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Claude McKay’s Liberating Narrative “From the Harlem Renaissance to the Trinidadian Awakening, Anglophone Afro-Caribbean writers have actively expressed a culturally particular identity by engaging in a surrogate dialogue with Russian writing. With a focus on Claude McKay’s struggle to define a folk-based West Indian cosmopolitan nationalism, Tatiana A. Tagirova-Daley’s book maps, for the first time, the journey through classic Russian realism and Soviet internationalism toward a Caribbean postcolonial literature that both aroused ethnic identity and raised class consciousness.”

Dale E. Peterson, Amherst College “This spectacular new inquiry into Claude McKay’s presence in Russian periodicals and literary diaries illuminates in entirely novel ways the Harlem Renaissance writer’s role in shaping Soviet insights into black matters. McKay’s fascination with the black Russian writer Alexander Pushkin and the white Russian radical Leo Tolstoy, alongside his acquaintanceship with revolutionary Caribbeans C.L.R. James and Ralph de Boissière, makes this remarkable study requisite reading for future interracial, transnational, and transcultural study.”

Gary Edward Holcomb, Ohio University; Author of Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance

and Hemingway and the Black Renaissance

Claude McKay’s Liberating Narrative

Tamara Alvarez-Detrell and Michael G. Paulson

General Editors

Vol. 28

PETER LANG New York Washington, D.C./Baltimore Bern Frankfurt Berlin Brussels Vienna Oxford

Tatiana A. Tagirova-Daley

Claude McKay’s Liberating Narrative

RUSSIAN AND ANGLOPHONE

CARIBBEAN LITERARY CONNECTIONS

PETER LANG New York Washington, D.C./Baltimore Bern Frankfurt Berlin Brussels Vienna Oxford

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tagirova-Daley, Tatiana A. Claude McKay’s liberating narrative: Russian and Anglophone

Caribbean literary connections / Tatiana A. Tagirova-Daley. p. cm. — (Caribbean studies; v. 28)

Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. McKay, Claude, 1890–1948—Criticism and interpretation.

2. American literature—Russian influences. 3. Caribbean literature—20th century—History and criticism.

4. Identity (Psychology)—Cross-cultural studies. 5. Jamaican Americans—Intellectual life. I. Title. PS3525.A24785Z88 811’.52—dc23 2012000705

ISBN 978-1-4331-1820-3 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4539-0574-6 (e-book)

ISSN 1098-4186

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche

Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity

of the Council of Library Resources.

© 2012 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York 29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006

www.peterlang.com

All rights reserved. Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,

xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.

Printed in Germany

This book is dedicated to my family:

my husband, my son, my mother, my late father,

my sister, and my two nephews

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ...................................................................................... ix

Introduction .................................................................................................. 1

Chapter 1: The Jamaican Beginnings and World Travels of Claude

McKay: Formation of National Consciousness ................................. 9

Chapter 2: Mutual Concerns and Contributions: Claude McKay and

Soviet Russia ........................................................................................ 37

Chapter 3: “What is Art?”: Claude McKay and Russian Writers of the

Nineteenth Century ............................................................................. 69

Chapter 4: Russian Writers and Claude McKay, C.L.R. James, and

Ralph de Boissière as Early Creators of Anglophone Caribbean

Literature ............................................................................................ 103

Conclusion ................................................................................................ 131

Selected Bibliography .............................................................................. 135

Index .......................................................................................................... 143

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book required visits to various libraries and research institutes,

all of which provided exceptionally good service. These included the

Institute of World Literature in Moscow, Pushkin’s House in St.

Petersburg, the St. Petersburg State Library, the Yale Collection of

American Literature, the Slavic Center in Paris, the Center for Russian

Culture at Amherst College, the Bakhmeteff Archive at Columbia

University, and the M.E. Grenander Department of Special

Collections and Archives at the State University of New York at

Albany. I am very grateful to all the people who helped me with the

research and to my family and friends in Moscow and St. Petersburg

who provided accommodation during my stay there.

I must also acknowledge the help of a number of individuals

whose knowledge, constructive criticism, and encouragement

enabled me to complete this book. My thanks go first to Dr. Maria

Soledad Rodriguez, professor and former Interim Dean of Graduate

Studies and Research at University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras

Campus, and my mentor. Her high standards of scholarship and

multiple engaged readings are reflected in the body of this work.

Other important individuals who provided assistance and

encouragement along the way include Dr. Dale Peterson at Amherest

College, Dr. Maxim Matusevich and Dr. Larry Green at Seton Hall

University, Dr. Elena Apenko at St. Petersburg State University, Dr.

Jorge Velez at the University of Puerto Rico, Bayamon Campus, Dr.

Loretta Collins, Dr. Reinhard Sander, Dr. Tinna Stoyanova, Dr. Maria

Cristina Rodriguez, Dr. Lowell Fiet, Dr. Nicholas Faraclas, Dr. Nalini

Natarajan, Dr. James Conlan, Dr. Dannabang Kuwabong, Dr. Alma

Simounet, Dr. Alicia Pousada, Dr. Richard Weinraub, Dr. Mirerza

Gonzales, Dr. Dorsia Smith, and the late and beloved Dr. Joan Fayer

at University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus.

My special thanks go to the Office of the Dean of Graduate

Studies and Research at the University of Puerto Rico for the 2005–

2006 PBDTP grant that not only provided funds to conduct research

at Amherst College, Columbia University, and the State University of

x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

New York at Albany, but enabled me to focus only on the writing of

the book.

It is also a pleasure to record my appreciation of Mr. Manuel

Martinez Nazario and other staff at the Interlibrary Loan Office at the

University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus for their courtesy and

assistance over many years of research.

Portions of this publication have first appeared as articles in

Russian-American Links: African Americans and Russia, Narrating the Past: (Re)Constructing Memory, (Re)Negotiating History, Caribbean

Without Borders: Literature, Language and Culture, Critical Perspectives on

Caribbean Literature and Culture, La Torre, Milenio, and Cahiers

Pluridisciplinaires DʹEtudes Litteraires, Artistiques et Culturelles. I am

grateful to the editors and publishers of the above publications for

permission to reprint in slightly different form my previous writings.

My acknowledgments would not be complete without expressing

my gratitude to Dr. Christine Hoff Kraemer for her help with the final

revisions and formatting of the book.

INTRODUCTION

In the epilogue to Up from Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and

African American Soul, Dale Peterson refers to a long‐denied kinship

between Russians and African Americans that “few Russians have

cared to think about and many African Americans have lost sight

of.”1 As a Russian with a special interest in Claude McKay and

Caribbean literature, I accepted the call to acknowledge this kinship

and decided to explore it in the context of Anglophone Caribbean

writers who also had to escape from the bondage of Western literacy

in their struggle to construct their identity and to create a sense of

collective Caribbean consciousness.

I first became interested in McKay when I read his article “Soviet

Russia and the Negro,” in which he describes his triumphant 1922–

1923 experience in the Soviet Union that encouraged him to take

pride in his African heritage.2 The article made me sympathize with

McKay, who felt that he could not be respected for who he was in the

United States or Western Europe just because of his skin color.3 At the

same time, as a Russian, I felt very proud that the former Soviet

Union of that time offered him the acceptance and appreciation that

he couldn’t find anywhere else. While this article sparked my initial

interest in McKay, that interest became a five‐year‐long passion that

took me to Russia, the United States, and France to trace the writer’s

footsteps and to understand him better. The protagonist’s reference to

Feodor Dostoyevsky that I later read in Home to Harlem (1929)

encouraged my initial in‐depth research on Russian literary criticism

and led to many discoveries of McKay’s affinities with Russian

writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Furthermore, C.L.R. James and Ralph de Boissière, McKay’s

Trinidadian contemporaries, were also influenced by Russian

literature. Their direct references to nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐

century Russian writers show their importance in the Caribbean

endeavor to create a type of writing rooted in local themes and

concerns. Even though McKay, James, and de Boissière do not come

from the same island, all three of them demonstrate their positive

reception of Russian literature and its application in their

2 INTRODUCTION

Anglophone Caribbean context in ways that particularly interest me.

While my first three chapters are devoted only to McKay, in the

fourth one I discuss James and de Boissière as two other pioneering

creators of Anglophone Caribbean literature who also engaged in a

literary dialogue with their Russian predecessors.

Whereas McKay’s critics present their valid and well‐formulated

arguments for positioning him in African American, Caribbean, or

British literary canons, none of them fully analyze the influence of

Russian literature on his development as an Anglophone Caribbean

writer. Robert Bone considers him a “major figure in the Negro

Renaissance” and an exponent of Hughes’s literary manifesto who

expressed himself without fear or shame.4 Others, like Elaine

Campbell and Leo Oakley, believe that he is primarily a spokesman

for the West Indian Negro point of view who asserted a particular

Jamaican way of life.5 In contrast, P.S. Chauhan points to “the English

attitudes, a European sensibility, and the general impedimenta of a

colonial mind” that represent “the intellectual baggage” that McKay

brought to Harlem; he thinks that the poet and novelist was

“condemned to dwell in the limbo of imagination of the colonized,

unable forever to state a clear‐cut preference.”6 While I position

myself most closely to Campbell and Oakley in my discussion of

Russian literary influences on McKay and his contributions to the

field of Caribbean literature, I disagree with Chauhan’s assessment

and use the examples of Alexander Pushkin, Feodor Dostoyevsky,

Leo Tolstoy, and Maxim Gorky to contest the claim about McKay’s

inability to clearly state his predilection. As I argue, the writer’s

search for a particular Afro‐Caribbean identity started in his literary

works published in Jamaica; took a new dimension in Home to Harlem

(1928) and Banjo (1929), his first two novels influenced by his

experience in the Soviet Union and his subsequent engagement in an

internal dialogue with the Russian writers of the nineteenth century;

and became complete in Banana Bottom (1933), his last novel, in which

he actually applied the Russian example to his Anglophone

Caribbean context and created a liberating type of writing different

from previously‐established European forms and standards.

My book owes a debt to work that preceded it. Dale Peterson’s Up

From Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul and

CLAUDE MCKAY’S LIBERATING NARRATIVE 3

Kate Baldwin’s Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading

Encounters between Black and Red, 1922–1963 are important in my

analysis.7 While Peterson analyzes similarities between Russian and

African American literary efforts to “give visibility and voice to a

native culture that had been hidden from view and held in bondage

to narrow Western standards of civility and literacy,”8 Baldwin

examines the mutually beneficial relationship between the Soviet

Union and some of the most renowned black intellectuals of the

twentieth century. Using their theoretical claims as a point of

departure, I argue for the importance of both the Soviet Union and

Russian literature in McKay’s literary development. Along with

Dostoyevsky’s Memoirs from the House of the Dead (1862) and Du Bois’s

The Souls of Black Folk (1903), which share a “deep affinity” and make

visible in literary form “the previous devalued and veiled expressive

culture of an ethnic majority still in bondage to the sovereign

contempt of modern Western civilization,”9 McKay’s writings

demonstrate his reception of Russian literature and contest

previously‐established Western standards.

Not only do I develop some of the claims made by Baldwin and

Peterson further, but I also introduce and analyze new topics and

issues. Whereas Peterson omits McKay from his discussion of literary

similarities between Russian and African American literature,

Baldwin does not acknowledge McKay’s Caribbean background and

the importance of the Soviet Union in his development of West Indian

consciousness. While I agree with her argument for the importance of

“the specific interactions between Soviet ideology and black

American aspiration toward racial liberation and a society free of

racism” in the development of “black internationalism,”10 I also bring

new light on McKay’s contribution to the Soviet understanding of

race through my discussion of his presence in several Soviet

periodicals, magazines, and literary diaries that I found during my

research in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the summer of 2003.

Furthermore, the materials that I discovered in the Institute of World

Literature in Moscow, Russia, and the Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian

and East European Culture at Columbia University in New York are

the most beneficial in my analysis of McKay’s possible influence on

Yevgeny Zamyatin, the twentieth‐century writer he met during his

4 INTRODUCTION

stay in the Soviet Union. Moreover, while Peterson has already

established literary links between Russian and African American

literatures, the affinities between Russian and Anglophone Caribbean

modes of artistic expression have not yet received the attention they

merit. Thus, one of my attempts is not only to analyze McKay’s

reception of Russian literature and its application in the Anglophone

Caribbean context, but also to establish Russian and Caribbean

literary affinities, another important and fertile field of comparison

untouched by both critics.

As I argue, in his search for a new liberating narrative, McKay

escaped the restrictive bonds of ethnicity, national identification and

race and established a cross‐racial, cross‐national and cross‐cultural

alliance between Russian and West Indian writing. While significant

similarities between Caribbean, African American, and Russian

people as marginalized, historical “others” excluded from Western

European narratives drew him to Soviet Russia and its politics and

cemented his desire to “transcend both the structures of the nation

state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity that go

along with it,”11 he turned to nineteenth‐century Russian writers to

find answers to some of his literary questions. In my discussion of

Ray, the Haitian protagonist of his first two novels, I focus on his

notion of double consciousness aroused by contradictions between

the dominant European ethnocentrism and his African background.

As I point out, his lack of self‐consciousness and his evaluation of

himself through the eyes of his Western education are similarities that

he shares with Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, a Russian example of the

national culture conducting a dialogue with itself.

In the first chapter, I offer a brief sketch of McKay’s Jamaican

beginnings and international travels and refer to A Long Way from

Home (1937) and My Green Hills of Jamaica (published posthumously in

1979), his two autobiographies that reveal and illuminate many

aspects of his poems, novels and short stories. As I argue, they

disclose two sources of the writer’s formation. One is that of his

connectedness to Jamaica, its culture, and its community, and the

other is that of his international inspiration. While he first started his

search for an original form of expression in Songs of Jamaica (1912) and

Constab Ballads (1912), his two Jamaican volumes of poetry, his long


travels abroad enabled him to see the problem of the black diaspora

in a wider perspective and facilitated the growth of his Jamaican

consciousness in his subsequent poetry and prose. The materials that

I found while doing research at the Yale Collection of American

Literature in the summer of 2004 and used in this chapter illuminate

not only McKay’s international search for justice and equality, but

also the formation of his national consciousness and sentiments.

In the second chapter, I analyze McKay’s experience in the Soviet

Union and his affirmative interaction with Russian people, politics

and culture. I discuss The Negroes in America (1923) and Trials by

Lynching: Stories about Negro Life in North America (1925), two

important Soviet publications that reveal McKay’s then‐Marxist

approach to the question of black nationalism and provide an insight

into his subsequent writings. I argue for the mutually beneficial

exchanges that took place between McKay and the Soviet Union

during his stay there. While Soviet Russia enabled him to take pride

in his African heritage and provided political and literary aspirations

for the Jamaican‐born writer, he significantly contributed to the Soviet

understanding of the Negro question. In my analysis of McKay’s

probable influence on Zamyatin, I also point to both writers’ similar

opposition to a rational type of thinking devoid of any authentic

feelings and emotions. Furthermore, I contest those Soviet critics who

condemned Home to Harlem and Banjo for their inability to satisfy

their revolutionary expectations and offer a comparative analysis of

McKay’s similarities with Maxim Gorky, the twentieth‐century

proletarian writer whom he admired. As I argue, his dedication to the

lower classes, his representation of their difficult everyday reality,

and his use of folklore have affinities with Gorky’s pre‐revolutionary

writing.

In Chapter Three, I finally turn to Russian literature of the

nineteenth century and its importance in McKay’s formulation of a

solution to his dilemma of a dual cultural identity. While Ray, the

Haitian writer and protagonist of McKay’s first two novels, reads

Crime and Punishment and refers to Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy,

Chekhov, and Turgenev as creators of genuine art in Home to Harlem,

in Banjo he conducts a more complex, longer‐lasting dialogue with his

literary master, Leo Tolstoy. There is no doubt that Russian literature

6 INTRODUCTION

of the nineteenth century plays an important role in McKay’s artistic

development. The alienation of the educated from the uneducated,

the connection of art with contemporary reality, and the seminal role

of the writer in the development of the nation are some of the Russian

themes that McKay applies to his West Indian background. Yet, even

though his approach to art is similar to that of Tolstoy’s in “What is

Art?” (1898), he is not able to fully assimilate the example of his

Russian model and cannot transcend his divided rational/emotional

impasse in his first two novels.

In my final chapter, I focus on Banana Bottom, McKay’s last novel.

In it, he continues the search for a particular Afro‐Caribbean identity

started by Ray in North American and French settings in Home to

Harlem and Banjo. I argue that in this novel there is no longer a

surrogate dialogue with Russian writers, but a practical application,

an actual integration of the educated colonial with the common

Jamaican people and their culture. Cultural dualism, a deep

appreciation of common people, criticism of the middle class for

imitating foreign ideas and principles, and a desire to come closer to

the masses are some of the Russian themes that McKay shares with

C.L.R. James and Ralph de Boissière, his Trinidadian contemporaries.

James’s essay “A National Purpose for Caribbean People,” in which

he compares Caribbean literature with that of Pushkin, Tolstoy,

Dostoyevsky, and Turgenev, is essential in understanding the

Anglophone Caribbean effort to define its identity and to create art

rooted in native settings and backgrounds. In my comparison of

Banana Bottom (1933) with James’s The Black Jacobins (1938) and de

Boissière’s Crown Jewel (1952), I analyze how Russian literary

reception in the Anglophone Caribbean context and parallel

developments that took place in Russia and the Anglophone

Caribbean due to common socio‐historical conditions enabled McKay,

James, and de Boissière to express their passionate protest against

foreign impositions and to become the early creators of Caribbean

literature.

McKay’s writing is truly liberating, for he is one of the first

Anglophone Caribbean writers to take pride in his African

background and to turn to his culture and its people as the main

source of his inspiration. Parallel to Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and


Pushkin, he contested the positive effects of Western rationalism and

individualism on his ethnic identity and created a distinct difference

between Caribbean and Western modes of artistic expression. He is

Fanon’s “awakener” of Caribbean people who not only encouraged

other writers to escape the supremacy of European culture, but also

became a radical literary revolutionary who protested against

colonialism, imperialism, and cultural imposition. Similar to the

nineteenth‐century Russian writers who contributed to the

development of their national personality through their writings,

McKay contested previous Western imitations, generated a type of art

embedded in indigenous Caribbean culture and its people, and

became a pioneering creator of Anglophone Caribbean literature.

Notes

1 Dale Peterson, Up from Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American

Soul (Durham: Duke UP, 2000), p. 200. 2 “Soviet Russia and the Negro” in The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Poetry and

Prose 1912–1948, ed. Wayne F. Cooper (New York: Schocken, 1973), pp. 95‐106. 3 I cite this article in Chapter Two, “Mutual Concerns and Contributions: Claude

McKay and Soviet Russia.” 4 Robert Bone, “The Harlem School” in The Negro Novel in America (New Haven:

Yale UP, 1958), p. 67. 5 See Elain Campbell, “Two West Indian Heroines: Bita Plant and Fola Piggott” in

Caribbean Quarterly 29.2 (June 1983), pp. 22–29 and Leo Oakley, “Ideas of Patriotism

and National Dignity” in The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature, ed. Allison

Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welsh (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 91–93. 6 P.S. Chauhan, “Rereading Claude McKay” in College Language Association Journal

34:1 (1996), p. 80. 7 Kate Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters

Between Black and Red, 1922–1963 (Durham and London: Duke UP, 2002). 8 p. 6. 9 Peterson, p. 80. 10 p. 3. 11 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge:

Harvard UP, 1993), p. 19.

CHAPTER 1

The Jamaican Beginnings and World Travels of

Claude McKay: Formation of National

Consciousness

It is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness

lives and grows.

—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Indeed, the interplay between nationalism and exile is like Hegel’s dialectic

of servant and master, opposites informing and constituting each other. All

nationalisms in their early stages develop from a condition of estrangement.

—Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile”

Like a multicolored shell that enables an ear to hear the noise of the ocean,

the voice of the human ocean—the hundreds of millions of people liberated

from colonialism—is heard in the talented poetry of the big and the smallest

West Indian islands.

—E.L. Gal’perina, Vremya Plameneyuschihderev’ev:

Poeti Antil’skih Ostrovov (The Time of Flamboyant Trees:

The Poets of the Antillean Islands [my translation])

Claude McKay’s two autobiographies, A Long Way from Home (1937)

and My Green Hills of Jamaica (published posthumously in 1979),

reveal and illuminate many aspects of his poems, novels, and short

stories. Therefore, they should not be ignored if one wants to properly

understand his work. While A Long Way from Home focuses on his

international experiences as a black writer in the United States,

Europe, and North Africa, My Green Hills of Jamaica discloses his

Jamaican background and inspiration. The title of A Long Way from

Home is taken from a Negro spiritual with the opening line,

“Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, a long way from home.”1

Yet the man of motion that is seen in McKay’s first autobiography is

neither a representation of the rootless drifter nor an endless quester

in search of his identity. Instead, his worldwide travels play a

10 FORMATION OF NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS

significant role in the formation of a national consciousness shaped by

his engagement with the important political and social issues of the

twentieth century. As such, the journey provides McKay with an

opportunity to express the international consciousness of the black

diaspora as he does in Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo (1929), the

novels he wrote during his expatriate years in Europe. However, in

Gingertown (1932) and Banana Bottom (1933), his subsequent works

written in Africa, he returns to the Jamaican landscape and its people.

Whereas in his first autobiography, Home to Harlem and in Banjo,

McKay attempts to reconcile his internationalism with his desire for

cultural belonging, in his second autobiography and in the poetry and

narrative devoted to his homeland, he shows his ultimate preference

for a national identification. Therefore, Jamaica is indeed a starting

and an ending point for the writer and one of the determining

influences that shaped his literary formation.

Even though McKay was born in a country with an educational

system that encouraged native Jamaicans to accept the superiority of

British cultural and literary forms and standards, from early

childhood he possessed qualities that prevented him from becoming

completely submerged in the foreign culture. He delighted in

listening to stories about his Madagascar ancestors who managed to

stay together by declaring a strike on the auction block.2 The

perseverance and inner strength of Mrs. McKay’s ancestors had a

profound impact on young Claude.

While the poetry that McKay began to write in Jamaica under U.

Theo’s guidance gravitated towards conventional English expression

that the young man accepted as the appropriate way to speak and

write,3 it was not until his meeting with Walter Jekyll that he

rediscovered the beauty and significance of the Jamaican Creole. As

he describes in My Green Hills of Jamaica, Jekyll liked his short

Jamaican dialect poem about “an ass that was laden for the market—

laden with native vegetables—who had suddenly sat down in the

middle of the road and wouldn’t get up” much better than the other

poems in straight English, which Jekyll considered to be

“repetitious.”4 When Jekyll saw McKay’s verses in Jamaican Creole,

he became excited, for he considered them to be “the articulate

consciousness of the peasants.”5 He was the one who encouraged the


young poet to give the Jamaican dialect a literary form. Even though

McKay acknowledged that writing in the Jamaican Creole came

naturally to him, it was not without some thought that he eventually

followed the advice of his friend:

I was not very enthusiastic about this statement, because to us who were

getting an education in the English schools the Jamaican dialect was

considered a vulgar tongue. It was the language of the peasants. All

cultivated people spoke English, straight English.6

Despite the unpopularity of Jamaican Creole as a literary language at

the beginning of the twentieth century, McKay did know many pieces

that were based on the “local songs of the draymen, the sugar mills,

and the farm land.”7 This firsthand knowledge of the black peasantry

of Jamaica and the encouragement of Jekyll enabled him to produce

Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads, two volumes of poetry in

Jamaican Creole that were published in 1912.

Even though McKay’s Jamaican poems showed an attachment to

nineteenth‐century British literary standards, he was the first one to

articulate the consciousness of a rural black Jamaican and to use

Creole as a primary poetic language. To a much greater degree than

any previous West Indian poets, in his Jamaican poetry he

demonstrated “the intellectual, social, and cultural contradictions that

faced a perceptive black artist in British colonial Jamaica.”8 His use of

such West African loan words as “quashie” and “buccra” in these

poems illuminates his understanding of the complexity of a Jamaican

identity influenced by foreign culture and traditions.9 Both white

British aristocrats and poor black Jamaican peasants comprise native

culture that the poet describes. Quashie and buccra are “antipodes of

Jamaica’s social world: the black country bumpkin, the peasant, the

subaltern, and the symbol of power, superordination, the oppressor,

the white man.”10 McKay’s sympathy is clearly with the poor peasants

whose voice is heard in his poetry. In “Quashie to Buccra,” the

Jamaican peasant condemns the insensitive British ruler who takes

advantage of his hard work:

You tas’e petater an’ you say it sweet,

But you no know how hard we wuk fe it;


You want a basketful fe quattiewut,

’Cause you no know how ’tiff de bush fe cut.11

The poem is written from the perspective of a Jamaican of rural,

peasant origin who resists colonial exploitation. Sweet potatoes are a

product that rich whites consume without thinking about the hard

work that the peasants put into their cultivation. Buccra wants to buy

potatoes for the cheapest possible price because he is not the one who

actually has to grow the crop. Therefore, he does not understand its

real worth. The peasant does all the hard work, yet he is not able to

fully enjoy the fruits of his labor.

In addition to being an exploiter who takes advantage of the

peasants’ labor, buccra is also an educator who wants to impose his

knowledge and culture on the natives. This domineering teacher

appears in the poem “Cudjoe Fresh from de Lecture,” where McKay

describes him as an instructor who wants to enlighten the peasants

and to trap them in the ideas, culture, and exploitation of the British

ruler. In spite of this, however, the natives do not submit to the racist

philosophy of their instructor. On the contrary, they contest buccra’s

teaching and take pride in their Afro‐Jamaican heritage in “My

Native Land, My Home”:

Jamaica is de nigger’s place,

No mind whe’ some declare;

Although dem call we “no‐land race,”

I know we home is here….

You draw de t’ousan’ from deir shore,

An’ all ’long keep dem please’;

De invalid come here fe cure,

You heal all deir disease…. 12

This is the poet’s homeland, a wonderful country with rich culture

and traditions that has the potential to bring happiness and

tranquility to its people. However, these blessings cannot come forth

because of colonialism and exploitation. In this poem the narrator

contests buccra’s previous teaching of superiority and accuses him of

diminishing his homeland.

In Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads, McKay demonstrates his

intimate knowledge of the peasants’ lives and celebrates their rural,


Afro‐Jamaican origin. He shows the country as a beloved agrarian

motherland that that suffers greatly from the white man’s

interference. McKay realistically depicts the life of a peasant who is

annoyed and disturbed by the white man’s presence. He clearly

expresses his sympathy toward the exploited. Most of the poems of

Constab Ballads are directed against the Kingston policemen and their

hypocrisy and arrogance. McKay describes a cruel world in which the

justice system does not protect the oppressed that inhabit the lowest

rung of the social ladder.

While most of the previous West Indian writers found their muse

and romance in the beautiful landscape of the region, McKay was the

first one to turn to the Jamaican folk as a source of his inspiration.13 In

his Jamaican poetry, he expresses the everyday reality of the folk in a

language created by them. Despite the wide acceptability of the

British cultural standard in the Jamaica of his time, McKay turns to

Jamaican indigenous language and culture. These two volumes of

poetry are “pioneering attempts by a black West Indian to portray

realistically the life of his people.”14 They hold the key to a deeper

understanding of McKay’s early formation of Jamaican consciousness

and are essential to a full understanding of McKay’s subsequent

development. It is no wonder that these poems sold over two

thousand copies; won the Mulgrave Silver Medal, a prize established

by a British family for the best representation of Jamaican literature;

and made a significant contribution within the Jamaican context.

McKay’s formative years on the island and his Jamaican literary

beginnings influenced his subsequent work. According to Pouchet

Paquet, My Green Hills of Jamaica reveals McKay’s “inspiration and

foundation of self and art” rooted in Jamaica.15 Winston James agrees

with her in his discussion of McKay’s intellectual, cultural, and

political formation on the island and the writer’s formation of

“lifelong concern with racism, color, class, justice and injustice,

oppression and revolt.”16 As these two volumes of poetry

demonstrate, McKay is ahead of most other Anglophone Caribbean

authors of that time. Written at the beginning of the twentieth

century, they deal with such concepts as West Indian society, self‐

discovery, and self‐definition, Caribbean themes that only later

became the primary focus of Caribbean literature.


The writer’s search for justice and equality started in Jamaica and

continued in the United States shortly after his magnificent

accomplishments. When the poet landed in Charleston, South

Carolina in the late summer of 1912, he was not prepared to

encounter a racial segregation system that “effectively denied blacks

any social or civil intercourse with the white majority except as

menials or supplicants.”17 He describes his surprise, horror and

defiance of North American racial prejudice in the following way:

I had heard of prejudice in America but never dreamed of it being so

intensely bitter; for at home there is also prejudice of the English sort, subtle

and dignified, rooted in class distinction—color and race being hardly taken

into account…. At first, I was horrified, my spirit revolted against the

ignoble cruelty and blindness of it all. Then I soon found myself hating in

return but this feeling couldn’t last for to hate is to be miserable.18

In the United States, McKay turned to reading and writing as forms of

protest against the injustices that he saw. During that time he also

realized his desire to analyze the problems of the black diaspora from

an international perspective. Even though completing his education

had been his original intention for going to the United States, after a

few years of study at Kansas State College, he became possessed by

an urge to travel:

The spirit of the vagabond, the daemon of some poets, had got hold of me. I

quit college. I had no desire to return home. What I had previously done

was done. But I still cherished the urge to creative expression. I desired to

achieve something new, something in the spirit and accent of America. And

so I became a vagabond—but a vagabond with a purpose. I was determined

to find expression in writing.19

In a conversation with Frank Harris, an editor of Pearson’s magazine,

McKay admitted that “the dominant desire to find a bigger audience”

had been on his mind when he went to the United States because he

felt that in Jamaica he was “isolated, cut off from the great currents of

life.”20 Even though he never mentioned a racial motive for leaving, it

is possible that McKay’s professional future would have been limited

there since “doors which would have been shut to an equally talented

Negro were open to the white‐skinned de Lisser.”21


McKay’s inclination to rebel against injustices, already manifest in

Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads, increased in the United States. In

October 1917, Seven Arts published “Invocation” and “The Harlem

Dancer,” two sonnets whose “lyric forms, though traditional,

expressed the spirit and consciousness of black America and

uncovered the muffled voice of ancient Africa.”22 In “Invocation,”

McKay appeals to his African roots that had been demolished by

colonialism and the hegemony of European civilization:

Bring ancient music to my modern heart,

Let fall the light upon my sable face

That once gleamed upon the Ethiopian’s art,

Lift me to thee out of this alien place

So I may be, thine exiled counterpart,

The worthy singer of my world and race.23

He was well familiar with the massive scattering of millions of men

and women out of their African homes and the misery of Caribbean

and African American people as a result of this separation. It is not

surprising that his verse written around the theme of Negro suffering

in the United States is the one that won recognition. As a Caribbean

writer, he identified with what he saw in the United States and

condemned racial injustices and the entire social, economic, and

political order that had allowed these injustices to occur.

