Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Caryl Emerson

Critical Essay by Caryl Emerson

SOURCE: Emerson, Caryl. “‘The Queen of Spades’ and the Open End.” In Puškin Today, edited by David M. Bethea, pp. 317. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.

In the following essay, Emerson relates Pushkin's utilization of supernatural elements and realism in The Queen of Spades to his use of parody.

In Puškin, however, the idea of fate, fate acting with the speed of lightning, is deprived of any of the strictness and purity of religious doctrine. Chance is that point which casts the idea [of fate] in a position of faceless and vacillating indeterminateness, an indeterminateness which nevertheless retains the right to pass judgment over us. … Chance chops fate off at the knee and constructs it on a new scientific basis. Chance is a concession to black magic on the part of precision mechanics, which had discovered in the tiresome hustle and bustle of atoms the origin of things, and...
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