Russian Tsar Era Classics — The Tales of Belkin, Part 2, by Alexander Pushkin
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
The second 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 2 of 2.
Part 1 carried From the Publisher, The Shot and The Blizzard. In The Undertaker, Adrian Prokhorov, slighted at a neighbour's feast, invites his true clientele — his dead — to his housewarming, and they come. In The Stationmaster, Samson Vyrin's beloved daughter Dunya is carried off by a passing hussar, and the old man walks to Petersburg to bring her home. And in The Lady Peasant, Liza Muromskaya dresses as the blacksmith's daughter Akulina to meet the young man her father's feud forbids her to know — and teaches him his letters in a grove.
The tales:
0:00 — The Undertaker
18:54 — The Stationmaster
46:47 — The Lady Peasant
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) — between the tales, and closing theme. No music under the narration.
Season 147 — Russian Tsar Era Classics, Episode 6 (Part 2). 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.
