SOURCE: "Alexander Pushkin: Stories," in A Man of Letters: Selected Essays, Chatto & Windus, 1985, pp. 264-68.

In the following essay, originally published in 1984, Pritchett briefly surveys developments in Pushkin 's short fiction, characterizing his early prose style as "expository" and "scholarly," but praising his later works, especially The Queen of Spades.

The reader who knows no Russian is cut off from Pushkin as a lyrical poet and yet can respond to a narrative poem like Eugene Onegin in, say, Sir Charles Johnston's recent Byronic version and to the volatile wordplay of Nabokov's translation. Like Byron, Pushkin is one of the world's greatest letter writers, open and impromptu in all his moods. He is the sunniest of devils. We can see from the narrative poems that he is the forerunner of the great Russian realists of the nineteenth century. Yes, he is the Russian Shakespeare or Cervantes. 'Not a giant'...