SOURCE: "The Queen of Spades, " in New Literary History, Vol. IX, No. 2, Winter, 1978, pp. 315-32.

In the following essay, Bocharov examines Pushkin's narrative technique and use of differing modes of speech in The Queen of Spades.

"In the same way that two bodies cannot occupy the same place in the physical world, neither can two fixed ideas coexist in the moral world. The three, the seven, and the ace were soon overshadowed in Hermann's mind by the image of the dead countess."

Thus Pushkin in the last catastrophic chapter of The Queen of Spades reveals Hermann's fatal mistake. Critics concerned with the significance of numbers have only directed their attention to the three and the seven, the actual numbers which appear in the plot. But the opening sentence from the final chapter serves to indicate the importance of the one and the two in the structure of the...