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Pushkin Between Russia and Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Dieudonné Gnammankou

Extract

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Born in 1799 in Moscow, Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin - who has been called the “founder of poetic and literary language in Russian” (Belinski, Turgenev), “the first of the Russians” (Dos-toyevski), “the first Russian artist-poet” (Belinski), “the original model for Russian identity” (Grigoriev), “an extremely rare and perhaps unique phenomenon of the Russian spirit” (Gogol), “the sun of the Russian intellectual conception of the world” (Dostoyevsky) - could trace his roots back to African ancestors. His mother, Nadine Hanibal, was the granddaughter of “The Negro of Peter the Great,” Abraham Petrovich Hanibal, who at the beginning of the eighteenth century fell victim to the black slave trade with the Ottoman Empire.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 45 , Issue 179 , September 1997 , pp. 211 - 229
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

Notes

1. See D. Gnammankou, “La traite des Noirs en direction de la Russie,” in Actes du Colloque Unesco “La Route de l'Esclave: Ouidah (Bénin 1994),” (forthcoming, Editions Unesco-Aupelf).

2. Czeslaw Jesman, “Early Russian Contacts with Ethiopia,” in Proceedings of the Third International Conference of Ethiopian Studies (Addis Ababa, 1966), pp. 253-267.

3. Letter to the Russian Senate, 1742. In this autobiographical document, Hani bal does not however supply the name of the country where the town of Logone was located. Half a century later, Rotkirkh, Hanibal's son-in-law, wrote in a document known as the “German Biography” that Hanibal was a “Negro from Abyssinia.” Towards the end of the nineteenth century, as the centenary of the poet's birth drew near, attempts were made in Russia to determine the native land of Pushkin's black great-grandfather. In 1899, a Russian scholar named Anuchin announced that he had discovered the town of Logone in Ethiopia. Thus was born the legend of Pushkin's Ethiopian ancestry. But Anuchin had inaccurately transformed the place name Logo-Tchova, the name of a village in northern Ethiopia, into Logone. A few decades later, Vladimir Nabokov endeavored in vain to locate the town of Logone in Ethiopia according to Anuchin ‘s indications. Having concluded that the “German Biography” that mentioned Abyssinia was an error-ridden document, and realizing that in Anuchin ‘s article the Ethiopian place name Loggo or Logo was miraculously transformed in various versions to Loggom or Logom, then Loggon or Logon, Nabokov decided to ignor the document and to pursue his own line of investigation from scratch; he did not find Logone in Ethiopia. In reality, the town of Logone was located else where in Africa, in a principality of the same name located in the basin of Lake Chad, in territory formerly known as Central Sudan and now part of Cameroon. This conclusion is based on a critical study of all of my predeces sors' work and on new research. Cf. my article “Otkuda rodom Ibragim Gannibal,” Rossiyskie Vesti no. 101 (2 June 1995) and the English version of this article, “New Research on Pushkin's Africa: Hannibal's Homeland,” in Research in African Literature, vol 28, no. 4 (winter 1997); and my article “Where Does Hanibal Come From?, in The Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences, vol. 65, no. 12 (December 1995).

4. Bukhalov, V. I. Roman o tsarskom arape [The Novel of the Tsar's Negro] (Moscow, 1990), p. 22.

5. Emile Haumant, Pouchkine (Paris, 1911), p. 14.

6. A. S. Pushkin, Correspondence (not translated) (Moscow, 1965), vol. 10, p. 49.

7. In 1820 Pushkin wrote:

But I, an eternally-idle rake,

An ugly offspring of Negroes,

Not knowing the sufferings of love,

I please youthful beauties

With the shameless rage of my desire …

A. Pushkin, “Iur'evu” (“To Iurev”), quoted by Allison Blakely, in Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought (Washington, D.C., 1986), p. 51.

8. Bukhalov, Roman o tsarskom arape, p. 27.

9. In May 1820, Pushkin was exiled in the south of the Russian Empire for hav ing written political verse, in particular the “Ode to Liberty.” In July 1824, after the police had intercepted one of his letters expressing atheist ideas, he was transferred to the northwest of Russia, to Mikhailovskoé. See Dimitrij Blagoj, Alexander Pushkin (Paris, 1981). Nicholas I, who became emperor after the death of Alexander I, brought Pushkin's second exile to an end in Septem ber 1826. The poet's troubles with the authorities were however not over, for Nicholas I himself decided to censor Pushkin and had him placed under police surveillance.

