J. THOMAS SH AW

Puškin on His African Heritage

Publications during His Lifetime

Puškin was proud of both sides of his family genealogy. At the same time, he was sensitive about each of them. Any consideration of his African heritage and his attitude toward it must be undertaken in the context of his Russian heritage and his attitude toward it. This essay will focus on the direct reflection of Puškin’s African ancestry in works published during his lifetime, particularly those he himself completed and published (or wished to publish). It would require an extensive monograph to examine with any adequacy all aspects of the relationship of Puškin to his African heritage— how that ancestry affected him as man and writer. That would have to include not only his public life as writer and man of society, but his private life as well; it would need to include consideration of works he began but did not complete, the indirect effects of that heritage on his work and personality, and the testimony of contemporaries to these points in such things as letters and memoir literature. Here we shall concentrate on what Puškin said about his African ancestry for the perusal of the reading public of his day and the effects of these publications on his own career. I have found no previous study that has approached the question from this angle.

There has been much study of Puškin’s ancestry on both sides of his family, and recently there has been great interest in his African greatgrandfather and his descendants in Russia.¹ Puškin was particularly proud of Abram Petrovič Gannibal (or Annibal), as he came to be known, and one of his sons, Ivan Gannibal. Abram Gannibal was obtained for Peter the Great in Constantinople; he became godson, ward, and favorite of Peter, who took Gannibal on expeditions with him and sent him to France for a time. However, Peter the Great died suddenly in 1725, not long after Gannibal’s return from France. After that, Gannibal was out of favor until Peter’s daughter Elisabeth came to the throne in 1741. He was recalled to active duty in the army and promoted to the rank of general. Under the system set up by Peter the Great, his rank gave him and his family the status of members of the hereditary Russian nobility. However, Gannibal’s appeal for the recognition of noble status was made on the basis of his father’s being a local ruler in Africa. No action was ever taken on this petition. Abram’s son Ivan also eventually became a full general in the army, and served with distinction, especially during the Greek Archipelago Campaign of 1770, when, as the commander of a landing party, he defeated Turkish forces on the Greek mainland at Navarino; he was in charge of fire control in the naval battle of Chesma in the same year. Ivan Gannibal acted as sponsor of Puškin’s mother at her social debut, which led to her marriage to Puškin’s father.

Any treatment of Puškin’s African heritage with regard to both his published works and his life must concern itself also with terminology and the overtones of words used in Russia at the time. The relevant terms are Negro (for Russian negr, French nègre), blackamoor (for arap), and mulatto (mulat, mulatka). Puškin himself, in a letter written during the last year or so of his life, clearly presented his view of the difference between the homonyms arap and arab, emphasizing an orthographic distinction that is not always observed in memoirs about him.

Neither Puškin (as the above passage shows) nor other Russians of his time made any distinction between negr and arap, that is, between blacks from different parts of Africa. Later on, ethnographers classified northern Africans as “Hamitic” and “Caucasoid,” and Africans south of the Sahara as “Negroid.” This distinction has usually been made in studies of Puškin since D. I. Anučin’s “anthropological study” (1899)—both in Russia and abroad (for example, in Simmons 1937, Lotman 1983, Fejnberg 1983). By arap or negr or mulat(ka) Puškin included all black Africans. When he spoke of “my brethren the Negroes,”³ he included not only blacks from Egypt or Tunis but also the black slaves then in the New World (that is, blacks from south of the Sahara, now classified as Negroid, as well as the blacks now considered Caucasoid).

It should be emphasized that there is nothing to indicate that Puškin’s having a black ancestor hindered his acceptance as a Russian man of letters. On the contrary, when his first Romantic verse tale, The Prisoner of the Caucasus, appeared in 1822, his publisher, N. I. Gnedič, obviously thought it would help sales to have a frontispiece emphasizing Puškin’s black heritage; Gnedič provided such a lithograph without consulting the author.⁴ Furthermore, there is no evidence that Puškin’s African ancestry hindered his acceptance in Russian society, though neither his father’s nor his mother’s heritage gave him immediate entry to the highest circles of it. Curiously enough, it was not the Puškin (or the Gannibal) family connections, or Puškin’s genius as a writer, that, after his marriage, resulted in his having access to the “great world around the throne,” but rather his wife’s beauty and her family connections.

