Home seminars of the 1970s

I received the task to precede the conversation about home seminars, because I initiated the discussion of such a topic. I received the task a week ago and, of course, could not do any work during this time. In order not to be up to the participant in the battle of Chalkin-Gol, who came to share his memories, I still tried to think about whether I knew anything about home seminars outside the 70s, for which this phenomenon is really characteristic. But in order to compare, it is necessary to determine what was called "seminars" in order to distinguish from other types of home gatherings. The task is worthy of a special science and sociological research, which I naturally do not wave. And yet. First of all, I think, it would be correct to distinguish seminars from circles and all kinds of friendly and professional communities. So, in the 60s, my parents were members of such an informal circle, which was called with some self-irony "poetic gathering". To the nucleus of poetry lovers of poetry lovers gradually "grew" the circle of their individual friends and friends of their friends. Sometimes poets were invited, including now very famous, but there were no professional poets in the “bunch” itself, although Yu.K. Efremov published a collection of his poems at the end of his life. They gathered and read poetry to each other, reprinted them for each other, shared all information about evenings, publications. It was not only about new products, but, of course, about gaining poetry forbidden, half -long and emigrant. There were their leaders who said something, but this was not and was not called the seminar. "Buildings" took turns from its members and were simultaneously receiving guests with a feast. There was a lot of such informal circles.

There were "seminars" theological and philosophical direction. Ilya Shmain gathered the same mathematicians, only younger, graduates of elite mathematics and students of mathematical and physical faculties, collecting life truths. They read N.O. Lossky, and nearby, also younger mathematicians, they read Helterlin and Rilke. From such circles of mathematicians who read together Rilke and Leibniz, Florensky and Tsvetaeva, Orthodox mathematicians turned out, which made them internal emigrants, the emigrants actually, with their special emigrant fate, and priests. Recently, we heard a priest who uttered a sermon on the funeral service of Vladimir Nikolayevich Toporov. I think that many drew attention to the fact that the priest was some kind of unusual. He knew whom he was talking about and, although he sang no matter, he spoke well. It didn’t go at all. Just from such a seminar, he left.

The lifestyle of students, graduate students, researchers, life habits, attitudes for "study" made a seminar a clear and familiar form. Therefore, what could be called the "Catechizer Group", there was an ALS OB seminar. The priest Alexander the menu seemed attractive to the idea of ​​the Schmain seminar - a seminar for the "search for truth", and he began to collect young people directly to search for her in the Bible, for studying the Bible. Other participants in the seminar of the father of Alexander, the humanitarians, then went the way the way back from mathematicians to the priests: of them, scientists turned out to be a sharply anti -lrical direction (1).

In the variety of forms of intellectual and spiritual collective "amateur", the form of the seminar, in its origin, was a model for circles of various kinds, while the "scientific home seminar" is a fairly paradoxical phenomenon.

So, we will accept the first time that the “scientific home seminar” is not any group of people who are gathering together to read poetry or gospel together or discuss how to achieve liberal freedoms in Russia, or how to save it from foreigners, or to collect information about human rights in the Perm zone. The core of the concept of "home seminar" I tend to consider a scientific or educational or scientific and educational collective activity, regularly carried out in purely private conditions. The content of this activity is socially significant and publicly - scientific work, research and training, a private form - a friendly meeting, "guests", a tea party. A scientific home seminar is Contradiction in Adjecto, this type of seminar was bred in the 70s. The remaining forms - philosophical, poetic, religious collections, with the self -name of the "seminars", we will consider cousin forms, and the scientific form is central, since the self -identification of the rest resorted to the scientific nomenclature.

Were there home seminars in Russia until the 70s? We fumble in memory. Yes, they were. Before the revolution, it was accepted that, say, students work at the house of the professor. “Housing conditions” allowed this, the necessary special library, collected for a lifetime, was at hand. I don’t know how in other specialties, and the classic philologists have never been interrupted: in my student years, my course visited the ninety-year-old Alexander Nikolayevich Popov to read the Iliad at home, and now my classmate takes students at home, because otherwise he needs to take a car from his library every time. When the icy winter of 1919, unheated Petrograd University, stood empty, without students, classics S.A. Zhebelev, I.I. Tolstoy and others continued at home classes. So far, only about their stamina and devotion of the profession speaks. But when the students who graduated from the course did not leave the teachers, but continued to come on the same days, sit down and read with the former teacher of the ancient author, as if they were forever remained students, and so for another 10 years, this is already something special. Such a circle was engaged in Zhebelev of the year until 1926.

