Nightmare (The Queen of Spades)
"The three. seven and ace haunted him in dreams, assuming every sort of guise"
Surrealist interpretation.
©2014 ANNA+ELENA=BALBUSSO ART www.balbusso.com
"The Queen of spades and others stories" by Alexander Pushkin, Folio Society 2014
ILLUSTRATED BOOK
The cover and two interior illustrations are dedicated to the famous short story "The Queen of Spades".
Pushkin wrote the story in autumn 1833.
About the story: In the story a Russian officer of German ancestry named Hermann learns that a fellow officer’s grandmother, an old countess, possesses the secret of winning at faro, a high-stakes card game. Hermann begins a liaison with Lizaveta, the countess’s impoverished young ward, to gain access to the old woman, but when the countess refuses to reveal the secret, he threatens her with a pistol and she dies of fright. The night of her funeral, he dreams that the countess has told him the winning cards—three, seven, and ace. Hermann then places bets on the three and seven and wins. After betting everything on the ace, which wins, Hermann is horror-stricken to see that he is holding not the ace but the queen of spades, who seems to smile up at him as did the countess from her casket.
The ghost Countess (The Queen of Spades)
"The door opened: A woman in a white dress came in..."
