The Queen Of Spades

The Impossible City: Artificiality and the Supernatural in Gogol’s The Nose and Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades

The city of St Petersburg commands a mythology like no other city in the world. The city is stored to have been built on a previously uninhabited piece of land, and has retained a sense of mystery and artificiality. Many of the greatest Russian writers produced some of their greatest works in St Petersburg. Alexandr Sergeyevitch Pushkin adored the city, and centered some of his greatest prose on its mystique. Nicolai V. Gogol, a friend of Pushkin and a very important writer in his own right, used St Petersburg as the setting for some of his most widely read short stories. Both writers carefully observed the society of St Petersburg,

He believed that the dead Countess could exercise a harmful influence on his life”(Pushkin, pg. 299). Pushkin observes that “[N] nobody cried; tears would have been une affectation”(Pushkin, pg. 299), reminding us of the obsession with appearance that the upper class of Petersburg holds. This display of pettiness and affectation is coupled with Hermann’s supernatural experience upon approaching the coffin and looking upon the corpse of the countess. It seems to Hermann is if the countess “gave him a mocking glance, and winked at him”(Pushkin, pg. 300). Though clearly a figment of his imagination brought upon him by his tormented conscience, Hermann is extremely disturbed by this event, and it drives him to drink that evening. When the countess appears as a ghost to Hermann, and communicated to him the secret of the cards, the reader wonders whether this too is a figment of his troubled imagination, brought on by drink. If the dark supernatural is no more than a drunken dream, it can be presumed that the dark mysticism of St Petersburg is simply another artificial facet of the city in this tale, and

Petersburg itself, as well as those who reside there. Through their careful observations of society, these two authors provide the reader with a nuanced view of society and the people who inhabit it. In Gogol, we are presented with gullible public and an affected upper class through satire of the public obsession with the capacity of Petersburg for supernatural occurrences. Pushkin presents a darker, wittier view of the upper class, and delves into the imagination of the middle class Hermann as is drawn in by his betters’ affected superstition. Both pictures of Petersburg cause the reader to question the supernatural qualities attributed to the city, and wonder if the supernatural is, in fact, just another