How Dostoevsky hurt Russian culture

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Why should Mayakovsky be pounded in the face, what are the prospects for the development of the theme "Dostoevsky and homosexuality", and also why are there no major literary scholars today? We talked about this and many other things with Alexander Krinitsyn, a lecturer at the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University and a specialist in the work of the author of "Crime and Punishment".

Carry the torch

As a child, I was taught to read for so long that I finally hated it. And then somehow I was left alone, I was about five years old, took and read all the children's books that were at home in one evening. Since then I have been reading.

Of course, later I was fond of both geography and history, but I never thought that I would do something other than literature. As I saw the philological faculty, passing by on the bus, I realized that I would be applying here. In addition, my mother studied here, she is a teacher of Russian and literature, and my father was an avant-garde artist (now a film director). They, like me, did not consider any other option for me than this.

I entered in 1987, at the end of the Gorbachev era, then the nineties began. Material difficulties did not particularly concern me, I always found an opportunity to earn extra money, taught. And the mess around, too, had no effect on my choice. I believe that literature in itself, the situation in society in itself. It is clear that time is running wild, it continues to run wild even now, people are leaving high culture, in particular, 19th century literature, before our very eyes, but we must "carry the torch", we must live our own life. If it is possible to find a compromise with time, it must be found, if not - we must go our own way.

From the teaching dynasty

I attended the School of Young Philology at Moscow State University. We had students as teachers. They really tried, the lectures were at a high level. In particular, Dmitry Kuzmin, now a scandalous poet, taught us, I attended a circle dedicated to the poetry of the Silver Age. In short, I was finally convinced that the philological faculty is the place where you need to enter and entered.

Having entered the Russian department, I chose a special seminar by Anna Ivanovna Zhuravleva, a specialist in Ostrovsky, Lermontov and Grigoriev. By the way, I didn't always have a simple relationship with her, but I always respected her. It was also close to me that her husband, Seva Nekrasov, was an avant-garde artist, like my father.

I also went a little to a special seminar with Turbin, a favorite of students of the 60s, he was brilliant, but chatty. Zhuravleva spoke little, but I still remember everything she said. She was a student of Bakhtin. Her special seminar was devoted to drama, and I wanted to study Dostoevsky. As a result, he wrote a work on the theme "Dostoevsky and the Theater". According to Dostoevsky, I never had a leader - everything that I read, I read myself, took a long time to choose what was close to me.

When I graduated from university, I first taught at an Orthodox gymnasium - oddly enough, Greek and Latin (I did not want to teach literature then - this is very emotional and energetically expensive at school). In general, as far as I can remember, I have always taught, starting with classmates, whom I trained in Russian. I am from a teaching dynasty, my grandfather and his sisters also taught in the pre-revolutionary gymnasium. There are six or eight teachers in total. My learning and teaching process went in parallel, the areas of responsibility just changed. When I was taken to the department, I left the gymnasium, but the experience of working with children remained and then came in handy.

Train has already left

Such scientists as Bakhtin, Toporov, Vinogradov evoke respect and admiration in me, but none of the modern ones. There are more or less professional people, but no one makes discoveries. Scientists ended, in my opinion, at Uspensky, Lotman, Nikita Ilyich Tolstoy. There are also interesting people abroad - for example, Mikhail Weisskopf, author of the book "Gogol's Plot".

The generation of real major literary scholars was the one that was educated in pre-revolutionary Russia, especially at the turn of the century, when humanitarian culture and art were on the rise. Then - the generation of the 1920s, which caught the old intelligentsia before its extermination, it was already shining with a reflected light. And then there was a generation that caught the one that shone with reflected light. And he also found something to learn from him …

Now there are no such scientists who knew five languages, really owned world literature, and in parallel - philosophy and history. At least I cannot name them … The general depth of philological culture has been lost. There are people who master some of its fragments. And then there are people who use grants.

Philological knowledge is based on the mass of read texts, and you need to study them in the original. For this, it is too late at the institute to start with Latin once a week. Train has already left. Before the revolution, the graduates of the classical gymnasium reached the level of our graduate students, at the university they were already doing something else.

Modern students do not even take what we took in our time. In our list of foreigners there were collected works of Balzac, Hugo … Now they read the complete collected works? I think no. What was required of the majority became, at best, the enthusiasm of a few.

