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    Readers often have regarded with curiosity the creative life of the poet. In this passionate and authoritative new study, David Bethea illustrates the relation between the art and life of nineteenth-century poet Alexander Pushkin, the central figure in Russian thought and culture. Bethea shows how Pushkin, on the eve of his two-hundredth birthday, still speaks to our time. He indicates how we as modern readers might "realize"— that is, not only grasp cognitively, but feel, experience—the promethean metaphors central to the poet's intensely "sculpted" life. The Pushkin who emerges from Bethea's portrait is one who, long unknown to English-language readers, closely resembles the original both psychologically and artistically.
    Bethea begins by addressing the influential thinkers Freud, Bloom, Jakobson, and Lotman to show that their premises do not, by themselves, adequately account for Pushkin's psychology of creation or his version of the "life of the poet." He then proposes his own versatile model of reading, and goes on to sketches the tangled connections between Pushkin and his great compatriot, the eighteenth-century poet Gavrila Derzhavin. Pushkin simultaneously advanced toward and retreated from the shadow of his predecessor as he created notions of poet-in-history and inspiration new for his time and absolutely determinative for the tradition thereafter.

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.