Pushkin's prose is in some respects as remarkable as his verse. Here, too, he proved a pioneer. _Dubrovsky_ is the story of a young officer whose father is ousted, like Naboth, from his small estate by his neighbour, a rich and greedy landed proprietor, becomes a highway robber so as to revenge himself, and introduces himself into the family of his enemy as a French master, but forgoes his revenge because he falls in love with his enemy's daughter. In this extremely vivid story he anticipates Gogol in his lifelike pictures of country life. _The Captain's Daughter_ is equally vivid; the rebel Pugachev has nothing stagey or melodramatic about him, nothing of Harrison Ainsworth. Of his shorter stories, such as _The Blizzard_, _The Pistol Shot_, _The Lady-Peasant_, the most entertaining, and certainly the most popular, is _The Queen of Spades_, which was so admirably translated by Mérimée, and formed the subject of one of Tchaikovsky's most successful operas. As an artistic work _The Egyptian Nights_, written in 1828, is the most interesting, and ranks among Pushkin's masterpieces. It tells of an Italian _improvisatore_ who, at a party in St. Petersburg, improvises verses on Cleopatra and her lovers. The story is written to lead up to this poem, which gives a gorgeous picture of the pagan world, and is another example of Pushkin's miraculous power of assimilation. Pushkin's prose has the same limpidity and ease as his verse; the characters have the same vitality and reality as those in his poems and dramatic scenes, and had he lived longer he might have become a great novelist. As it is, he furnished Gogol (whose acquaintance he made in 1832) with the subject of two of his masterpieces--_Dead Souls_ and _The Revisor_.