JOHN BAYLEY
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opening pages exist in two or three fragmentary versions, notably one
which begins "The guests were arriving at the dacha." As it happens,
Tolstoy was to mention this opening when he was himself meditating on
his novel
Anna Karenina,
exclaiming with admiration that this was the
kind of way in which to begin a story. Several of his early drafts of
Anna
Karenina
begin along similar lines. The way Tolstoy envisaged Anna and
her situation was probably influenced and even inspired by Pushkin's
sketch of a certain type of society woman at odds with her environment
- intelligent, lonely, passionate, foolhardy, eventually shunned by her
peers a misfit. There seems every likelihood that Pushkin knew such a
person in the circles he frequented in the capital, and that he sympathized
warmly with her predicament.
Be that as it may, he certainly had the idea of writing a novel about
such a woman, her admirers and her eventual fate, treating the subject
from the standpoint of the detached omniscient narrator, who both un–
derstands and feels for the subject of his scrutiny. Such a method would
be
used and indeed become common in later nineteenth-century fiction,
and was already foreshadowed in Stendhal's novels, about which
Stendhal himself once quizzically observed that they would obtain their
readership at the end of the century. Haubert, Tolstoy and George Eliot
would all in their different ways perfect the method. But it seems likely
that Pushkin, feeling his way into a style of prose that suited him, found
the problem of striking a balance a hard one to solve, and preferred
experimenting with a more personal and hybrid form of narrative, in
which humor, fantasy, and sober realism could all be present on his own
terms. This was how he shaped the melodrama of "The Queen of
Spades," his most successful and popular tale; and how - in a more
grotesque genre - he proposed to combine verse and prose in an original
medley for "Egyptian Nights," written in the autumn of 1835. Like
Eugene Onegin
itself, both have the Pushkinian quality of being touching
and comical, sober and extravagant, at the same time; and both involve
Pushkin's own ideas and lifestyle without compromising his own
personality and his own privacy.
Its success lies in the force and sympathy of its human portrayals - the
ancient countess, Hermann the Napoleonic hero, the modern young man
on the make, and the
ingenue
Lizaveta Ivanovna. Although the tale is
unified and complete the characters seem held in an unobtrusive but rig–
orous isolation from each other, reminiscent of the isolation which sur–
rounded the heroine of Pushkin's abortive novel of society. The same
high
society, the world of the old countess and her grandson Tomsky, is
the background of "The Queen of Spades," and the atmosphere of that
world is established with subtle simplicity in the opening sentence: "They
