Alexander Pushkin

Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) was a Russian poet, playwright and novelist, the undisputed founder of modern Russian literature. His verse novel Eugene Onegin — the story of Tatyana's love for a bored nobleman — and his prose like Novels, Tales, Journeys shaped the very language in which Russians write; his poetry schooled, his freedom poems shot.

A nobleman of African descent, Pushkin died at thirty-seven in a duel, yet in his short life created Russian literature's golden age: Boris Godunov, The Bronze Horseman, The Queen of Spades and The Captain's Daughter. Russians call him simply "our everything," and his influence on Pushkin's successors from Gogol to Dostoevsky is so total that the whole of modern Russian prose is measured against him.