This volume contains new translations of four of Pushkin's best works of fiction. The Queen of Spades has long been acknowledged as one of the world's greatest short stories, in which Pushkin explores the nature of obsession. The Tales of Belkin are witty
In these stories, Dostoevsky explores both the figure of the dreamer divorced from reality, and also his own ambiguous attitude toward utopianism, themes central to his great novels. In White Nights, the apparent idyll of the dreamer's romantic fantasies
Dombrovsky's tale of an exiled intellectual who, in the far province of Alma-Ata, becomes an archeologist and is arrested and interrogated by a Stalinist prosecutor (who will later himself become a target of the Great Terror), is largely autobiographical.