Pushkins The Queen of Spades Essay -- Pushkin Queen of Spades Essays

Pushkins The milksop of SpadesFrench connoisseurs already know Pushkins The Queen of Spades inMrimes translation. It might search impertinent to offer now a newversion, and I do not doubt that the earlier one will appear more delightfulthan this one, which has no merit other than its scrupulous exactness.That is its justification. A preoccupation with explaining and rounding offinduced Mrime to blunt somewhat the lucid peaks of the tale. Wehave resisted adding anything to Pushkins clean and spare style, with itsslender grace, which hums like a taut string. When Pushkin writesHerman quivered like a tiger, Mrime adds ... lying in wait. When hehas Lisaveta bend over a book, Mrime says gracefully. This charmingwriter thus marks his own manner, and if some criticize his dryness it is wakeful here that the criticism is ill-founded, or, at least, that only bycomparison with the lush style of the writers of his period can Mrimesstyle seem so unadorned to us. The clarity of Pushkin, on th e other hand,chafes him, and nothing shows that better than a study of thistranslation. Poets, Pushkin wrote, often sin by neglect of simplicityand truth they copy all manner of external effects. The pursuit of formsweeps them toward exaggeration and bombast. He criticized in Hugo,whom he admired, an absence of simplicity. Life is lacking in him, hewrote. In other words, truth is absent. The strangeness of most Russian writers, including the greatest amongthem, often baffles the French reader, and indeed, sometimes repels himbut I confess that it is the absence of strangeness in Pushkin thatconfounds me. Or at least what baffles me, is to see that Dostoevsky,that genius so prodigi... ...offersus geniuses like Shakespeare, Cervantes, Schiller. But show me, even oneamong them all, who possesses to the same degree as Pushkin thecapacity for universal comprehension. And again Pushkin was the onlyone among the poets who succeeded in assuming the soul of otherpoets. But according to Dos toevsky it is to his profoundly Russiancharacter that Pushkin owes his universality, for the kick of eachRussian is doubtless a universal mission. ... To become truly a Russian,he adds, to become completely Russianmeans to feel oneself brotherto all men. The Queen of Spades, that brief masterpiece, offers us an excellentexample of the admirable poetic qualities of Pushkin and his gift forself-effacement. Work Cited Gide, Andre. Preface to The Queen of Spades. Reflections on Literature and Morality. New York Meridian Books, 1959.