The Queen of Spades and Selected Works

Description

...The Queen of Spades... is one of the most famous tales in Russian literature, and inspired the eponymous opera by Tchaikovsky; in ...The Stationmaster..., from The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, Pushkin reworks the parable of the Prodigal Son; ...Tsar Nikita and his Forty Daughters... is one of Pushkin's bawdier early poems; and the narrative poem ...The Bronze Horseman..., inspired by a St Petersburg statue of Peter the Great, is one of Pushkin's best-known and most influential works. The volume also includes a selection of Pushkin's best lyric poetry. Contents: Short Stories: The Queen of Spades; The Stationmaster Drama: Extracts from Boris Godunov and Mozart and Salieri The Bronze Horseman (narrative poem), Tsar Nikita and His Forty Daughters (folk poem) and 14 lyric poems Novel in Verse: Extract from Yevgeny Onegin (novel in verse)

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin ranks as one of Russia's greatest writers. Born in 1799, he published his first poem when he was a teenager, and attained fame in 1820 with his first long poem, Ruslan and Lyudmila. In the late 1820s he found himself the target of government censors, unable to travel or publish at will; during this time, he wrote his most famous play, Boris Godunov, and Eugene Onegin, which was published in serial form between 1825 and 1832. "The Queen of Spades", his most famous prose work, was published in 1834; his best known poem, "The Bronze Horseman", only appeared after his death (from a wound sustained in a duel) in 1837. Anthony Briggs has published widely on the work of Alexander Pushkin. His translations from the Russian include War and Peace, Resurrection and The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy, all for Penguin Classics.

"As with all Pushkin books it is a thing of beauty, and its contents are worth turning to again and again" Nick Lezard, Guardian "Charming - an ideal introduction to the man widely regarded as the greatest Russian writer - Poetry is notoriously hard to translate, but Anthony Briggs's skilful rendering of colloquial speech is faithful to the spirit of the Russian text" Phoebe Taplin, Russia Now