SOURCE: "The Queen of Spades, " in New Literary History, Vol. IX, No. 2, Winter, 1978, pp. 315-32.

"In the same way that two bodies cannot occupy the same place in the physical world, neither can two fixed ideas coexist in the moral world. The three, the seven, and the ace were soon overshadowed in Hermann's mind by the image of the dead countess."

Thus Pushkin in the last catastrophic chapter of The Queen of Spades reveals Hermann's fatal mistake. Critics concerned with the significance of numbers have only directed their attention to the three and the seven, the actual numbers which appear in the plot. But the opening sentence from the final chapter serves to indicate the importance of the one and the two in the structure of the action. To continue this idea, the sequential nature of The Queen of Spades sets it apart from the Boldino stories. [During the autumn of 1830 a cholera outbreak kept Pushkin on his estate near Boldino during which time he produced The Little Tragedies and The Tales of Belkin] "The story develops in a natural succession of events which unfold into a single, coherent sequence." But it is as if there is an internal and ironic duality in this consistent unity of action, and the first sentence of the concluding chapter indicates this bifurcation of the plot as a reason for Hermann's downfall. He could not tolerate the duality in his life, to which his fate had brought him and which had in fact been engendered in his own imagination.

In The Queen of Spades the real direction of the action is always in compliance with the imagined direction which in its turn creates its own reality. At any stage the action can be given this dual interpretation. But at the same time the narrative combines and blends these two strands, tracing Hermann's maniacal single-mindedness which can neither make allowances for nor accommodate this duality and in the end destroys him.

The plot is based upon different interpretations of Tomsky's anecdote about three winning cards. The anecdote in its turn is based upon other anecdotes and snatches of hearsay forming a rumor within a rumor (e.g., the story about Saint-Germain). Here are two judgments about this unusual tale: "'Chance!' said one of the guests. 'A fairy tale!' remarked Hermann."

At this point, then, there are two versions which are later blended into the single story. All the subsequent events ending with the miraculous win and the ill-fated mistake on the part of the hero can either be seen as "chance" or "fairy tale." The action takes place simultaneously both in the external world and in Hermann's imagination, which realizes the fairy tale and of its own making constructs a complete fable out of an anecdote, out of nothing. Within the tale the prosaic foundation and the fantastic continuation operate on the same plane. The narration thereby embodies the dual nature of Hermann and the dual motivation behind his behavior: the prosaic German calculation and the humble craving for gain are counterposed with the fiery imagination and the passion for the game. Both motifs affect and disturb Hermann, combining the picture of external reality with the picture created by his imagination at one and the same level, which through its very insidious duality results in his destruction. He constantly finds himself at the parting of the ways and has to choose between them. At the very beginning of the intrigue his stern reasoning tells him, "No! Calculation, moderation, and diligence, these are my three winning cards which will secure and increase my capital sevenfold and bring me peace and independence." Thus even before the dead countess reveals the significance of three and seven to Hermann, these numbers have already come into his mind as being three winning cards in albeit a rather more conventional sense. The way is therefore set for this fantastical idea to be translated into the ordinary language of serious calculation and for this fairy-tale motif to become a real alternative for the hero.

Hermann combines both his discovery of the secret for acquiring great personal wealth and his love affair with the countess' ward under the general heading of "passion." When we read in Hermann's letter to Lizaveta Ivanovna, "I speak as a man on fire with passion," it sounds ambiguous and indicates the different attitudes revealed by his adventures which he generalizes as "passion." The traditional emotional clichés play an important part in the depiction of their relationship. Both are constantly "trembling," "in torment," and so on. These words create the impression of common emotions shared by lovers, but at the same time they show that their emotions are not in tune. This divergence within a common emotional language finally emerges in the fourth chapter: "Lizaveta Ivanovna listened to him with horror. Hermann looked at her in silence. His heart was also beating, but neither the poor girl's tears nor the surprising charm of her grief touched his stern soul. . . . Only one thing horrified him and that was that the secret which was to have brought him great wealth was irretrievably lost."

