Subject
Pushkin's Ethiopian grandfather & Nabokov's Onegin translation
From
Date
Body
----- Forwarded message from spklein52@hotmail.com -----
Date: Thu, 04 Aug 2005 15:56:30 -0400
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
http://www.newstatesman.com/Books/200508080033[2] Dark star of the
Enlightenment
New Statesman - London,England,UK
... Pushkin's translator and editor VLADIMIR NABOKOV included a
50-page excursus on the current state of knowledge about "Abram
Gannibal", which suddenly explodes ...
See all stories on this topic [3]
BOOK REVIEWS
Gannibal: the Moor of Petersburg
DARK STAR OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT
Book Reviews
Maggie Gee
Monday 8th August 2005
Gannibal: the Moor of Petersburg
Hugh Barnes _Profile, 300pp, £16.99_
ISBN 1861973659
The extraordinary Gannibal was the African great-grandfather of
Aleksandr Pushkin, Russia's greatest poet, who spoke proudly of his
own inherited "blackamoor profile". In his elegantly written new
biography, Hugh Barnes suggests Gannibal was born in Chad, taken as a
slave to Constantinople, and purchased in 1704, aged seven or eight,
by Tsar Peter the Great of Russia. While still a teenager, Gannibal
was writing the tsar's letters, working on encryption for secret
messages, and helping to plan military campaigns. As an adult he rose
to the top of the Russian army. Gannibal also read Racine, Corneille
and Moliere, and was, in Paris, the friend of Montesquieu, Diderot
and Voltaire, who called him "the dark star of the Enlightenment".
Yet this was less than a century after France had established its
slave colonies in the West Indies, and Voltaire also said that the
intelligence of black people was "far inferior", while Montesquieu,
equivocating about slavery, said it was sometimes "founded on natural
reason". How did Gannibal manage to surmount 18th-century attitudes to
slavery and to Africans?
His story has intrigued and defeated other authors. Pushkin himself
wrote an unfinished historical romance called _The Negro of Peter the
Great_, and began by praising his great-grandfather's "culture and
natural intelligence" - but his plot foundered when he came to
describe Gannibal's rejection by Natasha, a white Russian aristocrat.
After overhearing plans to marry her off to "that black devil",
Natasha lies in a swoon for two weeks. Gannibal's friend Korsakov,
warning him off marriage, alludes to his "flat nose, thick lips and
fuzzy hair". Then the story breaks off. Pushkin's translator and
editor Vladimir Nabokov included a 50-page excursus on the current
state of knowledge about "Abram Gannibal", which suddenly explodes
into an astonishing attack: Gannibal was "a sour, grovelling,
crotchety, timid, ambitious and cruel person: a good military
engineer, perhaps, but humanistically a nonentity". Neither Pushkin
nor Nabokov, it seems, found Gannibal easy to write about.
Hugh Barnes also deals at length with "facts" that turn to dust as he
pursues his subject, now in an unheated Russian library where all the
readers shiver in hats, coats and scarves, now in the no-go zone
between Ethiopia and Eritrea. The biography by Gannibal's son-in-law
Rotkirkh is full of myths, including the idea, which has become a
truism, that Gannibal was Ethiopian. The black Beninois scholar
Dieudonne Gnammankou wryly claims this was because Russians think
"Ethiopians are practically white". Barnes comes down on Gnammankou's
side, placing Gannibal's birth firmly in equatorial Africa, in
sub-Saharan Chad.
After the necessary demolition work (not always an easy read),
Barnes's book takes off into gripping narrative. Why was Gannibal
taken as a slave to Constantinople? A powerful African family may
have had too many potential heirs for comfort. Having been bought by
the Turkish sultan, Gannibal was co-opted into an even more grisly
system, becoming page to Sultan Mustafa's younger brother Ahmed, who
was imprisoned in a cage for life to curtail his ambitions to the
throne. Gannibal was learning lessons that later helped him survive
the rapidly shifting alliances at his next destination, the Russian
court.
Peter the Great was the key to Gannibal's success. Six feet seven
inches tall, Peter was an eccentric moderniser who wan- ted "new men"
at court. Gifted young Gannibal strikingly disproved what was, in
Peter's words, "that odious prejudice which assigns to the Negro race
a reputation of intellectual and moral inferiority". Peter became
Gannibal's godfather and made him an intimate. Once, the young
African boy shrieked out in fright, believing his entrails were
coming out; Peter the Great plucked from his behind a large worm. As
a teenager, Gannibal slept in the tsar's bedroom and acted as his
secretary while learning science and mathematics; a fluent linguist,
he accompanied Peter on his unsuccessful empire-building mission to
Paris, staying behind to educate himself when Peter went home.
