Richard Wright's long journey from Gorky to Dostoevsky.

Ours is an age, in Russia as in the United States, which revels in ethnic revivals and romanticizes cultural difference. In such a time of enthusiastic and sometimes euphoric reconstruction of a usable national identity, Richard Wright, like Maxim Gorky, appears to be a toppled idol of proletarian internationalism, a massive remnant from a discredited humanism. Yet monuments, especially literary monuments, pile up high ruins--all those uncirculating books--and leave a large absence that never quite disappears from cultural memory. Even in a time of relative neglect, Richard Wright continues to occupy a distinctive and disturbing position in African-American letters that is comparable to Gorky's place in the evolution of Russian literary history.

Gorky and Wright are the two modern writers who most inconvenience the cultural separatists and sentimental populists among their own people. No two major writers were raised closer to the folk who had recently risen from bondage, and yet both Gorky and Wright rejected the vestiges of the traditional peasant cultures of survival that had spawned them.(1) Both writers carried the large psychic burden of the inside outsider, ever seeking to account for the source of the rage and removal that made them so different. Ultimately the pressure of Gorky's "bitter" knowledge forced him to imagine and then to help canonize the positive hero of socialist realism, the universal proletarian who would replace the ex-peasant has-beens (byvshie liudi) of his early fiction. But Richard Wright's black-and-blue sensibility, the pain of his profoundly alienated and wounded individuality, eventually led him away from Gorky's faith in collectivist culture and social engineering. Sometime around 1942 Richard Wright began to risk a desperate transcendentalism, an absurd Dostoevskian faith in solitary leaps of consciousness that prefigured the later existential humanism of his expatriate years in France.

First, though, the young Richard Wright experienced a powerful identification with the life and writing of Maxim Gorky, and with good reason. Coming to social consciousness in Depression-era Chicago's John Reed Club, at the height of the Popular Front campaign to unite the intellectual proletariat of the world, Wright could not help but be aware of Gorky's legendary life and inspirational example, as promoted in pamphlets, newsprint, and in the world-famous autobiography in its translated and even filmed representation.(2) Indeed, Richard Wright came into literary prominence as the beau ideal of the proletarian revolutionary artist. His early prose and pronouncements emulated Gorky's call for the dialectical transformation of suffering peasant souls into militant socialist masses. By 1937, Wright had fully emerged as the American Communist Party's most illustrious recruit to the newly established literary standards of proletarian realism.(3)

In his first important manifesto, "Blueprint for Negro Writing," Wright took issue with what he considered the black chauvinism of the Harlem Renaissance, insisting that one could not responsibly advance the race by "conspicuous ornamentation" of the institutions imposed by segregation:

Negro writers must accept this nationalism, but only in order to understand it, possess it, and transcend it.... a deep, informed, and complex consciousness is necessary; a consciousness which draws for its strength upon the fluid lore of a great people, and moulds this lore with the concepts that move and direct the forces of history today.... To borrow a phrase from the Russians, it should have a complex simplicity. (58-60)

Very much resembling Gorky's 1934 address to the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, Wright was calling for a selective integration of the "progressive" aspects of folk culture and religion into a consciously

refashioned collective myth that would promote a revolutionary attitude toward reality. Not surprisingly, an activist reconception of Negro spirituals and black Christianity is precisely what distinguished the plotting of Wright's first collection of stories, Uncle Tom's Children. The first Soviet reviewers in 1938 were justly impressed by the dialectical logic of these tales, in which each black hero chooses to risk martyrdom in progressively more elevated stages of class consciousness, and they correctly noted the unmistakable resemblance of the culminating story's heroine to the title figure in Gorky's prototype of socialist-realist myth-making, Mother.(4) Both Gorky and Wright strategically embodied the radiant future of proletarian internationalism in the prophetic shape of a peasant mother of revolutionaries who learns to translate her Christian faith into an earthly vision of socialist solidarity. An'Sue of "Bright and Morning Star," like Gorky's Nilovna, projected the fondest aspirations of an author who sought to be literary nursemaid to a folk culture which, in his experience, had yet to nourish a full human dignity.

Richard Wright's first writings emerged from a biography that bore many striking and uncomfortably close resemblances to Gorky's much-publicized formative years. Both shared a brutalized and peripatetic childhood in the midst of an increasingly desperate clan of downwardly mobile former serfs and sharecroppers; they both led vagabond existences up and down the major river of their nation's heartland, deprived of fathers, disappointed in mothers, shuttling in and out of insecure households dominated by sporadic violence and a suffocating piety. And in an odd, but telling, detail, Gorky and Wright shared an important secret of psychic survival in an environment that militated against uncensored expression of inner emotion and rebellious instinct. That secret was, quite simply, that literature was more of a lifeline to authentic existence than the given culture that was one's birthright.

