New Pushkin Translation

The most recent issue of The Hudson Review (Summer 2014) features three stories by Alexander Pushkin from a new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The stories, “The Blizzard,” “The Staionmaster,” and “The Young Lady Peasant,” are three of the five Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin (1830), Pushkin’s first finished prose works. Pevear notes these stories were written in “an extraordinarily productive period for Pushkin, when a quarantine confined him for two months to his estate in Boldino. He ascribed the authorship to a rather simple country gentleman, Ivan Petrovich Belkin, who, in a brief introduction, is said to have written them down from the account of local inhabitants.” The works were first “considered mere anecdotes,” but have since been recognized as “unsurpassed” narrative constructions “in the whole range of Russian literature,” according to D.S. Mirsky, Pushkin biographer.