THE QUEEN OF SPADES
Translated by T. Keane from the Russian of Alexander Pushkin
“Hairpins fell in showers around her.”
Hermann, who is “not in the position to sacrifice the necessary in the hope of winning the superfluous”, at first as literal and conservative as this book’s erstwhile man with the Sphinx and its Secret, gambles with a new womanly mystery, i.e. that of an 87 year old Countess, by first beguiling Lisa her younger lady companion, for the rhythm of riches in the sequence of three playing cards, with mention of three crimes and a three-cornered hat, a triangulation or tontine of fateful fiction made real by his own foolhardy leap of imagination…while vis à vis Lisa, by dint of reading romantic novels, “the ordinary countenance of her admirer became invested with attributes capable of alarming her and fascinating her imagination at the same time”, be it the conjuring up of the Countess’s now presumably dead countenance or even more insidiously a spade calling itself another spade till Queendom Come.
Full context here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/04/the-4th-fontana-book-of-great-ghost-stories-edited-by-robert-aickman/
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