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Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) was born in
Moscow into an aristocratic family. He attended the Imperial Lyceum, where he began his literary career with the publication in 1814 of his verse epistle "To My Friend, the Poet." After accepting a post with the foreign office in 1817, he joined an exclusive literary circle as well as became associated with those who later took part in the Decembrist uprising of 1825, which was to later haunt his career.
In 1823 Pushkin began Eugene Onegin, on which he worked until 1831.
Pushkin died in St. Petersburg in 1837. In 1881, the Pushkin Prize was established in Russia, awarded to Russian (later Soviet) authors who achieved the highest standard of literary excellence.
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Eugene Onegin is a comedy of manners, written in exquisitely crafted verse, about two young members of the
Russian gentry, the eponymous hero and the girl Tatyana, who don't quite connect.
It is also the greatest masterpiece of Russian literature -- the source of the human archetypes
and the attitudes that define and govern the towering fictional creations of 19th-century Russia --
and one of the most celebrated poems of the world. Before Alexander Pushkin (1788-1837) wrote Eugene Onegin,
his nation's literature was a parochial one; after he wrote it, due in no small part
to its power and influence, the Russian tradition became one of the central traditions of Western civilization.
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