“The Queen of Spades”: A Fairy-Tale of Disordered Loves

Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), the “Father of Russian Literature,” is most famous for his poetry, but later in his life he increasingly published prose. We are not to see Pushkin’s “turn to prose” as representing any loss of inspiration on the author’s part, for his skillful storytelling in prose continues to speak prophetically to our generation. In his 1833 story “The Queen of Spades,” Pushkin challenges our priorities, especially those related to control and material gain. Widely regarded as Pushkin’s prose masterpiece, “The Queen of Spades” influenced later Russian authors like Fyodor Dostoevsky, who called it “the height of artistic perfection” (as quoted by Paul Debreczeny in The Other Pushfkin).

“The Queen of Spades” depicts a military officer, Hermann, whose disordered desires lead to obsession, superstition, and ultimately insanity. In the story, we may discern a critique of an encroaching modern culture—embodied in allusions to Napoleon—that values materialism and control over love for God and neighbor. As Neil Cornwell notes in his study, Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades, the story takes the form of a fairy tale, complete with “a quest, secret knowledge, the prize of riches and/or a fair maiden, a donor, an assistant, fatal choices, mistakes, and so on.” The fairy-tale aspects of the story make Hermann’s evil choices especially clear.

Capturing the Imagination

Pushkin’s story opens with an all-night gambling party, at which Hermann hears an account of his friend Tomsky’s grandmother, the Countess. While living in Paris sixty years earlier, the Countess got out of gambling debt quickly when she learned a series of three winning cards to play in a game of faro. According to Tomsky, the Countess later passed her knowledge on to a young man named Chaplitsky, who used the sequence of three cards to get out of his debt—but the Countess did not tell anyone else her secret, not even her own children.

Hermann initially dismisses the story, calling it a “fairy-tale” (Ch. I; translated by Carl Proffer). The son of a German immigrant, Hermann is described as having a disciplined character who reasons himself out of temptation: “while he was a gambler in his soul, he never took cards in his hand, for he calculated that his financial position would not permit him (as he would say) ‘to sacrifice the essential in hope of acquiring the superfluous’—and nevertheless he sat whole nights through at the card tables and followed the various turns of play with feverish trembling” (Ch. II). Though Hermann does not participate in the game, he is thoroughly engaged with both mind and body.

Despite Hermann’s scoffing at the “fairy tale,” it takes hold of his imagination, as fairy tales do. We value the imagination, but some risks come with this uniquely human quality; this story illustrates how we may become fixated on the wrong things. The narrator follows Hermann’s growing obsession: “The anecdote about the three cards had a strong effect on his imagination and did not leave his mind all night” (Ch. II). Hermann begins to consider ways to get the Countess to reveal her secret to him; he even entertains the idea of becoming her lover, though she is almost sixty years older than he is! He decides not to, falling back on his commitment to methodical discipline, telling himself, “No! Calculation, moderation, and industriousness—they are my three sure cards, that’s what will increase my capital threefold, increase it sevenfold, and gain me peace and independence” (Ch. II).

However, as the story unfolds, Hermann’s self-discipline cannot stand up to his “strong passions” and “fiery imagination” (Ch. II). Hermann’s desire overrides his discipline, and he decides he must seize this opportunity. When Hermann realizes that the Countess has a young ward named Lizaveta Ivanovna, he writes her several letters of increasing intensity, pretending to show a romantic interest: “Inspired by passion, Hermann wrote them; and he spoke a language characteristic of him: they revealed both the inflexibility of his desires and the disorder of an unrestrained imagination” (Ch. III). He also stands outside the Countess’s home for hours on end, stalking the young woman. Despite her initial reservations about the propriety of Hermann’s advances, Lizaveta (who is desperately lonely and unhappy in her role as the Countess’s ward) is flattered by Hermann’s apparent interest in her. She eventually writes Hermann with instructions about how to gain entrance into the house while she and the Countess are at a ball. She expects that he will meet her in her bedroom after she arrives home in the early hours of the morning.

Fatal Choices: Following Napoleon and Faust

At the ball, Lizaveta learns more about Hermann’s character. Tomsky tells Lizaveta that Hermann has “the profile of Napoleon and the soul of Mephistopheles. I think that he has at least three malefactions on his conscience.” (Ch. IV). For Pushkin’s readers, Napoleon was not a distant historical allusion, as he is for us. Pushkin and many of his contemporaries were alive during Napoleon’s invasion of Moscow in 1812, which ended in defeat for Napoleon and a long wintertime retreat. As Caryl Emerson observes in The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature, Napoleon became a mythical figure in Russian literature. In his study, The Other Pushkin, Paul Debreczeny notes that Pushkin (in other writings) critiqued Napoleon for “regarding ‘millions of biped creatures’ as only a ‘means’ to an end.” Likewise, in his Napoleonic ambition, Hermann uses Lizaveta in an attempt to get access to riches. Later Russian authors would further develop the myth of Napoleon. For example, in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, one of Raskolnikov’s motives for murder was that he wanted to see if he could be a great man, like Napoleon.

After the party, when the Countess and Lizaveta return home, Hermann is hiding there. He had entered the house using Lizaveta’s instructions and had seen two doors, as she described—one leading upstairs to her room, and one to the Countess’s room. As Debreczeny points out, “the doors represent a choice for Hermann between love and greed, between beauty and ugliness, between Venus and Mammon—and also, as it turns out, a choice between sanity and madness.” Herman makes his choice: he does not go up to Lizaveta’s room, but lurks unseen in the Countess’s study, waiting until the Countess is alone and trying to fall asleep.

