Debreczeny Paul. The Other Pushkin: A Study of Alexander Pushkin's Prose Fiction

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983. — 386 p. — ISBN-10: 0804711437; ISBN-13: 978-0804711432.The prose works of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin (1799— 1837) have a double claim on our attention. Some of them— such as "The Stationmaster" and "The Queen of Spades"—can be ranked among the highest achievements of Russian and European fiction-writing in the nineteenth century and deserve study in their own right. Others—completed, half-finished, or representing mere fragments—are significant not only because they surround and explain Pushkin's own best accomplishments in the genre, but also because they signal the beginning of one of the richest epochs in the history of prose fiction in any country. Pushkin's "The Undertaker," as well as other stories, paved the way for Gogol and the so-called Natural School; Pushkin's "The Stationmaster" inspired Gogol's "The Overcoat"; and the two works together formed the thematic background for Dostoevskii's Poor People. Hermann of "The Queen of Spades" served as a prototype for both Aleksei Ivanovich in Dostoevskii's The Gambler and Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment-, Pushkin's Belkin was the father of Goncharov's Oblomov,- and Pushkin's The Captain’s Daughter, as a "family chronicle," was the most useful model Tolstoi could turn to as he experimented with the novelistic form, working on War and Peace. Pushkin's artistic legacy—over and above individual instances of influence—pervaded the whole of nineteenthcentury Russian fiction.ContentsPushkin's approach to fiction
Experiments with narrative modes
'Belkin' and 'Goriukhino'
'Roslavlev' and 'Dubrovskii'
'The Queen of Spades'
'The Captain's Daughter'
Last prose worksNotes
Selected bibliography
Index