Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, who is considered the greatest Russian poet, also wrote works of prose. Admired Russian writers such as Gogol and Chekhov, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, testified that they were greatly influenced by his writing. Pushkin’s father was a descendant of the Russian nobility, while his mother was the granddaughter of a slave who was brought from Ethiopia as a gift to Tsar Peter the Great. Pushkin was born in Moscow in 1799, and died in St. Petersburg in 1837 – after losing a duel he waged against his wife’s lover. In addition to his most famous works, among them the narrative poems Ruslan and Ludmila and Eugene Onegin, he wrote fairy tales in verse for children (including The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish and The Tale of Tsar Saltan), novels (most of them of which he did not complete), plays, and short stories.
