Is Tagore a socialist? || Azfar Hussain

Rabindranath Tagore visited the Soviet Union--in 1930--six years after Lenin's death; but isn't it interesting that it was in the very year 1917--the year of the Russian Revolution--that several volumes of Tagore's _Gitanjali_ appeared in Russian translations, including one edited by the well-known Russian writer Ivan Bunin?

Some Russian literary historians tell us that Tagore was widely read even in pre-revolutionary Russia, and that the attempts to translate Tagore into Russian continued with a vengeance in the Soviet Union at a time when the Western world--by and large--began to lose interest in his work. (Remember Yeats--one who somewhat promoted Tagore but was later totally disgusted at Tagore's English translations of his own poems, even going to the extent of saying, "Tagore does not know English, no Indian knows English?")

While, earlier, Tagore was enthusiastically read and even actively promoted by the Russian symbolists, the poet Boris Paternak translated Tagore in the mid-to-late 1950s and the poet Anna Akhmatova did the same in the 1960s. And the Soviet government itself published his collected works in 1926. But, in his famous _Letters from Russia_, Tagore remained quite modest about the reception of his written work in the Soviet Union, while he remained deeply interested in the Soviet Union--his later criticisms of it notwithstanding--until the very last day in his life.

But don't get me wrong, folks: This is a quick note, and my purpose here is not to turn Tagore into a Leninist or something or even into a socialist; but I'm simply struggling to figure out why he was so well-received in the Soviet Union at that particular point of time in history.