Alexander Genis - Native speech. belles-lettres lessons

P. Weil and A. Genis are Russian writers formed in the West - authors of fascinating and subtle essays. In their new book, with brilliance, wit and grace, the authors show a fresh and unconventional view of Russian literature.

The book is addressed to language teachers, high school students and all lovers of good prose.

FOREWORD
Andrei Sinyavsky. FUN CRAFT

Someone decided that science must necessarily be boring. Probably to make her more respected. Boring means a solid, reputable enterprise. You can invest. Soon there will be no place left on earth in the midst of serious garbage heaps erected to the sky.

But once science itself was revered as a good art and everything in the world was interesting. Mermaids flew. Angels splashed. Chemistry was called alchemy. Astronomy is astrology. Psychology - palmistry. The story was inspired by the Muse from Apollo's round dance and contained an adventurous romance.

And now what? Reproduction reproduction?

The last refuge is philology. It would seem: love for the word. And in general, love. Free air. Nothing forced. Lots of fun and fantasy. So is science here. They put numbers (0.1; 0.2; 0.3, etc.), poked footnotes, provided, for the sake of science, with an apparatus of incomprehensible abstractions, through which one could not break through ("vermeculite", "grubber", "loxodrome", "parabiosis", "ultrarapid"), rewrote all this in a deliberately indigestible language - and here you are, instead of poetry, another sawmill for the production of countless books.

Already at the beginning of the century, idle book dealers thought: "Sometimes you wonder - does humanity really have enough brains for all books? There are not as many brains as there are books!" “Nothing,” our cheerful contemporaries object to them, “soon only computers will read and produce books. And people will get to take products to warehouses and landfills!”

Against this industrial background, in the form of opposition, in refutation of the gloomy utopia, it seems to me that the book by Peter Weil and Alexander Genis, "Native Speech", arose. The name sounds archaic. Almost rustic. Smells like childhood. Sen. rural school. It is fun and entertaining to read, as befits a child. Not a textbook, but an invitation to reading, to divertissement. It is proposed not to glorify the famous Russian classics, but to look into it at least with one eye and then fall in love. The concerns of "Native Speech" are of an ecological nature and are aimed at saving the book, at improving the very nature of reading. The main task is formulated as follows: "The book was studied and - as often happens in such cases - they practically stopped reading." Pedagogy for adults, in the highest degree, by the way, well-read and educated persons.

"Native speech", murmuring like a stream, is accompanied by unobtrusive, easy learning. She suggests that reading is co-creation. Everyone has their own. It has a lot of permissions. Freedom of interpretation. Let our authors eat the dog in belles lettres and give out completely original imperious decisions at every step, our business, they inspire, is not to obey, but to pick up any idea on the fly and continue, sometimes, perhaps, in the other direction. Russian literature is presented here in the image of the expanse of the sea, where every writer is his own captain, where sails and ropes are stretched from Karamzin's "Poor Liza" to our poor "villagers", from the story "Moscow - Petushki" to "Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow".

Reading this book, we see that the eternal and, indeed, unshakable values ​​do not stand still, pinned, like exhibits, according to scientific headings. They - move in the literary series and in the reader's mind and, it happens, are part of the later problematic achievements. Where they will swim, how they will turn tomorrow, no one knows. The unpredictability of art is its main strength. This is not for you studying proccess, not progress.

"Native speech" by Weil and Genis is an update of speech that encourages the reader, even if he is seven spans in his forehead, to re-read the entire school literature. This technique, known since ancient times, is called estrangement.

To use it, you need not so much, just one effort: to look at reality and at works of art with an unbiased look. As if you were reading them for the first time. And you will see: behind every classic beats a living, just discovered thought. She wants to play.

FROM THE AUTHORS

For Russia, literature is a starting point, a symbol of faith, an ideological and moral foundation. You can interpret history, politics, religion, national character, but as soon as you say "Pushkin", the ardent antagonists nod their heads joyfully and in unison.

Of course, only literature that is recognized as classical is suitable for such mutual understanding. Classics is a universal language based on absolute values.

Russian literature of the golden 19th century has become an indivisible unity, a kind of typological community, before which the differences between individual writers recede. Hence the eternal temptation to find a dominant feature that delimits Russian literature from any others - the intensity of the spiritual search, or love of the people, or religiosity, or chastity.

However, with the same - if not greater - success, one could speak not about the uniqueness of Russian literature, but about the uniqueness of the Russian reader, who is inclined to see the most sacred national property in his favorite books. Touching a classic is like insulting your homeland.

Naturally, such an attitude develops from an early age. The main tool for the sacralization of the classics is the school. The lessons of literature played a tremendous role in shaping the Russian public consciousness, primarily because books opposed the educational claims of the state. At all times, literature, no matter how they struggled with it, revealed its internal inconsistency. It was impossible not to notice that Pierre Bezukhov and Pavel Korchagin are heroes of different novels. Generations of those who managed to maintain skepticism and irony in a society poorly adapted for this grew up on this contradiction.

However, the dialectic of life leads to the fact that the admiration for the classics, firmly learned in school, makes it difficult to see in it living literature. Books familiar from childhood become signs of books, standards for other books. They are taken off the shelf as rarely as the Parisian standard of meter.

Anyone who decides on such an act - to re-read the classics without prejudice - is faced not only with old authors, but also with himself. Reading the main books of Russian literature is like revisiting your biography. Life experience was accumulated along with reading and thanks to it. The date when Dostoevsky was first revealed is no less important than family anniversaries.

We grow with books - they grow in us. And once the time comes for a rebellion against the attitude to the classics invested in childhood. (Apparently, this is inevitable. Andrei Bitov once admitted: "I spent more than half of my work on fighting with the school literature course").

We conceived this book not so much to refute the school tradition, but to test - and not even her, but ourselves in it. All chapters of "Native Speech" strictly correspond to the program high school.

Of course, we do not hope to say anything essentially new about a subject that has occupied generations of the best minds in Russia. We just decided to talk about the most stormy and intimate events of our lives - Russian books.

Peter Vail, Alexander Genis

New York, 1989

Beetle formula. Turgenev

(About the novel "Fathers and Sons")

Peter Vail, Alexander Genis. Native speech. Graceful Lessons
Literature. - "Independent newspaper". 1991, Moscow

"Fathers and Sons" is perhaps the most noisy and scandalous book in Russian literature. Avdotya Panaeva, who did not like Turgenev very much, wrote: “I don’t remember that any literary work made so much noise and aroused so many conversations as Turgenev’s story Fathers and Sons. It can be positively said that Fathers and Sons were read even by such people who have not taken books in their hands since school.
It is precisely the fact that since then the book has been picked up just at the school bench, and only occasionally after, has deprived Turgenev's work of a romantic aura of resounding popularity. "Fathers and Sons" is perceived as a work of social service. And in fact, the novel is such a work. It is simply necessary, apparently, to separate what arose due to the author's intention, and what - contrary, by virtue of the very nature of art, which desperately resists attempts to put it at the service of something.
Turgenev quite succinctly described the new phenomenon in his book. A definite, concrete, today's phenomenon. Such a mood is already set at the very beginning of the novel: “What, Peter? can’t you see it yet?” he asked on May 20, 1859, going out on a low porch without a hat ...
It was very significant for the author and for the reader that such a year was in the yard. Previously, Bazarov could not appear. The achievements of the 1840s prepared for his arrival. The society was strongly impressed by natural scientific discoveries: the law of conservation of energy, the cellular structure of organisms. It turned out that all the phenomena of life can be reduced to the simplest chemical and physical processes, express in an accessible and convenient formula. Focht's book, the same one that Arkady Kirsanov gives his father to read - "Strength and Matter" - taught: the brain secretes thought, like the liver - bile. Thus, herself higher activity of a person - thinking - turned into a physiological mechanism that can be traced and described. There were no secrets.
Therefore, Bazarov easily and simply transforms the main position new science adapting it for different occasions. “You study the anatomy of the eye: where does the mysterious look come from, as you say? It’s all romanticism, nonsense, rot, art,” he says to Arkady. And logically ends: "Let's go and watch the beetle."
(Bazarov quite rightly contrasts two worldviews - scientific and artistic. Only their clash will end differently than it seems inevitable to him. Actually, Turgenev's book is about this - more precisely, this is her role in the history of Russian literature.)
In general, Bazarov's ideas boil down to "watching the beetle" - instead of pondering over enigmatic views. The beetle is the key to all problems. Bazarov's perception of the world is dominated by biological categories. In such a system of thinking, the beetle is simpler, the person is more complicated. Society is also an organism, only even more developed and complex than a person.

