Book Event - Pursuing Alexander Pushkin, A Memoir

PURSUING ALEXANDER PUSHKIN, A MEMOIR

Pursuing Alexander Pushkin is the story of a scholar/poet whose life and work was 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.

Coles’s book is fundamentally a personal story. Through poems, diary entries, and first- person narrative, he spans over forty years of his life to recount how his Pushkin pursuit changed from initial self-discovery to developing relationships with others —scholars, filmmakers, and poets—in various…