African American Writers

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Maria R. Bloshteyn
Comparative Literature Studies, Volume 38, Number 4, 2001, pp. 277-309
(Article)
Published by Penn State University Press
DOI: 10.1353/cls.2001.0031
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Rage and Revolt: Dostoevsky and

Three African-American Writers.
MARIA R. BLOSHTEYN
In 1920, H. L. Mencken, the irreverent and highly quotable American

critic, reviewed a novel just published in New York. The Shadow told the
tale of a light-skinned young woman who grew up in an African-American family in the Southern United States and considered herself Black
until the age of twenty, when she discovered that she was actually an
illegitimate child of white parents. She moved to New York to live as a
white woman, was disappointed in her expectations of the white people
in whose midst she lived, and returned to her original family. Mencken
titled his review The Negro as Author. However the review may have
read in 1920s, it is difficult to perceive it today as anything but grossly
patronizing. Mencken begins by announcing that the novel is a failure
but that it is interesting as a first attempt by a coloured writer to plunge
into fiction in a grand manner. 1 He then issues a number of recommendations to the woman writer: Let her forget her race prejudices and her
infantile fables long enough to get a true, an unemotional and a typical
picture of her people on paper. [ . . . ] The thing we need is a realistic
picture of the inner life of the negro by one who sees the race from within
(32021). Notably, Menckens list of recommendations includes an attempt at creation of a self-portrait as vivid and accurate as Dostoevskys
portrait of the Russian (321).
Menckens review would not be worthy of any particular notice today if not for two tendencies. First of all, it exemplifies the curious disposition of both white American reviewers and many African-American
writers themselves to link the African-American experience with
Dostoevskys writings. Even a writer like Gertrude Stein, who did not
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES, Vol. 38, No. 4, 2001.
Copyright 2001 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.
277
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES
consider herself to be at all indebted to Dostoevsky and whose works

were ordinarily never compared to those of the Russian novelist, found
herself being likened to Dostoevsky after writing the story Melanctha,
a fictional portrait of an African-American woman.2
Menckens review is important for another reason as well (leaving
aside for the moment the reasons for the linkage of writings about the
African-American experience with Dostoevskys works). It appears that
Richard Wright, the first African-American writer to win both national
and international acclaim did take Dostoevskys portrait of the Russian
as a Menckenian model in his depiction of the African-American experience in his writings. (The fact that Mencken was mistaken about the
author of The Shadow, Mary White Ovington, who turned out to be not
African-American but a kindred Caucasian, represents another instance
of irony for the informed reader.)
Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, and Dostoevsky

Richard Wright (19081960) and two of his erstwhile friends, Ralph
Ellison (19141994) and James Baldwin (19241987), justly occupy a
central place in African-American literature, as well as a place of considerable importance in the larger American literary canon. Not only did
these writers manage to win a wide national and international following,
defining African-American literature for years to come, but their works
had a prodigious impact on their contemporaries and, especially, on the
successive generations of African-American writers and poets (as acknowledged by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou, among others).
Even more significantly, these three writers had strong connections
to Dostoevsky that went far beyond their considerable interest in Russian literature and the Soviet Union.3
All three writers testified in interviews and essays that Dostoevsky
played a significant role in shaping them as novelists. Wright told an
interviewer that Dostoevsky was [his] model when [he] started writing.4
Baldwin wrote that he had been turning to Dostoevsky for inspiration
since his youth, and that his relentless pursuit of Crime and Punishment
made [his] father (vocally) and [his] mother (silently) consider the possibility of brain fever.5 Ellison maintained that he had been strongly influenced by Dostoevsky. 6 In reply to an interviewer who suggested that
his seminal work, Invisible Man (1952) was written in the American
vernacular tradition . . . [with] some correspondence between [its] Pro-
DOSTOEVSKY AND THREE AFRICAN-AMERICAN WRITERS
279
logue and that of Moby Dick, Ellison countered: Let me test something
on youwhereupon he read the opening lines from chapter one of
Dostoevskys Notes from the Underground and concluded, chuckling, That
aint Melville.7
The three writers fascination with Dostoevsky is well documented
by them, their friends, and biographers. In the past twenty years there
have been several scholarly efforts to outline the extent of Dostoevskys
influence on Wright and Ellison, mostly as part of a general attempt to
expand the context of their writings beyond that of the American civil
rights movement, which figures prominently in all interpretations of their
work. (Notably, Baldwins interest in Dostoevsky has not been discussed
reflecting, perhaps, his lesser literary fame during the past two decades.)
Most of these efforts, however, have concentrated on uncovering the many
parallels between the individual novels of Wright and Ellison on the one
hand, and Dostoevskys novels, on the other hand.8 To a scholar interested in Dostoevskys reception in the United States, it is evident, at the
very least, that the underlying issues of Dostoevskys reception by the
three writers have yet to be directly addressed. Why, to ask a deceptively
simple question, did these three voraciously well read African-American
writers regard Dostoevsky as a literary ancestor? Who, in a sense, was
their Dostoevsky? And, ultimately, are there any similarities in the way
that these three stylistically and temperamentally different writers employ Dostoevsky and his writings in their own works?
Wrights Dostoevsky
Any discussion of what Dostoevsky meant to these African-American
writers must be preceded by a careful reconstruction of Richard Wrights
path to Dostoevsky. Wright was older than either Ellison or Baldwin,
achieved a national fame before either of them, and attempted to mentor
the two younger writers and to shape their literary tastes. Wrights compulsive reading and interpretation of Dostoevsky is of primary importance
in a consideration of the significance and the meaning of Dostoevsky to
all three writers. Fortunately, there is a wealth of information available
to the researcher on Wrights life, reading habits, and intellectual pursuits through his published autobiographical writings and interviews, several biographies, and exhaustive literary studies (such as Michel Fabres
Richard Wright: Books and Writers [Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1990]), and
the vast Wright archives housed at Yale Universitys Beinecke library.
280
According to Wrights own account, he discovered Dostoevsky sometime in 1926, while he was still living in Memphis. He was eighteen years
old at the time, and intrigued by his reading of H. L. Menckens Book of
Prefaces (New York: Garden City, 1917, 1924) where he first encountered Dostoevskys name. The story of Wrights surreptitious attempts to
gain access to Menckens books in the Memphis library (then off-limits
to African-Americans) is legendary and is told in his autobiographical
novel, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (1945, restored version
including American Hunger [New York: HarperPerennial, 1993]). Wright
himself had said many times that Menckens book was instrumental in
guiding his reading habits and forming his literary tastes. In a 1940 interview, for instance, he claimed that A Book of Prefaces served as a literary
Bible for me for years. I read all the books he mentioned that I could lay
my hands on. 9 The importance of Mencken and his literary views is
suggested by the fact that Wright read and reread everything he could
find by Mencken and that he acquired a full library of Menckens works
when he finally had the financial means to do so (Wrights diary for 1945,
for instance, lists many purchases of Menckens books that he had already read but that he wanted to have for reference in his home library 10).
There are several reasons why it is particularly significant that Wright
came to Dostoevsky through Mencken. First of all, Mencken, as Wright
suggests in Black Boy, had a well-established reputation as a troublemaker.
Up to 1924, Mencken was one of the editors of Smart Set, a popular literary magazine which was widely denounced by the conservative press as
immoral, corrupting, foreign, anarchistic.11 By 1926, Mencken gained
additional notoriety as a social and cultural critic of all things American
(and especially those of the American South) in the American Mercury.
The narrator of Black Boy (Wrights autobiographic persona) becomes
interested in Mencken after he reads a fierce editorial damning Mencken
in a Memphis newspaper. The narrator comments: I felt a vague sympathy for him. Had not the South, which had assigned me the role of a nonman, cast at him its hardest words? (288) In other words, it was precisely
Menckens status of an outsider in the South that attracted Wright
another outsiderto his books.
Mencken does not directly discuss either Dostoevsky or his works in
A Book of Prefaces. In fact, his only mention of Dostoevsky occurs in the
chapter on Joseph Conrad. However, the context in which Dostoevskys
name appears is important, if only because this was Wrights first impression of the Russian novelist. While discussing Conrads consuming melancholy (12), Mencken explains that this emotional state is typical of
281
the Slavic people, whom he perceives as the outsiders of the Western

Civilization. Mencken goes on to make the following sweeping assertion:
We detect certain curious qualities in every Slav simply because
he is more given than we are to revealing the qualities that are in
all of us. Introspection and self-revelation are his habit; he carries
the study of man and fate to a point that seems morbid to
westerners; he is forever gabbling about what he finds in his own
soul. But in the last analysis his verdicts are the immemorial and
almost universal ones . . . [it is the] conviction that human life is a
seeking without a finding, that its purpose is impenetrable, that
joy and sorrow are alike meaningless. (1415)
Mencken proceeds to rhetorically reel off about twenty names,
Dostoevskys among them. It is with this list that Wright began his literary education, and it is in this way that Dostoevsky entered his consciousness as a disillusioned Slavic novelist, an outsiders writer, who wrote
about his own soul with the belief that life was meaningless and had no
purpose.
The Reading
Before leaving Memphis, Wright had read only one of Dostoevskys books,
Bednye liudi [Poor Folk] (1846), an early epistolary novel about a doomed
relationship between two people living in the St. Petersburg slums. Wright
did not record his immediate thoughts upon finishing the novel, but it
must have made an impression on him because almost twenty years later
he was still comparing contemporary books to it.12 Wright left the South
in 1927 and came to live in Chicago, where libraries were freely accessible and where he left off writing and began reading again [because he]
could get hold of more books.13 According to Wrights own account,
Dostoevsky was among the first authors that he turned to in Chicago and
one of the first books that he read was Zapiski iz mertvogo doma [Notes
from the Dead House] (18601862):
I came North in my 19th year, filled with the hunger to know. Books
were the windows through which I looked at the world. I read
Dostoevskys The House of the Dead, an autobiographical novel
depicting the lives of exiled prisoners in Siberia, how they lived
282
in crowded barracks and vented their hostility upon one another.

