Pushkin's The Queen of Spades

Pushkin's The Queen of Spades

French connoisseurs already know Pushkin's The Queen of Spades in

Mérimée's translation. It might appear impertinent to offer now a new

version, and I do not doubt that the earlier one will appear more elegant

than this one, which has no merit other than its scrupulous exactness.

That is its justification. A preoccupation with explaining and rounding off

induced Mérimée to blunt somewhat the crystalline peaks of the tale. We

have resisted adding anything to Pushkin's clean and spare style, with its

slender grace, which hums like a taut string. When Pushkin writes:

Herman quivered like a tiger, Mérimée adds: ... lying in wait. When he

has Lisaveta bend over a book, Mérimée says gracefully. This charming

writer thus marks his own manner, and if some criticize his dryness it is

clear here that the criticism is ill-founded, or, at least, that only by

comparison with the lush style of the writers of his period can Mérimée's

style seem so unadorned to us. The clarity of Pushkin, on the other hand,

chafes him, and nothing shows that better than a study of this

translation. Poets, Pushkin wrote, often sin by neglect of simplicity

and truth; they pursue all manner of external effects. The pursuit of form

sweeps them toward exaggeration and bombast. He criticized in Hugo,

whom he admired, an absence of simplicity. Life is lacking in him, he

wrote. In other words, truth is absent.

The strangeness of most Russian writers, including the greatest among

them, often baffles the French reader, and indeed, sometimes repels him;

but I confess that it is the absence of strangeness in Pushkin that

confounds me. Or at least what baffles me, is to see that Dostoevsky,

that genius so prodigi...

... middle of paper ...

...offers

us geniuses like Shakespeare, Cervantes, Schiller. But show me, even one

among them all, who possesses to the same degree as Pushkin the

capacity for universal comprehension. And again: Pushkin was the only

one among the poets who succeeded in assuming the soul of other

poets. But according to Dostoevsky it is to his profoundly Russian

character that Pushkin owes his universality, for the mission of each

Russian is doubtless a universal mission. ... To become truly a Russian,

he adds, to become completely Russianmeans to feel oneself brother

to all men.

The Queen of Spades, that brief masterpiece, offers us an excellent

example of the admirable poetic qualities of Pushkin and his gift for

self-effacement.

Work Cited

Gide, Andre. "Preface to The Queen of Spades." Reflections on Literature and Morality. New York: Meridian Books, 1959.