Join NYU's Jordan Center for a talk with Professors Korey Garibaldi and Emily Wang on changing perceptions and representations of Pushkin's racial descent. 

Though most scholarship on Pushkin’s reception in the United States focuses on twentieth-century African American literature, the origins of this encounter remain poorly understood. In fact, nineteenth-century commentators on both sides of the Atlantic were obsessed with Pushkin’s racial heritage—as both a Russian, and as a canonical European writer of African descent. This collaborative talk (prepared by a transatlantic historian of race and a Slavist) brings together little-remembered newspaper records, personal correspondence, and others texts—from the mid-1830s onwards—to recover how Pushkin was regarded as a black intellectual. Dr. Wang and Dr. Garibaldi’s examinations focus on how Henry James used Pushkin’s daughter, the morganatic Countess Merenberg, as a model for the racially ambiguous “morganatic” Baroness Münster in The Europeans (1878). We also consider how this canonical American writer used the scandals surrounding the Countess once more in his rewriting of Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades” (1833) in "The Aspern Papers" (1888). While James publicly attributed Byron and Shelley as inspirations, the discourse surrounding the African heritage of Pushkin and his heirs explains why the novelist erased the racial lineage at the center of "The Aspern Papers." In the 1870s, James formed an enormously influential bond with Ivan Turgenev, who was, like James, born into a dynastic abolitionist family. By tracing their communal ties to Pushkin back to the early 1800s, an era when calls for abolitionism in the U.S. and Russia often intersected, the scholars recover a multiracial synergy that was downplayed during the rise of scientific racism later in that century.

Speakers:

Korey Garibaldi, assistant professor, department of American studies at the University of Notre Dame

Emily Wang, assistant professor of Russian, department of German and Russian languages and literatures, University of Notre Dame