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Olga P. Hasty The Pushkin of Opportunity in the Harlem Renaissance THE SECOND AND THIRD DECADES of the twentieth century , when “white writers ignored the race question more than at any other time in American history,” marked a vibrant blossoming of African American literature as writers of African descent countered racism with concerted efforts to establish a distinct cultural identity.1 On the basis of his African blood, Pushkin was drawn into the struggle to overturn prevalent notions about race and to raise African American consciousness. A century after his death, the greatest poet of the Golden Age of Russian literature became part of the cultural ferment of the heady American movement that came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance. My purpose in this essay is not to rehearse Pushkin’s genealogy, which has already attracted considerable scholarly attention. I will consider instead the significance that this genealogy assumed first for Pushkin himself and subsequently for African Americans during the Harlem Renaissance, when he was introduced to a wide African American reading public, held up as a model for aspiring writers, and invoked to challenge Eurocentric notions of African cultural inferiority. Of interest to us here are the points of similarity that African American writers discerned between their own project and Pushkin’s achievements as we consider what the Russian poet came to signify in the context of the cultural agenda promoted by leading figures of the movement. Naturally , I cannot presume to exhaust the rich topic I introduce here of Pushkin’s role in the Harlem Renaissance. I will therefore base my discussion primarily on Pushkin’s introduction into this fertile cultural terrain as it was accomplished in the pages of Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, a publication that more than any other of its time was dedicated to promoting African American letters. Because “the Renaissance largely accepted that poetic form was inherently linked to social identity,” it was not Pushkin’s verse, but the fact of Pushkin himself that was of greatest relevance to the movement.2 Although 226 there was naturally an interest in his writings, the potential for African American enablement was seen primarily in Pushkin’s own biography and in the stories that he recorded of his African ancestors. Crucial too was Pushkin’s stature—the fact that a writer of African blood wrote poetry of genius and was hailed as the progenitor of the great tradition of Russian letters. It is important to understand that Pushkin became an appealing model for African Americans not simply because he had African blood in his veins, but, more important, on the strength of how he himself related to this fact of his genealogy, and the possibilities for self-affirmation he derived from it. The connections that the African American intelligentsia of the Harlem Renaissance established with Pushkin went beyond race and extended, significantly, to the social and political climate in which the Russian poet wrote. Pushkin’s attachment to the program of the Harlem Renaissance in general and to Opportunity in particular was thus doubly motivated: the poet’s own highly positive attitude to his African heritage combined productively with what African Americans perceived as significant parallels between his circumstances and their own. Because our grasp of how Pushkin was regarded by African Americans depends on understanding how he himself related to his ancestry, I will begin by looking at the cultural and historical context in which Pushkin himself shaped the African image that was carried forward into the Harlem Renaissance . This material permits us to recognize those points of similarity that were perceived and elaborated by intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance between their own situation and Pushkin’s. It shows us, too, incidentally, the extent to which assumptions about African character traits held in Pushkin’s time were still intact a full century later in the United States. Pushkin’s invocations of his African heritage in literary affirmations of his own individual creative freedom help us to appreciate the profound appropriateness of the seemingly improbable coalition of the Russian Golden Age poet and aspiring African American writers of the Harlem Renaissance. As we study the meaning Pushkin assigned his African blood, we are alerted to the remarkable continuity in the spirit in which he invoked his African forebears and the spirit in which he was in turn invoked by African American writers. Here we observe the integrity of creative discourse that points beyond questions of race and nationality to...

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