Art has never liberated a people. Shakespeare’s creative output was supported by the economic and political power of Elizabethan England, which followed England’s stunning victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588. Hamlet didn’t liberate England; England, you might say, liberated Shakespeare and Hamlet. Pushkin emerged from the stability and prosperity produced by Peter the Great, the very same emperor who purchased and enslaved Pushkin’s African great-grandfather, then freed him and made him a general.
