Alexander Pushkin

Alexander Pushkin (1799 – 1837) is Russia’s most famous poet and is widely considered to be the founder of modern Russian literature. His first major verse narrative, the mock epic Ruslan i Liudmila (1820), is a faux-fairytale based on Medieval Russian history. Perhaps his most famous long poem is Eugene Onegin (1833) which took seven years to write. Strangely, the fate of its hero foreshadows that of Pushkin himself who also died in a duel.