Turgenev saw a new phenomenon and was frightened of it. In these unprecedented people, an unknown force was felt. In order to realize it, he began to write down: "I painted all these faces, as if I were painting mushrooms, leaves, trees; they pricked my eyes - I began to draw."
Of course, one should not completely trust the author's coquetry. But it is true that Turgenev tried his best to maintain objectivity. And achieved this. As a matter of fact, this was precisely what made such a strong impression on the society of that time: it was not clear - for whom Turgenev?
The narrative fabric itself is extremely objectified. All the time one feels a zero degree of writing, uncharacteristic for Russian literature, where it is a question of a social phenomenon. In general, reading "Fathers and Sons" leaves a strange impression of a lack of alignment of the plot, looseness of the composition. And this is also the result of an orientation towards objectivity: as if not a novel is being written, but notebooks, memorabilia.
Of course, one should not overestimate the importance of intention in belles-lettres. Turgenev is an artist, and this is the main thing. The characters in the book are alive. The language is bright. How wonderfully Bazarov says about Odintsova: "A rich body. At least now to the anatomical theater."
But nevertheless, the scheme appears through the verbal fabric. Turgenev wrote a novel with a tendency. The point is not that the author openly takes sides, but that social problem. This is a novel on the subject. That is, as they would say now - engaged art. However, here a clash of scientific and artistic worldviews occurs, and the same miracle occurs that Bazarov completely denied. The book is by no means exhausted by the scheme of confrontation between the old and the new in Russia in the late 50s of the 19th century. And not because the author's talent built up high-quality artistic material on the speculative frame, which has independent value. The key to "Fathers and Sons" lies not above the scheme, but below it - in a deep philosophical problem that goes beyond both the century and the country.
The novel "Fathers and Sons" is about the collision of a civilizing impulse with the order of culture. The fact that the world, reduced to a formula, turns into chaos. Civilization is a vector, culture is a scalar. Civilization is made up of ideas and beliefs. Culture summarizes techniques and skills. The invention of the cistern is a sign of civilization. The fact that every house has a flush tank is a sign of culture.
Bazarov is a free and sweeping bearer of ideas. This looseness of his is presented in Turgenev's novel with mockery, but also with admiration. Here is one of the remarkable conversations: "- ... However, we philosophized quite a lot. "Nature evokes the silence of a dream," said Pushkin. "He never said anything like that," said Arkady. "Well, he didn't say so, he could and should have said as a poet. By the way, he must have served in the military. - Pushkin was never a military man! - For mercy, on every page he has: "To fight, to fight! for the honor of Russia!"
It is clear that Bazarov is talking nonsense. But at the same time, something very accurately guesses in the reading and mass perception of Pushkin by Russian society. Such courage is the privilege of a free mind. Enslaved thinking operates with ready-made dogmas. Uninhibited thinking turns a hypothesis into a hyperbole, a hyperbole into a dogma. This is the most attractive thing in Bazarov. But the most frightening thing, too.
Such Bazarov was remarkably shown by Turgenev. His hero is not a philosopher, not a thinker. When he speaks at length, these are usually calculations from popular scientific papers. When brief, he speaks sharply and sometimes witty. But the point is not in the ideas themselves that Bazarov expounds, but in the way of thinking, in absolute freedom ("Rafael is not worth a penny").
And Bazarov is opposed not by his main opponent - Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov - but by the way, order, respect for which Kirsanov professes ("Without principles taken on faith, one cannot take a step, one cannot breathe").
Turgenev destroys Bazarov, confronting him with the very idea of ​​a way of life. The author guides his hero through the book, consistently arranging exams for him in all spheres of life - friendship, enmity, love, family ties. And Bazarov consistently fails everywhere. The series of these examinations constitutes the plot of the novel.
Despite the differences in circumstances, Bazarov fails for the same reason: he invades order, rushing like a lawless comet - and burns out.
His friendship with Arkady, so devoted and faithful, ends in failure. Attachment does not withstand the tests of strength, which are carried out in such barbaric ways as the reviling of Pushkin and other authorities. The bride of Arkady Katya accurately formulates: "He is predatory, and we are tame." Manual - means living by the rules, keeping order.
The way of life is sharply hostile to Bazarov and in his love for Odintsova. This is strongly emphasized in the book, even by the simple repetition of literally the same words. “What do you need Latin names for?” Bazarov asked. “Everything needs order,” she answered.
And then the “order” that she brought in her house and life is described even more clearly. She strictly adhered to it and forced others to submit to it. Everything during the day was done at a certain time ... Bazarov did not like this measured, somewhat solemn regularity of daily life; “You’re rolling on rails,” he assured. Odintsova is frightened by the scope and uncontrollability of Bazarov, and the worst accusation in her lips is the words: “I begin to suspect that you are prone to exaggeration.” Hyperbole is the strongest and most effective trump card of Bazarov’s thinking - regarded as a violation of the norm.
The clash of chaos with the norm exhausts the theme of enmity, which is very important in the novel. Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov is also, like Bazarov, not a thinker. He is unable to oppose Bazarov's pressure with any articulated ideas and arguments. But Kirsanov acutely feels the danger of the very fact of Bazarov’s existence, while focusing not on thoughts and not even on words: “You deign to find my habits, my toilet, my neatness funny ... Kirsanov defends these seemingly trifles, because instinctively understands that the sum of trifles is culture. The same culture in which Pushkin, Raphael, clean nails and an evening walk are naturally distributed. Bazarov poses a threat to all this.
The civilizer Bazarov believes that somewhere there is a reliable formula for well-being and happiness, which you just need to find and offer to humanity ("Fix society, and there will be no diseases"). For the sake of finding this formula, some insignificant trifles can be sacrificed. And since any civilizer always deals with an already existing, established world order, he goes by the opposite method: not creating something anew, but first destroying what is already there.
Kirsanov, on the other hand, is convinced that well-being and happiness itself lie in accumulation, summation and preservation. The uniqueness of the formula is opposed by the diversity of the system. new life can't start on Monday.
The pathos of destruction and reorganization is so unacceptable to Turgenev that it forces Bazarov to ultimately lose outright to Kirsanov. The climactic event is a finely crafted fight scene. Depicted as a whole as an absurdity, the duel, however, is not out of place for Kirsanov. She is part of his heritage, his world, his culture, rules and "principles". Bazarov, on the other hand, looks pitiful in a duel, because he is alien to the system itself, which gave rise to such phenomena as a duel. He is forced to fight here on foreign territory. Turgenev even suggests that against Bazarov - something much more important and powerful than Kirsanov with a pistol: "Pavel Petrovich seemed to him a big forest, with which he still had to fight." In other words, at the barrier is nature itself, nature, the world order.
And Bazarov is finally finished off when it becomes clear why Odintsova renounced him: "She forced herself to reach a certain line, forced herself to look beyond her - and saw behind her not even an abyss, but emptiness ... or disgrace."
This is an important confession. Turgenev denies even greatness to the chaos that Bazarov brings, leaving only one bare disorder.
That is why Bazarov dies humiliatingly and pitifully. Although here the author retains complete objectivity, showing the strength of mind and courage of the hero. Pisarev even believed that by his behavior in the face of death, Bazarov put on the scales that last weight, which, ultimately, pulled in his direction.
But the cause of Bazarov's death is much more significant - a scratch on his finger. The paradoxical nature of the death of a young, flourishing, outstanding person from such an insignificant reason creates a scale that makes one think. It was not a scratch that killed Bazarov, but nature itself. He again invaded with his crude lancet (literally this time) of the transducer into the routine of life and death - and fell victim to it. The smallness of the cause here only emphasizes the inequality of forces. Bazarov himself is aware of this: "Yes, go try to deny death. She denies you, and that's it!"
Turgenev killed Bazarov not because he did not guess how to adapt this new phenomenon in Russian society, but because he discovered the only law that, at least theoretically, the nihilist does not undertake to refute.
The novel "Fathers and Sons" was created in the heat of controversy. Russian literature rapidly democratized, the priestly sons crowded out the nobles resting on "principles". "Literary Robespierres", "cookers-vandals" confidently walked, striving to "wipe poetry, fine arts, all aesthetic pleasures from the face of the earth and establish their coarse seminary principles" (all are Turgenev's words).
This, of course, is an exaggeration, a hyperbole - that is, a tool that, naturally, is more suitable for a destroyer-civilizer than for a cultural conservative, which was Turgenev. However, he used this tool in private conversations and correspondence, and not in belles-lettres.
The journalistic idea of ​​the novel "Fathers and Sons" was transformed into a convincing literary text. It sounds not even the author's voice, but the culture itself, which denies the formula in ethics, but does not find a material equivalent for aesthetics. The pressure of civilization breaks down on the foundations of the cultural order, and the diversity of life cannot be reduced to a beetle, which one must go to look at in order to understand the world.

Native speech. belles-lettres lessons Alexander Genis, Peter Vail

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Title: Native speech. belles-lettres lessons

About the book "Native speech. Lessons in belles lettres" Alexander Genis, Peter Vail

“Reading the main books of Russian literature is like revisiting your biography. Life experience was accumulated along with reading and thanks to it ... We grow with books - they grow in us. And once the time comes for a rebellion against the attitude to the classics invested in childhood,” wrote Peter Vail and Alexander Genis in the preface to the very first edition of their “Native Speech”.

The authors who emigrated from the USSR created a book in a foreign land, which soon became a real, albeit a little playful, monument to the Soviet school textbook of literature. We have not yet forgotten how successfully these textbooks forever discouraged schoolchildren from any taste for reading, instilling in them a persistent aversion to Russian classics. The authors of "Native Speech" tried to awaken again among the unfortunate children (and their parents) an interest in Russian belles-lettres. It looks like the attempt was a complete success. The witty and fascinating “anti-textbook” by Weill and Genis has been helping graduates and applicants to pass exams in Russian literature for many years.

On our site about books, you can download the site for free without registration or read the online book “Native Speech. Fine Literature Lessons” Alexander Genis, Petr Vail in epub, fb2, txt, rtf, pdf formats for iPad, iPhone, Android and Kindle. The book will give you a lot of pleasant moments and a real pleasure to read. You can buy the full version from our partner. Also, here you will find the latest news from the literary world, learn the biography of your favorite authors. For beginner writers, there is a separate section with useful tips and tricks, interesting articles, thanks to which you yourself can try your hand at literary skills.

Quotes from the book “Native Speech. Lessons in belles lettres" Alexander Genis, Peter Vail

"They knew they were rebelling, but they couldn't help but kneel."

Fine Literature Lessons Petr Vail Alexander Genis

FOREWORD

Andrei Sinyavsky. FUN CRAFT

Someone decided that science must necessarily be boring. Probably to make her more respected. Boring means a solid, reputable enterprise. You can invest. Soon there will be no place left on earth in the midst of serious garbage heaps erected to the sky.

But once science itself was revered as a good art and everything in the world was interesting. Mermaids flew. Angels splashed. Chemistry was called alchemy. Astronomy - astrology. Psychology - palmistry. The story was inspired by the Muse from Apollo's round dance and contained an adventurous romance.

And now what? Reproduction reproduction?

The last refuge is philology. It would seem: love for the word. And in general, love. Free air. Nothing forced. Lots of fun and fantasy. So is science here. They put numbers (0.1; 0.2; 0.3, etc.), poked footnotes, provided, for the sake of science, with an apparatus of incomprehensible abstractions, through which one could not break through ("vermeculite", "grubber", "loxodrome", "parabiosis", "ultrarapid"), rewrote all this in a deliberately indigestible language - and here you are, instead of poetry, another sawmill for the production of countless books.

Already at the beginning of the century, idle book dealers thought: "Sometimes you wonder - does humanity really have enough brains for all books? There are not as many brains as there are books!" - "Nothing, - our cheerful contemporaries object to them, - soon only computers will read and produce books. And people will get to take products to warehouses and landfills!"

Against this industrial background, in the form of opposition, in refutation of the gloomy utopia, it seems to me that the book of Peter Weil and Alexander Genis - "Native speech" arose. The name sounds archaic. Almost rustic. Smells like childhood. Sen. Rural school. It is fun and entertaining to read, as befits a child. Not a textbook, but an invitation to reading, to divertissement. It is proposed not to glorify the famous Russian classics, but to look into it at least with one eye and then fall in love. The concerns of "Native Speech" are of an ecological nature and are aimed at saving the book, at improving the very nature of reading. The main task is formulated as follows: "The book was studied and - as often happens in such cases - they practically stopped reading." Pedagogy for adults, by the way, to the highest degree, by the way, well-read and educated people.

"Native speech", murmuring like a stream, is accompanied by unobtrusive, easy learning. She suggests that reading is co-creation. Everyone has their own. It has a lot of permissions. Freedom of interpretation. Let our authors eat the dog in belles lettres and give out completely original imperious decisions at every step, our business, they inspire, is not to obey, but to pick up any idea on the fly and continue, sometimes, perhaps, in the other direction. Russian literature is shown here in the image of the expanse of the sea, where each writer is his own captain, where sails and ropes are stretched from Karamzin's "Poor Lisa" to our poor "village people", from the story "Moscow - Petushki" to "Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow".

Reading this book, we see that the eternal and, indeed, unshakable values ​​do not stand still, pinned, like exhibits, according to scientific headings. They - move in the literary series and in the reader's mind and, it happens, are part of the later problematic achievements. Where they will swim, how they will turn tomorrow, no one knows. The unpredictability of art is its main strength. This is not a learning process, not progress.

"Native speech" by Weil and Genis is a renewal of speech that encourages the reader, even if he is seven spans in his forehead, to re-read all school literature. This technique, known since ancient times, is called estrangement.

To use it, you need not so much, just one effort: to look at reality and at works of art with an unbiased look. As if you were reading them for the first time. And you will see: behind every classic beats a living, just discovered thought. She wants to play.

