The province of Russian folk-lore and legend from which Pushkin took the idea of _Rusalka_ was to furnish him with a great deal of rich material. It was in 1831 that in friendly rivalry with Zhukovsky he wrote his first long fairy-tale, imitating the Russian popular style, _The Tale of Tsar Saltan_. Up till now he had written only a few ballads in the popular style. This fairy-tale was a brilliant success as a _pastiche_; but it was a _pastiche_ and not quite the real thing, as cleverness kept breaking in, and a touch of epigram here and there, which indeed makes it delightful reading. He followed it by another in the comic vein, _The Tale of the Pope and his Man Balda_, and by two more _Märchen_, _The Dead Tsaritsa_ and _The Golden Cock_; but it was not until two years later that he wrote his masterpiece in this vein, _The Story of the Fisherman and the Fish_. It is the same story as Grimm's tale of the Fisherman's wife who wished to be King, Emperor, and then Pope, and finally lost all by her vaulting ambition. The tale is written in unrhymed rhythmical, indeed scarcely rhythmical, lines; all trace of art is concealed; it is a tale such as might have been handed down by oral tradition in some obscure village out of the remotest past; it has the real _Volkston_; the good-nature and simplicity and unobtrusive humour of a real fairy-tale. The subjects of all these stories were told to Pushkin by his nurse, Anna Rodionovna, who also furnished him with the subject of his ballad, _The Bridegroom_. In Pushkin's note-books there are seven fairy-tales taken down hurriedly from the words of his nurse; and most likely all that he wrote dealing with the life of the people came from the same source. Pushkin called Anna Rodionovna his last teacher, and said that he was indebted to her for counteracting the effects of his first French education. In 1833 he finished a poem called _The Brazen Horseman_, the story of a man who loses his beloved in the great floods in St. Petersburg in 1834, and going mad, imagines that he is pursued by Falconet's equestrian statue of Peter the Great. The poem contains a magnificent description of St. Petersburg. During the last years of his life, he was engaged in collecting materials for a history of Peter the Great. His power of production had never run dry from the moment he left school, although his actual work was interrupted from time to time by distractions and the society of his friends.