Money, Greed, And Empathy In Two Russian Short Stories: Ivan Bunin „The Gentleman From San Francisco“ And Alexander Pushkin „The Queen Of Spades”

Money, greed, and empathy in two Russian short stories: Ivan Bunin „The Gentleman from San Francisco“ and Alexander Pushkin „The Queen of Spades”.

Money does make the world go around, but how much do we need to make it us happy and is the only thing that elevates us into that state. The significance of money is not going away anytime soon, money solves a lot of problems, provides comfort and pleasure, but would it buy happiness. Two Russian short story characters depicted from two different time eras, social statuses and greed levels will try to answer that question. How important for us is our riches and whether it makes us more humane or apathetic?

At first impression it seems that gentlemen like to place himself above all the others, calling them “ragamuffins” (Bunin, 165) yet at the end, it turns out that he is just an ordinary person, no better than the anyone else. After the protagonist`s sudden death, everything changes dramatically. The death of a person is sickening to others no one wants to see, be in any part of it or have any empathy towards his family. The dead body is transferred into the worst room in the hotel. To gentlemen’s family request for “a plain coffin” as if a reference that money does not always buy everything, rich he was or not; instead of a coffin they were offered only an empty English soda water box. People are heartless; they care only about money, not human sorrow. Empathy is the capacity to understand the position of others accurately, to feel that “this could happen to me” is missing from surrounding people. It is symbolic of how the writer right after “gentlemen's” dead vividly depicts sunny Capri surroundings and laborers as if they live a simple poor living and working hard but are happy. If we were secretly condemning protagonist for his arrogance and poise against others, yet all others are no better than him, they are merely missing one vital feeling - empathy.