ALSO TRANSLATED BY RICHARD PEVEAR AND LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY MIKHAIL BULGAKOV
The Master and Margarita ANTON CHEKHOV
The Complete Short Novels of Anton Chekhov
Selected Stories FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
The Adolescent
The Brothers Karamazov
Crime and Punishment
Demons
The Double and The Gambler
The Eternal Husband and Other Stories
The Idiot
Notes from a Dead House
Notes from Underground NIKOLAI GOGOL
The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
Dead Souls NIKOLAI LESKOV
The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories BORIS PASTERNAK
Doctor Zhivago LEO TOLSTOY
Anna Karenina
The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
War and Peace
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2016 by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
Foreword copyright © 2016 by Richard Pevear
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich, 1799–1837, author. | Pevear, Richard, 1943– translator. | Volokhonsky, Larissa, translator.
Title: Novels, tales, journeys / by Alexander Pushkin ; a new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
Description: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2016. | “Borzoi book”—Title page verso. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015049350 (print) | LCCN 2016000916 (ebook) | ISBN 9780307959621 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780307959638 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PG3347.A15 2016 (print) | LCC PG3347 (ebook) | DDC 891.73/3—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015049350
Ebook ISBN 9780307959638
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This collection follows the contents and order in volume 5 of the “Khudozhestvennaya Literatura” edition of Pushkin’s works (Moscow, 1975), omitting a few very brief fragments.
Cover image: Alexander Pushkin (detail). Pictoral Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
Cover design by Oliver Munday
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Contents
Cover
Also Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
The Moor of Peter the Great
The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin
From the Publisher
The Shot
The Blizzard
The Coffin-Maker
The Stationmaster
The Young Lady Peasant
The History of the Village of Goryukhino
Roslavlev
Dubrovsky
The Queen of Spades
Kirdjali
Egyptian Nights
The Captain’s Daughter
Journey to Arzrum
Fragments and Sketches
The Guests Were Arriving at the Dacha
A Novel in Letters
At the Corner of a Little Square
Notes of a Young Man
My Fate Is Decided. I Am Getting Married…
A Romance at the Caucasian Waters
A Russian Pelham
We Were Spending the Evening at the Dacha
A Story from Roman Life
Maria Schoning
Notes
A Note About the Translators
A Note About the Author
Introduction PUSHKIN’S DESCENT INTO PROSE
Alexander Pushkin was mortally wounded in a duel on the afternoon of January 27, 1837, at Chernaya Rechka, just outside Petersburg. “It is thus that the figure of Pushkin remains in our memory—with a pistol,” Andrei Sinyavsky wrote in Strolls with Pushkin.*1 “Little Pushkin with a big pistol. A civilian, but louder than a soldier. A general. An ace. Pushkin! Crude, but just. The first poet with his own biography—how else would you have him up and die, this first poet, who inscribed himself with blood and powder in the history of art?”
Pushkin was just thirty-seven when he died, but he had already been acknowledged as Russia’s greatest poet, a title that has since been defined and redefined but never disputed. In the decade before his death, however, he had also become the true originator of Russian prose. Sinyavsky is right to say that Pushkin lives in Russian memory as more than a writer, more than a poet—as “Pushkin!” In a speech delivered at a commemoration in revolutionary Petrograd in February 1921, the poet Alexander Blok said: “From early childhood our memory keeps the cheerful name: Pushkin. This name, this sound fills many days of our life. The grim names of emperors, generals, inventors of the tools of murder, the tormented and the tormentors of life. And beside them—this light name: Pushkin.” Yet his personal presence is in marked contrast with the essential impersonality of Pushkin’s art. It is not that he celebrated himself and sang himself: he never did. In a letter to his friend Nikolai Raevsky, written in July 1825, Pushkin criticized Byron (whom he generally admired) for the constant intrusion of his personality: “Byron…has parceled out among his characters such-and-such a trait of his own character; his pride to one, his hate to another, his melancholy to a third, etc.”*2 And he contrasts Byron’s practice with the multifarious receptivity he had come to admire in Shakespeare—his “negative capability,” as Keats called it. Sinyavsky intensifies Keats’s paradox: “Emptiness is Pushkin’s content. Without it he would not be full, he would not be, just as there is no fire without air, no breathing in without breathing out.” Impersonality, openness, and lightness are the essential qualities of his prose.
Our collection includes Pushkin’s few finished and published works of fiction—The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, The Queen of Spades, Kirdjali, The Captain’s Daughter—each different and all masterpieces. It also includes his experiments in various forms, borrowing from and parodying well-known European models, consciously trying out the possibilities of Russian prose. The closest he came to a self-portrait is perhaps the character of Charsky in the fragmentary Egyptian Nights; otherwise he appears in person only in the nonfictional Journey to Arzrum, where, as D. S. Mirsky wrote, “he reached the limits of noble and bare terseness.”*3
Pushkin’s family on his father’s side belonged to the old military-feudal aristocracy, the Russian boyars, dating back some six centuries to the founding of the Grand Duchy of Moscow. He proudly refers to their “six-hundred-year standing” more than once in his letters. He was also proud of the rebelliousness of some of his ancestors, one of whom was executed by Peter the Great for opposing his political reforms, another of whom (his grandfather) was imprisoned for protesting against the “usurpation” of the throne by the Prussian-born Catherine the Great. The new gentry that arose in the eighteenth century as a result of Peter’s reforms more or less eclipsed the old boyars, and Pushkin’s father was left with relatively modest means.