Mixed-race Pushkin: racial ambiguity and “The Lady Peasant”

ABSTRACT

The concept of racial ambiguity, or the quality of challenging existing racial categories, helps us understand Aleksandr Pushkin, a Russian poet of partially African descent famously known as “protean.” According to memoirs about the poet, in his own lifetime Pushkin’s African heritage did not prevent him from being categorized as Russian, but it distinguished him from his peers. Moreover, as a light-skinned mixed-race individual, Pushkin challenged reigning notions of Africanness. Pushkin did not fit perfectly into the categories of either “Russian” or “African.” This ambiguity is reflected both in memoirs about the poet and in Pushkin’s story “The Lady Peasant” (1831), whose heroine adopts different identities over the course of the text. While she crosses class rather than racial boundaries, the story’s broader, intertextual context and Pushkin’s focus on her dark skin suggest that race informs her performance. This paper thus suggests that we can better understand the writer’s treatment of shifting identities when we think of Pushkin not just as racially marked (as African or Black) but as racially ambiguous.

RÉSUMÉ

Le concept d’ambiguïté raciale, soit le fait de remettre en question les catégories raciales existantes, nous aide à comprendre l’œuvre d’Aleksandr Puškin, un poète russe d’ascendance partiellement africaine connu pour son identité « protéenne ». Les mémoires écrits sur le poète, de son vivant affirment que l’héritage africain de Puškin ne l’a pas empêché d’être catégorisé comme russe, mais que cet héritage contribuait à le distinguer de ses pairs. En tant qu’individu métis à la peau claire, Puškin remettait en question les notions dominantes de l’africanité. Il ne s’inscrivait pas clairement dans les catégories « russe » ou « africain ». Cette ambiguïté se reflète à la fois dans les mémoires sur le poète et dans le récit de Puškin « La Demoiselle-paysanne » (1831), dont l’héroïne adopte différentes identités au fil du texte. Bien qu’elle franchisse des frontières de classes plutôt que de races, le contexte intertextuel de l’histoire et l’accent mis par l’auteur sur la peau foncée de la protagoniste laissent penser que la race influence sa représentation. Cet article suggère donc que nous pouvons mieux comprendre le traitement par l’écrivain des identités changeantes lorsque nous considérons Puškin non pas simplement comme marqué racialement (comme africain ou noir) mais comme racialement ambigu.

KEYWORDS:

• Aleksandr Pushkin
• mixed race
• multiracial
• racial ambiguity
• “Baryshnia-krest’ianka”

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to Lindsay Ceballos, Jinyi Chu, D. Brian Kim, James Krapfl, Alisa Ballard Lin, Susanne Fusso, Korey Garibaldi, Guillaume Sauvé, and my anonymous reviewers for reading earlier versions of this text. All remaining errors, of course, are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. On Dostoevskii’s Pushkin speech, see Levitt, Russian Literary Politics; and Fusso, Editing Turgenev, 204–45.

2. On Pushkin’s symbolic status in Soviet and Russian culture, see especially Sandler, Commemorating Pushkin; and Sandler, “Pushkin and Identity.” Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, several Pushkin monuments were removed on Ukrainian territory because they were perceived as symbols of Russia and the Soviet Union. Golubeva, “V Ukraine snosiat pamiatniki.” On Pushkin and Blackness, see Nepomnyashchy, Trigos, and Svobodny, Under the Sky, as well as Nepomnyashchy, “Pushkin as a Poet”; Coles, “Pushkin’s Black Consciousness”; Lounsbery, “Soul Man”; Ahern, “Images of Pushkin”; Barnstead, “Black Canadian Studies”; Peterson, “Russia and the Mission”; and Garibaldi and Wang, “When Pushkin’s Blackness.”

3. For a rare exception, see Sollors, Neither Black nor White, 54–59.

4. Abram Petrovich Gannibal was a member of the so-called service nobility, initiated by Peter I. Gannibal held an estate and serfs and the right for his family to occupy the noble estate, or soslovie. He was not a member of the more prestigious hereditary nobility, and his 1742 petition to be entered into the register of the hereditary nobility was denied, though his sons Petr and Osip were inducted in 1804. Lur′e, Abram Gannibal, 38, 60–62. Abram Petrovich’s military rank of general also granted him an exalted position in Russian society, only one step below the highest possible military rank – that of field marshal.

