While under strict surveillance by the Emperor's political police and unable to publish, Pushkin wrote his most famous play, Boris Godunov.

Pushkin was fatally wounded in a duel with his wife's alleged lover and her sister's husband, Georges-Charles de Heeckeren d'Anthès, also known as Dantes-Gekkern, a French officer serving with the Chevalier Guard Regiment.

[11] Pushkin's mother, Nadezhda (Nadya) Ossipovna Gannibal (1775–1836), was descended through her paternal grandmother from German and Scandinavian nobility.

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.

[14][15] 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.

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.

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.

[16] After school, Pushkin plunged into the vibrant and raucous intellectual youth culture of St. Petersburg, which was then the capital of the Russian Empire.

[17] Pushkin also immersed himself in the thought of the French Enlightenment, to which he would remain permanently indebted throughout his life, especially Voltaire, whom he described as "the first to follow the new road, and to bring the lamp of philosophy into the dark archives of history".

He joined the Filiki Eteria, a secret organization whose purpose was to overthrow Ottoman rule in Greece and establish an independent Greek state.

He was inspired by the Greek Revolution and when the war against the Ottoman Empire broke out, he kept a diary recording the events of the national uprising.

[21] In Mikhaylovskoye, Pushkin wrote nostalgic love poems which he dedicated to Elizaveta Vorontsova, wife of Malorossia's General-Governor.

[24] Vadim Nikolayev argued that the idea about the Empress was marginal and refused to discuss it, while trying to prove that poem had been dedicated to Tatyana Larina, the heroine of Eugene Onegin.

[23] Authorities summoned Pushkin to Moscow after his poem Ode to Liberty was found among the belongings of the rebels from the Decembrist Uprising (1825).

After much hesitation Natalia accepted a proposal of marriage from Pushkin in April 1830, but not before she received assurances that the Tsarist government had no intention of persecuting the libertarian poet.

[30] In 1831, during the period of Pushkin's growing literary influence, he met one of Russia's other influential early writers, Nikolai Gogol.

Pushkin received the formal challenge to a duel through his sister-in-law, Ekaterina Gekkerna, approved by d'Anthès, on the same day through the attaché of the French Embassy, Viscount d'Archiac.

Magenis, unable to find Pushkin in the evening, sent him a letter through a messenger at 2 o'clock in the morning declining to be his second, as the possibility of a peaceful settlement had already been quashed, and the traditional first task of the second was to try to bring about a reconciliation.

1836), the last of whom married morganatically Prince Nikolaus Wilhelm of Nassau of the House of Nassau-Weilburg and was granted the title of Countess of Merenberg.

Natalia's granddaughter, Nadejda, married into the extended British royal family, her husband being the uncle of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and is the grandmother of the present Marquess of Milford Haven.

Critics consider many of his works masterpieces, such as the poem The Bronze Horseman and the drama The Stone Guest, a tale of the fall of Don Juan.

Onegin is a work of such complexity that, though it is only about a hundred pages long, translator Vladimir Nabokov needed two full volumes of material to fully render its meaning into English.

Tchaikovsky's operas Eugene Onegin (1879) and The Queen of Spades (Pikovaya Dama, 1890) became perhaps better known outside of Russia than Pushkin's own works of the same name.

Other Russian operas based on Pushkin include Dargomyzhsky's Rusalka and The Stone Guest; Rimsky-Korsakov's Mozart and Salieri, Tale of Tsar Saltan, and The Golden Cockerel; Cui's Prisoner of the Caucasus, Feast in Time of Plague, and The Captain's Daughter; Tchaikovsky's Mazeppa; Rachmaninoff's one-act operas Aleko (based on The Gypsies) and The Miserly Knight; Stravinsky's Mavra, and Nápravník's Dubrovsky.

According to Vladimir Nabokov, Pushkin's idiom combined all the contemporaneous elements of Russian with all he had learned from Derzhavin, Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, Karamzin and Krylov: His work as a critic and as a journalist marked the birth of Russian magazine culture which included him devising and contributing heavily to one of the most influential literary magazines of the 19th century, the Sovremennik (The Contemporary, or Современник).

In the centennial year of Pushkin's death in 1937, a mass renaming of streets across the entire Soviet Union occurred in his honour.

[41][42] These monuments, along with any toponymy named after him, are now illegal in Ukraine following the implementation of a law that bans symbols "dedicated to persons who publicly, including … in literary and other artistic works, supported, glorified, or justified Russian imperial policy".

Pushkin was reputed as a libertine with aristocratic tendencies, which clashed with Soviet values and led to a form of repressive revisionism, akin to the Stalinist reworking of Tolstoy's Christian anarchism.