Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky (Russian: Васи́лий Андре́евич Жуко́вский; 9 February [O.S. 29 January] 1783 – 24 April [O.S. 12 April] 1852) was the foremost Russian poet of the 1810s and a leading figure in Russian literature in the first half of the 19th century. He held a high position at the Romanov court as tutor to the Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna and later to her son, the future tsar Alexander II.

Zhukovsky is credited with introducing the Romantic movement into Russia. The main body of his literary output consists of free translations covering an impressively wide range of poets, from ancients like Ferdowsi and Homer to his contemporaries Goethe, Schiller, Byron, and others. Many of his translations have become classics of Russian literature, regarded by some to be better written and more enduring in Russian than in their original languages.

Zhukovsky was born on 9 February [O.S. 29 January] 1783 in the village of Mishenskoe in the Tula Governorate of the Russian Empire. He was the illegitimate son of a landowner named Afanasi Bunin and his Turkish housekeeper Salkha, who had been captured during the siege of Bender in 1770 and brought to Russia as a slave.

The Bunin family had a literary bent and some 90 years later produced the Nobel Prize-winning modernist writer Ivan Bunin. Although raised in the Bunin family circle, the infant poet was formally adopted by a family friend for reasons of social propriety and kept his adopted surname and patronymic for the rest of his life. At the age of fourteen, he was sent to Moscow to be educated at the Moscow University's boarding school for noblemen. There, he was heavily influenced by Freemasonry, as well as by the fashionable literary trends of English Sentimentalism and German Sturm und Drang. He also met Nikolay Karamzin, the preeminent Russian man of letters and the founding editor of the most important literary journal of the day, Vestnik Yevropy (The herald of Europe).

In December 1802, the 19-year-old Zhukovsky published a free translation of Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" in Karamzin's journal. The translation was the first sustained example of his trademark sentimental-melancholy style, which at the time was strikingly original in Russian. It made him so well known among Russian readers that in 1808 Karamzin asked him to take over the editorship of Vestnik Yevropy. The young poet used this position to explore Romantic themes, motifs, and genres—largely by way of translation.

Zhukovsky was among the first Russian writers to cultivate the mystique of the Romantic poet. Much of his original work was inspired by his half-niece Maria "Masha" Protasova, the daughter of one of his several half-sisters, with whom he had a passionate but ultimately Platonic affair. He also came under the influence of Romanticism in the medieval Hansa cities of Dorpat and Revel, now called Tartu and Tallinn, which were then part of the Russian Empire. The Imperial University of Dorpat had been opened as the only German-speaking university in Imperial Russia.

Zhukovsky's rise at court began with Napoleon's invasion of 1812 and with the consequent revilement of French as the favored foreign language of the Russian aristocracy. Like thousands of others, Zhukovsky volunteered for the defense of Moscow and was present at the Battle of Borodino. There he joined the Russian general staff under Field Marshal Kutuzov, who drafted him to work on propaganda and morale. After the war, he settled down temporarily in the village of Dolbino, near Moscow, where in 1815 he experienced a burst of poetic creativity known as the Dolbino Autumn. His work in this period attracted the attention of Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna, the German-born wife of Grand Duke Nicholas, the future Tsar Nicholas I. Alexandra invited Zhukovsky to Saint Petersburg to be her personal Russian tutor. Many of Zhukovsky's best translations from German, including almost all of his translations of Goethe, were made as practical language exercises for Alexandra.

Zhukovsky's pedagogical career removed him in some respects from the forefront of Russian literary life, while at the same time positioning him to become one of the most powerful intellectuals in Russia. Among his first acts on moving to Saint Petersburg was to establish the jocular Arzamas literary society in order to promote Karamzin's European-oriented, anti-classicist aesthetics. Members of the Arzamas included the teenage Alexander Pushkin, who rapidly emerged as his poetic heir apparent. Indeed, by the early 1820s, Pushkin had upstaged Zhukovsky in terms of the originality and brilliance of his work—even in Zhukovsky's own estimation. Yet the two remained lifelong friends, with the older poet acting as a literary mentor and protector at court.