| Popis: |
Literary historical scholarship credits the coloured South African writer Peter Abrahams’s mediation of the literature of the Harlem Renaissance as foundational for black literary production in apartheid South Africa in a manner that underlies its transnational inception. Abrahams’ exilic trajectories have also been widely noted, with particular reference to his pan-Africanist, socialist and communist associations during his sojourn in England and France, as well as his engagement with the legacies of black radicalism in the Caribbean following his relocation to Jamaica. Yet Abrahams’s transnational involvement with pan-Africanism and communism (without being a formal Communist Party member) would also prove crucial to the extensive mediation of his work in the Soviet Union—a dimension of his career that remains largely unknown. Peter Abrahams’s The Path of Thunder (1948) commands renewed attention by virtue of its extraordinary trail of dissemination in Soviet space. One of the first works by a black South African to reach Soviet readers, the novel circulated on an unprecedented scale beginning with its initial Russian translation in 1949, and was steadily republished in multiple languages until the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union. The novel inspired a film, an opera, several dramatic plays, as well as a ballet adaptation staged to great acclaim at the Kirov State Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet in Leningrad in 1958 and at the State Academic Bolshoi Theater in Moscow in 1959. This adaptation on the part of librettist Yuri Slonimsky who initiated the project; Gara Garaev, a major Soviet composer of Azerbaijani nationality; and Konstantin Sergeev, an influential choreographer and dancer at the Kirov Ballet; stands at the center of our investigation. Soviet ballet as a form is itself an appropriation and repurposing of an Imperial tradition by a militant socialist realism, as Christina Ezrachi points out (2012). This offers a particularly dense “site of contest” in the terminology of this collection for an investigation of the tangled and often contradictory representations of apartheid South Africa in the Soviet imaginary. Building on Louise Bethlehem’s paradigm of the “restlessness” of apartheid which holds that the transnational circulation of anti-apartheid expressive culture offers rich historiographic leverage over sites of reception outside of South Africa, and engaging with an extensive archive of Russian-language sources, our chapter closely maps various processes of ideological appropriation focused on Cold War geopolitics which downplay and sometimes fully erase the South African specificity of Peter Abrahams’s original narrative. References Bethlehem, Louise. In press. “Restless Itineraries: Antiapartheid Expressive Culture and Transnational Historiography,” 36 (3). Ezrahi, C., 2012. Swans of the Kremlin: Ballet and Power in Soviet Russia. University of Pittsburgh Press. |
