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This chapter provides a detailed description of Prokofiev's scores for the 1937 Pushkin centennial, specifically his incidental music for theatrical productions of Boris Godunov and Eugene Onegin, and his score for a filmed version of The Queen of Spades. For political reasons, these three prestigious commissions went unrealized, obliging Prokofiev to recycle the music in other, later scores. The chapter details Prokofiev's collaborations with Meyerhold, the director Alexander Tairov, the writer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, and the filmmaker Mikhaíl Romm. Attention is paid to his theatrical and cinematic innovations, and to his effort to distance himself creatively from the operatic influences of Musorgsky and Chaikovsky.

This chapter offers a detailed empirical study of English swiping (e.g. What about?) and dialect Dutch spading (e.g. Wie dat? ‘who that’). The basic properties of both constructions are outlined and illustrated with examples. Both of them are shown to occur only with simple wh-phrases, to require stress on the stranded element, and to be restricted to sluicing contexts. Moreover, a swiped preposition is necessarily antecedentless, and spading stems from a cleft and induces a ‘surprise’-reading.

This chapter contains the analysis of English swiping and dialect Dutch spading and shows how the basic properties of these constructions follow from that analysis. Swiping is argued to involve preposition stranding in the lower specCP, while spading involves focus movement of the demonstrative to that position. The fact that both constructions only occur in sluicing is analyzed as a repair effect induced by ellipsis, while the fact that complex wh-phrases are excluded is the result of sluicing with complex wh-phrases deleting not IP but a low CP.

Swiping and spading can cooccur in one and the same example in Frisian. This chapter shows that the analysis of such sentences follows straightforwardly from the individual analyses outlined in the previous chapter. The chapter also takes issue with Merchant's (2002:310) claim that Frisian lacks swiping, arguing that the ill-formedness of Merchant's example follows from independent differences between English and Frisian regarding the possibility of putting stress on stranded prepositions.

This chapter introduces and discusses previous analyses of both spading and swiping, and argues that all of them suffer from shortcomings when confronted with the full set of data. The accounts discussed are Hoekstra (1993), a straw man analysis of spading as pseudosluicing, Kim (1997), Richards (2001), Merchant (2002) and Hartman (2007).

This chapter further extends the data set of this book in two ways. First of all, it briefly discusses the occurrence of spading in Eastern Norwegian and French. Secondly, it focuses on two other instances of stranding under sluicing: the stranding of the adverb dan ‘then’ in Dutch and the stranding of adverbial modifiers such as exactly. The former is shown to be substantially different from spading (despite superficial similarities), while the latter is shown to interact in an interesting way with both spading and swiping. In particular, the fact that a swiped preposition and a spaded demonstrative can intervene between a sluiced wh-phrase and an adverbial modifier indicates that the two do not form a constituent at Spell-Out and that the adverbial modifier is stranded inside the CP-domain as well. As such, swiping and spading can be used as a constituency diagnostic for sluiced phrases.

The first scene of the opera Queen of Spades introduces major leitmotifs associated with double passions—love and gambling—which, though contrasting, share an identical melody. Unexpected, surprising dualities, doubles, pairings penetrate both Pushkin’s tale and Tchaikovsky’s score. Gherman, by his very name linked to St. Germain (the original owner of the secret of three winning cards), repeats, reverses and distorts his predecessor’s story. Young Liza is paired with the countess (her grandmother in Tchaikovsky) and at the same time with her friend Polina. Liza replays the tale of the shepherdess, which unfolds in three fragments performed (in reverse time) by three female characters—the love arietta borrowed from Grétry and sung by the countess (scene 4), the shepherdess’s idyllic union enacted by Liza and Polina in a play within a play (scene 3), and Polina’s elegiac romance (scene 2). In a story collapsing times and confusing identities, a riddle between creators and spectators, the female circle is extended and empowered by one more person, a silent monarchical shadow at the falling curtain of the third scene.

This chapter explores the interaction between the split-CP hypothesis and the syntax of sluicing. If there is more than one CP-projection, there is potential variation as to which part of the clausal structure is deleted by sluicing. When wh-movement targets a low CP-layer, IP is deleted, but when it targets a high CP-layer, it can be either IP or a low CP-projection that is deleted. The chapter argues for a significant difference between simple and complex wh-phrases, in which the former move from their theta positions through a lower CP-projection (CP₂) onto a higher one (CP₁), while the latter are directly base-generated in SpecCP₁. The chapter then examines the consequences of this proposal for the syntax of sluicing, showing how “swiping” and “spading” constructions in Dutch and Frisian indicate that in sluicing with complex wh-phrases, CP₂ is deleted, while in sluicing with simple wh-phrases, IP is deleted.

In the last five years of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's life, celebrity obscured his real preoccupations, the most important of which was his muse, the ability to compose. His accomplishment in those years comprised The Sleeping Beauty, The Queen of Spades, Souvenir de Florence, Iolanta, The Nutcracker, and Sixth Symphony. If the composer's difficulties with Iolanta and The Nutcracker bespeak faltering inspiration, there remain four big works composed or completed in the fluent manner of old. The Sleeping Beauty, The Queen of Spades, and Souvenir were completed in 1889–1890 and Sixth Symphony in the winter of 1893. Being written out is no childish complaint. Nor is it accidental that Pyotr Ivanovich Jurgenson published during this time some old pieces of overtures. The first performance of the Sixth spanned the high and low points of his inspiration and included his last completed work, the Third Piano Concerto.

