Queen of Spades and Other Stories

Alexander Pushkin

Description

This collection of Pushkin's stories begins with 'The Queen of Spades', perhaps the most celebrated short story in Russian literature. The young Hermann, while watching some friends gambling, hears a rumour of how an officer's grandmother is always able to predict the three winning cards in a game. He becomes obsessed with the woman and her seemingly mystical powers, and seeks to extract the secret from her at any cost.This volume, part of a new series of the complete works of Pushkin in English, also includes 'Dubrovsky', the story of a man's desire to avenge himself after his land is unjustly taken from him by an aristocrat; 'The Negro of Peter the Great', a tale inspired by Pushkin's maternal grandfather; and the unfinished story 'Egyptian Nights', a meditation on poetry and the poet. Together, they represent some of the most striking and enduring pieces of Pushkin's prose fiction.

Sujets

• Short story

Informations

• Publié par: Alma Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780714545967
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Queen of Spades
and Other Stories
Alexander Pushkin
Translated by Paul Debreczeny
Verse Passages Translated
by Roger Clarke
Series Editor: Roger Clarke

ALMA CLASSICS




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This edition first published by Alma Classics in 2011
This new edition first published by Alma Classics in 2013
Reprinted with corrections by Alma Classics in 2017
Paul Debreczeny’s translation, introduction and notes © 1983 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved. Reprinted and published by arrangement with Stanford University Press. No part of this material may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval sysem without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press, www.sup.org.
Verse translations © Roger Clarke, 2011
Translation of ‘The Last of the Lineage of Joan of Arc’ © Michael Basker, 2011
Background material © Alma Classics
Cover design by Will Dady
isbn : 978-1-84749-478-8
All the pictures in this volume are reprinted with permission or presumed to be in the public domain. Every effort has been made to ascertain and acknowledge their copyright status, but should there have been any unwitting oversight on our part, we would be happy to rectify the error in subsequent printings.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.


Contents
Publisher’s Foreword
Note By Series Editor
Foreword
Introduction
The Queen Of Spades
Part One
The Queen Of Spades
Kirdzhali
Part Two
The Negro Of Peter The Great *
The Guests Were Arriving At The Dacha… * A Novel In Letters *
Notes Of A Young Man *
My Fate Is Sealed: I Am Getting Married… *
A Fragment *
In The Corner Of A Small Square… *
Roslavlev *
A Novel At A Caucasian Spa *
Dubrovsky *
A Tale Of Roman Life *
Maria Schoning *
A Russian Pelham *
We Were Spending The Evening At Princess D.’S Dacha… *
Egyptian Nights *
In 179– I Was Returning… *
The Last Of The Lineage Of Joan Of Arc *
Note On The Text
Notes
Extra Material On Alexander Pushkin’s The Queen Of Spades And Other Stories
Alexander Pushkin’s Life
Select Bibliography




Publisher’s Foreword
This is one of a series of volumes, to be published by Alma Classics during the coming years, that will present the complete works of Alexander Pushkin in English. The series will be a successor to the fifteen-volume Complete Works of Alexander Pushkin published by Milner and Company between 1999 and 2003, the rights to which have been acquired by Alma Classics. Some of the translations contained in the new volumes will, as here, be reprints of those in the Milner edition (corrected as necessary); others will be reworkings of the earlier translations; others again will be entirely new. The aim of the series is to build on the Milner edition’s work in giving readers in the English-speaking world access to the entire corpus of Pushkin’s writings in readable modern versions that are faithful to Pushkin’s meaning and spirit.
In publishing this series, Alma Classics wishes to pay a warm tribute to the initiative and drive of Iain Sproat, managing director and owner of Milner and Company and chairman of the original project’s editorial board, in achieving the publication of Pushkin’s complete works in English for the first time. Scholars, lovers of Pushkin and general readers wishing to gain knowledge of one of Europe’s finest writers owe him the heartiest gratitude.
– Alessandro Gallenzi


Other works of Alexander Pushkin available from alma Classics
Ruslan and Lyudmila , a dual-language text
trans. Roger Clarke
Boris Godunov and Little Tragedies
trans. Roger Clarke
Eugene Onegin, a dual-language text
trans. Roger Clarke
The Captain’s Daughter and A History of Pugachov
trans. Paul Debreczeny and Roger Clarke
Love Poems
trans. Roger Clarke
Belkin’s Stories
trans. Roger Clarke


