John Cournos
John Cournos was a Jewish author born in 1881 who emigrated to the United States at the age of ten. His Russian heritage significantly influenced his writing, intertwining with his experiences in America. Cournos is often associated with the vibrant literary scene of 1922, a pivotal year for modernism that saw the emergence of seminal works like "The Waste Land" and "Ulysses." Although not as widely recognized as some of his contemporaries, Cournos is noted for his complex relationship with the famous writer Dorothy Sayers, who portrayed him in her work as a figure of loss and betrayal. His literary contributions include translations of notable Russian authors such as Gogol and Chekhov, making their works accessible to English-speaking audiences. Cournos also played a role in fostering dialogue between Christians and Jews in the 1930s, contributing to discussions of cultural unity that arose in the context of rising fascism. His legacy includes a recognition of his impact on both literature and cultural discourse during a transformative period in American history.
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John Cournos
Fiction Writer and Poet
- Born: March 6, 1881
- Birthplace: Zhitomir, Ukraine
- Died: August 27, 1966
Biography
John Cournos was born into a Jewish home in 1881. He and his family emigrated to the United States when he was ten years of age. While he was to take on the mores of his adoptive country and of the time in which he lived and wrote, his Russian background remained a significant part of his life as an author.
Michael North in his Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of Modern includes John Cournos in his study of the year in which such major literary works as The Waste Land and Ulysses were written and the year in which another, The Great Gatsby, was set. It was also the year in which the Fascists took over Italy. He shows the year to be the primal scene of literary modernism, which served as the cradle for a host of major aesthetic and political transformations resonating around the globe. While Cournos is not as well known as many others living and writing at this time, he can be seen as both resident of and one of the creators of the cradle of North’s metaphor.
Cournos may be seen to have inhabited in life the careless world that Fitzgerald creates in his novel for the Buchanans—the world that kills Gatsby. In Cournos’s story, it was Dorothy Sayers, author of the popular Lord Peter Wimsey detective novels, who was the Gatsby-like victim. Cournos was the love of Sayers’s life, but their differing positions on marriage and contraception drove them apart. Most discussions of the better-known Sayers allude to the poignancy of her letters to Cournos: “You,” she says in one of these, “stood to me for beauty and truth—and you demanded ugliness, barrenness—and it seems now that even in doing so, you were just lying . . . You stripped love down to the merest and most brutal physical contact . . . I said to myself: ‘there is nothing I can give him, beyond what the first harlot in the street would provide’.” Better known, yet, than her letters is her fictional portrait of her betrayer in Strong Poison.
Cournos is more nobly represented by his own body of work and by those who write of it. As translator, it is clear that Cournos made some of the greatest Russian writers, among them Gogol and Chekhov, accessible to the non-Russian-speaking world. And he is credited among Jewish writers with Sholem Asch as “most notabl[e]” to have embraced Jesus as a Jewish brother and to have brought about unity between Christians and Jews in the 1930’s. The newly coined adjective “Judeo- Christian” served to rally antifascist and anticommunist Christians and Jews who wished to shake America out of its “splendid isolation.” After World War II, the unity became further marked by the explosion of Jewish talent into all areas of American intellectual, cultural, artistic, and political life.