The Queen of Spades

The Queen of Spades is an 1834 novella by Russian writer Alexander Pushkin, first published in the literary magazine Biblioteka dlya chteniya. It follows Hermann, an ambitious military officer who becomes obsessed with learning an elderly countess's secret formula for winning at cards, a fixation that leads to her death and his own descent into madness. Blending supernatural suggestion with psychological realism, the novella explores themes of greed, fate and the uncertain line between reality and delusion, and it later inspired Tchaikovsky's 1890 opera of the same name. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/