In Pushkin's late prose the poetics of emotional words, the usage of common terms for emotions, is becoming less acceptable. Already in Lermontov's novel this change is visible, but it is more consistently apparent in Tolstoy, who proceeds from an absolute lack of faith in these allembracing words and instead describes emotions in detail. But for Pushkin in The Queen of Spades these words still bind the action, although words like passion, quivering, fear signify quite different emotions in his heroes. They are word masks, so that when he uses "quivering" with reference to Hermann, its meaning is quite different from when he uses it about the girl ("Hermann quivered like a tiger, waiting for the right moment"; "quivering she went to her room wanting both to find him and not to find him there"). But these words not only deceive Liza about the true nature of her hero's passions, they also deceive him because he is aware neither of the two directions in which events are taking him nor of the duality of the "passion" itself. Pushkin brings the different directions of these desires, emotions, and aspirations together through the unity of style and expression. However, within this unity, unbeknown to the heroes, the plastic images of emotion and subject matter are beginning to disintegrate and in their turn to destroy the heroes' emotions, aspirations, and hopes.

In the scene where he tries to force her to tell him the secret, Hermann is ambivalently passionate with the countess. He is at once the greedy con-man, the thief, the robber (who urges the old woman on: "Well. . . ") and the ardent lover, the son, the inheritor of the secret (he implores her through "her feelings as a wife, a lover, a mother"). The image of the countess is split between the daily round and Hermann's fantastic world and to a significant degree becomes in the plot "the symbolic embodiment of the fixed idea" of the hero, even to the extent of her being transformed during her visitation into the queen of spades. At the same time as revealing the secret, she passes on a piece of information which, incredibly, Hermann overlooks completely; namely, that she absolves him of her own death providing he marries Lizaveta Ivanovna. But in his single-minded determination to reach his one goal, the hero has forgotten all about Lizaveta.

Hermann is becoming the victim of two disparate strands of events, which are converging at a point in his consciousness and which he can neither comprehend nor draw together. The three, the seven, and the ace dislodge the image of the dead old woman, bringing us logically back to the related problem of two fixed ideas being unable to coexist in the moral world. But this is another force of which he cannot take account and which pushes him inexorably towards his fate.

The queen of spades has her own "paraller plot and at the denouement substitutes herself for the ace which should by rights have been the final card. The two fixed ideas are mutually incompatible. In the epilogue the mad Hermann "mutters with unusual rapidity, Three, seven, ace!'" articulating the fateful duality with which his fanatical imagination could not come to terms. Thus the duality of life and of Hermann's fate bring havoc to his single purpose. The queen of spades pleads for the ward, who together with the dead countess has come to represent for her the whole of the human world which has been abandoned and eclipsed for the sake of the fantastic game. As a result she, the queen, discovers her "secret hostility" to the simple, aggressive lust which refuses to recognize life's complexity.

This subjective lust, concerned only to further its own end, is a real force in the dual way in which the plot unfolds. In his own fevered imagination Hermann in fact eliminates the old woman who on the sly mounts her own attack and then becomes for him the queen of spades, the fate he has chosen for himself. The fantastic promise made to Hermann has been fulfilled, but at the same time his fate has been realized, too. Having chosen the queen instead of the ace, his day of reckoning has come.

After this brief outline of the plot let us now turn to the narration. We find that it reflects that duality which pushes the hero in one direction and seals his fate and ambivalently blends the external ("real") interpretation of events and the internal ("fantastic") interpretation which the hero himself gives.

The Queen of Spades is a polished example of Pushkin's early prose where he as author remains in the third person. However, this technique in his first attempt at a novel is later abandoned for the narrators of The Tales of Belkin. A. V. Chicherin suggests an interesting idea: "In content The Queen of Spades is a novel, but in form it is not so convincing." Belinsky is also of the opinion that "it is actually not a short story, but an anecdote." For him the sole merit of Pushkin's prose was the story itself, which was "a great piece of craftmanship," "a masterly told tale." These characterizations of "story" and "anecdote" highlight well what is common to both the third-person narration of The Queen of Spades and to the narrators of The Tales of Belkin. It is precisely this common ground between these two works which separates them from The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, which both in form and content corresponds more to a novel (a historical novel). It combines the large-scale themes of politics and history with everyday, down-to-earth pictures and nuances.

A short story is not expected to match the breadth demonstrated by the chapters on the assembly and the dinner at the boyar's house, which a novel usually possesses. In passing, however, it is to Pushkin that we owe the unique form of a novel in verse, having as it does a lyrical unity with the world (the universal "I"). His epic prose on the other hand cannot be considered as the basis for a novel, more especially since the structure of his narration in the third person does not correspond to that which is normally associated with this particular form.