Few writers were as eager as Gorky and Wright to testify to the centrality of literature in getting a purchase on life. In the essay "How I Studied" (1918), Gorky waxed positively lyrical on the subject:

The more I read the closer books bound me to the world and the more vivid and significant life became for me.... Like some wondrous birds out of fairy tales, books sang their songs to me and spoke to me as though communing with one languishing in prison; they sang of the variety and richness of life. ... Each book was a rung in my ascent from the brutish to the human. (On Literature 16-17)

Literacy for Gorky was the spiritual equivalent of Jacob's Ladder. Wright's voice is no less enthusiastic, but symptomatically more prosaic:

I read Dreiser's Jennie Gerhardt and Sister Carrie and they revived in me a vivid sense of my mother's suffering; I was overwhelmed .... It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself. All my life had shaped me for the realism, the naturalism of the modern novel, and I could not read enough of them. (Black Boy 274)

These powerful testimonials offer living proof of the paradox that literary realists of the "slice-of-life" school are the greatest believers in the power of books and literacy to free lives from the shackles of a restrictive, "real-life" environment.

One crucial measure of Wright's reliance on Gorky for arriving at a reading of his own life can be found in the generic similarities and tonal differences between Black Boy (subtitled A Record of Childhood and Youth) and Gorky's Childhood (Detstvo). These mature reminiscences of an embattled and battered childhood reach, as their titles indicate, beyond the personal memoir toward the status of exemplary lives. Although it is customary (and appropriate) to read Wright's famous book as a modern reiteration of Frederick Douglass's prototypical slave narriative of 1845 with its celebration of a rise to literacy that rescues a freed man from a native "black world" that is itself but a phase of slavery, Wright also proudly attached his life story to world literature and thematized his own color-blind identification with the lonely waifs and wanderers of the naturalist novel.(5) But given its particular focus on childhood, its vast episodic scope, and the narrative shape of Wright's famous memoir, an especially compelling case can be made for reading Black Boy as a conscious literary dialogue with what was commonly accepted as the paradigmatic text of proletarian self-development--namely, the work that Erik Erikson so aptly labelled "the Bolshevik legend of Maxim Gorky's Childhood."

Although Erikson's persuasive argument is derived primarily from an analysis of Mark Donskoi's famous film of 1938, his thesis is more faithful to the original text than is suspected by critics who prefer to sentimentalize Gorky's devotion to his nurturing, folksy grandmother. Briefly stated, Erikson claims that the autobiographical persona dramatizes a telling refusal to participate in the conventions of his home life:

Each scene and each significant person thus represents a temptation to regress to the traditional morality and the ancient folkways of his people.... By far the greatest temptation, and the one which accompanies Alyosha to the very end, is that of finding refuge in his grandmother's peace of mind and becoming part of her calm conscience.... she obviously symbolizes the primitive trust of the people, their ability to survive and to persist, and yet also their weakness in enduring what will ultimately enslave them. (322-24)

Undeniably, readers of Gorky's remarkable memoir are made uncomfortably intimate with daily life among a mercurial clan suffering the insults and injuries of arbitrary patriarchal violence and indiscriminate maternal acceptance. The opening scene, with its rude life-and-death juxtaposition of a father's corpse and a mother in labor, as witnessed by a neglected four-year-old, captures vividly and with symbolic power the permanent frame through which Gorky's narrative patiently observes the Russian interior. As Helen Muchnic once pointed out, we too will come to stand like that astonished child "in a dark corner, gazing in tense and troubled incomprehension on the tragically sordid scene that unfolds"; but not all readers will be as consoled as Muchnic was by the grandmother's sudden replacement of the departed father with her soft, strong hand at the child's side offsetting "an infinitude of cruelty" (41) by teaching him tolerance and appreciation.(6)

At the beginning of the second chapter, Gorky makes clear the adult ambition that moves him to render so honestly the baffled responses and vacillating emotions of his childhood among vulgar Volga relatives: "Truth is grander than pity and I am not writing about myself but about that close, suffocating atmosphere of oppressive impressions in which lived, and lives to this very day, the ordinary Russian person" (Detstvo 17).(7) Much, then, hinges upon how the narrative cultivates the reader's sympathies and antipathies as Gorky reconstitutes his childhood traumas and affections. But the greatness of the book resides in its nuanced presentation both of a child's unresolved conflicts and of a conflicted adult voice. That is why the critical literature has reached no consensus about Gorky's authorized perspective on the folk subculture as a whole. It is clear that the careful sequence of episodes reinforces Erikson's masterplot of a proletarian's progress; that is, the child withdraws from and eventually rejects a range of traditional peasant behaviors that are in collusion with a culture which thrives on a punitive formal religion, outbursts of anarchistic rage, and a disabling resignation to suffering. The gradual emergence of a "Bolshevik" resistance to the mentality of traditional Russia is signaled by young Alyosha's sympathy for an ostracized local intellectual and inventor nicknamed "Good Deal." And the memoir even contains, in chapter 12, a precocious parable about perestroika. Gorky's young persona undertakes a voluntary project in social reconstruction. The alienated child uproots and overhauls a nasty backyard pit in which a foul-minded sadistic neighbor had committed suicide and transforms it into a "garden project" (postroiki v sadu) that is his "first independent deed" (142).

