Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin

The founder of modern Russian literature. Pushkin did for the Russian language what Dante did for Italian — established its written norms and its expressive range. Eugene Onegin (1833), a novel in verse, invented the 'superfluous man' archetype that would haunt Russian fiction for a century. He was killed in a duel at 37, having been driven to it by an aristocratic society that found his African ancestry and political past intolerable.

• Roles: Poet, Novelist, Playwright