In 1917, McKay had turned to Africa in search of an African

American identity as well as his own. By the spring of 1919, he was

ready to proclaim his revolutionary politics in his literary work. This

he did through the publication of his poems in The Liberator, a

magazine where he could both promote the cause of social justice and

find himself as a writer and artist. His famous poem “If We Must

Die” became a call to African Americans to stand brave before their

white oppressors, and it came at a time when black people needed

this message most. The poem was immediately reprinted in black

newspapers and magazines and gained the attention of a black

audience whose “deep emotions and post‐World War I spirit of

defiance were at the heart of its defiant lines.”24 The sonnet

encouraged African Americans not to be timid in the face of shootings

and hangings that were taking place at that time. It condemned


violence against black people and called upon them to resist the

murderers with courage. With the appearance of “If We Must Die,”

the Negro people unanimously declared McKay a poet.25 The poem

“forced its way” into Negro pulpits, clubs, schools, and mass

meetings.26 At the moment of writing, McKay was not aware that he

“was transformed into a medium to express a mass sentiment,”27 but

he was soon known in New York as a militant black poet.

After the publication of his poems in The Liberator, McKay

continued his world travels. He spent seven years in America and

arrived in England in the fall of 1919. England became another site of

political and professional growth. There he also discovered

discrimination against his race no different from that of the United

States. He thought of London as a “harshly unfriendly” city filled

with “strangely unsympathetic people, as coldly chilling as their

English fog.”28 In A Long Way from Home, McKay admits he wouldn’t

have survived more than a year in London if he hadn’t come in

contact with a club for “colored soldiers” and the International Club.29

The writer’s contact with the International Club “stimulated and

broadened” his social outlook and “plunged” him into the reading of

Karl Marx.30 Marxist debates that took place at the International Club

introduced him to the world of England’s political Left.31

England provided McKay with an opportunity to publish Spring

in New Hampshire, the book of poetry in which he expresses nostalgia

for Jamaica, his homeland. While living in London in 1920, McKay

wrote “I Shall Return,” a poem that shows Jamaica’s special place in

his heart and mind that none of the other new and interesting places

could fill:

I shall return to loiter by the streams

That bathe the brown blades of the bending grasses,

And realize once more my thousand dreams

Of waters rushing down the mountain passes.

I shall return to hear the fiddle and fife

Of village dances, dear delicious tunes

That stir the hidden depth of native life,

Stray melodies of dim remembered runes.


I shall return. I shall return again,

To ease my mind of long, long years of pain.32

After several years of separation from Jamaica, McKay remembers it

fondly and hopes to return one day to a country that could cure his

emptiness and hurt. The poem shows love, longing, and patriotism

for Jamaica that is devoid of imperial sentiments.

While living abroad, McKay took refuge in his memory and found

contentment in the celebration of his birthplace. “Flame Heart,” a

poem in which he describes Jamaica’s splendor and lure, is one such

example:

So much I have forgotten in ten years,

So much in ten brief years! I have forgot

What time the purple apples come to juice,

And what month brings the shy forget‐me‐not.

I have forgot the special, startling season

Of the pimento’s flowering and fruiting;

What time of year the ground doves brown the fields

And fill the noonday with their curious fluting.

I have forgotten much, but still remember

The poinsettia’s red, blood‐red, in warm December.33

This poem creates a feeling of serenity and peace that the poet can

find only in Jamaica, a country that provides “the sense of belonging

to a unified and harmonious way of life.”34 In spirit, McKay goes back

to “his own Garden of Eden, uncorrupted by Western technology and

industrialization—a land where emotions took precedence over cold,

calculating reason, where nature reigned, not red in tooth and claw,

but tenderly and benevolently.”35

Despite the nostalgic feelings for Jamaica that “I Shall Return” and

“Flame‐Heart” reveal, McKay did not go back to his homeland after

his sojourn in England. Disappointed with England, he returned to

the United States in 1921. There he resumed his association with The

Liberator and continued to contribute articles, book reviews, and

poems to one of the most radical magazines in the United States.

During these years, he composed poetry that represented his

understanding of the black dilemma in Western culture. The anger

and alienation that McKay felt in an unfair world dominated by


whites, the world in which the black race was denied humanity,

justice, and equality, found an expression in Harlem Shadows, the book

he published in the United States. In “Outcast,” he condemns the

Western civilization that separated him from his African roots:

…Something in me is lost, forever lost,

Some vital thing has gone out of my heart,

And I must walk the way of life a ghost

Among the sons of earth, a thing apart;

For I was born, far from my native clime,

Under the white man’s menace, out of time.36

The narrator of the poem contests the greatness of this civilization

and shows the negative effects of colonialism that make him feel at a

loss. The capitalism and colonialism that took Africans away from

their native land is also the reason workers dread a coming dawn in

the poem “The Tired Worker”:

The wretched day was theirs, the night is mine;

Come tender sleep, and fold me to thy breast.

But what steals out the gray clouds red like wine?

O dawn! O dreaded dawn! O let me rest

Weary my veins, my brain, my life! Have pity!

No! Once again the harsh, the ugly city.37

The poems of Harlem Shadows in which McKay speaks on behalf of

“millions of black Americans” fighting against racism and inequality

represent a “new poetical school” and constitute an “important

chapter of the American history of the twentieth century” (my

translation).38

After the publication of Harlem Shadows, McKay decided to visit

the Soviet Union and to see the results of the 1917 revolution for

himself. Russia “signaled” and he responded with the search for new

understanding and knowledge:

Go and see, was the command. Escape from the pit of sex and poverty, from

domestic death, from the cul‐de‐sac of self‐pity, from the hot syncopated

fascination of Harlem, from the suffocating ghetto of color consciousness.

Go, better than stand still, keep going.39


In 1922, McKay left for Russia in the hope that he would find

evidence that equality and justice were actually taking place under

socialism. Even though he was not a member of any official

Communist Party delegation that traveled to Moscow, he shared a

belief in international communism and an enthusiasm for the Russian

Revolution. Once there, he had to obtain permission from the

Comintern authorities to attend the congress as “an unofficial

delegate‐observer.”40

Despite the efforts of American communists to prevent McKay

from attending the congress, the poet won the right of “a special

delegate.”41 His vindication resulted from two sources. First, Sen

Katayama, the leading Japanese communist, confirmed McKay’s

knowledge of the black working class and convinced Comintern

officials that the poet could speak authoritatively about the potential

role of blacks in the international communist movement. Second, the

Russian people on the streets found his color, height, smile, and

laughter to be attractive.42 As McKay writes,

Never before had I experienced such an instinctive sentiment of affectionate

feeling compelling me to the bosom of any people, white or colored. And I

am certain I never will again. My response was as sincere as the mass feeling

was spontaneous. That miraculous experience was so extraordinary that I

have never been able to understand it.43

As “the first Negro to arrive in Russia since the revolution,” he

considered himself to be a “black ikon” and “an omen of good luck.”44

Never in his life had he felt prouder of “being an African, a black,” for

from Moscow to Petrograd and from Petrograd to Moscow he went

“triumphantly from surprise to surprise.”45 Even bourgeois readers

were interested in his poetry. As a token of appreciation for him as a

poet, an anti‐Bolshevik Russian professor who worshiped Pushkin’s

books gave McKay a photograph of the Russian poet as a young boy

with clearly‐seen Negroid features. Throughout his life McKay

thought of this portrait as one of his few most precious treasures.46

Even though McKay enjoyed a warm personal acceptance and

appreciation by the Russians, he never totally committed himself to

Soviet ideology. As he wrote James Weldon Johnson in a letter dated

May 8, 1935, he went to Russia as “a writer and a free spirit” and he


left the same.47 When he left Russia, he was determined to become a

writer and a spokesman for his people:

I left Russia with one determination and one objective: to write. I was not

received in Russia as a politician, but primarily as a Negro poet. And the

tremendous reception was a great inspiration and urge to write more. I often

felt in Russia that I was honored as a poet altogether out of proportion to my

actual performance. And thus I was fired with the desire to accomplish the

utmost.48

After Russia and a brief visit to Germany in the fall of 1923,

McKay journeyed to Paris, an emerging site of African American

intellectual life of that time. Living abroad and seeing from that

perspective how the Negro intelligentsia wanted to please the whites

rather than serve their own people provided him with an opportunity

to express his opinion in a different way:

For my part I was deeply stirred by the idea of a real Negro renaissance….

The Russian literary renaissance and also the Irish had absorbed my interest.

My idea of renaissance was one of talented persons of an ethnic or national

group working individually or collectively in a common purpose and

creating things that would be typical of their group.49

Being free from the attitude of the Negro elite, McKay was able to

compose Home to Harlem, a novel in which he describes the life of

common Negroes of Harlem. In a letter to James Weldon Johnson

dated April 30, 1928 he states,

In writing Home to Harlem I have not deviated in any way from my

intellectual and artistic ideas of life. I consider the book a real proletarian

novel, but I don’t expect the nice radicals to see that it is, because they know

very little about proletarian life and what they want of proletarian art is not

proletarian life, truthfully, realistically, and artistically portrayed, but their

own false, soft‐headed and wine‐watered notions of the proletariat. With the

Negro intelligentsia it is a different matter, but between the devil of Cracker

prejudice and the deep sea of respectable white condescension I can

certainly sympathize, though I cannot agree, with their dislike of the artistic

exploitation of low‐class Negro life. We must leave the real appreciation of

what we are doing to the emancipated Negro intelligentsia of the future….50


In A Long Way from Home, he further elaborates on the reason for “so

much genteel‐Negro hostility” against Home to Harlem and Langston

Hughes’s “primitive Negro poems” and criticizes the Negro

intelligentsia he met in Paris who were “Harlem‐conscious” not

because they understood “Harlem’s intrinsic values as a unique and

popular Negro quarter,” but because “white folks had discovered

black magic there.”51

Rather than associating with white Frenchmen, the writer found a

communal sense of kinship among ordinary Africans, West Indians,

and African Americans he met in Marseilles. In one of his letters to

Langston Hughes written in France, he expresses his fascination with

this French city:

Marseilles I really love more than any place in France. It is the most vivid

port I ever touched. Wonderful, dirty, unbeautiful, rolling in slime and color

and hourly interest. There all the scum of the sea seems to drift on to natural

soil. I love it more than any of the English, American or German ports.52

There McKay had a chance to live among the African diaspora and to

spend time with dockers and sailors from Dahomey, Senegal, and

Algeria.53 In the Vieux Port, an exciting place where he rented a room,

he met Senghor, a “Negro leader among the Communists” and “a tall,

lean intelligent Senegalese” to whom he promised to write the truth

about the Negroes in Marseilles.54

Just like Leo Tolstoy, who used his life experiences to compose

War and Peace, McKay’s four years in Marseilles from 1924 to 1928

became an inspiration for his novel Banjo. Sinclair Lewis makes an

interesting comparison between McKay and Tolstoy in a letter to Mr.

Baldwin dated January 19, 1925:

About his [McKay’s] coming home. It seems to me that that is something he

must decide. There is no general rule. Personally I should not want to stay

here too long, and I am quite sure that many American writers have been

enfeebled by it. But I don’t think that he would be. As he is a Negro, he has

here an ease, a chance to forget social problems and consider the vast

material he has already accumulated, which he would never have in

America. Tolstoy would presumably never have written “War and Peace”

without some experience of war but certainly also he would never have

written it while serving as an artillery officer…. This whole matter of writers

abroad is complicated, and I fancy that only the writer himself can decide


it—and decide it not so much on rational grounds as from his feeling about

it.55

The French port became the setting of his second novel, Banjo, “a

fictional account of the black seamen, drifters, and dockers he had

gotten to know in Marseilles during the summer of 1926.”56

In addition to the writing material that McKay collected while

living in France, Marseilles provided him with a chance to see racism

and social injustices similar to the ones that he encountered in the

United States and England. Even prior to his going to France, he

understood the reality of French liberalism. In From Harlem to Paris:

Black American Writers in France 1840–1980, Michel Fabre writes,

He [McKay] was also quick to denounce French racism. He was convinced

that, in spite of appearances, Senegalese Blaise Diagne had undermined W.

E. B. Du Bois’s efforts at the 1919 Pan‐African Conference in Paris: hadn’t

Diagne declared that French blacks should consider themselves Frenchmen,

not colored internationalists, for “the position of Negro citizens in France

[was] truly worthy of envy”? Yet even such an active supporter of

assimilation as Diagne, McKay noted, had been forced to concede that

French whites denied the black man even mere physical equality: the victory

of Senegalese boxer Battling Siki over native Frenchman Georges

Charpentier for the world championship had created no less a scandal than

that of Jack Johnson over Australian Tommy Burns.57

In “Once More the Germans Face Black Troops,” an article published

in Opportunity in November 1939, McKay favorably speaks of “cordial

relationship” between the African troops and the common German

people that “appeared even more natural and intimate” than those he

observed in France.58 Despite the government’s racist agitation

against the African troops in the Rhineland, the common German folk

demonstrated a positive attitude towards the black soldiers fighting

on behalf of France that “seemed to be the kindliest and most

considerate in Europe.”59 McKay was amazed when common people

asked him, “Do you like us Germans?” and “Do they like us in

America?” He thought that people in France would never ask those

questions, for they believed that “France should be admired by any

visitor as the most civilized country in the world.”60 In A Long Way


from Home, he condemns the great civilization that exploits black

people:

Yet the Negroes had hard industrial problems to face in Marseilles. On the

boats they were employed as stokers only, and they were not employed on

those boats making the “good” runs: that is, the short runs, which the white

seamen preferred. Also as dockers they were discriminated against and

given the hardest and most unpleasant jobs, such as loading and unloading

coal and sulphur.61

In Banjo, he criticizes the downfall of modern French civilization

through his narrator Ray:

There was a barbarous international romance in the ways of Marseilles that

was vividly significant of the great modern movement of life. Small, with a

population apparently too great for it, Europe’s best back door, discharging

and receiving its traffic to the Orient and Africa, favorite port of seamen on

French leave, infested with the ratty beings of the Mediterranean countries,

overrun with guides, cocottes, procurers, repelling and attracting in its

white‐fanged vileness under its picturesqueness, the town seemed to

proclaim to the world that the grandest thing about modern life was that it

was bawdy.62

As Fabre states, McKay not only condemned the French feeling of

superiority, but also provided “a sophisticated analysis of race

prejudice there and of the pro‐French attitude of the gullible Afro‐

American intelligentsia” and refused to “exonerate French

institutions and culture from responsibility for their colonial

oppression.”63 His subsequent traveling between 1929 and 1931 in

Tangier, Madrid, and Paris made him even more aware of French

colonialism.

While the greatest part of Banjo was written in Marseilles, by the

spring of 1928 the writer had to escape the French city in order to

finish it. Barcelona, a place that took his breath away, became his next

abode. In the letters he wrote to James Weldon Johnson between 1928

a 1931, he states,

Perhaps you know Barcelona—a beautiful city and it is a happy change

after France and more to my fancy, but I am working so hard I haven’t had a

chance to enjoy anything yet.


If you ever come to Europe soon, you must be sure to visit Spain. I am

sure that both you and Mrs. Johnson will be charmed by it. It is the only

European country that touches me emotionally.

Barcelona was to me the most inviting town and it has lovely suburbs.

And all along the Catalunian coast down to Valencia are the most beautiful

port towns and villages of brown‐gray and soft creamy color that I have

ever seen anywhere…. 64

Even though he intended to spend just three days in Barcelona when

he went there with a Senegalese boxer early in the summer of 1928, he

ended up staying in Spain for three months.65

The Spaniards’ approach to sports and their adherence to

Catholicism impressed him. As he writes in A Long Way from Home,

their genuine and indiscriminate interest in sports captured his

attention and made him an “aficionado” of Spain.66 The “sporting

impartiality” of the Spanish people whose major interest, according to

McKay, was not in discriminating between boxers of different colors,

but in “technical excellencies of the sport and the best opponent

winning,” captivated him.67 In addition to his fascination with the

Spaniards’ outlook on sports, he also thought of Spain as “physically

and spiritually the cleanest country” in which he ever lived.68 In

“Right Turn to Catholicism” he writes,

Spain, in my opinion, is the most Catholic of nations. Therefore, it will not

be easy for Protestant nations to understand her. Especially the Anglo‐Saxon

and the American. I must confess to not understanding the Anglo‐Saxon or

the American mind, although I know the language and am subject to its

culture. I have understood a little the French logic and intense nationalism,

the German bluntness and submissiveness, the Russian mixture of harsh

cruelty and kindness and obsession with theories, the Spanish predilection

for nobleness. But to me the Anglo‐Saxon mind is fathomless, too subtle for

probing.69

While McKay was raised in an atmosphere of Protestantism, it was

not until he visited Europe that he became aware of what he called in

the same article “the greatest glory and grandeur of Catholicism.”70

Following his stay in Spain, McKay traveled to Morocco, a

country that reminded him of his homeland. At the end of September

1928, he visited Casablanca, a place of an “overwhelming European

atmosphere.”71 After that, he journeyed to Rabat, a “delightfully


different city” where “the native life was the big tree with solid roots

and spreading branches.”72 In a letter to Max Eastman, he wrote that

no place had satisfied him as much as Morocco since he had left

home, for there were “many things in the life of the natives, their

customs and superstitions, reminiscent of Jamaica.”73 In a letter to

W.A. Bradley, McKay stated he was ready to write “the Jamaican

book—dealing with the religious customs and social life of the

peasants” for he was feeling “very religious” among the Moslems.74

McKay’s search for justice and equality was not just geographical.

While he spent time in the Soviet Union, France, Spain, and Africa

and learned a lot from these “logical steps” of his pilgrimage,75 in

Morocco he turned to the Moslem religion in his spiritual search for

equality between blacks and whites. In another letter to James

Weldon Johnson dated May 25, 1931, he adds,

I am seriously contemplating becoming a Moslem. The social side of the life

that is blind to racial and color prejudices appeals to me greatly and as the

religion is mostly great poetry, I can conscientiously subscribe to it, as a

poet.76

McKay felt as color‐conscious as he had felt twenty years earlier when

he wrote his “bitter poems on race questions.”77 As Winsten adds,

unlike the United States, Morocco gave him “something he had not

found in his native West Indies, not in Harlem and not in France,” for

the Moslems of Morocco made him feel completely without color

consciousness for the first time in his life.78

The community solidarity and sovereignty that McKay found in

Africa inspired him to depict the beauty of the Jamaican countryside

in the prose he wrote there. The African setting encouraged him to

return fictionally to a Jamaican community not only in Banana Bottom,

but also in Gingertown and My Green Hills of Jamaica, books in which

he included “Truant,” “The Agricultural Show,” “Crazy Mary,”

“When I Pounded the Pavement,” and “The Strange Burial of Sue.”

All of these stories are somewhat reminiscent of the writer’s

experience in his homeland. Even though the setting of “Truant” is

New York, in My Green Hills of Jamaica McKay still places it under the

title “Jamaican Short Stories.” Barclay, its main character, is a West

Indian peasant boy who feels like a prisoner within “the huge granite‐


gray walls of New York.”77 He nostalgically remembers his native

home, as he is trapped in the intricate life of this city:

Dreaming of tawny tasseled fields of sugar‐cane, and silver‐gray John‐

tuhits among clusters of green and glossy‐blue berries of pimento. The

husbands and fathers of his village were not mechanically‐driven servant

boys. They were hardy, independent tillers of the soil or struggling artisans.

What enchantment had lured him away from the green intimate life

that clustered round his village—the simple African‐transplanted life of the

West Indian hills? Why had he hankered for the hard‐slabbed streets, the

vertical towns, the gray complex life of this steel‐tempered city? Stone and

steel! Steel and stone! Mounting in heaven‐pursuing magnificence. Feet

piled upon feet, miles circling miles, of steel and stone…. 78

Barclay feels that he is a slave to New York. Only in moments when

he is “lost in the past” can he remember the sense of freedom that he

experienced as a West Indian peasant. City life intensifies in him the

fond memories of his village:

Yellow‐eyed and white‐lidden Spanish needles coloring the grassy hillsides,

barefooted black girls, straight like young sweet‐woods, tramping to market

with baskets of mangoes or star‐apples poised unsupported on their heads.

The native cockish liquor juice of the sugar‐cane, fermented in bamboo

joints for all‐night carousal at wakes and tea‐meetings….79

Whether in New York or Kingston, the city destroys a sense of

individuality and personal freedom. Like Barclay, who feels a

prisoner of New York, the narrator of “When I Pounded the

Pavement” is “the son of peasants” who had grown up in an

environment of “individual reserve and initiative.”80 In Jamaica’s

capital, he is “thrown among a big depot of men of different character

from bush and small town to mix in a common life with them.”81

When the narrator becomes a city constab, he is not happy with this

profession because he inherits “the peasant’s instinctive hostility for

police people.”82 Contrary to the city, McKay’s rural Jamaican village

with its own rights and regulations is a much happier place where

one can find a sense of community. The writer’s retrospective view of

a unified, agrarian, and harmonious Jamaican way of life becomes an

inspirational setting.


McKay’s international travels and experiences illuminated his

understanding of the importance of Negro national consciousness

and convinced him that African Americans had to unite and learn

how to rely upon themselves in order to achieve their goals. In a letter

to James Weldon Johnson dated April 15, 1935, he writes,

I learned very much abroad, especially in Africa. And I am certain that

Negroes will have to realize themselves as an organized group to get

anything. Wherever I traveled I observed that the people who were getting

anywhere and anything were those who could realize the strength of their

cultural groups, their political demands were considered and determined by

the force of their cultural grouping: it was the same underlying principle in

Communist Russia as in Fascist Spain and democratic France and England

and in “protected” Africa.83

In an earlier letter to Max Eastman dated September 1, 1932, he states,

“My attachment to Tangier is sort of spiritual looking backwards.”84

His African experience provided “the kind of deep‐seated, traditional

community self‐sufficiency that he had known as a child in the hills of

Jamaica.”85 He returned to the United States in January of 1934

convinced that American blacks could learn a lot from the minority

groups in Europe and North Africa:

In his (McKay’s) opinion, international communism had failed, and blacks

should concentrate on strengthening their collective group life and

promoting democratic government at home in order to be in a position to

meet all eventualities.86

As a result of these experiences, especially the one in Morocco,

McKay understood the importance of the Negroes’ realization of

themselves as an organized, self‐sufficient, and self‐reliable cultural

group. In his letter to James Weldon Johnson dated April 3, 1937, he

states that the three years of living in Africa were like “studying three

hundred years of life there.”87 In the same letter, he also criticizes the

tactics of orthodox communists for their “aim to suppress

independent thinking and opposition opinion”; as “a member of a

minority group which was the age‐long victim of intolerance,” he

refuses to embrace communist intolerance.88

McKay’s interest in Islam as a way to find unity and equality

among different racial groups was similar to his attraction to


Catholicism, the religion he turned to by the fall of 1944. In “Right

Turn to Catholicism” he writes,

Jesus Christ rejected the idea of any special, peculiar or chosen race or

nation, when he charged his apostles: Go ye into all the world and preach

the gospel. Not the gospel of Imperialism, Feudalism or Capitalism, or

Socialism, Communism or a National Church… I find in the Catholic

Church that which doesn’t exist in Capitalism, Socialism or Communism—

the one true International of Peace and Good Will on earth to all men.89

In another article, “Why I Became a Catholic,” he explains the role of

color and race in his decision to become a Catholic:

Like the Mohammedan religion today, there never was any race and

color prejudice in the Roman Catholic Church from its beginning up until

the Reformation.

It is said that three of the early popes were Negroid. In the Schomburg

library in New York there is the photograph of the nephew of a pope—

duke—who is unmistakably Negro…. But, as I have said, there was no race

or color prejudice in the world of the early church, and so it was not

necessary or important to mention the color or race of any of its

protagonists.90

He joined the Roman Catholic Church on October 11, 1944, despite

pleas from Eastman to be faithful to his commitment to rationalism.91

At the end of his life, he discovered “a humanism and spirituality”

that gave him “inspiration and brotherhood.”92 Even though one may

not agree with McKay’s assessment of Catholicism, one can “scarcely

characterize his conversion as inconsistent with his life.”93 In a letter

to Max Eastman dated June 30, 1944, he writes, “By becoming a

Catholic I would merely be giving Religion the proper place it had in

my nature and in man’s nature.”94 In the Catholic Church, the writer

found “that sense of wholeness very important to him” without a

compromise of his individuality.95

McKay’s “Cycle Manuscript,” a collection of poems that has been

published in Complete Poems (2004), is an important document that

sheds light on the poet’s reflections at the end of his life. Once again

these poems show McKay’s feelings of alienation and inner conflict.

In “Cycle 1,” he explains how his function as a black poet is similar to

that of the crucified Christ:


These poems distilled from my experience,

Exactly tell my feelings of today,

The cruel and the vicious and the tense

Conditions which have hedged my bitter way

Of life. But though I suffered much I bore

My cross and lived to put my trouble in song

I stripped down harshly to the naked core

Of hatred based on the essential wrong!96

Even though McKay encountered prejudice and discrimination as a

black writer, these sufferings did not break his spirit. Instead, he

condemned these injustices in his poems, novels, short stories,

autobiographies, and articles. Once again, this poem shows him as a

free spirit who can “soar with unclipped wing, / From earth to

heaven, while chanting of all things” regardless of what any “white or

black” critic might say about him.97 No one can stop him from telling

the world exactly what he wants to say. When he states that he never

“cared a damn / For being on the wrong side of the fence,” he

unquestionably refers to the Negro elite.98 As this poem reveals,

McKay did not relate to the black intelligentsia; rather he associated

himself with the black masses:

Even though I was as naked as a lamb,

And thought by many to be just as dense

For being black and poor, I always feel

That all I have and hold is my own mind,

And need not barter for mess of any kind.99

While the Negros of Jamaica, the United States, Europe, and Africa

encouraged him to take pride in his African heritage, until the end of

his life he remained suspicious of the Harlem Renaissance elite. His

idea of cultural or literary renaissance as that of “talented persons of

an ethnic or national group working individually or collectively” to

achieve a common purpose and to create “things that would be

typical of their group” differed significantly from that of other writers

and intellectuals who regarded the Harlem Renaissance as “an uplift

organization and a vehicle to accelerate the pace and progress of

smart Negro society.”100 In “Cycle 41,” McKay explains why the

Negro elite and the politicians will not praise him:


No lady of the land will praise my book.

It would not even be brought to her attention,

By those advising where and how to look

For items which make favorable mention

Because my writings are not party stuff,

For those who follow the old trodden track.

There are nothing of the tricks—the whine and bluff,

Which make politicians jump to slap your back!101

A politician would never admire McKay for his writing because in it

he shows “the Negro stripped of tricks, / As classic as a piece of

African art/ Without the frills and mask of politics.”102 The poet cares

much more about the realistic portrayal of the Negro masses than

about his acceptance by the Negro elite. He further develops this

theme in “Cycle 47,” where he stresses the importance of the black

working class in the Harlem Renaissance:

They hate me, black and white, for I am never

Afraid to say exactly what I think,

They hate me because I think, and will forever,

Of the common Negro wallowing in the sink.103

He states that American Negroes can only be saved as a “unit,” and

“better Negroes cannot rise alone” without the masses.104 Once again

he ridicules black Negroes who are striving to become white:

They who imagine they can save their soul

By thinking white and hating black will find

That in the end they cannot attain their goal;

For though they see, yet they are really blind.

We will be lifted up with our own masses

Or be kept down as slaves by the white classes.105

He fights for justice and equality on behalf of the black working class

for he can relate to their sorrow and misery:

It is the Negro’s tragedy I feel,

Binding me like a heavy iron chain,

It is the Negro’s wounds I want to heal,

Because I know the keenness of the pain.106


McKay did not come to know the masses of the African diaspora in

an academic way. Instead, he intimately acquainted himself with

them by “talking to black crowds at meetings, not in a bohemian way,

by talking about them at cafés.”107 His knowledge of their hardships

and sufferings came from his personal experience:

I knew the unskilled Negro worker of the city by working with him as a

porter and longshoreman and as a waiter on the railroad. I lived in the same

quarters and we drank and caroused together in bars and at rent parties.108

When he tried to cure their pain in his writings, he didn’t have to

create his heroes from “an outside view,” for he knew the inner lives

of his characters from his own close everyday association with

them.109 Till the end of his life, he remained faithful to the belief that

the African American community could not solve its problems

without the working class. He became “the first intellectual to link the

frailty of the Negro Renaissance to the failure of those in the forefront

to forge a synthesis between a community collective soul and loftier

social and political goals.”110 In his poems, as well as his novels, short

stories, articles, and autobiographies, he creates his Negro characters

without “sandpaper and varnish” and articulates the bonds of

kinship that he feels with them.111

McKay’s autobiographies disclose two sources of the writer’s

formation. One is that of his connectedness to Jamaica, its culture, and

its community, and the other is that of his international inspiration.

Even though he considered himself to be a “poet without country,”

someone with an “international mind”112 who was “always obsessed

with the idea of universality of life under the different patterns and

colors and felt it was altogether too grand to be distorted creatively in

the interest of any one group,”113 his deep sense of belonging to the

Jamaican community is evident in his narratives. As Cooper correctly

states, in Banana Bottom, McKay’s final novel written in Morocco, the

search for the psychic unity and stability that began in Home to Harlem

“came full circle to rest again in the lost paradise of his pastoral

childhood.”114 His pioneering articulation of the problem of Jamaican

identity found expression in his writings. While his long travels

abroad enabled him to see the black diaspora in a wider perspective,

he was to express particular Jamaican issues and concerns in his


poetry and prose. His life abroad provided not only material for his

literary work, but also exposed him to the major political and social

issues of the 1920s and 1930s. As McKay’s international consciousness

grew as a result of his travels in the United States, England, Russia,

Germany, France, Spain, and Morocco, his national Jamaican

consciousness also increased.

Notes

1 Geta J. LeSeur, “Claude McKay’s Romanticism” in College Language Association

Journal 32.3 (Mar. 1989), p. 300. 2 See Max Eastman, “Introduction” in Harlem Shadows: The Poems of Claude McKay

(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922). 3 See Wayne Cooper, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance

(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1987), p. 15–16 (thereafter cited as Claude McKay). 4 Claude McKay, My Green Hills of Jamaica, ed. Mervyn Morris (Kingston:

Heinemann Educational Book, 1979), p. 66 (thereafter cited as GH). 5 Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt

Brace Jovanovich, 1970), p. 13 (thereafter cited as LW). 6 GH, p. 67. 7 GH, p. 67. 8 Claude McKay, p. 36. 9 By the late eighteenth century, “quashee” or “quashie” was used to describe a

male born on a Sunday. In the twentieth century, it was also used as a typical name

for a Negro or a peasant. “Buccra,” “backra,” or “buckra,” on the other hand, derives

from the Efik mbakara, meaning “he who surrounds or governs.” In the Caribbean, it

soon became synonymous with white people. See Frederic Cassidy, Jamaica Talk:

Three Hundred Years of the English Language in Jamaica (London: Macmillan, 1961), pp.

