212
JOHN BAYLEY
were playing cards with Narumov, of the Horse Guards" - the same kind
of opening sentence which Tolstoy admired and held up as a model. In
his marvellous and terrifYing stories of the Far Eastern
gulag, Kolyma Tales,
Varlaam Shalamov imitated this opening sentence, transposing the
situation into the little world of privileged
ze ks
who run the horse
transport underground in the prisoner-operatedgoldmines, and in their
spare time play cards, often with their own lives at stake.
"They were playing cards .... " "They" are, so to speak, the people
to belong to - the best people, with too much easy confidence even to
bother to think of themselves as such, or to look down on others. The
old countess accepts this charmed circle as she accepts herself, with the
degagee
apathy of those who have always retained, in ever circumstance,
every advantage simply by being still alive - "the hideous but indispens–
able ornament of the ball-room." Outside the circle stands Hermann, the
ambitious young engineer officer and a man of the will; and outside it in
another sense is the countess's young ward and companion, Lizaveta
Ivanovna, with her pining youthful heart and forlorn desire to love and
be loved. Completed by the negligent good-hearted Tomsky, the tableau
presents an incomparably vivid and economical picture, which gives its
real substance to the fantastic and melodramatic events of the story.
Pushkin was very proud of the fact that after the story appeared all
the young gamblers of St. Petersburg began compulsively punting on the
three seven and aces, the magic numbers which the old countess confided
under duress to Hermann. Pushkin himself was very superstitious, and an
inveterate gambler for high stakes to the end of his life, preferring himself
to keep the bank a the game of
shtos,
or faro, which he describes. In
"The Queen of Spades" Pushkin was writing for an audience who knew
all about gambling, but it is not entirely easy for the modern reader to
follow the pattern of event. The procedure would have been that the
punter, Hermann, and the banker, Chekalinsky, each had a pack of cards.
Hermann selected a card - the three on his first night - and put it face
down on the table with his stake. The banker then dealt from his pack,
facing a card alternately left and right. If a card of the same points as the
punter had selected came up on his right the banker won; if on his left
he lost to the punter. Hermann therefore wins on his deal two nights
running. The punter could risk his stake plus
all
his previous winnings, as
Hermann does on the third night, by turning down the corners of his
card.
A writer such as Balzac or Kipling, or Ian Fleming at a later date,
would have explained the gambling operation in detail, but Pushkin's
spare narrative concentrates on the psychological suspense and the inter–
play of character. The supernatural element is itself psychological, with
