The diary, as Belkin observes, ‘is distinguished for clarity and brevity of style’ – just the qualities which Pushkin was seeking in his own prose.

Oppressed by the weight of things as they actually are, Belkin, unlike his great-grandfather, seeks relief in writing them down as they are not. And yet the gloomy history of Russian feudal serfdom, as also its more incidentally human side, appears both in his introduction and in the ‘history’ itself. Belkin suddenly becomes wholly natural when he describes his own homecoming, and how the birches on the estate have grown taller. ‘I told the women unceremoniously, “How you’ve aged,” and they replied with feeling, “And how plain you’ve become, master.”’ But when writing ‘history’ Belkin attempts the proper magisterial tone, and in doing so makes, as if accidentally, an observation that is true in all nations and at all times, but especially true of what the poet Aleksandr Blok called the dark chronicle of Russia. It is because of that darkness that the Russian peasantry always looked back to what they thought of as a golden age. It was not until the age of Lenin and the Communist Party that they became conditioned to look forward instead – to what was promised and proclaimed to be the gleaming heights of socialism.

Pushkin’s free and individual brand of interest in history, and how to write it, is also visible in the novel fragment ‘Roslavlev’. It seems at least to have been projected as a novel, a kind of alternative version of his acquaintance Zagoskin’s actual and orthodox historical fiction in the Sir Walter Scott manner, also called Roslavlev. The latter story concerns a young Russian lady, Polina, who has been in France before Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, where she has fallen in love with a married man. Back in Russia during the invasion she meets him again, now widowed, and a prisoner of war. She herself is half-heartedly betrothed to a young Russian officer, Roslavlev, but she now deserts her home in the company of her former French lover, and they manage to reach the French army. Like the old-time heroine who has suffered a fate worse than death, and therefore cannot be allowed to survive the conclusion of a heroic narrative, Zagoskin’s Polina is later killed with her lover during the Russian siege of Danzig.

Pushkin was clearly interested in the possibilities of Polina as a character, implying that she had been merely conventionalized in Zagoskin’s narrative. Slight as his sketch is, he makes it clear that she is a young woman of fire and intelligence, able to think for herself and eager to read and to know about everything that is going on. He gives her, in fact, the qualities which he himself could admire in young women, and which he felt were more paramount in Russian society among women than men. His own Tatiana in Eugene Onegin would be a good example. Young Lieutenant Roslavlev, on the other hand, is the sort of good-natured rake who talks down to what he thinks is women’s level, and who is quite unworthy of Polina’s love. Senicour, the French prisoner, is a different proposition entirely. He is gentle, courteous and attractive. But Polina is a spirited and patriotic girl, who at the end of the fragment gives the news to the female narrator that her brother Roslavlev has been killed fighting heroically at Borodino.

So what might happen now? A potentially interesting situation, with Polina divided between admiration and growing love for the French prisoner, and her own strong patriotic feelings? Whatever resolution for the story Pushkin might have found, he clearly lost interest at this point in continuing the novel. It was Polina as a person, rather than her story as told by Zagoskin, which had interested him. He toyed with the idea of making her a friend and confidante of the great Madame de Staël, whose personality and intelligence she sees as a reproach to the whole of a philistine Russian upper class. It is of some interest, incidentally, that Madame de Staël’s novel Corinne (1807), which Pushkin mentions more than once, is also mentioned by Tolstoy in War and Peace. Madame de Staël is the favourite novelist of the Russian General Kutuzov, and he is actually absorbed in her during the opening stages of the Battle of Borodino, presumably when he knows he can do no more than to let the events of the day take their course – a policy of wise passivity which Tolstoy approves in War and Peace; and which Pushkin, who took a great interest in military matters, and in the personalities of the war of 1812, would no doubt have approved of too.

Pushkin’s interest in campaigning – in this case a campaign against the Turks – is evident in his unique chapters of autobiography, ‘A Journey to Arzrum at the Time of the 1829 Campaign’. Not only does this give us one of the few pieces of Pushkin’s personal writing, but it is written in a style of quite singular compression, purity and vividness. Many later Russian authors, including Lérmontov and Tolstoy himself, have taken it for a model. Though it is one of the most interesting of Pushkin’s writings it is almost impossible to find in a translation, which makes its appearance in this selection particularly welcome.

As his early poems show, Pushkin loved the exotic for its own sake. The spirited tale ‘Kirdzhali’ shows that, but it is also a masterpiece of matter-of-fact simplicity which may remind us not only of one of Tolstoy’s last and finest tales, Hadji-Murad, but of some of the best early stories of Hemingway (themselves much influenced by Tolstoy). Love for the exotic, as well as a humorous attitude towards it, is also a feature of that fascinating fragment ‘Egyptian Nights’. Half serious and half playful, Pushkin plays in it with the idea of his own personality as a poet: or rather as two poets, the young Russian aristocrat Charsky, and the humble Italian improviser who possesses, in spite of his lowly status, that mysterious gift of the gods, a true poetic inspiration. Like Pushkin himself, he can produce finished verses on every subject. Nor is he concerned with what they mean, or with what he as a poet is ‘trying to say’.