The vogue for his poetry, especially his early poetry, had been sensational. In Russian literary circles he had become as famous as Byron had been in England and throughout western Europe. His poems were popular among ordinary folk too, in the same way that those of Burns became in his native Scotland. He had the common touch, and delighted in fairy tales and ballads, but he was also a dedicated and sophisticated artist who was never prepared to repeat a success, but was always exploring new effects and different forms. In his short life (he was killed in a duel at thirty-seven) he wrote a great deal, not in sheer bulk but in terms of versatility and variety. Furthermore, as he himself often stressed in a humorous way, he wrote for money. His early narrative poems had brought him in a good deal, but in the 1830s – he was born in the last year of the previous century – he understood very well that the fashion for romantic poetry was beginning to wane. A contemporary of his, an aspiring novelist in the manner of Sir Walter Scott, famously remarked that Russian readers had begun to get tired of poetry, as a child gets tired of its rattle: ‘There is a general outcry – give us prose! Water, plain water!’

Pushkin was prepared to oblige. His first serious attempt at writing prose fiction was to begin a novel about his own ancestor: the boy, probably from Abyssinia, who had been presented by the Turkish sultan to Peter the Great, and who had risen to become a general in Peter’s service. ‘Precision and tidiness are the prime merits of prose’, he had observed in one of his letters, and ‘The Negro of Peter the Great’ (1827) is perhaps almost too bald and simplistic in its narrative mode, although the account it gives of the period is a vivid and fascinating one. Probably the sheer impersonality of the narrative technique did not suit Pushkin, who in a narrative poem like Eugene Onegin had enjoyed playing deftly and humorously with every kind of literary convention and stylistic approach. In the unfinished Peter the Great story – it remains no more than a fragment – he ventured too boldly and too far towards the kind of omniscient and impersonal prose narration that would become common in the second half of the century – the heyday of the great novel. Possibly too he saw no way of making his leading character more significant and more interesting as the story of the young negro’s career developed. And so, with characteristic decisiveness, he stopped writing it.

None the less he did not at once abandon its impersonal and omniscient method. When reading ‘The guests were arriving at the dacha’, and ‘At the corner of a small square’ – these are the opening sentences of a pair of fragments a good deal shorter than the ‘Peter’ one – one has the uncanny impression of entering the sort of highly sophisticated and complex social world which is to be found in the novels of Stendhal or Flaubert. The characters Pushkin rapidly sketches in seem immensely ‘promising’: in a page or two one is already quite absorbed by them. The two fragments, especially the first, fascinated Tolstoy, who was inspired by its opening sentence (‘That is how prose should be written’, he remarked) in beginning the first draft of Anna Karenina.

And yet one can see why Pushkin found himself unable to develop a situation that seemed so auspiciously begun. The simple deadpan method gave him no room in which to turn round, and to expand the fashionable and intricate social scene in which his characters appear to be moving, and of which they are evidently natural denizens.

Pushkin moved in that sophisticated urban world himself, especially after 1831, when he married the beautiful Nataliya Goncharova. His marriage was a happy one, but his wife’s frivolity and flirtatiousness were to lead to the fatal duel seven years later, for Pushkin was by temperament intensely jealous, attributing this, like his own highly-sexed nature, to the remote African ancestor of whom he remained extremely proud. He loved society and gambling, and all the pleasures of the metropolis, but for two highly-productive autumns – the time he liked best to write – he withdrew to a small family manor house in the country at Boldino, shut himself up and wrote night and day for a month in a single continuous burst of inspiration. These ‘Boldino autumns’, as they are known to Pushkin scholars and admirers, produced astonishing achievements in verse, and at the same time in prose stories and the drama.

It was there he wrote his first prose masterpiece – the Tales of Belkin. This unique and delightful series of tales was first written straight out: it was afterwards that Pushkin invented the inimitable figure of Squire Belkin himself, as part of an elaborate mechanism of anonymity, and of a pretended naïveté. Pushkin was well aware too of a literary precedent, for both Walter Scott in Tales of My Landlord (1816–19) and the American Washington Irving in Tales of a Traveller (1824) had employed the same elaborately humorous narrative device. Pushkin’s humour is more subtle, however, and Belkin himself an excellent ‘character’, seen both with amusement and with a kind of affectionate respect. He is the simple good-hearted Russian squire – prostoy i dobry barin – rather like the father of Tatiana Larin in the verse novel Eugene Onegin. It seems quite likely that he was the kind of inspiration that came not only from a Boldino autumn in the country but from some of the local landowners.

As the ‘editor’ of the late Mr Belkin’s tales tells us in a footnote, their collector picked them up from various sources, in the course of his rural routines. A civil servant, a ‘titular councillor’, supplied ‘The Postmaster’. ‘The Shot’ he had heard from a Lieutenant-Colonel, and ‘The Undertaker’ from a ‘shop assistant’, perhaps at second-hand. Miss K. I.