CARYL EMERSON

“The Queen of Spades” and the Open End

Of the many controversies surrounding Puškin’s “Pikovaja dama” (The Queen of Spades), one of the most persistent has centered on its almost seamless fusion of the fantastic with the realistic.¹ On the one hand, the tale is saturated with unexplained—indeed, inexplicable—coincidence and supernatural events, very much in the Gothic (and later the Gogolian) tradition. On the other hand, the work is remarkably precise in historical and topographical detail, with a sober, reportorial narrator who documents by the day, hour, and minute the uncanny and the mundane with apparently equal confidence. As one student of the tale has remarked, this neutral narrator “does not moralize, does not issue warnings, does not terrify, but permits the readers themselves to assess characters and events” (Poljakova 1974: 385).

Given the uncertain genre of the tale, this burden on readers to “assess characters and events” through their own efforts has presented a challenge. “The Queen of Spades” both invites logical decoding and appears to frustrate it. In this essay I will suggest that such a dual—and ultimately contradictory—invitation to the reader constitutes a deliberate strategy on Puškin’s part, Puškin’s extension, as it were, of his own profound and endlessly inventive categories of parody into a realm we would today call reader-reception aesthetics.

First, a few words on the sorts of parody one finds in Puškin. On the most elementary and playful level there is outright blasphemy, as in Gavriiliada. And then there are Puškin’s famous inversions of moral scenarios or literary cliché, such as the fate of the Prodigal Son theme in “Stancionnyj smotritel’ “ (The Stationmaster) or the mockery of feuding families and civilizing the natives in “Baryšnja-krest’janka” (Mistress into Maid). But one of Puškin’s most sophisticated sorts of parody can be found, it seems, at a level above that of specific theme or plot. Here I draw on Gary Saul Morson’s discussion of parody in his book The Boundaries of Genre:“Parodies are usually described and identified as being of (or ‘after’) a particular author or work, but the parodist’s principal target may, in fact, be a particular audience or class of readers” (Morson 1981: 113). With Shamela as his case in point, Morson suggests that Fielding, like many parodists, “implies that readers must not be too ready to accept the invitations authors extend, and that reading is an action which, like any action, can be performed responsibly or irresponsibly” (1981: 114).

Precisely this target—readers who are “too ready to accept the invitations authors extend”—seems to me a defining characteristic of this final category of parody of Puškin. What is parodied is the reader’s search for a system or a key, and in this search, the more numerous the partial hints and tantalizing fragments provided by the author, the more challenging and irresistible the search becomes. We glimpse the method in Evgenij Onegin (Eugene Onegin). In that novel the formal symmetry governing the action and fates of the heroes encourages us, along with Tat’jana, to seek a “key” to Onegin’s personality. When Tat’jana asks, alone in Onegin’s library (Book Seven, XXIV), “ne parodija li on?” (Is he not a parody?), that parody could have several targets. Not the least of these targets is the reader or analyst of the novel, who persists in the attempt to make all of Onegin’s disparate segments add up to a psychologically satisfying explanation.²

The strategy is even more boldly present in Boris Godunov. There the presence of a real-life, documented historical event beneath the dramatic plot greatly increases the possibility and range of parody. Puškin takes Karamzin’s well-known, providential, over-determined story and reworks it so that only the open-ended, indifferent characters win—characters with infinitely malleable biographies, like the Pretender. The seemingly disjointed structure of the play, in which all the major action is offstage, encourages the audience to seek a hidden unity. But precisely that search can be seen as part of the target of the parody. The absence of unity in Puškin’s historical drama is more than a “Shakespeareanism.” It can be read as a comment on the nature of history itself—in which, we know, Puškin always respected the element of chance, “that powerful, instantaneous tool of providence.”³

Indeed, as Puškin surely divined, the very idea of historical unity distorts. Contemplating a historical event, later generations do not need to impose a unity on it. They already know how the story will end. Thus the “unity” that we perceive in any account of the past has no necessary connection with logic, system, or causality; it simply reflects the outrageous privilege of historical perspective. One possible way of exposing that false unity would be to confront the audience of historical drama with an event on stage as it might have looked in its own time and on its own chaotic, present-tense terms to its participants. With canonized historical plots such as that of Boris Godunov, this sense of radical openness is exceedingly difficult to transmit. Part of what Puškin parodies in Boris Godunov, I suggest, is audience gullibility: historical themes, when clothed in a present-tense form like drama, can never be honest to the event. That event will always appear chaotic and open-ended to those living it, and somehow inevitable and predetermined to those re-creating it or witnessing it later in narrative art.

