On Nihilism Of Russian Nation In The First Half Of The 19^Th Century

The Queen of Spades, as one of Alexander Pushkin’s representative works, was written in 1833. This novelette shows that Pushkin’s thoughts and skills of literary creation has achieved maturity at that time. As many Russian scholars have referred, the novelette has adopted a realistic narrative method, but meanwhile full of romantic fantasies within the realistic frame, which has formed a world with reality and fantasies. This has also made readers confused when trying to understand characters’ mentality, behavioral motive and main idea of the works. This dissertation is divided into four chapters. In the first chapter, the structural analysis method is applied to analyze space and time of the narrative. Through the analysis, we discover that Pushkin has built up two separate complete dimensions and two kinds of conflicting time in the world of the novelette, which is helpful for figuring out the motive of Herman choosing gambling card games as a way to wealth and the essence of his choice; then the thesis analyzes the characters of Herman. In the second chapter, the dissertation tries to discuss the social background of the novelette of the first half of the 19th century. Then in the third chapter, the thesis analyzes characters of Russian culture of that time, having found that not only national institutes but also cultural core were deeply under influence of German factors, thus there were cultural conflict of the West and the East. In the last chapter, the dissertation concentrates on nihilism of the Russian nation in the first half of the 19th century, which is a result of the above-mentioned factors. According to the study of the structure and contents of The Queen of Spades, we have explored the specific characters of society, culture and national spirits of Russia of that time.