It made me remember how Negroes in the South, crowded into
their Black Belts, vented their hostility upon one another, forgetting that their lives were conditioned by the whites above them.
To me reading was a kind of remembering .14
Wrights explanation of how he read Notes from the House of the Dead is
valuable for several reasons. First of all, it is obvious that when Wright
recognizes the plight of the African-Americans living in the South in
the misery of the Russian prisoners exiled in the North, he is focusing
primarily on psychological insight into behaviour (e.g., sub-standard living conditions and loss of control over ones life which lead to hostility,
which is vented in turn upon ones cell-mates). Margaret Walker, a poet
and writer befriended by Wright in Chicago during the late 1930s, notes
that this focus was generally characteristic of Wrights reading of
Dostoevsky. In her book recalling that friendship,15 Walker remarks that
Wright esteemed Dostoevsky as the greatest novelist of all time because of his [unique] knowledge of psychology [ . . . ] his probing of the
human mind and [ . . . ] psyche; [ . . . ] his understanding of the problem
of [ . . . ] guilt; and [ . . . ] probing of the unconscious (10001). Wright
himself confirms this point in a 1955 interview, when he responds to the
question of which books have impressed him most by claiming that
[f]oremost among all the writers who have influenced me in my attitude
toward the psychological state of modern man is Dostoevsky. 16 Wright
personally identified with Dostoevskys interest in psychologyaccording to Wright, one of the original sources of literature17and considered himself to be something, no matter how crudely, of a psychologist.18
Secondly, Wright perceives the position of exiled Russian prisoners
in Siberia (many of them former Serfs) as similar to the position of African-Americans crammed in the Black Belts of the South (most of them
former Slaves), because both groups are outcasts and outsiders of society
at large. In a 1960 interview, Wright explained that when he first came
to Chicago he started looking for American literature that illuminated
the life of an African-American either in the South of the United States
or in the North (both places where African-Americans were essentially
social outcasts, if to different degrees). He found nothing about [his]
environment until he turned to Russian novelists. Wright further specified that he chose Dostoevsky as a model when he started to write
(American Novel 214).
An interest in the psychology of the pariah or outcast appears to be
another constant in Wrights reading of Dostoevskys fictionhe once
283
put Raskolnikov at the head of a list of his literary heroes (I Curse the
Day 165). This is confirmed by Ralph Ellison, who felt that Wright
learned from and interpreted Notes from the Dead House chiefly as a psychological document of life under oppressive conditions . . . [a] profound
study of the humanity of Russian criminals.19 Notably, the main characters of Wrights own narratives are usually doubly outcast, like the main
narrator of Dostoevskys Notes from the Dead House: first by society at
large, and then by the group of outcasts in which they find themselves
(Gorianchikov realizes that he will never be accepted into the fellowship of the prisoners20 ). Thus, the narrator of Black Boy wonders why his
own family does not accept him: why it was I never seemed to do things
as people expected them to be done [?] Every word and gesture I made
seemed to provoke hostility [ . . . ] no matter what I did I would be wrong
somehow as far as my family was concerned (168). Bigger, the antihero
of Wrights most famous novel, Native Son (1940; New York: Harper,
1964), lives behind a wall, a curtain from the rest of his family (14).
Cross Damon of Wrights penultimate novel, titled, significantly, The
Outsider (1953; New York: Harper, 1989), considers himself to be set apart
from all of humanity, having broken all of his promises to the world and
people in it (551). He feels that he has nothing in common either with
Chicagos culturally segregated African-American community, which he
escapes, or with New Yorks Communists, Americas political pariahs,
among whom he lives and who ultimately kill him.
Finally, Wright indicates that he views Notes from the Dead House as
an autobiographical novel, which of course it is, with some qualifications
(the narrator of the notes is one Aleksander Petrovich Gorianchikov, a
wife murderer rather than a political prisoner; and the notes themselves
are a fictionalized account of Dostoevskys experiences, rather than a
straight record). Wright was well informed about the particulars of
Dostoevskys own life and exile; he explained that he had studied
Dostoevskys works carefully [and] go[ne] into his life with . . . thoroughness.21 The notion that Dostoevsky wrote about what he had personally
experienced (beyond Menckens questionable idea that every Slavic writer
writes about his soul), had probably served as another point of attraction
for Wright, who often asserted the need to write about what he himself
lived and observed and felt22 and who argued that all literature was really the writers attempt to relate his life to that of the world about.23
It is difficult to say how soon it was after coming to Chicago that
Wright had read the many other Dostoevsky texts that he refers to in his
writings and that were identified by others as possible influences.24 In
American Hunger (1944; New York: Harper, 1977), Wrights autobiographi-
284
cal account of his early years in Chicago, his narrator says that in the
summer of 1927, when he was working at the post office, he read
Dostoevskys Besy [The Possessed] (18711872) at night. This novel, among
others read during this period, revealed new realms of feeling to Wright,
according to his autobiographical persona, and led him eventually into
the field of psychology and sociology (19). Margaret Walker relates that
by the time she became acquainted with Wright in the late 1930s, he had
also read The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, Idiot [The Idiot]
(1868), and probably Zapiski iz podpolia [Notes from the Underground]
(1864) [119]. In Michel Fabres classic biography of Wright, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (1973), the author confirms that Wright
had read Notes from the Underground in his early years in Chicago.25
According to Fabre, Wrights home library included most of the
Dostoevsky texts listed above (most of these in the translations of
Constance Garnett), as well as a translation of Unizhennye i oskorblennye
[The Insulted and the Humiliated] (1861), 26 Podrostok [Raw Youth] (1875),
and several collections of Dostoevskys shorter fiction (39). Ralph Ellison
said that when he met Wright in 1937, Wright guided him to Dostoevskys
letters.27 There is every reason to believe that, like Ellison, Wright was
also familiar with Dostoevskys Dnevnik pisatelia [Diary of a Writer] (1876
1881). Significantly, Wright bought two of Dostoevskys novels even before he finally gained some financial stability in 1940, the watershed year
when he gained national fame and notoriety with the publication of Native
Son. At the very least, this purchase of The House of the Dead and of The
Possessed, when Wright could ill afford them, suggests that he considered
these books especially important and useful for his own work.
Reading the Dostoevsky Critics

Wright kept returning to Dostoevsky throughout his life. At the peak of
his literary fame with the publication of Native Son, Wright singled out
Dostoevsky as the one writer he especially liked.28 Twenty years after
that, in an interview given shortly before his death, Wright included
Dostoevsky among the few great novelists he revisited most often.29
Not only did Wright reread Dostoevskys books, but he also turned to the
Dostoevsky scholars and critics for a better understanding of Dostoevskys
novels. His home library included two books on Dostoevsky by Ernest
Simmons and Janko Lavrin.30 Both of these literary critics combined the
biographical and critical approaches in their interpretations of
Dostoevskys works, a perspective that must have appealed to Wright,
who once said that he was interested in the way the facts of [Dostoevskys]
285
life are related to the fiction he created (Author Discusses His Craft
16). Wright also owned several books by Nikolai Berdyaev where
Dostoevskys works are discussed (though not his famous study of
Dostoevsky)31 as well as Lev Shestovs Na vesakh Iova [On Jobs Balances]
(trans. Camilla Coventry and C. A. Macartney [London: Dent, 1932]),
where Dostoevskys Underground Man serves as the main focus of discussion.
Wrights dedication to Dostoevsky caused him greatest problems in
the 1930s, a period when he was establishing himself as a published author, working on Native Son, and actively participating in the American
Communist Party. During this decade, many members of the American
political leftparticularly those affiliated with the Communist Party
were critical of Dostoevskys writings, which they saw as an extension of
his reactionary politics. In this, of course, they were only following the
lead of the Soviet Communist Party (Dostoevsky was all but banned in
the Soviet Union throughout the 1930s 32). For example, Michael Gold,
editor of the influential leftist journal New Masses, suggested that reading Dostoevsky made one politically and morally suspect.33 Alfred Kazin,
a literary critic associated with the less doctrinaire journal New Directions, saw it as a sign of the times:
One laughed, and indeed many Communists laughed, when a
Michael Gold declared: When . . . an ex-Czarist officer who has
hung and flogged peasants tells us that Dostoevsky shakes him to
the very soul, one is perhaps justified in suspecting . . . Dostoevsky.
But Gold was only exaggerating with crude native force what more
sophisticated literary intelligences held as a prime critical superstition.34
Wright published in Golds New Masses and encouraged Ellison to contribute to that journal as well. Wright was also a card-carrying member of
the Communist Party, while Ellison was a fellow traveller. Wright and
Ellisons interest in Dostoevskys writings was widely considered to be
unacceptable by their colleagues. In American Hunger, Wright describes
the events that earned him the cryptic but obviously unflattering label of
a bastard intellectual with seraphim tendencies (99):
I discovered that it was not wise to be seen reading books that
were not endorsed by the Communist party. On one occasion I
was asked to show a book that I carried under my arm. The comrade looked at it and shook his head. . . . Reading bourgeois books
can only confuse you, comrade, he said, returning the book. . . .
286
You know, he said, his voice dropping to a low, confidential tone,

