The Queen of Spades, and Other Stories

An officer who never gambles hears of an old countess who knows three winning cards, and destroys himself finding out. With it are the other tales - the stationmaster's daughter, the shot, the blizzard. Pushkin wrote prose the way nobody in Russia had before, plain and fast, and every writer after him started here. Twelve plates from Munch to Kramskoi, 1824 to 1912, gather card players, old men and interiors to echo Pushkin's fatal games and quiet ruin.