By characterizing himself as "The Envoy" in the final chapter of Russia in the Shadows (1921), H. G. Wells not only acknowledged both "the shortness of [his] visit to Russia and ... [his] personal limitations" but also identified issues that would arise in similar travel writings about the USSR by a number of subsequent English novelists. Among these, the accounts of working-class "angry young men" of the 1950s and 1960s are of particular interest, coming as they did at the height of the Cold War and providing rare opportunities for reportage from within a closed and markedly "Other" society--by writers whose proletarian backgrounds made them of particular ideological interest to their Soviet hosts as well. Although they have received surprisingly little critical scrutiny and have never been reprinted, both Wells's Russia in the Shadows and Alan Sillitoe's Road to Volgograd (1964) are unique works of literary and political history. Considered as a form of travel writing, they transcend their (primary) topical journalistic functions of their day and raise issues about the particular ideology of the traveler/"envoy." Wells was, in fact, virtually the first western writer to report from post-revolutionary Russia--having been authorized to visit by Lenin himself, with whom he was granted an exclusive early interview; Wells characterizes him as "the dreamer in the Kremlin," a Utopiographer (like himself) whose vision of a transformed Russia he (Wells) nevertheless could not entirely share. Sillitoe's book, written shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis, provides a similarly rare (and surprisingly positive) depiction of life inside Khrushchev's Russia--a society that seems, in Sillitoe's reportage, well on its way to becoming a writer's if not a worker's paradise.
Yet if, as Sillitoe has suggested in his book Raw Material (1972, rev. 1974, 1978), all autobiographical writing is ultimately a form of fiction (since the narrative "self" is itself a fictional creation/construct), then these accounts of travel within the Soviet Union are products of distinctively Utopian imaginations, revealing as much or more about the traveler/autobiographer's own ideology (both overt and covert) than about actual conditions in the Soviet Union at the time--a fact (and a problem) that Wells, the twentieth century's foremost Utopiographer, was himself the first to point out. Trusting the teller as well as the tale (whose content has been shaped by the hosts' control of the traveler's access to people, places, and things during the visit) thus becomes more problematic than ever in assessing this particularly ideologically charged form of travel writing, the western novelist's Soviet Utopiography.
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