The Queen of Spades and Selected Works

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin ranks as one of Russia’s greatest writers. Born in 1799, he published his first poem when he was a teenager, and attained fame in 1820 with his first long poem, Ruslan and Lyudmila. In the late 1820s he found himself the target of government censors, unable to travel or publish at will; during this time, he wrote his most famous play, Boris Godunov, and Eugene Onegin (published 1825–1832). “The Queen of Spades”, his most famous prose work, was published in 1834; his best known poem, “The Bronze Horseman”, appeared after his death (from a wound sustained in a duel) in 1837.