Biography
of Pushkin.
Famous
Russian's poet A. Pushkin was born in Moscow on May 26, 1799 (Old
Style) into on ancient but impoverished family of the nobility.
Pushkin's mother, nee Hannibal, was a descendant of Abraham
Hannibal, an Ethiopian who served under Peter the Great as
Engineer, General. Pushkin studied at the Tsarskoye Selo Lycee
from 1811 to 1817 and received the best education available in
Russia at the time. His first poems were printed in 1814 and by
1820 Pushkin was already an experienced poet.
After
graduating from the Lyceum, he was given a sinecure in the
Collegium of Foreign Affairs in Petersburg. A. Pushkin wrote
anti-government epigrams.
Pushkin
incurred the tsar's wrath and the poet was exiled to the South.
The poet lived in Kishinev and in Odessa but in 1824 was ordered
to take up residence at his parents' estate of Mihailowskoe in
the Pskov province and the next two years, from August 1824 to
August 1826 he spent at Mihailowskoe in exile and under
surveillance. Mihailowskoe is located 120 kilometers from Pskov
city. During this period - it can be called his romantic period
- Pushkin wrote a cycle of longer poems. It was at
Mihailowskoe that Pushkin's poetic genius reached its full
development, it's innate realism coming to the fore.
Pushkin was
married to Natalia Goncharova on February 18, 1831, in Moscow.
In 1836, Pushkin founded the journal Sovremennik (The
Contemporary) but the hostility towards him of the ruling
circles, the court intrigues which took place with the tsar's
cognizance were suffocating him.
A duel with d'Anthes, the adopted son of the Dutch ambassador to
Russia, led to Pushkin's untimely death. He was buried beside
his mother at dawn on February 6, 1837 at Svyatye Gory Monastery,
near Mihailowskoe.
His major works are:
the novel in verse "Eugeny Onegin", narrative poems
such as "The Bronze Horseman", the verse dramas "Boris
Godunov", "Mozart and Salieri" and "The
Stone Guest", the verse fairy tales: "The Tale of the
Tsar Saltan" and "The Tale of the Golden Cockerel",
so wonderful "Ruslan and Lyudmila", the historical
novel "The Captain’s Daughter", the prose tale
"The Queen of Spades" and a large body of the finest
lyric poetry.
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