Alexander Pushkin was Russia's first true literary genius. Best known for his poetry, he also wrote sparkling prose that revealed his national culture with elegance and understated humour. Here, his gift for portraying the Russian people is fully revealed. The Tales of Belkin, his first prose masterpiece, presents a series of interlinked stories narrated by a good-hearted Russian squire - among them 'The Shot', in which a duel is revisited after many years, and the grotesque 'The Undertaker'. Elsewhere, works such as the novel-fragment Roslavlev and the Egyptian Nights, the tale of an Italian balladeer seeking an audience in St. Petersberg, demonstrate the wide range of Pushkin's fiction. A Journey to Arzrum, the final piece in this collection, offers an autobiographical account of Pushkin's own experiences in the 1829 war between Russia and Turkey, and remains one of the greatest of all pieces of journalistic adventure writing.

A collection of fiction, travel narratives, and epistolary tales includes "The Queen of Spades," in which an elderly countess is rumored to possess a supernatural secret for winning at cards.

This volume contains new translations of four of Pushkin's best works of fiction. The Queen of Spades has long been acknowledged as one of the world's greatest short stories, in which Pushkin explores the nature of obsession. The Tales of Belkin are witty parodies of sentimentalism, while Peter the Great's Blackamoor is an early experiment with recreating the past. The Captain's Daughter is a novel-length masterpiece which combines historical fiction in the manner of Sir Walter Scott with the devices of the Russian fairy-tale. The Introduction provides close readings of the stories and places them in their European literary context.

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.