Tales of Belkin and Other Prose Writings

TALES OF BELKIN AND OTHER PROSE WRITINGS

ALEXANDER SERGEYEVICH PUSHKIN was born in Moscow in 1799. He was liberally educated and left school in 1817. Given a sinecure in the Foreign Office, he spent three dissipated years in St Petersburg, writing light, erotic and highly polished verse. He flirted with several pre-Decembrist societies, composing the mildly revolutionary verses which led to his disgrace and exile in 1820. After a stay in the Caucasus and the Crimea, he was sent to Bessarabia, where he wrote The Prisoner of the Caucasus and The Fountain of Bakhchisarai. His work took a more serious turn during the last year of his southern exile, when he began The Gipsies and Eugene Onegin. In 1824 he moved to his parents’ estate at Mikhaylovskoye in north-west Russia and wrote The Gipsies. The following year he wrote his great historical drama Boris Godunov and continued Eugene Onegin. With the failure of the Decembrists’ rising in 1825 and the accession of a new Tsar, Pushkin recovered his freedom. During the next three years he wandered restlessly between St Petersburg and Moscow. He wrote an epic poem, Poltava, but little else. In 1829 he went with the Russian army to Transcaucasia, and the following year he retired to a family estate at Boldino, completing Eugene Onegin. In the autumn of 1830 he wrote Tales of Belkin and his experimental ‘Little Tragedies’ in blank verse. In 1831 he married the beautiful Natalia Goncharova. The rest of his life was plagued by debts and the malice of his enemies. His literary output slackened, but he wrote two prose works, The Captain’s Daughter and The Queen of Spades, and folk poems, including The Golden Cockerel. Towards the end of 1836 anonymous letters goaded Pushkin into challenging a troublesome admirer of his wife to a duel. Pushkin was mortally wounded and died in January 1837.

RONALD WILKS studied Russian language and literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, after training as a Naval interpreter, and later Russian literature at London University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1972. Among his translations for Penguin Classics are My Childhood, My Apprenticeship and My Universities by Gorky, Diary of a Madman by Gogol, filmed for Irish Television, The Golovlyov Family by Saltykov-Shchedrin, How Much Land Does a Man Need? by Tolstoy, and six volumes of stories by Chekhov: The Party and Other Stories, The Kiss and Other Stories, The Fiancée and Other Stories, The Duel and Other Stories, The Steppe and Other Stories and Ward No. 6 and Other Stories. He has also translated The Little Demon by Sologub for Penguin.

JOHN BAYLEY was Warton Professor of English Literature, Oxford University, from 1974–92. Among his many books are The Romantic Survival: A Study in Poetic Evolution, The Characters of Love: A Study in the Literature of Personality, Tolstoy and the Novel, Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary, An Essay on Hardy, Shakespeare and Tragedy, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch and a detailed study of A. E. Housman’s poems. Alice (1994), The Queer Captain (1995) and George’s Lair (1996) are his trilogy of novels. He has also introduced Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and edited James’s The Wings of the Dove for Penguin Classics.

TALES OF BELKIN AND OTHER PROSE WRITINGS

ALEXANDER PUSHKIN

Translated by RONALD WILKS
With an Introduction by JOHN BAYLEY

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BookishMall.com

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First published in Russian in 1831
This translation first published in Penguin Classics 1998
10

Copyright © Ronald Wilks, 1998
Copyright © Introduction, John Bayley, 1998
All rights reserved

The moral right of the editors has been asserted

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EISBN: 9781101492604

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION BY JOHN BAYLEY

FURTHER READING

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

THE TALES OF THE LATE IVAN PETROVICH BELKIN

FROM THE EDITOR

THE SHOT

THE BLIZZARD

THE UNDERTAKER

THE POSTMASTER

THE SQUIRE’S DAUGHTER

THE HISTORY OF THE VILLAGE OF GORYUKHINO

ROSLAVLEV

KIRDZHALI: A TALE

EGYPTIAN NIGHTS

A JOURNEY TO ARZRUM AT THE TIME OF THE 1829 CAMPAIGN

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

There is a kind of genius in art who seems to embody a culture, a language, a created world. Examples are Shakespeare and Mozart. In some degree each national culture possesses one such genius: one who most obviously embodies and expresses it. For Russia it is Pushkin.