Pushkin. I’d heard of him, of course. You can’t read about Russia without knowing of Pushkin. He seems to bestride their cultural self image like a colossus, the father of Russian literature and their greatest poet. I hadn’t, however, actually read him; it strikes me that in the west he’s somewhat overshadowed by the reputation of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. I knew that he had penned that novel in verse that I had always meant to read and yet never quite did. Then it was that tragic time last winter when Borders was closing down. Prices crashing, the forgotten corner of a dusty shelf, the copy of The Complete Prose Tales crying out for a home. I think it is clear where this is going.

I was surprised to find that Pushkin proved to be one of the easiest reads I’ve had in a long time. His prose is lucid and brilliant and his plots keep the pages turning. There is something smooth and seemingly effortless about the way he writes and it just takes you there. There are some words Jacques Chirac said at Alexandre Dumas’ internment; “With you, we were D’Artagnan, Monte Cristo or Balsamo, riding along the roads of France, touring battlefields, visiting palaces and castles — with you, we dream.” It is the same with Pushkin only with him we are Dubrovsky, Ibrahim, Grinyov, riding through Russia, besieged in fortresses and dining with royalty — with him, we dream.

What adds to the mystery and romance of Pushkin is his own life story. Great-grandson of Peter the Great’s African Major General, Abram Gannibal, Pushkin’s brief life saw him exiled for his political radicalism before later returning to St. Petersburg where he died in a duel at the age of thirty-seven, defending his wife’s honour. When you read of his heroes defending their honour you know that he did so himself to the point of his own life. Upon hearing of his death a friend who was away at that time is said to have written to others asking:  “How could you let this happen? If I had been there I would have thrown myself in front of the bullet.” Would that the friend had been there, it’s hard to imagine what Pushkin could have achieved with so much of life still ahead of him. Reading this book you enjoy what is there but are left with a sense of wonderment at the fact that this, while brilliant, is a poet just finding his way with prose. What would he have done with more time?

At times in this collection you come across the sentence “(Pushkin never finished this story.)” Many of these are from several years before his death so it is possible that he had either abandoned them entirely or was going to return to them later. It’s sad that some brilliant stories such as Dubrovsky and The Moor of Peter the Great were unfinished, they give you a taste of brilliance and you want more.

I was left with the paradoxical feeling of wishing that someone would finish them and the feeling that no one else really could. I get to thinking that perhaps they should take Pushkin’s pen and set it in the base of his statue like a latter day excalibur. Whenever a writer was in Saint Petersburg they would pass the statue and try to withdraw the pen. Eventually some young fellow, seemingly too inexperienced, would approach the statue and grasp the quill and out it would slide and to him would fall the task of completing what Pushkin started.

Then I realise that life is not a historical romance. C’est la vie, we shall simply never know.

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The Complete Prose Tales by Alexandr Pushkin is published by Vintage Classics.