Pique dame alexander pushkin biography
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The Queen of Spades
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5 things to know about The Queen of Spades
1° Pushkin and opera
As with Eugene Onegin eleven years prior, Tchaikovsky found his inspiration in Alexander Pushkin’s work. Pushkin’s gothic novella Pikovaya Dama, written in 1833, had been adapted twice before: in 1850 by Fromental Halévy of La Juive fame and in 1864 as Pique Dame an operetta by Franz von Suppé. The French-sounding transliteration Pique Dame of the original Russian title has often referred to Tchaikovsky’s opera as well.
Pushkin is commonly considered to be the greatest Russian poet and founder of modern Russian literature. It is thus not surprising that his work has sparked many a Russian composer. Mikhail Glinka was the first of note to set Pushkin to music in Ruslan and Lyudmila. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Sergei Rachmaninoff and Igor Stravinski followed suit. Modest Mussorgsky's monumental opera Boris Godunov can be considered as one of the most influential opera’s to
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La Dame de pique
You can't have everything.
This short story, written by Pushkin in 1833, describes avarice with a brilliant writing and a witty plot. A little fella named Hermann enjoyed watching other people play kort. He never played because he was not in the position to sacrifice the necessary in the hope of winning the superfluous, even though he was a gamester at heart. One night, he listened to a story involving someone's grandma (a Countess who makes you laugh but you would want to disintegrate if you were working for her) who apparently used to gamble when she was young. She lost a lot of money and turned to some Count to ask for help because her husband refused to pay tha
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When Alexander Pushkin published his story “The Queen of Spades” in 1834, prose was not highly regarded in Russia. To Pushkin’s contemporaries, it was hard to understand why the acclaimed Russian poet abandoned the sublime heights of his poetry to descend to the depths of everyday vernacular. At the time, sophisticated literature was synonymous with verse – or at least with opulent rhetorical effort. A good three decades before Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky began writing their great novels of psychological depth, in “The Queen of Spades”, Pushkin wove a net of relationships and allusions, recounting in provocative brevity the story of the officer and gambling addict Hermann and the poor orphan Lisaveta Ivanovna, blinded by her longing for love. Without detours or digressions, the author describes how the rumour that the old Countess supposedly knows the secret of three failsafe cards incites Hermann’s long-suppressed gambling addiction. When he happens to hear of t