Alexander Pushkin
In 1817, Pushkin got a job in the foreign office at St. Petersburg. He soon became interested in politics and supported the Decembrist revolt of 1825 when a group of noblemen and army officers tried to put another tsar in power and make him less powerful. Pushkin wrote some political poems. The result was that he was told he had to leave St. Petersburg. He had to spend six years in exile in the south of the country: in the Caucasus and the Crimea. He wrote about his experiences in the south in several romantic narrative poems (long poems which tell a story). He started work on a novel in verse called Yevgeny Onegin (or Eugene Onegin). He did not finish it until 1833. This was to be his most famous work. It was used by many musicians including Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky who made it into an opera. The poem shows typical Russian people in the society of his day.