Peter the Great's African Experiments in Prose

Newly translated, unfinished works about power, class conflict, and artistic inspiration by Russia's greatest poet.

Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s foundational writer, was constantly experimenting with new genres, and this fresh selection ushers readers into his creative laboratory. Politics and history weighed heavily on Pushkin’s imagination, and in “Peter the Great’s African” he depicts the Tsar through the eyes of one of his closest confidantes, Ibrahim, a former slave, modeled on Pushkin’s maternal great-grandfather. At once outsider and insider, Ibrahim offers a sympathetic yet questioning view of Peter’s attempt to integrate his vast, archaic empire into Europe. In the witty “History of the Village of Goriukhino” Pushkin employs parody and self-parody to explore problems of writing history, while “Dubrovsky” is both a gripping adventure story and a vivid picture of provincial Russia in the late eighteenth century, with its class conflicts ready to boil over in violence. “The Egyptian Nights,” an effervescent mixture of prose and poetry, reflects on the nature of artistic inspiration and the problem of the poet’s place in a rapidly changing and ever more commercialized society.

Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) is considered Russia’s greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. His novel The Captain’s Daughter is available from NYRB Classics. 

Robert Chandler has translated many NYRB Classics, including Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate and Stalingrad, as well as Andrey Platonov’s Soul and The Foundation Pit. 

Boris Dralyuk’s most recent translations include Leo Tolstoy’s Lives and Deaths and Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees. He is a translator of Maxim Osipov’s Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Stories and Lev Ozerov’s Portraits Without Frames, both published by NYRB Classics.