John Cournos, born Ivan Grigorievich Korshun (Иван Григорьевич Коршун[1][2]) (6 March 1881 – 27 August 1966), was an American writer and translator.
Cournos was born in Zhytomyr, Russian Empire (now in Ukraine) in Russian Jewish family and his first language was Yiddish; he studied Russian, German, and Hebrew with a tutor at home.[3] When he was 10 years old his family emigrated to Philadelphia, where he learned English.
In June 1912, Cournos moved to London, where he freelanced as an interviewer and critic for both UK and US publications and began his literary career as a poet and, later, novelist. He later emigrated to the US, where he spent the rest of his life.
He was one of the Imagist poets, but is better known for his novels, short stories, essays, and criticism, as well as a translator of Russian literature. He used the pseudonym John Courtney. He also wrote for The Philadelphia Record under the pseudonym "Gorky."
Later in life he married Helen Kestner Satterthwaite (1893–1960), who was also an author and published under the pseudonyms Sybil Norton and John Hawk. However, Cournos is better-known for his unhappy affair with Dorothy L. Sayers, fictionalised by Sayers in the detective book Strong Poison (1930) and by Cournos himself in The Devil Is an English Gentleman (1932).[4]
Cournos and his wife, under her pseudonym Sybil Norton, collaborated on several books, including Famous Modern American Novelists, Famous British Novelists, Best World Short Stories of 1947, and John Adams a biography.[5]
In the aftermath of the October Revolution Cournos was involved with a London-based anti-Communist organisation, the Russian Liberation Committee. On its behalf, he wrote in 1919 a propaganda pamphlet, London under the Bolsheviks: A Londoner's Dream on Returning from Petrograd, based largely on what he saw during his 1917–1918 visit to Aleksey Remizov in Petrograd, whose Chasy he was then translating as The Clock.[6] It closely follows the early events of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, and it was set in Britain to better enable the British audience to imagine what it was like. Sinclair Lewis used the same device to imagine a Fascist takeover in the United States in his 1935 work It Can't Happen Here.
In Cournos's lurid but humorous future history, a British revolutionary regime introduces a new currency named "The MacDonald" for Ramsay MacDonald, who is, however, soon shoved aside by the Bolshevik leaders "MacLenin" and "Trotsman" (obvious satires of Lenin and Trotsky). A counter-revolutionary drive by General Haig is defeated at St Albans, and the Bolsheviks start rounding up their former allies. Lloyd George is imprisoned in the Tower of London. H.G. Wells, too, is imprisoned by the Bolsheviks, despite his left-leaning book Love and Mr Lewisham. London is portrayed as plagued by poverty, with black market cigarettes and broken lifts, and the narrator wanders round the Strand exclaiming at the filth of the streets, the idlers and the jealous envy towards his new boots.
Cournos died in New York City.
Dorothy L. Sayers was his lover in 1920s. She described their lovestory in her detective novel Strong Poison (1930): her alter-ego female novelist Harriet Vane had an affair with writer Phillip Boyes (Cournos). Sayers' sublimation is obvious in this novel: Boyes is murdered and Vane is defendant.[7]