5. Vadim Vatsuro discusses this cycle’s initially weak reception and its intertextual and structural complexity: “Thus hides the deeper meaning of the ‘paradoxes’ in the ‘Tales of Belkin’ – the inner siuzhet [plot] can always be seen behind the external fabula [story], and in particular places it emerges to the surface, sometimes in sharp contrast with trivial consciousness.” Vatsuro, “Povesti pokoinogo Ivana Petrovicha,” 44. (Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in this article are the author’s.) For an interpretation of the story in the context of Pushkin’s life circumstances in 1831, particularly his impending marriage, see Murphy, “Imprisoned in Marital Bliss.”

6. Ho, Racial Ambiguity, 3.

7. Grier, Rambo, and Taylor, “‘What Are You?’” 1007.

8. Modi, “Shifting Legibility,” 3, 18.

9. Though in the book’s 2015 edition the authors suggest that asserting “mixed-race” identity makes essentialist presumptions (because “to consider an individual or group as ‘multiracial’ or mixed-race presupposes the existence of clear, discernible, and discrete races that have subsequently been combined to create a hybrid, or perhaps mongrel, identity”), elsewhere they themselves point out that the presence of mixed-race children and families in the United States “immediately problematize[d …] racial categories.” Omi and Winant, Racial Formation, 109 and 80.

10. Bojanowska, “Race-ing the Russian.”

11. Daniel, “New Millennium,” 286. In other words, Daniel argues that there are many dimensions to the Afro-diasporic experience and that it is reductive to conflate them. He adds, “This [multiracial] discourse would challenge Eurocentric notions of African-derived identity that represent blackness and whiteness in one-dimensional ways in order to reinforce and sustain white domination and black subordination.” For a more extensive discussion of the field of mixed-race studies, see Daniel et al., “Emerging Paradigms.”

12. A discussion of some of these memoir accounts is available in Borden, “Making a True Image,” 175–77. See also Nepomnyashchy and Trigos, “Introduction,” 15–18; and Bethea, “How Black Was Pushkin?” 135, 142–43.

13. For the liberal anthropologist Dmitrii Anuchin, Pushkin typified the “mixed” inhabitants of the Russian Empire and was a testament to the value of diversity. For the chauvinist nationalist Ivan Sikorskii, Pushkin’s ability to absorb a “lower type” demonstrated the strength of his Russian ancestry. In the Russian Empire, the rule of hyperdescent often applied to children of mixed ancestry. Mogilner, Homo Imperii, 151–64, 170–75, 78.

14. See Shaw, “Pushkin on His African,” 80–81. For the letter in which Pushkin discusses this portrait by Egor Geitman, see Pushkin’s 27 September 1822 letter to Nikolai Gnedich, no. 33 in Pushkin, Letters of Alexander Pushkin, 101–02. Pushkin writes of this portrait, “Alexander Pushkin is masterfully lithographed, but I do not know whether it resembles him.” At the end of the letter he requests that the bookseller Ivan Slenin not reproduce the image.

15. See, for example, Knight, “Ethnicity, Nationality.” For a more recent and much broader overview of the problem of race in the Russian context from the same scholar, see Nait, “Chto my imeem?”

16. See Rainbow, Ideologies of Race, 6–7. For more on the experiences of Africans and African Americans in Russia, see Blakely, Russia and the Negro; and Matusevich, “Exotic Subversive.”

17. For overviews, see Mogilner, “When Race Is”; Tolz, “Constructing Race”; and Avrutin, Racism in Modern Russia. See also Mogilner, Homo Imperii.

18. Tolz, “Constructing Race,” 44.

19. Tolz, “Diskursy o rase,” especially 151–83. For additional evidence of embedded racial thinking in nineteenth-century Russian culture, see Hall, “‘Rasovye priznaki.”

20. On late imperial efforts to study Pushkin “scientifically,” see Mogilner, Homo Imperii, 151–64, 170–75, 78.

21. Marie’s great-great-great grandmother had African blood. See Modzalevskii, “Katalog biblioteki A. S. Pushkina,” as well as the follow-up by his son, Modzalevskii, “Biblioteka Pushkina.” Beaumont is primarily known as Alexis de Tocqueville’s travelling companion.

22. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 16 tomakh, henceforth PSS, vol. 12, 104–32.

23. Pushkin, “Nachalo avtobiografii,” PSS, vol. 12, 310–14.

24. Bethea, “How Black Was Pushkin?” 122.

25. Nepomnyashchy, introduction to Tertz, Strolls with Pushkin, 7–8.

26. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 20-i, vol. 2, book 1, 475–80.

27. Vatsuro et al., Pushkin v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, 222–23.

28. See, for example, Pushkin’s comments in a letter to his friend Prince Viazemskii comparing liberal support for the Greeks in their struggle against the Ottomans to support for enslaved Africans: “About the fate of the Greeks one is permitted to reason, just as the fate of my brothers the Negroes – one may wish both groups freedom from unendurable slavery.” Pushkin, Letters of Alexander Pushkin, 161.

29. Raevskii, “Plach negra.”

30. Vatsuro et al., Pushkin v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, vol. 1, 224.

31. Ibid., 225.

32. Ibid., 229. This Raevskii was also a romantic rival to Pushkin.

33. Vatsuro et al., Pushkin v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov.

34. Ibid., vol. 2, 100. The poem cited is “Iur′evu” (“To Iur′ev), from 1820.

35. Ibid., vol. 1, 156–57.

36. Ibid., vol. 1, 170.

37. Ibid., vol. 2, 140.

38. Pushkin himself even used the term “monkey” to refer to his appearance. See, for example, his 1814 French-language poem “Mon Portrait,” in which he describes himself as “Vrai démon pour l’espièglerie, / Vrai singe par sa mine” (“A real demon for pranks, / A real monkey by my face”). See Pushkin, PSS, vol. 1, 90–91. Lotman argues that “tiger-monkey” refers to a stereotype about Frenchmen, and therefore it was essentially the same as Pushkin’s other school nickname, “The Frenchman,” but the sources he cites make it clear that the name refers to the poet’s African appearance. Lotman, “‘Smes′ obez′iany s tigrom’.”

39. Vatsuro et al., Pushkin v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, vol. 1, 140. The word riabchik was a slang term for a pockmarked person.

40. Ibid., vol. 1, 69.

41. Ibid., vol. 1, 119.

42. Ibid., vol. 1, 278.

43. Ibid., vol. 1, 92.

44. Ibid., vol. 2, 98.

45. Ibid., vol. 2, 140.

46. Ibid., vol. 2, 304.

47. Ibid., vol. 1, 226.

48. In Abraham Hanibal, Dieudonné Gnammenkou has argued that Abram Gannibal was most likely from present-day Cameroon rather than North Africa.

49. Vatsuro et al., Pushkin v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, vol. 1, 338.

50. Ibid., vol. 1, 342.

51. In his biography of Abram Gannibal, Barnes notes that Pushkin included “a black stranger from [his] homeland” in a draft of the Odesa scene of Onegin’s Journey. See Barnes, Stolen Prince, 28.

52. See Blakely, Russia and the Negro, 13–25.

53. For a semiotic analysis of clothing in this story, see Murphy, “Empress Undressed.”

54. I have not located any scholarship focusing on how this story treats race. David M. Bethea and Sergei Davydov discuss the Bogdanovich subtext, but focus on its generic rather than racial implications, in “Pushkin’s Saturnine Cupid.” Valentin Golovin’s article on subtexts in “The Lady Peasant” focuses primarily on Pushkin’s parodic treatment of sentimental subtexts, but it notes that one of them, V. V. Izmailov’s “Rostov Lake” (“Rostovskoe ozero”), includes an interesting discussion of physical appearance: “In V. V. Izmailov’s story ‘Rostov Lake’ an observer […] meets a young man, who tells him his story [….] on the shore of the lake he meets a black-haired (NB!) village girl with blue eyes. Izmailov comments here: ‘warning critics who demand black eyes alongside black hair, we will say that nature is not always consistent with her own rules’.” Golovin, “Baryshnia-krest′ianka: Pochemu Baratynskii,” 123–24. M. Speranskii devotes another of the few existing articles on “The Lady Peasant” to another subtext, from Isabelle de Montolieu’s “A Lesson in Love.” Speranskii, “‘Baryshnia-krest′ianka’ Pushkina.” For the genesis of the story and the Belkin tales, see Petrunina, “Kogda Pushkin napisal predislovie”; and Shvarzband, “Genesis of Pushkin’s ‘Tales.’”

