Prisoner of the Caucasus

Written during his exile to the southern reaches of the Russian Empire, Alexander Pushkin's The Prisoner of the Caucasus centers on a Russian officer in the mold of a Byronic hero who rejects fashionable society and embarks on an adventure to the Caucasus. He is captured by fierce Circassian tribesmen, but eventually freed by a Circassian woman with whom he has a star-crossed love affair. The Prisoner of the Caucasus was well-received and influenced Russian and other European Romantic perceptions of the Caucasus for decades, and other famous Russian authors - most notably Mikhail Lermontov and Leo Tolstoy - offered their own versions of the tale.

Despite the poem's influence on subsequent Russian literature and opera, the poem has only rarely appeared in English. This annotated and unabridged version includes a Prologue Pushkin wrote dedicated to his friend N. N. Raevsky and a controversial Epilogue.