THOUGHTS ON ABRAHAM

Alexander Pushkin was the greatest product of Abraham's seed. Alexander was extremely proud of his great-grandfather and his black heritage. After the line of verse in his novel Evgeny Onegin, 'beneath the sky of my Africa', Alexander added the passage about Abraham:

"The author, on his mother's side, is of African descent. His great-grandfather, Abram Petrovich Hannibal, was kidnapped in his eighth year from the shores of Africa and brought to Constantinople. Having rescued him, the Russian Ambassador sent him as a present to Peter the Great…"

Alexander Pushkin's interest in his great-grandfather was not shown better than in the fictional story he wrote about him called, "The Negro of Peter the Great." In the story, Pushkin gave his opinion on how Abraham was and what he did while on his stay in France. Pushkin wrote that the upper class society of the French was quite interested in Abraham. Some of the reasons he was adored was because of his uniqueness. There were not any people of his color in the aristocracy. He was sort of a mystery to them. He disliked all the attention he got; he knew it was superficial. Pushkin used his own feelings to describe how Abraham felt. Like Abraham, Pushkin was different from the rest of the upper class. Pushkin wanted the reader to be proud of Abraham for not loving the fake admiration.

Not everyone had the same feeling about Abraham as Alexander Pushkin. A couple Russians have written that Abraham was "nothing from a typical career-minded, superficially educated, coarse, wife-flogging Russian of his day, in a brutal and dull world of political intrigue, favouritism." They also commented that the Hannibals were "a patriarchal, half savage, half literate, family."