African American Writers

R nd R v lt: D t v nd Thr fr n r nr t r .Maria R. Bloshteyn

Comparative Literature Studies, Volume 38, Number 4, 2001, pp. 277-309(Article)

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES, Vol. 38, No. 4, 2001.Copyright © 2001 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

277

Rage and Revolt: Dostoevsky andThree African-American Writers.

MARIA R. BLOSHTEYN

In 1920, H. L. Mencken, the irreverent and highly quotable Americancritic, reviewed a novel just published in New York. The Shadow told thetale of a light-skinned young woman who grew up in an African-Ameri-can family in the Southern United States and considered herself Blackuntil the age of twenty, when she discovered that she was actually anillegitimate child of white parents. She moved to New York to live as awhite woman, was disappointed in her expectations of the white peoplein whose midst she lived, and returned to her original family. Menckentitled his review “The Negro as Author.” However the review may haveread in 1920s, it is difficult to perceive it today as anything but grosslypatronizing. Mencken begins by announcing that the novel is a failurebut that it is “interesting as a first attempt by a coloured writer to plungeinto fiction in a grand manner.”1 He then issues a number of recommen-dations to the woman writer: “Let her forget her race prejudices and herinfantile fables long enough to get a true, an unemotional and a typicalpicture of her people on paper. [ . . . ] The thing we need is a realisticpicture of the inner life of the negro by one who sees the race from within”(320–21). Notably, Mencken’s list of recommendations includes an at-tempt at creation of “a self-portrait as vivid and accurate as Dostoevsky’sportrait of the Russian” (321).

Mencken’s review would not be worthy of any particular notice to-day if not for two tendencies. First of all, it exemplifies the curious dispo-sition of both white American reviewers and many African-Americanwriters themselves to link the African-American experience withDostoevsky’s writings. Even a writer like Gertrude Stein, who did not

278 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

consider herself to be at all indebted to Dostoevsky and whose workswere ordinarily never compared to those of the Russian novelist, foundherself being likened to Dostoevsky after writing the story “Melanctha,”a fictional portrait of an African-American woman.2

Mencken’s review is important for another reason as well (leavingaside for the moment the reasons for the linkage of writings about theAfrican-American experience with Dostoevsky’s works). It appears thatRichard Wright, the first African-American writer to win both nationaland international acclaim did take Dostoevsky’s “portrait of the Russian”as a Menckenian model in his depiction of the African-American expe-rience in his writings. (The fact that Mencken was mistaken about theauthor of The Shadow, Mary White Ovington, who turned out to be notAfrican-American but a kindred Caucasian, represents another instanceof irony for the informed reader.)

Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, and Dostoevsky

Richard Wright (1908–1960) and two of his erstwhile friends, RalphEllison (1914–1994) and James Baldwin (1924–1987), justly occupy acentral place in African-American literature, as well as a place of consid-erable importance in the larger American literary canon. Not only didthese writers manage to win a wide national and international following,defining African-American literature for years to come, but their workshad a prodigious impact on their contemporaries and, especially, on thesuccessive generations of African-American writers and poets (as acknowl-edged by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou, among oth-ers).

Even more significantly, these three writers had strong connectionsto Dostoevsky that went far beyond their considerable interest in Rus-sian literature and the Soviet Union.3

All three writers testified in interviews and essays that Dostoevskyplayed a significant role in shaping them as novelists. Wright told aninterviewer that “Dostoevsky was [his] model when [he] started writing.”4

Baldwin wrote that he had been turning to Dostoevsky for inspirationsince his youth, and that his “relentless pursuit of Crime and Punishmentmade [his] father (vocally) and [his] mother (silently) consider the possi-bility of brain fever.”5 Ellison maintained that he had been “strongly in-fluenced by Dostoevsky.”6 In reply to an interviewer who suggested thathis seminal work, Invisible Man (1952) was written “in the Americanvernacular tradition . . . [with] some correspondence between [its] Pro-

279DOSTOEVSKY AND THREE AFRICAN-AMERICAN WRITERS

logue and that of Moby Dick,” Ellison countered: “Let me test somethingon you”—whereupon he read the opening lines from chapter one ofDostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground and concluded, chuckling, “Thatain’t Melville.”7

The three writers’ fascination with Dostoevsky is well documentedby them, their friends, and biographers. In the past twenty years therehave been several scholarly efforts to outline the extent of Dostoevsky’sinfluence on Wright and Ellison, mostly as part of a general attempt toexpand the context of their writings beyond that of the American civilrights movement, which figures prominently in all interpretations of theirwork. (Notably, Baldwin’s interest in Dostoevsky has not been discussed—reflecting, perhaps, his lesser literary fame during the past two decades.)Most of these efforts, however, have concentrated on uncovering the manyparallels between the individual novels of Wright and Ellison on the onehand, and Dostoevsky’s novels, on the other hand.8 To a scholar inter-ested in Dostoevsky’s reception in the United States, it is evident, at thevery least, that the underlying issues of Dostoevsky’s reception by thethree writers have yet to be directly addressed. Why, to ask a deceptivelysimple question, did these three voraciously well read African-Americanwriters regard Dostoevsky as a literary ancestor? Who, in a sense, wastheir Dostoevsky? And, ultimately, are there any similarities in the waythat these three stylistically and temperamentally different writers em-ploy Dostoevsky and his writings in their own works?

Wright’s Dostoevsky

Any discussion of what Dostoevsky meant to these African-Americanwriters must be preceded by a careful reconstruction of Richard Wright’spath to Dostoevsky. Wright was older than either Ellison or Baldwin,achieved a national fame before either of them, and attempted to mentorthe two younger writers and to shape their literary tastes. Wright’s com-pulsive reading and interpretation of Dostoevsky is of primary importancein a consideration of the significance and the meaning of Dostoevsky toall three writers. Fortunately, there is a wealth of information availableto the researcher on Wright’s life, reading habits, and intellectual pur-suits through his published autobiographical writings and interviews, sev-eral biographies, and exhaustive literary studies (such as Michel Fabre’sRichard Wright: Books and Writers [Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1990]), andthe vast Wright archives housed at Yale University’s Beinecke library.


According to Wright’s own account, he discovered Dostoevsky some-time in 1926, while he was still living in Memphis. He was eighteen yearsold at the time, and intrigued by his reading of H. L. Mencken’s Book ofPrefaces (New York: Garden City, 1917, 1924) where he first encoun-tered Dostoevsky’s name. The story of Wright’s surreptitious attempts togain access to Mencken’s books in the Memphis library (then off-limitsto African-Americans) is legendary and is told in his autobiographicalnovel, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (1945, restored versionincluding American Hunger [New York: HarperPerennial, 1993]). Wrighthimself had said many times that Mencken’s book was instrumental inguiding his reading habits and forming his literary tastes. In a 1940 inter-view, for instance, he claimed that “A Book of Prefaces served as a literaryBible for me for years. I read all the books he mentioned that I could laymy hands on.”9 The importance of Mencken and his literary views issuggested by the fact that Wright read and reread everything he couldfind by Mencken and that he acquired a full library of Mencken’s workswhen he finally had the financial means to do so (Wright’s diary for 1945,for instance, lists many purchases of Mencken’s books that he had al-ready read but that he wanted to have for reference in his home library10).

There are several reasons why it is particularly significant that Wrightcame to Dostoevsky through Mencken. First of all, Mencken, as Wrightsuggests in Black Boy, had a well-established reputation as a troublemaker.Up to 1924, Mencken was one of the editors of Smart Set, a popular liter-ary magazine which was widely denounced by the conservative press as“immoral, corrupting, foreign, anarchistic.”11 By 1926, Mencken gainedadditional notoriety as a social and cultural critic of all things American(and especially those of the American South) in the American Mercury.The narrator of Black Boy (Wright’s autobiographic persona) becomesinterested in Mencken after he reads a fierce editorial damning Menckenin a Memphis newspaper. The narrator comments: “ I felt a vague sympa-thy for him. Had not the South, which had assigned me the role of a non-man, cast at him its hardest words?” (288) In other words, it was preciselyMencken’s status of an outsider in the South that attracted Wright—another outsider—to his books.

Mencken does not directly discuss either Dostoevsky or his works inA Book of Prefaces. In fact, his only mention of Dostoevsky occurs in thechapter on Joseph Conrad. However, the context in which Dostoevsky’sname appears is important, if only because this was Wright’s first impres-sion of the Russian novelist. While discussing Conrad’s “consuming mel-ancholy” (12), Mencken explains that this emotional state is typical of


the Slavic people, whom he perceives as the outsiders of the WesternCivilization. Mencken goes on to make the following sweeping assertion:

We detect certain curious qualities in every Slav simply becausehe is more given than we are to revealing the qualities that are inall of us. Introspection and self-revelation are his habit; he carriesthe study of man and fate to a point that seems morbid towesterners; he is forever gabbling about what he finds in his ownsoul. But in the last analysis his verdicts are the immemorial andalmost universal ones . . . [it is the] conviction that human life is aseeking without a finding, that its purpose is impenetrable, thatjoy and sorrow are alike meaningless. (14–15)

Mencken proceeds to rhetorically reel off about twenty names,Dostoevsky’s among them. It is with this list that Wright began his liter-ary education, and it is in this way that Dostoevsky entered his conscious-ness as a disillusioned Slavic novelist, an outsider’s writer, who wroteabout his own soul with the belief that life was meaningless and had nopurpose.

