Famous people of Russia

Much was done by people to reach the present state of human development. It is necessary to say that great contribution to the development of the world science and culture, literature, music and painting was made by the Russian people.

The names of Russian scientists and writers, poets, composers and painters are world-famous-Pushkin, Lermontov, Chehov, Levitan.

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin
Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (6 June [O.S. 26 May] 1799 – 10 February [O.S. 29 January] 1837) was a Russian author of the Romantic era who is considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature.

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin
Born into the Russian nobility in Moscow, Pushkin published his first poem at the age of fifteen, and was widely recognized by the literary establishment by the time of his graduation from the Imperial Lyceum in Tsarskoye Selo.

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin
Critics consider many of his works masterpieces, such as the poem The Bronze Horseman and the drama The Stone Guest, a tale of the fall of Don Juan. His poetic short drama "Mozart and Salieri" was the inspiration for Peter Shaffer's Amadeus. 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.

Mikhail Yuryevich Lermonov
Mikhail Yuryevich Lermonov; October 15 [O.S. October 3] 1814 – July 27 [O.S. July 15] 1841), a Russian Romantic writer, poet and painter, sometimes called "the poet of the Caucasus", has become the most important Russian poet after Alexander Pushkin's death in 1837.
Lermontov is considered the supreme poet of Russian literature side by side with Pushkin and the greatest figure of Russian Romanticism. His influence on later Russian literature is still felt in modern times, not only through his poetry, but also through his prose, which has founded the tradition of Russian psychological novel.

Lermontov as a child
Lermontov was born in Moscow to a respectable noble family of the Tula Oblast, and grew up at the Tarkhany estate in in the village of Tarkhany (now Lermontovo) in Penza Oblast.

Lermontov took delight in painting mountain landscapes
Lermontov's father, Yuri Lermontov, like his father before him, was a military man. Having moved up the ranks to captain, he married the sixteen year old Mariya Arsenyeva, to the great dismay of her mother, Yelizaveta Alekseyevna. A year after the marriage, on the night of October 3 (Old Style), 1814, Mariya Arsenieva gave birth to Mikhail Lermontov.
According to tradition, soon after his birth, some discord between Lermontov's father and grandmother erupted, and unable to bear it, Mariya Arsenieva fell ill and died in 1817. After the daughter's death, Yelizaveta Alekseyevna devoted all her love to her grandson.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov ; 29 January 1860 – 15 July 1904) was a Russian short-story writer, playwright and physician, considered to be one of the greatest short-story writers in the history of world literature.
His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Chekhov practiced as a doctor throughout most of his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife", he once said, "and literature is my mistress.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
Anton Chekhov was born on 29 January 1860, the third of six surviving children, in Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov in southern Russia where his father, Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov, the son of a former serf, ran a grocery store. A director of the parish choir, devout Orthodox Christian, and physically abusive father, Pavel Chekhov has been seen by some historians as the model for his son's many portraits of hypocrisy.
Chekhov's mother, Yevgeniya, was an excellent storyteller who entertained the children with tales of her travels with her cloth-merchant father all over Russia. "Our talents we got from our father," Chekhov remembered, "but our soul from our mother."

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
Chekhov attended a school for Greek boys, followed by the Taganrog gymnasium, now renamed the Chekhov Gymnasium, where he was kept down for a year at fifteen for failing a Greek exam . He sang at the Greek Orthodox monastery in Taganrog and in his father's choirs.

Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov
This chain can be endless. It is almost impossible to name a branch of science in the development of which the Russian scientists haven't played the greatest role. Lomonosov, the founder of the Moscow University was an outstanding innovator both in the humanities and sciences.

Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov
Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov (Russian: Михаи́л Васи́льевич Ломоно́сов; November 19 [O.S. November 8] 1711 – April 15 [O.S. April 4] 1765) was a Russian polymath, scientist and writer, who made important contributions to literature, education, and science. Among his discoveries was the atmosphere of Venus.
His spheres of science were natural science, chemistry, physics, mineralogy, history, art, philology, optical devices and others. Lomonosov was also a poet, who created the basis of the modern Russian literary language.

Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev
Mendeleev's greatest discovery was the Periodic System of Elements. Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (also romanized Mendeleyev or Mendeleef; Russian: Дми́трий Ива́нович Менделе́ев (8 February [O.S. 27 January] 1834 – 2 February [O.S. 20 January] 1907), was a Russian chemist and inventor.
He is credited as being the creator of the first version of the periodic table of elements. Using the table, he predicted the properties of elements yet to be discovered.