many comrades go wrong by reading the books of the bourgeoisie. The party in the Soviet Union had trouble with people like
that. (7778)
Wrights narrator does not specify the book that led to this reprimand
(although Dostoevsky is a likely candidate), but Ellison does name the
author who got him into difficulties with the board of The New Masses: I
never accepted the ideology which The New Masses attempted to impose
on writers, he relates in a 1967 interview: They hated Dostoevsky, but
I was studying Dostoevsky.35
The anti-Dostoevsky atmosphere in much of the American Marxist
leftWrights chosen milieuhelps to explain why he paid such close
attention to a 1940 article about Dostoevsky written by an orthodox Soviet critic Vladimir Ermilov.36 The article, titled Gorky and Dostoevsky,
appeared in two installments in International Literature (the official organ of the Communist Partys International Union of Revolutionary
Writers). The journal was published in several languages and served as a
showcase for Soviet writings in the Western world. The reasons for the
Party wanting to sanction and widely disseminate an article on Dostoevsky
are debatable,37 but it is obvious that Ermilov was interpreting Dostoevsky
in a manner politically correct for his times and circumstances. In the
article, Dostoevsky is contrasted with Gorky. Ermilov maintains that
Gorky had the clarity of vision that Dostoevsky never possessed, but suggests that Dostoevskys works are redeemable if examined through the
lens of Gorkys writings: The ideas that tormented Ivan Karamazov are
presented in Gorkys works against their proper background of bourgeois
counterrevolution. This helped to lay bare the real truth of Dostoevskys
creations.38
Wright saved Ermilovs articletwo copies of itfor his own archives, annotated it, and shared his appreciation of it with others. Sometime in 1941, after the publication of Native Son, Wright received a letter
from Ermilov, who wrote to him after hearing that Wright had commented favourably on the modest work [he had] done on the subject of
Dostoevsky, as well as after reading Wrights Native Son, which he perceived as a tribute to Dostoevsky (1).39 Ermilovs apparent purpose in
writing the letter was to ask Wright the following: Do you too reread
Dostoevsky these dangerous but majestic days and what do you think
about him now. Dont you agree that he is living a new life in our time?
(2). Wrights response to Ermilov is unfortunately lost (his archives do
not contain any letter drafts). His annotations to the article, however,
287
suggest a deeper reason for his attention to the article than a simple need
to justify his fascination with Dostoevsky (Ermilovs article did carry an
implicit stamp of Party approval for an interest in Dostoevskys works).
In his analysis, Ermilov gives special notice to Brothers Karamazov,
more specifically, to Ivans conversation with Alyosha, known as the famous Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. The first passage that Wright
underscores is the one where Ermilov describes the Grand Inquisitors
explanation of how the church retains its dominance over people:
Miracles, mysteries, and authoritysuch are the precepts for governing
a mob (123). This is followed by the singling out of another passage
from the section titled Morals of the Slaves. Ermilov argues here, as
elsewhere, that even though Dostoevsky held on to his Christian faith,
he reveals an awareness of Christianitys shortcomings in his novels despite himself. Characteristically, Ermilov does not differentiate between
Dostoevskys attitude toward Catholicism and his attitude toward Russian Orthodoxy. He suggests, instead, that Dostoevsky aknowledges in
his novels that Christianity condones slavery and all kinds of inequality,
just as it ensures a passive response to it by all those oppressed: First
weep over the sufferings of children and then kiss the hands of their tormentorsthat is true Christianity [ . . . ] (138). This last line is the one
that Wright underlines heavily in his copy of the article.
Wrights focus on these particular passages of Ermilovs article is not
accidental. Ermilovs opinions support Wrights own conviction that
Dostoevskys novels, like The Possessed, are really about mans outliving
the mythological symbols of Christendom and his agonized groping for
some new faith.40 Wright himself was an out-of-the-closet atheist from
grade nine, when he announced to the astonished class that there was
no God. 41 Correspondingly, Wright reiterates this experience of outgrowing Christianity and its symbols through all of his worksranging
from the famous scene in Native Son, when Bigger flings the cross that
the preacher had given him through the bars of his cell (315) to the
segment of The Man Who Lived Underground, where the main character
spies on a praying congregation and wants to leap down to these silly
and foolish people to tell them Listen, dont do this! There is no God!
Why do you do this to yourselves?42
Composite Dostoevsky
Wrights reading of Ermilovs criticism suggests that, while Wright paid
attention to Dostoevsky scholarship, it was only important to him as the
288
extent to which it bolstered his own opinions of Dostoevskys writings.

In order to understand Wrights perception of Dostoevsky, however, one
has to piece together a large jigsaw puzzle consisting of bits of evidence
found in his interviews, essays, fictional writings, memoirs written by his
friends, and so forth. Wright ascribed Dostoevsky to the tradition of European realism, as he himself puts it, 43 but he evidently turned to
Dostoevsky because of his belief that the experiences of serfdom and slavery were fundamentally similar, thereby defining both Russians and African-Americans as fundamentally distinct from mainstream Western
culture. (Dostoevsky himself compared the plight of the Russian serfs to
that of the African-American slaves in Diary of a Writer,44 something
that Wright most probably knew.) Wright needed to obtain an insight
into the experience of his own people, his own environment (American Novel 214).
Since Wright felt that these insights were missing in American writing, he was forced to turn to Dostoevskya foreign writer who was exploring a parallel cultural situation on a different continent and at a
different time. It was this connection that made reading Dostoevsky, as
Wright himself said, an act both mnemonic and deeply personal (Black
Boy and Reading 81). Wright, incidentally, was not unique in making
this link: a later African-American novelist, Ernest J. Gaines, described
turning to Russian writers for a similar reason: [W]hen I first started
reading I wanted to read about my people in the South, and the white
writers whom I had read did not put my people into books the way that I
knew them. [ . . . ] I went into the Russians and I liked what they were
doing with their stories on the peasantry; the peasants were real human
beings, whereas in the fiction of American writers, especially Southern
writers, they were caricatures of human beings.45
If Wright initially read Dostoevsky to better understand the psychology of an oppressed people, he kept returning to Dostoevsky because of
his identification with the Russian novelist on a more immediately personal level. Dostoevskys humiliation and suffering in prison and exile
were likened by Wright to the humiliation and suffering experienced by
himself, growing up African-American in the segregated American South.
Again, Wright was not unique in seeing Dostoevskys experiences as a
mirror for the miseries of African-Americans in the southern United
States; Albert Murray, an African-American novelist, cultural historian,
Wrights late contemporary and a close friend of Ellison, described
Dostoevskys life in terms which emphasized these very similarities. Murray
wrote that Feodor Dostoevsky [ . . . ] was very poor, much oppressed. [ . . . ]
289
He was certainly alienated. He was imprisoned and one time he came

within minutes of being officially lynched [my emphasis added].46
The reference to lynching is, on the face of it, inaccurateDostoevsky did come close to being publically executed, but the orders came from
the Tsar and not from a lawless mob. Murray, however, is pointing out
something else: lynching was a public execution, aimed not only at eradicating a particular person from the midst of society, but also at ritually
humiliating him before killing him. In this respect, Dostoevskys public
near-execution, together with the ridiculous clown-like outfit that he
was forced to wear and the ritual gesture of the sword broken over his
head, can be likened to a near-lynching. It hardly needs to be pointed
out that lynching came to be associated almost exclusively with AfricanAmerican victims. Murray consciously parallels the two experiences in
order to show that even the oppressed and alienated can produce firstrate literature: Only people who have learned nothing from literary biography [ . . . ] hold [ . . . ] that Negroes will be able to write first-rate novels
only after oppression is removed [ . . . and ] Negroes no longer feel alienated
from the mainstream of U.S. life (127). Both Murray and Wright, as
well as Ellison and, especially, Baldwin, drew inspiration as writers from
Dostoevskys experiences with injustice, alienation, and suffering.
Other points of Wrights identification with Dostoevsky were even
more intimately personal. Wright recognized his own estrangementfrom
both society at large and his familyin what he saw as Dostoevskys status of an outsider in his own homeland and among his own people. (When
asked to comment on his decision to live and work outside of the United
States, Wright pointed to Dostoevskys example.47) Wrights favourite
characters in Dostoevskys works were also aliens or outsiders, from
Raskolnikov (who became Wrights personal literary hero) to the Underground Mantwo types which acquired particular importance in Wrights
own works. On another level, Ermilovs comments about Dostoevskys
supposedly ill-concealed atheism and Menckens argument about
Dostoevskys belief that life has no purpose corresponded to Wrights own
opinions: in a short essay intended for the cover of The Outsider, Wright
proclaims the worlds meaninglessness as its basic reality.48
Parenthetically, a recognition that Wright struggled with the problem of lifes apparent lack of purpose long before he moved to Paris in
1946 sheds a different light on his involvement with the French Existentialists and on The Outsider itself. When this novel was published in 1953,
most reviewers saw it as an indication that Wright had fallen under the
spell of the Existentialists and accused him of producing a book which
was not an organic part of his oeuvre. It would appear, however, that
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Wright was attracted by the Existentialists in the first place because they
were discussing the ideas that he grappled with in reading Dostoevsky.
This is supported by the fact that The Outsider his most Existentialist
novelis also his most Dostoevskian piece.49 Michael F. Lynch, for instance, has recently shown that The Outsider borrows liberally from Crime
and Punishment for basic themes, situations, characters, and even approximations of dialogue (Haunted by Innocence 257) and that it represents Wrights continued debate with Dostoevsky on the subjects of
criminal mentality, individual freedom, and guilt.
Wright had also probably identified with Dostoevskys unsatisfactory experiences with radical politics (as Lynch posits in his 1990 study
[Creative Revolt 9]). It is interesting to note in this connection that, from
Native Son onwards, Wrights novels created a polarized split in political
circles along the same lines as Dostoevskys The Possessed, which was
viewed in its own times as a paean to conservatism by radicals and as a
call to radicalism by conservatives. Wright commented that Native Son
caused him to be threatened [ . . . ] with expulsion from [the Communist
Party] ranks [ . . . ] while the Negro and white bourgeoisie screamed that
the book was a communist tract and grimly predicted that The Outsider
would incite frustrated Communists to brand me a Fascist and . . . prod
many hysterical Americans to try to pin on me the label of a cryptoCommunist (Position of the Negro Artist 7)a prediction which,
eventually, came true.
Beyond recognizing a kindred spirit in Dostoevsky and seeing him
as a consummate psychologist, Wright also tried to learn from Dostoevskys
mastery of the novel form. In a 1960 interview, he pointed out that even
though [s]ome say [Dostoevsky] is an old-fashioned novelist, a novelist
of the past, he did not feel that way himself. On the contrary, he believed that Dostoevsky wrote tremendous dramatic works . . . with direct
encounters and passionate exchanges between people. According to
Wright, this allowed Dostoevskys novels to do what every novel should
be able to do: increas[e] our sense of life . . . [and] shed light about other
people. The more direct, the more light. The more intense, the more
light. The more dramatic, the more intimate the novel (American
Novel 214). It is within this context and in this connection that Wright
acknowledged Dostoevsky as his inspirational model when he embarked
on a writers career.
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Finding Dostoevsky in Wrights Books

The only overt mention of Dostoevsky in Wrights fictional works occurs
in The Outsider. Damon Cross, who committed several murders, is being
questioned by the State Attorney, Houston. The latter admits that he
could neither believe that Cross committed the murders nor understand
the motivation behind them if he did; [t]hen I had a brainstorm, he
announces, I wired Chicago to send me a list of the titles of the books
youd left behind in your room. [ . . . ] That was the first real clue. Your
Nietzsche, your Hegel, your Jaspers, your Heidegger, your Husserl, your
Kierkegaard, and your Dostoevsky were the clues [ . . . ] (538). Although
critics had viewed this list as an acknowledgement of Wrights interest in
the Existentialists, it can also be viewed as a metatextual gesture, a nod
to Cross precursors in Dostoevskys novels. Scholars, notably, have
pointed out the similarities between Cross and Dostoevskys aspiring
bermenschen, such as Raskolnikov, Kirilov, and Stavrogin (Lynch
Haunted by Innocence 25566), as well as Ivan Karamazov.50 Further,
the conclusion that State Attorney Houston reaches after scrutinizing
the list points not in the direction of the Existentialist thinkers, but rather
in the direction of Dostoevskys Ivan Karamazov and Raskolnikov: I said
to myself, Houston declares immediately after citing the authors read by
Cross, that we were dealing with a man who had wallowed in guilty
thought (538).
Despite this scarcity of direct references to Dostoevsky in Wrights
works, a close reading uncovers a profusion of obvious instances of
intertextuality between Wrights novels and those of Dostoevsky. Several major patterns are suggested by scholars who have examined this
subject.51 Plot, situation, and character parallels are pointed to by all scholars. The dramatic plot lines of both Native Son and The Outsider, with
their shocking, graphically-depicted multiple murders committed by the
central character, who then tries to use his wits to evade capture, suggest
a link to Crime and Punishment. The murderers, Bigger Thomas and Damon
Cross, share many characteristics with Raskolnikov; Houstons methods
and seeming desire to understand Cross link him to Porfiry Petrovich;
Bigger Thomass second victim, his girlfriend Bessie, has many traits in
common with the murdered pawnbrokers sister Elizaveta, including the
name (Bessie, of course, is a short form of Elizabeth), and so forth. The
central situation in the pointedly named The Man Who Lived Underground
is that of a character who finds himself literally observing and condemning the world through the chinks in the basement walls, something that
Dostoevskys Underground Man does metaphorically (Peterson calls the
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main character of the novella a revision of Dostoevskys prototype, but

