Asteroid Pushkin & Poet Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin - St. Petersburg, Russia - Extraterrestrial Locations on Waymarking.com

The asteroid Pushkin is an outer main-belt asteroid, It was discovered by N. S. Chernykh at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory on August 22, 1977. It was named after the Russia,'s most noted poet.

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was born into a Russian noble family in Moscow on June 6, 1799. He graduated from the Imperial Lyceum in Tsarskoye Selo (now the town of Pushkin) located a few kilometers south of St. Petersburg and spent most of his life as a resident of St. Petersburg. Pushkin is considered to be the greatest of all Russian poets and the founder of the modern Russian literature.

Pushkin published his first poem at age fifteen and continued his writing career his entire life. In 1820, he published his first long poem, Ruslan and Lyudmila, which was the basis for the opera by Glinka. His verse novel Eugene Onegin was written between 1825 and 1832. It was the inspiration for Tschaikovsky's famous opera of the same name, first performed in 1879. His play Boris Gudunov was made into two operas by Mussorgsky's, first in 1868 - 1869 and a second version on 1871- 1872. His poem The Bronze Horseman is considered a classic of Russian literature and is well known by every Russian school child. Pushkin died as a result of wounds received in a duel in St. Petersburg on February 10, 1837 at age 37.

The monument was created by sculptor Mikhail Anikushin and erected in 1957 to mark the 250th anniversary of the founding of St. Petersburg Actually, the city was founded in 1703 but the death of Joseph Stalin, in 1953, delayed celebrations by four years.

A 6' high statue of Pushkin is standing on top od an 8' high light brown granite pedestal. He sports long sideburns, is wearing a long coat which open in the front, a waistcoat and a ruffled shirt. His right hand is held out with his palm opened facing the sky. The inscription in gold letters is (translated from Cyrillic):