How did the Caucasus and Crimea influence Aleksandr Pushkin’s writing?

Following his banishment from St. Petersburg in 1820, Aleksandr Pushkin traveled through the northern Caucasus and Crimea while convalescing from an illness. The impressions he gathered during these travels provided the essential inspiration and material for his "southern cycle" of romantic narrative poems.1

This cycle includes three notable works:
* Kavkazsky plennik (1820–21; The Prisoner of the Caucasus)
* Bratya razboyniki (1821–22; The Robber Brothers)
* Bakhchisaraysky fontan (1823; The Fountain of Bakhchisaray)

These poems helped solidify Pushkin's reputation as the leading Russian poet of his era and as a central figure of the romantic, liberty-loving generation of the 1820s. Although these works were highly successful, Pushkin eventually moved away from the exotic, romanticized style of this period, later favoring objective description and realistic settings in his masterpiece, Yevgeny Onegin.1