Alexander Pushkin

Alexander Pushkin was born in Moscow in 1799 into an old noble family; his great-grandfather was Hannibal, an African adopted by Peter the Great. While still at the Lyceum at Tsarskoye Selo he astonished the old poet Derzhavin with his verse. After leaving school he joined the foreign ministry, but for poems that celebrated freedom and mocked autocracy he was exiled for six years to southern Russia and his mother's estate. After the failure of the Decembrist rising the new Tsar Nicholas I summoned him and appointed himself Pushkin's personal censor. At thirty-one he married Natalia Goncharova, the most beautiful woman in Moscow; later, when the French émigré d'Anthès paid court to his wife and gossip spread, Pushkin fought a duel with him, was mortally wounded and died two days later, at only thirty-seven. He is called 'the sun of Russian poetry' and the founder of the modern Russian literary language.