Re-education of the Russian elite. A new breed of people from the end of the 18th century

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

Educational institutions that began to appear in Russia in the second half of the 18th century were distinguished by their severity: children from the age of six were taken from home, and until the age of 17-20 they lived in educational buildings, and they could see their parents only on fixed days and in the presence of a teacher …

Thus, the state ideologists tried to cultivate a new elite of society, which was to replace the "violent and bestial" nobles, colorfully described in the Fonvizin "Minor".

Culture to feel

On the one hand, talking about the feelings of certain people - living, departed - is an understandably problematic and hypothetical thing. And it seems that historical science should talk about this with caution. On the other hand, almost every person who talks about the past, one way or another concerns this. Napoleon wanted something, Stalin, Hitler, Mother Teresa … Mother Teresa felt sorry for the poor, someone was eager for power, someone felt a sense of protest. We endlessly come across some qualifications of the inner emotional world of the heroes of historical books, because without this it is impossible to analyze their motives and motives.

In fact, by default, we assume that in certain life situations the people we write about should experience the same thing that we would have experienced. The normal way of thinking about people's feelings is to put yourself in their shoes.

We live within two very fundamental and, in fact, historically defined views. We have two basic ideas about our own feelings. First, that they belong only to us and to no one else. Hence the expression "share feelings." Each person feels his emotional world as internal, intimate. On the other hand, we most often talk about feelings as spontaneously arising. Something happened, and we reacted: I was beside myself with rage, I was upset, I was delighted.

Our feelings are generally predictable. We roughly know what we should feel in a given situation. An error in such forecasting suggests that there is a hypothesis. If we did not have these hypotheses, no meaningful behavior would be possible. You need to know, when communicating with a person, what can offend or please him, how he will react if he was presented with flowers, how he will react if he was given a face, and what he will feel at this moment. We have educated guesses on this score, we roughly know. The question is: from where?

We are not born with our senses. We assimilate them, we learn, we master them throughout life, from early childhood: somehow we learn what is supposed to feel in certain situations.

The late Michelle Rosaldo, a remarkable American researcher and anthropologist, once wrote that we do not understand anything at all in the emotional world of a person until we stop talking about the soul and start talking about cultural forms.

I am not exaggerating: every person has an image in their head of how to feel correctly. The famous literary question "Is this love?" indicates that this feeling itself is preceded by an idea of what it is. And when you start to feel something like that, you still check the feeling you are experiencing with the existing archecultural ideas. Does it look like it or not, love or some kind of nonsense? Moreover, as a rule, the probable sources of these models and basic images are, firstly, mythology, and secondly, ritual. Thirdly, art is also a very important way of generating feelings. We learn what feelings are by looking at a symbolic pattern. People who, for centuries, from generation to generation, have looked at Madonna, knew what motherly love and motherly grief are.

Nowadays, the mass media have been added to this list, which belongs to the great American anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Geertz did not write about them, but the media are also a powerful source of production of our symbolic images.

Myth, ritual, art. And, probably, one can assume - very roughly, I am terribly simplifying again - that some source will be more or less central to some historical epoch. Assume, roughly linking mythology as a basic way of generating emotional symbolic models of feelings with archaic eras, ritual (primarily religious) - with traditional eras, with traditional culture, and art - with the culture of modernity. The media is probably a postmodern culture.

Regulations are applied to the samples of feelings. Not everyone is prescribed to experience the same thing. Among the main principles recorded in these regulations, for example, gender. We all know that "boys don't cry." Girls are allowed, boys are not; if a boy cried, they say to him: "What are you, a girl or what?" But, for example, the high Islamic culture, including its flourishing in the 16th century, as it is intuitively clear even to those who have never been involved in it, is unusually masculine. There is a very strong image of a man, a warrior, a hero, a winner, a fighter. And these people - heroes and warriors - are constantly crying. They shed endless tears because your crying is evidence of great passion. And in the XX century, as we know, only in the museum can you see a crying Bolshevik, and only in the case when Lenin died.

The second, very important aspect is age. We all know how to feel, at what age a person is supposed to fall in love. At some age, this is already funny, uncomfortable, awkward, indecent, and so on. And why, in fact, do we know? There is no rational explanation for this, except that this is the way it is, culture is how this business is organized.

Another important factor is, of course, the social one. People recognize people in their own social circle, including by the way they feel.

Social, gender and age factors are the main regulations for the distribution of emotional patterns and models of feelings. Although there are others - more subtle, smaller ones. But these are, in my opinion, the most fundamental cultural things. You know at what stage in your life, in what situations and what you are supposed to feel. And you train yourself, you educate yourself.

Incubators for undergrowth

At the end of the 18th century, the educated urban nobility experienced a transition from traditional culture to the culture of the New Age. I emphasize the importance of the epithet "educated nobility", because about 60% of the Russian nobility in their way of life did not differ much from their own serfs. Everyone, as a rule, was literate, in contrast to the serfs, but otherwise there were few differences.

