Angel Classics The Gypsies & other narrative poems - hardback

This selection of five of Pushkin's finest narrative poems displays his essential qualities. The Gypsies, the anti-Romantic tale of a city-dweller whose search for 'unspoiled' values among gypsies ends in tragedy, is modern Russian literature's first poetic masterpiece. The Bridegroom turns the Romantic ballad into a whodunit. Count Nulin, a deliciously comic tale of country life, stands Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece on its head. The Tale of the Dead Princess (Pushkin's version of the Snow White story) transforms Russian folk-tale into pure art, and the eerie Tale of the Golden Cockerel savagely politicizes the folk-tale form.

If, as one critic has written, Antony Wood 'comes close to the translator's ideal,' so the wood-engraver Simon Brett comes close to the illustrator's in this beautifully produced book, capturing the essence of each poem in a single dramatic image.