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His deeply fixated mind does not even see the addiction of the game itself; he does not play it because of the uncertainty of wining, the true aim of his pure gambling obsession. This central motif of compulsion shadows him throughout the story as he wins Lizaveta's heart through obsessively looking at her, and is haunted in every day life by the numbers the ghost discloses. When the prospect of certain winning reveals itself, Herman's obsessive character explodes, revealing his true, ailing nature. A sick man, or simply an unlucky fellow, Hermann ends up living in a game of cards by the end of the story, leading the reader from discrete manifestation of his pathology to a fully exposed disorder. His peak of obsession is shown in Lizaveta's room where he can only feel bad for killing the countess before finding the secret, the perfect sign of amorality in a mentally ill man. However, as realistically and strongly built this character is, Pushkin does not take away the tension from the reader. Hermann is surrounded by a world of magic where everything is a play of numbers. The prevalence of threes and sevens in everything happening make the reader wander of her own sanity. Additionally, the construct of the story is that of a game of cards where each player ponders about his move, makes a decision and plays a card, and then tensely awaits for the others to play as well. We see each character play along, in fashionable order, and we always leave a protagonist in tension while following another protagonist's move. This amazing symmetry combined with the number play, question Hermann's loss of mental abilities and raise the issue of a fantastic gambling superpower having all the characters in the story as cards to play with. The only time the symmetry breaks is at the end, where Hermann (or the revengeful countess) disintegrate the castle of playing cards built so subtly until that point, and make the reader land rather forcibly into reality.
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Remembrance
by Aleksandr Pushkin
When the loud day for men who sow and reap
Grows still, and on the silence of the town
The unsubstantial veils of night and sleep,
The meed of the day's labour, settle down,
Then for me in the stillness of the night
The wasting, watchful hours drag on their course,
And in the idle darkness comes the bite
Of all the burning serpents of remorse;
Dreams seethe; and fretful infelicities
Are swarming in my over-burdened soul,
And Memory before my wakeful eyes
With noiseless hand unwinds her lengthy scroll.
Then, as with loathing I peruse the years,
I tremble, and I curse my natal day,
Wail bitterly, and bitterly shed tears,
But cannot wash the woeful script away.
--Translated by Maurice Baring
From "World Poetry," edited by Katharine Washburn, John S. Major and Clifton Fadiman (W.W. Norton: 1,338 pp.) |
