If I’m sneaky, or manipulative, so be it. I’ve found that ordering a book through my library, usually adds a book of my choosing to their collection. If not, I buy it and donate it. Either way, this book will be in our library, here in Kentucky.

Quainoo's book review reminded me of another book review, I recently read about CHOSSA.

This one, is the true story of Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799 – 1837), who is considered the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. Pushkin, it is often claimed, invented the Russian literary language itself. From the book review...

The First Russian

An unfinished novel about his African great-grandfather provides the best sense of how Pushkin considered his own Blackness.

“That many readers of Pushkin remain unaware of his African roots is not an accident, and in fact was part of a concerted effort to ensure that Russia’s great national poet, whose talents were to redeem a country long viewed in the West as backward and incapable of literary genius, was as Russian as possible.

In 1899, in an article to mark the centennial of Pushkin’s birth, the journal Moscow News proclaimed: “With his works, he showed that the Russian people are not one of those peoples of the East which strives only to adopt the latest fruits of European civilization.” That year, all of Russia was lit up with celebrations of the poet. Streets were renamed in his honor. Schoolchildren were given candy bars with his face on the wrapper. There was even a macabre board game based on the poet’s death for sale: Pushkin’s Duel.

The ethnographer Dmitry Anuchin wrote a special report, “Pushkin: An Anthropological Sketch.” Conscious of Western racial hierarchies, Anuchin actively sought to distance Pushkin’s Africanness from his Blackness.”

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/08/18/the-first-russian-peter-the-greats-african-pushkin/