In society

Russia is on the knees

August 9, 2012 Mikhail Berg

Pamphlet Prilepin and the answer to him Shenderovich deserve analysis. Shenderovich called Prilepin an anti -Semite, but the problem of Prilepin in another - his pamphlet is emotional, but superficial. Prilepin spoke like Kurginyan with foam on his lips, considering that the damned microphone was turned off, and his hectic revelations, intended for his own or even for himself, turned out to be published.

In general, it is acute not to love Jews, Russians, Americans, Arabs - a common story, cattle from poor (and rich) countries does not tolerate strangers at all, but also geniuses, sometimes sick with xenophobia. The example can be given by Russian classics - every second great Russian writer in thexix century did not like Jews. I am not the fact that Prilepin is a good writer. He is not bad and not good, but traditional, everything that he writes traditionally, that is, secondly from an aesthetic and intellectual point of view. Traditionality is in fashion today, since there is a request for conservativeness in society, and conservatism is blind, and therefore gropes traditions with his hands. Shenderovich surprises how Prilepin connects the left political views with the right ideology - this is normal, traditionalness allows you to mix unconnected elements, not noticing this incompatibility.

And if in essence, Prilepin is wrong in the main thing: that he is all Jews or the entire liberal public, whose Jewish features are obvious in his version, smears one paint. The fact of the matter is that there are no these same Jews, or those very liberals who are “we”. “We” is an illusion, a symbolic (like “we” - the Soviet people) unification of the incompatible and different, fiction that appears if feelings are overlapped and forced to make impossible generalizations. And this is Schenderovich’s right: Jews and liberals are different, there are rich and poor among them, there are conformists and non -conformers, there are faithful Jews and no less faithful Christians, there are honest and dishonest, offended and arrogant, Abramovichi and Shenderovichi, word. The indifference of the difference is a vivid certificate of intellectual poverty.

But let's analyze the couples ourselves. Prilepin accuses the Jews that they privatized the country, that they were the main beneficiaries of the Yeltsin reforms, that they were heated by their hands on grabbing, and to respond to this as Shenderovich does - that is, explaining everything with anti -Semitism of the author - Kutzo will be. Because it must be admitted that the Jews among those who sawed our rash on sweet and juicy parts, many are no less than the former Kagashnikov, the first and second secretaries of the district committee of the Komsomol and the CPSU, red directors, etc., so on, so on. Many, many Jews among crooks and thieves and other signs, and this must be admitted. As well as the fact that there are always many Jews among conformists of any shades; True, there are many of them among non -conformists, because Jews are a socially engaged layer of the population, their social activity is a reaction to all kinds of and frequent in the history of oppression.

By the way, Prilepin does not say anything about the participation of the Jews in the revolution, in the Stalinist terror, etc., since socialism is clearly close to his overly sensitive heart, and scolding his objectivity is not enough. However, there were indeed many Jews among the Bolsheviks (although the responsibility for this must be divided with the tsarist government, Dostoevsky, Rosanov and others who advocated the Pale of Pale, for the deprivation of Jews of equal rights with other peoples), as well as among investigators of the NKVD of the first draft.

Paphos Shenderovich leveles this problem. He reduces everything to the fact that, they say, Prilepin is a xenophobe, and therefore he is wrong. It is only indecent to be xenophobes, after the Holocaust, the Jews openly scold the Jews as a nation can only marginal, who finally does not give a damn about a bad reputation. Another thing is that the nation is the same fiction, the fiction of which has become clear long before Benedict Anderson. There is no nation, because it is an illusory, symbolic community that cannot be defined and confirmed experimentally. Although the German Nazis stupidly insisted on the genetic separateness of mankind, now the faithful Jewish-enthusiasts insist on this, which, of course, symptomatic. However, what has been said does not cancel the main thing: culture is the area of ​​functioning of mainly symbolic objects; Craftsmen like writers and critics exchange them for symbolic values ​​such as success, reputation and material, like a fee.

Prilepin voiced a rather primitive and simplified version of Russian history, Shenderovich answered him the same-said: the fool and anti-Semite himself. But the problem of awareness of the role in the history of those who are called Jews remains. According to some estimates, in Russia, where the Jews moved (or fled - as you like) for centuries (two hundred years together), today about two hundred thousand Jews remain. The endangered type and change in the pole of complimentation, if we recall the old and honored scientist-anti-Semitus Leo Gumilyov. Another thing is that on the public scene of the so -called Jews there are still a lot of Jews - the Jews left the unsuccessful, successful, successful for themselves and calls some eyes to the reservoir. And many of them flourish, traditionally causing envy, turning into blindness. But what is Jewry - salt for any nation, as Dmitry Bykov believes, bile developed by the liver, as another writer believes, Leonid Girshovich, social activity in response to flagrant inequality - all this remains a question around which Prilepin and Shenderovich, and we are behind them.

As Mamardashvili used to say, Russian history constantly walks in a circle, not knowing how to allow the same basic oppositions - between Westerners (Shenderovich) and Slavophiles (Prilepin), between socially oriented politics and dense nationalist Stalin, between Jews by blood and, so to speak, Jews in social behavior. To allow, to remove contradictions means one thing - to realize them. Alas, we live in a society that longs not to understand and complexity, but to simplify and light answers. Hence the increase in uterine chauvinism, which ceases to be shameful, antediluvian fundamentalism, trying to replace an ideology that does not dance in any way, anti -intellectualism, which forces to return and return to more and more primitive.

Russia, contrary to the hopes of Dobrokhotov, does not get up from his knees, but kneels down. She is looking for humiliation, hoping that feelings will help to cope with social blindness. But those who do not have to choose the times in which it has fallen to live remains the only activity worthy of our (as, indeed, any) time - to understand and articulate what looks confusing and secret.

Graphics of Mikhail Zlatkovsky / Zlatkovsky.ru