I Am A[n Extraordinary] Man: The Intimate Suffering of Russianness and Blackness

The little trodden field of Russian and African-American comparative literary studies stores its richest treasures in the influence of Fyodor Dostoevsky on twentieth-century, black American writers. This Afro-Slavic kinship stems from a profound coincidence of existential and spiritual understanding which drew almost the entire century’s African-American literary authorship – from the Harlem Renaissance writers of the 1920 and 1930s to the Black Arts Movement’s authors in the 1960 and 1970s – to the Russian literary giant with an almost wild fervour. Such critical inquiry not only facilitates a deepened understanding of the mode by which Dostoevsky exists as an irrefutable pillar of twentieth-century, African-American literature; perhaps more interestingly, such research elucidates how Dostoevsky – unanticipated even by himself – came to figure as an intellectual prophet for an understanding of the psychological and spiritual impacts of anti-black racism.

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