Herman accosts the Countess with a plea that she tell him the three winning cards he needed to bet on to win in the game of faro: “Reveal your secret to me! What is it to you? . . . Perhaps it is connected to a terrible sin, to a pact with the devil . . . Think: you are old, you do not have long to live—I am ready to take your sin on my soul” (Ch. III). Though Tomsky tells Lizaveta that Hermann has the “soul of Mephistopheles,” referring to the legend in which Faust sells his soul to the demon Mephistopheles to obtain knowledge, it seems that Hermann is more like Faust: he is willing to risk his eternal soul for material gain in his present life.

Failing to persuade the Countess with words, Hermann pulls out a pistol. He does not shoot her, yet she falls over and dies anyway. Hermann proceeds to Lizaveta’s room, not for love as she was expecting, but to tell her that the Countess is dead. As she looks over at him seated in the window, she perceives “he was amazingly like a portrait of Napoleon” (Ch. IV).

Hermann feels some remorse at the Countess’s death, and decides to attend the funeral to ease his conscience: “Having little true faith,” the narrator tells us, “he had a multitude of superstitions” (Ch. V). For example, Hermann hopes to ask the Countess for forgiveness at her funeral, but when he approaches the coffin, “it seemed to him that the dead woman glanced at him mockingly, winking one eye” (Ch. V). Later that evening, though he gets drunk in the hope of dampening his agitation, “the wine inflamed his imagination even more” (Ch. V). That night the Countess appears to Hermann and tells him the three cards he is to play in faro, one card a night for three nights: the three, the seven, and the ace. She gives Hermann this secret on the condition that he marries Lizaveta.

It so happens that a famous dealer named Chekalinsky comes to town, and Hermann can employ his knowledge of the three cards. On the first night, Hermann bets his entire savings on the three and wins, taking home double what he had bet. On the second night, Hermann bets on the seven and wins again, much to everyone’s astonishment, taking home four times his original savings. On the third night, everybody is waiting to see what will happen between Hermann and Chekalinsky. The narrator observes, “It looked like a duel” (Ch. VI). Hermann bets all his money, and when the winning card is revealed as the ace, just as the Countess told Hermann, he is jubilant.

But somehow Hermann has made a mistake: the dealer, Chekalinsky, points out that Hermann had placed his bet on the queen instead of the ace, even though Hermann knew the ace was the winning card; therefore, he loses all his savings. As Hermann looks in shock at the card, he mistakenly bet his fortune on, “the queen of spades winked and grinned. The extraordinary similarity struck him . . .” (Ch. VI). We are to infer that the Countess has the last laugh. In the epilogue, the narrator informs us that Hermann loses his mind and ends up institutionalized, constantly murmuring to himself, “Three, seven, ace! Three, seven, queen!”

Applying the Critique of Disordered Loves

While there is much for reflection in Pushkin’s rich tale, the identification of Hermann with Napoleon and with Mephistopheles leads us to see a key critique: Hermann represents a desire for control that overrides all other considerations, including human and divine love.

One way to see this critique is to consider Hermann’s approach to gambling. As suggested by the narrator’s observation that Hermann’s encounter with Chekalinsky was like a duel, Caryl Emerson observes that gambling and dueling have a common motive: “To duel and gamble meant to assert one’s individual initiative and thus to act, and feel, more free—even though, paradoxically, the outcome was utterly out of one’s control. Staking everything on a single bullet (or card) opened a person to arbitrariness and fate.” As Emerson points out, Pushkin’s critique of Hermann is not that he gambles—after all, in addition to participating in several duels, Pushkin was a frequent gambler himself—but Pushkin’s critique is of Hermann’s “refusal to gamble, that is, his trying to fix in advance the results of a game of chance. Such calculation always struck Pushkin as servile and dishonorable.” Hermann is not content to leave the outcome to chance, but he wants a guarantee. He wants control.

To add to his faults, Hermann pretends to have a romantic interest in Lizaveta just to gain access to the Countess, trading the possibility of human love for the love of money. As Neil Cornwell puts it, noting the overall fairy-tale-like character of Pushkin’s story, “Hermann’s overall mistake, in terms of the classic fairy tale, is that, instead of striving to win fortune and the bride, he misuses the latter in his single-minded attempt to gain the former.” Ultimately, Hermann’s problem is that he does not fear God. He does not seem to care about the consequences for his eternal soul if there is indeed a curse associated with obtaining the secret knowledge of the three cards.

When Hermann flubs the bet in the end, we readers are left to speculate: is this mistake caused by a distracted mental state? A Freudian slip? Was it, as one of my students suggested, Hermann’s inexperience with the hands-on aspect of placing a bet so that he mistakenly bet on the queen when he intended to bet on the ace? Are there supernatural forces getting back at Hermann? Neil Cornwell’s study details a number of plausible readings, but perhaps Fyodor Dostoevsky says it best when he points to the story’s ambiguity as an example of Pushkin’s genius:

You believe that Hermann really had a vision, exactly in accordance with his view of the world, and yet, at the end of the tale, that is when you have read it through, you cannot make up your mind: did this vision emanate from Hermann’s nature or was he really one of those who are in contact with another world, one of evil spirits hostile to man . . . That’s art for you! (as quoted by Cornwell in Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades).

Whatever the case, it seems that while Hermann had the knowledge that could have won him a fortune, his misplaced loves led him, in the end, to insanity. Knowledge alone cannot save us.

“The Queen of Spades” shows the fruit of disordered desires for control and money, which remain as snares for us today. The story prompts us to question the trajectory of our own lives and culture: How do we respond when our desires are exposed as evil? Can we repent of our misplaced love of material things, and redirect that love to God and others?

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