In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Richard F. Gustafson Ruslan and Ludmila: Pushkin’s Anxiety of Blackness PUSHKIN WAS BORN DIFFERENT. On the genealogical surface he was the descendant on both sides of a distinguished Russian boyar family. He had, it would seem, every right to the privilege of his heritage. At the same time, however, Pushkin was inordinately obsessed with his lineage, even as he was “proud to the point of hypersensitivity of his aristocratic pedigree.”1 The source of this obsession and hypersensitivity has generally been found in the social and economic conditions of his life: the decline of the old boyar aristocracy with the concomitant rise of the new dvorianstvo (nobility) and the economic impoverishment of the Pushkin family. While there is much evidence in Pushkin’s own writings that these conditions played an important role in his conscious awareness of his social status, I believe the emotional obsessiveness and hypersensitivity of Pushkin’s concern can be traced back to a less than conscious reaction to the “dark” side of his lineage. Pushkin’s maternal great-grandfather, as we all know, was black. From his early years Pushkin knew the family legend telling the story of Abram Gannibal , and shortly after leaving the Lycée he began to inquire further about his black ancestor.2 As the poet matured, the story of his great-grandfather and his relationship to Peter the Great became a central and conscious concern that surfaced first in a direct and honest footnote to the first edition (1825) of chapter 1 of Eugene Onegin and then appeared in fictional disguise in the poet’s first attempt in prose, the unfinished historical novel we refer to as The Blackamoor of Peter the Great (Arap Petra Velikogo, 1827). It is signi ficant, however, that after meeting his future wife Natalia Goncharova in 1828, Pushkin removed the telling footnote from the second (1829) and all subsequent editions of Eugene Onegin. Nevertheless, to judge from the famous engraving by E. Geitman (see figure 1) which was used, against Pushkin’s wishes, as the frontispiece to the first published edition (1822) of The Prisoner of the Caucasus (Kavkazsky plennik), the traces of this African lineage could not be deleted or fictionalized, because they were inscribed on 99 Pushkin’s body. This essay is an attempt to uncover in the body of his early texts the traces of the young Pushkin’s anxiety over his blackness, the sign of his difference that he carried with him into the Lycée at Tsarskoe Selo and later into St. Petersburg society. This anxiety, as we shall see, culminates in his first major narrative poem, Ruslan and Ludmila (Ruslan i Ludmila, 1818–20), which Pushkin claimed he began while still at the Lycée but actually wrote later, during his sojourn in St. Petersburg before his exile to the Caucasus. What must it have been like to get away from a home where you were never really happy or loved and to find yourself among a select group of young men by whom you had every right except one to be accepted? For at some level of your consciousness, however hidden from your awareness, every time you looked into a mirror you knew that you were different from those fellow students whose friendship you desired almost as a substitute for the parental love you, unlike your brothers and sisters, were never given. And those students knew too that you were different, calling you by that nickname that cut you to the quick, frantsuz (Frenchie), which they understood, as you did too, according to Voltaire’s characterization of the French as a “mixture of monkey and tiger.”3 In the poem “My Portrait” (“Mon portrait,” 1814) which you wrote while at the Lycée but of course never published, you even agreed with them, describing yourself in their terms: “By looks a real monkey”(Vraie singe par sa mine). Since acceptance by your fellow students and hence the attractiveness to the girls that would earn you the desired homosocial association4 were excessively important to you, how did you cope with being seen by both the boys and the girls as that “mixture of monkey and tiger”? As might be expected , you began to deal with your obviously embodied blackness by attempting to deny it. Pushkin’s first extant Russian lyric, written when he was fourteen years old, is an erotic piece entitled “To Natalia” (“K Natal’e,” 1813). It is addressed to a young peasant girl who was...

Share