The Belkin Tales, or Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin is a series of short stories written by Alexander Pushkin in 1831.
This series is written as a collection of five tales told by various people to Ivan Petrovich Belkin, a recently deceased landowner. When he was alive, his favorite pastime was to hear and collect stories from people he encounters, several of which are presented to the reader by a publisher who collected them after Belkin's passing.
The short stories in the collection are:
- The Shot
- The Blizzard
- The Undertaker
- The Stationmaster
- The Squire's Daughter
The Belkin Tales share the following tropes:
- Affectionate Parody: What Pushkin's short story collection are, poking fun at the literary genres of his time.
- All Just a Dream: In The Undertaker, Prokhorov awakens from a dream of reanimated dead visiting his shop.
- Brain Fever: Marya falls ill with a fever to the point where she semiconsciously spills her plans of eloping with Vladimir, which her parents overhear.
- Braving the Blizzard: Vladimir gets caught in a blizzard on his way to the church.
- Duel to the Death: The subject of The Shot. Silvio challenged the count to one such duel in revenge for the insult he hadn't had the chance to duel over.
- Embarrassing Nickname: Lizaveta is tired of being called "Betsy" by her father.
- Feuding Families: Downplayed. The landowners Muromsky and Berestov criticize how one another runs his estate.
- Lonely Funeral: When the narrator revisits the village to find out the station master has passed away, he thought the poor man had nobody to mourn him. It turned out, however, that a young lady (realized to be Dunya) visited his grave to mourn her beloved father.
- Parental Marriage Veto: In The Blizzard, Marya's parents initially wouldn't let her marry Vladimir on the grounds of their difference in societal status. They change their mind later.
- Playing Sick: Minsky does this to the station master's daughter, Dunya, in order to take her as his wife.
