Under The Sky Of My Africa

by Nepomnyashchy, Catharine Theimer; Svobodny, Nicole; Trigos, Ludmilla A.

• ISBN13: 9780810119710
• ISBN10: 0810119714
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-05-30
• Publisher: Northwestern Univ Pr

Summary

In approximately 1705, a young African boy purchased from the seraglio of the Turkish sultan was transported to Russia and presented as a gift to Peter the Great. This child, later known as Abram Petrovich Gannibal, became Peter's godson and lived to a ripe old age, having attained the rank of general and the status of Russian nobility. He was also the great-grandfather of Russia's foremost national poet, Alexander Pushkin. The editors of this book demonstrate that Gannibal's African legacy played a significant role in Pushkin's creative life, in his perception of himself, and in his perception and interpretation of Russia. Moreover, they contend, the exaggeration or diminishment of Pushkin's "blackness" in biography and portraiture over the last two hundred years serves as a shifting marker of Russia's self-definition.

Author Biography

Catharine Nepomnyashchy is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Russian Literature at Barnard College and director of the Harriman Institute at Columbia University.
Ludmilla A. Trigos is an independent scholar. Nicole Svobodny is a language arts editor at Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	vii
Foreword	xi
Acknowledgments	xv
Editors' Note	xvii
Introduction: Was Pushkin Black and Does It Matter?	3	(43)
Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Ludmilla A. Trigos
A.P. Cannibal: On the Occasion of the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of Alexander Pushkin's Great-Grandfather	46	(33)
N.K. Teletova
Pushkin on His African Heritage: Publications during His Lifetime	79	(20)
J. Thomas Shaw
Ruslan and Ludmila: Pushkin's Anxiety of Blackness	99	(23)
Richard F. Gustafson
How Black Was Pushkin? Otherness and Self-Creation	122	(28)
David M. Bethea
The Telltale Black Baby, or Why Pushkin Began The Blackamoor of Peter the Great but Didn't Finish It	150	(22)
Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy
Making a True Image: Blackness and Pushkin Portraits	172	(24)
Richard C. Borden
Pushkin and Othello	196	(30)
Catherine O'Neil
The Pushkin of Opportunity in the Harlem Renaissance	226	(22)
Olga P. Hasty
"Bound by Blood to the Race": Pushkin in African American Context	248	(31)
Anne Lounsbery
Tsvetaeva's "Blackest of Black" (Naicherneishii) Pushkin	279	(23)
Liza Knapp
"Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child": Paul Robeson and the 1949 Pushkin jubilee	302	(30)
Alexandar Mihailovic
Artur Vincent Laurié's The Blackamoor of Peter the Great: Pushkin's Exotic Ancestor as Twentieth-Century Opera	332	(37)
Caryl Emerson
Appendix A: Creativity and Blackness-a Note on Yury Tynianav's "The Cannibals"	369	(8)
Appendix B: Introduction to "The Cannibals" by Yury Tynianov	377	(7)
Appendix C: Excerpt from "My Puslikin" by Marina Tsvetacva	384	(9)
Appendix D: Excerpt from Strolls with Pushkin by Abram Tertz	393	(6)
Andrei Sinvityski
Index	399	(16)
Contributors	415