For Russia, literature is a starting point, a symbol of faith, an ideological and moral foundation. One can interpret history, politics, religion, national character in any way, but it is worth pronouncing "Pushkin" as ardent antagonists nod their heads happily and amicably.

Of course, only literature that is recognized as classical is suitable for such mutual understanding. Classics is a universal language based on absolute values.

Russian literature of the golden 19th century has become an indivisible unity, a kind of typological community, before which the differences between individual writers recede. Hence the eternal temptation to find a dominant feature that delimits Russian literature from any others - the intensity of the spiritual search, or love of the people, or religiosity, or chastity.

However, with the same - if not greater - success one could speak not about the uniqueness of Russian literature, but about the uniqueness of the Russian reader, who is inclined to see the most sacred national property in his favorite books. Touching a classic is like insulting your homeland.

Naturally, such an attitude develops from an early age. The main tool for the sacralization of the classics is the school. The lessons of literature played a tremendous role in shaping the Russian public consciousness, primarily because books opposed the educational claims of the state. At all times, literature, no matter how they struggled with it, revealed its internal inconsistency. It was impossible not to notice that Pierre Bezukhov and Pavel Korchagin are heroes of different novels. Generations of those who managed to maintain skepticism and irony in a society poorly adapted for this grew up on this contradiction.

However, the dialectic of life leads to the fact that the admiration for the classics, firmly learned in school, makes it difficult to see in it living literature. Books familiar from childhood become signs of books, standards for other books. They are taken off the shelf as rarely as the Parisian standard of meter.

Anyone who decides on such an act - to reread the classics without prejudice - is faced not only with old authors, but also with himself. Reading the main books of Russian literature is like revisiting your biography. Life experience was accumulated along with reading and thanks to it. The date when Dostoevsky was first revealed is no less important than family anniversaries.

We grow with books - they grow in us. And once the time comes for a rebellion against the attitude to the classics invested in childhood. (Apparently, this is inevitable. Andrei Bitov once admitted: "I spent more than half of my work on fighting with the school literature course").

We conceived this book not so much to refute the school tradition, but to test - and not even her, but ourselves in it. All chapters of "Native Speech" strictly correspond to the secondary school curriculum.

Of course, we do not hope to say anything essentially new about a subject that has occupied generations of the best minds in Russia. We just decided to talk about the most stormy and intimate events of our lives - Russian books.

Peter Vail, Alexander Genis

New York, 1989

HERITAGE OF "POOR LIZA". Karamzin

In the very name Karamzin - a certain affectation sounds. No wonder Dostoevsky distorted this surname in order to ridicule Turgenev in Possessed. It looks like it's not even funny.

Not so long ago, before the boom in Russia brought about by the revival of his History, Karamzin was regarded as a mere shadow of Pushkin. Until recently, Karamzin seemed elegant and frivolous, like a gentleman from the paintings of Boucher and Fragonard, later resurrected by the artists of the World of Art.

And all because it is known about Karamzin that he invented sentimentalism. Like all superficial judgments, and this is true, at least in part. In order to read Karamzin's stories today, one must stock up on aesthetic cynicism, which allows one to enjoy the old-fashioned innocence of the text.

Nevertheless, one of the stories, "Poor Lisa" - fortunately there are only seventeen pages and everything about love - still lives in the minds of the modern reader.

The poor peasant girl Lisa meets the young nobleman Erast. Tired of the windy light, he falls in love with a spontaneous, innocent girl with the love of his brother. However, soon platonic love turns into sensual. Liza consistently loses her spontaneity, innocence and Erast himself - he goes to war. "No, he really was in the army, but instead of fighting the enemy, he played cards and lost almost all his estate." To improve things, Erast marries an elderly rich widow. Upon learning of this, Lisa drowns herself in the pond.

Most of all, it is similar to the libretto of a ballet. Something like Giselle. Karamzin, using the plot of the European petty-bourgeois drama, which was common at that time, translated it not only into Russian, but also transplanted it onto Russian soil.

The results of this simple experience were grandiose. Telling the sentimental and sugary story of poor Lisa, Karamzin - along the way - discovered prose.

He was the first to write smoothly. In his writings (not poetry!) words were intertwined in such a regular, rhythmic way that the reader was left with the impression of rhetorical music. The smooth weaving of words has a hypnotic effect. This is a kind of rut, once in which one should not worry too much about the meaning: a reasonable grammatical and stylistic necessity will create it itself.

Smoothness in prose is the same as meter and rhyme in poetry. The meaning of words that find themselves in the rigid pattern of prose rhythm plays a lesser role than the pattern itself.

Listen: "In blooming Andalusia - where proud palm trees rustle, where myrtle groves are fragrant, where the majestic Guadalquivir slowly rolls its waters, where the Sierra Morena crowned with rosemary rises - there I saw the beautiful." A century later, Severyanin wrote with the same success and just as beautifully.

Many generations of writers lived in the shadow of such prose. Of course, they gradually got rid of prettiness, but not from the smoothness of style. The worse the writer, the deeper the rut in which he crawls. The greater the dependence of the next word on the previous one. The higher the overall predictability of the text. Therefore, Simenon's novel is written in a week, read in two hours and everyone likes it.

Great writers have always, and especially in the 20th century, fought against the smoothness of style, tormented, shredded and tormented it. But until now, the vast majority of books are written in the same prose that Karamzin discovered for Russia.

"Poor Lisa" appeared from scratch. She was not surrounded by a dense literary context. Karamzin single-handedly controlled the future of Russian prose - because it could be read not only in order to elevate the soul or learn a moral lesson, but for pleasure, entertainment, fun.

No matter what they say, what matters in literature is not the good intentions of the author, but his ability to captivate the reader with fiction. Otherwise, everyone would read Hegel, and not The Count of Monte Cristo.

So, Karamzin "Poor Lisa" pleased the reader. Russian literature wanted to see in this little story a prototype of its bright future - and it did. She found in "Poor Lisa" a cursory summary of her themes and characters. There was everything that occupied her and still occupies her.

First of all, the people. The operetta peasant woman Liza with her virtuous mother gave birth to an endless series of literary peasants. Already Karamzin's slogan "truth lives not in palaces, but in huts" called for learning healthy from the people moral sense. All Russian classics, to one degree or another, idealized the peasant. It seems that the sober Chekhov (the story "In the ravine" could not be forgiven for a long time) was almost the only one who resisted this epidemic.

Karamzin's Lisa can still be found today among the "village people". Reading their prose, you can be sure in advance that a person from the people will always be right. This is how there are no bad blacks in American films. The famous "heart beats under black skin too" is quite applicable to Karamzin, who wrote: "Even peasant women know how to love." There is an ethnographic aftertaste of a colonialist tormented by remorse.

Erast is also suffering: he "was unhappy until the end of his life." This insignificant remark was also destined to have a long life. From it grew the carefully cherished guilt of the intellectual before the people.

love to common man, a man of the people, they demand from a Russian writer for so long and with such persistence that anyone who does not declare it will seem to us a moral monster. (Is there a Russian book devoted to the guilt of the people against the intelligentsia?) Meanwhile, this is by no means such a universal emotion. After all, we do not wonder whether the common people loved Horace or Petrarch.

Only the Russian intelligentsia suffered from a guilt complex to such an extent that they were in a hurry to pay their debt to the people with all possible ways- from folklore collections to the revolution.

Karamzin already has all these plots, albeit in their infancy. Here, for example, is the conflict between the city and the countryside, which continues to feed the Russian muse today. Escorting Lisa to Moscow, where she sells flowers, her mother says: "My heart is always on the spot when you go to the city, I always put a candle in front of the image and pray to the Lord God that he save you from all misfortune."

The city is the center of depravity. The village is a reserve of moral purity. Turning here to the ideal of Rousseau's "natural man", Karamzin, again in passing, introduces into the tradition a rural literary landscape, a tradition that flourished with Turgenev, and since then has served as the best source of dictations: "On the other side of the river, an oak grove is visible, near where numerous flocks graze, where young shepherds, sitting under the shade of trees, sing simple, dull songs.

On the one hand - bucolic shepherds, on the other - Erast, who "led a scattered life, thought only about his own pleasures, looked for them in secular amusements, but often did not find them: he was bored and complained about his fate."

Of course, Erast could be the father of Eugene Onegin. Here Karamzin, opening the gallery of "superfluous people", stands at the source of another powerful tradition - the image of smart loafers, for whom idleness helps to keep a distance between themselves and the state. Thanks to blessed laziness, superfluous people are always frontiers, always in opposition. If they had served their country honestly, they would have had no time for Liz's seduction and witty digressions.

In addition, if the people are always poor, then the extra people are always with the means, even if they squandered, as happened with Erast. The careless frivolity of the characters in money matters saves the reader from the petty accounting vicissitudes that are so rich, for example, in French novels of the 19th century.

Erast has no affairs in the story, except for love. And here Karamzin postulates another commandment of Russian literature: chastity.

Here is how the moment of Liza's fall is described: "Erast feels a tremble in himself - Liza also, not knowing why - not knowing what is happening to her ... Ah, Liza, Liza! Where is your guardian angel? Where is your innocence?"

In the most risky place - one punctuation: dashes, ellipsis, exclamation marks. And this technique was destined to longevity. Erotica in our literature, with rare exceptions (Bunin's "Dark Alleys"), was bookish, heady. High literature described only love, leaving sex to anecdotes. Brodsky will write about this: "Love as an act is devoid of a verb." Because of this, Limonov and many others will appear, trying to find this verb. But it is not so easy to overcome the tradition of love descriptions with the help of punctuation marks if it was born back in 1792.

"Poor Lisa" is the embryo from which our literature has grown. It can be studied as a visual aid to Russian classical literature.

Unfortunately, for a very long time, readers noticed only tears in the founder of sentimentalism. Indeed, Karamzin has many of them. The author cries: "I love those objects that make me shed tears of tender sorrow." His heroes are tearful: "Liza sobbed - Erast wept." Even the harsh characters from the "History of the Russian State" are sensitive: when they heard that Ivan the Terrible was going to marry, "the boyars wept for joy."

The generation that grew up on Hemingway and Pavka Korchagin, this softness jars. But in the past, perhaps, sentimentality seemed more natural. After all, even the heroes of Homer now and then burst into tears. And in the "Song of Roland" the constant refrain is "the proud barons sobbed."

However, the general revival of interest in Karamzin may be evidence that the next turn of the cultural spiral instinctively denies the already bored poetry of courageous silence, preferring Karamzin's frankness of feelings to it.

The author of "Poor Liza" himself was fond of sentimentalism in moderation. Being a professional writer in almost the modern sense of the word, he used his main invention - smooth writing - for any, often contradictory purposes.

In the wonderful Letters of a Russian Traveler, written at the same time as Poor Liza, Karamzin is already sober, and attentive, and witty, and down to earth. "Our dinner consisted of roast beef, ground apples, pudding and cheese." But Erast drank only milk, and even then from the hands of the kind Liza. The hero of the "Letters" dine with sense and arrangement.

The travel notes of Karamzin, who traveled half of Europe, and even during the Great French Revolution, are amazingly fascinating reading. Like any good traveler's diary, these "Letters" are remarkable for their meticulousness and unceremoniousness.

