Ilya Lepikhov. According to scripture-4

According to scripture-4
Ilya Lepikhov

Date of publication: October 24, 2000

By the end of the 40s, all the prerequisites for the reproduction of the Russian national myth were taking shape in the Soviet Union. The idea of ​​a Monarchy, understood primarily in a religious sense, is being replaced by the idea of ​​a Self-Building Nation, completely devoid of any metaphysical connotations. If the Synodal God seemed to have been created in order to affirm with his whole being the immutability of the earthly structure, then the People, this new Supreme Being, preferred to decide their own fate.

The new myth was called upon to reckon with the autocratic past and, as a result, to rediscover the foundations of Russian statehood. There is every reason to talk about an attempt to construct a Russian republican myth, a legend that is all the more viable and an attempt that is all the more justified because by the middle of the 20th century, Russian culture had accumulated a sufficient amount of appropriately arranged knowledge and skills in order to try to adapt them to business.

The fundamental basis of the process was the myth of Novgorod statehood, which was introduced into aesthetic and cultural circulation almost in Pavlov’s era and has since occupied an extremely important place in Russian humanitarian consciousness. The Novgorod theme corresponded to at least two necessary conditions for a “democratic” culture.

Firstly, it was equally traditional and modern, since, being absolutely scientific, organic and evidence-based, the history of Novgorod statehood, for obvious reasons, could not take its rightful place in pre-revolutionary historiography. Secondly, it was consecrated by the authority of such people as Karamzin, Pushkin, Khomyakov, Pogodin, Lermontov, Samarin - it is impossible to imagine a better claque. Stories about the free Novgorodians who caused a stir in the Hanseatic League, tales about the rich merchant Sadko, who fell in love with almost the entire underwater kingdom, the suffering of Marfa Boretskaya, who did not want to come to terms with the inevitable - all this together, filled with the loud alarm of the veche bell for fidelity, could not but evoke respect from lazy and incurious descendants. The place that was given to the Vikings in European history was given to the Novgorodians in Russia. They did not discover America before Columbus only due to a misunderstanding, but their boats sailed to Kolyvan-Spitsbergen almost earlier than the boats of Eric the Red. They were more resourceful than the Dutch, more economical than the Germans, more resourceful than the Swedes. They were free citizens of the Russian land. "We are not slaves!" - Ukomovites read somewhere in a bearish corner near Vyatka in warehouses. “We are not slaves, and our ancestors were not born slaves,” they could add with good reason.

The central “Novgorod” text of the 20th century turned out to be not the books of Academician Presnyakov or the birch bark letters of Artsikhovsky (members of the primary cell could not raise science), but a film. "Alexander Nevsky", filmed by Eisenstein in the late 30s, meant as much for Russian self-awareness as perhaps Karamzin's "History". Despite the fact that Karamzin addressed mainly the upper class, and Eisenstein addressed a much more democratic audience, he addressed and achieved his goal. However, it could hardly have been otherwise. The text, brilliant in all respects, - "Nevsky" was, among other things, amazingly accurately ideologically and intonationally spelled out: Free Novgorod, ready to sacrifice their well-being for the sake of the Idea of ​​Freedom, its citizens, powerful and foolish, like painters in the first year of the Academy. M.V. Frunze, and, finally, Prince Alexander, the elected head of the army, as it were, a tsar, and at the same time not a tsar - in a word, a leader.

With their joint efforts, the Russian heroes put a limit to the atrocities of the aggressor, who, as we know, walked like a pig, like a wedge. Livonian cuneiforms, who coveted other people's goods, in full accordance with Russian cultural tradition, turned out to be bandits of a very special kind, gentlemen, civilized to the highest and last degree, like some heroes of Kipling's novels, going into battle against barbaric Russia to the sounds of an organ mass. Thus, the motif of Order arose in the picture, carried by iron legions in their bags strapped to their saddles. He was opposed by a sea of ​​people who did not want to enter foreign borders. The sea was agitated, clinking its chain mail and anxiously peering into the stormy distance until it was the turn to wash over the adversary.

