Egyptian Nights and Other Tales

Three shorter prose works that show the range of Pushkin's imagination. In Kirdjali, a lightning sketch of a real Balkan brigand caught between empires. In The Egyptian Nights, a fashionable Petersburg poet meets a starving Italian improvisatore who can spin verse on any theme a crowd throws at him — and the theme they choose is Cleopatra, and the deadly price she set on a single night of her love.

The third and longest, Peter the Great's Negro, is Pushkin's unfinished historical novel about his own African great-grandfather, raised at the French court and summoned into the whirlwind of Peter the Great's new Russia — a study of an outsider prized, watched, and never quite at home.

Fragments and finished gems together, they range from the battlefield to the ballroom to the poet's own bloodline. Translated by T. Keane (1894).