Púshkin was born in an aristocratic family at Moscow. Through his mother he had African blood in his veins: she was a beautiful creole, the granddaughter of a negro who had been in the service of Peter I. His father was a typical representative of the noblemen of those times: squandering a large fortune, living all his life anyhow and anyway, amidst feasts, in a house half-furnished and half-empty; fond of the lighter French literature of the time, fond of entering into a discussion upon anything that he had just learned from the encyclopædists, and bringing together at his house all possible notabilities of literature, Russian and French, who happened to be at Moscow. Púshkin’s grandmother and his old nurse were the future poet’s best friends in his childhood. From them he got his perfect mastership of the Russian language; and from his nurse, with whom he used to spend, later on, the long winter nights at his country house, when he was ordered by the State police to reside on his country estate, he borrowed that admirable knowledge of Russian folk-lore and Russian ways of expression which rendered his poetry and prose so wonderfully Russian. To these two women we thus owe the creation of the modern, easy, pliable Russian language which Púshkin introduced into our literature. He was educated at St. Petersburg, at the Tsárskoe Seló Lyceum, and even before he left school he became renowned as a most extraordinary poet, in whom Derzhávin recognised more than a mere successor, and whom Zhukóvskiy presented was his portrait bearing the following inscription: “To a pupil, from his defeated teacher.” Unfortunately, Púshkin’s passionate nature drew him away from both the literary circles and the circles of his best friends--the Decembrists Púschin and Küchelbecker--into the circles of the lazy, insignificant aristocrats, amongst whom he spent his vital energy in orgies. Something of the shallow, empty sort of life he lived then he has himself described in _Evghéniy Onyéghin_. Being friendly with the political youth who appeared six or seven years later, on the square of Peter I. at St. Petersburg, as insurgents against autocracy and serfdom, Púshkin wrote an _Ode to Liberty_, and numbers of small pieces of poetry expressing the most revolutionary ideas, as well as satires against the rulers of the time. The result was that in 1820, when he was only twenty years old, he was exiled to Kishinyóff, a very small town at that time, in newly annexed Bessarabia, where he led the most extravagant life, eventually joining a party of wandering gypsies. Happily enough he was permitted to leave for some time this dusty and uninteresting little spot, and to make, in company with the charming and educated family of the Rayévskys, a journey to the Crimea and the Caucasus, from which journey he brought back some of his finest lyrical works.