Demonism in «The queen of spades» by A.S. Pushkin from the perspective of semiotics of cards and card game

The article is dedicated to the semiotic analysis of demonism in the short story «The Queen of Spades» by A.S. Pushkin. The irrational appears not only on the characters’ imaginary level and in certain narrative elements, but also is supposed to be the foundation of the entire text connected with the ambiguity of cards as the object of two different semiotic systems that are a card game and a divination. In the article, the correlation between these systems and their alteration in the structure of the short story and in the main character’s consciousness are considered gradually; that might lead to the original approach to Germann’s «mistake» which is corresponded both to the main character’s immanent demonism and to the infernal connotations of semiotic systems exploited by him. The article is based on Russian literary critics and works by Y.M. Lotman on semiotics of culture.