Опыт прочтения повести А. С. Пушкина «Метель»: два да едино будет …

ABSTRACT The technique of close reading invites us to focus on particular points in the text that helps understand it as a work of art. In Puškin’s “Snowstorm” such points include the image of a snowstorm, literary clichés, paroemia like you cannot get around your intended on a horse (что суженого конем не объедешь), as well as several specific items, such as a Tula signet ring with a symbolic image of two burning hearts. And, strange as it may seem, the story’s happy ending is anticipated by “a suitable motto” casually mentioned in connection with the Tula signet ring – as a figure of silence without explanation in the text, but easily guessed by Puškin’s contemporaries as a motto accompanying the image of two burning hearts in the Dictionary of symbols and emblems (number 120), re-issued in St Petersburg in 1811. In this article, I offer a reading of the story as a rhetorical amplification of the “suitable motto” engraved on the Tula signet ring: Ut duo unum componant (‘That two may make but one’). I suggest to interpret this poetic design as a narrative program, incorporated into the text and structuring the narrative flow of the story.