A traveler - even one as educated as Karamzin - always acts as an ignoramus in a foreign land. He is quick to jump to conclusions. He is not embarrassed by the categoricalness of hasty judgments. In this genre, irresponsible impressionism is a forced and pleasant necessity. "Few kings live as splendidly as English aged sailors." Or - "This land is much better than Livonia, which it is not a pity to pass through closing your eyes."

Romantic ignorance is better than pedantry. Readers forgive the first, never the second.

Karamzin was one of the first Russian writers to have a monument erected. But, of course, not for "Poor Lisa", but for the 12-volume "History of the Russian State". Contemporaries considered it the most important of all Pushkin; descendants did not reprint for a hundred years. And suddenly Karamzin's "History" was reopened. Suddenly it became the hottest bestseller. No matter how this phenomenon is explained, the main reason for the revival of Karamzin is his prose, the same smooth writing. Karamzin created the first "readable" Russian history. The prose rhythm discovered by him was so universal that he managed to revive even a multi-volume monument.

History exists in any nation only when it is written about it fascinatingly. The grandiose Persian empire was not lucky enough to give birth to its Herodotus and Thucydides, and ancient Persia became the property of archaeologists, and everyone knows and loves the history of Hellas. The same happened with Rome. If there had not been Titus Livius, Tacitus, Suetonius, perhaps the American Senate would not have been called the Senate. And the formidable rivals of the Roman Empire - the Parthians - left no evidence of their colorful history.

Karamzin did for Russian culture what ancient historians did for their peoples. When his work was published, Fyodor Tolstoy exclaimed: "It turns out that I have a fatherland!"

Although Karamzin was not the first and not the only historian of Russia, he was the first to translate history into the language of fiction, wrote an interesting, artistic history, a story for readers.

In the style of his "History of the Russian State", he managed to merge the newly invented prose with ancient samples of Roman, above all, Tacitus laconic eloquence: "This people in poverty alone sought security for itself", "Elena indulged at the same time in the tenderness of lawless love and ferocity bloodthirsty malice."

Only by developing a special language for his unique work, Karamzin was able to convince everyone that "the history of ancestors is always curious for someone who is worthy of having a fatherland."

Well-written history is the foundation of literature. Without Herodotus, there would be no Aeschylus. Thanks to Karamzin, Pushkin's "Boris Godunov" appeared. Without Karamzin, Pikul appears in literature.

Throughout the 19th century, Russian writers focused on the history of Karamzin. Both Shchedrin, A. K. Tolstoy, and Ostrovsky, took the "History of the Russian State" as a starting point, as something taken for granted. She was often argued with, she was ridiculed, parodied, but only such an attitude makes the work a classic.

When, after the revolution, Russian literature lost this, which had become natural, dependence on the Karamzin tradition, the long connection between literature and history was severed (Solzhenitsyn knowingly knits "knots" for nothing).

Modern literature lacks the new Karamzin so much. The appearance of a great writer must be preceded by the appearance of a great historian - in order for a harmonic literary panorama to be created from individual fragments, a solid and unconditional foundation is needed.

The 19th century provided such a basis for Karamzin. In general, he did a lot for the century, about which he wrote: "The ninth to the tenth century! How much will be revealed in you that we considered a secret." But Karamzin himself still remained in the eighteenth. Others took advantage of his discoveries. No matter how smooth his prose once seemed, today we read it with a nostalgic feeling of tenderness, enjoying those semantic shifts that time makes in old texts and which give the old texts a slightly absurd character - like the Oberiuts: "The doormen! Can you really to have fun with such a sad trophy? Proud of the name of the porter, do not forget your noblest name - the name of a man.

One way or another, on the soil moistened by the tears of poor Lisa, many flowers of the garden of Russian literature grew.

Celebration of the undergrowth. Fonvizin

The case of "Undergrowth" is a special one. Comedy is studied at school so early that nothing remains in my head by the final exams, except for the famous phrase: "I don't want to study, I want to get married." This maxim can hardly be felt by sixth-graders who have not reached puberty: the ability to appreciate the deep connection between spiritual emotions ("study") and physiological ones ("marry") is important.

Even the very word "undergrowth" is not perceived as intended by the author of the comedy. At the time of Fonvizin, this was a completely definite concept: this was the name of the nobles who did not receive proper education, who were therefore forbidden to enter the service and marry. So the undergrowth could be more than twenty years old. True, in the Fonvizin case, Mitrofan Prostakov is sixteen.

With all this, it is quite fair that with the advent of Fonvizin's Mitrofanushka, the term "undergrowth" acquired a new meaning - a dunce, a dumbass, a teenager with limited vicious inclinations.

The myth of the image is more important than the truth of life. The subtle spiritualized lyricist Fet was a efficient master and for the landlord's 17 years he did not write even half a dozen poems. But we, thank God, have "Whispers, timid breathing, trills of a nightingale ..." - and with this the image of the poet is exhausted, which is only fair, though not true.

The terminological "undergrowth" forever, thanks to Mitrofanushka and his creator, has turned into a common condemning word of school teachers, a groan of parents, a curse.

Nothing can be done about it. Although there is a simple way - to read the play.

Its plot is simple. In the family of provincial landowners Prostakov lives their distant relative - the orphaned Sophia. The brother of Mrs. Prostakova, Taras Skotinin, and the son of the Prostakovs, Mitrofan, have mating views on Sophia. At a critical moment for the girl, when her uncle and nephew are desperately sharing her, another uncle appears - Starodum. He is convinced of the evil nature of the Prostakov family with the help of the progressive official Pravdin. Sophia comes to her senses and marries the man she loves - officer Milon. The Prostakovs' estate is taken in state guardianship per cruel treatment with the fortresses. Mitrofan is given to military service.

Everything ends, thus, well. The enlightening happy ending is overshadowed by only one, but very significant circumstance: Mitrofanushka and his parents, disgraced and humiliated in the finale, are the only bright spot in the play.

Living, full-blooded people carrying natural emotions and common sense - the Prostakovs - in the midst of the darkness of hypocrisy, hypocrisy, officialdom.

Gloomy and inert forces gathered around Starodum.

Fonvizin is usually attributed to the tradition of classicism. This is true, and even the most superficial, at first glance noticeable details testify to this: for example, the names of the characters. Milon is handsome, Pravdin is a sincere person, Skotinin is understandable. However, upon closer examination, we will be convinced that Fonvizin is a classicist only when he deals with the so-called positive characters. Here they are Walking ideas, embodied treatises on moral topics.

But the negative heroes do not fit into any classicism, despite their "talking" names.

Fonvizin did his best to depict the triumph of reason, which comprehended the ideal regularity of the universe.

As always and at all times, the organizing mind confidently relied on a beneficial organized force: punitive measures were taken by the Starodum team - Mitrofan was exiled to the soldiers, guardianship was taken over his parents. But when, and what kind of justice did terror, instituted with the noblest intentions, serve?

Ultimately, true beingness, individual characters, and the living variety of life itself turned out to be stronger. It was the negative characters of "The Undergrowth" that entered Russian proverbs, acquired archetypal qualities - that is, they won, if we take into account the alignment of forces over the long course of Russian culture.

But that is precisely why one should pay attention to the positive heroes who won in the course of the plot, but passed indistinct shadows in our literature.

Their language is deadly terrible. In places their monologues are reminiscent of Kafka's most refined horror texts. Here is Pravdin’s speech: “I have an order to go around the local district; and, moreover, from my own feat of my heart, I do not leave to notice those malevolent ignoramuses who, having full power over their people, use it for evil inhumanly.”

The language of the positive characters of The Undergrowth reveals the ideological value of the play much better than its consciously didactic attitudes. Ultimately, it is clear that only such people can introduce troops and a curfew: “I did not know how to guard against the first movements of my irritated piety. begged for, and true respect must be deserved; that it is much more honest to be bypassed without guilt than to be granted without merit.

The easiest way to attribute all this linguistic panopticon to the account of the era is, after all, the 18th century. But nothing comes out, because in the same play negative characters living next to the positive take the floor. And what modern music the replicas of the Prostakov family sound like! Their language is alive and fresh, it does not interfere with those two centuries that separate us from the "Undergrowth". Taras Skotinin, boasting of the merits of his late uncle, speaks as Shukshin's heroes could have said: "Astride a greyhound pacer, he ran drunkenly into the stone gates. The man was tall, the gates were low, he forgot to bend down. How would he suffice himself with his forehead against the lintel ... I would like to know if there is a learned forehead in the world that would not fall apart from such a cuff; but my uncle, eternal memory to him, having sobered up, only asked if the gate was intact?

Both the positive and negative characters of "Undergrowth" are most clearly and most expressively manifested in the discussion of the problems of education and upbringing. This is understandable: an active figure in the Enlightenment, Fonvizin, as was customary then, paid a lot of attention to these issues. And again, conflict.

In the play, the dry scholasticism of the retired soldier Tsifirkin and the seminarian Kuteikin collide with the common sense of the Prostakovs. There is a remarkable passage when Mitrofan is given a task: how much money would each one have if he found three hundred rubles with two comrades? The preaching of justice and morality, which the author puts into this episode with all the causticity, is nullified by a powerful instinct common sense Mrs Prostakova. It's hard not to detect an ugly but natural logic in her simple-hearted energetic protest: "He's lying, my hearty friend! He found the money, don't share it with anyone. Take everything for yourself, Mitrofanushka. Don't study this stupid science."

The underage foolish science to learn, as a matter of fact, does not even think. This dense youngster - unlike Starodum and his entourage - has his own ideas about everything, clumsy, inarticulate, but not borrowed, not serrated. Many generations of schoolchildren learn how ridiculous, stupid and absurd Mitrofan is in a mathematics lesson. This ferocious stereotype makes it difficult to understand that the parody turned out - probably against the wishes of the author - not on ignorance, but on science, on all these rules of phonetics, morphology and syntax.

Pravdin. Door, for example, what name: noun or adjective?

Mitrofan. Door, which door?

Pravdin. Which door! This one.

Mitrofan. This? Adjective.

Pravdin. Why?

Mitrofan. Because it is attached to its place. Here, at the closet of the sixth week, the door has not yet been hung: so for the time being it is a noun.

For two hundred years they have been laughing at underage stupidity, as if not noticing that he is not only witty and accurate, but also in his deep insight into the essence of things, in the true individualization of everything that exists, in the spiritualization of the inanimate surrounding world - in a sense, the forerunner of Andrei Platonov . And as for the way of expression, he is one of the founders of a whole stylistic trend of modern prose: maybe Maramzin writes - "the mind of the head" or Dovlatov - "froze his toes and ears of the head."

The simple and intelligible truths of the negative and condemned by the Prostakov school shine against the gray cloth background of the cursive exercises of the positive characters. Even about such a delicate matter as love, these rude, uneducated people know how to speak more expressively and brighter.

Handsome Milon is confused in spiritual confessions, as in a poorly learned lesson: "Noble soul! .. No ... I can no longer hide my heartfelt feelings ... No. Your virtue extracts by force all the mystery of my soul. If my heart is virtuous, if it is worth it to be happy, it depends on you to make him happy. Here the inconsistency is not so much from excitement, but from forgetfulness: Milon read something like this in between drills - something from Fenelon, from the moralistic treatise "On the Education of Girls".