If Boris Godunov has provoked its share of searches for hidden unity and keys to its meaning, those searches are meager and amateurish fare when compared to the studies devoted to the decoding of “The Queen of Spades.” My purpose here is not to survey the extremely rich and clever secondary literature in any detail, but merely to offer some general categories of classification.

To state first the obvious: The spare, efficient, dense, and objectively cold prose in this tale encourages the reader to assume that someone is in control. Meaning appears to be distributed by some higher power, or at least by a higher narrative perspective. The critical search for this unified meaning seems to fall into four basic categories or strategies. Each strategy erects a symbolic system in the text that relates to some narrative or visual patterns—in behavior, plot, language, or number; these patterns are then interpreted as tying together all the details of the story.

There are, first, the socio-literary studies that focus on the mechanics and ideology behind gambling in Puškin’s era. Exemplary here might be Jurij Lotman’s discussion of card games and gambling in nineteenthcentury Russia (Lotman 1975) and Nathan Rosen’s classic essay on the meaning of the three magic cards (Rosen 1975). As Lotman points out, the concept of chance (and the challenge presented by games of chance) involves both a negative and a positive aspect: what is rational collapses into the chaotic and the anomalous, but at the same time what is dead becomes animate, mobile, changeable. Gambling is a metaphor for multiple, coexisting codes in a society and in a text. The impulse to coordinate, rank, and crack these codes has been the motivation behind much of the criticism on “The Queen of Spades.”

A second category would be the psychoanalytical-generational treatments. These include the vision, by Murray and Albert Schwartz (1975), of Germann as a sexual impotent who seeks through gambling the prerogatives of parenthood, and also Diana Burgin’s ingenious hypothesis (Burgin 1974) that the Countess revealed the secret of the three cards to Čaplickij because he was her natural son by St. Germain and also (once he grew up) her lover. Burgin suggests that this taboo-ridden family cabal exercises a fatal attraction for Germann; he tries obsessively to gain entry but fails, and can only imitate its patterns hopelessly unto death.

On a different level of analysis are the linguistic and syntactic studies, of which V. V. Vinogradov is the illustrious founder. Representative of this approach would be Heidi Faletti’s inquiry into the frequency of parataxis in the text (Faletti 1977), and her suggestion that this tendency to bunch together clauses without conjunctions has a thematic significance: it is the linguistic expression of a plot “organized largely on the basis of juxtaposition” (1977: 133).

Finally we have the various erudite numerological studies. Prototypical here is Lauren Leighton’s “Gematria in ‘The Queen of Spades’: A Decembrist Puzzle” (1977). Leighton reveals a multitude of anagrams, chronograms, cryptograms, cryptonyms, and logogriphs that suggest Masonic allusions and references to the executed Decembrist Kondratij Ryleev. This final category is perhaps the most quantified of the searches for a “key to the work.” But critics in all categories would probably ascribe to Diana Burgin’s comment in the paragraph of her essay that opens a subchapter entitled “Questions: Clues to the Solution of the Mystery”: “It is up to the reader to speculate on the implications of the text, piece together the information they offer, and come up with the solution to the mystery. Let us begin this task by examining four passages” (1974: 47). The primary responsibility of the reader is to uncover a system that will explain the work.

In the midst of these many mysterious codes, the question inevitably arises: Who is the reader of all this hidden material? If Puškin is parodying the code-breaking efforts of an audience, on what level does this audience exist? In a recent essay, “The Ace in Puškin’s ‘The Queen of Spades,’ ” Sergej Davydov assumes that the audience parodied is internal to the text; that is, it is Germann himself: “Puškin settles his own account with Germann. . . . He surrounds him with mysterious events, teases him with anagrams and cryptograms which the calculative engineer repeatedly failed to solve” (1989: 130). This idea of internal audience is intriguing. But it seems to me equally—if not more—plausible that the audience parodied by Puškin is in fact the reader external to the text, and for a reason quite opposite to the “failure” Davydov detects in Germann. Puškin might well be parodying his readers precisely because of their success and skill at reading codes.

