Translated material
Textbook "for the shelf"
Print Evgenia Abelyuk
It is now clear that writing a textbook [1] was stupid. Years of work. Two publishing houses. And the result is a book “on the shelf.” True, in a two-color layout, with good illustrations. One strong-willed decision is enough - and she is in the printing house. But there will be no such strong-willed decision. At least not yet. And there are several reasons.
In fact, this is a well-known truth: creating a textbook is a thankless task. Especially school ones. Especially a literature textbook. There is an opinion that it is generally impossible to write a good textbook on literature. It is no coincidence that good literature teachers do not use textbooks. But even if a decent textbook appears, what is it for? It is necessary for children to read books - Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Blok... This is the most important thing. Is a book plus a textbook necessary? is it justified? When you read the words of Varlam Shalamov that in his first school there were no BOOKS, there were only TEXTBOOKS, you hear the ironic intonation of the writer. He says that at school they did not do what they needed to do (V. Shalamov, “The Fourth Prose”).
And yet, we took on a textbook on Russian literature of the 20th century for schools with in-depth study of literature. The year was 2001. Positive changes in education began to be felt in the early 90s. It was a time when many things seemed possible - a time of searching. The initiative came, as they say, “from below.” That is, each teacher felt responsible for how he taught. Of course, not everyone wanted such responsibility and took it upon themselves. But suddenly it turned out that teaching can do a lot. In addition, it was then that people new to her appeared at school - until recently, while doing science, they could not even imagine themselves as school teachers. Their experience and professionalism promised a lot. So, life in pedagogy was in full swing: new schools were created, unusual subjects, programs, books appeared... The “top” did not interfere. Many books were submitted to the competition under the program “Renewal of Humanitarian Education in Russia” (1992). The top ten have been published. Almost all of them remained in the 90s [2] . At the same time, the first “alternative”—as they were called then—textbooks appeared. The Ministry held one after another competitions of author's programs (1989, 1990). There were some kinks, of course. For some reason, it suddenly turned out that everyone now has to write their school course syllabuses. But if you do not take into account some absurdities, it turns out that there was much more good. There was a lot accumulated. Quantity had to turn into quality. In this situation, everything seemed possible. And even write a new one - definitely a good one! - a textbook on literature.
And so we - I, a teacher, a philologist by training and by that time already the author of several textbooks and popular books for schoolchildren, and my colleague K. M. Polivanov, a famous parsnip scholar and at the same time a literature teacher - decided to take on such a textbook. What guided us? I quite clearly remember my feeling at that time: I wanted to write for those children who are not taught by us, but write as if we were teaching them after all.
What is so special about us as teachers? Why, without having, let alone doctoral or candidate’s degrees, should we write the textbook? Because the conviction has matured: it is possible to write a good textbook. And even necessary. And I also had an understanding of how to write it. So that those children who were unlucky with a teacher, studying school literature, would receive no less as a result than those who were lucky with a teacher. It may seem immodest, but that’s how we reasoned.
How to write such a textbook? We need to write while talking with our possible “interlocutors” about what we read. It is as if we were talking in class to our students, formulating our own reader questions and anticipating the student readers' questions. Drawing them into co-thinking. In printed text, you need to create an atmosphere of questioning tension. Reading - then a question. Again reading - and again a question. Why does the author do this? So, and not otherwise? Why did Bunin, who wrote that a character’s dissonant surname can ruin the entire story, give the heroes of the story “The Village” such strange and dissonant names - Chuchchen, Odnodvorka, Gololoby, Bottle, Koshel, Koza?.. Either surnames, or nicknames. Why does the motif of flaying appear with such insistence in this story - and images of skinned cats and skinned cattle appear? Why does the heroine of E. Zamyatin’s novel “We,” 1-330, in one of the episodes so resemble the “stranger” from A. Blok’s poem? Why does one main character of Bulgakov’s story “Heart of a Dog” prefer the circus to the theater, and the other, on the contrary, prefer the theater to the circus? Why do the unprepossessing narrator of Zoshchenko’s early works and the narrator of his later works, who calls himself a writer, speak the same language and, from the point of view of the norms of literary language, speak equally incorrectly? Why does this “speech mask” make us remember Makar Devushkin, the hero of Dostoevsky’s story “Poor People”? Why is the parade ground of the Alexander Gymnasium called Borodino Field in M. Bulgakov’s novel “The White Guard”? Etc.
Taken out of context, these questions may seem random. However, arising during the reading process as a natural reaction to what is read, they are perceived in a completely different way - as necessary. It is impossible not to reflect on them.