Try to write better

The question is often raised whether Dostoevsky is a good writer - not a thinker, not a publicist, but a writer. You can simply answer: try to write better. They joke about Mona Lisa: if someone doesn't like her now, then she has the right to do so, because too many have already liked her and has the opportunity to choose who likes and who doesn't. The same is with Dostoevsky: if a person has already been liked by so many, has stood the test of time, then he is a good writer. If he became a global phenomenon, then he conveyed a message that turned out to be important to many. And each generation discovers it for itself anew and in its own way.

But it is complex and ambiguous. They scold him, because, naturally, he hurts to the quick. He is by nature a provocateur, he wants to shock readers with his heroes, psychological moments and philosophical paradoxes. He is all about conflicts and provocations. Of course, everyone cannot like it.

Mayakovsky is also a provocateur, also shocking. I love Mayakovsky very much, but if I saw him, I would have stuffed his face; when you read something, sometimes you just want to kick in the face. He insults everything that is dear to me, he trampled on Russian culture. He helped the Bolsheviks to destroy it, sanctioned its destruction, allegedly on its own behalf, as its bearer and successor. But at the same time a genius poet.

Archfire writer

Lenin called Dostoevsky an arch-infamous writer, even in our department I know those who, in a fit of revelation, called him vile. If you look at Dostoevsky from the point of view of the harm he brought to Russian culture, you can see a lot. He talks a lot about Russians and Russia, but in fact describes himself, his own complexes, fears, problems. When he says that a typical Russian person strives for an abyss, it is not a Russian person strives for an abyss, it is Dostoevsky that strives for an abyss. But he shouted about this for so long at every corner (he especially influenced the study of Russian literature abroad with his authority) that he imposed such a stereotype on Russians.

After the revolution, many philosophers and professors emigrated (or were expelled) to Europe and took jobs in universities. They were looked upon as if they had escaped from a wrecked ship. What about your country, they asked them, and they explained the catastrophe in Russia according to Dostoevsky. That the “mysterious Russian soul” seeks to look into the abyss; that a Russian cannot be in the middle - he is either a criminal or a saint; that chaos reigns in the soul of a Russian person. All this perfectly fit into the concept of the confrontation between Russia and Europe and explained the nightmare of the revolution. Accordingly, as a result, Russian literature began to be interpreted according to Dostoevsky. Not according to Aksakov, not according to his "Family Chronicle", where there are no conflicts, no contradictions, where there is an ordinary stable life, but according to Dostoevsky, who just denied stability, everyday current time, everyday life, for him everything should always be on the brink of life and death. Heroes become interesting for him only when they experience despair and an existential crisis and solve the "last questions", and therefore he begins by "knocking them down", that is, putting them before a catastrophe, knocking them out of the rut of everyday life. And then everyone abroad begins to believe that such is the Russian person. And the venerable German burgher is horrified, where and how these Russian beasts came from, how terrible.

Dostoevsky's homosexuality

Dostoevsky has been studied up and down, but people must continue to write articles in order to receive a salary. Therefore, they begin either to speculate with their knowledge, or to invent something spectacular. For example, at a conference they make a report on the topic that Myshkin or Alyosha Karamazov killed everyone in the novel. A sort of "reverse commonplace," as Turgenev said. All the listeners will be indignant for a long time, and then tell the others how heated the discussion was, which means that the report was remembered and was “effective”. Such a cheap way of self-promotion. What they just do not find in poor Dostoevsky: both sadism and sadomasochism.

I remember one report at a conference in Germany, when a person presented a study on what model was the ax that Raskolnikov used during the murder of an old woman. He gave drawings and photographs of axes of the 19th century, calculated the force with which Raskolnikov had to hit in order to open the skull, and talked about it in detail for a long time. Then he was asked (ours, of course) why all this, whether it helps to understand the novel. I don’t remember what he said. And did he answer at all.

Most of all I am bothered by questions about Dostoevsky's homosexuality - in my opinion, this is already out of complete despair.

I had two friends in my student days, one of them is Pasha Ponomarev, now the famous singer Psoy Korolenko. They earned money by writing diplomas to order. They were smart people, in addition to being funny, and they had such a trick: in every diploma, whatever the topic, it is imperative to discover and carry out the Jewish question and the problem of homosexuality. The diplomas were defended with a bang. I laughed wildly when I read it all.

Absolutely left-wing people like to publish books about Dostoevsky: emigrants, retired engineers, detectives and others. With such "yellow" titles: "The Mystery of Dostoevsky Solved", "What Dostoevsky the Literary Critics Won't Tell You About," "Dostoevsky's Prophecy," etc. So, Dostoevsky is alive, intellectually excites people, but the quality and novelty of such "revelations" are predictable …

Dostoevsky became famous only because of his talent?