Yet the memoir remains crucially ambivalent about the earthy grandmother and the role of the folk's lore in contributing to the secular socialism of the young Russian protestant who emerges from Gorky's old Russia. The adult voice that occasionally intrudes on the faithful transcript of Gorky's childhood is patently of two minds. It can seem at times that the maternal grandmother brings a redemption of bliny and byliny, of sweet pancakes and heroic tales: "I had been as if asleep, hidden in a dark corner, but she appeared, awakened me, led me out into the light, wrapped everything around me into one sustained thread and wove from it all many-colored lace" (14). Yet the beautiful images associated with Arina Kashirina also have an underside. She tries to account for her husband's greedy exploitation of a meek servant's compulsive thievery by explaining: "It's all, Lyosha, complicated lacework spun out by a blind hag, and how are we supposed to make out the design in it?" (37). Her luxurious hair is glorious and sheltering, but it can also serve as a means of abuse when she is battered. And it is subtly associated with the potential in folklore and folk religion for seduction and suffocation when the narrator admits, "I used to take her heavy velvety braids into my hands and wrap them all around my neck as I listened attentively, without moving a muscle, to her endless stories that never satiated me" (43). The point would seem to be that the traditional peasant culture had rich resources for garbing patriarchal exploitation and saintly endurance in colorful images and rhythms of speech. It could instill courage and patient discipline in a child of old Russia, but by itself it could not promote active resistance to customary evils. Gorky's Childhood leaves us with the sad knowledge that the Russian folk, in the poverty and scantness of their lives, distract themselves with suffering: "On a blank face even a scratch is a decoration" (120).

It is not difficult to believe that Richard Wright's searing account of his own childhood was a deliberate revision of Gorky's prototype. Wright's own description of Black Boy in an interview from 1945 accords, in the main, with Gorky's project, except for his more extreme, categorical repudiation of cultural nurturance:

I wrote the book to tell a series of incidents strung through my childhood, but the main desire was to render a judgment on my environment.... That judgment was this: the environment the South creates is too small to nourish human beings, especially Negro human beings. (qtd. in Fabre, Unfinished 252)

Indeed, for many African-American critics, the autobiography epitomizes the awkward position of Richard Wright as a black militant writer: namely, his refusal to be culturally black or to embrace with pride "intraracial ritual communications."(8)

Black Boy, like Gorky's Detstvo, frames a long series of traumatic episodes between a four-year-old's encounter with horrifying "primal scenes" and the narrator's emergence, in premature adolescence, as a modern man. There is also, as in Gorky's work, a grand narrative strategy firmly shaping a flood of childhood impressions that are interrupted occasionally by the voiced reflections of an adult narrator. But, despite the formal and generic resemblances, the masterplot and the dominant tone of Wright's narrative establish a radical remove from origins that far exceeds Gorky's intention. To cite Robert Stepto's rather oblique summary of Black Boy: "Expressions of literate mobility slowly take form, then accompany, and then supersede expressions of illiterate immobility" ("Literacy" 132). In other words, Wright means to write off the legacy of the unlettered Southern black culture of survival.

Conscious life begins in Wright's autobiography with a representative incident in which the disruption of an interior decorum leads to the beating of a black boy. Hushed into silence and separated from the natural world behind long, fluffy white curtains kept immaculate by an ailing, near-white maternal grandmother, an impatient, bored black child ignites the gauzy white barrier with lit broomstraws. The young Wright's subconscious nearly succeeds in sweeping away the respectable religious black home in which he is narrowly cabined. For this infraction he is beaten by his mother within an inch of his life. The adult narrator then proceeds to link this first abuse to an entire environment dedicated to the suffocation of instinct and the stifling of potential. The first chapter of Black Boy exposes the nightmare of the black matriarchy's protective nurture and the trauma of an absent or impotent paternity, and both deficiencies are implicitly connected to the subculture of an underclass which has been mentally colonized by fearsome images of white supremacy.

As a consequence of his mother's harsh beating, young Wright suffers an obsessive delirium:

Whenever I tried to sleep I would see huge wobbly white bags, like the full udders of cows, suspended from the ceiling above me.... I could see the bags in the daytime with my eyes open and I was gripped by the fear that they were going to fall and drench me with some horrible liquid.(13)

This is a most peculiar wet dream, the life-denying nightmare of a black male child horrified by the prospect of being nurtured to death by a protective, pacifying maternalism. But another consequence, equally appalling, follows from Wright's father's inability to provide support or nurturance. Furious to find himself abandoned by a father whose only potency is sexual, young Wright forever associates the paternal image with biological and spiritual hunger. Refusing absolutely whatever pittance his black sire can offer him, Wright survives to pen a devastatingly anti-pastoral portrait of the artist's father as a man with a hoe:

I was to see him again, standing alone upon the red clay of a Mississippi plantation, a sharecropper, clad in ragged overalls, holding a muddy hoe in his gnarled, veined hands.... though ties of blood made us kin, though I could see a shadow of my face in his face, though there was an echo of his voice in my voice, we were forever strangers, speaking a different language, living on vastly different planes of reality. (42)

