Download or read book Gannibal written by Hugh Barnes and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A truly amazing 18th century life restored to history - Tsar's godson and nobleman, Russian Bluebeard, engineer of genius - who began life in an African village. When Major-General Gannibal died in 1781 in his eighties, he could look back on a long and successful life. He was the godson of Peter the Great, the Empress Elizabeth had given him nobility, thousands of acres, villages of serfs. His French education and a natural gift for mathematics had led him to fame as a fireworks expert and the architect of a string of fortifications from the Arctic Circle to China. As a husband he was a provincial Bluebeard, but his descendants would include the great poet Pushkin and a bevy of British aristocrats. Yet Abram Petrovich Gannibal had been born in very different circumstances. He was a black African, perhaps from Ethiopia, perhaps from modern Chad, sold as a child into slavery. In a brilliant biography Hugh Barnes who has tracked Gannibal's footsteps across three continents restores an extraordinary life to history.
Download or read book The Stolen Prince written by Hugh Barnes and published by Ecco. This book was released on 2006-05-30 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the spring of 1703, a young African boy stepped off a slave ship in Constantinople, the gateway between East and West. Huddling in chains, with other frightened captives, the seven-year-old claimed to be a prince of Abyssinia, a "noble Moor" kidnapped and stolen out of Africa. His tragedy was shared by millions of black people caught up in the Islamic slave trade, but his destiny was unique: rescued by Peter the Great, the young African became Abram Petrovich Gannibal. Russia's westernizing tsar adopted the child and, in a bizarre nature-and-nurture experiment, lavished on him the best education available in the new "European" capital of Saint Petersburg. Gannibal, the "Negro of Peter the Great," soared to dizzying heights as a soldier, diplomat, mathematician and spy. He was fêted in glittering salons, from the Winter Palace to the Louvre, and came to know Voltaire and Montesquieu, who praised him as the "dark star of Russia's enlightenment." At the same time, his military exploits, from northern Spain to the icy wastes of Siberia -- to say nothing of his marital problems -- sealed Gannibal's reputation as the Russian Othello. African prince or not, the ex-slave founded a dynasty of his own in Russia, where he came to embody the strengths and weaknesses of the country itself -- volatile, courageous, handsome, gifted and always astonishing. His descendants included not only Alexander Pushkin, Russia's greatest poet, but also, in England, several Mountbattens and others close to the royal family.
Download or read book Under the Sky of My Africa written by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2006-05-30 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide-ranging consideration of the nature and significance of Pushkin's African heritage Roughly in the year 1705, a young African boy, acquired from the seraglio of the Turkish sultan, was transported to Russia as a gift to Peter the Great. This child, later known as Abram Petrovich Gannibal, was to become Peter's godson and to live to a ripe old age, having attained the rank of general and the status of Russian nobility. More important, he was to become the great-grandfather of Russia's greatest national poet, Alexander Pushkin. It is the contention of the editors of this book, borne out by the essays in the collection, that Pushkin's African ancestry has played the role of a "wild card" of sorts as a formative element in Russian cultural mythology; and that the ways in which Gannibal's legacy has been included in or excluded from Pushkin's biography over the last two hundred years can serve as a shifting marker of Russia's self-definition. The first single volume in English on this rich topic, Under the Sky of My Africa addresses the wide variety of interests implicated in the question of Pushkin's blackness-race studies, politics, American studies, music, mythopoetic criticism, mainstream Pushkin studies. In essays that are by turns biographical, iconographical, cultural, and sociological in focus, the authors-representing a broad range of disciplines and perspectives-take us from the complex attitudes toward race in Russia during Pushkin's era to the surge of racism in late Soviet and post-Soviet contemporary Russia. In sum, Under the Sky of My Africa provides a wealth of basic material on the subject as well as a series of provocative readings and interpretations that will influence future considerations of Pushkin and race in Russian culture.
