SOURCE: Rosenshield, Gary. “Choosing the Right Card: Madness, Gambling, and the Imagination in Pushkin's ‘The Queen of Spades.’” PMLA 109, no. 5 (1994): 995-1008.

In the following essay, Rosenshield explains the role of madness in Pushkin's novella.

M. L. Gofman writes that Aleksandr Pushkin's formulation of the problem of madness is the most successful in Russian literature, indeed that all Russian literature may be said to derive from it (62). Though this statement is polemical—a challenge to the often quoted apocryphal saying, attributed to Dostoevsky, that all Russian literature came out of Gogol's “Overcoat”—it points to a significant lacuna in the study of Pushkin: the representation of madness. Pushkin's remarkable lyric “God Grant That I Not Lose My Mind” (“He daj mni Bоg sоjti s uma”; 3: 322-23) has received only scant attention.¹ Even more surprising, madness has never been argued as central to the understanding of The Queen...