Russian Classics in Russian and English: Learn Russian with Pushkin (Russian Edition)

This book is missing its first 12 pages. It begins abruptly on page 13 in the middle of a short story.

good

The translation is rough but still helpful for beginners. Pushkin is a must if you want to study Russia and this is a good way to get to know him.

Having decided to relearn Russian (which I studied as a subsidiary subject at university about 15 years ago and have subsequently mostly forgotten), my eye was caught by this book as one of my main aims for the language is to be able to enjoy Russian literature in the original language rather than just in translation.As advertised, the book is based around parallel texts in Russian and English of two short stories by Pushkin. The print is nice and clear and the Russian version has the stresses marked on all polysyllabic words, which is a very handy feature (as remembering word stresses was always one of things I found hardest about the language).There is a small vocabulary given on each page, which includes multiple translations of each featured Russian word and several cognates (i.e. related words formed from the same root), which is useful for building vocabulary. However, only a very few of the words on each page are covered (mostly ones towards the start of the page) so you still have to rely on the parallel English text or dictionaries to get most of the vocabulary required for understanding the texts.The inclusion of a transliteration seems to be slightly pointless since anyone who can read Russian sufficiently well to even make a start on trying to use this book is going to be able to read the Cyrillic alphabet anyway. I think the space would have been much better used for increasing the size of the vocabulary section or including some notes on grammar or cultural issues that would aid understanding the text (there is nothing like that at all in the book).For someone with a reasonable grasp of Russian already, even fairly rusty, this is not a a bad book at all (despite the space wasted on the transliteration). It would, however, be very frustrating for somebody who bought this with a view to learning the language from it in the first place.