SOURCE: "Pushkin's Belkin Tales," in Russian Romantic Fiction, Ardis Publishers, 1983, 127-41.

In the following essay, Mersereau analyzes Pushkin's prose fiction—particularly the Tales of Belkin—tracing influences of the tales and viewing them as part of a story cycle.

The best authors of the Romantic period began their careers as poets, and among them only Perovsky-Pogorelsky was exclusively a prose fictionist. Not surprisingly, Alexander Pushkin displayed an extraordinary gift for prose, although his talent in that area was hardly recognized during his lifetime—Marlinsky was more to the public taste. It was in the later twenties that Pushkin turned to prose with The Negro of Peter the Great [Arap Petra Velikogo], a fictionalized biography of the author's African great grandfather, Abraham Hannibal. The piece, which breaks off in the middle of the seventh chapter, displays from its first lines that laconicism so typical of all his prose:

Among...