Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was born in Moscow in 1799. After traveling through the Caucasus and the Crimea, he was sent to Bessarabia, where he wrote The Captive of the Caucasus and The Fountain at Bakhchisaray, and began Eugene Onegin. His work took an increasingly serious turn during the last year of his southern exile, in Odessa. In 1824 he was transferred in north-west Russia, where he wrote his historical drama Boris Godunov, continued Eugene Onegin and finished The Gipsies. He was mortally wounded and died in January 1837.

Stanley Mitchell was born in 1932 in London. He read Modern Languages (French, German and Russian) at Oxford. He taught at various universities - Birmingham, Essex, Sussex, San Diego California, McGill, Montreal, Dar es Salaam Tanzania, Derby, University College London and Camberwell School of Art. Subjects included Russian literature and art, comparative literature, art history and cultural studies. He is currently Emeritus Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Derby and Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Art History at University College, London. He has translated Georg Lukacs and Walter Benjamin, written a variety of articles and reviews, and given numerous lectures and talks.