‘Сказка о золотом петушке’ А. С. Пушкина: Сюжет о добывании беды

We suggest an integral interpretation of Pushkin's ‘The Tale of the Golden Cockerel’. We argue that the Shamakhan Queen is nothing else than the disaster mentioned in the “guarantee” of the golden cockerel's work presented by the eunuch. The tsar turns out to be an unintentional seeker of Disaster, which the eunuch actually sends to obtain. Motifs of the magic disaster overlap with those of a human one, the source of a human disaster being a weak tsar behaving himself in a monstrous way. In Pushkin's work common fairytale elements are replaced by their negative counterparts and the “lack” becomes the constructive principle on its own. In this respect, the theme of castration, the explicit bearer of which is the eunuch, is embodied on the structural level.