The Queen of Spades and Other Stories [antikvár]

Note Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799-1837) could without exaggeration be called the founding father of modern Russian literature. He was the nation's first poet to achieve international fame writing in his mother tongue (educated Russians then used mainly French and German); his play Boris Godunov was transformed by the composer Modest Mussorgsky (1835-1881) into Russia's most admired opera; and he created a role that itself became a Russian national treasure, that of the subversive writer. Pushkin was more than once jailed for his poetry, its content judged by Imperial censors to be either treasonous ("The Upas Tree," a searing indictment of the Tsarist regime) or morally corrupt ("The Gavriliad," a raffish burlesque of the Annunciation). Finally, Tsar Nicholas I, while encouraging the poet to write, burdened him with his own Imperial censor, a Count BenckendorfF, whom Pushkin openly insulted and often hoodwinked by inscribing "Translated from the Latin" at the head of certain manuscripts. While Pushkin's greatest contributions may be in the medium of verse, his small body of prose fiction, which includes novels, short stories and folktales, rewards investigation. The stories included here represent two distinct aspects of Pushkin's fiction writing. "The Queen of Spades" (1833-1834) reflects, in style as well as in substance, the cosmopolitan Russia of the nineteenth century: urbane, eard-playing officers, fancy dress balls and countesses. The other stories included here, written a short time earlier, are known collectively as The Tales of the Late P. Belkin after the fictional author under whose name Pushkin published them (his first printed stories). Set for the most part far from Moscow and St. Petersburg, these portray the character of rural Russia: provincial government functionaries, poor soldiers and artisans, plump land-owners and their beguiling young daughters.