To wheezing

On average, a student of the Russian school sits out about 25 days of his life in literature lessons. In total in the curriculum, they are allotted for about 600 hours, two to three hours a week for seven years, from 5th to 11th grade . The subject "Literature" is one of the school heavyweights: only Russian, English and mathematics have more hours - and then, except for the time that requires the obligatory reading of volumes of Russian classics.

However, now in Russian schools, in addition to the existing giant, a new subject is introduced - “Native Literature (Russian)”; A few weeks ago, his approximate program was posted on the website of the Moscow City Methodological Center. The developers argue that the new training course has “specific features” (SIC) , because it selects works with the most pronounced “national-cultural originality” and with their help reflects “cognitive space, which is a form of existence of Russian culture”. This differs from the main one, although "focused on [his] support and support."

According to the program, schoolchildren from the 5th to the 9th grade will be additionally engaged in another hour a week, 34 hours a year, only 170 hours. The course is aimed at "the formation of cognitive interest in native Russian literature <...>, the inclusion of his people and familiarization with their cultural heritage in the cultural and linguistic field." Having mastered it, Russian schoolchildren will have to find “awareness <...> of Russian civil identity, their ethnicity <...> a sense of responsibility and duty to the homeland; Understanding the humanistic, democratic and traditional values ​​of the multinational Russian society. ”

But with the subject “Native Literature (Russian)” and with its approximate program there are several problems.

The first will immediately catch your eye to those who will be forced to work with her somehow. The main course of literature and so already 95% consists of the works of the same “native literature (Russian)”, including the circle of its traditional “national” topics: the beauty of native nature (Tyutchev - Fet - Secenin, village prose), patriotism (usually on the example of “Taras Bulba” or “Captain's daughter”), the heroic of war (“Poltava”, Twardovsky and numerous poems about the verses WWII), the spirit of the Russian people (“war and peace”), riddles of the Russian soul (Turgenev, Dostoevsky).

This loose set of abstractions is well familiar to any student and already causes acute allergies to high school, and indifference at best to the eldest. As a tutor, I constantly encounter this: eleventh graders come to me who need to take the exam in literature, and the first thing they are honestly admitted that the literature “passed”, but did not read anything. Often, the parents of the younger children timidly ask whether it is possible to “instill a love of reading” - the school, it seems, has not been able to do it for a long time. But still, children memorize some of the program in literature: Pushkin is our everything, poetry is boring solemn texts about nature and war, classic is something distant, high-parity, patriotism-a set of confused patterns and pictures.

Now, officials have lowered a subject into schools, which consists entirely of these ideologies obsessed in their teeth. The explanatory note to the program is comically argues that the subject is designed to “satisfy the needs of schoolchildren in the study of Russian literature,” for some reason assuming that such a need for overfed classic texts still remained. But the schoolchildren are not fools, they smell officialdom and insincerity. I do not think that obviously a dense and stuffy object will cause enthusiasm at least one Russian high school student, exhausted by overload, lack of sleep and puberty (if he generally distinguishes him from the usual “liter”). If I were a Russian patriot, I would be horrified: there is no better way to instill in a person complete indifference to native birches than to make them the subject of the school obligation.

However, enthusiasm is the task of the teacher, isn't it? This is an ordinary bureaucratic excuse for claims that the program turned out to be officiaious: you are a teacher - so arouse interest. However-and this is a problem number two-it is easy to imagine what will happen to the subject in the hands of a teacher-explosive who received another 30+ hours of load per year. Or the time allotted to the “native literature (Russian)” will be taken from the literature of ordinary, Russian (but, apparently, non -native), to the detriment of the conditional “captain’s daughter”; Or-which is more likely-the subject will be set up with the last lesson, and teachers (also not fools) will use this watch for something more useful. The program strictly prohibits this and reports that the course “cannot be considered as the time for an in-depth study of the main course of literature,” but the pragmatist of school life will probably be stronger than the document. The course of "native literature (Russian)" is doomed to sabotage and profanity.

The third problem of the course is its content.

The program on the subject is carefully called “approximate”, which should protect it from the nit -picking to individual works that became part of it, or to the flaws of accompanying formulations. But it reflects the logic and approach of the compilers to the selection quite clearly. “Native Literature (Russian)” is crushed into several “problematic blocks”, which in the same order are repeated by each academic year, only individual texts change inside.

