Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #104972 in Books
• Published on: 1968-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 495 pages

Language Notes
Text: English, Russian (translation)

Customer Reviews

so this is literature . . .
Gentlemen, I am not impressed. I understand that Russians worship Pushkin as the be-all and end-all of their literary language, assigning him much the same significance as we do to Shakespeare or Germans, Goethe. If Pushkin is the best they have to offer, they'd better do some serious searching: perhaps a contest for a $10 prize would ferret out something deeper. True, Pushkin is a decent writer--and I recognize that, having a very sketchy command of Russian and not having read his prose in the Russian original, I cannot begin to capture a fair idea of what he actually sounds like--but I was utterly underwhelmed. And I gave the man a fair whirl: I read his complete tales of Belkin (of which, to be fair, The Undertaker was a reasonably funny stint) and a supposedly entertaining novella, The Captain's Daughter. I have been exposed to a wide array of Russian writers--some titanic, some less known, some quite obscure--and I have yet to find cause to jump up and down. Sorry.

The Best of Them All
Virtually anybody who prepares a list of the five greatest writers in world history will include at least one Russian on the list. If there is only one, that one should be Pushkin.

Unfortunately, Pushkin is given short shrift outside of his homeland. The reason is not hard to explain - most of his work is poetry, which translates badly. What's worse, even in translation his poetry wouldn't read any better than, say, Lermontov, whereas the difference would be obvious to a Russian, just as the difference between Shakespeare and Marlowe would be to an English speaker.

Pushkin's prose works provide a basis for remedying the situation. His stories are disarmingly simple and readable, just like his poetry. Yet practically every major Russian novelist of the nineteenth century acknowledged his debt to Pushkin as a model and crafter of prose, as well as a source of themes. This includes Gogol, Goncharov, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.

My personal favorites are "The Captain's Daughter", "The Moor of Peter the Great", which is about Pushkin's own great grandfather, who was Ethiopian, and most of all "The Queen of Spades", which practically singlehandedly created the genre of stories of the supernatural. Any one of the stories can be done in one sitting (well, maybe one long sitting for a few of them). Do yourself a favor and make the acquaintance of one of the best writers that ever lived.

Pushkin's Genius Never Fails to Give Us Pleasure!
Given the crowded field of the 19th century writers of the Russian Empire, Pushkin is not appreciated enough. And it's understandable - with Gogol, Dostoievski, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Goncharov and Chekhov around, Pushkin gets squeezed out. His prose and his plays are wonderful to read even in translation, and if you're lucky enough to be able to read Russian, his poetry is simply unsurpassed among the Slavic poets, even the Polish Mickiewicz and the Ukrainian Shevchenko. Pushkin the poet belongs with Shakespeare, Goethe and Byron. Pushkin's stories are fun to read, and are a good introduction to the big league Russian Empire writers that follow him.