INTRODUCTION

Rich and multicolored is the poetical world of Jack London—fierce and cruel, full of breakdowns and hopes, defeats and victories, inhabited by people for whom life is a constant overcoming, and who value duty, honor, and justice more than life. His books are deeply realistic but, at the same time, are imbued with romanticism.

London wrote about the sufferings of human beings and about their steadfastness, about selfless love and passionate hate, about striving to build a just society on earth. Books of this writer are full of sympathy for laboring people, for people of high dignity and courage; London condemned any exploitation of one human being by another.

London's brave heroes inspired soldiers of World War II (Great Patriotic War, for Russians) and they continue to influence the lives of our contemporaries. A talented storyteller, a romanticist, a dramatist, and a journalist, Jack London is interesting for all ages: young readers are carried away by his Northern short stories, sea novels, his stories about animals, and novels like The Sea-Wolf and White Fang; adults are fascinated not only by London's stories, but also by his essays, and, of course, by his novels The Iron Heel, Martin Eden, The Little Lady of the Big House, and many others. In the Soviet Union, the works of Jack London hold a peculiar supremacy among translated literature—more than 90 million copies of his books, translated into 33 languages of the nations inhabiting the former USSR, have been published in our country. One will not find a library, even the most modest private library, that does not include his romantic, yet sometimes harsh works. Books of Jack London are being published again and again in France, England, Finland, Japan, India, Denmark, and other countries. A survey conducted in the United States in 1915 indicated the great popularity of the author in his native country. His novella The Call of the Wild has been voted by the majority to be the best among his stories about animals. Before Adam has been recognized as the best among science fiction stories, and The Sea-Wolf ranked second among the sea novels, the first place being reserved for Stevenson's Treasure Island.

American literary scholars and critics have acknowledged that, in the first decade of this century, Jack London was one of the most famous writers in the United States. “He has really been a king among our fiction writers,” declared famous American author Upton Sinclair in Mammonart, “and the brightest star that has ever shined on our horizon. He combined tremendous talent with the great mind.”

From childhood, I loved London's stories and novels. “The Apostate” was particularly the one that captured my imagination. It is a story about the wretched life of an American boy who, like an adult, had to bend his back at the factory. I was also fascinated by the courage of another teenager who rescued people from a trailer stuck above the chasm in “The Banks of Sacramento”, as well as by the self-sacrifice of a young Mexican man who managed to obtain money for his friends—revolutionaries in an unequal struggle in “The Mexican”.

With the Northland and South Seas novels of Jack London, as well as the legends and the tales of the ancient times—my room was filled with the white silence of the icy-cold Arctic, with the warm winds of Southern seas, and with the play of colors in the open space of the ocean. Attentive swarthy faces of the natives of the faraway islands, with their naive and cruel ways of primitive peoples, appeared in my imagination.

I thought, and perhaps not without reason, that the works of this author reflected episodes from his own interesting and adventurous life. Who was this famous artist who had opened to us the world of beautiful and courageous people? How widespread is his popularity in the United States? Under what circumstances did he compose his masterpieces? It seemed that the destiny of the works by this famous writer had not been an easy one, both in his motherland and in our country—it changed with historical events and with the development of aesthetic thought.

There have been a score of books as well as articles and chapters in textbooks about him, but not a definitive biography of the author. Meanwhile, many of the facts of his life remain unknown. For example, it is not known who London's father was, and the circumstances of his death remain controversial, as well as the extent of his connections with the Russian revolutionary movement.

My interest in Jack London is both that of a reader and that of a professional. In 1954, I was working on a major in philology at Moscow State University and was writing a research paper on the heroes of The Iron Heel, which caused me to look for American journals contemporary to the author. It must have been the merge of my two interests, as a reader and a professional, that inspired my search for the unknown works and photographs of this author and caused a thrilling desire for discoveries for myself as well as for those who treasure London's creations.

Carefully comparing the bibliography of Jack London's works that were published in the United States with Russian translations of them, there appeared to be a lot within a half-century period. I was able to establish the existence of some stories and articles that were unknown to the Russian reader. What a challenge it was to find the originals! A long time studying the catalog and making trips from one Moscow library to the next did not yield any satisfactory results. Even in those rare cases when I would happen to find this or that magazine, the issue that, according to my information included the original (untranslated) story or an article by London, would be missing from the archives. It was only in the Scientific Library of Moscow State University that I was able to find one magazine published in New York in 1907, which had an anonymous article "Is Jack London a Plagiarist?" It was not even a full article, but a brief note of rebuff to a journalist, accusing the writer of borrowing someone else's plot for his story. Still it was something. I continued searching the V. I. Lenin State Library of the USSR, in the Fundamental Library of Social Sciences, in the libraries of Kiev, Odessa, and even in the Saltykov-Schedrin State Public Library in Leningrad, which is extraordinarily rich in pre-Revolutionary editions. These searches did not yield anything new. However I got lucky in the library of Leningrad State University. There, in the catalogs, I discovered a magazine with London's essays about his four-horse trip through California and Oregon. Still I was in for a surprise: the precious American magazine was missing from the shelf. This magazine, as I found out later, had been checked out by students to study in order to pass the reading requirement in English. Finding out that they possessed this unique edition (these essays of London have not been translated in the Soviet Union) alarmed the librarians, and they immediately started the search for the student who had checked out the priceless journal a long time ago. Three days later, I was handed those essays. Since then, they have been included in the catalog of especially valuable books that are placed on reserve. My master's thesis was devoted to the imagery of such novels as Martin Eden and The Iron Heel, and the topic for my doctoral dissertation dealt with ideological and artistic peculiarities of works by Jack London, the novelist.

The scientific research and analysis that I started in the Soviet Union was continued in the United States. Stories presented in this book are the result of fruitful research that continues to this day: the result of my journey in the steps of Jack London.

Copyright � 2004 by Vil M. Bykov