Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was a Russian 19th century who has often been considered his country's greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. Alexander Pushkin blended Old Slavonic with vernacular Russian into a rich, melodic language. He was the first to use everyday speech in his poetry (Lakhostskii 50).
             Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was born in Moscow on May 26,1799 into a cultured but poor aristocratic family (Lakhostskii 25). On his father's side he was a descendant of an ancient noble family and on his mother's side he was a great-great grandson of a black Abyssinian, Gannibal, who served under Peter the Great. Pushkin took great pride in his black ancestry and noble heritage. Throughout his childhood the future poet was entrusted to nursemaids, French tutors and governesses. He learned Russian from household serfs and from his nanny, Arina Rodionovna (Lavrin 61). Pushkin started to write poems from an early age. His first published poem was written when he was only 14.
             In 1811 he was selected to be among the thirty students in the first class at the Lyceum in Tsarskoe Selo. He attended the Lyceum from 1811 to 1817 and received the best education available to Russia at the time. He soon not only became the unofficial laureate of the Lyceum, but also found a wider audience and recognition. He was first published in the journal The Messenger of Europe in 1814 when he was 14. In 1815 his poem "Recollections in Tsarskoe Selo" met the approval of Derzhavin, a great eighteenth- century poet, at a public examination in the Lyceum. While attending the Imperial Lyceum he began writing his first major work, Ruslan and Ludmila (1820), a kind of fairy story in verse. It was based on Russian folk-tales, which his grandmother had told him-in French (Mirsky 101).
             After graduating from the Lyceum, he was given a sinecure in the Collegium of Foreign Affairs in Petersburg (Mirsky110). The ...