On his eventual return to Russia, Gannibal had to survive the blow of
Peter's death and a rapid succession of different rulers (by the end
of his life he had served under half a dozen tsars or tsarinas). He
wrote a six-inch-thick textbook on _Geometry and Fortification_, and
became chief military engineer to the Russian army. He also worked on
a "secret howitzer" that paved the way for the first rockets, and
helped design the system of canals finally built by Joseph Stalin.
How did he survive demotion and exile to Siberia, and rise to ever
higher military office? Barnes analyses the way in which lethal
infighting among home-grown aristocratic families made 18th-century
Russia unusually eager to admit foreigners to power. The 19th-century
military expert Christoph von Manstein claimed that "the soldiers
repose more confidence in strangers than in officers of their own
nation". Gannibal scored doubly as both African and Russian, Peter's
adopted "son". But as Gannibal fathered a family of 11 children with
a Swedish/German wife, Christina-Regina von Schoberg, the mixed-race
family aroused hostility among conservative Russians: Gannibal said
he suffered "insults and offences".
Gannibal's life came full circle when in 1742 he was granted, by
Tsarina Elizabeth, 6,000 acres of woodland and hundreds of serfs. He
decided to rent out his estate to a powerful German aristocrat,
making a proviso that surely harked back to his own enslaved
childhood: "The present contract is . . . void if . . . the peasants
. . . are mistreated in any way." When two peasants complained, he
brought a successful lawsuit against the German, "one of the first in
Russian legal history", according to Barnes, "to enshrine peasants'
rights in common law". Unfortunately Gannibal also made an enemy of
the new German district governor, and when the latter's nephew
succeeded the tsarina, becoming Peter III, Gannibal was despatched to
rural retirement, where he died.
Peter the Great's belief in racial equality had been vindicated
dramatically, however, as had Russians' willingness to benefit from
"alien" talent. Both Gannibal and Pushkin, despite the poet's mostly
white antecedents, have become stars in the constellation of black
history. Gannibal's fortifications were still in place to thwart the
advance of the Nazi armies on St Petersburg two centuries later, and
his granddaughter Nadezhda gave birth to the writer revered as the
founder of modern Russian literature.
_Maggie Gee's new novel, _My Cleaner_, is published at the end of
this month by Saqi Books_
_
This article first appeared in the New Statesman. _
Links:
------
[1] http://www.newstatesman.com/
[2] http://www.newstatesman.com/Books/200508080033
[3] http://www.newstatesman.com/
----- End forwarded message -----
Date: Thu, 04 Aug 2005 15:56:30 -0400
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
http://www.newstatesman.com/Books/200508080033[2] Dark star of the
Enlightenment
New Statesman - London,England,UK
... Pushkin's translator and editor VLADIMIR NABOKOV included a
50-page excursus on the current state of knowledge about "Abram
Gannibal", which suddenly explodes ...
See all stories on this topic [3]
BOOK REVIEWS
Gannibal: the Moor of Petersburg
DARK STAR OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT
Book Reviews
Maggie Gee
Monday 8th August 2005
Gannibal: the Moor of Petersburg
Hugh Barnes _Profile, 300pp, £16.99_
ISBN 1861973659
The extraordinary Gannibal was the African great-grandfather of
Aleksandr Pushkin, Russia's greatest poet, who spoke proudly of his
own inherited "blackamoor profile". In his elegantly written new
biography, Hugh Barnes suggests Gannibal was born in Chad, taken as a
slave to Constantinople, and purchased in 1704, aged seven or eight,
by Tsar Peter the Great of Russia. While still a teenager, Gannibal
was writing the tsar's letters, working on encryption for secret
messages, and helping to plan military campaigns. As an adult he rose
to the top of the Russian army. Gannibal also read Racine, Corneille
and Moliere, and was, in Paris, the friend of Montesquieu, Diderot
and Voltaire, who called him "the dark star of the Enlightenment".
Yet this was less than a century after France had established its
slave colonies in the West Indies, and Voltaire also said that the
intelligence of black people was "far inferior", while Montesquieu,
equivocating about slavery, said it was sometimes "founded on natural
reason". How did Gannibal manage to surmount 18th-century attitudes to
slavery and to Africans?
His story has intrigued and defeated other authors. Pushkin himself
wrote an unfinished historical romance called _The Negro of Peter the
Great_, and began by praising his great-grandfather's "culture and
natural intelligence" - but his plot foundered when he came to
describe Gannibal's rejection by Natasha, a white Russian aristocrat.
