The importance of Pushkin's Queen of Spades and why it's worth reading

American readers, even those like me who are devotees of Russian literature, don't read Alexander Pushkin much any more, probably because his greatest work, Eugene Onegin, is in verse and not so accessible in translation. Count me among the guilty. Yesterday, for the first time, I read his story The Queen of Spades, from the 1820s or so, which is to say about 50 years ahead of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and about 80 ahead of Chekhov, yet we can see in this short short story the foretelling of so many of the themes and modes in modern Russian literature: gambling of course, but also obsession, monomania, intoxication, duplicity, gentleman's clubs, full-dress fomal "balls," courtships of convenience, unmasking, and fate. In essence, the story begins with an all-night card game for high stakes among fellow club members; one of those present declines to gamble though he studiously observes all the action. One of the gambles, as the men recover at dawn  (over champagne) tells of how his grandmother once gambled her life on three cards - the passed her "secret" onto another who did the same. The man listening becomes obsessed with this idea, takes some risky and amoral actions to try to learn the "secret" of the successful betting on three straight drawn cads, and then risks his entire fortune on the three-in-a-row bet. Spades may not be a great story - it lacks the humanity of Chekhov's greatest, for example - but it's full of high drama and powerful, almost cinematic episodes (sneaking into the mansion at night for a supposed liaison, spying on the aged countess as she takes off gown, wig, and makeup, a murder, all-night cad games, a fantastic dream, a jilted lover...) so it's no surprise that this story is best known for its adaptations: it's the basis for a still-popular opera by Tchaikovsky, and still worth reading as a seminal work in Russian and an ambitious story by all measures.