The Captain's Daughter

A dazzling new collection of Pushkin's most essential fiction, in definitive translations by the acclaimed Anthony Briggs Pushkin's restless creative genius laid the foundations for Russian prose. His stories, among the greatest and most influential ever written, retain stunning directness and precision, more than ever in Anthony Brigg's finely nuanced translations. Upending expectations at every turn, Pushkin depicts brutal conflicts and sudden reversals of fortune with disarming lightness and sly humour. These are stories of fateful chances: a stationmaster encourages his young daughter to ride to town with a traveller, only to lose her forever; a man obsessively pursues an elderly woman's secret for success at cards with bizarre results, in 'The Queen of Spades'; and in The Captain's Daughter, Pushkin's great historical novella of love and rebellion in the era of Catherine the Great, a mysterious encounter proves fatally significant during a violent uprising.

Alexander Pushkin was born in 1799. He published his first poem when he was fifteen, and in 1820 his first long poem, Ruslan and Lyudmila, made him famous. His work, including the novel-in-verse Yevgeny Onegin, the poem The Bronze Horseman, the play Boris Godunov and the short story 'The Queen of Spades', has secured his place as one of the greatest writers, in any language, ever to have lived. He died aged just 37, having been wounded in a duel - Pushkin's 29th - by his brother-in-law.