Fights of literary significance

This whole week was marked by the struggle for correct literature at school. Each of the parties: the compilers from the Russian Academy of Education, the liberal writing and teaching community (Bykov, Volkov), the communists, the Orthodox, and even Tina Kandelaki, believe that they are the ones for the correct literature, and the rest - just whatever.

However, to reduce the entire essence of the dispute to the ignorance of those who are outraged by the draft literature program for high schools, as Volkov and Bykov do, is incorrect.

The question is much broader.

Firstly, we are faced with a long-term clash of civilizations, a confrontation between two worlds, two systems. I wrote about this at one time , back when literary topics were just creeping into the public eye.

Secondly, this dispute revealed the crisis of modern Russian literature, which in recent years has been talked about abstractly in literary gazebos and corners, and now it has hit the school directly and practically.

Thirdly, the case with Kolmanovsky and Bykov’s latest statements on literary topics show that not only the national tradition is under attack, but the concept of norm as such.

The dispute is being waged not even from the standpoint of the content of the standards and the program, but from the standpoint of their absence. Both Volkov, and Bykov, and even Moscow teachers in yesterday’s material from Moscow News demonstrate outright tastefulness, considering the content of literary education as something worthwhile depending on the arbitrariness of the teacher and his subjective preferences.

In this way, the very meaning of education is taken away as acquaintance with classical examples, with standards of literary excellence or the heights of spiritual quest. Instead of generally accepted artistic creations, we are offered texts to suit our tastes, arguing that a moral meaning or a lesson in poetic technique can be drawn from everything.

In the abstract, that's true. In principle, you can fill your belly with grass. However, people do not prefer grass in general, but lettuce, cabbage or potatoes.

Because they are healthier.

You can go one and a half kilometers underground for coal, or you can mine it where it lies almost on the surface.

Because it is more practical and effective.

With the literary component the situation is hardly different. There are works that have artistic perfection, deep meaning, that correspond in spirit to an established and unshakable system of values, the existence of which is precisely denied by our supposed intellectuals. They should be given.

Another thing is that we don’t have such indisputable works in modern times, that we don’t have literature that we wouldn’t be ashamed to offer to a schoolchild, saying at the same time: “This is a worthy successor to the tradition, this is a new and significant word in literature.”

When I graduated from school, there were plenty of such examples, such achievements, as well as names: Aitmatov, Astafiev, Bondarev, Vasiliev, Rasputin. Writers with different ideological content, but writers. Take it and read it, they write for you and about you.

Today's "writers" do not even write for each other, but in general for whom and for what. It’s difficult to call it self-expression, since the latter still requires mastery of presentation, technique, grace and depth of thought.

It’s a shame, a shame to offer such bad taste to schoolchildren, because it’s abnormal not from the point of view of “approved by censorship,” but from an aesthetic point of view. It was poorly written, poorly thought out, and certainly not achieved through suffering at all.

Why is this persistently shoved at us?

I have already mentioned one of the reasons - subjectivity and taste. After all, someone loves cartoons about Spider-Man and Transformers, why shouldn’t someone like Ulitskaya and Pelevin. But liking it is not a reason for a school curriculum.

Another reason, one way or another connected with the first, is “groupism.” The same one that is strangling our literature, and what’s more, the country as a whole. After all, they offer and protect “their own”. Out of vanity, out of profit, for political reasons.

And we don't need our own. We need talented people, we need ours, not theirs and ours, but everyone’s.

Once they were, somewhere they are.