Alexander Pushkin

Pushkin's great-grandfather was Abram Gannibal, an African page raised at Peter the Great's court to general's rank, a lineage Pushkin was proud of and mocked for in equal measure. Tsar Alexander I exiled him south for insurrectionary verse, and further isolation at his family's estate at Mikhailovskoye gave him the solitude to write most of Eugene Onegin, serialized over eight years.

He founded a literary journal, feuded constantly with censors, and married a celebrated beauty, Natalia Goncharova, whose admirer's insinuations drove him to challenge the man to a duel. He died two days later, not yet forty, having also given Russian prose The Captain's Daughter, a lean historical novel of the Pugachev rebellion that showed the same command in plain narrative that Onegin showed in verse.