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

Pushkin's The Queen of Spades French connoisseurs already know Pushkin's The Queen of Spades in Mà ©rimà ©e's translation. It might appear impertinent to offer now a new version, and I do not doubt that the earlier one will appear more elegant than this one, which has no merit other than its scrupulous exactness. That is its justification. A preoccupation with explaining and rounding off induced Mà ©rimà ©e to blunt somewhat the crystalline peaks of the tale. We have resisted adding anything to Pushkin's clean and spare style, with its slender grace, which hums like a taut string. When Pushkin writes: Herman quivered like a tiger, Mà ©rimà ©e adds: ... lying in wait. When he has Lisaveta bend over a book, Mà ©rimà ©e says gracefully. This charming writer thus marks his own manner, and if some criticize his dryness it is clear here that the criticism is ill-founded, or, at least, that only by comparison with the lush style of the writers of his period can Mà ©rimà ©e's style seem so unadorned to us. The clarity of Pushkin, on the other hand, chafes him, and nothing shows that better than a study of this translation. Poets, Pushkin wrote, often sin by neglect of simplicity and truth; they pursue all manner of external effects. The pursuit of form sweeps them toward exaggeration and bombast. He criticized in Hugo, whom he admired, an absence of simplicity. Life is lacking in him, he wrote. In other words, truth is absent. The strangeness of most Russian writers, including the greatest among them, often baffles the French reader, and indeed, sometimes repels him; but I confess that it is the absence of strangeness in Pushkin that confounds me. Or at least what baffles me, is to see that Dostoevsky, that genius so prodigi... ...offers us geniuses like Shakespeare, Cervantes, Schiller. But show me, even one among them all, who possesses to the same degree as Pushkin the capacity for universal comprehension. And again: Pushkin was the only one among the poets who succeeded in assuming the soul of other poets. But according to Dostoevsky it is to his profoundly Russian character that Pushkin owes his universality, for the mission of each Russian is doubtless a universal mission. ... To become truly a Russian, he adds, to become completely Russianmeans to feel oneself brother to all men. The Queen of Spades, that brief masterpiece, offers us an excellent example of the admirable poetic qualities of Pushkin and his gift for self-effacement. Work Cited Gide, Andre. "Preface to The Queen of Spades." Reflections on Literature and Morality. New York: Meridian Books, 1959.