Langston Hughes:
Poems, Photos,
and Notebooks from
Turkestan
Reviewed at
Publishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly just reviewed Langston Hughes: Poems, Photos, and Notebooks from Turkestan, edited by Zohra Saed for CUNY’s Lost & Found Series V (which also featured Kathy Acker, William S. Burroughs, and Jean Sénac). These writings and photographs, from Hughes’s 1932 trip to the Soviet Union with a group of African-American activists and writers, were not published in book form until now.
In 1932, Langston Hughes visited Leningrad to help make a Soviet film about race in America; from there he asked to visit Central Asia, evading his Soviet minders to “make his own path” through the old towns and new literary circles of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The travels have long been known, as has Hughes’s book about them, A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia, published in Moscow in 1935. But Hughes’s journals and the Uzbek poems about his visit have never been published until now. Saed provides an informative foreword explaining literary politics in Soviet Central Asia under Stalin, and a moving afterword about her family’s flight from Uzbekistan. Hughes’s clipped notes on his travels reveal his views of “minority” life in non-Russian Soviet states, and though he was determined to meet writers and find things out for himself, he did not always see past the Communist Party line: “So rapidly are Uzbeks and Russians mixing,” he wrote in Tashkent, “that in 15 years, one probably can’t tell who is who.”
Read the full review at Publishers Weekly; you can also listen to Saed discuss the book project below. At top: Photo by Langston Hughes. Turkmenistan cotton collective workers wearing a traditional Telpek sheep’s wool hat and an embroidered Tubeteika cap, 1932.