155–157. 10 Winston James, A Fierce Hatred of Injustice: Claude McKay’s Jamaica and His Poetry

of Rebellion (London and New York: Verso, 2000), p. 59 (thereafter cited as Fierce

Hatred). 11 Claude McKay, Songs of Jamaica in The Dialect Poetry of Claude McKay (Plainview,

New York: Books for Libraries, 1972) (thereafter cited as SJ). 12 SJ, pp. 84–85. 13 See Eugenia Collier, “Claude McKay (1889–1948)” in Fifty Caribbean Writers: A

Bio‐Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, ed. Daryl Cumber Dance (New York, Westport,

Conn. and London: Greenwood, 1986), pp. 284–293. 14 Wayne Cooper, “Introduction” in The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Poetry and

Prose, 1912–1948, ed. Wayne Cooper (New York: Schocken, 1973), p. 5.


15 Sandra Pouchet Paquet, Caribbean Autobiography: Cultural Identity and Self‐

Representation (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2002), p. 87. 16 Fierce Hatred, p. 29. 17 Claude McKay, p. 64. 18 Claude McKay, “A Negro Poet Writes” in Pearson’s Magazine XXXIX (September

1918), pp. 275–276. 19 Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt

Brace Jovanovich, 1970), p. 4 (thereafter cited as LW). 20 LW, p. 20. 21 Kenneth Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and Its Background (New York: Barnes

and Noble, 1970), p. 56. 22 Claude McKay, p. 81. 23 Claude McKay, Complete Poems (Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2004), p.

132, thereafter cited as CP. 24 George Kent, “The Soulful Way of Claude McKay” in Black World XX (1970), p.

38. 25 LW, p. 31. 26 LW, p. 227. 27 LW, p. 228. 28 LW, p. 67. 29 LW, pp. 67–68. 30 LW, p. 68. 31 Claude McKay, p. 111. 32 CP, pp. 167–168. 33 CP, p. 155. 34 William Hansell, “Jamaica in the Poems of Claude McKay” in Studies in Black

Literature 7 (Autumn 1976), p. 9. 35 Addison Gayle, The Black Poet at War (Michigan: Broadside, 1972), p. 22. 36 CP, p. 174. 37 CP, p. 173. 38 A. Zverev, “Poeti i Poeziya Ameriki” in Poeziya Soedinennih Shtatov Ameriki (The

Poetry of the United States of America) (Moscow: Hudozhestvennaya Literatura, 1982),

pp. 24–25. 39 LW, p. 150. 40 CM, p. 173. 41 CM, p. 174. 42 CM, p. 174. 43 LW, p. 167. 44 LW, p. 168. 45 LW, p. 168. 46 LW, pp. 169–170. I found this portrait in the James Weldon Johnson Collection of

Negro Literature and Art, part of the Yale Collection of American Literature in the


Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, while doing my research there in the

summer of 2004. 47 CMPJ 4‐119, Claude McKay Papers, James Weldon Johnson Collection of Negro

Literature and Art, the Yale Collection of American Literature, the Beinecke Rare

Book and Manuscript Library; hereafter cited as CMPJ and followed by the box and

the folder numbers. 48 LW, p. 226. 49 LW, p. 321. 50 CMPJ 13‐38. 51 LW, p. 322. 52 LHPJ 109‐2042, Langston Hughes Papers, James Weldon Johnson Collection of

Negro Literature and Art, the Yale Collection of American Literature, the Beinecke

Rare Book and Manuscript Library; hereafter cited as LHPJ and followed by the box

and the folder numbers. 53 LW, p. 277. 54 LW, p. 278. 55 CMPJ 5‐134. 56 Claude McKay, p. 235. 57 p. 93. 58 p. 323. 59 p. 328. 60 p. 328. 61 p. 279. 62 p. 69. 63 pp. 93–94. 64 CMPJ 13‐38. 65 LW, p. 295–296. 66 p. 296. 67 LW, p. 296. 68 CMPJ 9‐298. 69 CMPJ 9‐298. 70 CMPJ 9‐298. 71 LW, p. 298. 72 LW, p. 298. 73 Claude McKay, p. 271. 74 Claude McKay, p. 271. 75 Letter to James Weldon Johnson dated May 8, 1935, CMPJ 4‐419. 76 CMPJ 13‐38. 77 CMPJ 15‐455. 78 CMPJ 15‐455. 77 Claude McKay, Gingertown (New York: Harper and Bros., 1932), p. 152, hereafter

cited as G. 78 G, p. 152.


79 G, pp. 159–60. 80 G, p. 208. 81 G, p. 208. 82 G, p. 211. 83 CMPJ 13‐38. 84 Claude McKay’s Letters to Max Eastman from 1928 to 1934, The Lilly Library,

Indiana University. 85 Claude McKay, p. 272. 86 Claude McKay, p. 306. 87 CMPJ 13‐309. 88 CMPJ 13‐309. 89 CMPJ 9‐298. 90 p. 32. 91 Barbara Jackson Griffin, “The Last Word: Claude McKay’s Unpublished ‘Cycle

Manuscript’” in Melus 21.1 (Spr.1996), p. 41. 92 David Goldweber, “Home at Last: The Pilgrimage of Claude McKay” in

Commoweal (September 10, 1999), p. 13. 93 Condit Hillyer, “An Urge Toward Wholeness: Claude McKay and His Sonnets”

in College Language Association Journal 22 (1979), p. 357. 94 Claude McKay, p. 360. 95 Hillyer, p. 357. 96 CP, p. 241. 97 CP, p. 241. 98 Jackson Griffin, p. 45. 99 CP, p. 241. 100 LW, p. 321. 101 CP, p. 263. 102 CP, p. 263. 103 CP, p. 266. 104 CP, p. 266. 105 CP, p. 266. 106 CP, p. 260. 107 LW, p. 228. 108 LW, p. 228. 109 LW, p. 228. 110 Jackson Griffin, pp. 49–50. 111 LW, p. 228. 112 McKay’s letter to Langston Hughes, LHPJ 109‐2042. 113 McKay’s letter to James Weldon Johnson, CMPJ 13‐30. 114 Claude McKay, p. 282.

CHAPTER 2

Mutual Concerns and Contributions: Claude

McKay and Soviet Russia

In your struggle for existence, do not think of your colour as a handicap, but

as raiment of distinction to wear proudly, always.

—Claude McKay1

Through his interactions with Russian people, culture and politics,

McKay not only entered the space of new international formations

and allegiances, but also became a spokesman for Negro radicalism in

The Negroes in America and Trials by Lynching: Stories about Negro Life in

North America, his ignored Soviet publications. Numerous articles

about him and his poetry that appeared in such newspapers and

magazines as Pravda, Krasnaya Nov’, Krasnaya Niva, Literaturniy

Ezhenedel’nik, Noviy Mir, and Literaturnaya Gazeta show his

importance in the Soviet understanding of American and Caribbean

blacks of the 1920s.2 Soviet Russia enabled McKay to take pride in his

African heritage and provided political and literary aspirations, while

for his part, he significantly contributed to the Soviet understanding

of the Negro question. Thus, it is important to trace and analyze

mutual concerns and contributions resulting from his interaction with

Soviet Russia during the period of the Third International. They not

only reveal reciprocated routes of influences but also demonstrate the

importance of the Soviet Union in McKay’s development as an

Anglophone Caribbean writer in search of an original form of self‐

expression.3

McKay’s interactions with Yevgeny Zamyatin and the possibility

of his influence on the creation of black characters in We (1924) and

“The African Guest,” the play Zamyatin completed by December of

1931, has not been analyzed. While Kate Baldwin points to

“intriguing moments in Russian cultural production” that in her

opinion show McKay’s importance in Soviet thinking about race4 and

assumes “a fusion of McKay and Pushkin” in the character of the

38 CLAUDE MCKAY AND SOVIET RUSSIA

Negro poet of We,5 she does not examine specific incidents of this

connection. Therefore, through my discussion of R‐13’s ability to

integrate with the new social order in We and the Negro’s popularity

in “The African Guest,” I offer a more detailed analysis that suggests

McKay’s influence.6 In addition, I also trace McKay’s literary affinities

with Zamyatin. Both writers challenge rational thinking devoid of

any authentic feeling and emotions; their work explores their inner

struggle between reason and instinct and criticizes any type of social

system that limits personal freedom.

Furthermore, I argue for the importance of the Soviet Union in

McKay’s development as a writer and contest Soviet critics who failed

to appreciate his creation of an original form of literary expression in

the writings that followed the visit. Even though reviews of Home to

Harlem and Banjo published in Soviet periodicals reveal the inability

of these novels to satisfy the revolutionary expectations of his Soviet

audience,7 McKay’s dedication to the lower classes, representation of

their difficult everyday reality, and use of folklore to communicate

the lessons that he wants his readers to learn are some of the areas of

his affinity with Gorky, the twentieth‐century proletarian writer

whom he admired. In my comparison of Home to Harlem and Banjo

with Gorky’s early short stories “Marak Chudra” (1892) and

“Twenty‐Six Men and a Girl” (1899), I discuss these areas of affinity

and point to McKay’s revolutionary achievement in the Caribbean

and African American contexts.

Even prior to his trip to the Soviet Union, McKay had the chance

to explore similarities between the Russians and the people of African

descent. Even though at that time, he still struggled with the

dominant European ethnocentrism and thought that his mind was

not complex enough to appreciate modern Western theater, he

changed his opinion after seeing the Moscow theatrical show Chauve‐

Souris in New York in March 1922.8 In “What Is Lacking in the

Theatre?,” an article he published in The Liberator the same year, he

wrote a review of the Russian performance and stated that it

reminded him of his amateur singing and acting in his homeland of

Jamaica. Whereas in the days of his childhood and adolescence he

could devote himself to “the keen, whole‐hearted enjoyment of

village concerts and wakes,” even the most extravagant and


magnificent Western productions usually left “a strange aching

emptiness” in his mind.9 However, when he attended the Moscow

show, he felt that he witnessed a beautiful performance of “artful

simplicity” from which “the joy poured like silver showers from a

waterfall.”10 The creativity, originality, unrestraint, and excellence of

the performance captivated him:

The first number is like a glittering page from a musty old‐fashioned

romance of lazy laughing lords and sweet, idiotic ladies. It soothes, softens

and prepares the audience for the delicate and delightful whimsicalities to

follow. The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers is child’s play carried to the

highest totality of perfection…. Mind cannot visualize it on the Metropolitan

stage, but the Russians have put it there; every look, every step, every

gesture of the free playing boy is recaptured by them and reproduced in its

original spontaneity.11

Seeing the ability of the Russian actors to transfer their personalities

in a very simple and effortless manner made him realize what was

lacking in the American theater and what Russians and Negroes on

the stage could teach white Americans.12 The simplicity and

originality of the Moscow show encouraged McKay to reevaluate the

artistic talents of his race and to understand that both Russians and

Negroes presented an artistic challenge to Western forms and

standards of theatrical expression.

His subsequent trip to the Soviet Union in October 1922 enabled

him to further explore previously‐noticed cross‐cultural and cross‐

racial alliances and to take a political step towards “the vision of the

Communist revolution as a biracial, international movement of such

kindred spirits as the Negro and the Russian.”13 Attracted to what he

believed at that time to be the progressive attitude of the Bolsheviks

towards national minorities, he was anxious to visit post‐

revolutionary Russia and to see the establishment of a new social

order. His decision to attend the Third International rather than the

Second was not coincidental. While the Second International (1920)

recognized only the white race, the Third International (1921) decided

to involve workers of different races in the emancipation of the

worldwide working class. After the Second International, Lenin

encouraged his American followers to recognize blacks as “a

strategically important element in Communist activity.”14 Even


though John Reed actually invited McKay to come to Moscow in

1920,15 he waited till the time his Soviet comrades were eager to

include the black race and to aid its advancement in bourgeois

society. Only when the Soviet government started to pay attention to

the Negro problem and its importance to the emancipation of the

world’s oppressed did McKay make his decision to go to Moscow

and represent the voice of Harlem Renaissance bolshevism.

The new social order of the Soviet Union impressed McKay and

enabled him to see how it could benefit his race. As a Caribbean

radical, “simultaneously much more nationalistic, class conscious,

and international‐minded” than most American‐born blacks,16 he

immediately noticed new opportunities for the advancement of his

race in communism and decided to use them. The 1917 Russian

Revolution played an important role in his political formation and in

his work among African Americans, whom he encouraged to use the

Russian example in their fight against social and racial inequality.

His experience in the Soviet Union inspired him to take pride in

his African heritage and turned out to be significantly different from

his experiences in North America and Western Europe, where he

encountered apathy and ignorance toward people of African descent.

In November of 1922, the first month of his stay there, he witnessed

the country’s mobilization to honor the Fifth Anniversary of the

Russian Revolution. As a member of “the great American Negro

group—kin to the unhappy black slaves of European Imperialism in

Africa” that the Russian workers greeted through him, he

immediately became an active participant of this celebration.17 The

Soviet attitude towards him fascinated McKay, especially once he

compared it to that of Western Europe:

The English people from the lowest to the highest, (sic) cannot think of a

black man as being anything but an entertainer, boxer, a Baptist preacher or

a menial. The Germans are just a little worse. Any healthy‐looking black

coon of an adventurous streak can have a wonderful time palming himself

off as another Siki or a buck dancer….

But in Petrograd and Moscow, I could not detect a trace of this ignorant

snobbishness among the educated classes, and the attitude of the common

workers, the soldiers and sailors was still more remarkable. It was so

beautifully naïve; for them I was a black member of the world of

humanity.18


In New Negro, Old Left: African‐American Writing and Communism

Between the Wars, William Maxwell also points to this warm reception

and describes the enthusiasm with which the Russians greeted

McKay:

He had been carried along Moscow’s Tverskaya Street on the shoulders of

cheering crowds, granted the use of a driver, housed in some of the finest

accommodations of the city, and toasted by units of the Red Army and

Navy, whom he invited to join the “we” of “If We Must Die.” While McKay

only peeked at a sickly V.I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky granted him public

correspondence and a private meeting; Grigori Zinoviev, the president of

the Third International, stood by his side at a May Day reviewing stand; and

the Moscow soviet made him an honorary member. He was dined by the

commissar of education and arts, introduced to the constructivist theater

director Vsevolod Meyerhold, and presented with an autographed

collection of poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky. Pravda, Izvestia, and other

Soviet publications competed for his articles, for which he received the best

pay of his life.19

Apart from Bolsheviks, who only later considered his political views

to be important enough to be heard, common Russian people showed

their admiration for McKay as a poet and a representative of an

oppressed race. In A Long Way from Home, he records his spontaneous,

warm reception by the Russian masses and points to their curiosity,

which was stirred not just by his color:

MEANWHILE, all the Russian folk unwittingly were doing their part

for me. Whenever I appeared in the street I was greeted by all of the people

with enthusiasm. At first I thought that this was merely because of the

curiosity which any strange and distinctive type creates in any foreign

environment, such as I had experienced in Holland and Belgium and

Germany. But no! I soon apprehended that this Russian demonstration was

a different thing. Just a spontaneous upsurging of folk feeling.

The Bolsheviks had nothing at all to do with it. The public

manifestation took them unawares…. So, as soon as they perceived the

trend of the general enthusiasm for me, they decided to use it. And I was not

averse to it.20

As these entries show, contrary to his previous experience in the

United States and Western Europe, in Russia his color made him

popular. This refreshing experience fascinated McKay and gave him


new confidence and strength. Even when in later years, following his

return to the United States in 1934, he became disillusioned with

communism and began to criticize its propagandistic purposes, he

still admitted that Russia made him feel “prouder of being an African,

a black.”21

It is possible that McKay’s enthusiastic reception may have

resulted from the Russian appreciation for Pushkin, the most loved

and respected national poet often admired for his African heritage. In

her essay “My Pushkin,” Marina Tsvetaeva makes a connection

between Pushkin’s greatness as a poet and his Negro heritage:

The Russian poet—is a Negro, the poet—is a Negro and the poet—was

struck down.

(Oh God, how it all came together! What poet among those that were

and those that are, isn’t a Negro and what poet—hasn’t been struck down

and killed?)22

Even though she includes a footnote about Pushkin’s light hair and

light eyes, she deliberately chooses to focus on the Negroid features

of Pushkin’s Monument, the poet’s statue sculptured by A.M.

Opekushin and erected in Moscow in 1880:

I loved the Pushkin Monument for its blackness—the reverse of the

whiteness of our household gods. Their eyes were totally white but the

Pushkin‐Monument’s were totally black, totally full. The Pushkin‐

Monument was totally black, like a dog, still blacker than a dog because the

very blackest of them always had something yellow above the eyes or

something white under the neck. The Pushkin Monument was black like the

piano. If they had not told me later, that Pushkin was a Negro, I would have

known, that Pushkin was a Negro.23

As the essay further reveals, Tsvetaeva’s appreciation of the poet’s

greatness and his African heritage leads to an admiration of the black

race:

From the Pushkin Monument I also got my mad love for black people,

carried through a whole lifetime; to this day I feel the engulfment of my

whole being, when, by chance, in a streetcar or some other vehicle, I find

myself with a black person next to me. My white piety side by side with

black deity. In every Negro I love Pushkin and I recognize Pushkin, the

black Pushkin Monument of my pre‐literate childhood and of all Russia. 24


It is probable that the Russians not only appreciated McKay as a poet,

but also linked his poetry to the gift of poetic expression that some,

like Tsvetaeva, considered to be characteristic of the black race. In

Petrograd, the anti‐communist intellectual elite gathered to hear his

poems; one of the Russian professors, “contemptuous of bourgeois

literature” despite his studies in England and France, respected his

poetry and thought that like Pushkin, McKay was a “revolutionist.”25

He associated McKay with the famous Russian poet when he gave

him Pushkin’s portrait as a present. Unlike most Soviet critics who

later condemned his novels, this Russian professor made a correct

assessment of McKay’s revolutionary literary achievement in the

Anglophone Caribbean context that does relate to that of Pushkin.

In addition to this, McKay also became a political revolutionary

who supported the Soviet position on the relatedness of the Negro

question to that of class. When he made his famous “Report on the

Negro Question” and shared his experiences and perspectives on the

role of blacks within the international communist movement, he

announced that he would prefer to face a lynching stake in civilized

America than to try to speak before the “most intellectual and critical

audience in the world.”26 He proceeded to say that even though he

belonged to “a race of creators,” his public speaking was so bad that

his own people told him not to make speeches, but “stick to writing,

and laughing.”27 Despite this, however, he felt that it would be “an

eternal shame” not to speak on behalf of the members of his race.28 As

the author of “If We Must Die” and “one of the spokesmen of Negro

radicalism in America,” he courageously represented his race at the

Congress:

I feel that my race is honored by this invitation to one of its members to

speak at this Fourth Congress of the Third International. My race on this

occasion is honored, not because it is different from the white race and the

yellow race, but (because it) is especially a race of toilers, hewers of wood

and drawers of water, that belongs to the most oppressed, exploited, and

suppressed section of the working class of the world. The Third

International stands for the emancipation of all the workers of the world,

regardless of race or color, and this stand of the Third International is not

merely on paper like the Fifteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the

United States of America. It is a real thing.29


In spite of his fear of speaking that probably resulted from his

personality and his pioneering endeavor to explain the Negro

problem to his Soviet audience, he already showed himself as a

radical capable of overcoming obstacles in his efforts to contribute to

the social advancement of his race.

In his speech, McKay addressed the mistreatment of African

American soldiers by the international bourgeoisie, one of his most

vital concerns of that time. After a brief mention of the exploitation of

the Negro race by the French and English armies, he explained how

the situation resembled that of the United States:

The Northern bourgeoisie knows how well the Negro soldiers fought for

their own emancipation, although illiterate and untrained, during the Civil

War. They also remember how well the Negro soldiers fought for the

Spanish‐American War under Theodore Roosevelt. They know that in the

last war over 400,000 Negroes who were mobilized gave a very good

account of themselves, and that, besides fighting for the capitalists, they also

put a very good fight for themselves on returning to America when they

fought the white mobs in Chicago, St. Louis and Washington.30

His comments about imperialism and the unfair treatment of black

soldiers echo those of Alfred H. Mendes, his Trinidadian

contemporary and the editor of Trinidad who also criticized the

exploitation of blacks by the bourgeoisie.31

Furthermore, McKay addressed the racist attitude of the

American Communist Party towards its black members, another

concern. He informed his Soviet colleagues about the conditions of

American Negroes in early twentieth‐century America that he

considered “much uglier” and “more terrible” than those of “the

peasants and Jews of Russia under the Tsar”32 and criticized

American socialists and communists for not doing anything to make

them better:

The reformist bourgeoisie have been carrying on the battle against

discrimination and racial prejudice in America. The Socialists and

Communists have fought very shy of it because there is a great element of

prejudice among the Socialists and Communists of America. They are not

willing to face the Negro question. In associating with the comrades of


America I have found demonstrations of prejudice on the various occasions

when the White and Black comrades had to get together: and this is the

greatest difficulty that the Communists of America have got to overcome—

the fact that they first have got to emancipate themselves from the ideas they

entertain towards the Negroes before they can be able to reach the Negroes

with any kind of racial propaganda.33

McKay at that time did not seem to worry about the threat of Soviet

intervention on Negro autonomy, for he sought the Comintern’s

support to liberate the black race and to understand the attitudes of

American communists towards it.

In addition to this, he wanted his Soviet audience to recognize the

considerable differences between the northern and the southern states

of the United States and their effects on black people. In his speech, he

stated that a lot of work had to be done in the South to break up the

existing traditions and to make the situation better for the African

American population:

The fact is that it is really only in the Southern States that there is any real

suppression of opinion. No suppression of opinion exists in the Northern

states in the way it exists in the South. In the Northern states special laws

are made for special occasions—as those against Communists and Socialists

during the War—but in the South we find laws that have existed for fifty

years, under which the Negroes cannot meet to talk about their grievances.34

Following the speech, he further elaborated on these problems in

the Russian‐language Negry v Amerike, the book that was published in

Moscow in 1923. Once again, he described the Negro question as “an

integral and one of the chief problems of the class struggle in

America.”35 While the Soviet audience had the chance to read it

immediately after its publication, its Russian copy was left forgotten

on the Slavic Languages shelves of the New York Public Library until

1973, when Wayne Cooper discovered it.36 In 1979, it was translated

into English by Robert J. Winter and published under the title of The

Negroes in America. More than five decades after its original

publication, Western critics were finally able to read it and to better

understand McKay’s then‐Marxist approach to the Negro problem

appreciated by his Soviet audience.


This ignored Soviet publication illuminates McKay’s international

approach to the Negro problem and provides means for

understanding his subsequent novels. Even though the United States

is the primary focus of the book, he also makes a connection between

American racism and larger European colonial exploitation in the

world, the theme he first addressed in his speech and developed later

on in Home to Harlem and Banjo. While in the first novel he used the

example of Haiti to demonstrate how colonialism and imperialism

had similar effects not only on African American but also on

Caribbean people, in the second one he went a step further and

encouraged the people of African descent to unite in their struggle

against white domination and influences.

In the introductory chapter of The Negroes in America, McKay once

again expresses his gratitude to the Soviet government for providing

the opportunity to devote time to literary work and presents his

criticism of North American society from the point of view of both

class and race. As he states, the book “should have been written in

America—for Americans” since it explains a close affinity between

black and white workers and points to their “true place in the class

struggle and their role in the international workers’ movement.”37 He

also clarifies that the opinions expressed in The Negroes in America are

based on facts and personal experience rather than an intention to

please his Russian comrades.38 The purpose of the book is to inform

his Soviet colleagues about the situation of the American Negro:

I have written with the aim of letting them know the truth about the

American Negro, his place in the workers’ movement, and his relationship

to that movement; about his place in American society, and about the

relationship of organized labor and American society to him.39

In “A General View,” the second chapter, McKay educates his

Soviet colleagues about the concern he first addressed in his speech:

the especially difficult situation of Negroes in Texas, Oklahoma,

Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida,

the southern states of the United States.40 As he states, despite the

official ending of slavery, the situation became worse in those states

after the end of the Civil War in 1865:


The blacks, when freed from slavery and while growing in numbers and

strength, naturally strove for equal participation in the civil life of American

democracy. Negroes strove to obtain education, voting rights, access to

social institutions, bearable living conditions, and monetary salaries. But

white gentlemen thought differently. They wanted to keep southern

Negroes in slavery, to own the land, and to direct and decide the course of

political life in the cities, stirring up the white poor (who were sunk in

ignorance, crime, and pauperism) against dark‐skinned people. 41

In more detail, McKay explains how the first fifty years of

emancipation and American history created differences between the

industrial North and the landowning South and made the situation

worse for the African American population.

In “The Workers’ Party and Negroes,” another chapter, McKay

reiterates his concern with US communists’ surrender to racism and

criticizes the white radicals who usually defend American Negroes

with much less enthusiasm than when they stand up against

injustices towards their own race. He recommends that they act upon

what they preach and understand the way the capitalist system

works:

They must understand more profoundly what they themselves preach so

eloquently: that capitalism is as deeply rooted in Africa as in Europe and

that this system cannot be eliminated in England and continue to exist on

the island of Haiti.42

He urges white radicals to follow the example of the Russian

Bolsheviks who support and encourage the oppressed of different

races and nationalities. Since he believes that the Negro question is

related to the working class in Africa and America, he urges the

American workers to choose one of the following two paths: “the

organization of black workers separately or together with whites—or

the defeat of both by the forces of the bourgeoisie.”43

Although the Marxist perspective of The Negroes in America is of

great importance in the analysis of McKay as a critic permeated with

race and class consciousness, the book also clarifies his position as a

writer in search of an original form of Negro self‐expression. In

“Negroes in Sports,” “Negroes in Art and Music,” and “Negroes in

Literature,” the following three chapters, he relates issues of race to


the politics of cultural production and points to the important role of

intellectuals in constructing racial and cultural identity. Despite his

adherence to communism during his 1922–1923 visit to the Soviet

Union, his commitment to the people of African descent as a writer is

much greater than that of just a political activist.44

In “Negroes in Sports,” McKay prefigures C.L.R. James’s cricket

writing by approaching the boxing ring as an arena in which white

supremacy can be tested.45 He uses the example of Jack Johnson, a

black boxer, to describe sport as a meaningful instrument of black

resistance and a field in which the Negro presents a challenge to

capitalist America when he shows himself capable of fighting and

winning. When Jess Willard beat Jack Johnson, in all the Negro

barbershops, billiard halls, and nightclubs of American cities, crying

and moaning was heard. 46 After Johnson’s persecution by the

American justice system and a short imprisonment for his

involvement with a white woman, the black population met him as

their hero. They took him into one of the Negro churches and asked

him to preach.

While racial identity is the primary focus of “Negroes in Sports,”

in “Negroes in Art and Music,” McKay focuses on cultural identity

and the role of a writer. In the first part of the chapter, he points to the

destruction of African cultural treasures by the colonial powers of

Europe and refers to the African Hall of the British Museum as “the

most marvelous treasure house of the world, where the opportunity

of seeing the most beautiful samples of the acquisitions of British

piracy, exploitation and deceit is presented to the gaze of the amazed

spectator.”47 He takes pride in African culture destroyed by

colonialism and criticizes “Anglo‐Saxon literature on Negroes” that

“continued to remain a parody and a superfluous caricature.”48 His

discussion of African influence on European art and literature is

similar to that of Squire Gensir of Banana Bottom, who encourages Bita

to take pride in her Afro‐based culture and traditions.

McKay asserts the necessity for an original type of art and protests

against limitations imposed on his race by Anglo‐Saxons. His

challenges to the Negro elite to accept their people’s cultural and

historical background and to create a sense of collective identity in

their writings are some of the ideas that he later develops in Home to


Harlem, Banjo, and Banana Bottom. The criticism of the Negro

intelligentsia’s “state of spiritual impotence” and inability “to realize

its ideals as a group inside a certain society”49 echoes that of Ray, who

in Banjo encourages African American and Caribbean intellectuals to

take pride in their African heritage.

In “Negroes in Literature,” he reaffirms the revolutionary

potential of the oppressed people of African descent and asserts black

folk culture through his affirmation of the Negro dialect. His

overview of the Haitian revolution led by Toussaint L’Ouverture and

his depiction of the slave revolt and victory over Napoleon that he

first initiates in The Negroes in America and later develops in Home to

Harlem is almost an exact summary of the history that C.L.R. James

writes in The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo

Revolution (1938) several years after the publications of McKay’s

books.50 When McKay states that “stories from the world of animals

in the West Indies, field songs and house‐servant games, the folk tales

of Brer Rabbit and the spirituals and slave songs of the southern

states” are “a rich treasure,”51 he makes a connection between African

American and Caribbean folklore and points to the worth found in

their common African origin. Furthermore, he criticizes fictional

misrepresentation of Negroes and condemns white writers who

persistently surrender the interests of artistic truth by creating unreal

Negro types that accommodate the views of their class.52

In the last chapter of the book, “Sex and Economics,” McKay links

Marxist analysis of the question of the working class with that of

women’s exploitation. He considers the white woman’s compliance to

such American slogans as “The white woman must be protected from

rape by blacks” and “The white man must not allow white woman to

have relations with Negroes” to be regrettable.53 He further

establishes a connection between the oppression of American women

and American Negroes by stating that both groups are overworked,

underpaid, and deprived of advancement. According to McKay,

while black and white antagonism on account of sex has its extreme

manifestation in the United States, it plays an insignificant role in the

economic struggle of the Caribbean islands.54

The Negroes in America reveals McKay’s criticism of American and

European racism and provides his readers with insights into his most


vital concerns. It helps his readers to understand McKay’s outlook on

American society and culture and “explains, in part at least, the

reasons for his alienation from the black intelligentsia, from the liberal

political movement, and ultimately from the left‐wing groups

through which he had long hoped to witness a fundamental change

in the status of Negroes in the United States.”55 This publication

demonstrates McKay’s commitment to the oppressed black diaspora

and to the social transformation that he longed to bring about

through his writings.

