Two myths

"Thank God, there is literature - the best story of Rus'!" - Once in one of his poems, Yevgeny Yevtushenko exclaimed, who has a rare gift to respond to every myth. Alas (or “ cheers! ”), The work of literature is not to reflect reality with the ultimate accuracy, but to create collective phantoms, collective dreams, and in which direction it pleases to transform reality, one museum is known.

They are probably known to the reasons why Russian literature has weighed down to the image of a post-reform nobility as a social layer that comes into decay, because of its wastefulness or "poetry" not able to withstand economic competition with "distant" rational classes. However, the famous American historian Seymour Becker, based on many sources, draws a completely different picture.

The fact that the very significant share of the nobility after the liberation of the peasants hastened to get rid of their land, according to the researcher, proves precisely the high rationality of the “first estate”, its high adaptability to radically changed economic and social circumstances: the Russian nobility is much easier than the current “farmers”, the fact that land was only one of the forms of capital.

"While some nobles took up their estates management for the sake of making profits, others (and there were more of them) began to benefit from prices growing to land, leasing it to the peasants living in the neighborhood, using it as a guarantee for obtaining a loan or in places where agriculture did not promise to be profitable - selling it to the peasants to the peasants, ready to pay off the bloated prices. The yields of the land, taken on the bail of the land or received from its sale, were not so invested in the trade or production sector of the developing Russian economy. Life and the fact that after the liberation of the serfs with multiplied energy began to teach its sons in schools and universities is another evidence that the first class was not a passive victim of social changes, but quickly and effectively adapted to them. ”

Moreover, the nobility not only successfully fit into the middle class, but also retained the dominant positions not only in agriculture, but also in politics, in the last pre -revolutionary decade, turning into one of the most politically influential groups (here we are talking mainly about the owners of medium and large estates). It is curious that the main buyers of land sold by the nobles were also nobles.

"They acted just as a group of conservative rich people should act, who have so far have a high social status and a sense of their historical right to help the king in the management of Russia." "It was the autocracy, and not the nobility, and could not be free from the captivity of the past and adapt to the modern world."

The nobility, therefore, managed to free herself from the captivity of the past ... But what about the notorious "reactionaries", which demanded to maintain legalized privileges for the nobility and even create new ones to ensure advantages in almost all areas of activity, and above all in the state field? S. Bekker writes about this struggle with the onset of universal equality before the law in great detail and entertaining.

The party nomenclature never towered (did not fall) to such frankness, which has not decided to openly proclaim: our privileges are much more firmly associated with our well -being with the well -being of the state than that could do money that could flow to the most irresponsible owners; Therefore, privileges should not be canceled, but rather legalized, and even make them hereditary; It is the privileges that freed us from low selfish concerns, and therefore it is us that we should put at the state steering wheel - etc., etc., etc., I advise you to read.

And this is not at all as stupid as the dogmatic liberalism believes, at all costs requiring universal equality in the competition of all with everyone. The state support of the aristocracy as the main trustee of the public good was seriously reflected in minds such as Plato and Pushkin . They were most likely mistaken, linking aristocratic disinterestedness and aristocratic responsibility for the public whole with some specific class, but, apparently, they were deeply right in the fact that individuals alone about personal interests were not enough for the survival and development of social whole.

The very democratic society needs an aristocracy that can take care of the strategic interests of the public whole, even contrary to its own momentary interests. The “reactionaries” were also right in that they refused to measure the value of the social layer at the cost of the products that he produces: the values ​​that he professes is no less important. And the state of the state is not just to ensure free competition of all values, but rather, on the contrary, to protect the values ​​of the values ​​of pressing, momentary, mass values ​​complex, fragile, personally necessary only a few, revealing their usefulness only in a scale of decades, or even centuries.

The state of the state is to be a keeper of complexity, not to allow the values ​​to be strong and primitive to absorb the values ​​of the sophisticated and fragile. Aristocratic. Perhaps the "reactionaries", with all their class unilaterality, vaguely understood this task, which the "pragmatic" state practically abandoned today.

As a matter of fact, an aristocratic myth of nobility as the only socially responsible public layer is no worse than a democratic myth representing the nobility worthless and self -serving.

But what vice did his vice prevented the aristocratic myth also find support in first -class literature? Or was it not a vice, but dignity? After all, our noble literature, with which would be about the most zeal, convicted (and forgave) vices, which sang dignity.