Download or read book Notes on Prosody and Abram Gannibal written by Vladimir Nabokov and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-08 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two appendixes from Nabokov's famous edition of Eugene Onegin: his study of versification in English and Russian poetry, and his "term paper" on Pushkin’s Ethiopian ancestor. Originally published in 1965. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book The Pushkin Project written by David Bethea and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2023-09-26 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Bethea’s book conveys the story of an amazingly ambitious attempt to preserve the humanities while also saving the future of disadvantaged high school students in Chicago. … Highly recommended.” — Library Journal (starred review) The Pushkin Project tells the story of how a Russian studies professor changes course late in his career by reeducating himself in evolutionary thought and founding a summer institute that partners with inner-city high schools to implement a new set of learning strategies for underserved youth. These “cognitive cross-training” strategies involve introducing students from Hispanic and Black neighborhoods in the west and south sides of Chicago to the Russian culture and language, with an emphasis on poet, playwright, and novelist Alexander Pushkin. Through the lens of modern evolutionary thought, students adopt not only a new and different language and culture, but also a different sort of literary hero, one whose African heritage within the majority culture speaks to them directly. This inspiring and compelling story provides fascinating insights into Russia's national poet, brings the sciences and humanities together, and provides new directions in teaching young people from historically disadvantaged backgrounds.
Download or read book Eugene Onegin written by Aleksandr Pushkin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 1052 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vladimir Nabokov's famous and brilliant commentary on Pushkin's Eugene Onegin When Vladimir Nabokov first published his controversial translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin in 1964, the great majority of the edition was taken up by Nabokov’s witty and exhaustive commentary. Presented here in its own volume, the commentary is a unique scholarly masterwork by one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers—a work that Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd calls “the most detailed commentary ever made on” Onegin and “indispensable to all serious students of Pushkin’s masterpiece.” In his commentary, Nabokov seeks to illuminate every possible nuance of this nineteenth-century classic. He explains obscurities, traces literary influences, relates Onegin to Pushkin’s other work, and in a characteristically entertaining manner dwells on a host of interesting details relevant to the poem and the Russia it depicts. Nabokov also provides translations of lines and stanzas deleted by the censor or by Pushkin himself, variants from Pushkin’s notebooks, fragments of a continuation called “Onegin’s Journey,” the unfinished and unpublished “Chapter Ten,” other continuations, and an index. A work of astonishing erudition and passion, Nabokov’s commentary is a landmark in the history of literary scholarship and in the understanding and appreciation of the greatest work of Russia’s national poet.
Download or read book The Sergeant written by Dean Calbreath and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-02-07 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the nobility in the kingdom of Borno to being kidnapped into slavery, the inspiring life-story of Nicholas Said is an epic journey through the nineteenth century that takes him from Africa to the Ottoman Empire, and finally from Czarist Russia to the American Civil War, becoming a sergeant in one of the first African American regiments in the Union Army. In the late 1830s a young Black man was born into a world of wealth and privilege in the powerful, thousand-year-old African kingdom of Borno. But instead of becoming a respected general like his fearsome father (who was known as The Lion), Nicolas Said’s fate was to fight a very different kind of battle. At the age of thirteen, Said was kidnapped and sold into slavery, beginning an epic journey that would take him across Africa, Asia, Europe, and eventually the United States, where he would join one of the first African American regiments in the Union Army. Nicholas Said would then spend the rest of his life fighting for equality. Along the way, Said encountered such luminaries as Queen Victoria and Czar Nicholas I, fought Civil War battles that would turn the war for the North, established schools to educate newly freed Black children, and served as one of the first Black voting registrars. In The Sergeant, Said’s epic (and largely unknown) story is brought to light by globe-trotting, Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Dean Calbreath in a meticulously researched and approachable biography. Through the lens of Said’s continent-crossing life, Calbreath examines the parallels and differences in the ways slavery was practiced from a global and religious perspective, and he highlights how Said’s experiences echo the discrimination, segregation, and violence that are still being reckoned with today. There has never been a more voracious appetite for stories documenting the African American experience, and The Sergeant’s unique perspective of slavery from a global perspective will resonate with a wide audience.
