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.

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.

He was the illegitimate son of a landowner named Afanasi Bunin and his Turkish housekeeper Salkha,[2][3] who had been captured during the siege of Bender in 1770 and brought to Russia as a slave.

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).

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.

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.

The poet also used his high station at court to take up the cudgels for such free-thinking writers as Mikhail Lermontov, Alexander Herzen, and Taras Shevchenko (Zhukovsky was instrumental in buying him out of serfdom), as well as many of the persecuted Decembrists.

On Pushkin's early death in 1837, Zhukovsky stepped in as his literary executor, not only rescuing his work from a hostile censorship (including several unpublished masterpieces), but also diligently collecting and preparing it for publication.

Like his mentor Karamzin, Zhukovsky travelled widely in Europe, above all in the German-speaking world, where his connections with the Prussian court in Berlin gave him access to high society in spa-towns like Baden-Baden and Bad Ems.

He also met and corresponded with world-class cultural figures like Goethe, the poet Ludwig Tieck, and the landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich.

In the opinion of Vladimir Nabokov, Zhukovsky was "a wonderful translator, who surpassed both Seidlitz and Schiller in his versions of their poems, and one of the greatest minor poets that ever was.

"[5] His main contribution was as a stylistic and formal innovator who borrowed freely from European literature in order to provide high-quality models for "original" works in Russian.

In the late 1830s, after a period of partial withdrawal from the literary scene, Zhukovsky staged a comeback with a highly original verse translation of his German friend Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's prose novella Undine.

On retiring from court, Zhukovsky devoted his remaining years to hexameter translations of Eastern poetry, including long excerpts from the Persian epic Shahnameh.