And the great Prokofiev - just in case, the author of the music for the film - would not have been himself if he had not contrasted the Russian system with the ruthlessness of civilization, the woodwinds with the brass, and the horn with the organ. In the end, the cunning horn players defeated the unsmiling priest, and the Russians drowned the Teutons. Novgorod freedom triumphed, but in a very bizarre way. Without the Leader, the Great Warrior - by the way, that’s exactly what “The Great Warrior of Albania Skandenbeg” (1954) was called, the film by Sergei Yutkevich, sent by Stalin to Enver Hoxha to establish film propaganda - and so, without Prince Alexander it turned out to be impossible.

Novgorod freedom found its limit almost where it began. "Alexander Nevsky" almost word for word repeated the arguments of the "Novgorod" Karamzin. Thus, North Russian republicanism merged with Moscow sovereignty. The latter - with all the attractiveness of the Novgorod myth - was never forgotten at the top, which, I remember, caused genuine indignation among the progressive youth of the 40s - 60s. The then student of the Literary Institute, Naum Korzhavin, branded Ivan Kalita from the bottom of his heart: “You were quite disgusting in appearance, mean in heart, but that’s not the point - // Historically progressive // ​​Your life path turned out to be.” And a little later, the young but already famous director Andrei Tarkovsky spoke very disapprovingly of Muscovite Rus' in interviews given on the set of his new film with the working title “The Passion of Andrei.”

The Novgorod-Moscow sovereign consciousness formed the basis of a new historical myth. One can and, I believe, should argue about the degree of its productivity, about the benefits and harms it brought to Soviet society, about certain details that are not combined with general expediency, but one cannot help but admit the obvious: the appearance of something like this was required by time itself. A great state, which, without a doubt, the USSR was at that time, could not do without its “ancient” history.

However, objective difficulties arose along this path. In fact, the Romance peoples traced their genealogy to Aeneas, the Germanic peoples to Clovis and Germanaric, real rulers of real tribes who actually took part in real European affairs. Russian Rurik, as well as Russian Vladimir, by and large, were not noticed in anything like this, and could not have been. Russian history could not be the history of a tribe, nor the history of a nation, nor the history of a leading economic type. In full accordance with Marxist theory, it turned out to be the history of an idea that gradually embodied itself in material existence. The role of the latter was played by Russian republican statehood, and its very content was largely exhausted by the bravura cries of military bands: “Roll the thunder of victory, // Have fun, brave Ross!”

A Russian person, especially if he was far from religion, had essentially nothing to cling to except the external power of his great and unkind Fatherland. As a matter of fact, it has been written and rewritten about this. Why go far: “Walking through Torment” by Alexei Nikolaevich Tolstoy, this unique collection of slogans and misconceptions of the era, contains piercing evidence on this matter in its constructed simplicity. One of the heroes of the novel, an officer of the Russian army Roshchin, in the hungry winter of 1918, rereads almost all of Kostomarov and Ilovaisky and, when things get especially bad, recites chapters depicting the dubious delights of the Time of Troubles, with the expected refrain: “But we survived! But we rose !" True, a little later the same Roshchin will move to the Don, and there is no time for Kostomarov: there it is not far from Slashchev and Solonevich. But still.

The history of Russia throughout the 20th century was understood as the history of the state idea, while the history of Russian society was one of the varieties of this very idea, in our case - a kind of history of citizenship. The latter could not exist without an extensive legend, which clearly proved all the advantages and disadvantages of a person’s misunderstood duty to the state and the sovereign: on the one hand, Menshikov, and on the other, on the contrary, Mazepa, on the one hand, Shibanov, on the other, Kurbsky, and so on further ad infinitum. It turned out great: patriotic and in some ways even historical, no worse than, say, in Ryleev’s “Thoughts,” where the author set himself largely similar goals: “I know that destruction awaits//The one who rises first.. ." - further in the text.

But the consciousness of a subject, as well as the consciousness of a citizen, is formed by external conditions. On the way to counting and analyzing them, I’m afraid an inevitable fiasco awaits us. The main difficulty, which today is hardly possible to resolve, is that we are completely deprived of the opportunity to assess with a due degree of objectivity the true content of these very conditions, and, consequently, to understand the basic parameters of the history of society, and, consequently, to penetrate into the content of the national myth of the Stalin era as a whole.

