Children of Gannibal reframes Russian literary heritage as a multiethnic project aimed at challenging imperial narratives of racial homogeneity and nationalist unity. Relying on frameworks from race, ethnic, and cultural studies, approaches that are still relatively new to Slavic literary studies, this book-length project critically examines metaphorical and actual representations of mixed-race experience in canonical texts of the nineteenth century.From Pushkin’s attempt to tell the life story of his great-grandfather Gannibal, an enslaved African,to Dostoevsky’s reimaging of Othello’s blackness in The Brothers Karamazov, this study reveals writers’ on going impulses to describe a multiethnic Russian heritage.Finally, this pattern in Russian literary development is put into sustained dialogue with the rise of cultural anthropology and the origins of race as a structure for analysis.