"Un'immagine non muore mai"

From the seventeenth century the circulation of images between the West and Eastern Slavia is a significant phenomenon in Russia. The paper analyses the subject of "The devil of money", represented in some variants (from the 1770s to the beginning of the twentieth century) in Russian prints widely diffused (lubok). The subject is an elaboration of the French print "Le diable d’argent", which found success over the centuries (from the 1680s to the second half of the twentieth century) in France. The comparison between Russian and French prints highlights some peculiarities of Russian and French culture, encouraging a reflection on the productive and interesting relationship between svoe and čužoe, in the elaboration and russification, in the passage of a subject from a culture to the other.