Download or read book Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Moral Acts written by Dana Dragunoiu and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2022 Brian Boyd Prize for Best Second Book on Nabokov This book shows how ethics and aesthetics interact in the works of one of the most celebrated literary stylists of the twentieth century: the Russian American novelist Vladimir Nabokov. Dana Dragunoiu reads Nabokov’s fictional worlds as battlegrounds between an autonomous will and heteronomous passions, demonstrating Nabokov’s insistence that genuinely moral acts occur when the will triumphs over the passions by answering the call of duty. Dragunoiu puts Nabokov’s novels into dialogue with the work of writers such as Alexander Pushkin, William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, and Marcel Proust; with Kantian moral philosophy; with the institution of the modern duel of honor; and with the European traditions of chivalric literature that Nabokov studied as an undergraduate at Cambridge University. This configuration of literary influences and philosophical contexts allows Dragunoiu to advance an original and provocative argument about the formation, career, and legacies of an author who viewed moral activity as an art, and for whom artistic and moral acts served as testaments to the freedom of the will.
Download or read book Doctor Levitin written by David Shrayer-Petrov and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-17 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of a doctor’s family torn apart by Soviet politics, persecution, and the Jewish struggle for freedom during the Cold War. Available now for the first time in English, Doctor Levitin is a modern classic in Jewish literature. A major work of late twentieth-century Russian and Jewish literature since its first publication in Israel in 1986, it has also seen three subsequent Russian editions. It is the first in David Shrayer-Petrov’s trilogy of novels about the struggle of Soviet Jews and the destinies of refuseniks. In addition to being the first novel available in English that depicts the experience of the Jewish exodus from the former USSR, Doctor Levitin is presented in an excellent translation that has been overseen and edited by the author’s son, the bilingual scholar Maxim D. Shrayer. Doctor Levitin is a panoramic novel that portrays the Soviet Union during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the USSR invaded Afghanistan and Soviet Jews fought for their right to emigrate. Doctor Herbert Levitin, the novel’s protagonist, is a professor of medicine in Moscow whose non-Jewish wife, Tatyana, comes from the Russian peasantry. Shrayer-Petrov documents with anatomical precision the mutually unbreachable contradictions of the Levitins’ mixed marriage, which becomes an allegory of Jewish-Russian history. Doctor Levitin’s Jewishness evolves over the course of the novel, becoming a spiritual mission. The antisemitism of the Soviet regime forces the quiet intellectual and his family to seek emigration. Denied permission to leave, the family of Doctor Levitin is forced into the existence of refuseniks and outcasts, which inexorably leads to their destruction and a final act of defiance and revenge on the Soviet system. A significant contribution to the works of translated literature available in English, David Shrayer-Petrov’s Doctor Levitinis ideal for any reader of fiction and literature. It will hold particular interest for those who study Jewish or Russian literature, culture, and history and Cold War politics.
Download or read book Vladimir Nabokov written by Brian Boyd and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-10 with total page 833 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of Nabokov's life continues with his arrival in the United States in 1940. He found that supporting himself and his family was not easy--until the astonishing success of Lolita catapulted him to world fame and financial security.
Download or read book The Rest Is History written by Goalhanger Podcasts and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2023-12-05 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This entertaining companion to the massively popular history podcast tackles everything from Alexander the Great to Agatha Christie, the Wars of the Roses to Watergate--with a unique blend of wit, wisdom, and good old-fashioned banter The Rest Is History podcast brilliantly distills major moments in human history, covering everything from the Trojan War to a historical ranking of the greatest dogs. Now, this official tie-in book brings the chart-topping podcast’s charms to the page, offering readers a fresh, wide-ranging tour of humanity’s essential, and essentially weird, moments, including: - Did the Trojan War actually happen? - What was the most disastrous party in history? - Was Richard Nixon more like Caligula or Claudius? - How did a hair appointment almost blow Churchill’s cover? - Why did the Nazis believe they were descended from Atlantis? Featuring an introduction from podcast hosts Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, this book cleverly demonstrates that the past—from modern to ancient and every time in between—is both closer to us than we might realize and bafflingly strange, all at once. So run your Egyptian milk bath, strap up your best Spartan sandals, and prepare for a journey down the highways and byways of the human past.
