In January 1832 a New Year’s gift arrived at the home of Alexander Pushkin. The parcel had been sent by a close friend, the art collector Pavel Nashchokin, along with a note: “I am sending you your ancestor.” At the center of the gift, an inkstand, was the figure of a small Black boy with bright red lips leaning against two bales of cotton. Inside them, in lieu of the white crop, was ink (chernilo, literally “black stuff” in Russian). The substitution revealed Pushkin’s ancestor to be a man of “great foresight,” wrote Nashchokin, for else how could a slave child from what is now Cameroon, purchased in Constantinople (for a bottle of rum, as one rumor had it), have known that his great-grandson would become Russia’s greatest poet, a man known colloquially as nashe vse, “our everything”?
Pushkin was born in 1799 to an aristocratic family that could trace its lineage all the way to the twelfth century and the boyars of feudal Russia. An inviolate snob, he resented the new nobility that had gained its status through Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks - an attempt at meritocracy that conferred titles based on service to the state. In his writing, he took pains to highlight how influential his family had been at pivotal moments of Russia’s history. He gave the ancestral Pushkins meaty roles in "Boris Godunov", his play about the Time of Troubles (1598–1613), the chaos over succession that followed the death of Ivan the Terrible.
Pushkin also intended to immortalize his great-grandfather Abram Petrovich Gannibal in print. In 1828 the poet’s first experiment in prose fiction was the unfinished (and posthumously titled) Peter the Great’s African, a Russian Othello story set against the backdrop of the tsar’s modernizing reforms. In keeping with the Pushkins’ class pride, the family was keen to emphasize that Gannibal, who was born in 1696, had been a prince in his native country; likewise, they preferred the version of the story in which he had been taken hostage (not purchased) by Ottoman invaders. He arrived in Constantinople at age seven, where he was kept in the seraglio of Sultan Ahmed III until he was acquired by a Russian envoy, likely through a bribe of Siberian fur (not rum).
Africans were a commonplace oddity in imperial Russia. Peter the Great kept several in the palace, and up until the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Romanov tsars all had black soldiers guard the doors of their bedchambers. They were known as “Abyssinian Guards,” though not all were from Ethiopia or Eritrea - an African American boxer named Jim Hercules worked as one for Alexander III after his wife, the empress, spotted Hercules in London and offered him the job. He made regular trips home to America and was known to bring back jars of guava jelly for the tsar’s children. A number of Russian nobles had their own African servants to keep up with the fashions of court; a “negro” even appears briefly in the Rostov family home in War and Peace.
But Gannibal was special. This particular African became the favorite of Peter the Great, who raised him as a godson. The tsar sent him to be educated abroad, in France, after which he returned to Russia to serve in the military, rising to the rank of general. He was tasked with teaching civil engineering to the architects of Peter the Great’s new, Westernized empire. Such a fate should have been enough to make Gannibal the star of his family tree.
It is not enough to say that Gannibal’s great-grandson became a poet, even a great poet. Pushkin, it is often claimed, invented the Russian literary language itself. This is hyperbole for sure, but it is true that by the end of the eighteenth century, when Pushkin was born, secular genres were still emerging in Russia. The use of the vernacular was relatively nascent, and the patronage system meant that genres like the court ode predominated. Russian models for popular literary genres like the adventure tale or historical fiction were either limited or poor in quality. It was against this background that Pushkin produced dramas, fairy tales, historical fiction, a novel in verse, historical tracts, and astonishing pieces of lyric poetry.
Does it matter, then, that this writer whom Dostoevsky later called “the first Russian” made frequent mention of another kind of heritage?
That many readers of Pushkin remain unaware of his African roots is not an accident, and in fact was part of a concerted effort to ensure that Russia’s great national poet, whose talents were to redeem a country long viewed in the West as backward and incapable of literary genius, was as Russian as possible.
To some extent, his dual heritage was useful as a metaphor for imperial Russia just then, as it sought to subsume a multitude of ethnically disparate nations to its south and east (in what is now called Central Asia). Anuchin, however, conscious of Western racial hierarchies, actively sought to distance Pushkin’s Africanness from his blackness. To do so, he claimed Pushkin’s ancestor had to have hailed from Abyssinia. Gannibal belonged, in Anuchin’s formulation, to “the Ethiopian race, which considerably differed from the negro race.” Soviet scholars likewise tended to skirt the question of Pushkin’s blackness. The critic Yury Lotman, for instance, avoided mentioning Pushkin’s great-grandfather by name in his 1981 biography of the poet, and even claimed that the “monkey” taunts Pushkin received in his lycée were a response to Pushkin’s facility with the French language.
Though the motivation behind these omissions is odious, modern readers of Pushkin could be forgiven for wondering how much filling in these gaps truly require. To some, an invocation of Pushkin’s blackness feels out of place, the misapplication of American racial categories in a vastly different setting. None other than W.E.B. Du Bois raised that concern in a 1940 biographical sketch of Pushkin, intended for a collection of profiles of great black figures throughout history.
By 2006 this question was still pertinent, and a group of scholars devoted a collection of essays, Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness, to answering it. Being black mattered to Pushkin - his own words attest to it. As a poet, he found utility in Africa as a myth and in blackness as metaphor. His great-grandfather, as a Europeanized black man, was the poet’s entryway into imagining Peter the Great’s Russia - a place where European standards of modernity were imposed, sometimes violently, on unwilling peoples.
