In 1958, the “Literaturnaya Zhizn” magazine published an article called “Three Monuments” dedicated to Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin. Its author was the 80-year-old journalist Arnold Ilyich Gessen. A year later, honoring the poet’s 160th birthday, the “Sovetskaya Kultura” newspaper published another article by the new Pushkinist entitled “Rising from the Ashes”. Then Gessen published his first book on the Pushkin theme called “12, Moyka River Embankment”, which was commissioned by the editor of “Detskaya Literatura”. Readers welcomed the new author with interest.

After that, Gessen wrote two or three new articles every year for Pushkin’s admirers about the poet and his entourage, and every other two or three years he had a new book to be published. They were issued by the “Detskaya Literatura” and “Nauka” publishing houses and primarily targeted a teenage audience.

After the publication of his third Pushkiniana book “All would excite the tender mind…”, Arnold Gessen joined the USSR Union of Writers at the age of 88.

His works present a combination of great journalist skills, painstaking work with archives, and a sincere interest in the topic. Arnold Gessen’s books are a complex and thought-out interweaving of original documents, quotes from letters, diaries, poems, memoirs, and comments on them. His genre can be defined as a blend of fiction, literary essay, and focused research.

In an interview given to the “V Mire Knig” (In the World of Books) magazine in 1974, the literary critic and bibliographer, Professor Nikolay Mikhailovich Sikorsky noted that Arnold Gessen’s books were popular due to the author’s meticulous selection of the most entertaining facts, “elegant and tactful” narration and “warm heart.”

Arnold Gessen sent his new books to the “cradle of [his] culture” — the former Korocha gymnasium. He was keenly interested in reviews of his works, especially by history teachers and philologists. He mentioned this in his correspondence with Mikhail Ivanovich Marchenko from Korocha in 1964–1965.