Master of his own fate The first thing that struck me about "The Queen of Spades" by Alexander Pushkin is its elegant simplicity. In less than thirty pages, Pushkin has managed to portray a complex character and tell an enthralling psychological tale. The romantic in the story is not Tomskii but Hermann, who is at the same time the calculating German and the imaginative and obsessive Russian. Hermann is established as an outsider on the …showed first 75 words of 1495 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1495 total…and Chaplitskii deserved the "magic" of the winning combination because they were honest gamblers and had taken the risk in the first place and paid their price in that way. It is ironic that while in the beginning Hermann refuses to take any risk at all, in the end he takes the greatest risk of all, after having been tricked into thinking - by none other than himself - that he has beaten the system.