Alexander Pushkin

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (6 June [O.S. 26 May] 1799 – 10 February [O.S. 29 January] 1837) was a Russian poet, playwright, and novelist of the Romantic era. He is considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet, as well as the founder of modern Russian literature.

Pushkin was born into the Russian nobility in Moscow. His father, Sergey Lvovich Pushkin, belonged to an old noble family. One of his maternal great-grandfathers was Abram Petrovich Gannibal, a nobleman of African origin who was kidnapped from his homeland by the Ottomans, then freed by the Russian Emperor and raised in the Emperor's court household as his godson.

He published his first poem at the age of 15, and was widely recognized by the literary establishment by the time of his graduation from the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum. Upon graduation from the Lycée, Pushkin recited his controversial poem "Ode to Liberty", one of several that led to his exile by Emperor Alexander I. While under strict surveillance by the Emperor's political police and unable to publish, Pushkin wrote his most famous play, Boris Godunov. His novel in verse Eugene Onegin was serialized between 1825 and 1832. Pushkin was fatally wounded in a duel with his wife's alleged lover (her sister's husband), Georges-Charles de Heeckeren d'Anthès, also known as Dantes-Gekkern, a French officer serving with the Chevalier Guard Regiment.

Pushkin's father, Sergei Lvovich Pushkin (1767–1848), was descended from a distinguished family of the Russian nobility that traced its ancestry back to the 12th century. Pushkin's mother, Nadezhda (Nadya) Ossipovna Gannibal (1775–1836), was descended through her paternal grandmother from German and Scandinavian nobility. She was the daughter of Ossip Abramovich Gannibal (1744–1807) and his wife, Maria Alekseyevna Pushkina (1745–1818).

Ossip Abramovich Gannibal's father, Pushkin's great-grandfather, was Abram Petrovich Gannibal (1696–1781), an African page kidnapped and taken to Constantinople as a gift for the Ottoman Sultan and later transferred to Russia as a gift for Peter the Great. Abram wrote in a letter to Empress Elizabeth, Peter the Great's daughter, that Gannibal was from the town of "Lagon", largely on the basis of a mythical biography by Gannibal's son-in-law Rotkirch.

Vladimir Nabokov, when researching Eugene Onegin, cast serious doubt on this origin theory. Later research by the scholars Dieudonné Gnammankou and Hugh Barnes eventually conclusively established that Gannibal was instead born in Central Africa, in an area bordering Lake Chad in modern-day Cameroon. After education in France as a military engineer, Gannibal became governor of Reval and eventually Général en Chief (the third most senior army rank) in charge of the building of sea forts and canals in Russia.

Born in Moscow, Pushkin was entrusted to nursemaids and French tutors, and spoke mostly French until the age of ten. He became acquainted with the Russian language through communication with household serfs and his nanny, Arina Rodionovna, whom he loved dearly and to whom he was more attached than to his own mother.

He published his first poem at the age of 15. When he finished school, as part of the first graduating class of the prestigious Imperial Lyceum in Tsarskoye Selo, near Saint Petersburg, his talent was already widely recognized on the Russian literary scene. At the Lyceum, he was a student of David Mara, known in Russia as David de Boudry [fr], a younger brother of French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat. After school, Pushkin plunged into the vibrant and raucous intellectual youth culture of St. Petersburg, which was then the capital of the Russian Empire. In 1820, he published his first long poem, Ruslan and Ludmila, with much controversy about its subject and style.