EIMI is a 1933 travelogue by poet

Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

 E. E. Cummings

E. E. Cummings

Edward Estlin Cummings , popularly known as E. E. Cummings, with the abbreviated form of his name often written by others in lowercase letters as e.e. cummings , was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright...

, dealling with a visit to the Soviet Union

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 in the spring of 1931. The book is written in the form of abstract prose

Prose

Prose is the most typical form of written language, applying ordinary grammatical structure and natural flow of speech rather than rhythmic structure...

 verse.

Background information

EIMI (Greek for "I Am") is a 432 page volume recounting the visit of American poet Edward Estlin Cummings to Moscow

Moscow

Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...

, Kiev

Kiev

Kiev or Kyiv is the capital and the largest city of Ukraine, located in the north central part of the country on the Dnieper River. The population as of the 2001 census was 2,611,300. However, higher numbers have been cited in the press....

, and Odessa

Odessa

Odessa or Odesa is the administrative center of the Odessa Oblast located in southern Ukraine. The city is a major seaport located on the northwest shore of the Black Sea and the fourth largest city in Ukraine with a population of 1,029,000 .The predecessor of Odessa, a small Tatar settlement,...

 from May 14 to June 14, 1931. Packing a portable typewriter

Typewriter

A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical device with keys that, when pressed, cause characters to be printed on a medium, usually paper. Typically one character is printed per keypress, and the machine prints the characters by making ink impressions of type elements similar to the pieces...

 with him, Cummings kept copious notes of his Soviet journey and wrote the book after his return to the United States.

Although actually a stylized work of non-fiction, Cummings's book was originally touted as a novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 by Covici-Friede, a small publisher located in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

.

In the book Cummings employs an abstract form of verse best comparable to Ulysses

Ulysses (novel)

Ulysses is a novel by the Irish author James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, in Paris. One of the most important works of Modernist literature,...

 by James Joyce

James Joyce

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...

 and uses non-standard sentence structure, punctuation, spacing, and text breaks to evoke a sort of confusion and tension in the reader akin to his own feelings as a non-Russian

Russian language

Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...

 speaker in the Soviet metropolis.

In Moscow, Cummings meets up with an acquaintance from his days at Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, a committed Communist

Communism

Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...

 then living at the Metropole Hotel

Hotel Metropol (Moscow)

Hotel Metropol is a historical hotel in the center of Moscow, Russia, built in 1899-1907 in Art Nouveau style. It is notable as the largest extant Moscow hotel built before the Russian Revolution of 1917, and for the unique collaboration of architects and artists .In 1898, Savva Mamontov...

. Dana showed Cummings around the city and acted as a mentor, attempting — unsuccessfully — to win the apolitical Cummings' sympathies to the Soviet cause before the pair split over political differences. While in Moscow Cummings also met Joan London, daughter of novelist Jack London

Jack London

John Griffith "Jack" London was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone...

, and her husband, the newspaper correspondent Charles Malamuth.

The theme of the work deals with Cummings' growing disappointment with the squalor and inefficiency he saw in the USSR, as well as the lack of intellectual and artistic freedom he observed. After recounting his experiences in the Soviet Union, Cummings refers to the country as "Hell

Hell

In many religious traditions, a hell is a place of suffering and punishment in the afterlife. Religions with a linear divine history often depict hells as endless. Religions with a cyclic history often depict a hell as an intermediary period between incarnations...

.

Reviews

EIMI was reckoned to be "a large poem" by a "penguin-Dante

DANTE

Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe is a not-for-profit organisation that plans, builds and operates the international networks that interconnect the various national research and education networks in Europe and surrounding regions...

" in Marianne Moore's

Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore was an American Modernist poet and writer noted for her irony and wit.- Life :Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in the manse of the Presbyterian church where her maternal grandfather, John Riddle Warner, served as pastor. She was the daughter of mechanical engineer and inventor...

 review of the work in Poetry magazine

Poetry (magazine)

Poetry , published in Chicago, Illinois since 1912, is one of the leading monthly poetry journals in the English-speaking world. Published by the Poetry Foundation and currently edited by Christian Wiman, the magazine has a circulation of 30,000 and prints 300 poems per year out of approximately...

, 1933. Moore judges the book to be an "'enormous dream' about the proletarian fable" in which Cummings shifts grammatical and lyrical styles "as a seal that has been swimming right-side-up turns over and swims on its back for a time."

After being out of print for nearly half a century, EIMI was reissued in 2007 by the New York publisher Liveright

Boni & Liveright

Boni & Liveright was a publishing house established in 1916 in New York City by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright which made a name by publishing work considered avant-garde and in so doing published work by many modernist authors. They attracted attention from the Society for Suppression of Vice...

. This brought the work to the attention of a new generation of reviewers, including Frank Bures of World Hum, who wrote:

"To call EIMI an easy read would be a lie. It’s a long, slow slog (like taking a train through the Soviet Union!) that requires tiresome mental gymnastics to understand each sentence. Much of it is impenetrable. Other parts are incomprehensible. Some parts, I have to admit, I read really, really fast.

But it’s worth a look, nonetheless, at least as a glimpse of a time and place that’s no longer with us, and a journey with one of the most unusual writers ever, and one who didn’t like the world he saw being created on his journey into the heart Stalin’s

Joseph Stalin

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...

empire. It was a world that made him, in the end, cry out in a plea for what he saw being extinguished, for the very thing that made him a poet, and for that which makes us all human..."

Bures calles the book a "very political travelogue" which "sees the political landscape as integral to the place," thereby getting at "bigger questions about the kind of worlds we create and that create us."

Editions

• First edition: EIMI. New York: Covici-Friede, 1933. —First printing was 1381 copies signed and numbered.
• Second edition: EIMI: The Journal of a Trip to Russia. New York: William Sloan Associates, n.d. [1949] —Facsimile typography of first edition; cover title.
• Third edition: EIMI. New York: Grove Press, n.d. [1958].
• Fourth edition: EIMI: A Journey Through Soviet Russia. New York: Liveright, 2007.

Further reading

• Norman Friedman, "Eimi (1933)," E.E. Cummings: The Growth of a Writer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964; pp. 109-124.
• Richard S. Kennedy, "Anne and Russia" and "The Unworld Visited," in Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E.E. Cummings. New York: Liveright, 1980; pp. 304-315, 327-335.