Peter the Great’s Negro

This is an unfinished historical novel, which is now considered to be Pushkin’s first prose work.  The author began writing the novel towards the end of July, 1827 in Mikhailovskoe and in spring 1828 he is recorded to have read several drafts to his friends. During Pushkin’s lifetime, only two fragments of the work were published in the literary magazine Severnye Tsvety in 1829 and in the newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta the following year.  After Pushkin’s untimely death, the entire extant text was published by the editors of the journal Sovremennik in 1837, who also gave the fragment its current title. There is no recorded evidence of why Pushkin left Peter the Great’s Negro unfinished and sadly no outline has survived to show how he intended to develop the plot.

The narrative introduces the character Ibrahim, who is loosely based on Pushkin’s maternal great-grandfather, Abram Petrovich Gannibal, a black African who was brought to Russia during the reign of Peter the Great. Pushkin’s interest in history and genealogy help to portray the transformation of Russia at the beginning of 18th century. Several Russian critics have bemoaned the unfinished state of the text, believing that had Peter the Great’s Negro been completed, it would have been one of the greatest novels in the Russian language.

Translated by T. Keane. This story has all 7 chapters featured on this site, containing a total of 12,659 words.