Before these more recent scholarly interventions, Pushkin’s black heritage stayed in the public consciousness in large part thanks to his reception by black artists and writers. During the Harlem Renaissance, Pushkin became a source of race pride for poets like Claude McKay, whose 1927 poem, titled simply “Pushkin,” reflects on seeing his statue while visiting Moscow years earlier.
Reflecting on this scene of the Jamaican-American McKay - buoyed by the communal identity that fostered black artistic production during the Harlem Renaissance, gazing at an image of another black poet and feeling invigorated - one feels the profound absence of such moments in the life of Pushkin. To the extent he was aware of himself as a black writer, he forged this identity in isolation, likely cobbling it together from news reports about the slave trade, Enlightenment tracts regarding African savages, and certainly Othello - quite the brew. Our best sense of how these disparate (and deranged) clues about the nature of black personhood were filtered through Pushkin’s mind into something like a manageable sense of self comes through in his characterization of his ancestor Gannibal, renamed Ibrahim in “Peter the Great’s African.”
Pushkin portrays Ibrahim as a curiosity among the French, at times an object of racist scorn and at others of sexual fascination. Desirability was central to Pushkin’s wrestling with race, including his own.
Similarly, Ibrahim is both insecure in his appearance and never without options.
Ibrahim resolves to return to Russia to serve his godfather. His friend the Duke of Orléans is aghast at the notion and tries to convince him to stay.
Pushkin accessed blackness by wrestling with what it meant to be Russian.
In the era when Pushkin was writing, race as a philosophical concept was in conflict with other theories on how to divide people into categories.
By having a Frenchman portray both Russian and African climates as inhospitable to a man of Ibrahim’s refined manners and sophistication, Pushkin subtly yokes Russianness and blackness together. The moment suggests that Pushkin, at least in part, understood being black through the experience of being Russian - that is, on the losing end of the hierarchies of difference concocted by the West.
Pushkin, however, would not have been inventing the wheel by connecting the black and Russian experiences, especially during the period in which he was writing.
Is it his Africanness that explains Ibrahim’s patience with the old Russian nobles who are obstinate in the face of Peter’s reforms, refusing to let their self-worth be tied to their adoption of European standards of style and decorum? When he returns to St. Petersburg, Ibrahim distinguishes himself from other Russian officers back from France by not mocking the obstinate members of Peter’s court who still insist on doing some things by old traditions. Whereas Korsakov, a young Russian likewise educated in Paris, turns his nose up at Russian customs, both old and new. - Ibrahim wins admirers for his deference to Russian ways, even as he seems an embodiment of the foreign. And that comes in handy when he decides he wants to marry one of their daughters.
Peter the Great’s African is also significant as an exploration of genre. Inspired by the success of Walter Scott’s Waverly - a historical novel about the Jacobite Uprising of 1745 - Pushkin was keen to bring the form to bear on historical events in his own country. Though Ibrahim is at the center of the narrative, Peter the Great is his true subject. The tsar appears or is referenced at various moments, but even in his absence he can be keenly felt. In his reforms and the affects they have on everyone in Russia, he is ambient.
During Pushkin’s lifetime, the question of history - its purpose and how to write it - was hotly contested, and few entered the fray with more fire than he. In his youth he had been an ardent reader of Nikolai Karamzin’s groundbreaking twelve-volume History of the Russian State. Like many, Pushkin admired Karamzin’s ability to combine meticulous archival research with a narrative style that flowed like fiction, full of lively anecdotes and historical figures who came across like fully realized characters. He had, though, echoed liberal critics who found Karamzin’s writing marred by its tacit defenses of autocracy; the history was sponsored by the state, and Karamzin portrayed the tsar and his antecedents as competent rulers and serfdom as necessary to establish order. When Pushkin sat down to write his own historical works, he directed his criticism at French historians, who focused too heavily, he believed, on identifying historical laws that governed the fate of nations. To Pushkin, such historians woefully underestimated the importance of chance. This was all the more true for Russia, he felt, a country where all power was concentrated in the hands of a single human being who could be subject to irrational impulses or flights of fancy. Pushkin’s belief in the centrality of capriciousness would explain his numerous attempts across genres to capture the figure of Peter the Great.
Pushkin criticized the self-assuredness with which historians undertake their work.
Pushkin himself undertook serious archival research. Thus, his attitude toward history writing is not a condemnation of the historian’s craft but an acknowledgment of its limitations, the same ones that would propel Pushkin back into fiction. It was there that he could, after having rigorously delved into what had been, imagine what else could have been. In other words, this account makes room for counternarratives that the historians of his time deemed unserious, too plebian: myth, rumor, and folk forms of historiography.
Yet in the world of fiction, our attention is drawn precisely to vivid and magical stories.
No one is quite sure why Pushkin never completed Peter the Great’s African. Perhaps he intended to return to it at a later point, but the poet died at the age of 37 in a duel with his wife’s rumored lover. Some scholars have suggested that Pushkin was sensitive about the class, rather than racial, origins of his ancestor and worried that his project opened Gannibal’s supposed royal paternity up to scrutiny.
As was common practice, Pushkin began his career as a gentleman poet, reading his work in literary salons. But advances in printing-press technology in Russia facilitated a transition away from the patronage system and toward a literary marketplace where prose, not poetry, was most in demand.
Though Pushkin became known as Russia’s first professional writer, meaning he was able to make a living from his literary output alone, he brooded over the expectations of the market.
We see Pushkin, the great-grandson of a slave, once full of anxiety at the mention of his ancestor’s purchase, settle into the idea that to be bought and sold is no shame, and that in fact being able to serve two masters, one external and one within, has long been an act of black genius.
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