Download or read book The Family Album written by Veronica B. Gamburg and published by FriesenPress. This book was released on 2017-04-03 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A searing, emotional and inspiring memoir, The Family Album: Reminiscing About the Past tells the story of a resilient family living in Russia during some of the country’s darkest and most difficult history. With photographs dating from the end of the 19th to the end of the 20th century, the book tells the powerful and sometimes heartbreaking stories of four families trying to survive during the Russian Revolution, the Great Purge and The Great Patriotic War. With skilful and engaging storytelling, this memoir details the rich history of the time through photos while telling personal stories, such as how the author’s own father perished while fighting for his country and how she and her mother survived the Leningrad Blockade. Despite the hardships faced by the family, this book still brims with hope, enthusiasm and patriotism and offers its readers an uplifting lesson in history and the strength of the human spirit.
Download or read book Muscovite and Mandarin written by Clifford M. Foust and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-06-15 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first published study in English of Russian trade and commercial relations with China from the Treaty of Kiakhta (1727) to the early nineteenth century. It is a study in Russian economic and entrepreneurial history, focusing on Russian state economic policy and activity concerning China. It dwells at length on the state monopolies, but at the same time private trade with China and the Chinese is also fully explored. Originally published 1969. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
Download or read book Busted in New York and Other Essays written by Darryl Pinckney and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays that blend the personal and the social, from the celebrated literary critic and novelist In these twenty-five essays, Darryl Pinckney has given us a view of our recent racial history that blends the social and the personal and wonders how we arrived at our current moment. Pinckney reminds us that “white supremacy isn’t back; it never went away.” It is this impulse to see historically that is at the core of Busted in New York and Other Essays, which traces the lineage of black intellectual history from Booker T. Washington through the Harlem Renaissance, to the Black Panther Party and the turbulent sixties, to today’s Afro-pessimists, and celebrated and neglected thinkers in between. These are capacious essays whose topics range from the grassroots of protest in Ferguson, Missouri, to the eighteenth-century Guadeloupian composer Joseph Bologne, from an unsparing portrait of Louis Farrakhan to the enduring legacy of James Baldwin, the unexpected story of black people experiencing Russia, Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, and the painter Kara Walker. The essays themselves are a kind of record, many of them written in real-time, as Pinckney witnesses the Million Man March, feels and experiences the highs and lows of Obama’s first presidential campaign, explores the literary black diaspora, and reflects on the surprising and severe lesson he learned firsthand about the changing urban fabric of New York. As Zadie Smith writes in her introduction to the book: “How lucky we are to have Darryl Pinckney who, without rancor, without insult, has, all these years, been taking down our various songs, examining them with love and care, and bringing them back from the past, like a Sankofa bird, for our present examination. These days Sankofas like Darryl are rare. Treasure him!”
Download or read book Pushkin written by T.J. Binyon and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 786 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the course of his short, dramatic life, Aleksandr Pushkin gave Russia not only its greatest poetry–including the novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin–but a new literary language. He also gave it a figure of enduring romantic allure–fiery, restless, extravagant, a prodigal gambler and inveterate seducer of women. Having forged a dazzling, controversial career that cost him the enmity of one tsar and won him the patronage of another, he died at the age of thirty-eight, following a duel with a French officer who was paying unscrupulous attention to his wife. In his magnificent, prizewinning Pushkin, T. J. Binyon lifts the veil of the iconic poet’s myth to reveal the complexity and pathos of his life while brilliantly evoking Russia in all its nineteenth-century splendor. Combining exemplary scholarship with the pace and detail of a great novel, Pushkin elevates biography to a work of art.
Download or read book The Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History written by Joseph L. Wieczynski and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book 21 Rules of Blackness written by Jason Clue and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a roadmap for the African diaspora to navigate their way through a society in which they appear as a visible minority. It provides a set of rules that if followed correctly, will not only improve life within that society, but also reinforce relationships between black brothers and sisters. These rules underpin the values that we have always strived to achieve, yet we sometimes forget to exemplify. We’ve all heard of the term getting on code; this book provides the codes which we need to move forward as a people. The reader is challenged to do better simply because they know better. Just like any exercise, it is the stamina and continued effort that produces the greatest results. By exercising these twenty-one rules consistently, the reader will gain an internal strength and fortitude that will resonate with whomever they meet.