Few indictments of the limits of a native birthright match Richard Wright's narrative of his literary ascent up from the vestiges of the slave culture. Black Boy is relentless in its enumeration of the lack of resources which the future author endured on home soil. In a notorious parenthetical meditation early in the second chapter, Wright's adult voice rivals the shocking cultural despair of nineteenth-century Russia's foremost "Westernizer," Peter Chaadaev: "Whenever I thought of the essential bleakness of black life in America, I knew that Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization, that they lived somehow in it but not of it" (45). It is hardly trivial that Wright's first defiance of the paralyzing domestic injunction against expressing the truth of his own emotions and experience comes when he cajoles a schoolteacher/boarder into reciting the story she is reading, Bluebeard and His Seven Wives:

They could not have known that Ella's whispered story of deception and murder had been the first experience in my life that had elicited from me a total emotional response. ... I had tasted what to me was life, and I would have more of it, somehow, someway. (48)

In a controlling environment over-whelmingly female and pious, the literary word enters with murderous intent, authorizing masculine aggression and accepting previously censored fantasies of revenge. Wright's autobiographical writing is eloquent about the literal empowerment literature can bring to the wretched of the earth who have been dispossessed of a culture that dares express a full humanity. In the recently restored continuation of Wright's autobiography, American Hunger, the mature writer openly expresses his admiration for the inseminating ejaculation that the literary word represented to his imagination: "I strove to master words ... to make them melt into a rising spiral of emotional stimuli, each feeding and reinforcing the other, and all ending in an emotional climax that would drench the reader with a sense of a new world" (22).(9) Clearly, the nightmare of drowning in a suffocating mother culture had been overcome, but a desperate intensity is still palpable in the troubled tale of Richard Wright's childhood.

By 1945, when Black Boy was published, Richard Wright had outgrown his close identification with Gorky and had stopped trying to be a Communist. The years of gradual disaffection after 1938 coincided with Wright's long encounter with Gorky's nemesis, Fyodor Dostoevsky, that "cruel genius" who had exposed to view the "anarchism of the vanquished" among Russia's meek souls and spiteful intellectuals.(10) Although Wright had read Poor Folk as early as 1927 in Memphis, we know he avidly pursued in Chicago libraries and bookstores all the available works and biographical facts of his favorite writers and that he reread analytically the major Dostoevsky novels with his Brooklyn friend Jane Newton while working on Native Son.(11) And we also know what riveted Wright's attention on Dostoevsky over many years. Early on, he associated Dostoevsky with "one thing [the petty bourgeoisie] has in abundance--emotional consciousness, intense emotional consciousness"; and by the end of his career, he could honestly say, "Foremost among all the writers who have influenced me in my attitude toward the psychological state of modern man is Dostoevsky."(12) In fact, Richard Wright sounds very much like Nietszche in Nice in 1887 excitedly discovering unsuspected truths beyond good and evil as he browsed through French translations of Dostoevsky.

Commentators have long acknowledged that Native Son is more like "an American Crime and Punishment" than an exemplary proletarian novel, even though it does contain a lengthy Communist rationale for antisocial behavior.(13) At the same time, it has seemed that Wright, in going to such length to defend a black Raskolnikov, was revising Dostoevsky's psychological and spiritual understanding of human culpability.(14) In a profoundly disturbing manner, the novel manages to frustrate both socialist and Christian explications of homicidal violence, leaving the killer's consciousness and conscience still volatile and inarticulate, yearning to express and communicate an interior reality that has no adequate language. But this anxious irresolution is much closer to Dostoevsky than to Gorky. In a letter written to the novelist Mike Gold soon after Native Son was published, Wright already found himself protesting the incomprehension of his former allies: "Not to plunge into the complex jungle of human relationships ... and write of Negroes through the lens of how the Party views them in terms of political theory, I'd abandon the Bigger Thomases" (Fabre, Unfinished 185). In Native Son, Wright moved boldly toward a Dostoevskian exposure of the lacerated psyche of the insulted and the injured.

At first glance, the parallels between the intellectual Raskolnikov and the inarticulate Bigger seem restricted to the superficial plot rather than the deep content of each novel. A young ghetto dweller is humiliated by a social position which renders him impotent to alleviate family suffering. The daily frustration of altruism and ego takes its toll in suppressed rage and pretended indifference. Secretly, however, a determination to take willed action against injustice forms. But when the occasion to deliver a lethal blow arises, that blow falls by reflex action, conditioned by accidental circumstance and internalized fear. Worse yet, a second, unintended victim falls as a consequence of the compulsive need to hide from public exposure. Yet an inner conflict rages between impulses to disclaim the shameful original deed and to claim it proudly as a transgression, a sign of autonomy. The culprit is in the grip of unconscious compulsions which finally resolve the tension between hiding and showing what one has done. A representative social pathology is exposed to full view, and each novel concludes by staging a show trial. The question which society, the victim/villain, and the reader are all asked to resolve is: "Who or what is responsible for the 'brutal crime' so typical of our condition?"