While McKay’s first Soviet publication provided theoretical

education for his Russian audience, the short story collection Trial by

Lynching: Stories about Negro Life in North America narratively

portrayed the racial injustices he had previously only described. In

“Trial by Lynching,” “The Mulatto Girl,” and “A Soldier’s Return,”

the three stories included in the volume, McKay further elaborates on

the interrelationship between race, class, and gender. The stories that

appeared in Russia in 1925 would not have been easily published in

the United States or Western Europe due to the unacceptability of

their subject matter. They represent McKay’s “anguish at the

barbarity of Southern ways and his deep‐felt sympathy for those

deprived of self‐respect, justice, and life itself,”56 and they provide a

fictional criticism of racial injustices facing both male and female

black Americans.

“Trial by Lynching,” the first story of the collection, echoes “Sex

and Economics,” the last chapter of The Negroes in America. In it,

McKay not only establishes a similarity between the oppression of

American women and American Negroes, but also links the struggle

of Negro self‐determination with that of female autonomy. Nathalia,

a daughter of Andrew Cord, the southern white owner of a

department store, wishes to marry a northern Jew, Michael Sanovich.

However, her father prefers Dr. Taylor, another Southerner and a

personal friend. Even though Cord’s daughter is a typical aristocratic

southern woman in many ways, unlike her father she admires the

“enterprising spirit” and “great commercial abilities” of the

Northerners.57 Similar to Nathalia, who contests southern traditions,

Abe Mitchell, an aspiring black businessman and organizer of a

cooperative, asserts his rights and demands to be served before


William Cross, the white customer who enters the store after he does.

Both Mitchell and Nathalia represent a threat to Cord, who wants

them to remain within the boundaries of southern racist traditions.

McKay fictionally shows differences between the North and the

South. Despite “those crazy Yankees” who provoke northern

educated Negroes to educate the southern ones,58 Cord and his

associates want to uphold the southern practice of lynching. As Cord

states in his conversation with Archibald Farnon, his supplier and a

leader of the Democratic Party, they have to fight against northern

laws with their “Southern methods.” Both Cord and Farnon decide

that Mitchell’s execution will prevent other Negroes from challenging

their set ways of life. His crimes of accumulating wealth, organizing

other Blacks into a cooperative, and demanding to be treated on a

first‐come‐first‐served basis must be punished:

When a white man takes a mistaken path, we must always make allowances

for him, whether he be a governor, president, director of a railroad

company, or of a bank. But a negro is first and foremost a negro, and if he

makes a mistake, then we must give him a kick and send him to hell. We

can’t make allowances for a nigger. Everytime that a nigger begins to get a

swelled head, we must knock off the head that has gotten swelled. No, we

can’t show any softness: there is only one way to solve this kind of problem.

We’ve got nothing against good negroes who know their place, but ambitious

negroes we don’t need in the South—let them go up North.59

The writer’s depiction of Mitchell’s courageous resistance to the

humiliation inflicted on him is reminiscent of his call to African

Americans to stand brave before their white oppressors in “If We

Must Die.” The whites of this story are not only followers of these

rules, but also sadists who take pleasure in a black man’s sufferings.

When Bruce, Cord’s clerk, makes an attempt to shoot Mitchell, his

effort is considered an interruption of their “amusement.”60 The

lynching participants do not want Mitchell to die instantly for they

take pleasure in his agony:

Finally he moaned: God how he moaned! It seemed that the moan was like

thunder; but when the fire flared up around him, he lost consciousness

again; we finished him off with a hail of bullets.61


However, the brutal white murderers do not get the joy of hearing

Mitchell “squeal like a fat, black pig that is being slaughtered, or howl

like a mongrel that has been beaten with a stick.”62 Instead, the Negro

is portrayed as a martyr who bravely resists the oppressors and dies

nobly. Even though he is subjected to terrible humiliation, he remains

dignified in the degrading atmosphere.

While the black protagonist of the first story undergoes

excruciating physical pain, in “Mulatto Girl,” the young, light‐

skinned Mathilda suffers emotional pain as she becomes a victim of

unjust rumors that destroy her reputation. This time, the action takes

place in Eagle Point, Harlem, in the northern part of the United States.

The heroine becomes “a sacrifice to the morality of the whites”

because she dares to have a love relationship with a white man.63 She

is sent away because of the gossip about her sexual relationships with

half of a dozen students who had to go to the hospital. She doesn’t

undergo any doctor’s examination, nor is there any evidence against

her to suggest her unfaithfulness to Dick Coleman, yet the fact that

she is beautiful and black is “already enough.”64 Even though her

white lover can easily prove her fidelity, he laughs at her misfortune.

When she stops him on the street and asks him to intercede on her

behalf, he demonstrates his racism and cruelty:

“…Ne‐gress! Don’t you know that you mustn’t stop a white man on the

sidewalk? Get off the sidewalk and let us pass.”

But Mathilda didn’t move from the spot. Then Coleman, having raised

his hand threateningly, struck her in the face.

“That’ll teach you, negress, not to forget your place. That’ll be a lesson

to you.”65

There is no feeling of love toward her on Coleman’s part. The

narrator of the story is the only one who shows sympathy for the

humiliated and oppressed mulatto female character. This unfair

treatment has a greater effect on him than lynching, and that is why

he leaves college.

In “The Soldier’s Return,” the concluding story of the collection,

McKay describes unfair treatment of black soldiers, the topic he first

addressed in his speech at the Third International. Black characters

who fight along with whites in the First World War encounter


difficulties upon their return home to Georgia. Whereas there is a

grand welcome‐home banquet for the white soldiers, there is only a

small one for the non‐whites. Fredrick, the octoroon protagonist of

the story, scares the daughter of the postmaster when he is passing by

an “abandoned, semi‐ruined, slave‐owning manor.”66 Unjustly, he is

placed in prison and accused of harassing her. When Fredrick

answers that he saw the girl but couldn’t understand why she was

running and screaming, the sheriff is not satisfied. After that, the

mayor sentences him to several months’ work because he dares to

wear a soldier’s uniform instead of work clothes. Even though

Fredrick is a fighter equal to whites during the war, he is expected to

quickly change from his soldier’s uniform to a working outfit that the

whites of the town consider to be more appropriate for him. His

outward appearance and his refusal to conform to a racist code of

behavior are the reasons for his persecution.

The Negroes in America and Trial by Lynching contest preexisting

Soviet notions of whiteness and blackness and educate McKay’s

Soviet colleagues about the topic of racism. Both books reveal a

complex and intricate understanding of blacks and whites and inform

his Soviet audience about the interrelatedness of exploitation based

on class, race, and gender. By describing the cruel treatment of

Mathilda and Fredrick, the mulatto and octoroon characters of his

short stories, McKay encourages his Soviet colleagues to broaden

their perspective and to include people of different shades in the

category of those who can suffer from discrimination.

McKay’s education of the Soviet audience extended even more

when he shared his knowledge and experience with the important

Russian writers and journalists that he met during his stay there. In

the February 27, 1923 entry to his 1901–1929 diary, Korney

Chukovksy, a leading critic and author of children’s books, refers to

McKay’s reading of his poetry in the house of Mayakovsky, another

important twentieth‐century Soviet poet:67

Everybody is waiting for McKay. At last, he starts reading. Good reading.

He pronounces everything like a hohol68 and instead of v he prolongs a

sound o—Mayakooousky. There are some pieces of real poetry and the topic

is broad, but on the whole tiresome. McKay is standing at the pechka,69 very


handsome, with intelligent eyes, very much interested in the reading

himself.70 (my translation)

In the April 24, 1923 entry, Chukovsky records McKay’s conversation

with Klyachko, a Soviet journalist and the owner of the publishing

company Raduga, whom he informed about the discrimination

against African American people:

Again Negro McKay. He has gained weight, but says it is because of the

frost: frosty cheeks. He laughs a lot, but internally he is serious. When he

talks about the conditions of Negroes in America, he is always nervous. I

immediately took him to Klyachko and was amazed to see that Klyachko

didn’t know that Negroes were oppressed in America. “How can it be

possible?” he asks. “There is freedom there!”71 (my translation)

Despite the fact that Chukovsky considers McKay’s poetry “tiresome”

and doesn’t seem to appreciate its excitement, meaning, and purpose

within the Caribbean and African American contexts, his diary

descriptions reveal his respect for the Jamaican‐born poet and show

McKay’s importance in the Russian understanding of the

“democratic” America of the twentieth century to which Klyachko

referred.

Even though in A Long Way from Home, McKay states that he

never met Sergey Yesenin, the twentieth‐century Russian peasant

poet whom he admired,72 there is a possibility that the famous

Russian described him in his poem “The Black Man.” Walter Duranty

associates the Negro face grinning at “a drunkard on the verge of

delirium tremens” with that of Claude McKay.73 Wayne Cooper also

points to the possibility that Yesenin learned about McKay’s high

esteem for his poetry upon his return to Russia from America with

Isadora Duncan and then incorporated him in his poem:

In his last remorseful months, Yesenin may have conjured in his mind an

image of this strange black man, who had once sung his praises above all

other Russian poets, now returned to haunt and reproach his failures.

Although it is only speculation, Duranty may not have been entirely wrong

in his assertion that Claude McKay was in the sense “the black man” of the

famous poem.74


While it is difficult to accurately assess McKay’s influence on

Yesenin due to the unavailability of any recorded confirmation of

their interactions, the documented evidence of the writer’s personal

contact with Yevgeny Zamyatin75 makes the possibility of his

influence on R‐13, the black character of Zamyatin’s famous novel We

(1924), more probable. Even though We was written in 1920, the

writer could have corrected the novel’s manuscript between the time

that he sent it to the Grzhebin Publishing House in Berlin in 1921 and

the time the publisher made a copy available for translation into

English in 1923.76 Therefore, McKay’s possible influence on Zamyatin

should not be excluded from the analysis of his contributions to the

writer’s understanding of the black race and its incorporation in We.

Despite the Soviet condemnation of We for its supposed criticism

of communism, the main philosophical tension of this novel results

from the conflict between reason and instinct. Zamyatin takes his

readers one thousand years into the future to show the consequences

of a life based on reason and intellect and to challenge rational, logical

thinking devoid of any authentic feelings. D‐503, the narrator of the

novel who is writing a diary for unknown future readers, is a

mathematician and a builder of the spaceship Integral that is going to

“subjugate to the grateful yoke of reason the unknown beings who

live on other planets.”77 In the United State, ruled by Well‐Doer,

nothing is left to chance, for all life is integrated and organized to the

smallest detail. Even love is based upon reason and science and must

be regulated according to the Hour Tables, a schedule that controls all

activities of the United State. The Green Wall separates the “machine‐

like, perfected world” of D‐503 from the “irrational, ugly world of

trees, birds, and beasts.”78

Whereas D‐503, a white engineer and a builder of the future, is a

replica of Zamyatin’s rationality, the black characters of the novel

represent irrationality and threaten the narrator’s sense of coherence

and order. Pointing to the Negroid characteristics of R‐13 and the

poet of the past in whom he recognizes Pushkin, D‐503 connects their

lack of rationality with their racial background. Their unexplainable

joy and laughter intimidate the narrator, and he can’t comprehend the

popularity of both the “snub‐nosed” ancient poet and R‐13, a poet

with “the lips of a Negro.”79 While sitting in front of a “somewhat


smiling poet” of the Ancient House, D‐503 asks himself, “Why do I sit

here enduring this smile with such resignation, and what is this all

about?”80 He finds his friend to be a “not precise, not rhythmic” poet

and he considers his logic to be “jocular and turned inside out.”81 As

he observes, R‐13’s inherent irrationality is manifested in his actions:

In R‐’s room everything seems like mine: the Tables, the glass of the chairs,

the table, the closet, the bed. But as we entered, R‐ moved one chair out of

place, then another—the room became confused, everything lost the

established order and seemed to violate every rule of Euclid’s geometry. R‐

remained the same as always; in Taylor and in mathematics he always

lagged at the tail of the class.82

While the African features of the black poets and the challenge to

logical thinking that they both represent point to the validity of

Baldwin’s assumption of “a fusion of McKay and Pushkin” in the

character of the Negro poet of We,83 R‐13’s ability to integrate with the

new social order and to contribute to its formation suggests the

possibility of McKay’s influence. Despite his irrationality, R‐13

adheres to the new way of life, associates himself with the Well‐Doer,

and relates his writing to the world in which he and D‐503 live:

You see, it is the ancient legend of paradise (“p” like a fountain.) That

legend referred to us of today, did it not? Yes. Only think of it, think of it a

moment! There were two in paradise and the choice was offered to them:

happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. No other choice.

Tertium non datur. They, fools that they were, chose freedom. Naturally, for

centuries afterward they longed for fetters, for the fetters of yore…. It was

he, the devil, who led people to transgression, to taste pernicious freedom—

he, the cunning serpent. And we came along, planted a boot on his head,

and …squash!… No more meddling with good and evil and all that;

everything is simple again, heavenly, childishly simple! The Well‐Doer, the

Machine, the Cube, the giant Gas Bell, the Guardians—all these are good.

All this is magnificent, beautiful, noble, lofty, crystalline, pure. For all this

preserves our non‐freedom, that is, our happiness…. Well, in short, these are

the highlights of my little paradise poem.84

R‐13’s belief in the substitution of personal freedom for a submission

to a United State that can bring happiness seems to relate to McKay

and other black communists of that time who did not worry about the

threat of Soviet intervention in African American autonomy, since


“indigenous black interests were sometimes better represented in

Comintern directives than in U.S. Communism.”85 Parallel to McKay,

who saw the possibility of forming new kinds of social and political

alliances between Russian and Negro workers in internationalism’s

potential, R‐13 is an equal partner and creator of a new social order.

Zamyatin’s description of the Negro character in “The African

Guest,” the play he completed by December 1931, also seems to relate

to McKay and his personal experience in Soviet Russia. In particular,

his status as a delegate at the Third International, his popularity, the

dark color that made him attractive, and the magnificent payment

that he received for his Soviet publications are characteristics that he

shares with the African delegate/guest in some versions of Zamyatin’s

farce. An ex‐deacon, a secretary of the Soviet authorities, and a Soviet

poet try to assimilate new ways of life and thinking and consider the

marriage of the ex‐deacon’s daughter to an African delegate to be

more prestigious than one to a white former anti‐Bolshevik.

According to the 1930, two‐page typed manuscript of the play

corrected by the writer, its original title is “The African Delegate” and

the delegate is met everywhere “with triumph” (my translation).86 In

a longer ten‐page summary of the play, Zamyatin refers to the Negro

character as “the delegate from the rebelling Negroes of the English

colonies in Africa” who will become wealthy and have a bright future

in Moscow (my translation).87 In the typed script of the play, the

characters are particularly interested in the delegate because he is a

Negro. For example, Kaptolina Palna says, “Negro! Wow, how

interesting!” (my translation).88

Whereas these are merely possibilities of McKay’s influence on

the construction of the black characters in We and “The African

Guest,” there is no doubt that both challenge the value of rationality

devoid of authentic feelings and emotions. Similar to Nathalia in

“Trial by Lynching,” who threatens Cord’s set southern way of life

when she desires to marry someone from the northern United States,

I‐330 of Zamyatin’s We challenges D‐503’s rationality and plays an

important role in his internal struggle. When D‐503 falls in love with

her, the illogical part of his being takes on a new dimension:

I became glass‐like and saw within myself. There were two selves in me.

One, the former D‐503, Number D‐503; and the other…Before, that other


used only to show his hairy paws from time to time, but now that whole

other self left his shell. That shell was breaking, and in a moment…89

An inner struggle between reason and instinct is another area of

affinity. Similar to Ray of Home to Harlem and Banjo, who cannot fully

reconcile his Western education and rationality with his desire to

come closer to the black working class of Harlem and Marseilles, D‐

503 undergoes an identity crisis. He is not able to integrate both

rational and irrational parts within himself and believes that he

should choose one or the other. When he asks I‐330 about people

behind the Green Wall, she responds, “Where are they? The half we

have lost. H2O, creeks, seas, waterfalls, storms—those two halves

must be united.”90 While earlier in the novel, D‐503 agrees with R‐13’s

description of their way of life as “magnificent, beautiful, noble, lofty,

crystalline, pure,” later on he desires to give it up for the

unreasonable world represented by I‐330:

I—, dear, before it is too late…If you want…I’ll leave everything, I’ll

forget everything, and we’ll go there beyond the Wall, to them….I do not

even know who they are….

Your hand…You undoubtedly don’t know, and very few do know, that

women from here occasionally used to fall in love with them. Probably there

are in you a few drops of that blood of the sun and the woods. Perhaps that

is why I…91

Even though D‐503 wants to know more about a different life that

exists in a world unfamiliar to him and desires to combine the

rational and the irrational within himself, he never resolves his

conflict. At the end of the novel, he expresses his final belief in the

superiority of reason and identifies his personality dilemma as

“illness.”92 While D‐503’s dependence on the United State does not

allow him to fulfill the need for individuality aroused by his growing

consciousness, Ray’s adherence to his Western education is the cause

of his failure.

Similar to Zamyatin, McKay later criticizes any type of social

system that limits individual freedom. In “Negro Author Sees

Disaster if C.P. Gains Control of Colored Workers” (1938), he rejects

any totalitarian type of government. As always, he demonstrates his

sympathy towards black workers, whom he warns:


It would be bad enough for the colored minority to be owned by any purely

American party, as it formerly was by the Republican Party. But it would be

disastrous if it were captured by a Communist Party, which, despite its

professions to the contrary, is the highly‐controlled Propaganda Bureau of

the Communist International, which is dominated by the Russian

Government.93

While in his Soviet publications McKay related many issues of race to

those of class, towards the end of his life he understood the

importance of Negroes’ realization of themselves independently of

Soviet influence. In Harlem: Negro Metropolis, a non‐fictional account

of Harlem he published in 1940, he urges various black leaders to

organize, look for resources, and solve their problems within their

own group. In the same book, he criticizes white communists of

Harlem and advises the Negro masses to be aware of their strategies:

The Communists would just as readily betray the Negro minority here in

America if it suited their purpose. It should be plain why they are seeking to

penetrate every Negro organization. The Negro intellectual, apparently

becoming neurotic and therefore confused on the issue of Segregation, may

not perceive that the Communist maneuver is to make an appendage of his

race—a red Uncle Tom of Communism. They are striving for control of the

political mind of the Negro so that they may do his thinking for him.94

McKay encourages African Americans to think for themselves instead

of relying on any organization that doesn’t truly represent their

interests. Especially in the last chapter of Harlem: Negro Metropolis, he

condemns the Communist Party for misleading many black

intellectuals into supporting the Soviet Union instead of devoting

their attention to the problems of the Afro‐American population.

Despite McKay’s eventual rejection of communism, however, his

warm, affirmative reception during the period of the Third

International shows the influence of the Soviet Union in his political

and literary development. This experience facilitated his awareness of

himself as a representative of black race who stood not only for

American blacks, but also for the black diaspora of European

imperialism in Africa and the Caribbean islands. The visit provided

inspiration for creating a new liberating kind of art in the writings

that followed.


It is unfortunate that Russian reviewers of Home to Harlem and

Banjo, who criticized the inability of these novels to satisfy their

revolutionary expectations,95 did not understand the type of art that

McKay was attempting to create after his visit to the Soviet Union.

For example, in their introduction to the Russian translation of Home

to Harlem, Mais and Vil’son condemn McKay for his inability to depict

characters that are “strong in spirit”96 (my translation). Y. Frid is just

as negative. According to a review of Home to Harlem published in

Noviy Mir in 1929, Ray is an educated Negro neurotic who

understands that he is unfit to participate in social change. Home to

Harlem is not “a step forward,” for it is written in the spirit of

“primitive, naïve, realism,” and it presents a “passive description” of

Harlem life97 (my translation). Furthermore, in “Kurs Na Ar’ergard,”

Pesis describes his disappointment in McKay as a “fighter for the

liberation of the Negro masses”98 (my translation). He states that even

though McKay describes the gloomy life of homeless, hungry

Negroes persecuted by the French police in Banjo, its characters

represent “the worse characteristics of bourgeois civilization.”99 In his

opinion, McKay’s Ray doesn’t see the white proletariat as his ally.

Instead, he juxtaposes it to “his Negro race” and doubts that Negroes

can benefit from “the revolutionary movement of the world

proletariat.”100 The shortcomings of Banjo are not a coincidence, but

rather a way that “may lead McKay astray from the wide

revolutionary literature to the bourgeois literature of Europe and

America”101 (my translation).

Even though the Soviet critics of McKay’s first two novels did not

consider them to be progressive, Home to Harlem and Banjo are

authentic writings significant in Caribbean and African American

contexts. McKay’s first novel is not about the Negro elite that strives

to become Western in their way of life and thinking. Instead it is a

story of the serving class‐longshoremen, housemaids, porters,

waiters, cooks, and washroom attendants. His second novel is a

realistic depiction of a difficult life of seamen and drifters of all races

and nations who come in contact with each other in Marseilles. While

in his first novel, McKay made an effort to come closer to common

African American people and their backgrounds, in the second one he

described the difficult life of the African diaspora in Marseilles,


created a sense of their collective identity, and attempted to make a

connection between class and race, the topic he first addressed in The

Negroes in America. Thus, the “primitive, naïve, realism” to which Frid

refers in his review of Home to Harlem is McKay’s way of taking pride

in his people and their African roots and creating a type of art

different from the previously established Western forms and

standards.

In “Group Life and Literature,” McKay contests Soviet criticism

and points to his dedication to the lower classes and their

background, an area of affinity with Maxim Gorky, the Russian

proletarian writer whom he considers to be one of the greatest

exponents of “the field of the lower depth of rural and urban life.”102

Concerning this type of literature and the involvement of black

writers in it, McKay states,

I know of no colored writers truly representative of that field, excepting

myself. My novels, Home to Harlem and Banjo, belong to it. It is not my

intention here to explain or defend my own works. I do not think there need

to be any apology for a novel about the submerged world of the colored

men. For the fact stands that the great majority of colored people live in

lower depths.103

In addition to McKay’s and Gorky’s praise of the lower classes’

superior abilities to overcome hardships, both writers also use

folklore in their writings. The tale that Bugsy shares with his friends

in Banjo and the love story between Loiko and Radda that an old

gypsy relates to Danilo in “Makar Chudra” (1892) reveal the writers’

similar struggle between concern for the life of others and individual

advancement. In McKay’s tale, Sam, “a house darky” and the right

hand of the boss, is not satisfied to be “the bestest darky foh the boss

folks” and wants to be “the biggest darky ovah all the rest a

darkies.”104 He wants to progress in life no matter what and pursues

his own selfish purposes. Instead of rebelling against the white

stereotype imposed on his race, he accommodates the white man’s

image of the black man. When he guesses that there is a coon under a

pot of another plantation owner, his boss is happy, exclaiming, “I

knowed mah nigger could tell anything.”105 Like Sam, Radda is very

selfish in the pursuit of her desire to dominate Loiko:


There are few brave Gypsies left in the world as it is, very few, Loiko. I

never loved anybody, Loiko, but you I love. But I love liberty too! I love

liberty, Loiko, more than I do you. But I cannot live without you, as you

cannot live without me. So I want you to be mine, body and soul, do you

hear?

This more I want to say, Loiko: no matter how you twist I’ll have my

way with you, you’ll be mine. So don’t waste time—my kisses and caresses

are awaiting you, and I shall kiss you sweetly, Loiko! Under my kisses you

shall forget your adventurous life… and your lively songs which so gladden

the hearts of the Gypsy lads will be heard no more in the steppe—you shall

sing other songs, tender love songs to me, Radda…. Waste not time then—I

have spoken, therefore tomorrow you shall obey me like the youth who

obeys his elder comrade. You shall bow the knee to me before the whole

Gypsy camp and kiss my right hand—then I shall be your wife.106

The successful technique of relating his tales to the major thematic

units of his writing is another similarity that McKay shares with

Gorky. Parallel to the old Gypsy of “Makar Chudra” who not only

relates one of his favorite legends to his young listener, but also

expresses his belief in a strong man who should place his personal

interests over any obligations to society, Banjo’s tales about common

heritage and the importance of survival strategies are also meaningful

within the context of the characters’ lives in Marseilles. Similar to

Makar Chudra, who tells the legend to the young man for he believes

he will be “a free bird” all his life if he adheres to its lesson,107 Ray and

the Senegalese sergeant purposefully share their tales. The first tale is

about a little black girl and her aunt who stole the “tiny red mole,” a

charm that would keep the girl happy, young, and beautiful.108 At the

end of the tale, the girl becomes a princess and forgives her. When the

aunt falls on her knees to say that she should be given to the leopards

because she was a bad relative to her niece, she replies, “No, aunt,

we’re flesh and blood of the same family and you will come and live

in this house and garden all the rest of your days.”109 The second tale

is about a leopard that always sets traps for other animals. While he

manages to kill a bear, a cow, a dog, a pig, a goat, a rabbit, a donkey, a

cat, and a gazelle, he can’t outwit the monkey. Instead of making the

monkey fall into his prong, the leopard lands on the steel prongs

himself. At the end, the monkey uncovers the pile of dead victims and

calls all the animals to a big feast. The tales’ lessons about justice and


forgiveness and the importance of survival techniques can be applied

to the relationship between Banjo’s characters. Parallel to the poor

animals of the second tale that are trapped by the leopard’s trick, the

merchants cajole the black vagabonds of Banjo into wasting their

money without giving them anything in return. Opposed to the law

of the jungle that these merchants observe, Banjo and his friends

share with each other under “the communal law.”110

The use of folklore in Banjo not only shows McKay’s predilection

for his Afro‐based roots, but also offers the black diaspora his

suggestions on how to survive in the world dominated by whites. His

triumphant experience in the Soviet Union gave him new confidence

and strength and facilitated his literary pursuit for justice and

equality. In Home to Harlem and Banjo, he turned to his Afro‐based

culture as the main source of his inspiration and showed the potential

of common African, African American, and Caribbean people to

survive imperialism and colonialism and to present a challenge to

their oppressors. These two novels are not examples of the bourgeois

type of literature to which the Soviet critics of McKay’s work refer,

but a step forward towards an original form of black self‐expression.

McKay’s writings extend beyond any national or ethnic

constraints and share similarities with the Russian writers of the

twentieth century. While his dedication to the lower classes and

representation of their difficult everyday reality are the main areas of

his affinity with Gorky, his challenge to any type of rationalism

lacking authentic feelings and emotions is the main parallel with

Zamyatin. McKay not only possibly influenced the construction of R‐

13 in We, but also, like the black character of the novel, showed the

ability of black culture and literature to challenge Western rationalism

and individualism. His experience in the Soviet Union and

appreciation of Gorky left a mark on his fiction and encouraged him

to turn to the black working class and their backgrounds as the main

source of his inspiration. Even though for a long time he struggled

with the dominant European influences in his search for an Afro‐

Caribbean identity, like his Russian contemporaries he understood

the importance and significance of one’s culture in creating a type of

art different from the previously established forms and standards.


Despite his eventual disappointment with communism, one should

not overlook mutual concerns and contributions that result from

interactions between McKay and the Soviet Union during the period

of the Third International. While he educated his Soviet colleagues

about the black race and influenced the Comintern’s decision to

include blacks in their revolutionary movement, Russia exemplified

models of personal and artistic freedom and self‐determination for

McKay. It empowered him to take pride in his Afro‐based cultural

background, to articulate new forms of black international

movements, and to become a spokesman for the Negro people in his

subsequent writings.

Notes

1 Qtd. by his daughter, Hope McKay‐Virtue, in an interview with Doris Nelson,

CMPJ 19‐618a. 2 I examined these periodicals in the St. Petersburg State Library while doing

research in Russia in the summer of 2003. For the most part, the articles published

there provide McKay’s autobiographical material, cite his poetry, and point to his

importance within the international communist movement. 3 In this chapter, I discuss the impact of the Soviet Union on McKay and establish

his literary connections with twentieth‐century Russian writers. In the third chapter, I

focus on Ray, McKay’s Haitian protagonist, and shed light on the influence of

nineteenth‐century Russian literature on the development of McKay’s West Indian

consciousness. Home to Harlem and Banjo are shaped by McKay’s political

engagement with the Soviet Union, which preceded his literary dialogue with

nineteenth‐century Russian writers, but they also share the Russian writers’ theme of

cross‐racial allegiances. McKay’s Caribbean background and his search for a

particular Caribbean identity are the main angles of my interest. 4 Kate Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters

Between Black and Red, 1922–1963 (Durham and London: Duke UP, 2002), p. 85. 5 p. 280. 6 The materials that I found in the Institute of World Literature in Moscow, Russia

and in the Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian and East European Culture at Columbia

University in New York (cited in this chapter) are the most beneficial in this analysis. 7 Reviews of McKay’s first two novels (found in the St. Petersburg State Library

and cited in this chapter) reveal the Soviet criticism and misunderstanding of Home to

Harlem and Banjo.


8 La Chauve‐Souris (The Bat Theater) was an internationally‐known musical theater

under the direction of Nikita Baliev. It was founded in Moscow in 1908 and became a

touring theater, “a company equally at home in Paris, London, New York, and

elsewhere” (Sullivan 17). 9 p. 20. 10 pp. 20–21. 11 p. 21. 12 p. 21. 13 Michael B. Stoff, “Claude McKay and the Cult of Primitivism” in The Harlem

Renaissance Remembered, ed. Arna Bontemps (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company,

1972), p. 144. 14 Theodore Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia (New York: Octagon,

1977), p. 321. 15 Claude McKay, p. 176. 16 Claude McKay, p. 181. 17 Claude McKay, “Soviet Russia and the Negro” in The Passion of Claude McKay:

Selected Poetry and Prose, 1912–1948, ed. Wayne F. Cooper (New York: Schocken,

1973), p. 100. 18 p. 101. 19 p. 73. 20 p. 167. 21 LW, p. 168. 22 p. 321. 23 p. 324. 24 p. 324. 25 LW, p. 170. 26 Claude McKay, The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Poetry and Prose, 1912–1948,

ed. Wayne Cooper (New York: Schocken, 1973), p. 91. 27 p. 91. 28 p. 92. 29 p. 92. 30 p. 92. 31 In The Trinidad Awakening: West Indian Literature of the Nineteen‐Thirties, Reinhard

Sander refers to Mendes’s service in a British regiment and the Bolshevik Revolution

that “stirred up a revolutionary change” and opened the writer’s eyes to the “evil

inherent in imperialist concept of domination (13). 32 p. 93. 33 p. 93. 34 pp. 94–95. 35 p. XI. 36 William J. Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left: African‐American Writing and

Communism between the Wars (New York: Columbia UP, 1999), p. 75. 37 p. 3.


