The Stolen Prince: Gannibal, Adopted Son of Peter the Great, Great-Grandfather of Alexander Pushkin and Europe's First Black Intellectual

In this disappointing biography, Russian scholar and journalist Barnes claims to seek the truth behind the story of Alexander Pushkin's black great-grandfather, Abram Petrovich Gannibal (1696–1781), who was born a slave, raised as a Russian prince and employed by Peter the Great as a military engineer, diplomat and spy. Pushkin's account of his elusive ancestor mutated into an unfinished novel, The Negro of Peter the Great . Traveling to the Logone Delta in Chad, Barnes impressively sleuths Gannibal's likely origins. He entertains with his description of 18th-century Constantinople, where the boy Gannibal was taken as a slave to work as a page in the sultan's harem. But the author becomes pedantic when weighing the evidence for Gannibal's removal by Russian ambassadors, supplying far too much information on Russian foreign emissaries and court politics. Indeed, throughout the biography we periodically lose sight of Gannibal altogether. Despite meticulously tracing his subject's career (even visiting a ruin of one of Gannibal's fortifications), evoking the racism of the Enlightenment and detailing the strife of Gannibal's first, singularly unsuccessful marriage, this biography lacks a historical purpose or thesis, hovering tentatively around a cluster of facts. 16 pages of b&w photos. (June 6)