Too bad Pushkin couldn't have written and finished ore novels like The Captain's Daughter

One piece of prose fiction that Alexander Pushkin did complete - The Captain's Daughter - stands as a short novel, about 120 pp., and it makes you wish that AP had been willing or able to finish several other of the promising works of fiction that he began and then for some reason dropped (e.g., The Improvisor, The Emperor's Moor). About half-way through reading this short novel, and, yes, it does not have the breadth of knowledge and ideas and social classes that we see in Tolstoy nor the depth of character that we see in Chekhov nor the drama and inner turmoil that we see in Dostoyevsky - to cite three great Russian writers who lived and wrote in Pushkin's wake, but it's a fine narrative that keeps us fully engaged and treats many themes. Most of all it's "bildungsroman," a "novel of education," about the life and maturation of a young man, the narrator in this case, who is looking back at his youth in the Russian army in the late 18th century (novel written ca 1832). The narrator is pushed by his father to enter military service (rather than university, which his father believes would be a life of dissipation - probably right); he heads off with his servant (who will stay w/ him throughout his service) and immediately gets into trouble, gambling away much of his money. Ultimately, to his chagrin, he's sent to a remote outpost where his life looks to be miserable, but he falls in love w/ the eponymous Captain's Daughter - and fights a duel over her, is wounded, writes home to seek his father's blessing to marry the young woman, is sternly rebuffed and likely to be sent to an even more remote posting when a band of (Kazakh?) rebels threaten to attack the under-manned outpost and the narrator stays and gets ready for battle. (That's where I left off in this forward-rushing plot.) So we can see that the novel encompasses themes of father-son relationships, class relationships, discipline and maturation, love and folly, battles and duels - plus a crew of sharply delineated characters, such as the overly tolerant commanding officer who defers all decisions to his sharp-witted, highly competent wife. I can't say that this novel is on eeryone's reading list; probably more readers would know of it had Pushkin been able to write more works of prose fiction (the Collected Prose Fiction of Pushkin available in a Norton edition, ed. and tr. Aitken, from 1966).