suggests that Wright has combined several Dostoevsky references under
one guise [383]).
Certain techniques that Wright employs in his novels hark directly
back to Dostoevskysuch as using setting to suggest a psychological state
(gloomy city tenements and claustrophobic rooms which correspond to
the gloom and paranoia enveloping the major characters) and employing
dreams to provide insights into the characters psyche (e.g., Biggers nightmare of seeing his own severed head, which suggests his suppressed guilt
and horror over what he had done). In the same category are Wrights
lengthy confrontations between characters which function either like
evasive cat-and-mouse games (Houston and Cross) or like confessionals
(Bigger Thomas and Boris Max). The Dostoevsky connection is strongly
suggested by set pieces, like the culminating trial scene in Native Son,
which inevitably brings to mind the trial in Brothers Karamazov. The grotesqueness in Wrights novels has also been linked to the use of deformities in Dostoevskys novelsas seen, for example, in the misshapen State
Attorney in The Outsider, whose physical deformity allows him insight
into an outsiders psyche.52
What is more, the ideas, concepts, and themes that Wright explores
in his own works also recall those in Dostoevskys novels. Wrights interest in the nature of free will, the relationship of crime and punishment,
the effects of oppression and alienation, and, especially, the meaning and
the consequences of suffering, are all subjects that Dostoevsky examines
in his novels. Scholars have noted Wrights interest in the Dostoevskian
exposure of the lacerated psyche of the insulted and the injured (Peterson
381). Revealingly, one of the titles that Wright considered for Native Son
was The Shamed and The Blind,53 which recalls, in structure as well as in
content, Dostoevskys The Insulted and The Humiliated, a book which
Wright had in his personal library.
Extreme States
The earliest reviewers of Wrights work recognized the Dostoevsky connection. In fact, Native Son, Wrights first novel, was specifically positioned to be read in terms of Dostoevskys writings. In the preface to the
first edition of Native Son, the Vermont author Dorothy Canfield Fisher
wrote that the novel plumbs blacker depths of human experience than
American literature has yet had, comparable only to Dostoevskys revelation of human misery in wrong-doing. She praised Wright for
293
wrestl[ing] with utter sincerity with Dostoevskys subjecta human soul

in hell because it is sick with a deadly spiritual sickness.54 (Dostoevsky,
incidentally, is the only writer Fisher mentions in the introduction besides Wright himself.) A lionizing review of the novel which appeared in
The New Yorker framed its approval in a Dostoevskian comparison, declaring that Wright goes into layers of consciousness where only
Dostoevsky and a few others have penetrated.55 Even reviewers who did
not like the novel appreciated the Dostoevsky connection: At times,
wrote a reviewer for the Boston Evening Transcript, Mr. Wright shows a
Dostoevsky-like insight; at other times he writes like a ten-twent-andthirt melodrama.56 Wright was The Black Dostoevsky and Bigger The
Black Raskolnikov.57
Occasionally, it seemed that Dostoevsky was the only literary influence that reviewers were identifying, which was odd, considering that
Wright read widely, had many literary models and that the influences of
Joseph Conrad, Theodore Dreiser, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce, among
others, are also readily detected in his work. One left-wing critic who
reviewed Native Son in the Socialist paper, The Daily Worker, pointed
this out with some outrage, and exclaimed that the constant reference to
Dostoevsky was a means for bourgeois reviewers to blunt [the] revolutionary edge of Wrights book.58 However, a review of the novel written
by a presumably non-bourgeois Soviet critic in 1940 also noted a
Dostoevskian link (the author argued that the novel was an important
literary event despite Dostoevskys influence).59
There is no question that Wright owed a conscious literary debt to
Dostoevsky, as he himself acknowledged many times. Nonetheless, the
persistence with which Dostoevskys name was evoked in the introduction to Wrights first novel and the very specific parallels that were drawn
by reviewers of the novel between the two writersfocusing on such
things as souls in torment and human miseryare thought-provoking. They suggest the reviewers discomfort with Wrights subject matter
of discrimination, rape, and murder (or their anticipation of his readers
discomfort with these subjects) and their attempt to make it more palatable by aligning it with a foreign and respectable writer who also wrote
about extreme situations. This in itself speaks volumes about the popular
American perception of Dostoevsky as a writer. Many Americans, it appears, persisted in seeing Dostoevsky as he was initially introduced to
them by Melchior de Vog in 1886: Psychologue incomparable, ds
quil tudie des mes noires ou blesses, dramaturge habile, mais born
aux scnes deffroi et de piti (267).60 Ernest Gaines, whose own literary relationship to Dostoevsky is a complex one, testified both to the
294
persistence and the limitations of this stereotype in a candid interview

about his work: People think that I should like Dostoevsky. . . . Dostoevsky
wrote so much of hunger, of deprivation and pain that people said, youve
gone through that sort of thing you should like Dostoevsky. He had a big
influence on Richard Wright, on Ellison, and on the early black writers,
but Ive never ever thought of him as a teacher.61
There is something vaguely offensive about the reviewers and the
critics persistent superimposing of Dostoevsky upon African-American
life. When Mencken and others like him insisted that African-American
writers frame their experiences in terms of Dostoevskys portrait of the
Russian, it carried the implicit suggestion that black skin is somehow
correlated with me noire ou blesse and that African-American writers must produce records of dearth, privation and anguish, without venturing into other literary territory. This, in fact, was one of James Baldwins
critiques of Wrights Native Son in his essay Many Thousands Gone
(1951), which effectively ended his friendship with Wright. 62 Baldwin
contended that Wright gave the American public just the novel that
they were expecting and it was only superficially remarkable that this
book should have enjoyed among Americans the favor it did enjoy; no
more remarkable . . . than that it should have been compared, exuberantly, to Dostoevsky (31).
Nonetheless, it is clear that Baldwin himself, just as Wright and
Ellison before him, identified with Dostoevskys portrayal of extreme situations and states. Reminiscing about his precocious childhood, Baldwin
wrote that he had compulsively read Dostoevsky because he believed that
his novels had something to tell me. It was this particular childs way of
circling around the question of what it meant to be a nigger. It was the
reason that I was reading Dostoevsky. . . . I was intrigued, but not misled,
by the surface of these novels . . . [as, for instance,] the tracking down of
Raskolnikov. . . . I did not believe in any of these people so much as I
believed in their situation, which I suspected, dreadfully, to have something to do with my own.63
Sharing Dostoevsky
The personal and literary association of Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin
(Wright and Ellison met in 1936; Baldwin met Wright in 1944 and Ellison
in 1953), is a crucial one for the development of African-American fiction.64 Wright, who became established as a writer before the two younger
men, attempted to influence Ellison and Baldwins literary tastes by di-
295
recting their reading (to Dostoevsky, among other writers) and giving
them advice on how to write. In fact, Ellison tried his hand at writing
fiction at Wrights suggestion and Baldwin completed his first novel after
receiving Wrights enthusiastic support. In turn, Ellison attempted to
shape Baldwins view of literature, commenting to Wright after meeting
Baldwin in September of 1953 that he felt the responsibility of passing
along some of the stuff that [he] learned from [Wright].65 Among other
things, the writers tried to share their individual views of Dostoevsky
and his characters.66
The interests of the three writers eventually diverged and their
mutual loyalties declined, but their fascination with Dostoevsky remained
little altered. Towards the end of his life, Ellison did appear to downplay
the connection of his master novel with Dostoevskys work, even though
he insisted upon it earlier. In a 1981 introduction to his novel, for example, Ellison wrote that by way of providing myself the widest field for
success or failure, I associated [the main character of The Invisible Man],
ever so distantly, with the narrator of Dostoevskys Notes from Underground
[emphasis added].67 Nonetheless, his work contains many obvious links
to Dostoevskys novels and includes many a homage to Dostoevsky. Even
his never completed and only posthumously published novel, Juneteenth
(New York: Random, 1999), displays a deep indebtedness to Dostoevsky
(especially in the dream sequences) and has already evoked comparisons
with Brothers Karamazov.68
On the other hand, Baldwins interest in Dostoevsky and his willingness to acknowledge it appeared to increase as the years passed. During the winter of 19481949, when his relationship with Wright collapsed,
Baldwin was calling Dostoevsky one of his great literary enthusiasms.69
In the 1960s, he claimed Dostoevsky as one of his models. Shortly before
his death, Baldwin talked of learning how to write from Dostoevsky.
All three writers regarded Dostoevsky as a literary forefather. Wright
saw his life and writings prefigured in Dostoevskys own. Baldwin described
Dostoevsky as both a personal messenger (Devil Finds Work 11) and, significantly, a witnessa term that he used to describe himself as a writer
as well: Witness to whence I came, where I am. Witness to what Ive
seen and the possiblities that I think I see. [ . . . ] In the church in which
I was raised you were supposed to bear witness to the truth.70 (Interestingly, Ellison proclaimed Dostoevsky as one of his literary ancestors,
among other writers that influenced him, at the same time as he made a
public and very definite statement of literary independence from Wright
in his essay The World and the Jug: I respected Wrights work . . . but
that is not to say that he influenced me as significantly as you assume . . .
296
[O]ne can do nothing about choosing ones relatives, one can, as artist,
choose ones ancestors. Wright was, in this sense, a relative . . . Dostoevsky . . . [an] ancestor.71 )
It is difficult to judge now how much of Wrights own interpretation of Dostoevsky was passed down to Ellison and Baldwinor, for that
matter, from Ellison to Baldwinand how much was formulated by each
writer independently. It is clear, however, that the three writers identified with Dostoevsky on several levels. Like Wright, Baldwin and Ellison
drew inspiration from Dostoevskys depiction of suffering and alienation
in his works. Baldwin wrote at length about being empowered by reading
of the suffering that both Dostoevsky and his characters undergo: You
read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover it happened 100 years ago to Dostoevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is
alone; 72 and again, You go through life . . . thinking, No one has ever
suffered the way I suffered, my God, my God. And then you realizeyou
read something . . . and you realize that your suffering does not isolate
you; your suffering is your bridge.73 Dostoevskys alienation was another
point of identification for Baldwin, since he viewed himself as an outcast
within his family (his stepfather was harshly critical of his looks), his
community (which disapproved of his abandonment of religion), and
American society at large (he wrote to a friend in the 1940s: I am . . .
surrounded by the model Americans of our time. . . . I am, of course, a
misfit. . . . Have I ever been anything else? 74 ). Towards the end of his
life, Baldwin told an interviewer that he felt he was only too similar to
Dostoevsky (cit. in Weatherby 8586).
Ellison, for his part, disapproved of the assumption that suffering is
somehow responsible for great art. In a 1964 address, for example, he
argued against Hemingways opinion that Dostoevskys experience in Siberia shaped his art by contending that art was primary and personal
and social injustice . . . suffered was secondary: It is a matter of outrageous irony, perhaps, but in literature the great social clashes of history
no less than the painful experience of the individual are secondary to the
meaning which they take on through the skill, the talent, the imagination and personal vision of the writer who transforms them into art (Hidden Name and Complex Fate 148). He was, however, clearly interested
in Dostoevskys depiction of suffering and alienated characters, whose
alienation went beyond class and society and sprang from much deeper
and more individual causes (as it did in the narrator of Invisible Man). He
also maintained that Notes from Underground contains the most direct
treatment of alienation which [he] knew and suggested that [a]fter
Dostoevsky you dont need Kafka.75
297
Ellison and Baldwin, as did Wright before them, regarded Dostoevsky

