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The Queen of Spades and Selected Works
"The Queen of Spades" is one of the most famous tales in Russian literature, and inspired the eponymous opera by Tchaikovsky; in "The Stationmaster", from The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, Pushkin reworks the parable of the Prodigal Son; "Tsar Nikita and his Forty Daughters" is one of Pushkin’s bawdier early poems; and the narrative poem "The Bronze Horseman", inspired by a St Petersburg statue of Peter the Great, is one of Pushkin’s best-known and most influential works. The volume also includes a selection of Pushkin’s best lyric poetry.
• Short The Queen of Spades ; The Stationmaster
• Extracts from Boris Godunov and Mozart and Salieri
• The Bronze Horseman (narrative poem), Tsar Nikita and His Forty
Daughters (folk poem) and 14 lyric poems
• Novel in Extract from Yevgeny Onegin (novel in verse)
Pushkin Collection editions feature a spare, elegant series style and superior, durable components. The Collection is typeset in Monotype Baskerville, litho-printed on Munken Premium White Paper and notch-bound by the independently owned printer TJ International in Padstow. The covers, with French flaps, are printed on Colorplan Pristine White Paper. Both paper and cover board are acid-free and Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified.
• Short The Queen of Spades ; The Stationmaster
• Extracts from Boris Godunov and Mozart and Salieri
• The Bronze Horseman (narrative poem), Tsar Nikita and His Forty
Daughters (folk poem) and 14 lyric poems
• Novel in Extract from Yevgeny Onegin (novel in verse)
Pushkin Collection editions feature a spare, elegant series style and superior, durable components. The Collection is typeset in Monotype Baskerville, litho-printed on Munken Premium White Paper and notch-bound by the independently owned printer TJ International in Padstow. The covers, with French flaps, are printed on Colorplan Pristine White Paper. Both paper and cover board are acid-free and Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified.
- GenresClassicsShort Stories
160 pages, Paperback
Published May 7, 2024
1 person is currently reading
18 people want to read
About the author
Alexander Pushkin
3,084 books3,446 followersWorks of Russian writer Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin include the verse novel
Eugene Onegin
(1831), the play
Boris Godunov
(1831), and many narrative and lyrical poems and short stories.
See also:
Russian: Александр Сергеевич Пушкин
French: Alexandre Pouchkine
Norwegian: Aleksander Pusjkin
Spanish:Aleksandr Pushkin
People consider this author the greatest poet and the founder of modern literature. Pushkin pioneered the use of vernacular speech in his poems, creating a style of storytelling—mixing drama, romance, and satire—associated ever with greatly influential later literature.
Pushkin published his first poem at the age of 15 years in 1814, and the literary establishment widely recognized him before the time of his graduation from the imperial lyceum in Tsarskoe Selo. Social reform gradually committed Pushkin, who emerged as a spokesman for literary radicals and in the early 1820s clashed with the government, which sent him into exile in southern Russia. Under the strict surveillance of government censors and unable to travel or publish at will, he wrote his most famous drama but ably published it not until years later. People published his verse serially from 1825 to 1832.
Pushkin and his wife Natalya Goncharova, whom he married in 1831, later became regulars of court society. In 1837, while falling into ever greater debt amidst rumors that his wife started conducting a scandalous affair, Pushkin challenged her alleged lover, Georges d'Anthès, to a duel. Pushkin was mortally wounded and died two days later.
Because of his liberal political views and influence on generations of Russian rebels, Pushkin was portrayed by Bolsheviks as an opponent to bourgeois literature and culture and a predecessor of Soviet literature and poetry. Tsarskoe Selo was renamed after him.
See also:
Russian: Александр Сергеевич Пушкин
French: Alexandre Pouchkine
Norwegian: Aleksander Pusjkin
Spanish:Aleksandr Pushkin
People consider this author the greatest poet and the founder of modern literature. Pushkin pioneered the use of vernacular speech in his poems, creating a style of storytelling—mixing drama, romance, and satire—associated ever with greatly influential later literature.
Pushkin published his first poem at the age of 15 years in 1814, and the literary establishment widely recognized him before the time of his graduation from the imperial lyceum in Tsarskoe Selo. Social reform gradually committed Pushkin, who emerged as a spokesman for literary radicals and in the early 1820s clashed with the government, which sent him into exile in southern Russia. Under the strict surveillance of government censors and unable to travel or publish at will, he wrote his most famous drama but ably published it not until years later. People published his verse serially from 1825 to 1832.
Pushkin and his wife Natalya Goncharova, whom he married in 1831, later became regulars of court society. In 1837, while falling into ever greater debt amidst rumors that his wife started conducting a scandalous affair, Pushkin challenged her alleged lover, Georges d'Anthès, to a duel. Pushkin was mortally wounded and died two days later.