38 p. 4. 39 p. 4. 40 p. 12. 41 pp. 12–13. 42 p. 39. 43 p. 44. 44 In a letter to James Weldon Johnson, dated May 8, 1935, McKay writes, “I went

into Russia as a writer and a free spirit and left the same, because I was always

convinced that however far I was advanced in social ideas, if I could do something

significantly active as a Negro, it would mean more to my group and the world than

being merely a social agitator” (CMPJ 4‐119). 45 In Beyond a Boundary (1963), C.L.R. James uses the game of cricket to show how

black Trinidadian teams could defeat their white British competitors and present a

challenge to their white supremacy. 46 p. 54. 47 p. 56. 48 p. 58. 49 p. 62. 50 McKay’s description of Toussaint’s superior qualities and achievements as well

as his reference to Haiti as “a place to which slaves from Central, South, and North

America could look for hope and inspiration” (67) echo those of James that I describe

in the fourth chapter. 51 pp. 68–69. 52 p. 72. 53 pp. 76–77. 54 pp. 77–78. 55 Marian B. McLeod, “Claude McKay’s Russian Interpretation: The Negroes in

America” in College Language Association Journal 23 (1980), p. 340. 56 McLeod, p. 337. 57 Claude McKay, Trial by Lynching: Stories about Negro Life in North America, trans.

Robert J. Winter (Mysore, India: Center for Commonwealth Literature and Research,

1977), p. 11. 58 p. 13. 59 pp. 15–16. 60 p. 20. 61 p. 21. 62 p. 20. 63 p. 30. 64 p. 30. 65 p. 31. 66 pp. 38–39. 67 I found this diary in the Institute of World Literature in Moscow, Russia. 68 Hohol is a common word used to describe someone of Ukrainian origin.


69 A typical Russian stove widely used for cooking and heating during McKay’s

stay in Russia. 70 p. 238. 71 p. 242. 72 p. 188. 73 Walter Duranty, I Write As I Please (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935), p. 242. 74 Claude McKay, p. 182. 75 In A Long Way from Home, McKay mentions Zamyatin as one of the Russian

writers whom he met during his stay in the Soviet Union (186). 76 Yevgeny Zamyatin, A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin, trans. and ed.

Mirra Ginsburg (Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 1970), p. 301. 77 p. 3. 78 p. 89. 79 p. 21, 29. 80 p. 28. 81 p. 39. 82 p. 39. 83 p. 280. 84 p. 59. 85 Maxwell, p. 72. 86 pp. 1–2. I found the typed summary of the play identified by the numbers 47‐1‐

156 in the Institute of World Literature in Moscow, Russia. 87 pp. 5, 9. The summary of the play is located in the Bakhmeteff Archive of

Russian and East European Culture at Columbia University, New York. 88 p. 24. The typed script of the play is located in the Bakhmeteff Archive of

Russian and East European Culture at Columbia University, New York. 89 p. 54. 90 p. 152. 91 p. 153. 92 pp. 217–218. 93 p. 5. 94 p. 254. 95 I found these reviews while doing my research in the St. Petersburg State Library

in Russia. 96 p. 6. 97 p. 238. 98 p. 16. 99 p. 17. 100 p. 17. 101 p. 18. 102 p. 9. 103 p. 9. 104 p. 124.


105 p. 125. 106 p. 39. 107 p. 33. 108 pp.118–119. 109 p. 121. 110 Richard Priebe, “The Search for Community in the Novels of Claude McKay” in

Studies in Black Literature 3 (1972), pp. 26–27.

CHAPTER 3

“What is Art?”: Claude McKay and Russian

Writers of the Nineteenth Century

In the countryside, where Peter’s foster‐child,

Favorite slave of tsars and tsarinas

And their forgotten housemate,

My Negro great‐grandfather hid

Where, having forgotten Elizabeth

And the court and magnificent promise,

Under the canopy of lime‐blossom lanes

He thought in cool summers

About his distant Africa,

I wait for you…. 1

Europe has been reflected in us at different times and, together with its

civilization, has gradually imposed itself on us as a guest…2

Only the Russians of the later era seemed to stand up like giants in the new.

Gogol, Dostoievski, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgeniev… Here were elements that

the grand carnage swept over and touched not. The soil of life saved their

roots from the fire. They were so saturated, so deep‐down rooted in it.3

Russian literature of the nineteenth century plays an important role in

McKay’s formulation of a solution to his dilemma of a dual cultural

identity and in his development as a writer. It is not a coincidence

that Ray, the Haitian narrator of Home to Harlem, reads Dostoyevsky’s

Crime and Punishment and considers Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy,

Chekhov, and Turgenev to be creators of genuine art. His

engagement with them in Home to Harlem and his subsequent internal

dialogue with Tolstoy in Banjo reveal their influence on his

intellectual and artistic development and on his assertion of Afro‐

Caribbean identity. Parallel to Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Pushkin, the

Russian writers who contest the positive effects of Western

rationalism and individualism and affirm their national culture, Ray

70 CLAUDE MCKAY AND RUSSIAN WRITERS OF THE 19TH CENTURY

is an example of an effort to create a distinct difference between

Caribbean and Western modes of thinking.

McKay’s first two novels establish a cross‐racial, cross‐national,

and cross‐cultural alliance between these two distinct yet similar

types of literature. The alienation of the educated from the

uneducated, the connection of art with contemporary reality, and the

seminal role of the writer in the development of the nation are some

of the Russian themes that influenced McKay’s formation. Instead of

imitating Western standards of his time and producing the

inauthentic works to which Tolstoy refers in his essay “What is Art?,”

he turns to the indigenous Caribbean and African American culture

and its people as the main source of his inspiration. Along with

Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Tolstoy’s “Ivan the Fool or the

Old Devil and the Three Small Devils,” and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin,

Home to Harlem and Banjo illuminate an understanding of “a native

culture that had been hidden from view and held in bondage to

narrow Western standards of civility and literacy.”4 A return to the

“native soil” and an affirmation of his own people and their culture

are some of the ultimate values that McKay shares with his Russian

predecessors.

The search for black identity and the influence of the dominant

European ethnocentrism are some of McKay’s most characteristic

tensions. In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois points to African

American man as someone who is born with a veil and “a sense of

always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”5 Du Bois’s

statements about the lack of true self‐consciousness among North

American blacks who could see themselves only “through the

revelation of the other world” encouraged him to confront “his own

deepest ambivalence as a black colonial reared in both the folk and

the British imperial traditions.”6 As a poet and an individual who had

the previous experience of living between two worlds, the world of

the Jamaican black peasants and the world of the British literary and

cultural traditions, he understood African Americans and their

duality. In his best‐selling novel celebrating Harlem’s black masses,

he gives importance to the notion of double consciousness and

applies it to his West Indian background.


The two identities within one to which Du Bois refers is not just

an African American or Caribbean phenomenon. Due to profoundly

parallel socio‐historical conditions, Russian writers, like their

Caribbean and African American counterparts, acknowledged the

notion of double consciousness resulting from Peter the Great’s

westernization of Russia. The czar’s transformation of the Russian

gentry into military and civil services as well as his recruitment of

masses of armed workers from the peasantry created major problems

for these two groups of people. The service caste that Peter formed

from the Russian nobility was to benefit the state that was attempting

to become westernized, and the heavy taxes that the peasants had to

pay deprived them of any financial independence.7 These reforms

further separated the Russian masses from the gentry. In The

Notebooks for the Possessed, Dostoyevsky describes this process in the

following way:

The people were not considered essential at the time, but were looked upon

as raw material, and as payers of the poll tax. Sure, they were closely

guarded, but as to internal, proper life, it was left to them in its entirety; and

though the people had to suffer a lot, they finally ended up by loving their

own suffering.8

While the majority of the Russian population was left with its own

traditions intact, the Russian nobility became westernized. As

Dostoyevsky acidly states, “the entire upper class of Russia ended up

being transformed into Germans, and, uprooted, got to love

everything German and to hate and despise everything of their

own.”9 Catherine the Great, Peter’s most faithful follower, continued

this process and instructed Russians to turn to the West as a source of

intellectual knowledge. Influenced by the European Enlightenment,

she considered France to be “the supreme model of civilization.”10

The Russian nobility that aspired to become European then desired

above all to become Frenchmen. This adoration of French civilization

continued in the nineteenth century “undiminished even by the war

with Napoleon.”11 While France became the most important source of

Russia’s enlightenment, Germany, Britain, and Italy also contributed

to the development of the emerging Russian intelligentsia of that

time.12


Russian writers contested the imposition of a centuries‐long

foreign culture on their national identity. Contrary to the westernizers

who felt that Russia should turn to Western European individualism

and rational thought, the Slavophiles thought that its salvation must

be found in the “values of the simple Russian people, in the ideal of

communality, Russian religion, the irrational and the peasant

commune with its communal ownership of property.”13 Furthermore,

the nineteenth‐century “native soil” movement (pochvennichestvo) was

founded as a response to the westernization of Russia that began in

the eighteenth century. Like the Slavophiles, the pochvenniki (“native

soil thinkers”) believed that “Russia was different from the West by

virtue of its Slavic fraternity or communality (sobornost’).”14 Even

though they thought “Peter had responded, consciously or not, to the

Russian yearning for the universal,” they still criticized the methods

that he chose to inflict Western culture on his empire.15

Feodor Dostoyevsky, a founding “native soil” member, was

among the first ones to reject foreign impositions and to show the

duality of the Russian identity created by means of this influence.

Mikhail Bakhtin describes the innovative, non‐European type of

writing that Dostoyevsky created:

Thus, all the elements of novelistic structure in Dostoevsky are profoundly

original; all are determined by that new artistic task that only he could pose

and solve with the requisite scope and depth: the task of constructing a

polyphonic world and destroying the established forms of the

fundamentally monologic (homophonic) European novel.16

Discussing the pluralism within Dostoyevsky’s writings, Bakhtin

continues,

Here in Russia the contradictory nature of evolving social life, not fitting

within the framework of a confident and calmly meditative monologic

consciousness, was bound to appear particularly abrupt, and at the same

time the individuality of those worlds, worlds thrown off their ideological

balance and colliding with one another, was bound to be particularly full

and vivid. In this way the objective preconditions were created for the

multi‐leveledness and multi‐voicedness of the polyphonic novel.17


Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov is an example of the national culture

conducting a dialogue with itself. Throughout Crime and Punishment,

he engages in an internal conversation that reveals different sources

that influence him:

Characteristically, his inner speech is filled with other people’s worlds that

he has just recently heard or read: from his mother’s letter, from things

Luzhin, Dunechka, Svidrigailov had said that were quoted in the letter, from

Marmelodov’s speech which he had just heard, from Sonechka’s words

which he heard from Marmeladov, etc. He inundates his own inner speech

with these words of others, complicating them with his own accents or

directly reaccenting them, entering into a passionate polemic with them.18

Each one of these people touches a “sore spot” in Raskolnikov. While

assuming “a firm role in his inner speech,” they become “reciprocally

permeable” as they come in contact within the character’s

consciousness.19

The absence of the monologic consciousness and a polyphonic

type of thinking to which Bakhtin refers are also characteristic of

McKay’s Ray, who searches for his own voice among the “multi‐

leveledness” of other voices presented in Home to Harlem and

struggles to reconcile his African identity with Western influence.

Commenting on his belonging to a black race, he states,

These men claimed kinship with him. They were black like him. Man and

nature had put them in the same race. He ought to love them and feel them

(if they felt anything). He ought to if he had a shred of social morality in

him. They were all chain‐ganged together and he was counted as one link.

Yet he loathed every soul in that great barrack room, except Jake. Race. Why

should he have and love a race?20

Even though Ray understands that white civilization and Western

education have negative effects on black people, he cannot fully reject

them. Despite his intellectual knowledge of African history and

culture, he demonstrates an ambivalent attitude toward blackness by

his desire to belong to a white nation:

Great races and big nations! There must be something mighty inspiring in

being the citizen of a great strong nation. To be the white citizen of a nation

that can say bold, challenging things like a strong man. Something very


different from the keen ecstatic joy the man feels in the romance of being

black. Something the black man could never feel nor quite understand.21

He is alienated from the black masses of Harlem due to the cultural

and intellectual background that makes him feel superior. The

European voice is one of the prominent voices among which he has to

discover his own.

In Home to Harlem and Banjo, Russian writers of the nineteenth

century are central influences in Ray’s inner drama. Similar to those

different individuals who enter Raskolnikov’s inner speech as “a

symbol of a certain orientation to life and an ideological position, the

symbol of a specific real‐life solution to those same ideological

questions that torment him,”22 they exemplify a type of art that Ray

would like to create in Home to Harlem. As he thinks of achieving an

original form in his writings, he engages in an internal dialogue with

them:

Dreams of making something with words. What could he make… and

fashion? Could he ever create Art? Art, around which vague,

incomprehensible words and phrases stormed? What was art, anyway? Was

it more than a clear‐cut presentation of a vivid impression of life? Only the

Russians of the later era seemed to stand up like giants in the new. Gogol,

Dostoievski, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgeniev. When he read them now he

thought: Here were elements that the grand carnage swept over and

touched not. The soil of life saved their roots from the fire. They were so

saturated, so deep‐down rooted in it.23

Parallel to Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, who conducts a search for

his own voice among other voices of Crime and Punishment, Ray

realizes his allegiance to both European and African cultures and

influences and understands the difference between himself and the

uneducated masses of Harlem. The nineteenth‐century Russian

writers offer him a counterpart to the European influences. They are

the voices that play an important role in Ray’s formation. Like the

influence of new points of view that present a resolution to the

questions of Raskolnikov’s identity, they help Ray to find answers to

some of his questions.

The alienation of the educated from the uneducated is one of

Dostoyevsky’s most vital concerns. According to Leonid Grossman,


in prison he became aware for the first time that “the cosmopolitan,

socialist dreams of his youth were remote from and even contrary to

the nationality newly revealed to him through his contacts with the

oppressed Russian people.”24 During that time he started to think

about a specific problem of the Russians—the alienation of the

educated and uneducated, of the upper and lower classes. Later on,

he incarnated this alienation in Raskolnikov, the main character of

Crime and Punishment who is attracted to Sonia, a representative of

national culture rooted in the Russian Orthodox Church. Unlike her,

he is an embodiment of “two opposing characters that he describes in

his article on crime” whose very name suggests that he is “split in

two.”25

Raskolnikov’s divided personality that is the result of foreign

influence is revealed from the opening pages of the novel. He wants

to know if he is capable of killing an old woman pawnbroker, Alyona

Ivanovna, whom he considers to be useless. Through this act of

violence he desires to find out if he can prove to himself that he is a

Napoleon, an extraordinary man who has the right to murder in

order to realize his inherent greatness. He thinks that the killing of the

old woman would actually be a noble act and believes that “all is in a

man’s hands.”26 In a tavern, he overhears a conversation during

which a student asks an officer if the killing of a “stupid, senseless,

worthless, spiteful, ailing, horrid old woman” would be beneficial for

the lives of other human beings:

Kill her, take her money and with the help of it devote oneself to the service

of humanity and the good of all. What do you think, would not one tiny

crime be wiped by thousands of good deeds? For one life thousands would

be saved from corruption and decay. One death, and a hundred lives in

exchange—it’s simple arithmetic!27

He happens to hear this conversation “at the very moment” his own

brain is conceiving “the very same idea.”28 Raskolnikov is “driven,

inspired, and ultimately destroyed by an obsession with Napoleon.”29

The French emperor introduces a “complex idea that itself seems to

take on a life of its own, becoming an object of artistic representation,

a living event, discussed by many voices, enacted by many characters,

explored by many minds.”30 His obsession with the idea previously


imprinted in his own mind is further reinforced by the conversation

that he hears.

At the same time, Raskolnikov is a representative of “ordinary”

and “extraordinary” people that he describes in his article on crime

published in the Periodical Review. He thinks that ordinary men must

live in submission and have no right to disobey the law. On the other

hand, extraordinary ones may “transgress the law” as they seek “the

destruction of the present for the sake of the better.”31 He believes that

the first category “preserve the world,” while the second “move the

world and lead it to its goal.”32 According to Richard Peace,

Raskolnikov’s theory has merely externalized his internal conflict:

Thus from the very first the reader is made aware of the disharmony in

Raskolnikov between a ruthless side and a meek side. This dichotomy is

present in scene after scene throughout the novel. The behavior of

Raskolnikov is now self‐assertive, now self‐effacing; now rational, now

irrational; now “bad,” now “good,” and his own ambivalence is both

reflected and heightened through the characters and situations he

encounters.33

When he is drawn to Napoleon, he acts with coldness and rationality.

Other times, he demonstrates kindness and compassion. In his

actions, he is simultaneously “the man of the present” and “the man

of the future“ that he describes in his article. Both superiority and

inferiority complexes are Raskolnikov’s inherent characteristics:

Symbols of aggression evoke in Raskolnikov feelings of submission;

symbols of submission bring out his aggressiveness. The coin of

Raskolnikov’s inner realm, bearing on one side the head of Napoleon, on the

other side, the effigy of a louse, spins in a constant game of “heads and tails”

with his surroundings.34

Even though Raskolnikov is both a Napoleon who wants to rule

the world and a humble man who shows kindness and submission to

his fellow human beings, Napoleonic ideas are the ones that dominate

his thinking and actions for most of the novel. When he confesses his

crime to Sonia, he states that he committed it because he was

following his hero’s example:


It was like this: I asked myself one day this question—what if Napoleon, for

instance, had happened to be in my place, and if he had not had Toulon nor

Egypt, nor the passage of Mont Blanc to begin his career with, but instead of

all those picturesque and monumental things, there had simply been some

ridiculous old hag, a pawnbroker, who had to be murdered too to get

money from her trunk (for his career, you understand). Well, would he have

brought himself to that if there had been no other means? Would he have

felt a pang at its being so far from monumental and… and sinful, too? Well,

I must tell you that I worried myself fearfully over that “question” so that I

was awfully ashamed when I guessed at last (all of a sudden, somehow) that

it would not have given him the least pang, that it would not even have

struck him that it was not monumental… that he would not have seen that

there was anything in it to pause over, and that, if he had had no other way,

he would have strangled her in a minute without thinking about it! Well, I

too… left off thinking about it … murdered her, following his example.35

Although he admits that he felt shame when he realized how

Napoleon would act in his place, he still decides to follow his

footsteps. Unfortunately, he stops thinking about the morality of this

example and turns to its cruelty. In spite of his inability to attain the

expected feelings of greatness, he desperately adheres to his ideal.

Even later on, when the crime that he committed torments him, he

continues to cling to his theory:

Perhaps I’ve been unfair to myself…Perhaps after all I am a man and not a

louse and I’ve been in too great a hurry to condemn myself. I’ll make

another fight for it.36

When Sonia asks him to openly confess the crime, he is “still trying to

convince himself that the killing proved what he wanted to prove”

and thinks that “he is getting away with murder, psychologically, as

long as he can continue to get away with it, legally.”37

Contrary to Raskolnikov, Sonia does not believe in the theory of

extraordinary men. In her opinion, there can be no rationalization of

murder because no human being has the right to kill another. She

completely rejects his theory and demands that he interpret his act as

a crime that he needs to confess. His rationality and individualism are

juxtaposed to Sonia’s morality and inner understanding of right and

wrong that comes from her faith in God. While he is alienated from

the common people, Sonia is embedded in Russian culture and


religion. Through her, Dostoyevsky presents a challenge to

Raskolnikov, a representative of the Russian intelligentsia who has

drifted away from his national morals. The novel asserts that Sonia’s

example of unconditional love and submission to God is much more

valuable than that of Napoleon. Dostoyevsky’s condemnation of

Raskolnikov’s rationality, cruelty, and individualism and his praise of

Sonia’s faith in God, sacrifice, and morality are clearly seen. Even

though Sonia is a prostitute who can only fit the “louse” description

in Raskolnikov’s theory, her inner goodness and integrity are

superior to his values. She is the one who finally helps him to find a

solution to his agonizing problem.

While adherence to Napoleon creates adversity in Raskolnikov’s

life, Sonia’s spirituality, rooted in the Russian Orthodox Church,

brings about a change in his life. Through these two characters,

Dostoyevsky presents his criticism of blind fascination with the West.

As Ellen Chances states in “The Superfluous Man in Russian

Literature,” the westernized heroes of Dostoyevsky’s fiction must

take “a journey through doubt and rational thought in order to come

to an acceptance of Russian spiritual values.”38 Like Alyosha and

Ivan, two protagonists of The Brothers Karamazov, Sonia and

Raskolnikov represent two different value systems to which the

Russian intellectuals of the nineteenth century were exposed. One is

that of sacrifice, consideration for others, and submission to God and

the Russian Orthodox church. The other is that of Western rationality,

egotism, and isolation. Like Ivan Karamazov, a character uprooted

from the Russian soil who questions the very existence of God,

Raskolnikov believes that he is the one who can decide the destiny of

others. In his opinion, it is justifiable to kill a human being in order to

make the world a better place. On the other hand, Sonia and Alyosha

Karamazov share a deep and sincere faith in God and believe that

happiness can never be built on the unhappiness and tears of other

human beings.

Even though at the beginning of the novel Raskolnikov is a proud,

Western‐oriented rationalist who imagines himself to be independent

of Russian spirituality, his ideas change towards the end. At first he

decides to follow the path of Napoleon, but later on he returns to the

second path. The epilogue replaces his rationality and egotism with


the religion and love of Sonia, who accompanies him into exile. His

decision to follow her example shows his final rejection of the

Napoleonic theory:

Raskolnikov’s controversial conversion in Siberia to Sonya’s ethic of

submissive and limitless love for mankind, although it strains credibility to

the limit, is meant to conclude his journey from evil to good, from a

rebellious individualism in which “all is permitted” to a pious acquiescence

in the way things are, however painful and unjust.39

The novel’s structure and development admit the possibility of

Raskolnikov’s ultimate conversion. Through Sonia and her faith in

God, Dostoyevsky demolishes “successful layers of rationalization”

and shows that the Napoleonic type of thinking is “evil and insane.”40

Even though Raskolnikov separates himself from God and Russian

morality when he decides to act upon his theory, he is not a

completely cold, selfish, and rational egotist devoid of any inner

morality:

Although the epilogue has struck many excellent critics as contrived and

extraneous, it emerges from a thorough examination as an essential

component of Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov is psychologically capable

of the metamorphosis he is destined to undergo. He is impelled by a

preternatural force to conceive, commit, and confess the crime. Furthermore,

the numerical motifs, the Lazarus theme, and the nature imagery of the

novel all prepare the reader for the concluding scene. The epilogue is the

inevitable result of all that precedes it and is, in Robert Louis Jackson’s

felicitous phrase, the “transformation of ends into beginnings.”41

The positive side of his inner nature creates the possibility of his

salvation. Like Sonia, he chooses morality and God through his final

acknowledgment of the negative effects of the calculating type of

thinking.

Dostoyevsky’s return to the common people and his realistic

portrayal of their everyday reality are some of his most important

contributions to the development of Russian literature. He not only

theorized about art, but also actively strove to bring art and reality

together. The secret of his popularity lies in “that truthfulness (pravda)

which looks at us from every page of his books and gives them such

irresistible force.”42 A return to the common Russian folk and their


culture is his continious theme. In an 1861 issue of Vremya (Time),

Dostoyevsky writes,

We have come to realize the necessity of our joining with our native soil and

with the people, because without them we cannot exist. We feel that we

have wasted all our forces in a life led separately from the people.43

He realizes the importance of his connection with the Russian masses

and their spirit and urges other writers to turn to the common people

and the culture that they represent. In the February 1861 issue of

Vremya, he insists of a realistic portrayal of their lives:

The important thing is that art is always faithful to reality to the highest

degree, its deviations are fleeting and temporary; art is not only faithful to

reality but cannot be anything else but true to contemporary reality.

Otherwise it would not be real art. The mark of real art is that it is always

contemporary, urgent and useful… Art which is not contemporary and

doesn’t answer contemporary needs cannot exist. If it does exist, it is not art,

it becomes shallow, degenerates, loses its power and all artistic value.44

The alienation of the educated from the uneducated is one of the

main areas of McKay’s affinity with Dostoyevsky. He expresses his

own ambivalence and tensions through the protagonist who reads

Crime and Punishment in Home to Harlem. While Ray’s friend Jake has a

free and unregulated approach to life, Ray displays the dilemma of a

“civilized” West Indian intellectual. By juxtaposing Raskolnikov with

Sonia and Ray with Jake, both Dostoyevsky and McKay question the

positive effects of Western influences on their national identities.

Even though Sonia’s irrationality is rooted in the Russian Orthodox

Church and Jake’s is found in his closer ties to Africa, both writers

convey their preferences for their national sentiments. Parallel to

Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead (1862) and Du Bois’s

The Souls of Black Folk (1903), which share a “deep affinity” and bring

to light “the previously devalued and veiled expressive culture of an

ethnic majority still in bondage to the sovereign contempt of modern

Western civilization,”45 Crime and Punishment and Home to Harlem

reestablish the importance of Russian and Afro‐Caribbean cultural

values.


Home to Harlem, McKay’s first novel, belongs to one of the most

exciting and interesting historical periods, one during which a

growing number of African American writers began to take pride in

their African heritage. Even though some of them disagreed about

their approaches, styles, and philosophies, many of them thought that

it was time to articulate their Afro‐American consciousness.

According to Cooper, even prior to writing his prose, McKay had

established a model of artistic freedom and unrestraint respected by

other Harlem Renaissance writers:

Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella

Larsen, Rudolph Fisher, and Wallace Thurman were all about ten years

younger than McKay, and between 1922 and 1928 they had begun to

produce the kind of freer, more varied and self–assertive literature that had

first been suggested by McKay’s poetry after World War I.46

He was instrumental in encouraging other emerging black writers to

produce the free, more realistic type of literature to which Cooper

refers. Similar to Hughes, McKay demonstrated a strong attachment

to the Negro masses. In his poetry and prose, he depicts and admires

common folks and their warmth and courage in the face of pain. He

points to the importance of the common people as the true keepers of

the African roots and encourages African Americans and Caribbean

blacks to follow cultural values and traditions that their ancestors

brought from Africa.

Although the sincerity of McKay’s intention to define black

culture positively is evident in Ray’s aspiration to come closer to his

African heritage, it is not surprising that his first novel was severely

criticized. Langston Hughes explains this condemnation in the

following way:

The Negro critics and many of the intellectuals were very sensitive about

their race in books. (And still are). In anything that white people were likely

to read, they wanted to put their best foot forward, their politely polished

and cultured foot—and only that foot. There was a reason for it, of course.

They had seen their race laughed at and caricatured so often in stories like

those by Octavus Roy Cohen, maligned and abused so often in books like

Thomas Dixon’s, made a servant or a clown always in the movies, and

forever defeated on the Broadway stage, that when Negroes wrote books

they wanted them to be books in which only good Negroes, clean and


cultured and not‐funny Negroes, beautiful and nice and upper class were

presented. Jessie Fauset’s novels they loved, because they were always

about the educated Negro—but my poems, or Claude McKay’s Home to

Harlem they did not like, sincere though we might be.47

In Home to Harlem, McKay takes pride in the black working class and

contests the middle‐class preoccupation with racial advancement and

its attainment of a foreign culture. He doesn’t focus on middle‐ or

upper‐class African Americans who prefer the portrayal of their

culture to that of the common folks. As an alternative, he chooses to

contrast them with the black masses that he knows intimately.

The first novel placed its writer directly in the center of the

controversy pertaining to the debate aroused by the question of the

portrayal of Negroes. Contemporary reviews of Home to Harlem

clearly reflect different opinions about this issue. W.E. B. Du Bois

stated that the novel nauseated him and “after the dirtier parts of its

filth,” he felt like “taking a bath.”48 Marcus Garvey was just as

negative:

Our race, within recent years, has developed a new group of writers who

have been prostituting their intelligence under the direction of the White

man, to bring out and show up the worst traits of our people. Several of

these writers are American and West Indian Negroes. They have been

writing books, novels and poems, under the advice of White publishers to

portray to the world the looseness, laxity and immorality that are peculiar to

our group; for the purpose of these publishers circulating the libel against us

among the White peoples of the world, is to hold us up to ridicule and

contempt and universal prejudice.49

Both Garvey and Du Bois wrongly accused McKay of

internalizing Western prejudice against their race because they did

not understand the writer’s intention to portray the vitality and

integrity of a Negro culture flowering in the midst of misery,

discrimination, and despair. If anything, he wanted to resist the

“ridicule, contempt and universal prejudice” to which Garvey refers.

Moreover, it is just as unfortunate that many white critics read in his

work only “a confirmation of what they already knew about the

blacks from the widely held social and literary stereotypes.”50

Contrary to the negative reviews, Burton Rascoe in The Bookman


(April 1928) and Aubrey Bowser in the New York Amsterdam News (21

March 1928) gave a more accurate assessment of Home to Harlem and

noted its characterization, use of dialect, and poetic description.51

McKay’s own comments about his novel show the validity of the

positive reviews that it received. In a letter to James Weldon Johnson

dated April 30, 1928, he contests the negative criticism and disagrees

with those who dislike his “artistic exploitation of low‐class Negro

life.”52 Contrary to Du Bois’s and Garvey’s opinions, he considers his

novel to be both a truthful and artistic portrayal of reality.53 In “A

Negro Writer to His Critics,” he asserts,

A Negro writer feeling the urge to write faithfully about the people he

knows from real experience and impartial observation is caught in a

dilemma (unless he possesses a very strong sense of esthetic values)

between the opinion of this group and his own artistic conscientiousness.

If my brethren had taken the trouble to look a little into my obscure life

they would have discovered that years before I had recaptured the spirit of

the Jamaican peasants in verse, rendering their primitive joys, their loves

and hates, their work and play, their dialect. And what I did in prose for

Harlem was very similar to what I had done for Jamaica in verse.53

It was among the black masses that he found deeper African

influences. That is why he preferred the description of their milieu to

that of middle‐ or high‐class Negroes who had drifted away from

their African‐based roots. McKay turns to the folk culture and

expresses his sympathy with the African American working class of

Home to Harlem. Even though Ray feels alienated from the black

masses of Harlem, in no way does he laugh at his race or caricature it.

On the contrary, he desires to come closer to Jake, an Afro‐American

keeper of Negro roots, and he finds beauty, spontaneity, and sincerity

in common people.