As the “conversation” progresses, questions are lined up in a chain; one pulls the other; they make you think - and gradually the author’s artistic logic is “exposed.”
This kind of literary study can be as exciting as a detective story. You just need to be able to be surprised along with your students. Don’t surprise them with yourself, but rather be surprised by what you read together. There is one more very important rule here: there may not be clear answers to questions that arise. And most often it doesn’t happen! And both the author of the textbook and the teacher must be aware of this. Answers may be more precise or less precise; I would like to strive for the first one.
Is this textbook similar or different to those to which we are accustomed? Not similar to a very significant extent.
Here, the priority is not information that needs to be memorized, not knowledge that can be tested, but understanding, reading culture. Of course, the student will need the ability to “distinguish an iambic from a trochee,” and knowledge of what Proletkult is, and an idea of what kind of life I. A. Bunin lived - in what period of his life he wrote the story “Antonov Apples,” and in which one is “Clean Monday”. But this knowledge is not an end in itself, but a tool necessary to better understand the works themselves.
This approach to literary education changes a lot. For example, it is not at all necessary to make the chapters devoted to the work of different writers the same in length. The more complex the subject of the conversation, the more space in the textbook should be devoted to this conversation.
In modern Russia, poetry is almost never read. I'm talking about the wider society, not its intellectual elite. The culture of society's perception of poetry has been lost. Or, more precisely, not formed. (It is no coincidence that in 1928 Mandelstam wrote in the essay “On Poetry”: “If literary illiteracy in Russia is great, then poetic illiteracy is monstrous...”) So we decided that in a school textbook the conversation about poetry should be leisurely; It’s not worth wasting space and time on it. As a result, the chapters devoted to poets and poetry turned out to be quite large. The book analyzes in detail poems that, as a rule, are not mentioned in school. Judge for yourself: these are “Cleopatra” and “The Nightingale Garden” by A. Blok, “Poem without a Hero” by A. Akhmatova, “Columns” by N. Zabolotsky, “The Great Elegy to John Donne” by I. Brodsky and much more.
Understanding meanings (rather than memorizing them) involves abandoning clear answers. I have already talked about this. But I’ll still say it in more detail, because to get away from simplification and schematism when talking about literature of the Soviet period - and where? in the textbook! - not at all simple, because we grew up on such simplification. (A characteristic extract was made by M. Jl. Gasparov (“Records and Extracts”): “From an article about D. Bedny: “The simplicity of Demyan Bedny’s poems is surpassed only by the simplification of the usual study of them.”) I will not argue that today the desire to move away from schemes peculiar only to us. And yet: not only were we not afraid, but we strived to pose open questions to the students, the answers to which we ourselves do not know, we can only guess. I will give examples. It is clear that the answer to the question “In which lines of S. Yesenin’s poem “The Mysterious World, My Ancient World...” (1921) is the poetic meter violated?” can be only one. But from the next task - to give a semantic explanation for these rhythmic disruptions - you should not expect a definite answer, although it will also be quite definite. While completing some tasks, the student will need to conduct a real investigation. For example, in order to compile an “encyclopedia” of everyday situations into which the heroes of Zoshchenko’s early stories find themselves. And it may happen that the children’s conclusions will not coincide with the teacher’s ideas and expand them. This means that the teacher must be ready to adjust his vision.
In the textbook, not all questions are left unanswered. We answer some, and help others find answers, at least by indicating in which direction to look for these answers. Thus, in Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita,” the reader now and then encounters “musical” motifs. The appearance of some is directly explained in the textbook. Both in Griboedov and in Woland’s ball scene, instead of the traditional praise to God, “Hallelujah!” there is music with the same name, but it has nothing in common with church chants. And we are talking about the fact that, apparently, the writer has a specific work in mind - the foxtrot by the American composer W. Youmans.
The names of Dr. Stravinsky and the chairman of the board of MASSOLIT Berlioz are also significant in the novel. Why do they appear? The statement that these names sound ironic in the context of the novel is, of course, true, but perhaps this topic is worth thinking about more carefully. For this, as for a mathematical problem, “additional conditions” are needed. Some information is given in the textbook. For example, it tells about the main motives of the “Fantastastic Symphony” by the composer Berlioz, the namesake of Bulgakov’s hero. But then the student is asked to think for himself. And then new questions arise: why is the “waltz king” Johann Strauss conducting at Woland’s ball? Why does music appear in the scenes with Woland and his retinue, but not in the episodes with the Master and Yeshua?
