The Queen of Spades and Other Stories

THE QUEEN OF SPADES

ALEXANDER SERGEYEVICH PUSHKIN was born in Moscow in 1799. He was liberally educated and left school in 1817. Given a sinecure in the Foreign Office, he spent three dissipated years in St Petersburg writing light, erotic and highly polished verse. He flirted with several pre-Decembrist societies, composing the mildly revolutionary verses which led to his disgrace and exile in 1820. After a stay in the Caucasus and the Crimea, he was sent to Bessarabia, where he wrote The Prisoner of the Caucasus and Bachisaraysky Fontan. His work took a more serious turn during the last year of his southern exile, when he began Tsygany and Eugene Onegin. In 1824 he moved to his parents’ estate at Mikhaylovskoye in north-west Russia and spent two fruitful years during which he wrote his great historical drama Boris Godunov, con-tinued Eugene Onegin and finished Tsygany. With the failure of the Decembrists’ rising in 1825 and the succession of a new tsar, Pushkin recovered his freedom. During the next three years he wandered restlessly between St Petersburg and Moscow. He wrote an epic poem, Poltava, but little else. In 1829 he went with the Russian army to Transcaucasia, and the following year he retired to a family estate at Boldino, completing Eugene Onegin. In 1831 he wrote his experimental little tragedies, Povesti Belkina, in prose; and married the beautiful Natalia Goncharova. The rest of his life was harried by debts and the malice of his enemies. His literary output slackened, but he wrote two prose works, The Captain’s Daughter and The Queen of Spades, and one folk poem, The Golden Cockerel. Towards the end of 1836 anonymous letters goaded Pushkin into challenging a troublesome admirer of his wife in the Horse Guards, to a duel. Pushkin was mortally wounded and died in January 1837.

ROSEMARY EDMONDS was born in London and studied English, Russian, French, Italian and Old Church Slavonic at universities in England, France and Italy. During the war she was translator to General de Gaulle at Fighting France Headquarters in London and, after the liberation, in Paris. She went on to study Russian Orthodox Spirituality, and translated Archimandrite Sophrony’s The Undistorted Image (since published in two volumes as The Monk of Mount Athos and The Wisdom from Mount Athos), His Life Is Mine, We Shall See Him As He Is, Saint Silovan the Athonite and other works. She also researched and translated Old Church Slavonic texts. Among the many translations she made for Penguin Classics are Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Anna Karenin, Resurrection, The Death of Ivan Ilyich/The Cossacks/Happy Ever After and Childhood, Boyhood, Youth; Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades and Other Stories; and Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. She also translated works by Gogol and Leskov.

Rosemary Edmonds died in 1998, aged 92.

ALEXANDER PUSHKIN

The Queen of Spades

THE NEGRO OF PETER THE GREAT

DUBROVSKY

THE CAPTAIN’S DAUGHTER

Translated with an Introduction by
ROSEMARY EDMONDS

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The Captain’s Daughter and
The Negro of Peter the Great published by Neville Spearman 1958
This collection published in Penguin Books 1962
Reprinted with a Chronology 2004
20

Copyright © Rosemary Edmonds, 1958, 1962
All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

The Negro of Peter the Great

Dubrovsky

The Queen of Spades

The Captain’s Daughter

CHRONOLOGY

INTRODUCTION

ALEXANDER SERGEYEVICH PUSHKIN (1799–1837), the greatest name in Russian literature, was born in the reign of Paul I – who closed down all private printing-presses in Russia and prohibited inter alia the importation of foreign literature, travelling by Russians abroad and even French fashions. Pushkin’s father belonged to the nobility, while his mother inherited Abyssinian blood, her grandmother being the daughter of the ‘negro’, Hannibal, whom Peter the Great bought from a Turkish seraglio. As a schoolboy the young Pushkin shared the high hopes of a new era which swept Russia after the Napoleonic débâcle of 1812, and experienced the disappointment which followed. A very daring Ode to Liberty written while he was an official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and circulated in manuscript in Petersburg, was brought to the notice of the police and caused his banishment to the south of Russia before his twenty-first birthday. In the summer of 1824 he was transferred to his mother’s estate in the province of Pskov and put under the supervision of the local governor, the marshal of nobility who requested his father to open the young man’s correspondence and spy on him generally, and the archimandrite of the neighbouring monastery of Svyatogorsk.

During his coronation festivities Nicolas I suddenly decided to send for the exiled poet. An order was signed obliging Pushkin to travel under the escort of the imperial courier, but ‘not in the position of a prisoner’. (In a sense, this was to be his status for the rest of his life.) In Moscow the Emperor ordered him to ‘send me all your writings from now on: it is I who shall be your censor’. Nicolas never ceased to be suspicious of Pushkin and every move the latter made was observed and reported to the police. Nor did the Tsar’s censorship exempt his works from that imposed upon all writers by the Third Section and its chief, Count Benckendorff, to whom Pushkin complained: ‘Not a single Russian author is more oppressed than I. Having been approved by the Emperor my writings are yet stopped when they appear; they are printed with the censors’ wilful corrections, while all my protestations are ignored.’ He was refused permission to visit France and Italy, or to join a mission going to China, and his private letters continued to be opened and censored.