His poems taught the Russian people to speak, to be themselves and rejoice in their language, to know who they were and how they felt. No cultivated Russian, familiar with his country’s history and literature, would find such a claim extravagant.

And yet the absolute ascendancy of Pushkin’s genius in Russian eyes and for Russian culture does continue to puzzle the rest of Europe. Pushkin is above all a poet, and so absolute a poet in his own language that he cannot be translated. Shakespeare is a poet too, of course; but he has so many other gifts that his native linguistic genius dilutes itself naturally into universal human channels. This is not the case with Pushkin. As a poet his dependence on his own language is complete. To see his real point you must be able to participate in the magic of the words of his poems. Those words lose their magic utterly in translation.

This strange fact has annoyed as well as puzzled writers and critics in western countries, who rightly supposed that they could always tell literary genius when they saw it. Flaubert in France was more than willing to accept his friend Mérimée’s enthusiastic assessment of Pushkin as one of the greatest. But he soon changed his mind. ‘Il est plat, votre poète’, he exclaimed disconsolately when Mérimée supplied him with translated samples of Pushkin’s poetic masterpieces, put into accurate French. Mérimée could read Russian: Flaubert could not.

If Mérimée, on the other hand, had seen fit to supply his friend with translations of Pushkin’s Tales of Belkin, Flaubert’s reaction might well have been very different. In fact Mérimée did translate at least two of the tales, and one, ‘The Shot’, he virtually passed off as his own. One could say, in fact, that Pushkin’s prose inspired the French writer in a way that Pushkin’s poetry could not possibly have done. And yet Mérimée, as a man of letters who knew Russian, was well aware that Pushkin’s greatness for his own countrymen was in his poetry, and so he attempted to persuade Flaubert. No good. It sounded flat; and the novelist was quite right to say so. But any Tale of Belkin would have sparkled in French, as it can in English. The humour, the understatement, the graphic simplicity all come over very well. Flaubert would have seen that and enjoyed it. He would at least have been valuing Pushkin as an admirable and versatile prose writer, even though he could not understand why he was a very much greater poet.

Dostoyevsky too made a valiant attempt, on a very much larger scale than Mérimée’s, to persuade the world of the importance of his country’s greatest genius. At the celebration of Pushkin’s fiftieth anniversary in Moscow he made an impassioned speech, which he obviously hoped would be widely reported throughout Europe. In it he claimed that Pushkin was indeed a universal genius, who should be recognized as such wherever great books were read. Shakespeare, Cervantes – yes, very well, said Dostoyevsky, but neither had our Pushkin’s power of projecting himself into every country, every culture, every class and kind of mind. This startling claim was based on the ideas and the situations that can be extrapolated from Pushkin’s swift-moving poetic and dramatic narratives, and particularly from the so-called Little Tragedies, such as ‘Mozart and Salieri’. In a sense the claim is just enough, for Pushkin’s ideas and situations did indeed inspire subsequent Russian writers, and none more than Dostoyevsky himself.

But ideas and situations are commonplace in themselves. They must be transformed by the magic of art, and it is this art which – residing in the poetry as it does – is so difficult to bring across in a translation. Pushkin’s lighter art, on the other hand, as it is expanded in prose stories – his humour, his pleasure in absurdity, his good-natured amusement at human beings – these things can come across very well. Yet it has never been easy to find translations of the prose pieces in which these qualities of a great writer are both paramount and accessible. Hence the pleasure with which the reader who has not come across Pushkin’s prose before will welcome this excellent translation of most of his lesser known prose works.

Where prose was concerned Pushkin was above all a pioneer and experimentalist.