Pushkin, Alexander Sergeyevich 1799-1837
Russian poet and writer

Pushkin was born in Moscow into an illustrious family. He attended the Lyceum at Tsarskoe Selo near St Petersburg, where his talent for poetry first emerged. In 1817 he entered government service, but because of his liberalism he was exiled in 1820 to the south. In 1824 he was dismissed and confined to his estate near Pskov, and did not return to Moscow until after the accession of Nicholas I. He married Natalia Goncharova in 1832, whose beauty attracted Baron Georges D'Anth�s, a French Royalist in the Russian service. Pushkin challenged him to a duel and was mortally wounded.

Regarded as Russia's greatest poet, he had his first success was the romantic poem Ruslan and Lyudmilla (1820), followed by The Prisoner of the Caucasus (1822), Fountain of Bakhchisarai (1826), Tzigani (1827), and his masterpiece, Eugene Onegin (1828), a sophisticated novel in verse that was much imitated but never rivalled. Prolific for one whose life was so short, he also wrote lyric poems, essays, the blank verse historical drama Boris Godunov (1825), and, in 1830, the four 'Little Tragedies': 'Mozart and Salieri', 'The Covetous Knight', 'The Stone Guest' and 'The Feast during the Plague'.

Bibliography: W Vickers, Pushkin (1970); D Magarshak, Pushkin: A Biography (1967); B Tomashevsky, Alexander Pushkin (1956-61).