The Tales of Belkin.

In the autumn of 1830, held at his family's estate at Boldino by a cholera quarantine, Pushkin wrote five short tales in about six weeks, then published them the next year as the work of the late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, a gentle country squire of his own invention. A shot held back for six years, a secret wedding gone wrong in a blizzard, an undertaker who invites his dead customers to a housewarming, a stationmaster and his lost daughter, a squire's daughter who dresses as a peasant girl: many readers date modern Russian prose from these pages. This volume gives the whole cycle, the five tales and the publisher's preface, unabridged.

The format is a true parallel text. On the left-hand page is Pushkin's Russian, with a short literal English gloss printed in small capitals beneath every word, so you can see what each word is doing in that form and that sentence. On the facing right-hand page is a new, modern English translation made for this edition, and matching paragraph numbers keep the two sides in step across the spread. Each tale opens with its epigraph in Russian and in English, and Pushkin's own two footnotes to the preface are kept.

Every Russian word of two syllables or more shows where its stress falls, and ё, which ordinary print writes as е, is restored. Nothing has been simplified: the text follows the Academy edition of Pushkin's complete works (volume 6, 1978), period spellings and all. Three short Before You Read guides open the book, and a glossary of 3,868 entries closes it, every word of the six texts in its dictionary form, with its stress and meaning.