By Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) A Study Guide | ||||||||||||||||||
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Plot Summary By Michael J. Cummings...© 2007 .......The all-night card party at the rooms of Narumov, a cavalry officer, ends with dinner and champagne near dawn. Narumov asks Surin how he fared. .......“I have no luck," Surin laments: "I play cautiously, never get excited, never lose my head, and yet I go on losing!" .......Another player calls attention to Hermann, an officer in the engineers, saying he always comes to watch but never plays. Hermann explains, “I am not in the position to sacrifice the necessary in the hope of winning the superfluous." .......Prince Paul Tomsky, also an officer, observes that Hermann is simply being prudent. The person who really puzzles him, Tomsky says, is his eighty-seven-year-old grandmother, Countess Anna Fedotovna, because she never bets against the banker in card games. Then he tells a little story about her that he heard from his uncle, Count Ivan Ilyitch, the countess's son. .......In Paris sixty years before, when her beauty dazzled society, she lost an enormous sum at court to the Duke of Orleans in a game of faro. After returning to her residence, she directed her husband to pay the debt. The normally compliant man refused to do so, pointing out that she had spent 500,000 francs in just six months. In desperation, she wrote a letter to old Count St. Germain, famous for the stories told about him–that he claimed to have discovered the elixir of life and to have found a way to turn base metals into gold. In his memoirs, Casanova said he was a spy. Whatever was true or untrue about him, he was always in demand at social gatherings, and the countess had fond memories of him, the most important of which was that he had money. .......The count immediately went to her and told her a secret card strategy that would enable her to win back her money. That night at Versailles at the jeu de la reine (Queen Marie-Antoinette's own gaming table), she again played against the Duke of Orleans after telling him a little tale about why she had not yet paid him his money. Upon employing the secret strategy, she immediately recouped her losses. .......Afterward, the countess guarded the card secret from others. She even refused to reveal it to her four sons, including Tomsky’s father. However, after taking pity on an acquaintance named Chaplitzky, who had lost 300,000 rubles, she told him the secret, designating three cards he should bet on. She also made him promise that after the game he would never play cards again. .......When he used the secret, he won immediately. Before the game ended, he had covered his losses–and won a little extra. Oddly, though, Chaplitzky died in poverty. .......The narrator flashes back several days to a scene that takes place a few days before Narumov’s card party. .......In
her home, Countess Fedotovna primps before a mirror while three maids attend
her. Lizaveta Ivanovna, her ward, sits by a window embroidering. Her grandson,
Tomsky, enters and asks permission to introduce a friend to her at a Friday
ball. After she grants it, she and Paul discuss a woman he admires–a Miss
Yeletsky. The countess criticizes her, then asks about the young lady’s
grandmother, Princess Daria Petrovna. When Paul reminds the countess that
the princess has been dead seven years, Lizaveta furtively signals Paul
with a cautionary gesture. He well knows its meaning: Never should anyone
inform the countess of the death of one of her contemporaries.
.......The narrator flashes back a week, to a moment when Lizaveta is embroidering at the same window. .......Glancing
out the window, Lizavetta catches sight of a young soldier staring
up at her. She does not know him, but the reader becomes aware that it
is Hermann, the engineer.
.......The narrator flashes forward, returning to the scene in the countess’s room at the time that she called off the drive in the carriage. .......Shortly
after the countess cancelled the carriage drive with Lizaveta, she changes
her mind and again orders a carriage. When she and Lizaveta enter the carriage,
the engineer approaches her, places a letter in her hand, and leaves. The
countess questions her about the man, but Lizaveta answers vaguely. After
the drive, Lizaveta goes immediately to her room and opens the letter.
It declares Hermann’s love for her in polite, respectful language. Lizaveta
is unaware that he had copied the words from a German novel. She is delighted
at first, then uneasy about starting a secret relationship. It would be
improper. Should she cease sitting at the window? Should see send the letter
back?
The action takes place in winter in the early 1830s in St. Petersburg, Russia, a port city on the Gulf of Finland in the Baltic Sea. St. Petersburg was Russia's capital from 1712 to 1918. Between 1914 and 1924, it was known as Petrograd. Between 1924 and 1991, it was known as Leningrad. In 1991, the Russian government restored its original name. Flashbacks involving Countess Anna Fedotovna takes place in two French locales, Paris and Versailles, in the 1770s. Hermann: Russian military
officer (an engineer) who is the son of a German immigrant. He refuses
to gamble at cards for fear of jeopardizing the inheritance from his father.
However, after learning that Countess Anna Fedotovna possesses a card secret
that guarantees victory, he abandons all caution and dedicates himself
to extracting the secret from the countess. Hermann's character, then,
has a prudent German side and a daring Russian side.
Type of Work and Year of Completion Publishers frequently identify The Queen of Spades as a short story. However, the term novella seems more appropriate inasmuch as the work is not only longer than the typical short story but also more structurally complex, featuring subplots and flashbacks as well as epigraphs (quotations) that precede each of the six short chapters of the work. Each epigraph calls attention to a theme in the chapter it introduces. The novella may be read as a tale of the supernatural, a psychological study, or a parody of the Gothic romance. It may also be read as a combination of these genres. Pushkin completed The Queen of Spades in 1834. Pushkin tells The Queen
of Spades in third-person omniscient point of view with cold objectivity
that admits no room for melodrama. The narration freely flashes backward
and forward as the story unfolds during a winter month. There are six chapters,
each preceded by an epigraph relating to the theme of the chapter, and
a conclusion.
Themes Obsession After hearing Tomsky’s tale, Hermann becomes obsessed with uncovering the card secret and winning a fortune. Thinking about the secret keeps him awake at night. And when he does fall asleep, he dreams “of nothing but cards, green tables, piles of banknotes, and heaps of ducats." So obsessed is he with the secret that he pretends to be in love with the countess’s ward in order to gain access to the old woman’s house. He even considers romancing the decrepit countess herself: "If," he thought to himself the following evening, as he walked along the streets of St. Petersburg, "if the old Countess would but reveal her secret to me! if she would only tell me the names of the three winning cards. Why should I not try my fortune? I must get introduced to her and win her favour–become her lover. But all that will take time, and she is eighty-seven years old: she might be dead in a week, in a couple of days even!–"After he learns the secret and wins 47,000 rubles, the passion to win more consumes him. He doubles his winnings, the loses everything–including his mind–after he mistakes a queen for an ace. After being confined to a mental hospital, his obsession continues as continually repeats, “Three, seven, ace. Three, seven, queen." Risk Hermann’s pathological preoccupation with learning the card secret is born of his desire to eliminate risk at the gaming table. Knowing the secret card formula will enable him to transcend the laws of chance and probability and become fabulously wealthy without putting a single ruble in jeopardy. Ironically, however, Hermann must take great risks–falsely wooing Lizaveta, stealing into a strange house, and confronting the old countess at 2 a.m.–in order to neutralize risk. In life, it seems, it is impossible to suppress risk entirely. Even after he learns the foolproof card strategy and uses it against Chekalinsky, risk sits at his elbow in the form of his own volatile emotions. Will he be able to control them? Lizavetta also struggles with risk. After establishing communications with Hermann, she wonders whether she should risk her reputation by becoming further involved with him. And the countess? In her youth, she gambled prodigally, continually placing her and her husband’s money at risk. After learning the secret card trick and winning back her losses, she quits gambling. The Unpredictability of Life Like a game of chance, life itself is unpredictable. (This theme is related to the previous one.) However, because unpredictability scares Hermann, he does not fully participate in life. Rather, he observes it from a distance. His only goal is to conserve his inheritance. However, when he sees an opportunity to eliminate unpredictability, he becomes active. After he learns the card secret and uses it in the climactic competition against Chekalinsky, he wins big, then loses everything–ironically, to unpredictability. To underscore this theme, Pushkin wrote unpredictable sequences and outcomes into The Queen of Spades. For example, he flashes back and forth in time at sometimes