Support for this hypothesis (albeit grudging support) can be found in even the most severely puzzle- and key-oriented criticism. For much of it ends on an oddly indeterminate note. After prodigious code-cracking efforts, Leighton asks “what functions gematria serves in the tale” (1977: 464). And he modestly concludes that it adds interest, zest; it “enriches the style by enlarging the tale’s lexical means, expanding its semantic fields, and adding to its morphological and syntactic texture. . . . It helps to unify the tale’s parts into a gracefully organic whole, and it makes for a greatly intriguing, and therefore greatly entertaining, narrative.” The puzzle, in other words, is not cracked; it is only elaborated. Several other studies conclude in much the same way (Davydov, Poljakova): despite all the apparent overcoding, something in the text is always missing; the integrative move that will cap the deed is forever deferred. It is either the elusive ace, or the absence of resolution in the debate over realistic versus supernatural motivation, or the lack of a single literary prototype that the heroes of the tale might be parodying. As Paul Debreczeny points out, there appear to be many diluted prototypes for both characters and scenes. “Puškin used details of literary models only as so many tiny building blocks,” Debreczeny concludes (1983b: 202). What, then, do these blocks actually build?

In answer, I would suggest that the codes we get in this story, wonderfully crafted as they are, were designed by Puškin not to build any single unified structure, or to solve any single puzzle. Scholars have long noted this strategy on a blunt compositional level, in Puškin’s choice of epigraphs. The epigraphs to “Queen of Spades” rarely summarize but rather comment ironically on their chapters, defining “the chapter’s tonality— sometimes, to be sure, against the spirit of its content” (Poljakova 1974: 410). But it would seem that the irony of structures in this tale is not confined to a dialogue between epigraph and text. That irony is itself a clue to a larger disjunction. For just as the self-contained scenes in Boris Godunov do not add up to the dramatically resolved whole that was expected of tragedy, so the mysteries in “The Queen of Spades” are not really solvable by a single code—by the sort of code we would seek, say, in a good detective story. And yet the evidence for crackable codes is so overwhelming in “The Queen of Spades” that we, along with Germann, are almost flung into the search. This passion on the part of the reader to explain the whole by a single key might well be the real target of Puškin’s parody.

With this hypothesis, yet another reading of the story becomes possible: Puškin provides us not with a code, and not with chaos, but precisely with the fragments of codes, codes that tantalize but do not quite add up. He teases the reader with partial keys—because the reader, like Germann, does not really want to gamble. The reader wants to decipher, to study the past so that it will reveal the future, to predict patterns of behavior and events. We know from the very plot of the tale, however, that only desperately passionate true gamblers—people willing to stake everything on truechance, like St. Germain, the Countess, Caplickij—can be privy to true secrets (Burgin 1974: 53).

In this reading, the key passage in the text has nothing to do with threes, sevens, numerology, or cryptography. It is, rather, the Countess’s final words to German: “Eto byla šutka” (it was a joke)—not, note, a riddle, which has an answer already implied in the asking. Simply a joke, non-repeatable and non-systematizing, randomly successful in one context and perhaps a complete fiasco in some other time and place. Naturally Germann cannot read this reponse properly, because his whole life is one of calculation. When he answers the Countess with “Etim nečego šutit’ ” (This is no joking matter), it is clear to what extent his entire being is alien to the lesson of real gambling, namely, that there is no system,⁴ As Lotman points out in his essay on the card game, Faro is a model of fate. And, Lotman continues, “the external world, which possesses an inexhaustible supply of time and unlimited possibilities of resuming the game, inevitably outplays every individual” (1975: 477-78).

This wisdom, which is routinely applied to Germann, could apply to code-crackers outside the text as well. For Puškin always promises system, but it is a trap. In this connection it is worth mentioning the excellent essay by Michael Shapiro on Puškin’s “semiotic dominant” (Shapiro 1979). Shapiro suggests that the one truly characteristic feature of Puškin’s work is its definition by negation. And the essential negated value in “The Queen of Spades,” I suggest, is the search for system. As Shapiro points out, it is not the supernatural that drives Germann mad, but chance itself, the most everyday and natural randomness of events. As Shapiro concludes his reading of the tale: “The element of chance which irrupts into the conclusion just when success is nearest is conditioned by the preternatural, by that whole realm of the (private) imagination which is opposed to reality as its negation. The reversal is all the more powerful since all of the events leading up to the moment of potential success are themselves accidents” (1979: 125).

There is, in short, a philosophy of history in this tale, just as there clearly is in Boris Godunov. The means are different because the problem that time poses in each work is different. In the play, Puškin parodies our search for system in the past; in the story, he parodies our search for system in the future. Blindness to the present—Germann convinced of his ace and confronted by a Queen—is common to both works. If Dmitrij the Pretender survives because he is so thoroughly a product of contingency, then Germann, in contrast, perishes because he cannot live in that sort of world once the promise of code has been offered him. In the seductive fragments of an explanation that are strewn around his story, we glimpse what might be the real logic of the tale: an allegory of interpretation itself. In “The Queen of Spades” Puškin appears to be celebrating the spirit of the true gambler, whom chance can impoverish but could never drive mad.