The Reading

Before leaving Memphis, Wright had read only one of Dostoevsky’s books,Bednye liudi [Poor Folk] (1846), an early epistolary novel about a doomedrelationship between two people living in the St. Petersburg slums. Wrightdid not record his immediate thoughts upon finishing the novel, but itmust have made an impression on him because almost twenty years laterhe was still comparing contemporary books to it.12 Wright left the Southin 1927 and came to live in Chicago, where libraries were freely acces-sible and where he “left off writing and began reading again [because he]could get hold of more books.”13 According to Wright’s own account,Dostoevsky was among the first authors that he turned to in Chicago andone of the first books that he read was Zapiski iz mertvogo doma [Notesfrom the Dead House] (1860–1862):

I came North in my 19th year, filled with the hunger to know. Bookswere the windows through which I looked at the world. I readDostoevsky’s The House of the Dead, an autobiographical noveldepicting the lives of exiled prisoners in Siberia, how they lived


in crowded barracks and vented their hostility upon one another.It made me remember how Negroes in the South, crowded intotheir Black Belts, vented their hostility upon one another, forget-ting that their lives were conditioned by the whites above them.To me reading was a kind of remembering .14

Wright’s explanation of how he read Notes from the House of the Dead isvaluable for several reasons. First of all, it is obvious that when Wrightrecognizes the plight of the African-Americans living in the South inthe misery of the Russian prisoners exiled in the North, he is focusingprimarily on psychological insight into behaviour (e.g., sub-standard liv-ing conditions and loss of control over one’s life which lead to hostility,which is vented in turn upon one’s cell-mates). Margaret Walker, a poetand writer befriended by Wright in Chicago during the late 1930s, notesthat this focus was generally characteristic of Wright’s reading ofDostoevsky. In her book recalling that friendship,15 Walker remarks thatWright esteemed Dostoevsky as “the greatest novelist of all time” be-cause of “his [unique] knowledge of psychology [ . . . ] his probing of thehuman mind and [ . . . ] psyche; [ . . . ] his understanding of the problemof [ . . . ] guilt; and [ . . . ] probing of the unconscious” (100–01). Wrighthimself confirms this point in a 1955 interview, when he responds to thequestion of which books have impressed him most by claiming that“[f]oremost among all the writers who have influenced me in my attitudetoward the psychological state of modern man is Dostoevsky.”16 Wrightpersonally identified with Dostoevsky’s interest in psychology—accord-ing to Wright, one of the “original sources” of literature17—and consid-ered himself to be “something, no matter how crudely, of a psychologist.”18

Secondly, Wright perceives the position of exiled Russian prisonersin Siberia (many of them former Serfs) as similar to the position of Afri-can-Americans crammed in the Black Belts of the South (most of themformer Slaves), because both groups are outcasts and outsiders of societyat large. In a 1960 interview, Wright explained that when he first cameto Chicago he started looking for American literature that illuminatedthe life of an African-American either in the South of the United Statesor in the North (both places where African-Americans were essentiallysocial outcasts, if to different degrees). He “found nothing about [his]environment” until he turned to Russian novelists. Wright further speci-fied that he chose Dostoevsky as a “model” when he started to write(“American Novel” 214).

An interest in the psychology of the pariah or outcast appears to beanother constant in Wright’s reading of Dostoevsky’s fiction—he once


put Raskolnikov at the head of a list of his “literary heroes (“I Curse theDay” 165). This is confirmed by Ralph Ellison, who felt that Wrightlearned from and interpreted Notes from the Dead House chiefly as “a psy-chological document of life under oppressive conditions . . . [a] profoundstudy of the humanity of Russian criminals.”19 Notably, the main charac-ters of Wright’s own narratives are usually doubly outcast, like the mainnarrator of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Dead House: first by society atlarge, and then by the group of outcasts in which they find themselves(Gorianchikov realizes that he will never be accepted into the fellow-ship of the prisoners20 ). Thus, the narrator of Black Boy wonders why hisown family does not accept him: “why it was I never seemed to do thingsas people expected them to be done [?] Every word and gesture I madeseemed to provoke hostility [ . . . ] no matter what I did I would be wrongsomehow as far as my family was concerned” (168). Bigger, the antiheroof Wright’s most famous novel, Native Son (1940; New York: Harper,1964), lives “behind a wall, a curtain” from the rest of his family (14).Cross Damon of Wright’s penultimate novel, titled, significantly, TheOutsider (1953; New York: Harper, 1989), considers himself to be set apartfrom all of humanity, having “broken all of his promises to the world andpeople in it” (551). He feels that he has nothing in common either withChicago’s culturally segregated African-American community, which heescapes, or with New York’s Communists, America’s political pariahs,among whom he lives and who ultimately kill him.

Finally, Wright indicates that he views Notes from the Dead House asan autobiographical novel, which of course it is, with some qualifications(the narrator of the “notes” is one Aleksander Petrovich Gorianchikov, awife murderer rather than a political prisoner; and the “notes” themselvesare a fictionalized account of Dostoevsky’s experiences, rather than astraight record). Wright was well informed about the particulars ofDostoevsky’s own life and exile; he explained that he had studiedDostoevsky’s “works carefully [and] go[ne] into his life with . . . thorough-ness.”21 The notion that Dostoevsky wrote about what he had personallyexperienced (beyond Mencken’s questionable idea that every Slavic writerwrites about his soul), had probably served as another point of attractionfor Wright, who often asserted the need to write about what he himself“lived and observed and felt”22 and who argued that all literature was re-ally the writer’s “attempt to relate his life to that of the world about.”23

It is difficult to say how soon it was after coming to Chicago thatWright had read the many other Dostoevsky texts that he refers to in hiswritings and that were identified by others as possible influences.24 InAmerican Hunger (1944; New York: Harper, 1977), Wright’s autobiographi-


cal account of his early years in Chicago, his narrator says that in thesummer of 1927, when he was working at the post office, he readDostoevsky’s Besy [The Possessed] (1871–1872) at night. This novel, amongothers read during this period, “revealed new realms of feeling” to Wright,according to his autobiographical persona, and led him eventually “intothe field of psychology and sociology” (19). Margaret Walker relates thatby the time she became acquainted with Wright in the late 1930s, he hadalso read The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, Idiot [The Idiot](1868), and probably Zapiski iz podpol’ia [Notes from the Underground](1864) [119]. In Michel Fabre’s classic biography of Wright, The Unfin-ished Quest of Richard Wright (1973), the author confirms that Wrighthad read Notes from the Underground in his early years in Chicago.25

According to Fabre, Wright’s home library included most of theDostoevsky texts listed above (most of these in the translations ofConstance Garnett), as well as a translation of Unizhennye i oskorblennye[The Insulted and the Humiliated] (1861),26 Podrostok [Raw Youth] (1875),and several collections of Dostoevsky’s shorter fiction (39). Ralph Ellisonsaid that when he met Wright in 1937, Wright guided him to Dostoevsky’sletters.27 There is every reason to believe that, like Ellison, Wright wasalso familiar with Dostoevsky’s Dnevnik pisatelia [Diary of a Writer] (1876–1881). Significantly, Wright bought two of Dostoevsky’s novels even be-fore he finally gained some financial stability in 1940, the watershed yearwhen he gained national fame and notoriety with the publication of NativeSon. At the very least, this purchase of The House of the Dead and of ThePossessed, when Wright could ill afford them, suggests that he consideredthese books especially important and useful for his own work.

Reading the Dostoevsky Critics

Wright kept returning to Dostoevsky throughout his life. At the peak ofhis literary fame with the publication of Native Son, Wright singled outDostoevsky as the one writer he especially liked.28 Twenty years afterthat, in an interview given shortly before his death, Wright includedDostoevsky among the few “great novelists” he revisited “most often.”29

Not only did Wright reread Dostoevsky’s books, but he also turned to theDostoevsky scholars and critics for a better understanding of Dostoevsky’snovels. His home library included two books on Dostoevsky by ErnestSimmons and Janko Lavrin.30 Both of these literary critics combined thebiographical and critical approaches in their interpretations ofDostoevsky’s works, a perspective that must have appealed to Wright,who once said that he was interested in “the way the facts of [Dostoevsky’s]


life are related to the fiction he created” (“Author Discusses His Craft”16). Wright also owned several books by Nikolai Berdyaev whereDostoevsky’s works are discussed (though not his famous study ofDostoevsky)31 as well as Lev Shestov’s Na vesakh Iova [On Job’s Balances](trans. Camilla Coventry and C. A. Macartney [London: Dent, 1932]),where Dostoevsky’s Underground Man serves as the main focus of discus-sion.

Wright’s dedication to Dostoevsky caused him greatest problems inthe 1930s, a period when he was establishing himself as a published au-thor, working on Native Son, and actively participating in the AmericanCommunist Party. During this decade, many members of the Americanpolitical left—particularly those affiliated with the Communist Party—were critical of Dostoevsky’s writings, which they saw as an extension ofhis reactionary politics. In this, of course, they were only following thelead of the Soviet Communist Party (Dostoevsky was all but banned inthe Soviet Union throughout the 1930s32). For example, Michael Gold,editor of the influential leftist journal New Masses, suggested that read-ing Dostoevsky made one politically and morally suspect.33 Alfred Kazin,a literary critic associated with the less doctrinaire journal New Direc-tions, saw it as a sign of the times:

One laughed, and indeed many Communists laughed, when aMichael Gold declared: “When . . . an ex-Czarist officer who hashung and flogged peasants tells us that Dostoevsky shakes him tothe very soul, one is perhaps justified in suspecting . . . Dostoevsky.”But Gold was only exaggerating with crude native force what moresophisticated literary intelligences held as a prime critical super-stition.34

Wright published in Gold’s New Masses and encouraged Ellison to con-tribute to that journal as well. Wright was also a card-carrying member ofthe Communist Party, while Ellison was a “fellow traveller.” Wright andEllison’s interest in Dostoevsky’s writings was widely considered to beunacceptable by their colleagues. In American Hunger, Wright describesthe events that earned him the cryptic but obviously unflattering label ofa “bastard intellectual” with “seraphim tendencies” (99):

I discovered that it was not wise to be seen reading books thatwere not endorsed by the Communist party. On one occasion Iwas asked to show a book that I carried under my arm. The com-rade looked at it and shook his head. . . . “Reading bourgeois bookscan only confuse you, comrade,” he said, returning the book. . . .


“You know,” he said, his voice dropping to a low, confidential tone,“many comrades go wrong by reading the books of the bourgeoi-sie. The party in the Soviet Union had trouble with people likethat.” (77–78)

Wright’s narrator does not specify the book that led to this reprimand(although Dostoevsky is a likely candidate), but Ellison does name theauthor who got him into difficulties with the board of The New Masses: “Inever accepted the ideology which The New Masses attempted to imposeon writers,” he relates in a 1967 interview: “They hated Dostoevsky, butI was studying Dostoevsky.”35

The anti-Dostoevsky atmosphere in much of the American Marxistleft—Wright’s chosen milieu—helps to explain why he paid such closeattention to a 1940 article about Dostoevsky written by an orthodox So-viet critic Vladimir Ermilov.36 The article, titled “Gorky and Dostoevsky,”appeared in two installments in International Literature (the official or-gan of the Communist Party’s “International Union of RevolutionaryWriters”). The journal was published in several languages and served as ashowcase for Soviet writings in the Western world. The reasons for theParty wanting to sanction and widely disseminate an article on Dostoevskyare debatable,37 but it is obvious that Ermilov was interpreting Dostoevskyin a manner politically correct for his times and circumstances. In thearticle, Dostoevsky is contrasted with Gorky. Ermilov maintains thatGorky had the clarity of vision that Dostoevsky never possessed, but sug-gests that Dostoevsky’s works are redeemable if examined through thelens of Gorky’s writings: “The ideas that tormented Ivan Karamazov arepresented in Gorky’s works against their proper background of bourgeoiscounterrevolution. This helped to lay bare the real truth of Dostoevsky’screations.”38

Wright saved Ermilov’s article—two copies of it—for his own ar-chives, annotated it, and shared his appreciation of it with others. Some-time in 1941, after the publication of Native Son, Wright received a letterfrom Ermilov, who wrote to him after hearing that Wright had “com-mented favourably on the modest work [he had] done on the subject ofDostoevsky,” as well as after reading Wright’s Native Son, which he per-ceived as a “tribute” to Dostoevsky (1).39 Ermilov’s apparent purpose inwriting the letter was to ask Wright the following: “Do you too rereadDostoevsky these dangerous but majestic days and what do you thinkabout him now. Don’t you agree that he is living a new life in our time?”(2). Wright’s response to Ermilov is unfortunately lost (his archives donot contain any letter drafts). His annotations to the article, however,


suggest a deeper reason for his attention to the article than a simple needto justify his fascination with Dostoevsky (Ermilov’s article did carry animplicit stamp of Party approval for an interest in Dostoevsky’s works).