Clearly, it matters that the predisposing ambiance for Raskolnikov's half-involuntary crime is, roughly speaking, the cultural ideology of "modernization" with its Napoleonic cult of self-assertion, whereas Bigger Thomas seems cornered into murderous violence when he internalizes and acts on a racist society's presumption that he is bestial. One mentality suffers from the social affliction of a superhuman expectation and the other from the infliction of a subhuman self-image. But both victims are also victimizers, and each novel explores a variety of discourses that compete to speak to a complex case. And it is this polyphonic novelistic rhetoric that Wright learned from Dostoevsky in dramatizing the unspeakable truth of a native son's crime and punishment.

Richard Wright's copy of Crime and Punishment, Michel Fabre tells us, was dog-eared to mark Chapter 5 of Part IV (Richard 39). That is the chapter in which Raskolnikov has his first interview with the remarkable public prosecutor Porfiry Petrovitch, who turns out, paradoxically, to be tormentingly intimate with the criminal's psyche. In a cunning display of enmity masked as friendship, Porfiry sets up his trap:

"But how did I treat you just now, I, the examining lawyer? Prompting you and giving you every means for your defense: illness, I said, delirium, injury, melancholy.... Though, indeed, all those psychological means of defense are not very reliable and cut both ways." (350)(15)

It so happens that one shrewd reading of Native Son has justly noted the paradox that Bigger's defense lawyer, Boris Max, ensnares him thoroughly in a determinism which the client desperately seeks to escape (Bigsby 70). The defense which both Raskolnikov and Bigger would prefer is quite different; they could live with their acts, however deplorable, if they could only convince themselves that the alleged crime was a voluntary act of self-determination. In a profound and, I believe, deliberate irony, Wright sees to it that Bigger's Communist attorney unwittingly performs the same function as Raskolnikov's cunning prosecutor. The legal arguments serve as a catalyst to the injured pride of the criminal, prodding him to claim a specious, self-deluding responsibility for a complex and tragic destiny in which he has but colluded. As early as 1940, Wright understood, like Dostoevsky, that the victims of cultural conditioning are likely to protest their differentness while suffering an identity shaped by reaction.

In Native Son, Richard Wright gradually gives Bigger Thomas his own voice, after exhausting the narrative resources of the naturalistic novel and the rhetoric of the Communist Party to articulate the living panic and aggression of a black boy from the urban underclass.(16) When this happens, Wright's novel dares something new and shocking in protest literature. It strives to express the interiority of cultural inferiority in a language that does justice to the inarticulate outrage of the "uncultured." This means, in effect, that Richard Wright's black Raskolnikov neither repents nor relents; instead, he rattles the bars of his cage and seeks, for the first time, to make outside auditors hear his paradoxical rumblings. It is not accidental that, when Bigger finds his voice, he often echoes the puzzled and tortured introspection heard in Dostoevsky's "underground." Like his Russian precursor, Bigger is conflicted as to whether to seek acceptance or rejection from those who begin to understand him. Both acknowledge they have transgressed and violated a better self, but they enter two pleas in extenuation of their inhumane conduct. One plea asks compassion for a mind that has internalized from the dominant culture a cruelly low estimate of the natural self: "'They wouldn't let me ...' [be good]" (388). The other plea demands respect for a necessary seizure of control: "'It must have been good! When a man kills, it's for something'" (392). The moral reality of a violent native son is experienced as a human conundrum, not as a sociological formula.

Nothing better illustrates Wright's defection from the optimistic teleology of historical materialism and his turn toward Dostoevskian despair and spiritual transfiguration than the work that coincided with his break from Communism and his move toward autobiography--"The Man Who Lived Underground."(17) Despite the title's evident allusion to Dostoevsky's anti-hero, the work is correctly understood as a deliberately literal-minded realization of the "underground" metaphor and, hence, as a revision of Dostoevsky's prototype. But just as Wright's black Raskolnikov was ultimately more closely akin to the underground man's psychology, here, too, Wright has combined several Dostoevsky references under one guise. Wright's man who lived underground turns out to be a near brother to the desperate transcendental visionary who emerges from Dostoevsky's "Dream of a Ridiculous Man."(18)

"The Man Who Lived Underground" is, by all accounts, a touchstone of Wright's intellectual evolution; it anticipates by many years his later "existentialist" phase during the expatriate years in France. When it first appeared, it seemed to represent a rude and sudden shift from a racially-aware novel to a metaphysical parable; and it remains Wright's single most debated and explicated text, problematically hovering between a "naturalistic" tale of racial oppression and an "existentialist" fable of dark wisdom and achieved illumination.(19) Wright himself was clearly seeking a new genre to express his growing conviction that blackness signified more than proletarian brotherhood; it was, he said," the first time I've really tried to step beyond the straight black-white stuff" (qtd. in Fabre, Unfinished 240). In fact, the Negro identity of the narrator becomes clar only after twenty pages that narrate a Kafkaesque pursuit of an anonymous innocent into a dark labyrinth. In "The Man Who Lived Underground" blackness happens to carry the burden of a nearly incommunicable insight into an essential humantity. In other words, it begins to dawn on Richard Wright that being a black boy in America initiates one into an essential absurdity that far transcends racial or cultural specifics.(20)

