After Pushkin edited by Elaine Feinstein (Carcanet, £7.95)

At the close of the 20th century, one of the literary observations most often made concerned the astonishing legacy left by the 19th-century Russian writers, particularly the mighty novelists who elevated fiction to art. It is fitting that just as Chekhov straddled the 19th and 20th centuries, so too did the father of the great Russian literary tradition, the even shorter-lived Pushkin , who straddled the 18th and 19th. This book offers new versions of some of the master's greatest poems by a strong and varied team of poets including Seamus Heaney, the late Ted Hughes, Carol Ann Duffy and Eavan Boland.

The results are exciting; they also testify to Pushkin's artistic range as a romantic who could also write satire and epic. Feinstein's highly perceptive introduction acts as a concise and useful essay to a literary genius whose messy life overshadowed the majestic ouevre. In Weimar last summer, a party of German students gathered before his bust and honoured Pushkin as the creator of Eugene Onegin, a vivid masterwork of verse which is also a pioneering work of narrative fiction - as, indeed, is The Bronze Horse Man. Some of them wept. Slim and unobtrusive, this modest little volume is worth its weight in gold.