as a teacher of the difficult art of novelistic mastery. When discussing his
own techniques, Ellison frequently cited Dostoevskys use of the same.
For example, when he talked of the importance of dreams in his own
work, he suggested that he had learned this from Dostoevsky who taught
the novelist how to use the dream.76 He named Dostoevsky when he
talked about the rhythms of the epilogue of Invisible Man (Dialogue with
Audience 138). He also refered to Dostoevskys use of folklore, saying
that The hero of Dostoevskys Notes from the Underground [among other
Dostoevskys characters] . . . appear in their rudimentary forms far back in
Russian folklore, when talking about his own extensive use of AfricanAmerican folklore.77
Significantly, Ellison drew upon Dostoevsky to legitimize his own
ceaseless struggles with literary form (he only managed to produce one
novel during his lifetime, and spent close to fifty years working on the
next one which he never finished). In an early letter to Wright, written
when he was working on The Invisible Man, he called grappling with form
an uncertain battle on a dark terrain and noted that what worried him
most about writing was just that: the form, the learning how to organize
my material in order to take the maximum advantage of those psychological and emotional currents within myself and the reader which endow prose with meaning . . . and mak[e] prose magical.78 Ellison explained
his ideas about form in an 1974 interview, where he suggested that
Dostoevsky had the same difficulties: Once a logic is set up for a character . . . [then in order] for you to discover the form of the fiction, you have
to go where he takes you, you have to follow him. In the process you
change your ideas. You remember, Dostoevsky wrote about eight versions
of a certain scene in The Brothers Karamazov and in some instances the
original incidents were retained but the characters who performed them
were changed. I find that happens with me.79 He also found it comforting, apparently, that Dostoevsky and some of the other giants never did
succeed in writing what we call a perfect novel, pointing out that, more
importantly, these books . . . gave the audience . . . a sense of wonder
arising out of the multiplicity of events being reduced to form (Art of
Fiction 2526). Elsewhere, he described that form as Symphonica
definition that included the intermixing of the tragic with the comic,
the light with the solemn, and so on.80
Ellison tried to impart some of his ideas about literary form to
Baldwin. He felt, for instance, that Baldwins first published novel Go
Tell It on the Mountain (1953) was written in a much too restrictive and
controlling mode (he was of the opinion that Henry James was not a
298
good model for Baldwin to follow81 ). Together, they spoke at length about
writing. It is a matter of conjecture, of course, as to how much of Ellisons
advice made any impression on Baldwin. What is clear, however, is that
Baldwins third novel, Another Country (1962; New York: Dell, 1968),
despite the Jamesian epigraph, lacks that strict control of form which
characterized his first book and has more in common with those fluid
puddings though not tastelessin Jamess infamous characterization of
Dostoevskys novels (Baldwin himself acknowledged the shapelessness of
the novel).82
Further, it is not James who is evoked again and again in Another
Country but Dostoevsky. One of the characters, Richard, a novelist who
is aspiring to write a great book, tries unsuccessfully to approach
Dostoevsky in his efforts. Richards homosexual friend, Eric, is offered
the role of Stavrogin in a film version of The Possessed. The narrators
depiction of Erics inner life and his quest for love deliberately evokes
Dostoevskys dreamers of Belye nochi [White Nights] (1848): The aim of
the dreamer . . . is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested by the
world. His dreams are his protection against the world. But the aims of
life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world
are sharp (170). Interestingly, the text of Baldwins novel appears to
include an attempt to preempt criticism of its explosive subject matter
with another evocation of Dostoevsky (Another Country deals with, among
other things, suicide, violence, interracial and homosexual relationships).
Thus, the aspiring novelists wife realizes that her husband will never
equal to Dostoevsky because he was afraid, afraid of things dark, strange,
dangerous, difficult, and deep (98)ostensibly the provenance of great
fiction as well as Baldwins own metier. Several years before his death,
Baldwin gave an interview where he talked about drawing inspiration
from Dostoevskys use of minor characters and humbly admitted that he
was still learning how to write from reading other novelists, namely Balzac
and Dostoevsky: I dont know what technique is. All I know is that you
have to make the reader see it.83 Dostoevsky, Baldwin suggested, knew
how to make his reader see even in the darkness.
Difficult Politics
Ellisons friend and eminent Dostoevsky scholar, Joseph Frank, ponders
Ellisons connection to Dostoevsky in his article of tribute to the latter,
titled Ralph Ellison and a Literary Ancestor: Dostoevsky (1983).84 He
advances several interesting ideas in the article, the most fruitful of these
299
being the suggestion that tracing the connections of Invisible Man with
Dostoevskys individual novels is only of limited usefulness. Much more
fundamental, he writes, is Ellisons profound grasp of the ideological
inspiration of Dostoevskys work, and his perception of its relevance to
his own creative purposeshis perception, that is, of how he could use
Dostoevskys relation to the Russian culture of his time to express his
own position as an American Negro writer in relation to the dominating
white culture (232). Frank employs this vital insight to point out two
important patterns. First, he shows that Dostoevskys wary and critical
attitude towards Western European culture is parallelled by the Invisible
Mans stance in relation to mainstream (White) American culture, its
values and ideas (23233). Secondly, he suggests that Dostoevskys cleareyed and unblinking depiction of the Russian peasant, along with his
understanding of the age-old oppression which led to benightedness,
backwardness, and sometimes terrible cruelty, and his ability to discer[n]
whatever spark of humanity continued to exist under such conditions
(237) was mirrored in Ellisons depiction of African-American life. In
this connection, he also argues that Dostoevskys rehabilitation of Russian folk idiom and folklore not as a source of quaint exoticism . . . but as
a symbol of a realm of values (as in Notes from the Dead House) parallels
the use of African-American folklore in Ellisons work.
Franks central argument about Ellisons identification with
Dostoevskys relation to the Russian culture of his time acquires a deeper
resonance when one considers the fact that Ellison himself identified the
social shifts and political upheavals of Dostoevskys Russia with a similar
situation in America of his day (both within the African-American communities and in American society at large). In a 1974 interview (Completion of Personality), for instance, Ellison talked at great length about
the extreme disruption of hierarchical relationships which occured during the nineteenth century [in Russia]. He pointed out that in Russia
you had a great declassed aristocracy, with the Tsar still at the top, and
the awakening peasantry at the bottom. On one hand, society was plunging headlong into chaos, and on the other there was a growing identification . . . across traditional hierarchical divisions. He went on to compare
[s]uch disruption of the traditional ordering of society with what was
happening in our own country since 1954. He also commented that life
in nineteenth-century Russia became so theatrical (not to say nightmarish) that even Dostoevskys smoking imagination was barely able to
keep a step ahead of what was actually happening in garrets and streets
and again drew the parallel with America of his day: Today, here in the
United States, we have something similar (288). In the same interview,
300
Ellison discussed learning from such writers as Dostoevsky about what is

possible in depicting a society in which class lines are fluid or have broken down without the cultural style and values on either extreme of society being dissipated [ . . . ] you learn to explore the rich fictional possibilities
to be achieved in juxtapositng the peasants consciousness with that of
the aristocrat and the aristocrats with the peasants and emphasized that
[t]his insight is useful when you are dealing with American society (287).
Several things are worthy of note here. First of all, it is evident that
Ellison, like Wright before him and Baldwin after him, turned to
Dostoevsky to understand his own environment and the changes that it
was undergoing. Secondly, Ellisons interest in the psychological implications of social turmoil in Dostoevskys work harks back to Wrights own
assertion that reading Dostoevsky led him into the field of psychology
and sociology. In fact, a primary literary concern for all three writers
(Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin) was a depiction and analysis of the effects of drastic social change upon their characters psyche. This, along
with their interest in and concern with radical politics made Dostoevskys
The Possessed an invaluable sourcebook and manual. It is not surprising
then that echoes of The Possessed proliferate in the Invisible Man (Frank
points out as one example that when the Brotherhood provokes a race
riot, it is employing the very tactics [ . . . ] that Dostoevsky understood
very well, and had dramatized in [The Possessed] [233]); nor that the
political radicals in Wrights The Outsider can be traced back to
Dostoevskys novel (The Possessed was among the first books acquired by
Wright for his home library); nor that Baldwin was reportedly reading
The Possessed in the 1970s and making parallels with the America of
today (Weatherby 327), and that this novel is both explicitly mentioned
and implicitly evoked in Baldwins own novels.85
What is more important than the recurrent use of The Possessed made
by Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin, is that these three writers also employ
Dostoevskys works as proof-texts to support their various political engagements and evoke his name for the same purpose. Baldwin, for instance, frequently wrote and spoke against the exploitation of the
third-world nations by the capitalist Western countries. In one of his
essays, Baldwin cites Malcolm Xs opinion that All of the Western nations have been caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism; this
means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West
has no moral authority (No Name in the Street [New Yok: Dial, 1972]
85). He develops this idea at length and, as the ultimate indictment of
the Western world in general and capitalist imperialism in particular,
cites Lebedev (the buffoon-like character in Dostoevskys The Idiot) who
301
argues that without morality any industrial or technological advances

