The Shot and The Queen of Spades

"The Shot" is a short story by Aleksandr Pushkin published in 1831. It is the first of five tales in Pushkin's The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, a cycle of five short stories. The Shot details events at a military outpost in a Russian province, and then several years later, on a country estate. Pushkin discusses themes of honor, revenge and death, and places them within the broader context of Russian society. The Shot tells the story of a retired soldier named Silvio, who harbors a grudge for many years following an argument in which he was disrespected in front of his peers.

The Queen of Spades is a short story with supernatural elements about human avarice. Pushkin wrote the story in autumn 1833 in Boldino and it was first published in the literary magazine Biblioteka dlya chteniya in March 1834.
The story was the basis of the operas The Queen of Spades (1890) by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, La dame de pique (1850) by Fromental Halévy and Pique Dame (1864) by Franz von Suppé (the overture to the Suppé work is all that remains in today's repertoire). It has been filmed numerous times.

Dettagli