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Yes, strictly speaking the title of this book is generally Tales of Belkin in English, but uniquely and unnecessarily, in this 1947 translation it hass been rendered as "Bielkin" instead.

These stories are all short, of slight appearance and witty. We, the readers, get to be deliberately misled and fooled about with as well as generally pushed to change our understanding as Pushkin twists out these tales for us.

I read these stories first long ago and far away as a student, bold and undaunted by the library steps or even the wayward habits of the stressed photocopiers. Pushkin is a foundational writer for Russian literature but that doesn't really come through in translation (into English in any case). For example Tolstoy was inspired reading one sentence of the Queen of Spades - kareti priexali (pray forgive the probably incorrect transliteration). That translates as the carriages were still arriving or the carriages continued to arrive or the carriages were still drawing up outside the palace depending on how much context and flavour you wanted to add. That two word sentence illustrates the problem. Some linguistic qualities are untranslatable, what made Pushkin's writing exciting and inspirational doesn't always clear the linguistic border.

Pushkin also had the advantage of being early and writing widely across a range of genres. The stories here assume the reader is familiar with the Byronic hero, the Gothic, romances, and sentimental novels - if you are alive today and read you are familiar with all of these, even if not by name. Typically Pushkin's attitude to these is playful. Is the Byronic figure a hero or a psychopath or are the two indistinguishable? The young nobleman who presents himself in the style of Evgeny Onegin to the young noble women of his district, pale faced and melancholic is to be found in true She stoops to conquer style romping around with the servant women out the back.

The Tales of Belkin then turn upon the issue of perspective. Each story was allegedly told to 'Belkin' by one of four storytellers and within each story there might be a further narrator or two embedded (view spoiler)[and why not? The more the merrier (hide spoiler)]. Furthermore these stories are presented to us by an editor who clearly isn't meant to be confused with Pushkin himself (although for the sake of clarity he was the author). In other words we have nested sets, like Matryoshkas, of unreliable narrators while Pushkin not only washes his hands of all of them but has had the basin scrubbed and disinfected while denying that he had ever owned such a thing.