Authors

Discussion

The 'golden era' of Russian literature characterised by a fixation with defining the Russian national essence had a substantial influence upon twentieth-century, black American writers who undertook a similar task of defining Afro-America’s cultural identity. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s revolutionary valorisation of Russian folk life inspired these writers valorising their own folk culture by inscribing a black vernacular voice in Western letters. The Dostoevskian polyphonic novel characterised by an inherent multi-voicedness figured as the ideal novelistic form to dramatize the ‘double-consciousness’ of African-American identity, through an active negotiation of the standard English (i.e. white) and black vernacular dictional voices. I analyse texts penned by the movement’s ‘first’ writer, Jean Toomer, its leading female voice, Zora Neale Hurston, and its youngest author, Dorothy West, to subtly illuminate their negotiation of these dictional modes dramatizing the African-American experience, with a sideward glance continually cast at their Russian predecessors.