In 1762 - this is a well-known fact - the Manifesto on the Liberty of the Nobility came out. The nobles were allowed not to serve in the public service. For the first time - before that the service was obligatory. It was written right in the manifesto that the sovereign-emperor Peter Alekseevich, having established the service, had to force everyone to serve, because the nobles did not have zeal at that time. He forced everyone, now they have zeal. And since now they have zeal, you can allow them and not serve. But they must have zeal, they must still serve. And those who do not serve, will shy away without good reason, should be covered with general contempt. This is very interesting, because the state speaks to its own subjects in the language of emotional categories. This is the case when the state switched the register: issues of loyalty, love for the monarch, loyalty to the throne, zeal came to the fore, because service was no longer a duty. The state takes on the task of educating feelings, it prescribes feelings.

This is a very important cultural, political and social quantum. Educational institutions grow like mushrooms after rain. As a characteristic feature of them, the first educational institution for girls in Russia is emerging - the Institute for Noble Maidens, the Smolny Institute. Why at this moment and for what in general? Women don't serve. If the whole point is to make a person serve, then there is no need to start teaching girls - why, she will not have to serve anyway. But if we are talking about what one needs to feel, then, of course, they need to be educated. Because they will be mothers, they will instill something in their children - and how will their sons serve the fatherland and the monarch out of zeal if their mother does not instill in them the right feelings from childhood? I am not reconstructing the logic of the state power of Catherine's monarchy, but retelling, close to the text, what is written in the official documents. This is how it was formulated.

The educational regime in both male and female schools was so ferocious that when you read about it, you shudder. This is a super-elite, it was incredibly difficult to get there, they studied "on the state cat". Children were taken from families: from 6 to 17 years old - girls, and from 6 to 20 years old - boys, if it was the Land Gentry Cadet Corps. They never let me go home - not for any vacations or weekends, under any circumstances. You should have spent your entire life on the premises of the corps. Parents had the right to see you only on fixed days and only in the presence of a teacher. This complete isolation is the task of educating a new breed of people, which was so directly formulated and called - "a new breed of people." They are taken to incubators, taken away from their parents and brought up. Because the existing people-nobles, as Ivan Ivanovich Betskoy, the closest adviser to Catherine in the field of education, formulated, “are frantic and bestial”. Those who have read the play "The Minor" imagine how it looked from the point of view of the educated nobility. I am not telling how it was in reality, but how the ideologists and intellectuals who were close to the throne saw modern noble life: what kind of people are these - Skotinin and all the others. Of course, if we want them to have normal children, they must be taken from their families, placed in this incubator and the structure of their life must be completely changed.

Monopoly on the souls of nobles

What institution came to the fore for the state in solving this problem? In the center of everything was the courtyard and the court theater. The theater was the center of society at that time. A visit to the theater for an employee nobleman living in St. Petersburg was mandatory.

The Winter Palace had four theater halls. Accordingly, access is regulated. In the smallest - the narrowest circle, those around the empress. People of a certain rank should come to large performances in the big hall - they sit down by rank. Moreover, there are open performances, for which, of course, there is face control, there is a dress code. Directly in the regulations it is written that people "not of a vile type" are allowed there. Those who stood at the gate understand well who is vile and who is not vile. In general, they said, it was not difficult to figure it out.

The symbolic center of the performance is the personal presence of the empress. The Empress goes to all the performances - you can watch her. On the other hand, she looks at how someone is behaving: examines the personnel.

The Empress had two boxes in the main hall of the court theater. One was behind the hall, opposite the stage, in the very depths, and was raised. The second was on the side, right next to the stage. During the performance, she changed boxes, moving from one to another. Why, why didn't you sit in one? They had different functions. The one in the back represented the hall: everyone sits in rank, and the empress takes a place above everyone else. It is a representation of the social structure, the political structure of the imperial power. On the other hand, there, behind, the Empress is not visible. But it is inconvenient to turn your head, and in general it is obscene - you still have to look ahead at the stage, and not turn around and look at the empress. The question arises: why is it necessary to see the empress? And because you have to see how to react to certain episodes of the play: what is funny, what is sad, where to cry, where to be happy, where to clap. Whether you like the performance or not is also a very important question. Because this is a matter of national importance!

The Empress likes it, but you don’t - it doesn’t fit into any gate. And vice versa. Therefore, at some point, she leaves the imperial box, transplants into the next box, where everyone can see how she reacts, and can learn how to feel correctly.

In general, theater provides wonderful opportunities: we see basic emotions, basic human experiences on the stage. On the one hand, they are cleared of daily empiricism and brought to focus by art, shown as they are. On the other hand, you can experience them, perceive, react to them against the background of others - you see how others react and adjust your reactions. This is funny, and this is scary, and this is fun, and this is sad, and this is very sentimental and sad. And people learn together, collectively create what modern scientists call "emotional community" - these are people who understand how to feel each other.

