Aleksandr Pushkin

Aleksandr Pushkin is the founder of modern Russian literature, and the writer against whom every Russian since has been measured. Educated at the Lyceum at Tsarskoye Selo, he was twice exiled, once for political verse. He worked in every form, from the verse novel Yevgeny Onegin and the Shakespearean chronicle play Boris Godunov to lyric poetry and the prose of The Captain's Daughter, and made from them a literary Russian that had not existed before. He was killed at thirty-seven in a duel with his wife's admirer. Glinka, Dargomyzhsky, Musorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Rachmaninov all built operas from his work.