← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · eric von zipper
Thread ID: 4982 | Posts: 9 | Started: 2003-02-13
2003-02-13 14:49 | User Profile
From the Baltimore Sun today.
Vivat! St. Petersburg and Black History Month converge this evening in celebration of Alexander Pushkin, the nonpareil Russian poet, at the Great Blacks in Wax Museum.
Pushkin (1799-1837), a world literary figure considered comparable to Shakespeare, was the great-grandson of an African slave named Abram Hannibal, who was brought to Imperial Russia as a boy from Turkey. Hannibal became a favorite of Czar Peter the Great, a brilliant engineer and an illustrious general. Peter's daughter, Empress Elizabeth, granted him vast estates and thousands of serfs. He also married the daughter of a Baltic German officer and fathered 11 children.
At one point, says Allison Blakely, a Boston University historian, when Hannibal returned from six years of study in France, he was "one of the most highly educated people in Russia."
Blakely, 62, speaks at 7 p.m. at the wax museum on The Life and Times of Alexander S. Pushkin. And, he says, he'll talk a bit more on blacks in both Imperial and Soviet Russia. Professor of European and Comparative History at Boston U., he's the author of a pioneer work, Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian Thought and History, which won the American Book Award in 1988.
"I am going to give an overview of the black [presence] in Russia," he says, "at a gallop."
He's a soft-voiced, unprepossessing man not without a sense of humor, or irony. His scholarly resume runs nine pages. He's fluent in Russian (and Dutch, incidentally), and he's visited Russia often, starting in 1965, when it was part of the Soviet Union. He says he's going to try to give his audience members a sense of Pushkin's family in historical context and of his significance in a way they might not be able to get on their own.
Folks of a literary bent, of course, know that Pushkin wrote Eugene Onegin, a long novel in verse that is something like the Russian national epic Boris Godunov, the drama that became inspired operas by Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky, numerous short stories and many more poems.
Pushkin is revered in Russia even more than Shakespeare is in English-speaking countries. Even illiterate Russians can recite his verse, they've heard them read so often. He set the models for the main basic forms in Russian literature: the short story, novel, plays, dramatic poems.
"Pushkin played a special role in the development of the written Russian language," Blakely says. "The literary language didn't really exist before the beginning of the 19th century. And Pushkin was really the first person to popularize a written form of Russian that more closely approximates the spoken language. That's one reason he immediately resonated so widely with the people.
"He was a people's poet and writer," he says. "He could speak to them in their language.
"I compare him to Langston Hughes in the black American culture. Hughes deliberately used jazz and the rhythms that go with [jazz] in writing his poetry, so he captured something that was African that can be reflected in his art."
Because Pushkin's maternal great-grandfather was African, he would have been legally black in parts of the United States. And in general attitude in America, he had the "one drop" of African blood that made him black.
But most Russians don't think of Pushkin as black, nor did his contemporaries, nor did he.
"He was very, very proud of his African ancestry but did not think of himself as black, per se," Blakely says. Pushkin thought of himself primarily as "a proud Russian nobleman."
His father's family had been ennobled for centuries. The Pushkin family was equal to the Romanovs, the professor says, until the Romanovs became czars.
"The kinds of insults he responded to publicly," Blakley says, "had more to do with people ridiculing him for being descended from a slave, as opposed to being black."
Being called a slave cast aspersions on his nobility.
"He was quick to point out that particular slave was a godson of the czar," Blakely says. "And he could list all the accomplishments, not only of his great-grandfather, but one of his grand-uncles who was the founder of a city in the Ukraine, a big war hero against the Turks."
But Pushkin, he says, could be easily identified with liberation, abolitionism and other issues that were of concern to people of black-African descent.
"He was in what you would call the radical part of the intellectual class in Russia. He sympathized with the plight of the American Indian, the liberation movements in Greece and in other parts of the world. He almost was arrested, and he might have lost his life, in connection with a revolt in Russia in 1825. Some of his close friends were actually executed."
