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Pushkin's honeymoon home.
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Pushkin's
life was brief. He died in extreme pain on 27 January 1837, from gunshot
wounds sustained in a duel two days earlier. At the time, next to
Tsar Nicholas I, he was the most famous man in Russia.
Alexander Pushkin was the child of a feckless Russian aristocrat and
the descendant - on his mother's side - of an Abyssinian slave who
became a favourite at the court of Peter the Great. Two Tsars - Alexander
I then Nicholas I - were suspicious of his poetry which was found
amongst the papers of Decembrist activists. Pushkin was reckless,
high-spirited, had a ready wit, which often landed him in trouble
and was a profligate who had affairs with many society women. He chose
a beautiful, younger woman - Natalya Goncharova - to be his wife.
He ended fighting a senseless, and ultimately fatal, duel to defend
her honour and his pride.
Pushkin's interest in politics was so diverse that many political
factions have made use of his writing to support their own theories.
Some of Pushkin's closest friends were Decembrists and his love of
traditional Russian folk tales made it easy for the Soviet Government
to paint him as an early Revolutionary. Because of his writing and
his behaviour, Pushkin spent a total of five years in exile from the
St Petersburg court and the Tsars exercised censorship over nearly
everything he wrote.
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