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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012
The Queen of Spades and Selected Works is a brand new English translation of two of Alexander Pushkin's greatest short stories, 'The Queen of Spades' and 'The Stationmaster', together with the poem 'The Bronze Horseman', extracts from Yevgeny Onegin and Boris Godunov, and a selection of his poetic work. 'The Queen of Spades' ('Pikovaya dama'), originally published in Russian in 1834, is one of the most famous tales in Russian literature, and inspired the eponymous opera by Tchaikovsky; in 'The Stationmaster' ('Stantsionnyy smotritel'), originally published in Russian in The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin (Povesti pokoynogo Ivana Petrovicha Belkina) in 1830, he reworks the parable of the Prodigal Son; the hugely entertaining 'Tsar Nikita and his Forty Daughters' is a bawdier early poem; and the deeply moving narrative poem 'The Bronze Horseman', inspired by a St Petersburg statue of Peter the Great, is one of his most influential works. The volume also includes a selection of his best lyric poetry. Translated by Anthony Briggs, The Queen of Spades and Selected Works is the perfect introduction to Alexander Pushkin's finest work. Pushkin ranks as one of Russia's greatest writers. Born in 1799, he published his first poem when he was a teenager, and attained fame in 1820 with his first long poem, Ruslan and Lyudmila. In the late 1820s he found himself the target of government censors, unable to travel or publish at will; during this time, he wrote his most famous play, Boris Godunov, and Yevgeny Onegin (published 1825-1832). 'The Queen of Spades', his most famous prose work, was published in 1834; his best-known poem, 'The Bronze Horseman', appeared after his death (from a wound sustained in a duel) in 1837. Anthony Briggs is one of the world's leading authorities on the work of Pushkin, author of Alexander Pushkin: A Critical Study and editor of Alexander Pushkin: A Celebration of Russia's Best-Loved Writer. He is also an acclaimed translator from the Russian, whose translations include War and Peace, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy.
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‘An unusual selection of a surprisingly modern master’s work… worth turning to again and again’
GUARDIAN
‘Exceptionally original, elegant and often subversively critical in his writings, Pushkin touched depths of feeling while cultivating an insouciant lightness’
IAIN BAMFORTH
‘Charming… an ideal introduction to the man widely regarded as the greatest Russian writer’
RUSSIA NOW
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THE QUEEN OF SPADES
AND SELECTED WORKS
ALEXANDER PUSHKIN
TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN BY ANTHONY BRIGGS
PUSHKIN PRESS CLASSICS
CONTENTS
THE QUEEN OF SPADESAND SELECTED WORKS
INTRODUCTION
Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837)
Pushkin—the most subcutaneous of Russian presences.
Alexander Zholkovsky
Alexander Pushkin is one of those rare writers—like Shakespeare and Dante—whose name embodies an entire national culture. He was the creator of the modern Russian language, and the founder of his country’s great literary tradition.
Born of ancient lineage on both sides of the family, and especially proud of the Abyssinian blood inherited from his great-grandfather, Pushkin received an excellent education but then went on to lead a restless and largely unhappy life. He was exiled for long periods, beset with money problems and, although famous for a time as the country’s first poet, worried about his declining popularity when the vogue for poetry began to wane. Marriage, at the age of thirty-one, brought him little contentment, exacerbating 10many of his problems, and it was in a duel over his wife’s honour that he died at the age of thirty-seven.
He was a prolific writer, the author of eight hundred lyric and a dozen narrative poems (culminating in The Bronze Horseman), a novel in verse (Yevgeny Onegin), several dramatic works (including Boris Godunov), a number of prose stories (including The Queen of Spades), and a large body of critical articles, historical studies and letters.
Pushkin did for the Russian language what Chaucer did for English—but with a big difference. Pushkin’s Russian is totally of today. He created a vibrant, modern language out of several different strands that needed to be woven together, predominantly vernacular Russian, French and Old Church Slavonic. This new form of Russian he used with a sensitivity that has never been surpassed. The acoustical skill of his verse is matched with an elegant literary manner, great powers of originality and imagination, and a sophisticated style. Melodious, agreeable and playful, yet also at times disturbingly profound and serious-minded, his works are often compared to those of Mozart.
Shakespeare aside, it is doubtful whether any writer has inspired more music than Pushkin. Well over a thousand composers have set his writing to music, using hundreds of his works; songs on Pushkin’s texts run into the thousands, and among our most famous operas are Tchaikovsky’s Yevgeny Onegin and The Queen of Spades, and Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov.
11Pushkin was an instinctive assimilator of the world’s greatest writing. Widely read from childhood in classical and European literature, he developed the most discriminating taste and knew how to absorb and imitate without sacrificing originality. He came to match Byron for light-hearted fluency, but wrote with greater discipline and elegance. From Scott he borrowed the broad sweep of characterization which blended real historical figures with fictional men and women. Most of all, he admired Shakespeare as a master of psychological insight and consistency.
Conversely, Pushkin has had a profound effect on all subsequent Russian writers, including the greatest—Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy—and it continues to this day. These artists often expressed their gratitude for the gift of a great literary language, and for innumerable models to be followed, explored and developed in new works that have themselves become world-famous.
Today in Russia Pushkin remains a household name, the best-loved of all her writers. Almost all Russians know bits of Pushkin by heart, and many people have committed hundreds of his lines to memory. He provides a quotation for every family occasion and for moments of national triumph and disaster.
This man’s statue, unveiled in 1880, stands proudly in what is today Moscow’s Pushkin Square. In 1990, only a few hundred yards away, the first Russian fast-food outlet was opened: the Moscow McDonald’s. Thus, old Russia, with its great achievements in high culture, has been set 12against the materialist modern world, with her own future still uncertain. So far, the coalition of old and new has worked with no small degree of success. But whatever happens to that country, when the Russians need a symbolic figure to rally round they will turn not to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky or Chekhov, but to Alexander Pushkin.
Although Pushkin is remembered at home mainly for his poetry, the easiest approach for foreigners may be through his prose works. Of these, The Queen of Spades stands out as a masterpiece. In a story of mental collapse, the hero, Hermann, begins as a prudent onlooker at the gambling table, fascinated by the twists and turns of the cards, but ends up in an asylum. The story of how he got there is told succinctly and with forensic clarity. What could have been a tale of Gothic melodrama becomes a fascinating study in psychology, the supernatural details appearing as emanations from a sick mind.
The Stationmaster is set mainly in a remote postal station. The beautiful young daughter of the master, having charmed every visitor, including the narrator and us, suddenly disappears. Has she run away, been abducted, or worse? As the tale unfolds, in a narrative overflowing with sympathy, it builds up unforgettable portraits of the master, the girl and one traveller, on whom the outcome depends.
Pushkin’s tribute to his beloved Shakespeare, Boris Godunov, a historical drama in blank verse, contains 13memorable individual scenes; we have included one famous passage, a dignified monologue, slowly declaimed by an old monk completing his record of Russian history.
Of Pushkin’s four Little Tragedies—character-studies in blank verse—the most famous is Mozart and Salieri, in which Pushkin gives dramatic form to a rumour that the latter composer had poisoned the former out of jealousy. This myth has now become entrenched because of Peter Shaffer’s English play Amadeus, which drew extensively on Pushkin, and the deserved success of the film adaptation of the same name.
There are twelve completed narrative poems, the best of which is The Bronze Horseman, one of the brightest gems in all Russian literature, resplendent with incident, character and ideas. It describes the building of St Petersburg in 1703, and then the sad fate of one of its poorer citizens, Yevgeny, whose dreams of domestic happiness are shattered by the real-life floods of 1824. Yevgeny’s tragedy is set in a broad context, conveying the political need for a ruler to build such a city, and the indomitable power of nature. Woe betide any individual who stands in the path of historical necessity or thinks he has been spared by the surrounding elements.
The poem that follows is Pushkin’s naughtiest work. Cast in the form of a folk narrative in verse, Tsar Nikita and His Forty Daughters tells of a sad situation. All the daughters of the Tsar (born of several wives) suffer from the same embarrassing condition; the narrator blushes to inform 14us that they lack the one physical feature that, er, defines their femininity. Somehow a supply of these objects must be found to put things right. The story of how this is achieved, and what happens in the process, takes us to the outer regions of the Tsar’s kingdom and the inner reaches of his daughters’ bodily identity. A tricky subject is treated with the lightest touch and a steady flow of humour.
Pushkin’s novel in verse, Yevgeny Onegin, cannot be adequately treated here; it is too long and expansive, too stylish and too dependent on its special form—366 stanzas in a specially designed version of the sonnet—to survive encapsulation. Since this is his finest single work, however, we have included a few sample stanzas from the middle of the novel to give a general idea of how the form works.
Fifteen lyric poems stand for the eight hundred plus that Pushkin has left behind. They cover a number of his commonest preoccupations, including poetry itself and the impact of inspiration; love and sex, which played a large part in Pushkin’s life; short tales of folk interest; and the natural scene, which is widely described in many of Pushkin’s works. The last poem is a Russian version of Exegi Monumentum, in which the Roman poet Horace states his confidence that he will be remembered by posterity. Pushkin has nothing to fear from this warning found in a reference book: “Only the likes of a Horace should apply this sentence to their own works.”
ANTHONY BRIGGS
THE QUEEN OF SPADES
The Queen of Spades has a hidden meaning—bad blood.
Fortune-Telling Companion, Latest Edition
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I
In all kinds of weather
They sat down together
When able,
And soon—for God’s sake!—
They were doubling the stake
At the table.
They marked cards with crosses,
And wrote down their losses
In chalk.
Yes, in all kinds of weather
They got down together
To work.
There was once a card game at the residence of Horse Guardsman Narumov. A long winter night had slipped by unnoticed, and it was past four o’clock when they sat down to dine. The winners thoroughly enjoyed their dinner; the others sat there at empty places, unable to concentrate on anything. But champagne was served, the conversation struck up again, and everybody was involved.
“How’d you get on, Surin?” asked the host.
“Lost. I always do. To be honest, I’m just not lucky. I don’t take any risks, I never raise the stakes, I don’t let anything put me off, and I still end up losing!”
18“And you’ve never been tempted? Never done any doubling up?… Your willpower amazes me.”
“Well, what about Hermann?” said one of the guests, gesturing towards a young Engineers officer. “Never picked up a card since the day he was born, never doubled a stake, and he sits here till five in the morning just watching us gamble.”
“I’m very interested in gambling,” said Hermann, “but I’m in no situation to sacrifice what is essential in the hope of winning something superfluous.”
“Hermann’s from Germany. He calculates the odds. Nothing more to it than that,” put in Tomsky. “If there’s one person I don’t understand, it’s my grandmother, Countess Anna Fedotovna.”
“Why? What d’you mean?” cried the company.
“What I can’t work out,” Tomsky went on, “is why my grandmother never has a bet.”
“What’s so funny about that?” said Narumov. “An old woman of eighty who doesn’t gamble?”
“So, you’ve never heard anything about her?”
“No! Honestly, I haven’t. Nothing at all!”
“Oh, well, listen to this. You ought to know that, fifty-odd years ago, my grandmother used to go to Paris, where she was considered the latest thing. People flocked after her to get a glimpse of the ‘Venus from Moscow’. Richelieu pursued her, and Grandmother swears he nearly shot himself because of her hard heart. At that time the ladies liked to play faro. One day at court she lost to the Duke 19of Orléans on credit—it was a large sum of money. Back home, as she peeled off her beauty spots and unfastened her crinoline, Grandmother declared her loss to my grandfather and ordered him to pay it off. My late grandfather, I seem to recall, was like a butler to my grandmother. He dreaded her like fire, but when he heard about this terrible loss of hers he lost his temper, brought out the accounts, pointing out that they had spent half a million in half a year, that living near Paris wasn’t the same as living on their own estates near Moscow or Saratov, and refused point-blank to pay. Grandmother slapped his face and went off to bed alone as a sign of her displeasure. The next morning she sent for her husband, hoping that marital punishment would have had its effect on him, but she found him intransigent. For the first time in her life she was reduced to persuasion and argument with him; her idea was to bring him to heel by deigning to point out that there are different kinds of debt, and that there is a difference between a prince and a coach-builder. No use! Grandfather was in revolt. Nothing more to be said. Grandmother had no idea what to do.
“She numbered among her acquaintances one quite remarkable man. You will have heard the name of Count Saint-Germain, about whom such wonderful stories are told. You will know that he had claimed to be the Wandering Jew, the discoverer of the elixir of life, and the philosopher’s stone, and so on. He was ridiculed as a charlatan, but Casanova in his memoirs refers to him 20as a spy. Putting that aside, Saint-Germain, for all his air of mystery, had a handsome look about him and a charismatic personality. To this day Grandmother loves him to distraction, and she gets angry when disrespectful things are said about him. Grandmother knew that he had access to big money. Deciding to throw herself on his mercy, she wrote him a note asking him to come round and see her without delay. The old eccentric lost no time in getting there, and found her prostrate with grief. She described her husband’s barbarity in the darkest terms, and ended by placing all her hopes on his friendship and generosity.
“Saint-Germain gave it some thought. ‘I can oblige you with that sum of money,’ he said, ‘but I know you will never rest until you have been able to pay me back, and I wouldn’t wish to cause you any more trouble. There is another solution: you can win it all back.’
“‘But, my dear Count,’ Grandmother replied, ‘I’m telling you—we have no money at all.’
“‘Money is not required,’ replied Saint-Germain. ‘Please let me finish.’
“At this point he told her a secret that any of us would pay a good deal to learn…”
The young gamblers redoubled their interest. Tomsky lit his pipe, pulled on it, and spoke further.
“That same evening Grandmother turned up at the Jeu de la Reine in Versailles. The Duke of Orléans was dealing. Grandmother muttered a word of apology for not bringing 21the money to pay off her debt, concocting a little story by way of excuse, and she began to bet against him. She chose three cards, and played them one after the other; all three won at the first turn of the cards, doubling up in series, and Grandmother had recouped her entire debt.”
“Fluke!” said one of the guests.
“Fairy tale!” cried Hermann.
“Could have been marked cards,” was the response from a third guest, eager to join in.
“I think not,” observed Tomsky with some gravity.
“What?” said Narumov. “You have a grandmother who can play three winning cards in a row, and in all this time you haven’t got hold of her magic formula?”
“Not much chance of that!” replied Tomsky. “She had four sons, one of them being my father. They were all desperate gamblers, and she never told her secret to any one of them, even though it could have done them a lot of good, and me, too, for that matter. But my uncle, Count Ivan Ilyich, told me something which he swore was true. That man Chaplitsky—he’s dead now, squandered millions and died in poverty—in his youth once lost about three hundred thousand—to Zorich, if memory serves. He was in despair. Grandmother always came down hard on young people’s stupid indiscretions, but for some reason she took pity on Chaplitsky. She told him the three cards, provided that he played them in the right sequence and gave his word never to gamble again. Chaplitsky turned up to face his victorious opponent; 22