The Queen of Spades seems to begin in the present, almost as if there actually is a narrator (the reduced "we"). We have already referred to V. V. Vinogradov's interpretation in which he discovers in the first chapter the personality of a narrator hidden in the structure of the speech and the syntax. "They were playing cards one day at Narumov's, a Horse Guard. The long winter night passed by unnoticed, and they eventually sat down to supper at 5 a.m." This is conveyed with the informality of a conversation or a letter. We also compared the beginning of the story with a first draft which opens directly in the first person, almost autobiographically. (From Pushkin's own recollections, his life in St. Petersburg at the end of the 1820s was in a "fairly disordered state.") By the final draft the first person, both as participant and narrator, has been reduced, and his traces can only be found in the first chapter, which, according to Vinogradov, still "creates the illusion that the author is present at this gathering." So the first chapter concludes:

However it is time to retire. It is already a quarter to six.

In fact it was already light. The young people finish their drinks and go their separate ways.

"In this way the author's statements about time are put secondary to his characters' feelings. The author merges with the characters and looks at time through their eyes."

"In fact"—Pushkin was very fond of using this echo as a connecting device in his story. The author's conclusion sounds like indirect speech, as if the dialogue is continued in narrative form. Thus in the final lines of the chapter the illusion of the author as both onlooker and participant is maintained, as if he is amongest them all, interested but a little aloof. But his interest does reduce the author's conventional objectivity.

In the first chapter Tomsky's anecdote about the three cards occupies the central place. The author, now talking through someone else, makes Tomsky's speech more like a story within a story, quite naturally more intimately affected by the character of this narrator. One would expect the depiction of life in the previous century to be colored by the language characteristic of the life and times of the narrator. And in fact Tomsky's tale from beginning to end bears the impressions of his own verbal and personal intonations, of natural illustrations of his own character: "She lost rather a lot of money on trust to the Duke of Orleans"; "My late grandfather, as far as I remember. ... " Moreover, Tomsky is telling not a true story whose authenticity is beyond doubt, but a tale which has been passed down by word of mouth. We can see how very quickly story becomes literature and narrator becomes author: "Upon arriving home my grandmother, peeling the beauty spots from her face and loosening her farthingale, told my grandfather about her losses and demanded that he should pay." Here one is reminded of "The Stationmaster," one of the stories from The Tales of Belkin, in which that narrator is not bound by the conventions of narration.

This leads M. Gershenzon with his more modern approach to the relationship between author and narrator to consider that Tomsky's anecdote is "in its detail excellent, but it is precisely as Tomsky's story that it lacks credibility." The narrator is relating, apparently authentically and objectively, an utterly private conversation between the countess and Saint-Germain: "'But my dear count,' answered my grandmother, 'I tell you that we have no money at all.'"

In a real story it would be impossible to record direct speech retaining the supposed actual intonation just for effect. Tomsky gets La Vénus Moscovite to talk just as Pushkin gets Tomsky and the other characters to talk, thereby giving the author greater freedom to display his own omniscience. In the convincing detail of Tomsky's anecdote the author freely represents a fable as if it were genuine. Tomsky "in fact" should not have related it like that. Hermann's imagination becomes fired from an anecdote, from a "shadow of reality." But the author's artistically convincing portrayal of the anecdote puts Hermann's fantasy and all the subsequent semitransparent intrigue onto a definite, real footing. The author, relaying a private conversation between two people, is able to miss the most important, the most fantastic part. This technique brings to mind what Cervantes means when he has Sancho Panza talk with such amazement about the "magical" powers of the storyteller and novelist.

Here the narrator passes the rumor on and becomes once more the artist, but the anecdote remains an anecdote. Thus in the unbroken chain of reality and fantasy in The Queen of Spades the author changes his position and personality as the story requires, having at one moment full knowledge of all the circumstances and at another being completely ignorant of what is most important to the mystery.

