Novels, Tales, Journeys

On the surface The Queen of Spades is an elaborate anecdote about the passion for gambling, of which Pushkin had great personal experience. But it goes far beyond mere gambling in its brush with the supernatural, or madness, in the fate of its protagonist, the rootless, ambitious army engineer Hermann. The essential ambiguity of the tale is prefigured in the person of the Comte de Saint-Germain, who appears in a flashback early on. Both a typical eighteenth-century aristocrat and the subject of strange legends and mysterious rumors, he is portrayed with considerable sympathy and humor. The same is true of the three main characters—Hermann, the old countess, and her young ward Lizaveta—whose vulnerable humanity tempers the melodrama of the events they are caught up in. Pushkin wisely leaves the central mystery of the tale unresolved, and it lingers darkly in the reader’s mind after the summary conclusion.

“The thought of abandoning trivial and dubious anecdotes for the recounting of true and great events had long stirred my imagination.” So wrote Ivan Petrovich Belkin in his preface to The History of the Village of Goryukhino, anticipating what would be the final stage in Pushkin’s own development as a prose writer. One of the few real benefits Pushkin derived from being under the emperor’s personal supervision was permission to work in the state archives, granted him in 1832. He made good use of it. His first impulse was to write a history of Peter the Great, which he began that same year but laid aside almost at once. Instead he took up the more recent events of the Cossack rebellion of 1773–1774, the largest peasant revolt of the eighteenth century, led by Emelyan Pugachev, who claimed to be the emperor Peter III. The result was the masterful two-volume History of the Pugachev Rebellion, based on over a thousand pages of notes and transcriptions he took from the archives. In the late summer of 1833, during his work on the History, he also traveled to the Orenburg region, where the rebellion broke out, and visited the various towns and fortresses connected with it. All of this research nourished his last and longest work of fiction, The Captain’s Daughter.

In the novel Pushkin deals with the same historical events as in the history, but in an indirect, incidental, almost happenstance way, as the personal experiences of the young officer Pyotr Andreevich Grinyov. What concerns Pushkin is not historical forces, causes and effects, but the working out of destiny through a series of apparent coincidences. Destiny seems like mere chance, but here, as Sinyavsky writes, chance has a formative function. It reveals “the wittiness of life…the good sense behind its riddles and mishaps.” It depends, as in Shakespeare, not on ineluctable fate, but on the response of the characters to what befalls them.

Pushkin has space in the novel to develop his characters more fully than in his earlier fiction. They are unusual because they are quite ordinary. Grinyov himself is a naïve, impressionable young man. Grinyov’s superior at the fortress, Captain Mironov, his wife, and his daughter Masha are simple and good people, portrayed with fine humor, as is Grinyov’s tutor, Savelyich. They show a modest but genuine heroism in the face of catastrophe. Grinyov, too, for all his youthful naïveté and impulsiveness, is both steadfast and intelligent. There is no romantic glamour about any of them. They are masterfully drawn, but with such understatement that we hardly notice how it is done. In Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil wrote:

Imaginary evil is romantic, varied; real evil is dreary, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating. Hence the “literature of imagination” is either boring or immoral (or a mixture of the two). It can only escape this alternative by passing over somehow, by dint of art, to the side of reality—which genius alone can do.

The characters in The Captain’s Daughter are on the side of reality. The only exception is Shvabrin, the melodramatic villain of the piece, whose villainy, like Iago’s in Othello, is never explained.