Pushkin as a Poet of Blackness

Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy

The title of this paper, “Pushkin as a Poet of Blackness,” shades into an­other title, “Pushkin as a Black Poet.” I am taking as my starting point a question one of my colleagues, Irina Reyfman, posed when my co-editors and I were first beginning the project that culminated in the book Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness. She asked—quite simply, but very much to the point—whether black and its Russian coun­terpart chernyi could be viewed as meaningful equivalents with regard to comparative Russian and American racial semiotics generally and, more specifically, with regard to Pushkin. Obviously this is an aspect of the much larger issue of whether race mattered to Pushkin and his contempo­raries and to those who created and participated in the Pushkin cult after him. The contributors to our book project unanimously concurred that, at different times and in different ways, race does indeed matter in studying Pushkin. Here I am interested precisely in the intersection of linguistic, cultural, and political difference. To what extent does the word chernyi in Pushkin’s works resonate with the poet’s African ancestry?

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Excerpts from Variegated Tales by Prince Vladimir Fyodorovich Odoevsky

Translated by Olesya Surkova

Translator’s Preface

In general, the American reader’s knowledge of Russian literary classics is limited primarily by the availability of English language translations. Extant translations have also largely defined the foreign audience’s pref­erences for certain Russian writers over others. Thus, while some authors, such as Tolstoy and Chekhov, have been translated and retranslated into English, others, such as Prince Vladimir Fyodorovich Odoevsky, have un­fortunately been neglected or translated very selectively.[1] In the hope of restoring justice in regard to one of my favorite writers, I have translated several literary pieces by Odoevsky that were first published together in Pestrye skazki (Variegated Tales), a collection of stories from 1833. These translations are part of a larger work in progress, a project that will result in an English-language version of the collection in its entirety.