If you had been born in Russia, you would certainly have met Pushkin's poetry in childhood and grown up with it. Starting with the learned cat, who walked round and round the oak tree singing songs as he circled right and telling tales as he circled left, you might then have encountered the exiled Prince, who was turned into a bumble-bee so that he could fly to his father's court and sting his wicked aunt on the nose. You would have moved on to the little boy who got a frost-bitten finger through playing too long in the snow and ignoring his mother calling him indoors. And then you would be really in to the collected works and experiencing Onegin's boredom, Tatiana's unrequited love, Godunov's uneasy conscience, Hermann's tension at the gaming table, Salieri's jealousy of Mozart, and hearing the dread steps of the Stone Guest and the thundering hooves of the Bronze Horseman. Your would have discovered that, like Shakespeare, Pushkin could always find the right words for everything.

Pushkin's appearance would also be very familiar to you, for there is no shortage of statues and portraits of him. There he stands, head thrown back, arm extended, reciting poetry; or there he sits, head on hand, no doubt composing poetry. He may not have been particularly striking to look at - fairly short, with curly dark hair and a longish nose, to judge by the sketches of himself which he scribbled on his manuscripts - but this did not prevent him from winning ladies' hearts.

Pushkin was proud of his ancestry: his parents were members of the old Russian gentry and he had one Ethiopian great-grandfather, who had served at Peter the Great's court. He was sent to a privileged boarding school, with no going home for the holidays. He grew to love it and made life-long friends, but his reports were not very complimentary. For example, "sharp wits used only for idle chatter", "very lazy and bumptious in class", "indifferent progress" or "more talent than application", "does not concentrate". But at his final school examination, when called upon to recite one of his own poems, he made the leading poet of the day jump up from his seat in astonished admiration. Russia's national poet had stepped out before his public.

Hardly out of school, he soon irritated the authorities by his political views and was exiled to the south of Russia. There he became enthusiastic about Byron's poetry and Caucasian mountain scenery, and formed an over-close relationship with the Governor General's wife. He was sent off again, this time to his parents' country estate. There he lived with only his old nanny to keep him company and she enriched his store of folk-tales, with which he was later to delight generations of Russian children.

Eventually he was allowed to return to St. Petersburg. Soon marriage to one of the leading beauties of society brought its problems and he had to write hard to support his growing family, sometimes escaping back to the country for quiet concentration. When he was thirty-seven he was killed in a duel, defending his wife's honour. In Russia his popularity as a writer was well established in his lifetime and it has never been surpassed.