Peter the Great's African

Peter the Great's African
Author: Alexander Pushkin
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2022-04-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1681376008

Newly translated, unfinished works about power, class conflict, and artistic inspiration by Russia's greatest poet. Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s foundational writer, was constantly experimenting with new genres, and this fresh selection ushers readers into his creative laboratory. Politics and history weighed heavily on Pushkin’s imagination, and in “Peter the Great’s African” he depicts the Tsar through the eyes of one of his closest confidantes, Ibrahim, a former slave, modeled on Pushkin’s maternal great-grandfather. At once outsider and insider, Ibrahim offers a sympathetic yet questioning view of Peter’s attempt to integrate his vast, archaic empire into Europe. In the witty “History of the Village of Goriukhino” Pushkin employs parody and self-parody to explore problems of writing history, while “Dubrovsky” is both a gripping adventure story and a vivid picture of provincial Russia in the late eighteenth century, with its class conflicts ready to boil over in violence. “The Egyptian Nights,” an effervescent mixture of prose and poetry, reflects on the nature of artistic inspiration and the problem of the poet’s place in a rapidly changing and ever more commercialized society.

Peter the Great's African

Peter the Great's African
Author: Alexander Pushkin
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2022-04-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1681375990

Newly translated, unfinished works about power, class conflict, and artistic inspiration by Russia's greatest poet. Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s foundational writer, was constantly experimenting with new genres, and this fresh selection ushers readers into his creative laboratory. Politics and history weighed heavily on Pushkin’s imagination, and in “Peter the Great’s African” he depicts the Tsar through the eyes of one of his closest confidantes, Ibrahim, a former slave, modeled on Pushkin’s maternal great-grandfather. At once outsider and insider, Ibrahim offers a sympathetic yet questioning view of Peter’s attempt to integrate his vast, archaic empire into Europe. In the witty “History of the Village of Goriukhino” Pushkin employs parody and self-parody to explore problems of writing history, while “Dubrovsky” is both a gripping adventure story and a vivid picture of provincial Russia in the late eighteenth century, with its class conflicts ready to boil over in violence. “The Egyptian Nights,” an effervescent mixture of prose and poetry, reflects on the nature of artistic inspiration and the problem of the poet’s place in a rapidly changing and ever more commercialized society.

7 Best Short Stories by Alexander Pushkin

7 Best Short Stories by Alexander Pushkin
Author: Alexander Pushkin
Publisher: Tacet Books
Total Pages: 149
Release: 2019-01-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 8577770419

Alexander Pushkin was a Russian poet and writer who is considered the father of the modern Russian novel. The so-called Golden Age of Russian Literature was inspired by the themes and aesthetics of Pushkin - we are talking about names like Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov, Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolai Gogol. This selection of short stories brings you the best of Pushkin selected by August Nemo: The Queen of Spades The Shot The Snowstorm The Postmaster The Coffin-maker Kirdjali Peter, The Great's Negro

The Petrine Instauration

The Petrine Instauration
Author: Robert Collis
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 605
Release: 2011-12-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004215670

Drawing on recent scholarship on the history of Western esotericism and religious studies on the importance of millenarian thought in Early Modern Europe, this study provides an innovative re-examination of Peter the Great’s Court in early eighteenth-century Russia.

Novels, Tales, Journeys

Novels, Tales, Journeys
Author: Alexander Pushkin
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 512
Release: 2016-11-22
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0307959635

From the award-winning translators: the complete prose narratives of the most acclaimed Russian writer of the Romantic era and one of the world's greatest storytellers. The father of Russian literature, Pushkin is beloved not only for his poetry but also for his brilliant stories, which range from dramatic tales of love, obsession, and betrayal to dark fables and sparkling comic masterpieces, from satirical epistolary tales and romantic adventures in the manner of Sir Walter Scott to imaginative historical fiction and the haunting dreamworld of "The Queen of Spades." The five short stories of The Late Tales of Ivan Petrovich Belkin are lightly humorous and yet reveal astonishing human depths, and his short novel, The Captain's Daughter, has been called the most perfect book in Russian literature.

Peter the Great Through British Eyes

Peter the Great Through British Eyes
Author: Anthony Cross
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2000-11-30
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780521782982

Peter the Great's visit to England in the first months of 1698 has been called 'the most picturesque episode in the history of Anglo-Russian relations', and lives on most vividly in popular memory for the devastation caused at Sayes Court, John Evelyn's house and garden in Deptford. Recent celebrations of the tercentenary of that visit have refocused attention on the most famous of Russian tsars, but the story of Britain's love-hate relationship with him over the intervening centuries has never before been told. This study analyses changing British reactions to Peter in an extremely wide variety of printed sources - newspapers and journals, letters and collections of anecdotes, histories and biographies, novels, poems and plays. A final innovative chapter is devoted to images of the tsar as interpreted by British painters from Godfrey Kneller to Daniel Maclise, and by a whole cohort of engravers, illustrating biographies and travel accounts.