This chapter conflates two previously published pieces: “A Masterpiece of Musical Surrealism” and “Why the Queen of Spades Is the Great Symbolist Opera.” At the beginning of the year 1888, a composer named Nikolai Semyonovich Klenovsky (1853–1915), who worked as a staff conductor at the Moscow Bolshoi Theater and had produced several ballets there, decided it was time to try his hand at an opera. At the recommendation of his boss, Ivan Alexandrovich Vsevolozhsky, the intendant of the Russian Imperial Theaters, Klenovsky turned to Modest Ilyich Chaikovsky, the famous composer's younger brother, who had begun making a name for himself as a dramatist, with a request that Chaikovsky furnish him with a libretto on the subject of Pushkin's novella The Queen of Spades.

This chapter assesses the destroyed landscape of war and the cities of earth that soldiers built to survive, crafting a semi-urban space using standard issue spades and attempting to recreate aspects of civilian life. During the Great Patriotic War, survival at the front was virtually impossible without the help of an ancient hand tool: the spade. Indeed, the idea of the spade as a loyal friend became a major trope of military propaganda. That such a humble object received so much attention is telling. The spade was the key to soldiers' reading, shaping, and using the landscape. The soldier's small spade was an anonymous object, standard to everyone, and manuals taught soldiers to dig trenches according to a regular plan, yet Red Army soldiers excavated highly personalized spaces. Ultimately, the small, relatively primitive object and the labor it facilitated were central to the experience of millions of people in one of the most technologically advanced conflicts in world history.

This chapter focuses on the world of enlightened improvement that inspired the drainage scheme at Blair Drummond. It begins at the Select Society of Edinburgh, the premier venue for intellectual debates in Scotland in the period of the Seven Years' War. The savants and literati convened here to discuss the advantages and risks of commercialization, in which the judge James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, and Presbyterian minister Robert Wallace promoted a mode of husbandry that maximized the number of people working the land. This intellectual agenda carried over into the newly established Board for the Annexed Estates, a government body set up to manage the confiscated properties of Jacobite rebels. This blend of debate, field work, and estate management led to a vision of spade husbandry as a counterweight that balanced the social costs associated with conventional forms of agricultural improvement.

Immediately following his repatriation in 1936, Prokofiev composed his second film score, this one for a screen adaptation of Alexander Pushkin's The Queen of Spades. Although the film was never finished, the chapter shows that Prokofiev's completed score demonstrates a continued interest in economy and minimal means. Further considered in the chapter is Prokofiev's intentional politicization of his aesthetic goals: the composer positioned his new simplicity as an ideal musical answer to the ideological goals of state-sponsored events planned for the centenary of Pushkin's death.

This chapter examines Pyotr Ilyich Chaikovsky's opera The Queen of Spades, which was based on Alexander Pushkin's short story. It identifies the symbolist and expressionist traits in the opera and suggests that it was a quintessentially Petersburgian tale that absorbed into itself and powerfully contributed to the peculiar spirit of a symbolist city. It also discusses how the sounds of Chaikovsky's The Queen of Spades became an overture to the symbolist drama of an imperial city on the road to its collapse.

This chapter surveys how in the late 1950s certain queer men found new ways of orienting themselves within the metropolitan landscape. It focuses on the queer journalist and novelist Colin MacInnes and his works, such as City of Spades, Absolute Beginners, and Mr. Love and Justice, which expressed an increased engagement with metropolitan consumerism, expansive urban media, and proliferating forms of popular culture. The chapter also analyzes MacInnes’ writings about the urban youth culture, in which he voiced a developing form of queer sensibility that is accustomed to the shifting metropolitan landscapes of the later 1950s.

This chapter focuses on the reclamation of coastal wetlands, such as the marshes and fens that borders most of England's estuaries. These created a series of uniquely handcrafted landscapes. The management of reclaimed coastal wetlands is dominated by the need to deal with excess water. In the historic period, the reclamation consisted of a complex hierarchy of channels, ranging from plough-ridges and spade-dug ravines on the surface of fields, through minor field boundary ditches, major drainage channels, sewers, drains or dykes, and occasionally lakes. This chapter explains how the needs of navigation often outstripped the capacity of natural rivers and this lead to the construction of artificial canals.

This chapter explores the complex affiliations between crime stories by Dashiell Hammett, Georges Simenon, and Bertolt Brecht and their not necessarily synonymous responses to state repression in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and the growing interpenetration of crime, business, and the law. Paying particular attention to the comparative and transnational context, and the philosophical and political underpinnings of the stories, the chapter offers close readings of Hammett’s Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon, Simenon’s early Maigret novels and a selection of his roman durs, and Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. A series of illustrative tensions, whereby the state’s ethical and coercive tendencies are equally evident, are carefully teased out via interlinked and comparative readings of Simenon and Hammett, and Hammett and Brecht. Ultimately the inability of the crime story to effect meaningful social change is taken as a harbinger for the future direction of the genre.