Lecture by Robert Chandler: Pushkin as a Historian

From his student days, Pushkin was passionately interested in Russian history and in 1831 he was appointed Russia’s official historian laureate. The main project he left unfinished at the end of his life was a history of Peter the Great, the historical figure who fascinated him most of all. Robert Chandler will read from his forthcoming translation of Peter the Great’s African, Pushkin’s unfinished novel about his maternal great-grandfather, Ibrahim Gannibal. Probably the son of a minor African prince, Gannibal was abducted as a child, sold as a slave in Constantinople, purchased by the Russian ambassador and presented as a gift to Peter the Great. Gannibal went on to become an important military engineer and one of Peter’s closest confidants.

Robert will go on to discuss, and read from, “The History of the Village of Goriukhino,” one of the wittiest and most original of all Pushkin’s works. This parody-history is perhaps best understood as a series of questions Pushkin was asking himself. As he moved towards his own, more original way of writing history, Pushkin was trying on different styles and viewpoints. Goriukhino is also a quizzical, often critical self-examination on Pushkin’s part – above all, with regard to his conduct towards his own serfs. Goriukhino breaks off on a note of deep, tragic seriousness; it may well have been Pushkin’s awareness of the desperateness of the peasants’ condition that made it impossible for him to complete the work in a way that would have been acceptable to the tsarist censorship.

The event will be held in English.