This selection contains three of Alexander Pushkin's verse narratives. The least known of them, "The Bridegroom", is written in the stanza form of a wildly popular German Romantic ballad that swept Europe, but is far more modern than a Romantic ballad. Count Nulin is a comic tale of Russian country life, as light as a Golden Cockerel transforms the fairytale genre with its bitter subtext of Pushkin's relations with the tsar. Antony Wood seeks to render Pushkin's style in English verse. His introduction and end-notes place the poems in context, discuss the problems of translation, and offer a glimpse of Pushkin's life and world. There are drawings by selected modern Russian artists.