On the Red Hobby Horse

Abstract Drawing on archival and oral history, this chapter examines the lives and opinions of two forgotten Soviet critics, Izrail Vertsman and Stepan Babookh, and their differing views on Laurence Sterne and on literary history more broadly. Vertsman, a disciple of the Marxist philosophers Mikhail Lifshitz and Georg Lukács as well as the author of the first Soviet doctoral dissertation on Sterne, interpreted Sterne’s work as resisting Enlightenment utilitarianism and rigid ideological frameworks. He justified his interest in Sterne by citing Marx’s appreciation of this writer, yet struggled to reconcile this with his desire to join the Soviet intellectual mainstream. Babookh, a former soldier and Bolshevik activist who discovered his love for English literature while held captive by the British army, regarded Sterne’s sentimentality as a sincere effort at self-understanding, founded on compassion for the marginalized. The conclusion to Part II turns to a phrase misattributed to Sterne in Gorky’s letters, considering its usefulness for Shandean historiography.