On the death of Vasily Belov

Photo: ITAR-TASS

Writer Vasily Belov has died. They write that Belov suffered a stroke when he learned that the church he had restored in his home village of Timonikha had been plundered by fellow villagers. If this story is true, it is doubly tragic: Belov witnessed not only barbarity. He saw the death of his ideal.

Belov, like many of his like-minded people, are traditionally called “villageists,” but this definition speaks only of the choice of material, as if we were talking about marine painters or detective writers. Belov and many of his like-minded people wrote not so much about the village, but about the primordial. About what today might be called a “point of power.” Nikolai Rubtsov, a contemporary and fellow countryman (they lived in Vologda at the same time) of Vasily Belov, sneered:

There are no houses up to the sky,
There is no river with a barge,
But there on potatoes and bread
I've grown so big.

Belov was not interested in “potatoes and bread,” but in blood and soil. For half a century, Belov recreated the invisible city of Kitezh - the authentic Russian world, untouched by alien influences, which does not exist in reality, but serves as an ideal to which the entire country should strive.

The same ironic poem by Nikolai Rubtsov “Fringes” ends like this:

Ax, the city is ramming the village!
Ax, something is going to be scrapped!
I'm tormented by edges
Between city and village.

Vasily Belov was not tormented by the edges. In his harsh Manichaean world there was no place for irony and interest in border subjects. The city was the embodiment of evil: ethical, aesthetic, political. In a heterogeneous, that is, cosmopolitan and anti-Russian, city, children are raised according to Dr. Spock, they swear there, collectivization and the plan to turn the Siberian rivers into Central Asia came from there. Only in the village, perishing but miraculously surviving, normal love and friendship, natural ideas about beauty and truth were preserved. In his “essays on folk aesthetics” “Lad” (1981), Belov, who by that time had received the Lenin Prize and had become an officially recognized literary figure, formulated in detail his credo - naive and at the same time harsh, archaic and extremely hostile to modern urban culture. Belov's aesthetic and ethical ideal was localized in an indefinite "past":

“Everything was interconnected, and nothing could live separately or without each other, everything had its place and time. Nothing could exist outside the whole or appear out of turn. Moreover, unity and integrity did not at all contradict beauty and diversity. Beauty could not be separated from benefit, benefit from beauty...

It all starts with an uncontrollable and inexplicable desire to work... This desire itself makes a person, an ethnic group, or even an entire nation predisposed to creativity and therefore viable. Such a people is not in danger of death from internal decay...

The general moral atmosphere did not at all require any special sex education. She spared the teenager’s fragile self-esteem, encouraged modesty and chastity...

Marriage is not entertainment (although that too) and not a personal whim, but a natural necessity of life associated with new responsibility to the world, with new, not yet experienced joys."

Probably, if Vasily Belov had not been a writer, he could have become a wonderful primitivist artist, like Henri Rousseau or Pavel Leonov . But Belov was a writer who, over the years, increasingly became a frantic fighter against “strangers,” scoffers of the original and the present. In 1986, the intelligent public was clearly confused after reading Belov’s new novel “Everything is Ahead.” Vasily Ivanovich dotted all the “e”s. The main villain in the book was the seducer and trickster Mikhail Brish. The main character, scientist Dmitry Medvedev (yes, there are strange connections) cannot stand the horrors of city life and runs away to the village, where he stops drinking and is morally reborn. It seemed that Belov had written a parody of himself. But calling evil by name (obviously Jewish), Belov was consistent. He became one of the most prominent nationalist and protective publicists of perestroika and post-perestroika Russia, attacking either Juris Podnieks' film "Is It Easy to Be Young" or fighters against clericalism - sometimes feigning embarrassment at his anti-Semitism.

And if we remember the writer today, let’s remember everything. And the charming "Carpenter's Stories", written by him 44 years ago, and what he said more recently. For example, this: “I welcome and support everything, I emphasize - ALL methods of struggle for Russia. And holding the so-called “Russian Marches”, and re-establishing the Union of the Russian People, and organizing a variety of protests, and much more.”