We are accustomed to the fact that questions and tasks in textbooks are located at the end of each section or paragraph, since these are questions for self-test or further testing of knowledge by the teacher. Sometimes the student is expected to reproduce what he has just read in the same textbook. Such tasks may be perceived by the student as a boring necessity and even a kind of punishment. What if questions appear constantly, as they arise, right in the middle of the section? Let's imagine that we are talking about early Akhmatova, about her collection “Evening”. The fact that each poem contains the story of the lyrical heroine about her love drama. About meetings, more often partings. The lyrical heroine of the collection has many faces. This is Andersen's little mermaid, and a woman from the Russian Middle Ages, and a princess from a Russian fairy tale, and the heroine of a folk lyrical song. And here the task naturally appears: “Give other examples of “masks” of the lyrical heroine of the collection “Evening.” Are there any poems in the collection written from a man’s point of view?” And then the conversation about Akhmatova continues. The logic of reasoning leads us, the authors, to the idea that the poems of “Evening” are not a lyrical diary, but a skillful imitation of it. And here questions arise again. Readers are invited to agree or disagree with us, give their own examples, figure out for what purpose Akhmatova names the place in which the action takes place, indicates the time of events, etc. So, gradually, we move forward, leaving students the prospect for independent reflection.
From “questioning” reading it is not far from research. “Stumbling” over questions that arise every now and then, the child thinks. These questions can be of varying levels of difficulty. Including those requiring serious research. Some high school students aspire to such work, but do not know how to see the problem. Gradually they will learn to do this. Perhaps this will happen already at school. But for now they need help. To do this, the problem must not only be formulated, but also interested in it, “hooked.” How to do it? We are talking about the poetry of the same early Akhmatova - how conscious was her desire to create a visual image of the world in her poems? Remember: “I pray to the window ray - / It is pale, thin, straight” or “On my washstand / The copper has turned green...” In her poems you can find impressionistic detail, reminiscent of bright brush strokes, landscapes and still lifes. Akhmatova also spoke about Fet: “a delightful impressionist.” To what extent did she continue his tradition? The last question is beyond the scope of the course - this is a topic for independent research. Questions of this kind related to the main course of the conversation are lie in the textbook. Staging them is sure to motivate. It looks, for example, like this: “Read the poem “The Pied Piper” (1924); Its plot is based on a German medieval legend. In this poem, Tsvetaeva refers to the image of a musician-pied catcher; his instrument is the flute. The image of the flute and some of the features of the rat catcher may remind you of Mayakovsky. Topic of independent research: The image of Mayakovsky in M. Tsvetaeva’s poem “The Pied Piper.”
I would like to specifically say about one principle that is important for us and not yet familiar to the school. Literature is considered in the textbook as immersed in a historical context (largely due to the problematic presentation of the writer’s biographical sketch) and in a historical and cultural context. The latter is achieved, for example, by the fact that in the process of slow reading we constantly draw the attention of our reader-students to the internal echoes of texts. In Blok’s poems we find references to Pushkin, Derzhavin, Bryusov; in Kibirov’s poems - to Pushkin, Tyutchev, Blok, etc. And, of course, we invite you to reflect on the meaning of such a “dialogue” of texts; We invite you to find allusions and reminiscences in the texts yourself (let them develop an associative culture and activate their own reading experience!) and again reflect on their meaning.
From these examples it is clear that the range of literary terms in the textbook is wider than usual. Here we use such concepts as “reminiscence”, “allusion”, “alien speech”, “tale”, “cycle”, “free verse”... The concept of “context” was important for us - not only verbal, but also the context of the cycle , the writer’s creativity, literary movement, culture in general; historical context. But since the terms are not given for memorization, but appear during the analysis as a working tool, it seems to us that they should not complicate the content.
After reading my story about the textbook, my opponent will definitely ask: “Where is the educational role of literature?” I have something to answer this question: the ability to understand someone else’s text is the ability to understand another, openness to other people’s opinions and multiple points of view. This is the basis for education and self-education.
