There is a legend that, when Pushkin set out to join the Decembrists in St Petersburg in 1825, a hare ran across his path.

Taking this to be a warning, the poet turned back. A few days later, the Decembrist uprising took place and most of his friends were either exiled or executed.

Sasha Dugdale's fine new collection The Estate takes this story as the starting point for a series of meditations on failure and hope, self-pity and self-justification, chance and fate.

The book opens with a gorgeous sequence written at the Pushkin family estate at Mikhailovskoye and moves out through widening circles of Russian and European history, literature and loss.
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