T., herself perhaps the daughter of a local squire, had been the source of the two most obviously ‘romantic’ tales – ‘The Blizzard’ and ‘The Squire’s Daughter’.

It is obvious of course that Pushkin enjoyed himself in his own quiet artist’s way by putting in touches appropriate to these various narrators. What is less obvious is the skill with which he has made his narrators not necessarily typical at all. His own theory of character (though one can hardly call the rapid, sparkling way in which he flung out ideas in his letters by the name of a ‘theory’) was that really great creators, notably Shakespeare, never created characters whose behaviour was consistent and all-of-a-piece. Shylock and Macbeth, for instance, show personalities – Shylock a man of his word and a devoted father, Macbeth tormented by conscience and wholly unsuited by nature to murder and intrigue – which are quite at variance with their dramatic roles. Byron, on the other hand, says Pushkin, makes a conspirator ‘even order a drink conspiratorially, and that’s absurd’.

This sense of a true and unpredictable humanity was vital to Pushkin’s creative genius. It appears most clearly in the Little Tragedies, where Salieri is as honourable and high-minded a murderer as Othello, and Don Juan irresistible not because he is an expert and cold-hearted seducer but because he really loves and appreciates women – all women. We can see the same impulse working in the complex comedy of the Belkin stories, most felicitously of all in ‘The Postmaster’. For a start the narrator is himself by no means a ‘typical’ civil servant: he is a man of sense and sensibility, who understands and appreciates both the pathos of the situation from the old father’s point of view, and how things must look to a pretty and intelligent daughter longing for a chance to make her way in the world. The consistency and predictability which Pushkin subtly undermines in his tale are here in fact those of the New Testament story of the Prodigal Son. So far from going to the bad, the Postmaster’s daughter Dunya goes to the good, as it were. Everything turns out well for her; it is her old father who takes to drink and dies forlorn. And then she comes home, as he would not permit her while he was alive, to shed a tear on his grave. She is by no means an abandoned or a hard-hearted girl.

There is not a trace of sentimentality in the telling of the story, and yet this quiet and unemphatic presentation of an episode from Wordsworth’s ‘still sad music of humanity’ is very moving. Romanticism tended of course to sentimentalize such things. Pushkin was very gently sending up the famous tear-jerker ‘Poor Liza’ (1792), by the older and distinguished Russian author Karamzin. The same sentimental formula would be exploited by Dickens. But temperamentally Pushkin was not in the least a romantic. He was, it would be true to say, much more a Shakespearean; and in his first wholly successful prose pieces he delighted in using the subtle arts of parody and comedy to produce an effect which was intelligently moving, and never superficial or sensationalized. As his critics have demonstrated, Pushkin’s art is full of implication. In his own words there was ‘no need to spell it out’.

The Tales of Belkin are thus in one sense a ‘plain prose’ equivalent of the dazzling poetic virtuosity he had displayed in Eugene Onegin. But there is no authorial presence in the tales, just as there is no sign of an omniscient narrator. The flashes of insight which transform the stories do not proceed from any individual in them, or, apparently, from the author himself. That anonymity seems to have been what Pushkin was trying to produce in prose. If so he succeeded in doing so with perfect unobtrusiveness. The ashamed and yet exasperated young hussar assures the postmaster that his daughter is very well off, and inadvertently he reveals exactly the truth which the parable of the Prodigal Son preferred to leave out. ‘Neither of you will ever forget what has happened.’ Nor is the old man dignified in his pathos. When the young hussar gives him money he indignantly throws it to the ground and walks away, but after a moment’s reflection comes back to pick it up. Too late! – someone else has already removed it. So it all too often goes with preconceived moral gestures.

‘The Blizzard’ is a charming parodic variant on the contemporary vogue for tales of romantic elopements and demon bridegrooms returning from limbo. Miss K.