SOURCE: Leatherbarrow, W. J. “Pushkin: The Queen of Spades.” In The Voice of a Giant: Essays on Seven Russian Prose Classics, edited by Roger Cockrell and David Richards, pp. 1-14. Exeter, England: University of Exeter Press, 1985.

In the following essay, Leatherbarrow unfavorably compares Pushkin's prose to his poetry and considers The Queen of Spades a unique work within the context of other nineteenth-century Russian prose works.

Pushkin's literary status is beyond question for Russians and for those in the West who read Russian. He is ‘the father of Russian literature’, a remarkable genius directly responsible for the impressive development of Russian literature in the nineteenth century. He is also revered as Russia's finest poet.

But Pushkin's genius—both as artist and as instigator—is by no means as apparent to the casual non-Russian reader, who perhaps has little difficulty in appreciating other Russian writers, such as Dostoevsky, Turgenev...