The Tales of Belkin

Five stories, framed as the papers of one Ivan Belkin, a mild provincial gentleman who set down what he heard from travellers and neighbours: a marksman nursing a duel left unfinished; a wedding thrown into chaos by a snowstorm; a drunken undertaker haunted by his own trade; a postmaster and the daughter who leaves him; a bored young lady playing at being a peasant.

Each tale takes a stock romantic situation and turns it, gently or slyly, into something truer — comic, rueful, or quietly moving. The prose is plain and fast, alert to the ordinary lives of provincial Russia, and famous for saying a great deal in very little space.

The book that founded the modern Russian short story, and still one of the most companionable ways into Pushkin. Translated by T. Keane (1894).