In the 20s, the circle of people, partially intersecting with readers of the texts near Zhebelev, was gathered in an apartment by I.I. Tolstoy. This is a group known under the pseudonym Abdem, which jointly translated by the novels of Achilles Tatia and Heliodor (2). A circle, which could well be called a seminar, crossed friendly relations with the group M.M. Bakhtina and with members of the ARIRIU association; Travested images of their gatherings can be found in the novels and poems of Konstantin Vaginov (3). The death of Abdemites is associated with another intersection: the “Cosmic Academy of Sciences” who belonged to the game and philosophical community, the Achilles Tatia translation participant, was arrested for belonging to this “Cosmacademy” and in a state of acute mental insanity wrote under the dictation of investigators a crazy project of the state structure of the “Russian monarchy”, in which important posts were intended by I.I. Tolstoy, A.N. Egunov and A.I. Dovature. All three were immediately arrested, Tolstoy was soon released, and Egunov and Dovatures were sentenced to long terms (4). In the second half of the 1920s. At the Institute of the National Economy and the Institute of the Word, there were changes in such a property that not only many teachers, but also students have gone from it. At this time, in particular, restrictions on education for noble children began to act. One of these students, subsequently Archimandrite Sergius, came to his general culture teacher by the speaker V.N. Muravyov for advice on what to do: young people wanted to act. The teacher suggested continuing classes with students who left institutes (many studied there and there), at home. Thus, several teachers and students began to engage in the history of Russian culture at a closed seminar in order to understand how the position in which they and all Russian society turned out to be. Neither teachers nor students were religious people, especially church, but the search for truth in the seminar on the history of Russian culture led students to Orthodoxy. The student composition of the seminar soon turned into a church community, while teachers who studied the Law of God in the state gymnasiums of their childhood did not go to church. Under Stalin at different times, all teachers were destroyed, and the communitymen spent decades in camps and links (5). So, we see that home seminars are in one way or another interpreted with groups united by no one’s owned scientific activities, but opposition to the regime, and all such groups cause the authorities, even if they are engaged in the translation of ancient novels.

I know too little to make generalizations, but it seems to me that the actual scientific home seminars are not very long - three -seven, a maximum of ten years. Therefore, the decades of the existence of the Savelyevites community, (their second generation survived to the present day), they themselves speak about ties of a different nature. Therefore, the seminar of the philosopher Vladimir Solomonovich Bibler, which has existed for 35 years, perhaps represents the phenomenon of SUI Generis and is not embedded in the typology.

The educational system produces cohorts, which at the time of a sharp climate change are without space. Social marginals perpetuate their younger state, because society no longer needs the role for which these people were prepared. Their destiny is to be nobody, to conduct a ghostly existence, that is, the destiny of the heroes of the "goat song". Their teachers, who have received status under the previous regime, have a chance to maintain professional identity. It is characteristic that Tolstoy was released by the GPU and in 1946 under Stalin became an academician, and his students, Dovatura and Egunov, with whom he was very close in views, were subjected to arrests, expulsions and persecutions up to the Khrushchev thaw. Nothing, God forbid, I do not want to say a compromising about Tolstoy: only that the younger generation, released by the educational system in a new life, in which they no longer have to be realized, is going to be realized under the knife. And when it is necessary to say ahead of time: "The pot is not a cook", no one knows. These "excessive" make up the environment from which home seminars are recruited. The seminars of the 70s formed, roughly speaking, high school students and students of the thaw, and they were united more often around people of the older generation, who had a certain formal status and authority.

In the next "cycle" marginals of the previous period, there is a chance to find status. Although not everyone, of course, happens to use it even individually, but some seminars of the 70s gave rise to institulated communities in the post-Soviet time. So the seminar of V.S. Bibler gave rise to a number of instructive formations, although his maternal, seminar, form continued to live while Biebler himself was alive.

Home and semi -official seminars were my community and the most important universities during my scientific youth. I was a regular participant in the folklore seminar of Yeleazar Moiseevich Meletinsky, and the sporadic - the seminar A.K. Zholkovsky in poetics, and when the latter moved from Zholkovsky to Meletinsky, then here is constant. M.L. Gasparov wrote about the poetry seminar, and the Russian version was published in # 77 of the UFO. I can only say that the names of its participants are very loud, and philology, say, at the RSUSU, like the Slavic of many American universities, largely continues these seminars thematically, methodologically and personally. Locally the seminar of Zholkovsky and Meletinsky took place in two places of accumulation of intellectuals - Ostozhenka and South -West. I will not describe it in more detail, since he was described by Gasparov and a report on him Zholkovsky will be ahead in June.

