Credit for the origins of the Russian short story is
split between Alexander Pushkin's Tales of Belkin (1831) and Gogol's
"The Overcoat" (1842).
Although Victor Terras suggests that Pushkin initiated a general shift
toward prose in Russia in the 1830s, and Charles Moser says Tales of Belkin
is the most important collection of stories in Russian Literature. Pushkin's
claim for being the Russian progenitor of the short story has been limited by
the common charge that his stories were so much a part of a common tradition of
the time that had they not been written by Pushkin they would not have received
the attention they did. However, as is
typical for the development of the short story in the early 19th century,
Pushkin combined previous generic conventions with his own self-conscious
experimentation with prose. Moser says
that Pushkin's stories recapitulate literary tradition proceeding him, that
they constitute a "parodic anthology of early 19th-century prose fiction."
The two Pushkin stories that have generated the most
critical commentary, particularly concerning their generic tradition and
innovation, are "The Shot" and "The Queen of Spades." As Caryl Emerson points out, of all the
controversies generated over "The Queen of Spades," the most extensive
has been the generic issue of its "almost seamless fusion of the fantastic
with the realistic." Like many other early 19th-century stories by
Hawthorne, Poe, Hoffmann, and Gogol, all of whom have been given credit for
originating the short story genre, the problem with Pushkin's most famous
story, "The Queen of Spades" is that Pushkin combined so many different
existing fictional conventions within it that readers have always been somewhat
puzzled about how to read it.
Comparing its uncanny effect (in the basic Freudian
sense of blurring the lines between imagination and reality or between map and
territory) with that of stories by Poe and Hoffman, academic critics have asked
the same question that all serious readers have asked of the story: "What is to be done with this mystery,
this tale of illusion?" After
summarizing the socioliterary, psychoanalytical, linguistic, and numerological
studies of "Queen of Spades," Caryl Emerson concludes that the story
so thoroughly and self-consciously combines inexplicable coincidence and
supernatural events with a precise and reportorial mode that what Pushkin
ultimately parodies in the story is the reader's search for a system or key, a
figure in the carpet, that would explain it.
Basically, the plot of the story is motivated by a
secret; the attempt to discover the secret generates the plot; the story ends when
the secret is discovered. The secret, of course, must be a primal secret, the
origins of which are in the most primitive and basic desire of the human
psyche. In this case, the secret
revolves around a game of cards, possessing which would eliminate chance. Indeed, when the countess's grandson tells of
her getting a secret from the old Count, who represents himself as the
Wandering Jew, and winning all three cards chosen, the listeners respond in the
three basic ways that the event could be explained: chance, fairy tale, marked
cards. However, it is the fourth
listener, the engineer Hermann, a man of "ardent imagination" and a
gambler at heart who had never touched a card, who is most affected by the
story of the secret. "The story of
the three cards produced a powerful impression upon his imagination, and all
night long he could think of nothing else."
Hermann's fascination with the secret of the three
cards introduces another typical romantic short story element later explored so
thoroughly by Poe--a character's powerful obsession that makes all reality
contract around the object of the obsession itself. Establishing himself as a romantic and
mysterious figure standing outside the window of Lizaveta Ivanovna, the Countess's
ward, much as Michael Furey does outside Gretta's window in Joyce's "The
Dead," Hermann, like a character in a romance, sends the ward declarations
of love, "copied word for word from a German novel." Hermann's copied romanticism in turn infects
Lizaveta, who, horrified by Hermann's boldness, enters into "secret and
intimate relations" with a young man for the first time in her life. As Hermann's letters become more impassioned,
bearing "full testimony to the inflexibility of his desire and the disordered
condition of his uncontrollable imagination," Lizaveta in turn becomes
intoxicated and arranges, in romantic fashion, a rendezvous whereby Hermann may
journey through the Countess's bedroom up a narrow winding staircase to her
room.
The fact that the journey to the maid must pass
through the Countess's bedroom is, of course, not accidental, but thematically
purposeful, for instead of wishing to reach the maid by means of the Countess,
Hermann wishes to reach the Countess by means of the maid. This reversal activates a grotesque mirror
image in which the young lover, in Keatsean romantic fashion, is witness not to
the undressing of the young girl, but rather the "repulsive
mysteries" of the Countess's toilette.
Just as Silvio dismisses the occasion of the final shot as a comic
illusion, the Countess tells Hermann it was all a joke. Hermann's retort that it is not a joking
matter is inevitably followed by his murder of the Countess with an empty gun
All of this mock behavior is further emphasized by
Tomsky, the Countess's grandson, who describes Hermann as a "truly
romantic character" a portrait that agrees with Lazaveta's own mental
picture, an image that, "rendered commonplace by current novels, terrified
and fascinated her imagination."
The mockery motif is continued when Hermann goes to the funeral and
thinks the old Countess darts a "mocking look at him and winked with one
eye," a comic image that undermines the horror of the late night visit of
the Countess to give Hermann the secret which prepares the reader for a
continuation of the joke gesture. As in
fairy-tale conventions, whereas possession of the secret may be harmless,
actual use of it is not. When Hermann does
use the secret, he thinks he now has the ultimate power to eliminate chance and
uncertainty from life; however, on the third card, expecting the ace, he draws
the Queen of Spades, coming face to face with the old woman, the embodiment of
the inevitability of age and death.
Self-consciously aware that he was experimenting
with the conventions of narrative fiction, Pushkin has, in "The Queen of
Spades" written a story, that in parodying narrative conventions, is about
the basic desire that underlies all fiction--that life is not contingency and
mere chance, but rather teleologically purposeful--that one can escape
contingency into the realm that governs the art work, the realm of relevance,
unity, meaning, and purpose. Pushkin's
theme in "The Shot" and "The Queen of Spades"--the romantic
desire to impose one's own will on the world of fact, contingency, and
chance--is the same theme that always pushes the stories of Poe, Hawthorne,
Hoffmann, and Gogol away from ordinary reality into the realm of art; and it is
this theme that compels these short-story writers to create a purely fictional
or aesthetic order--not as a reflection of the real world, but as a reflection
of the most basic human wish.
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