Short answers, pulled from the story.
Vasily Zhukovsky was born on the 24th of February 1783 in the village of Mishenskoe within the Tula Governorate. His mother Salkha had been captured during the siege of Bender in 1770 and brought to Russia as a slave.
In December 1802 the nineteen-year-old Zhukovsky published a free translation of Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Karamzin placed this work in his journal Vestnik Yevropy where it became the first sustained example of sentimental-melancholy style in Russian literature.
Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna invited him to Saint Petersburg to serve as her personal Russian tutor. Later he tutored the tsarevich Alexander who eventually became tsar Alexander II.
The ballad Ludmila published in 1808 and its companion piece Svetlana from 1813 are considered landmarks in Russian poetry. Both render Gottfried August Burger's Lenore in completely different ways.
On Pushkin's early death in 1837 Zhukovsky stepped in as his literary executor. He rescued Pushkin's work from hostile censorship including several unpublished masterpieces while collecting them for publication.
Zhukovsky died in Baden-Baden in 1852 aged sixty-nine. His body was returned to Saint Petersburg and buried in the Alexander Nevsky Lavra behind Dostoevsky's monument.