Pushkin's father, Sergei Lvovich Pushkin (1767–1848) , was descended from a distinguished family of the Russian nobility that traced its ancestry back to the 12th century.[8][9]Pushkin's mother Nadezhda (Nadya) Ossipovna Gannibal (1775–1836) was descended through her paternal grandmother from German and Scandinavian nobility.[10][11] She was the daughter of Ossip Abramovich Gannibal (1744–1807) and his wife, Maria Alekseyevna Pushkina (1745–1818).Ossip Abramovich Gannibal's father, Pushkin's great-grandfather, was Abram Petrovich Gannibal (1696–1781) , a Black African page raised by Peter the Great. Abram wrote in a letter to Empress Elizabeth, Peter the Great's daughter, that he was from the town of "Lagon". Russian biographers concluded from the beginning that Lagon was in Ethiopia, a nation with Orthodox Christian associations. Vladimir Nabokov, when researching Eugene Onegin, cast serious doubt on this Ethiopian origin theory. In 1995 Dieudonné Gnammankou outlined a strong case that "Lagon" was a town located on the southern side of Lake Chad, now in northern Cameroon. However, there is no conclusive evidence for either theory.[8][9][11][12][13][14]After education in France as a military engineer, Abram Gannibal became governor of Reval and eventually Général en Chef (the third most senior army rank) in charge of the building of sea forts and canals in Russia.Born in Moscow, Pushkin published his first poem at the age of fifteen. By the time he finished school as part of the first graduating class of the prestigious Imperial Lyceum in Tsarskoe Selo near Saint Petersburg, his talent was already widely recognized within the Russian literary scene. After school, Pushkin plunged into the vibrant and raucous intellectual youth culture of the capital, Saint Petersburg. In 1820 he published his first long poem, Ruslan and Lyudmila, amidst much controversy about its subject and style.Pushkin gradually became committed to social reform and emerged as a spokesman for literary radicals. This angered the government, and led to his transfer from the capital (1820). He went to the Caucasus and to the Crimea, then to Kamenkaand Chişinău, where he became a Freemason.Pushkin's married lover, Anna Petrovna Kern, for whom he wrote the most famous love poem in the Russian language.Here he joined the Filiki Eteria, a secret organization whose purpose was to overthrow Ottoman rule in Greece and establish an independent Greek state. He was inspired by the Greek Revolution and when the war against the Ottoman Turks broke out he kept a diary recording the events of the great national uprising.He stayed in Chişinău until 1823 and wrote there two Romantic poems which brought him wide acclaim, The Captive of the Caucasus and The Fountain of Bakhchisaray. In 1823 Pushkin moved to Odessa, where he again clashed with the government, which sent him into exile on his mother's rural estate of Mikhailovskoe (near Pskov) from 1824 to 1826.[15]
