Catherine II; but his literary
activity was so great that he had also written the rough sketch of a
long story in prose dealing with the same subject, _The Captain's
Daughter_, another prose story of considerable length, _Dubrovsky_,
and portions of a drama, _Rusalka_, The Water Nymph, which was never
finished. Besides _Boris Godunov_ and the _Rusalka_, Pushkin wrote a
certain number of dramatic scenes, or short dramas in one or more
scenes. Of these, one, _The Feast in the Time of Plague_, is taken
from the English of John Wilson (_The City of the Plague_), with
original additions. In _Mozart and Salieri_ we see the contrast
between the genius which does what it must and the talent which does
what it can. The story is based on the unfounded anecdote that Mozart
was poisoned by Salieri out of envy. This dramatic and beautifully
written episode has been set to music as it stands by Rimsky-Korsakov.

_The Covetous Knight_, which bears the superscription, "From the
tragi-comedy of Chenstone"--an unknown English original--tells of the
conflict between a Harpagon and his son: the delineation of the
miser's imaginative passion for his treasures is, both in conception
and execution, in Pushkin's finest manner. This scene has been
recently set to music by Rakhmaninov. _The Guest of Stone_, the story
of Don Juan and the _statua gentilissima del gran Commendatore_, makes
Don Juan life. A scene from _Faust_ between Faust and Mephistopheles
is original and not of great interest; _Angelo_ is the story of
_Measure for Measure_ told as a narrative with two scenes in dialogue.
_Rusalka_, The Water Maid, is taken from the genuine and not the sham
province of national legend, and it is tantalizing that this poetic
fragment remained a fragment.

Pushkin's prose is in some respects as remarkable as his verse. Here,
too, he proved a pioneer. _Dubrovsky_ is the story of a young officer
whose father is ousted, like Naboth, from his small estate by his
neighbour, a rich and greedy landed proprietor, becomes a highway
robber so as to revenge himself, and introduces himself into the
family of his enemy as a French master, but forgoes his revenge
because he falls in love with his enemy's daughter. In this extremely
vivid story he anticipates Gogol in his lifelike pictures of country
life. _The Captain's Daughter_ is equally vivid; the rebel Pugachev
has nothing stagey or melodramatic about him, nothing of Harrison
Ainsworth. Of his shorter stor