The Little Tragedies, written by Pushkin in the early 1830s, are highly compressed "chamber dramas", focusing on a protagonist at a crucial moment of moral choice - as Anderson puts it in her introduction,
"each little tragedy begins in the fifth act." Far surpassing the previous translators, Anderson has sought to preserve the heightened intensity of Pushkin's diction while avoiding the archaic cadences of blank verse. Without sacrificing authenticity, Anderson has managed to translate these pieces into readable, twentieth-century English. Anderson has provided a substantial critical apparatus to the translations, including a lengthy introduction in which she both outlines the literary and historical context of the plays and explains her method as a translator. The volume also includes four critical essays (one on each tragedy), two of which Caryl Emerson has described as "the best ever written on these plays."
