ies, such as _The Blizzard_, _The Pistol
Shot_, _The Lady-Peasant_, the most entertaining, and certainly the
most popular, is _The Queen of Spades_, which was so admirably
translated by Merimee, and formed the subject of one of Tchaikovsky's
most successful operas. As an artistic work _The Egyptian Nights_,
written in 1828, is the most interesting, and ranks among Pushkin's
masterpieces. It tells of an Italian _improvisatore_ who, at a party
in St. Petersburg, improvises verses on Cleopatra and her lovers. The
story is written to lead up to this poem, which gives a gorgeous
picture of the pagan world, and is another example of Pushkin's
miraculous power of assimilation. Pushkin's prose has the same
limpidity and ease as his verse; the characters have the same vitality
and reality as those in his poems and dramatic scenes, and had he
lived longer he might have become a great novelist. As it is, he
furnished Gogol (whose acquaintance he made in 1832) with the subject
of two of his masterpieces--_Dead Souls_ and _The Revisor_.

The province of Russian folk-lore and legend from which Pushkin took
the idea of _Rusalka_ was to furnish him with a great deal of rich
material. It was in 1831 that in friendly rivalry with Zhukovsky he
wrote his first long fairy-tale, imitating the Russian popular style,
_The Tale of Tsar Saltan_. Up till now he had written only a few
ballads in the popular style. This fairy-tale was a brilliant success
as a _pastiche_; but it was a _pastiche_ and not quite the real thing,
as cleverness kept breaking in, and a touch of epigram here and there,
which indeed makes it delightful reading. He followed it by another in
the comic vein, _The Tale of the Pope and his Man Balda_, and by two
more _Maerchen_, _The Dead Tsaritsa_ and _The Golden Cock_; but it was
not until two years later that he wrote his masterpiece in this vein,
_The Story of the Fisherman and the Fish_. It is the same story as
Grimm's tale of the Fisherman's wife who wished to be King, Emperor,
and then Pope, and finally lost all by her vaulting ambition. The tale
is written in unrhymed rhythmical, indeed scarcely rhythmical, lines;
all trace of art is concealed; it is a tale such as might have been
handed down by oral tradition in some obscure village out of the
remotest past; it has the real _Volkston_; the good-nature and
simplicity and unobtrusive humour of a real fairy-tale. The subjects
of all these stories were told to Pushkin by his