I. T.’s other story, ‘The Squire’s Daughter’, is also discreetly told from the feminine angle. The narrator takes pleasure in the fact that her hero should think of marrying a peasant girl for love; and he is seen from a woman’s point of view, as Darcy and Bingham are seen in Pride and Prejudice. The shop assistant who is the anecdotalist of ‘The Undertaker’ takes for granted his protagonist’s pride in trade and pleasure, in securing custom and cheating the customer. Once again, however, a sudden insight seems to come from nowhere in particular. The new cottage bought by the undertaker, which he has always longed for, does not after all make ‘his heart… rejoice’, as he is surprised to find. For trade and business are his whole life, though he had never realized it before.

Insofar as there is a meaning or even a moral in the Tales, and to find such things in Pushkin is in any event highly dubious, it is that the objective reality of things always remains outside the stories we tell about them, just as they remain outside the meanings we ourselves seek to impose. Silvio, in ‘The Shot’, has an absolute determination to impose his will upon the indifferent world of fact. His determination is magnificent but futile. He is a mystery man, a melodramatist cut off from the prosaic world, and it takes sober prose to reveal him, not as a hero but as the grotesquely isolated figure he has become. None the less he is surely still admired by the army officer who tells his story.

In Pushkin’s prose the world seems alienated from the medium describing it by the very operation of that medium. As the Russian critic Lezhnev put it, ‘poetry and truth cannot coexist’ in this atmosphere, which is the point of prose. It is a property of the prose virtues which Pushkin is investigating, rather than something put in by his own personality. The Tales of Belkin are thus very different from the contes of Flaubert, Maupassant or Mérimée, where ‘impersonality’ is a product of the writer’s own personal attitude. They are much more like James Joyce’s Dubliners, and have the same play of parody mixed with realism. We could say that Pushkin, as an experimenter, honours the medium of prose by not slipping it on with the casual and familiar ease with which he had slipped on the garment of poetry. His successor Gogol, who much admired the Belkin tales, could be said to have made a kind of deliberate and often facetious mannerism of his own, out of this unobtrusive evasiveness which he found in Pushkin.

Pushkin, as we have seen, created the figure of Belkin himself as a kind of postscript to his stories, almost as an incongruous guarantee of their impersonality. When Belkin gets his head, he becomes, as if quite unintentionally, a character in his own right, both comic and endearing. As if to relax himself and his reader, Pushkin went on at once to write his inimitable ‘History of the Village of Goryukhino’. We learn now that young Squire Belkin had always had literary ambitions; that he attempted at first to write a Russian epic, which caused him so much trouble that he turned it into a tragedy and finally into a ballad. Then he dropped the whole idea and started to compose aphorisms, which even he could see were a trifle banal. So he collected and embellished anecdotes – in fact the Tales which we have just been reading – and finally, still unsatisfied, he determines to write a proper history, like that of the Russian historian Polevoy or the celebrated Gibbon (‘whose name I cannot remember’).

So drolly effective is Pushkin’s satire – if indeed something so good-natured can be called satire at all – that we could easily miss what must have amused his friends, and some of his fellow-authors, at the time. Belkin is struggling to do what the Russian writers of the great classic period, and not least Pushkin himself, had themselves all been trying to do. They had begun ambitious epics, turned to other kinds of poetry, and then finally to prose and to history. Belkin found the diary of his own great-grandfather, once lord of the manor, a preliminary inspiration.

May 4th. Snow. Trishka beaten for rudeness. 6th – the brown cow died. Senka flogged for drunkenness… 9th – rain and snow. Trishka flogged because of the weather.

And so forth.