Ms. Prostakova didn’t read books at all, and her emotion is healthy and immaculate: “Here, listen! Go for whoever you want, if only the person is worth it. So, my father, so. a nobleman, a young fellow ... Who has enough, albeit a small one ... "

The entire historical and literary fault of the Prostakovs is that they do not fit into the ideology of Starodum. Not that they had any ideology of their own - God forbid. One cannot believe in their feudal cruelty: the plot move seems far-fetched for the greater persuasiveness of the finale, and it even seems that Fonvizin convinces himself first of all. The Prostakovs are not villains, for this they are too spontaneous anarchists, shameless okhlamons, pea jesters. They just live and, if possible, want to live as they want. Ultimately, the conflict between the Prostakovs, on the one hand, and Starodum and Pravdin, on the other, is a contradiction between ideology and individuality. Between authoritarian and free consciousness.

In the modern reader's natural search for today's analogies, the rhetorical wisdom of Starodum meets in a strange way with the didactic pathos of Solzhenitsyn. There are many similarities: from hopes for Siberia ("to the land where they get money without exchanging it for conscience" - Starodum, "Our hope and our sump" - Solzhenitsyn) to addiction to proverbs and sayings. "From his birth, his tongue did not say yes, when his soul felt no," Pravdin says about Starodum something that two centuries later will be expressed in the chased formula "to live not by lies." What they have in common is a wary, suspicious attitude towards the West: Starodum's theses could be included in the Harvard speech without violating its ideological and stylistic integrity.

The remarkable reasoning of Starodum about the West (“I am afraid of the current wise men. I happened to read everything that is translated in Russian. They, however, strongly eradicate prejudices, but bring back virtue from the root”) remind of the ever-present topicality of this problem for Russian society. Although not much space is devoted to her in The Undergrowth itself, Fonvizin's entire work as a whole is replete with reflections on the relationship between Russia and the West. His famous letters from France amaze with a combination of the most subtle observations and vulgar swearing. Fonvizin catches on all the time. He sincerely admires the Lyon textile enterprises, but immediately remarks: "It is necessary to pinch your nose when entering Lyon." Immediately after the raptures in front of Strasbourg and the famous cathedral - an obligatory reminder that in this city "the inhabitants are up to their ears in filth."

But the main thing, of course, is not hygiene and sanitation. The main thing is the difference between the human types of Russians and Europeans. Fonvizin noted the peculiarity of communication with a Western person very elegantly. He would use the words "alternative opinion" and "pluralism of thought" if he knew them. But Fonvizin wrote precisely about this, and that extreme of these obviously positive qualities did not escape the Russian writer, which in Russian in a condemning sense is called "spinelessness" (in a commendable way it would be called "flexibility", but there is no praise for flexibility). He writes that a Westerner "if asked in an affirmative way, answers: yes, and if in a negative way about the same matter, answers: no." This is subtle and completely fair, but such words about France, for example, are rude and completely unfair: "Empty brilliance, eccentric impudence in men, shameless indecency in women, I really see nothing else."

There is a feeling that Fonvizin really wanted to be Starodum. However, he hopelessly lacked gloominess, consistency, straightforwardness. He stubbornly fought for these virtues, even going to publish a magazine with a symbolic title - "Friend of honest people, or Starodum." His hero and ideal was Starodum.

But nothing happened. Fonvizin's humor was too brilliant, his judgments were too independent, his characteristics were too caustic and independent, his style was too bright.

The Undergrowth was too strong in Fonvizin for him to become Starodum.

He constantly strays from didactics to cheerful nonsense and, wishing to condemn the debauchery of Paris, writes: “Whoever is recently in Paris, the local residents bet that when you don’t go along it (the New Bridge), every time you meet a white horse on it , pop and obscene woman. I purposely go to this bridge and every time I meet them. "

Starodum will never achieve such ridiculous lightness. He will denounce the decline of morals with the right turns or, what’s good, he will actually go to the bridge to count obscene women. But such a stupid story will be happy to tell the Undergrowth. That is, the Fonvizin who managed not to become Starodum.

CRISIS OF THE GENRE. Radishchev

The most flattering review of the work of Alexander Radishchev belongs to Catherine II: "A rebel is worse than Pugachev."

Pushkin gave the most sober assessment of Radishchev: "Journey to Moscow, the cause of his misfortune and fame, is a very mediocre work, not to mention the barbaric style."

The most important thing in the posthumous fate of Radishchev was the statement of Lenin, who placed Radishchev "the first among the Russian revolutionaries, causing the Russian people to feel national pride". The strangest thing is that none of the above contradicts each other.

Descendants often treat the classics at will. It costs them nothing to turn Swift's philosophical satire into a Disney cartoon, to retell "Don Quixote" in their own simple words, to reduce "Crime and Punishment" to two chapters in an anthology.

Our contemporaries treated Radishchev even worse. They reduced all his vast heritage to one work, but even from it they left only the title - "Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow". Further, behind the heading, there is a void, into which arguments about the freedom-loving nature of the completely absent text occasionally wander.

It cannot be said that the descendants are so wrong. Perhaps one could even agree with Minister Count Uvarov, who considered it “completely superfluous to renew the memory of a writer and a book completely forgotten and worthy of oblivion,” if not for one circumstance. Radishchev is not a writer. He is the ancestor, the discoverer, the founder of what is commonly called the Russian revolutionary movement. A long chain of Russian dissidence begins with him.

Radishchev gave birth to the Decembrists, the Decembrists - Herzen, he woke up Lenin, Lenin - Stalin, Stalin - Khrushchev, from whom Academician Sakharov descended.

No matter how fantastic this Old Testament continuity (Abraham gave birth to Isaac), it must be reckoned with. If only because this scheme lived in the minds of more than one generation of critics.

The life of the first Russian dissident is extraordinarily instructive. His fate has been repeated many times and continues to repeat itself. Radishchev was the first Russian person convicted of literary activity. His Journey was the first book to be cracked down on by secular censorship. And, probably, Radishchev was the first writer whose biography was so closely intertwined with creativity.

The harsh verdict of the Senate court awarded Radishchev with the halo of a martyr. Government persecution provided Radishchev with literary fame. A ten-year exile made it indecent to discuss the purely literary merits of his works.

Thus was born a great confusion: the personal fate of the writer is directly reflected in the quality of his works.

Of course, it is interesting to know that Sinyavsky wrote "Walks with Pushkin" in the Mordovian camp, but this circumstance cannot improve or worsen the book.

So, Catherine gave Radishchev immortality, but what prompted her to take this rash step?

First of all, "Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow" is not a journey - it is only a formal device. Radishchev divided the book into chapters, naming each after the cities and villages that lie on the highway connecting the two capitals.

By the way, these names are remarkably inexpressive in themselves - Zavidovo, Chernaya Mud, Vydropusk, Yazhlebitsy, Khotilov. No wonder Venedikt Erofeev was tempted by the same toponymic poetry in his work "Moscow-Petushki".

The enumeration of geographical points is limited to the actual travel impressions of Radishchev. Everything else is a lengthy treatise on ... perhaps everything in the world. The author collected in his main book all the arguments about the surrounding and non-surrounding life, as if preparing a collection of works in one volume. This includes the previously written ode "Liberty" and the rhetorical exercise "The Tale of Lomonosov", as well as numerous excerpts from Western enlighteners.

The cement that holds all this amorphous formation together was the dominant emotion - indignation, which made it possible to consider the book a revealing encyclopedia of Russian society.

"Here I trembled in the fury of mankind," writes the hero-narrator. And this trembling does not leave the reader, but all the hard way from St. Petersburg to Moscow through 37 pages of a considerable format.

It is generally accepted that Radishchev denounces the plagues of tsarism: serfdom, recruitment, popular poverty. In fact, he is indignant for a variety of reasons. Here Radishchev smashes the fundamental curtain of Russia: "Can a state where two-thirds of its citizens are deprived of civil status and partly dead in law be called blessed ?!" But right there, with no less fervor, the custom of brushing your teeth attacks: "They (peasant girls - Auth.) Do not rip off the gloss of their teeth every day either with brushes or powders." As soon as the author read a rebuke to censorship (“censorship has become the nurse of reason”), his attention is diverted by French dishes “invented for poison.” Sometimes, in his temper, Radishchev writes something completely absurd. For example, when describing the farewell of a father to his son, who is leaving for the capital on public service, he exclaims: "Wouldn't you like to strangle your son rather than let him go to the service?"

Radishchev's accusatory pathos is strangely illegible. He equally hates lawlessness and sugar-making. It must be said that this universal "fury of mankind" had a long history in our literature. Gogol also attacked the "whim" of drinking tea with sugar. Tolstoy did not like medicine. Our contemporary Soloukhin calls with equal zeal to save icons and harass women's trousers. Vasily Belov opposes environmental disasters and aerobics.

However, the totality of Radishchev's mania for truth-seeking escaped readers. They preferred to pay attention not to the denunciation of, say, venereal diseases, but to attacks against the government and serfdom. This is exactly what Catherine did.

Radishchev's political program, presented according to Pushkin, "without any connection or order," was a collection of commonplaces from the writings of the philosophers of the Enlightenment - Rousseau, Montesquieu, Helvetius. The most piquant thing in all this is that any educated person in Russia could read the arguments about freedom and equality in the original - before the French Revolution, no one banned anything in Russia (censorship was in the department of the Academy of Sciences, which did not want to engage in censorship).

Radishchev's crime was not in popularizing Western free-thinking, but in the fact that he applied someone else's theory to domestic practice and described cases of unthinkable atrocities.

Until now, our ideas about serfdom are largely based on the examples of Radishchev. It is from him that we draw terrible pictures of human trafficking, from Radishchev the tradition began to compare Russian serfs with American black slaves, he also cited episodes of the monstrous arbitrariness of the landowners, which, judging by Radishchev, often manifested itself in sexual terms. So, in the "Journey" a master is described who "disgusted 60 girls, depriving them of their purity." (The indignant Catherine ordered to find the criminal.) Immediately, with details suspicious of voluptuousness, a libertine is brought out, who, "having become deprived of joy, used violence. Four villains, the executor of your will, holding her hands and feet ... but we do not end this." However, judging serfdom by Radishchev is probably the same as judging ancient slavery by the film Spartacus.

The noble revolutionary Radishchev not only denounced his class, but also created a gallery of positive images - people from the people. The author, like subsequent generations of Russian writers, was convinced that only the common people were able to resist the vile power: "I could not be surprised to find so much nobility in the way of thinking among the villagers." At the same time, the people depicting Radishchev remains a rhetorical figure. Only within the genre of an educational treatise can there be men who exclaim: "Whoever betrays the body of our common mother, the damp earth." Only the author of such treatises could attribute to the peasants passionate love to civil rights. Radishchev writes: "I finally cried out to this: a man was born into the world equal to all others," which is translated into political language era means the introduction of a constitution like the one just adopted in America. It was this that the Empress blamed him for, and it was for this that he earned posthumous fame.

