Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin

Alexander Pushkin created modern Russian literature and died in a duel at thirty-seven. Born in Moscow in 1799 into an old noble family, he was the great-grandson of Abram Gannibal, an African brought to Russia as a child and made a general and engineer by Peter the Great, and he wrote about that ancestry with pride. He was educated at the imperial lycée at Tsarskoye Selo and was recognised as a prodigy before he left it. He was exiled south in 1820 for political epigrams and an ode to liberty, spent years in Kishinev and Odessa, and was then confined to his mother's estate at Mikhailovskoye, where he wrote a great deal because there was nothing else to do. Nicholas I recalled him in 1826 and appointed himself his personal censor, which was a courtesy and a leash. His achievement was linguistic before it was anything else: he fused the church Slavonic of formal writing with the spoken Russian of ordinary life, and the result is the language Russian literature has used since. Eugene Onegin, a novel in verse written over eight years, invented a stanza form and a hero — the bored, gifted, useless nobleman — that Russian fiction worked through for a century. Boris Godunov, The Bronze Horseman and the prose tales followed. He married Natalya Goncharova in 1831. Anonymous letters in 1836 named him a cuckold, and he challenged Georges d'Anthès, a French officer who had married Natalya's sister. He was shot in the abdomen in January 1837 and died two days later.

• Lived: 1799 CE – 1837 CE
• Nationality: Russian
• Roles: poet, writer, playwright