June 6 is Pushkin Day
June 6 is Pushkin Day!
Friday marks the birthday of Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (born June 6, 1799), widely regarded as the father of modern Russian literature. A poet, playwright, and novelist of mixed African and Russian descent, Pushkin revolutionized Russian language and literary form by blending classical influences with vernacular speech and vivid emotional realism. His ancestry traced back to Abram Gannibal, an African man brought to Russia and raised by Peter the Great—a lineage Pushkin proudly explored in his writings.
Pushkin’s engagement with his African heritage was both rare and audacious in early 19th-century Europe, especially for a nobleman. His acknowledgment of his great-grandfather, Ibrahim Petrovich Gannibal, an African child stolen from a Turkish harem and later raised as a ward of Peter the Great, was not merely personal. It could be considered politically subversive, asserting Black identity within the heart of the Russian literary canon and challenging prevailing notions of lineage, race, and nobility itself. Pearl-clutching and cringe to the royal class.
People often ask me why I care about these so-called “little factlings.” It’s because I grew up reading the Black history panels by J.A. Rogers in the Chicago Defender, flipping through The Black Scholar, and walking down to Frederick Hammurabi’s House of Knowledge on 38th and Michigan.
We didn’t have formal Black history classes in school, we fought for that. In high school and college, some of us got arrested, some indicted by Hammerhead Hanrahan himself, the State’s Attorney who treated Black student activism like a threat to the republic. We made history just trying to get Black history canonized in the academy, though we didn’t know it at the time. We were just trying to make bail.
Our teachers were free thinkers, and they gave us what they believed we needed, not just what the system approved. Yes, we had Black History Week, founded in 1926 by Dr. Carter G. Woodson to uplift the contributions of African Americans to the national narrative, but people like Rogers and “Ham” (as we called him), a Northwestern-trained attorney, took us even further. They connected us to the entire globe, to the world’s great men of color and to the long memory of our struggle for human rights and liberation.
So, as I said earlier, Pushkin’s poem “My Pedigree” (Моя родословная) reflects on his ancestry, his African heritage through his great-grandfather, Ibrahim Petrovich Gannibal. The poem is a bit satirical, but a proud assertion of his lineage, challenging societal norms of nobility and heritage. I alway thought the Brazilian writer Jorge Amado, created his protagonist in Tent of Miracles, Peter Archanjo, upon being inspired by this poem.
Here we go:
With scornful laughter at a fellow writer,
In chorus the Russian scribes
With name of aristocrat me chide:
Just look, if please you… nonsense what!
Court Coachman not I, nor assessor,
Nor am I nobleman by cross;
No academician, nor professor,
I’m simply of Russia a citizen.
Well I know the times’ corruption,
And, surely, not gainsay it shall I:
Our nobility but recent is:
The more recent it, the more noble ’t is.
But of humbled races a chip,
And, God be thanked, not alone
Of ancient Lords am scion I;
Citizen I am, a citizen!
Not in cakes my grandsire traded,
Not a prince was newly-baked he;
Nor at church sang he in choir,
Nor polished he the boots of Tsar;
Was not escaped a soldier he
From the German powdered ranks;
How then aristocrat am I to be?
God be thanked, I am but a citizen.
My grandsire Radsha in warlike service
To Alexander Nevsky was attached.
The Crowned Wrathful, Fourth Ivan,
His descendants in his ire had spared.
About the Tsars the Pushkins moved;
And more than one acquired renown,
When against the Poles battling was
Of Nizhny Novgorod the citizen plain.
When treason conquered was and falsehood,
And the rage of storm of war,
When the Romanoffs upon the throne
The nation called by its Chart—
We upon it laid our hands;
The martyr’s son then favored us;
Time was, our race was prized,
But I… am but a citizen obscure.
Our stubborn spirit us tricks has played;
Most irrepressible of his race,
With Peter my sire could not get on;
And for this was hung by him.
Let his example a lesson be:
Not contradiction loves a ruler,
Not all can be Prince Dolgorukys,
Happy only is the simple citizen.
My grandfather, when the rebels rose
In the palace of Peterhof,
Like Munich, faithful he remained
To the fallen Peter Third;
To honor came then the Orloffs,
But my sire into fortress, prison—
Quiet now was our stern race,
And I was born merely—citizen.
Beneath my crested seal
The roll of family charts I’ve kept;
Not running after magnates new,
My pride of blood I have subdued;
I’m but an unknown singer
Simply Pushkin, not Moussin,
My strength is mine, not from court:
I am a writer, a citizen.
Damn I enjoyed that. Great words are like mourning dew on fresh flowers. Like morning sunlight on a gray day, like today.
Have a great day, yall.
