The Queen of Spades and Other Stories

by Alexander Pushkin, Rosemary Edmonds (Translator)

Overview

Surrounded by spies, his writing personally censored by the Tsar, Pushkin (1799-1837) had every incentive both to write historical stories, such as The Captain's Daughter and the uncompleted Negro of Peter the Great, and to criticize Russian society. This selection from his work also includes Dubrovsky, a Byronic tale of a disposessed young officer, and The Queen of Spades. This famous story of the card tables, whose self-seeking hero Dostoyevsky called a "colossal figure,"' was made into an opera by Tchaikovsky.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780141914183
Publisher:	Penguin UK
Publication date:	07/01/2004
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Alexander Pushkin was born in Moscow in 1799. Leaving school in 1817, he spent three years in St Petersburg working in the Foreign Office and writing erotic verse. His flirtations with pre-Decembrist movements and his revolutionary verses lead to his exile in 1820. After a stay in the Caucasus and Crimea he was sent to Bessarabia, where he began to write more seriously, beginning Eugene Onegin and Tsygany. In 1831 he retired to a family estate, married, and his literary output slackened. He was mortally wounded in a duel and died in January 1837.

Rosemary Edmonds was born in London and studied languages in England, France and Italy. During the war she was translator to General de Gaulle. Among her many translations for Penguin Classics are Tolstoy's War and Peace, Anna Karenin and Resurrection and Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. She died in 1998.

Table of Contents

The Queen of Spades; The Tales of Belkin; Peter the Great's Blackamoor; The Captain's Daughter.