Mixed-race Pushkin
Racial ambiguity and “The Lady Peasant”
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9640909 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Emily Wang (0000-0001-6760-9046, Department of German and Russian, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, USA, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 65 |
| Issue | 3-4 |
| Pages | 279-301 |
| Publication date | 2023-10-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Canadian Slavonic Papers (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0008-5006 • E-ISSN: 2375-2475 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/00085006.2023.2273698 |
| OpenAlex | W4389951562 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 38 |
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
Ambiguity · Art · Context (archaeology · Linguistics · Literature · Memoir · Peasant · Race (biology · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Soviet and Russian History
Ideologies of Race
Ethnicity, Nationality and the Masses
Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture
Under the Sky of My Africa
Neither Black Nor White Yet Both
Racial Formation in the United States
Black Canadian Studies as the Cutting Edge of Change
Shifting legibility
“What Are You?”
Under the Sky of My Africa
The Other Pushkin
Commemorating Pushkin
Complete Prose Fiction
The Empress Undressed
The Letters of Alexander Pushkin
Imprisoned in marital bliss
Unfree labor. American slavery and Russian serfdom
When Pushkin's Blackness Was in Vogue
Reading Race in Slavic Studies Scholarship through a Digital Lens
When Race Is a Language and Empire Is a Context
Race-ing the Russian Nineteenth Century
Exotic Aesthetics
Russia and the Negro
An exotic subversive
What Are You
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |