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Experiments in Prose (New York Review Books Classics)
by Alexander Pushkin
Newly translated, unfinished works about power, class conflict, and artistic inspiration by Russia's greatest poet.
Alexander Pushkin, Russia's foundational writer, was constantly experimenting with new genres, and this fresh selection ushers readers into his creative laboratory. Politics and history weighed heavily on Pushkin's imagination, and in "Peter the Great's African" he depicts the Tsar through the eyes of one of his closest confidantes, Ibrahim, a former slave, modeled on Pushkin's maternal great-grandfather. At once outsider and insider, Ibrahim offers a sympathetic yet questioning view of Peter's attempt to integrate his vast, archaic empire into Europe. In the witty "History of the Village of Goriukhino" Pushkin employs parody and self-parody to explore problems of writing history, while "Dubrovsky" is both a gripping adventure story and a vivid picture of provincial Russia in the late eighteenth century, with its class conflicts ready to boil over in violence. "The Egyptian Nights," an effervescent mixture of prose and poetry, reflects on the nature of artistic inspiration and the problem of the poet's place in a rapidly changing and ever more commercialized society.
"It is not enough to say that Gannibal's great-grandson became a poet, even a great poet. Pushkin, it is often claimed, invented the Russian literary language itself." —New York Review of Books
"Notably, all poetic sections appear in rhymed, metrical verse. It is challenging to produce iambic tetrameters in modern English that sound serious, let alone a worthy of Pushkin, yet these translators pull off a miracle, using a delicate combination of full and half-rhymes to prevent the magnificent poem that concludes 'Egyptian Nights' (155-157) from sounding like a children's song. To translate a work in which the distinction between poetry and prose is central, however, this feat is indeed a necessary miracle." —Slavic and East European Journal
This information about Peter the Great's African was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
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Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) is considered Russia's greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. His novel The Captain's Daughter is available from NYRB Classics.
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