While still a school-boy, he began to write his famous fantastic-romantic poem, "Ruslan and Liudmila" (which Glinka afterwards made the subject of a charming opera), and here, for the first time in Russian literary history, a thoroughly national theme was handled with a freedom and naturalness which dealt the death-blow to the prevailing inflated, rhetorical style.

The subject of the poem was one of the folk-legends, of which he had been fond as a child; and when it was published, in 1820, the critics were dumb with amazement.

The gay, even dissipated, society life which he took up on leaving the Lyceum came to a temporary end in consequence of some biting epigrams which he wrote.

The Prefect of St.Petersburg called him to account for his attacks on prominent people, and transferred him from the ministry of foreign affairs to southern Russia--in fact, to polite exile--giving him a corresponding position in another department of the government.
For four years (1820-1824) he lived chiefly in southern Russia, including the Crimea and the Caucasus, and wrote, "The Prisoner of the Caucasus," "The Fountain of Baktchesarai," "The Gypsies," and a part of his famous "Evgeny Onyegin," being, at this period, strongly influenced by Byron, as the above-mentioned poems and the short lyrics of the same period show.

Again his life and his poetry were changed radically by a caustic but witty and amusing epigram on his uncongenial official superior in Odessa; and on the latter's complaint to headquarters--the complaint being as neat as the epigram, in its way--Pushkin was ordered to reside on one of the paternal estates, in the government of Pskoff.
Here, under the influence of his old nurse, Arina Rodionovna, and her folk-tales, he became thoroughly and definitively Russian, and entered at last on his real career--poetry which was truly national in spirit.
His talents were now completely matured.