In his analysis, Ermilov gives special notice to Brothers Karamazov,more specifically, to Ivan’s conversation with Alyosha, known as the fa-mous “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.” The first passage that Wrightunderscores is the one where Ermilov describes the Grand Inquisitor’sexplanation of how the church retains its dominance over people:“Miracles, mysteries, and authority—such are the precepts for governinga mob” (123). This is followed by the singling out of another passagefrom the section titled “Morals of the Slaves.” Ermilov argues here, aselsewhere, that even though Dostoevsky held on to his Christian faith,he reveals an awareness of Christianity’s shortcomings in his novels de-spite himself. Characteristically, Ermilov does not differentiate betweenDostoevsky’s attitude toward Catholicism and his attitude toward Rus-sian Orthodoxy. He suggests, instead, that Dostoevsky aknowledges inhis novels that Christianity condones slavery and all kinds of inequality,just as it ensures a passive response to it by all those oppressed: “Firstweep over the sufferings of children and then kiss the hands of their tor-mentors—that is true Christianity [ . . . ] ” (138). This last line is the onethat Wright underlines heavily in his copy of the article.

Wright’s focus on these particular passages of Ermilov’s article is notaccidental. Ermilov’s opinions support Wright’s own conviction thatDostoevsky’s novels, like The Possessed, are really about “man’s outlivingthe mythological symbols of Christendom and his agonized groping forsome new faith.”40 Wright himself was an out-of-the-closet atheist fromgrade nine, when he “announced to the astonished class that there wasno God.”41 Correspondingly, Wright reiterates this experience of “out-growing” Christianity and its symbols through all of his works—rangingfrom the famous scene in Native Son, when Bigger flings the cross thatthe preacher had given him through the bars of his cell (315) to thesegment of The Man Who Lived Underground, where the main characterspies on a praying congregation and wants to leap down to “these sillyand foolish people” to tell them “Listen, don’t do this! There is no God!Why do you do this to yourselves?”42

Composite Dostoevsky

Wright’s reading of Ermilov’s criticism suggests that, while Wright paidattention to Dostoevsky scholarship, it was only important to him as the


extent to which it bolstered his own opinions of Dostoevsky’s writings.In order to understand Wright’s perception of Dostoevsky, however, onehas to piece together a large jigsaw puzzle consisting of bits of evidencefound in his interviews, essays, fictional writings, memoirs written by hisfriends, and so forth. Wright ascribed Dostoevsky to the tradition of “Eu-ropean realism,” as he himself puts it,43 but he evidently turned toDostoevsky because of his belief that the experiences of serfdom and sla-very were fundamentally similar, thereby defining both Russians and Af-rican-Americans as fundamentally distinct from mainstream Westernculture. (Dostoevsky himself compared the plight of the Russian serfs tothat of the African-American slaves in Diary of a Writer,44 somethingthat Wright most probably knew.) Wright needed to obtain an insightinto the experience of his own people, his “own environment” (“Ameri-can Novel” 214).

Since Wright felt that these insights were missing in American writ-ing, he was forced to turn to Dostoevsky—a foreign writer who was ex-ploring a parallel cultural situation on a different continent and at adifferent time. It was this connection that made reading Dostoevsky, asWright himself said, an act both mnemonic and deeply personal (“BlackBoy and Reading” 81). Wright, incidentally, was not unique in makingthis link: a later African-American novelist, Ernest J. Gaines, describedturning to Russian writers for a similar reason: “[W]hen I first startedreading I wanted to read about my people in the South, and the whitewriters whom I had read did not put my people into books the way that Iknew them. [ . . . ] I went into the Russians and I liked what they weredoing with their stories on the peasantry; the peasants were real humanbeings, whereas in the fiction of American writers, especially Southernwriters, they were caricatures of human beings.”45

If Wright initially read Dostoevsky to better understand the psychol-ogy of an oppressed people, he kept returning to Dostoevsky because ofhis identification with the Russian novelist on a more immediately per-sonal level. Dostoevsky’s humiliation and suffering in prison and exilewere likened by Wright to the humiliation and suffering experienced byhimself, growing up African-American in the segregated American South.Again, Wright was not unique in seeing Dostoevsky’s experiences as amirror for the miseries of African-Americans in the southern UnitedStates; Albert Murray, an African-American novelist, cultural historian,Wright’s late contemporary and a close friend of Ellison, describedDostoevsky’s life in terms which emphasized these very similarities. Murraywrote that “Feodor Dostoevsky [ . . . ] was very poor, much oppressed. [ . . . ]


He was certainly alienated. He was imprisoned and one time he camewithin minutes of being officially lynched” [my emphasis added].46

The reference to lynching is, on the face of it, inaccurate—Dostoev-sky did come close to being publically executed, but the orders came fromthe Tsar and not from a lawless mob. Murray, however, is pointing outsomething else: lynching was a public execution, aimed not only at eradi-cating a particular person from the midst of society, but also at rituallyhumiliating him before killing him. In this respect, Dostoevsky’s publicnear-execution, together with the ridiculous clown-like outfit that hewas forced to wear and the ritual gesture of the sword broken over hishead, can be likened to a near-lynching. It hardly needs to be pointedout that lynching came to be associated almost exclusively with African-American victims. Murray consciously parallels the two experiences inorder to show that even the oppressed and alienated can produce first-rate literature: “Only people who have learned nothing from literary bi-ography [ . . . ] hold [ . . . ] that Negroes will be able to write first-rate novelsonly after oppression is removed [ . . . and ] Negroes no longer feel alienatedfrom the mainstream of U.S. life” (127). Both Murray and Wright, aswell as Ellison and, especially, Baldwin, drew inspiration as writers fromDostoevsky’s experiences with injustice, alienation, and suffering.

Other points of Wright’s identification with Dostoevsky were evenmore intimately personal. Wright recognized his own estrangement—fromboth society at large and his family—in what he saw as Dostoevsky’s sta-tus of an outsider in his own homeland and among his own people. (Whenasked to comment on his decision to live and work outside of the UnitedStates, Wright pointed to Dostoevsky’s example.47) Wright’s favouritecharacters in Dostoevsky’s works were also aliens or outsiders, fromRaskolnikov (who became Wright’s personal literary hero) to the Under-ground Man—two types which acquired particular importance in Wright’sown works. On another level, Ermilov’s comments about Dostoevsky’ssupposedly ill-concealed atheism and Mencken’s argument aboutDostoevsky’s belief that life has no purpose corresponded to Wright’s ownopinions: in a short essay intended for the cover of The Outsider, Wrightproclaims the world’s meaninglessness as its “basic reality.”48

Parenthetically, a recognition that Wright struggled with the prob-lem of life’s apparent lack of purpose long before he moved to Paris in1946 sheds a different light on his involvement with the French Existen-tialists and on The Outsider itself. When this novel was published in 1953,most reviewers saw it as an indication that Wright had fallen under thespell of the Existentialists and accused him of producing a book whichwas not an organic part of his oeuvre. It would appear, however, that


Wright was attracted by the Existentialists in the first place because theywere discussing the ideas that he grappled with in reading Dostoevsky.This is supported by the fact that The Outsider –his most “Existentialist”novel–is also his most Dostoevskian piece.49 Michael F. Lynch, for in-stance, has recently shown that The Outsider borrows “liberally from Crimeand Punishment for basic themes, situations, characters, and even approxi-mations of dialogue” (“Haunted by Innocence” 257) and that it repre-sents Wright’s continued debate with Dostoevsky on the subjects ofcriminal mentality, individual freedom, and guilt.

Wright had also probably identified with Dostoevsky’s unsatisfac-tory experiences with radical politics (as Lynch posits in his 1990 study[Creative Revolt 9]). It is interesting to note in this connection that, fromNative Son onwards, Wright’s novels created a polarized split in politicalcircles along the same lines as Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, which wasviewed in its own times as a paean to conservatism by radicals and as acall to radicalism by conservatives. Wright commented that Native Soncaused him to be “threatened [ . . . ] with expulsion from [the CommunistParty] ranks [ . . . ] while the Negro and white bourgeoisie screamed thatthe book was a communist tract” and grimly predicted that The Outsiderwould “incite frustrated Communists to brand me a Fascist and . . . prodmany hysterical Americans to try to pin on me the label of a crypto-Communist” (“Position of the Negro Artist” 7)—a prediction which,eventually, came true.

Beyond recognizing a kindred spirit in Dostoevsky and seeing himas a consummate psychologist, Wright also tried to learn from Dostoevsky’smastery of the novel form. In a 1960 interview, he pointed out that eventhough “[s]ome say [Dostoevsky] is an old-fashioned novelist, a novelistof the past,” he did not feel that way himself. On the contrary, he be-lieved that Dostoevsky “wrote tremendous dramatic works . . . with directencounters and passionate exchanges between people.” According toWright, this allowed Dostoevsky’s novels to do what every novel shouldbe able to do: “increas[e] our sense of life . . . [and] shed light about otherpeople. The more direct, the more light. The more intense, the morelight. The more dramatic, the more intimate the novel” (“AmericanNovel” 214). It is within this context and in this connection that Wrightacknowledged Dostoevsky as his inspirational model when he embarkedon a writer’s career.


Finding Dostoevsky in Wright’s Books

The only overt mention of Dostoevsky in Wright’s fictional works occursin The Outsider. Damon Cross, who committed several murders, is beingquestioned by the State Attorney, Houston. The latter admits that hecould neither believe that Cross committed the murders nor understandthe motivation behind them if he did; “[t]hen I had a brainstorm,” heannounces, “I wired Chicago to send me a list of the titles of the booksyou’d left behind in your room. [ . . . ] That was the first real clue. YourNietzsche, your Hegel, your Jaspers, your Heidegger, your Husserl, yourKierkegaard, and your Dostoevsky were the clues [ . . . ]” (538). Althoughcritics had viewed this list as an acknowledgement of Wright’s interest inthe Existentialists, it can also be viewed as a metatextual gesture, a nodto Cross’ precursors in Dostoevsky’s novels. Scholars, notably, havepointed out the similarities between Cross and Dostoevsky’s aspiringÜbermenschen, such as Raskolnikov, Kirilov, and Stavrogin (Lynch“Haunted by Innocence” 255–66), as well as Ivan Karamazov.50 Further,the conclusion that State Attorney Houston reaches after scrutinizingthe list points not in the direction of the Existentialist thinkers, but ratherin the direction of Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov and Raskolnikov: “I saidto myself,” Houston declares immediately after citing the authors read byCross, “that we were dealing with a man who had wallowed in guiltythought” (538).

