reshuffling the fairy tale

In America perhaps the greatest debt we owe to Alexander Pushkin is the Rocky and Bullwinkle character Boris Badanov (a take-off on Pushkin's Boris Gudanov), but undoubtedly his best-known story in the wider world is "The Queen of Spades." The ability to blend elements of Romanticism and folk literature ironically is best exemplified in the often-overlooked works of Nikolai Gogol (overlooked by the editors of our text, in any case); still, Pushkin, the more famous author, very successfully takes several literary conventions and knocks them on their respective ears.

As do other authors of the Romantic era, Pushkin has his own vision; he presents material that feels conventional, then he shakes the plot with several unexpected twists to consistently frustrate our expectations. In the end we are invited to wonder why we had any expectations to begin with; this is, after all, a work of fiction, of fancy.

Pushkin suggests that even fiction is traditionally bound by established patterns; readers may think they are visiting new worlds with each turn of the page, but really the same story is retold with different names, settings, costumes over and over. The formulae are comfortable and comforting; they're easy.

Pushkin doesn't want us to settle into the lazy, easy patterns; he throws us off from the very beginning. Everything we've seen or read for escape tells us that we can locate the central character based on who receives the most attention in the opening. In "Queen of Spades" this would be Tomsky; by the middle of the story we are fairly certain the main character is Lisaveta or perhaps the Countess; in the end, of course, we realize this is Hermann's story.

Within the various sub-plots (each chapter presents a different turn in the story), we are thrown curves again and again. The Lisaveta story, for example, appears to be an updated version of "Cinderella." Taken in by a rich and demanding aristocrat, Lisaveta is forced to fetch and clean. She lives in a small apartment high above the main house. She follows along as a servant but is never invited to actively participate in the parties. When the scoundrel Hermann sees her fresh, pretty face, we sense that he will play the Prince who will whisk her away from the cinders. Unlike the good and patient "Cinderella" of Charles Perrault's fairy tale, however, Lisaveta is not particularly virtuous, and Pushkin's treatment of the material is neither so chaste nor simple.

Pushkin's technique is clearly described in the headnotes in our text:

The treatment of love and sexuality in "The Queen of Spades" exemplifies the complexity of Pushkin's approach. First of all we hear the story of the "Muscovite Venus," the beautiful young gambler who pays her debts by learning the secret of three infallible cards. Then we encounter a lovely girl suffering in her dependent position and longing for a "deliverer." Hermann, the immediate object of Lisaveta's dreams, has his own sexual fantasies: a young man himself, he imagines becoming the lover of the eighty-seven-year-old Countess. At this point, if not before, the reader begins to realize that something's wrong here: this is not the kind of romantic tale we're used to. Describing Hermann's first glimpse of Lisaveta, Pushkin writes, "Hermann saw a small, fresh face and a pair of dark eyes. That moment decided his fate." A romantic cliche--except that the young man sees Lisaveta not as an object of devotion but as a means to an end. He sends her a love letter; it's copied word for word from a German novel. His rapidly developing passion focuses on financial, not erotic, gain.

Lisaveta's character remains somewhat more ambiguous. The narrator invokes sympathy for her plight, at the mercy of a tyrannical employer who makes endless irrational demands and who never pays her. Her situation prohibits her from enjoying the kinds of amorous gratifications other young women can expect. We can understand, therefore, why her dreams should concentrate specifically on a deliverer. Like Hermann, although far less unscrupulous, she may indulge in intrigues as a means to an end: in her case, not money but liberty. (1773-4)

In the end, however, I'm not so sure that we are meant to be all that sympathetic towards Lisaveta. Unlike the charitable Cinderella, who, in Perrault's version at least, secures good husbands for her now-reformed step-sisters, Lisaveta is, ominously, noted as "bringing up a poor relative" (1797) in the end of the story. There is ambiguity in that simple statement: is she doing a kindness for someone in need, or is she finally getting some satisfaction having her own cinder-wench?

Pushkin makes us think!