Even during the first chapter the author changes his personality. He uses his objectivity as the author to communicate a certain subjectivity on the part of the narrator. But on the other hand during Tomsky's story he shows himself to be the real author and tells the tale objectively. So the boundaries between author and narrator, between conversations of character and author, between real events and anecdote are all relative, flexible, and undelineated within the single artistic whole. Thus in Tomsky's story the author is able to take on someone else's conversation as if it were his own and to bring the bright picture of a past age to life. But contrast this with the next chapter in which the author's description of the ward's fate is permeated with her own "inner thoughts," with her own complaints and supplications, and is transformed into her hidden, private monologue: "How many times had she left the boring but splendid drawing room and gone away to weep in her own small, poor room where stood the screens covered with wallpaper, the chest of drawers, the mirror, and the painted bed and where the tallow candle so dimly burned in the brass chandelier!" The deliberate exclamation mark is the author's way of bringing the ward's tears to the surface.

Lizaveta Ivanovna talks to us through his speech in the same way that the author uses Tomsky's speech as his own vehicle. The author makes his style more personal by making it appear that someone else is speaking (a narrator who is present but hidden in the first chapter and a poor ward in the second). Then he quite happily steps into the conversation of one of his characters in order to continue the story. When he speaks it is relatively different from the direct speech and conversation of his characters. The borders between these two worlds of speech are easily crossed in either direction. V. N. Voloshinov refers to the relationship between these two types of speech as "painterly" [following Wölfflin]. He says that the communication of a character's speech is typified by a weakening of the mutual borders between statements made by author and character and by their mutual penetration. This is to be distinguished from a linear style in which the contours of a character's speech are sharply set out.

Within the limits of this painterly style Voloshinov discerns two possible tendencies:

The active weakening of the borders of a statement can come from the author's own desire to permeate a character's speech with his own nuances, with humor, irony, with love or hate, with excitement or contempt. But it is equally possible for the dominance to be transmitted to the character's speech which thereby becomes stronger and more active, to the extent even of beginning to resolve the author's own medium which frames it. In comparison to the character's speech, the author's medium loses its own normal objectivity and sees in itself, as well as being seen as having, the qualities of the subjective speech of another character, a tendency often realized in the replacement of author by narrator.

Voloshinov notes the different writers and the different periods in literature in which one or the other of these two types of "painterly" style predominates. However, in Pushkin it is difficult to determine the prevalence of either tendency. In one respect the author always reigns supreme, putting his own stamp upon all the conversations, statements, and reflections. Certainly that style of direct speech which developed later in Russian prose as a consequence of the "natural school," using stage techniques and being somehow independent of the author's narration, is quite absent in Pushkin.

For Pushkin the "subjective" realm of any character's speech is easily penetrated. However, in another sense the author, as prose writer, builds his own particular image which really is itself subjective. Thus Belkin is essential to Pushkin as the embodiment of the position of prose, as is clear from Grinev's narration. Slightly aloof, the writer constructs an image of the narrator as a "person," mediating between Pushkin and the world he seeks to represent. The reader must feel this distance between Pushkin and "this image of the narrator," although at the same time he experiences it partly as an ironic distance and this alien authorship partly as an ironic authorship.

Up until Belkin, Pushkin's prose had not developed this complexity which paradoxically is the basis of its very simplicity. Early in his career when he still wrote in the third person as the author without any of these devices (see the chapters of the novel and the society tales of the late twenties), there was no sense of this self-imposed limitation on the part of the author. The distance between author and hero (Abraham's monologues in the chapters of the novel) is unclear, and in his attempts at the end of the twenties "clever people" articulated the author's favorite ideas for him. The position of prose was first elaborated through Belkin, whose pale form was therefore of such major significance for the whole of Pushkin's work, including The Queen of Spades, although it was not attributed to any particular character like Belkin or Grinev.

But from its opening words, in the very visual nature of the text, the person of a hidden (reduced) narrator is perceptible. In the next chapter about the life of the ward, it is her character which shows through. At each point in the story we feel a subjectivity, which does not exactly correspond to Pushkin, but is mobile, varied, and devoid of any precise definition. "The open structure of the subject turns out to be of a special type which is just as full of people and images as reality itself." But in Pushkin's painterly style neither author's nor character's speech dominates, so neither is subordinate in the way Voloshinov described, but instead they exist in balanced and mutual alternation. The author's narration appears to strive to subordinate itself immediately to the narrator and to erect self-imposed constraints. It is here too that the story told by the narrator, a dramatis persona, adopts its own constraints to make way for the author.

Later critics with their particular notions of psychological truth and the relationship between author and character have interpreted these paradoxes in Pushkin's prose not only as such, but even as artistic errors. For example, Gershenzon and Lerner talk about Pushkin's artistic perfection, but are confused and unexpectedly find artistic slips, particularly in those especially Pushkinian places in the narrative (i.e., where they could, with good grounds, find perfection). Gershenzon makes such criticisms about Tomsky's story and also about "the detailed, objective description" of the scene in the countess' bedroom, told "through Hermann's eyes." "The contemporary artist, like Chekhov, for example, would here have drawn only those lines of the furniture, which Hermann in this moment of extreme tension could and should have noticed. Hermann at that moment could not possibly have seen and committed to memory everything which is enumerated here." In the same spirit Lerner finds Hermann's thoughts on leaving the dead countess' house at dawn "psychologically improbable." "The author, but not Hermann, could at that precise moment have reflected in that way."

Vinogradov, who objected to this "psychologically based" criticism, justifiably counterposes it with the variety of Pushkin's narrative style "which combines narration and psychological portrait." However, this blending which occurs in Pushkin is different from that which occurs in Tolstoy, who seems to Gershenzon to be not only "psychologically probable," but even to produce that "model" of psychologically developed prose such as he is yet to find in Pushkin. He cites as his example Nicholas Rostov's arrival home on leave from the army and how he runs in and notices the familiar details: "The same door knob whose dirty state always angered the countess because it would not open properly. In the hall a single tallow candle was burning, and old Michael lay sleeping on the chest."

In his articles about War and Peace, N. Strakhov discusses this characteristic of Tolstoy's prose: "Count Tolstoy never invents pictures or descriptions. . . . Nowhere does the author emerge from his characters to describe events which have not been, as it were, abstracted from the flesh and blood of those people who comprise the material for the events." In this Strakhov sees "the highest level of objectivity." The following is a typical example of Tolstoy's writing in War and Peace: "Petya galloped along by the manor house and instead of holding on to the reins oddly and quickly waved both his arms, leaning further and further to one side out of the saddle. Running on to a bonfire smoldering in the morning light, the horse balked and Petya fell heavily onto the wet ground. The cossacks saw how quickly his arms and legs moved even though his head did not stir. A bullet had pierced his skull."

The death of Petya Rostov is indicated by "the cossacks saw." It is a visual impression which could not be made or communicated by words explaining what had happened. It is a fate which could neither be admitted nor have a name put to it, but only alluded to in the last phrase, "A bullet had pierced his skull." The author has a different impersonal point of view. In Tolstoy there is "the constant transference between abbreviation and the point of observation from outside to inside the character and back." The rough copies of War and Peace show how all the time Tolstoy is turning the story "away from himself into a picture "built up of his characters' impressions," in Strakhov's words, with the breaking down of the subjective "psychological" and the objective points of view of the author and their "conjunction" into a total image.

"Hurray!" yelled Petya, not delaying for an instant, but galloping straight through the gates. There were several shots and, swaying, Petya let go of the reins, galloped into the gates, and fell sideways off his horse, right into the middle of the French.

Almost all the cossacks galloped in after him, and the French threw down their arms.

Petya lay there, not moving, a bullet having pierced his skull and lodged in his brain.

The breaking down to "what the cossacks saw" from what the author himself knows and communicates is much less developed in this initial depiction. The story has the much more homogeneous, neutral character of the author speaking "from himself."

And now, together with Pushkin's Hermann, we take a look around the old countess' room.

Hermann entered the bedroom. Before the holder filled with old icons gleamed a gold lamp. Faded damask armchairs and sofas, with feather cushions whose gilt was peeling off, stood in sad symmetry around the walls covered in Chinese paper. On the wall hung two portraits painted in Paris by Mme. Lebrun. One of them was of a man, about forty years old, red-faced and fat. The other was of a beautiful young woman with an aquiline nose. She had smooth temples and a rose in her powdered hair. In the corners were stacked porcelain shepherdesses, clocks made by the famous Leroy, little baskets, tape measures, fans, and various feminine knickknacks made at the end of the last century together with models of a Montgolfier hot air balloon and a Mesmer magnet.

For Gershenzon, accustomed to the conventions of Tolstoy or Chekhov, this picture seems psychologically "improbable" and "imprecise." In an unpublished article, "The Spirit of Narration," S. Gizhdeu returns again to this example, maintaining that "the description of the room in its normal state" is not the result of Hermann's observation but of the omnipotent author "who is not seized by the hero's anxiety, but is able to maintain his epic calm." This position that Pushkin occupies as the author is not dependent upon the hero's "relative" perspectives.

