Richard Wright's long journey from Gorky to Dostoevsky - Maxim Gorky and Fyodor Dostoevsky

African American Review, Fall, 1994 by Dale E. Peterson

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.