Elena Vigdorova. Fear of the word

Fear of the word
Elena Vigdorova

Publication date: December 27, 2000

I love reading bad essays . They, bad essays, like unhappy families, are different. Hippocrates said that a patient’s delirium can be both cheerful and sad. Cheerful delirium promotes recovery, but sad delirium leaves no hope. The sad nonsense in children's writings is when from the introduction I learn that Pushkin is a great Russian poet, and " Eugene Onegin " is his brilliant work. The further set of stamps need not be given. I will only say that these essays, as a rule, are smooth and their author is accustomed to receiving good grades. But it is impossible to teach him anything until he transfers his text to the stage of cheerful delirium.

Merry nonsense is the type of bad writing that I confessed my love for. There is always a sense of freedom of thought, albeit wild, in him. Such essays are written by children who suddenly saw that Pushkin’s novel is not just an encyclopedia of Russian life, but, in Akhmatova’s words , “Onegin’s aerial community.”

The main task of the teacher is to break down stereotypes and immerse the student in the incredibly complex, sometimes cruel and scary world of literature. Children complain: we are not allowed to write what we think. But very often these complaints are unfair. Children say their famous “I think” and “it seems to me” in their essays when they report that Tatyana is Pushkin’s “sweet ideal” or that Chatsky, in their opinion, will come to Senate Square. Doomed by school requirements to sad delirium, they do not know how independent thinking manifests itself. Standard wording of topics provokes cliches. If a child must write an essay on the topic “Tatyana - Pushkin’s “sweet ideal”,” then in addition to the ready-made word blocks that are somehow preserved in his head or notebook, he will also easily find this essay in any collection , where it will go under the definition “golden”, or in the storerooms of their older brothers, as well as mothers and grandmothers. If instead of the famous problematic topics children will be tasked with analyzing the text, determining the function of an episode or even a specific word in the context of the work, this will be of more use. Text analysis is not only useful in the learning process, but is possible and convenient for both final and entrance exams. Providing the audience with the necessary literary material is a matter of technology, and this, truly, is simpler and cheaper than rebuilding the entire examination system.

The fact that the most important thing in literature is the word is not known to everyone. How often, when analyzing poems or plays that seem to be known to high school students in class, I see that the meaning of the words is not clear to them, or rather, that they do not see or hear these words - in other words, the path from a poor or excellent student to a person who reads lies through understanding what is written through respect for the word - one’s own and others’.

When they talk about the educational role of literature, they often mean a certain direct impact, the positive and negative examples that it gives, explaining what is good and what is not so good. But everything created by the geniuses of mankind rebels against such an interpretation of art in general and literature in particular. “I’m not a reader of nonsense, but even more so of exemplary ones,” so will Chatsky, who was irritated not so much with fools as with imitators and preferred “originals to lists.” in class A literature teacher, analyzing Griboyedov's comedy and proposing a deliberately standard theme, comes into conflict first of all with the author, who said about himself: “I write, as I live, freely and freely”...

A person who is not afraid of words feels freedom differently than someone who rarely takes up a pen and every time is afraid of dying in a single combat with the word “which.”

Now, as probably fifty or thirty years ago, the most vile thing we can pass on to our children is a feeling of fear. Fear of the word, fear of the thought. It begins with the fear of answering incorrectly, of using in a speech something that is not what the person asking is expecting from you. And here tests - the most harmful type of literature exam, in my opinion, for youth - greatly contribute to this lack of freedom of thought. Tests can only ask questions about very specific historical or plot facts, like these:

- in such and such a play there are 3,4,5 acts?
- such and such lines belong to Griboyedov? Pushkin? Pasternak?
- such and such a hero died, got married, stands immersed in his heart in a “storm of sensations”?
- Pushkin was born at the end of this, last, and the century before last?
- “ Paul I , Nicholas II , Yeltsin ruled over us then ? ”

It seems that questions of any other nature are simply unacceptable, because they have to be answered using someone else’s formulations. If in a test they ask me whether V.A. Zhukovsky is a classicist, sentimentalist or romanticist , I not only cannot answer this question unambiguously, but I do not have the right to do so, because the literary process is a complex phenomenon, and for any word written in my hand and signed with my name, I am responsible.

It is this responsibility that should be cultivated, I think, in literature lessons.

And not only her, probably.