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Justifying the Margin: The Construction of “Soul” in Russian and African-American Texts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Dale E. Peterson
Dale E. Peterson*
Affiliation:
Amherst College
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Extract

The scholarly world has little noted nor long remembered the interesting fact that the emancipation proclamation of a culturally separate African-American literature was accompanied by a generous acknowledgment of Russian precedent. In 1925 Alain Locke issued the first manifesto of the modern Black Arts movement, The New Negro. There could not have been a clearer call for the free expression of a suppressed native voice: “we have lately had an art that was stiltedly selfconscious, and racially rhetorical rather than racially expressive. Our poets have now stopped speaking for the Negro—they speak as Negroes.“ Even so, this liberating word of the Harlem Renaissance was uttered with a sideward glance at the prior success of nineteenth century Russia's soulful literature and music. Locke himself cited the testimony of his brilliant contemporary, the author of Cane, a poetic distillation of the pungent essence of slavery's culture of oppression: “for vital originality of substance, the young Negro writers dig deep into the racy peasant undersoil of the race life.

Type
Research Notes
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 51 , Issue 4 , Winter 1992 , pp. 749 - 757
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1992

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References

1. Alain Locke, ed. The New Negro: An Interpretation (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925), 48.

2. Ibid., 51.

3. Ibid., 202.

4. In a recent discussion of The New Negro, Houston Baker, Jr. has described the book's project as nothing less than the sounding and imaging of an emergent black culture that had been a “marooned” nation at the margins of modern America: “Locke's compendium virtually collects … the fullest extensions of a field of sounding possibilities; it serves as both the speaking manual and the singing book of a pioneering civilization.” See Houston A. Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 84.

5. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), xxiv.Google Scholar

6. Ibid., 50-51. It should perhaps be noted that Gates's argument appropriates Bakhtin's available words in a manner that is particularly sensitive to the empowering implications of “double-voicedness,” while underplaying the double-edged aspects of Bakhtin's theory of the utterance as a site of unavoidable semantic contestation. It is more characteristic of Bakhtin to emphasize the resistance of all language to univocal, uncluttered signification: “Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated—overpopulated— with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one's own intonations and accents, is a difficult and complicated process” (M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist [Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1981], 294).

7. This translation is by James A. Snead, who gives a thorough analysis of Hegel's negative concept of “Africanicity” in his important essay, “Repetition as a figure of black culture” in Gates, Henry Louis Jr., ed., Black Literature and Literary Theory (New York: Methuen, 1984), 59–79 Google Scholar. Hegel's entire discussion of Africa as “Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit” is condensed into a mere nine pages of the Introduction to the Sibree, J. translation of Hegel's The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 91–99.Google Scholar

8. von Herder, Johann Gottfried, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, trans. Churchill, T. (New York: Bergman Publishers, 1969), 482–83Google Scholar.

9. This point is made by Robert C. Williams, who has written on the emergence of the term in Russian nationalist discourse; see his article, “The Russian Soul: A Study in European Thought and Non-European Nationalism” in Journal of the History of Ideas 31 (1970): 573-78. It appears that the Slavophiles preferred the Hegelian category of “Spirit” and that it was, ironically, the western-oriented Belinsky who first used the term by way of a literary compliment to GogoF's great novel.

10. Wayne Dowler has demonstrated the intellectual evolution of the ideology of Russian “soul” in his valuable study, Dostoevsky, Grigor'ev, and Native Soil Conservatism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982). Without question, the major theoreticians of Russia's national, ethnic “soul” were Apollon Grigor'ev and Fyodor Dostoev sky, both of whom abandoned the historically retrograde manorial idyll of the Slavophiles for a quite different notion of Russia's still-formative, evolving culture of a synthetic, highly adaptive nationality. Interestingly, Vladimir Dal''s great dictionary offers support for the distinction between “spirit” (dukh) as primarily denoting “a bodiless entity” while “soul” (dusha) more particularly denotes embodied spirit, “that which gives life to flesh.” See Vladimir Ivanovich Dal', Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1955), 1: 503.

11. Robert B. Stepto carefully describes the composition and intertextual subtleties of DuBois's “generic narrative” in his pioneering study, From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 53-81. Incidentally, Stepto's analysis of The Souls of Black Folk strongly suggests a functional equivalence to the phenomenon of Russian “boundary” works which operate in two significantly different genres at the same time; DuBois has performed a text that reads both as intellectual autobiography and collective history.

12. W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin, 1989), 204.

13. This claim is advanced in the scholarly commentary to Pevcy included in IS. Turgenev, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii (Moscow: Akademiia Nauk, 1963), IV: 582.

14. Ibid., 241.

15. Both the name of the village, Kolotovka, (from kolot’ meaning “to break, chop, split “) and the symbolic geography of the setting, with an unbridgeable ravine splitting the village in half, anticipate the culture shock of entering an environment in which an astonishing emotional chasm yawns between the transcendent singing and oppressive brutality of the “broad Russian soul. “

16. Yakov the Turk's song, “Little Path” (Dorozhen'ka), is identified by Richard Taruskin as a classic example of Russian folk music's “most aesthetically autonomous genre,” the protiazhnaia, a lyric song characterized by capricious rhythmic shifts, tonal ambiguity, and frequent use of “melisma” (more than one note per syllable). For many examples of these peasant “art songs” and a succinct history of their importance to Russian cultural nationalists, see Taruskin's article, “'Little Star': An Etude in the Folk Style,” Musorgsky: In Memoriam 1881-1981, ed., Malcolm Hamrick Brown (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982), 57-84.

17. Ralph Ellison, “Richard Wright's Blues” in Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), 77-94. This famous essay was originally published in The Antioch Review (Summer 1945).

18. See in particular, Il'ya Serman, “Tema narodnosti v ‘Zapiskakh iz mertvogo doma, '” in Dostoevsky Studies 3 (1982): 101-44; and more recently, Gary Rosenshield, “The Realization of the Collective Self: The Rebirth of Religious Autobiography in Dostoevskii's Zapiski iz Mertvogo Doma” in Slavic Review 50 (Summer 1991): 317-27.

19. Robert Louis Jackson, The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).

20. F.M. Dostoevsky, Zapiski iz Mertvogo Doma in Sobranie Sochinenii (Moscow: Akademiia Nauk, 1956), 111: 513.

21. Stepto, 66.

22. Ibid., 74.

23. DuBois, 5.

24. Ibid., 1.