Soul Brother...Alexander Pushkin

Alexander Pushkin famed Russian author of the verse novel, Eugene Onegin, among many other poems, short stores, and plays is apparently a Brotha. In fact quite proud of his African heritage, an unfinished novel, A Moor of Peter the Great is more or less a biography of his great-grandfather, Avram (Ibrahim) Gannibal. Though perhaps technically he is of Abyssinian and not Sub-Saharan decent, he is quite comfortable with the moniker "negry." Though I would imagine that the term itself "negry" must be understood in a radically different context than the term "black" or "African-American" is used in the United States today; it certainly might be useful to compare his self-understanding as an African and the modern Black experience. One notable point, the "hot African blood" that is often attributed to such other figures as the noble St. Augustine, he himself appropriates it as a driving force behind his many sexual conquests, which he alluded to in conversation and a poem regarding his heritage, "I please young beauty with the shameless frenzy of my desires." Though it seems he is not totally immune to the syndrome that W.E.B. DuBois intimated in his, Souls of Black Folk, the syndrome of double consciousness when he describes himself as "an idle rake, ugly descendant of Negroes, brought up in wild simplicity." It is of course the case that his enemies and rivals used his heritage against him, Faddei Bulgarin, apparently the Dan Savage of 19th century Russia describes Pushkin's ancestor not as "a Negro bought by a skipper for a bottle of rum."

An article, by Anne Lounsbery in a 2000 edition of Transition Magazine is an excellent piece on the subject. She suggests that the blackness of Pushkin is not a minor biographical detail for American audiences, though to be honest it was a chance encounter with a question to which Pushkin was the answer did I become aware of this fact. Perhaps, I have been hiding under some type of literary rock and am apparently even more of a Philistine than I had previously imagined, but I guess that is for a later personal-inventory session. Nonetheless, I do believe that Pushkin's African-ness is not a well-known fact for those (and a dwindling "those" in United States) that even know who Pushkin is.

Russians, as I have been told by a number of sources, are uniquely aware of their literary tradition in a way many Americans are not so as it regards our tradition. Many a Russian, both of the literati and proletariat will tell you that Pushkin is the father of the Golden Age of Russian Literature, which naturally had a strong influence on the Silver Age of Russian Literature occurring soon thereafter. Some would suggest he is the single most important Russian literary figure, though I would add such a claim would be significantly more contentious than the former. I am not sure what difference Pushkin's "Negro Blood" makes if any in Russia, but I am left wondering as a last thought, if in the United States a literary figure of the stature of Pushkin could have ever existed or would have been recognized as the "father" of any age of American literature. The Harlem Renaissance is typically presented and conceived of as some brief and isolated outburst of literary genius, a towering mountain in an otherwise unaccented literary terrain. As the name suggests however, it had to be a "re-birth" of something and yet I am at a loss to offer another period in American History that provides a context from which to be reborn. Again, this might be some function of my gargantuan ignorance manifesting itself here in my inability to recognize other significant African-American authors before the 20th century and so further investigations await.