Russia’s Black Genius: A Sourcebook on the African Heritage of Alexander Pushkin brings together primary sources related to the racialization of Russian poet Alexander Pushkin and his Afro-Russian great-grandfather, the military engineer and general Abram Petrovich Gannibal. While Pushkin is a canonical figure and renowned to this day as Russia’s national poet, his African heritage is often overlooked or poorly understood; meanwhile Gannibal, despite his compelling life story, has become a relatively obscure figure outside of Russia. Yet over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was common to find discussions of Pushkin’s Black and multiracial ancestry in books and periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic. Building on the work of a small but influential cohort of scholars and intellectuals who have illuminated the racial dimensions of Pushkin’s legacy, this volume makes primary and source materials available, often for the first time, to readers who are not fluent in the Russian language. Ranging from US criticism and English translations of Russian, German, and French texts to numerous accounts of Pushkin’s life and works penned by Black Americans, the texts in this sourcebook expand and complicate the historical reception of Pushkin in Europe and the United States. Through translation and interdisciplinary dialogue, Russia’s Black Genius brings one of Russia’s—and the world’s— foremost poets into conversation with a broader swath of global readers.
 

Emily Wang is associate professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Pushkin, the Decembrists, and Civic Sentimentalism (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023) and edited Pushkin Review from 2016–2020.

Korey Garibaldi is associate professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame and associate editor of American Quarterly. His first book, Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Unmaking of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America, was published by Princeton University Press in 2023.