Another seminar, well known to me, was more narrow and special in subject: ancient philosophy and science. He took place at home with Ivan Dmitrievich Rozhansky. Before the history of ancient science, Ivan Dmitrievich was a physicist, and a loop physicist in nuclear, it seems, technologies. He was the son of a professor of royal times (we read about the worthy behavior of his father at one time in the "Gulag Archipelago"). Both sides of its origin were typologically significant: mathematicians and physicists (mathematicians to a greater extent) had high "seminar readiness", and in addition, Rozhansky was much, two generations, older than those whom he collected, and inherited the traditions of intelligentsia with pre -Soviet life experience. This seminar, like both seminars of Meletinsky, lasted until the beginning of the 1980s. But it ended differently, about which later. He also had regular participants - Andrei Lebedev, Anatoly Akhutin, Sergey Muravyov, Yuri Shichalin, Tatyana Boroday, Alexey Sidorov, Alexander Stolyarov and others. Intelligentsian Locus - Krasnoarmeyskaya Street, a writer's house near the Airport metro (6). All participants were a little marginalized or were a little out of place. The philosopher Akhutin had the education of a chemist, Prince Muravyov was a reemigrant and failed to adapt to Soviet reality in order to receive higher education. The beard served as a junior researcher in a stranger to her interests by the Byzantine sector, translated the bossal correspondence into all languages ​​and greatly yearned. Andrei Lebedev, whose outstanding scientific abilities and devotion to science were visible at first sight, many years of their work on "fragments of pre-graphics" were listed as a scientific and technical employee, and so on. If these people served in their specialty, then they received a normal environment and scientific communication rather from Rozhansky.

The socialism of the 70s was so mature, the negative selection was so reliable that the discharge to the side of the road was often half the recommendation, while success was half compromising. Say, in the sector of ancient literature, IMLI, which took turns in the Averintsy and Gasparov, in the period from 70 to 90, several young researchers received - all past the will of these managers, by the will of the authorities. These were, generally speaking, pretty young classic philologists, not Partchudovy. But if everyone remained in the profession from the Rozhansky seminar, then from these sciences arranged at the Academy of Sciences - today not one. Scientifically, home seminars served as a shadow certification commission. This is exactly this meaning: to find out who actually costs without the intervention of a large society, they had additional to the official, narrow seminars at home among large physicists and mathematicians. I know about this only in firsthand.

So, in the first time I know about the seminars of the linguistic and psychological Rita Markovna Frumkina, she wrote about this, about the seminars of Byzantine A. Deman, seminars M.Ya. Hifter, a lot about seminars G.P. Shchedrovitsky, not quite domestic, but clearly special, semi -official. They need to devote special meetings, as well as the seminar V.S. Bibler today.

The scale of seminospace seminars - 30-60 people - excluded the home format, but they were tied not to the institution, but to the person, the leader. This was the seminar of Yuri Levada, which I visited quite regularly, although I never performed there. However, I am not quite right: the core of the Levada seminar composed the sector of the theory and methodology of the Institute of Specific Social Research Expected by Rutkevich in 1972. The Levada seminar huddled under a particular look, and in terms of content - I think, Lev Gudkov and Alexei Levinson will be able to tell about this really - I was the most universal from my point of view: philosophy with Pyatigorsk, a story with Yanin, philology with Chudakova, demography with Vishnevsky, etc. Sociology, which was discussed there, gravitated to the general methodology and theory of culture. If the seminars of Meletinsky and Rozhansky were repulsed from official, methodological and thematic aspects, and the conversations that were inherent in the authorities were only over tea, then Levada still had relevant modernity in the center, even if the report was about Khlebnikov. Therefore, the sense of call and conspiracy was transmitted even to such third -party participants like me. The nucleus of the seminar formed at the next climate change, the basis of VTsome, and then the Levada Center, first.

As I already said, by the beginning of the 80s, many seminars began to squeak or stop their activities. At this time, in 1981, a certain intermediate form arose in my professional field - the seminars of the Scientific Council for the world culture of the Academy of Sciences. The ancient commission of this council organized as many as three seminars on ancient philosophy and science, where the Rozhansky seminar, a seminar on the ancient life and culture of everyday life, led by G.S. Knabe, and almost not collected a seminar for discussing the phenomenon of late antiquity as the coexistence of pagan and Christian cultures. Averintsev was supposed to lead this seminar. The seminars of the Scientific Council survived to the early piercing period, and how they came to naught (nominally all these commissions and seminars exist to this day), I do not remember. When I began to engage in social activities in the framework of the Memorial society and even before its formal creation, I immediately introduced the form of the “seminar” and from 1988 to 1992. I was the organizer of the seminars in Soviet history for the memorial public, first nomadic, and at the end in my own premises of society.