These are all stories about a book that doesn’t exist. That is, it “seems to” be there, but in reality it is not. The story of her absence is sad, at times detective-like, and for us, the authors, psychologically difficult. It is desperately difficult to remember it in detail, and it is not necessary. But I think it’s worth citing some names and main milestones. We went through a period of communication with the Mnemosyne publishing house. Like the authors, it entered the competition for the opportunity to publish the winning textbook. General Director M.I. Bezvikonnaya began her communication with us with a strict requirement - to look for approaches to members of the Expert Council of the Ministry of Education, through which this book should go through [3] . However, the hardest thing awaited us ahead - the editor assigned to us, O. A. Eremina, who spoke to us as if her task was not to improve the textbook, but to do everything to prevent it from being published. Unfortunately, we quickly received confirmation of this guess. Unexpectedly, it turned out that Eremina was collecting “compromising evidence” against us - examples of the discrepancy between the content of the textbook and the educational standard, which, by the way, had not yet been adopted and existed only in the draft. She did not collect it in order to work with the authors - she, without warning us, handed over the list of discrepancies between the textbook and the future standard to the Ministry of Education, the chief specialist in literature, E. A. Zinina. We believed that Zinina, unlike us, did not need this list at all. However, Zinina refused to give it to us. All this happened at a time when the publishing house was supposed to receive another money transfer from the National Personnel Training Fund (NFTP) for the implementation of our book. Well, since the director did not agree to change the editor who behaved in this way, we had to inform the Foundation about the behavior of the publisher, which led to the cessation of further financial support for our textbook. With great difficulty, with the help of a lawyer, we unilaterally broke off relations with Mnemosyne. And at the same time, we did not receive our manuscript back - with the changes made to it, which were not transferred to our computers simply because we did not have time to do it. The publisher refused to give it to us! Then we entered into an agreement with the Verbum M publishing house. Here we were very, very lucky with the editor. Our book was most carefully edited by the famous Tver teacher, Doctor of Pedagogical Sciences N.V. Belyaeva. True, the work took too long - editing and layout lasted almost three years! And in the end, the director of Verbum M, Yu. I. Yastrebov, did not fulfill his promises - our book again did not make it into the Expert Council. The terms of the contract were exceeded, and the publishing house changed owners.
What is this? A chain of tragic accidents? I'm afraid it's a pattern. Over the years of working on the textbook, we had to delve into many issues - how the standard for the subject was compiled and how it works, what unspoken rules publishers strive to follow when preparing a textbook for submission to the Expert Council, how the examination system itself slows down the work. The order of the latter has changed over the years, however, as our history shows, it still works in such a way that everything at least somewhat unusual remains “on the shelf.”
It was stupid to write a textbook. If only they had written a book, it would have been published in a small edition. A thousand or two schoolchildren would read it and, who knows, maybe not without benefit...
And our textbook began like this:
“We have entered a period of early developments and early deaths: Blok died of despair, Gumilyov was shot, Khlebnikov died of exhaustion, Yesenin hanged himself. What unfolds before the film-man is not a film, edited by a skillful director and passed through Political Education and Repertcom, but a real tragedy of an entire generation...” [4]
These words of Boris Eikhenbaum sounded in special silence, although in a hall full of people - they sounded at the coffin of Sergei Yesenin.
A shocked man, forty-year-old professor-philologist Eikhenbaum at Yesenin’s tomb speaks not only about Yesenin - he speaks about his time. And the point is not only that in his speech signs of Soviet life and the life of Soviet art of the 1920s appear - Political education, Repertkom (organizations, as you see, not only enlightened, but enlightened in a special way - “polit” enlightened or carried out - how Repertcom is a censorship function). Perhaps, just the day before, modernity seemed to him like an unfolding “movie” - then, at the beginning of the 20th century, Eikhenbaum was not the only one who perceived time this way: the diversity of multi-scale events of the turned upside down world, their unexpected connection - “montage” - created in a person the feeling of a spectator: at the same time he was both in the rushing vortex flow of events, and observed this flow from the side. But on February 8, 1926, a person cannot feel like a spectator, step back... To those gathered in the Great Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic, B. Eikhenbaum speaks about the tragedy of time.
It seems that people who lived in the “bubbling” 20th century physically felt time. A. Bely writes about the “noise of time” in the novel “Silver Dove”; O. Mandelstam calls his prose “The Noise of Time” (1925). A. Akhmatova gives her latest poetry collection the title “The Running of Time” (1965).
A century is a long time. At first there was a time when it seemed: the world was collapsing and apocalyptic [5] times were approaching - this was at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and at the beginning of the 20th century. Later - in the 20s - there was a feeling that the world had been born again. And the new world must have new art. And then it becomes obvious that it is impossible to write as they wrote before. “We are faced with the question of how to write at all,” says Yu. Olesha [6] .
Now writers - Zoshchenko, Babel, Pilnyak, and Prishvin - listen to live speech. Previously, according to Mayakovsky, the street “writhed without a tongue,” but after the revolution it received “the gift of speech.”
“Both the poetry and prose of the ancients (our italics: this is about pre-revolutionary authors, that is, about those who wrote just 10 years ago! - Author) were equally far from practical speech, from the jargon of the streets, from the exact language of science," - wrote V. Mayakovsky and O. Brik in the article “Our verbal work” (1923) [7] .
And nearby, in the same years, there was a completely different opinion. “The Bolshevik jargon is completely intolerable. What was the general language of our leftists?.. Russian literature has been incredibly corrupted over the past decades. The street and the crowd began to play a very important role. Everything - and literature especially - goes out onto the street, connects with it and falls under its influence,” this is I. Bunin, “Cursed Days” (1918) [8] .
The feeling that it is impossible to write as before gives rise to the following: “Give up Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc. and so on. from the Steamship of Modernity” - D. Burlyuk, A. Kruchenykh, V. Mayakovsky, V. Khlebnikov, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (1912) [9] . And they “dropped it.” And not only futurists and future Lefists, but also proletkultists. And again they returned - to the past, to the origins: in 1923, A. Lunacharsky wrote a passionate article “About Alexander Nikolaevich Ostrovsky and about him,” and here the slogan sounded: “Back to Ostrovsky!” And then it sounded again: “Back to Pushkin!”
Passions raged and disputes did not cease. But there were artists who in their time lived as if in eternity, learned from their predecessors and talked with the past: “Modern Russian poetry did not fall from the sky, but was predicted by the entire poetic past of our country - wasn’t Pasternak and Isn’t this one example enough to show how poetic batteries talk to each other like a switch fire, not in the least embarrassed by the indifference of the time that separates them” - O. Mandelstam, “Notes on Poetry” (1923) [10] .
The 20th century is an era of writers’ increasingly conscious attitude towards their work, an era of experiments, demonstrative searches for a new form, when each author is looking for his own artistic language. But this is also the time when in every newly created work of art (and literature) the voices of contemporaries and predecessors are heard, even when the artist renounces the past and opposes himself to it.
Tradition and innovation are two old words. But, it turns out, they do not become obsolete, and in the 20th century they again help us understand both a person who has changed and yet remains the same, and his art. Immersed in a historical and cultural context, this art becomes clearer and closer to us.
[1] We are talking about the textbook for schoolchildren “Russian Literature of the 20th Century” written by E. Abelyuk in collaboration with K. Polivanov, which won the competition of the National Personnel Training Foundation, held jointly with the Ministry of Education in 2001.
[2] New generations of schoolchildren and today's teachers do not use these manuals. Books published with the money of J. Soros in small editions and in paperbacks were no longer reprinted.
[3] At that time, the Expert Council existed under the Ministry of Education. In recent years, changes have occurred in the examination of school textbooks. Now there are two expert councils - at the Russian Academy of Education and at the Russian Academy of Sciences. Each book undergoes examination in both councils. The publishing house must pay a considerable amount for the examination (however, this was the case before). Therefore, before submitting a textbook for review by Expert Councils, the publishing house plays it safe - it tries to anticipate and take into account all possible claims of experts. This includes the mechanism of self-censorship. Currently, the situation is aggravated by the fact that the textbook is submitted to the expert council in the form of a layout. This means that in the case of even small corrections at the request of experts, the publishing house will have to redo the layout, on which several thousand dollars have already been spent.
[4] Eikhenbaum B. In memory of Sergei Yesenin // Eikhenbaum B. M. My temporary book: Fiction and selected articles of the 20-30s. St. Petersburg: Inapress, 2001. P. 571.
[5] Apocalyptic - from the Apocalypse, or Revelation of John the Theologian - a book that completes the New Testament and talks about the end and rebirth of the world.
[6] Olesha Yu. K. Not a day without a line. M.: Soviet Russia, 1965. P. 63.
[7] Lef. 1923. № I. S. 40-41.
[8] Russian writers are Nobel Prize laureates. Ivan Bunin. M., 1991.
[9] Quoted. based on the book: Sokolov A.G., Mikhailova M.V. Russian literary criticism of the late XIX - early XX centuries: Reader. M.: Higher school. 1982. P. 347.
[10] Mandelstam O. E. Works: In 2 volumes. T. 2. Prose. M.: Fiction, 1990. P. 207.
The image of a child in the textbook for elementary school Gypsy Affairs