A young officer is posted to a fort on the Orenburg steppe in 1773, falls in love with the commandant's daughter, and is captured by Pugachev — the Cossack pretender who claimed to be the murdered Tsar and burned half of southeastern Russia. Pushkin is where Russian literature begins; he researched the rebellion in the archives and on the ground, and gave the rebel a courtesy nobody else dared. Published here as Marie, its early English title.