There are blocks of an encyclopedic nature: about different Russian cities (“Russian Cities”), folklore (“legend of antiquity of deep”), Christian holidays (“Holidays of the Russian World”). There are blocks of a value nature: about the beauty of nature (“native spaces”), the war (“not to the order - there would be a homeland”) and the mighty Russian language (“only the word life is given”) - the shortest of all (one hour a year).

In addition, there are two much less understandable block. One is called the “warmth of the native home”, where, as far as one can judge, works about family and everyday problems are gathered; Another temporarily entitled the "riddles of the Russian soul." The “riddles” authors, among other things, mean texts about the “fate of Russian emigrants”, about peasants (for example, the “Sphinx” of Turgenev) and about the suffering women (subtitle “female share”).

Finally, the last block is called "On your peers"; He has nothing to do with all these national topics. It seems that the compilers thus decided to dilute state intonations with something more human. This block mainly consists of the texts of modern writers, “closer and more understandable to a modern schoolchild than a classic,” as the authors write self -which are self -powerfully.

I hope it is clear that these blocks do not add up to any single picture. Their unity is caused only by the annoying repetition of the same from the 5th to the 9th grade and the fact that fogically certain topics are constantly repenting and climbing each other, so that the works about the war can be in the "peers" or in the "riddles of the Russian soul"-and vice versa.

The compilers almost do not hide the fact that they got porridge. So, for example, according to an explanatory note, as a result of study in the fifth graders, “the formation of initial ideas about the Russian national character, its paradoxes and riddles of the Russian soul in the works on the protection of the homeland in the Patriotic War of 1812, about the problems of adolescents and the originality of the Russian language and native speech” should occur. The national character, the mysteries of the soul, the war and the problems of adolescents. White, blue, wooden. These topics, forcibly driven into the head, according to the plan of the compilers, ultimately should magically form a certain gestalt in the student and arouse the national consciousness (or the unknown “cognitive space”). It turns out, however, not a gestalt, but something opposite, less than the sum of its own parts.

In other words, in the “native literature (Russian)” there is no subject for study, but there is only a set of vague romanticated images weakly connected with each other. In their place, there could be another conditionally “national” set - say, from the blocks “Our Kings”, “Russian Church”, “Great Commanders”, “Maternal Love” and “Native Rivers” - with the same results.

The situation is no better with a selection of texts. As you can see, the authors do not bother themselves with curatorial subtleties and simply completely thoughtlessly focus on the superficial compliance with the topic. However, variegated - this in itself is not so bad. In addition to the usual violence against the classics-Pushkin and Fet were torn out the most ceremonial poems (“Borodino anniversary” and “Sevastopol Bratsk cemetery”), and Lermontov’s eight-west Lermontov “in the middle of the celestial bodies ...” was sent to the “Holidays of the Russian World” for fifth graders studying Maslenitsa, only for comparing the moon with pancake-they still have little mentioned in the list. At school, the authors, a number of good poets of the 20th century or the modern stories of Givargizov and the duet Andrei Zhalevsky and Evgenia Pasternak, popular among progressive words.

Another thing is that thoughtlessness sometimes plays with the authors who scrape off the necessary bunches of classics, an angry joke. So, the list for fifth graders who need to love the same Russian Shrovetide, includes the mocking early story of Chekhov “Pancakes” with a motive of unexpected death visible in it (“By the evening of the lady and the cook, they can neither stand or sit. They look suffering ... It would seem a little to live long ...”;

But that's okay. It is much more interesting to see that these lists of “native literature (Russian)” did not enter what writers are denied belonging to the great Russian people.

So, for example, in the program you can not find Leo Tolstoy. I wonder why? Probably, he does not belong to Russian literature! Or he is not as native as we thought. It is a pity, because Lev Nikolayevich had thoughts of war and patriotism suitable for blocks, it would be interesting to discuss them with schoolchildren.

There is no Genghis Aitmatov - apparently, we are not spiritually native, because the Kyrgyz, although he wrote in Russian. In the same way, the writers of the spiritually uneasy peoples living in Russia (a bonus task: find Jewish literature in the list) are excluded from the “native literature (Russian)”. However, for the “works of regional authors”, the compilers mercifully freed the “variable” part of the program - 20% of the total hours of the course.

Even from the relatives (Russians), they expelled from sin the closer of all avant -garde - apparently, for cosmopolitanism and the subversive nature of language experiments. The nature of Veliomir Khlebnikov or the religiosity of the Vvedensky place in the Russian world was not found. The “hole of the Bul Shchil” was demonstratively ignored, in which, in the known expression of the twisted, more Russian national than in the whole Pushkin.