No work of Puškin’s deals exclusively with his African ancestry. Mentions of, or allusions to, that ancestry always occur in a larger context; they form only passages or parts of longer works, even when the entire work is a short lyric. They are listed in Table I, along with date of composition, of publication, and of republication, if any, during his lifetime. There are ten of them, five in verse and five in prose. The first was published in 1825, and between 1828 and 1831, all that were published or widely circulated during his lifetime either appeared for the first time or were republished. This time of concentrated publication includes Puškin’s most productive literary period, and it coincides with his period of courtship with a view to marriage and the first year of his married life.

TABLE 1

The first two that Puškin published appeared in the first chapter of his novel in verse, Evgenij Onegin (Eugene Onegin): he mentions his African ancestry specifically both in the verse and in a rather lengthy note in prose. Four individual lyrics allude to his African ancestry.⁵ Puškin published separately two individual chapters of his uncompleted novel The Blackamoor of Peter the Great about his black great-grandfather (though he is not explicitly named in the part Puškin himself published). Puškin’s African heritage may be considered to be implied in two notes in which he mentions Othello, the most famous Moor in literature: one of them was in the Note on Poltava, the other in his “Table-Talk”; the second of these was written during the last year or so of his life, and he did not live to see it in print. Both sides of Puškin’s ancestry are dealt with in a lyric, “My Genealogy,” which was not printed but was widely circulated in handwritten copies.⁶

Thus publication and/or republication of all of Puškin’s works that deal with his African heritage and appeared in print during his lifetime was concentrated in the years 1828-31: every one of them was published or republished during these years. And the wide circulation of “My Genealogy” constituted an obviously deliberate kind of publication.

1. EVGENIJ ONEGIN, CHAPTER I, STANZA 50, AND NOTE

The most important of Puškin’s publications on the subject of his African heritage during his lifetime is part of a “flight of the imagination” at the end of the first chapter of Evgenij Onegin. This chapter appeared as a separate publication early in 1825. At the time of its writing (1823), Puškin was in exile in Kišinev and then Odessa, under the guise of a transfer in government service, because of “liberal” (Russians say “revolutionary”) poems. When he published it, he had been dismissed from the service and was in open exile and disgrace (v opale) on his mother’s estate of Mixajlovskoe. Under the censorship of the time, direct mention of his exile was impossible in print, and the notion of his actually “fleeing” from Russia could not have been published. One could, however, present a poetic flight of the imagination. In the Onegin passage, the first such “poetic flight” is to Italy (EO.I.49). The second, in the following stanza, is to “my Africa.” This second “flight of the imagination” is so important and relevant that it should be quoted, and the note he appended to it as well:

The point of view expressed here is paradoxically and typically Puškinian: he will take a “free flight” from the Russian shore where the sea is “hostile to me,” to the friendly southern billows under the skies of “my Africa.” However, once there, he will sigh for Russia. The important themes include “poetic flight” (for one whose actual fleeing would have constituted a crime), travel to the south, memory of Russia from afar (from south to north), and “my Africa.”

In a long footnote Puškin explained the term “my Africa” and gave information about his great-grandfather. During his lifetime, he published the stanza four times, with no changes in the verse. In the 1829 reprint of the first chapter, the appended note remained almost identical in form to that published in 1825. However, in the last two reprintings of the first chapter (when all the chapters of the novel were published together, in 1833 and 1837), the note was sharply cut. Here we shall focus on the long form of it.

Here follows my translation of the note as it originally appeared (the only changes in 1829 are the transposition of the last two paragraphs and the incorporation of the square-bracketed note into the text). It is curious that he here cites his great-grandfather’s surname as “Annibal,” instead of the form “Gannibal,” which he uses later.

Puškin had written the stanza in Odessa in fall 1823. The note was written in fall 1824 in Mixajlovskoe, the estate his mother had inherited from his great-grandfather’s property, where his great-grandfather had lived in “deep old age,” still remembering his childhood in Africa.

Other points which seem not to have been sufficiently emphasized hitherto are the themes (1) of exile under the guise of transfer in the service, and (2) of Gannibal’s voluntarily breaking exile to return to Russia proper. In the Onegin passage in verse, Puškin, utilizing a “poetic flight” of the imagination, is hinting at voluntarily breaking that kind of exile in order to flee to “my Africa.”