Despite this scarcity of direct references to Dostoevsky in Wright’sworks, a close reading uncovers a profusion of obvious instances ofintertextuality between Wright’s novels and those of Dostoevsky. Sev-eral major patterns are suggested by scholars who have examined thissubject.51 Plot, situation, and character parallels are pointed to by all schol-ars. The dramatic plot lines of both Native Son and The Outsider, withtheir shocking, graphically-depicted multiple murders committed by thecentral character, who then tries to use his wits to evade capture, suggesta link to Crime and Punishment. The murderers, Bigger Thomas and DamonCross, share many characteristics with Raskolnikov; Houston’s methodsand seeming desire to understand Cross link him to Porfiry Petrovich;Bigger Thomas’s second victim, his girlfriend Bessie, has many traits incommon with the murdered pawnbroker’s sister Elizaveta, including thename (Bessie, of course, is a short form of Elizabeth), and so forth. Thecentral situation in the pointedly named The Man Who Lived Undergroundis that of a character who finds himself literally observing and condemn-ing the world through the chinks in the basement walls, something thatDostoevsky’s Underground Man does metaphorically (Peterson calls the


main character of the novella “a revision of Dostoevsky’s prototype,” butsuggests that “Wright has combined several Dostoevsky references underone guise” [383]).

Certain techniques that Wright employs in his novels hark directlyback to Dostoevsky—such as using setting to suggest a psychological state(gloomy city tenements and claustrophobic rooms which correspond tothe gloom and paranoia enveloping the major characters) and employingdreams to provide insights into the character’s psyche (e.g., Bigger’s night-mare of seeing his own severed head, which suggests his suppressed guiltand horror over what he had done). In the same category are Wright’slengthy confrontations between characters which function either likeevasive cat-and-mouse games (Houston and Cross) or like confessionals(Bigger Thomas and Boris Max). The Dostoevsky connection is stronglysuggested by set pieces, like the culminating trial scene in Native Son,which inevitably brings to mind the trial in Brothers Karamazov. The gro-tesqueness in Wright’s novels has also been linked to the use of deformi-ties in Dostoevsky’s novels—as seen, for example, in the misshapen StateAttorney in The Outsider, whose physical deformity allows him insightinto an outsider’s psyche.52

What is more, the ideas, concepts, and themes that Wright exploresin his own works also recall those in Dostoevsky’s novels. Wright’s inter-est in the nature of free will, the relationship of crime and punishment,the effects of oppression and alienation, and, especially, the meaning andthe consequences of suffering, are all subjects that Dostoevsky examinesin his novels. Scholars have noted Wright’s interest in the “Dostoevskianexposure of the lacerated psyche of the insulted and the injured” (Peterson381). Revealingly, one of the titles that Wright considered for Native Sonwas The Shamed and The Blind,53 which recalls, in structure as well as incontent, Dostoevsky’s The Insulted and The Humiliated, a book whichWright had in his personal library.

Extreme States

The earliest reviewers of Wright’s work recognized the Dostoevsky con-nection. In fact, Native Son, Wright’s first novel, was specifically posi-tioned to be read in terms of Dostoevsky’s writings. In the preface to thefirst edition of Native Son, the Vermont author Dorothy Canfield Fisherwrote that the “novel plumbs blacker depths of human experience thanAmerican literature has yet had, comparable only to Dostoevsky’s rev-elation of human misery in wrong-doing.” She praised Wright for


“wrestl[ing] with utter sincerity with Dostoevsky’s subject–a human soulin hell because it is sick with a deadly spiritual sickness.”54 (Dostoevsky,incidentally, is the only writer Fisher mentions in the introduction be-sides Wright himself.) A lionizing review of the novel which appeared inThe New Yorker framed its approval in a Dostoevskian comparison, de-claring that Wright goes “into layers of consciousness where onlyDostoevsky and a few others have penetrated.”55 Even reviewers who didnot like the novel appreciated the Dostoevsky connection: “At times,”wrote a reviewer for the Boston Evening Transcript, “Mr. Wright shows aDostoevsky-like insight; at other times he writes like a ten-twent-and-thirt melodrama.”56 Wright was “The Black Dostoevsky” and Bigger “TheBlack Raskolnikov.”57

Occasionally, it seemed that Dostoevsky was the only literary influ-ence that reviewers were identifying, which was odd, considering thatWright read widely, had many literary models and that the influences ofJoseph Conrad, Theodore Dreiser, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce, amongothers, are also readily detected in his work. One left-wing critic whoreviewed Native Son in the Socialist paper, The Daily Worker, pointedthis out with some outrage, and exclaimed that the constant reference toDostoevsky was a means for bourgeois reviewers to “blunt [the] revolu-tionary edge” of Wright’s book.58 However, a review of the novel writtenby a presumably non-bourgeois Soviet critic in 1940 also noted aDostoevskian link (the author argued that the novel was an importantliterary event despite Dostoevsky’s influence).59

There is no question that Wright owed a conscious literary debt toDostoevsky, as he himself acknowledged many times. Nonetheless, thepersistence with which Dostoevsky’s name was evoked in the introduc-tion to Wright’s first novel and the very specific parallels that were drawnby reviewers of the novel between the two writers—focusing on suchthings as “souls in torment” and “human misery”—are thought-provok-ing. They suggest the reviewers’ discomfort with Wright’s subject matterof discrimination, rape, and murder (or their anticipation of his readers’discomfort with these subjects) and their attempt to make it more palat-able by aligning it with a foreign and “respectable” writer who also wroteabout extreme situations. This in itself speaks volumes about the popularAmerican perception of Dostoevsky as a writer. Many Americans, it ap-pears, persisted in seeing Dostoevsky as he was initially introduced tothem by Melchior de Vogüé in 1886: “Psychologue incomparable, dèsqu’il étudie des âmes noires ou blessées, dramaturge habile, mais bornéaux scènes d’effroi et de pitié” (267).60 Ernest Gaines, whose own liter-ary relationship to Dostoevsky is a complex one, testified both to the


persistence and the limitations of this stereotype in a candid interviewabout his work: “People think that I should like Dostoevsky. . . . Dostoevskywrote so much of hunger, of deprivation and pain that people said, you’vegone through that sort of thing you should like Dostoevsky. He had a biginfluence on Richard Wright, on Ellison, and on the early black writers,but I’ve never ever thought of him as a teacher.”61

There is something vaguely offensive about the reviewers’ and thecritics’ persistent superimposing of Dostoevsky upon African-Americanlife. When Mencken and others like him insisted that African-Americanwriters frame their experiences in terms of “Dostoevsky’s portrait of theRussian,” it carried the implicit suggestion that black skin is somehowcorrelated with “âme noire ou blessée” and that African-American writ-ers must produce records of dearth, privation and anguish, without ven-turing into other literary territory. This, in fact, was one of James Baldwin’scritiques of Wright’s Native Son in his essay “Many Thousands Gone”(1951), which effectively ended his friendship with Wright.62 Baldwincontended that Wright gave the American public just the novel thatthey were expecting and it was only superficially remarkable “that thisbook should have enjoyed among Americans the favor it did enjoy; nomore remarkable . . . than that it should have been compared, exuber-antly, to Dostoevsky” (31).

Nonetheless, it is clear that Baldwin himself, just as Wright andEllison before him, identified with Dostoevsky’s portrayal of extreme situ-ations and states. Reminiscing about his precocious childhood, Baldwinwrote that he had compulsively read Dostoevsky because he believed thathis novels “had something to tell me. It was this particular child’s way ofcircling around the question of what it meant to be a nigger. It was thereason that I was reading Dostoevsky. . . . I was intrigued, but not misled,by the surface of these novels . . . [as, for instance,] the tracking down ofRaskolnikov. . . . I did not believe in any of these people so much as Ibelieved in their situation, which I suspected, dreadfully, to have some-thing to do with my own.”63

Sharing Dostoevsky

The personal and literary association of Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin(Wright and Ellison met in 1936; Baldwin met Wright in 1944 and Ellisonin 1953), is a crucial one for the development of African-American fic-tion.64 Wright, who became established as a writer before the two youngermen, attempted to influence Ellison and Baldwin’s literary tastes by di-


recting their reading (to Dostoevsky, among other writers) and givingthem advice on how to write. In fact, Ellison tried his hand at writingfiction at Wright’s suggestion and Baldwin completed his first novel afterreceiving Wright’s enthusiastic support. In turn, Ellison attempted toshape Baldwin’s view of literature, commenting to Wright after meetingBaldwin in September of 1953 that he felt “the responsibility of passingalong some of the stuff that [he] learned from [Wright].”65 Among otherthings, the writers tried to share their individual views of Dostoevskyand his characters.66

The interests of the three writers eventually diverged and theirmutual loyalties declined, but their fascination with Dostoevsky remainedlittle altered. Towards the end of his life, Ellison did appear to downplaythe connection of his master novel with Dostoevsky’s work, even thoughhe insisted upon it earlier. In a 1981 introduction to his novel, for ex-ample, Ellison wrote that “by way of providing myself the widest field forsuccess or failure, I associated [the main character of The Invisible Man],ever so distantly, with the narrator of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground[emphasis added].”67 Nonetheless, his work contains many obvious linksto Dostoevsky’s novels and includes many a homage to Dostoevsky. Evenhis never completed and only posthumously published novel, Juneteenth(New York: Random, 1999), displays a deep indebtedness to Dostoevsky(especially in the dream sequences) and has already evoked comparisonswith Brothers Karamazov.68

On the other hand, Baldwin’s interest in Dostoevsky and his will-ingness to acknowledge it appeared to increase as the years passed. Dur-ing the winter of 1948–1949, when his relationship with Wright collapsed,Baldwin was calling Dostoevsky one of his great literary enthusiasms.69

In the 1960s, he claimed Dostoevsky as one of his models. Shortly beforehis death, Baldwin talked of learning how to write from Dostoevsky.

All three writers regarded Dostoevsky as a literary forefather. Wrightsaw his life and writings prefigured in Dostoevsky’s own. Baldwin describedDostoevsky as both a personal messenger (Devil Finds Work 11) and, sig-nificantly, a “witness”—a term that he used to describe himself as a writeras well: “Witness to whence I came, where I am. Witness to what I’veseen and the possiblities that I think I see. [ . . . ] In the church in whichI was raised you were supposed to bear witness to the truth.”70 (Interest-ingly, Ellison proclaimed Dostoevsky as one of his literary ancestors,among other writers that influenced him, at the same time as he made apublic and very definite statement of literary independence from Wrightin his essay “The World and the Jug”: “I respected Wright’s work . . . butthat is not to say that he ‘influenced’ me as significantly as you assume . . .


[O]ne can do nothing about choosing one’s relatives, one can, as artist,choose one’s ‘ancestors’. Wright was, in this sense, a ‘relative’ . . . Dostoev-sky . . . [an] ‘ancestor.’”71 )

It is difficult to judge now how much of Wright’s own interpreta-tion of Dostoevsky was passed down to Ellison and Baldwin—or, for thatmatter, from Ellison to Baldwin—and how much was formulated by eachwriter independently. It is clear, however, that the three writers identi-fied with Dostoevsky on several levels. Like Wright, Baldwin and Ellisondrew inspiration from Dostoevsky’s depiction of suffering and alienationin his works. Baldwin wrote at length about being empowered by readingof the suffering that both Dostoevsky and his characters undergo: “Youread something which you thought only happened to you, and you dis-cover it happened 100 years ago to Dostoevsky. This is a very great lib-eration for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he isalone;”72 and again, “You go through life . . . thinking, No one has eversuffered the way I suffered, my God, my God. And then you realize—youread something . . . and you realize that your suffering does not isolateyou; your suffering is your bridge.”73 Dostoevsky’s alienation was anotherpoint of identification for Baldwin, since he viewed himself as an outcastwithin his family (his stepfather was harshly critical of his looks), hiscommunity (which disapproved of his abandonment of religion), andAmerican society at large (he wrote to a friend in the 1940s: “I am . . .surrounded by the model Americans of our time. . . . I am, of course, amisfit. . . . Have I ever been anything else?”74 ). Towards the end of hislife, Baldwin told an interviewer that he felt he was only too similar toDostoevsky (cit. in Weatherby 85–86).

Ellison, for his part, disapproved of the assumption that suffering issomehow responsible for great art. In a 1964 address, for example, heargued against Hemingway’s opinion that Dostoevsky’s experience in Si-beria shaped his art by contending that art was primary and “personaland social injustice . . . suffered” was secondary: “It is a matter of outra-geous irony, perhaps, but in literature the great social clashes of historyno less than the painful experience of the individual are secondary to themeaning which they take on through the skill, the talent, the imagina-tion and personal vision of the writer who transforms them into art” (“Hid-den Name and Complex Fate” 148). He was, however, clearly interestedin Dostoevsky’s depiction of suffering and alienated characters, whosealienation went beyond class and society and sprang from much deeperand more individual causes (as it did in the narrator of Invisible Man). Healso maintained that Notes from Underground contains “the most directtreatment of alienation which [he] knew” and suggested that “[a]fterDostoevsky you don’t need Kafka.”75


Ellison and Baldwin, as did Wright before them, regarded Dostoevskyas a teacher of the difficult art of novelistic mastery. When discussing hisown techniques, Ellison frequently cited Dostoevsky’s use of the same.For example, when he talked of the importance of dreams in his ownwork, he suggested that he had learned this from Dostoevsky who “taughtthe novelist how to use the dream.”76 He named Dostoevsky when hetalked about the rhythms of the epilogue of Invisible Man (“Dialogue withAudience” 138). He also refered to Dostoevsky’s use of folklore, sayingthat “The hero of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground [among otherDostoevsky’s characters] . . . appear in their rudimentary forms far back inRussian folklore,” when talking about his own extensive use of African-American folklore.77

Significantly, Ellison drew upon Dostoevsky to legitimize his ownceaseless struggles with literary form (he only managed to produce onenovel during his lifetime, and spent close to fifty years working on thenext one which he never finished). In an early letter to Wright, writtenwhen he was working on The Invisible Man, he called grappling with form“an uncertain battle on a dark terrain” and noted that what worried himmost about writing was just that: “the form, the learning how to organizemy material in order to take the maximum advantage of those psycho-logical and emotional currents within myself and the reader which en-dow prose with meaning . . . and mak[e] prose magical.”78 Ellison explainedhis ideas about form in an 1974 interview, where he suggested thatDostoevsky had the same difficulties: “Once a logic is set up for a charac-ter . . . [then in order] for you to discover the form of the fiction, you haveto go where he takes you, you have to follow him. In the process youchange your ideas. You remember, Dostoevsky wrote about eight versionsof a certain scene in The Brothers Karamazov and in some instances theoriginal incidents were retained but the characters who performed themwere changed. I find that happens with me.”79 He also found it comfort-ing, apparently, that “Dostoevsky and some of the other giants never didsucceed in writing what we call a perfect novel,” pointing out that, moreimportantly, “these books . . . gave the audience . . . a sense of wonderarising out of the multiplicity of events being reduced to form” (“Art ofFiction” 25–26). Elsewhere, he described that form as “Symphonic”—adefinition that included “the intermixing of the tragic with the comic,the light with the solemn, and so on.”80

Ellison tried to impart some of his ideas about literary form toBaldwin. He felt, for instance, that Baldwin’s first published novel GoTell It on the Mountain (1953) was written in a much too restrictive andcontrolling mode (he was of the opinion that Henry James was not a


good model for Baldwin to follow81 ). Together, they spoke at length aboutwriting. It is a matter of conjecture, of course, as to how much of Ellison’sadvice made any impression on Baldwin. What is clear, however, is thatBaldwin’s third novel, Another Country (1962; New York: Dell, 1968),despite the Jamesian epigraph, lacks that strict control of form whichcharacterized his first book and has more in common with those “fluidpuddings though not tasteless”—in James’s infamous characterization ofDostoevsky’s novels (Baldwin himself acknowledged the shapelessness ofthe novel).82

Further, it is not James who is evoked again and again in AnotherCountry but Dostoevsky. One of the characters, Richard, a novelist whois aspiring to write a great book, tries unsuccessfully to approachDostoevsky in his efforts. Richard’s homosexual friend, Eric, is offeredthe role of Stavrogin in a film version of The Possessed. The narrator’sdepiction of Eric’s inner life and his quest for love deliberately evokesDostoevsky’s dreamers of Belye nochi [White Nights] (1848): “The aim ofthe dreamer . . . is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested by theworld. His dreams are his protection against the world. But the aims oflife are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the worldare sharp” (170). Interestingly, the text of Baldwin’s novel appears toinclude an attempt to preempt criticism of its explosive subject matterwith another evocation of Dostoevsky (Another Country deals with, amongother things, suicide, violence, interracial and homosexual relationships).Thus, the aspiring novelist’s wife realizes that her husband will neverequal to Dostoevsky because “he was afraid, afraid of things dark, strange,dangerous, difficult, and deep” (98)—ostensibly the provenance of greatfiction as well as Baldwin’s own metier. Several years before his death,Baldwin gave an interview where he talked about drawing inspirationfrom Dostoevsky’s use of minor characters and humbly admitted that hewas still learning how to write from reading other novelists, namely Balzacand Dostoevsky: “I don’t know what technique is. All I know is that youhave to make the reader see it.”83 Dostoevsky, Baldwin suggested, knewhow to make his reader see even in the darkness.

Difficult Politics

Ellison’s friend and eminent Dostoevsky scholar, Joseph Frank, pondersEllison’s connection to Dostoevsky in his article of tribute to the latter,titled “Ralph Ellison and a Literary ‘Ancestor’: Dostoevsky” (1983).84 Headvances several interesting ideas in the article, the most fruitful of these


being the suggestion that tracing the connections of Invisible Man withDostoevsky’s individual novels is only of limited usefulness. “Much morefundamental,” he writes, “is Ellison’s profound grasp of the ideologicalinspiration of Dostoevsky’s work, and his perception of its relevance tohis own creative purposes—his perception, that is, of how he could useDostoevsky’s relation to the Russian culture of his time to express hisown position as an American Negro writer in relation to the dominatingwhite culture” (232). Frank employs this vital insight to point out twoimportant patterns. First, he shows that Dostoevsky’s wary and criticalattitude towards Western European culture is parallelled by the InvisibleMan’s stance in relation to mainstream (White) American culture, itsvalues and ideas (232–33). Secondly, he suggests that Dostoevsky’s “clear-eyed and unblinking” depiction of the Russian peasant, along with hisunderstanding of the “age-old oppression” which led to “benightedness,backwardness, and sometimes terrible cruelty,” and his ability to “discer[n]whatever spark of humanity continued to exist under such conditions”(237) was mirrored in Ellison’s depiction of African-American life. Inthis connection, he also argues that Dostoevsky’s rehabilitation of Rus-sian folk idiom and folklore not as “a source of quaint exoticism . . . but asa symbol of a realm of values” (as in Notes from the Dead House) parallelsthe use of African-American folklore in Ellison’s work.

Frank’s central argument about Ellison’s identification with“Dostoevsky’s relation to the Russian culture of his time” acquires a deeperresonance when one considers the fact that Ellison himself identified thesocial shifts and political upheavals of Dostoevsky’s Russia with a similarsituation in America of his day (both within the African-American com-munities and in American society at large). In a 1974 interview (“Comple-tion of Personality”), for instance, Ellison talked at great length about“the extreme disruption of hierarchical relationships which occured dur-ing the nineteenth century [in Russia].” He pointed out that in Russia“you had a great declassed aristocracy, with the Tsar still at the top, andthe awakening peasantry at the bottom. On one hand, society was plung-ing headlong into chaos, and on the other there was a growing identifi-cation . . . across traditional hierarchical divisions.” He went on to compare“[s]uch disruption of the traditional ordering of society” with what washappening “in our own country since 1954.” He also commented that lifein nineteenth-century Russia became “so theatrical (not to say night-marish) that even Dostoevsky’s smoking imagination was barely able tokeep a step ahead of what was actually happening in garrets and streets”and again drew the parallel with America of his day: “Today, here in theUnited States, we have something similar” (288). In the same interview,


Ellison discussed learning from such writers as Dostoevsky about “what ispossible in depicting a society in which class lines are fluid or have bro-ken down without the cultural style and values on either extreme of soci-ety being dissipated [ . . . ] you learn to explore the rich fictional possibilitiesto be achieved in juxtapositng the peasant’s consciousness with that ofthe aristocrat and the aristocrat’s with the peasant’s” and emphasized that“[t]his insight is useful when you are dealing with American society” (287).