In the first part of our essay, we already had the opportunity to talk about how little and poorly we know modern Russia, but now, apparently, we must say approximately the same in relation to the USSR. Moreover, this can be asserted with almost greater justification than before. And the reason for this is the inevitable subjectivity of assessments. If we didn’t have the chance to live in Tsarist Russia, then the jingling chansonnet: “My address is not a house or a street, // My address is the Soviet Union” - and to this day evokes a whole range of feelings, from which it is so easy, impossible to get rid of in an instant .

Firstly, we don’t like it - in the sense of the Union, and even the song at all... Secondly, any attempt at a conceptual approach to the problem of “CoCo” is doomed in advance to lightness, because, from the point of view of accurate knowledge, we to this day we have, essentially, nothing at our disposal: not only suitable instruments for the case, but even the subject of measurement itself - because, alas, we do not even approximately understand what with this very instrument, if it, of course, existed, to measure and What is this most incomprehensible “something” to calculate in - in newtons, in kilohertz, in jeffersons? In principle, where science is powerless, aesthetics comes to the rescue. In our case, aesthetics, mainly verbal, is language, the fundamental basis of national culture. But here too we are forced to acknowledge our own helplessness.

Marxist rhetoric, which permeates the entire structure of the Russian language of the 20th century, completely confuses the matter, inviting those who wish to figure out for themselves exactly in which cases some kind of “internationalism” means “xenophobia”, in which - “foreign trade interest”, and in which - "commodity shortage". And since the USSR during its heyday was a country of heightened verbal culture, the problem of interpretation (in our case, the interpretation of conditions) turns out to be almost the key one.

In this regard, let us simply allow ourselves to express our vision of the problem, taking into account in advance all possible objections, for which we hardly have a sufficient number of counterarguments.

Nevertheless, we will take the liberty of asserting that the so-called “Stalinist national myth” was only partly, and not its most significant part, the result of the influence of conditions brought to life by the Soviet system itself. We are inclined to interpret the cultural situation of the 40s - the first half of the 50s as a delayed completion of the process of formation of the Russian proper, or, if you prefer, Russian-Russian, national consciousness, which began with the activities of Karamzin, publisher of the "Bulletin of Europe" (1801), and the first Russian romantics.

However, you don’t have to look that far. The problem of Russian “nationality”, which dominated, as Y. Lotman showed in his dissertation, in the Kaisarov-Turgenev circle even on the eve of the Patriotic War, became the property of broad sections of the democratic public only in the Nicholas era. Yesterday's admirers of Ovid and Tibullus suddenly begin to compete in the ethnographic genre: A. Afanasyev writes down fairy tales, V. Dahl - proverbs, A. Hilferding - epics, A. Ostrovsky begins to practice the dramatic genre, and Khomyakov composes his Babylon.

The first wave of interest in the “national,” understood quite broadly, had a distinctly religious-tribal character. It was not even the Orthodox Church as a historical institution or as a community of people professing Christ that aroused interest, but rather the Orthodox doctrine as one of the possible ways of knowing the Absolute. The great Florovsky provides remarkable evidence of this in his “Ways of Russian Theology.” Allegedly, carried away by Schelling, Ivan Kireevsky wanted to introduce his young wife to higher activities and from time to time read to her his especially favorite passages from the “System of Transcendental Idealism.” She, like any intelligent woman, for a time meekly endured the test, but one day her restraint failed her, and for each extract from Schelling she began to attach a corresponding extract from the Holy Fathers. Kireyevsky, at that time a brilliant literary critic, who in many ways anticipated the best works of Belinsky, was a man of impeccable taste and therefore could not help but prefer the 4th century AD. XIX century.

So, in a sense, Russian Slavophilism, at the origins of which stood the Kireyevsky brothers, is an aesthetic-historical phenomenon. However, not entirely and not unconditionally. For a long time we were inclined to regard Slavophilism as a phenomenon of the exclusively Russian spirit, while losing sight of the corresponding processes taking place at that time in Europe.

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

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