His commitment to common folks, initiated in Home to Harlem,

continues in Banjo, his second novel. In the Vieux Port or “the Ditch”

of Marseilles, Ray meets the black diaspora from the United States,

the West Indies, and Africa. The French port becomes the

international setting for McKay’s search for a “revitalised diasporic

black culture” that can challenge postwar colonialism and

imperialism.54 While the diasporic exile community is denied freedom

and equal rights in France, “the Ditch” is a place where the characters


find a sense of belonging and form their own community. Unlike

Goosey, who feels protected from racism in France, Ray understands

the effects of colonialism and perceives France a part of Western

civilization that dehumanizes black people and makes them “labor

under its law,” yet lacks “the spirit to tolerate them within its walls.”55

The French consider themselves to be “the most civilized nation in the

world” that treats black people much better than the Anglo‐Saxon

nations, yet Ray deems the French police to be “the rottenest of the

whole world.”56 In France, as in Anglo‐Saxon nations, he finds

discrimination against his people:

Ray looked deeper than the noise for the truth, and what he really found

was a fundamental contempt for black people quite as pronounced as in

Anglo‐Saxon lands. The common idea of the Negro did not differ from that

of the civilized world in general. There was, if anything, an unveiled

condescension in it that was gall to a Negro who wanted to live his life free

of the demoralizing effect of being pitied and patronized.57

In Banjo, McKay praises the lifestyle of his black characters and

questions a stereotypical approach to race:

Ray refused to accept the idea of the Negro simply as a “problem.” All of life

was a problem. White people, like red and brown people, had their

problems. And of the highest importance was the problem of the individual,

from which some people thought they could escape by joining

movements.58

In Ray’s opinion, the Negro presents a challenge to Western

civilization. In his race, he finds a sincerity and openness that he

admires:

From his experience, it was white people who were the great wearers of

veils, shadowing their lives and the lives of other peoples by them. Negroes

were too fond of the sunny open ways of living, to hide behind any kind of

veil. If the Negro had to be defined, there was every reason to define him as

a challenge rather than a “problem” to Western civilization.59

Through Ray, McKay contests Du Bois’s definition of ordinary

African Americans as wearers of veils. While, according to McKay, a

civilized white person, an educated African American, or a Caribbean


intellectual who strives to be white may have to see himself through

the eyes of the others, the Caribbean and African American masses

are free from that restraint. Contrary to Du Bois’s opinion of the

“history of the American Negro” as the struggle to “attain self‐

conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer

self,”60 McKay’s characters are worthy of respect, dignity, and

admiration just the way they are. Unlike those influenced by Western

education and culture, they don’t feel a need to lose their identity in

order to escape white society’s stereotypes.

Yet Ray feels that he is caught in between two worlds, that of his

African heritage and that of Western civilization. That is why he

thinks that it is easier for Banjo, someone who “in all matters acted

instinctively,” to be himself in the white world.61 It is much more

difficult for him, a black intellectual, to find his way in the white

man’s civilization. In spite of this, however, he doesn’t want his

intellect to take control over his soul:

But of one thing he was resolved: civilization would not take the love of

color, joy, beauty, vitality, and nobility out of his life and make him like one

of the poor mass of its pale creatures. Before he was aware of what was the

big drift of this Occidental life he had fought against it instinctively, and

now that he had grown and broadened and knew it better, he could bring

intellect to the aid of instinct.62

In Banjo, McKay continues the realistic portrayal of the Negro

masses first started in Home to Harlem. Again his voice is heard

through his main character, Ray. In response to Goosey’s advice to

write about “race men and women” who make a good living in Paris,

he states that he is not a reporter for the Negro press and cannot keep

up with black “society folk” of Paris who might prefer to have

Monsieur Paul Morand, “a society writer,” describe them.63 He does

not think that upper‐ or middle‐class black folks are good examples of

his race:

I can’t see that. They say you find the best Negro society in Washington.

When I was there the government clerks and school‐ teachers and the wives

of the few professional men formed a group and called themselves the

“upper classes.” They were nearly all between your complexion and near‐

white. The women wore rich clothes and I don’t know whether it was that


or their complexions or their teaching or clerking ability that put them in the

“upper class.” In my home we had an upper class of Negroes, but it had big

money and property and power. It wasn’t just a moving‐picture imitation.

School‐teachers and clerks didn’t make any ridiculous pretenses of

belonging to it…. I could write about the society of Negroes you mean if I

wrote a farce.64

Ray finds the imitation of the upper class by the middle‐class

North American Negroes amusing. He attacks their hypocrisy and

snobbery:

Gee! I remember when I was in college in America how those Negroes

getting an education could make me tired talking class and class all the time.

It was funny and it was sad. There was hardly one of them with the upper‐

class bug on the brain who didn’t have a near relative—a brother or sister

who was an ignorant chauffeur, butler, or maid, or a mother paying their

way through college with her washtub. If you think it’s fine for the society

Negroes to fool themselves on the cheapest of imitations, I don’t. I am fed

up with class.65

This comical imitation irritates Ray. He prefers the truth rather than

lies, pretensions, and hypocrisy. Therefore, he turns to the masses that

he finds to be much more honest and real.

McKay shows his protest against the misunderstanding aroused

by his first novel. In a conversation that takes place between Ray and

Goosey, the latter rebukes his friends for their self‐derogatory Negro

jokes and especially for their use of the word nigger in the presence of

Kid Irish, a white person. He believes that they shouldn’t make

“colored jokes” because “the weak and comic side of race life can’t

further race advancement.”66 When Ray tells Goosey to shut up and

stop talking like a “nigger newspaper,” he expresses his outrage.

Goosey is surprised to hear the word “nigger” from Ray, an educated

Haitian. In his angry response to Goosey, Ray states,

“Yes, nigger,” repeated Ray. “I didn’t say ‘niggah’ the way you and the

crackers say it, but ‘nigger’ with the gritty ‘r’ in it to express exactly what I

feel about you and all coons like you. I know you think that a coon is a

Negro like Banjo and Ginger, but you’re fooling yourself. They are real and

you are the coon—a stage thing, a made‐up thing. I said nigger newspaper

because a nigger newspaper is nothing more than a nigger newspaper.

Something like you, half baked, half educated, full of false ideas about


Negroes, because it can’t hold its head up out of its miserable purgatory.

That is why we—you—the race—can’t get beyond the nigger newspaper in

the printed world. That’s why an intelligent man reads it only for the

comic—the joke that it is. You talk about niggerism. Good Lord! You are a

perfect example of niggerism.67

Through Ray, McKay presents his criticism of the black leaders and

their strong middle‐class orientation that contributes to the neglect of

the richness of their African heritage. Even though “a superior class of

Negroes” uses the word “Niggerism” to “denote certain uncultured

Negroid traits,” McKay believes the Negro artist should make use of

peculiar characteristics of Negroes in his work and describes the

phenomenon of “Niggerism” as a part of “the eternal wine and

beauty of life” that the artist should pay attention to.68 Ray believes

that until black intellectuals acknowledge their racial heritage, they

will never produce a real renaissance:

And I wonder how we’re going to get it. On one side we’re up against the

world’s arrogance—a mighty cold hard white stone thing. On the other the

great sweating army—our race. It’s the common people, you know, who

furnish the bone and sinew and salt of any race or nation. In the modern

race of life we’re merely beginners. If this renaissance we’re talking about is

going to be more than a sporadic and scabby thing, we’ll have to get down

to our racial roots to create it.69

Ray suggests turning for example to “whites of a different type”; he

recommends that blacks turn their backs on “all these tiresome clever

European novels” and instead study the Irish cultural and social

movement, the struggle of the Russian peasants, the great Russian

novelists up to the time of the Russian Revolution, the story of

Gandhi and his contribution to India, and “the simple beauty” of the

African dialects.70

His challenge to take pride in Negro roots also extends to the

West Indian elite. In chapter XVI of Banjo, “The ‘Blue Cinema,’”

McKay shows that colonizers have achieved success in dividing West

Indians from Africans. At the beginning of the chapter, Ray meets a

student from Martinique who is proud of the fact that Empress

Josephine was born in his island. He thinks that most people from

there are Creole rather than Negro, and “the best people” of


Martinique speak a “pure French.”71 When Ray asks the Martinican to

meet an African from the Ivory Coast, he refuses to go with him to the

African bar, saying that the white French changed their attitude

toward black people because of the Senegalese who came to France.72

Ray challenges his superior attitude:

You must judge civilization by its general attitude toward primitive peoples,

and not by the exceptional cases. You can’t get away from the Senegalese

and other black Africans any more than you can from the fact that our

forefathers were slaves.73

He goes on to tell the Martinican student that his white education is

the source of his blindness:

“You are like many Negro intellectuals who are belly‐aching about race,”

said Ray. “What is wrong with you‐all is your education. You get a white

man’s education and learn to despise your own people. You read biased

history of the whites conquering the colored and primitive peoples, and it

thrills you just as it does a white boy belonging to a great white nation.”74

In Banjo, Ray continues his search for an authentic artistic

expression and conducts a more complex, longer‐lasting dialogue

with Tolstoy. This “great Russian” and “fanatic moralist” is his ideal

of the artist.75 Ray understands that his nature, his outlook, and his

attitude toward life are significantly different from those of Tolstoy,

yet he is very responsive to the Russian writer:

What lifted him up and carried him away, after Tolstoy’s mighty art was his

equally mighty life of restless searching within and without, and energetic

living to find himself until the very end. Rimbaud moved him with the same

sympathy, but Tolstoy’s appeal was stronger, because he lived longer and

was the greater creator.76

Even though at the end of the novel, Ray is still favoring his intellect,

Tolstoy’s writings bring him closer to the black men of Marseilles

who possess more potential for racial salvation than the Negro

intelligentsia. As Ray notes, the black international masses he meets

in Marseilles teach him how to exist as a black man in a white world

and how to rid his consciousness of “the used‐up hussy white

morality.”77 In them, he finds sincerity, warmth, and a sense of


community that he thinks are not characteristic of the “civilized”

upper or middle classes.

Parallel to Tolstoy’s characters who experience freedom and relief

away from Western civilization that diminishes humanity, Ray of

Banjo feels safe and protected among the masses of the African

diaspora. In them he admires the roots saturated in African culture:

They inspired him with confidence in them. Short of extermination by the

Europeans, they were a safe people, protected by their own indigenous

culture. Even though they stood bewildered before the imposing bigness of

white things, apparently unaware of the invaluable worth of their own, they

were naturally defended by the richness of their own fundamental racial

values.78

His close association with the Africans makes him feel that he is not

merely “an unfortunate accident of birth,” but that he belongs to a

race “weighed, tested, and poised in the universal scheme.”79 They

encourage him to take pride in his African heritage and to be

confident in his own race and culture.

However, unlike the Tolstoy McKay admires, who comes closer to

the Russian peasants in whom he finds the intelligence, vitality, and

true expression of Russian culture, Ray merely looks nostalgically at

the Africans. He understands that they are the true keepers of the

African soul and admires their simple and genuine approach to life.

Yet, even though he describes his contact with them as “a sensual‐

sweet feeling” that he can’t resist,80 he also realizes he can’t “scrap his

intellectual life and be entirely like them.”81 Unlike McKay’s Tolstoy,

who “had turned his back on the intellect as guide to find himself in

Ivan Durak,”82 Ray cannot reconcile his Western education and Afro‐

Caribbean heritage within himself.

Ivan the Fool, the example to which Ray refers in Banjo, is a

prototype of the unselfish, caring, and hardworking peasant in

Tolstoy’s “Ivan the Fool or the Old Devil and the Three Small Devils.”

Unlike his selfish, uncaring brothers, he deserves respect and

admiration. At the beginning of the tale, Simeon leaves home to serve

in the army and Tarras‐Briukhan (fat man) goes to the city to become

a merchant, but Ivan continues to work on the family farm and takes

care of his parents and dumb sister.83 Even though Ivan’s brothers


consider him to be an irrational fool, on several occasions he shows

them that he is actually smarter than they are. When Simeon receives

no more income from the army and Tarras is not satisfied with his life

as a rich merchant, both of them go back home to ask for one‐third of

their father’s possessions. Unselfish Ivan gives them their portion of

the household—the result of his own hard work.84 Three little devils

then devastate Ivan’s brothers, but they cannot destroy Ivan. All three

of them disappear when he tells them to go away with God’s

blessing.

While the “old devil” has no trouble destroying the lives of Ivan’s

brothers, he can’t trick Ivan and the other peasants. When the soldiers

of the Tarakanian ruler try to conquer Ivan’s kingdom, the peasants

invite them to live with them, saying: “If you, dear friends, find it

difficult to earn a living in your own land, come and live with us,

where everything is plentiful.”85 When the father devil transforms

himself into a nobleman and tries to seduce them with gold, the

peasants don’t consider it to be more important than the eggs,

chickens, and fish that they have.86 The devil can’t convince the

peasants that wise men don’t need to labor with their hands. They

laugh at him when he tries to teach them that mental work is more

beneficial than manual labor. At the end of the tale the old devil

disappears, but Ivan and his kingdom still survive. Ivan’s faith in

God, his ties to the land and the family, his dedication to his work,

and his kindness are admirable qualities. On the other hand, his

brothers’ selfishness, rationality, and desire for material possessions

are the causes of their destruction.

Tolstoy’s commitment to common folk and his criticism of the

upper class is also evident in his famous essay “What is Art?” (1898).

He points to the artistically simple narratives of the Bible, the Gospel

parables, folk legends, fairy tales, and folk songs as the highest forms

of art that are understood by everyone. In contrast, the art of the

upper classes is separate from the people and “poor in content and

bad in form.”87 Tolstoy opposes those critics who feel that it is

important to compare one’s work to that of the already established

models:

Dante was considered a great poet, Raphael a great painter, Bach a great

musician, and the critics, having no standard by which to distinguish good


art from bad, not only consider these artists still great, but also consider all

the works of these artists great and worthy of imitation. Nothing has

contributed and still contributes so much to the perversion of art as these

authorities set up by criticism.88

He believes that an author produces an original type of art if it is

based on his or her personal feelings and concerns. However, if an

artist listens to the critics who say that his work makes him no Dante

or Shakespeare, he will start to imitate those who are set up as an

example for him and will produce weak, counterfeit works. He

considers Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and Gypsies to be works of true art,

but he describes Boris Godunov, the play influenced by Shakespeare,

as a “cold, cerebral work.”89

McKay has a similar approach. In Home to Harlem, Ray asks what

art is, and in Banjo he tells Goosey that there is no need to emulate

somebody else’s culture, for there is always something special and

unique about black culture:

If I am a real story‐teller, I won’t worry about the differences in complexion

of those who listen and those who don’t, I will just identify myself with

those who are really listening and tell my story. You see, Goosey, a good

story, in spite of those who tell it and those who hear it, is like good ore that

you might find in any soil—Europe, Asia, Africa, America. The world wants

the ore and gets it by a thousand men scrambling and fighting, digging and

dying for it. The world gets its story the same way.90

Ray says that he desires to present a realistic portrayal of life. When

Goosey says that he might bring up a lot of dirt by describing the

everyday reality of the Ditch, he states that steel, gold, pearls, and

other rare stones come out of dirt.91

An affirmation of one’s national culture and an attempt to escape

the supremacy of Western forms and standards are also characteristic

of Alexander Pushkin, the beloved and respected Russian poet, prose

writer, and dramatist. In Eugene Onegin, his famous novel in verse, he

represents ideals rooted in Russian culture and traditions. According

to Apollon Grigor’ev, a leading nineteenth‐century Russian “native

soil” thinker, Pushkin is proof of Russian universality.92 As “a great

artist,” he embodies the trends of his time in the two types of

characters that he creates—“the rapacious or predatory (khishchnyi)”


one represented by Onegin and “the humble (smirnyi) type”

represented by Tatiana.93 Incorporation of the foreign ideas that had

entered Russia with the reforms of Peter the Great and the remaining

essence of Russian culture find expression in the poet’s intimate

knowledge and understanding of both Tatiana and Onegin, his

protagonists.

From the opening pages, Pushkin presents a clear, complete, and

accurate portrayal of Onegin. He introduces this westernized hero in

the following way:

Onegin, meet him, born and nourished

Where old Neva’s gray waters flow,

Where you were born, or, as a beau,

It may be, in your glory flourished,

I moved there also for a while,

But find the North is not my style.94

Onegin is nurtured near the Neva in a city built by Peter the Great.

He is a bored, spoiled young man who spends three hours before the

mirror prior to going out, speaks and writes French, and cuts his hair

in “the latest mode.”95 In his description, the poet mockingly states

that “the learned world” would have him mention “each detail” of his

attire. Like his knowledge and preferences, his outer appearance is

also foreign. Although Onegin realizes that much of his life has been

spent in vain, he confesses that he would “live through every ball

again.”96 However, the modern trends to which Onegin conforms

soon bore him, and he tries his hand at writing:

His door he locks, his lamp he trims.

He yawns, for serious labor tires him,

His page is empty as can be,

The pen makes mock of such as he.97

Despite his efforts, however, writing is also unsatisfying. Nothing can

fulfill the corrupted, empty inner nature of this character.

As the action progresses, Pushkin transfers Onegin from the

westernized atmosphere of Petersburg to the Russian countryside.

Upon the death of his uncle, he inherits an estate in the country where

he meets Tatiana, a girl who falls in love with him because she


imagines him to be one of the characters from the novels that she

reads:

Malek‐Adhel and de Linar,

St. Preux, the rival of Wolmar,

And Grandison, who leaves us sleeping,

The matchless bore—on these she mused:

And all, our tender dreamer fused

Into one image, her heart leaping

As fancy in the lot would trace

Onegin’s form, Onegin’s face.98

Tatiana is also exposed to foreign culture and its values. Even though

she has not wholly assimilated Western influences, she conforms to

them. When she falls madly in love with Onegin and writes him a

letter, she chooses French to express her deep and sincere feelings:

Tatyana read no Russian journal,

She did not speak the language well

And found it rather hard to spell;

And so of course the girl decided

To write in French …What’s to be done?

For lady never, no, not one,

Her love in Russian has confided.99

Despite Tatiana’s outward adherence to Western standards,

however, inwardly she still remains true to her Russia background

and its values. This internal predilection for her own culture helps her

to make a correct assessment of who Onegin really is. When she

enters his study with its “haughty portrait of Lord Byron” and its pile

of books, she realizes that her object of love is nothing else but “a

foreign joke,” “a wretched ghost,” and “a parody.”100 After a careful

examination of his books, she understands their negative influence on

Onegin:

Lord Byron’s tales, which well consorted

With two or three bright‐backed imported

Romances, upon every page

Exhibiting the present age,

And modern man’s true soul divulging:


A creature arid, cold, and vain,

Careless of others’ joy and pain.101

Perhaps at that moment, she can better understand his cold, selfish

and careless response to a love letter that she had written to him

earlier. As Tatiana looks through all the pencil‐marks in his books,

she finds them “unconsciously revealing” of who Onegin really is:

So Tanya bit by bit is learning

The truth, and, God be praised, can see

At last for whom her heart is yearning

By Fate’s imperious decree.102

Even though Tatiana falls blindly in love with him at the beginning of

the novel, later on she starts to question his worth. “Is he from

Heaven or from Hades?” asks the heroine as she begins to reevaluate

the impact of foreign ideas on Onegin:

Angel or fiend, as you prefer,

What is he? A mere imitation,

A Muscovite in Harold’s cloak,

A wretched ghost, a foreign joke

But with a new interpretation,

A lexicon of snobbery

And fashion, or a parody?103

Marriage between these two characters is impossible due to their

significant differences. Onegin is an example of the “superfluous

man” who cannot fit into his immediate environment.104 He is so

rooted in the westernized environment of Petersburg and feels like an

exile in the country. On the other hand, Tatiana was born in the

country, a place where she has strong roots and enjoys living. When

she marries an elderly Russian general, moves to Petersburg and

meets Onegin again, she still thinks of her home fondly:

To me, Onegin, all these splendors,

The tinsel of unwelcome days,

The homage that the gay world tenders,

My handsome house and my soirées—

To me all this is naught.

This minute I’d give my house and all that’s in it,


This giddy play in fancy‐dress,

For a few books, a wilderness

Of flowers, for our modest dwelling,

The scene where first I saw your face,

Onegin, that familiar place,

And for the simple churchyard, telling

Its tale of humble lives, where now

My poor nurse sleeps beneath the bough…105

Unlike Onegin, to whom appearances and facades are more

important than genuine feelings, Tatiana has deep and authentic

emotions and prefers the country’s simplicity to the glamour of

Petersburg life. At the end, she rejects his love not because of her

position as “a lady of fashion and the newly engendered ideals of

fashionable society,” but because she fully comprehends his foreign

nature.106 The metropolis doesn’t spoil her; on the contrary, “she

suffers and feels oppressed by the pomp of Petersburg life.”107

Onegin is not Pushkin’s ideal, worthy of respect and adoration.

He condemns his arrogance and superficiality when he implicitly

states through his narrator that he did not intend to portray himself

through his hero:

To love and idleness devoted,

To flowery field and village sport,

With pleasure I have often noted

That I am not Onegin’s sort;

Let no sly reader be so daring—

Onegin’s traits with me comparing—

And no calumnious friend so pert

As some time later to assert

That here, for all the world to know it,

I’ve drawn a likeness perfectly:

A portrait of none else but me…108

From the very beginning, Pushkin wants his readers to understand

his purpose and not to confuse him with this westernized character.

That is why he asserts that “the North” where Onegin was born and

raised is not his “style”109 and implicitly shows his preference and

admiration for Tatiana.


The heroine’s simplicity, inner sincerity, and depth are juxtaposed

with Onegin’s pretentiousness, hypocrisy, and superficiality. At the

end, Tatiana understands that her beloved is someone to whom

appearances are much more important than real feelings:

You lectured me, I listened, meek;

Today it is my turn to speak.

…Then, far from Moscow’s noise and glitter,

Off in the wilds—is it not true?

You did not like me… That was bitter,

But worse, what now you choose to do!

Why do you pay me these attentions?

Because society’s conventions,

Deferring to my wealth and rank,

Have given me prestige? Be frank!110

Tatiana is a representative of the Russian values that Pushkin

admires. At the end of the novel, she chooses not to respond to

Onegin’s confession of love because she is an unselfish, caring woman

who considers the feelings of her husband, a general to whom she

swore to be a faithful wife.

Parallel to Tatiana, who finally understands that Onegin is

nothing more than an imitation of foreign ideas and principals, is Bita

Plant, the protagonist of McKay’s last novel. Bita rebels against

Herald Newton Day, the pretentious westernized character who

doesn’t fit into the Jamaican community, and chooses the peasant life

instead. It is possible that Bita’s choice of the country over the city

represents McKay’s “final refusal to accept the new city identity of the

new world’s black population—a repudiation, in part at least, of his

romanticism of Harlem and Marseille.”111

McKay’s search for a particular Caribbean identity that started on

the pages of Home to Harlem and continued in Banjo can be perceived

as his coherent attempt to articulate the personal problems of the

black intellectual and create a type of writing rooted in African

culture and traditions. The collective entity of the folk rather than the

individual was of major significance to the Slavophiles. A character’s

integration with his or her culture and its values is also important to

McKay. Similar to Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy, who strove to

portray the Russian people of the nineteenth century truthfully, he


worked towards a unique and distinctive depiction of the Caribbean

and African American people of the twentieth century. A return to

the “native soil” and respect for his own people and culture are some

of the tendencies that he shares with them. The “penitent nobleman”

desires to come close to the masses and becomes “creatively active” in

the Russian literature of the nineteenth century.112 McKay’s Ray also

gains strength through contact with the cultural treasure of Africa

and with ordinary black folk.

However, unlike Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, who finally rejects

the Napoleonic type of thinking and returns to the national

sentiments embedded in Russian Orthodoxy, Ray cannot fully reject

Western education in defining his Afro‐Caribbean identity. He is an

alienated West Indian intellectual who desires to come closer to the

masses, but though he is fascinated with Tolstoy, he is not able to

fully assimilate his example. Ray understands the contradictions

between intellect and instinct, but he doesn’t want to forsake either

one of them. While his contact with the black community of Banjo

brings him closer to his African‐based roots, he is unable to undergo a

complete change.

Notes

1 Alexander Pushkin qtd. by Kathleen Ahern, “Images of Pushkin in the Works of

the Black Pilgrims” in The Mississipi Quarterly 55.1 (2001), p. 76. 2 Feodor Dostoyevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, translated by Richard

Lee Renfield (New York, Toronto and London: McGraw‐Hill, 1955), p. 57. 3 Claude McKay, Home to Harlem, p. 159. 4 Peterson, p. 6. 5 p. 38. 6 Claude McKay, pp. 68–69. 7 Bruce K. Ward, Dostoyevsky’s Critique of the West: The Quest for the Earthly Paradise

(Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 1986), p. 11. 8 p. 146. 9 p. 146. 10 Ward, p. 67. 11 Ward, p. 67. 12 Ward, p. 13.


13 Ellen Chances, “The Superfluous Man in Russian Literature” in Reference Guide to

Russian Literature, ed. Neil Cornwell and N. Christian (London: Fitzroy Dearborn,

1998), p. 30. 14 Wayne Dowler, Dostoevsky, Grigor’ev, and Native Soil Conservatism (Toronto: U of

Toronto P, 1982), p. 80. 15 Dowler, p. 82. 16 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,

1984), p. 8. 17 p. 20. 18 Bakhtin, p. 238. 19 Bakhtin, pp. 238–239. 20 p. 106. 21 p. 106. 22 Bakhtin, p. 238. 23 pp. 158–159. 24 Qtd. by Dowler, p. 66. In 1849, the secret police of Nicolas I arrested Dostoyevsky

and other members of the Petrashevsky circle for their adherence to the European

revolutions of 1848 and their criticism of the Russian social order. Following the

arrest, Dostoyevsky was sent to Siberia, where he lived in prison camp for the next

four years. 25 Richard Peace, Dostoyevsky: An Examination of the Major Novels (Cambridge:

Cambridge UP, 1971), p. 34. 26 p. 1. 27 p. 53. 28 p. 53. 29 Shoshana Knapp, “The Dynamics of the Idea of Napoleon in Crime and

Punishment” in Dostoevski and the Human Condition after a Century, ed. Alexej

Ugrinsky, Frank S. Lambasa and Valija K. Ozolins (Westport: Greenwood, 1986), p.

31. 30 Knapp, p. 31. 31 p. 203. 32 p. 203. 33 p. 35. 34 Peace, p. 36. 35 p. 323. 36 p. 328. 37 Knapp, p. 38. 38 p. 33. 39 Rufus Mathewson, The Positive Hero in Russian Literature (Stanford, California:

Stanford UP, 1975), p. 20. 40 Mathewson, p. 20. 41 David Matual, “In Defense of the Epilogue of Crime and Punishment” in Studies in

the Novel 24.1 (Spring 92), p. 33.


42 V.V. Zenkovskii, Russian Thinkers and Europe, translated by Galia S. Bodde (Paris:

Young Men’s Christian Association, 1926), p. 155. 43 Qtd. by Zenkovskii, p. 158. 44 Qtd. by Dowler, p. 117. 45 Peterson, p. 80. 46 Claude McKay, pp. 238–239. 47 The Collected Works, p. 204. 48 “Review of Home to Harlem” in Crisis XXXV (Sep. 1928), p. 202. 49 ”Home to Harlem, Claude McKay’s Damaging Book Should Earn Wholesale

Condemnation of Negroes” in Negro World September 29, 1928, p. 1. 50 Amritjit Singh, The Novels of the Harlem Renaissance: Twelve Black Writers, 1923–

1933 (University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State UP, 1976), p. 46. 51 Singh, p. 46. 52 CMPJ 13‐38. 53 CMPJ 13‐38. 53 pp. 133, 135. 54 Carl Pedersen, “Olaudah Equiano, Claude McKay, Caryl Phillips and the

Extended Caribbean” in Prospero’s Isles: The Presence of the Caribbean in the American

Imaginary, ed. Diane Accaria‐Zavala and Rodolfo Popelnik (Oxford: Macmillan, 2004),

p. 144. 55 p. 314. 56 p. 274. 57 p. 275. 58 p. 272. 59 pp. 272–273. 60 The Souls of Black Folk, p. 17. 61 p. 164. 62 p. 164. 63 p. 116. 64 p. 116. 65 pp. 116–117. 66 pp. 182–183. 67 p. 183. 68 Claude McKay, “Negro Life and Negro Art,” James Weldon Johnson Papers,

NAACP Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., pp. 4–6. 69 Banjo, p. 200. 70 p. 201. 71 p. 199. 72 p. 200. 73 p. 200. 74 pp. 200–201. 75 p. 66. 76 p. 66.


77 p. 322. 78 p. 320. 79 p. 320. 80 p. 316. 81 p. 322. 82 The Russian word durak that McKay uses in Banjo is translated as “the fool” in

English. Ivan Durak or Ivan the Fool is a Russian folkloric character who often

outwits those who consider him a fool. 83 p. 11. 84 p. 13. 85 p. 67. 86 p. 71. 87 p. 84. 88 p. 95. 89 p. 96. 90 p. 115. 91 p. 115. 92 Dowler, p. 58. 93 Dowler, p. 59. 94 p. 5. 95 pp. 6, 12. 96 p. 14. 97 p. 17. 98 p. 46. 99 p. 51. 100 p.124. 101 p. 123. 102 p. 124. 103 p. 124. 104 The “superfluous man” (lishniy chelovek) is a term that, since the mid‐nineteenth

century, has been most commonly used in Russian literature to refer to certain

characters, beginning with Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and extending to Turgenev’s The

Diary of a Superfluous Man. These are tragic or romantic heroes who are usually

unappreciated outsiders and feel alienated in the societies in which they live. 105 p. 154. 106 Feodor Dostoyevsky, “Pushkin: A Sketch” in Russian Intellectual History: An

Anthology, ed. Marc Raeff (New Jersey: Humanities, 1992), p. 293. 107 Dostoyevsky, p. 293. 108 p. 21. 109 p. 5. 110 pp. 152–153. 111 Elaine Campbell, “Two West Indian Heroines: Bita Plant and Fola Piggott” in

Caribbean Quarterly 29.2 (June 1983), p. 26.


112 V.V. Zenkovskii, Russian Thinkers and Europe, trans. Galia S. Bodde (Paris: Young

Men’s Christian Association, 1926), p. 115.

CHAPTER 4

Russian Writers and Claude McKay, C.L.R.

James, and Ralph de Boissière as Early Creators

of Anglophone Caribbean Literature

Bananas ripe and green and ginger‐root,

Cocoa in pods and alligator pears,

Fit for the highest prize at parish fairs…

My eyes grew dim, and I could no more gaze;

A wave of longing through my body swept,

And, hungry for the old, familiar ways,

I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.1

In Banana Bottom, Claude McKay develops the ideas first initiated in

Home to Harlem and Banjo even further. Bita Plant, the protagonist of

the third novel, continues the search for a particular Afro‐Caribbean

identity started by Ray within North American and French settings

and completes it in an authentic Jamaican environment. If in the first

two novels, Ray’s engagement in a surrogate dialogue with Russian

writers leads simply to a discussion of the importance of African

heritage within a Caribbean identity, in Banana Bottom there is an

action, an actual integration of an educated colonial with the common

Jamaican people and the Afro‐Jamaican culture that they represent.

The heroine’s uprooting from the nurturing Afro‐Jamaican soil leads

to her fervent attachment to its cultural and spiritual values. In his

last novel, McKay actually applies the example of the Russian authors

to an Anglophone Caribbean context and resolves the psychological

dilemma of his previous novels.