After overhearing plans to marry her off to "that black devil",
Natasha lies in a swoon for two weeks. Gannibal's friend Korsakov,
warning him off marriage, alludes to his "flat nose, thick lips and
fuzzy hair". Then the story breaks off. Pushkin's translator and
editor Vladimir Nabokov included a 50-page excursus on the current
state of knowledge about "Abram Gannibal", which suddenly explodes
into an astonishing attack: Gannibal was "a sour, grovelling,
crotchety, timid, ambitious and cruel person: a good military
engineer, perhaps, but humanistically a nonentity". Neither Pushkin
nor Nabokov, it seems, found Gannibal easy to write about.
Hugh Barnes also deals at length with "facts" that turn to dust as he
pursues his subject, now in an unheated Russian library where all the
readers shiver in hats, coats and scarves, now in the no-go zone
between Ethiopia and Eritrea. The biography by Gannibal's son-in-law
Rotkirkh is full of myths, including the idea, which has become a
truism, that Gannibal was Ethiopian. The black Beninois scholar
Dieudonne Gnammankou wryly claims this was because Russians think
"Ethiopians are practically white". Barnes comes down on Gnammankou's
side, placing Gannibal's birth firmly in equatorial Africa, in
sub-Saharan Chad.
After the necessary demolition work (not always an easy read),
Barnes's book takes off into gripping narrative. Why was Gannibal
taken as a slave to Constantinople? A powerful African family may
have had too many potential heirs for comfort. Having been bought by
the Turkish sultan, Gannibal was co-opted into an even more grisly
system, becoming page to Sultan Mustafa's younger brother Ahmed, who
was imprisoned in a cage for life to curtail his ambitions to the
throne. Gannibal was learning lessons that later helped him survive
the rapidly shifting alliances at his next destination, the Russian
court.
Peter the Great was the key to Gannibal's success. Six feet seven
inches tall, Peter was an eccentric moderniser who wan- ted "new men"
at court. Gifted young Gannibal strikingly disproved what was, in
Peter's words, "that odious prejudice which assigns to the Negro race
a reputation of intellectual and moral inferiority". Peter became
Gannibal's godfather and made him an intimate. Once, the young
African boy shrieked out in fright, believing his entrails were
coming out; Peter the Great plucked from his behind a large worm. As
a teenager, Gannibal slept in the tsar's bedroom and acted as his
secretary while learning science and mathematics; a fluent linguist,
he accompanied Peter on his unsuccessful empire-building mission to
Paris, staying behind to educate himself when Peter went home.
On his eventual return to Russia, Gannibal had to survive the blow of
Peter's death and a rapid succession of different rulers (by the end
of his life he had served under half a dozen tsars or tsarinas). He
wrote a six-inch-thick textbook on _Geometry and Fortification_, and
became chief military engineer to the Russian army. He also worked on
a "secret howitzer" that paved the way for the first rockets, and
helped design the system of canals finally built by Joseph Stalin.
How did he survive demotion and exile to Siberia, and rise to ever
higher military office? Barnes analyses the way in which lethal
infighting among home-grown aristocratic families made 18th-century
Russia unusually eager to admit foreigners to power. The 19th-century
military expert Christoph von Manstein claimed that "the soldiers
repose more confidence in strangers than in officers of their own
nation". Gannibal scored doubly as both African and Russian, Peter's
adopted "son". But as Gannibal fathered a family of 11 children with
a Swedish/German wife, Christina-Regina von Schoberg, the mixed-race
family aroused hostility among conservative Russians: Gannibal said
he suffered "insults and offences".
Gannibal's life came full circle when in 1742 he was granted, by
Tsarina Elizabeth, 6,000 acres of woodland and hundreds of serfs. He
decided to rent out his estate to a powerful German aristocrat,
making a proviso that surely harked back to his own enslaved
childhood: "The present contract is . . . void if . . . the peasants
. . . are mistreated in any way." When two peasants complained, he
brought a successful lawsuit against the German, "one of the first in
Russian legal history", according to Barnes, "to enshrine peasants'
rights in common law". Unfortunately Gannibal also made an enemy of
the new German district governor, and when the latter's nephew
succeeded the tsarina, becoming Peter III, Gannibal was despatched to
rural retirement, where he died.
Peter the Great's belief in racial equality had been vindicated
dramatically, however, as had Russians' willingness to benefit from
"alien" talent. Both Gannibal and Pushkin, despite the poet's mostly
white antecedents, have become stars in the constellation of black
history. Gannibal's fortifications were still in place to thwart the
advance of the Nazi armies on St Petersburg two centuries later, and
his granddaughter Nadezhda gave birth to the writer revered as the
founder of modern Russian literature.
_Maggie Gee's new novel, _My Cleaner_, is published at the end of
this month by Saqi Books_
_
This article first appeared in the New Statesman. _
Links:
------
[1] http://www.newstatesman.com/
[2] http://www.newstatesman.com/Books/200508080033
[3] http://www.newstatesman.com/
----- End forwarded message -----