Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799–1837), proud of his noble Russian lineage and his African maternal great-grandfather Abram Gannibal (a general under Peter the Great), was educated at the Imperial Lyceum in Tsarskoye Selo. Banished into southern exile for his defiant liberal verses supporting the Decembrist revolutionaries, Pushkin was placed under personal censorship by Tsar Nicholas I.

Pushkin transformed the Russian language from French court imitation into an instrument of dazzling, effortless poetic genius. In his verse novel Eugene Onegin (written in the unique 14-line 'Onegin stanza'), the tragic drama Boris Godunov, and the haunting equestrian poem The Bronze Horseman, Pushkin laid the foundation for all subsequent Russian literature (Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky). At age thirty-seven, defending the honour of his wife Natalya Goncharova, Pushkin was mortally wounded in a pistol duel in the snowy woods of Saint Petersburg by Georges d'Anthès.