Little Tragedies

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799-1837) is a classic of Russian literature, who laid the foundations of the Russian realistic movement, a poet, prose writer, and playwright. For the creative merits of the writer, he was already called a genius during his lifetime. Gogol wrote: "Pushkin is an extraordinary phenomenon and, perhaps, the only phenomenon of the Russian spirit: this is the Russian man in his development, as he may appear in two hundred years." "Little Tragedies" is the name of a cycle of small dramatic plays by Pushkin, written during the famous Boldin Autumn in 1830. It includes "The Miserly Knight," "Mozart and Salieri," "The Stone Guest," and "Feast During the Plague." The main motif of the tragedies becomes human passions: for money in "The Miserly Knight," for art in "Mozart and Salieri," for a beloved in "The Stone Guest," and for life itself in "Feast During the Plague."