Vinogradov on the contrary considers that the story owes its eighteenth-century atmosphere "largely to the perception of Hermann who is as one possessed by thoughts of the late countess." In a similar vein A. Slonimsky writes, "Hermann is dogged by a sense of the historical which is somehow closer and more comprehensible to him than the contemporary. He feels a deeper bond with the old countess than with Liza. .. . It is as if through the power of his imagination he combines two time scales.. .. For Hermann the anticipation of a miracle is intimately connected with the intensification of his sense of history. There could be no better harmonization of his flight into the fantastic than the detailed description of the old things and the old furniture." M. P. Alexeyev examines this same picture from a very singular point of view, emphasizing that Hermann has an engineer's eye which notices things like "the clocks made by the famous Leroy," the Montgolfier hot air balloon, and the Mesmer magnet.

The critics quite rightly dwell upon this description of the countess' bedroom as it is very characteristic of Pushkin's prose. Hermann remains the focal point, but at the same time we seem to be looking over his horizon rather as if author and hero had drawn the picture together. It is a similar effect to the one created by the picture through the open door which so transfixed the poor Stationmaster. Here too the author walks the tightrope between Hermann's attitude and the description we have in the text, amplifying Hermann's impressions for the reader. The author becomes absorbed in his hero's thoughts, extending and completing them. Pushkin's description seems to realize Hermann's dreams. It is as if in Pushkin's text Hermann really sees and knows all of this and is imbued with the spirit of a past age.

But such freedom of contemplation and expression requires freedom from both the hero's true outlook and his psychology. As readers we do not follow his impressions in the same way that we observe as spectators the death of Petya Rostov. Therefore Gershenzon's reference to the "contemporary artist," including only those aspects of the situation which the hero "in this moment of extreme tension" could have noticed, is an unsuitable yardstick by which to evaluate Pushkin. Indeed, Pushkin does not observe this psychological exactitude. Not sharing the values set out in Strakhov's description of Tolstoy, he does not write in the flesh and blood of, or through the anxiety and tension of, his hero. On the contrary Pushkin liberates Hermann from this tension and psychology and sets him in the freer and more objective situation of aesthetic contemplation. Within Hermann's perspective the author is able to elongate his gaze with these everyday objects which are so closely connected with the era to which they belong.

The effect is quite simply created: "On the wall hung two portraits painted in Paris by Mme. Lebrun." In the second half of the sentence the author uses his knowledge to extend what the hero sees in the first half. What Hermann sees is the subject, and the author continues using a participle. The author comes with his own knowledge as a historian and the skill of a painter into the hero's subjective and, for him, quite accessible world. In this picture there is everything that the eye could see, animated and extended by the author's imagination, which is in total concert with Hermann's.

But in the next scene of the meeting between Hermann and the countess, the author's imagination is as silent as the mute old woman and even with his knowledge of the secret which Hermann lacks, behaves merely as an external observer: "The countess appeared to understand what he was demanding from her; she seemed to be searching for the words to answer him." "The countess seemed troubled. Her features reflected the torment in her soul, but she soon lapsed into her earlier insensibility." The author is omniscient about all the realistic details, but his knowledge and with it his narration stop at the "secret." So in the scenes where Hermann pleads before the countess and afterwards during the visitation by the white apparition, the author's pose coincides with Hermann's, who is never to possess the secret. The author is imposing his own constraints upon himself. He is not aware of the precise moment when the story enters into the world of the fantastic, and the dividing line between reality and Hermann's imagination is unclear. At the appearance of the white apparition, the author only relates what Hermann sees and hears.

In conclusion, let us examine dialogue and direct speech in The Queen of Spades. K. Leontyev, in his book on the novels of Tolstoy written at the end of the last century, considered Pushkin to be a representative "of the old style of writing," which he described thus: 'The author is more in evidence and there is greater stress put upon the general outline and less upon direct speech and the characters' affairs." For Leontyev, then, where the older writer would have said, "She was invited to come and have some tea," the contemporary writer would use direct speech, "Do come and have some tea, Miss."

