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When Pushkin's Blackness Was in Vogue: Rediscovering the Racialization of Russia's Preeminent Poet and His Descendants

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 September 2021

Korey Garibaldi  and
Emily Wang
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Abstract

This essay investigates interconnections between the novelist, Henry James, Ivan Turgenev, and Aleksandr Pushkin and identifies the racial subtext of these associations. Several scholars have connected Pushkin and James. But none of this scholarship has speculated on whether it was the poet's African heritage that was at the root of hidden connections between these authors. Moreover, though most scholarship on Pushkin's reception in the United States focuses on twentieth-century African American literature, his African heritage was publicized much earlier. In fact, nineteenth-century commentators on both sides of the Atlantic frequently discussed Pushkin's racial heritage as a canonical European writer of African descent. This essay recovers how Henry James used Pushkin's daughter, the morganatic Countess Merenberg, as a model for the racially ambiguous “morganatic” Baroness Münster in The Europeans (1878). A decade later, James seems to have invoked the Countess Merenberg once more in his rewriting of Pushkin's “The Queen of Spades” (1833) in The Aspern Papers (1888). While James publicly attributed Byron and Shelley as inspirations, the discourse surrounding the African heritage of Pushkin and his heirs helps explain why the novelist minimized and erased the racial lineage at the center of The Europeans and The Aspern Papers.

Type
Critical Discussion Forum on Race and Bias
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 80 , Issue 2 , Summer 2021 , pp. 245 - 257
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

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Footnotes

The authors are grateful for feedback from blind peer review, Harriet Murav, Susanne Fusso, and the audiences provided by the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University. Any remaining errors are our own.

References

1. John Russell, “Discovering Afro-American Art From the 19th Century,” New York Times, June 27, 1976, 76 at https://www.nytimes.com/1976/06/27/archives/gallery-view-discovering-afroamerican-art-from-the-19th-century.html (accessed April 28, 2021).

2. Here, the most important precedent remains the landmark volume, Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness, eds. Catherine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, Nicole Svobodny, and Ludmilla A. Trigos (Evanston, IL, 2006), especially Olga P. Hasty, “The Pushkin of Opportunity in the Harlem Renaissance” (248–78) and Anne Lounsbery, “‘Bound by Blood to the Race’: Pushkin in African American Context” (279–301).

3. “Negro Blood in Russia,” Vermont Watchman and State Journal, April 25, 1837, 2.

4. Petrovskoe was one of the estates Gannibal was granted by Peter the Great’s daughter, Empress Elizabeth. Credit: Ludushka. This image is free from copyright restrictions via the Creative Commons Attribution - Share Alike 3.0 Unported at https://tinyurl.com/6p2mzdhn (accessed April 28, 2021).

5. For a sample of scholarship on James and Turgenev’s relationship, see Terras, Victor, “Turgenev’s Aesthetic and Western Realism,” Comparative Literature 22, no.1 (Winter 1970): 19–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Peterson, Dale E., The Clement Vision: Poetic Realism in Turgenev and James (Port Washington, NY, 1975)Google Scholar; Debreczeny, Paul, “Ivan Turgenev and Henry James: The Function of Social Themes in Fathers and Sons and The Princess Casamassima,” in Debreczeny, Paul, ed., American Contributions to the Ninth International Congress of Slavists. Kiev, September 1983, Vol. II: Literature, Poetics, History (Columbus, 1983), 113–23Google Scholar.

6. Haralson, Eric L., “The Person Sitting in Darkness: James in the American South,” The Henry James Review 16, no. 3 (Fall 1995): 249CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. Edel, Leon and Tintner, Adeline R., eds., The Library of Henry James (Ann Arbor, MI, 1987), 53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. Plumstead, A. W., Gilman, William H., and Bennett, Ruth H., eds., Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume XI: 1848–1851 (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), 376Google Scholar.

9. Lewis, R.W.B., The Jameses: A Family Narrative (New York, 1991), 33Google Scholar.

10. For two recent comparative studies, see Kolchin, Peter, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass., 1990)Google Scholar; Bellows, Amanda Brickell, American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination (Chapel Hill, NC, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11. For a brief overview of Turgenev’s discussions of American slavery and Russian serfdom alongside one another, see Allison Blakely, Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought (Washington, DC, 1986), 31–32.

