This collection includes most of Pushkin's prose fiction: the five Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin from 1831, the uncollected stories "The Queen of Spades" and "Kirjali" (both 1834), the novella The Captain's daughter from 1836, and the unfinished novel The Moor of Peter the Great (1828). The rather plodding translations date from the 1950s, and, as you should expect in this kind of cheap reprint, there is no introduction or editorial material included.

The Captain's daughter is the star-turn, of course, taking up about half the book, a lively adventure story set during the Pugachev Rebellion of 1773-4. The narrator is a young army officer serving in a fort in the Yaik region who finds himself having to manoeuvre between Imperial and rebel forces in an effort to save the girl he loves, the daughter of the fort's commandant. It's usually his sometime tutor, the serf Savelyich, who ends up saving the young man's life when he gets into a perilous situation. The story comes with a bonus chapter: a quite different alternative version of the ending from an earlier draft Pushkin decided not to use.

The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin are enjoyable short stories based around simple ideas: "The shot" picks up the fateful topic of duelling; "The snowstorm" is about an elopement that goes wrong in an unexpected way; "The undertaker" makes the mistake of inviting his old clients to a party; "The postmaster" (more usually "The stationmaster") is a touching tale of a minor official with a beautiful daughter; and "Mistress into maid" is a comic-opera tale of a young lady who dresses up as a servant to meet a young man on the sly and is embarrassed when they later meet in their true roles. Several of these could very easily have been subjects for Chekhov a few decades later. Pushkin's style is rather more detached and ironic, though.

"The Queen of Spades" we all know thanks to Tchaikovsky, of course, but it's good fun as a prose tale as well, whilst "Kirjali" gives Pushkin the chance to get on his hobbyhorse of Balkan independence from the Turks.

"The Moor of Peter the Great" is perhaps the most unexpected thing here: it's a fictionalised biography of Pushkin's great-grandfather, Abram Petrovich Gannibal (d.1781), an African — probably from Cameroon — who was bought for Peter the Great as a slave by the Russian ambassador in Constantinople, adopted by the Czar as a godson and sent to Paris to be educated. On returning to Russia he served as a senior military engineer and married into the aristocracy. Pushkin's story, in the fragment translated here, takes him from Paris up to the point where Peter arranges a marriage for him. Pushkin has fun along the way depicting the conservative Russian courtiers struggling to keep up with Peter's strange Dutch and German habits. ( )

Pushkin has loomed larger in my reading experience, because he has been been a huge influence on so many of the Russian writers I love. I have not yet read Eugene Onegin, and I plan to do so. While I loved the writing on a sentence-to-sentence level, and the world-building, I felt structurally many of these stories were almost eye-rolling, O Henry-style. The last story in this book, the unfinished "The Negro of Peter the Great" was the most interesting, with the titular The Captain's Daughter coming in second. The stories in between were mostly just readable but strange, plot-twisty one-offs. Didn't even seem Pushkin was trying that hard. Yes, as I write this, that's what was bothering me: it was the feeling of an insanely talented writer not trying very hard. ( )