He had to be very careful not to say bad things about the rulers of the country. The police watched him very carefully. Yet at this time Pushkin wrote a large number of great works, almost each one of them being the first of their kind in Russian literature. One example is the short story "The Queen of Spades", which Tchaikovsky made into an opera and which was to be a great influence on the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky.