A Spanish three-masted ship,

Ready to dock in Holland:

There are three hundred scoundrels on it,

Two monkeys, barrels of gold,

Yes, a rich cargo of chocolat,

Yes, a fashionable disease: it

Recently given to you.

Pushkin could not write in plain text - he used the Aesopian language, nevertheless, this language was so transparent that it was understandable to his contemporaries, and even more so to the Freemasons themselves. The Freemasons called the lodge a ship. The presence of three masts in a ship is an allusion to the three main degrees of initiation in Freemasonry: apprentice, apprentice, master. The fact that the ship is moving from Spain to Holland is a reference to the history of the Templars - the predecessors of the Freemasons, who were expelled from Spain and settled in Holland. In total, about six hundred people were involved in the Decembrist case, among them there were three hundred Freemasons [78]. Two monkeys are an allusion to the two leaders of northern and southern society, in response to the fact that one of them called Pushkin, who allowed himself critical remarks about their schemes, a monkey. Pushkin calls the Masonic teaching itself a fashionable disease. So it is incorrect to speak after these words about some ideological or even formal affiliation of Pushkin with Freemasonry. And also to believe that Pushkin saw in Freemasonry some ideals by which he was inspired and allegedly ready to suffer with the Freemasons for the sake of social truth, at least stupidly, because good people are not called scoundrels.

Finally, Pushkin debunked the Masonic worldview and showed the inconsistency of its ideals in The Queen of Spades. Alexander Sergeyevich did it in a very original form. Using artistic means, he expounded the Masonic religious myth, dressing it in well-known Masonic images and symbols, but providing it with Christian commentaries. The poet of light and harmony could not help but give answers to Masonic questions, could not help but denounce this religious myth. So his story is more of a philosophical and theological article than a work of fiction. It is even difficult to unambiguously determine the genre of this work, because Pushkin consciously writes a story, but unconsciously creates a revelatory Christian commentary on the multifaceted Masonic myth. Since myth is the worldview part of religion, Pushkin exposes the Masonic worldview in a mythological way.

About the Queen of Spades genre

The language used by Pushkin is so polysemantic that it acquires not so much an artistic as a symbolic meaning. And his narrative is so multifaceted that it is impossible even to describe all the plans he enters. The Freemasons themselves say that "there are as many planes as there are phenomena, that is, their number is infinite" [79]. Therefore, Pushkin tries to build his narrative in the same Masonic versatility. Pushkin prescribes some plans only as a hint, a certain stroke in the subordinate clause, so it is very difficult to comment on them with evidence. But, nevertheless, even the presence of such hints and allusions shows that Pushkin unconsciously strives to fill the myth with symbolic meanings that encompass all this mystical versatility. He builds a myth in accordance with the knowledge acquired by reading mystical literature.