History was also affected. The only kind of historical event, which, according to the authors, deserves the attention of patriotic schoolchildren is war. There is a war of 1812, Crimean, the first and second world. We have no other historical events uniting the country, and there are no works about them.

Soviet writers remained in the program, but there is almost no “Soviet” - life, language, experience. The texts that comprehend this part of the national history are not allowed. Schoolchildren are invited to jump over the past of their grandparents immediately to the eternal constants of national culture - to birch and Pushkin.

The fact that the compilers ignore the inconvenient Soviet experience, especially indicative because the new program remains absolutely Soviet in terms of intention and spirit. The literature is understood in it not as a dialogue, but as an instrument of indocation - a set of finished, indisputable and trouble -free positions that should be jealous. The schoolchildren themselves, respectively, are seen not as self -thinking subjects independently, but as objects of influence in which “development”, “understanding” and “understanding” arise from the outside, thanks to the state.

* * *

In the final of the course “Native Literature (Russian)” there is a poem by Sergey Kargashin “I am Russian! Thank you, Lord! .. ” - the name of which the Russian ninth grader after a five -year course must clearly try on for himself.

I will give this text entirely:

I am Russian! Thank you, Lord!
I am a field. Grandmother's Cross.
I am the huts of the Ryazan region.
I am a blue -propeling forest.
I am Russian! According to the neck.
Forever and ever. Through.
I am a swan of a white feather.
I am a warrior of the fallen bone.
No matter what sorrows fell.
I will spite all the troubles:
I am Russian! Thank you, Lord!
I am Russian. I am so lucky! ..
Let the blades spin of time
I can’t take me away from me.
Russia, like a fortress over the abyss,
Standing and will stand! ..

Well, this is a very bad poem, but it would be useful to pass it with high school students as a visual example of a famous truth: “What the author wanted to say” and “What did he have” are often different things.

What the author wanted is visible from the title. The rest to this cry adds nothing but emotional intensity and thieves. The lyrical hero repels from specific, personal images (“huts of the Ryazan region”), then dissolves in the abstract-national (folklore swan, battlefield), everything ends with an enthusiastic symbol of eternal Russia-fever.

Ninth graders who have well-owned skills in analyzing a poetic text will be able to find something else here, which manifested itself contrary to the author’s will.

For example, there is a through, obsessive motive for death. In addition to the grandmother's cross and the bones of the warrior with death, the huts are associated in one way or another (is this a murdered village? The author does not specify), swan (“Swan Song”), the blades of the time (who should they grind?), Russian “through through the bullet?). With all this, the motive of the disaster is closely intertwined: the forest that propagates the heavens is suspicious (is it because they fall?), And the fortress over the abyss (will it soon fall?), And the biblical “forever and ever” (“And the smoke of their torment will rise forever and ever” (Rev. 14:11)). The central metaphor is also alarming, which is spreading in Kargashin. Russian in the very neck? Doesn't the bottle mean, how can any person living in Russia understand? Or is the hero just fed up?

And most importantly - why does he wheeze? Does he die? Or suffocates from crowding, lack of air (which is strange - after all, before that it was about spacious fields and heaven)?

But in this word - “wheezes” - the key to the poem. The hero’s speech really looks stifled, not free, and numerous unstructured repetitions are uncertain, neurotic. He, either lying on the battlefield, or grinded by the blades of time, tries to freeze himself, pick up his tongue, but only other people's words are being turned up: the Yesenin “blue”, erased “folk” and historical stamps (swan, bones), a mixture of religious and Soviet formulas (“standing and standing” - this, of course, “Lenin lived, live, live.” Therefore, the hero is stuck, stumbles, repeats “I am Russian” as a cry, which loses strength from repetitions, and slides to tautology (“I can’t take me from me”, “stood and will stand”).

So finding this solemn text in the final of the course is quite reasonable. This is a suitable epitaph for the course of "native literature (Russian)", which is written in a lack of bureaucratic language; who sorting out emasculated "folk" images; who did not find another dictionary for Russian landscapes, except for the school-Soviet set from Tyutchev, Yesenin and rustic prose; which hides Soviet, and it now and then climbs from all the cracks; which teaches the "warm home", but offers to choose between an abandoned village hut and a cold fortress; which is obsessed with the bones remaining on the battlefield; Which is simply dead, how the hero of the poem of Kargashin is dead, how the Russian national idea is dead, built on the ruins of romantic nationalism, how the Russian school is dead, through the pierced by the bureaucracy, and how almost dead Russian school literature, crushed to wheezing with the hands of officials.