Pushkin in A. Makhov’s New Emblematica

The article is based on the material of the recently published A. Makhov’s Emblematica: Microcosm. Pushkin is included in the “personal pantheon” of A. Makhov, being a link between the main research worlds of the scholar: emblem studies, the history of Russian and European poetics, the history of European Romanticism, etc. By Pushkin’s “presence”, we mean not only mentions of Pushkin’s name and direct quotations from his writings, but also more or less easily readable convergences at the topic level. Makhov’s new book is devoted to man as a subject of European emblems of the 16th and 17th centuries; an important place in it is occupied by the study of the human body as the language of emblems and the source of signs, the application of the main four combinatorial operations in the creation of emblematic composite images. When interpreting European emblems, associations with Pushkin’s work constantly arise — for example, the figure of the conciliatio of the stingy rich and poor, expressed in the topos “rich is poor”, allows a Russian reader to see a parallel with Pushkin’s “The Miserly Knight”; the topos of “vain flight from love, the incurable love disease” — with his lyrics. The method of reading “through the prism of Pushkin” used in the article allows us to look at the rich material of the monograph at least in two aspects: to shed new light on Pushkin’s connection with European emblems and to incorporate his work even more deeply into the European cultural tradition; to see how the Pushkin principle can serve as a kind of core, an immanent dominant in interpretations of European cultural realities by such a multi-world scholar as A. Makhov.