gained might not be made available to a larger part of humanity.
Dostoevsky, Baldwin writes, saw that the rise of this power would coldly
exclude a considerable part of humanity. Indeed, he continues, it
was on this exclusion that the rise of this power inexorably depended
(85). Ironically, it is the aura of authority that Dostoevsky possesses in
the immoral West, that allows Baldwin to cite Dostoevskys opinions about
the moral bancruptcy of the West with such finality.
Baldwins strategic evocation of Dostoevsky as the ultimate authority in his corner, so to speak, supports Franks subtle suggestion that
Dostoevskys prestige in the West contributed to his usefulness as a literary ancestor (235). But while Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin may well have
recognized the convenience of adopting Dostoevsky as a literary ancestor, it was shown earlier that they readily declared their indebtedness to
his work when it was not strategically advantageous to do so. The ultimate reasons for their choice of Dostoevsky as a teacher and ancestor
were much more complex than a simple matter of convenience. Beyond
personally identifying with Dostoevsky as a fellow outsider and drawing
a general parallel between the Russian serfs and the African-American
slaves, they also saw him as a contemporary of sortsliving in a time of
similar social and political upheaval. Dostoevskys works were useful to
them not only because they were interested in his technique and literary
craft, but because he was confronting the larger philosophical, psychological, and sociological questions that they were attempting to tackle in
their own books.
On another level, Dostoevskys texts provided a rich assortment of
characters who could be drawn upon to elucidate ones own opinions and
philosophical position. Thus, in 1946, Ellison penned a letter toWright
where he discussed a literary critics unsuccessful attempt to describe a
character who would incorporate all the contradictions present in the
Negro-white situation in this country and yet be appealing to whites.86
Ellison gropes for a fitting description of the end product and chooses
Prince Myshkina Dostoevskian Idiot type. He concedes that this idea
holds some possibilities, but then declares that he personally had always
preferred another Dostoevsky type, the Ivans, or Dmitris, rather than the
Alyoshas or Myshkins.
Ellisons choice of the doubting, protesting, and suffering Ivans or
Dmitris over the accepting, affirming, and loving Alyoshas or Myshkins
was not serendipitous. Ellison, like Wright and Baldwin, created characters who raged, suffered, and questioned the injustices of the world. Ellison,
as the other two writers, authored texts that caused controversy because
302
they fearlessly and relentlessly engaged with the most pressing and explosive social issues of the day. The term protest literature inevitably
comes up in the critical discussion of the three writers works; responding
to this, Ellison once said that he recognize[d] no dichotomy between art
and protest and cited Dostoevskys Notes from the Underground as one
example that the two can seamlessly merge in a single literary text (Art
of Fiction 8). Dostoevskys willingness to take on the dominant ideology of the day (as Ellison points out, Notes from the Underground is among
other things, a protest against the limitations of 19th century rationalism [8]) while maintaining high literary standards proved inspiring to
each of the three writers and provided yet another reason for their choice
of Dostoevsky as a literary role model.
The three writers could have, of course, realized that protest may
coexist with art without knowing anything about Dostoevsky (though he
is one of the most prominent writers to consistently combine the two
spheres and achieve results that rank among the very best in world fiction). However, the three did learn something very important from
Dostoevsky that they could not, most likely, learn elsewhere. As creators
of texts that were politically and socially engaged, Ellison, Baldwin, and
Wright benefited enormously from their awareness of the paradoxes lying at the intersection of Dostoevskys politics and poetics. Ellison, whose
understanding of Dostoevsky was perhaps the most thorough and factual
of the three writers, summed it up best: Dostoevsky could be pretty rabid in some of his ideological concerns, pretty bigoted in his attitudes
toward the members of certain groups, but when he chose to depict characters identified with such groups he gave them all the human complexity that the form and action of the novel demanded (Study and
Experience 33233). I dont think, Ellison added, that you can do
this if your mind is made up beforehand. You end up creating stereotypes,
writing propaganda (333).
The realization that one cannot set up cardboard cutouts of villains
if one wishes to produce worthwhile literary texts informs the human
complexity of all characters in The Invisible Man and Juneteenth, a complexity and a humanity which cannot be denied no matter how despicable the beliefs these characters espouse. Similarly, however radical
Baldwins own political allegiances were at the time of writing his novels, he always resists making any of his characters into subhuman monsters and two-dimensional stereotypes. In an ironic twist, it would seem
that Wright, who constantly pushed the younger novelists towards
Dostoevsky, took the longest to recognize that a politically and socially
engaged novel needs to contain a certain amount of polyphonic openness, and that all the characterswhether the author agrees with their
303
views or notmust be allowed a voice within the text. In fact, one wonders if he was ever successful in fully realizing this in his work, though
after Native Son he seems to be steadfastly travelling in that direction.87
This is not to say that the connections and instances of intertextuality
between Wrights books and Dostoevskys works become any less important or profound because of this. Like Ellison and Baldwin, Wright learned
a great deal from reading Dostoevsky and he did manage to incorporate
much of it into his novels. Native Son proved that Wright knew how to
create a dynamic and riveting novel, a novel that engaged all the burning questions his day and created the same feverish excitement in its
reader that Crime and Punishment apparently did when it was just published. It is not for nothing that Mary White Ovingtonwhom Mencken
advised to imitate Dostoevskys portrait of the Russiansent an enthusiastic letter to Wright after reading The Native Son. Ive watched Negro
literature now for forty years, she wrote. [Ive] collected it, reviewed it,
even written a little of it, she added archly. Much of it has seemed
unreal. . . . But youve gone down so deep, your book is rooted in life.
Dorothy Canfield [Fisher] is right in comparing you to Dostoevsky and
that to me means the greatest in fiction.88 Whatever ideological and
creative differences eventually came between Wright, Ellison, and
Baldwin, it would appear that all three novelists agreed that Dostoevsky
produced the greatest in fiction. Their Dostoevsky, however, was not
another Dead White Man, enshrined within the Western literary canon
, but a kindred soul, an ancestor,89 whose novels, like The Possessed, transcribe a dangerous terrain, where fiction meets life, where politics and
poetics converge, and where every step can set off an explosion, as their
own novels frequently did.
Columbia University
Notes
The present essay is part of a larger work which considers Dostoevskys impact on American literature and culture in the twentieth century. My work on this project is made
possible by a generous postdoctoral fellowship granted by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am deeply indebted to Professor Robert Belnap
(Colombia University) for his encouragement and his generous input into this project.
1. H. L. Mencken, The Negro as Author (1920) 90; rpt. in H. L. Menckens Smart
Set Criticism, ed. William H. Nolte (Washington, D. C.: Gateway, 1987) 320.
2. Stein wrote about her book, Three Lives, to Carl Van Vechten: even its worst
enemies say it is like Dostoevsky which is none so dirty from an enemy (To Carl Van
304
Vechten, 23 June 1924, The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten, 19131946,
ed. Edward Burns, vol. 1 [New York: Columbia U P, 1986] 101). The Dostoevskian
connection was made most often with the second story of the book, Melanctha. Thus,
one enlightened American reader, the expatriate writer and publisher Robert
McAlmon, gushed to Stein in a 1924 letter, after reading her Three Lives: The second
story was amazing; a clarified Dostoevskian depiction of niggers, in Letter to Gertrude
Stein, August ? 1924, The Flowers of Friendship: Letters Written to Gertrude Stein, ed.
Donald Gallup (New York: Knopf, 1953) 162.
3. The three writers were widely read in Russian literature and they all drew inspiration from the fact that Russias greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin, had African ancestry.
The Soviet Union and its antiracism policy were another obvious focus of interest. In
1936, for instance, one of the top Soviet actresses, Lyubov Orlova, starred in the film
Tsirk [The Circus] about an American circus performer who has an interracial love affair and gives birth to a dark-skinned child. She knows that if anyone finds out, her
career will be ruined. This information is used by her unscrupulous manager to control
and manipulate her. Eventually they come to the Soviet Union, where the manager,
angry that she fell in love with a Soviet man, brings out the child in the middle of a
performance and announces that she is the mother. To his surprise, the Soviet citizens
are enchanted and sing a lullaby to the baby, as Paul Robeson leads them in the chorus
(the film was followed in Russia by a fad for black dolls). Needless to say, it would be
years before an interracial love affair could be alluded to in a Hollywood film. Wright
and Ellison were both involved with the Communist Party (Wright as member and
Ellison as fellow traveller), while Baldwin was a Trotskyist.
4. Richard Wright, interview, The American Novel, radio broadcast rec. ORTF
Paris (Oct. 1960); rpt. in Conversations with Richard Wright, eds. Kenneth Kinnamon
and Michel Fabre, trans. Michel Fabre (Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 1993) 214.
5. James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work (New York: Dial, 1976) 11.
6. Ralph Ellison, interview, A Completion of Personality: A Talk With Ralph
Ellison, Ralph Ellison: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. John Hersey (Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice, 1974), rpt. in Conversations with Ralph Ellison, eds. Maryemma Graham and
Amrijit Singh, (Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 1995) 266.
7. Ralph Ellison, interview, Ralph Ellison: Twenty Years After (1973); rpt. in Conversations with Ralph Ellison 202.
8. Tony Magistrale and Dasha Culic Nisula argue for the link with Dostoevskys
Prestuplenie i nakazanie [Crime and Punishment](1866) in From St. Petersburg to Chicago: Wrights Crime and Punishment(Comparative Literature Studies 23 [1986]: 5969)
and Dostoevsky and Richard Wright: From St. Petersburg to Chicago (Dostoevsky and
the Human Condition After a Century, eds. Alexej Ugrinsky, Frank Lambasa, and Valija
Ozolin [New York: Greenwood, 1986] 16370) respectively. Horst-Jrgen Gerigk discusses the novels connection with Crime and Punishment and Bratia Karamazovy [The
Brothers Karamazov] (18791880) in Die Russen in Amerika: Dostojewskij, Tolstoj,
Turgenjew und Tschechow in ihrer Bedeutung fr die Literatur der USA ([Hrtgenwald:
Pressler, 1995] 13843, 21822). Michael F. Lynch writes about the parallels between
Wrights The Outsider (1953) and Crime and Punishment in his 1996 essay Haunted by
Innocence: The Debate with Dostoevsky in Wrights Other Novel, The Outsider (African American Review 30.2 [1996]: 25566). Dale E. Peterson posits a problematic argument in his otherwise praiseworthy article Richard Wrights Long Journey from Gorky
to Dostoevsky (African American Review 28.3 [1994]: 37587) that Wright began to
focus on Dostoevsky only after he became disenchanted with Gorky. Peterson also traces
the parallels between Native Son and Crime and Punishment and Zapiski iz podpolia [Notes
from the Underground] (1864) as well as the parallels between Wrights novella The
Man who Lived Underground (first published as The Man Who Lived Underground:
Two Excerpts from a Novel, Accent 2 (Spring 1942): 17076) and Dostoevskys Notes
from Underground. There are several exceptions to this tendency to explore the specific
305
parallels between individual novels that examine larger questions of intertextuality:

especially noteworthy is Joseph Franks 1983 article, Ralph Ellison and a Literary Ancestor: Dostoevsky (New Criterion Sept. 1983, rpt. in Speaking for You: The Vision of
Ralph Ellison, ed. Kimberly W. Benston [Washington, D.C.: Howard U P, 1987] 231
44); another interesting exception is Michael F. Lynchs 1990 study, Creative Revolt: A
Study of Wright, Ellison and Dostoevsky (New York: Lang).
9. Richard Wright, Interview, Book of the Month Club News (Feb. 1940) 4.
10. Wrights diary entries for the thirteenth of November 1945 and for the ninth of
December 1945 include the mention of buying eight books written by Mencken, including the Prejudices series which he had already read in Memphis (Richard Wright
Papers, Yale University, JWJ MSS3, box 113, folder 1812).
11. Burton Rascoe, Smart Set History, The Smart Set Anthology of World Famous
Authors, eds. Burton Rascoe and Groff Conklin (New York: Halcyon, 1934) xxiv.
12. Wright compares John OHaras collection of stories Pal Joey (1940) to Dostoevskys
book in his diary entry for the sixth of April 1945 (Richard Wright Papers, Yale University, JWJ MSS3, box 117, folder 1860).
13. Wrights undated lecture notes cited by Fabre in Richard Wright, Books and Writers
(Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 1990) 97.
14. Richard Wright, Black Boy and Reading, 1945, The Lexington Reader, ed. Lynn
Z. Bloom (Lexington, Mass.:Heath, 1987); rpt. in Conversations with Richard Wright 81.
15. Margaret Walker, Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius: A Portrait of the Man, A Critical Look at His Work (New York: Warner, 1988).
16. Richard Wright, interview, Richard Wright: I Curse the Day When for the First
Time I Heard the Word Politics, LExpress (18 Oct. 1955); trans. Keneth Kinnamon,
Conversations with Richard Wright 163.
17. Cited from a draft for Wrights early lecture or article, The Future of Literary
Expression (Richard Wright Papers, Yale University, JWJ MSS3, box 5, folder 87).
18. Richard Wright, The Position of the Negro Artist and Intellectual in American
Society, draft of a lecture written in 1960 (Richard Wright Papers, Yale University,
JWJ MSS3, box 3, folder 41).
19. Ralph Ellison, Richard Wrights Blues, Antioch Review 3.2 (1945); rpt. in Shadow
and Act (New York: Signet, 1964) 90.
20. Fedor Dostoevsky, Zapiski iz mertvogo doma [Notes from the Dead House] (1860
1862) in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh [Full Edition of Collected Works in
Thirty Volumes] vol. 4 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972) 207.
21. Richard Wright, An Author Discusses His Craft, interview, Daily Worker (13
Dec. 1938); rpt. in Conversations with Richard Wright 16.
22. Richard Wright, Author! Author!: Prize-Winning Novelist Talks of Communism
and Importance of Felt Life, interview (1938), rpt. in Conversations with Richard Wright 4.
23. Richard Wright, The Future of Literary Expression (Richard Wright Papers, Yale
Library, JWJ MSS3, box 5, folder 87).
24. Fabres Richard Wright, Books and Writers (1990), which describes the contents of
Wrights personal library, is of little assistance in trying to pinpoint when Wright had
read the individual Dostoevsky texts, because it is known that he first read most
Dostoevsky novels by borrowing them from Chicagos Public Library.
25. Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, trans. Isabel Barzun (New
York: Morrow, 1973) 84.
26. According to Fabre, Wright had this novel in a nineteenthcentury translation
by Frederick Whishaw who rendered its title as Injury and Insult.
27. Ralph Ellison, Hidden Name and Complex Fate: A Writers Experience in the
United States, address, January 6, 1964, rpt. in Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act 163.
28. Richard Wright, interview, A Conversation With Richard Wright, Author of
Native Son, Romance (1940); rpt. in Conversations with Richard Wright 32.
306
29. Richard Wright, interview, R. Wright: America Is Not Conformist: It Renews

