Abstract
The last Pushkin’s "small tragedy" absorbs the meaning of many subjects of a cycle, expanding and deepening them. It is the most tragic, but the merriest of these plays. The feast appears in the tragedy as the last refuge of the lost people. Of all the attributes of a feast in Pushkin’s play there is only "table", "wine", "fun", "songs", the rest is absent including food. Pushkin’s "feast" image acquires a wider semantic meaning. For the characters of the last Pushkin’s "small tragedy" the feast is neither Trizna for the dead, nor epicurean praise of life. In the collision of "plague" and "feast" the formula is built: the collision of the life and death associated with a continuous cycle – "life-death-life".
Keywords
"Small tragedies", a feast, plague, death, life, to die – to revive, Christian, pagan, revivalist