The exaggeration in Leontyev's example is actually to the discredit of contemporary naturalism, masking objective observation. Pushkin's technique of writing from himself does contain actual information. But it is also an artistic position in exactly the same way that for Strakhov Tolstoy's technique of not writing from himself but through the impressions of his characters was for him Tolstoy's artistic position. In saying that there is more narrative and less conversation, Leontyev is of course alluding to what is for him a qualitative rather than just quantitative difference between the two styles. It cannot be said of The Queen of Spades that there is hardly any dialogue or direct speech. However, it is different from what one finds in Turgenev or Tolstoy. It has a different position in the text and a different relationship with the author's contribution and with the total narrative which surrounds it.

We have already partly discussed this problem above. The author's contribution can only be distinguished from a character's speech up to a certain point, for it is itself affected by a subjective sphere, by the character's image, albeit concealed and reduced (even to the extent of the heroless story of The Queen of Spades). Further, the bounds of the hero's speech are not observed, and the author moves quite happily within them as the free and objective narrator. Naturally Pushkin does maintain a distinction between direct and indirect speech, as do both Turgenev and Tolstoy. But there is also something of a dialogue between author and characters when the author responds to a remark made by a character as if in conversation. So in the last lines of the first chapter we find, "In fact it was already light." There is another example in the second chapter, in the further transformation of the author's reply and description of the ward's life through her soliloquy:

"Well, that's what my life's like!" thought Lizaveta Ivanovna.

And it certainly was the case that Lizaveta Ivanovna was a most unfortunate creature.

The author, as a person, is replying to his heroine using almost direct speech, "with all the freedom of a conversation or a letter." In Tolstoy we find nothing resembling this dialogue between the author and his characters.

So on the whole the distinction for Pushkin between the author's contribution and the straight dialogue is less defined and less sharp and is instead more relative, shifting, and open. Likewise, he does not strictly adhere to that separation between dialogue and narrative to which the modern reader is accustomed. The background upon which the direct speech and dialogue stands is rather subjective, personal, and colloquial. Therefore the predominant sense is of a single text, a narration, of the larger single subject of a story, without any precisely delineated subjectivity, without the dividing lines corresponding to the very objective world of the story. The characters' replies and the dialogues are the dividing lines within this single subject which is itself very diverse and even inherently contradictory. These characteristics are, however, all somehow neutralized by the predominant impression of a single whole, what Leontyev means when he says "a story from the author himself."

The Queen of Spades is colored with the very individual language of the different characters, the most vivid being that of the old countess, a mixture of the simple peasant and grand lady. "'Speak up!' said the countess. 'What's the matter with you, 'pon my soul? Has the cat got your tongue, or something?'" But for Pushkin it signifies not actual conversation, but only examples or models. He tends to quote from the countess rather than represent her speech as artistic subject matter. For Vinogradov the dialogue in The Queen of Spades is rather like "narrative quotations."

But Pushkin does not allow the image of the countess to be constricted by this stylized speech. When Hermann appears, "the old woman is speechless: the scales of the conventional language of an eighteenth-century lady fall from her." Her only utterance during this scene is quite free from that stylization which elsewhere so thickly colors her image: "'It was a joke,' she said finally. 'I swear to you! It was a joke!'" Neither does the woman in white who visits Hermann late at night in order to reveal the secret to him use the tones of a former grand dame. Thus this speech characterization is not final and at the fateful moment is indeed shed like scales. Vinogradov's analogy expresses the flexible attitude Pushkin has towards his character and his mode of speech very well. This mode can be dispensed with and thus allow the hero to talk in a free and pure way, unconstrained by the writer.

As M. Bakhtin writes, "The heroes' linguistic differentiation and 'the clear modes of speech' are of the greatest artistic significance in the creation of completed images of people. The more objectified the character, the sharper his speech physiognomy stands out." But for Pushkin his images of people go beyond being mere objects, although their speech may be highly objectified, as the language of the countess shows. Furthermore, the linguistic differentiation in The Queen of Spades is undoubtedly considerable. His characters are not the equivalent of their speech characterization, which as we have seen can be dropped at any time. The depiction of a character's vivid speech fulfills the role of a narrative quotation, quite different from the dramatic (theatrical) qualities which Leontyev demands of his contemporary writers. The dividing line between what the author says and what the heroes say is drawn differently. Moreover, as the contrasts in Hermann's language show, the linguistic differentiation within a single character is sufficiently great to destroy his image as a complete and rounded individual.