In the representation of the descendants, Radishchev became the intellectual counterpart of Pugachev. With the light hand of Catherine, a couple - an intellectual dissident and a Cossack rebel - became the prototype of Russian dissent. We always have educated people who speak on behalf of an unenlightened people - Decembrists, populists, Slavophiles, liberals, human rights activists. But speaking on behalf of the people, they say far from what the people themselves say.

Best of all, Radishchev himself, who became acquainted with the Pugachev movement while serving in the army headquarters as a prosecutor (chief auditor), should have known this.

Radishchev demanded freedom and equality for the people. But the people themselves dreamed of something else. In Pugachev's manifestos, the impostor favors his subjects with "lands, waters, forests, habitation, herbs, rivers, fishes, bread, laws, arable land, bodies, monetary salaries, lead and gunpowder, as you wished. And stay like steppe animals." Radishchev writes about freedom - Pugachev about will. One is to bless the people with a constitution - the other with lands and waters. The first offers to become citizens, the second - steppe animals. Not surprisingly, Pugachev turned out to have much more supporters.

Pushkin in the fate of Radishchev was most interested in one question: "What goal did Radishchev have? What exactly did he want?"

Indeed, a prosperous official (customs director) publishes a book in his own printing house, which cannot but destroy the author. Moreover, he himself sent the first copies to important nobles, among whom was Derzhavin. Didn't he really think to overthrow the absolute monarchy and establish in the country a system copied from the French Encyclopedia?

Perhaps one of the motives for Radishchev's strange behavior was literary ambition. Radishchev dreamed of acquiring the laurels of a piit, not a revolutionary. "Journey" was to be the answer to all those who did not appreciate his literary experiments. He dully mentions numerous zoils, speaking of his ode "Liberty": "In Moscow they did not want to print it for two reasons: first, that the meaning in the verses is not clear and there are many verses of clumsy work ..."

Stung by such critics, Radishchev intended to amaze reading Russia with his Journey. There is a lot to be said for this idea. An immense scope, designed for a universal reader. The accusatory character that gives the book its poignancy. Instructive tone, finally. Replete with projects, Journey is a kind of Letter to the Leaders. Radishchev always remembers his addressee, addressing him directly: "Lord of the world, if, while reading my dream, you smile with mockery or frown your brow ..." Radishchev knew about the fate of Derzhavin, who owed his career to the empress's poetic instructions.

However, the main argument in favor of Radishchev's writing ambitions is the book's artistic form. In Journey, the author is by no means a political thinker. On the contrary, educational ideas are only texture, material for building a purely literary work. That is why Radishchev chose for his main book a model then fashionable - "A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy" by Lawrence Sterne.

The whole of Europe read the stern. He discovered a new literary principle - to write about nothing, constantly mocking the reader, ironically over his expectation, teasing with a complete lack of content.

Like Radishchev, there is no journey in Stern's Journey. There are only a hundred pages filled with mosaic random discussions on trifling matters. Each of these arguments leads nowhere, and the author does not forget to make fun of each. Stern's book ends remarkably and characteristically - the last sentence: "So, when I reached out, I grabbed the maid by - ".

No one will ever know why Stern's hero grabbed the maid, but it was precisely this mocking understatement that captivated the readers. Radishchev was among these readers. One of his chapters ends like this: “Everyone dances, but not like a buffoon,” I repeated, bending over and, lifting, unfolding ...

Radishchev's Journey almost copies Stern's Journey, with the exception that Radishchev chose to fill Stern's deliberately empty form with pathetic content. He seems to have taken at face value Stern's silly statements: "Dress as you like, Slavery, you are still a bitter potion!"

At the same time, Radishchev also tried to be funny and frivolous (“when I intended to commit a crime on the back of a commissar”), but he was stifled by accusatory and reformist pathos. He wanted to simultaneously write subtle, elegant, witty prose, but also to benefit the fatherland, scourging vices and singing virtues.

For mixing genres, Radishchev was given ten years.

Although this book has not been read for a long time, it has played an epoch-making role in Russian literature. Being the first martyr of literature, Radishchev created a specific Russian symbiosis of politics and literature.

Adding to the title of writer the position of a tribune, a defender of all the disadvantaged, Radishchev founded a powerful tradition, the quintessence of which is expressed by the inevitably topical verses: "A poet in Russia is more than a poet."

Thus, the development of political thought in Russia became inseparable from the artistic form in which it took on. We had Nekrasov and Yevtushenko, but we didn't have Jefferson and Franklin.

It is unlikely that such a substitution benefited both politics and literature.

GOSPEL FROM IVAN. Krylov

In the unconditional, broadest glory of Ivan Andreevich Krylov, there is a taste of second-rate quality. This astringency is, of course, from the soreness that Krylov's fables have stuffed over two centuries. However, not all of his contemporaries were enthusiastic about his works: for example, the sarcastic intellectual Vyazemsky looked at Krylov very critically. But he and others like him were clearly in the minority. "For Krylov" were Pushkin and Zhukovsky, and Bulgarin with Grech, and Gogol with Belinsky. Probably, such unanimity just embarrassed Vyazemsky.

Further - throughout Russian history- Conservatives and liberals, monarchists and social democrats, reds and whites converge in love for Krylov. Contrary to the behest of Nekrasov, no one carried and does not carry Belinsky and Gogol from the market, but Krylov is carried and known by heart. Only Pushkin can compare with the popularity of grandfather Krylov. The fact that only individual lines are stored in mass memory is normal, otherwise it does not happen in public functioning poems. With Pushkin, the situation is exactly the same: “My uncle has the most honest rules”, “I remember a wonderful moment”, “Kochubey is rich and glorious” - but what next?

When Krylov died, the highest command followed to erect a monument to him. As stated in the circular of the Ministry of Education, "these monuments, these personifications of national glory, scattered from the shores of the Arctic Sea to the eastern edge of Europe, inhabit the space of our boundless fatherland with signs of life and spiritual strength."

Krylov was to immediately after his death become a symbol of spiritual strength, which only three writers had been recognized before him: Lomonosov, Derzhavin, Karamzin.

The company is typical. The founder of the first university, the reformer of the Russian language Lomonosov, the majestic odographer Derzhavin, the chief Russian historian Karamzin. And with them - the author of poems, according to Hegel's definition, "the slave genre." Fabulous. The monument was erected in St. Petersburg Summer and not only the author of memorable lines entered the life of Russia, but also a specific person: fat, sleepy, imperturbable, surrounded by small animals. Grandfather. Sage. Buddha.

This truly fabulous glory could not be prevented by any Vyazma. The introduction of a plebeian - by birth and by genre - into the host of Russian spiritual celestials was only a partial retribution for science. The recognition that all regimes and everything invested in Krylov is only a small fraction of the debt that Russia owes to Krylov. Because his fables are the basis of morality, the moral code on which generations grew up Russian people. That tuning fork of good and evil that every Russian carries with him. Such versatility of Krylov plunges him into the thick of mass culture. Hence the feeling of second-rateness - everything is too clear. Although paradoxes move thought, only banal truths are fixed in the mind. When it was discovered that the sum of the angles of a triangle is not always equal to 180 degrees, and parallel lines can intersect, only perverted intellectuals could rejoice. This news should irritate a normal person, as an unceremonious intrusion into an established mental life.

Krylov's merit is not that he uttered the infinitely banal and therefore infinitely true truths that were known before him. In the end, we must not forget that Krylov followed well-known models - from Aesop to La Fontaine. His main achievement is common truths. (as in the text - ocr.) But the most important thing was not even the poet himself, but the years and circumstances of Russian history, thanks to which the significance of Ivan Andreevich Krylov in Russian culture is grandiose and cannot be compared with the role of Aesop for the Greeks or La Fontaine for the French .

The unpretentious fables of Krylov largely replaced moral institutions and institutions in Russia.

It is noteworthy that both Krylov himself and his contemporaries - even very insightful ones - believed that he was growing just from moralism to high poetry, and did not appreciate the utilitarian benefits of fables. “Many in Krylov want to see a fabulist without fail, we see something more in him,” Belinsky wrote. And further: "A fable as a moralizing kind of poetry in our time is really a false kind; if it is suitable for someone, it is only for children ... But a fable as a satire is a true kind of poetry." Pushkin spoke about the same about Krylov's fables.

In these judgments, an element of justification is clear: after all, a fable is an official, base, childish matter. It's another matter if it's a satire...

The great Russian minds turned out to be wrong. Krylov wrote two hundred fables, of which no more than two dozen survived for Russian culture. Ten percent is a very high figure. But it is significant that not the poems that the author was proud of and admired by his contemporaries survived at all. Only in special works are the once sensational "Motley Sheep" or "Fish Dance" mentioned, in which Krylov exposed and scourged. They are outside the mass consciousness, like intersecting parallel lines. But the lines "And you, friends, no matter how you sit down, are all unsuitable for musicians" are immortal. Uncoordinated quartets exist at all times, without any political allegories.

It is enough for a fable that it is essentially an allegory. The first metaphor in the human mind. When a person thought about how to behave in the world around him, he illustrated his opinion with an example. And a generalized example is a fable. Only the infantile idea of ​​anthropomorphism came to the rescue: this is how talking foxes, lions, and eagles appeared.

The fact that the naughty Monkey, the Donkey, the Goat and the clumsy Mishka play the strings is already amusing, enough already. Only boredom can cause the knowledge - who these animals designate: departments of laws, military affairs, civil and spiritual affairs, state economy. Dedicated contemporaries could smile subtly: how Krylov whipped Mordvinov and Arakcheev. But after a few weeks, no one remembered the disagreements in the State Council - especially after years. What remains is a neatly expressed banal truth: the essence cannot be replaced by vanity, skill - by chatter. That is what keeps the Quartet alive, not satire. But Krylov could not know who would remain in the memory of his descendants, and, of course, he did not think of remaining a moralist. He was already a moralist - from the very beginning.

Having seen enough of different aspects of life (since nine years in the bureaucratic service - in Tver, and then in St. Petersburg), Krylov denounced vice from the age of 15, when he wrote the comic opera "Coffee House". Then came the turn of the Spirit Mail magazine, which he wrote and published alone.

These were the backs of Novikov and Fonvizin - Russian enlightenment classicism: the conceited Taratora, the stupid Count Dubovoy, the fidgety Novomodov, the mediocre Rifmograd, the harlots of Shameless, Vsemrad, Neotkaza. In fact, such works are not intended for reading: it is enough to familiarize yourself with the list actors. The names exhaust the classicist indignation at the sight of the emptiness of petimeters and dandies, the dominance of the French, the insignificance of the ideals of a secular person: "I found a train of the best English horses, a beautiful dancer and a bride; and even more, they promised to send me a beautiful little pug; here are the desires that have occupied my heart for a long time!" A moralist roams the balls and receptions like a gloomy accuser, standing out sharply in stylized simplicity against the background of society: “From America or from Siberia, did you deign to come here?” a stranger asked me. “I would very curiously like to hear from you about the wild peoples there; I don't think they've lost their innocence yet." The innocent consciousness of the accuser Krylov was most outraged by marriages of convenience, adultery, agile debauchery, lovers of noble ladies, recruited from the estate of lackeys and hair combs. His disproportionate rage makes one suspect some personal offense. In any case, the image of an imperturbable Buddha, a good-natured grandfather, does not fit with this Savanorola. It is noteworthy that Krylov came to fables when he was already over forty - and, it seems, this is age-related: as the loud proclamations of youth are replaced by senile grumbling - so the classicist sermons were replaced by moralizing allegories about chanterelles and cockerels.

