Alexander Ageev. Hunger 26

Hunger 26
Practical gastroenterology reading

Alexander Ageev

Publication date: April 13, 2001

...And what? The shortlist for the National Bestseller award is even touching. The touching juxtaposition of “Tomorrow” and SPS sets one in a benevolent mood. Who is it that is tirelessly fussing about protecting freedom of speech from government stranglers? Just look at such a list and you will be convinced that not only do we have freedom of speech, but multiculturalism is emerging against the backdrop of the broadest tolerance of the educated class. Or is this not tolerance, but indifference? Well, indifference, too, with a strong desire, can be interpreted as an innovative development of the liberal tradition. In a word, blooming (even already blooming) complexity, which the gloomy esthete Konstantin Leontiev loved so much.

On the other hand, you weigh this list and see: there are only two candidates! The triumph of Prokhanov and his nominator Bondarev still doesn’t fit in my head - it would be, you see, too stylish for an evasively worded award. Khakamada presenting a diploma of laureates and an envelope with green enemy engravings to veterans of the partisan war against the “occupation regime” is a plot certainly worthy of Aivazovsky’s brush, but he, as we know, died in warm April Feodosia exactly one hundred and one years ago.

Limonov? But he himself is a member of the Small Jury, and it is unlikely that it will decide to bake its first pancake with such an unappetizing lump, that is, to provoke a scandal on such a cheap lining.

I'm afraid that the chances of Bolmat and Sorokin are very doubtful - again due to their clear markings, but it is possible to discuss Bykov and Yuzefovich. Especially about Bykov . “Justification,” to be sure, is a novel with a certain number of free valences, that is, it can enter into different connections. So the passionate liberal Arkhip Angelevich, having criticized the award itself to smithereens, still wishes the well-rounded Bykov well. Therefore, success.

This is Russia: not just a country of words, as the evil-tongued Weil and Genis once quipped, but a country of adjectives. It is cold and difficult for a noun without an epithet. Well, what exactly is a “liberal”? Or "patriot"? And if you say “liberal patriot” or “nationally-minded liberal” - it’s immediately clearer, more familiar and closer.

Yes, this is the most “liberal” thing on the tongue, because all week I’ve been reading the volume of Isaiah Berlin from the new series of the UFO publishing house “Liberal Heritage”. To be honest, I read with some tension, because Sir Isaiah was verbose, and the public lecture (“Philosophy of Freedom” is, in essence, a collection of recorded public lectures by Berlin) is by no means an essay: a different addressee, a different style, an inevitable elaboration of the obvious for an unprepared audience, rhetorical excesses.

I believe the memoirists: Berlin was probably indeed a brilliant lecturer and interlocutor, but he is clearly not a writer, unlike, for example, the reactionary and proto-fascist Joseph de Maistre, to whom the book contains an instructive essay (“Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism ").

Well, what can we do, this is also a commonplace: the “philosophy of freedom” (not Berlin’s book, but liberal ideology as such) is aesthetically inexpressive, because it is too rational - there is no room for metaphors to run wild and there is practically no need to fall back on metaphysical sources. Take almost any of the classics of liberal thought - be it Popper or Hayek: the gentlemen wrote poorly, it was erased, and some did not even hide their hostility to vivid, figurative speech. Why be careful - they treated Beauty itself (it is she who will save the world!) with the greatest suspicion. For example, Popper denounced the great Plato not for anything, but for aestheticism:

“Politics, according to Plato, is a royal art, art not in a metaphorical sense, as if we were talking about the art of managing people or the art of bringing something to life, but art in the literal sense of the word. This is the art of composition - like music, painting or architecture. Plato's politician creates cities in the name of beauty. However, all this is unacceptable to me. I do not believe that human lives can be used as a means of satisfying the artist's need for self-expression... I demand that politicians defend the principles of egalitarianism and individualism. Dreams about beauty must be subordinated to the need to help people who are unhappy or suffering from injustice, and to the need to create institutions that serve such purposes . "

Wow, how flat. Therefore, Plato is still deep, great and beyond the jurisdiction of the majority of the educated community, and the most liberal bird rarely flies to the middle of even the first volume of Popper’s book “The Open Society and Its Enemies”: a dry theory, my friend, and from time to time passion is something you want to chew on sticky leaves. And wash it down with fresh blood...

This is not to say that it is enough to honor Isaiah Berlin, but there is no need to read it. Sooner or later you get used to his wasteful style, you learn to skip commonplaces, and a clear structure of thought emerges: the history of a particular political idea builds up as a rather tense drama, the plot of which is interesting to watch. Moreover, the interest is not memorial-archaeological (with which I read, for example, Edmund Burke, or Carlyle, or, if chronologically closer, Bertrand Russell), but very fresh, today. Although the 20th century is commented on by Berlin almost from the 19th century.

And how pleasant is the fundamental adogmatism, the absence of aggression and bad pathos, the willingness to admit the relativity, or at least the historical limitations of one’s views!

“It may turn out that this ideal - freedom to choose a goal without claiming its eternal significance, and the pluralism of values ​​associated with it - is just a late fruit of our declining capitalist civilization. It was not recognized in distant centuries and in primitive societies, and the future ", perhaps, will look at him with curiosity and sympathy, but is unlikely to understand him well . "

What does not prevent you from demonstrating firmness:

“Yes, it may be so. But from all this, it seems to me, skeptical conclusions do not follow. The principles do not become less sacred because their durability is not guaranteed. In fact, wanting to guarantee the eternity and inviolability of our values ​​at some point In the sky of objectivity, we may show a longing for the security of childhood or for the absolute values ​​of the simple past . "

It's rare to come across a phrase that isn't spoiled by the word "sacred," but the above one is just that. This, by the way, is one of Isaiah Berlin’s specific talents - to compose such phrases: without winking, without shamanism, but without any semantic losses.

In short, I personally will not miss the promised second volume of Isaiah Berlin (with the subtitle “Russia”).

...And the circumstances had to be such that from the liberal coolness of Berlin’s book I fell into the sultry authoritarian text of Solzhenitsyn! I bought the April “New World”, and somehow there was nothing there for my eye to grab onto, except Buida’s new story and the third part of Solzhenitsyn’s epic “The Grain Satisfied...”

I don’t like Solzhenitsyn, but I read him. Partly even out of protest: I don’t like the fact that we are now treating him like a dead man. There is something juvenile and extra-cultural about this attitude.

It turns out that the writer Dmitry Bykov exists, but the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn does not. But more on that next time.