SOURCE: "Introduction," in Alexander Pushkin: Complete Prose Fiction, Stanford University Press, 1983, pp. 1-7.

In the following essay, Debreczeny places Pushkin's prose within the context of European-influenced Russian fiction and suggests that even Pushkin's incomplete prose fragments were influential.

Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, widely acknowledged the progenitor of modern Russian literature, was born in 1799 and died of a wound received in a duel in 1837. His greatest achievement was in poetry—lyrical, epic, dramatic—and he did not turn to prose in a serious way until the end of the 1820's, but the fiction he wrote in the last decade of his life was to have a tremendous impact on the subsequent development of Russian prose.

The art of prose writing in Russia could not boast of great accomplishments at the time Pushkin entered on the scene. Its healthiest tradition—an earthy realism in the adventure story of the seventeenth century...