It is worth emphasizing that Puškin’s biographical note including information about his great-grandfather’s return without permission from Siberia to St. Petersburg was not only published in late March 1825, six months before the Decembrist Uprising, but also reprinted in 1829, four years after it.

2. “To JAZYKOV”

Puškin’s friendly poetic epistle “To Jazykov” (“K Jazykovu”), a fellow poet, was written in September 1824, some months after the Onegin passage, and a month or so before he wrote the accompanying prose note. Part of the poem was published in 1830, as “To Jazykov (Fragment of a Poem),” ending with Puškin’s invitation to his fellow poet to visit him at Mixajlovskoe, which the poem alludes to directly as having formerly been part of the estates of his great-grandfather Abram Gannibal. The location and year of composition were both stated explicitly: Mixajlovskoe, 1824. Here follows the relevant part of the poem in the form in which Puškin published it twice.

In the verse passage in Eugene Onegin, Puškin imagined himself in “my Africa” remembering Russia—in memories going from south to north. In “To Jazykov,” he imagines his great-grandfather in Russia, remembering “his Africa,” with memories going from north to south.⁷

In the passage, Puškin uses the specific term rab, literally “slave,” in speaking of his great-grandfather. Under the autocracy in Russia, particularly under Peter the Great, anyone could be treated as a “slave.” One of the burning questions in Puškin’s time was that of serfdom: the word slave could not then be applied in print to a serf except by the serf himself; Puškin’s reference in print to his great-grandfather as rab meant that he was not really a slave. One way of alluding to serfdom as slavery was to speak of the condition of blacks elsewhere, as Puškin himself did in 1836 (review of the autobiography of an American, John Tanner; see Shaw 1966). One may compare this use of rab as servant to the Tsar to the term xolop, xolopij, which is used in the meaning “vassal, vassal’s,” as a boyar applies it himself with regard to Peter the Great in The Blackamoor of Peter the Great (PSS VIII: 26; in Chapter V, which Puškin did not publish): in modern Russian, the word xolop is pejorative and means something like “flunky.” As we shall see, Puškin’s speaking of his great-grandfather’s coming from Africa, and his term rab (slave) provided the journalist Bulgarin with a bludgeon with which to beat him.

3. CHAPTERS FROM THE BLACKAMOOR OF PETER THE GREAT

All posthumous editions of Puškin’s works include in the prose fiction all he wrote of his uncompleted historical novel, called by editors The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, a fictional story based on the life of Abram Gannibal. Puškin wrote six chapters in 1827 and the beginning of a seventh in early 1828, before dropping it. He himself published only parts of two chapters of this work, one in 1828 and the other in 1830, and republished both in 1834. In the part Puškin chose to publish, little is explicitly about his great-grandfather, though more is implied.

The first of these chapters to be published came out under the title “Chapter IV from a Historical Novel.” Gavrila Afanas’evič (his surname is not given in the passage), the head of the “old Russian” family, compares one Kunfavorably with the “Tsar’s blackamoor”: “of all the young people educated abroad (God forgive me), the Tsar’s blackamoor is the one that most resembles a man” (Debreczeny 1983a: 29; PSS VIII: 22). To anyone who had read the note to the first chapter of Onegin, the term “Tsar’s blackamoor” might have revealed that G- (as he was called in the “Chapter” as it was published and republished during Puškin’s lifetime [see PSS VIII: 533]) was Gannibal—though in the Onegin note he was called “ An-nibal.”

The other passage Puškin published, actually part of the preceding Chapter III in the manuscript, was called “An Assembly at the Time of Peter I.” Here the Frenchified K- is punished for unknowingly breaking the “rule” at Peter’s “Assembly” that the lady ask the gentleman to dance the minuet, and is made to suffer the punishment allotted for it. Then the young lady, at her father’s behest, asks G- to dance.

The focus of the parts of the novel Puškin published is not at all on G- (Gannibal), but on the manners and mores of the time, including Peter the Great’s personal manners and his method of operating in the state, his construction of St. Petersburg, and G-’s setting to work to help Peter in the undertaking.

4. “To DAWE, ESQ.”

