Exploring Chance in Pushkin’s the Queen of Spades

It is said in The Bible that God has given Man “free will.” Unfortunately for Man, The Bible does not entail exactly what “free will” is. Some speculate that there is a force called Chance. These people believe that through a serious of coincidence, luck, and their own choices, they can control their future. Others believe in a force known as Fate. With this line of thinking, everything has a goal, and those goals will be met eventually. This gives the believer a sense of inevitability and they tend to be more laid back due to the philosophy of least resistance. Least resistance is the idea of “it’s going to happen anyway, so there’s no real point in pushing back.” In Pushkin’s “Queen of Spades”, chance and fate seem to endlessly intertwine themselves to the point where there appears to be a third force somewhat dictating their actions. In some instances, the lives of the characters seem to be going in a set path (Fate). At other instances, it appears as if had this not just happened to happen at this point in time, this person’s life wouldn’t have been affected in this way (Chance). Are Fate and Chance separate forces, or puppets on the strings of another power? Chances are, they’re one in the same.

The play opens with a man, Tomsky, who “just so happens” to be telling the story of his grandmother and how she “fatefully” came upon the secret to wealth. First, looking at it from the chance perspective, had this not happened, life would have been altered for many people. Countess Anna Fedrova, Countess A-----, is the person who puts the order of chance happenings in motion. Had she not been born, had she been “damaged” in some way earlier in life, had she not married the man she did, and many other “what ifs" and “if onlys" could have stopped the series of events from occurring. But, “by chance”, all of these things did happen. “By chance”, a man who would be interested in learning the secret of the three winning cards was listening to Tomsky. Again, had his life not gone the way it had, he might not have been around Tomsky in the first place. “By chance”, he was. The pattern of “by chance” is set up early in the story. The entire story was written “by chance”, which makes an interesting parallel to real life. Had Pushkin not been born, we would not have the story, and so forth.

Or was it fate? Was Countess A----- destined to be at the card game that caused her to lose her money which caused her to become desperate, and ultimately be given the secret? All this was set up for her to continue living the life she was accustomed to and by doing so gave birth and had assistants, and lived to be very old. This set up for the rest of the events to take place. At times, it appears that everything is happening for a reason; as if a coin were flipped and it was known what the result would be and due to the result being pre-ordained and not left to chance, something would happen. Or to relate more to the story, had she never learned the secret, she wouldn’t be killed because of it.

“ ‘Money is not necessary,’ replied St. Germaine: ‘be

pleased to listen to me.’

‘Then he revealed to her a secret, for which each of us

would pay a great deal…’”

(Pushkin, pp. 3)

But discussing fate as an inevitability goes against the notion of free will. If we cannot escape our fate, are we actually making the choices at all?

Instep the third force. The Puppeteer. God. If fate has goals, who sets them? When this question is asked, another force happens to be created. When this happens, chance and fate may be more easily meshed. God set a goal for Fate to strive toward. Fate achieves this by acts of Chance. Acts of chance are based on our decisions. With this line of thinking, fate and free will can exist. Some would argue that if God is setting our goals, then we have no free will. A rebuttal to that would be that we have the freedom to choose how we get there. The God Force could easily explain how things come to be. This gives rise to infinite possibilities to how the story could progress. For example, God wants to test Hermann at some point in time. Because of a timeline built on fate, Tomsky is born and Hermann by chance hears of the three winning cards. Because Hermann made the choice to listen to Tomsky’s tale, he is tempted and a fate’s goal is complete.

One problem with using the God Force to explain the story is that it contradicts with the religious ideology of Russia which was at the time composed of an atheism enforcing government. Yet again, Pushkin did make reference to Mephisto, which is a reference to Goethe’s “Faustus”. Mephisto is another word