Why couldn’t these ghosts make themselves useful for once?
Bernardine Evaristo, Soul Tourists
The pivotal role of Alexander Pushkin in the Soviet state-sponsored literary project cannot be overstated: He served as the “model poet” not only for Russia but also for all other Soviet republics that were supposed to develop “their own Pushkin,” as Maxim Gorky suggested in his speech at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934.[1] Pushkin’s role as the nation’s primary poet had been firmly established since the Pushkin Jubilee in 1880. In the imperial literary discourse, the religious ideal of the “poet-prophet” was largely modeled on him. In the Soviet remodeling of Pushkin, this image merged with the Socialist Realist ideal of the writer as an “engineer of the human soul.”[2] Pushkin served not only as a national poet but also as a cultural, i.e., secular saint.[3] Consequently, Soviet Pushkin studies allowed little room for thought that seemed sacrilegious or iconoclastic. Thus, despite the significant socio-cultural changes following the collapse of the Soviet Union, contemporary Pushkin research continues to grapple with persistent lacunae in the history of his reception.
A markedly different approach to Pushkin’s ancestry has emerged in the Afropean discourse of the new millennium. Texts like Bernardine Evaristo’s novel Soul Tourists (2005) and Johny Pitts’ travelogue Afropean. Notes from Black Europe (2019) free Pushkin from the confines of Russian nationalism, offering a more comprehensive understanding of Black Europe’s past and present. They stress Pushkin’s African heritage while also re-telling his story—and by extension, European history—as a testament to the presence and contributions of Afropeans in Europe. In Afropean, Pitts approaches this endeavour as both reparative and spatial, emphasizing Pushkin’s relevance for his project: “In him I saw a sort of kindred spirit of the liminal terrain, rooted in Russia but at a poetic distance from it, too; an Afropean wanderer.”[4] Approaching Pushkin as an Afropean wanderer is not merely Pitts’ projection: Pushkin himself grappled with his identity as both a Russian and a Black poet, his position within and beyond Europe.[5]
Since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, and even more so since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Pushkin’s literary participation in Russia’s imperial expansion has come under renewed scrutiny. The war has not only prompted a shift in cultural heritage building in Central Eastern Europe, but also an extensive re-evaluation of Pushkin. One of his most popular texts serves as an example of this problematic imperial literary heritage: His epic poem The Fountain of Bakhchisaray (Bakhchisaraiskiy fontan, 1821–1823) is considered the most famous orientalist Crimea text in Russian literature. The text centers on the Khan’s Palace in the city of Bağçasaray, which, in Pushkin’s time, was already a site of spatial violence. After the annexation of Crimea by the Russian empire in 1783, the Crimean Khanate was eliminated, and the palace turned into a tsarist residence.[6] Through his poem, Pushkin gave the empire’s readers imaginative access to the newly acquired territories, effectively rendering them “readable”. In other words, his literary appropriation complemented the military one.
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The famous Fountain of Bakhchisaray, also known as the “Fountain of Tears,” is a feature of the palace that still exists today. In the Russian imagination, it is inextricably linked with Pushkin’s poem. But it also appears in a more contemporary text, which, unlike Pushkin’s poem, proved inherently problematic to a Russian (in this case Soviet) historical narrative as it implicitly undermined it. In his unrealized film script The Slumbering Palace (Dremliushchii dvorets, 1969), director Sergei Parajanov situates Pushkin against the backdrop of the Khan’s palace.[7] The script blurs the boundaries between imperial past and Soviet present: Pushkin appears in the historical palace Hansaray, a familiar figure in his frock coat and top hat, only to later re-appear as a ghostly apparition in tourist photographs in present-day Bağçasaray. This combination of the figure of the national poet and the architectural landmark points to a more recent violent history of the place. The architecture, highlighting the glaring absence of Crimean Tatars (following their 1944 deportation under Stalin), is a testament to their indigenous identity.
Parajanov’s script intertwines the silencing of marginalized voices in historical narratives with the literary representation of a “time out of joint.” By portraying Pushkin as a ghost in the Hansaray, The Slumbering Palace points to an incomplete historical narrative. The idea that repressed histories return, haunting the present, and the portrayal of Pushkin as a ghost connect the script to yet another text that recounts a journey across space and time.