Several things are worthy of note here. First of all, it is evident thatEllison, like Wright before him and Baldwin after him, turned toDostoevsky to understand his own environment and the changes that itwas undergoing. Secondly, Ellison’s interest in the psychological impli-cations of social turmoil in Dostoevsky’s work harks back to Wright’s ownassertion that reading Dostoevsky led him “into the field of psychologyand sociology.” In fact, a primary literary concern for all three writers(Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin) was a depiction and analysis of the ef-fects of drastic social change upon their characters’ psyche. This, alongwith their interest in and concern with radical politics made Dostoevsky’sThe Possessed an invaluable sourcebook and manual. It is not surprisingthen that echoes of The Possessed proliferate in the Invisible Man (Frankpoints out as one example that when “the Brotherhood provokes a raceriot, it is employing the very tactics [ . . . ] that Dostoevsky understoodvery well, and had dramatized in [The Possessed]” [233]); nor that thepolitical radicals in Wright’s The Outsider can be traced back toDostoevsky’s novel (The Possessed was among the first books acquired byWright for his home library); nor that Baldwin was reportedly readingThe Possessed in the 1970s and “making parallels with the America oftoday” (Weatherby 327), and that this novel is both explicitly mentionedand implicitly evoked in Baldwin’s own novels.85

What is more important than the recurrent use of The Possessed madeby Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin, is that these three writers also employDostoevsky’s works as “proof-texts” to support their various political en-gagements and evoke his name for the same purpose. Baldwin, for in-stance, frequently wrote and spoke against the exploitation of thethird-world nations by the capitalist Western countries. In one of hisessays, Baldwin cites Malcolm X’s opinion that “All of the Western na-tions have been caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism; thismeans that their history has no moral justification, and that the Westhas no moral authority” (No Name in the Street [New Yok: Dial, 1972]85). He develops this idea at length and, as the ultimate indictment ofthe Western world in general and capitalist imperialism in particular,cites Lebedev (the buffoon-like character in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot) who


argues that without morality any industrial or technological advancesgained might not be made available to a larger part of humanity.“Dostoevsky,” Baldwin writes, “saw that the rise of this power would ‘coldlyexclude a considerable part of humanity.’” “Indeed,” he continues, “itwas on this exclusion that the rise of this power inexorably depended”(85). Ironically, it is the aura of authority that Dostoevsky possesses inthe immoral West, that allows Baldwin to cite Dostoevsky’s opinions aboutthe moral bancruptcy of the West with such finality.

Baldwin’s strategic evocation of Dostoevsky as the ultimate author-ity in his corner, so to speak, supports Frank’s subtle suggestion thatDostoevsky’s prestige in the West contributed to his usefulness as a liter-ary ancestor (235). But while Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin may well haverecognized the convenience of adopting Dostoevsky as a literary ances-tor, it was shown earlier that they readily declared their indebtedness tohis work when it was not strategically advantageous to do so. The ulti-mate reasons for their choice of Dostoevsky as a teacher and “ancestor”were much more complex than a simple matter of convenience. Beyondpersonally identifying with Dostoevsky as a fellow outsider and drawinga general parallel between the Russian serfs and the African-Americanslaves, they also saw him as a contemporary of sorts—living in a time ofsimilar social and political upheaval. Dostoevsky’s works were useful tothem not only because they were interested in his technique and literarycraft, but because he was confronting the larger philosophical, psycho-logical, and sociological questions that they were attempting to tackle intheir own books.

On another level, Dostoevsky’s texts provided a rich assortment ofcharacters who could be drawn upon to elucidate one’s own opinions andphilosophical position. Thus, in 1946, Ellison penned a letter toWrightwhere he discussed a literary critic’s unsuccessful attempt to describe acharacter who would “incorporate all the contradictions present in theNegro-white situation in this country and yet be appealing to whites.”86

Ellison gropes for a fitting description of the end product and choosesPrince Myshkin—“a Dostoevskian Idiot type.” He concedes that this ideaholds some possibilities, but then declares that he personally had “alwayspreferred another Dostoevsky type, the Ivans, or Dmitris, rather than theAlyoshas or Myshkins.”

Ellison’s choice of the doubting, protesting, and suffering “Ivans orDmitris” over the accepting, affirming, and loving “Alyoshas or Myshkins”was not serendipitous. Ellison, like Wright and Baldwin, created charac-ters who raged, suffered, and questioned the injustices of the world. Ellison,as the other two writers, authored texts that caused controversy because


they fearlessly and relentlessly engaged with the most pressing and ex-plosive social issues of the day. The term “protest literature” inevitablycomes up in the critical discussion of the three writers’ works; respondingto this, Ellison once said that he “recognize[d] no dichotomy between artand protest” and cited Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground as oneexample that the two can seamlessly merge in a single literary text (“Artof Fiction” 8). Dostoevsky’s willingness to take on the dominant ideol-ogy of the day (as Ellison points out, Notes from the Underground is “amongother things, a protest against the limitations of 19th century rational-ism” [8]) while maintaining high literary standards proved inspiring toeach of the three writers and provided yet another reason for their choiceof Dostoevsky as a literary role model.

The three writers could have, of course, realized that protest maycoexist with art without knowing anything about Dostoevsky (though heis one of the most prominent writers to consistently combine the twospheres and achieve results that rank among the very best in world fic-tion). However, the three did learn something very important fromDostoevsky that they could not, most likely, learn elsewhere. As creatorsof texts that were politically and socially engaged, Ellison, Baldwin, andWright benefited enormously from their awareness of the paradoxes ly-ing at the intersection of Dostoevsky’s politics and poetics. Ellison, whoseunderstanding of Dostoevsky was perhaps the most thorough and factualof the three writers, summed it up best: “Dostoevsky could be pretty ra-bid in some of his ideological concerns, pretty bigoted in his attitudestoward the members of certain groups, but when he chose to depict char-acters identified with such groups he gave them all the human complex-ity that the form and action of the novel demanded” (“Study andExperience” 332–33). “I don’t think,” Ellison added, “that you can dothis if your mind is made up beforehand. You end up creating stereotypes,writing propaganda” (333).

The realization that one cannot set up cardboard cutouts of villainsif one wishes to produce worthwhile literary texts informs the “humancomplexity” of all characters in The Invisible Man and Juneteenth, a com-plexity and a humanity which cannot be denied no matter how despi-cable the beliefs these characters espouse. Similarly, however radicalBaldwin’s own political allegiances were at the time of writing his nov-els, he always resists making any of his characters into subhuman mon-sters and two-dimensional stereotypes. In an ironic twist, it would seemthat Wright, who constantly pushed the younger novelists towardsDostoevsky, took the longest to recognize that a politically and sociallyengaged novel needs to contain a certain amount of polyphonic open-ness, and that all the characters—whether the author agrees with their


views or not—must be allowed a voice within the text. In fact, one won-ders if he was ever successful in fully realizing this in his work, thoughafter Native Son he seems to be steadfastly travelling in that direction.87

This is not to say that the connections and instances of intertextualitybetween Wright’s books and Dostoevsky’s works become any less impor-tant or profound because of this. Like Ellison and Baldwin, Wright learneda great deal from reading Dostoevsky and he did manage to incorporatemuch of it into his novels. Native Son proved that Wright knew how tocreate a dynamic and riveting novel, a novel that engaged all the burn-ing questions his day and created the same feverish excitement in itsreader that Crime and Punishment apparently did when it was just pub-lished. It is not for nothing that Mary White Ovington—whom Menckenadvised to imitate Dostoevsky’s portrait of the Russian—sent an enthusi-astic letter to Wright after reading The Native Son. “I’ve watched Negroliterature now for forty years,” she wrote. “[I’ve] collected it, reviewed it,even written a little of it,” she added archly. “Much of it has seemedunreal. . . . But you’ve gone down so deep, your book is rooted in life.Dorothy Canfield [Fisher] is right in comparing you to Dostoevsky andthat to me means the greatest in fiction.”88 Whatever ideological andcreative differences eventually came between Wright, Ellison, andBaldwin, it would appear that all three novelists agreed that Dostoevskyproduced “the greatest in fiction.” Their Dostoevsky, however, was notanother Dead White Man, enshrined within the Western literary canon, but a kindred soul, an ancestor,89 whose novels, like The Possessed, tran-scribe a dangerous terrain, where fiction meets life, where politics andpoetics converge, and where every step can set off an explosion, as theirown novels frequently did.

Columbia University

Notes

The present essay is part of a larger work which considers Dostoevsky’s impact on Ameri-can literature and culture in the twentieth century. My work on this project is madepossible by a generous postdoctoral fellowship granted by the Social Sciences and Hu-manities Research Council of Canada. I am deeply indebted to Professor Robert Belnap(Colombia University) for his encouragement and his generous input into this project.

1. H. L. Mencken, “The Negro as Author” (1920) 90; rpt. in H. L. Mencken’s SmartSet Criticism, ed. William H. Nolte (Washington, D. C.: Gateway, 1987) 320.

2. Stein wrote about her book, Three Lives, to Carl Van Vechten: “even its worstenemies say it is like Dostoevsky which is none so dirty from an enemy” (“To Carl Van


Vechten,” 23 June 1924, The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten, 1913–1946,ed. Edward Burns, vol. 1 [New York: Columbia U P, 1986] 101). The Dostoevskianconnection was made most often with the second story of the book, “Melanctha.” Thus,one “enlightened” American reader, the expatriate writer and publisher RobertMcAlmon, gushed to Stein in a 1924 letter, after reading her Three Lives: “The secondstory was amazing; a clarified Dostoevskian depiction of niggers,” in “Letter to GertrudeStein,” August ? 1924, The Flowers of Friendship: Letters Written to Gertrude Stein, ed.Donald Gallup (New York: Knopf, 1953) 162.

3. The three writers were widely read in Russian literature and they all drew inspira-tion from the fact that Russia’s greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin, had African ancestry.The Soviet Union and its antiracism policy were another obvious focus of interest. In1936, for instance, one of the top Soviet actresses, Lyubov Orlova, starred in the filmTsirk [The Circus] about an American circus performer who has an interracial love af-fair and gives birth to a dark-skinned child. She knows that if anyone finds out, hercareer will be ruined. This information is used by her unscrupulous manager to controland manipulate her. Eventually they come to the Soviet Union, where the manager,angry that she fell in love with a Soviet man, brings out the child in the middle of aperformance and announces that she is the mother. To his surprise, the Soviet citizensare enchanted and sing a lullaby to the baby, as Paul Robeson leads them in the chorus(the film was followed in Russia by a fad for black dolls). Needless to say, it would beyears before an interracial love affair could be alluded to in a Hollywood film. Wrightand Ellison were both involved with the Communist Party (Wright as member andEllison as fellow traveller), while Baldwin was a Trotskyist.

4. Richard Wright, interview, “The American Novel,” radio broadcast rec. ORTFParis (Oct. 1960); rpt. in Conversations with Richard Wright, eds. Kenneth Kinnamonand Michel Fabre, trans. Michel Fabre (Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 1993) 214.

5. James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work (New York: Dial, 1976) 11.6. Ralph Ellison, interview, “‘A Completion of Personality’: A Talk With Ralph

Ellison,” Ralph Ellison: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. John Hersey (Englewood Cliffs:Prentice, 1974), rpt. in Conversations with Ralph Ellison, eds. Maryemma Graham andAmrijit Singh, (Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 1995) 266.

7. Ralph Ellison, interview, “Ralph Ellison: Twenty Years After” (1973); rpt. in Con-versations with Ralph Ellison 202.

8. Tony Magistrale and Dasha Culic Nisula argue for the link with Dostoevsky’sPrestuplenie i nakazanie [Crime and Punishment](1866) in “From St. Petersburg to Chi-cago: Wright’s Crime and Punishment”(Comparative Literature Studies 23 [1986]: 59–69)and “Dostoevsky and Richard Wright: From St. Petersburg to Chicago” (Dostoevsky andthe Human Condition After a Century, eds. Alexej Ugrinsky, Frank Lambasa, and ValijaOzolin [New York: Greenwood, 1986] 163–70) respectively. Horst-Jürgen Gerigk dis-cusses the novel’s connection with Crime and Punishment and Brat’ia Karamazovy [TheBrothers Karamazov] (1879–1880) in Die Russen in Amerika: Dostojewskij, Tolstoj,Turgenjew und Tschechow in ihrer Bedeutung für die Literatur der USA ([Hürtgenwald:Pressler, 1995] 138–43, 218–22). Michael F. Lynch writes about the parallels betweenWright’s The Outsider (1953) and Crime and Punishment in his 1996 essay “Haunted byInnocence: The Debate with Dostoevsky in Wright’s ‘Other Novel,’ The Outsider” (Af-rican American Review 30.2 [1996]: 255–66). Dale E. Peterson posits a problematic ar-gument in his otherwise praiseworthy article “Richard Wright’s Long Journey from Gorkyto Dostoevsky” (African American Review 28.3 [1994]: 375–87) that Wright began tofocus on Dostoevsky only after he became disenchanted with Gorky. Peterson also tracesthe parallels between Native Son and Crime and Punishment and Zapiski iz podpol’ia [Notesfrom the Underground] (1864) as well as the parallels between Wright’s novella “TheMan who Lived Underground” (first published as “The Man Who Lived Underground:Two Excerpts from a Novel,” Accent 2 (Spring 1942): 170–76) and Dostoevsky’s Notesfrom Underground. There are several exceptions to this tendency to explore the specific


parallels between individual novels that examine larger questions of intertextuality:especially noteworthy is Joseph Frank’s 1983 article, “Ralph Ellison and a Literary ‘An-cestor’: Dostoevsky” (New Criterion Sept. 1983, rpt. in Speaking for You: The Vision ofRalph Ellison, ed. Kimberly W. Benston [Washington, D.C.: Howard U P, 1987] 231–44); another interesting exception is Michael F. Lynch’s 1990 study, Creative Revolt: AStudy of Wright, Ellison and Dostoevsky (New York: Lang).

9. Richard Wright, “Interview,” Book of the Month Club News (Feb. 1940) 4.10. Wright’s diary entries for the thirteenth of November 1945 and for the ninth of

December 1945 include the mention of buying eight books written by Mencken, in-cluding the Prejudices series which he had already read in Memphis (Richard WrightPapers, Yale University, JWJ MSS3, box 113, folder 1812).

11. Burton Rascoe, “Smart Set History,” The Smart Set Anthology of World FamousAuthors, eds. Burton Rascoe and Groff Conklin (New York: Halcyon, 1934) xxiv.

12. Wright compares John O’Hara’s collection of stories Pal Joey (1940) to Dostoevsky’sbook in his diary entry for the sixth of April 1945 (Richard Wright Papers, Yale Uni-versity, JWJ MSS3, box 117, folder 1860).

13. Wright’s undated lecture notes cited by Fabre in Richard Wright, Books and Writers(Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 1990) 97.

14. Richard Wright, “Black Boy and Reading,” 1945, The Lexington Reader, ed. LynnZ. Bloom (Lexington, Mass.:Heath, 1987); rpt. in Conversations with Richard Wright 81.

15. Margaret Walker, Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius: A Portrait of the Man, A Criti-cal Look at His Work (New York: Warner, 1988).

16. Richard Wright, interview, “Richard Wright: I Curse the Day When for the FirstTime I Heard the Word ‘Politics’,” L’Express (18 Oct. 1955); trans. Keneth Kinnamon,Conversations with Richard Wright 163.

17. Cited from a draft for Wright’s early lecture or article, “The Future of LiteraryExpression” (Richard Wright Papers, Yale University, JWJ MSS3, box 5, folder 87).

18. Richard Wright, “The Position of the Negro Artist and Intellectual in AmericanSociety,” draft of a lecture written in 1960 (Richard Wright Papers, Yale University,JWJ MSS3, box 3, folder 41).

19. Ralph Ellison, “Richard Wright’s Blues,” Antioch Review 3.2 (1945); rpt. in Shadowand Act (New York: Signet, 1964) 90.

20. Fedor Dostoevsky, Zapiski iz mertvogo doma [Notes from the Dead House] (1860–1862) in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh [Full Edition of Collected Works inThirty Volumes] vol. 4 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972) 207.

21. Richard Wright, “An Author Discusses His Craft,” interview, Daily Worker (13Dec. 1938); rpt. in Conversations with Richard Wright 16.

22. Richard Wright, “Author! Author!: Prize-Winning Novelist Talks of Communismand Importance of ‘Felt Life’,” interview (1938), rpt. in Conversations with Richard Wright 4.

23. Richard Wright, “The Future of Literary Expression” (Richard Wright Papers, YaleLibrary, JWJ MSS3, box 5, folder 87).

24. Fabre’s Richard Wright, Books and Writers (1990), which describes the contents ofWright’s personal library, is of little assistance in trying to pinpoint when Wright hadread the individual Dostoevsky texts, because it is known that he first read mostDostoevsky novels by borrowing them from Chicago’s Public Library.

25. Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, trans. Isabel Barzun (NewYork: Morrow, 1973) 84.

26. According to Fabre, Wright had this novel in a nineteenth–century translationby Frederick Whishaw who rendered its title as Injury and Insult.

27. Ralph Ellison, “Hidden Name and Complex Fate: A Writer’s Experience in theUnited States,” address, January 6, 1964, rpt. in Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act 163.

28. Richard Wright, interview, “A Conversation With Richard Wright, Author ofNative Son,” Romance (1940); rpt. in Conversations with Richard Wright 32.


29. Richard Wright, interview, “R. Wright: America Is Not Conformist: It RenewsItself Endlessly” (1960); rpt. in Conversations with Richard Wright 210.

30. The two studies were Janko Lavrin’s Dostoevsky, A Study (London: Methuen, 1948),based on his earlier, out-of-print work, and Ernest Simmons’ Dostoevsky: The Making ofa Novelist (London: Oxford U P, 1940).

31. Wright did not have Berdyaev’s book-length study of Dostoevsky, but he did havehis The Destiny of Man (trans. Natalie Duddington, 2nd ed. [London: Bles., 1945]), Free-dom and the Spirit (trans. Oliver Fielding Clark, 3rd ed. [ London: Bles., 1944]), andSlavery and Freedom (New York: Scribner, 1944), all of which contain references toDostoevsky and his novels.

32. W. J. Leatherbarrow’s points out in his very useful overview of Dostoevsky criti-cism that the 1930s saw “the victory of the narrowly ideological and hostile view ofDostoevsky as Soviet society and intellectual life settled into the strict Party ortho-doxy” (“Introduction,” Fedor Dostoevsky, A Reference Guide [Boston: Hall, 1990] xxxvi).

33. It is interesting to note that the situation became reversed in the 1950s. Whereasreading Dostoevsky in the United States in the 1930s opened one to the charges ofbeing a reactionary member of the political right, reading him in the 1950s—SenatorMcCarthy era—brought charges of being a dangerous leftist radical. Susan Sontag re-members that “[p]eople would throw away . . . Dostoevsky in the early fifties becausethey were afraid. [ . . . ] That fear went on through the fifites and early sixties,” in “Din-ner with Susan Sontag: New York, 1980,” A Report From the Bunker With WilliamBurroughs, ed. Victor Bockris (London: Vermilion, 1982) 170.

34. Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Lit-erature. (New York: Harcourt, 1942) 415.

35. Ralph Ellison, interview, “A Very Stern Discipline: An Interview with RalphEllison” (1967); rpt. in Conversations with Ralph Ellison 124.

36. This is the same Ermilov who was the leading critic of RAPP and who played aparticularly active and unsavoury role in the hounding of the writers deemed worthlessby the Party.

37. It is quite possible that the reason why these articles were approved for publica-tion in International Literature in the first place, was that the editors were aware of theinterest Dostoevsky generated in the West, and wanted to provide a reading of hisworks that appropriated him for the Communist cause.

38. Vladimir Ermilov (Yermilov), “Gorky and Dostoevsky,” International Literature 3(Mar. 1940): 40–66; 4–5 (April-May 1940): 107–54; 4–5: 123.

39. Vladimir Ermilov, “Letter to Wright,” 1941 (Richard Wright Papers, Yale Univer-sity, JWJ MSS3, box 97, folder 1317).

40. Richard Wright, review of Michel del Castillo’s The Disinherited (1960), “Ill-PaidWere the Players of the Communist Drama: The Voiceless Ones,” rpt. in Michel Fabre,Richard Wright: Books and Writers,192.

41. Richard Wright, “Untitled,” bio-Sketch from 1940 (Richard Wright Papers, YaleUniversity, box 8, folder 162).

42. Cited from a draft for the novel-length unpublished version of this text, whichwas eventually cut down by Wright to the novella form in which it finally appeared(Richard Wright Papers, Yale University, JWJ MSS3, box 41, folder 531).

43. Richard Wright, “Interview with Richard Wright” (1950); rpt. in Conversationswith Richard Wright 141.

44. Fedor Dostoevsky, Dnevnik pisatelia za 1876 god [The Diary of a Writer for 1876](May-Oct. 1876); rpt. in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [Full Edition of Collected Works] vol. 23(Leningrad: Nauka, 1981) 66.

45. Ernest Gaines, “An Interview with Ernest Gaines,” Interviews With Black Writers(New York: Liveright, 1973) 82–83.

46. Albert Murray, “Something Different, Something More,” Anger and Beyond: TheNegro Writer in the United States, ed. Herbert Hill (New York: Harper, 1966) 128.


47. Richard Wright, interview, “U.S. Lets Negro Explain Race Ills, Wright Declares”(24 January 1959); rpt. in Conversations with Richard Wright 185.

48. Cited from a draft for a book cover of The Outsider, possibly written in 1952 or1953 (Richard Wright Papers, Yale University, box 52, folder 637).

49. Fabre points out that the longer “version of the manuscript . . . had [even] more ofthe intricacy and richness of a Dostoevsky novel” (Unfinished Quest 373).

50. Katherine Fishburn, Richard Wright’s Hero: The Faces of a Rebel-Victim. (Metuchen,N.J.: Scarecrow, 1977) 114.

51. Including Gerigk Die Russen; Lynch Creative Revolt, “Haunted by Innocence”;Magistrale “From St. Petersburg”; Nisula “Dostoevsky and Wright”; Peterson “Wright’sLong Journey.”

