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A 1932 photograph of Dorothy West and Langston Hughes taken aboard the S.S. Europa reveals a smiling, sleeveless Dorothy leaning against the strikingly handsome bad boy of the Harlem Renaissance. His arm is draped possessively, fraternally around her shoulders. This photograph reveals their unveiled affection as mutual and spontaneous. The nature of that affection remains opaque, complicated by unanswered questions about their sexuality that surface from the duo’s private letters. This image best captures West’s optimistic perspective at the start of her “adventure in Moscow” as one of twenty-two African Americans enlisted to star in the infamous, ill-fated film production of Black and White. What motivates West to travel to Moscow with relatively little assurance of her reception, compensation, or purpose? Is she motivated by personal, professional, or political aims? Perhaps she is merely bored with Harlem rent parties and sees the trip as a fabulous lark? Whatever the case, West’s Russian sojourn would have a profound effect on her private life and creative endeavors. 77 To Russia with Love Here we come from a country where everything is denied us—work, protection of life and property, freedom to go where we will and to live where we will—where we are despised and humiliated at every turn. And here we are [in the U.S.S.R.], accorded every courtesy—free to go where we will and eagerly welcomed—given every opportunity to enjoy ourselves and to travel—free to pursue any work we choose. —Louise Thompson (quoted in Defying Dixie, by Glenda Gilmore) That year in Russia was the most carefree year of my life. —Dorothy West (Deborah E. McDowell, “Conversations with Dorothy West”) 4 DOROTHY WEST’S PARADISE 78 Understanding West’s experience in Russia requires me to establish an intricate tapestry of stories, voices, and histories from both sides of the Atlantic during the course of two centuries. Many scholars have written about the Black and White expedition. It remains a rich event within the historiographies of black radicalism and American communism precisely because of its spectacular failure as a project and the multinational politics behind the film’s genesis and ultimate suppression. Various examinations of the trip by biographers, literary critics, and film historians reveal a complex narrative of encounters between East and West, black, white, and, of course, red. The diverse cast of characters and the fascinating terrain they traverse resist easy summarizing of the trip and require a broad understanding of the African diasporic subject in Imperial Russia and the former U.S.S.R. My goal is neither to conclusively confirm West’s politics as either “red” or “pink” nor to construct her as a closet revolutionary. Rather, I seek to understand why the trip was so meaningful to West and her fellow travelers. The Russian sojourn was a critical turning point in West’s intimate and writing life. In several interviews she describes the trip as “the most carefree year of [her] life,” even though the ostensible, official purpose of the trip is never realized.1 Uncovering a gendered, feminist view of the Russia trip is a challenge as the dominant and most comprehensive accounts of the trip are from masculine perspectives. Most historians rely on Langston Hughes’s autobiography I Wonder as I Wander (1956). I piece together West’s particular experience from a series of letters written over the course of her eleven-month stay in Russia and three publications directly based on the trip: “Room in Red Square,” “An Adventure in Moscow,” and “Russian Correspondence.” Glenda Gilmore’s Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights (1919–1950) and Kate Baldwin’s Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red 1922–1963 help contextualize the experience of women on the trip; both studies rely heavily on labor organizer Louise Thompson Patterson’s account of the “Trip to Russia” in her unpublished autobiography.2 As the trip’s main recruiter and a true believer in the potential of communism as a viable solution to racial injustice in the United States, Thompson is attentive to the gender politics at work behind the scenes. Her perspective illuminates the relationships between the Black and White group and the Russians they encounter during their trip. Although Baldwin’s study focuses on familiar, male perspectives and encounters within Russia, she analyzes excised portions of Langston Hughes’s autobiography in a way that draws attention to his fixation with the unveiling...

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