Short Fiction Pushkin, Alexander: The Queen of Spades. v1, 28 May 2016

[AlexBell]

Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) was a Russian poet and author who some consider to be the founder of modern Russian literature. His first published poem was in 1814, and his perhaps most famous poem was 'To ***', addressed to a married lover in 1825. Much of his work was censored, especially as he had some contact with the leaders of the Decembrist uprising.

In his verse novel Eugene Onegin, 1825, there is a duel in which one of the main characters is killed. Pushkin married in 1830, and in 1837 died after a duel forced on him by allegations that a man was having an affair with his wife.

The Queen of Spades was published in 1834, and tells of pathological gambling, an old countess who knows the secret of a sequence of cards, her return after death, and her revenge. The text is taken from the Wikisource version of Best Russian Short Stories edited and published by Thomas Seltzer in 1919.

Thomas Seltzer was born in Russia, but moved to the United States as a child. He was fluent in several languages, worked as a journalist, and set up his own publishing firm in 1919. He published several controversial authors including D.H. Lawrence, and was forced into bankruptcy after charges of publishing 'unclean books'.

The cover is taken from Wikimedia.

I have silently corrected typos, curled quotes, and made changes to spelling, punctuation, and hyphenation using oxforddictionaries.com.

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