Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Brander Matthews (1852–1929). The Short-Story. 1907.

Notes to The Shot By Alexander Pushkin

AUTHOR NOTE

PUSHKIN was a Russian poet and playwright. novelist and historian. Exiled for a while to the Caucasus, he was afterward taken into favor by the Czar. He was killed in a duel with his brother-in-law. He is the typical Romanticist poet of Russia, strongly under the influence of Byron. This story was published in 1830.

STORY NOTE

This is an anecdote, rather than a true short-story, although it deals with a theme admirably suited for treatment in this form. In Pushkin’s telling, the incidents are straggling; and the tale lacks the compression, the swiftness, and the impending terror that later writers would have given to it. If Pushkin had been familiar with the cold condensation of Mérimée’s narrative, he might have told this tale with a fuller appreciation of its artistic possibilities.