The Captain's Daughter

"The thought of a novel that would tell a simple, straightforward tale of life right here in Russia occupied Pushkin relentlessly in recent times. He abandoned poetry… and wrote ‘The Captain’s Daughter,’ decisively the best Russian work in narrative form. Compared with ‘The Captain’s Daughter,’ all our novels and stories seem like sugary, smudgy goo. Purity and naturalness reached such a high level in it that reality itself appears artificial and caricatured before it. For the first time there appeared truly Russian characters: the simple commandant of the fortress, the captain’s wife, the lieutenant; the fortress itself with its only cannon; the confusion of the times and the plain grandeur of ordinary people—everything is not only the most truthful, but as if even better than truth. So it should be: that is the poet’s calling—to take us from ourselves and return us to ourselves in cleansed, and better form."

N. V. Gogol.

“Pushkin was a historian where he didn’t intend to be one, and where it often isn’t possible to become a true historian. ‘The Captain’s Daughter’ was written in the meantime, amid work on the ‘Pugachevshchina,’ but there is more history in it than in ‘The History of Pugachev’s Rebellion,’ which seems like a long explanatory footnote to the novel.”