The Captain's Daughter

Pushkin's restless creative genius laid the foundations for Russian prose. His stories, among the greatest and most influential ever written, retain stunning directness and precision, more than ever in Anthony Briggs's finely nuanced translation.

Upending expectations every turn, Pushkin depicts brutal conflicts and sudden reversals of fortune with disarming lightness and sly humour. These are stories of fateful chances: a stationmaster encourage his young daughter to ride to town with a traveller, only to lose her forever; a man obsessively pursues an elderly women's secret for success at cards, with bizarre results, in 'The Queen of Spades'; and in the Captain's Daughter, Pushkin's great historical novella of love and rebellion in the era of Catherine the Great, a mysterious encounter proves fatally significant during a violent uprising.