Universally acknowledged as Russia’s greatest poet, Pushkin wrote with the rich, prolific creative powers of a Mozart or a Shakespeare. His prose spans a remarkable range, from satires to epistolary tales, from light comedies to romantic adventures in the manner of Sir Walter Scott, from travel narratives to historical fiction. The haunting dream world of “The Queen of Spades” draws on his own experiences with high-stakes society gambling. The five short stories of The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin are deceptively light as they reveal astonishing human depths, and his short novel, The Captain’s Daughter, a love story set during the Cossack rebellion against Catherine the Great, has been called the most perfect book in Russian literature.
