Pushkin's novel in verse follows a bored St. Petersburg dandy who inherits a country estate, rejects a girl's love letter, kills his friend in a duel, and years later finds her transformed into the star of Petersburg society.
The route runs from the capital's garden walks to the road into Moscow and the exile estate where he wrote part of the book. Most places in the verse are glimpsed rather than described, so several pins are approximate or stand-ins.
Russia's national poet, Alexander Pushkin, went from the Lyceum at Tsarskoye Selo to exile at Mikhailovskoye, a Moscow wedding, the duel at the Black River in Saint Petersburg and a grave at Svyatogorsky Monastery. The route follows his life, not his fiction.
It runs from the schoolboy of 1811 to the funeral of 1837, and ends at the monastery near Pskov where he was buried beside his mother. Where the exact spot of a stop is only approximate, the stop says so.