Blakely, the son of an Alabama sharecropper, was himself a leading student activist at the University of California at Berkeley during the height of the free speech and civil rights movements of the 1960s. Even more remarkably, although firmly opposed to the war, he served as an Army intelligence officer in Vietnam, where he was wounded in a rocket attack.
"Nobody could give me a way out of Vietnam I was willing to accept," he says. "And so, not willing to run away, not willing to lie, not willing to go to prison ... I finally went."
He spent eight months training at the old intelligence school at Fort Holabird, in Southeast Baltimore near Dundalk.
"Where I was refused housing, by the way," he says, without noticeable rancor, "because I was black, even though I was in uniform."
In his book, Blakely quotes Pushkin's sharp condemnation of American shortcomings: "All that is noble, unselfish, everything elevating the human spirit is suppressed by implacable egotism and the striving for ... comfort; the majority an outrageously repressed society; Negro slavery amidst culture and freedom; genealogical persecutions in a nation without nobility ... "
"I really do think the poet in him took real pleasure in the sort of stereotypical notion of hot African blood," Blakely says.
Pushkin was, after all, a Romantic poet.
"I think that appealed to him a lot, in addition to his sympathies for the oppressed. I do think those kind of sympathies were actually reinforced by the knowledge of his own African ancestry."
Pushkin began a novel based on his great-grandfather called The Negro of Peter the Great. But he never finished it.
He died of a gunshot wound after a duel in which he was defending his wife's honor, which in fact was a bit dubious. He was just 37 years old.
2003-02-13 18:07 | User Profile
He's the author of a pioneer work, Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian Thought and History**, which won the American Book Award in 1988. "I am going to give an overview of the black [presence] in Russia," he says, "at a gallop."
Most Russians don't think of Pushkin as black, nor did his contemporaries, nor did he.**
Well, that was a quick gallop! Can we go again? As for the author, Samovar Davis Jr:
He's a soft-voiced, unprepossessing man not without a sense of humor, or irony. His scholarly resume runs nine pages. ****
Not to be confused with his scholarly work, which runs a solid eight. Minus a whole lot of padding.
2003-02-13 18:13 | User Profile
Originally posted by il ragno@Feb 13 2003, 12:07 **As for the author, Samovar Davis Jr:
**
Play it again, Sammy!
Not to be confused with his scholarly work, which runs a solid eight. Minus a whole lot of padding.
"Fletch is 6 ft. 2 inches, 6' 6" with the afro."
2003-02-13 18:30 | User Profile
I'm gonna take a flying leap here and guess that Ole Abram himself, although technically a slave, was like Ben Bannecker (son of a slave) and William Frederick Douglas nee Hemphill the product of an owner/slave sexual liasson.
So Pushkin was not even 1/8 black if his one black great grandparent was only 1/2 black.
It's odd how the much criticized ante bellum method of classifying negroes has been turned upside down by modern negroes to suit their own purpose: to rewrite history. Truly, they are the only people hollering the old discredited "one drop" rule.
Fact is, they picked February for BH month on purpose. If you eliminate all the mulattoes from BH you could have covered it on a long weekend.
2003-02-14 06:01 | User Profile
Is it not amazing, the strange tales and twisted history that the obsolete farm machinery can invent for their holy days; black mythology month. ( Once known as February.)
2003-02-14 06:26 | User Profile
**I'm gonna take a flying leap here and guess that Ole Abram himself, although technically a slave, was like Ben Bannecker (son of a slave) and William Frederick Douglas nee Hemphill the product of an owner/slave sexual liasson. **
Classic Black History:
In 1893 Dr. Daniel Hall Williams performed the first open heart surgery by removing a knife from the heart of a stabbing victim. He sutured a wound to the pericardium (the fluid sac surrounding the myocardium), from which the patient recovered and lived for several years afterward
In other words, he sewed up some guy with a chest (knife )wound, something that had been done by thousands of surgeons before him, but that no had had the Jew like effrontery to "patent". Kinda like the Wogs patenting the number zero. You're a better man than I Gunga Dung.
