The Captain's Daughter

A pampered nobleman's son is packed off to serve at a lonely fortress on the edge of the Orenburg steppe, expecting only boredom — and finding instead the quiet daughter of its ageing commandant, and, gathering on the horizon, the great peasant rising led by the Cossack Pugachev.

Pushkin tells it as a plain-spoken memoir, swift and unadorned, with a sharp eye for the small courtesy that later turns out to decide a life. Set in a countryside torn between the empress and the pretender, the story turns on honour, mercy, and where a decent man's loyalties can rest when both sides demand all of him.

The first great Russian historical novel, it keeps its epic human-scaled: a courtship and a civil war seen through one honest, fallible pair of eyes. Translated by T. Keane (1894).