Ilya Lepikhov. According to scripture

According to scripture - 2
Ilya Lepikhov

Date of publication: October 10, 2000

As we have already had the opportunity to notice, the stagnation in the market of humanitarian and, therefore, in the broad sense of the word social ideas, without which any successful implementation of any, and especially information policy, is impossible, is mediated by a very weak knowledge of the subject of application of this very policy - Russia itself. The latter circumstance correlated with the very specific nature of domestic enlightenment, “semi-enlightenment ,” as we undertook to assert a week ago.

However, “half-enlightenment” is a rather bright, but not entirely accurate term. Just as enlightenment presupposes a focused, as if captured in a beam, influence on consciousness, so its half is the weakening, dispersal of this influence. In both cases, consciousness itself is considered something like uncultivated pasture, longingly awaiting the life-giving seed of knowledge and until then dormant under the cover of life’s circumstances. Needless to say, nothing like this can be found in natural conditions. Just as the wind carries the spores of thistle, alfalfa and euonymus into the spring arable land and they rise under the rays of the young sun along with the green arrows of oats or barley, so in the field of Russian enlightenment the most outlandish shoots were accepted, and its “half-hearted” character can be explained either by the owner’s carelessness, or an extreme degree of agricultural self-confidence in the full sense of the word. Intending to separate the wheat from the chaff at harvest time, the unlucky agricultural producer completely lost sight of the fact that he could simply thin out the plantings in the spring.

Likewise, Russian cultural managers once did not want or were completely deprived of the opportunity to separate healthy shoots from bad ones, black beans from white beans, lambs from goats, and perhaps that is why we have what we have. Several completely autonomous and often simply hostile cultural masses are competing for the right to subjugate public opinion - an aspiration that is both fruitless and dangerous.

In the last two decades, the conviction has finally formed that under the conditions of Soviet authoritarianism, two cultures (or “subcultures,” as you prefer) coexisted - official and unofficial, usually the latter meant the culture of the intelligentsia. Official art was covered by the generally recognized canon, everything else was automatically classified as unofficial. Like Roerich’s angels of light and darkness, they soared over the abyss, every now and then striking sparks in front of the amazed observers, so on the sinful earth pro-Soviet augurs and the sorcerers of nonconformism, who knew no fear, butted heads and somewhere completely below, on the other side of the earth’s abysses, a third culture was emerging, the culture of Russian penal servitude, with its secret signs and wild but cute demons, gradually wheezing about the secret. The train of culture was rushing beyond the horizon of a bright tomorrow. Everything was strictly ranked. In the sleeping cars, rich academic painters luxuriated, in the reserved seats, unkempt geniuses of the underground argued until they were hoarse, in general, laconic men with hard faces, as if carved out of stone, laughed, spat and urinated. “The yellow and blue ones were silent, // The green ones cried and sang ,” - well, pure Blok.

There were also misfires: either the angel of light touched the ground with his wing, or something in the abyss was not correct, or the controller overlooked... It rarely happened, but it happened that a passenger, apparently intended for a green carriage, suddenly found himself in a blue or yellow one . Usually, however, this happened soon after his death. Usually, but not always. Why, for example, young Vysotsky traveled second class is absolutely impossible to say. Slutsky and Samoilov, I remember, talked about the fact that he, you see, has an extremely rich rhyme. Ha, rhyme! Now Ivan Barkov was no less a poet (Pushkin still thought about this quite seriously) than Lomonosov or Kheraskov, and he painted not only about the leisure time of Priapus - so what? As he was, he remains shameless. Vysotsky, as one wit rightly noted, “has become like Pushkin, but only more important.” The need to blur the lines between the third and second class was, apparently, so great, the desire to rub the noses of renowned poets and painters so unbearable that one could only lament the untimely death of the author of the unforgettable “Luka M...shchev” - in the late 80s he would have assembled sports palaces, Lakshin and Anninsky would have lauded his style, and Voznesensky would have produced uncensored graphic free verse.

