Kansas, Oz, and the Magic Land: A wizard's travels through the Iron Curtain

The following essay addresses Alexandr Volko's adaption and appropriation of L. Frank Baum's "The Wizard of Oz". Exceedingly popular throughthout the Easern bloc, Volkov's novels have endeared a magical setting and cast of characters to readers who rarely knew of their American origins. I discuss the Wizard's 'travels' throught the Iron Curtain as an incidence of cultural exchange at once motivated by and subverting Cold War cultural politics. I suggest that it is not so much the changes to which Baum's narrative universe has been subjected on its way from West to East that makes this case study remarkable but the ways in wich the two Wizards have been interpreted to fit contestable notions of 'American' and 'Soviet' culture