Pushkin: Dark Depths Beneath Light Surfaces
April 20, 2006; Page A15

It's nice to be called "brave" and "good" (David Gurevich's review of "The Gypsies & Other Narrative Poems" by Alexander Pushkin in my translations, Bookmarks, March 31. But may I set the record straight on certain things?

"The Bridegroom" is not "a retelling of a German Romantic ballad," but a wholly original verse tale of Pushkin's own, using a meter taken from a famous German romantic ballad. As Vladimir Nabokov pointed out more than 40 years ago in a note to his translation of Eugene Onegin, Pushkin's "great ballad" turns out to be not a Romantic dream story but a thoroughly realistic whodunit.

Mr. Gurevich calls the four poems in the book apart from the title tale "amusing, though of hardly more than passing interest." I think it should be said in fairness that the comic tale "Count Nulin" is generally held to be one of Pushkin's unqualified masterpieces; that "The Bridegroom" and the quasi-fairy story "The Tale of the Golden Cockerel" both have a horrific denouement; and that the least familiar poem in the book, "The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Champions," is Pushkin's version of a story that was made into one of the most popular of all films, Walt Disney's "Snow White."

All these verse narratives seem to me to be typically Pushkinian in their mischievous, parodic way of telling their stories, and in the dark depths that lie beneath the lightness of their surfaces.

Antony Wood
London