52. Herbert Hill, “Introduction,” Soon, One Morning: New Writing by American Ne-groes, 1940–1962 (New York: Knopf, 1969) 8.

53. In Wright’s archive there is a page which appears to contain alternative titles forNative Son (Richard Wright Papers, Yale University, box 79, folder 887). Among otherversions of the title that can also be seen as connected to Dostoevsky: Shame and Crime;A Crime of Shame.

54. Dorothy Canfield Fisher, “Introduction,” Native Son (New York: Harper , 1940) x.55. Clifton Fadiman, review, “Native Son,” The New Yorker (2 March 1940), rpt. in

Richard Wright; Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. andK. A. Appiah (New York: Amistad, 1993) 8.

56. Howard Mumford Jones, “Uneven Effect” (2 Mar. 1940); rpt. in The Critical Re-sponse to Richard Wright, ed. Robert J. Butler (Westport: Greenwood, 1940) 28.

57. See, for example, Ramuncho Gomez, “Richard Wright, the Black Dostoevsky”(28 October 1949) trans. Keneth Kinnamon in Conversations with Richard Wright 133;or the anonymous 1940 article “Negro Hailed as New Writer” (4 March 1940); rpt. inConversations with Richard Wright 28. Cross Damon was also called a “Black Raskolnikov”by the European critics, according to Constance Webb’s Richard Wright, A Biography(New York: Putnam, 1968) 313.

58. Ben Davis Jr., “Wright’s Native Son,” Daily Worker (30 June 1940) 4.59. A. Abramov, “Syn diadi Toma” [“Uncle Tom’s Son”], Literaturnaia Gazeta (8 Sept.

1940) 5.60. Vogüé’s famous1886 study, Le roman russe (Paris: Plon, 1912) was translated into

English and made available in the US long before most of Dostoevsky’s novels wereaccessible to the Anglophone reader. His chapter of Dostoevsky had done a great dealto shape the American understanding of the Russian novelist and his opinions are ech-oed in many subsequent American studies of Dostoevsky and his works.

61. Ernest Gaines, “An Interview with Ernest Gaines” (Fall 1986); rpt. in Conversa-tions with Ernest Gaines, ed. John Lowe (Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 1995) 191–92.

62. “Many Thousands Gone” originally appeared in Partisan Review (Nov.–Dec. 1951);it was reprinted in a collection of Baldwin’s essays, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Bea-con, 1957). The rift between Baldwin and Wright came earlier, however, with Baldwin’sattack on Native Son in his essay, “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (published in the Parti-san Review in June of 1941).

63. James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work, (New York: Dial, 1976) 10–11.64. See, for instance, Charles T. Davis, “The Mixed Heritage of the Modern Black

Novel” (1981), Black is the Color of the Cosmos: Essays on Afro-American Literature andCulture, 1942–1981, rpt. in Modern Critical Views: Ralph Ellison (New York: Chelsea,1986) 101–11.

65. Ellison wrote these words in a letter to Richard Wright on January 21, 1953 (Ri-chard Wright Papers,Yale University, box 97, folder 1314).

66. Naturally, there was some resistance. Ellison resented Wright’s “underestimation”of him—namely, Wright’s presumption that he had not read a number of authors withwhom he was in fact quite familiar, Dostoevsky among these (“Study and Experience:


An Interview With Ralph Ellison” [1977]; rpt. in Conversations with Ralph Ellison, 323).He was willing, however, to concede that he had not read Dostoevsky’s letters beforebeing directed to them by Wright (“Hidden Name and Complex Fate” 163). Ellisonalso disliked the commonly made assumption that he was Wright’s groupie and insistedon his independence—although he did notify Wright in a letter that he was not both-ered by being “dismiss[ed] as simply ‘a disciple of Dick Wright’s’ . . . feeling as [he did]about [Wright’s] work” (letter to Wright of February 1, 1948 in Richard Wright Papers,Yale University, box 97, folder 1314). In a letter written to Wright in the 1940s herelated being questioned “in the best Commisar [sic] fashion” about his literary alle-giances: “So you and Wright are together?” he was asked. “No,” he replied, “Wright isby himself and I am by myself. We are individuals” (letter of August 24, 1946 in Rich-ard Wright Papers, Yale University, box 97, folder 1314). Wright and Ellison retainedtheir friendship (though it cooled somewhat towards the end), but Baldwin ultimatelyrebelled against both Wright and Ellison. His two intensely critical essays about NativeSon were regarded by Wright as a personal betrayal and led to a complete break in theirrelations. Baldwin stopped communicating with Ellison upon ostensibly deciding thatEllison’s “official aesthetic position” was one which he did not wish to pursue, in “JamesBaldwin, an Interview” (23 Oct. 1980); rpt in Conversations with James Baldwin, eds.Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt (Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 1989) 208.

67. Ralph Ellison, “Introduction,” Invisible Man (New York: Random, 1989) xix .68. See, for instance, Judy Lightfoot’s review, “Ellison’s Second Act, Visible at Last,”

Seattle Weekly (June 3–9, 1999).69. Cited by W. J. Weatherby in James Baldwin: Artist on Fire (New York: Fine, 1989) 71.70. James Baldwin, interview, “James Baldwin–Reflections of a Maverick” (May 1984);

rpt. in Conversations with James Baldwin 226.71. Ralph Ellison,“The World and the Jug” (9 Dec. 1963 and 3 Feb. 1964); rpt. in

Shadow and Act 144–45.72. James Baldwin, “An Interview With James Baldwin” (15 July 1961); rpt. in Con-

versations with James Baldwin 21.73. James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni, A Dialogue (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1973)

74.74. James Baldwin, Early MS and Papers, Yale University, JWJ MSS 21, box 2, folder 43.75. Ralph Ellison, “A Dialogue With His Audience” (January 1968); rpt. in Conver-

sations with Ralph Ellison 138.76. Ralph Ellison, television interview, “Interview with Ralph Ellison” (1974); rpt.

in Conversations with Ralph Ellison 266.77. Ralph Ellison, interview, “The Art of Fiction: An Interview” (1954); rpt in Con-

versations with Ralph Ellison 10. Notably, Ellison does not specify which Russian folk-loric character served as the prototype for the narrator of Notes from Underground; infact, the whole notion is problematic and suggests a certain paucity of knowledge aboutthe sources of that text. There can be no doubt, however, that Ellison had eventuallygained an extensive knowledge of Dostoevsky’s work, life, and times. His understand-ing of Dostoevsky was advanced, among other things, by the close friendship he culti-vated with the Dostoevsky scholar and biographer, Joseph Frank. Ellison even endedup teaching Dostoevsky’s novels for several years at Bard College in the late 1950s andearly 1960s as part of a course on Russian and American Literature.

78. Ralph Ellison, “To Richard Wright,” 5 August 1945, Richard Wright Papers, box97, folder 1314.

79. Ralph Ellison, interview, “‘A Completion of Personality’: A Talk With RalphEllison” (1974); rpt. in Conversations with Ralph Ellison 278–79.

80. Ralph Ellison, television interview, “Interview with Ralph Ellison” (1974); rpt.in Conversations with Ralph Ellison 266.

81. Ralph Ellison, “To Richard Wright,” 21 Jan. 1953, Richard Wright Papers, YaleUniversity, box 97, folder 1314.


82. Baldwin explained the shapelessness of Another Country as a reflection of the in-coherence of American life (cited in David Leeming’s James Baldwin, A Biography [NewYork: Knopf, 1994] 200) and mentioned Dostoevsky among his models for the novel. Itis noteworthy that some American apologists of Dostoevsky (like Henry Miller, withwhose works Baldwin was intimately familiar) claimed that Dostoevsky deliberatelywrote shapeless novels to reflect the chaos and shapelessness of life.

83. James Baldwin, interview, “The Art of Fiction LXXVIII: James Baldwin” (Spring1984); rpt. in Conversations with James Baldwin 236.

84. Joseph Frank, “Ralph Ellison and a Literary ‘Ancestor’: Dostoevsky” (1983); rptin Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison, ed. Kimberley W. Benson (WashingtonD. C.: Howard U P, 1987) 231–44.

85. Baldwin expressed a special interest in the novel and its Hollywood screen adap-tation. As a child, Baldwin was a preacher. When he became an adult, he got involvedin politics, first as a Trotskyist and then as a spokesman for the Civil Rights movement.Later, he suggested that a belief in a political system is not much different from reli-gious faith. According to Baldwin, both of these experiences involve a larger forcetaking over or possessing the individual. In The Devil Finds Work (1976) he writes thateven though his brother laughed incredulously after watching the film version of theDostoevsky novel, Baldwin, as someone who read the novel and “had once claimed tobe ‘filled’ with the Holy Ghost, and had once really believed . . . could not . . . arbi-trarily sneer at the notion of demonic possession” (116).

86. Ralph Ellison, “To Richard Wright,” 24 Aug. 1946, Richard Wright Papers, YaleUniversity, box 97, folder 1314. The critic mentioned is Kenneth Burke, a GreenwichVillage writer, literary and social critic.

87. Wright’s early stories and his first novel were essentially agitprop. The “evil” char-acters are monstrous (one thinks of the inhuman Sheriff ’s men in his story “Bright andMorning Star” [1938]) and the good characters “saintly” and martyred; whatever depthis allowed to the characters is bestowed upon victims of oppression who blindly lashout against their oppressors and destroy themselves in the process. It is only in TheOutsider (1953) that the characters become more complex and three-dimensional. InWright’s last finished novel, The Long Dream (New York: Doubleday, 1958), about lifein the American South, the majority of the characters are allowed some complexityand resist familiar stereotypes. It is a Bildungsroman, and its African-American protago-nist, nicknamed “Fishbelly,” discovers that the world is much more complicated than itseems. He finds out, for instance, that his own father is involved with the corrupt Sher-iff, runs a bawdy house where African-American women and girls are prostituted, andis indirectly responsible for the horrific fire that kills many of his neighbours, includingFishbelly’s girlfriend. The novel still contains plenty of stereotypes, however. The Sheriff,for instance, and the white jailers are racist, corrupt, possess no redeeming or humaniz-ing traits, and are wholly despicable (although one of the police officers is allowed toshow some compassion to Fishbelly). Wright’s two last unfinished novels, Island of Hal-lucinations and My Father’s Law (the drafts of which are in Yale’s Beinecke library),appear to present more successful attempts at resisting stereotyping and at allowing allcharacters to have a voice.

88. Mary White Ovington, “To Richard Wright,” 3 May 1940, Richard Wright Pa-pers, Yale University, box 102, folder 1485.

89. This propensity to view Dostoevsky as a writer who existed somehow outside ofand separately from the literary establishment and from the (white) literary canon ex-plains why some African-American writers, like Amiri Baraka, could comfortably andapprovingly cite Dostoevsky despite holding radical anti-white views, as in Baraka’speriod of involvement with the Black Power Movement.

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African American Writers