If a writer became famous, it means that his questions coincided with the conjuncture. Chernyshevsky wrote "What is to be done?" in 1862, when he was in the Peter and Paul Fortress, and became a hero. Had he written this twenty years later, no one would have read it. And he wrote, and it became the most important and most widely read book of Russian literature. Lenin admitted that he would never have become a revolutionary if he had not read What Is to Be Done? At the same time, the book is frankly bad.

The peak of Dostoevsky's fame falls on the turn of the century and the beginning of the 20th century, when he came into resonance with time. And during his lifetime he was in the shadow of Tolstoy and Turgenev. It was believed that there is a writer who mows like Edgar Poe, deals with the painful sides of the human soul. About some kind of religion, he says that it is no longer at any gate. And then, on the contrary, the Russian religious renaissance showed that Dostoevsky was his harbinger. At its first appearance, Crime and Punishment was, of course, a great success, it was read, but this is incomparable with what its popularity was later.

Everything that you study intently becomes a part of you

Dostoevsky undoubtedly influenced my life, I became as a person, studying his texts. It is difficult to assess in hindsight exactly how much he influenced. Everything that you intently study becomes a part of you, but then it is difficult to separate this part - it's like cutting off one or another finger.

I have almost erased the emotions of the reader due to years of scientific interest. Now, when you have to reread Dostoevsky's texts, sometimes they provoke more and more irritation, and sometimes you admit again and again: yes, these are genius passages. "Crime and Punishment" and "The Brothers Karamazov" are the most artistically powerful texts by Dostoevsky, in my opinion. The Brothers Karamazov is one of the texts that I can always read non-stop, like War and Peace. You open it, read it and you can't stop.

I used to love The Idiot very much: there is something in this text, it is mysterious, incomprehensible to the end. Dostoevsky himself said that he did not say even a tenth of what he intended in it. However, he is most attracted to those readers who say their favorite novel is The Idiot, because there is something particularly important about it that he wanted to say. Frankly, I fiddled with him for a very long time: I wanted to understand deeper, all the time it seemed that there was something else there.

Dostoevsky and religion

In order to understand Russian literature, at least some kind of religious or mystical experience is needed. One way or another, religious questions are posed by all writers, even by Turgenev and Tolstoy. Dostoevsky did not immerse himself deeply in religion and theology, although Tatyana Aleksandrovna Kasatkina tries to say that he was a serious theologian and holds conferences on Dostoevsky's theology. But Dostoevsky himself counted on the perception of his texts by people who were not involved in religion, for example, by the youth of the 1860s. He expected the reader to begin with a tabula rasa. He was engaged not in the subtleties of theology, but in proselytism, showing that, whatever one may say, with serious life questions one cannot get away from religion. At the same time, it led to the need for religion from the opposite - what would happen if it was removed.

He himself had a difficult path to Orthodoxy, also rather from the opposite. We see from his letters that he was madly in doubt. The hero of The Idiot was written under the impression of The Life of Christ by Renan, who considers Jesus Christ not as God, but as a righteous man, says that he is the best person in the history of mankind. It is important for Dostoevsky that even atheists recognize Christ as a moral ideal. The Idiot has a romantic component, both Protestant and Schiller’s, and many other “mediations” of Russian Orthodoxy through which Dostoevsky came to him. The Brothers Karamazov is a much more Orthodox novel than The Idiot.

I cannot say that I came to faith thanks to Dostoevsky. Still, my family is cultured, and the New Testament was read in it even before they came to faith. Although I personally know people who became believers after reading Dostoevsky or even Bulgakov - through The Master and Margarita they first learned about Christianity. Rather, I chose Dostoevsky precisely because I was already involved in faith.

There is nothing more difficult than introducing a child to the classical tradition

It is definitely necessary to attach. First of all, we have a literary-centric culture. And the classics make up a common cultural code - a people-forming one. And even a state-forming one. It forms a common view of the world, unites and allows us to understand each other in a way that people of other cultures do not understand us.

Dislike for literature is always from a bad teacher. There are very few good, real teachers in the school now. The school in the last Soviet and the first years of perestroika was chronically underfunded, now they woke up, but the tradition has already been stopped. There is nothing more difficult than introducing a child to the classical tradition, no matter if it is literature, painting or music. You try to teach your child - and fail seven times out of ten. And when a whole class is sitting in front of you and the majority have one desire to show off in public and gag … Even one scoffer or vulgar can break the psychological atmosphere in the class, which you hardly create to understand the work. There must be a very strong personality of the teacher, there are such people, but there are only a few of them. Because of the emotional layout, teaching literature is an order of magnitude more difficult than even mathematics (unless, of course, you don’t hack, don’t put children on a classic movie for a whole lesson, as they sometimes do now). Therefore, I did not want to work at school, like my mother: I probably would have succeeded, but I would have had to devote myself to this business with the utmost effort. My energy is average, and then I would not have had enough strength for science. When I came after six lessons from the gymnasium, I lay down on the sofa and just lay there for an hour in prostration, without sleep, leaving as if the battery had run out.