There's a picture of the good doctor at [url=http://www.princeton.edu/~mcbrown/display/williams.html]http://www.princeton.edu/~mcbrown/display/...y/williams.html[/url]. He's whiter than Saddam Hussein.
Then there's good old Dr. Charles Drew, another tainted white man whose modest achievements the nigras have er, embellished.
I'll let Dr. William Pierce descant on the merits and genealogy of Dr.Drew:
Perhaps you have heard about the decision of the New Orleans school board last month to change the name of one of the city's schools, George Washington Elementary School, to Charles Richard Drew Elementary School: a decision which has been applauded by the usual suspects. (That means Jooz, Jay. Not space aliens, arabs, secular humanists, or antisemites, but hebes - MPC)
Charles Drew was a man of mixed race -- slightly mixed anyway, approximately an octoroon, judging by his appearance -- who, working under the direction of a White professor at Columbia University just before the Second World War, helped in the development of new methods for preserving and storing blood and blood components. In 1940 he was appointed the head of a "Blood for Britain" program to ship dried blood from the United States to Britain. Although Drew certainly deserves credit for his work in the blood-bank field, groups searching desperately for non-White achievers to hold up as "proofs" of racial equality have made a bit too much of his accomplishments and a bit too much of his supposed Blackness. They have unabashedly proclaimed him a "Black man," when he actually was seven-eighths or more White.
There's a picture of Dr. Drew at [url=http://www.princeton.edu/~mcbrown/display/charles_drew.html]http://www.princeton.edu/~mcbrown/display/...arles_drew.html[/url]. He's whiter than most Sicilians, including the blond ones.
2003-02-14 07:38 | User Profile
Originally posted by eric von zipper@Feb 13 2003, 12:30 Fact is, they picked February for BH month on purpose. If you eliminate all the mulattoes from BH you could have covered it on a long weekend.
You're pretty generous. IMHO February 29th as Black History Day (no mulattos) would be more than sufficient, and I declare the holiday so. See y'all in 2 years; we'll discuss peanut butter and spears. ;)
(PS: "obsolete farm machinery". Clever, BK! I must remember that one. :D)
2003-02-14 18:30 | User Profile
Drakmal; glad you liked the description of the congoids, " obsolete farm machinery"
It is not an original from yours truely, as I remember reading it several months ago on another thread, I do not remember who the original wit was.
However, in honor of black mythology month, we should make note of black contributions in all areas of society. Therefore I would like to recoginize black achievements in the area of medicine in this 21st century.
1) Cure for AIDS. - African witch doctors tell their fellow tribesmen that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS which immediatly results in an epidemic of baby raping in South Africa.
2) AIDS prevention. - Goat raping, beastiality!
2003-02-15 04:45 | User Profile
The Pushkin thing...
"Aleksandr Pushkin was born in Moscow into a cultured but poor aristocratic family. On his father's side he was descendant of an ancient noble family and on his mother's side he was a great-great-grandson of an black Abyssinian, Gannibal, who served under Peter the Great. In his childhood the future poet was entrusted to nursemaids, French tutors, and governesses. He learned Russian from household serfs and from his nanny, Arina Rodionovna. Pushkin started to write poems from an early age. His first published poem was written when he was only 14."
It was on his mother's side, the Pushkin were an aristocratic family. Rember the Ethiopians are not true Negros, they are black by way of miscegenation.
Look at these Picture of Haile Selassie an aristocratic Ethiopian.
Haile Selassie
[url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/835000/images/_839415_haile300.jpg]http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/835000/image...15_haile300.jpg[/url]
[url=http://www.titoville.com/images/tito-hajle3.jpg]http://www.titoville.com/images/tito-hajle3.jpg[/url]
[url=http://www.angelfire.com/ny/ethiocrown/HaileIII.html]http://www.angelfire.com/ny/ethiocrown/HaileIII.html[/url]