For example, here is Hermann's reply in the first scene: "'I am very much attracted by the game,' said Hermann. 'But I am not in a position to sacrifice the essential in the hope of obtaining the superfluous.'" Against the free verbal background of the first chapter, it is a very rational and bookish sentence. "'Hermann is a German. He is prudent and that's about it!' remarked Tomsky." The finality of this condemnation corresponds to his typically German way of talking. In the following chapter the author quotes Hermann's reply word for word, putting in his own italics for emphasis: "Thus for example, although a gambler at heart, he never actually played because he thought his situation did not allow him (as he himself was wont to say) to sacrifice the essential in the hope of gaining the superfluous. Meanwhile he spent nights on end sitting at the card tables, following the various fortunes with feverish trepidation." Such behavior is not compatible with Tomsky's final and easy dismissal in the first paragraph.

Hermann's monologue in front of the countess reveals quite a different mode of speech. Vinogradov very subtly discusses the stylistic composition of Hermann's language in this episode: "The tone of passionate entreaty, of submissive conviction ('Don't be afraid, for God's sake, don't be afraid. I have only come to beg one kindness from you. . . .') is broken by the angry retorts of an avid gambler. Out of this combination of the lofty and the funny, the terrible and the comic, emerge the scene's dramatic tension and profound tragedy."

At this point the duality in Hermann reaches its apogee. In one speech it engenders two apparently incompatible images, which finally become incompatible modes of speech, ranging from the most elevated to the most base: '"If at any time,' he said, 'your heart felt love, if you remember its rapture, if you ever smiled at the cry of a new-born son, if your breast was ever stirred by human feeling, then I beg you because you know what it feels like to be a spouse, a lover, a mother. . . . '" Later: '"Old witch!' he said, clenching his teeth. 'I'll make you answer. . . . '"

According to a more modern approach to psychological truth, there are two completely different people at work here, each with his own particular mode of speech. But as far as Pushkin is concerned these are two different facets of the same speech and the same image, both belonging to Hermann and constituting the total spectrum of his indivisible personality. Although if one looks carefully Hermann does actually switch suddenly from supplication to threat, as V. V. Vinogradov says, the reader does not sense any sharpness in the change which would be so astonishing had we begun to analyze two Hermanns in this scene and extract the contradictory replies separately.

These contrasts, according to Leontyev, comparing such concepts in Pushkin and Tolstoy as the psychological analysis and the isolation of the hero in each, are muted rather than prominent against the general background of The Queen of Spades. For Pushkin this totality of the muted qualities and the contrasts and nuances in speech and in the heroes themselves becomes, as it were, a single entity, a single character, with its own organic inner variety and different aspects. Amongst all this internal diversity there prevails a sense of unity which is not merely an objective, impersonal, external unity of very different characters and subjects but a personal unity with subjective qualities. But this great diversity is surprising, total, and even contradictory such that we, reading Pushkin, do not get any sense of the separateness of all these elements as we assimilate the spontaneous complexity of the composition, becoming aware first of all of its simplicity.

A. Lezhnev points to an "average dialogue" in which a typical speech is only an overtone: "This applies not only to Tomsky's language, but to Hermann's as well. Thus the hero does not talk pedantically or rhetorically, but he is not just a stereotype either." Hermann is actually only pedantic in his first "German" reply, and when he is talking to the countess he is simultaneously both rhetorical and stereotyped. In fact if The Queen of Spades is given a play-reading, then not only Hermann but also the rest of the story fall into these three characteristics.

In his memoirs A. B. Goldenweiser describes the way in which Tolstoy read: "Pushkin gives the countess, Tomsky, and Liza their own individual language. Reading quite naturally, as if he were the narrator, Lev Nikolayevich managed nevertheless to communicate beautifully Tomsky's fluent, absent-minded conversation, the countess' magnificent, archaic, and somewhat coarse language, and Liza's shy words." Tolstoy read the beginning of the second chapter which, being mainly dialogue, has more obvious dramatic qualities. But he still read without any undue ostentation or theatricality.

Pushkin's individual stylistic devices are not overwhelmed by any average speech, but being varied and even directly contradictory, reflect the greater individuality of the whole world which is universal and devoid of any precise borders. Contradictory stylistic beginnings are not smoothed out into any average mode of speech at the expense of their own bright individual qualities, but are only, each in its own way, borders and areas of transition in Pushkin's own brand of multidimensional speech.