History man: making sense of race in Russia via the extraordinary life of Pushkin’s black forebear

If Pushkin is the fountain from which Russian culture flows then his origins are distinctly non-Russian. The poet’s matrilineal great-grandfather was an extraordinary man named Abram Petrovich Gannibal: an African of mysterious origin who rose from slavery to become a favourite godson of Peter the Great; a Russian nobleman, spy and military engineer; a prodigious mathematician described by his friend Voltaire as the “dark star of Russia’s Enlightenment”. Trying to trace the impact of Pushkin’s African heritage on Russian culture is not easy: Gannibal was a secretive figure and left few clues behind. And so in the 235 years since his death he, like his great-grandson, has been deployed to different ends by different groups, his name becoming a focus of debates about race relations and national culture across the world. So, who exactly was Abram Gannibal, and how have Russians — and others — imagined, reconciled or appropriated the “dark star” behind Pushkin?

As for Pushkin himself, the great poet gives us no clearer sense of the “real” Gannibal. As ignorant as his countrymen when it came to Gannibal’s true story (and Africa in general), Pushkin played on his family history to create an image of himself as a hot-blooded Romantic, unfairly shackled by the conventions of Russian courtly life. He often played up the idea of his “Negro” heritage: from sketching out crude self-portraits with distorted simian features, to keeping on his desk at all times an inkwell gifted to him by a friend in the shape of a young African page boy — his great-grandfather in souvenir form. And at one point in Pushkin’s famous long poem Evgeny Onegin, the narrator imagines himself “Under the sky of my Africa/Sighing for gloomy Russia”.

Pushkin did try to compose a historically accurate version of Gannibal’s life, but died before he could finish The Negro of Peter the Great. Perhaps it was too much of an ask for the irrepressible poet to stick to some semblance of non-fiction, especially when it came to his African ancestor. The great Soviet critic Andrei Siniavsky described Pushkin’s version of Gannibal as “a kinship in fantasy”. Once again, the real Gannibal is lost behind the useful fiction.

In time Pushkin’s fame overtook Gannibal’s, at which point the African ancestor’s legacy took yet another twist. From as early as the mid-nineteenth century, Pushkin became something of an icon for African Americans, to an extent that is not appreciated in Russia. For many, Pushkin was a black man who had found recognition in a white world. His connection to Gannibal tied to his global fame was proof that an African could become the focal point of a national culture – a source of optimism and pride for the myriad African American political and cultural groups that emerged after the abolition of slavery. In 1929 the African-American newspaper The Amsterdam News wrote: “In America Pushkin would have to ride in dirty Jim Crow cars, would have been refused service in restaurants, libraries, and theatres. For Pushkin was a Negro.” A few years later, Langston Hughes, intellectual heavyweight of the Harlem Renaissance, called Pushkin “the first black writer to scale the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America”. In 1949 — over a century after Pushkin’s death, and long after Gannibal had ceased to be mentioned by name — the great African-American singer and activist Paul Robeson would stand in front of a crowd of thousands in New York and proclaim “a whole nation which is now doing honour to our poet Pushkin – one of the greatest poets in history — the Soviet people’s and our proud world’s possession”. Pushkin is still taught today on African-American literature courses, with critic Dorothy Trench-Bonnett recently arguing that his The Negro of Peter the Great “is the first work of fiction in modern times by a black writer, with a black hero”.

In Soviet culture Gannibal re-emerges from Pushkin’s shadow, becoming something of a folkloric figure; the “graceful figure of gentle stride” and “liveliness, fire and sharp wit” from state-sponsored poet David Samoilov’s 1977 ode Gannibal’s Dream. In the opera The Moor of Peter the Great by emigré composer Arthur-Vincent Lourie, our hero is a time-travelling decadent who challenges autocracy. Lourie described Gannibal as “a monument of Russian culture, the Russian people and Russian history”, and penned his opera as an attack on the racial politics of 1960s America. The greatest – and oddest – tribute to Gannibal is the 1976 film How Tsar Peter the Great Married Off His Moor by Alexander Mitta: an energetic, incoherent romantic comedy featuring cartoonish characters, bursts of animation, dreamlike sets and the bizarre spectacle of the beloved, brooding poet-bard Vladimir Vysotsky blacked up in the lead role. The film is offensive, naïve, confused, celebratory, and it is hard to imagine a less accurate or more fitting portrayal of the great man.