Short answers, pulled from the story.
Alexander Pushkin was a Russian poet, playwright, and novelist of the Romantic era, born in Moscow in 1799. He is considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. His combination of Church Slavonic forms, gallicisms, colloquialisms, and stylized popular speech created the linguistic foundation on which Turgenev, Goncharov, Tolstoy, and Lermontov built their work.
Pushkin's great-grandfather, Abram Petrovich Gannibal, was born around 1696 in Central Africa in a region bordering Lake Chad in present-day Cameroon. He was kidnapped as a child, sent to Constantinople as a gift for the Ottoman Sultan, and later transferred to Russia as a gift for Peter the Great. Gannibal rose to become governor of Reval and attained the rank of General en Chief in Russia.
Pushkin was fatally wounded in a pistol duel at the Black River on the 27th of January 1837 (the 8th of February, Gregorian calendar). His opponent, the French officer Georges d'Anthès, fired first and struck Pushkin in the hip; the bullet penetrated his abdomen. Pushkin died two days later, at 2:45 pm on the 29th of January, from peritonitis.
Eugene Onegin is Pushkin's verse novel, serialized between 1825 and 1832, which he considered his grand opus. It follows a few central characters but shifts widely in tone and focus. When Vladimir Nabokov translated it into English, the project required two full volumes of commentary to convey its full meaning.
Pushkin was exiled from Saint Petersburg in May 1820 by Emperor Alexander I because of his politically radical poems, including his "Ode to Liberty". His poem was later found among the belongings of rebels from the Decembrist Uprising of 1825, which drew further imperial attention. Emperor Nicholas I eventually freed him from exile but retained strict control over everything Pushkin published and banned him from travelling freely.
Dozens of major musical works draw on Pushkin's texts. Tchaikovsky wrote Eugene Onegin in 1879 and The Queen of Spades in 1890. Mussorgsky composed Boris Godunov in two versions between 1868 and 1872. Rimsky-Korsakov set Mozart and Salieri, Tale of Tsar Saltan, and The Golden Cockerel. Rachmaninoff, Dargomyzhsky, Stravinsky, Glinka, and several other composers also based major works on Pushkin's writings. Pushkin's Mozart and Salieri additionally inspired Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus.