Week 06. 3/02. Wed. Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin. "The Queen of Spades" (Vol. E, 863-83).
European Romanticism and Pushkin
Pushkin is in a sense a kindred spirit to Goethe; I mean that while both are associated with European romanticism, neither is easily confined to that category. Goethe's work shows him to be something like an historian of romanticism as an international movement and a concept or set of attitudes and beliefs about art and society. Pushkin keeps his distance from romanticism's intuitionism and emphasis on passion as salvational. He befriended Nikolai Gogol', another of Russia's finest writers. All in all, it's difficult to fit Russia's literary productions neatly within pan-European categories except for realism during the mid-to-late nineteenth century with Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Turgenev, Chekhov and Maxim Gorky. On the whole, however you classify the authors, what they produced during the C19 is among the world's greatest literary flowerings, rivalling that of the Elizabethan period's drama and poetry or the British Romantic movement led by Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, and Shelley, with Jane Austen beside them for Regency (1811-20) emphasis.
Пиковая дама, Queen of Spades
The story "Queen of Spades" certainly casts its characters as driven by various passions, but there's nothing particularly salvational about such deep feelings and obsessions. Instead, a character like Hermann is driven by money; his need to come by a fortune overwhelms any sense of decency or chivalry he might have had, and his relationship to Lisaveta Ivanovna is purely an object-relation. His imagination becomes fixated on those cards.
Genuine religious feeling is replaced by superstition, and love is a construct of social codes, for the most part. The Countess keeps Elizaveta in thrall to her needs.
The old Countess, as the Norton editors point out, is at the center of this kind of society; she is essentially a worn-out, corrupt old woman who followed her own passions and whims in her day, and the truth is that she hasn't changed in that regard. Her prototype seems to have been rather badly dealt with since she was a famous and accomplished woman: Princess Natalya Petrovna Galitzine, née Chernysheva or Chernyshyova (17 January 1741, St. Petersburg, Russia – 20 December 1837).
The fancy card games they play – faro and such – here seem like a metaphor for the vapidity of the characters' lives. They don't do much honest work, but rather spend their time gambling, trading on their established positions to get still more reputation and wealth. Pushkin's view of this world is scathing, which makes sense because he was a reformist and had friends who participated in the so-called Decembrist Uprising against the new Tsar Nicholas I in 1825, who succeeded Alexander I of the Napoleonic Era (1799-1815; Napoleon became First Consul by a coup in 1799, Consul for Life in 1802, and Emperor in 1804; at war with Brits from 1793 onwards, but 1803-15 most intensively).
In a French deck, the Queen of Spades is pictured as the Greek goddess Athena. I suppose Russian aristocrats would have been using a French deck, so the association may be pertinent. The Countess is an impressive figure, an imposing woman who showed genuine independence of spirit in the fashion of the European Enlightenment, during the 1770's, which is the period Pushkin allies her with by her insistence on keeping up that time's fashions.
