The Black Russian is Vladimir Alexandrov's biography of Frederick Bruce Thomas, the remarkable son of former slaves in Mississippi who became a millionaire entrepreneur in czarist Moscow and the 'Sultan of Jazz' in Constantinople. Although famous during his lifetime (1872-1928), Thomas was virtually forgotten before Alexandrov's book returned him to public memory.
Speaker(s):
Vladimir Alexandrov has a Ph. D. in comparative literature from Princeton, and taught in the Slavic Department at Harvard before moving to Yale in 1986, where he is B. E. Bensinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures.
Cosponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University.
