SOURCE: Scales, Jean Norris. “The Ironic Smile: Pushkin's ‘The Queen of Spades’ and James' ‘The Aspern Papers.’” CLA 34, no. 4 (June 1991): 486-90.

In the following essay, Scales finds parallels between Pushkin's tale and Henry James's “The Aspern Papers.”

Reflecting contrasting bodies of literature, Alexander Pushkin's The Queen of Spades and Henry James' “The Aspern Papers” present views of man that are remarkably similar—man in his obsession learning the ironic consequences of his excesses. Pushkin's milieu is prerevolutionary tsarist Russia, and James' environment, a late nineteenth-century European setting. Yet, there is poignant similarity in the obsessive desire of the protagonists, in the striking reversal on the brink of success, and in the ironic smile that reinforces the reversal of each story.

Pushkin's protagonist, Hermann, a German engineer, moves in the courtly circles of late eighteenth-century St. Petersburg, while James' narrator, an American literary critic, moves in a foreign world...