This volume presents Pushkin at his most questioning and experimental. "Peter the Great's African" is his first attempt at representing the man he saw as the most important of all Russian tsars. Here Pushkin presents him from the perspective of Pushkin's maternal great-grandfather, a former African slave whom Peter the Great educated and made into one of his closest confidants; Pushkin's central concern in this story is the success or failure of Peter's attempt to refashion his vast, archaic empire and turn it into an integral part of Europe. "The History of the Village of Goriukhino" shows him grappling, through parody and self-parody, with the question of what it means to write history. "Dubrovsky" is both a gripping adventure story and a vivid picture of provincial Russia in the late eighteenth century. "The Egyptian Nights" is an examination, in both prose and poetry, of questions of the deepest importance to Pushkin.