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“Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”: Paul Robeson and the 1949 Pushkin Jubilee
- Northwestern University Press
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Alexandar Mihailovic “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”: Paul Robeson and the 1949 Pushkin Jubilee The patriarch of the forest will outlive my forgotten time, Just as he outlived the age of our fathers. —Pushkin, “Whether I wander along the noisy streets . . . ,” 1829 THE HISTORIAN Martin Duberman observes in his 1989 biography of Paul Robeson that he had “scant interest in recording his thoughts and feelings,” so we have no ready memoiristic window onto his own thoughts, and there is much about the African American social activist and performer’s emotional life that remains a mystery to us.1 Certainly Robeson’s response to the injustices of Stalinism during the late 1930s and the postwar years was at best equivocal and at worst mute, muffled by his pronouncements of unwavering support of Soviet policy. Was Paul Robeson an unequivocating apologist for the Soviet regime? If not, can we find in his work any criticisms, however veiled, of Stalinism and its legacy? To be sure, with the recent appearance of the first volume of Paul Robeson Jr.’s memoiristic biography, some additional light has been shed on what the Henry James biographer Leon Edel calls the “passional life,” the wellspring of intellectual yearnings and motivating forces in an artist’s creative work. We see this hidden vein in Paul Jr.’s recollection of his father’s reaction to Stalin’s repressive domestic policy. According to this account, Robeson was fully aware that injustices had taken place. As early as 1938 he admitted to his son that “‘terrible’ things had been done, and that innocent people had been ‘sacrificed to punish the guilty.’” In the same conversation Robeson emphasized to his son (then enrolled in a school for the children of the Soviet diplomatic corps in London) that it was also important to understand that dissent could not be brooked in the Soviet Union, which was experiencing “the equivalent of war.” Robeson explained to his son that “sometimes . . . great injustices may be inflicted on the minority when the majority is in the pursuit of a great and just cause.”2 That Robeson could never bring himself to write these comments, and could 302 express such misgivings only in the context of a spoken, and clearly pained justi fication—you can almost feel the self-inflicted sting and wince of the comment about “great injustices” visited out of necessity upon a minority—tells us a great deal about his profound ideological dilemmas. A few years after the appearance of Duberman’s biography, and in an apparent rebuttal to its claim about the enigmatic aspects of Robeson’s life, Paul Jr. wrote an essay about his father in which he quotes from some of the artist’s unpublished notes. One statement in particular stands out. In 1936 Robeson jotted down a remark about Pushkin that is as cryptically autobiographical as it is observant of the historical significance of the Russian poet himself. “It is interesting ,” Robeson writes, “that Pushkin, the shaper of the Russian language, like Chaucer and Shakespeare rolled into one, was of African descent. So the Russian language as spoken today passed through the temperament of a man of African blood . . . Pushkin means more to me than any other poet.”3 The personal identification with Pushkin is, to use one of Pushkin’s own turns of phrase, a window that Robeson cuts open to look out upon the territory of cultural identity. Perhaps it is even the kind of window or access onto Robeson’s own inner life that Duberman senses is too deeply hidden in his writing and performative art to be easily excavated. Robeson’s attempts to negotiate a passage between the demands of his American identity and his progressive conscience are writ large in the events of his life after the end of the Second World War, and provide a necessary starting point in considering his reading of the Russian poet. By all accounts, the beginning of the Cold War was a pivotal if difficult time for Robeson. Always controversial for his pro-Soviet views—which sometimes went well beyond expressed sympathy for the suffering of the Russian people during the German invasion—Robeson was often gloomy and depressed during the years of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. With increasing frequency he voiced his dissatisfaction with the domestic political situation during his concert tours abroad, where he felt less inclined to muffle his views. After the war, Robeson gradually transformed...