Vroege RecensentenAlexander Pushkin

The Tales of Belkin is the first work of prose fiction to be completed by Russia’s greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin. Pushkin’s artfully conceived narrator, the inexperienced and soft-hearted Ivan Petrovich Belkin, draws on the time-honoured themes of marriage, honour and betrayal. Truly a man of his time, Belkin relates stories of Byronic heroes, lovelorn heroines and supernatural events played out against Gothic backdrops. Pushkin’s genius is to breathe new life into each genre, producing sparkling vignettes as surprising as they are charming. These tales have suggested fruitful new avenues of exploration to generations of Russian authors. The volume is completed by Pushkin’s other prose work of the same time, ‘The History of the Village of Goryukhino’, a wry parody of a contemporary history of Russia.