Set during the Pugachov rebellion against Catherine the Great, The Captain's Daughter was Pushkin's only completed novel and remains one of his most popular works. The inexperienced and impetuous young nobleman Pyotr Grinyev is sent on military service to a remote fortress, where he falls in love with Masha, Captain Mironov's daughter - but then the ruthless Cossack Pugachov lays siege to the stronghold, setting in motion a tragic train of events. This volume also contains another work by Pushkin on the same theme, A History of Pugachov, which presents an impartial, meticulously researched history of the revolt, but was regarded in aristocratic circles as subversive on its publication. Together, these two works provide a fascinating insight into the character of the peasant who tried to overthrow an empress, written with the clarity and insight of Russia's greatest poet.

Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) is best known for his great achievments in poetry, but the fixtion he wrote in the last decade of his life was to have a tremendous impact on the subsequent development of Russian prose, influencing such later writers as Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. This is a new translation of all his prose fiction, from his famous story "The Queen of Spades" down to unfinished stories and fragments that appear in English for the first time. Pushkin's non-fictional A History of Pugachev, also translated into English for the first time, is included because it furnished the historical background of his novel The Captain's Daughter. The translator has taken care to achieve a balance between faithfulness to the original and readability in English, and several Russian editions have been collated to establish an accurate text. The translations are annotated to place each work in its historical context, and to eluvidate passages not easily understandable to today's reader. Appendixes present a chapter that Pushkin deleted from The Captain's Daughter; fictional fragments; Pushkin's outlines of projected works; and the apocryphal novella The Lonely Cottage on Vasilev Island.

This study of the effect of literature on readers, both as individuals and as members of social groups, focuses on Russia's national poet, Alexander Pushkin, as a model for investigating the aesthetic and social functions of literature.
The individual reader's response to the literary text is demonstrated in Part One through a broad range of memoirs, diaries, and correspondences in which Russian readers recorded their reactions to Pushkin. Among the reactions are testimonies that Pushkin's works helped readers form their personalities, provided cathartic relief in times of stress, and aided them in releasing their suppressed emotions. In his analysis, the author draws on various psychological approaches, from studies of perception through developmental psychology to psychoanalysis.
Part Two exposes the extent to which individuals' aesthetic responses are conditioned by their social environment. Against the backdrop of Russian social history in the early nineteenth century, the author describes the dissemination of new aesthetic norms, notably the relations of the Russian literary elite to "lowbrow" and "middlebrow" groups. In this context, he analyzes a number of Pushkin imitations (with Pushkin's responses to them) and links Nikolai Gogol's development as a writer to the social groups surrounding Pushkin. Among the other topics discussed are the popularization of Pushkin on the stage and his inclusion in school textbooks and anthologies.
The aura surrounding the personality of an author is the subject of Part Three, in which the author shows how Pushkin's death in a duel with a foreigner contributed to his emergence as a symbol of the Russian nation, and how deep-seated anxiety about national identity gave rise to the Pushkin myth and to the canonization of the poet as martyr. The author also describes how the combined effect of the widespread reading of Pushkin's work and his legend as martyr allowed him to remain Russia's main mythic figure despite the Soviet Union's attempts to supplant him with Lenin. Throughout the book, theoretical arguments are buttressed by close readings of Pushkin's works, especially "The Prisoner of the Caucasus," "Eugene Onegin," "Poltava," "Egyptian Nights," and several lyric poems.

Translated with notes by Ronald Wilks and an introduction by Paul Debreczeny

In the final years of his life, Chekhov had reached the height of his powers as a dramatist, yet he also wrote short stories that rank among his masterpieces.

In ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ a man and a woman indulge in an affair that could ruin both their marriages, but their feelings for each other compel them towards betrayal. ‘Peasants’ focuses on the brutality of peasant life, where the locus of evil is the tavern in which the men spend the last of their meagre earnings on vodka and go home drunk to beat their wives. And in ‘My Life’ Misail rejects the life of a gentleman to become a labourer despite his father’s protestations and threats to disown him.

These later works show how Chekhov moved away from the realism of his earlier stories, forging a style that would inspire modern short story writers such as Hemingway, Faulkner and the Bloomsbury Group.

• with a chronology, further reading, and publishing history and notes for each story •

This collection of Pushkin's stories begins with 'The Queen of Spades', perhaps the most celebrated short story in Russian literature. The young Hermann, while watching some friends gambling, hears a rumour of how an officer's grandmother is always able to predict the three winning cards in a game. He becomes obsessed with the woman and her seemingly mystical powers, and seeks to extract the secret from her at any cost. This volume, part of a new series of the complete works of Pushkin in English, also includes 'Dubrovsky', the story of a man's desire to avenge himself after his land is unjustly taken from him by an aristocrat; 'The Negro of Peter the Great', a tale inspired by Pushkin's maternal grandfather; and the unfinished story 'Egyptian Nights', a meditation on poetry and the poet. Together, they represent some of the most striking and enduring pieces of Pushkin's prose fiction.