The pride of Russian literature father for his African ancestor

For the Russians, Alexander Pushkin is the undisputed father of their literature, the same as Shakespeare [Shakespere] to the British. In view of the nature of today's Russian policies, it is hard to imagine that the creator of éugene Onegin) was not just a follower of multiculturalism but also an example of it: Pushkin had mixed race, and proud of its African origin.

His great grandfather, Ibrahim Petrovich Gannibal, was probably born in what is known as Cameroon in 1696. Gannibal was kidnapped as a child and sent to Constantinople, where one of his ancestors rescued him and sent him as a gift to the Great Peter.

Gannibal moved from one form of service to another, but since he was the emperor's favorite, his new life was more glaucomaous. After a military education in France, he rose to the rank of nobility and died as a gchemeral with hundreds of farmers under his command - a black aristocrat with white servants in northern Europe of the 18th century.

Pushkin tried to understand his great grandfather's life in an incomplete historical novel that began in 1827 “The Moor of Peter the Great. In the fragment, Abraham finds himself admired by French women, but “curiosity, though hiding under the appearance of kindness, hurt his self-confidence”. He envys “people whom no one observed, assessing their inadequacy as happiness”. He expects “to mock”. And when you fall in love, you fall for Contesare D, which “treated Ibrahim the people, but without any special attention. And that satisfied him. ”

Yet, Abraham himself was prejudiced against the sexual motives of women around him.

This ambition was central to the identity of the great Russian writer. Sometimes he used his African roots to set himself up as an external fucking hero [Lord Bureau] when he spoke of my “He also called American slaves like my “brothers, although he himself carried Russian slaves, insisting that Gannibal [his great grandfather] was “The emperor's most trusted friend, not a slave. ”

As a historical romance, The Moor of Peter the Great would never be one of Pushkin's greatest works. But leaving it unfinished, he deprived us of something extraordinary: a stable portrait of the inner life of a Russian black man in the early 18th century, written by a colored person who had white privileges. It cannot be said how much such a revolutionary novel from such an important literary figure could have shaped Western tradition.

Subtitles by: Periscope