SOURCE: Rosenshield, Gary. “Freud, Lacan, and Romantic Psychoanalysis: Three Psychoanalytic Approaches to Madness in Pushkin's The Queen of Spades.” Slavic and East European Journal 4, no. 1 (spring 1996): 1-26.

In the following essay, Rosenshield provides a psychoanalytical perspective on The Queen of Spades, focusing on the nature and significance of the protagonist's madness.

1. introduction

Scholars and critics have offered more ingenious and diverse interpretations of The Queen of Spades than of any other work in Russian literature of the nineteenth century. But they have curiously paid relatively little attention to the nature and significance of the hero's madness—certainly the most dramatic event in the tale.¹ This critical lacuna is understandable: in contrast to the heroes of King Lear or Dostoevskii's The Double, Germann, the hero of The Queen of Spades, goes clinically mad only at the very end of the story, in the brief epilogue. That is, until the...