Alexander pushkin

Return from exile
After the revolt in 1825 the new tsar Nicholas I realized that Pushkin was by now very famous. He also realized that he had not taken part in the revolt, so he allowed him to return. The tsar said that he himself would censor Pushkin's works before they were allowed to be published. He said that he was going to be a good tsar and help the poor people (the serfs) to become free. Pushkin was in a difficult position because he could not write anything that the tsar would not like.
He had to be very careful not to say bad things about the rulers of the country. The police watched him very carefully. Yet at this time Pushkin wrote a large number of great works, almost each one of them being the first of their kind in Russian literature. One example is the short story The Queen of Spades, which Tchaikovsky made into an opera and which was to be a great influence on the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Last years
In his last years, Pushkin was again in government service in St. Petersburg. He married in 1831 and had to spend a lot of time in society at court. He wrote more and more prose. He wrote a history of Peter the Great and a historical novel The Captain's Daughter. He kept asking the tsar to let him resign from his job and go to the country to spend his time writing. The tsar would not allow that. In 1837, Pushkin was killed in a duel. He had been forced to fight the duel in order to defend his wife's honour.
Pushkin’s achievements
The Russian language today would be very different if it had not been for Pushkin. Using the language as it was spoken by the people he made it into a language which was simple but which could also express deep feelings. His works were a great influence on later writers like Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov and Leo Tolstoy. Yevgeny Onegin was the first Russian novel which told a story about the society of the time. His works have been translated into all the major languages