In the late 1820s two more Puškin lyrics were published that directly concern his African ancestry, though they do not mention specifically his great-grandfather. The first was a little poem addressed to a portrait painter, with title in English: “To Dawe, Esq.” The portrait (if one was made) has not survived. The poem was written and published in 1828 (and republished in 1829, in the first volume of Puškin’s collected poetry [Stixotvorenija]). The first stanza reads as follows:

The remainder of the poem suggests that the artist should, instead, dedicate his talents to painting a beautiful woman such as O- (identified after Puškin’s death as Anna Olenina, whom Puškin was courting at the time; his suit was rejected). The contrast of the poem is between O-’s beauty and the implied lack of beauty of his own “blackamoor profile.”⁸ The poetpersona suggests himself as not presenting the possibility of being converted into a handsome Faust, so that Mephistopheles would “hiss him off the stage.”

5. “To JUR’EV”

In 1829, another poem including the theme of Puškin’s African ancestry appeared in print—this one without his approval and against his wishes. It includes specific mention of black ancestry, and “ugliness” is an explicit theme. This poem was written in 1820 in a friendly poetic epistle (“To Jur’ev”). It describes a handsome man and his exploits with the ladies, and ends with comment in the first person about the poet-persona himself:

The relevant themes here are, in my literal translation, “ugly descendant of Negroes,” and how young beautiful women are pleased “with the shameless frenzy of [his] desires” like a nymph involuntarily aroused by watching a faun while remaining unseen. We now consider the poem a delightfully sensuous and sensual “imitation of the ancients” embodying the theme of the nymph and the faun. Indeed, upon reading it shortly after it was written, Puškin’s older contemporary Batjuskov—the poet whose sensuous poems “From the Greek Anthology” (published earlier in the same year, 1820) led immediately to the popularity of that genre in Russia—is said to have remarked: “How that young devil has learned to write.”

We have noted that Puškin objected to the publication of this poem; he never published it himself. This is in sharp contrast to another lyric written in the same year, “The Nereid.” The essential difference between the poems “To Jur’ev” and “The Nereid”—another “imitation of the ancients” that Puškin published and republished—is the conspicuous presence in the friendly epistle of the poet-persona directly identifiable as the author himself. One of the most complex problems with regard to Puškin has to do with the type and amount of self-revelation, or apparent self-revelation, he might allow to be reflected in a poem he would publish.⁹

6. THE THEME OF OTHELLO

It is not surprising that the theme of Othello the Moor would be in Puškin’s consciousness. His friend Vigel’ in his Memoirs says that while in Odessa (sometime in 1823-24) he “once told Puškin jokingly that by his African extraction I would like to compare him with Othello, and [Aleksandr N.] Raevskij with Othello’s unfaithful friend Iago.” He added that Puškin “only laughed” (Vacuro 1974 I: 226). Thus, at least from 1823-24 on, Puškin was aware of the literary theme of jealousy in relation to the love of a blackamoor and a white.

However, Puškin mentioned Othello only once—briefly—in the publications that appeared during his lifetime; this mention is contained in “Fragment from a Manuscript of Puškin’s (Poltava),” a prose note written in 1830 and published in 1831 in such manner as to suggest that publication was not by him or at his wish. In response to those who objected that it was “unreasonable” for young Marija to fall in love with old Mazepa in Poltava, Puškin lists a number of myths and stories not “devoid of poetry,” and specifically includes the love of Desdemona for Othello, “that old Negro who captivated her with stories of his wanderings and battles” (PSS XI: 164).¹⁰

The theme of Othello and jealousy is explicit in one of his pieces of “Table-Talk” (title in English) which he wrote in 1835-36, the last year or so of his life, and planned to publish: “Othello is not by nature jealous—on the contrary, he is trusting. Voltaire understood that, and developing Shakespeare’s creation in his imitation, he placed in Orosmane’s mouth the following verse: ‘I am not at all jealous . . . If ever I were! . . . ’ ” (PSS XII: 157). The man who wrote this obviously did not think of himself as having a jealous disposition, though he might be capable of becoming jealous with cause; in that event, “African passion” might be manifested.

7. “MY GENEALOGY”

The next important published document with regard to Puškin’s African heritage was neither written nor published by him; it was an attack on Puškin in the form of a transparent “foreign anecdote” published by Faddej Bulgarin, a Pole who fought with the French against the Russians in 1812 and then went over to the side of the Russians. Puškin made a rejoinder to that attack in his poem “My Genealogy.”

