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2 books match the query 'Wang, Emily'

cover of Pushkin, the Decembrists, and Civic Sentimentalism

Pushkin, the Decembrists, and Civic Sentimentalism

Emily Wang

University of Wisconsin Press, 2023

In December 1825, a group of liberal aristocrats, officers, and intelligentsia mounted a coup against the tsarist government of Russia. Inspired partially by the democratic revolutions in the United States and France, the Decembrist movement was unsuccessful; however, it led Russia’s civil society to new avenues of aspiration and had a lasting impact on Russian culture and politics. Many writers and thinkers belonged to the conspiracy while others, including the poet Alexander Pushkin, were loosely or ambiguously affiliated. While the Decembrist movement and Pushkin’s involvement has been well covered by historians, Emily Wang takes a novel approach, examining the emotional and literary motivations behind the movement and the dramatic, failed coup. 

Through careful readings of the literature of Pushkin and others active in the northern branch of the Decembrist movement, such as Kondraty Ryleev, Wilhelm Küchelbecker, and Fyodor Glinka, Wang traces the development of “emotional communities” among the members and adjacent writers. This book illuminates what Wang terms “civic sentimentalism”: the belief that cultivating noble sentiments on an individual level was the key to liberal progress for Russian society, a core part of Decembrist ideology that constituted a key difference from their thought and Pushkin’s. The emotional program for Decembrist community members was, in other ways, a civic program for Russia as a whole, one that they strove to enact by any means necessary. 
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cover of Russia’s Black Genius: A Sourcebook on the African Heritage of Alexander Pushkin

Russia’s Black Genius

A Sourcebook on the African Heritage of Alexander Pushkin

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.
 

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