Books like Novels and Stories

This edition of Pushkin's writings contains all the stories from The Queen of Spades and Other Stories and from Tales of Belkin and Other Prose Writings, both of which I've read in ebook form, so this volume is destined for my real life shelves as a reminder of how much I enjoyed reading Pushkin these last weeks. But this book also contains a piece I hadn't already read, which was a nice surprise: the first twenty pages of 'A Novel in Letters', one of the writing projects Pushkin left unfinished when he died in 1836 from a wound sustained in a duel at the age of thirty seven. This 'Novel in Letters' dates from 1829. There are four correspondents, two men and two women. Two of the correspondents live in St Petersburg, the other two have separately fled city life for the country, and find themselves in the same Pavlovskoye village since they both have relatives there. It's an interesting set-up, but what was really interesting for me was the portrait of a girl they both meet in the village, a slim melancholy girl of about seventeen, brought up on novels and fresh air. She spends her whole day in the garden or in the fields with a book in her hands, surrounded by yard dogs, talks about the weather in a singsong voice, and treats one to jam. Mashenka, as she is called, sounds very like Tatiana from Eugene Onegin, who was also melancholy, fond of solitary walks and known to offer visitors jam! And like Mashenka, her favourite novel was Richardson's Clarissa. Knowing that Richardson's book is also an epistolatory novel about a young and innocent heroine, I wondered if Pushkin was aiming to parody it, and I briefly worried for young and innocent Mashenka.Another aspect of this short novel I found interesting were some lines about the impressions a reader gets from reading books set before their time, in this case, specifically 'Clarissa': You cannot imagine how strange it is to read, in 1829, a novel written in 1775. writes one of Pushkin's correspondents to another. It seems as if, suddenly from our drawing-room, we enter an ancient hall, upholstered with damask, seat ourselves on satin-covered armchairs, see around us strange dresses but familiar faces, and recognise in them our uncles and grandmothers, but grown younger. In the main these novels have no other virtue.If it feels strange to read a novel set fifty years before one's time, how much stranger should it be to read one set nearly two hundred years before, as Pushkin's work is for us today. But I don't share the letter writer's opinion, although I haven't yet read Richardson. I never find it strange to read novels from previous centuries, and rather feel that those that have remained in print over the intervening time must have virtues past counting. That has certainly been my experience reading Pushkin.