Ilya Lepikhov. According to scripture

According to scripture - 3
Ilya Lepikhov

Date of publication: October 17, 2000

Totalitarian culture today seems to double in our imagination. On the one hand, it is presented as an unshakable monolith, a wall extending into the heavens, the stones of which are so tightly fitted to each other that it is impossible, let alone sticking matches or pins, between them. The wall... And above it, behind the clouds, work is in full swing: further, higher, forward.

Construction is a true metaphor for a new culture - first blow up the dilapidated, then rake out the loam, level the hole to a slimy surface, hammer it with reinforcement: “Bricklayer, bricklayer, in a white apron, // What are you building, for whom?” - Emil Wernharn asked in Bryusov’s voice a century ago. The answer was frighteningly simple - European culture, grain of sand, brick by brick, was building a prison for the whole world. In some places it was more, in others less comfortable, in others it was painted white, in others it was moldy to a copper patina, but otherwise everything was the same: a bolt on the gate, full-length steel spaghetti and a faded sky seeping through the barred window.

In the East, it seems, this was understood better and earlier than in the West. It’s clear that when you go to a golden parasha, it’s difficult to overcome the deceptive feeling of your own power - or the tiled stench that hits your nose: you don’t even want to, but take a closer look at your home. The same bed screwed to the floor, the same light chime of aluminum plates and brickwork placed under the edge of the ceiling. Kindly. Good job.

The once great Andrzej Wajda made the leading mason the hero of his “Man of Marble” (1976). After that, there was no need to shoot anything: the metaphor was read by itself. Culture as a wall, culture as a stone (how can one not recall Mandelstam here?) - we have long ago become accustomed to this image of the aesthetics of totalitarianism. It has become a familiar element of our everyday life, a kind of plaster skeleton in the closet, unsightly and touching. It was. That's it.

Even those who have not fully tasted all the delights of Central Soviet art can still feel its charm as a decrepit Goliath by visiting... - and the same Izmailovsky Park station of the Moscow metro. The polished space of the three-runner casemate is crowned with a sculptural group depicting for some reason partisans, who, if we take into account the proximity of the wholesale market, strongly resemble the unsleeping lads during the winter rut: a sheepskin butt, a worn bronze sash and a Thomson machine gun, better known to us as PPSh , Shpagin submachine gun. Their gaze is stern, their intentions are clear in advance. If I were the RUBOP employees, I would assign a 24-hour patrol to the monument. But no - ordinary people are hurrying about their business, looking at their feet, and trains bathed in a poisonous light are busily scurrying around their bronze felt boots.

Culture cast on a blank, impaled on polished stone, driven under a concrete underground vault is the extreme point of the totalitarian style. Precisely the extreme and precise point.

If we abandon stereotypes, then it’s a strange thing! - totalitarian culture turns out to be not at all as homogeneous as it appears from the outside. Quite the opposite. United in the chosen direction, in all other respects it is colorful, like the outfit of a Swiss guardsman, and fragile, like the word of a Turkish sports manager. We didn’t seem to notice this before. They didn’t pay attention, because there was no time, and they got used to it, and it didn’t provide the opportunity for calm consideration, separation into its component parts: it worked and that’s it. Like a barrel made of tanned boards, cut off at the bottom and tightly grasped by a tight hoop of ideology, totalitarian culture was in business not so long ago, adapted to the flow of all sorts of monumental nonsense. But a barrel is a barrel, and as soon as you stop filling it to the brim or loosen the tension of the canvas a little, it tends to dry out. The totalitarian cooper is a very careless mechanic. He has no time to calculate; he works more using intuition than a plumb line and a ruler. The result is sad - and the design he chose was not the most successful, and the raw materials were bad.

In its structure, totalitarian culture is, as a rule, two-part. The parts that form it are unequal and not comparable in quantitative terms. The first, very small, group is formed by the so-called standards , whose number is small, but their artistic merits are decent; the other, quite numerous, consists of variations on themes specified by the standards. To a certain extent, we can talk about playing out the opposition between “elite” and “profane”, which is so important for any stable society, when part of the cultural product is addressed to the conventional “elite”, and part of the equally conventional “mass”, conditional insofar as a totalitarian society, despite in its external order and goodness, it is a kind of suspension, within which it is physically impossible to designate any, even somewhat approximate, boundaries.