Bulgarin is the most unsavory figure in Russian nineteenth-century literary life, and publishing this anecdote was perhaps the most unsavory deed of all.¹¹ According to his partner Nikolaj Greč, in memoirs written many years later, Bulgarin arbitrarily discharged an assistant, Orest Somov, and then when Somov began to work on Baron Del’vig’s publications, the almanac Northern Flowers and the Literary Gazette, Bulgarin launched attacks on authors whose works appeared in them as the “literary aristocracy.” Bulgarin’s technique was to attack, often utilizing a pseudonym, in crude, coarse, but indirect fashion, in such manner that an effective answer would be difficult or impossible, but so as to get around the law against publishing a “personality” without that “personality’s” consent. In 1830, Bulgarin attacked Puškin twice in “foreign anecdotes.” The second of these refers transparently to Puškin’s African ancestry. Here follows Bulgarin’s anecdote (published in August 1830).¹²

We have seen that Puškin “acknowledged connection” with his “Negro” maternal great-grandfather in several works. Although Bulgarin does not use the word slave, the mention of purchase and possession of the “ancestor” clearly implies slavery, and alludes to Puškin’s use of the word rab (literally “slave”) in the poetic epistle “To Jazykov.” The anecdote stops with the supposed initial status of the “Poet’s” original black ancestor— nothing is said of his later career or accomplishments. What to Puškin was worst was bringing his mother into the affair; the mention in the anecdote of a Poet in Spanish America, an “offspring of a Mulatto man or woman,” was an obvious allusion to his mother’s being known as the “beautiful Creole.”

Puškin was stung to the quick by Bulgarin’s anecdote. The question was how to respond. Puškin’s public rejoinder¹³ was a two-part poem, “My Genealogy,” which he at first proposed to publish but instead allowed to circulate in manuscript—so widely that, like some of his early poems, this amounted to a kind of “public-ation” (see PSS III: 1225-30, where sixty-four such surviving manuscript copies are described). The first part of the poem was a response to Bulgarin’s previous attacks on “aristocratic authors”: it compares the Puškin family genealogy with that of “new” families that became prominent in the eighteenth century. The part of the poem that is directly relevant to this essay—that dealing with Puškin’s heritage on his mother’s side—is called in it a “post-script”:

The poem does not respond to the supposition that Gannibal was “bought” but has a pointed rejoinder with regard to the themes of “skipper” (Peter the Great), “purchase” (and “purchasable”), and “slave.” The poet-persona proudly responds that “that skipper was accessible to [my] granddad, and the blackamoor purchased cheaply grew up diligent, unpurchasable, a confidant to the tsar, and not a slave.” Then, with regard to Abram Gannibal’s son Ivan, it speaks of two feats in 1770: his being in charge of fire control in the Russian fleet that destroyed the Turkish fleet in Chesma Bay off the coast of Turkey, and his commanding Russian troops that landed and captured the important Turkish fortress on the Greek mainland at Navarino, for the first time (three years before the poem was written, Navarino had been conquered again by Allied forces in the Greek War for Independence).

In November 1831, Puškin sent a copy of the poem, and an explanation of its being circulated, to Count Benkendorf, to be shown to Nicholas I. The result is a rare example of a poet’s explanation and a sovereign’s response. Both deserve quoting. They are as follows:

Here follows the response (the original is in French) in Nicholas I’s hand:

Nicholas did not consider Puškin’s response “moderate,” whatever the provocation, and he was completely right about how others would look at the poem.

Thus Puškin reacted sharply to “Figljarin’s” alluding to the initial status in Russia of his black ancestor rather than his accomplishments for the Russian state. In his letter to Benkendorf, Puškin shows how offensive it was to him that that his mother (a “mulatto woman”) was brought into literary polemics (a feuilleton). The nature of Puškin’s relationships with both parents, and especially his mother, was such that he would have objected at any time if an allusion to her were brought into a literary struggle; irrespective of Puškin’s own relationship to his parents or his mother, strife in the presence of, or involving, a lady was unconscionable to him. The letter to Benkendorf clearly implies that Puškin would have challenged Bulgarin to a duel (in spite of the illegality of dueling at the time) if Bulgarin had belonged to Puškin’s social class. However, Puškin was trapped: the “nobility around the throne” never forgave him for the first part of the poem, in which he ironically calls himself, a descendant of boyars, a “bourgeois,” in contrast to the “new high nobility”—descendants of cooks, flunkies, foreign renegades, and adventurers. Much of the pain and difficulty of Puškin’s final years can be attributed to this poem— to what provoked it and to Puškin’s response.