Under the Sky of My Africa

Under the Sky of My Africa
Author: Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 489
Release: 2006-05-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810119714

A wide-ranging consideration of the nature and significance of Pushkin's African heritage Roughly in the year 1705, a young African boy, acquired from the seraglio of the Turkish sultan, was transported to Russia as a gift to Peter the Great. This child, later known as Abram Petrovich Gannibal, was to become Peter's godson and to live to a ripe old age, having attained the rank of general and the status of Russian nobility. More important, he was to become the great-grandfather of Russia's greatest national poet, Alexander Pushkin. It is the contention of the editors of this book, borne out by the essays in the collection, that Pushkin's African ancestry has played the role of a "wild card" of sorts as a formative element in Russian cultural mythology; and that the ways in which Gannibal's legacy has been included in or excluded from Pushkin's biography over the last two hundred years can serve as a shifting marker of Russia's self-definition. The first single volume in English on this rich topic, Under the Sky of My Africa addresses the wide variety of interests implicated in the question of Pushkin's blackness-race studies, politics, American studies, music, mythopoetic criticism, mainstream Pushkin studies. In essays that are by turns biographical, iconographical, cultural, and sociological in focus, the authors-representing a broad range of disciplines and perspectives-take us from the complex attitudes toward race in Russia during Pushkin's era to the surge of racism in late Soviet and post-Soviet contemporary Russia. In sum, Under the Sky of My Africa provides a wealth of basic material on the subject as well as a series of provocative readings and interpretations that will influence future considerations of Pushkin and race in Russian culture.

The Stolen Prince

The Stolen Prince
Author: Hugh Barnes
Publisher: Ecco
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2006-05-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780066212654

In the spring of 1703, a young African boy stepped off a slave ship in Constantinople, the gateway between East and West. Huddling in chains, with other frightened captives, the seven-year-old claimed to be a prince of Abyssinia, a "noble Moor" kidnapped and stolen out of Africa. His tragedy was shared by millions of black people caught up in the Islamic slave trade, but his destiny was unique: rescued by Peter the Great, the young African became Abram Petrovich Gannibal. Russia's westernizing tsar adopted the child and, in a bizarre nature-and-nurture experiment, lavished on him the best education available in the new "European" capital of Saint Petersburg. Gannibal, the "Negro of Peter the Great," soared to dizzying heights as a soldier, diplomat, mathematician and spy. He was fêted in glittering salons, from the Winter Palace to the Louvre, and came to know Voltaire and Montesquieu, who praised him as the "dark star of Russia's enlightenment." At the same time, his military exploits, from northern Spain to the icy wastes of Siberia -- to say nothing of his marital problems -- sealed Gannibal's reputation as the Russian Othello. African prince or not, the ex-slave founded a dynasty of his own in Russia, where he came to embody the strengths and weaknesses of the country itself -- volatile, courageous, handsome, gifted and always astonishing. His descendants included not only Alexander Pushkin, Russia's greatest poet, but also, in England, several Mountbattens and others close to the royal family.

Peter the Great's African

Peter the Great's African
Author: Alexander Pushkin
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2022-04-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1681375990

Newly translated, unfinished works about power, class conflict, and artistic inspiration by Russia's greatest poet. Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s foundational writer, was constantly experimenting with new genres, and this fresh selection ushers readers into his creative laboratory. Politics and history weighed heavily on Pushkin’s imagination, and in “Peter the Great’s African” he depicts the Tsar through the eyes of one of his closest confidantes, Ibrahim, a former slave, modeled on Pushkin’s maternal great-grandfather. At once outsider and insider, Ibrahim offers a sympathetic yet questioning view of Peter’s attempt to integrate his vast, archaic empire into Europe. In the witty “History of the Village of Goriukhino” Pushkin employs parody and self-parody to explore problems of writing history, while “Dubrovsky” is both a gripping adventure story and a vivid picture of provincial Russia in the late eighteenth century, with its class conflicts ready to boil over in violence. “The Egyptian Nights,” an effervescent mixture of prose and poetry, reflects on the nature of artistic inspiration and the problem of the poet’s place in a rapidly changing and ever more commercialized society.