Alexander Pushkin

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799–1837) was born in Moscow into an old noble family and educated at the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum. His early verse brought him fame, and his liberal poems led the authorities to send him into exile in southern Russia in 1820 and then to his family estate at Mikhailovskoye. He is widely regarded as the founder of modern Russian literature and its literary language.

Besides the verse novel Eugene Onegin, the drama Boris Godunov and the narrative poem The Bronze Horseman, he wrote many short lyrics, ballads and tales in verse. He died in St Petersburg in 1837 of a wound received in a duel. The versions here are by Ivan Panin (1888), who aimed at literal, line-for-line renderings, unrhymed, rather than at the music of the originals.