A note to an esteemed Facebook Friend re the popularity of "Gone with the Wind" in Russia (sightly amended)

Some years ago I did considerable research/thinking on the popularity of GWTW in Russia. Some reasons (based in part on my conversation with its Russian translator): (a) the suffering invaded Russians endured during WWII, comparable to the suffering of the South during the Civil War (b) the Russian mythical world of the supposedly paradise-like  usad'ba (country estate), evoked by Russian literature which corresponded, to some extent, to the myth of the plantation as a harmonious solution to man/vs man, man vs. nature (forget about slaves and serfs)

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(c) the appeal of a pre-industrial world in a society (20th-century Russia) where industrialism was brutally imposed from the top (d) the fact that GWTW was banned in the USSR, thus making it a "forbidden apple" many wished to get their minds into (e) a "ladies, sentimental, tear-jerking" book appealing to Russia women because of its "independent" heroine (I noticed that on women's day in Russia this year [if my memory serves me right] the film version of GWTW was shown on Russian state Tee-Vee (f) the fact that the Russian translation of the novel was "more literary" than Mitchell's pedestrian prose: indeed I heard (if my failing memory serves me right) a Russian compare GWTW with "War and Peace"

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(f) perhaps most important, a great Hollywood flick, far better, as an "emotionally moving narrative," than the mediocre novel itself.