It is not enough to say that Gannibal’s great-grandson became a poet, even a great poet. Such a fate should have been enough to make Gannibal the star of his family tree. He was tasked with teaching civil engineering to the architects of Peter the Great’s new, Westernized empire. The tsar sent him to be educated abroad, in France, after which he returned to Russia to serve in the military, rising to the rank of general. This particular African became the favorite of Peter the Great, who raised him as a godson. A number of Russian nobles had their own African servants to keep up with the fashions of court a “negro” even appears briefly in the Rostov family home in War and Peace.īut Gannibal was special. He made regular trips home to America and was known to bring back jars of guava jelly for the tsar’s children. They were known as “Abyssinian Guards,” though not all were from Ethiopia or Eritrea-an African American boxer named Jim Hercules worked as one for Alexander III after his wife, the empress, spotted Hercules in London and offered him the job. Peter the Great kept several in the palace, and up until the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Romanov tsars all had Black soldiers guard the doors of their bedchambers. He arrived in Constantinople at age seven, where he was kept in the seraglio of Sultan Ahmed III until he was acquired by a Russian envoy, likely through a bribe of Siberian fur (not rum).Īfricans were a commonplace oddity in imperial Russia. In 1828 the poet’s first experiment in prose fiction was the unfinished (and posthumously titled) “Peter the Great’s African,” a Russian Othello story set against the backdrop of the tsar’s modernizing reforms the novel is now available in a new translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Boris Dralyuk, alongside the prose works “Dubrovsky,” “The History of Goriukhino,” and “The Egyptian Nights.” In keeping with the Pushkins’ class pride, the family was keen to emphasize that Gannibal, who was born in 1696, had been a prince in his native country likewise, they preferred the version of the story in which he had been taken hostage (not purchased) by Ottoman invaders. Pushkin also intended to immortalize his great-grandfather Abram Petrovich Gannibal in print.
He gave the ancestral Pushkins meaty roles in Boris Godunov (1825), his play about the Time of Troubles (1598–1613), the chaos over succession that followed the death of Ivan the Terrible. In his writing, he took pains to highlight how influential his family had been at pivotal moments of Russia’s history. An inviolate snob, he resented the new nobility that had gained its status through Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks-an attempt at meritocracy that conferred titles based on service to the state. Pushkin was born in 1799 to an aristocratic family that could trace its lineage all the way to the twelfth century and the boyars of feudal Russia.
The substitution revealed Pushkin’s ancestor to be a man of “great foresight,” wrote Nashchokin, for else how could a slave child from what is now Cameroon, purchased in Constantinople (for a bottle of rum, as one rumor had it), have known that his great-grandson would become Russia’s greatest poet, a man known colloquially as nashe vse, “our everything”? Inside them, in lieu of the white crop, was ink ( chernilo, literally “black stuff” in Russian).
The parcel had been sent by a close friend, the art collector Pavel Nashchokin, along with a note: “I am sending you your ancestor.” At the center of the gift, an inkstand, was the figure of a small Black boy with bright red lips leaning against two bales of cotton. In January 1832 a New Year’s gift arrived at the home of Alexander Pushkin.
0 kommentar(er)
