From Hughes to Baldwin: How Soviet Critics Read Black American Literature

UW Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia (CREECA) lecture series, Room 206. Coffee/tea and cookies at 3:45 pm.

media release: Jesse Kruschke is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant in the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic+ at UW-Madison. Her research focuses on the Soviet reception of twentieth-century American literature, with particular attention to how literary journals published, translated, and framed the work of leftist Black American writers.

This lecture reveals how literary criticism functioned as ideological instruction in the Soviet Union, with critics constructing a carefully curated canon of acceptable Black literature that taught readers how to “properly understand” Black American life, reinforcing the state’s anti-racist credentials while serving Cold War propaganda goals. By attending to these continuities rather than taking revolutionary rhetoric at face value, the lecture offers new insights into Soviet cultural politics and the enduring patterns of Russian soft-power projection that remain relevant to understanding contemporary Russian foreign policy.