Welcome to Litsy!

More interesting than enjoyable, this collection is exactly what the title suggests, fragments of various unfinished novels and short stories. The introduction posits that Pushkin's importance to Russian literature is greater than even Shakespeare's to English literature, a claim I can believe given the universal reverence the great Russian novelists of the late-19th and 20th centuries had for him. I've been told Pushkin's poetry can only be...

He was wearing a black frock coat, turning white along the seams, and summer trousers (even though it was now well into autumn), and on his yellowish shirt front, beneath a worn black cravat, shone a false diamond; his fraying hat had clearly seen both sun and rain. Meeting this man in a forest, you'd take him for a brigand; in society-for a political conspirator; in your vestibule-for a charlatan peddling elixirs and rat poison.

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

Peter the Great sent a number of young men to foreign lands to acquire knowledge necessary to a Russia he had transformed; among them was his godson, an African named Ibrahim.

(I couldn't find my book in the database, but it's 'Peter the Great's African, Experiments in Prose' by Pushkin.)