Aleksander Pushkins father was of the nobility. His mother had Abyssinian blood, and was descended from Hannibal, the Negro servant of Peter the Great. He lived in St Petersburgh and became an official in the Ministry of Affairs but was effectively banished to the Crimea before he was twenty-one. He eventually returned, and in 1831 married Natalia Goncharova. He was subsequently killed in a duel. Russias greatest poet, he is, in some respects, Russias Byron, a great lyric poet whose Eugene Onegin nevertheless fulfils the same role of the superfluous man as the narrator of Byrons Don Juan.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.
Pushkin himself preferred his verse novel Eugene Onegin, which he wrote over the course of his life and which, starting a tradition of great Russian novels, follows a few central characters but varies widely in tone and focus. "Onegin" is a work of such complexity that, while only about a hundred pages long, it required translator Vladimir Nabokov four full volumes of material to fully render its meaning in English. Unfortunately, in so doing Nabokov, like all translators of Pushkin into English to date, totally destroyed the fundamental readability of Pushkin in Russian which makes him so popular and Pushkin's verse remains largely unknown to English readers.