Not being sufficiently knowledgeable about the artistic practice of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, I can only recognize the validity of this kind of judgment in relation to Soviet Russia. Here you will find a dozen canonical texts, such as, for example, “Quiet Don” by Sholokhov, “We are from Kronstadt” by Dzigan or “Future Pilots” by Deineka. There are countless stylizations here: up to a hundred “Virgin Soils Upturned”, several dozen “Men with Guns” (“Father, I saw Lenin!”), a countless number of “New Moscows” (Moscow?).

Here you have Eisenstein’s “Ivan the Terrible”, and some “Alexander Parkhomenko” with his “birch-like” harmony: “You are waiting, Lizaveta, // Greetings from a friend... // On a hot war horse . ” Easel academicism coexists peacefully with virtuoso pseudo-traditional stylizations.

Which, strictly speaking, is not surprising. It is well known that the beginnings of proletarian culture were formed not by academic idiots, as the theory would seem to require, but by brilliant leftists like Mayakovsky, Meyerhold or the same Eisenstein. But leftists are different from leftists. It’s one thing for Khlebnikov, who brought the experience of “folk” poetry of the 60s (Nekrasov, Nikitin, Mikhailov) to a grotesque sharpening, and quite another thing for Mayakovsky, with his Blokovsky (and therefore Sluchevsky, Meevsky, Fetovsky, Batyushkovsky) leaven, with his later Pushkin's servility ("At the top of my voice", 1930). A farce of blueshirts is one thing, and quite another is Mayakovsky-Meyerhold’s “Mystery-bouffe,” which turned the Holy Scriptures and, in a sense, went back to the pre-Stanislav romantic theatricality of the director of “Masquerade.” Medvedkin's popular print or the picturesque barbarism of Dovzhenko is one thing, and the encyclopedic education, that is, mainly sophistication in tradition, of Eisenstein is quite another.

Yes, what to talk about! There is not and cannot exist a truly talented artist (engineer, politician, economist) who is not properly familiar with the experience of his predecessors. Otherwise, we risk getting not a titan of social art, not a genius of cumulative perversions, but, at best, a self-born madman. At worst, he's a toilet scrapper. And what? Also art: “Some guy named Sandy // Graffitied a coat. // Wow! // Girls are different...” .

So, the duality of the totalitarian type of culture seems to be beyond doubt. Its ultimate goal is also beyond doubt. Another thing is, what is its essential premise, what feelings and ideas does it primarily appeal to? Since at the end of the day a totalitarian state strives to achieve maximum mobilization of the consumer, this means that the task of the artist serving him is to appeal to the broadly understood collective : conscious or unconscious - in this case it is not so important. But the collective, for obvious reasons, under no circumstances can be perceived as something unified: it disperses, multiplies, at least doubles, disintegrating into what could be conditionally called “collective physiological” and “collective archetypal.” The first appeals to the animal, the second to the social instinct.

Strictly speaking, there are not many options. Quite conventionally, they can be distributed as follows: a dynamic animal - we are alive, they are motionless ("Chapaev" by the Vasilyev brothers, scene of a psychic attack); the animal is colorful - we are all in light, they are the opposite (see easel painting, for example, “Defense of Sevastopol”); archetypal ethical - we are good, they are not; the archetypal social - we are the oppressed, they are the oppressors ("Black and White" by Mayakovsky - here, however, bad luck emerges: in white, or rather, they are white, well, nothing can be done); and, finally, the archetypal national - “No, we told the fascists, // Our people will not tolerate, // So that fragrant Russian bread, // Called the word “brot” (S.V. Mikhalkov). The first three methods are simple and convenient, but perhaps they are not ideological enough to put them on stream. The fourth is suitable only to a limited extent, since it turns out to be truly effective only in transitional or similar eras. Only the fifth is universal. So, in a completely natural way, a totalitarian culture turns out to be a nationalist culture par excellence, and the direction totalitarian propaganda is chosen in such a way as to most effectively use the national archetype, the notorious “national unconscious”.

In practice, if not evidence, then evidence of this is abundant: from the victorious toast raised by the Supreme Commander-in-Chief in 1945 for the victorious Russian people, to G. Alexandrov’s film “The Composer Glinka”, from Comrade Stalin’s works on linguistics in the 50s before the resolution of the Central Committee of the early 40s, which launched the fight against Volga-Tatar nationalism - and this was during the fighting on the Soviet-German front. And what about the project of organizing a new super film studio, the so-called “Russfilm”, which was circulated through the authorities in 1943-1944!

But since we assert that Stalinist culture turned to a national, predominantly Russian, archetype, we must be aware of what it, this very archetype, was by that time - the mid-40s - what it was? Answering this harmless question is, in fact, extremely difficult. All known facts indicate that by the end of the 1930s there was not and could not have been a complete Russian archetype. We omit the reasons; they are well known. Around the same time, a slow but steady restoration of the rights of the “national,” understood very, very broadly, began.

It is being carried out in three main directions. Firstly, the mythology of the Russian army is being formed, a victorious continuity is being designated, which during the Patriotic War will allow military field painters to paint propaganda posters with characteristic inscriptions: “We fight hard, // We cut desperately, // Grandsons of Suvorov, // Children of Chapaev.” . It is characteristic that at the same time, the silhouettes of Chapaev, Suvorov and for some reason Alexander Nevsky, performed by Nikolai Cherkasov, appear from behind the blackened Red Army soldier. However, an explanation can be found for this too. At approximately the same time, or perhaps a little later, the Russian Church was “allowed.” Saint Alexander was one of its most... let's say, its most secular pillars. Another thing is that not everything is clear in this story. We have yet to find out what was more in the actions of the Soviet leadership: fear for their own future, genius foresight, or sober foreign policy calculation. Molotov recalls that in all negotiations with the United States, Lend-Lease assistance was regularly linked to the provision of religious freedoms to residents of the USSR. However, the cunning fox Stalin could only pretend that he was making concessions to counterparties, dressing the already made decision in the form of a curtsy to the American congressmen.

And finally, the third and perhaps the main circumstance was brought to life by the very special situation of science in the then Soviet Union. It was in demand: in a wild guise, in wild doses, in no less wild declarations, but still... Yes, of course, it’s enough to read the diaries of V.I. Vernadsky to understand the relativity of this very demand, but I’m afraid that After October 1917, there were all the prerequisites for destroying science, especially the humanities. But “armed with advanced ideology, the leading ranks of fighters for...” were firmly confident in the possibility of creating a fundamentally new system of sciences about society, which would be based on Marxist methodology. Allies were needed on this path, and one of the most durable was historical positivism, represented by the works of the students of Klyuchevsky and Platonov.

Not being, as a rule, Marxists in their immediate worldview, they soon came to terms with the new rhetoric. Ultimately, the new government did not prevent them from doing what they loved. Let's say more: the main premise of Russian historical positivism was the desire to get to the very essence of the events that once took place, and therefore, first of all, to update the research tools, slipping out of the shrouds of the previous ideology.

A classic example of misalliance: each side tried to use the other to achieve its goals. Until a certain point, the Bolsheviks turned a blind eye to the lack of devotion of their allies, since it was important for them to “fund” their own system and method. The positivists were ready, if necessary, to sing hosannas to the authorities and the army, since they received a happy opportunity to put their method into practice: to finally “unravel” Russian history, to consider it without any connection with the schemes allegedly imposed on it during the monarchical period. The result was not slow to tell, Russia was gone: the place of the thousand-year kingdom on the pages of textbooks, and a little later, of historical novels was taken by a semi-abstract geopolitical formation, the Ugro-Slavic-Tatar community, which from ancient times was guided by certain constant aspirations and interests, such as access to the Baltic Sea, construction of the Black Sea Fleet, construction of manufactories and so on.

Thus, by the mid-40s in the Soviet Union, which operated throughout the entire territory of the former Russian Empire, with the exception of the Polish lands, three independent processes of reproduction of the Russian national myth came together: the mythology of the army, the mythology of the Church, and the mythology of the state - a new type was taking shape national myth, where the place of autocratic statehood was taken by a very uniquely understood republican statehood.

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