To understand the classics at school, the student must be prepared a little long beforehand - by independent reading or by his family, so that he has something to rely on in the text.

Even if you really want to enjoy Beethoven, but have not listened to the classics before, you will at best like the first sound of the main theme, but you will not be able to trace its development if you do not understand its harmonic structure, do not know the laws of the genre, and do not know how to hear several voices … It is the same with Pushkin: if you have not read anything before him, you may like and remember one line, but you will not appreciate the whole: for this you need to imagine the era and know the reading circle of Pushkin himself. But this does not mean that it is not necessary to go through it at school in general: the learned classical texts will be the first in the piggy bank, then they will be remembered for a long time and comprehended when others are added to them, but you have to start somewhere, otherwise you will not meet serious literature generally.

It is a mistake to believe that a masterpiece should immediately be liked and carried away: reading complex things and understanding them is a job, just like playing music. Understanding and admiration is a reward for work and experience.

And so the children do not understand not only the problems facing the heroes, but even just the realities of their lives. How much money did Raskolnikov have in his pocket? 50 kopecks. They do not understand what could be bought with them (and he buys beer for himself for a penny, say). They do not understand how much his apartment costs, how well or badly he lives. They do not understand why Sonya Marmeladova cannot sit down in the presence of his relatives, and that when Raskolnikov put her in prison, he disgraced his mother. Until you explain to the child that there were completely different rules of relations between the sexes, between the estates, he will not understand anything. It is necessary to explain this strongly before letting you read Crime and Punishment, and only then say that Dostoevsky, in fact, raises the problems that face them, specifically teenagers: self-affirmation, the desire to become a “Napoleon,” insane self-shame, fear of not being liked by anyone, especially of the opposite sex, a feeling of inferiority.

We study literature in order to understand ourselves and the world around us. If you know the history of feelings, you will understand your own feelings differently. This will complicate your picture of the world so much that you will have a different consciousness.

Why listen to classical music? Don't listen to your health. But if you love her and understand her, then you know why you are listening to her. And you won't trade your knowledge of classical music for anything. Even if you make me a banker, I will not give up my knowledge, my personality, my picture of the world.

Or you live like a pig from Krylov's fable, you go out to bask in the sun, get some fresh air. There is nothing wrong with that either. This pig may even be happy. I even envy her in part, I myself do not always find time to go out to breathe. But her outlook and level of comprehension of her life is somewhat narrower. Every organism trembles cheerfully from simple human joys, I have nothing against it. But the intensity of the experience of the world that the knowledge of art, literature, painting gives you, you will not exchange for anything.

It is impossible to explain to the child who bought the first pink watch that this color is cheap. And don't, let him stay happy. Moreover, everyone around has the same pink watches, marketing has tried. But the artist experiences colors in such a way that he can experience a shock from a living and complex color - and how can this be conveyed to another? Art and literature have never been the property of everyone, they have always been elite. It was only in the Soviet school that there was a focus on universal, very high-quality education, it cost a lot of resources and infrastructure costs, and we habitually focus on this high level as the norm. In the West, on the contrary, this bar is deliberately lowered so that people are better managed as citizens and as consumers. And the "reformers" are actively involving us in this trend.

Actual

I am now interested in poetry; it seems to me that it is much more complicated than prose, it is much more interesting to study it. Rilke, Hölderlin, from the modern - Paul Celan. If I had a choice of which famous person I could meet, I would have chosen Hölderlin, but only before he lost his mind.

I am interested in difficult texts, in which there is some kind of system that needs to be unraveled and understood. At the same time, the aesthetic side is at the same time important for me. That is why I love literature, because poets and writers put beauty in the forefront. Yes, literature has some other functions - for example, it touches on political issues or captures the feelings of people, their worldview in a particular era. History will not convey this. And by the way, if not for literary criticism, I would have been studying history. I am very attracted to it. But, as I said, the main thing in art for me is aesthetics, so if I had musical talent, I would become a musician. To tell the truth, I put music much higher than literature. But I have to study literature, because I do it better.