Dubrovsky

When a petty quarrel between two old landowners curdles into a rigged lawsuit, a proud young officer returns home to find his father broken and the family estate signed over to a tyrannical neighbour. He takes to the forests at the head of a band of his own former serfs — and then, under a borrowed name, walks back into the household of the man who ruined him.

Pushkin's swift, unfinished romance moves like a ballad: arson and ambush on one side, a slow, dangerous tenderness for the enemy's daughter on the other. Beneath the adventure runs a colder question about justice that the law refuses to give, and the price of taking it for yourself.

A Russian Robin Hood by the founder of Russian literature — lean, headlong, and shadowed by the vengeance it can never quite put down. Translated by T. Keane (1894).