The Captain's Daughter

Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) is considered the founder of modern Russian literature. He was a Romantic writer of poetry, plays, and prose whose best-known works are the novel in verse Eugene Onegin and the play Boris Godunov. Pushkin achieved great renown in his lifetime and is still widely read in Russia and in translation. The novella The Captain’s Daughter contains many elements of Russian Romantic literature, most notably the emphasis on the life of a remarkable individual and the role of emotional sentimentality in driving the action of the plot. The work itself became a model for later Russian writers like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Turgenev in the way that it weaves together a folkloric structure with closely observed realism about the social and historical conditions of Russian life. As writer Ben Okri states, “[O]ut of this little book came a forest” (Okri, Ben. “I Began Don Quixote as One Person and Finished as Another.” The Guardian, 8 Mar. 2019).

Pushkin wrote The Captain’s Daughter, a work of historical fiction about the 1770s, in part to understand and respond to social concerns of his class in 1836 from a liberal

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