Alexander Pushkin (1799 1837), Russia's greatest writer, wrote much more than his novel in verse Eugene Onegin. In this selection of five of his finest narrative poems, all his essential qualities are on display his ironic poise, his stylistic variety, his confounding of expectations, his creation of poetry out of everyday language. "The Gypsies" is modern Russian literature's first masterpiece. Telling the anti-Romantic tale of an effete city-dweller whose search for "unspoiled" values among a band of gypsies ends in tragedy, it is the major but unacknowledged source for Bizet's Carmen. In "The Bridegroom" Pushkin turns the Romantic ballad into a whodunnit filled with sexual dread and subconscious terror. In "Count Nulin," a deliciously comic tale of country life, he stands Shakespeare's "Rape of Lucrece" on its head what would have happened if Lucrece had slapped Tarquin's face? "The Tale of the Dead Princess" (Pushkin's version of the Snow White story) transforms Russian folk tale into purest art, and its companion-piece, the eerie "Tale of the Golden Cockerel" (inspired by his bitter experience in with Tsar Nicholas I), savagely politicizes the folk-tale form.