Like Dostoevsky's "ridiculous" dreamer, Wright's Fred Daniels experiences a sudden conversion from radical disaffection to a quixotic compassion for the absurd human species. In flight from a forced confession to a murder he didn't commit, Daniels has no recourse from injustice other than to disappear down a "manhole," into a city sewer system which, significantly, he refers to as a "cave." Looked at one way, he has been flushed with all the other offal into the black hole of non-existence, but that same dystopia is also a parodic version of the Platonic cave in which ordinary man is privileged to see darkly reflections of a higher world. Knowing what he now knows about the unprotected "thrownness" of any human existence, Daniels finds himself living in an underground connected to, but separated from, the institutions of civilized life. From his new perch, he spies on black gospel singers with a radically alienated vision: "Just singing with the air of the sewer blowing in on them.... He felt that he was gazing on something abysmally obscene, yet he could not bring himself to leave" (32). Looking on with dispassion and detachment, he is privy to all manner of ludicrous human occupations, from undertaking to movie-going to safe-cracking. For him, there is no future to these cosmetic illusions covering over the injustice of existence; after all, he has stood by helplessly while a babe's tiny life swirled like so much excrement in the sewer, "feeling that he had been staring for all eternity at the ripples of veined water skimming impersonally over the shriveled limbs" (34). In this phase of his life underground, Daniels is in the lion's den of a cruel universe, overwhelmed by the intellectual conviction that torments Dostoevsky's suicidal narrator: "nothing in the world mattered" (308). But also like Dostoevsky's ridiculous narrator, Daniels' radical alienation is informed by an illogical rage and pity that belies his indifference and subjects him to dreams of a higher order than existence allows.

Life in the underground offers an exhilarating, but also frightening, liberation from Naturalism's trinity of determinisms: Zola's race, moment, milieu. Fred Daniels is suddenly free to deny the attachments and values that regulate the social consensus above ground; having no situation to maintain, he is able to move with dream-like impunity in and out of human lives, rading the world to decorate his cave and act out fantasized roles. When Daniels wallpapers his cave with greenbacks, walks on scattered diamonds, and lets others take the blame for his looting, Wright is surely creating a fable that underlines the "ghetto" critique of commodified values, the carnivalesque play of the dispossessed with the "serious toys" of symbolic power.(21) But the spectacle of his own lawless existential freedom produces a moral vertigo that is expressed in a Dostoevskian turn of mind and phrase:

Maybe anything's right, he mumbled.... He straightened with a start. What was happening to him? He was drawn to these crazy thoughts, yet they made him feel vaguely guilty.(64)

Having realized in the imaginative riot of the human heart that "all is permissible," Wright's protagonist, like Dostoevsky's desperate dreamer of a corrupted Edenic innocence, feels compelled to emerge before the world with an absurd truth, one perhaps most succinctly expressed by Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov: "Each is responsible for everyone and everything." But neither the church nor the law is prepared to tolerate this ridiculous embrace of universal guilt, this piteous and indiscriminate communion with all humanity in its separation from a harmony it can but dream. Both Dostoevsky and Wright finally leave their readers with the uncomfortable spectacle of a saving word that is always rejected as an embarrassing confession of an absurd oneness in suffering. Dostoevsky's ridiculous man preaches despite knowing his dream cannot be translated into the necessary words. And a policeman named Law/son liquidates Fred Daniels in the sewer, refusing to enter with him into the dark cave: "'You've got to shoothis kind. They'd wreck things'" (92).

Richard Wright never imagined there could be much comfort or support for his painful self-awareness in black nationalism or a defense against dehumanization in cultural exclusivity. With good reason, he was resented for denying that human dignity could be adequately nurtured by the vernacular subculture in which he was raised. Perhaps one simply has to be as radically alienated as a Mississippi black boy or a Russian dissident to feel the desperate importance of transcending the limits of a given birthright and of affirming a leaping faith in one's essential, inalienable, universal humanity. Certainly Wright needed to discover that his black and bruised body was not destined for a predetermined exclusion from a fully human nature. Yet he also indicated his understanding that the leap of faith required for a belief in universal humanism is predicated on an absurd confidence in the obliteration of proudly held differences. In his courageous battle to express the truth of his revolt against cultural determinism, he identified first with the promise of a colorblind proletarian internationalism and then, disenchanted with the shallow psychology of class-consciousness, he embraced a difficult faith in a desperate, transcendental humanism. A heroic figure of resistance to cultural marginalization, Richard Wright made his journey from Gorky to Dostoevsky while also remaining an exemplary African-American soul.

Notes

(1.)As early as 1945 Ralph Ellison noted a cultural parallelism between "Richard Wright's blues" and the antecedent literature of serfdom: "The extent of beatings and psychological maimings meted out by Southern Negro parents rivals those described by the nineteenth-century Russian writers as characteristic of peasant life under the Tsars. The horrible thing is that the cruelty is also an expression of concern, of love .... Wright recognized and made no peace with its essential cruelty" ("Richard" 91).

(2.)Michel Fabre reports, in his definitive intellectual biography, that Wright left his first Left Front editorial board meeting in 1933 with recent issues of New Masses and International Literature, in which articles by Gorky were prominent (see Unfinished 97). Gorky's autobiography had been translated into English as early as 1915, and interest was revived by the American distribution in 1938 of Mark Donskoi's film The Childhood of Maxim. Wright's private library included the 1939 International Publishers edition of Gorky's literary and political essays, Culture and the People.

(3.)Daniel Aaron (35-46) relates in some detail the story of Wright's recruitment and rapid promotion from 1932 to 1937 as the American "black hope" of proletarian art.

(4.)The relevant points are made in the first reviews of the Russian translation, "Deti Diadi Toma," by S. Vostokova (1938) and V. Nevel'skii (1939). The specific reference is to "Bright and Morning Star," added by Wright to the expanded edition of Uncle Tom's Children in 1940.

(5.)See the interesting contrast between Robert B. Stepto's sensitive African-American intertextual reading "Literacy and Ascent: Richard Wright's Black Boy" and Charles T. Davis's modernist contextualization of the same work, "From Experience to Eloquence: Richard Wright's Black Boy as Art," both published in 1979.

(6.)Muchnic (1966) offers by far the best and most eloquent statement in English criticism of the reading that sees the grandmother as Gorky's masterpiece, holding the same place in Soviet literature as Pushkin's Arina Rodionovna, the nurturing folk godmother of classic Russian literature. This reading, of course, attaches Gorky fondly and firmly to the "best" in the traditional folk culture.

(7.)All translations from Detstvo, including this one, are my own.

(8.)Robert B. Stepto speaks honestly about this difficulty in "I Thought." A frustrated attempt to reconcile Wright's writing with black vernacular culture can be seen in Ralph Ellison's retreat from the assertions in "Richard Wright's Blues" toward defensiveness in "The World and the Jug" (1963) about Wright's rejection of the cunning artistic deflections of pain in black music and narrative.

(9.)The author's corrected page proofs of 1944 for the intended second part of the autobiography were finally published in their entirety in 1977. It is unfortunate that this continuation of the narrative did not appear until recently in a single volume with Black Boy. Wright's rebellion against the suppression of an innate selfhood was not restricted to a rejection of the Southern culture of rural black matriarchs; his original intent clearly included an equally harsh critique of the culture of the Northern white patriarchy with its paternalistic political censorship of Wright's hunger to express his full humanity.

(10.)For an excellent discussion of Gorky's agonized hostility and secret sympathy toward his strong predecessor, see Peace.

(11.)"I take an author, study his works carefully, go into his life with the same thoroughness, follow the way the facts of his life are related to the fiction he created. I have done this with Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Conrad, Turgeniev," Wright admitted in 1938 in an interview with Marcia Minor. Michel Fabre has tracked the chronology and sequence of Wright's Dostoevsky readings in several of his books; see especially World 20-21 and Unfinished 170-71.

(12.)For these (and other) quotations and a list of Wright's library holdings, see Fabre, Richard 39-40.

(13.)Fabre, in particular, has emphasized that Native Son violates the formulaic optimism of the standard proletarian hero's raised consciousness while also moving "beyond naturalism" by refuting an obligatory determinism and despair: "Feodor Dostoevsky comes to mind when we consider Wright's conception of self-creation through violence and murder" (World 6, 64). For a brief list of parallel plotting in Wright and Dostoevsky, see Reed 33-34. The most recent parallel reading of the characters, atmospheric details, and psychological motivation in the two novels is by Tony Magistrale. Unfortunately, it is marred by a forced argument that Bigger and Raskolnikov undergo "similar moral awakenings" in which crime is finally acknowledged as self-annihilation, and moral growth toward reconciliation with all men occurs.

(14.)Gerigk argues for the extreme position that Wright intends to polemicize with Dostoevsky by allowing Bigger Thomas to gain his identity and human dignity in justifying his crime. A similar overstatement of Wright's ideological attachment to "creative nihilism" makes for naive readings of an alleged tendency "to glorify self-will" in the one monograph devoted to the dialogue between modern African-American fiction and Dostoevsky (Lynch). Lynch takes at face value the tortured arguments by which Wright's unhappy killers attempt to claim their crimes as liberations of personality, but he does identify very well the structural parallels and multiple subtextual allusions that link a late work like The Outsider (1953) to the Dostoevskian oeuvre in general. It is symptomatic of his critical difficulty that he is forced to recognize the strong Dostoevskian vision present in "The Man Who Lived Underground," although that text stands chronologically between the two novels which supposedly celebrate "creative revolt" and thus criticize Dostoevsky's psychology of the self-lacerating rebel.

(15.)This is the Constance Garnett translation Wright also read. Although his library copy was apparently purchased after 1943, it seems reasonable to believe that he was making note of a place in the text he regarded as crucial from his many previous readings of it.

(16.)I follow here the argument of Reilly. Until the very end, Bigger's life story is expropriated by the objectifying third-person narrator and by the typifying voice of the Marxist defender; what Wright and Bigger struggle to emancipate is a highly unliterary and deeply alienated black subjectivity.