55. “Напоследи, смотря и в стороны и в след / И до двора уже немного не дошед, / Венеры заповедь, и гнев, и страх презрела, / Открыла кровельку, в горшочек посмотрела. / Оттуда, случаем лихим, / Внезапно вышел черный дым. / Сей дым, за сильной густотою, / Зефиры не могли отдуть; / И белое лицо и вскрыта бела грудь / У Душеньки тогда покрылось чернотою.” (Finally, looking to the sides and behind her / And not quite having reached the courtyard, / She decided to ignore Venus’s commandment, and anger, and fear, / She opened the lid and looked into the flask. / By an evil chance, from out of it / Suddenly a black smoke emerged. / This smoke, because of its powerful thickness, / The Zephyrs couldn’t blow away; / And Dushenka’s white face and bare white chest / Were then covered in blackness.) Bogdanovich, “Dushen′ka,” 121.

56. Ibid.

57. Ibid., 122.

58. Ibid. A similar phrase appears in La Fontaine’s tale. Harrison notes that “[Heliodorus’s Aethiopica], Chariclea, is an Ethiopian princess who was bizarrely born with white skin. La Fontaine’s Psyche inverts this by having her skin turn black and is indeed called by the narrator ‘la belle Éthiopienne’.” Harrison, “Apuleius in France,” 395.

59. Bogdanovich, “Dushen′ka,” 125–26.

60. See Kitanina, “Eshche raz”; and Kardash and Kitanina, “Povesti pokoinogo.” The notes to the latter (an encyclopedia entry) indicate that Kitanina wrote the section on “Baryshnia-Krest′ianka.”

61. Makarov, “Mnimaia arapka.”

62. The end of the story frames the attractions of Black women as immoral: “It was Clarissa herself. Having found out that I was in San Domingo, she immediately set off there, and through the means of a certain substance known in those parts she gave herself the colour of an African, in order to try out the power of African charms on the faithless” (nad nevernyimi; this last word can mean both “faithless” and “non-Christian,” as in the English infidel). Ibid., 92. A rhyme quoted at the beginning of the tale also alludes to the undesirability of dark colouring: “L’encre sied mal aux doigts de rose / L’Amour n’y trempe point ses traits.” (“Ink does not suit rosy fingers / Cupid does not slip his arrows [lit. ‘features’] into them.”) Ibid., 77. Makarov quotes these lines in both French and Russian. In Russian, “ink” is literally “black stuff,” chernila.

63. Murphy, “Empress Undressed,” 719.

64. Pushkin, “Baryshnia-krest′ianka,” PSS, vol. 8, 120; Pushkin, Complete Prose, 115.

65. Only when Liza later pleads forgiveness from Miss Jackson for borrowing her white powder does the heroine refer to herself with the ambivalent term chernavka, “a dark-skinned woman,” containing the word chernyi, or “black,” at its root; elsewhere, the narrator refers to her as smuglaia, or “swarthy,” in a positive sense. See Pushkin, “Baryshnia-krest′ianka,” 120–21. In Pushkin’s time chernavka could also be used to refer to a servant who performed chernaia rabota, “black work” or hard labour. Though the Dictionary of Pushkin’s Language edited by V. V. Vinogradov lists only the first definition under chernavka, the dictionary also uses the term in the second sense in its other entries. Vinogradov, Slovar′ iazyka Pushkina, vol. 4, 928; see also 48, 106, 222, 466, 491, 931; on chernaia rabota, see 932.

66. Pushkin, PSS, vol. 8, 109.

67. Pushkin, “Baryshnia-krest′ianka,” PSS, vol. 8, 121; Pushkin, Complete Prose, 116.

68. Lotman, “‘Smes′ obez′iany s tigrom.’” Here, Lotman discusses both nicknames.

69. For the original, see Pushkin, PSS, vol. 8, 61. The translation comes from Pushkin himself. Ibid., 64.

70. Shvarzband, “Genesis of Pushkin’s Tales,” 623. This work occurred after Pushkin had drafted “The Coffin-Maker” (“Grobovshchik”), “The Station-Master” (“Stantsionnyi smotritel′”), and “The Lady Peasant” (“Baryshnia-krest′ianka”), but before he finished writing “The Shot” (“Vystrel”) and “The Blizzard” (“Metel′”).