What is an emotional community - this image achieves incredible clarity if, for example, we look at the broadcast of a football match. One team scored a goal, and we are shown the stands. And we can see very accurately where the fans of one team sit, and where - the other. The intensity of emotions can be different, but they have the same essence, we see one emotional community: they have the same symbolic model. The State Theater forms just such a thing and forms it the way the Empress needs, as she considers it right. A very important moment for representing the place of this theater in cultural life: the candles were not extinguished at those performances, the whole hall is a part of what is happening in the performance, you see everything around.

I talked about this monstrous regime of isolation that existed at the Smolny Institute in order to educate the correct patterns of feeling. Young ladies were allowed to read only moralizing historical literature. The meaning of this prohibition is clear: novels were excluded. Girls are not allowed to read novels because God knows what comes into their heads. But, on the other hand, these same girls, who were so carefully guarded, were constantly rehearsing in performances. We know very well that the entire theatrical repertoire is arranged around love. Catherine was worried about this, she saw some kind of problem in this. And she wrote letters to Voltaire with a request to find some more "decent" repertoire and edit some plays: throw out the unnecessary from them so that the girls could perform all this from the point of view of morality and ethics. Voltaire promised, but, as was his custom, he did not send anything. Despite this circumstance, Catherine still sanctioned the theater - it is clear that the advantages outweighed. There were fears, but all the same it was necessary for the pupils to play, because in this way they learned the correct and real ways to feel.

A very interesting moment in theatrical history begins in France at the end of the 18th century. This is what went down in theatrical and, above all, operatic history as the "Gluck revolution." Began to rely on looking at the scene. Even the architecture of the theater hall is changing: the boxes stand at an angle to the stage, and not perpendicularly, so that from the box you can see mainly those who are sitting opposite you, and you had to turn to the stage. At the end of Gluck's overtures - all without exception - a terrible "bang" is heard. What for? This means that the conversations, chatter and contemplation of the hall are over - look at the scene. The lighting of the hall gradually changes, the stage stands out. In today's theater, opera, cinema, the hall is symbolically absent - it is dark, you should not see those who are next to you. Your dialogue with the scene is recorded. This is a huge cultural revolution.

It was not some kind of whim of Catherine - this was characteristic of all monarchs of the era of absolutism. There is a basic cultural form for each institution, towards which those who reproduce it in other countries, in other places or eras, are guided. For court culture, this is the court of Louis XIV in France at the end of the 17th century. There, everyone went crazy around the theater, and personally the king, the Sun King (until he got old, then he had to stop it), went on stage in ballet performances and danced. There were standard forms of patronage, incredibly generous funding: they never spared money for the theater, the actors were generously paid, theater troupes in almost every country were headed by the most noble and important dignitaries. This was the ministerial level - to be at the head of the imperial theater.

Catherine did not appear in ballet scenes - those who imagine what the empress looked like will easily understand why. The Empress was wider across herself, and it would seem strange to her to dance in ballet. But she was extremely sensitive to the theater, no less anxious than Louis XIV. She personally wrote comedies, as you know, distributed roles among the actors, staged performances. It was about a huge project for the education of the souls of subjects - first of all, of course, of the noble and central elite, which was supposed to be an example for the whole country. The state presented its rights to a monopoly in this area.

Facebook Masons feed

The monopoly of the state, of course, did not remain unconditional for everyone. She was questioned, criticized, trying to offer alternative models of feeling. We are dealing with a competition for the souls of citizens - or, rather, subjects of that time. Freemasonry is the central project of moral re-improvement of the Russian person in the second half of the 18th century, an alternative to the court.

Russian Freemasons consistently offer a completely different model of behavior. First, it is based on completely different ideas about a person. What is important in the theatrical emotion that is demonstrated from the stage? It is experienced and enacted at the same time. And it is experienced only insofar as it is enacted. It exists only in a played out form, it is a certain dimension of the human personality: in order to experience a feeling, you have to play it, and they tell you what feeling it is and how you play it.

According to Masonic views, a person has depth: there is what is on the surface, and what is inside is hidden. And above all, you must change and remake the inner, the innermost, the deepest. All Masons, without exception, in that era were faithful parishioners of the Russian Orthodox Church - they did not take others. It was considered obligatory to go to church correctly, to do everything that you are taught. But this Masons called "the outer church." And the “inner church” is what happens in your soul, how you morally reform yourself, throw off the sin of Adam, and gradually, plunging into esoteric wisdom, you rise up, up and up.