One way or another, the coexistence during the recent dark past of at least several independent subcultures, each of which, despite all its external polemics, was absolutely self-sufficient, seems to no longer require proof. At the same time, we have every reason to believe that the tripartite division of “yellow”, “blue” and “green” socially determined cultures developed above does not at all exhaust all the uniqueness of the moment experienced by Soviet society somewhere from the 60s.

The eternal aspiration of the Russian person - regardless of his attitude to those in power - over the hill, where everything is there and everything happens, raised several generations of Russian (Kyrgyz, Ukrainian, Transcaucasian, which looked especially funny) foreigners. The first westernization influence occurred in the 20s, but absolutely nothing remained of it except the Ford plant in Nizhny Novgorod and a few poems by Mayakovsky: “Comrades! Have you seen the Rolls, // That Rolls, // Which with the wind grown together, // And when it stands - // Whale . " What happened in the 30s, and whether it even happened, we can only guess. But what remains from the 40s is “Sun Valley Serenade”, from the 50s – “A Farewell to Arms!”, Hemingway’s newest “Eloise”, and from the 60s we have once and for all confirmed that “ we all live in the yellow submarine " .

No, the tape revolution was there, “Seva-Seva Novgorodtsev...” - that’s all there was, that’s all there; we are talking about something else. Somewhere since the Vietnam War, where our Cold War rivals demonstrated that they were capable of being no smarter than Soviet leaders, in Soviet cultural public catering all the prerequisites for the assimilation of Western dishes, very specifically served, very sparsely arranged with a humanitarian side dish, have matured. , still bearing the imprint of otherness and therefore somewhat off-putting and yet quite familiar: neither cabbage nor mushroom hodgepodge, nor vodka, but mash.

Whether the democratic rhetoric of the overseas model, or the eternal habit of the Russian person to be touched by hygiene was a guarantee of this, only the West, or rather Western abundance, was perceived by most of us quite at home, as a kind of practical embodiment of the dream of developed socialism. Before any theories about the rapprochement of the two systems (the so-called “convergence”) or simultaneously with them, the Soviet man in the street was inclined to believe that there everything is exactly the same as here, only richer, purer and more colorful, and therefore everything that arises and exists to the west of the Elbe, must have... cannot but have (!) its likeness to the east of it.

An entire generation was raised by the standards of Western life. It believed that real beer should be in cans, real books should be written by Updike and Vonnegut, and real community life takes place on lined plots in the Odintsovo forest. Even if they had only seen aluminum cans in movies, had not read Updike at all, and lived in a rundown five-story building, Westernization in the conditions of the USSR turned out to be fundamentally outside the class, and this was its great strength. Socialist society longed for consolidation, which traditional culture could in no way satisfactorily provide. Its function was taken over by the Soviet certification culture. The Acmeistic longing for world culture was replaced by a longing for world materiality. From this moment on, it is time to talk about a significant split in the national cultural consciousness. It must be admitted that the certification culture, once so vividly denounced by the progressive public ( “Close your mouths, take off your clothes, // Major boys are scratching the streets...” ), stylized as an extreme version of the general intellectual worldview, in fact it was hardly such. The reason for this is not even only class-restrictive discrepancies. If the culture of the intelligentsia lived with the possibility, or rather the impossibility, of speaking out and, consequently, voluntarily or involuntarily fed on the past, in relation to which that unspoken word turned out to be effective, if it thereby acquired a historical character par excellence, then its “major” (almost said “ majoritarian") opponents were fundamentally modern. Modern to the point of ruthlessness.

The “major” subculture was, in its essence, a deeply Soviet phenomenon. Indeed, to some extent it was a “fat culture,” but it is at least stupid to see in it only an expression of the desire of the service elite to acquire their own language, thereby separating themselves from the rest of society. Moreover, as we have already had the opportunity to notice, such an attempt would be doomed to failure in advance. So, in our opinion, the peculiar elitism of Soviet Westernism is just a concomitant consequence, but not the root cause of it. The most important prerequisite for it should be considered a special type of social development, a state of it that could be called “wave modernization.”

