Ask any Russian who their greatest writer is, and the answer will surprise you: not Tolstoy, not Dostoevsky, but Alexander Pushkin — a poet most of the English-speaking world has barely read. He is to Russian what Shakespeare is to English: the source, the standard, the one who made the language itself into an instrument for art.
Before Pushkin, literary Russian was a stiff, French-besotted thing. He fused it with the living speech of the streets and the folk tale and made it sing, and every writer who followed drank from that spring. His masterpiece, Eugene Onegin, a novel written entirely in sparkling verse, gave Russia its first modern hero and heroine — the bored, cynical Onegin and the luminous Tatyana, whose rejected love letter is memorised by Russians to this day. It is the template from which the whole Russian novel unfolds.
And he wrote everything — the eerie Queen of Spades, the historical drama Boris Godunov, the tales, the lyrics — before dying at thirty-seven in a duel over his wife’s honour, as romantic and reckless as any of his heroes. Russia has never quite recovered from the loss of what he might have written.
This edition gathers the essential works in five classic translations. To understand the Russians, begin where they began — with Pushkin.
Read Alexander Pushkin: The Essential Works →
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