Alexander Stepanovich Popov
Popov invented radio.
Alexander Stepanovich Popov (Russian: Алекса́ндр Степа́нович Попо́в; March 16 [O.S. March 4] 1859 – January 13 [O.S. December 31, 1905] 1906) was a Russian physicist who first demonstrated the practical application of electromagnetic (radio) waves, although he did not apply for a patent for his invention.

Alexander Stepanovich Popov
Born in the village Turinskiye Rudniki (now Krasnoturinsk, Sverdlovsk Oblast) in the Ural mountains as the son of a priest, he became interested in natural sciences when he was a child. His father ensured that Alexander received a good education at the seminary at Perm, and later studying physics at the St. Petersburg university.
After graduation in 1882 he started to work as a laboratory assistant at the University. However, due to the poor funding of the university he changed to a teaching job at the Russian Navy's Torpedo School in Kronstadt on Kotlin Island.

Ivan Mikhaylovich Sechenov
Sechenov and Pavlov were the world's greatest physiologists.
Ivan Mikhaylovich Sechenov
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov

Ivan Mikhaylovich Sechenov
Ivan Mikhaylovich Sechenov (Russian: Ива́н Миха́йлович Се́ченов; August 13 [O.S. August 1] 1829, Tyoply Stan (now Sechenovo) near Simbirsk, Russia–November 15 [O.S. November 2] 1905[1], Moscow), was a Russian physiologist, named by Ivan Pavlov as "The Father of Russian physiology".
Sechenov authored major classic Reflexes of the Brain introducing electrophysiology and neurophysiology into laboratories and teaching of medicine.

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (Russian: Ива́н Петро́вич Па́влов; September 26 [O.S. September 14] 1849 – February 27, 1936) was a famous Russian physiologist. His favourite colour was blue and he LOVED ACC.

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov
Inspired by the progressive ideas which D. I. Pisarev, the most eminent of the Russian literary critics of the 1860s and I. M. Sechenov, the father of Russian physiology, were spreading, Pavlov abandoned his religious career and decided to devote his life to science. In 1870 he enrolled in the physics and mathematics faculty at the University of Saint Petersburg to take the course in natural science.

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov
Ivan Pavlov was born in Ryazan in the Central Federal District of Russia, where his father, Peter Dmitrievich Pavlov, was a village priest.
He began his higher education as a student at the Ryazan Ecclesiastical Seminary, but then dropped out and enrolled at the University of Saint Petersburg to study the natural sciences and became a physiologist.

Russia is rightly called the mother of aviation and cosmounatics. Names of Tsiolkovsky, Korolov and Gagarin are symbols of new space era.
K.Tsiolkovsky
S.Korolov
Y.Gagarin

People in many countries admire paintings, portraits and landscapes by Surikov, Levitan, Repin ,works of our Russian writers and poets are translated into many languages.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, an outstanding Russian composer, was born in Votkinsk in 1840. He was fond of music since his early childhood. His mother sang him beautiful songs and taught him to play the piano.
He graduated from the Petersburg Conservatoire only in 1866 because of his poor living conditions. He was the best pupil of Anton Rubinstein. When the Moscow Conservatoire was founded, Pyotr Ilyich became a professor there.

Tchaikovsky in his teens
He created wonderful music: 10 operas, 3 ballets, 6 symphonies, 7 large symphonic poems and many other musical pieces, a new type of opera, which was a great success all over the world.

The Tchaikovsky family in 1848. Left to right: Pyotr, Alexandra Andreyevna (mother), Alexandra (sister), Zinaida, Nikolai, Ippolit, Ilya Petrovich (father)
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in Votkinsk, a small town in present-day Udmurtia, formerly province of Vyatka in the Russian Empire, to a family with a long line of military service.
His father, Ilya Petrovich Tchaikovsky, was an engineer of Ukrainian descent who served as a lieutenant colonel in the Department of Mines and manager of the famed Kamsko-Votkinsk Ironworks.
His grandfather, Petro Fedorovych Chaika, emigrated from Nikolaevka (near Poltava), Ukraine. The composer's mother, Alexandra Andreyevna née d'Assier, 18 years her husband's junior, was of French ancestry on her father's side, and was the second of Ilya's three wives.
Tchaikovsky had four brothers (Nikolai, Ippolit, and twins Anatoly and Modest), and a sister, Alexandra. He also had a half-sister Zinaida from his father's first marriage.