The history of Pushkin's duel is shrouded in a dense veil of myths and legends. The author of this book is Professor of St. Petersburg University R.G. Skrynnikov, well known to readers in Russia and abroad, did a lot of work with the original manuscripts of Pushkin in the Pushkin House, with Zhukovsky’s notes about the duel, diaries and notes of the poet’s contemporaries, as well as with a set of documents from the Dantes archive, recently introduced into scientific circulation by an Italian researcher S. Vitale. For the first time, approaching the study of the topic as a source scholar and textual critic, the historian destroyed the mountain of myths about Pushkin’s duel that had accumulated in science. The book is designed for a wide range of readers and is written in lively language; it is replete with quotes from letters, diary entries and memoirs of contemporaries of the events that bring the spirit of the era. The publication was carried out with the financial support of the Russian Humanitarian Foundation (RGNF), project No. 98-04-16376.