Tsvetaeva’s “Blackest of Black” (Naicherneishii) Pushkin

IN HER MEDITATIONS on Pushkin in poetry and prose,¹ Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941) refers to Pushkin’s African heritage and to the blackness she associates with him as determining features of “her” Pushkin and, in turn, of her understanding of what it means to be a poet.² Although she points out that Pushkin did not bear some of the physical characteristics associated with an African heritage—her Pushkin was “light-haired and light-eyed”—Tsvetaeva still considers Pushkin a black poet. Her understanding of what this meant is based on other things (Proza2:250). Tsvetaeva’s assertions of Pushkin’s blackness, her intuitions about the