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Published in 2005, Bernardine Evaristo’s novel Soul Tourists is set in an entirely different geographical and temporal context. After the death of his Jamaican father, the protagonist Stanley Williams sets out on a road trip across Europe. Slipping in and out of Europe’s past, he re-encounters the continent and its forgotten Black history. As Stanley travels to present-day Istanbul, he almost immediately finds himself transported into the past. In historical Constantinople, he meets the ghosts of Pushkin and his great-grandfather Abram [Ibrahim] Gannibal.[8] In Topkapı Palace, the two ghosts engage with Stanley in a playful discussion about their historical and contemporary reception. Stanley’s responses show how the erasure of Black histories has distorted the narrative of European history in general and the conception of Pushkin in particular. “I never even knew there were Black people in Russia. This journey has been a series of awakenings.” “We are everywhere,”[9] Ibrahim reassures him. In another twist of a “time out of joint,” their exchange is interrupted by a tourist guide who explains the Seraglio to “a motley crew of tourists” (244), interrupting Stanley’s entirely different tourism as a “wandering soul” (288). As in the script for The Slumbering Palace, commercial tourism figures in the novel as a common practice of narrating history, one that often glosses over the histories that Evaristo and Parajanov are putting at the center of their texts.
Comparing Parajanov’s and Evaristo’s portrayals of Pushkin reveals the poet at the nexus of two repressive historiographies: While Evaristo’s text addresses the erasure of Black Europeans and their stories from European history, Parajanov’s script highlights the taboo surrounding the deportation of the Crimean Tatars in Soviet historiography. It also alludes to Pushkin’s role in shaping the Russian imperial imagination, thereby challenging not only the Soviet ideal of Pushkin, but also implicitly undermining the Soviet promise of an anti-colonial and anti-racist state. In Soul Tourists, Pushkin is portrayed as a triumphant ghost who has endured adversity, achieved immortality, and overcome attempts to erase his African heritage. While Evaristo’s novel celebrates Pushkin as an Afropean poet, Parajanov’s script invokes the poet’s ambivalence as the “bard of empire and freedom.”[10]
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To understand Pushkin more fully, we need to consider the gaps in his reception. His identity as an Afropean poet is still often denied, its relevance diminished. Staring the white actor Yura Borisov as Pushkin, the Russian biopic The Prophet. The Story of Alexander Pushkin (Prorok. Istoria Aleksandra Pushkina) from 2025 almost entirely ignores the poet’s African ancestry. To this day, Pushkin remains an important point of reference for Russian neo-imperial aspirations against territories that his texts had previously subjected to literary colonization. Confronting these complex entanglements is the central challenge of contemporary Pushkin research.
Fanny Helena Wehner is a research team member in the ERC-project Black Narratives of Transcultural Appropriation: Constructing Afropean Worlds, Questioning European Foundations at ZfL.
[1] This suggestion was embraced by several speakers at the congress, cf. Susanne Frank: “Competing Claims to World Literature as Heritage (The Mid-1930s and Beyond)”, in: Dustin Breitenwischer et al. (eds.): Literatures, Communities, Worlds. Competing Notions of the Global. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 2024, 167–192 (178).
[2] Pamela Davidson: “The Moral Dimension of the Prophetic Ideal: Pushkin and His Readers”, in: Slavic Review 61.3 (2002), 490–518 (491).
[3] Marijan Dović, Jon Karl Helgason: National Poets, Cultural Saints: Canonization and Commemorative Cults of Writers in Europe. Leiden/Boston: Brill 2017.
[4] Johny Pitts: Afropean. Notes from Black Europe. London: Penguin 2019, 267–268.
[5] More recently, Polish-American Slavist Ewa M. Thompson described Pushkin as one of the “troubadours of the empire.” Cf. Ewa M. Thompson: Imperial Knowledge. Russian Literature and Colonialism. Westport (CT): Greenwood Press 2000.
[6] Nicole Kançal-Ferrari: “Between Imposed Memory and Damnatio Memoriae: Places of Memory in the Black Sea Region”, in: Ninja Bumann et al. (eds.): Handbook on the History and Culture of the Black Sea Region. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter 2025, 277–314 (289).
[7] Sergei Parajanov: Dremliushchii dvorets. St. Petersburg: Azbuka-Klassika 2006.
[8] After being abducted from his homeland (most likely present-day Cameroon), Abram Gannibal was first taken to Constantinople, then to Moscow in 1704.
[9] Bernardine Evaristo: Soul Tourists. London: Hamish Hamilton 2005, 243. Quotations from Evaristo’s novel are referenced directly in the text.
[10] Georgij Fedotov: “Pevez Imperii i Svobody”, in: P. A. Gal’cevaja (ed.): Puškin v russkoj filosofskoj kritike: konec XIX – pervaja polovina XX vv. Moscow: Kniga 1990.
VORGESCHLAGENE ZITIERWEISE: Fanny Helena Wehner: Alexander Pushkin, Afropean Poet, in: ZfL Blog, 25.8.2025, [https://www.zflprojekte.de/zfl-blog/2025/08/25/fanny-helena-wehner-alexander-pushkin-afropean-poet/].
DOI: https://doi.org/10.13151/zfl-blog/20250825-01