(17.)Originally a short novel rejected by Harper & Brothers, it appeared in two brief excerpts in Accent (Spring 1942) before being published in its final novella form in Edwin Seaver's 1944 anthology Cross Section. Although reprinted several times, the work only became widely acknowledged with the publication of the posthumous collection Eight Men (1961). My citations are taken from this edition.

(18.)Dostoevsky's parable of 1877 was available in the well-known Macmillan series of Constance Garnett's translations. I have referred to the volume entitled An Honest Thief and Other Stories (1923). This is the English text Wright was most likely to have read.

(19.)The best account of the genesis, textual history, and critical literature is Michel Fabre's 1971 essay "From Tabloid to Myth," reprinted in The World of Richard Wright (93-107). A highly intelligent description and resolution of the current interpretive dualism is provided by Watkins.

(20.)As Wright brooded in his diary for February 12, 1945 while actively composing his autobiography, "When the feeling of the fact of being a Negro is accepted fully into the consciousness of a Negro there's something universal about it and something that lifts it above being a Negro in America.... do I know it well enough to tell it?" (qtd. in Fabre, Unfinished 274).

(21.)Two readings which emphasize the potential in Wright's story for deconstructing a materialist cultural discourse and substituting for it an alternative black or existential essentialism are presented by Houston A. Baker, Jr., and Susan Neal Mayberry.

Works Cited

Aaron, Daniel. "Richard Wright and the Communist Party." Richard Wright: Impressions and Perspectives. Ed. David Ray and Robert W. Farnsworth. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1973. 35-46.

Baker, Houston A., Jr. "Reassessing (W)right: A Meditation on the Black (W)hole." Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984. 140-72.

Bigsby, C. W. E. The Second Black Renaissance: Essays in Black Literature. Westport: Greenwood, 1980.

Davis, Charles T. "From Experience to Eloquence: Richard Wright's Black Boy as Art." Harper and Stepto 425-39.

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Trans. Constance Garnett. New York: Random, 1950.

--. "Dream of a Ridiculous Man." An Honest Thief and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. New York: Macmillan, 1923. 307-25.

Ellison, Ralph. "Richard Wright's Blues." Shadow and Act. New York: Random, 1964. 77-94.

__. "The World and the Jug." Shadow and Act. New Yorom, 1964. 107-43.

Erikson, Erik, Childhood and Society. New York: Norton, 1950.

Fabre, Michel. Richard Wright: Books & Writers. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1990.

__. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: Morrow, 1973.

__. The World of Richard Wright. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1985.

Gerigk, Horst-Jurgen. "Culpabilite et Liberte: Dostoevskij, Dreiser et Richard Wright." Revue de Litterature Comparee 55 (1981): 358-76.

Gorki, Maxim. "Detstvo." Sobranie Sochinenii, 9. Moscow: Gosizdat, 1962. 9-166.

__. On Literature. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1973.

Harper, Michael S., and Robert B. Stepto, eds. Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1979.

Lynch, Michael F. Creative Revolt: A Study of Wright, Ellison, and Dostoevsky. New York: Lang, 1990.

Magistrale, Tony. "From St. Petersburg to Chicago: Wright's Crime and Punishment." Comparative Literature Studies 23 (1986): 59-69.

Mayberry, Susan Neal. "Symbols in the Sewer: A Symbolic Renunciation of Symbols in Richard Wright's 'The Man Who Lived Underground.'" South Atlantic Review 54.1 (1989): 71-83.

Minor, Marcia. "An Author Discusses His Gift." Daily Worker 13 Dec. 1938: 7.

Muchnic, Helen. From Gorky to Pasternak: Six Writers in Soviet Russia. New York: Vintage, 1966.

Nevel'skii, V. "Deti diadi Toma." Oktiabr' 11 (1939): 326-28.

Peace, Richard A. "Some Dostoyevskian Themes in the Work of Maksim Gorky." Dostoevsky Studies 8 (1987): 143-54.

Reed, Kenneth T. "Native Son: An American Crime and Punishment." Studies in Black Literature 2 (1970): 33-34.

Reilly, John M. "Giving Bigger a Voice: The Politics of Narrative in Native Son." New Essays on Native Son. Ed. Keneth Kinnamon. New York: Cambridge UP, 1990. 35-62.

Stepto, Robert B. "I Thought I Knew These People: Richard Wright and the Afro-American Literary Tradition." Harper and Stepto 195-211.

__. "Literacy and Ascent: Richard Wright's Black Boy." From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative. Urbana: U Illinois P, 1979. 128-162.

Vostokova, S. "Richard Rait 'Deti diadi Toma.'" International'naia Literatura 7 (1938): 281-83.

Watkins, Patricia. "The Paradoxical Structure of Richard Wright's 'The Man Who Lived Underground.'" Black American Literature Forum 23 (1989): 767-83.

Wright, Richard. American Hunger. New York: Harper, 1979.

__. Black Boy. 1945. New York: Harper, 1989.

__. "Blueprint for Negro Writing." New Challenge Fall 1937: 58-60.

__. "The Man Who Lived Underground." Eight Men. Cleveland: World, 1961. 27-92.

__. Native Son. 1940. New York: Harper, 1989.