Cultural dualism, a deep appreciation of the lower classes,

criticism of the middle class for imitating foreign ideas and principles,

and a desire to come closer to the masses are the most important

issues and concerns that McKay shares with C.L.R. James and Ralph

104 RUSSIAN WRITERS, MCKAY, JAMES, AND DE BOISSIÈRE

de Boissière, his Trinidadian contemporaries. While Russian literature

of the nineteenth century enables McKay and de Boissière to see the

importance of the native intellectual’s connection with the common

Caribbean folk and their values, involvement with Marxism provides

a way for James and de Boissière to portray the dispossessed masses

as builders of their own history. The integrity, strength, and sincerity

of the Jamaican, Haitian, and Trinidadian peasants and working class

captivate these authors, shape their political outlooks, and make them

give birth to a distinct Caribbean identity.2

Despite these authors’ importance in the creation of West Indian

literature, the development of a type of literature different from its

European counterparts is problematic within the Caribbean colonial

context in which all efforts had been made to enforce foreign culture

on the natives. The Russian proletariat’s task of creating a culture

different from the bourgeois one that had for centuries existed in pre‐

revolutionary Russia was not “as simple as it seems at first glance.”3 It

was also not easy for these Caribbean‐born intellectuals to escape

from white European dominance in their artistic development.

In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon differentiates three

phases that characterize the evolution of Caribbean writers. While in

the first the intellectual “gives proof that he has assimilated the

culture of the occupying power,” in the second “the native is

disturbed: he decides to remember who he is.”4 It is only in the third

phase that he or she is able to create a type of writing embedded in

his or her roots:

Finally, in the third phase, which is called the fighting phase, the native,

after having tried to lose himself in the people and with the people, will on

the contrary shake the people. Instead of according the people’s lethargy an

honored place in his esteem, he turns himself into an awakener of the

people; hence comes a fighting literature, a revolutionary literature, and a

national literature. During this phase a great many men and women who up

till then would never have thought of producing a literary work, now that

they find themselves in exceptional circumstances—in prison, with the

Maquis, or on the eve of their execution—feel the need to speak to their

nation, to compose the sentence which expresses the heart of the people, and

to become the mouthpiece of a new reality in action.5


The colonial system of education forced West Indians to

assimilate the foreign culture to which Fanon refers. In “A Moscow

Lady,” the article published in Crisis in September 1924, McKay states

that his subjection to Anglo‐Saxon world monopolists was his “only

inheritance.”6 In “Ideas of Patriotism and National Dignity,” Leo

Oakley describes the prevailing British influences that for centuries

dominated Jamaica:

As it were, Colonial Jamaica was never encouraged to have any sense of

national dignity—at least not until the “Mother Country” saw which way

the wind was blowing. We were to have instead a sort of Empire dignity,

and the literature was really a by‐product of an education system geared to

ensure loyalty to England, and designed to make us look outside for

standards and values.7

Ralph de Boissière refers to Trinidadian students who could not

receive an education grounded in their own culture and traditions

either:

We learned English history, which seemed to consist mostly of England’s

military and naval conquests. In geography you had to know what was

made in Sheffield and Birmingham. You were required to draw maps of

England showing its principal towns and seaports.8

Despite this, many intellectuals rebelled against the imposed

system. While Haitian literature had demonstrated nationalistic

characteristics and started to differ from its continental precursor as

early as 1804,9 the literature of most Anglophone Caribbean islands

became less imitative of British standards and forms only at the

beginning of the twentieth century. In their protest against foreign

domination, Anglophone Caribbean writers looked to Haiti, a country

founded upon the defeat of whites.

As Amon Saba Saakana states in The Colonial Legacy in Caribbean

Literature, several political factors contributed to the development of

nationalist and race consciousness in the Afro‐Caribbean people

during the 1900–1944 period.10 The Boer War of 1900 that was highly

publicized in all Caribbean newspapers served to highlight the

oppression of black people. Veterans returning from the First World

War were disappointed with the racism of the British on whose side


they fought, and they “extended this racial consciousness to their

brethren at home and pushed them to move against the limited

opportunities of black people in their own societies.”11

Furthermore, as Afro‐Caribbean people got involved with Marcus

Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement and Conservation

Association and African Communities League, an organization that

became popularly known as UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement

Association), their sense of racial and social justice also increased.

Garvey placed importance on Africa as the original homeland of

Caribbean blacks and argued that the 1917 Soviet Revolution had to

be used as an example in the struggle for African emancipation.12 The

UNIA newspaper Negro World that was widely distributed in the

Caribbean referred to Lenin as “probably the world’s greatest man

between 1917 and 1924.”13 Even though UNIA was based in the

United States, it established 1,120 branches in forty countries with

Cuba alone having fifty‐two branches, more than any other territory

in the world except the United States.14

The writers’ West Indian consciousness grew as they became

involved in the struggles of their people and started to pay attention

to their native culture and traditions. Contrary to “an analysis of

character in relation to the manners and morals operative in a given

period,” the main pattern of nineteenth‐century English literature,

most West Indian writers became “as much interested in society as in

character.”15 In “The Peasant Roots of the West Indian Novel,” George

Lamming describes this interest in the following way:

The education of all these (West Indian) writers is more or less middle‐class

Western culture, and particularly English culture. But the substance of their

books, the general motives and directions, are peasant….

Why is it that Reid, Mittelholzer in his early work, Selvon, Neville

Dawes, Roger Mais, Andrew Salkey, Jan Carew—why is it that their work is

shot through and through with the urgency of peasant life? And how has it

come about that their colonial education should not have made them pursue

the general ambitions of non‐provincial writers. How is it that they have not

to play at being the Eliots and Henry Jameses of the West Indies? Instead,

they move nearer to Mark Twain.16

Since West Indian societies at the beginning of the twentieth century

were primarily agrarian communities made of peasants, Lamming


continues, West Indian novelists started to describe peasants in a

more positive way.17

Claude McKay is one of the first authors to affirm the importance

of a peasant culture within an Anglophone Caribbean context. He

made his literary name in the United States, but he never forgot his

homeland and imaginatively returned to it in his poetry and prose.

Despite his “paradoxical personality, characterized by a deep‐seated

ambivalence,” his security was always anchored to a positive identity

that he found in the black Jamaican peasantry.18 The community‐

oriented society and many cultural similarities between Jamaica and

Morocco that he observed while living in Africa made it possible to

create Banana Bottom (1933), a Caribbean novel that anticipates many

patterns and themes of subsequent West Indian writing.

As a pioneer of twentieth‐century black literature in the West

Indies and the United States, McKay gave importance to such themes

as identity, alienation, and community development. In his early

Jamaican poetry, he began to explore the consciousness of black

peasants and depicted their culture in a positive light. In Banana

Bottom, he further developed the themes first started in Songs of

Jamaica and Constab Ballads and later continued in Home to Harlem and

Banjo, suggesting an affirmative solution to the problem of Jamaican

identity. It is surely relevant that the first two novels present a split

protagonist, but in his third novel McKay is able to transcend the

divided rational/emotional impasse and to create “his best‐developed

and most credible central character: Bita Plant.”19 If in Home to Harlem

and Banjo there is simply discussion about the importance of the

African heritage within a Caribbean identity, in Banana Bottom there is

a practical application of Banjo’s version of Tolstoy as a great master

who “had turned his back on the intellect as guide to find himself in

Ivan Durak.”20

While Priscilla Craig interprets a mutual attraction between Bita

and the local musician Crazy Bow as rape, McKay makes obvious that

the sexual relationship is more an accident than an act of rape and

offers a sympathetic portrayal of Crazy Bow. This incident is “the

narrative pretext” that draws Bita to the attention of the Craigs, who

adopt her and pay for her education in order to compensate for what

they alone consider to be a “heinous crime of violation.”21 Despite


their age difference, neither Jordan, nor Naomi Plant, nor other

inhabitants of Banana Bottom worry about Bita’s companionship with

Crazy Bow. When they spend time together near the banks of Cane

River, she initiates the physical contact:

As they romped, Bita got upon Crazy Bow’s breast and began rubbing

her head against his face. Crazy Bow suddenly drew himself up and rather

roughly he pushed Bita away and she rolled off a little down the slope.

Crazy Bow took up his fiddle, and sitting under a low and shady guava

tree he began to play. He played a sweet tea‐meeting love song. And as he

played Bita went creeping upon her hands and feet up the slope to him and

listened in the attitude of a bewitched being.

And when he had finished she clambered upon him again and began

kissing his face. Crazy Bow tried to push her off. But Bita hugged and clung

to him passionately. Crazy Bow was blinded by temptation and lost control

of himself and the deed was done.22

Even though the Craigs demonstrate their negative response, the

locally‐composed ballad about Bita’s encounter with Crazy Bow that

soon fills the Jamaican countryside shows how the values of Banana

Bottom society are different from those of Jubilee. This theme is

repeated several times in the novel to emphasize the community’s

opinion about the artificiality of foreign imposition on Bita:

You may wrap her up in silk,

You may trim her up with gold

And the prince may come after

To ask for your daughter,

But Crazy Bow was first.23

Bita refuses to be alienated from her past and culture and finds a

way to be reintegrated into her home society through an affirmation

of her Afro‐Jamaican community and traditions. Upon her return

home from England, she enjoys new feelings that deeply touch her

soul. While the missionaries are proud to see in Bita “the transplanted

African peasant girl that they had transformed from a brown wildling

into a decorous cultivated young lady,” their own “handiwork” and

“a development of their idea,”24 she is very happy and excited to be

back home. Native cooking and dancing, tea meetings, Jamaican

folklore, and her own people give her a sense of contentment. The


proper British education does not change Bita’s love for the peasant

ways of life. Her authentic experiences as a little girl growing up in

her home create a sense of belonging to her Jamaican community:

Many young natives had gone to the city or abroad for higher culture and

had returned aloof from, if not actually despising, the tribal life in which

they were nurtured. But the pure joy that Bita felt in the simple life of her

girlhood was childlike and almost unconscious. She could not reason and

theorize why she felt that way. It was just a surging free big feeling.25

The heroine enjoys participating in cultural events that

demonstrate the rich, flamboyant and vibrant way of life to which she

is emotionally attached. One example is her visit to the market:

Bita mingled in the crowd, responsive to the feeling, the colour, the smell,

the swell and press of it. It gave her the sensation of reservoir of familiar

kindred spirit into which she had descended for baptism….

The noises of the market were sweeter in her ears than a symphony.

Accents and rhythms, movements and colours, nuances that might have

passed unnoticed if she had never gone away, were now revealed to her in

all their striking detail. And of the foodstuff on view she felt an impulse to

touch and fondle a thousand times more than she wanted to buy.26

The narrator describes Bita’s visit to the market as an experience she

can appreciate even more because she has been separated from her

homeland:

She had never had that big moving feeling as a girl when she visited the

native market. And she thought that if she had never gone abroad for a

period so long, from which she had become accustomed to viewing her

native life in perspective, she might never had had that experience.27

A local dance at Kojo’s tea‐party is another example of her

engagement with the life of Jamaican people:

Bita danced freely released, danced as she had never danced since she

was a girl at a picnic at Tabletop, wiggling and swaying and sliding along,

the memories of her tomboyish girlhood rushing sparkling over her like

water cascading over one bathing upon a hot summer’s day.

The crowd rejoiced to see her dance and some girls stood clapping and

stamping to her measure and crying: “Dance, Miss Bita, dance you’ step!

Dance, Miss Bita, dance away!” And she danced forgetting herself,


forgetting even Jubilee, dancing down the barrier between high breeding

and common pleasures under her light stamping feet until she was one with

the crowd.28

While both Squire Gensir and Bita value the folk culture of

Jamaican peasants, they have a different reaction to it.29 At the tea

meeting Bita actively participates, but Squire Gensir remains just a

spectator. At the end, when Bita glances at him, she notices that he is

enjoying the evening. Yet she perceives this enjoyment as “merely

cerebral.” He can appreciate the culture of the Jamaican peasants only

intellectually, whereas she is emotionally attached to the life that

touches her inner being.

Bita is a full step ahead of Ray of Home to Harlem and Banjo. While

he wants to hold on to his Western education, she is not afraid to lose

some of her intellectual acquisitions in order to come closer to the

folk. Despite the Craigs’ efforts to separate her from the rest of the

Jamaican people, she does not feel alienated from them. The more

time she spends with the villagers of Banana Bottom, the less she

desires to go back to Jubilee. She feels “so much pleasanter and freer

at Banana Bottom,” and she is thankful that Anty Nommy’s illness

provides an excuse for her to “stay away from Jubilee as long as she

could.”30

Her sense of individuality in spite of foreign influences is

remarkable. When Herald Newton, a black theological student who is

expected to take over the mission when the Craigs retire, tells her that

he would like to marry her because she has been trained like “a pure‐

minded white lady,” Bita replies, “I don’t know about that. But

whatever I was trained like or to be, I know one thing. And that is

that I am myself.”31 Even though she understands that her marriage

with Newton would advance her socially, this idea does not appeal to

her:

And the vision of climbing and pushing and trying to crash the barred gates

was not inspiring to her. She had been educated to the point where she was

able to look down and see how futile and mind‐racking was such a manner

of existence. She remembered at college how girls would spend their time

cold‐shouldering some who they thought were socially unimportant, and

calculating and scheming to get invitations from those whose families were,


and how ugly was the game—the heartburnings and cynical reflections

from disappointments, setbacks and barren achievements.32

Bita’s confidence in herself helps her to find a solution to her

cultural identity. When she realizes that Day is nothing more than a

hypocrite, her physical and spiritual self rebels against the idea of

marrying him and she longs to be free from “the irritation of his

presence.”33 In another conversation with him, she states,

I thank God that although I was brought up and educated among white

people, I have never wanted to be anything but myself. I take pride in being

coloured and different, just as an intelligent white person does in being

white. I can’t imagine anything more tragic than people torturing

themselves to be different from their natural unchangeable selves. I think

that all the white friends I ever made liked me precisely because I was

myself.34

She actually follows Tolstoy’s example of turning away from the

guiding influence of the intellect when she gives up the advantages of

a middle‐class social position. The dark‐skinned peasant Jubban

whom she marries is a representative of the Afro‐Jamaican culture to

which she returns. While Bita’s education is “the flowers of her

intelligence,” he is “the root in the earth upon which she was grafted,

both nourished by the same soil.”35

A natural attraction and love develops between Bita and Jubban.

Contrary to Newton, a character influenced too much by Western

intellect and religion, her marriage partner is a simple, reliable, and

self‐sufficient peasant. Named for “that healing plant of Jamaican folk

medicine,” he is “an exemplary character” who embodies virtues of

Afro‐Jamaican culture.36 When Bita first becomes conscious of his

existence, she notices his “frank, broad, blue‐black and solid jaws”

and thinks that “it was all right for her father to have confidence in

him.”37 Even though she could have picked someone of a higher class

and education as a husband, her deep love for her people and their

land explains the choice that she makes:

Jubban was superior in one thing. He possessed a deep feeling for the land

and he was a lucky‐born cultivator. No one could do better than he in

carrying on the work of the soil that had absorbed Jordan Plant’s being and

kept his heart’s blood always warm.38


Jubban and Bita share a mutual ability to appreciate each other’s

deep‐rootedness in Jamaican peasant culture despite their educational

differences. When at the end of the novel she reflects upon her school

days and her travels, she admires the inner traits of his character:

Jubban. She was contented with him. She had become used to his kindly‐

rough gestures and they had adjusted themselves well to each other….

Intimate relations with Bita and the mastership of the house had developed

in Jubban all the splendid qualities that were latent in him. His sureness and

firmness about the things of which he was familiar, such as superintending

the clearing of the land, planting, harvesting and marketing and the care

and breeding of the live stock.39

Her choice of Jubban is an assertion of Jamaican cultural values that

Priscilla Craig desired to uproot in her.

Despite the clarity of Bita’s final choice, like McKay’s previous

novels, Banana Bottom is structured on a number of contradictions that

present the character’s psychological dilemma. The writer’s decision

to alternate the action of the novel between the village of Banana

Bottom and Jubilee makes “unobtrusive use of the nominal difference

between the two in order to symbolize Bita’s final liberation and

embrace of the folk.”40 The heroine’s increasing sense of rootedness in

peasant life results in a final separation from the foreign values

imposed on her by the Craigs. When Mrs. Craig asks Bita if she has

forgotten all that she did “to make a lady” out of her, she states it was

not her choice to be reared in the English ways of life.41 Despite

Priscilla’s efforts to convince Bita that Hopping Dick would not be an

appropriate marriage candidate for her because she considers him to

be “a low peacock who murders his h’s and altogether speaks in such

a vile manner,” Bita states that her parents also speak “broken

English.”42

After a series of confrontations with Priscilla, Bita comes to a full

realization of the values that are alien to her:

Bita was certain now that the time had arrived for her to face the fact of

leaving Jubilee. It would be impossible for her to stay when she felt not only

resentment, but a natural opposition against Mrs. Craig. A latent hostility

would make her always want to do anything of which Mrs. Craig

disapproved. Bita could not quite explain this strong feeling to herself. It


was just there, going much deeper than the Hopping Dick affair. Maybe it

was an old unconscious thing manifesting itself, because it was to Mrs.

Craig, a woman whose attitude to life was alien to hers, and not to her

parents, she owed the entire shaping of her career.43

Her growing self‐awareness leads to a final break with the Craigs:

She became contemptuous of everything—the plan of her education and the

way of existence at the mission, and her eye wandering to the photograph of

her English college over her bed, she suddenly took and ripped it from its

frame, tore the thing up and trampled the pieces under her feet….44

McKay creates the Jamaican alternative to the colonizing mission

represented by the Craigs through Bita’s final choice. The heroine’s

preference for Jamaican culture and her gradual rejection of Western

values is a convincing process that makes the heroine’s return to her

cultural roots and traditions inevitable.

The desire to expose the negative influence of foreign values on

one’s own culture and identity is a similarity that McKay shares with

Ivan Turgenev, the Russian writer whom Ray considers a creator of

genuine art in Home to Harlem.45 While McKay reveals the effects of

British imposition on Jamaica in Banana Bottom, Turgenev describes

the centuries of domineering Western influences in Russia in A

Nobleman’s Nest (1859). Ivan, the father of Fedor, is exposed to French

culture at the house of his aunt, Princess Kubenskoy, who introduces

him to foreign ideas, customs, and manners, dresses him “like a doll,”

and provides him with “a governor, a Frenchman, a former abbé.”46

While Voltaire and Rousseau fill Ivan’s head as a young boy growing

up with his aunt, British ideas and philosophies influence his adult

formation when he escapes his parents’ estate and goes to England:

Ivan Petrovich returned to Russia an Anglo‐maniac. His closely‐clipped

hair, starched neck‐cloth, long‐skirted, yellowish‐gray overcoat with a

multitude of capes, his sour expression of visage, a certain harshness and

also indifference of demeanour, his manner of talking through his teeth, a

wooden, abrupt laugh, the absence of smiles, a conversation exclusively

political and politico‐economical, a passion for bloody roast beef and port

wine,—everything about him fairly reeked of Great Britain; he seemed

thoroughly imbued with her spirit.47


Through his description of Malanya Sergyeevna, Ivan’s wife and

Fedor’s mother, Turgenev reveals the suppression of native Russian

values by overbearing foreign ideas and principles. Ivan’s marriage to

Malanya, one of his mother’s maids, does not make Russian ideas and

values prevail in his life or that of his son. The narrator describes her

as “a kind and gentle being” who was “flung aside, like an uprooted

sapling, with its roots to the sun” and “faded away.”48 Even though

her “pale and gentle face,” “melancholy glasses and timid caresses”

“forever imprinted” themselves in the heart of Fedor,49 his Western

upbringing flourishes after her death:

When the time came to teach him language and music, Glafira Petrovna

hired, for a paltry sum, an elderly spinster, a Swede, with frightened, hare‐

like eyes, who spoke French and German indifferently, played the piano

after a fashion…50

Fedor’s foreign education continues when his father hires a Swiss

man who teaches him the natural sciences, international law,

mathematics, and the carpenter’s trade after the advice of Jean‐

Jacques Rousseau.

This Western education and upbringing have negative effects

on Fedor’s life:

…the deed was done, the habits had become rooted. He did not know how

to make acquaintance with people: at twenty‐three years of age, with an

indomitable thirst for love in his shame‐stricken heart, he did not dare to

look a single woman in the eye.51

Fedor feels alienated from the rest of the students when he enters the

department of physics and mathematics at Moscow University. In the

course of his first two years in Moscow, he makes only one friend,

Mikhalevitch, who encourages him to take pride in his peasant roots

and urges him to turn away from his aristocratic background.

Parallel to Turgenev, who values Russian culture through

Mikhalevitch, McKay shows his appreciation of Afro‐Jamaican roots

through Squire Gensir, the enlightened Westerner whose approach to

life differs significantly from that of the Craigs. The squire enjoys

spending time among common Jamaican folks. Their culture

fascinates him so much that he devotes his life to studying it:


He ate their food and sat with them out upon their barbecues on moonlight

nights, listening to their Anancy stories. And he had made a collection of

them. Now he was engaged in writing down their songs, jammas, shey‐

sheys and breakdowns. Songs of the fields, draymen’s songs, love songs,

satiric ditties of rustic victims of elemental passions. Any new turn of

speech, any original manner of turning English to fit the peasant way of

thinking and speaking, could make him as happy as a child.52

Squire Gensir even starts imitating them. When one of his visitors

remarks upon the plainness of his way of living, he states that

simplicity is difficult to achieve:

The squire replied that primitive living was more complex than his visitor

imagined. That it was the art of knowing how to eliminate the non‐essentials

that militate against plastic living and preventing accumulations, valuable

or worthless. It was easy for hampering things to heap up in the homes of all

classes of people, because it is traditional in human nature to cling

tenaciously to things that have no more place in material or spiritual living

than manure, and as the home is cluttered up so is the mind.53

He also finds it exciting to track down similarities between European

and African music and folklore:

That is one reason it’s so interesting to go to the tea‐meetings and to listen to

the Anancy stories. I think some of our famous European fables have their

origin in Africa. Even the mumbo‐jumbo of the Obeahmen fascinates me.54

Squire Gensir criticizes Bita for turning away from her peasant

background and encourages her to treasure Jamaican folklore and

culture.

In his last novel, McKay rejects colonial ideology and argues for

the importance of his native roots. His voice is heard through Bita,

who is proud to be a “Negro girl” and a beautiful, “worthy human

being.”55 Her return to Banana Bottom shows the triumph of the

peasant Jamaican culture over the peaks of British education. The

heroine’s predilection for the peasants presents an alternative to

colonial rule and a challenge to a global commodity culture. Bita’s

choice of the folk is not just a romantic preference, but an alternative

that represents a connection between Bita’s personal liberation and a

political affiliation.56


Similar to McKay, who makes political statements and

incorporates ideas of different countries and continents into his

writings, C.L.R. James engages with African, North American,

Caribbean, European, and Soviet politics. His social politics, like those

of McKay’s, developed as he engaged with colonialism and specific

conditions of the Caribbean. Both the Harlem Renaissance and

“intercontinental movements” influenced James’s formation as an

intellectual of the Trinidadian Renaissance.57 Even though little has

been said about a connection between left‐wing literary writers of the

Harlem Renaissance and Trinidadian intellectuals, the involvement of

Isidor and Nathan Schneider in the North American left and in the

production of The Beacon would confirm the existing links.58

Furthermore, the “Resolution of the First All‐Union of Proletarian

Writers” (1925) established many “terms and conditions of

proletarian literature” that became influential in Europe, North

America, and the Caribbean.59 When The Beacon’s contributors began

“to attack Trinidadian politicians and political structures, to comment

on world events, to openly support Soviet policies, to publish banned

Soviet articles, and to develop a socialist and sometimes communist

politics,” their concern with the poor and dispossessed of Trinidad

was not divorced from that of their Russian and Afro‐American

counterparts.60 Along with the Russian proletarian writers who

acknowledged literature as a powerful weapon in the class war, many

of the Trinidadian writers who contributed to The Beacon felt the

necessity of “the cultural upheaval.”61

James’s appreciation of common Caribbean folks and their culture

is one of the main areas of his affinity with McKay. Contact with

everyday people and their struggles and a return to the “yard,” the

residential environment of the working poor, became very important

to him. In Minty Alley (1936), he realistically portrays West Indian

urban life and affirms the literary values of ordinary Trinidadian

working people. In The Black Jacobins (1938), he goes a step further

and shows the significance of the Haitian peasants:

He established for the first time the historical importance of the self‐activity

of the oppressed colonial people. The wretched of the earth, to use Fanon’s

term, were no more passive objects of administrative control. They were


men who resisted and in their resistance, proved as creative if not more so,

as any other set of men.62

James’s political appreciation for “barefoot men and women” is

evident in his description of slaves on the pages of The Black Jacobins:

The difficulty was that though one could trap them like animals, transport

them in pens, work them alongside an ass or a horse and beat both with the

same stick, stable them and starve them, they remained, despite their black

skins and curly hair, quite invincibly human beings; with the intelligence

and resentments of human beings.63

In his opinion, the slaves are so remarkable precisely because they

remain intelligent human beings despite the denigrating efforts of the

colonizers. In “Caliban Orders History,” Lamming praises James’s

ability to show us Caliban as Prospero had never known him: “a slave

was a great soldier in battle, an incomparable administrator in public

affairs, full of paradox but never without compassion, a humane

leader of men.”64 The slaves’ strength and their superior ability to

resist and to overcome the obstacles put in their way are worthy of

respect and admiration.

James is also concerned with the alienation of the educated

Caribbean intellectual from the people. Minty Alley (1936) is an

especially vivid portrayal of a Caribbean middle‐class educated

outsider whose Western education is a cause of his separation from

common people and their values. Mr. Haynes, the protagonist of

James’s novel, cannot go beyond his social class despite his efforts to

come closer to the inhabitants of the barrack yard where he moves

after the death of his mother. In many ways he is a replica of McKay’s

Ray, who looks to the lower classes embedded in African roots in his

identity search but cannot completely integrate with them. Like Ray

in Home to Harlem and Banjo, Mr. Haynes begins to genuinely

appreciate his neighbors and residents at Number 2 Minty Alley and

to admire many traits of their characters; yet, like Ray, on many

occasions he feels his alienation from them. Through his protagonist,

James reveals awareness of the duality of his position as “an

intellectual drawn to the plight of the exploited masses.”65 While in

Minty Alley, he first made an effort to overcome his own intellectual

alienation from the common Caribbean folk, he later continued to


expand this problem in The Black Jacobins. At a cultural congress in

Havana in 1968, he reiterated the importance of the masses and their

culture in the development of a Caribbean intellectual. As he stated,

Caribbean authors could become “truly conscious of themselves”

only through a rejection of “all the artificial trappings of Western

society, including the very artificial hierarchy that ranked them in

relation to the masses.”66

The Black Jacobins is an analysis of historical events that took place

in Haiti at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the

nineteenth centuries, but it is also a call to Caribbean nations to

become aware of themselves as independent nations. In it, James

depicts the 1791 historical revolt of Haitian slaves that lasted for

twelve years and finally ended when Haitians defeated local whites

and the soldiers of the French monarchy, a Spanish invasion, and the

British and French expeditions. He presents a history that is not static

and shows the life and culture of ordinary Caribbean people as a

“reaction to the West, as alternative to the West.”67

Despite James’s resistance to oppression and slavery, however, his

Western European influences are evident in his elevation of

Toussaint. In his opinion, “men make history, and Toussaint made

the history that he made because he was the man he was.”68 He

praises Toussaint’s leadership abilities and points to his contribution

in transforming a slave population into a free community:

He erected fine buildings in Le Cap and built a huge monument to

commemorate the abolition of slavery.

Personal industry, social morality, public education, religious

toleration, free trade, civic pride, racial equality, this ex‐slave strove

according to his lights to lay their foundations in the new State…. He sought

to lift the people to some understanding of the duties and responsibilities of

freedom and citizenship.69

He describes him as a great man standing above the level of common

people:

He had had exceptional opportunities, and both in mind and body was

far beyond the average slave. Slavery dulls the intellect and degrades the

character of the slave. There was nothing of that dullness or degradation in

Toussaint.


…Having read and re‐read the long volume by the Abbé Raynal on the

East and West Indies, he had a thorough grounding in the economics and

politics, not only of San Domingo, but of all the great empires of Europe

which were engaged in colonial expansion and trade.

His comparative learning, his success in life, his character and

personality gave him an immense prestige among all the Negroes who knew

him, and he was a man of some consequence among the slaves long before

the revolution. Knowing his superiority he never had the slightest doubt

that his destiny was to be their leader, nor would those with whom he came

in contact take long to recognize it.70

The division of the world into “enlightened leaders” and “ignorant

masses,” identified by Lucien Goldmann as “one of the most notable

hallmarks of the Enlightenment,” characterizes James’s thought.71

Though James praises Toussaint’s superior qualities and

achievements, it is the ordinary Haitian people who make

extraordinary history and ultimately change their future. As

Lamming writes in The Pleasures of Exile,

the transformation of slaves, trembling in hundreds before a single white

man, into people able to organize themselves and defeat one of the most

powerful European nations of their day, is one of the great epics of

revolutionary struggle and achievement.72

Furthermore, he contests the claim of Hilaire Belloc in The French

Revolution that the ability of the masses to organize themselves is

something peculiarly French:

At the same time as the French, the half‐savage slaves of San Domingo were

showing themselves subject to the same historical laws as the advanced

workers of revolutionary Paris; and over a century later the Russian masses

were to prove once more that this innate power will display itself in all

populations when deeply stirred and given a clear perspective by a strong

and trusted leadership.73

The Haitian slaves demonstrate the historically inherent power to

which the writer refers. They fight and die in their efforts to achieve

freedom. As James writes,

That courageous, adventurous spirit was in all the people…There was no

need to be ashamed of being a black. The revolution had awakened them,


had given the possibility of achievement, confidence and pride. That

psychological weakness, that feeling of inferiority with which the

Imperialists poison colonial people everywhere, these were gone.74

While freedom would not have been possible without Toussaint’s

vision and determination, it would also not be possible without the

courageous fight of the masses.

