Early Pushkin stories and what they have to say about race and class

Interest piqued by reading a Pushkin story (probably his most famous, Queen of Spades) in an anthology, I've started reading some of the pieces in the Complete Prose Stories ofAlexander Pushkin, an old Norton anthology, edited/translated by Gillad (?) Aitken, and have to admit I was taken aback by the first piece (they're arranged chronologically; all written in the 1820s or early 30s, when AP died), The Moor of Peter the Great; the eponymous Moor is the adopted son of the emperor, and the story follows him from his life at the center of culture and society in the Paris of Louis XIV (a century previous) and his return to Russia, where father/mentor/protector tries to arrange a marriage w/ a daughter of the Russian nobility. What's so striking about this story is the frank examination of racism and prejudice that serve to ostracize this handsome and talented young man - including his feelings of social isolation - and the nobility of Emperor/Czar Peter in recognizing the humanity of his son and rising above prejudice, setting an example. The only problem - the story stops dead at one point with a note from Aitken that Pushkin abandoned the story as incomplete. How frustrating! I wish he'd placed that note at the top of the story. Skipping other incomplete pieces and a famous story, The Shot, about which I have previously posted, I read two more of Pushkin's short pieces - The Blizzard, about a complex courtship and a plot that goes awry, which is a good story of its type, although it's a type long since passed over - relying on the most bizarre twists of fortune and fate and coincidence. Another story, The Undertaker (?), is more in the "modern" mode as a study in character and class, showing the local undertaker and his greed and bias against the German population in his neighborhood and ending in a nightmarish dance of death - a foreshadowing of Poe and Lovecraft, perhaps, but also a shrewd social commentary, as Pushkin really begins to establish his voice and his material.