1799

1799 is the year in which Alexander Pushkin was born, placing the poet at the opening of a life that the biographical notice links to the youthful world of Eugene Oneguine. The date anchors both the account of his early formation and the poem’s portrait of a young man entering fashionable society.

Birth and Family Background

Pushkin was born in 1799 at Pskoff and belonged to an ancient Russian family. The biographical notice emphasizes the family’s historical presence by recalling a letter in which he recorded that six Pushkins signed the charter declaring the Romanoff family’s election to the Russian throne, while two others marked it because they could not write. The date thus introduces not only an individual life but a lineage presented as longstanding and connected to Russian political history.

From Schoolboy to Poet

In 1811, Pushkin entered the aristocratic Lyceum at Tsarskoe Selo, near St. Petersburg. Though the notice says he showed no remarkable scholarly capacity, it describes him as widely read and devoted to verse: while still a schoolboy, he wrote lyrical compositions and began Ruslan and Liudmila, his first substantial poem. His early literary surroundings included Dmitrieff and Joukovski, friends of his father, his author-uncle Vassili Pushkin, and the historian Karamzine, whose influence the notice regards as especially beneficial.

The Date in Relation to the Poem

After leaving the Lyceum in 1817, Pushkin took a post in the Foreign Office at St. Petersburg. The notice describes three years of dissipation in the capital, interrupted by a near-fatal putrid fever in 1818. It connects this period to the first canto of Eugene Oneguine, where the young protagonist’s early dissipations reflect the poet’s own life in the Russian capital. The poem also presents its fashionable young man as accomplished in French and graceful in the mazurka, details that place him within the social world against which the biographical account sets Pushkin’s youth.

Significance

The year 1799 functions as a biographical point of departure rather than as an event developed independently in the poem. Its importance comes from the span it opens: an aristocratic family background, schooling at the Lyceum, precocious literary activity, and a later urban life that the biographical notice sees reflected in the young Eugene Oneguine. The connection makes the date a hinge between the poet’s recorded life and the novel’s representation of fashionable youth.