A graduate of home seminars, I appreciate all kinds of freemen in academic life, and attempts to plan my activity and overturn to it poorly. Как оказалось, я воспроизвожу в рамках университета домашний семинар с его свободой самоопределения участников, занимающихся наукой по собственной воле и не ради заработка. Служащие или учащиеся в РГГУ составляют примерно половину нашего семинара, а иногда меньше. Компания разновозрастная, включает студентов МГУ и РГГУ, людей уже солидного возраста, молодых ученых, аспирантов разных академических институтов и университетов, есть аспирантка моего бывшего аспиранта - "внучатая", так сказать. Почти никому не нужны зачеты или часы. И мы обязательно пьем чай - кто что принесет - прямо во время занятий. Но такой семинар лучше домашнего, он открытей, сюда легче прийти новому человеку, в нем присутствует и научная и учебная составляющая, сама совместная работа людей разных специальностей и разного опыта есть способ взаимного обучения, причем всех, включая старших. Уход тоже естествен, это не разрыв и не предательство, а живая, проточная вода. И никаких вопросов о засланных казачках, и никаких протестов против прихода того или иного лица: двери открыты для всех, и ценз один - греческий язык. Только теперь я сообразила, что содержание нашего семинара - сравнительное изучение языческой, христианской и иудео-эллинистической прозы - входит в перспективу задуманного двадцать лет тому назад Аверинцевым семинара Античной комиссии. Через наш семинар прошло более 50 человек, некоторые посещали его всего по семестру, иные восьмой год, хотя и с перерывами. В условиях свободы университет лучше для научного семинара, чем домашняя обстановка, лучше, чем Академия наук. Наличие совсем молодых людей и их безусловное право задавать любые, самые наивные вопросы - великое благо. Ничто не считается заведомо "принятым", как бывает "принято" в доме, в кружке. Срок жизни университетского семинара больший, чем у домашнего(7), как, впрочем, и такого феномена, как семинар Левады.

Мне кажется, историкам и науковедам есть, что тут делать, если, конечно, они уже не написали об этом книги(8), и только я о том ничего не знаю. Как не знаю я, конечно, и многих не упомянутых мною семинаров 1970-х. Пусть простят меня те, о ком я не вспомнила. Я только обозначила тему разговора и опиралась на собственный неизбежно узкий, исключительно московский опыт и некоторое знакомство с судьбами филологов-классиков в XX в.

Notes:

(1) Эти соображения обязаны своим происхождением моим беседам с дочерью о.Шмаина А.И. Шмаиной-Великановой.

(2) О кружке АБДЕМ см. Е.Г. Рабинович "Жизнь Аполлония Тианского Флавия Филострата", приложения и примечания к: Флавий Филострат, Жизнь Аполлония Тианского, М., 1985, 217-225; 277.

(3) См., напр., Т. Никольская, "К.К. Вагинов. Канва биографии и творчества", Четвертые тыняновские чтения, Рига, 1988, с. 76

(4) С. Еленин, Ю. Овчинников, примечания к Н.П. Анциферов, "Три главы из Воспоминаний", Память, Париж, 4 (1981), с. 128-129; Лурье, с.с. 111, 136, 147.

(5) Архимандрит Сергий (Савельев). Далекий путь. История одной христианской общины. Даниловский благовестник. М.,1998, с. 19-23.

(6) Краткие сведения о нем см. в предисловии к сборнику Mathesis. Из истории античной науки и философии. М.: "Наука", 1991.

(7) Александр Иосифович Зайцев в течение 20 лет в 60-80-е по субботам читал сначала на филологическом, а потом на философском факультете ЛГУ, "Законы" Платона, некогда переведенные молодым Егуновым. Ситуация частично подобна домашним семинарам: классики длят свое "детское", студенческое, состояние, продолжая годами посещать семинары своего бывшего формального учителя. Но открытость университета позволяет этому длиться столько, сколько сил достало учителю.

(8) Вот, что мне удалось сыскать, всего пара страничек: В. Каганский. Семинар о негосударственной институциализации свободной науки// Кентавр. Методологич. и игротехнический альманах. 1997. Вып. 17, с. 20-21 [Чебанов С.В.]