Pushkin's Early Youth Years

Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin was born in Moscow on May 26, 1799. 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 in Russia at the time. He soon not only became the unofficial laureate of the Lyceum, but found a wider audience and recognition. He was first published in the journal The Messenger of Europe in 1814. 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 (see painting by I. Ryepin above).

Pushkin's Biographical Timeline