His son was a distinguished general of Katherine II.'s day.

Pushkin, the poet, had blue eyes, and very fair skin and hair, but the whole cast of his countenance in his portraits is negro.

His father was a typical society man, and in accordance with the fashion of the day, Pushkin was educated exclusively by French tutors at home, and his first writings (at the age of ten) were in French, and imitated from writers of that nation.

When his father retired from the military service, he settled in Moscow, and the boy knew all the literary men of that day and town before he was twelve years of age, and there can be no doubt that this literary atmosphere had a great influence upon him.

When, at the age of twelve, he was placed in the newly founded Lyceum,[10] at Tzarskoe Selo (sixteen miles from St.
Petersburg), whence so many famous men were afterwards graduated, he and the other pupils amused themselves in their play hours by writing a little newspaper, and by other literary pursuits.