Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"Death at the age of 39 in such a dramatic fashion preserved Pushkin's monument as the romantic "Upon graduation from the Lycee, Pushkin recited his controversial poem "Ode to Liberty", one of several that led to his exile by Tsar Alexander the First. While under the strict surveillance of the Tsar's political police and unable to publish, Pushkin wrote his most famous play, the drama Boris Godunov. His novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, was serialized between 1825 and 1832. Pushkin was fatally wounded in a duel with his brother-in-law . . . Who attempted to seduce the poet's wife, Natalia Pushkina. . . . Pushkin himself preferred his verse novel Eugene Onegin, which he wrote over the course of his life and which, starting a tradition of great Russian novels, follows a few central characters but varies widely in tone and focus. Onegin is a work of such complexity that, while only about a hundred pages long, translator Vladimir Nabokov needed two full volumes of material to fully render its meaning in English. Because of this difficulty in translation, Pushkin's verse remains largely unknown to English readers." [Wikipedia]