Today, practically all of Pushkin's manuscripts are preserved in St Petersburg at Pushkinskii Dom. The most significant of these are the extant 18 working notebooks which contain both draft and final versions of most of the major works. The majority of these have never been seen in their original form outside the Strong Room in Pushkinskii Dom.

Pushkin enjoyed using large notebooks for his work. In them we can follow the movement of his ideas. We can be part of the creative process that led him to switch freely from one work to another or to return again and again to lines already crossed out and altered many times.

N. V. Izmailov, a great Pushkin expert, remarked 'shortly before leaving the Lyceum, Pushkin collected into one notebook the most important works he had produced up to that time. The bound notebook, with the title "Poems by Alexander Pushkin 1817" was preserved and represents the first of his working notebooks. Yet, to call it a working notebook can be done only in a relative sense: it contains the fair copies of his Lyceum poetry, which had not been published and which was intended, apparently, to appear as a separate collection - in all 41 poems, mainly carefully copied by his friends. These fair versions were subsequently reworked by Pushkin, who returned to them several times (to some - up to seven times), which indeed turned the clean manuscript into a working notebook.'

Among the other working notebooks are three which Pushkin used at many different times during his wanderings: the first in the Caucasus, the Crimea and at Kishinev, between 1820 and 1823; the second during his trips in 1833 to places connected with the Pugachev uprising; and the third, containing a separate stanza for the seventh chapter of 'Eugene Onegin' and different jottings from 1830 to 1833 including Pushkin's notes on Voltaire's Library.

The series contains the set of three 'Kishinev' working notebooks filled with texts written between 1820 and 1833 beginning with 'The Prisoner of the Caucasus'.

The three 'Masonic' working notebooks are office ledgers - rough, white paper in dark leather bindings. On each a Masonic sign - an equilateral triangle with the letters 'Ov...'. The first of these is dated, on the inside cover, '27 May 1822' Kishinev', apparently the date on which Pushkin received it. The first chapter of 'Eugene Onegin' follows, dated '9 May' and subsequently'28 May 1823, at night'.

At the end of 1833 Pushkin began his last working notebook. In 1835 he wrote a drama about a peasant uprising in Germany during the fourteenth Century 'Scenes from the Age of Chivalry'. Almost his last significant poem 'I have raised myself a monument not made with hands' is dated 'August 21, 1836, Kamennyi Ostrov'. Most of this last working notebook remained blank: the worries leading up to the duel and the subsequent death of the poet brought an abrupt and tragic end to his work.

For the first time, we can see all of Pushkin's famous sketches in context. Frequently these sketches were not ends in themselves; rather they were the result of the same thought processes and the same spiritual state that gave rise to the poetry. Pushkin himself emphasized that, in most cases, the appearance of a sketch was related to an unfinished line: when a stanza ground to a halt, when an epithet would not come, when the rhythm slowed, each hesitation was solved with a sketch.

We are now able to ponder the coded marks and secret notes which intrude upon Pushkin's creative texts. Sometimes, they merely indicate the number of lines in a work just completed. Sometimes, they record debts and expenses. There are dates relating to creative events and to daily happenings, addresses, lists of names and objects and, often, a note here and there which only Pushkin understood. M. A. Tsiavlovskii, the renowned Pushkin scholar, wrote of them:
'Many of these notes are profoundly intimate and denote events and facts, the spelling-out of which Pushkin could not and did not wish to entrust even to his notebook. The intimate nature of the notes dictated the abbreviations he used, the decoding of which constitutes a kind of sport for Pushkinists.'