This book contains the Russian text of Pushkin's Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin. The text is accompanied with English language introduction and notes on the text.At the age of thirty, Russia's greatest poet Alexander Pushkin, competed his first (anonymously published) collection of prose stories, the Tales of Belkin. Unappreciated by contemporary critics, they have been seen by later commentator s as masterpieces, innovatory in language and immaculate in style. They certainly enjoy historical importance as Russian' literatures' first stories of permanent artistic value and their influence on subsequent Russian writers has been considerable. Emphasising their humour and varied quality, the editor argues in his introduction that there is great scope for personal preferences in the evaluation of these still controversial stories.