Black Russians #BlkHandSide

The birth of Alexander Pushkin in 1799 is celebrated on this date. He was a Black Russian poet and the great-grandson of Abraham Hannibal, an African general and friend of Peter the Great.

As a child, Alexander Pushkin displayed a talent for writing poetry. In 1818, he was appointed to Russia's ministry of foreign affairs. By day, he worked for the government; at night, he wrote poetry. Pushkin eventually became Russia's poet laureate. Political freedom was the subject of two of his most famous poems, Noel and Ode to Freedom, which critiqued the government. As a result, Pushkin was banished into exile, during which he continued to write and became the first Russian to earn a living as a poet.

In 1824, he received a pardon from Alexander the First on the condition that his future writings would not provoke political unrest. Thereafter, he wrote two novels, The Captive of the Caucasus and The Captain's Daughter. A continuous theme throughout his works was his obvious pride in his African heritage. He left unfinished a tribute novel, The Moor of Peter the Great, in honor of his grandfather.

https://www.waggish.org/2014/the-black-pushkin-and-the-blackamoor-of-peter-the-great/

In 1837 at the age of 38, Pushkin died in a duel over the woman he married.

Pushkin and his wife met George D’Anthès in 1834. D’Anthès was the adopted son of the Dutch ambassador, a handsome and dashing Frenchman who had joined the Tsar’s army to advance his career. He began paying court to Natalya in 1835, and the whole affair came to a head when Pushkin received a letter informing him that he had been elected to ‘The Most Serene Order of Cuckolds’. Pushkin immediately issued a challenge, but the duel was put off and delayed by a complex series of negotiations initiated by D’Anthès’ adoptive father. Although it was never proven that Natalya, who had also flirted with Tsar Nicholas, had been unfaithful, the inevitable duel took place on the afternoon of 27 January 1837 and Pushkin killed.

The grief that broke out on the news of Pushkin’s death was unprecedented and took the authorities by surprise. The funeral was transferred from the cathedral at the last moment to a smaller church, every effort was made to play down public mourning, and in the repressive atmosphere of the century Pushkin, even in death, continued to be viewed as a threat to public order and a source of dangerous ideas. It was more than 30 years later that the poet’s genius received public when a statue of Pushkin was unveiled in Moscow during 1880. Since then Pushkin has been all things to all men. In the rest of the world, the operas of Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov brought Pushkin’s imagination to a wider public. In Russia, the Soviet authorities highlighted his friendship with the Decembrists to claim his posthumous support.

Nowadays, in a continent struggling with the different claims of ethnicity and nationality, he seems to be, above all, a towering figure who was capable of using the different strands of his identity to create and inspire new modes of seeing and new cultural achievements.

Reference: The World Book Encyclopedia. Copyright 1996, World Book, Inc. ISBN 0-7166-0096-X