Newly translated, unfinished works about power, class conflict, and artistic inspiration by Russia's greatest poet.

Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s foundational writer, was constantly experimenting with new genres, and this fresh selection ushers readers into his creative laboratory. Politics and history weighed heavily on Pushkin’s imagination, and in “Peter the Great’s African” he depicts the Tsar through the eyes of one of his closest confidantes, Ibrahim, a former slave, modeled on Pushkin’s maternal great-grandfather. At once outsider and insider, Ibrahim offers a sympathetic yet questioning view of Peter’s attempt to integrate his vast, archaic empire into Europe. In the witty “History of the Village of Goriukhino” Pushkin employs parody and self-parody to explore problems of writing history, while “Dubrovsky” is both a gripping adventure story and a vivid picture of provincial Russia in the late eighteenth century, with its class conflicts ready to boil over in violence. “The Egyptian Nights,” an effervescent mixture of prose and poetry, reflects on the nature of artistic inspiration and the problem of the poet’s place in a rapidly changing and ever more commercialized society.

"This volume presents Pushkin at his most questioning and experimental. "Peter the Great's African" is his first attempt at representing the man he saw as the most important of all Russian tsars. Here Pushkin presents him from the perspective of Pushkin's maternal great-grandfather, a former African slave whom Peter the Great educated and made into one of his closest confidants; Pushkin's central concern in this story is the success or failure of Peter's attempt to refashion his vast, archaic empire and turn it into an integral part of Europe. "The History of the Village of Goriukhino"--one of Pushkin's wittiest works--shows him grappling, through parody and self-parody, with the question of what it means to write history; it points the way towards the serious, archivally based historical works to which Pushkin dedicated several of his last years. "Dubrovsky" is both a gripping adventure story and a vivid picture of provincial Russia in the late eighteenth century, with its simmering class conflicts ready to explode in violence. And "The Egyptian Nights" is an examination, in both prose and poetry, of questions of the deepest importance to Pushkin: from the nature of artistic inspiration to the problem of the poet's place in a rapidly changing and ever more commercialized society. These unfinished works are as remarkable as Pushkin's one completed novel, The Captain's Daughter--of interest both in their own right and for the insight they allow us into the poet's creative laboratory"--

“Pushkin is everywhere.” —Elif Batuman

“The challenges of translating Pushkin are well known, and they have seldom met with such sure hands as those of Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler.” —Judges of the MLA Lois Roth Translation Prize on The Captain’s Daughter

“As a bonus to this fine translation of ‘Dubrovsky,’ Robert Chandler includes ‘Egyptian Nights,’ Pushkin’s original mix of prose and verse. . . . Chandler shows that he is as gifted at translating verse as he is with prose.” —Donald Rayfield