Alexander Pushkin created modern Russian literature almost single-handedly — inventing its poetic language, its novelistic tradition, and its national literary identity. Then he was killed in a duel at thirty-seven, defending his wife’s honor against a French officer whose flirtation with Natalya Pushkina had become the gossip of St. Petersburg. Russia’s founding literary genius died over a society scandal.

This episode traces Pushkin from his aristocratic childhood through the exile years, Eugene Onegin, the marriage that trapped him in court life, and the duel on the Black River that killed the man every Russian writer since has called their beginning.

• Pushkin’s aristocratic upbringing, his African great-grandfather, and the early poems that got him exiled
• Eugene Onegin — the “novel in verse” that founded Russian literary fiction
• The marriage to Natalya Goncharova and the court intrigues that consumed his final years
• The d’Anthes affair, the duel on the Black River, and Russia’s grief for its greatest poet