The father of modern Russian literature grew up speaking almost exclusively French, descended from an African military engineer adopted by Peter the Great, and died at 37 in a formal pistol duel over high-society gossip. This episode unpacks the paradox of Alexander Pushkin, starting with his great-grandfather Abram Petrovich Gannibal, kidnapped near Lake Chad and raised at the imperial court, and moving through a childhood split between French tutors drilling classical form and a Russian nanny passing on peasant folktales and street rhythm.

We trace how Pushkin fused those two worlds to give Russian a new literary flexibility, how his Ode to Liberty got him banished to the southern provinces, and how that exile kept him away from Senate Square during the Decembrist uprising of 1825 while his friends were executed or sent to Siberia. Then c ...