This special Pushkin private tour showcases the life, death, and poetry of the Russian Shakespeare.
Pushkin was the soul of 19th century Russia; born in 1799 to an aristocratic family, his mother was the grand-daughter of Peter the Great’s Abyssinian general, Hannibal, and the poet was proud of his nobility and African blood. In 1811 Pushkin was sent to school at Tsar Village where he began to write light romantic poetry; the Lyceum (school for boys from Noble families) is now a museum and the classrooms and laboratories are kept as they were during Pushkin’s time.
Not far from Lyceum stands the statue of Alexander Pushkin, commissioned in 1899 to mark the 100th –anniversary of his birth. We will also visit the Pushkin House museum in St Petersburg, where the poet is considered the head of Russian literature, lived from October 1836 until his death in January 1837. The rooms have all been preserved and contain his personal belongings, manuscripts and even his death mask.
Pushkin died following a duel on Chyornaya Rechka (“Black river”) with a French soldier of fortune named George D’ Anthes, who had been publicly flirting with Pushkin’s beautiful wife Natalia (she is buried in St Petersburg and we will visit her grave).
Even those who has never heard of Pushkin actually know him, since several world famous operas are based on his poems, it is enough to mention Evgeny Onegin and Queen of Spades (with music by Tchaikovsky). Many beautiful places in St Petersburg were described by Pushkin in his great poems and even now in 21st century Pushkin is loved and known by everyone: children study his poems in school, adults quote him in everyday life: many lines from his poems became proverbs.