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 Ecco The Stolen Prince: Gannibal, Adopted Son of Peter the Great, Great-Grandfather of Alexander Pushkin, and Europe's First Black Intellectual |
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'The black African who had become a Russian noble lived out his life like a French philosophe," Alexander Pushkin wrote in a note to "Eugene Onegin." The poet was describing Abram Gannibal, his maternal great-grandfather, an engineer and mathematician, and a godson of Peter the Great. One of the most intriguing figures of the 18th century, Gannibal is also one of the most obscure, making the challenges faced by Hugh Barnes in "The Stolen Prince," his fascinating new biography, nothing if not daunting.
Gannibal's beginnings are shrouded in mystery. His date of birth is uncertain -- probably as late as 1696, plausibly as early as 1689 -- while the place shifts from Ethiopia to Morocco to Lake Chad, nudged about by Pushkin's impassioned biographers or detractors in their attempts to darken or bleach the poet's ancestor. Depending on the source, Gannibal's background vacillates between princely and lowly. In some accounts he proudly steps out of a fountain-sparkling garden into the silk captivity of a seraglio as the son of an Abyssinian ruler, sold to a sultan in the aftermath of his treacherous brothers' struggle for the throne; in others, he stumbles onto the deck of a pitching ship as a common slave from the hidden depths of Africa, purchased by a drunken skipper for a bottle of rum. Even his name possesses a disconcerting chameleon-like quality. Called Ibrahim in Constantinople, in Russia the boy was transformed into Abram, nicknamed arap (blackamoor) by the court and christened Pyotr Petrovich Petrov by Peter the Great. Eventually acquiring the nom de guerre Gannibal (a tribute to the famed African general), he spent decades hiding behind many perplexing iterations and distortions -- Abram Petrov, Arap Avraam, Pyotr Gannibal, Petrov Arab -- before finally arriving at the amalgam of Abram Petrovich Gannibal.
Whatever his origins and moniker, it is known at least that Gannibal came to Constantinople as a slave around 1703, and was soon obtained -- bought or abducted -- by a Russian envoy as a gift for Peter I. Arriving in Russia in 1704, the boy endeared himself to the volatile tsar, received a fine education and became a skilled military engineer. He fought in wars, studied in France, wrote a long work on geometry and fortification, staged fireworks, married a Greek beauty and divorced her amidst a scandal, married again and fathered 11 children, and, throughout, built fortresses across the growing Russian empire, from the Baltics to the remote Chinese border. Under the Empress Elizabeth, in 1742, he reached the pinnacle of his career, becoming a major-general, a wealthy landowner (and, ironically, a slave-owner), and the military commander of Reval (present-day Tallinn). Under Peter III, in 1762, he was rudely dismissed. Under Catherine the Great, he retired to his estate in Mikhailovskoye -- the celebrated place of his great-grandson's later exile -- and died there in 1781, tending his garden, forgotten by the world.
There are far more gaps than certainties in Gannibal's chronology, loosely pinned down as it is by scant documentary evidence: some 15 hyperbole-prone pages by Gannibal's son-in-law; a few anecdotes about Peter the Great, which well illustrate the crude humor then in vogue but keep Gannibal eternally obscured by Peter's towering shadow; a portrait, long deemed to be the only known representation of Gannibal, until it was recently cleaned to reveal the face of a white man; a number of tantalizing hints in decrees and memoirs from the time; and a handful of disappointingly stiff letters, mainly petitions and complaints, by Gannibal himself. Given this dearth of data, it is not surprising that few biographers have tackled the subject at length. The mystery of Gannibal haunted Pushkin for years, but the poet abandoned his several attempts to write about his forebear. Vladimir Nabokov memorably appended an essay on Gannibal to his controversial translation of "Eugene Onegin." Having reviewed the facts available, he saw no reason to seek exotic explanations for the existing blank spots in the man's biography, and instead drew a dismissive conclusion: Imported to Russia as a "curio" for Peter's amusement, Gannibal "was a sour, groveling, crotchety, timid, ambitious, and cruel person; a good military engineer, perhaps, but humanistically a nonentity; differing in nothing from a typical career-minded, superficially educated, coarse, wife-flogging Russian of his day."
 National Pushkin Museum No known likeness of Gannibal as an adult exists. A portrait formerly said to be of him was revealed upon being restored to depict a white man instead. |
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Yet the most captivating aspect of the book lies in the wealth of plausible scenarios that Barnes constructs, often with novelistic flair, reading conspiracies between the dry lines of diplomatic missives and borrowing scenes from Pushkin, Gogol and Montesquieu to render his imagined landscapes more vivid. For despite Nabokov's view, Gannibal's life is full of romantic potential. Pushkin's ancestor could indeed have been a young African prince trapped in spy-infested Constantinople and rescued in cloak-and-dagger style by Russia's ambassador (incidentally, an ancestor of Leo Tolstoy). He could have been a brilliant mind, a courageous boy soldier, Peter the Great's secret messenger and substitute son, the fruit of the tsar's daring experiment in education -- the dazzling "dark star" of the French Enlightenment, friend of Voltaire and Montesquieu, lover of Madame de Staal, confidant of dukes and duchesses -- a noble philosopher-gardener, the model for "Candide."
Was he all these things, as Barnes suggests? Did he really, as a 15-year-old boy, win over the German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz with his subtle understanding of cryptography? Did he speak half a dozen languages by the age of 20 and devise secret codes that forever changed Russian espionage? Did his private library form the cornerstone of the Russian Academy of Sciences? Did he plot against despotism, help Mikhail Lomonosov found Moscow State University, discuss mathematical puzzles with Kant, steer Alexander Suvorov toward a military career, and build fortifications that repelled the Nazi invasion two centuries later? Was he, in short, "an intellectual pioneer, a voice of conscience, a defender of freedom"? And could his virtual invisibility in history, as well as some of the roles in which contemporary sources have cast him on occasion -- the jealous Othello, the jester-like curiosity in Peter's collection of freaks -- be explained by the color of his skin in his racially prejudiced age?
Inevitably, Barnes cannot always supply neat answers to these questions, and in the end Gannibal remains in many ways elusive. All the same, the suspenseful search for the truth, the constant interplay of mythologies and archetypes, the procession of vividly drawn aristocrats, adventurers, soldiers, scientists, spies and rulers of Gannibal's century, as well as the underlying discourse on race, education and immortality, make this engaging biography a many-varied pleasure -- and, until a forgotten memoir is uncovered in some dusty attic, the most complete account possible of a man who was not merely an ancestor of Russia's greatest poet but a singular character in his own right.
Olga Grushin is the author of the novel "The Dream Life of Sukhanov."