Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was born on June 6, 1799 (May 26 in the old style) in Moscow, into a family of the landed gentry (his father was a retired major), on the day of the Feast of the Ascension. On the same day the Emperor Paul had a granddaughter born, in whose honor thanksgiving services were held and bells rang in every church. So, by a chance coincidence, the birthday of the Russian genius was marked by universal public rejoicing. The place of the poet's birth is symbolic too: Moscow, the very heart of Russian life, of Russia. The future poet was christened on June 8 in the Church of the Epiphany in Yelokhovo. Pushkin's father Sergey Lvovich and his mother Nadezhda Osipovna, née Gannibal, were distant relatives. The ardent passions that guided his ancestors on both the paternal and the maternal side also left their mark on Pushkin. The family (besides Alexander there were two more children, Olga and Lev) belonged to the most educated part of Moscow society. Poets, artists and musicians gathered in their house, or rather in the apartment rented by Pushkin's parents. The general Gallomania that reigned in society, a French upbringing with French tutors (happily balanced by the poet's grandmother Maria Alekseyevna and the famous nanny Arina Rodionovna), and access to the excellent libraries of his father, of his uncle the poet V. L. Pushkin and of distant relatives the Buturlins shaped Pushkin's mind and childhood soul. He wrote his first poems in French. At the Lyceum his nickname was «the Frenchman». Three of the poet's friends from that graduating class took part in the uprising against the tsar on December 14, 1825. In 1815 Pushkin triumphantly recited his poem «Recollections in Tsarskoye Selo» at an examination in the presence of the famous poet G. R. Derzhavin: «Old Derzhavin noticed us and, going down into the grave, blessed us». At the graduation ceremony in 1817 Pushkin also read his own poem «Unbelief». Soon Pushkin moved to Petersburg and entered the College of Foreign Affairs with the rank of collegiate secretary. His circle was very wide: hussars, poets, the literary societies «Arzamas» and «The Green Lamp», theaters, fashionable restaurants, duels – «thank God, not deadly ones», as E. A. Karamzina wrote to her brother Vyazemsky. But Pushkin did not dissolve in this variety; he was looking for himself. Right after graduating from the Lyceum in 1817, and then again in 1819 after a serious illness, Pushkin visited his mother's estate, Mikhailovskoye in the Pskov province. In the first years after the Lyceum he wrote the poems «The Village», «To the House Spirit», «To Chaadayev», the ode «Liberty» and the poem «Ruslan and Lyudmila».

At the age of 12, having received the rudiments of a home education, Alexander was taken to study at a new school that had just opened on October 19, 1811: the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum near Petersburg, the place where the summer residence of the Russian tsars stood. The Lyceum's curriculum was broad but not so deeply thought out. The pupils, however, were destined for a high state career and had the rights of those who had finished a higher educational institution. The small number of students (29), the youth of several professors, the humane character of their teaching ideas, oriented, at least in the best of them, toward attention to and respect for the pupil as a person, the absence of corporal punishment, the spirit of honor and comradeship: all this created a special atmosphere. Pushkin kept his Lyceum friendships and the cult of the Lyceum for the rest of his life. The lyceum students published handwritten magazines and devoted much attention to their own literary work. «I began to write at the age of 13 and to publish almost from the same time», Pushkin recalled later.