Every closed society develops in two ways. Internally, like any society, it experiences the influence of various processes and moves from event to event, from idea to idea, one way or another responding to the facts of external reality. This type of social development is usually called “organic”; all problems, difficulties, controversial issues in this case are resolved more or less naturally, and life seems to renew itself: a washing machine, a food processor, a fume hood, and so on appear next to the gas stove. until the time comes, and the gas stove itself is scrapped.

It’s a different matter if a Fume Hood takes the place of a fume hood, Pants takes the place of pants, a Book takes the place of a book, when the longing for new materiality takes the extreme form. The external history of a closed society is directed from event to event, from one liberal decision to another, even if it is several decades distant from the first. In a sense, the entire history of the post-Stalin USSR is a history of gradual resolution. It doesn’t matter what: the style of trousers, drinks, films, an alien way of life, the very fact of permission is important: instead of a red flag, a yellow flag is hung, before it was impossible, but now - please!

Thus, along with the natural mechanism of social development, a mechanism of a different kind was included, sanctified by the authority of the notorious official culture. Today accounting - tomorrow a computer, today suits from Moskvosveya - tomorrow a licensed Saint Laurent, today Asadov - tomorrow Yevtushenko. Today - thorns, and tomorrow... The liberal waves that rolled over the Soviet people with varying degrees of frequency put him in a rather difficult situation. After passing a certain point, it turned out that life had been developing on its own all these years, and he, who seemed to be in the vanguard and sincerely strived to keep up with the century, was again hopelessly behind.

Thus, the past life was declared to be partly not past, or to have been not in the full sense of the word. You can refer to Orwell, but I'm afraid that will only spoil the matter. The war with Eurasia, at the behest of Big Brother, did not turn out to be a battle with Oceania at all. It was just that at some point it turned out that the war with Eurasia, which was waged until the enemy was completely exhausted, was carried out by the forces of one rifle battalion, and therefore a tank brigade, or even two, should be immediately sent. A dangerous precedent was being created. “Wave modernization” taught society to distinguish between different types of time and life, turning on and cozy, like a New Year’s garland, buzzing during eras of widely announced changes and dozing peacefully in the intervals between them.

The natural consequence of this state of affairs was, in addition to all other delights, the splitting of society in relation to the Main Modernization Event. It was necessary to start from it, and only in this way was it possible to build one’s own system of views, which was insignificantly connected with the official one, and the norm of life habits that did not contradict common sense.

Just as once upon a time, like mushrooms after the rain, the “children of the 20th Congress”, which overthrew Stalin, they were also the “children of Arbat”, climbed from everywhere, so the “children of October 1964”, which overthrew Khrushchev, the “children of November 1982”, which gave rise to Andropov training, and, of course, “children of April 1985.” The fundamental dissimilarity of the “children,” these half-brothers and sisters of the Soviet way of life, was mediated not so much by age and certainly not by the difference in historical experience. Their worldview was built only and exclusively in relation to a distorted perspective. In it, the permitted was placed in the foreground, and in turn, everything else was grouped around it: a pebble of the cult of personality, and behind the fir trees of the Kremlin wall, and a little further away, an elderberry bush on the grave of unclaimed ashes of the Don Cemetery - a touching universal landscape to tears, nonconformist ikebana.

I remember that in the late 80s it was fashionable to make fun of long-time liberals: they said they read the wrong books, proclaimed the wrong ideas, invested their lives in the wrong things. In fact, this, apparently, should have meant only one single reproach: they didn’t give you permission, guys, and you’re glad - they piled up the wrong colored boulder, they piled up the wrong trees.

The certification culture, which we have already discussed above, is the flesh and blood of this process. It could be tied to several Modernization Events at once. Its organizational root cause was the foreign policy expansion carried out by the Soviet Union since the late 50s. Its formal root cause was the appearance of the Beryozka stores, which replaced the dilapidated torgsins. Its essential root cause was the overcoming of a single cultural type, which finally emerged by the end of the Stalin era.

But, if you allow, we will continue talking about this in exactly a week.