A little girl from the noble Pleshcheev family - she was six years old - wrote a letter to the famous Russian freemason Alexei Mikhailovich Kutuzov. That is, of course, the parents wrote, and she added: "We are going to stage the comedy at home that you translated." Dejected and shocked, Kutuzov writes a letter to her mother: “First of all, I have never translated any comedy, you cannot stage a comedy in my translation. And secondly, I do not like at all that children are forced to play in the theater. What can be from this: either they will learn feelings that they know early and prematurely, or they will learn to hypocrisy. " The logic is clear.

It is a distinct alternative to court culture and its monopoly. Freemasons create their own practices for creating their own emotional community. First of all, all Freemasons are ordered to keep diaries. In your diary, you should be aware of your feelings, experiences, what is good in you, what is bad in you. A diary is not written by a person only for himself: you write it, and then there is a meeting of the lodge and you read it, or send it to others, or tell what you wrote. This way of self-reflection, self-reflection, in order to criticize oneself later, is a collective enterprise for the moral education of the emotional world of an individual member of the lodge. You demonstrate yourself, compare with others. This is a Facebook feed.

Another important tool in this upbringing was correspondence. Masons write to each other endlessly, the number of their letters is mind-boggling. And their volume is mind-boggling. Particularly striking are the endless apologies for brevity. "Sorry for the brevity, there is no time for detail" - and pages, pages, pages of stories about everything in the world. And the main thing, of course, is what is happening in your soul. The Masonic lodge is fundamentally hierarchical: there are apprentices, there are masters - accordingly, your soul should be open to comrades, but first of all it should be open to the one who is above you. Nothing can be hidden from the authorities, everything is visible and transparent to them. And you can walk these steps - ascend, ascend and ascend. And at the top, faith is already transformed into evidence. As the same Kutuzov writes to his Moscow friends from Berlin: "I met with the Supreme Magician Welner." Welner is in the eighth degree of Freemasonry, the penultimate, the ninth - this is already astral. Kutuzov seems to be in the fifth. And he writes to his Moscow friends: "Welner sees Christ the same way I do Welner." They imagine it this way: you ascend, and the higher you rise in the hierarchy, the purer your faith becomes. And at some point, it turns into evidence, because what others believe, you already see with your own eyes. This is a certain type of personality: in a monstrous furious intransigence towards yourself, you must constantly engage in self-flagellation, subject yourself to fierce criticism, and repent. It is natural for a person to sin, what to do, which of us is without sin, this is a natural thing. But the main thing is to react correctly to your own sin, so that it becomes for you another evidence of the weakness of your bestial nature, saves you from pride, directs you to the true path and everything else.

Pocket Models of Feelings

It is at this moment that the third agent of competition for the formation of the emotional world of the Russian educated person appears. We all know him - this is Russian literature. Works of art appear, people write. In history, such monumental turns are rarely accurately dated, but in this case we can say that this happens at the moment when Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin returns from a trip abroad and publishes his famous, renowned "Letters of a Russian Traveler", in which he collects these symbolic images feelings from all over Europe. How one should feel in a cemetery, how one should feel oneself at the grave of a great writer, how a love confession is made, what one feels at a waterfall. He visits all the memorable places in Europe, talks with famous writers. Then he brings all this stunning wealth, an inventory of emotional matrices, packs them and sends them to all ends of the empire.

In some respects, the book loses to the theater: it does not allow us to experience next to others, to watch how others are experiencing - you read the book in private. It does not possess such plastic visualization. On the other hand, the book has some advantages: as a source of emotional experience, it can be re-read. Books - Karamzin himself describes it - it is more and more customary to publish in pocket format, put it in your pocket and see if you feel right or wrong. This is how Karamzin describes his Moscow walk: “I go, taking my Thomson with me. I sit under a bush, sit, think, then open it, read, put it back in my pocket, think again. You can carry these very models of feelings with you in your pocket and check - read and re-read.

And the last example. It is interesting because in it the Russian traveler is not only an equal among the enlightened Europeans, but also achieves a monumental symbolic victory in their language of sentimental European culture.

Karamzin has been living in Paris for several months and goes to the theater all the time. One of the performances he attends is Gluck's opera Orpheus and Eurydice. He comes, sits down in the box, and there sits a beauty with a gentleman. Karamzin is completely amazed at what a beautiful Frenchwoman is sitting next to him. They are talking with the beauty, the beauty's gentleman is convinced that they speak German in Russia. They talk, and then Gluck starts. And, as Karamzin writes, the opera ends, and the beauty says: “Divine music! And you, it seems, did not applaud? " And he answers her: "I felt, madam."

She does not yet know how to listen to modern music, she still exists in the world where there are individual arias that are performed in the hall in the court theater. A singer comes out, sings an aria, they applaud him. And Karamzin already knows what contemporary art is. He arrived in Paris and right in Paris calmly and politely washed this lady, showed her her place: "I felt, madam." This is a different, new way of perceiving art.