Examine Pushkin’s Use of the Supernatural in ‘Pikovaia Dama’

Examine Pushkins use of the supernatural in Pikovaia genus Dama (The Queen of Spades). To what extent could this text be described as a sense of touch story? The beginning setting is a tantalize c each(prenominal)er hosted by Narumov of the kwickedness Guards. Her macrocosmn the young engineer was always ceremonial the others play until the early hours of the morning barely had never demonstrablely par imbiben in the beleaguer game himself. Tomsky starts to talk ab emerge his granny k non, findess Anna Fedotovna. solely the others listen eagerly while he tells a story ab unwrap his granny knots gambling sixty years ago in Paris. She had lost a large message playing the notification game Faro.When her husband refused to pay away her debts, which she could not do so herself she has to side elsewhere for the m hotshoty. Tomsky goes on to tell of his grannies acquaintance with a man named Count de Saint-Germain, the subject of so numerous a(prenominal) weird and terri fic tales. One of those tales mentioned in the novella is that he was the inventor of the elixir of life. A potion which could be used to summate eternal life to whoever drank it. This is the first theatre of the supernatural in the story. Pushkin by no means shows any touch of the tales of Count de Saint-Germain to be true.It is actu whollyy quite the strange as Tomsky starts off by construction You adopt a go at it he passed himself off as the indicating that he was seek to convince sight he was solely in actual fact very(prenominal) few cerebrated him. as well the use of and so forth indicates he is getting bored of listing these wonderful tales about the Count. He then goes on to say that people used to shout him. For each told the Counts mysteriousness he was though a very flush man. The Countess requested to meet with him in the promise that he would pay off her debts out of the kindness of his heart. by and by all, that kind of money would not even make a s ubaltern dent in the Counts wallet. After pondering her proposal he verbalize I can accommodate you as far as the sum of money goes, but I k at present you would be at ease until you had repaid me, and I would not wish to encumber you with immaterial worries. Instead he wanted to authorise her a hugger-mugger which would allow her to grow all her money back. By now all the guests at the panel party were listening intently. The countess turned up at a card game the identical(p) level the Count had given her the secret.Playing Faro, the same game they themselves were playing at the part, the Countess selected tether tease. All three cards won, glide path up one after other and she had recouped all of her losses. thither was a very sceptical reaction to the story. One said Pure luck and Hermann remarked A rangy story. Tomsky also tell of his grandmother passing down the secret at one magazine to a young man she took grace on. He also won with all three cards. Without c alculating the odds it is sightly to say that Pushkin is not expecting us to view that these sequences have occurred twice out of sheer luck.Therefore it is up to the reader to decide in this situation if the tale of the magical secret should be believed. It is not creation told from the cashiers point of view but kind of from Tomskys. It could be perceived as being no more than a drunken story made up in a bar to light upon a few friends and acquaintances. The adjoining clip Pushkin presents with something of the supernatural is much later on in the story in chapter five. Since the time that Tomsky had told the story of his ageing grandmothers secret, the young engineer, Hermann, had become obsessed with the notion.In trying to obtain the secret from the Countess he had minutely killed her. Three days after that darkness he had decided to attend the funeral at a local monastery. After the oration at a full perform the relatives were first to go up and take leave of the body. Then it was the turn of all other guests wanting to pay their respects. After many had gone it came to the turn of Hermann who was emotional stateing no real remorse for putting to death the old lady. He bowed to the fuse and lay for several moments on the frigid floor, strewn with fir-twigs.At length he rose, pale as the corpse itself, ascended the steps of the catafalque and bent down. At that moment it seemed to him that the deceased gave him a do by glance and come throughked an eye. Hermann in hastily recoiling befuddled his footing and crashed faced upwards to the ground. He was helped to his feet. The way Pushkin says in this paragraph it seemed to him around implies that it did not actually happen at all and that it was exactly in Hermanns imagination. This could be a as a result of crime Hermann may feel for killing the old lady or could even be a pledge that Hermann is going mad.Later that evening Hermann went to an inn and drank a fair amount of wine, wh ich was very uncharacteristic for him. On arriving home he jumped nifty into bed fully clothed and hide sound asleep. In the middle of the night he woke up because of the moonlight inundate his room. At that moment somebody peeped in at his window from the Street and now walked away. Hermann did not pay the slightest attention to this. A minute later he hear the door of the next room being opened. Hermann thought that it was his orderly, drunk as usual, glide slope home from a night walk.But he heard an unfamiliar footstep someone was softly shuffling along in slippers. The door opened a char in a white cultivate came in. Hermann took her for his old nurse and wondered what could have brought her at such an hour. But gliding crossways the floor the white adult female perfectly stood in advance himand Hermann recognized the Countess I have come to you against my will, she said in a clear voice, but I am commanded to grant your request. Three, seven, and ace will win for y ou in succession, provided that you stake yet one card each day and never in your life play again.I absolve you my death, on condition that you marry my ward, Lizaveta Ivanovna. . . . Hermann was the only one to see this, his orderly inhabit asleep throughout the whole episode. once again the element of supernatural is only witnessed by Hermann. On top of this he has been drinking heavily which Pushkin could have pointed out to lead us to believe that is was all in Hermanns assessment. With the three cards Hermann believed the Countess told him engraved in his mind he made his way to a card game in Petersburg. Hermann rigid an exceedingly high stake on the first card, higher than the table had ever seen before.The dealer dealt and a three turned up on the left, a win for Hermann. The next evening he was back and placed even higher stakes on the seven card, another win. The next evening Hermann was back once again and everybody was gather around the table in excitement. Herman n of ladder choosing ace as the Countess had told him. Tchekalinsky began dealing his hands trembled. A queen fell on the right, an ace on the left. The ace has won Hermann said, and showed his card. Your queen has lost, Tchekalinsky said kindly. Hermann shuddered in fact, instead of an ace there lay before him a Queen of Spades.He could not believe his eye or think how he could have made a mistake. At that moment it seemed to him that the Queen of Spades screwed up her eyes and gave a meaning smile. He was laid low(p) by the extraordinary likeness. . . .The old woman he cried in terror. On this single-valued function we can be sure that its all in Hermanns mind as all the other players and spectators clear see a different card to the one that Hermann is seeing. It also adds to the theory that Hermann was tardily losing his mind throughout the story with him in the long run being admitted to a mental infirmary in the novellas conclusion.In my confidence I think it would de finitely be possible to label The Queen of Spades as a specter story on the premise that the main character, Hermann, believes he sees a ghost. At the same time Pushkin seems to go out of his way to give us a logical reason for all of the supernatural occurrences in the story, whether it be alcohol, dreams, guilt or just simply hallucinations. There are also so many different layers to the story that labelling it a ghost story would omit so many other possible labels. Garry Evans