"The Queen of Spades" is decidedly one of Pushkin's gloomier tales, which inspired several movie adaptations and a magnificent opera by Tchaikovsky. Its determined but misguided protagonist stakes his life on a very old secret that might or might not even exist - with dire consequences.
50 Masterpieces you have to read before you die
Frances Hodgson Burnett, Homer, Charles Dickens, Lyman Frank Baum, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Haggard, Wilkie Collins, H.G. Wells, Sir Walter Scott, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Louisa May Alcott, Henry Fielding, Mary Shelley, Arthur Conan Doyle, Leo Tolstoy, Euripides, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alexander Pushkin, James Fenimore Cooper, Daniel Defoe, Joseph Conrad, Jonathan Swift, William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, John Bunyan, Charles Darwin, Alfred Tennyson, Bram Stoker, James Joyce, Dante Alighieri, Howard Pyle, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Giovanni Boccaccio, Rudyard Kipling
