Alexander Pushkin, exiled to southern Russia for the revolutionary sentiments of such verse as Ode to Liberty, spent three weeks – “the happiest days of his life” – in the former summer house of the Duke of Richelieu, Governor of the Southern Russia between 1808 and 1811.

Puskin was packed off home from Crimea by the Duke’s successor, Count Vorontsov, who feared that the praise of the “society of political and literary fanatics” who surrounded him might convince him that he was a great writer, not merely “a feeble imitator of Lord Byron, an original not much to be commended”.

Richelieu’s ducal dacha in Gurzuf is today a museum devoted to Russia’s greatest poet.