The Bright Book of Life by Harold Bloom

A READER LIKE MYSELF who has no Russian has to take the greatness of Pushkin's poetry on faith, since it seems untranslatable, even by the chess master V. Nabokov. But the prose fiction has been translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky in one large volume, Novels, Tales, Journeys: The Complete Prose of Alexander Pushkin (2016). The wonder of the book is the novella The Captain's Daughter (1836), a historical fiction founded on the Pugachev Rebellion (1773–74). Pushkin had access to the tsarist archives and initially wrote The History of Pugachev, which gave him the materia poetica for The Captain's Daughter. Yemelyan Pugachev, executed in 1775 at the age of thirty-three, was a Don Cossack who became a pretender to the throne occupied by Catherine the Great. Claiming he was the murdered Emperor Peter III, he manifested considerable skill and appropriate viciousness while gathering a large force of Cossacks and peasants. He captured Kazan but then was defeated by the Russian army and delivered by his followers in a cage, where he was kept until his public execution, in which he was drawn and quartered after decapitation.

It is difficult for me to describe Pushkin's unassuming and apparently straightforward style of narration. Russian critics speak of its return to folktales. Tolstoy owed as much to Pushkin as the major Russian poet seems, to me at least, to quarry Shakespeare for modes of characterization. Pugachev in Pushkin's novella has a complicated nature. I do not know whether to call his a humorous savagery or a savage humor: