The Queen of Spades and Other Stories Read online

  THE QUEEN OF SPADES

  ALEXANDER SERGEYEVICH PUSHKIN was born in Moscow in 1799. He was liberally educated and left school in 1817. Given a sinecure in the Foreign Office, he spent three dissipated years in St Petersburg writing light, erotic and highly polished verse. He flirted with several pre-Decembrist societies, composing the mildly revolutionary verses which led to his disgrace and exile in 1820. After a stay in the Caucasus and the Crimea, he was sent to Bessarabia, where he wrote The Prisoner of the Caucasus and Bachisaraysky Fontan. His work took a more serious turn during the last year of his southern exile, when he began Tsygany and Eugene Onegin. In 1824 he moved to his parents’ estate at Mikhaylovskoye in north-west Russia and spent two fruitful years during which he wrote his great historical drama Boris Godunov, con-tinued Eugene Onegin and finished Tsygany. With the failure of the Decembrists’ rising in 1825 and the succession of a new tsar, Pushkin recovered his freedom. During the next three years he wandered restlessly between St Petersburg and Moscow. He wrote an epic poem, Poltava, but little else. In 1829 he went with the Russian army to Transcaucasia, and the following year he retired to a family estate at Boldino, completing Eugene Onegin. In 1831 he wrote his experimental little tragedies, Povesti Belkina, in prose; and married the beautiful Natalia Goncharova. The rest of his life was harried by debts and the malice of his enemies. His literary output slackened, but he wrote two prose works, The Captain’s Daughter and The Queen of Spades, and one folk poem, The Golden Cockerel. Towards the end of 1836 anonymous letters goaded Pushkin into challenging a troublesome admirer of his wife in the Horse Guards, to a duel. Pushkin was mortally wounded and died in January 1837.

  ROSEMARY EDMONDS was born in London and studied English, Russian, French, Italian and Old Church Slavonic at universities in England, France and Italy. During the war she was translator to General de Gaulle at Fighting France Headquarters in London and, after the liberation, in Paris. She went on to study Russian Orthodox Spirituality, and translated Archimandrite Sophrony’s The Undistorted Image (since published in two volumes as The Monk of Mount Athos and The Wisdom from Mount Athos), His Life Is Mine, We Shall See Him As He Is, Saint Silovan the Athonite and other works. She also researched and translated Old Church Slavonic texts. Among the many translations she made for Penguin Classics are Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Anna Karenin, Resurrection, The Death of Ivan Ilyich/The Cossacks/Happy Ever After and Childhood, Boyhood, Youth; Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades and Other Stories; and Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. She also translated works by Gogol and Leskov.

  Rosemary Edmonds died in 1998, aged 92.

  ALEXANDER PUSHKIN

  The Queen of Spades

  THE NEGRO OF PETER THE GREAT

  DUBROVSKY

  THE CAPTAIN’S DAUGHTER

  Translated with an Introduction by

  ROSEMARY EDMONDS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  The Captain’s Daughter and

  The Negro of Peter the Great published by Neville Spearman 1958

  This collection published in Penguin Books 1962

  Reprinted with a Chronology 2004

  20

  Copyright © Rosemary Edmonds, 1958, 1962

  All rights reserved

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  The Negro of Peter the Great

  Dubrovsky

  The Queen of Spades

  The Captain’s Daughter

  CHRONOLOGY

  INTRODUCTION

  ALEXANDER SERGEYEVICH PUSHKIN (1799–1837), the greatest name in Russian literature, was born in the reign of Paul I – who closed down all private printing-presses in Russia and prohibited inter alia the importation of foreign literature, travelling by Russians abroad and even French fashions. Pushkin’s father belonged to the nobility, while his mother inherited Abyssinian blood, her grandmother being the daughter of the ‘negro’, Hannibal, whom Peter the Great bought from a Turkish seraglio. As a schoolboy the young Pushkin shared the high hopes of a new era which swept Russia after the Napoleonic débâcle of 1812, and experienced the disappointment which followed. A very daring Ode to Liberty written while he was an official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and circulated in manuscript in Petersburg, was brought to the notice of the police and caused his banishment to the south of Russia before his twenty-first birthday. In the summer of 1824 he was transferred to his mother’s estate in the province of Pskov and put under the supervision of the local governor, the marshal of nobility who requested his father to open the young man’s correspondence and spy on him generally, and the archimandrite of the neighbouring monastery of Svyatogorsk.

  During his coronation festivities Nicolas I suddenly decided to send for the exiled poet. An order was signed obliging Pushkin to travel under the escort of the imperial courier, but ‘not in the position of a prisoner’. (In a sense, this was to be his status for the rest of his life.) In Moscow the Emperor ordered him to ‘send me all your writings from now on: it is I who shall be your censor’. Nicolas never ceased to be suspicious of Pushkin and every move the latter made was observed and reported to the police. Nor did the Tsar’s censorship exempt his works from that imposed upon all writers by the Third Section and its chief, Count Benckendorff, to whom Pushkin complained: ‘Not a single Russian author is more oppressed than I. Having been approved by the Emperor my writings are yet stopped when they appear; they are printed with the censors’ wilful corrections, while all my protestations are ignored.’ He was refused permission to visit France and Italy, or to join a mission going to China, and his private letters continued to be opened and censored. ‘It was a devil’s trick to let me be born with a soul and talent in Russia,’ he wrote to his wife, whom he married in 1831.’

  Natalia Goncharova possessed unusual beauty but a shallow, uncultured mind. The pair settled in Petersburg, and the Tsar, who admired Natalia and wished her to attend Court, made Pushkin a gentleman of the chamber – a rank suitable for a youth of eighteen but an insult to a man of standing, which compromised the poet in the eyes of the liberal younger generation. The adopted son of the Dutch minister at Petersburg, Baron George Heckeren d’Anthès, paid persistent attention to Natalia, until anonymous letters goaded Pushkin into challenging him to a duel, in which the poet was mortally wounded. His death was recognized by the people as a national calamity, and the house where his body lay was besieged by mourners. The Tsar and his police became alarmed. After a secret funeral service the remains were removed by night in a coffin covered with str
aw, which was driven in an ordinary sledge under an escort of gendarmes to the Svyatogorsky monastery.

  Of Pushkin’s short life six years were spent in exile. As we have seen, his writings were subjected to the severest censorship, and oppression by the police and gendarmerie was unremitting. Almost from his schooldays he felt that he lived bors la loi and deprived of legal justice.

  Pushkin began his prose work in 1827 with an historical narrative, The Negro of Peter the Great. It was the age of the great historical romances of Walter Scott, the age of new ideas on history. ‘In our day’, wrote Pushkin, ‘the word novel means an historical epoch developed in the form of an imaginary story.’ In The Negro of Peter the Great Pushkin strove for a new understanding of history. He brought history nearer to himself and to his readers by giving it biographical interest. ‘The plot of the story’, he said, ‘centres about the Negro’s wife, who is unfaithful to her husband, gives birth to a white child, and is punished by being shut up in a convent’ The novel opens with a striking picture of the morals and manners of French society in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. ‘Nothing could equal the frivolity, folly and luxury of the French of that period…. Greed for money was united to a thirst for pleasure and dissipation; estates were squandered; morals foundered; the French laughed and speculated – and the State was going to ruin to the lively refrain of satirical vaudevilles.’ In contrast to the decay of France under the Regent, Pushkin vividly portrays youthful Petrine Russia, the stern simplicity of the Petersburg Court and Peter’s ‘progressive’ outlook and concern for his Empire. ‘Russia seemed to Ibrahim one huge work-room where only machines were moving and every worker was occupied with his job in accordance with a fixed plan.’ Ibrahim was one of Peter’s collaborators, a courtier who recognized his responsibility to the country. A feeling of duty and not dread of the Tsar or any motive of personal ambition brought him home from the brilliant if frivolous ambiance of the nobility of France. For the sake of duty, for the sake of the honour of helping a great man, Ibrahim sacrificed gaiety and pleasure, exchanging a life of refinement for one of austerity and toil. ‘He felt that he, too, ought to be labouring at his appointed task, and tried to regret as little as possible the gaieties of Parisian life.’

  It was natural that Pushkin should feel drawn to a monarch whose work he understood in all its implications. ‘Peter was undoubtedly a revolutionary by God’s grace,’ he wrote the year before his death. ‘The tremendous revolution achieved by his autocratic power abolished the old system of life, and European influences spread all over Russia. Russia entered Europe like a launched vessel, amid the hammering of axes and the thunder of cannon… As the executioner of an era which no longer corresponded to the nation’s needs, the Tsar brought us culture and enlightenment, which in the end must bring us freedom too.’

  ‘Had this novel [The Negro of Peter the Great] been completed… we should have a supreme Russian historical novel, depicting the manners and customs of the greatest epoch of Russian history,’ was the verdict of the eminent critic Belinsky.

  Dubrovsky, the tale of a young officer whose father, like Naboth, is ousted from his small estate by an unscrupulous neighbour, is one of Pushkin’s masterpieces. Melodramatic in subject, it is extremely simple in style. The fairly elaborate plot develops swiftly against a background which presents an illuminating picture of rural conditions in Russia and of Russian legal procedure under Catherine II. The two noblemen, Troyekurov and Vereisky, with the Byronic hero, the young Dubrovsky, are impressive creations in Pushkin’s portrait gallery. The heroine is more of a lay figure – in all his prose stories except the historical ones Pushkin seems to have been more interested in his men than in his women characters. An almost exclusive diet of a little gentle music, a great many French novels, and no companionship, makes them eager to Suffer in one role after another – any role so long as they can dramatize themselves into the centre of the stage. This time the heroine goes to the altar to wed her elderly suitor, expecting until the last second to be rescued and carried off by the brigand. But the brigand arrives late and unhesitatingly she switches into the new part of the loyal wife.

  A word as to Pushkin’s use of landscape, which he introduces only when it is needed as a physical setting. For him nature is a visual phenomenon, never to be endowed with emotional content in order to add to a mood. In Dubrovsky there is an almost laconic description of the Volga: ‘The Volga flowed past outside; loaded barges under full sail floated by, and little fishing boats… flashed here and there. Beyond the river stretched hills and fields, and several small villages enlivened the landscape.’ That is all: and there is no further mention of the Volga. It is the river itself that interests Pushkin. He describes it qua river, and the Volga does not appear again.

  Of Pushkin’s shorter stories The Queen of Spades is perhaps the most entertaining. It was certainly the most popular in his lifetime. Card-players punted on the three, the seven and the ace; and critics – Dostoyevsky was one of the first – wrote enthusiastically, declaring that in it Russian literary language had been created. Certainly in the person of Hermann a new type emerged in Russian literature.

  In The Queen of Spades Pushkin again attains great simplicity of language. An almost total absence of adjectives excludes rhetorical cadence. The dry energetic sentences – as cold and relentless as the hero himself – are saved from jerkiness by the use of semi-colons instead of full stops. Consider the rhythm here: ‘It was a frightful night: the wind howled, wet snow fell in big flakes; the street lamps burned dimly; the streets were deserted.’ The phrases are not so much linked together as confronted with one another. A common impulse and the pressure which they exert one on the other carry them forward. Continuity of thought welds a series of abrupt phrases into a smooth whole: the author has his story perfectly worked out and knows exactly what he is doing. The Queen of Spades is remarkable for the range of its dramatic action and its economy of words – Pushkin’s masters are the French for whom the crowning virtue of prose is conciseness. The opening paragraph – it is one of Pushkin’s famous openings – plunges the reader into the heart of the matter. The card game is over, the company are having supper and chatting. ‘The long winter night had passed unnoticed; it was after four in the morning when the company sat down to supper.’ And there follows without delay the conversation bringing in the young man and the old woman, the two principal protagonists.

  From first to last a tinge of fantasy pervades the story, looming over the whole plot like some mysterious and fatal curse. By contrast, the epigrams at the beginning of each chapter tend to restore the everyday world. Drawn for the most part from popular ballads, conversations between friends or personal correspondence – the only exception is the quotation from Swedenborg preceding Chapter 5 – they provide a foil to Pushkin’s consummate literary style (whereas the more usual function of the epigram is to point the text with brilliance). The epigram to the shortest chapter – ‘Homme sans maurs et sans religion’ – offers an ironic forecast of the reader’s verdict on Hermann. For Pushkin Hermann was not a hero but he recognized him as a man of the future – the theme of the poor young man resolved coûte que coûte to wrest for himself a place in the sun was already familiar in the works of artist and poet. Dostoyevsky called him a ‘colossal figure’ and went on to create Raskolnikov. (It was no accident that Pushkin invested Hermann with a physical likeness to Napoleon. The type of young man determined on success was bound up in contemporary understanding with the person of Napoleon. Pushkin makes Hermann resemble Napoleon and at the same time describes him as a mean character.)

  What is the primum mobile of The Queen of Spades?) The compelling power of chance events and circumstances? The idea of fatality? Is it a tragedy of destiny or a tragedy of personality? Or is Pushkin merely telling us a story having no special significance?… Tchaikovsky’s opera has given persuasive expression to one of these interpretations but, occupied as it is with only one of a whole series of motive forces, it doe
s not measure up adequately to Pushkin’s creation, which is both more and less than a tragedy of fatality. The Queen of Spades may be described as a psychological tale without psychology.

  Pushkin’s last prose narrative, The Captain’s Daughter, was born of his interest in the rebellion against Catherine II in 1773, under the leadership of the illiterate Cossack, Emelian Pugachev (who claimed to be Peter III, the husband Catherine had ‘liquidated’). In preparation for a history of Pugachev himself Pushkin had collected material from the State Archives, and journeyed to the Urals and the Lower Volga, the centres of the revolt; but Nicolas I objected to the project on the ground that a rebel like Pugachev ‘has no history’. The Captain’s Daughter combines historical accuracy with superb character drawing. As Gogol pointed out: ‘For the first time characters that are truly Russian come into being: the simple commander of a fortress, his wife, his young lieutenant, the fortress itself with its single cannon, the confusion of the period, and the modest greatness of ordinary people.’

  ‘The history of the people is the province of the Poet,’ wrote Pushkin in 1825. For him the poet’s imagination, his invention in general, did not entail an inevitable distortion of history. In his novels, as in Walter Scott’s, historical events are interwoven with personal memoirs or a family chronicle in which the imaginary heroes occupy the foreground. The historical figures appear only in the background but they are drawn into the circle of everyday human relationships and thus lose their traditional grandeur and remoteness. In Pushkin, to quote his own lines on Walter Scott, ‘we get to know past times not with the enflure of French tragedy, not with the primness of the sentimental novel, not with the dignité of history, but as though we were living a day-to-day life in them ourselves.’ In thus widening the social basis of literature itself by introducing into it a great variety of characters from Peter the Great and Catherine II to the unassuming Captain Mironov Pushkin proves himself to be the cultural complement of Peter who, just over a century previously, had opened his ‘window on to Europe’. Pushkin filled the gap between the literature of his country and that of the world.