Pushkin, The Black Slave Poet

My daughter and I spent a full day in the Southbank Center's Poetry Event. Colorful poets sung about their dreams, which were what they imagined the London cultured public would want them to dream: Universal Peace, Love, No Borders, etc. After all, they had to thank the Brits that invited them to London all expenses included. Not one original insight, not one arresting image.


There was also a panel of established poets discussing poetry. They were most Politically Correct, longing for a world without gender, race, class (Marxism is in fashion again), borders, Trump. One elderly Jewish poetess talked about underground poets of Russia, all of them White and none a penniless refugee... At some point she grasped the crowd's indifference/dislike, and changed the focus to Pushkin, who - she emphasized - was AN AFRICAN, descendant of an AFRICAN SLAVE, therefore glatt kosher for the Southbank communists present. How come that Pushkin (pic) was a Black Slave poet? His Grandfather had been born somewhere in Africa and became a general in the Czarist army, married into the Russian high aristocracy. She needed a PC poet and the nearest she found was Pushkin. BTW Pushkin owned lands with hundreds of slave mujiks.

Notwithstanding the reigning hypocrisy, Pushkin is a great poet and we enjoyed London very much.