But even in fables, Krylov remained, first of all, a moralist - despite the efforts of modern and later lovers of his work to identify an acutely satirical tendency. Who cares now about the political convictions of the fabulist? By some misunderstanding, he was finally and irrevocably enrolled in a certain progressive camp. This is Krylov, the author of the fables "The Horse and the Rider" - about the need to curb freedom, "The Writer and the Robber" - that a freethinker is worse than a murderer, "The Atheist" - about punishing even a hint of unbelief!

But in a historical perspective, everything turned out right: no one knows these fables, and there is no need - because they are boring, intricate, long, dark. And the best ones are written harmoniously and simply - so much so that they are one of the mysteries of Russian literature: no one wrote like that before Pushkin. Except Krylov. Pushkin opened the floodgates to a stream of simplicity and intelligibility, but Krylov somehow leaked out earlier.

Chased moralizing endings of Krylov's fables were easy to memorize for high school students. Gymnasium students grew up, they had children and students, whom they seated for the same fables. Officials and statesmen were grown-up high school students, again brought up on Krylov's allegorical wisdom. The Russian gymnasium was replaced by the Soviet school, but the fables remained, demonstrating the thesis about the imperishability of art.

When Belinsky wrote that the fable was "only suitable for children," he clearly underestimated the functioning of the genre. Children's consciousness willingly assimilated and carried through life moral norms, smoothly set out in rhyme with the help of interesting chanterelles and cockerels.

The circumstances of Russian history were superimposed on this.

A country that did not know the Reformation - paradoxically, only a counter-reformation (schism), a people who often confused where God was and where the king was - were guided more by the gospel letter than by the gospel parable. The emphasis on a literal reading of the text contributed to the development of a literary-centric culture in Russia, which is associated with the highest rises and deepest falls in the history of the nation.

The main moral source of the Western world - Scripture - is ambiguous and alternative. Even the most definite of Jesus' speeches, the Sermon on the Mount, is open to many interpretations. Even when "the disciples said to him, Why do you speak to them in parables? He answered them, 'For this reason I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, and they do not understand" (Matt. 13:11-15 ) is again an allegory. And so it is with all the gospel parables: the truth hidden in them is always ambiguous, complex, dialectical.

Russian thought approached the concept of alternative morality. But historical events took place - and dogma, unequivocal morality reigned again. Krylov's fables are also a dogma, but much more convenient, intelligible, and funny. And most importantly - assimilated in childhood, when in general everything is assimilated more reliably and more durable.

But since, due to the lack of democratic institutions and glasnost, morality in Russia gravitated toward one-dimensional certainty, did not Krylov reflect this, relying on folk wisdom? Gogol writes: "From here (from proverbs) Krylov originates." In any textbook of Russian literature, it is a common place that the moralistic endings of fables follow directly from folk proverbs. But is it?

In fact, folklore is by no means reduced to a series of common truths. Indeed, any Krylov's fable can find an analogue among proverbs. But with the same success - and the opposite concept. Where the fabulist offers a ready-made recipe, the people's consciousness confronts them with a choice.

In the fable "The Monkey and Glasses" ignorance is castigated. The proverb echoes: "The smart one humbles himself, the fool puffs up." But there is another saying nearby: "A lot of mind - a lot of sin." Or even more cynically: "Not a piece of reason, a piece of money."

Boasting and lying is not good - Krylov teaches in a fable about a tit that threatened to set fire to the sea. That's right - the people agree: "A good deed praises itself." But also: "There is no field without rye, and words without lies."

Current page: 1 (total book has 13 pages)

Peter Vail, Alexander Genis
Native speech. belles-lettres lessons

© P. Weil, A. Genis, 1989

© A. Bondarenko, artwork, 2016

© LLC AST Publishing House, 2016 CORPUS ® Publishing House

* * *

Over the years, I realized that humor for Weil and Genis is not a goal, but a means, and moreover, a tool for understanding life: if you investigate some phenomenon, then find what is funny in it, and the phenomenon will be revealed in its entirety ...

Sergey Dovlatov

Weil and Genis' "Native Speech" is an update of speech that prompts the reader to re-read all school literature.

Andrey Sinyavsky

…books familiar from childhood over the years become only signs of books, standards for other books. And they get them off the shelf as rarely as the Parisian standard of meter.

P. Weil, A. Genis

Andrey Sinyavsky
fun craft

Someone decided that science must necessarily be boring. Probably to make her more respected. Boring means a solid, reputable enterprise. You can invest. Soon there will be no place left on earth in the midst of serious garbage heaps erected to the sky.

But once science itself was revered as a good art and everything in the world was interesting. Mermaids flew. Angels splashed. Chemistry was called alchemy. Astronomy is astrology. Psychology - palmistry. The story was inspired by the muse from the round dance of Apollo and contained an adventurous romance.

And now what? Reproduction reproduction? The last refuge is philology. It would seem: love for the word. And in general, love. Free air. Nothing forced. Lots of fun and fantasy. So it is here: science. They set the numbers (0.1; 0.2; 0.3, etc.), poked footnotes, provided, for the sake of science, with an apparatus of incomprehensible abstractions through which one could not break through (“vermiculite”, “grubber”, “loxodrome”, “parabiosis”, “ultrarapid”), rewrote all this in a deliberately indigestible language - and here you are, instead of poetry, another sawmill for the production of countless books.

Already at the beginning of the 20th century, idle second-hand booksellers thought: “Sometimes you wonder - does humanity really have enough brains for all books? There are not as many brains as there are books!” – “Nothing,” our cheerful contemporaries object to them, “soon only computers will read and produce books. And people will get to take products to warehouses and landfills!”

Against this industrial background, in the form of opposition, in refutation of the gloomy utopia, it seems to me that the book of Peter Weil and Alexander Genis, “Native Speech”, arose. The name sounds archaic. Almost rustic. Smells like childhood. Sen. Rural school. It is fun and entertaining to read, as befits a child. Not a textbook, but an invitation to reading, to divertissement. It is proposed not to glorify the famous Russian classics, but to look into it at least with one eye and then fall in love. The concerns of "Native Speech" are of an ecological nature and are aimed at saving the book, at improving the very nature of reading. The main task is formulated as follows: "The book was studied and - as often happens in such cases - they practically stopped reading." Pedagogy for adults, by the way, to the highest degree, by the way, well-read and educated people.

"Native speech", murmuring like a stream, is accompanied by unobtrusive, easy learning. She suggests that reading is co-creation. Everyone has their own. It has a lot of permissions. Freedom of interpretation. Let our authors eat the dog in belles lettres and give out completely original imperious decisions at every step, our business, they inspire, is not to obey, but to pick up any idea on the fly and continue, sometimes, perhaps, in the other direction. Russian literature is presented here in the image of the expanse of the sea, where every writer is his own captain, where sails and ropes are stretched from Karamzin's "Poor Lisa" to our poor "villagers", from the poem "Moscow - Petushki" to "Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow".

Reading this book, we see that the eternal and, indeed, unshakable values ​​do not stand still, pinned, like exhibits, according to scientific headings. They - move in the literary series and in the reader's mind and, it happens, are part of the later problematic achievements. Where they will swim, how they will turn tomorrow, no one knows. The unpredictability of art is its main strength. This is not a learning process, not progress.

“Native speech” by Weil and Genis is a renewal of speech that encourages the reader, be he seven spans in his forehead, to re-read all school literature. This technique, known since ancient times, is called estrangement.

To use it, you need not so much, just one effort: to look at reality and at works of art with an unbiased look. As if you were reading them for the first time. And you will see: behind every classic beats a living, just discovered thought. She wants to play.

From the authors

For Russia, literature is a starting point, a symbol of faith, an ideological and moral foundation. One can interpret history, politics, religion, national character in any way, but it is worth pronouncing “Pushkin”, as ardent antagonists nod their heads joyfully and unanimously.

Of course, only literature that is recognized as classical is suitable for such mutual understanding. Classics is a universal language based on absolute values.

Russian literature of the golden 19th century has become an indivisible unity, a kind of typological community, before which the differences between individual writers recede. Hence the eternal temptation to find a dominant feature that delimits Russian literature from any others - the intensity of the spiritual search, or love of the people, or religiosity, or chastity.

However, with the same - if not greater - success, one could speak not about the uniqueness of Russian literature, but about the uniqueness of the Russian reader, who is inclined to see the most sacred national property in his favorite books. Touching a classic is like insulting your homeland.

Naturally, such an attitude develops from an early age. The main tool for the sacralization of the classics is the school. The lessons of literature played a tremendous role in shaping the Russian public consciousness. First of all, because the books resisted the educational claims of the state. At all times, literature, no matter how they struggled with it, revealed its internal inconsistency. It was impossible not to notice that Pierre Bezukhov and Pavel Korchagin are heroes of different novels. Generations of those who managed to maintain skepticism and irony in a society poorly adapted for this grew up on this contradiction.

However, books familiar from childhood, over the years, become only signs of books, standards for other books. And they get them off the shelf as rarely as the Parisian standard of meter.

Anyone who decides on such an act - to reread the classics without prejudice - is faced not only with old authors, but also with himself. Reading the main books of Russian literature is like revisiting your biography. Life experience was accumulated along with reading and thanks to it. The date when Dostoevsky was first revealed is no less important than family anniversaries. We grow with books - they grow in us. And once the time comes for a rebellion against the attitude to the classics invested in childhood. Apparently, this is inevitable. Andrei Bitov once admitted: “I spent more than half of my work on fighting with the school literature course.”

We conceived this book not so much to refute the school tradition, but to test - and not even her, but ourselves in it. All chapters of Native Speech strictly correspond to the regular high school curriculum. Of course, we do not hope to say anything essentially new about the subject that occupied the best minds Russia. We just decided to talk about the most stormy and intimate events of our lives - Russian books.

Peter Vail, Alexander Genis

New York, 1989

Legacy of “Poor Lisa”
Karamzin

In the very name Karamzin one can hear cuteness. No wonder Dostoevsky distorted this surname in order to ridicule Turgenev in Possessed. It looks like it's not even funny. Not so long ago, before the boom in Russia brought about by the revival of his History, Karamzin was regarded as a mere shadow of Pushkin. Until recently, Karamzin seemed elegant and frivolous, like a gentleman from the paintings of Boucher and Fragonard, later resurrected by the artists of the World of Art.

And all because one thing is known about Karamzin: he invented sentimentalism. This, like all superficial judgments, is true, at least in part. To read Karamzin today, you need to stock up on aesthetic cynicism, which allows you to enjoy the old-fashioned simplicity of the text.

Nevertheless, one of his stories, "Poor Liza", - fortunately there are only seventeen pages and everything about love - still lives in the minds of the modern reader.

