•Why it earns a slot
Pushkin's story is a foundational text of Russian prose fiction and a precise study of how greed warps reason, using the supernatural not to resolve ambiguity but to deepen it, since the reader never knows whether the ghost was real or Herman's delusion caused his own downfall.
A calculating Russian officer named Herman becomes obsessed with a secret three-card gambling formula supposedly known by an elderly Countess. He terrorizes the old woman into her grave, receives the secret from her ghost, wins twice at faro, then loses everything on the final card and ends his days in a madhouse.
This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: gutenberg.org.