Pushkin's Aestheticized Defense of His African Heritage in His Poem "My Genealogy" (Alexander Pushkin) (Critical Essay‪)‬

I treasure the past in my home, I secretly conjure up the past. --Anna Akhmatova, "They came and said ..." (1) This study concentrates on Pushkin's masterpiece of rebuttal "My Genealogy" ("Moia rodoslovnaia"), crafted in defense of his Pushkin ancestry, on the one hand, and his African progenitor Abram Gannibal (c. 1696-1781), on the other. I first consider the background to Pushkin's poem, scholarly and personal alike, so vital to understanding the full import of the anonymous feuilleton attack by Faddei Bulgarin (1789-1859), by no means the first but rather the "last straw." Then I enlist the poet's brilliantly marshaled specific vocabulary and literary devices that effectively refute the vicious transparent attacks. The indirect nature of Pushkin's self-defense augments its impact. By laughing in the familiar humorous manner of a young "know-it-all" adult at his ostensibly risible Pushkin ancestors, the poet disarms his audience's vigilance and attention so that they hardly sense the mounting intensity of laughter amidst defense and praise of Gannibal until the final indisputable, but anonymous counterattack on Bulgarin (under the name of Figliarin) at the very end--achieved without a coda.