Russian Tsar Era Classics — The Tales of Belkin, Part 1, by Alexander Pushkin
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
The first part of the complete cycle, in a fresh in-house English translation, performed by the full KacheliTV cast: the five prose tales with which Pushkin, in one autumn at Boldino, invented modern Russian prose — framed as the posthumous papers of Ivan Petrovich Belkin, presented by his publisher.
Part 1 of 2.
In The Shot, the mysterious Silvio hoards his right to a return shot for years, waiting until his enemy has something to lose. In The Blizzard, a secret midnight wedding in a country church goes astray in the snow — and fate keeps its own ledger for four years. The Undertaker, The Stationmaster and The Lady Peasant follow in Part 2.
The tales:
0:39 — From the Publisher
11:28 — The Shot
44:17 — The Blizzard
Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), «Повести покойного Ивана Петровича Белкина» — first published 1831. Public domain. Russian text via ru.wikisource.org (РВБ, 1959) and as-pushkin.net. Fresh in-house English translation made for this production; no existing translation was used or consulted. Nothing has been cut: across the two parts, the publisher's preface, all five tales and all their epigraphs are performed complete, in book order. Two period epithets in the Russian are rendered neutrally in translation; no fact, event or sentence is altered. No passage required exclusion under the shelf's content law — the famous duel of The Shot is postponed and averted within Pushkin's own plot; no one is killed.
A dramatized performance by the KacheliTV cast: narrated by Magnolia, with Bruno as Silvio, Berestov and the dead Brigadier; Felix as the Count, Minsky and Alexei; Violetta as the Countess, Marya and Liza; Silas as the Lieutenant-Colonel, Schulz and the lackey; Amos as Burmin and the skeleton Kurilkin; Orson as Vladimir, Yurko and Muromsky; Benedetto as Gavrila, Samson Vyrin and the Baker; Madame de Pamplemousse as Praskovya, Aksinya and the brewer's wife; Scratch as Adrian Prokhorov; and Lulu as Vanka and Nastya.
Music: "Forbidden Palace Cello" (KacheliTV instrumental library) — opening theme and between the tales. No music under the narration.
Season 147 — Russian Tsar Era Classics, Episode 6 (Part 1). The shelf so far: Lefty, by Nikolai Leskov · The Queen of Spades, by Alexander Pushkin · The Overcoat, by Nikolai Gogol · The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Leo Tolstoy · The Lady with the Dog, by Anton Chekhov · The Tales of Belkin, by Alexander Pushkin.
KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
