The Queen of Spades
In the card rooms of imperial St Petersburg, a cautious army engineer watches other men play and swears he will never risk what he cannot afford to lose. Then he hears a legend — that a withered old countess, decades ago, was given the secret of three unbeatable cards — and the certainty of it begins to eat him alive.
Pushkin builds his most famous tale with terrible economy: a few pages, a rising fever of arithmetic and greed, and a chill of the supernatural seeping into a mind that prides itself on reason. Ambition, chance, and a woman used as a means to an end all converge on the turn of a single card.
A founding masterpiece of Russian prose and the source of Tchaikovsky's opera — compact, ironic, and quietly terrifying. Translated by T. Keane (1894).
