On his mother’s side, Pushkin’s ancestors bore the name of Gannibal, from his great-grandfather Ibrahim Gannibal. It was long thought (by Pushkin among others) that Ibrahim was the son of a minor Ethiopian prince, though recently it has been argued that he came from the sultanate of Logone-Birni in Cameroon. In any case at around the age of five he was sent as a hostage or slave to the court of the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul, and a year later was either ransomed or stolen by Sava Vladislavich-Raguzinsky, advisor to the Russian ambassador, and brought to Petersburg, where he was presented to Peter the Great. Peter was very taken with the boy, stood as godfather at his baptism, gave him the patronymic Petrovich from his own name, and had him educated in the best European fashion. Ibrahim rose to the rank of general, was granted nobility, and had a long military and political career in the reigns of Peter and his daughter Elizabeth. While serving in the French army in his youth he adopted the surname Gannibal, or Hannibal, after the great Carthaginian general.
Pushkin prized his African ancestry, and his African ancestor, highly, and when he decided, in 1827, to try his hand at a historical novel along the lines of Walter Scott’s immensely popular Waverley (published in 1814), he chose the life of Ibrahim as his subject. The result was The Moor of Peter the Great. In an article published three years later, he observed: “In our time, by the term novel we mean an historical epoch developed in a fictional narrative.”*4 And indeed, while the two protagonists, Ibrahim and Peter the Great, are fully historical, his portrayal of their interactions is almost entirely invented. We first meet Ibrahim during his military service in the decadent Paris of Philippe d’Orléans’s regency (1715–1723), and hear mainly about the complications of his love life, both in France and on his return to Russia. Peter, meanwhile, is busy building his new capital in the north, “a vast factory,” as it appears to Ibrahim, and though the emperor is referred to at one point as “the hero of Poltava, the powerful and terrible reformer of Russia,” we see him mainly as the “gentle and hospitable host” of his godson. More historical and personal complexity is suggested in later chapters, in Peter’s relations with the old boyar aristocrats and with the entrance of Ibrahim’s rival Valerian, but Pushkin abandoned the novel just at that point and never went back to the Waverley manner.
That was in 1828. A year or two later, one of Pushkin’s literary enemies, Faddei Bulgarin (Pushkin liked to call him “Figlyarin,” from figlyar, “buffoon”), wrote a scurrilous article about a certain unnamed poet whose grandfather was not a Negro prince, as he boasted, but had been bought by a sea captain for a bottle of rum. Pushkin replied in a post scriptum to his poem “My Genealogy”: “That skipper was the glorious skipper / Who started our land moving, / Who forcefully took the helm of our native ship / And set it on a majestic course.” Pushkin’s awareness of himself as a descendant both of old boyar stock and of the reformer’s black godson nourished his meditations on state power in all its contradictions. In the same year that he abandoned his first novel, he wrote the long poem Poltava, about Peter’s decisive victory in 1709 over the Swedish forces of Charles XII, which led to the emergence of Russia as the predominant nation of northern Europe. The “terrible reformer,” grown more ambiguous and demonic in the grim figure of his statue, is also the subject of Pushkin’s last long poem, The Bronze Horseman, written in 1833. D. S. Mirsky has called it “the greatest work ever penned in Russian verse.”*5
Pushkin’s own confrontation with imperial power had begun many years earlier. After the defeat of Napoleon, Russian troops occupied Paris and camped along the Champs-Élysées. The victorious coalition restored the French monarchy, but the young Russian officers picked up French revolutionary thinking in the process and came home with new notions of political liberty. French culture had been the dominant influence in Russia since the time of Catherine the Great, who reigned from 1762 until her death in 1796. The aristocracy spoke French, which was Pushkin’s first language. In 1811, the emperor Alexander I founded a school which he called by the French name of lycée (litsei in Russian) in the imperial village of Tsarskoe Selo, some eighteen miles south of Petersburg, to give the sons of the aristocracy a European education, after which they were to take up important posts in government service. Pushkin was in the first class of thirty, and his years at the lycée remained central to his life. There he began to write poetry, first in French, then in Russian, and by the age of fourteen he had already seen his work published and praised. On graduating in 1817, he moved to Petersburg, where he held a nominal post in the service, which did not keep him from living a rather wild life, gambling, womanizing, dueling. In Petersburg he also got to know some of the young officers who had come back from Paris. He shared their thoughts and hopes, and in that spirit wrote a number of poems which were not very pleasing to the authorities. One of them, the ode “Liberty,” written as early as 1817, praises “the exalted son of Gaul” who sang of Liberty and denounced “enthroned vice” with its scourges, irons, and serfdom. Against “lawless Authority” it invokes “the trustworthy shelter of the Law.” This, along with some biting epigrams on various government officials, was finally too much even for the rather liberal Alexander. Pushkin was relieved of his post in Petersburg and “exiled” to the south, to serve in Ekaterinoslav, Kishinev, and finally Odessa.
Pushkin was absent from Petersburg from 1820 to 1826. During those years he wrote a great deal of poetry, some of it based on his travels to the Caucasus and the Crimea with General Nikolai Raevsky, a retired hero of the Napoleonic Wars, and his sons Alexander and Nikolai, who became his close friends. He detested life in backward Kishinev, which had been ceded to Russia by the Turks in 1812, managed to get transferred to Odessa, but caused himself trouble there as well, particularly with the beautiful young wife of the governor-general, Prince Mikhail Vorontsov. He wrote a notorious epigram about the governor-generaclass="underline"
Half milord, half merchant,
Half wise man, half ignoramus,
Half scoundrel, but there’s hope
He’ll finally become a full one.
The post office routinely opened Pushkin’s mail, and in one letter found him sympathizing with the atheistic arguments of a local philosopher (a certain “deaf Englishman”). This was enough to allow Vorontsov to petition for Pushkin’s removal from Odessa. By imperial order he was expelled from the service and confined to his mother’s small estate at Mikhailovskoe, near Pskov, where he was to be kept under surveillance by his father and the local authorities.
In a way the two years of this “house arrest” were Pushkin’s salvation. He was left free to read and to write, and he produced more than he had in the previous four years. Along with many of his finest lyric poems, which went into the collection he was gathering then and published in 1826, he finished his long poem The Gypsies, begun in Kishinev, wrote two more long poems, The Bridegroom and the comic parody Count Nulin, completed three chapters of his novel in verse Evgeny Onegin, and wrote his first and longest play, the historical tragedy Boris Godunov. And he worked on yet another narrative poem, Cleopatra, parts of which eventually found their way into the prose/verse fragment Egyptian Nights, included in our collection.