The Beggar and Other Stories

Translated for the first time, the best short stories by the 'modernist master' Gazdanov, author of The Spectre of Alexander Wolf.

In a Metro underpass, bald and dressed in rags, stands a silent beggar. In the evening, he walks the deserted streets of Paris; at night, he sleeps in a small, foetid crate vacated by the death of another beggar. He is poor and he is ill, but, on reflection, he is free.

Never published before in English, this marvellously translated collection of tightly written, lyrical works represent marvellously compact miniatures of all the major strands that Gazdanov explores in his novels. The senselessness of life, the nature of fate, and the richness of the inner life - these brilliant and moving stories have it all.

Gaito Gazdanov (1903-1971) joined the White Army aged just sixteen and fought in the Russian Civil War. Exiled in Paris from the 1920s onwards, he eventually became a nocturnal taxi-driver and quickly gained prominence on the literary scene as a novelist, essayist, critic and short-story writer, and was greatly admired by Maxim Gorky, among others. Pushkin Press also publishes the celebrated The Spectre of Alexander Wolf, The Buddha's Return and The Flight.