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.

Psychological aspect

The most important aspect of myth is the psychological and spiritual aspect. It is interesting in this sense to pay attention to the fact that everything in the story is described as if through Hermann. He is present everywhere, if not directly, then invisibly standing somewhere, hiding around the corner of the house. If he is not in the next scene, then the action unfolds as if for him or in connection with him.

It is no accident that Pushkin, although in one of the epigraphs, introduces the Swedish mystic Swedenborg into the context of the story. The fact is that Swedenborg is one of those mystics who are inclined to interpret the Scriptures exclusively symbolically.

He interprets historical biblical events as changes that occur within a person. Responding to this interpretation, Pushkin constructs his story in exactly the same way. Therefore, everything that happens in the story is revealed only in the context of the fact that this action takes place inside a person. The characters are only personifications of certain realities of man himself, such as the mind, heart, will, wisdom, etc. But Pushkin, already following the patristic tradition, shows that all these realities live in man in isolation. And this disunity is the result of the Fall. St. Basil the Great, explaining this phenomenon, wrote: "Sin has divided human nature into many warring parts." In the same way, Pushkin paints a picture not only of internal disunity in man, in which individual parts live in accordance with their own desires, but also a picture of the enmity of these parts among themselves.

In Hermann, Pushkin constantly singles out two main psychological traits: the inflexibility of his desires (strong passions) and the unbridled imagination (277, 280), and at the same time he calls his imagination also fiery. "Imagination," according to the Holy Fathers, "is an irrational force, acting for the most part mechanically, according to the laws of the combination of images" [101]. Lucifer was the first to descend into such a state of "multi-component imagination", "dreaming and filling his mind with images of equality with God" [102]. Following him, Adam was plunged into "a sensual, multi-component, multi-form, immersed in images and dreams." To be "immersed in images or to live in them and under the influence of them is a property of irrational animals, and not of rational beings" [103]. Strong passions and unbridled imagination lead Hermann to what in the patristic tradition is called prelest. The world that attracts him is an imaginary world, a game world, as it is customary to say now, virtual. And the money itself, which is the purpose and meaning of this game, is also virtual reality. They are that which is adequate to any thing, but in themselves have no value. Hermann was drawn into this fantastic world by his unbridled fantasy – his imagination fills this world with a kind of reality. But this virtual world is the product of his passions, of his unbending will to the unreal world. However, this unreal world is still a reality, but only in one sense – it is the realization of his freedom. That is why Pushkin's Hermann himself is a hero, personifying the will within man, but a vicious will, perverted by passions. The fact that Pushkin understood well the patristic teaching on the imagination is confirmed by his statement about the creative process. "Delight excludes tranquility, a necessary condition for beauty," writes Pushkin, "rapture does not offer the power of the mind, which disposes the parts in their relation to the whole. Rapture is short-lived, inconstant, and, consequently, unable to produce true, great perfection" [105].