Читает книгу: Jason Dettrey

The Queen of Spades is a short story with supernatural elements by Alexander Pushkin about human avarice. Pushkin wrote the story in autumn 1833 in Boldino and it was first published in the literary magazine Biblioteka dlya chteniya in March 1834. The story was the basis of the operas The Queen of Spades (1890) by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, La dame de pique (1850) by Fromental Halevy and Pique Dame (1864) by Franz von Suppe (the overture to the Suppe work is all that remains in today’s repertoire). It has been filmed numerous times. Hermann, an ethnic German, is an officer of the…

Lazarus is 1906 short story by Leonid Andreyev. The story is a speculation about the life of the Biblical Lazarus after Jesus brings him out of the tomb. And when the scarlet, flattened globe would lower, Lazarus would set out for the desert and walk straight toward the sun, as though striving to reach it. He always walked straight toward the sun and those who tried to follow him and to spy upon what he was doing at night in the desert, retained in their memory the black silhouette of a tall stout man against the red background of an enormous flattened disc. Other works of Andreyev’s…