Note by Series Editor
This volume, which corresponds to Volume Nine of the Milner Edition of Pushkin’s Works in English, contains all of Pushkin’s prose fiction, finished and unfinished, with the exception of: The Captain’s Daughter and Belkin’s Stories – which, as Pushkin’s two most substantial completed works in the form, will be published separately – and those manuscript notes and brief fragments less than a page long that are of minimal literary interest. I have also excluded the story ‘ A Lonely Cottage on Vasilyev Island’ as an inauthentic piece of Pushkin’s writing.
The two works in this volume completed and published during Pushkin’s lifetime – ‘ The Queen of Spades’ and ‘ Kirdzhali’ – come first; there follow in Part Two the unfinished works found among Pushkin’s papers after his death, arranged in order (so far as can be ascertained) of composition, so as to give an impression of how Pushkin’s projected use of this form developed over time. The unfinished works contain both those that are clearly interrupted or fragmentary and some more substantial and polished compositions – such as ‘ Roslavlev’ , ‘ Dubrovsky’ and ‘ Egyptian Nights’ – where arguably Pushkin had come to realize that he had achieved his main objectives and need say no more .
The late Paul Debreczeny’s edition of these works was first published by Stanford University Press in 1983. For this edition I have made only sparing revisions and corrections to Professor Debreczeny’s excellent translations; his notes I have revised and supplemented more extensively. His introduction is included in a slightly shortened form.
Professor Debreczeny incorporated translations of verse passages (notably in ‘A Tale from Roman Life’, ‘We Were Spending the Evening at Princess D.’s Dacha…’ and ‘Egyptian Nights’) by Walter Arndt. To my mind the somewhat antique and florid diction of these verse translations is alien to Pushkin, and the quest for English rhymes has dragged the sense too far from that of Pushkin’s words, so I have substituted my own versions, which replicate Pushkin’s metres but not, in the interests of clarity and accuracy, his rhyme schemes.
Dates of events in Russian and Eastern Europe are given in the Old Style.
I should like to record my own and Alma Classics’ gratitude to Stanford University Press for their permission to reprint Professor Debreczeny’s material; and to Professor Michel Basker of Bristol University for his contribution of the translation of ‘The Last of the Lineage of Joan of Arc’, which was not included in the Stanford University Press volume.
Asterisks in the text of the translation indicate endnotes on pp. 294 ff .
– Roger Clarke


Foreword
“W ith prose – I have trouble ,” Pushkin remarked to a friend at the end of the 1820s, a time when he had no trouble with poetry at all. But it would be a mistake to think of Pushkin’s creative journey as divided, both formally and chronologically, into his works in poetry and the separate and contrasting work in prose. At all periods of his creative life he was, as it were, trying his hand at all sorts of both kinds, and filling copybooks with sketches imaginary and autobiographical – many of which, written during his exile in southern Russia, he destroyed after the failure of the Decembrist uprising in 1825. He continued nonetheless to produce ideas for novels and stories, and to scribble them down.
But, as he confessed, prose caused him trouble. It required thought and theory and technique in a way that poetry did not. Poetry flowed from him; it was the natural speech of his genius, a fact he ironically acknowledges in ‘Egyptian Nights’ in his sketch of an Italian improviser who can become instantly inspired by any topic, provided he can treat it in verse. The contrast shows significantly in the difference between Pushkin’s unfinished poems and his many unfinished or abortive fragments in prose. He seems to have broken off a poem – for example the wonderful uncompleted poetic drama Rusalka , or even, it could be said, his greatest masterpiece Eugene Onegin – because he knew that it had already done what was in its nature and genius to do as a work of art. Eugene’s story was over: there was no point in conducting him on his aimless chance wanderings in the style of Byron’s Don Juan.
The Prince in Rusalka has similarly made his choice, and paid for it. He has abandoned the miller’s daughter who loved him and who drowns herself, and he finds too late that he cannot be contented with a cold and loveless marriage. He can only long hopelessly for the passion and fire that he has lost. There is no further need, as Pushkin once observed of his poetry, “to spell it out”.
Prose, however, was another matter. I have introduced the case of Rusalka because it shows very clearly how Pushkin’s poetry could achieve the implied and unspoken effects which he may have been attempting, in his other persona and in quite a different way, to achieve in prose. But prose was a much more recalcitrant medium. In several of the fragments of story or novel which were begun, Pushkin seems to be attempting something analogous t