THE QUEEN OF SPADES AND OTHER SHORT-STORIES

Author: Alexander Pushkin
Year: 1954 (1831, 1834)
Publisher: Tidens Förlag
Language: Swedish (translators Manja Benkow, E von Sabsay, C Sterzel)

Many nations have their own literary deity; a towering figure who stands as a standard-bearer for the collected belle-lettre, poetry, and drama of a group of people which communally subscribe to the national identity with which the apotheosised wordsmith is associated. I imagine such personas to be Homer for Greece, William Shakespeare for England, Adam Mickiewicz for Poland, Johann Wolfgang Goethe for Germany, and perhaps Molière for France.

Yet none of these giants, revered as they are both nationally and internationally, enjoy a stature in their respective country similar to Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin’s in Russia. Every generation of Russians in the last 150 years have learned, and continue to learn, his poems by heart; all his dramas and novels are analysed in primary school; quotes from his works have entered daily Russian language; one would be hard-pressed to find a city, town, or hamlet in Russia without a Pushkin Street; and “Пушкин: наше всё” (“Pushkin: our everything”) is a slogan known to every Russian.

Having read some of his short stories, more specifically “Spader Dam” (“The Queen of Spades”) and “Bjelkins berättelser” (“The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin”) it is easy to understand why Pushkin was and still is an appreciated writer, but it is not immediately obvious why he has become such a monumental entity.

“Spader Dam” is a gothic tale of a young officer who hears a story about an old countess who is said to know the secret of how to always win at cards. In order to get to the old lady with the aim to obtain the auspicious formula, he decides to court her young but lethargic ward. Things do not exactly go according to plan.

“Bjelkins berättelser” is a collection of short stories which Pushkin pretends to have heard from a fictional acquaintance of his, Ivan Belkin. In the Russian original, there are five stories but for some reason, the editor of my Swedish translation, the legendary Nils-Åke Nilsson (see my post on Nicolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat” from March 2019) chose to omit one of them.

The first Belkin, “The Shot”, is the story about Silvio who is a civilian but hangs out with a group of young officers drinking, playing cards, and telling stories. He is widely considered to be the best marksman in the region. One day he shocks and confuses his friends when a newly arrived officer at the regiment insults him in his own house and yet Silvio refuses to challenge him to a duel, which would be the honourable thing to do. But as it will turn out; there is a reason.

The second Belkin, “The Snowstorm”, tells the tale of two lovers who decide to elope and get married against the will of the young woman’s parents. They decide to meet in the middle of the night in a small nearby village and perform the wedding ceremony in the local church. When the night arrives, a terrible blizzard hits the area and the groom-to-be loses his directions as he tries to sled to the meeting point and gets hopelessly lost. The hapless lovers never see each other again. Some years later, a young hussar wins the heart of the forsaken bride, but the snowstorm has one more surprise up its sleeve.

The third Belkin, “The Undertaker” is the one that Nilsson excluded from my copy. Hence, no comment.

The fourth then is “The Postmaster” wherein a traveller recounts his meeting with the fair Dunya, the daughter of a keeper of a rural post station. The postmaster is very proud of his daughter who is the epitome of beauty, wit, and charm. Three years after their first meeting, the traveller returns to the station on official business and encounters the postmaster in a state of deep depression. It appears that a wealthy nobleman has seduced Dunya and swept her away to St Petersburg without her father’s approval. The traveller agrees to seek her out and bring her back to her father’s home.

The fifth and final Belkin, “The Mistress as Farm Girl”, is yet another love story where two feuding landowners are unable to reconcile with the different lifestyle of the other. Incidentally, one of them has a son and the other a daughter of roughly the same age. The young woman grows curious about the allegedly handsome son of her father’s foe and disguises as a farm girl to have an excuse to ostensibly accidentally run into him without revealing her true identity. Sure enough, they fall in love. Things get complicated when their respective parents mend fences and decide to introduce their children to one another.

All of these short stories are an absolute delight to read. There is not a boring moment, not a cumbersome passage or redundant word in the whole book. Pushkin was quite simply a superb writer. Still, the leap from superb to divine is not immediately clear. In fact, internationally Pushkin is not even the best-known Russian writer, overshadowed outside of Russia by Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, and probably even Bulgakov given the global cult status of “The Master and Margarita” (see my review from May 2021). And yet to Russians, he remains without equal.

I can identify two possible explanations for this. The first is that Alexander Pushkin was first and foremost a poet. His preeminent works “Ruslan and Ludmila” and “Eugene Onegin” are written in poetic form and he is the author of several large and small format poems. Poetry is notoriously difficult to translate, linguistically as well as culturally, which may have impeded the penetration power of his works in other languages. The second is that in Russia, Pushkin’s importance is measured against the backdrop of the evolution of Russian literature and his role in modernising the art of poetry and fiction in Russia. All great Russian writers who came after him are in a way his artistic heirs. On a global scale, however, his impact has been much less crucial which is likely to have prompted rather less admiration for his art in the rest of the world.

Reading “Spader dam” and “Belkins berättlser” hardly qualifies me to pass judgment on the totality of Pushkin’s legacy. All I can say is that I had a jolly good time reading them and I have no hesitations to recommend them to anyone who is looking for easily digestible stories with a twist conceived and penned by a true master.