1799 Born in Moscow on 26 May, eldest of three children (with a younger brother and sister) of Sergey L’vovich Pushkin and Nadezhda Osipovna.
1800–1811 Brought up in Moscow, Pushkin has the run of his father’s well-stocked library of French literature and attends his and his father’s poet brother Vasily’s literary salons frequented by leading figures.
1801 Paul I is killed in a palace revolution. Accession of Alexander I.
1811 Pushkin enters the new Lycée at Tsarskoye Selo founded by Alexander.
1812 Napoleon invades Russia. Battle of Borodino.
1814 Napoleon’s defeat outside Paris. Poems by Pushkin published for the first time, anonymously, in a St Petersburg magazine.
1815 The poet Gavrila Derzhavin hears Pushkin read one of his poems and names him his successor.
1816 Pushkin takes a keen interest in the meetings of the literary society Arzamas while at school.
1817 Graduates from the Lycée. Appointed to a sinecure in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Begins work on Ruslan and Lyudmila; writes ‘Liberty: An Ode’.
1817–20 Leads a dissipated life in St Petersburg; continues to write daring liberal verses, resulting in his exile.
1820 Ruslan and Lyudmila published, making Pushkin a national celebrity. Travels with the Rayevsky family in the Caucasus and Crimea on journey to exile in Kishinev, Bessarabia. Begins first Byronic poem, The Prisoner of the Caucasus.
1821 Writes the blasphemous poem The Gabrieliad (unpublished). Meets Karolina Sobanskaya.
1822 The Prisoner of the Caucasus published.
1823 Begins the novel in verse Eugene Onegin. Transferred to Odessa under the command of the new governor-general of New Russia (i.e. the South) and Bessarabia, Count Mikhail Vorontsov. Meets Amalia Riznich.
1824 Affair with Vorontsov’s wife Yelizaveta. The Fountain of Bakhchisaray published, a great commercial success. Death of Byron. After being discovered by the authorities studying atheism, Pushkin is transferred to his mother’s estate at Mikhaylovskoye near Pskov. Writes memoirs, later burnt. Writes The Gypsies. St Petersburg suffers the most destructive flood in its history.
1825 Receives visit during first winter at Mikhaylovskoye from his close school friend and Decembrist Ivan Pushchin. Meets Anna Kern and writes ‘To ***’ (‘It comes to me again, that moment’). First chapter of Eugene Onegin published. Writes Boris Godunov and Count Nulin. Death of Alexander I; accession of Nicholas I. Decembrist uprising in support of a constitutional monarchy.
1826 Pushkin writes ‘The Prophet’. Summoned to meet Nicholas I, who ends his exile and states that he will be his personal censor. First collection of lyric poems published and quickly sells out. The tsar’s secret police organ created, responsible for censorship: the Third Department of the Tsar’s Chancellery, headed by Count Aleksandr Benckendorff. Five of the Decembrists are hanged and some hundred and twenty exiled to Siberia. Pushkin given official reprimand for reading Boris Godunov, unpublished, to friends without permission.
1827 The Gypsies published. Becomes friendly with the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz in Moscow.
1828 For the last time Pushkin is accused of suspected authorship of the blasphemous narrative poem The Gabrieliad; after a confidential interview with the tsar, no more is said. Writes Poltava, a long narrative poem on Peter the Great, the Ukrainian Cossack leader Mazepa and Charles XII of Sweden; it receives a mixed reception on publication in 1829. Russian victory over Persia brings definitive absorption of Dagestan, eastern Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia into the Russian Empire. Death of Nikolay Karamzin. Pushkin meets Natalya Goncharova.
1828–9 Third Russo-Turkish War. Pushkin travels through Transcaucasia and rides with the Russian army in a skirmish.
1829 Playwright and diplomat Aleksandr Griboyedov lynched by a mob in Tehran. Second collection of Pushkin’s lyric poems published. Begins the verse drama Rusalka, to be finally revised and completed in 1834.
1830 Betrothal to Natalya Goncharova. French July Revolution; King Charles X replaced by Louis Philippe I. Quarantined on his father’s estate of Boldino in Nizhny Novgorod province in the autumn during a cholera outbreak, writes The Tales of Belkin, the last two chapters of Eugene Onegin, the ‘Little Tragedies’, A Little House in Kolomna and some thirty short poems.
1831 Pushkin marries Natalya on 18 February. Appointed Russia’s official historian laureate, succeeding Karamzin. Boris Godunov published in censored form, to a mixed reception. Publishes poem ‘To the Slanderers of Russia’ supporting Russian suppression of the Polish uprising of 1830–31. Writes The Tale of Tsar Saltan.
1832 Third collection of lyric poems published, also containing The Tale of Tsar Saltan and the blank verse ‘Little Tragedy’ Mozart and Salieri.
1833 First complete edition of Eugene Onegin published. Pushkin works on A History of the Pugachev Rebellion; the tsar grants him an interest-free loan of 20,000 roubles to cover publication costs, to be repaid in two instalments. At Boldino in the autumn writes in four weeks The Bronze Horseman, The Tale of a Fisherman and a Little Fish, The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Champions and first drafts of prose tale The Queen of Spades. The tsar demands radical cuts to The Bronze Horseman which Pushkin is unable to make, so the poem remains unpublished, apart from the prologue, in his lifetime. Appointed to the humiliatingly lowly court post of kamer-junker (gentleman of the chamber), necessitating regular appearances at balls with his wife.
1834 A History of the Pugachev Rebellion published. Pushkin begins work on a history of Peter the Great. Continuously mounting debts. A letter from Pushkin to Natalya with a disparaging reference to Nicholas’s two predecessors and the poet’s appointment as kamer-junker is opened by the authorities, causing tensions between Pushkin and the tsar. Attempts to resign the new post and retire from the capital to the country to write and work refused by the tsar with the threat of withdrawal of access to state archives. Writes The Tale of the Golden Cockerel.
1835 Publication of selected works in volumes of narrative verse, lyric poems and prose. The tsar grants Pushkin’s request for an interest-free loan of 30,000 roubles, soon to be repaid, in lieu of salary. Georges d’Anthès, adopted son of the Dutch envoy Baron Jacob van Heeckeren, begins to pay court to Natalya.
1836 Pushkin launches quarterly journal The Contemporary, in which he publishes his own and others’ work, including his novel The Captain’s Daughter, Gogol’s story ‘The Nose’ and early lyrics by Fyodor Tyutchev. Writes the ‘Stone Island cycle’ of poems. In November receives an anonymous round-robin letter announcing his ‘cuckoldry’.
1837 In January, Pushkin provokes a duel with d’Anthès. He is severely wounded in the duel and dies two days later (29 January). The tsar pays off Pushkin’s debts, grants a pension to Natalya and further sums to his four children, and undertakes to bear publication costs of his works.
1838 Pushkin’s published works unreliably reprinted.
1841 Publication of posthumous works in three volumes edited by Vasily Zhukovsky; also unreliable.
1855–7 First attempt at a comprehensive edition of Pushkin’s works in seven volumes edited by P. V. Annenkov: lacking in editorial rigour, and corruptions remain.
1887 Expiry of Pushkin’s copyrights. A number of unrigorous and unreliable collected editions follow over the next forty years.
1937–59 The Complete Works in seventeen volumes, with textual annotation only, published by the USSR Academy of Sciences, its launch marking the centenary of Pushkin’s death; it remains the most thorough and reliable complete edition; reissued Moscow, 1994–7.