unexpected moments. In addition, he suggests plot outcomes that never materialize. To wit: When Pushkin presents beautiful Lizaveta looking out the window at the uniformed officer in the street, the reader believes that a princely rescuer has arrived to take her away from her oppressive life as bondwoman to the countess. But nothing of the sort happens. Lizaveta's rescuer goes insane, and she marries the son of the countess's steward. Secrecy All men and women carry secrets, some as trivial as cake recipes and others as momentous as war strategies. In The Queen of Spades, Pushkin builds his story on several secrets, the most prominent of which is a foolproof strategy for winning at cards. The mysterious Count St. Germain passes the card secret on to Countess Anna Fedetovna, enabling her to liquidate a huge gambling debt. She then divulges the secret to an acquaintance desperate to recoup 300,000 rubles he lost at cards. Sixty years later, the grandson of the countess, Prince Paul Tomsky, tells his gambling friends how his grandmother restored herself to financial health with the secret strategy. In response to Tomsky’s story, told after an all-night card party, his friend Narumov–the host of the party–replies, What! You have a grandmother who knows how to hit upon three lucky cards in succession, and you have never yet succeeded in getting the secret of it out of her?Tomsky says, That's the deuce of it! She had four sons, one of whom was my father; all four were determined gamblers, and yet not to one of them did she ever reveal her secret, although it would not have been a bad thing either for them or for me.The reader learns later in the story that Narumov has asked Tomsky to introduce him to the countess. The narrator does not disclose the reason for Narumov’s request, but it seems clear that he wants to prod the countess for the secret. So does another guest at the card party, Hermann, the son of a German immigrant to Russia. Hermann–who attends card parties as an observer, not a participant, in order to conserve his inheritance–loses all sense of caution after hearing about the secret and dedicates himself to learning it at all costs. Lizaveta guards a secret of a different kind: her infatuation with Hermann. When she begins communicating with him via letters, she feels “exceedingly uneasy," the narrator says, for fear of discovery. Through a slip of her tongue, Prince Paul Tomsky learns that she may be interested in an engineer. When Tomsky dances with Lizaveta at the ball, he keeps teasing her about her partiality for engineer. When he tells her that he knows more about her than she imagines, “Lizaveta becomes alarmed that her secret is known to him." Normal vs Paranormal Is the card strategy an invention of an otherworldly force? Does Hermann really see the ghost of the old countess? Pushkin leaves these questions open to speculation, providing enough evidence to argue for or against the occurrence of paranormal phenomena in the story. One may accept Tomsky's story as entirely true, making the strange events that follow plausible. One may also argue that Tomsky's story about his grandmother's gaming experiences is a either a complete fabrication or an account that had been exaggerated and embellished over the years. What of the ghost and the winking queen of spades? Hermann saw the wraith after undergoing great stress and drinking heavily. His vision could have been a hallucination, or it could have resulted from wishful thinking or mental debility. Mistaking the queen of spades for the ace may have been a simple oversight or, again, the result of fevered thinking. Hermann attempts to become rich at the expense of others. First, he deceives Lizaveta. Then he causes the death of the countess. But he feels no remorse for his action, as the narrator points out when Hermann meets with Lizaveta in her room: Hermann gazed at her in silence: his heart, too, was a prey to violent emotion, but neither the tears of the poor girl, nor the wonderful charm of her beauty, enhanced by her grief, could produce any impression upon his hardened soul. He felt no pricking of conscience at the thought of the dead old woman. One thing only grieved him: the irreparable loss of the secret from which he had expected to obtain great wealth.Finally, after learning the card secret, Hermann greedily cheats others out of vast sums at the gaming table. The Death of an Era and Revenge Against Napoleon Europe was at the height of its aristocratic glory in the 1770s, when Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were the king and queen of France and Catherine the Great was empress of Russia. This was the Europe in which the fictional Countess Anna Fedetovna thrived as an extraordinary beauty who played at the gaming tables of Versailles. And then came the French Revolution and later, Napoleon. The old order was overthrown; a new age had dawned. However, beginning in Chapter 2 of The Queen of Spades, the narrator