Fairytales of Alexander Pushkin

Alexander Pushkin first addressed the fairytale theme in 1815, when he began work on a poem about Prince Bova. The first complete fairytale work in his oeuvre is Ruslan and Lyudmila (1820), which made the poet famous in Russia. Pushkin was interested in folklore throughout his entire career. He recorded the folk tales and songs that he heard from his nanny, Arina Rodionova, at his Mikhailovskoe estate. The poet planned to publish a collection of Russian folk songs. Pushkin started composing his own fairytales in Boldino in autumn 1830, continuing work in the first half of the 1830s. He derived inspiration from Russian folklore in The Tale of the Priest and his Workman Balda and West European sources in The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish and The Tale of Tsar Saltan.