The compositions in Volume III begin from mid-1824, when Pushkin, in increasing disfavour with Tsar Alexander I, was placed under house arrest on a remote family estate in western Russia.   Many of the poems from this frustrating but poetically productive period look back to happier times of relative freedom in Odessa; others are addressed to his neighbours in the country and to his friends, and enemies, back in St Petersburg and Moscow.  The second part of the volume includes the verses Pushkin, still a bachelor, wrote during the years immediately following his exile, when the new Tsar Nicholas I allowed him to return to metropolitan life. We witness the banter he exchanged with friends, his messages of infatuation to a succession of girl friends, and his guarded attempts to test the limits of toleration of the new political and censorship regime.

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