Portrait behind your back

What kind of phenomenon "Soviet culture" is quite difficult to explain to those who were born and grew up after it. I do not mean the "culture of the Soviet period" - this phenomenon, as they say, is ambiguous and certainly heterogeneous. I'm talking about Soviet culture.

Once during the years of deep perestroika, but even under the Soviet regime, I was present at a large poetic evening, which was held, as was found in those years, in some kind of culture palace of some kind of almost tobacco factory. It was a time of violent creative emancipation, and the poets who performed one after another in turn demonstrated insolence and relaxedness. It was a blissful, one might say, infant time, when the expanded audience violently reacted to some keywords used in non -canonical contexts, such as “party” or “ass”.

At some point, I suddenly noticed that the huge portrait of Ilyich was hanging behind the speakers, and above him a poster, continued to persist in the fact that "communism is the bright future of all mankind." This familiar picture to complete indifference suddenly so amused me so much that I could not resist the liberating laughter, so stormy that several surprised heads immediately turned to me.

It was at that moment that I clearly realized: "Soviet culture is everything. Yes, and the Soviet government at the same time." Soon it happened.

It was the scene with the portrait on the back and was the "Soviet culture."

Yes, of course, on this huge scene, not only roared the combined choir, performing the song “The Party-our Steering”, there not only frolic themselves and the unassuming audience had amused the lively jokers, who pulled out bureaucrats, Nesunov and red tosses of the level not higher than what was approved by the authorities, not only whipped the dust from the old carpets of the vocabulary and nimble-wise-nasty guy-nasty. The ensembles of the songs of the songs during the decade of the culture of the Bratsk Republic as part of the Friendship of Peoples, not only the People's Artist told a birch baritone about “Read, envy, I am a citizen”, not only cheerfully galloped and sang about the “Cosmodrome” slightly westernized Komsomol members.

No, not only. Great ballerinas danced there and played great musicians. Great symphonies were performed there and great operas and performances were played. Lectures were given there and academic seminars were held. There, sometimes a culture was performed without brackets and quotes, without pads and corsets. And only she alone, this culture, humanized and partially justified the inhuman and painfully mediocre era with its existence.

But she, this won time culture, unfolded everything on the same scene. On the scene, on the back of which a huge portrait hung. Either with a mustache, then with a beard, then in a cap, then in uniform. And this portrait shone even through the dense thickets of the Cherry Orchard or looked treacherously from behind the gear walls of Elsinor.

Whoever goes to this scene - the mediocre servile conformist or conformist is a presented and not without the remnants of conscience and human dignity, a lecturer in the spread of political and scientific knowledge, a scientist with a pointer in his hand, a violinist, a magician or a juggler - everyone seemed to look at this portrait behind him, everyone constantly felt in the back of the back of his head. The gaze of this portrait is approving, indifferent, or suspicious.

This back, this portrait was a visual visual metaphor of total, all -pervasive censorship. Time changed, the degree of severity changed with which the portrait looked at you.

The employees of the institution, called “Soviet literature”, that is, more simply, Soviet writers, were divided into those for whom censorship was like a native mother (they were then called “socialists”), and others, that is, “progressive”, who considered their mission to enter into complex and crafty relations with censorship, as a result of which a special aesthetics arose and creatively developed, named "Aesopovskaya." And the ill -wishers called and still call a similar creative strategy "fig in the pocket."

It was essentially an euphemistical culture, in which easily unraveled “dragons”, “kings” or “our crazy sultans” acted, and the action unfolded somewhere from sin away-either in ancient Greece, then in some kind of country, or even in other galaxies.

Nothing bad I can say about this culture. Firstly, it is rooted with a powerful tradition of the 19th century, with Gogols and Shredrini. Secondly, she still gave us several truly brilliant authors-from Eugene Schwartz to the Brothers Strugatsky.

But at all times there were those who didn’t even want to, but simply organically were not able to breathe the dusty and sour air of this office. This was not always a conscious choice. Just someone could, but someone not. Non-Soviet writers, with different, to put it mildly, degree of giftedness and multidirectional of artistic aspirations, united one thing, namely what was reduced to the formula: "For me, there can be no censorship."

Everyone allowed this situation as he understood, and as he knew how. Each violator of the Convention violated it in its own way. Someone plunged into the poetry of absurdity, someone fell into an archaic, into God-care, into mysticism.

Someone took up the clarification of relations with the language. These were those who recognized quite early, or rather, sensed poisoning, the total deceitfulness of the so -called literary language. The very "great and powerful" that he lurked himself with shameful collaboration. The language, our native language after Kolyma, just like "poetry after Auschwitz", demanded a radical revision. Some of the censorship problem solved in the most radical way, as decisively as it is sophisticatedly introducing into prose and poetry that layer of vocabulary and phraseology, which is commonly called non -normative. Invaluation took the form of "obsceneity".

So there was an unofficial culture in which, sometimes, sometimes and aesthetically enlightening among themselves, different schools and currents coexisted. But all of the characters of this culture, without exception, united one, but very important circumstance: they simply could not - sometimes even at the level not by the ideological, but almost organic, at the allergy level - they could not and did not want to act on the stage, on the back of which the portrait hung. And this strong circumstance united more than disconnected all aesthetic disagreements combined.

And then what happened was what I remembered at the very beginning. And a completely different era began.

I remembered all this because these days the word "censorship" began to be pronounced more and more often. And not in vain, of course.

But censorship itself is not so scary. There are, as we know, many strategies that allow it to "work" with it without prejudice to creative will. From crazy games with her to her completely ignoring. Here everyone chooses it, this strategy, in accordance with their social or artistic temperament. Censorship is not terrible. Self -censorship is terrible.

The role of censorship or even at least attempts to introduce it, as it seems to me, is precisely in imposing a self -censorship to us. But for someone who pecks at this bait, this is definitely a disaster - both professional and human. Because a free statement, a free and responsible gesture is not only the integral right of the writer, artist, artist, journalist, but his professional duty, his duty, no matter how highly it sounds. We will not look back at the portraits behind our back. We will look right in front of us. There, where is our audience.