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The Tales of Belkin

The Tales of Belkin

by Alexander Pushkin
Paperback
Publication Date: 01/01/2009

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"The Tales of Belkin" were the first work of prose fiction to be completed by Russia's greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin. Written over a short period in the autumn of 1830, and sometimes referred to as 'the little parodies', the five stories reflect a number of the key interests of European writers of the time, such as the Byronic hero, the Gothic novel, and the tale of the supernatural. Perhaps the key element in each of these sparkling vignettes is surprise, as they provide some familiar literary themes with a range of unexpected twists. At the same time they suggested fruitful new avenues for Russian writers to explore, and the country's literature would simply not have been the same without them. The volume is completed by Pushkin's other prose work of the same time, "The History of the Village of Goryukhino", an amusing parody of a contemporary history of Russia.
ISBN:
9781843911852
9781843911852
Category:
Classic fiction
Format:
Paperback
Publication Date:
01-01-2009
Language:
English
Publisher:
Hesperus Press Ltd
Country of origin:
United Kingdom
Pages:
117
Dimensions (mm):
196x127x12mm
Weight:
0.15kg
Alexander Pushkin

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was born in Moscow in 1799. He was liberally educated and left school in 1817. Given a sinecure in the Foreign Office, he spent three dissipated years in St Petersburg writing light, erotic and highly polished verse. He flirted with several pre-Decembrist societies, composing the mildly revolutionary verses which led to his disgrace and exile in 1820. After traveling through the Caucasus and the Crimea, he was sent to Bessarabia, where he wrote The Captive of the Caucasus and The Fountain at Bakhchisaray, and began Eugene Onegin. His work took an increasingly serious turn during the last year of his southern exile, in Odessa.

In 1824 he was transferred to his parents' estate at Mikhaylovskoe in north-west Russia, where he spent two solitary but fruitful years during which he wrote his historical drama Boris Godunov, continued Eugene Onegin and finished The Gipsies. After the failure of the Decembrist Revolt in 1825 and the succession of a new tsar, Pushkin was granted conditional freedom in 1826. During the next three years he wandered restlessly between St Petersburg and Moscow. He wrote an epic poem, Poltava, but little else.

In 1829 he went with the Russian army to Transcaucasia, and the following year, stranded by a cholera outbreak at the small family estate of Boldino, he wrote his experimental Little Tragedies in blank verse and The Tales of Belkin in prose, and virtually completed Eugene Onegin. In 1831 he married the beautiful Natalya Goncharova. The rest of his life was soured by debts and the malice of his enemies. Although his literary output slackened, he produced his major prose works The Queen of Spades and The Captain's Daughter, his masterpiece in verse, The Bronze Horseman, important lyrics and fairy tales, including The Tale of the Golden Cockerel. Towards the end of 1836 anonymous letters goaded Pushkin into challenging a troublesome admirer of his wife to a duel. He was mortally wounded and died in January 1837.

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