Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness

Introduction: Was Pushkin Black and Does It Matter?

Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Ludmilla A. Trigos Introduction: Was Pushkin Black and Does It Matter? Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil. —Jeremiah 13:23 The native of Africa is a lazy, beast-like, dull-witted creature doomed to perpetual slavery and working under the threat of punishment and dire torment. —Vissarion Belinsky, The Idea of Art, 1841 Pushkin was a Rastaman. —Black Russians ROUGHLY IN THE YEAR 1705, a young African boy, acquired from the seraglio of the Turkish sultan by the Russian envoy in Constantinople (Istanbul), was transported to Russia as a gift to Tsar Peter the Great, who was known for his love of the exotic and the odd. As the vagaries of history would have it, this child, later known as Abram Petrovich Gannibal, was to become the godson of the ruler of the largest contiguous empire on earth, travel from one end of Europe to the other and across the huge expanses of Russia into Asia almost to the Chinese border, and survive six of Peter’s successors to die at a ripe old age, having attained the rank of general and the status of Russian nobility. Most important, he was to become the great-grandfather of Russia’s greatest national poet, Alexander Pushkin. It is the contention of the editors of this book, borne out, we believe, by the majority of essays included in this collection, that Pushkin’s African ancestry has played the role of a “wild card” of sorts as a formative element in Russian cultural mythology. That is, not only has the fact of Gannibal’s African origin functioned as an essential element in the “canonization” of his great-grandson as the exemplary Russian—heralded even in his lifetime by his fellow writer Nikolai Gogol as “the Russian as he will be in two hundred years”—but the 3 ways in which Gannibal’s legacy over the course of the past two centuries has been incorporated into or excluded from the cult of Pushkin’s biography serve as shifting markers of Russia’s self-definition. Despite sparring over historical detail, it is safe to say that there is some consensus among biographers about the broad outlines of Gannibal’s life, especially as concerns the better-documented period after he arrived in Russia.1 Within months of his presentation to the tsar, he was baptized in Vilno (Vilnius) with Peter the Great standing as his godfather, and he appears to have traveled in Peter’s entourage throughout the military campaigns of the next decade, eventually becoming Peter’s amanuensis. In 1717 he went along on the tsar’s second journey to western Europe and was left behind to study in France, in line with Peter’s policy of sending youths abroad for education to stock the cadres he needed in his campaign to reform and westernize his empire. Gannibal spent five years in France, where he studied military engineering. He served in the French army from 1719 to 1721, apparently both to continue his training and to better the precarious financial position into which erratic deliveries of stipends from Russia and the French crisis in paper money had left those young Russians studying in France at the time. Gannibal apparently suffered a head wound in battle in 1719. From 1720 he studied mathematics, forti fication, and artillery in a new school 100 miles outside of Paris. Despite the straitened financial circumstances of which Gannibal and his fellow students complained bitterly in periodic letters to Russia, and which one contemporary Russian observer lamented as bringing down “such shame on our fatherland,” Gannibal managed to acquire a library of some 400 volumes on diverse subjects , which he took back with him to Russia.2 After his somewhat reluctant return to Russia in 1722, Gannibal again appears to have served as Peter’s personal secretary as well as to have put into practice the engineering training he had acquired in France. In February 1724 Peter awarded his protégé the rank of engineer-lieutenant in his own crack Preobrazhensky Regiment, where Gannibal taught fortification and mathematics to officer candidates. At the time of Peter’s sudden death in 1725 Gannibal was in Riga, whither the tsar had sent him in the fall of 1724 to work on the strengthening of the city’s fortress. Since Peter had not designated a successor, his death plunged his court...