Gannibal: the Moor of Petersburg

[Kire]

Gannibal: the Moor of Petersburg
Hugh Barnes Profile, 300pp, £16.99
ISBN 1861973659

Reviewed by Maggie Gee

The extraordinary Gannibal was the African great-grandfather of Aleksandr Pushkin, Russia's greatest poet, who spoke proudly of his own inherited "blackamoor profile". In his elegantly written new biography, Hugh Barnes suggests Gannibal was born in Chad, taken as a slave to Constantinople, and purchased in 1704, aged seven or eight, by Tsar Peter the Great of Russia. While still a teenager, Gannibal was writing the tsar's letters, working on encryption for secret messages, and helping to plan military campaigns. As an adult he rose to the top of the Russian army. Gannibal also read Racine, Corneille and Moliere, and was, in Paris, the friend of Montesquieu, Diderot and Voltaire, who called him "the dark star of the Enlightenment". Yet this was less than a century after France had established its slave colonies in the West Indies, and Voltaire also said that the intelligence of black people was "far inferior", while Montesquieu, equivocating about slavery, said it was sometimes "founded on natural reason". How did Gannibal manage to surmount 18th-century attitudes to slavery and to Africans?

His story has intrigued and defeated other authors. Pushkin himself wrote an unfinished historical romance called The Negro of Peter the Great, and began by praising his great-grandfather's "culture and natural intelligence" - but his plot foundered when he came to describe Gannibal's rejection by Natasha, a white Russian aristocrat. After overhearing plans to marry her off to "that black devil", Natasha lies in a swoon for two weeks. Gannibal's friend Korsakov, warning him off marriage, alludes to his "flat nose, thick lips and fuzzy hair". Then the story breaks off. Pushkin's translator and editor Vladimir Nabokov included a 50-page excursus on the current state of knowledge about "Abram Gannibal", which suddenly explodes into an astonishing attack: Gannibal was "a sour, grovelling, crotchety, timid, ambitious and cruel person: a good military engineer, perhaps, but humanistically a nonentity". Neither Pushkin nor Nabokov, it seems, found Gannibal easy to write about.

Hugh Barnes also deals at length with "facts" that turn to dust as he pursues his subject, now in an unheated Russian library where all the readers shiver in hats, coats and scarves, now in the no-go zone between Ethiopia and Eritrea. The biography by Gannibal's son-in-law Rotkirkh is full of myths, including the idea, which has become a truism, that Gannibal was Ethiopian. The black Beninois scholar Dieudonne Gnammankou wryly claims this was because Russians think "Ethiopians are practically white". Barnes comes down on Gnammankou's side, placing Gannibal's birth firmly in equatorial Africa, in sub-Saharan Chad.

After the necessary demolition work (not always an easy read), Barnes's book takes off into gripping narrative. Why was Gannibal taken as a slave to Constantinople? A powerful African family may have had too many potential heirs for comfort. Having been bought by the Turkish sultan, Gannibal was co-opted into an even more grisly system, becoming page to Sultan Mustafa's younger brother Ahmed, who was imprisoned in a cage for life to curtail his ambitions to the throne. Gannibal was learning lessons that later helped him survive the rapidly shifting alliances at his next destination, the Russian court.


More: http://www.newstatesman.com/Bookshop/300000101812

[bleedingheart]

1. that is absolutely fascinating...

thanks for the link...too bad there isn't more about him to read about...

[Kire]

2. Here's another review of the same book.

On a recent visit to the New York Public Library I was struck by the non-Slavonic shelfmark of a work on Pushkin. To my query the reference librarian replied, "Honey, that book is in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture because everybody knows that Pushkin was black". What she meant, of course, was that Pushkin's great-grandfather, the subject of Hugh Barnes's lively study, Gannibal: The moor of Petersburg, was a black African. There have been two previous modern lives of Ganibal (wrongly transliterated in this book), the first a potted biography by Vladimir Nabokov in his great commentary to Eugene Onegin (1964), and the second the still definitive study by Diedonne Gnammankou (Abraham Hanibal: L'aieul noir de Pouchkine, Paris, 1996). In his new, first full-length life in English, Barnes tells the story with novelistic, colourful flair. The life of Abram Petrovich Ganibal (1697-1781), the great-grandfather of Alexander Pushkin, reads like a parable of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, a fable of reason and happenstance perfectly straight out of the pages of Voltaire's Candide. Abducted as a child from his native homeland somewhere near Chad, he was sold into slavery in Constantinopl. A shady Croatian operating as a Russian spy whisked him away from the intrigues of Sultan Ahmed III's seraglio to the court of Peter the Great in the newly founded St Petersburg. Other blackamoors were named for their owner Tsar, taking both his Christian name (Petr) and patronymic (Petrovich). At some point the child baulked at being just another Petr Petrovich Petrov, gaining permission to retain his name Ibrahim (in the Russian variant, Abram).

More: http://www.powells.com/review/2005_10_02

[On the Road]

3. Great Stuff --

Thanks for the link. Had no idea that this figue even existed.

Nabokov was such as Tsarist, I'm surprised he didn't like Gannibal for that reason alone. I would hate to think of him as racist.