| The scandal with Leonid Desyatnikov’s opera based on the libretto by Vladimir Sorokin “Children of Rosenthal” is taking on completely anecdotal forms. On March 4, the State Duma voted almost entirely to check information about the pornographic content of the opera. Recently on the NTV channel, in the popular program “To the Barrier,” politician Irina Khakamada spoke out against the leader of “Walking Together” and the “Nashi” movement Vasily Yakemenko and won by a margin of several votes, and the ratings of the participants grew not when they spoke, but then, when an opponent was substituted. Yakemenko called Sorokin a “pornographer and a kale-eater” and tried to force Khakamada to read an excerpt from a specially printed “Chosen One”. Khakamada frowned in disgust. On Friday, pickets began around the Bolshoi Theater. On Saturday, TVC again devoted the plot of the program “Postscript” to the upcoming premiere at the Bolshoi, in which Lyubov Sliska and Elena Drapeko were among the opponents of the “desecration of the sacred stage.” The Interfax agency reported that, according to Lyubov Blizhina, a member of the parliamentary committee on culture, the management of the Bolshoi Theater allocated 40 tickets to deputies for the dress rehearsal of the play, which will take place on March 22. After viewing, the culture committee will meet again and draw conclusions. Ms. Blizhina reported on her meeting with the Minister of Culture Alexander Sokolov. State Duma deputy Irina Savelyeva was also present at the meeting. “We expressed the deputies’ concerns about the production of Sorokin’s opera, since we believe that the Bolshoi Theater’s repertoire is a national treasure,” Blizhina said.
Where the deputies marching with Vasily Yakemenko got such a passion for opera is a topic for a separate discussion. Obviously, only part of a large intrigue is coming to light, which is not directed at all against Sorokin, who was found not guilty by the court of distributing pornography. But the point is not even in the complex games of officials entangled in administrative reform, but in the obvious confusion of minds demonstrated during the struggle.
By engaging in a discussion of a cultural event - the production of a modern opera, the participants showed that the problem was completely alien and unfamiliar to them. It was in vain that opponents called on the attackers to inquire about the content of the libretto and, in general, the essence of what was happening. And the visit of deputies to the performance is unlikely to clarify anything for them.
Moreover, the collision of unprepared minds of deputies with a work of modern art can have unpredictable consequences. What do deputies, people who received their education in Soviet times through school literature classes or lectures at higher technical educational institutions, know about contemporary art? And even those who graduated from special institutes are hardly better prepared. Who taught there then and often teaches now - people who in Soviet times went through a strict ideological selection, prepared to interpret "The Quiet Don" or - in the best version - "The Master and Margarita"? Contemporary art, literature, and cinema remain completely unknown to most of them. Let's not think that deputies and other politicians, feeling their responsibility to society, study special publications at night, subscribe to art history magazines that are rare today... And even if such a magazine accidentally falls into their hands, they are unlikely to get through it - there are so many terms, such a complex context, so many completely unfamiliar names that even a professional would not suddenly understand. Let us remember what happened when a document prepared by the Ministry of Culture and written by the director of the Institute of Cultural Studies, Kirill Razlogov, fell into the hands of members of the government. They perceived this text as mockery because they were confused by the words.
Expert opinions, even if they are formulated on various topical issues, simply do not reach the minds of ordinary citizens. There are no mechanisms that could broadcast these opinions, nor are there any tools that could stimulate their emergence.
The main source of information for the vast majority of the population is, of course, television. Now let's remember what programs about literature, theater, and modern music exist on the central channels? Yes, even on the “Culture” channel, specially created for those who are interested in art, we mainly talk about classical culture, about its history, and everything that is new, non-trivial, revolutionary appears today, “Culture” is simply ignored. There are still critics, of course, but they are becoming fewer and fewer - because society has no need to comprehend and articulate the main problems of the language of modern culture. What was previously called aesthetics - the science of beauty, now no one in Russia deals with it, there are no institutions, there is no special media space, this topic is not in demand, no one allocates money for it.
Ask those who have been involved in media culture for the last ten years, what basic requirements have been formulated by their superiors? No need for reviews, no need for complex texts, be simpler and more fun, no need to talk about films and performances, tell us about the lives of the actors, take an interview, you need direct speech (no matter what, the main thing is that there is a newsmaker). As a result, those same ordinary people who are not obliged to read, discuss, and think about everything themselves find themselves without any professional help at all. Even in Soviet times, those who wanted to “keep in the know” could choose whether to read “Soviet Screen” or “The Art of Cinema”, the magazine “Theater”, “Decorative Art” or watch “Kinopanorama”... That is, there was a hierarchy opinions, in which there was an understandable simplification of ideas developed among the elite - from experts to the masses. In pursuit of ratings, circulation, and mass readers, Russian society simply abandoned reflection. Including from new cultural myths and linguistic clichés, the need for which was not understood for a long time.
Irina Khakamada is not obliged to read Sorokin or Astafiev herself, but she could use arguments and formulations that would make her position understandable to television viewers, if such arguments and formulations existed in everyday life. This difficult but necessary work should have been done by specialists, but no one ordered it for them. And for themselves, they can easily make do with that “bird language” that causes such anger and irritation in the average person when for some reason he encounters it.
The lack of popular television programs about art has led to the fact that today there is no mutual understanding at all between the population and those artists who are trying - to varying degrees successfully, but this is not what we are talking about now - to look for some new paths in art, to use other strategies, than those that were in use thirty years ago, when the country was quietly dozing behind the Iron Curtain.
Well, in what context can deputies, whose knowledge of modern theater, at best, draws from the performances of Lenkom and Sovremennik, or is even limited to attending pop concerts, put the history of composer clones, built on irony, quotation and other joys of intertextuality? Has anyone explained to them that in the world of modern music everything is generally structured differently than in the 19th century?
Those “who brand Vladimir Sorokin’s libretto without reading a single line from it” need not familiarity with the text, but calm and confidential educational work to explain that flies exist separately from cutlets, that public space and art space are delimited, and that no one forces them to go to the Bolshoi Theater not to see “Eugene Onegin”, but to modern opera. That every citizen today has a choice whether to buy the works of Pushkin, Dontsova, Sorokin or Petrushevskaya, or watch “Shadowboxing” or “The Sun” by Sokurov - and on what grounds should he make this choice. And that today in the world culture is complexly structured, that it has many separate shelves, that the tasks that artists set for themselves have meaning, and Oleg Kulik does not need to be able to draw like Levitan. The trouble is that there is no one to do this today. Alena Solntseva
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