71. See the discussion in Teletova, Zhizn′ Gannibala, 211–13. Teletova notes that the “birth of a child with a skin colour different from that of his apparent father” was a theme that “occupied Pushkin his entire life.” Ibid., 213.

72. Pushkin, PSS, vol. 12, 313.

73. Nepomnyashchy, “Telltale Black Baby.”

74. On slavery in eighteenth-century Africa, see Lur′e, Abram Gannibal, 82–84. Muslims under the Ottoman Empire considered it legal to enslave nonbelievers, giving them a chance to convert and avoid slavery or to be ransomed from captivity. Gannibal’s homeland of Logone became Muslim only towards the end of the eighteenth century.

75. See Blakely, Russia and the Negro, 28–34; and Kurilla, “Rabstvo, krepostnoe pravo.” Kurilla argues that after Alexander II became Tsar and censorship relaxed, it became more common for Russian liberals to critique Russian serfdom in print by discussing American slavery and abolitionist texts such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. For a detailed comparison of the two institutions in Russia and the United States, see Kolchin, Unfree Labor.

76. Pushkin, PSS, vol. 11, 223–67; Pushkin, Sobranie sochinenii v 10, vol. 6, 165–91.

77. S. L. Abramovich notes that on the obverse of one of his “Journey” drafts, Pushkin wrote a note to himself suggesting that he harboured guilt or doubts for defending serfdom: “[May God preserve me from being a champion and advocate of slavery] – [I’m only writing that] [but I’m saying directly that the condition of our peasants is not…] The welfare of our peasants is closely tied to their benefit to landowners – and this is obvious to everyone. Abuses [exist] are encountered everywhere.” Abramovich, “Krest′ianskii vopros v stat′e,” 235–36. The brackets are Abramovich’s, indicating places where Pushkin was experimenting with different formulations.

78. For the appearance of the term “white Negro” (belyi negr), see Eidel′man, Pushkin i dekabristy, 241. When his literary rival Faddei Bulgarin publicly referred to Gannibal’s formerly enslaved status in an anonymous feuilleton, Pushkin responded furiously. See Ketchian, “Pushkin’s Aestheticized Defense.”

79. Edyta Bojanowska identifies another episode in which class prejudice and racial prejudice inform one another. Bojanowska, “Race-ing the Russian,” 265.

80. As Vasilii Gippius points out, Karamzin was the most important prose writer for Pushkin. Since “Poor Liza” was the most important prose work of Russian literature during this period, Gippius sees it as an inspiration for the entire cycle. Gippius, “Povesti Belkina,” 23. On “The Lady Peasant,” see ibid., 36–41. On Pushkin’s parodic approach to literary predecessors in this and other works, see Al′tman, “Baryshnia-Krest′ianka.”

81. Debreczeny, Other Pushkin, 76–77.

82. On the autobiographical impulses informing this tale, see Murphy, “Imprisoned in Marital Bliss.”

83. Vatsuro et al., Pushkin v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, vol. 1, 140.

84. Pushkin, PSS, vol 1, 7. Richard F. Gustafson points out that this poem suggests that the young Pushkin has been rejected in part because of his Blackness. Gustafson, “Ruslan and Ludmila,” 100–01.

85. See, for example, a 2020 article by the philosopher of race Céline Leboeuf: “‘What Are You?’”

86. On the paucity of scholarship addressing race in Slavic Studies, see Kohen et al., “Reading Race in Slavic.”

87. See the “About” page for the Pushkin Industries website, which includes the line “Pushkin Industries was co-founded by a person of color and is named after a bi-racial poet.” https://www.pushkin.fm/about.

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Emily Wang

Emily Wang is an assistant professor of Russian at the University of Notre Dame. Her research deals with Russian literature (especially poetry) and its relation to broader social trends. Her first book, Pushkin, the Decembrists, and Civic Sentimentalism, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2023, and her articles have appeared in such venues as The Slavic and East European Journal, The Russian Review, Comparative Literature, and Slavic Review. From 2016 to 2019, she edited Pushkin Review.