SOURCE: Shrayer, Maxim D. “Rethinking Romantic Irony: Puškin, Byron, Schlegel and The Queen of Spades.” Slavic and East European Journal 36, no. 4 (winter 1992): 397-414.

In the following essay, Shrayer explores the romantic irony in The Queen of Spades in order to clarify Pushkin's status as a Romantic writer.

It is a very good sign when the harmonious bores are at a loss about how they should react to this continuous self-parody, when they fluctuate endlessly between belief and disbelief until they get dizzy and take what is meant as a joke seriously and is meant seriously as a joke.¹

Friedrich Schlegel, Critical Fragments

This essay will examine Puškin's The Queen of Spades (1833) in light of the current debates on the place of romantic irony in the Romantic movement. Puškin's oeuvre on the whole has been associated with Romanticism in one way or another, although scholars indicate...