
Edited by Emily Wang and Korey Garibaldi
Amherst College Press, 2027
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.
James W. Hughes
Rutgers University Press, 2025
Mark Conway
Four Way Books, 2019