Aleksandr Pushkin again clashed with his superiors in Odessa and was again exiled, this time to his mother's rural estate. In 1826 he was recalled to Moscow under the tsar's protection, but his relations with the government remained strained throughout his life. He married Natalia Goncharova, a society beauty, in 1831. His wife's social ambitions caused Pushkin to become involved in a reckless social life, put him deeply in debt, and eventually killed him. Early in 1837 he was forced to fight a duel to defend Natalia's reputation and was mortally wounded.Pushkin's early writing is mainly in the 18th-century classical tradition of light, frivolous verse. The verse fairy tale Ruslan & Liudmila (1820) is his first major attempt to use colloquial speech and themes from Russian folklore. This work and other exotic narratives written at that time were very much influenced by romanticism, the movement that was beginning to dominate contemporary English poetry. Pushkin was particularly drawn to the verse of Lord Byron, whose style he emulated in such poems as The Prisoner of the Caucasus (1822), The Robber Brothers (1827), and Eugene Onegin. In Onegin, however, the Byronic hero has been changed by Pushkin into a tragic figure. He disdains the love offered him by a naive and awkward provincial girl, only to fall in love with her later when he meets her in Saint Petersburg, now a poised, married woman prominent in society. Although she still loves him, the heroine remains faithful to her husband and rejects Onegin. The plot is simple, but Pushkin has used it to convey his poignant central theme: the relentless passage of time and the irrevocable nature of past actions.
