Do the Russians accept the fact that Pushkin had an African great-grandfather?
It is not strange for the Russians. We accept it as a fact. Nobody is astonished. Pushkin is a literary genius and in Russia we do not connect it with his ancestry. Pushkin’s name belongs to the whole world. Q: What do you think the Eritreans feel when they look at the statue of Pushkin in Asmara? I think the Eritreans now see in him a poet that has a relation to Eritrea. They see in him the return of his great grandfather, a return to the homeland. You know the birthday of Pushkin is on the 26th of May. Every year now, the Russian Embassy will go to the monument and deposit flowers. This will be a new tradition in Asmara. Q: This is the first statue of Pushkin in Africa. Are there many statues of Pushkin outside of Russia? There are several, but I am not sure how many, maybe 20 or 25 in the world. I think he is the only Russian writer to have statues of him abroad. It is true that we pay tribute to Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and others, but Pushkin remains the greatest. Q: What i