Parallel to McKay, who questions the positive effects of the

guiding influence of the intellect through Ray, James finally indicts

the superiority of Toussaint’s intellectual achievements and considers

them to be the cause of his hero’s downfall. According to Paul Miller,

Toussaint is such a fascinating figure for James “precisely because he

promises—and, as James is painfully aware, fails to deliver—a bridge

or mediation between the popular masses and the enlightened few.”75

Toussaint’s overconfidence in his own powers and the neglect of his

people is the cause of his downfall. It is Dessalines and not Toussaint

who takes time to explain the war situation to the masses and to form

a closer relationship with them:

After the war with Rigaud, Dessalines told his soldiers, “The war you have

just won is a little war, but you have two more, bigger ones. One is against

the Spaniards, who do not want to give up their land and who have insulted

your brave Commander‐in‐Chief; the other is against France, who will try to

make you slaves again as soon as she has finished with her enemies. We’ll

win those wars.”76

Because of Dessalines’ stronger bonds with the masses, he is the

one who finally leads the island to independence. While Dessalines

could “see so clearly and simply” because of “the ties that bound this

uneducated soldier to French civilization were of the slenderest,”

Toussaint’s error “was the failure of enlightenment, not of

darkness.”77 His hesitation and his inability to choose between

between French civilization and Haitian independence is his tragic

mistake. Dessalines, on the other hand, is Toussaint’s antithesis who

does not have any allegiance to French civilization and ironically is

more enlightened than Toussaint. His close connection with the

masses and his desire to throw the yoke of colonial authority lead him

to victory.


A return to his own people and their culture is essential to James.

In “A National Purpose for Caribbean People,” he discusses how

West Indian literature came into existence when different Caribbean

nations began the process of finding themselves in “much the same

way that Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Turgenev wrote a particular

literature in Russia in the nineteenth century.”78 He shows his

appreciation for Pushkin and states that he knows nothing in modern

European or American literature that can fill his place. In his opinion,

there are significant similarities between those Russian and Caribbean

writers who understood the importance of creating a realistic type of

literature rooted in their native settings and backgrounds:

Now you see when I was talking about these West Indian writers being a

similar type to Turgenev, and Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, I was implying

something else. When those Russians were writing, they were seeing things

in Russian society which were not obvious to everybody but which they as

men of genius could see and put into artistic fiction. The ideas were not

falling from the sky. Ultimately the things they saw exploded in the Russian

revolution of 1905 and two revolutions in 1917. Now you can take it or leave

it but I am absolutely confident that the writings of Naipaul, Vic Reid,

George Lamming and Wilson Harris are the evidence, unmistakable

evidence of all sorts of currents running about in West Indian society which

sooner or later are going to be expressed.79

Furthermore, Russian literature also influenced Ralph de

Boissière, another Trinidadian writer of the twentieth century who,

unlike McKay and James, focused primarily on working‐class issues.

In Crown Jewel, the novel he published in Australia in 1952 but set in

Trinidad in the nineteen‐thirties, he explores the notion of the

oppressors and the oppressed that he first learned from his Russian

predecessors. In “On Writing a Novel,” he refers to Turgenev,

Tolstoy, Gorky, Dostoyevsky, and Pushkin as writers who made “a

deep and lasting impression” on his formation.80 In their works, he

found many similarities between nineteenth‐century Russia and

twentieth‐century Trinidad:

They were writing of the world of Czarist oppression; a world that seemed

strangely familiar to me in Trinidad. When I read Tolstoy’s What Then Must

We Do?, a book about the development of capitalism in the 1870s in Russia, I

suddenly understood what I had all along been looking at without really


seeing it. The people who slept in the streets, who begged, who were

deformed, who were tubercular, were not suffering because it had been so

ordained, were not sleeping in the open because they liked fresh air. I was

young, yet full of latent protest, and Tolstoy’s book set a match to it. The

conflict between judges and judged, between boss and workers, became

sharply alive for me—especially so a bit later when I felt the lash on my own

back.81

De Boissière is one of the first writers of the Trinidad national

awakening to contest the imposition of British culture and literature

on Trinidad and to depict a life different from the one illustrated in

British novels. In the mid‐1920s, he was introduced to Alfred H.

Mendes, C. L. R. James, and Albert Gomes. He became involved in

the island’s literary awakening through his publications in Trinidad

and The Beacon, two magazines that warned West Indian writers

against the imitation of foreign literature and encouraged them to use

authentic West Indian settings, characters, and conflicts. As de

Boissière explains in “On Writing a Novel,” Trinidad became “the first

publication of a progressive nature” in which “for the first time local

writers appeared who did not write about English lords riding to

hounds, and did not laugh at Blacks and make fun of them and so, by

implication, uphold the superiority of Whites.”82 Despite their British

upbringing and education, these writers contested subordination to a

foreign culture through their writings.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 influenced Trinidad and The

Beacon contributors. Several articles appeared in the pages of The

Beacon that presented Russia’s perspective on the First World War as

an imperialist struggle and explained the rationale behind the Soviet

Union’s policy of non‐aggressive and peaceful coexistence.83 It gave

them new confidence and strength and provided a framework from

which they could criticize colonial structures:

Life and situations are far from static. They sometimes move forward and

sometimes back. What happens in one country influences movements in

others. We, the tiny group of writers in Trinidad, the very first group, would

not have been so bold in our condemnation of colonialism in 1930 but for

general revulsion and disillusionment caused by the first world war and the

hopes that sprang out of the October Revolution of 1917. The citadel so long

closed against us appeared not so impregnable any more. The objective


course of life pointed to new social developments, to the breakdown of

imperialism and colonialism.84

The Russian revolution gave new hope to de Boissière. While his

first‐hand experience of everyday life in Trinidadian society provided

him with material for his narratives, he was to “emulate the Russians’

realistic style and social vision in his Caribbean novels, Crown Jewel

(1952) and Rum and Coca‐Cola (1956).”85 Parallel to Gorky, who came

to the conclusion that the twentieth‐century working class of Russia

had potential to change society and make life better in Mother, a

proletarian novel about the awakening of the Russian people that

predated the 1917 Revolution, de Boissière started to believe in the

power of the Trinidadian proletariat. Eventually, his political

sympathies with the Trinidadian working class led to a nine‐month

period of unemployment in 1939 and migration to Australia, where

he began to study Marxist literature and literary criticism, became a

member of the Realist Writers Group, and finally joined the

Communist Party in 1951, remaining a member until 1967.86

An understanding of the hostility and misunderstanding between

the proletarian class and the intelligentsia as well as the importance of

their alliance in the construction of the new social order are areas of

de Boissière’s affinity with Gorky, the twentieth‐century Soviet writer

he admired. According to Borras, Gorky belonged to the people

through his difficult life experiences, but he belonged to the

intelligentsia through his “passionate love for books and a desire to

change the social order of Russia.”87 De Boissière, a descendant of a

French Creole family influenced by the French system of education,

chose to closely associate himself with the Trinidadian revolutionary

intelligentsia and became interested in the lifestyle and culture of the

Trinidadian urban proletariat. While Gorky noticed “an unbridgeable

gulf of misunderstanding caused by centuries of class isolation in

Russian life,”88 de Boissière understood the social gap that existed

between Trinidadian barrack‐yard writers and their lower‐class

characters.89 During his 1884–1888 sojourn in Kazan, Gorky became

closely acquainted with the revolutionary intelligentsia, an

exceptional group of people that was concerned about the welfare of

the Russian people and the future of Russia. De Boissière closely

associated himself with the Trinidadian revolutionary intelligentsia


and became interested in the political changes that he could bring

through his writings.

Even though André de Coudray, the protagonist of Crown Jewel, is

a descendant of one of the exploiters of the lower classes who once

had owned sugar cane estates, he is not happy with this ambivalent

position. From the early pages of this novel, readers can see his

attraction to Tolstoy’s writings, where he finds answers to some of his

questions:

He had read Tolstoy’s What Then Must We Do? It had turned him inside

out with its revelations of man’s exploitation of man, man’s cruelty to man.

It was there, everywhere around him, and he had not seen it. He had even

shared in this cruelty and accepted it. And now, hugging preciously,

jealously, the hunger gnawing him for greater knowledge, he searched

impatiently among the volumes, reading snippets, picking one book after

another, half hoping that in one of them he would find a revelation of life’s

meaning and purpose.

He carried off another volume by Leo Tolstoy, who painted life with

such persuasive artistic force, with an angry authority that seemed beyond

question. (In nothing could André bear half measures, especially in the

emotions.) And with the promise of light in his hand he went out and would

have driven away but for the voice in the square.90

Tolstoy’s writings encourage André to confront the source of his

unhappiness and to start the search for a West Indian identity. Even

though he likes to have clear definitions, circumstances do not allow

the clarity for which he is searching. He is the only one who “had not

been finished” and is “the darkest of them all,” a young man who

“from his earliest years doubted his abilities because no one approved

his visions, no one valued his gifts.”91 This lack of definition is the

source of his profound unhappiness and the reason he wants to find

himself through music. In one of his conversations with Elena

Henriques, the colored daughter of a local dressmaker, he states,

I’d like to compose real West Indian music… Of course. Nothing, nothing is

so important as to discover what one can do best, what must be done, and

do it with one’s whole soul no matter what happens.92

Despite André’s desire to form a closer bond with Elena, Le

Maitre, Cassie, and other working‐class people, however, he is


tormented by contradictory feelings for more than half of the novel.

He is attracted to both Elena Henriques and Gwenneth Osborne, two

women who come from different socioeconomic classes. Similar to

Ray’s ambivalence in Banjo, André’s simultaneous desire to stand up

for the cause of black workers and his allegiance to his class is the

source of his psychological torment:

He would go to the Osbornes’, listen to some music with Gwenneth, and

then what? How could one live on two levels? It necessitated insincerity,

downright dishonesty, from which he shrank. How could one, on the one

hand, espouse the cause of black workers and, on the other, ingratiate

oneself into the company of one’s British rulers and command their

respect?93

Even though he longs for West Indian self‐respect and a decent life

for the working‐class people, only towards the end of the novel does

he completely break up with Gwenneth and start visiting Elena again.

Along with André, who finally overcomes the inhibitions of his

class and allies himself with the workers, Cassie develops her political

and social awareness throughout the novel. While she is Judge

Osborne’s maid at the beginning, she is one of the most militant

members of the Workers’ Welfare and the wife and co‐worker of Le

Maitre at the end. De Boissière considers her to be one of the “typical

characters” in the sense that she and other characters of the novel

“combined in themselves, in their thinking, in their hopes, their loves

the essential contradictions of the society of that time.”94 Like

Pelageya Nilovna Vlasova, the protagonist of Gorky’s Mother—a

simple‐minded, illiterate woman and a devoted member of the

Russian Orthodox Church who finally sides with her son’s

companions and takes an active part in their struggle for a better

life—Cassie becomes an equal partner with Le Maitre in the struggle

of the Trinidadian working class:

Some of you ‘fraid to join the Workers’ Welfare, others feel it have no sense

in that, you believe Indian and Negro kean’t help one another to make life

better. I say, ladies and gentlemen, put that foolish idea out of you’ mind.

You have children. They will grow up naked, their belly big, their navel

swell up…. We have to make a union. We have to fight for higher wages,

shorter hours—yes, less work for more money!95


She understands that workers have to unite to create a better life and

encourages Le Maitre to continue the fight. In response to his

statement about the crushed spirits of workers, Cassie says, “What

are you sayin’, man‐hush! Our people not so. I never see them with so

much fight as now. This ain’t time to old‐talk so. If we don’t live to

see a change our children will see it.”96

While Gorky’s Mother is a proletarian novel about the

revolutionary development of the Russian people that predated the

1917 Revolution, Crown Jewel is a record of the Trinidadian

awakening. By creating a woman like Cassie and a man like Le

Maitre, de Boissière contests the colonial notion of the working

masses’ lack of potentiality and shows his characters’ ability to

develop their revolutionary potential and to ultimately take control of

their future. When de Boissière writes, “As far as I am concerned, a

novel should be not only about what people are but what they can

be,” he refers to the importance of critical realism in his writings.97 In

Crown Jewel, he not only demonstrates his commitment to the

Trinidadian working class and truthfully and realistically records

events that took place, but also moves towards Fanon’s third phase of

the native intellectual’s development.

Crown Jewel, The Black Jacobins, and Banana Bottom share areas of

affinity with each other and with the Russian writers of the

nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These similarities are not only the

result of the influence of Russian literature and history on the

writings of McKay, James, and de Boissière, but also an outcome of

profoundly parallel individual developments that took place due to

common cultural and social forces. Elements of social and critical

realism characteristic of nineteenth‐century and early twentieth‐

century Russian literature are also present in the works of these

authors; their dual plots involve their heroes’ progress toward

enlightened national consciousness, formed in the process of fulfilling

bigger, national‐assigned tasks of liberation from Western domination

and influences. The authors’ passionate protest against foreign

impositions and their seminal role in the development of their

national literature are important parallel areas of their affinity with

Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Gorky.


McKay, James, and de Boissière are Fanon’s “awakeners” of their

people who escaped from the supremacy of European culture in their

creation of a Caribbean literature. In their novels, they not only

describe Jamaican culture and Haitian and Trinidadian history, but

also protest against colonialism, imperialism, and cultural imposition.

They make an explicit connection between aesthetics and national

politics. Through their truthful, sincere, and realistic portrayal of

authentic West Indian settings, characters, and struggles, they inspire

fiction rooted in indigenous Caribbean reality. While the Russian

literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries significantly

contributed to McKay’s and de Boissière’s development as Fanon’s

third phase of native intellectuals, the influence of Marxism provided

a way for James and de Boissière to portray the dispossessed masses

as builders of their own history. Each of these intellectuals turned to

indigenous Caribbean people and their culture as the main source of

his writings and became a radical anti‐colonial writer who

substantiated the existence of Caribbean nations by his involvement

in the fight against the forces of occupation.

Notes

1 Claude McKay, “The Tropics in New York.” 2 In this chapter I compare McKay with two earlier Trinidadian writers and focus

on their interest in Russian literature. While all three of them at one point or another

were involved with the former Soviet Union, their direct references to the Russian

literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries motivate this analysis of Russian

literary influences on their artistic development. Through a comparison of McKay’s

similarities with the nineteenth‐century Russian and the twentieth‐century

Trinidadian writers, I make an effort to establish cross‐racial and cross‐cultural

literary alliances between Russian and Anglophone Caribbean writing as two distinct

forms of self‐expression rooted in similar socio‐historical conditions. 3 Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1960), p.

184. 4 p. 222. 5 pp. 222‐223. 6 p. 227. 7 p. 92. 8 Qtd. by Reinhard Sander in Fifty Caribbean Writers, p. 151.


9 Julio Finn, “Negritude in Haiti” in Voices of Negritude (London and New York:

Quartet Books, 1988), p. 116. 10 p. 64. 11 p. 64. 12 Rupert Lewis, “The Question of Imperialism and Aspects of Garvey’s Political

Activities in Jamaica, 1929–1930” in Garvey: Africa, Europe, the Americas, ed. Rupert

Lewis and Maureen Warner‐Lewis (Trenton: Africa World, 1994), p. 80. 13 Qtd. by Lewis, p. 80 14 Tony Martin, The Pan‐African Connection: From Slavery to Garvey and Beyond

(Dover, Massachusetts: The Majority, 1983), pp. 59‐60. 15 Kenneth Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and Its Background (New York: Barnes

and Noble, 1970), p. 5. 16 p. 24. 17 pp. 24‐25. 18 Claude McKay, p. ix. 19 Elaine Campbell, “Two West Indian Heroines: Bita Plant and Fola Piggott” in

Caribbean Quarterly 29.2 (June 1983), pp. 23‐24. 20 p. 322. 21 Rhonda Cobham‐Sander, “Jekyll and Claude: The Erotics of Patronage in Claude

McKay’s Banana Bottom” in Caribbean Quarterly 38.1 (1992), p. 55. 22 pp. 9‐10. 23 p. 14. 24 p. 11. 25 p. 41. 26 p. 40‐41. 27 p. 40. 28 p. 84. 29 It is important to note that several scholars have identified Squire Gensir as the

fictional equivalent of Walter Jekyll, McKay’s literary mentor in Jamaica. Both Wayne

Cooper in Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance and Rupert and

Maureen Lewis in “Claude McKay’s Jamaica” refer to Jekyll as the literary model for

Squire Gensir. 30 p. 161. 31 p. 100. 32 p. 101. 33 p. 110. 34 p. 169. 35 p. 313. 36 Carolyn Cooper, “‘Only a Nigger Gal!’: Race, Gender and the Politics of

Education in Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom” in Caribbean Quarterly 38.1 (1992), p. 49. 37 p. 115. 38 p. 291. 39 p. 312.


40 Kenneth Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and Its Background (New York: Barnes

and Noble, 1970), p. 260. 41 p. 210. 42 p. 210. 43 p. 211. 44 p. 212. 45 p. 159. 46 p. 48. 47 p. 65. 48 p. 63. 49 p. 68. 50 p. 69. 51 p. 76. 52 p. 71. 53 pp. 119‐120. 54 p. 124. 55 p. 266. 56 David Nicholls, “The Folk as Alternative Modernity: Claude McKay’s Banana

Bottom and the Romance of Nature” in Journal of Modern Literature 23.1 (Summer

1999), pp. 83‐84. 57 Hazel Carby, “Proletarian or Revolutionary Literature: C.L.R. James and the

Politics of the Trinidadian Renaissance” in The South Atlantic Quarterly 87.1 (Winter

1988), p. 42. 58 Carby, pp. 45‐46 59 Carby, pp. 42‐43. 60 Carby, p. 42. 61 Carby, p. 44. 62 R. Hill, Rejoinder in Document 2, C.L.R. James symposium (Mona, Jamaica, 1972),

p. 15. 63 p. 5. 64 p. 119. 65 Kathleen Balutansky, “Appreciating C.L.R. James: Model of Modernity and

Creolization” in Latin American Research Review 32.2 (1997), p. 240. 66 Cynthia Hamilton, “A Way of Seeing: Culture as Political Expression in the

Works of C.L.R. James” in Journal of Black Studies 22.3 (1992), p. 439. 67 Hamilton, p. 436. 68 p. 70. 69 p. 207. 70 pp. 70‐72. 71 Paul B. Miller, “Enlightened Hesitations: Black Masses and Tragic Heroes in

C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins” in Modern Language Notes 116.5 (Dec. 2001), p. 1071. 72 p. 119. 73 p. 202.


74 p. 204. 75 p. 1071. 76 The Black Jacobins, p. 200. 77 The Black Jacobins, p. 241. 78 p. 149. 79 p. 150. 80 p. 10. 81 p. 10. 82 p. 1. 83 Reinhard Sander, The Trinidad Awakening: West Indian Literature of the Nineteen‐

Thirties (New York, Westport, Conn. and London: Greenwood, 1988), p. 34. 84 Ralph De Boissière, “On Writing a Novel” in The Journal of Commonwealth

Literature 17.1 (1982), p. 6. 85 Sander, Trinidad, p. 116. 86 Reinhard Sander, “Ralph de Boissière (1907‐ ): Biography” in Fifty Caribbean

Writers: A Bio‐Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, ed. Daryl Cumber Dance (New York:

Greenwood, 1986), p. 152. 87 F.M. Borras, Maxim Gorky: The Writer (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), p. 32. 88 Borras, p. 31. 89 Similar to Mr. Haynes, the middle class protagonist of James’s Minty Alley,

André de Coudray, the protagonist of de Boissière’s Crown Jewel, feels alienated from

the yard‐dwellers. 90 p. 46. 91 p. 35. 92 p. 52. 93 p. 160. 94 “On Writing a Novel,” p. 7. 95 p. 249. 96 p. 299. 97 Sander, Trinidad, p. 132.

CONCLUSION

Claude McKay deserves respect and admiration because of the

importance and value of his work. He is neither P.S. Chauhan’s

colonial Jamaican who was never able to dislocate himself from “his

true emotional geography,”1 nor is he just a Harlem Renaissance

writer who stood up for the rebirth of the African culture in the

United States. He is a more complex author who turned to Russian

literature of the nineteenth century in his search for a particular Afro‐

Caribbean mode of self‐expression and became a pioneering creator

of Caribbean identity. His Jamaican beginnings, extensive journeys

around the world, experience in the Soviet Union, and engagement

with nineteenth‐century Russian writers in Home to Harlem and Banjo

left a mark on his fiction and enabled him to produce a national

literature in the Anglophone Caribbean context.

Russian literature influenced his production of a type of art

different from the previously‐established Western European norms

and standards and enabled him to realistically depict the life of the

African diaspora at the beginning of the twentieth century. Parallel to

Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Pushkin, who took pride in their culture

and background embedded in common people, McKay contested the

“positive” effects of Western rationalism and individualism, took

pride in the black masses, and affirmed the importance of Africa

within his Caribbean identity. Instead of thinking of him as someone

who “did little to foster a genuine West Indian literature,”2 critics

should acknowledge his revolutionary achievements. His lifelong

spirit of independence and his refusal to compromise his artistic

ideals, as well as his commitment to honesty, are remarkable. Despite

his wanderings around the world, he never ceased to love his

homeland and tremendously contributed towards its development.

While in Home to Harlem and Banjo, he affirmed the West Indian

notion of double consciousness and pointed to the importance of

African roots, in Banana Bottom he solved the prevailing conflict of the

first two novels and created an integrated protagonist rooted in her

Jamaican culture and traditions.

132 CONCLUSION

In his narrative, McKay took pride in common folks and their

culture and created a type of literature different from its Western

European predecessors. Similar to Dostoyevsky, an inventor of a non‐

European discourse that could only have emerged from a specifically

Russian sensibility, he critically analyzed the effects of foreign

impositions on his national identity and turned to his Afro‐Jamaican

roots as the main source of his inspiration. Parallel to his Russian

predecessors and his Trinidadian contemporaries, he rejected the

notion of art for art’s sake, became a literary spokesman for the cause

of the oppressed, integrated his writing with the everyday life of

common people, and made that writing significant in their social

contexts.

Both Russian and Caribbean writers encountered the imposition

of Western culture on their national identities and understood there

was a gap between the educated intellectuals and the common masses

created by means of this influence. Even though it is true that a

colonial society like Trinidad, which for centuries had been a labor

camp for European empires, is “even more artificial, fragmented and

dependent on the metropolitan West than the Russia Chaadaev

described,”3 Russia has also undergone centuries of European

intrusion resulting from Peter the Great’s efforts to westernize it and

to create an entire upper class separated from their native roots.

Along with Russians who battled for years to articulate their

authentic cultural particularity, McKay, James, and de Boissière

contested the superiority of Western values in their creation of an

original form of Caribbean expression and offered a distinct

difference between Caribbean and Western paradigms of thinking.

Parallel to the nineteenth‐century Russian writers who challenged

Western European forms and standards in their efforts to return to

their Russian roots, these early twentieth‐century Caribbean writers

gave birth to their national literature.

I hope this study can be used as a paradigm for further analysis of

both Russian literary reception in the Anglophone Caribbean context

and similar themes and concerns that are present in these two distinct

yet similar types of writing. Striking historical parallels between

Russian serfdom and U.S. slavery, two forms of bondage that

emerged at the same time and collapsed within two yeas of each other


(in 1861 and 1863 respectively), should be further explored, analyzed,

and applied to the Anglophone Caribbean context. The literary

striving of Caribbean writers to rise above their individual

dimensions, to express the experience of their social settings, and to

become part of a developing collective consciousness in their

assertion of original modes of ethnic self‐expression are shared with

their Russian and African American counterparts. Perhaps Seepersad

and V.S. Naipaul’s interest in Nikolai Gogol, V.S. Naipaul’s affinity

with Ivan Goncharov, and Derek Walcott’s fascination with Anton

Chekhov could be a subject of additional research and analysis that

would further shed light on Russo‐Caribbean literary kinship.4

Notes

1 P.S. Chauhan, “Rereading Claude McKay” in College Language Association Journal

34.1 (1996), p. 69. 2 Michael Gilkes, “Introduction” in The West Indian Novel (Boston: Twayne, 1981),

p. 12. 3 Pankaj Mishra, “Introduction” in Literary Occasions (New York and Toronto:

Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), p. ix. 4 In the introduction to Literary Occasions, Pankaj Mishra records Seepersad

Naipaul’s interest in Gogol and similarities and differences between these two

writers. In “Naipaul’s World,” Constantin Baloewen also refers to Gogol as one of

V.S. Naipaul’s favorite writers. In his introduction to Half a Life, Paul Evans considers

Willie Chandram, the protagonist of Naipaul’s thirteenth novel, to be the “twenty‐

first‐century psychic kin” of Ivan Gancharov’s Oblomov (1). In Derek Walcott and West

Indian Drama and in ʺWhy do Chekhov here?,” Bruce King and Derek Walcott refer to

Anton Chekhov as Walcott’s favorite dramatist whose sense of humor Walcott relates

to that of West Indian farce (7).

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INDEX

A Long Way from Home, 4, 9, 16, 21, 23,

24, 41, 54

A Nobleman’s Nest, 113

”African Guest, The,” 37, 38, 57

African heritage, 1, 5, 29, 37, 40, 42, 49,

81, 85, 87, 89, 103, 107

Afro‐Caribbean identity, 2, 6, 63, 69,

97, 103

Anancy stories, 115

André de Coudray, 124, 130

Anglophone Caribbean literature, 1, 2,

4, 6, 7, 13, 37, 43, 103, 105, 107,

131–133

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 72, 73

Baldwin, Kate, 3, 21, 37, 56

Banana Bottom, 2, 6, 10, 25, 31, 48, 49,

103, 107–115, 126, 131

Banjo, 2, 5, 6, 10, 21, 22, 23, 38, 46, 49,

58–70, 74, 83–91, 96, 97, 103, 107,

110, 117, 125, 131

Barcelona, 23, 24

Beacon, The, 116, 122

Bita, 48, 96, 103, 107–115

Black Jacobins, The, 6, 49, 116, 117, 118,

126

buccra, 11, 12

Caribbean consciousness, 1

Cassie, 124, 125, 126

Chukovsky, Korney, 54

colonialism, 7, 9, 12, 15, 18, 23, 46, 48,

63, 83, 116, 122, 127

communism, 19, 27, 40, 42, 48, 55, 59,

64

Complete Poems, 28

Constab Ballads, 4, 11, 12, 15, 107

Cooper, Wayne, 31, 45, 54, 81

Craig, Priscilla, 107, 112, 113

Crazy Bow, 107, 108

Crime and Punishment, 5, 69, 70, 73–75,

79, 80

critical realism, 126

Crown Jewel, 6, 121–126, 130

cultural dualism, 6, 103

D‐503, 55–58

De Boissière, Ralph, 1, 2, 6, 103–105,

121–123, 126, 127, 132

Dessalines, 120

Dostoyevsky, Feodor, 1–6, 69–80, 96,

97, 121, 131, 132

double consciousness, 4, 70–71, 131

Du Bois, W.E.B., 3, 22, 70, 71, 80, 82,

83, 84, 85

dual cultural identity, 5, 69

Eastman, Max, 25, 27, 28

England, 16, 17, 22, 27, 32, 43, 47, 105,

108, 113

Eugene Onegin, 70, 91–96

European ethnocentrism, 4, 38, 70

Fanon, Frantz, 7, 9, 104–105, 116, 126,

127

Fedor, 113–114

Garvey, Marcus, 82–83, 106

Gingertown, 10, 25

Goosey, 84–86, 91

Gorky, Maxim, 2, 5, 38, 61–63, 121,

123, 125–126

Haitian masses, 104, 116

Harlem, 2, 15, 18, 20, 21, 25

Harlem Renaissance, 29, 30, 40, 81,

116, 131

Henriques, Elena, 124, 125

Herald Newton Day, 96, 110

Home to Harlem, 1, 2, 5, 6, 10, 20, 21,

31, 38, 46, 49, 58–63, 69–74, 80–85,

91, 96, 103, 107, 110, 113, 117, 131

Hughes, Langston, 2, 21, 81

“If We Must Die,” 15, 43

Ivan, 78, 89, 90, 107, 113, 114

Ivan Durak, 89

Jake, 73, 80, 83

144 INDEX

Jamaica, 2, 4, 9–17, 25–27, 29, 31, 32,

38, 83, 105, 107, 113

Jamaican Creole, 10–11

Jamaican peasants, 11, 83, 110

James, C.L.R., 1, 2, 6, 48, 49, 103–104,

116–122, 126, 127, 132

James Weldon Johnson, 19, 20, 23, 25,

27, 33, 83

Jekyll, Walter, 10, 11

Jubban, 111, 112

Jubilee, 108, 110, 112

Lamming, George, 106, 117, 119, 121

Le Maitre, 124, 125, 126

Liberator, The, 15, 16, 17, 38

Marseilles, 21–23, 58, 60, 62, 83, 88

Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 41, 53

Minty Alley, 116, 117

monologic consciousness, 72, 73

Morocco, 24–25, 27, 31, 107

Mother, 105, 123, 125, 126

My Green Hills of Jamaica, 9–10, 25

Napoleon, 49, 71, 75–78

“native soil,” 70, 72, 91, 97

Negro elite, 20, 29, 30, 48, 60

Negroes in America, The, 5, 37, 45–50,

53, 54, 61

Onegin. See Eugene Onegin.

Osborne, Gwenneth, 125

Peter the Great, 71, 92, 132

Peterson, Dale, 1–4

Plant, Bita. See Bita.

pochvenniki (“native soil thinkers”), 72

Pushkin, Alexander, 2, 6, 7, 19, 37, 42–

43, 55–56, 69–70, 91–92, 95–96,

121, 131

R‐13, 38, 55–58, 63

Raskolnikov, 4, 73–80, 97

Ray, 4, 5, 6, 23, 49, 58, 60, 62, 69, 73,

74, 80–89, 91, 97, 103, 110, 113,

117, 120, 125

Russia, 1–6, 18–20, 27, 32, 37, 39, 41,

42, 44, 50, 54, 57, 64, 71–72, 92–93,

104, 113, 121–122, 123, 132

Russian countryside, 92

Russian intelligentsia, 71, 78

Russian Orthodox Church, 75, 78, 80,

125

Russian reviewers, 60

Slavophiles, 72, 96

Songs of Jamaica, 4, 11

Sonia, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80

Souls of Black Folk, The, 3, 70, 80

Soviet critics, 5, 38, 43, 60, 61, 63

Soviet Union, 1–5, 18, 25, 37–40, 48,

59, 60, 63, 64, 122, 131

Squire Gensir, 48, 110, 114, 115

”superfluous man,” 94

Tatiana, 92–96

Tolstoy, Leo, 2, 5, 6, 21, 69, 70, 74, 88–

90, 96, 97, 107, 111, 121–122, 124,

126, 131

Toussaint, 49, 118–120

Trials by Lynching: Stories about Negro

Life in America, 5, 37

Trinidad, 44, 122

Tsvetaeva, Marina, 42–43

Turgenev, Ivan, 5, 6, 69, 113–114, 121,

126

Vlasova, Pelageya Nilovna, 125

We, 37, 38, 55–57, 63

“What is Art?”, 6, 90

ʺWhat Is Lacking in the Theatre?ʺ, 38

What Then Must We Do?, 121, 124

Wretched of the Earth, The, 9, 104

Yesenin, Sergey, 54, 55

Zamyatin, Yevgeny, 3, 5, 37, 38, 55,

57–58, 63, 67

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