Itself Endlessly (1960); rpt. in Conversations with Richard Wright 210.
30. The two studies were Janko Lavrins Dostoevsky, A Study (London: Methuen, 1948),
based on his earlier, out-of-print work, and Ernest Simmons Dostoevsky: The Making of
a Novelist (London: Oxford U P, 1940).
31. Wright did not have Berdyaevs book-length study of Dostoevsky, but he did have
his The Destiny of Man (trans. Natalie Duddington, 2 nd ed. [London: Bles., 1945]), Freedom and the Spirit (trans. Oliver Fielding Clark, 3rd ed. [ London: Bles., 1944]), and
Slavery and Freedom (New York: Scribner, 1944), all of which contain references to
Dostoevsky and his novels.
32. W. J. Leatherbarrows points out in his very useful overview of Dostoevsky criticism that the 1930s saw the victory of the narrowly ideological and hostile view of
Dostoevsky as Soviet society and intellectual life settled into the strict Party orthodoxy (Introduction, Fedor Dostoevsky, A Reference Guide [Boston: Hall, 1990] xxxvi).
33. It is interesting to note that the situation became reversed in the 1950s. Whereas
reading Dostoevsky in the United States in the 1930s opened one to the charges of
being a reactionary member of the political right, reading him in the 1950sSenator
McCarthy erabrought charges of being a dangerous leftist radical. Susan Sontag remembers that [p]eople would throw away . . . Dostoevsky in the early fifties because
they were afraid. [ . . . ] That fear went on through the fifites and early sixties, in Dinner with Susan Sontag: New York, 1980, A Report From the Bunker With William
Burroughs, ed. Victor Bockris (London: Vermilion, 1982) 170.
34. Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature. (New York: Harcourt, 1942) 415.
35. Ralph Ellison, interview, A Very Stern Discipline: An Interview with Ralph
Ellison (1967); rpt. in Conversations with Ralph Ellison 124.
36. This is the same Ermilov who was the leading critic of RAPP and who played a
particularly active and unsavoury role in the hounding of the writers deemed worthless
by the Party.
37. It is quite possible that the reason why these articles were approved for publication in International Literature in the first place, was that the editors were aware of the
interest Dostoevsky generated in the West, and wanted to provide a reading of his
works that appropriated him for the Communist cause.
38. Vladimir Ermilov (Yermilov), Gorky and Dostoevsky, International Literature 3
(Mar. 1940): 4066; 45 (April-May 1940): 10754; 45: 123.
39. Vladimir Ermilov, Letter to Wright, 1941 (Richard Wright Papers, Yale University, JWJ MSS3, box 97, folder 1317).
40. Richard Wright, review of Michel del Castillos The Disinherited (1960), Ill-Paid
Were the Players of the Communist Drama: The Voiceless Ones, rpt. in Michel Fabre,
Richard Wright: Books and Writers,192.
41. Richard Wright, Untitled, bio-Sketch from 1940 (Richard Wright Papers, Yale
University, box 8, folder 162).
42. Cited from a draft for the novel-length unpublished version of this text, which
was eventually cut down by Wright to the novella form in which it finally appeared
(Richard Wright Papers, Yale University, JWJ MSS3, box 41, folder 531).
43. Richard Wright, Interview with Richard Wright (1950); rpt. in Conversations
with Richard Wright 141.
44. Fedor Dostoevsky, Dnevnik pisatelia za 1876 god [The Diary of a Writer for 1876](MayOct. 1876); rpt. in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [Full Edition of Collected Works] vol. 23
(Leningrad: Nauka, 1981) 66.
45. Ernest Gaines, An Interview with Ernest Gaines, Interviews With Black Writers
(New York: Liveright, 1973) 8283.
46. Albert Murray, Something Different, Something More, Anger and Beyond: The
Negro Writer in the United States, ed. Herbert Hill (New York: Harper, 1966) 128.
307
47. Richard Wright, interview, U.S. Lets Negro Explain Race Ills, Wright Declares
(24 January 1959); rpt. in Conversations with Richard Wright 185.
48. Cited from a draft for a book cover of The Outsider, possibly written in 1952 or
1953 (Richard Wright Papers, Yale University, box 52, folder 637).
49. Fabre points out that the longer version of the manuscript . . . had [even] more of
the intricacy and richness of a Dostoevsky novel (Unfinished Quest 373).
50. Katherine Fishburn, Richard Wrights Hero: The Faces of a Rebel-Victim. (Metuchen,
N.J.: Scarecrow, 1977) 114.
51. Including Gerigk Die Russen; Lynch Creative Revolt, Haunted by Innocence;
Magistrale From St. Petersburg; Nisula Dostoevsky and Wright; Peterson Wrights
Long Journey.
52. Herbert Hill, Introduction, Soon, One Morning: New Writing by American Negroes, 19401962 (New York: Knopf, 1969) 8.
53. In Wrights archive there is a page which appears to contain alternative titles for
Native Son (Richard Wright Papers, Yale University, box 79, folder 887). Among other
versions of the title that can also be seen as connected to Dostoevsky: Shame and Crime;
A Crime of Shame.
54. Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Introduction, Native Son (New York: Harper , 1940) x.
55. Clifton Fadiman, review, Native Son, The New Yorker (2 March 1940), rpt. in
Richard Wright; Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and
K. A. Appiah (New York: Amistad, 1993) 8.
56. Howard Mumford Jones, Uneven Effect (2 Mar. 1940); rpt. in The Critical Response to Richard Wright, ed. Robert J. Butler (Westport: Greenwood, 1940) 28.
57. See, for example, Ramuncho Gomez, Richard Wright, the Black Dostoevsky
(28 October 1949) trans. Keneth Kinnamon in Conversations with Richard Wright 133;
or the anonymous 1940 article Negro Hailed as New Writer (4 March 1940); rpt. in
Conversations with Richard Wright 28. Cross Damon was also called a Black Raskolnikov
by the European critics, according to Constance Webbs Richard Wright, A Biography
(New York: Putnam, 1968) 313.
58. Ben Davis Jr., Wrights Native Son, Daily Worker (30 June 1940) 4.
59. A. Abramov, Syn diadi Toma [Uncle Toms Son], Literaturnaia Gazeta (8 Sept.
1940) 5.
60. Vogs famous1886 study, Le roman russe (Paris: Plon, 1912) was translated into
English and made available in the US long before most of Dostoevskys novels were
accessible to the Anglophone reader. His chapter of Dostoevsky had done a great deal
to shape the American understanding of the Russian novelist and his opinions are echoed in many subsequent American studies of Dostoevsky and his works.
61. Ernest Gaines, An Interview with Ernest Gaines (Fall 1986); rpt. in Conversations with Ernest Gaines, ed. John Lowe (Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 1995) 19192.
62. Many Thousands Gone originally appeared in Partisan Review (Nov.Dec. 1951);
it was reprinted in a collection of Baldwins essays, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon, 1957). The rift between Baldwin and Wright came earlier, however, with Baldwins
attack on Native Son in his essay, Everybodys Protest Novel (published in the Partisan Review in June of 1941).
63. James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work, (New York: Dial, 1976) 1011.
64. See, for instance, Charles T. Davis, The Mixed Heritage of the Modern Black
Novel (1981), Black is the Color of the Cosmos: Essays on Afro-American Literature and
Culture, 19421981, rpt. in Modern Critical Views: Ralph Ellison (New York: Chelsea,
1986) 10111.
65. Ellison wrote these words in a letter to Richard Wright on January 21, 1953 (Richard Wright Papers,Yale University, box 97, folder 1314).
66. Naturally, there was some resistance. Ellison resented Wrights underestimation
of himnamely, Wrights presumption that he had not read a number of authors with
whom he was in fact quite familiar, Dostoevsky among these (Study and Experience:
308
An Interview With Ralph Ellison [1977]; rpt. in Conversations with Ralph Ellison, 323).
He was willing, however, to concede that he had not read Dostoevskys letters before
being directed to them by Wright (Hidden Name and Complex Fate 163). Ellison
also disliked the commonly made assumption that he was Wrights groupie and insisted
on his independencealthough he did notify Wright in a letter that he was not bothered by being dismiss[ed] as simply a disciple of Dick Wrights . . . feeling as [he did]
about [Wrights] work (letter to Wright of February 1, 1948 in Richard Wright Papers,
Yale University, box 97, folder 1314). In a letter written to Wright in the 1940s he
related being questioned in the best Commisar [sic] fashion about his literary allegiances: So you and Wright are together? he was asked. No, he replied, Wright is
by himself and I am by myself. We are individuals (letter of August 24, 1946 in Richard Wright Papers, Yale University, box 97, folder 1314). Wright and Ellison retained
their friendship (though it cooled somewhat towards the end), but Baldwin ultimately
rebelled against both Wright and Ellison. His two intensely critical essays about Native
Son were regarded by Wright as a personal betrayal and led to a complete break in their
relations. Baldwin stopped communicating with Ellison upon ostensibly deciding that
Ellisons official aesthetic position was one which he did not wish to pursue, in James
Baldwin, an Interview (23 Oct. 1980); rpt in Conversations with James Baldwin, eds.
Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt (Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 1989) 208.
67. Ralph Ellison, Introduction, Invisible Man (New York: Random, 1989) xix .
68. See, for instance, Judy Lightfoots review, Ellisons Second Act, Visible at Last,
Seattle Weekly (June 39, 1999).
69. Cited by W. J. Weatherby in James Baldwin: Artist on Fire (New York: Fine, 1989) 71.
70. James Baldwin, interview, James BaldwinReflections of a Maverick (May 1984);
rpt. in Conversations with James Baldwin 226.
71. Ralph Ellison,The World and the Jug (9 Dec. 1963 and 3 Feb. 1964); rpt. in
Shadow and Act 14445.
72. James Baldwin, An Interview With James Baldwin (15 July 1961); rpt. in Conversations with James Baldwin 21.
73. James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni, A Dialogue (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1973)
74.
74. James Baldwin, Early MS and Papers, Yale University, JWJ MSS 21, box 2, folder 43.
75. Ralph Ellison, A Dialogue With His Audience (January 1968); rpt. in Conversations with Ralph Ellison 138.
76. Ralph Ellison, television interview, Interview with Ralph Ellison (1974); rpt.
in Conversations with Ralph Ellison 266.
77. Ralph Ellison, interview, The Art of Fiction: An Interview (1954); rpt in Conversations with Ralph Ellison 10. Notably, Ellison does not specify which Russian folkloric character served as the prototype for the narrator of Notes from Underground; in
fact, the whole notion is problematic and suggests a certain paucity of knowledge about
the sources of that text. There can be no doubt, however, that Ellison had eventually
gained an extensive knowledge of Dostoevskys work, life, and times. His understanding of Dostoevsky was advanced, among other things, by the close friendship he cultivated with the Dostoevsky scholar and biographer, Joseph Frank. Ellison even ended
up teaching Dostoevskys novels for several years at Bard College in the late 1950s and
early 1960s as part of a course on Russian and American Literature.
78. Ralph Ellison, To Richard Wright, 5 August 1945, Richard Wright Papers, box
97, folder 1314.
79. Ralph Ellison, interview, A Completion of Personality: A Talk With Ralph
Ellison (1974); rpt. in Conversations with Ralph Ellison 27879.
80. Ralph Ellison, television interview, Interview with Ralph Ellison (1974); rpt.
in Conversations with Ralph Ellison 266.
81. Ralph Ellison, To Richard Wright, 21 Jan. 1953, Richard Wright Papers, Yale
University, box 97, folder 1314.
309
82. Baldwin explained the shapelessness of Another Country as a reflection of the incoherence of American life (cited in David Leemings James Baldwin, A Biography [New
York: Knopf, 1994] 200) and mentioned Dostoevsky among his models for the novel. It
is noteworthy that some American apologists of Dostoevsky (like Henry Miller, with
whose works Baldwin was intimately familiar) claimed that Dostoevsky deliberately
wrote shapeless novels to reflect the chaos and shapelessness of life.
83. James Baldwin, interview, The Art of Fiction LXXVIII: James Baldwin (Spring
1984); rpt. in Conversations with James Baldwin 236.
84. Joseph Frank, Ralph Ellison and a Literary Ancestor: Dostoevsky (1983); rpt
in Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison, ed. Kimberley W. Benson (Washington
D. C.: Howard U P, 1987) 23144.
85. Baldwin expressed a special interest in the novel and its Hollywood screen adaptation. As a child, Baldwin was a preacher. When he became an adult, he got involved
in politics, first as a Trotskyist and then as a spokesman for the Civil Rights movement.
Later, he suggested that a belief in a political system is not much different from religious faith. According to Baldwin, both of these experiences involve a larger force
taking over or possessing the individual. In The Devil Finds Work (1976) he writes that
even though his brother laughed incredulously after watching the film version of the
Dostoevsky novel, Baldwin, as someone who read the novel and had once claimed to
be filled with the Holy Ghost, and had once really believed . . . could not . . . arbitrarily sneer at the notion of demonic possession (116).
86. Ralph Ellison, To Richard Wright, 24 Aug. 1946, Richard Wright Papers, Yale
University, box 97, folder 1314. The critic mentioned is Kenneth Burke, a Greenwich
Village writer, literary and social critic.
87. Wrights early stories and his first novel were essentially agitprop. The evil characters are monstrous (one thinks of the inhuman Sheriff s men in his story Bright and
Morning Star [1938]) and the good characters saintly and martyred; whatever depth
is allowed to the characters is bestowed upon victims of oppression who blindly lash
out against their oppressors and destroy themselves in the process. It is only in The
Outsider (1953) that the characters become more complex and three-dimensional. In
Wrights last finished novel, The Long Dream (New York: Doubleday, 1958), about life
in the American South, the majority of the characters are allowed some complexity
and resist familiar stereotypes. It is a Bildungsroman, and its African-American protagonist, nicknamed Fishbelly, discovers that the world is much more complicated than it
seems. He finds out, for instance, that his own father is involved with the corrupt Sheriff, runs a bawdy house where African-American women and girls are prostituted, and
is indirectly responsible for the horrific fire that kills many of his neighbours, including
Fishbellys girlfriend. The novel still contains plenty of stereotypes, however. The Sheriff,
for instance, and the white jailers are racist, corrupt, possess no redeeming or humanizing traits, and are wholly despicable (although one of the police officers is allowed to
show some compassion to Fishbelly). Wrights two last unfinished novels, Island of Hallucinations and My Fathers Law (the drafts of which are in Yales Beinecke library),
appear to present more successful attempts at resisting stereotyping and at allowing all
characters to have a voice.
88. Mary White Ovington, To Richard Wright, 3 May 1940, Richard Wright Papers, Yale University, box 102, folder 1485.
89. This propensity to view Dostoevsky as a writer who existed somehow outside of
and separately from the literary establishment and from the (white) literary canon explains why some African-American writers, like Amiri Baraka, could comfortably and
approvingly cite Dostoevsky despite holding radical anti-white views, as in Barakas
period of involvement with the Black Power Movement.

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Rage and Revolt: Dostoevsky and

In 1920, H. L. Mencken, the irreverent and highly quotable American

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consider herself to be at all indebted to Dostoevsky and whose works

Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, and Dostoevsky

DOSTOEVSKY AND THREE AFRICAN-AMERICAN WRITERS

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DOSTOEVSKY AND THREE AFRICAN-AMERICAN WRITERS

the Slavic people, whom he perceives as the outsiders of the Western

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in crowded barracks and vented their hostility upon one another.

DOSTOEVSKY AND THREE AFRICAN-AMERICAN WRITERS

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Reading the Dostoevsky Critics

DOSTOEVSKY AND THREE AFRICAN-AMERICAN WRITERS

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You know, he said, his voice dropping to a low, confidential tone,

DOSTOEVSKY AND THREE AFRICAN-AMERICAN WRITERS

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extent to which it bolstered his own opinions of Dostoevskys writings.

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He was certainly alienated. He was imprisoned and one time he came

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Finding Dostoevsky in Wrights Books

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main character of the novella a revision of Dostoevskys prototype, but

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wrestl[ing] with utter sincerity with Dostoevskys subjecta human soul

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persistence and the limitations of this stereotype in a candid interview

DOSTOEVSKY AND THREE AFRICAN-AMERICAN WRITERS

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Ellison and Baldwin, as did Wright before them, regarded Dostoevsky

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DOSTOEVSKY AND THREE AFRICAN-AMERICAN WRITERS

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Ellison discussed learning from such writers as Dostoevsky about what is

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argues that without morality any industrial or technological advances

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DOSTOEVSKY AND THREE AFRICAN-AMERICAN WRITERS

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parallels between individual novels that examine larger questions of intertextuality:

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29. Richard Wright, interview, R. Wright: America Is Not Conformist: It Renews

DOSTOEVSKY AND THREE AFRICAN-AMERICAN WRITERS

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DOSTOEVSKY AND THREE AFRICAN-AMERICAN WRITERS

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