Todays writer is Alexander Pushkin from Russia but with African roots (his grandfather was a slave). Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was born in Moscow on June 6, 1799 (May 26, 1799 according to the Julian calendar used in Russia until 1917). His father, Sergey Lvovich Pushkin, came from an illustrious, if impoverished, noble family. He was known for his wit, French library, and literary salons, in which he read Molière aloud. The poet’s mother Nadyezhda Osipovna, née Gannibal, was known as “la belle créole”. Her black grandfather, Ibrahim Gannibal, had been kidnapped in childhood from Central Africa, sold by slave traders to the Turks, and then bought and sent as a “gift” to Tsar Peter the Great. Peter baptized the boy Abraham, raised him fondly, and sent him to study military engineering at Vauban’s academy in France. Abraham became Russia’s chief fortress builder, and wrote textbooks in French on military engineering. Proud of his African heritage, he chose his last name in honor of the great Carthaginian general Hannibal. Repeatedly decorated for valiant service, he rose to the rank of General en chef of the Imperial Russian Army; Empress Elizabeth, Peter’s daughter, endowed him with estates, including Mikhailovskoye, in Pskov Province. Upon retirement, the former slave had become a Russian nobleman—owning 800 serfs (white slaves) himself. From childhood, Alexander Pushkin had the free run of his father’s extensive, mostly French-language library: Homer, Plutarch, Virgil, Ovid, Tacitus, Juvenal, Suetonius, Horace, Montaigne, Corneille, Racine, Molière, Beaumarchais, Laclos, St. Preux, Richardson, Sterne, Defoe, Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau…young Pushkin devoured them all, while lapping up bons mots at his father’s literary soirées. A French houseguest exclaimed: “What an amazing child! How quickly he understands everything! May this boy live and live; you will see what will come of him!” Between French tutors, and houseguests, and his father’s library, Pushkin became so fluent in French, that later his schoolmates at the Lycée nicknamed him “the Frenchman”. Even without dread tales, Alexander Pushkin seems to have had trouble sleeping all his life. (“I can’t sleep, fire’s out, no light…”, Remembrance. Is insomnia an occupational hazards of being a poet?). One day when he was seven, Grandmother found him up before dawn, wandering the house entranced, saying: “I am writing poems”. He is acclaimed the “Father of modern Russian poetry”, was a playwright novelist and composer. In 1937, the town of Tsarskoye Selo was renamed Pushkin in his honour. A minor planet, 2208 Pushkin, discovered in 1977 by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Stepanovich Chernykh, is named after him. A crater on Mercury is also named in his honour. UN Russian Language Day, established by the United Nations in 2010 and celebrated each year on June 6, was scheduled to coincide with Pushkins birthday. He died on 10 February [O.S. 29 January] 1837.
Posted on: Mon, 09 Jun 2014 10:57:58 +0000
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