Thus Puškin’s black ancestry was directly involved in the personalliterary-social struggle with which he began the final stage of his life. Puškin did not cease to be proud of his black great-grandfather and great-uncle. His early comments about them are linked with feelings of exoticism, as well as with pride in their accomplishments in Russia. He reprinted the statements calling attention to exoticism; the comments written later emphasize his pride in their feats in their adopted land.

After 1831, Puškin published no new works dealing directly with his African heritage, though he continued to be interested in utilizing the theme in biographical or fictional works. He republished all the items we have dealt with that he was clearly responsible for publishing in the first place—that is, all those we have discussed except the poem “To Jur’ev” and the Note on Poltava. The only changes in these republications were in the long prose note about his great-grandfather in Chapter I of Onegin. When all the chapters of the novel in verse were combined in one book in 1833, the long note was replaced by the terse comment “The author, on his mother’s side, is of African descent.” When the entire novel was republished in early 1837, the note was changed again, to read: “See the first edition of Evgenij Onegin.” The “first edition” of Onegin was the individual chapters published as separate books; Chapter I was so published in 1825.

Puškin’s war with Bulgarin ended with a cease-fire—though not as a consequence of “My Genealogy.” What proved effective was the tactic Bulgarin had employed—the use of a pseudonymous “author.” Puškin succeeded in reducing Bulgarin to silence by publishing two articles signed “Feofilakt Kosičkin”—a persona with character, views, and style all quite different from Puškin’s. The second “Kosickin” article in devastating fashion “revealed” detailed information about the heredity and career of “Figljarin,” beginning with his birth in a “kennel.”

Perhaps nothing so clearly shows the paradoxical relationship between the public and the private question of Puškin and his African heritage as Puškin’s diametrically opposed reactions to the public treatment of that heredity by Bulgarin, which resulted in “My Genealogy,” and to a private or personal treatment of that heritage only a month after he wrote the above-cited letter to Benkendorf. The personal story has to do with a New Year’s gift and accompanying greeting sent by Pavel Naščokin, perhaps Puškin’s dearest friend in his final years. Naščokin, a man of the ancient high Russian nobility, was well acquainted with Puškin’s difficulty with Bulgarin; indeed, he was the one who directly provided Puškin with the biographical materials that effectively silenced Bulgarin in the second of the “Feofilakt Kosickin” articles.¹⁴ Naščokin’s gift was a bronze inkstand with a statuette of a black man leaning on an anchor and standing in front of two bales of cotton—two inkwells. In the letter accompanying the gift, Naščokin said: “I am sending you your ancestor with inkwells that open, and that reveal him to be a farsighted person (a double vue)” (Puškin PSS XIV: 250).

Puškin was obviously delighted with the gift, which suggests that his “farsighted” black ancestor had anticipated (by the inkwells) that a descendant of his would be a writer: so that not only did Puškin look backward with pride at his black great-grandfather, but that person looked forward to him. The answer to Bulgarin’s rhetorical question, who could have predicted in the time of Peter the Great’s blackamoor that a descendant would be a writer, was Gannibal himself. Upon receiving the gift, Puškin wrote to thank Naščokin “for the blackamoor,” and he kept it on his working desk the rest of his life.

The lineage of most of the important ninteenth-century Russian authors includes a mixture of non-Russian and Russian blood—not only Puškin but Žukovskij, Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoevskij, Tolstoj, and others. However, Puškin is the only important Russian author known to have African heritage. Whatever his ancestry, there has never really been any question to the Russians that Puškin is their own most important author and cultural figure. To us, Puškin is the most European and cosmopolitan of Russian authors. To Russians, he is, paradoxically, the most “Russian” of authors, but at the same time not only one who had African heritage and temperament, but also one whose African temperament is reflected in his literary works and contributes to their nature. This essay has focused on the theme of Puškin and his African heritage in works published during his lifetime. How his “African temperament” affected his literary works beyond the explicit use of the theme is a subject for further investigation—and speculation.