The collaboration between Capa and Steinbeck was, in fact, serendipitous. The two had met in London in 1943, and renewed their friendship in New York in March 1947, planning to leave for Russia as soon as possible, until, on May 14, Steinbeck took a nasty fall from a window of his apartment, shattered his knee, and spent a few weeks recovering (the knee, however, would give him problems throughout the trip). Each restless and independent, neither Capa nor Steinbeck, in fact, particularly cared for collaborative ventures. As early as 1936, when writer John O’Hara passed through Pacific Grove, eager to meet and then work with John Steinbeck on a stage adaptation of the recently published In Dubious Battle, Steinbeck declared that he “liked him and his attitude…. I think we could get along well. I do not believe in collaboration.” Yet despite his protest to the contrary, collaboration came easily to Steinbeck; he initiated or was drawn into several joint projects, many completed—as was his 1940 trip to the Sea of Cortez with marine biologist Edward Ricketts (Sea of Cortez, 1941)—some aborted, as was the one with O’Hara. In particular, Steinbeck gravitated toward visual artists, filmmakers, and photographers. Robert Capa, famed war photojournalist, formed with Steinbeck perhaps the happiest of Steinbeck’s alliances with an artist in another medium.

Capa, whose celebrated war photos had frozen individual human torment and exuberance, shared Steinbeck’s compassion and curiosity. Born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1913, Capa possessed the qualities of exuberance, tolerance, and a humanitarian spirit that captivated Steinbeck. As biographer Richard Whelan notes, Capa’s political philosophy, similar to Steinbeck’s own, was formed when Capa was a rebellious teen: “democratic, egalitarian, pacifistic, semi-collectivist, pro-labor, anti-authoritarian, and anti-fascist, with a strong emphasis on the dignity of man and the rights of the individual.” Forced to leave Budapest in 1931, he had been in exile most of his life, wandering the world as witness to the ravages of war, sometimes shooting photos for Time, Life, and Fortune, always focusing on the human drama, the ordinary in the extraordinary. Capa photographed people, not events, aiming his camera, notes Whelan, on the “edge of things … studies of people under extreme stress.”

The two artists’ forty-day trip to the Soviet Union in 1947 was, like Steinbeck’s 1940 trip to the Sea of Cortez with Edward Ricketts, an expedition of the curious. Like Ricketts and Steinbeck on the earlier journey, Capa and Steinbeck also “wanted to see everything our eyes would accommodate, to think what we could, and, out of our seeing and thinking, to build some kind of structure in modeled imitation of the observed reality.” If the structure of Sea of Cortez melds two approaches, the “conventionally scientific” and the experiential, this travel narrative opts for the single lens: “We would try to do honest reporting, to set down what we saw and heard without editorial comment, without drawing conclusions about things we didn’t know sufficiently.” Theirs was a journal, a photo essay. The structure they chose for their book—indeed, the dominant metaphor of A Russian Journal—is the Soviet Union as a framed portrait.