| Review: Catharine Nepomnyashchy, et al, eds. «Under the Sky of My Africa: Pushkin and Blackness» |
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| Volume 08-09 (2005-06) - Vols. 8-9: Reviews / Рецензии | |||
| Written by Greene, Raquel | |||
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Catharine Theimer Nempomnyashchy, Nicole Svobodny, and Ludmilla A. Trigos, eds. Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness. Foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006. viii + 418. Index. ISBN 0-8101-1970-6 (cloth), 0-8101-1971-4 (paper).
The anthology Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness, edited by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, Nicole Svobodny, and Ludmilla A. Trigos, is an ambitious and timely collection which examines the multi-faceted ramifications of Alexander Pushkin’s mixed Russian-African heritage and their reverberations in both Pushkin’s life and oeuvre as well as in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary and cultural history. Certainly, scholars have examined Pushkin’s African ancestry and its perceived importance in his life and oeuvre, attributing varying degrees of significance to the Gannibal branch of the poet’s genealogy. Scholars have also revealed how private and official perceptions and interpretations of Pushkin’s “blackness” have evolved in the centuries since the poet’s death, reflecting the divergent ways in which various constituencies have appropriated the poet’s mixed heritage for their own purposes. Yet Under the Sky of My Africa moves beyond the traditional historical and literary studies of Pushkin’s life and oeuvre to explore the thematic richness and complexity that accompanies the theme of Pushkin’s “blackness.”
The collection interweaves history, literature, and cultural studies. An introductory article by N. K. Teletova (“A.P. Gannibal”) deconstructs the documentary evidence related to Abram Gannibal’s life and provides a new glimpse into the career and personality of this figure whom Pushkin wove into a number of his creative works. However, Teletova’s essay only leads to the primary aim of the collection, that of illustrating the various ways and contexts in which blackness as a social construction has been reflected in literature and art by and about Pushkin over the last two centuries. What becomes clear through subsequent essays is that the intricate details of Gannibal’s life as revealed by Teletova find significance in what Pushkin gleaned from them, how he interpreted, and often reworked them to reflect his own feelings about his African ancestry.
The first part of the collection examines a number of Pushkin’s primary works, with each essay underscoring how the writer’s understanding of his African ancestry informs not only works in which Africanness is a theme, such as The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, but also works such as Ruslan and Ludmila (examined by Richard Gustafson), which is devoid of the African motif, yet reveals Pushkin’s perhaps less obvious but nonetheless important symbolic anxiety towards the “dark side of his lineage” (99). Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy’s “The Telltale Black Baby, or Why Pushkin Began the Blackamoor of Peter the Great but Didn’t Finish It,” expounds upon the motivations behind Pushkin’s decision to abandon work on his first prose creation. Nepomnyashchy points to, among other factors, the author’s anxiety about the genealogical connection to Gannibal as well as similar life circumstances, and Pushkin’s emotional difficulties inherent in coming to terms with himself. The significance of the writer’s perception of his ancestry is also observed in his appropriation of other works. Catherine O’Neil’s “Pushkin and Othello” illustrates the specific attraction that Shakespeare’s Moor held for the writer. This connection reflects an aspect of Pushkin’s personal myth of himself as the “other,” an outsider by virtue of his racial heritage. Ambivalence is also observed in artistic depictions of the writer. “Making a True Image: Blackness and Pushkin’s Portraits,” by Richard C. Borden, illustrates how varied representations of Pushkin’s physical features may arguably be read as “texts” which reflect individual artists’ own perceptions of Pushkin’s heritage.
J. Thomas Shaw’s classic study, reprinted in this volume (“Pushkin on his African Heritage: Publications during His Lifetime”), highlights the degree to which Pushkin’s attitude towards his African heritage simultaneously reflected pride, fascination, ambivalence, and anxiety, distinguishing between the poet’s public and private writings. This underlying thesis of Shaw’s article reverberates in each of the insightful essays which examine those works dealing both explicitly with the character of Gannibal and symbolically with the theme of blackness. In particular, I would point to David Bethea’s “How Black was Pushkin? Otherness and Self-Creation,” as offering a comprehensive overview of how Pushkin and others viewed the poet’s mixed ancestry within the context of Russian culture. As Bethea states, “the ‘Russianness’ that Pushkin embodied was a way of seeing the world that defined, in an ongoing and never static process, the self through the other, and one of those others that Pushkin experienced as absolutely inseparable from his self was ‘blackness’” (143). The essays in this first section of the anthology are to be recognized for the manner in which they illustrate the complexities and nuances of this process of self-recognition.
The second part of the collection examines Pushkinian echoes in twentieth-century literature and cultural studies. The literary response to the writer has yielded countless variations of “Moi Pushkin,” two examples of which are analyzed in Liza Knapp’s essay on Marina Tsvetaeva’s appropriation of the Pushkin myth as it relates to his African ancestry and Caryl Emerson’s piece on Artur Vincent Lourie’s opera The Negro of Peter the Great. Especially compelling, however, are the essays by Olga P. Hasty and Anne Lounsbery, which underscore the significance of Pushkin’s life and work among twentieth-century African-American writers and intellectuals—a theme that has not been previously examined in depth. As early as the mid-nineteenth century, Pushkin’s unsurpassed contributions to Russian literature and the development of the Russian literary language, as well as his self-identification as a man of African ancestry, were seen as proof of African-American creative and intellectual potential. For this reason, the writer was embraced by those pressed for the recognition of African-American equality. Yet, as Hasty and Lounsbery aptly demonstrate, the African-American tie to Pushkin extends beyond the issue of race to include an affinity with the political and social conditions under which Pushkin wrote. How African-American writers expressed this affinity during the Harlem Renaissance (and more recently) is an important aspect of African-American cultural studies.
The strength of this anthology is its breadth. The essays assembled in this volume expand traditional interpretations in the literary and cultural assessments of Pushkin’s racial heritage and reveal a multifarious complexity hitherto not thoroughly examined in either Slavic or Race studies. Overall, the essays offer not only thoughtful textual analysis, but also essential contextual information. In so doing, the collection becomes accessible and will appeal both to scholars and more casual readers interested in Slavic and Race studies. Readers are certainly indebted to both the editors and contributors to this important collection.
Raquel Greene
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