This dissertation examines the reception and translation of three modernist authors mentioned with surprising frequency in Soviet debates over socialist realism in the early USSR. I focus on the translations and criticism which developed and responded idiosyncratically within an official climate hostile to “formalism,” or modernism. Through close readings of Russian translations alongside Soviet criticism, public speeches and unpublished archival materials, this study re-evaluates these debates and the agency of translators and critics in using “bourgeois” modernism for “socialist” artistic ends. Both critics and advocates of these foreign “formalist” authors saw in their work the use of “microscopes” and “scalpels,” subjecting the human psyche to unprecedented inspection and dissection. The modernist work of these authors, however, was also put under the microscope by Soviet critics, translators and cultural figures, examined for traces of the bourgeois ideology these novels might threaten to reproduce in readers, or mined for techniques that could be extracted and adapted to extend the struggle for revolutionary consciousness. Ultimately, I argue that early Soviet translation culture and criticism, as a result of its Marxist ideological commitments to world culture, produced a substantive engagement with these three authors’ work, their literary technologies and the potential of art in the utopian project of engineering the human soul. The introduction establishes the context of Soviet critical interest in Proust, Dos Passos and Joyce between the Marxist conception of world literature and Soviet debates over Russian formalism. Chapter One examines an episode in the Soviet translation of modernism through a translated excerpt from John Dos Passos’s 1919 in a popular Soviet magazine. The translation, which radically normalizes Dos Passos’ language, provides a test case for the contradictory reception of Western modernist works and their treatment in Soviet translation. My second chapter examines Soviet criticism and early translations of Marcel Proust, especially writing by former Commissar of Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky. The first Soviet critic to apply the “microscope” metaphor to the work of a modernist author, Lunacharsky had a conflicted reading of Proust, in which he recognizes the hypnotic, narcotic power of Proust’s writing, while still finding Proust’s prose dangerous, even as he facilitated Proust’s Soviet translation. Chapter Three follows the reception of Dos Passos’ work. Likely the most discussed and translated of any of the three authors, Dos Passos’ reception was also the briefest, and presents a rare case of artistic influence between the Soviet Union and the USA. In the fourth chapter, “Framing Joyce: Karl Radek Opens a Window to Ulysses,” I revise the usual story of Joyce’s reception in the Soviet 1930s, arguing that Radek’s infamous speech at the 1934 Writers’ Congress was not the end, but a brief opening for the translation of Ulysses in Russian. Even the critical articles take on a different light when read as part of the effort to extract specific technologies and ideas from works as sufficiently “safe” for Soviet readers in an atmosphere of growing paranoia and hostility.