To a Poet

Alexander Pushkin (Алекса́ндр Серге́евич Пу́шкин, 1799-1837) is the jewel of Russian poetry, also famous as a playwright, prose writer and publicist who made a great contribution to the development of the Russian literary language. A prominent mid-19th-century Russian literary critic noted that Pushkin “was the first to give Russian literature the status of the whole nation’s matter… He became the first poet who, in the eyes of the Russian people, took that high place which a great poet should take in his country.”
Drawing equally on European Romanticism, Russian folklore, and everyday speech, Pushkin created a style that was at once elegant, natural, and profoundly expressive. His works — ranging from lyric poems and verse novels to historical dramas and short stories — established narrative, poetic, and linguistic models that later Russian writers would build upon. To this day, many lines from his poetry and prose are part of ordinary Russian speech, and his characters and stories remain deeply woven into Russia’s cultural imagination.