presents the countess as continuing to live in the pre-revolutionary past. She has even decorated her boudoir with Eighteenth Century relics: On one side of the room hung two portraits painted in Paris by Madame Lebrun. One of these represented a stout, red-faced man of about forty years of age in a bright-green uniform and with a star upon his breast; the other--a beautiful young woman, with an aquiline nose, forehead curls and a rose in her powdered hair. In the corners stood porcelain shepherds and shepherdesses, dining-room clocks from the workshop of the celebrated Lefroy, bandboxes, roulettes, fans and the various playthings for the amusement of ladies that were in vogue at the end of the last century, when Montgolfier's balloons and Mesmer's magnetism were the rage.However, there is a new Napoleon in her midst: Hermann. Tomsky describes him as a man "with the profile of a Napoleon, and the soul of Mephistopheles" (one of the archangels cast out of heaven to become a servant of Satan). When he visits Lizaveta's room and sits near a window "with his arms crossed and with a fierce frown upon his forehead . . . he bore a striking resemblance to the portrait of Napoleon." After learning the card secret from his vision of the countess, he uses it to run roughshod over opposing card players just as Napoleon ran roughshod over the old Europe. Consequently, the old older, represented by the countess and the queen of spades, gets its revenge, causing the new Napoleon to lose everything and exiling him to a mental institution. In The Queen of Spades, Pushkin excised all fat from his prose, leaving only the lean. Elaborate metaphors and florid prose--replete with a surfeit of adjectives and bombast--had no place in the story. Pushkin's spare style was in part a parody of the highfalutin prose of other writers of his day and in part an effort to prove Shakespeare's axiom: "Brevity is the soul of wit" (Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2). In The Queen of Spades, Pushkin uses unconventional plot developments and humor to ridicule the sentimental romance writing of his day. For example, after he leads the reader to believe that Lizaveta and Hermann will fall in love and marry, he reveals that Hermann is merely using Lizaveta to gain access to the countess and her card secret. Hermann will do almost anything to learn the secret, even woo the old woman: "I must get introduced to her," he says to himself, "and win her favour--become her lover... But all that will take time, and she is eighty-seven years old: she might be dead in a week, in a couple of days even." When Hermann confronts her in her room, he decides to threaten her, not romance her, and draws a pistol. She then drops dead. At her funeral, the bishop eulogizing her says, "The angel of death found her vigilant in pious thoughts, awaiting the midnight bridegroom." Lizaveta, whom the narrator describes as extraordinarily beautiful, ends up marrying the countess's former steward. The climax occurs when Hermann mistakes the queen of spades for the ace and loses all his money. Symbols, Allusions, and Direct References Alighieri, Dante:
author of The Divine Comedy. The narrator of The Queen of Spades
quotes from Canto 27 of "Paradiso," the third part of The Divine Comedy:
"The bread of the stranger is bitter, and his staircase hard to climb."
Narrator's Epigraphs and Statements An epigraph is a quotation that appears at the beginning of a body of text to establish a mood or underscore a theme. Epigraphs and other statements appear in The Queen of Spades, one before each of the six chapters. Preceding the first epigraph is a statement on the significance of the queen of spades as a playing card. Chapter 1 (Topic: Gambling) The Queen of Spades denotes secret ill-will.Chapter 2 (Topic: A Conversation) "II parait que monsieur est décidément pour les suivantes."Chapter 3 (Topic: Writing Letters) Vous m'ecrivez, mon ange, des lettres de quatre pagesChapter 4 (Topic: Morality and Religion) Homme sans moeurs et sans religion.Chapter 5 (Topic: A Vision) That night the dead Baroness von W. appeared to me. She was all in white and said: ' How do you do, Mr. Councillor?'Chapter 6 (Topic: Angry Reaction) “Attendez!" Study Questions and Essay Topics
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Unanswered Questions The Queen of Spades enjoys a reputation as one of the greatest short stories ever written. From beginning to end, its admirers maintain, it is a nearly perfect piece of writing, exhibiting masterly use of the succinct phrase while presenting a suspenseful account of one man’s descent into lunacy. But what of the unanswered questions the story leaves the reader? Do they increase the impact of the narrative by provoking intriguing insights and interpretations in the reader? Or do they merely lead the reader into blind alleys? Among the most tantalizing questions are the following:
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