10. Pierre Arminjon, Pouchkine et Pierre le Grand (Paris, 1971).

11. Before his marriage in 1831 to Nathalie Goncharova, Pushkin had attracted attention in Moscow and Petersburg with his many amorous adventures. He loved women and reveled in the pleasures of the senses and the mind, which were all gifts from heaven in his eyes (Seseman D.). He had many admirers among the women of high society and some of these lovers were immortal ized in not a few poems. Thus women found Pushkin handsome and quite seductive.

12. Mir Pushkina. Familnye bumagi Pushkinykh Gannibalov [The World of Pushkin] (St. Petersburg, 1993), vol. 1.

13. Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, chapter 1, stanza L, trans. Vladimir Nabokov, in “Pushkin and Gannibal: A Footnote,” Encounter, vol. 19, no. 1 (July 1962), p. 11. For the Russian translation of this article, see Legendy i mify o Pushkine [Myths et Legends about Pushkin] (St. Petersburg, 1995).

14. Cited by Bukhalov, Roman o tsarskom arape, p. 27.

15. Letter from Anna S. Hannibal to D. Anuchin, Odessa, 6 November 1899, in Vsesoyouznaïa Biblioteka v.i. Lenina, Troudy, Shornik IV, Moscow, 1939), p. 163.

16. Nikolai Leontovich Brodskii, A. S. Pushkin: Biografiia (Moscow, 1937), p. 572, cited by Bukhalov, Roman o tsarskom arape, p. 120.

17. Louis Martinez, Alexandre Pouchkine, Poésies (Paris, 1994).

18. Marina Tsvetaeva, Mon Pouchkine (Paris, 1987).

19. Legendy i mify o Puchkine.

20. Nina Ivanova Granovskaia, Esli ekhat vam sluchitsia … [In Case You Should Hap pen to Go …] (Leningrad, 1989).

21. Bukhalov.

22. In 1824, Pushkin sent his friend Yazykov the following lines from Mikhailovskoe:

In the countryside, where Peter's foster-child,

Favorite slave of tsars and tsarinas

And their forgotten housemate,

My Negro great-grandfather hid,

Where, having forgotten Elizabeth

And the court and magnificent promise,

Under the canopy of lime-blossom lanes

He thought in cool summers

About his distant Africa,

I wait for you …

(English translation by Allison Blakely, in Russia and the Negro, p. 52).

23. A. Pushkin, Début d'Autobriographie, in Dieudonné Gnammankou, Abraham Hanibal, l'aïeul noir de Pouchkine (Paris, 1996), p. 208.

24. From the French translation by Louis Martinez, Alexandre Pouchkine, Poésies.

25. From the French translation by André Meynieux, in Pouchkine. Oeuvres com plètes. Autobiographie. Critique. Correspondance (Paris, 1977).

26. G. Alexinsky, “Pouchkine l'Africain,” in Le Figaro Littéraire no. 276 (August 1951).

27. Daniel Zimmerman, Alexandre Dumas le Grand (Paris, 1993), p. 354.

28. Iurii Mikhailovich Lotman, Pouchkine (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo, 1995), p. 181.

29. Pushkin was the most illustrious of the descendants of Abraham Hanibal, the Russian of Africa, whose wife Nathalie had borne him four children: Marie, Alexander, Gregory, and Nathalie. The oldest, Marie (1832-1919) was married to Major-General Leonid Hartung. Alexander (1833-1914) was a Lieutenant General in the Russian Army. A war hero, he earned several military decora tions. His brother Gregory (1835-1905) left the army very early and went on to a career in administration. He became a senior member of the Council of State in 1896. As for Nathalie, whose contemporaries considered her “even more beautiful than her mother, despite her irregular African features,” she was married for a second time, in London, to a German prince, Nicolas of Nassau, a relative of the Romanovs, the Russian Imperial family. In 1867 she became Countess of Merenberg. In 1916 her granddaughter, the Countess Nada de Torbi, married another German prince, George of Mountbatten, the uncle of Philip of Edinburgh, and became the Marquessa of Milford-Haven. Cf. Viktor Mikhailovich Rusakov, Rasskazy o potomkakh A. S. Pushkina [The Descendants of Pushkin] (St. Petersburg, 1992). Today Pushkin's many descendants live all over the world.