Alexander Pushkin was Russia's first true literary genius. Best known for his poetry, he also wrote sparkling prose that revealed his national culture with elegance and understated humour. Here, his gift for portraying the Russian people is fully revealed. "The Tales of Belkin", his first prose masterpiece, presents a series of interlinked stories narrated by a good-hearted Russian squire - among them "The Shot", in which a duel is revisited after many years, and the grotesque "The Undertaker". Elsewhere, works such as the novel-fragment "Roslavlev" and the "Egyptian Nights", the tale of an Italian balladeer seeking an audience in St. Petersberg, demonstrate the wide range of Pushkin's fiction. "A Journey to Arzrum", the final piece in this collection, offers an autobiographical account of Pushkin's own experiences in the 1829 war between Russia and Turkey, and remains one of the greatest of all pieces of journalistic adventure writing.**

Shakespeare became famous as a dazzling poet before most people even knew that he wrote plays. His sonnets are the English language's most extraordinary anatomy of love in all its dimensions--desire and despair, longing and loss, adoration and disgust. To read them is to confront morality and eternity in the same breath. Produced under the editorial supervision of Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, two of today's most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, The Sonnets and Other Poems includes all of Shakespeare's sonnets, the long narrative poems "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece," and several other shorter works. Incorporating definitive texts and authoritative notes from William Shakespeare: Complete Works, this unique volume also includes an expanded Introduction by Jonathan Bate that places the poems in literary and historical context and illuminates their relationship to Shakespeare's dramatic writing. Also featured are key facts about the...

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)From the acclaimed translators of War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov, a brilliant translation of Nikolai Gogol’s short fiction.Collected here are Gogol’s finest tales—stories that combine the wide-eyed, credulous imagination of the peasant with the sardonic social criticism of the city dweller—allowing readers to experience anew the unmistakable genius of a writer who paved the way for Dostoevsky and Kafka. All of Gogol’s most memorable creations are here: the minor official who misplaces his nose, the downtrodden clerk whose life is changed by the acquisition of a splendid new overcoat, the wily madman who becomes convinced that a dog can tell him everything he needs to know. The wholly unique blend of the mundane and the supernatural that Gogol crafted established his reputation as one of the most daring and inventive writers of his time.From The New Yorker...a superb ... translation... From Kirkus ReviewsPevear and Volokhonsky continue their remarkable conquest of 19th-century Russian fiction with this lively new translation of 13 of the Russian Dickens's'' wildest and finest stories. Excluding only lesser pieces from Gogol's earliest volumes (though one misses the madly romantic novellaTaras Bulba''), this selection offers richly colloquial versions (which sound like spoken narrative) of such classic Ukrainian Tales'' as the imperturbably melodramaticThe Terrible Vengeance'' and the memorably lurid vampire tale Viy,'' and alsoPetersburg Tales'' like the deliriously surrealistic The Nose'' and that uniquely dreamlike, and seminal, portrayal of a timid clerk's acquisition and loss of his only meaningful possession:The Overcoat.'' Pevear's informative Preface persuasively emphasizes the personal, nonpolitical, and, to some degree, haphazard nature of the distinctive alchemy by which a deeply flawed and troubled soul managed to create some of the most colorful and haunting fiction of his century. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.