The Complete Prose Tales of Alexandr Sergeyevitch Pushkin
Virtually anybody who prepares a list of the five greatest writers in world history will include at least one Russian on the list. If there is only one, that one should be Pushkin.
Unfortunately, Pushkin is given short shrift outside of his homeland. The reason is not hard to explain - most of his work is poetry, which translates badly. What's worse, even in translation his poetry wouldn't read any better than, say, Lermontov, whereas the difference would be obvious to a Russian, just as the difference between Shakespeare and Marlowe would be to an English speaker.
Pushkin's prose works provide a basis for remedying the situation. His stories are disarmingly simple and readable, just like his poetry. Yet practically every major Russian novelist of the nineteenth century acknowledged his debt to Pushkin as a model and crafter of prose, as well as a source of themes. This includes Gogol, Goncharov, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.
My personal favorites are "The Captain's Daughter", "The Moor of Peter the Great", which is about Pushkin's own great grandfather, who was Ethiopian, and most of all "The Queen of Spades", which practically singlehandedly created the genre of stories of the supernatural. Any one of the stories can be done in one sitting (well, maybe one long sitting for a few of them). Do yourself a favor and make the acquaintance of one of the best writers that ever lived. --Reviewer: Thomas F. O'Gara from Monticello, Florida United States