12. See Struve, Gleb, “Alexander Turgenev, Ambassador of Russian Culture in Partibus Infidelium,” Slavic Review, 29, no. 3 (September 1970): 444–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on 459, Struve notes that French writer Prosper Mérimée befriended both Turgenevs in Paris. James became intimates of Ivan and Nikolai’s family in Paris in the mid-1870s.

13. A.D. Briggs, “Alexander Pushkin: A Possible Influence on Henry James,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 8, no. 1 (January 1972): 59–60.

14. A partial list of these works includes the aforementioned Briggs essay; Alexander Zholkovsky, Text Counter Text: Rereadings in Russian Literary History (Stanford, 1994), 171–72; and Neil Cornwell, “Pushkin and Henry James: Secrets, Papers and Figures (The Queen of Spades, The Aspern Papers, and The Figure in the Carpet)” in Joe Andrew and Robert Reid, eds., Two Hundred Years of Pushkin. Volume 3, Pushkin’s Legacy (Amsterdam, 2004), 193–208.

15. Henry James, “Prosper Mérimée,” Nation, February 12, 1874 and Henry James, “Introduction to Madame Bovary,” in Edmund Gosse and Octave Uzanne, eds., A Century of French Romance (London, 1902), reprinted in Henry James, Literary Criticism: French Writers. Other European Writers. The Prefaces to the New York Edition, eds., Leon Edel and Mark Wilson (New York, 1984), 320, 565.

16. Joseph-Eustathius Vivien (unverified attribution). Alamy webpage confirming that this image is in the Public Domain: https://www.alamy.com/1826-1826-506-pushkin-by-jviviene-miniature-image187500376.html. Wikimedia Foundation Public Domain information: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pushkin_by_J.Viviene_(miniature).jpeg.

17. Edmund Wilson, “The Ambiguity of Henry James,” in F.W. Dupee, ed., The Question of Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York, 1945), 190.

18. A reproduction of Honoré Daumier’s oil painting (ca. 1845/1846) of Alexandre Dumas père that appeared in Stockholm’s ORD OCH BILD Illustrerad Månadsskrift [Word and Image: Illustrated Magazine] in 1923. Digitized Image Location, downloaded from Project Runeberg at http://runeberg.org/ordochbild/1923/0201.html (accessed April 29, 2021). This image is in the Public Domain. Confirmation that this digitized image is not covered by copyright: http://runeberg.org/admin/copyright.html.

19. Henry James, “Ivan Turgénieff,” in French Poets and Novelists (London, 1878), 269.

20. Vigel exacerbates his racist framing in the remainder of this sketch: “Pushkin had been visiting the Turgenev brothers more and more frequently…Someone from this group…proposed that Pushkin write some verses….From his mother [Pushkin] was descended from the Moor general Gannibal, and in the flexibility of his limbs and the speed of his movements he rather resembled Negroes and the human-like inhabitants of Africa. With this agility he suddenly jumped up on the large, long table standing before the window, stretched out on it, grabbed a pen and paper and, with a laugh, began to write.” F.F. Vigel΄, “Iz zapisok,” in V.E. Vatsuro, M.I. Gillel΄son, R.V. Iezuitova, Ia.L. Levkovich, eds., A.S. Pushkin v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov v dvukh tomkah. Tom pervyi (Moscow, 1985), 222–23.

21. Letter 73, to Peter Andreevich Vyazemsky, June 24 or 25. From Odessa to Moscow, in The Letters of Alexander Pushkin. Three Volumes in One, trans., J. Thomas Shaw (Madison, WI, 1967), 161.

22. N.V. Izmailov, “Turgenev—Izdatel΄ pisem Pushkina k N.N. Pushkinoi,” Turgenevskii sbornik. Materialy k polnomu sobraniiu sochinenii i pisem I. S. Turgeneva V. (Leningrad, 1969), 399–416.

