Alexander Pushkin

Pushkin Alexander Sergeyevich was a Russian poet, playwright, and prose writer who laid the foundations of Russian realist literature, a critic and theorist of literature, historian, and publicist; one of the most authoritative literary figures of the first third of the 19th century.

He was born on June 6 (May 26, Old Style), 1799, in Moscow, into a poor noble family that nevertheless traced its ancestry to boyars from almost the time of Alexander Nevsky and to the “tsar’s Moor,” Abram Petrovich Gannibal. In the poet’s childhood, his uncle Vasily Lvovich Pushkin, who knew several languages, was acquainted with poets, and was himself engaged in literary pursuits, had a major influence on him. Little Alexander was brought up by French tutors; he learned to read early and began writing poetry in childhood, though in French; he spent the summer months at his grandmother’s estate near Moscow. On October 19, 1811, the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum opened, and Alexander Pushkin became one of its first pupils. The six Lyceum years profoundly influenced him: he developed as a poet, as evidenced by the highly praised poem “Remembrance in Tsarskoye Selo” and his participation in the literary circle “Arzamas” — and the atmosphere of free thought and revolutionary ideas largely determined the civic stance later taken by many Lyceum students, including Pushkin himself.

After graduating from the Lyceum in 1817, Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was appointed to the College of Foreign Affairs. However, bureaucratic service interested the poet little, and he plunged into the lively life of St. Petersburg, joined the literary and theatrical society “The Green Lamp,” and wrote poems imbued with ideals of freedom and sharp epigrams. Pushkin’s greatest poetic work was the poem “Ruslan and Ludmila,” published in 1820 and provoking fierce controversy. His attacks on those in power did not go unnoticed, and in May 1820, under the guise of an official transfer, the poet was in effect exiled from the capital. Pushkin went to the Caucasus, then to Crimea, lived in Chisinau and Odessa, and met future Decembrists. In the “southern” period of his творчество, Pushkin