Pursuing Alexander Pushkin is the story of a scholar/poet whose life and work is shaped significantly by the Russian writer, Alexander Pushkin. Robert Coles’s memoir begins with his student years at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania where he discovered Pushkin during the Black Arts Movement in the early 1970s. Coles describes how Pushkin’s African race pride and literary achievements influenced his own work and gave him much-needed inspiration to keep writing. Thereafter, Coles details how Pushkin, despite his Russian background, shares an existential consciousness with African American people. Eventually this led Coles to travel to Russia, numerous times, to trace this connection further. In other words, Pushkin’s experience of otherness and racial difference in Russian high society led him to better understand the suffering of Russian people, mostly serfs, and other oppressed groups. Pushkin’s universalism, his internationally recognized genius, grew from having both an African and Russian heritage.