The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin (Russian: «По́вести поко́йного Ива́на Петро́вича Бе́лкина», 1831) is a series of five short stories and a fictional editorial introduction by Russian author Aleksandr Pushkin. The collection is opened with the editorial, in which Pushkin pretends to be the verbose publisher of Belkin's tales. The tales themselves are not related to one another, except that they are all said in the introduction to be stories told by various people to a recently deceased landowner, Ivan Petrovich Belkin. The introduction continues to say that Belkin was an interesting and mysterious man, even to the point that the woman he left his estate to had never met him. It is also mentioned that Belkin's favorite pastime was to collect and hear stories, several of which are to be presented to the reader. Source: Wikipedia (en)