Written by Russia's greatest poet, this fact-based tale of an illiterate Don Cossack who nearly succeeded in deposing Catherine the Great was greeted with hostility by Czar Nicholas I, who insisted on censoring it. Pushkin did fieldwork and research that would be the envy of any historian, and then fashioned it into a powerful literary narrative of uprising and rebellion. The first English translation of a masterpiece that has become a Russian classic.