23. L.P. Fedchuk, Portrety i sud΄by. Iz leningradskoi Pushkinanoi (Leningrad, 1990), 113.

24. Pushkin himself was preoccupied by racial inheritance: see Catherine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, “The Telltale Black Baby, or Why Pushkin Began The Blackamoor of Peter the Great but Didn’t Finish it,” in Nepomnyashchy et al, Under the Sky, 150–171.

25. This image is in the Public Domain. Wikimedia Foundation Public Domain information at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alexander_Pushkin%27s_children_(drawing_by_N.I._Friesenhof,_1839).jpg (accessed April 29, 2021).

26. William Faulkner’s novel, Absalom, Absalom! (1936), poked fun at a “morganatic ceremony” disturbing “the unworldly Henry,” driven to kill his half-brother rather than let him marry an “eighth part negro mistress.” Faulkner’s plot, and the terms invoked above, are seemingly references to Pushkin’s heirs, if not Henry James as well. See William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York, 1986 [1936]), 80.

27. S. M. Zagoskin, “Vospominaniia,” Istoricheskii vestnik, 81, no. 8, (1900): 50.

28. Fedchuk, Portrety i sud΄by, 115; this page cites an unpublished letter from Turgenev to his brother.

29. V. M. Rusakov, Potomki A. S. Pushkina (Leningrad, 1974), 122; see also the anonymously published “‘Kul΄turnyi tsentr im. A. S. Pushkina’ v Liuksemburge,” Vremennik Pushkinskoi Kommissii, 1976 (Leningrad, 1979), 176–79.

30. A sample of two reports in the U.S. covering the controversy surrounding Countess Sophie Nikolaievna of Merenberg and Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovich’s marriage. The account at right was published on the front page of The Norfolk Virginian on October 24, 1891. That same day, the headline on the left was published by Richmond, Indiana’s The Richmond Item. There are no copyright restrictions on these articles.

31. See, for example, the discussion of Eugenia in Korey Garibaldi, “Irish Heritage in the Literary Remains of Frank Yerby and Henry James,” Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 44, no. 4 (Winter 2019): 122–46.

32. F.M. Dostoevskii, “Pushkin (ocherk),” Dnevnik pisatel΄ia. Ezhemesiachnoe izdaniie. God III-i. Edistnvennyi vypusk na 1880. Avgust (St. Petersburg, 1880), 8–19.

33. Marcus C. Levitt, Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880 (Ithaca, 1989), especially 137: “Ill-disposed contemporaries noted with some disgust the writer’s references in his speech to the ‘Aryan race,’ and Mikhailovsky sarcastically queried why Dostoevsky did not take his message of salvation to the heathen Hottentots rather than to civilized Europeans.” For additional political context surrounding this speech, see Susanne Fusso, Editing Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy: Mikhail Katkov and the Great Russian Novel (DeKalb, IL, 2017), 204–45.

34. See Marina Mogilner, Homo Imperii: A History of Physical Anthropology in Russia (Lincoln, NE, 2013), 133–84.

35. Orest Kiprensky’s Portrait of A.S. Pushkin (1827) and I.K. Mararov’s Portrait of Natalia Alexandrovna Pushkina, Daughter of Poet, the Countess Merenberg (1849). These paintings are both in the Public Domain. 1) Orest Kiprensky, Portrait of A.S. Pushkin (1827). Alamy webpage confirming that this imager is in the Public Domain at https://www.alamy.com/russian-portrait-of-portrait-of-aspushkin-1827-1017-portrait-of-alexander-pushkin-orest-kiprensky-1827-image185551029.html (accessed April 29, 2021). Wikimedia Foundation Public Domain information at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kiprensky_Pushkin.jpg (accessed April 29, 2021). 2) I.K. Mararov, Portrait of Natalia Alexandrovna Pushkina, Daughter of Poet [Pushkin], the Countess Merenberg (1849) Natal΄ia Aleksandrovna Dubel΄t (née Pushkina, I.K. Mararov, 1849). Merenberg painting produced in 1849: “This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or fewer. This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published (or registered with the US Copyright Office) before January 1, 1926. The official position taken by the Wikimedia Foundation is that ‘faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain.’ This photographic reproduction is therefore also considered to be in the public domain in the United States.” https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pushkinana.jpg (accessed April 29, 2021).