Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness (review)

This is a valuable, thought-provoking collection of essays that represents many leading scholars of Slavic Studies and is devoted to the surprisingly under-researched topic of the significance and consequences of Pushkin's African heritage for the writer himself and for the tradition that he and his work have come to embody.

The rich volume contains thirteen essays (including the introduction) by contemporary scholars, a foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., four reprints of translated pieces from Russian authors as appendices, and seventy-five portraits and illustrations. The essays, generally, can be broken into three categories: those that deal with the subject of blackness and ancestry in Pushkin's poetry and prose, those that deal with the subject of Pushkin and blackness in his own day and age, and those that deal with the legacies of Pushkin, blackness, and race in a larger historical context.

The first essay in the collection lays the groundwork for considering the source of Pushkin's blackness in his life and work. In an essay translated from the Russian, Natalia Teletova discusses the legacy and biographical difficulties surrounding Pushkin's African great-grandfather, Abram Petrovich Hannibal ("Gannibal" in the Russian spelling). Teletova, who has published extensively on the subject and whose essay demonstrates impressively detailed archival research, focuses on establishing a history and chronology for Hannibal's journey to Russia (as a slave captured from Turkey) and his growth from the tsar's page boy to a high-ranking naval engineer with a French education and the status of Russian nobility. Teletova's essay is rife with dates and information corroborated by correspondences and other primary source material and manages to create a coherent narrative of Hannibal's life, separating fact from fiction for this highly mythologized historical figure. Only briefly, at the end of the essay, does Teletova discuss the difficulties Hannibal may have experienced on account of his race: his first unsuccessful marriage, career disputes with his Swedish and German colleagues that haunted him later in life, the decline of a family for whom he worked so hard to provide. While Teletova's essay sets the standard for the kind of rigorous, informative scholarship that can be found in this collection, it also evinces a reluctance to fully investigate issues of race and blackness in the Russian context. Coupled with an underdeveloped sensitivity to the use of racialized language—here "blackamoor" and elsewhere "Negro" and "Negroid" are frequently used, not only as historical terms, but in authorial voice with seemingly little awareness of their offensive overtones—the essay reveals the limits of the discipline when confronting the issue of blackness. Fortunately, a good portion of the authors uses scholarship from African American and African studies to provide critical perspective in their work.

J. Thomas Shaw's essay, the second in the collection, proves canonical in its enumeration of references in Pushkin's work to both his black ancestor and his own blackness. Shaw lists every work of verse and prose that carries some mention of Pushkin's African heritage and discusses the context of each. At the end of the essay Shaw broaches the subject of mixed and non-Russian blood among the lineages of "the most important nineteenth-century Russian authors" (94). He lists Zhukovsky, Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy as examples. Unfortunately he veers away from this potentially fertile subject in favor of platitudes about how Pushkin's "African temperament" affected his literary work.

An essay that deserves attention for its original and nuanced perspective is editor Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy's "The Telltale Black Baby," on the possible reasons for Pushkin's abandoning his historical novel about his ancestor, titled by editors The Blackamoor of Peter the Great. Nepomnyashchy places Pushkin's dilemma in the context of the debates about race in the early nineteenth century and emphasizes that in Russia race had real consequences. She notes the nature/nurture debate that was popular in Europe at...