Because of his liberal political views and influence on generations of Russian rebels, Pushkin was portrayed by Bolsheviks as an opponent to bourgeois literature and culture and a predecessor of Soviet literature and poetry. Tsarskoe Selo was renamed after him.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
March 18, 2025
So, Eugene Onegin wasn't an exception; I just adore Pushkin.
April 23, 2024
Really enjoyed the prose. The poetry? Not so much. And not a ding on Pushkin (who the hell am I to even think to call his talents into question?), I'm just not in the mood for poetry very often, and this didn't lift me.
Very nice translation. Hey, Pushkin Press, can you put the name of the translator (Antony Briggs) on the cover? He did a great job, and, you know, it's the 21st century, after all.
Very nice translation. Hey, Pushkin Press, can you put the name of the translator (Antony Briggs) on the cover? He did a great job, and, you know, it's the 21st century, after all.
February 7, 2025
Queen of spades and the stationmaster I really loved.
Also the following
Tsar Nikita and his forty daughters
Winter evening (my favorite)
Oh I have loved you
The time has come, dear friend
Also the following
Tsar Nikita and his forty daughters
Winter evening (my favorite)
Oh I have loved you
The time has come, dear friend
April 22, 2024
One of my first comments would have been "really? Are these 150 pages the sum of all that is good about Pushkin – if he's that great, wouldn't there be more that was essential?!". But such scorn is not deserved here, in a book that actually succeeds where so many of this kind fail – they make you tick a writer off, but more importantly this makes you go back to find more elsewhere. Oh, and how much that is essential do you really expect from someone who died aged 37?! I did the contrary thing and jumped in in the middle, with an extract from "Yegveny Onegin", which definitely showed how readable and crafted alike his works were. It's different short poems next, and the repeated sections of "Winter Evening" really do point to why so much of his work has gained musical accompaniment over the last two hundred years. "Man Found Drowned" also has a kind of instant familiarity – if this were in a book by Poe I'd have read it six times over at least (and always with pleasure), but it wasn't and it was a joy to finally discover it.
There is so much unusual here – the poems of a man knowing he is going to die, written at such a tender age, for one. But if you want unusual, an extended narrative poem about the Tsar whose forty daughters are all born without, well, a certain anatomical detail most potential husbands would be devastated to find absent must take the biscuit. This, if nothing else does here, shows the mastery of the translator, in having to match rhyming scheme, tricksiness, jokiness, and so much more, in making this a coherent piece of craft, and not the cheesiest teenaged doggerel.
I guess some of the main pieces here still need to be looked at for proof of their value to the common browser as such a book is aimed – "Boris Godunov" gets two sides only; some of the key works here aren't as great as the quick little bits we stumble across elsewhere. "The Bronze Horseman", however, is worth everyone's attention, a wonderfully rhymed narrative here of a man suffering a St Petersburg flood, and then railing against the man he can blame for it – the man who actually put the city there in the first place.
I suspect "The Station Master" is not unique to this volume, and perhaps this very translation is what I read before (indeed it was – from this translator's The Captain's Daughter (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). It's an emotive story, even if problematic these days due to the stated age of the girl involved. But my survey of Pushkin, courtesy Pushkin, ended with the opening, title work. Or it would have done if I had not read that in the earlier version, too. So you see, Pushkin the author is so great that the same publishing house need put out not one but two compilations of his output in short order. Even if the bulk of the material is the exact same, it doesn't mean he's not worth checking out. Of all the authors you dabble with due to such a flippant little selection, Pushkin really is the one that smacks of more fun discoveries to come. This in its breadth bested the earlier volume for me, meaning four and a half stars was necessary.
There is so much unusual here – the poems of a man knowing he is going to die, written at such a tender age, for one. But if you want unusual, an extended narrative poem about the Tsar whose forty daughters are all born without, well, a certain anatomical detail most potential husbands would be devastated to find absent must take the biscuit. This, if nothing else does here, shows the mastery of the translator, in having to match rhyming scheme, tricksiness, jokiness, and so much more, in making this a coherent piece of craft, and not the cheesiest teenaged doggerel.
I guess some of the main pieces here still need to be looked at for proof of their value to the common browser as such a book is aimed – "Boris Godunov" gets two sides only; some of the key works here aren't as great as the quick little bits we stumble across elsewhere. "The Bronze Horseman", however, is worth everyone's attention, a wonderfully rhymed narrative here of a man suffering a St Petersburg flood, and then railing against the man he can blame for it – the man who actually put the city there in the first place.
