By Maidei Jenny Magirosa

“Pushkin was the Russian spring. Pushkin was the Russian morning. Pushkin was the Russian Adam.” – A.V. Lunacharsky
ONE of the most remarkable Russian poet and writer was Alexander Sergeievich Pushkin.
He was born in Moscow on May 26 1799.
He descended on his mother’s side from Major-General Ibrahim Petrovich Hannibal, an African.
He was the author of ‘Eugene Onegin’ and ‘Boris Gudonov’, and is widely regarded as ‘the father of Russian literature’, a national poet and most iconic cultural figure.
When you look at Pushkin’s photo, what strikes you are his African features. Pushkin valued his African heritage and this comes out very clearly in the aspects of his life and works.
Many literary critics, over the years, have downplayed Pushkin’s African background.
But in this article, we would like to trace back and explore how being of African origin influenced how Pushkin identified himself.
Pushkin was the great-grandson of General Abram Petrovich Gannibal.
Some history books say Pushkin’s great-grandfather was called, Abram (or Ibrahim) the son of a king ruler in Chad or Abyssinia.
Others say Abraham was from Central Africa.
Either way, Abram was from Africa.
As a young boy, he was captured by slave traders and sent to the court of the Turkish Sultan in Constantinople.
From there, he was bought from the Sultan by a Russian merchant.
Upon arrival in Russia, the African boy was baptised and Tsar Peter the Great was his godfather.
In 1717, Peter the Great took Abram to France and left him there to study.
During the time in France, Abram changed his surname to Hannibal, translated in Russian to the name Gannibal.
Later on, Abram returned to Russia well equipped with the conventional skills of an officer of artillery.
Hannibal impressed Czar Peter the Great so well that he became a confidant and favorite.
He was revered at the court, and thus began the aristocratic Pushkin lineage. 
He was a respected military engineer and was promoted during the reign of several rulers including under that of Catherine the Great.
A real original picture of Gannibal has not been found.
Hugh Barnes, in his book Gannibal: the Moor of Petersburg, has proved that one photo originally thought to be Gannibal was not of him.
Gannibal’s son Osip Abramovich married Marya Alexeevna Pushkin.
Their daughter was Pushkin’s mother Nadezhda.
Pushkin’s father Sergei Lvovich Pushkin came from a high class family of nobles. Sergei Lvovich inherited much of the family estates.
Sergei was not interested in business or hard work.
Instead, he read French and when his son Pushkin was born, he encouraged him to spend time reading in the library of French literature and philosophy.
Sergey Lvovich Pushkin was known for his humour and his French library was unusually huge.
His mother Nadyezhda Osipovna, nee Gannibal, was known as ‘la belle créole’. 
Pushkin was therefore inspired by a background of books and literature.  
When he began his career, he wrote in the Russian language at a time when most Russian intellectuals were writing in French. 
According to Feodor Dostoevsky, “No Russian writer was ever so intimately at one with the Russian people as Pushkin.” 
In addition, Maxim Gorky wrote that, “Pushkin is the greatest master in the world.  “Pushkin, in our country, is the beginning of all beginnings. 
“He most beautifully expressed the spirit of our people.”
Czar Nicholas I noted that he hated and feared Pushkin, but he also referred to him as “the most intelligent man in Russia.”
The best analysis of Alexander Pushkin’s relation to his African heritage is found in Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness.
According to the African-American literary critic, Henry Louis Gates JR, Pushkin wrote a series of radical poems unofficially, one of which was called ‘Ode to Liberty’.
As a result of this poem, Pushkin was accused of being a conspirator.
He was exiled to his mother’s estate in Northern Russia.
He was later forgiven by Nicolas 1 in 1826, but five of his friends were sentenced to death.
From that time onwards, Pushkin entered a period of intense creativity, writing over the next five years two of his masterpieces, Eugene Onegin and Boris Gudonov, four tragedies, including Mozart and Salieri.
At about the same time he commenced a novel about his great-grandfather, The Moor of Peter the Great, which, sadly he never completed.
In the United States, they have a ‘one drop’ rule, which means if a person has a tiny drop bit of black blood in it means he is black.
This means Pushkin would have been categorised as a black man.
Pushkin did not deny his African heritage.
In doing so, he strongly identified with his great-grandfather’s African heritage as a matter of choice.
He wrote about this in many on his writings.
In one letter written in 1824, related in Under the Sky of My Africa, Pushkin highlighted his relation to black slaves in the U.S.
“One can think of the fate of the Greeks in the same way as of the fate of my brother Negroes, and one can wish both of them liberation from unendurable slavery.”
Another writer, Nepomnyashchy tells a story about one of Pushkin’s favourite possessions.
He wrote that on Pushkin’s desk sat “an inkstand featuring a black man leaning against an anchor and standing in front of two bales of cotton, made to hold ink. “Accompanying it was a note from his close friend, Pavel Nashchokin stating: ‘I am sending you your ancestor with inkwells that open and that reveal him to be a farsighted person’.
“Pushkin was extremely pleased with the gift, which he kept on his desk to the end of his days.”
Nepomnyashchy then argues that the ink or the ‘black stuff’ was for Pushkin to practice his writing trade and prove creativity.
Henry Louis Gates goes further to say that Pushkin’s sign of his black ancestry, “centrally placed on his desk as a visible testament and reminder both of his African ancestry and, perhaps, of the irony that a man of recent African descent was playing such a seminal role in the creation of Russia’s national literary tradition.”