An important Russian anthology of African American poetry: the result of a 1932 delegation of twenty-two Black writers to the Soviet Union to work on a never realised film project. The trip was lead by civil rights activist and lawyer Loren Miller (1903-1967), who provides the afterword, and included his close friend Langston Hughes (1901-1967). Many of the anthologised poets are here translated into Russian for the first time. Furthermore this attractive volume is an early example of book designed by Soviet Jewish illustrator Lev Èpple (1900-1980), and offers an interesting insight into the idealistic overlap between the Harlem Renaissance and the Soviet cultural agenda.
The anthologised authors include: Langston Hughes, Lewis Alexander, Sterling A. Brown, Aloysius Green, Countee Cullen, Joseph Seamon Cotter, Claude McKay, Edward Silvera, and Walter Everett Hawkins.
Loren Miller, who provides the afterword, was born in Nebraska in 1903, the son of a formerly enslaved man and a white midwestern woman. He graduated law school in Kansas in 1928 and moved to Los Angeles where he edited the African American newspaper the California Eagle. He passed the California bar exam in 1933, and spent most of his legal career fighting against racial discrimination. To this end, he worked with Thurgood Marshall on Brown v. Board of Education, and went on to specialise in fighting restrictive covenants in California housing communities that were prejudiced against non-white residents. To this end, he acted to defend Academy Award winning actress Hattie McDaniel, as well as other high profile African Americans, in the racist “Sugar Hill” neighbourhood case. He would ultimately see restrictive covenants outlawed entirely in the landmark 1948 case before the Supreme Court Shelley v. Kraemer. These wins are considered to be major legal victories of the Civil Rights Movement. Despite his towering legal career, Miller never entirely let go of his journalistic identity, and in 1951 he purchased the California Eagle, which he owned until his appointment as a judge in 1963. His archive is held at the Huntington Library in California, alongside the papers of Langston Hughes.
The present volume begins with a selection of “Folk Poetry”, with the opening piece titled “After the Lynching”. Jennifer Wilson’s article on this book in The Paris Review adds some interesting analysis: “The author is unknown (like most folk songs, it was passed down orally), and the poem opens with the following four lines: “Brothers and Sisters/no need to pray/God will turn his head/once those black faces are raised.” These lines immediately aroused suspicion in me. An atheist anti-lynching poem borne out of black folk music (a deeply Christian tradition) felt…a little too perfect for a Soviet anthology. After playing endlessly with the translation, I was unable to find any original English referent that this “folk poem” could be based on, leading me to wonder–is it possible the poem was entirely made up?” Wilson goes on to note that “in the rush to build an international coalition of budding proletariats, the hurried pace of solidarity often involved shortcuts and even whole scale inventions.” She also comments on the accuracy of the translation of Langston Hughes’s poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and Claude McKay’s “The Lynching” wherein religious terms like “soul” and “heaven” are substituted for more secular alternatives.
The compiler Yulian Ansimov states in his preface that “The majority of the works included in the anthology were written between 1919 and 1929. The poetry is imbued with the spirit of social protest that has engulfed all strata of the Negro people and is directed against oppression and exploitation by the white bourgeoisie. Some of the poets reflect the mood of the petty Negro bourgeoisie, others speak on behalf of Negro workers, and others on behalf of exploited Negro farmers in the Southern states. Some of the poems are dedicated to memories of Africa.” He also notes that the translation was assisted by Valentina Stankevich, an expert in African-American English at the Moscow Library of Foreign Languages.
The book designer, Lev Èpple, worked on this only a year after joining the Artist’s Union. The wrappers draw influence from traditional African art through the filter of Harlem Renaissance design motifs made famous by the likes of Aaron Douglas. The endpapers are decorated with the striking image of a single upraised shackled hand, reaching from the lower right corner. Epple was Jewish, and in the 1940s spent four years imprisoned in a GULAG camp in Siberia. He would go on to find fame as a sci-fi and children’s book illustrator of the 1950s and 60s.
OCLC finds copies at: NYPL, UC Berkeley, MIT, Williams College, U Pittsburgh, and the British Library.
Wilson, J. “The Soviet Anthology of ‘Negro Poetry’.” The Paris Review. 15 March 2018. [accessed 25 March 2026].
