The Poet Moscow Wouldn’t Put Down

A Poetry Tale about Claude McKay, told by Hello Doggo.

In November nineteen twenty-two, the Jamaican poet Claude McKay arrived in Soviet Russia. Within days, Moscow was throwing him into the air.

Literally.

He’d come for the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, and he found himself a celebrity. On the seventh of November, the fifth anniversary of the revolution, he and his friend Max Eastman tried to push through the crowds on Tverskaya Street. The crowd had other ideas. In McKay’s own telling, he was lifted clean off his feet, tossed up, caught, and passed along by dozens of strapping young men.

He met Bolshevik leaders. He addressed the Congress itself. For a man who had come from an America of lynchings and race riots, it was dizzying.

Now, that’s McKay’s version, and he was a poet, not a stenographer. He wrote it up for The Crisis a year later, and went back over the whole Russian trip in his memoir in nineteen thirty-seven, by which time he’d fallen out with communism altogether.

And here’s the joke. Months earlier, in Harlem Shadows, he’d published After the Winter, a poem about escaping the cold. It dreams of leaving with a lover: “We’ll turn our faces southward, love, toward the summer isle.”

He went to Moscow. In November.