L. E. ULITSKAYA’S THE QUEEN OF SPADES AS THE PALIMPSEST OF PUSHKIN’S SHORT STORY

“The Queen of Spades” by Alexander Pushkin opens a number of Russian novels on the theme of Napoleonism, card game, chance and fate.In Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades” lack of money at the beginning and no hope of getting it could have caused a change of Hermann’s “Napoleonian” worldview, but the failure to implement the necessary shift both in his thinking and in his language, leads to his complete collapse and symbolic death. This paper discusses only a few aspects of the intertextual connection between the two versions of “The Queen of Spades”. Intertextual techniques allow us to come closer to both a new understanding of Pushkin’s story and an interpretation of that story by Ulitskaya. The artistic language of the postmodern Russian prose works is defined not only by stylistic and other features, or by the complete absence of traditional poetic means. As it turns out from this analysis, the theme problems appear to be also somewhat different in the modern interpretation of the classical story. This paper demonstrates the way Lyudmila Ulitskaya, in the short story “The Queen of Spades”, decisively changes both the images of the characters, the plot and narrative, and the metaphorical plan of Pushkin’s short novel “The Queen of Spades”. Unlike the classic author, the modern writer uses more zoomorphic images, creating linguistic and semantic metaphors that demonstrate the present crisis situation in a new way. The images of cats and birds play an important role in demonstrating the relationship between predators and their victims, and in particular in uncovering an unsuccessful revolt against such a world order. It also follows that in Ulitskaya’s “The Queen of Spades” the zoomorphic images are not only new components of rethinking the classical literary text, but also components for transferring the semantic accent from Pushkin’s “fate” to the questions of “women’s life”. So not only the plot of the short novel is changed, but other components of the original text’s poetic system are transformed in the postmodern text.