Content area
Full Text
TAMARA DENISSOVA*
RICHARD WRIGHT HAS BEEN WELL KNOWN IN RUSSIA since the very beginning of his writing career. Translations (and they were very good translations) of Wright's short stories from his first collection, Uncle Tom's Children, were published in the USSR immediately following their publication in America, first in the journal Internatsional'naja Literatura (1938, N 7, 1940, N 1) and later as a separate edition (Bright and Morning Star) . These were followed by Native Son (Internatsional'naja Literatura, 1941, N 1-2). The translations were executed by our finest masters-to-be in this field: V. Toper, N. Daruzes, T. Ozerskaja, M. Zenkievich, E. Kalashnikova. Fiction texts were accompanied with fragments from Wright's essays: excepts from his autobiographical "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow" and "How 'Bigger' Was Born" (Internatsional'naja Literatura, 1941, N 5). Many popular periodicals carried reviews of these publications (Literaturnaja Gazeta, Pravda, Novyj mir). Mainly through these translations Wright was established in the USSR as a young, gifted Negro writer who was extremely articulate in voicing racial and social protest. The "Foreword" to "Bright and Morning Star" said: "Richard Wright is a functionary of the United States Communist Party. His stories are fictionalized facts and episodes in revolutionary activities and . . . observations of a Party practitioner."
The fact that Wright left the Communist Party and broke with it upon deep consideration was largely overlooked in the USSR-due, I believe, to World War II's breaking out. Moreover, in the late 1940s James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison accused Wright in their "new wave" manifestoes of being a socially engaged writer and of creating, as a result, a simplified and onedimensional image of the Negro. This, too, served as a confirmation of his reputation here as a social rebel.
For a long time there have been neither repeated printings of Wright's translated works, nor new translations here. In 1962 a small collection of Wright's short stories from his book Eight Men ("The Man Who Saw the Flood," "Man of All Works," "Man, God Ain't Like That") came out as a supplement to Ogoniok, a popular magazine, which meant they appeared in a huge number of copies. They were translated by Dmytry Zhukov and were preceded by a brief and vague biography of the writer, by...