Beyond the river stretched hills and fields, and several small villages enlivened the landscape.’ That is all: and there is no further mention of the Volga. It is the river itself that interests Pushkin. He describes it qua river, and the Volga does not appear again.

Of Pushkin’s shorter stories The Queen of Spades is perhaps the most entertaining. It was certainly the most popular in his lifetime. Card-players punted on the three, the seven and the ace; and critics – Dostoyevsky was one of the first – wrote enthusiastically, declaring that in it Russian literary language had been created. Certainly in the person of Hermann a new type emerged in Russian literature.

In The Queen of Spades Pushkin again attains great simplicity of language. An almost total absence of adjectives excludes rhetorical cadence. The dry energetic sentences – as cold and relentless as the hero himself – are saved from jerkiness by the use of semi-colons instead of full stops. Consider the rhythm here: ‘It was a frightful night: the wind howled, wet snow fell in big flakes; the street lamps burned dimly; the streets were deserted.’ The phrases are not so much linked together as confronted with one another. A common impulse and the pressure which they exert one on the other carry them forward. Continuity of thought welds a series of abrupt phrases into a smooth whole: the author has his story perfectly worked out and knows exactly what he is doing. The Queen of Spades is remarkable for the range of its dramatic action and its economy of words – Pushkin’s masters are the French for whom the crowning virtue of prose is conciseness. The opening paragraph – it is one of Pushkin’s famous openings – plunges the reader into the heart of the matter. The card game is over, the company are having supper and chatting. ‘The long winter night had passed unnoticed; it was after four in the morning when the company sat down to supper.’ And there follows without delay the conversation bringing in the young man and the old woman, the two principal protagonists.

From first to last a tinge of fantasy pervades the story, looming over the whole plot like some mysterious and fatal curse. By contrast, the epigrams at the beginning of each chapter tend to restore the everyday world. Drawn for the most part from popular ballads, conversations between friends or personal correspondence – the only exception is the quotation from Swedenborg preceding Chapter 5 – they provide a foil to Pushkin’s consummate literary style (whereas the more usual function of the epigram is to point the text with brilliance). The epigram to the shortest chapter – ‘Homme sans maurs et sans religion’ – offers an ironic forecast of the reader’s verdict on Hermann. For Pushkin Hermann was not a hero but he recognized him as a man of the future – the theme of the poor young man resolved coûte que coûte to wrest for himself a place in the sun was already familiar in the works of artist and poet. Dostoyevsky called him a ‘colossal figure’ and went on to create Raskolnikov. (It was no accident that Pushkin invested Hermann with a physical likeness to Napoleon. The type of young man determined on success was bound up in contemporary understanding with the person of Napoleon. Pushkin makes Hermann resemble Napoleon and at the same time describes him as a mean character.)

What is the primum mobile of The Queen of Spades?) The compelling power of chance events and circumstances? The idea of fatality? Is it a tragedy of destiny or a tragedy of personality? Or is Pushkin merely telling us a story having no special significance?… Tchaikovsky’s opera has given persuasive expression to one of these interpretations but, occupied as it is with only one of a whole series of motive forces, it does not measure up adequately to Pushkin’s creation, which is both more and less than a tragedy of fatality. The Queen of Spades may be described as a psychological tale without psychology.

Pushkin’s last prose narrative, The Captain’s Daughter, was born of his interest in the rebellion against Catherine II in 1773, under the leadership of the illiterate Cossack, Emelian Pugachev (who claimed to be Peter III, the husband Catherine had ‘liquidated’). In preparation for a history of Pugachev himself Pushkin had collected material from the State Archives, and journeyed to the Urals and the Lower Volga, the centres of the revolt; but Nicolas I objected to the project on the ground that a rebel like Pugachev ‘has no history’. The Captain’s Daughter combines historical accuracy with superb character drawing. As Gogol pointed out: ‘For the first time characters that are truly Russian come into being: the simple commander of a fortress, his wife, his young lieutenant, the fortress itself with its single cannon, the confusion of the period, and the modest greatness of ordinary people.’

‘The history of the people is the province of the Poet,’ wrote Pushkin in 1825. For him the poet’s imagination, his invention in general, did not entail an inevitable distortion of history. In his novels, as in Walter Scott’s, historical events are interwoven with personal memoirs or a family chronicle in which the imaginary heroes occupy the foreground. The historical figures appear only in the background but they are drawn into the circle of everyday human relationships and thus lose their traditional grandeur and remoteness.