​About shame

The “repentant letter” of director Yuri Bykov, which caused a stir in the media environment, in which he calls his participation in the filming of the propaganda series “Sleepers” a mistake and announces his departure from cinema, is an event that highlights the changes that the category of reputation in the Russian public space has undergone in recent years. .

Here it is worth taking a step back and remembering the recently erected monument to Mikhail Kalashnikov on Sadovaya-Triumfalnaya Street in Moscow by Salavat Shcherbakov. This monument records an important stage in the evolution (more precisely, degradation) of the artist’s position in modern Russia. This trend has been evident for quite some time, since the beginning of the occupation of Moscow with the works of Zurab Tsereteli, but the monument to Salavat Shcherbakov has become the most convincing embodiment of the “new shamelessness.”

Traditionally, the shamelessness of an artist is the willingness to sacrifice principles in order to make a career, get to the top and get at your disposal the resources that allow you to create without constraining yourself in any way. A classic example is the story of the brilliant Gustaf Grundgens, who agreed to collaborate with the Nazis for the opportunity to stage and act in plays without hindrance. According to the myth, brilliantly told by Klaus Mann in the novel Mephistopheles, the price for such shamelessness is gradual creative degeneration. But when an artist uses administrative resources specifically to create and place in the center of Moscow a work that obviously destroys him as an artist (and the image on the bas-relief of a Schmeisser rifle diagram instead of a Kalashnikov assault rifle is just the icing on this tasteless cake), this situation is completely different. It’s too late to explain the value of the institution of reputation—it’s time to comprehend the new state of affairs associated with the fundamental absence of such a category.

As you know, art is nothing more than the most expressive mirror of life. The rejection of shame in Russia at the official level is a fait accompli, and art records this. Let us recall that the appointment of Vladimir Medinsky to the post of Minister of Culture in the summer of 2012 occurred against the backdrop of his accusations of plagiarism when writing his doctoral dissertation and the unscientific nature of the work itself. In a coordinate system that recognizes the importance of the institution of reputation, this is nonsense: the head of the department responsible for cultural policy is obliged, if not to be a legislator of good taste in matters relating to culture, science and education, then at least to stand guard over existing standards. Instead, from the moment of his appointment, the minister has been enthusiastically lowering the bar on these same standards. The ongoing scandals related to illiteracy, incompetence and lack of culture of the head of the Ministry of Culture confirmed that this is not an accident, but a consistent position. Needless to say, Medinsky is just one illustration of the general trend of recent years. The transformation of the country’s parliament into a factory of illegal and often contrary to common sense laws, and the official representation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs into a platform for deliberately undiplomatic rhetoric is evidence of the widespread triumph of the institution of “anti-reputation.”

This breakdown is a natural result of a strategy of relativization of any word, completely deliberately chosen at the state and political level. In the 20th century, the word weighed too much, it was capable of shaking regimes and destroying empires (the popularity of the thesis that Alexander Solzhenitsyn destroyed the USSR with his “Archipelago”, regardless of how true it is, is extremely indicative in this sense), and therefore The task of suppressing the word was one of the main ones for authoritarian regimes. But in the information age of total openness and transparency, a regime that relies on concealing its abuses cannot resist. An authoritarian ruler in the information age must either give up immediately or come up with mechanisms for relativizing the word. Instead of worrying about carefully classifying facts of corruption, it is much easier and more effective to ensure that reports about these facts are deprived of their discrediting potential. “Yes, we steal, and in general we [have gone crazy], so what? No, we don’t steal, how dare you say that? What difference does it make, everyone lies.” Bullshit strategy turns out to be a much more effective means of protection than censorship and repression. But this strategy can only work if categories such as shame and reputation are abolished.

In these conditions, building the institution of anti-reputation turns out to be an extremely important political and strategic task, practically a matter of protecting national interests...

Now is the time to return to the incident of Yuri Bykov. The series “Sleepers”, which tells extensively about the attempts of American intelligence services to use liberal journalists and civil activists to organize a color revolution and about the noble Russian security officers heroically opposing them, actually “films” the official protective rhetoric of recent times. It is interesting only because it was filmed according to the script of Sergei Minaev, the “Russian Begbeder”, considered the most outspoken exponent of the cynicism of the 2000s. A propaganda television series based on the script of a notorious cynic - there is a certain unity of style in this.

The only thing that breaks this unity is the figure of the director. Yuri Bykov, the author of the incredibly poignant films “To Live”, “Fool” and “Major”, shot from his own scripts, is one of the most sincere authors of modern Russian cinema. And this is not only a matter of sincerity: Bykov’s films are built on a very emotionally accurate assessment of the nature of today’s Russian reality. On top of everything else, the director tends to let the stories he tells pass through himself, like the old masters, assigning himself the role of the most repulsive characters in his films.

The director’s “repentant letter” (whatever it really was) would probably not have caused such a stir, just as his departure from the series “Stanitsa” and his dismissal from “Time of the First” did not cause, if it had not so clearly used the categories of shame and guilt. The drama of the situation is that this statement was written and read in an atmosphere where the categories of shame and reputation are abolished, and the product, the production of which the author repents, itself makes a significant contribution to this state of affairs.

But in a space where moral categories are no longer relevant, and repentance has no place to be perceived as repentance. If Gustaf Gründgens (or Hendrik Höfgen of Klaus Mann) uses the trampling of shame as a kind of negative energy to create a genuine and unsurpassed Mephistopheles of himself, in the situation of “removing” shame as a category, even a deal with the devil turns out to be a banal and meaningless commonplace. If Faust had been born in modern Russia, he would probably have been considered either a buffoon, a troll, or an alcoholic.