The poor peasant girl Lisa meets the young nobleman Erast. Tired of the windy light, he falls in love with a spontaneous, innocent girl with the love of his brother. But soon platonic love turns into sensual. Lisa consistently loses her spontaneity, innocence and Erast himself - he goes to war. “No, he really was in the army; but instead of fighting the enemy, he played cards and lost almost all his estate. To improve things, Erast marries an elderly rich widow. Upon learning of this, Lisa drowns herself in the pond.

Most of all, it is similar to the libretto of a ballet. Something like Giselle. Karamzin, using the plot of the European petty-bourgeois drama, which was common at that time, not only translated it into Russian, but also transplanted it onto Russian soil.

The results of this simple experience were grandiose. Telling the sentimental and sugary story of poor Liza, Karamzin - along the way! - opened prose.

He was the first to write smoothly. In his writings (not poetry), the words were intertwined in such a regular, rhythmic way that the reader was left with the impression of rhetorical music. The smooth weaving of words had a hypnotic effect. This is a kind of rut, once in which one should not worry too much about the meaning: a reasonable grammatical and stylistic necessity will create it itself.

Smoothness in prose is the same as meter and rhyme in poetry. The meaning of words that find themselves in the rigid pattern of prose rhythm plays a lesser role than the pattern itself.

Listen: “In blooming Andalusia - where proud palm trees rustle, where myrtle groves are fragrant, where the majestic Guadalquivir slowly rolls its waters, where the Sierra Morena crowned with rosemary rises - there I saw the beautiful.” A century later, Severyanin wrote with the same success and just as beautifully.

Many generations of writers lived in the shadow of such prose. Of course, they gradually got rid of prettiness, but not from the smoothness of style. The worse the writer, the deeper the rut in which he crawls. The greater the dependence of the next word on the previous one. The higher the overall predictability of the text. Therefore, Simenon's novel is written in a week, read in two hours and everyone likes it.

Great writers have always, and especially in the 20th century, fought against the smoothness of style, tormented, shredded and tormented it. But until now, the vast majority of books are written in the same prose that Karamzin discovered for Russia.

“Poor Lisa” appeared out of nowhere. Karamzin single-handedly controlled the future of Russian prose: it could be read not to elevate the soul, but for the sake of pleasure, entertainment, fun.

Whatever they say, what matters in literature is not the good intentions of the author, but his ability to captivate the reader with fiction. Otherwise, everyone would prefer Hegel to the “Count of Monte Cristo”.

So, Karamzin "Poor Liza" pleased the reader. Russian literature wanted to see in this little story a prototype of its bright future - and it did. In "Poor Lisa" she found a cursory summary of her themes and characters. There was everything that occupied her and still occupies her. First of all, the people. Dear Liza, with her virtuous mother, gave birth to an endless succession of literary peasants. Already in Karamzin, the slogan “truth lives not in palaces, but in huts” called for learning from the people a healthy moral feeling. All Russian classics, to one degree or another, idealized the peasant. It seems that the sober Chekhov (the story “In the ravine” could not be forgiven for a long time) was almost the only one who resisted this epidemic.

Karamzin's Liza is easy to find even today among the "villagers". Reading them, you can be sure in advance that a person from the people will always be right. This is how there are no bad blacks in American films. The famous “heart beats under black skin too” is quite applicable to Karamzin with his famous “peasant women know how to love”.

There is an ethnographic nuance here, a complex that torments conscientious colonizers.

Erast is also suffering: he "was unhappy until the end of his life." This insignificant remark was also destined to have a long life. From it grew the carefully cherished guilt of the intellectual before the people.

Love for a simple person, a person from the people, has been demanded of a Russian writer for so long and with such insistence that anyone who does not declare it will seem to us a moral monster. (Is there a Russian book devoted to the guilt of the people against the intelligentsia?) Meanwhile, this is by no means such a universal emotion. After all, we do not ask ourselves the question - did the people love Horace or Petrarch? Only the Russian intelligentsia suffered from a guilt complex to such an extent that they hurried to repay the debt to the people in all possible ways - from folklore collections to the revolution.

Karamzin already has all these plots, albeit in their infancy. Here, for example, is the conflict between the city and the countryside, which continues to feed the Russian muse today. Escorting Liza to Moscow, where she sells flowers, her mother says: “My heart is always out of place when you go to the city; I always put a candle in front of the image and pray to the Lord God that he save you from all trouble and misfortune.

The city is the center of depravity. The village is a reserve of moral purity. Turning here to the ideal of Rousseau's "natural man", Karamzin, again in passing, introduces into the tradition a rural literary landscape, a tradition that flourished with Turgenev and has since served as the best source of dictations: "On the other side of the river, an oak grove is visible, near which numerous herds graze; there young shepherds, sitting under the shade of trees, sing simple, dull songs…”

On the one hand, bucolic shepherds, on the other, Erast, who “led a dispersed life, thought only of his own pleasure, looked for it in secular amusements, but often did not find it: he was bored and complained about his fate.”

Of course, Erast could be the father of Eugene Onegin. Here Karamzin, opening the gallery of “superfluous people”, stands at the source of another powerful tradition - images of smart loafers, for whom idleness helps to keep a distance between themselves and the state. Thanks to blessed laziness, superfluous people are always frontiers, always in opposition. If they had served their country honestly, they would have had no time for Liz's seduction and witty digressions.

In addition, if the people are always poor, then extra people are always with means, even if they squandered, as happened with Erast. The careless frivolity of the characters in money matters saves the reader from the “accounting vicissitudes” with which French novels of the 19th century are so rich.

Erast has no affairs in the story, except for love. And here Karamzin postulates another commandment of Russian literature - chastity.

Here is how the fall of Lisa is described: “Erast feels a trembling in herself - Liza also, not knowing why - not knowing what is happening to her ... Ah, Liza, Liza! Where is your guardian angel? Where is your innocence?

In the most risky place - one punctuation: dashes, ellipsis, exclamation marks. And this technique was destined to longevity. Erotica in our literature, with rare exceptions (Bunin's "Dark Alleys"), was bookish, heady. High literature described only love, leaving sex to anecdotes. Brodsky writes about this: “Love as an act is devoid of a verb.” Because of this, Limonov and many others will appear, trying to find this verb. But it is not so easy to overcome the tradition of love descriptions with the help of punctuation marks if it was born back in 1792.

“Poor Lisa” is the embryo from which our literature has grown. It can be studied as a visual aid to Russian classical literature.

Unfortunately, for a very long time, readers noticed only tears in the founder of sentimentalism. There are really a lot of them. The author cries: “I love those objects that make me shed tears of tender sorrow.” His heroes are tearful: "Liza sobbed - Erast wept." Even the harsh characters from the History of the Russian State are sensitive: when they heard that Ivan the Terrible was going to marry, "the boyars wept for joy."

The generation that grew up on Hemingway, this softness jars. But crying was once a rhetorical device. Heroes of Homer now and then burst into tears. In "The Song of Roland" the constant refrain is "the proud barons sobbed."

The general revival of interest in Karamzin indicates that the bored poetics of courageous silence is being replaced by Karamzin's frankness of feelings.

The author of “Poor Liza” himself was fond of sentimentalism in moderation. Being a professional writer in almost the modern sense of the word, he used his invention - smooth writing - for any, often conflicting purposes.

In the wonderful Letters of a Russian Traveler, written at the same time as Poor Liza, Karamzin is already sober, and attentive, and witty, and down to earth: “Our dinner consisted of roast beef, ground apples, pudding and cheese” . But Erast drank only milk, and even then from the hands of the kind Liza. The hero of the "Letters" dine with sense and arrangement.

The travel notes of Karamzin, who traveled half of Europe, and even during the Great French Revolution, are amazingly fascinating reading. Like any good travel diary, the Letters are remarkable for their meticulousness and unceremoniousness.

A traveler, even one as educated as Karamzin, in a foreign land always turns out to be an ignoramus. He is quick to jump to conclusions. He is not embarrassed by the categoricalness of hasty judgments. In this genre, irresponsible impressionism is a forced but pleasant necessity. "Few kings live as splendidly as English aged sailors." Or - "This land is much better than Livonia, which it is not a pity to pass through closing your eyes."

Romantic ignorance is better than pedantry. Readers forgive the first, never the second.

Karamzin was one of the first Russian writers to have a monument erected. But, of course, not for “Poor Liza”, but for the 12-volume “History of the Russian State”. Contemporaries considered it the most important of all Pushkin; descendants did not reprint for a hundred years.

And suddenly Karamzin's "History" was rediscovered. It became a bestseller overnight. No matter how this phenomenon is explained, the reason for the revival of Karamzin is his prose, the same smoothness of writing.

Karamzin created the first “readable” Russian history. The prose rhythm discovered by him was so universal that he managed to revive even a multi-volume monument.

History exists in any nation only when it is written about it fascinatingly. The Persians were not lucky enough to give birth to their Herodotus - and the great Persian empire became the property of archaeologists, and everyone knows and loves the history of Hellas. The same happened with Rome. If there had not been Titus Livius, Tacitus, Suetonius, perhaps the American Senate would not have been called the Senate. But the Parthians, formidable rivals of the Romans, left no evidence of their colorful history.

Karamzin rendered the same service to Russian culture that ancient historians rendered to their peoples. When his work was published, Fyodor Tolstoy exclaimed: “It turns out that I have a fatherland!”

Although Karamzin was not the first and not the only historian of Russia, he was the first to translate history into the language of fiction, wrote an interesting - artistic - history, a story for readers. In it, he managed to merge the newly invented prose with ancient samples of Roman, primarily Tacitus, laconic eloquence: “This people in poverty alone sought security for itself”, “Helen indulged at one time both in the tenderness of lawless love and the ferocity of bloodthirsty malice.”

Only by developing a special language for his unique work, Karamzin was able to convince everyone that "the history of ancestors is always curious for someone who is worthy of having a fatherland."

A well-written history is the foundation of literature. Without Herodotus, there would be no Aeschylus. Thanks to Karamzin, Pushkin's "Boris Godunov" appeared. Without Karamzin, Pikul appears in literature.

Throughout the 19th century, Russian writers focused on the history of Karamzin. Both Shchedrin, and A. K. Tolstoy, and Ostrovsky perceived the “History of the Russian State” as a starting point, as something taken for granted. They argued with her, ridiculed her, parodied her, but only such an attitude makes the work a classic.

When, after the revolution, Russian literature lost this, which had become natural, dependence on the Karamzin tradition, the long connection between literature and history was severed (it was not for nothing that Solzhenitsyn also knitted his “knots”).

Modern literature is sorely lacking in the new Karamzin. The appearance of a great writer must be preceded by the appearance of a great historian - in order for a harmonic literary panorama to be created from individual fragments, a solid and unconditional foundation is needed. The nineteenth century provided such a foundation Karamzin.

In general, he did a lot for the century, about which he wrote: “The ninth to the tenth century! How much will be revealed in you that we considered a secret.

But Karamzin himself still remained in the eighteenth. Others took advantage of his discoveries. No matter how smooth his prose once seemed, today we read it with nostalgic tenderness, enjoying the semantic shifts that time produces in old texts and which give them a slightly absurd character - like the Oberiuts: “The porters! Can you rejoice with such a sad trophy? Being proud of the name of the porter, do not forget your most noble name - the name of a man.