ABSTRACT
South African writer Peter Abrahams’s literary mediation of the Harlem Renaissance is often seen as foundational for black literary production in apartheid South Africa. Abrahams’s exilic trajectories have also been widely noted. Despite scholarly interest in Abrahams’s transnational involvement with pan-Africanism and communism however, existing research has not sufficiently addressed the circulation of his work in the Soviet Union, and particularly that of The Path of Thunder (1948). 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. It inspired a film, an opera, several dramatic plays, as well as a ballet adaptation staged to great acclaim in leading Soviet venues. This 1958 adaptation on the part of librettist Yuri Slonimsky; Gara Garaev, a major Azerbaijani composer; and Konstantin Sergeev, an influential choreographer and dancer at the Kirov Ballet; stands at the center of our investigation. The importance of Soviet ballet to the pedagogical aspirations of “the Soviet cultural project” (Ezrahi, 2012, 3–4) renders the production a particularly engaging “site of contest” where processes of ideological appropriation attuned to Cold War geopolitics stand revealed as they augment, downplay, or sometimes fully erase the South African specificity of Peter Abrahams’ original narrative. Moreover, investigating the economy of representation employed in the adaptation along its various dimensions, textual, performative and musicological offers insights into contesting imaginaries of blackness operating in Soviet space.
