Reviews

The Queen of Spades and Selected Works by Alexander Pushkin

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pocketclown's review

4.5

“Oh, I have loved you, and perhaps my spirit
Still harbours a warm glow of love today.
But God forbid that you be burdened with it;
I would not sadden you in any way.

I loved you in a wordless, hopeless fashion,
Sometimes in jealous rage, sometimes struck
dumb.
I loved you with a deep and tender passion.
May you be loved like this in years to come.”

This nice sampler in a beautifully published little volume includes the full range of Alexander Pushkin in excellent translations by Anthony Briggs (whose recent translation of Yevgeny Onegin was also excellent). Not only is each item individually excellent on its own terms, by putting a tragedy next to a humorous erotic tall tale or a long prose tale next to a marvelously compact verse tale, it gives an English-speaking reader a taste of just how varied Pushkin was in form and just how consistent in quality.

The book includes prose tales (The Queen of Hearts and The Stationmaster), narrative verse (The Bronze Horseman and Tsar Nikita and His Forty Daughters, the later of which was new to me), a little tragedy verse/play (Mozart and Salieri), unfortunately-too-short extracts of a longer play and a longer verse novel (Boris Godunov and Yevgeny Onegin), and a set of lyric poems that were of less interest to me personally.

thewasteland's review

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reflective medium-paced

4.0

benedettal's review

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3.0

It was fine, all the stories had a twist at the end, comedy of errors type of feel. Short stories collections are just not my favourite, but this was good anyway.

kahell's review

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2.0

Most of the stories and poems in this are not memorable, though they are short enough to not make me regret reading them. Sometimes it seems Russian literature is some of the most profound things I've ever read, and other times it completely escapes me, like this book.