1. Pushkin used to surprise his friends and acquaintances with his occasionally eccentric behavior. According to one of the stories, Pushkin appeared at a summer party wearing a very unusual outfit; he was in transparent pantaloons – with no underwear! The guests were taken aback by the eccentricity of his costume but pretended not to notice anything. The governor’s wife, a very traditional Mrs. Schemiot who was also present at the party, not allowing the possibility of such indecency, assured everyone that Pushkin simply had blanched summer pantaloons in the tone of his skin. When she finally realized the bitter truth, she hurried immediately to send her daughters out of the room. Everyone else at the party kept pretending as if nothing unusual was happening so Pushkin’s little trick remained without greater consequences.

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2. In 1818, after a severe fever, Pushkin’s head had to be shaved so he wore a wig the following year. One of the anecdotes has it that he once stopped by the Bolshoi Theater and during the show visited the box where his friends were sitting. It was a very hot day and Pushkin started complaining about the heat. After some time, he took his wig off and started waving it around like a fan cooling himself. This made people sitting in the neighboring boxes laugh. When Pushkin noticed all the attention, he stood up and seated himself on the floor. This is where he spent the rest of the show waving his wig around and making jokes about the play and the actors.

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3. Ibrahim Petrovich Hannibal, Russian general and statesman, was a great-grandfather of Alexander Pushkin on his mother’s side. It is assumed that Ibrahim, a son of an African nobleman, was born in 1688 in Ethiopia and that he was as an eight-year-old boy taken away to Constantinople and sold to Peter the Great who consequently took him to Russia. Ibrahim went on to become the tsar’s associate, engineer and a well-known Russian statesman. In 1759 he became the owner of the estate of Suida near Petersburg, which is today open to visitors as a museum-estate. Ibrahim made a great contribution to the potato cultivation in Russia. Already Peter the Great started growing potatoes in Russia hoping they could be used for medicinal purposes, while Catherine the Great continued this trend and decided to use potatoes as food during the famine in Russia. She was the one who ordered Ibrahim Hannibal to start growing potatoes on his estate. In this way, Ibrahim’s estate became one of the first places in Russia that cultivated this plant. On the initiative of the estate-museum, work continues on creating the first Russian potato museum in Suida.

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4. Alexander Pushkin was not only an incredibly talented poet, but also an extremely good graphic artist. In addition to his extensive literary heritage, Pushkin has left to humanity a huge collection of his graphic works. He made over several thousand drawings, most of which are portraits and artist sketches made by him on the pages of draft manuscripts, in albums of friends and on postcards and letters.

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By Iva Petrak