The Captain’s Daughter (original: Kapitanskaia Dochka) was written by Alexander Pushkin. Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799-1837) was one of Russia’s greatest poets and a brilliant writer whose work remains solidly, and with justification, in the canon of world literature. The Captain’s Daughter was Pushkin’s last major prose work.

The Captain’s Daughter is set during the 1773 rebellion of the Don Cossack Emelian Pugachev against Empress Catherine II. When Pyotr, the son of a former soldier and nobleman, reaches age seventeen his father decides it is time for Pyotr to become a man and sends him off to join the army. Pyotr is given a position at the Belgorsky Fortress, on the edge of the steppes, and there becomes embroiled in Pugachev’s rebellion. Pyotr meets his future wife at the Fortress, Marya, the captain’s daughter of the story’s title, and inadvertently saves Pugachev’s life. Pugachev returns the favor later on, sparing Pyotr when many others in the Fortress are killed. Pyotr endures battles, separation from Marya, and incarceration, eventually being reunited with his wife after she arranges for his final release from jail. Pugachev is eventually hanged and Pyotr and Marya live happily ever after.

The Captain’s Daughter is highly regarded by critics, who see it as one of the best historical romances in the Russian language. These critics see a wide range of themes in the novel, from death, honor, and familial relations to the involvement of kings in marital happiness. The presence of these themes, usually absent in historical romances, elevates above most other historical novels. But few Western readers will describe The Captain’s Daughter as anything more than average. Pushkin nicely conveys what life would have been like for a Russian soldier at the time, although the essentially romantic nature of the novel leaves out more unpleasant, if realistic, details. The Captain’s Daughter lacks the venomous patriotism and ethnic bigotry which mar Gogol’s Taras Bulba and Sienkiewicz’s With Fire and Sword; there is only one throwaway antisemitic comment and no discernible anti-Catholicism. The Captain’s Daughter has the usual Russian seriousness and lack of irony, which gives the text a slightly leaden feel, although this may be the fault of the translator rather than Pushkin himself. Pushkin modeled The Captain’s Daughter on the work of Walter Scott (see: Ivanhoe, Waverley), and like Scott’s work The Captain’s Daughter might seem too serious for its own good to the modern reader. The themes which the critics rate so highly in The Captain’s Daughter are present in numerous historical romances, many of which are better-written and more entertaining. Pushkin’s style is extremely utilitarian and non-decorative, and The Captain’s Daughter is joyless and altogether lacking any sense of humor or wit.

Critics and academics, naturally, see things differently, and value aspects of the novel which may not be of much interest to modern readers:

The Captain’s Daughter can be seen as a historical novel, as an epistolary novel, and also as a fairy tale–or rather, two linked fairy tales. First Pyotr and then Masha set out on quests. Pyotr is a fairy-tale “wise fool”....And beneath the fairy-tale surface lies a densely textured novel full of quotation, pastiche, and allusion. The Captain’s Daughter can even be read as a discussion of the future direction of Russian literature. Pyotr has two tutors: one Russian and one French. At first Pyotr seems linguistically incompetent; he fails to learn French from Beaupré and, when he meets the incognito Pugachov, is unable to understand his riddling Russian. In time, however, Pyotr comes to be at home in both languages; he studies French, somewhat surprisingly, in a remote steppe fortress and he develops a rapport with Pugachov. Pyotr’s two languages, his two worlds, are represented by epigraphs and embedded poems, half of which are draw from folk songs and half of which are examples or pastiches of elegant eighteenth-century verse. Pushkin may be suggesting that, like Pyotr, Russian literature can find its true path only by acknowledging both the Asiatic world of the steppe and the high culture of the elite.¹

More broadly, “Petr Grinev...is one of the most closely scrutinized, yet poorly understood characters in Russian literature. Numerous scholars have researched Grinev’s origins and evolution, producing detailed accounts of the character’s historical prototypes, literary cousins, and the many successive permutations he underwent in Pushkin’s drafts.”² While critics and academics continue to find things to write about with regard to The Captain’s Daughter, the modern reader is likely to put the novel into the same category of “books to be read for a class and as a duty rather than for pleasure’s sake.”

Print: Alexander Pushkin and Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, The Captain’s Daughter. New York: NYRB Classics, 2014.

Robert Chandler, “Introduction,” in The Captain’s Daughter. New York: NYRB Classics, 2014.

¹ Robert Chandler, “Introduction,” in The Captain’s Daughter (New York: NYRB Classics, 2014), ix-x.

² Polina Rikoun, “Grinev the Trickster: Reading the Paradoxes of Pushkin’s ‘The Captain’s Daughter,’” The Slavic and East European Journal 51, no. 1 (Spring, 2007): 16.