"Grandmother," Tomsky says of this meeting, "still loves him without memory and is angry if they talk about him with disrespect" (270). Of St. Germain, Tomsky says that he "had a respectable appearance and was a very amiable man in society" (270). But Chekalinsky "was a man of the most respectable appearance" (292). Pushkin characterizes him as a person unusually amiable in his treatment and courteous. "Chekalinsky," writes Pushkin, "stopped after each throw to give the players time to give orders, wrote down the loss, politely listened to their demands, even more politely bent an extra corner bent by an absent-minded hand" (292). It is important to record this hint at direct kinship, not only spiritual, because the Kabbalistic tradition is a tribal tradition. And since this story is about the mystical heritage of the Russian nobility, this family feature in this context emphasizes the ironic nature of the heritage, because the nobility was proud of its ancestral origin. Pushkin seems to answer this proud claim of the nobility:

"Behold, what kind of family are you – your father is an eternal Jew, dedicated to St. Germain, and your mother is a prostitute who gave birth to you in the West, so that you are no longer Russian at all both in your spiritual and even clan origin." If we take into account that the name Lucifer (Venus) is also among the substitutable meanings, then this answer will sound even more categorical, directly in the Gospel: "Your father is the devil" (John 8:44). But this is only an associative circle of Pushkin's images and thoughts, and it would be wrong to believe that Pushkin creates this circle intentionally and meaningfully. On the other hand, this circle of associations is quite clearly revealed by the analysis of the material. And it becomes clear that this very material of the Masonic myth was well known to Pushkin.

Cultural

aspect

There are three types of culture that correspond to the goals that humanity sets for itself. This is eudaimonic culture, which is based on man's striving for happiness. Soteriological culture, in which the main goal of man is to achieve salvation. And culture is occult – its goal is the mastery of secret knowledge that gives power over the invisible and visible world.

Where social life exists, one of the forms of cultural life inevitably arises, for without such forms the life of society is impossible. The nobility, as a new society that entered the Russian life of the 18th century on a privileged basis, formed its own culture. This culture in its nature differed sharply from the culture that Russian society had been building up to that moment. If earlier the goal and meaning of building culture was salvation, the entire social life of Russia was subordinated to this goal, then the nobility brings completely different goals and meaning to Russian culture. As an estate freed from the social burden, it arranges its life not for salvation, but for enjoyment. Obtaining maximum pleasure from life (happiness, in the understanding of the nobility) becomes the goal and meaning of existence. Accordingly, the nobility also formed a new type of culture for Russia – eudaimonic.

Pushkin shows that this type of culture has a corrupting effect on the nobility – it destroys it morally and spiritually; that the fall of the nobility from organic tradition also has a tendency to further change culture, reducing it to magicism and occultism. "You can make my life happy" (283), says Hermann, addressing the countess. Hermann sees happiness in the money that the secret of three cards will give him. Using the example of Hermann, he illustrates this idea and shows all the disastrous consequences of the development of this kind of culture. Pushkin's Hermann is the personified embodiment of the entire nobility. Its German origin is a figurative expression of the nobility's inheritance of the Western spirit, of spiritual conception in the West. The action of The Queen of Spades itself takes place in St. Petersburg, as if in the West within Russia. The nobility, in Pushkin's understanding, is the bearer and heir of Western culture. This culture, planted on Russian soil, bears ugly fruits, produces the destruction of the soul and society.

Pushkin's Hermann is covered with a kind of romantic flair, it is not for nothing that Alexander Sergeyevich hints at his external resemblance to Napoleon. But under this mask lies the soul of Mephistopheles. In this discrepancy there is a bitter revelatory irony in relation to romanticism itself. Pushkin's contemporary, another writer who subtly feels the mystical content of images - N.V. Gogol - helps us to understand that this is so. In the story "Nevsky Prospekt" he focuses on two characters - Schiller and Hoffmann, but not on the same Schiller "who wrote William Tell and The History of the Thirty Years' War". This, as Gogol writes, was "the famous Schiller, a tinsmith in Meshchanskaya Street. Next to Schiller sat Hoffmann, not the writer Hoffmann, but a rather good shoemaker from Ofitserskaya Street, a great friend of Schiller's. Schiller was drunk and sitting on a chair"... Under the romantic camouflage hides a vulgar drunken muzzle. A gentle romantic breeze, quietly blowing from the West, brings a destructive revolutionary storm that puts drunken shoemakers and tinsmiths at the forefront of life. Pushkin and Gogol, long before this breeze grew into a storm, felt its pernicious breath. They both dressed these images in German clothes.

Everything German in the consciousness of a Russian person is associated with the theme of non-connection to the word – a "German" in the Russian language is someone who is dumb, who does not know how to speak. And since in Russia communion with culture was understood as communion with the word, then a "German" in the consciousness of a Russian person is one who is not introduced to Christian culture. Hence the connection of this image with evil spirits. At that time, the demon was thought of by the people and was depicted as a German in a tailcoat with long tails. Pushkin uses this image to characterize the nobility and the culture that it inculcated. The main result of such a culture is that it turns a person into an animal, deprives him of human personal dignity. All the characters are impersonal – Pushkin does not call them by name, they have only surnames, but this means that they, like animals, have only a genus [99]. With his brilliant intuition, Pushkin unconsciously encrypts this idea in the surname of an episodic, but very significant in the occult context of the story character – Chekalinsky. In the Russian language, this surname is actually identical to the surname Zverev. Dahl in his dictionary gives the meaning of the word chekalka - beast, jackal.