I suspect "The Station Master" is not unique to this volume, and perhaps this very translation is what I read before (indeed it was – from this translator's The Captain's Daughter (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). It's an emotive story, even if problematic these days due to the stated age of the girl involved. But my survey of Pushkin, courtesy Pushkin, ended with the opening, title work. Or it would have done if I had not read that in the earlier version, too. So you see, Pushkin the author is so great that the same publishing house need put out not one but two compilations of his output in short order. Even if the bulk of the material is the exact same, it doesn't mean he's not worth checking out. Of all the authors you dabble with due to such a flippant little selection, Pushkin really is the one that smacks of more fun discoveries to come. This in its breadth bested the earlier volume for me, meaning four and a half stars was necessary.
May 24, 2025
Simple short sweet, these stories and extracts feel like a mazurka: energetic, fairly rapid, pulling us in a direction and coming full circle in what feels like a very satisfying (even if sometimes somber) ending.
I really loved these :
“Although the senseless human frame
Cares but at all where it should mouler,
I’d like to end up, all the same,
Near places that I once thought golden.
And at the entrance to my tomb
May young life frolic dissolutely.
And may impassive Nature bloom,
Shining with everlasting beauty.”
“Oh, I have loved you” — “I would not sadden you in any way.”
“That I was one who roused kind feelings by my verses.
That in a cruel age I sang the cause of freedom,
And for the fallen called for mercy
Hearken, O Muse, to what is ordered in God’s name:
Ignore all calumny and ask no crown or jewels.
Receive with equanimity both praise and blames
Do this—and have no truck with fools.”
I really loved these :
“Although the senseless human frame
Cares but at all where it should mouler,
I’d like to end up, all the same,
Near places that I once thought golden.
And at the entrance to my tomb
May young life frolic dissolutely.
And may impassive Nature bloom,
Shining with everlasting beauty.”
“Oh, I have loved you” — “I would not sadden you in any way.”
“That I was one who roused kind feelings by my verses.
That in a cruel age I sang the cause of freedom,
And for the fallen called for mercy
Hearken, O Muse, to what is ordered in God’s name:
Ignore all calumny and ask no crown or jewels.
Receive with equanimity both praise and blames
Do this—and have no truck with fools.”
September 29, 2025
Excellent translation – Briggs managed to retain the rhyme and melody of the original Russian in the most elegant way.
The Queen of Spades (⭐⭐⭐⭐): Hilarious but lacks devotion to Hermann, we never got to see his thought process so the things he did seemed at odds to how he was initially described.
The Stationmaster (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐): Better than the titular story, but this is more emotional. Same issue still stands however – this time with Dunya.
Other works are either poems or extracts from plays, most are good but too small and inconsequential to affect my overall ratings. The best ones are:
The Bronze Horseman (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐)
Tsar Nikita and His Forty Daughters (⭐⭐⭐⭐)
Autumn (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐)
The Queen of Spades (⭐⭐⭐⭐): Hilarious but lacks devotion to Hermann, we never got to see his thought process so the things he did seemed at odds to how he was initially described.
The Stationmaster (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐): Better than the titular story, but this is more emotional. Same issue still stands however – this time with Dunya.
Other works are either poems or extracts from plays, most are good but too small and inconsequential to affect my overall ratings. The best ones are:
The Bronze Horseman (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐)
Tsar Nikita and His Forty Daughters (⭐⭐⭐⭐)
Autumn (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐)
March 6, 2025
The Queen of Spades is one of my favorite short stories; it's sparkling and crystalline in its supernatural perfection and was a pleasure to revisit. The verse was more challenging because it never comes off quite right when translators try to preserve the rhyme scheme, no matter how talented the translator is. The standout of the verse for me was the "Little Tragedy" Mozart and Salieri, which Pushkin wrote in blank verse. It's succinct and passionate. The lyric poems were also enjoyable, especially the ones with bawdy and erotic elements.
April 26, 2025
I really enjoyed The Queen of Spades and The Stationmaster! They leave much to be desired, but I think that’s what makes short stories great.
Tsar Nikita and His Forty Daughters was so absurd, I loved it. The Bronze Horseman was also excellent.
Lots of poetry in here. I’ve never really loved it, but I enjoyed working that muscle.
Tsar Nikita and His Forty Daughters was so absurd, I loved it. The Bronze Horseman was also excellent.
Lots of poetry in here. I’ve never really loved it, but I enjoyed working that muscle.
October 8, 2024
Quite humorous and interesting for a quick read. It is also a good introduction to Pushkin's style and some of his more classic plays and short stories (such as his Mozart and Salieri). Did not really like any of the stories in particular though.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews