Alexander Pushkin
1799–1837
Biography
Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799–1837) was a Russian poet, playwright and prose writer. He was born in Moscow into an old noble family, and his maternal great-grandfather was Abram Gannibal, a man born in Africa who rose to be a general in the Russian service. Pushkin is generally regarded as the founder of modern Russian literature and as the country's greatest poet. He began in the Romantic style and gradually moved toward a plainer, more realistic manner.
His political poems, above all the Ode to Liberty, angered the authorities, and he was sent into exile in the south of the empire and later kept under close police watch on his family estate. In those years he wrote the historical drama Boris Godunov. His verse novel Eugene Onegin appeared chapter by chapter between 1825 and 1832 and remains central to Russian literature. In prose, The Captain's Daughter (1836) is a historical tale set during the Pugachev rebellion, and Dubrovsky is an unfinished novel about a nobleman who turns outlaw. He was fatally wounded in a duel in 1837 and died in St Petersburg two days later.
Two of his books are on this site under their Russian titles: Дубровский (Dubrovsky) and Капитанская дочка (The Captain's Daughter). Dubrovsky follows the son of a ruined landowner who takes to the roads after his father's estate is seized. The Captain's Daughter follows a young officer caught between loyalty to the crown and the rebel leader Pugachev. Both are short, clear stories in which Pushkin turns history and class conflict into personal drama.
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Books
Tri Noveloj
by Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin (translated by Andreo Fiŝer)
Three of Pushkin's prose tales in Andreo Fiŝer's Esperanto translation. In The Queen of Spades a calculating young officer becomes obsessed with an old countess's secret of three winning cards; in The Snowstorm a blizzard upsets a secret elopement; and in The Shot a duel is left…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.Дубровский
by Александр Сергеевич Пушкин
Cheated of his father's estate by a powerful neighbour, the young guardsman Dubrovsky turns robber and burns the house. He later enters the neighbour's household in disguise and falls in love with the man's daughter, Masha.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Евгеній Онѣгинъ
by Александръ Сергѣевичъ Пушкинъ (1799—1837)
The bored young dandy Onegin rejects the country girl Tatyana's letter of love, kills his friend in a duel, and meets her again years later as a great lady. Pushkin's novel in verse, in the old orthography of the last edition printed in his lifetime, is the cornerstone of…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Капитанская дочка
by Александр Сергеевич Пушкин
A young officer, Pyotr Grinyov, is posted to a remote fortress on the Orenburg steppe, where he falls in love with the commandant's daughter Masha and runs foul of a rival. When Pugachev's rebellion sweeps over the fortress, an old act of kindness binds the rebel leader and the…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Пиковая дама
by Александр Сергеевич Пушкин
Hermann, an engineer who never gambles, hears that an old countess knows the secret of three winning cards and sets out to wrest it from her. Pushkin's tale of obsession and a ghost at the card table is one of the finest short stories in the language. This book uses the racial…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Повести покойного Ивана Петровича Белкина
by Александр Сергеевич Пушкин
Five short tales, supposedly gathered by a dead provincial landowner, take in a duellist's patient revenge, a snowstorm marriage, an undertaker's nightmare, a postmaster's lost daughter and a country girl in disguise. Pushkin's first finished prose is light, ironic and exact.…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.