Understanding of Russian classics

Conversation with Professor Ivan Yesaulov

Ivan Tolstoy: Recently in Moscow, I recorded a conversation with the doctor of philological sciences Professor Ivan Yesaulov. His new book is called "Russian Classics: New Understanding", it was published by the Russian Christian Humanitarian Academy.

Ivan Andreevich is distinguished by the polemic nature of the works. He calls Russian critics of the past interpreters and analysts, himself as an understanding of the writer's personality. A conversation with a polemicist involves, as a rule, a wide context, a deep knowledge of the subject and a professionally prepared audience. Neither one nor the other nor the third in the radio audience cannot be guaranteed, and I suggested that Professor Esaulov express the topic as for an enlightened taxi driver. The true polemicist Ivan Andreevich immediately grabbed the formula.

So, a new understanding of Russian classics.

Ivan Yesaulov: Belinsky did not want to enter into a dialogue with Gogol. He did not want to understand that Gogol's works are built on a single principle - both the early Gogol and the late Gogol. The principle is this: in every work of Gogol, one way or another, a completely distinct Easter archetype flickers. For example, "dead souls" must certainly resurrect. If the installation of an enlightened taxi driver is such that he is completely alien, this is the very idea that is the main thing for Gogol ... "Dead Souls" begin in a certain way, ends with the fact that dead souls must be resurrected. "Selected places from correspondence with friends" begin with lines about close death, end with the head of "Bright Sunday." The “auditor” begins in a certain way, the “auditor” ends with the scene of the Last Judgment, when you and I, being literary critics or enlightened taxi drivers, must die internally. This is Gogol's task.

We must respect Gogol's installation. Gogol's task is to feel like in the hall, and not clap, like fools, because this is a beautiful, best Russian comedy of the 19th century. We must stop at the end, to feel that not only those actors who froze in the dumb scene died, we are dead souls. And only after that, after we realize that this work is not about them, not about them “dead souls”, not about them “selected places”, but about us, only after that we should already, having felt the dead for two or three minutes, resurrect in the applause.

We can say a hundred times that this is ideologically not close to us. In this book, it is not about ideology in a new sense, but about a personal attitude ... You asked about Gogol, which means that I am answering a question about Gogol. Otherwise, in a dialogue with Gogol, not in the study of the text, not in the interpretation of Gogol, but we will not be able to join the dialogue with Gogol as a person.

I do not criticize anyone, but my installation is like that. And I show on a specific example, these are not just words, because I take the ending of "dead souls" and show how this is in a specific way, the proposal for the proposal, in reality. These are the things.

Ivan Tolstoy: What was Belinsky wrong in his letter?

Ivan Yesaulov: He began with the fact that Gogol was ideologically mistaken. That's all.

Ivan Tolstoy: And what?

Ivan Yesaulov: That Russia is not the same as Gogol thinks, that in Russia everything is as Belinsky thinks. And then he, exactly the same way as all the Soviet years did (maybe not with such extremism, but just the same), told Gogol what correct Russia, and showed Gogol how wrong he was. And then it was approximately the same: Russian writers were shown and told, they were explained how, for example, they explain birds, animals, explain how the world works.

Ivan Tolstoy: That is, they offer their understanding of this.

Ivan Yesaulov: Understanding this. You said this very correctly: this. That is, an understanding of a thing, understanding of the world, understanding of the structure of the country's structure, but not personal ...

Ivan Tolstoy: is that few?

If you relate to your interlocutor or work as a thing, then you will constantly have a temptation to explain how it is necessary

Ivan Yesaulov: Of course, not enough. I just show that this is not just a little, and this is an obstacle to a real humanitarian understanding. Because if you treat your interlocutor or work as a thing, then you will constantly have a temptation to explain how it should be.

Ivan Tolstoy: Why? Minute. Why, how to thing? As to aesthetic thing, as a work of art built according to certain laws. And you are the word "thing" what do you understand now?

Ivan Yesaulov: You said correctly now. This is a necessary part of understanding, precisely at the level of literary text, is absolutely true. Any work can be understood as such a thing. But I show that the second consciousness still flickers behind this thing, one way or another, and this second consciousness is the author’s consciousness.

I’ll tell you now, since you asked about it what kind of humanitarian tradition, it seems to me, I inherit. Because any person, if he is not quite an idiot, cannot claim that science or a new understanding began with him. This, of course, is a stupid installation and ridiculous. Who am I inherited? I inherit the positions of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin. I revise Bakhtin, I am such a bakhtinist-revisionist, but still Bakhtin, first in a polemic with a formal school, and, of course, with such Marxist attitudes, then in my own, I would say, fragments (they are published, but these are fragments) expressed very interesting claims for the actualists from structuralists. For example, Bakhtin wrote: "They see structures in everything, but I hear voices in everything." And, in principle, my installation is sympathetic in relation to Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin. But the fact is that the Bakhtinsky epigones absolutized completely its installation. They can be understood. I wanted to show that this forgotten Russian scientist is so great that each of his word is practically truth. But in fact, there was a mistake, because Bakhtin himself, in a conversation with Sergey Georgievich Bocharov, admitted that he, for example, did not say the most important thing in the book about Dostoevsky. He just admitted that here we have, under the non -free sky, this is impossible. And thus, he did not speak something.

Ivan Tolstoy: Now our sky seems to be much more free. Please tell us about the very most important thing that is told about what is understood in your book. So you said about Gogol's understanding. What else is we entertaining our enlightened listener?

Ivan Yesaulov: The word "entertain" ...

Ivan Tolstoy: I use in the first meaning of this word. We do not make fun, do not deceter, but entertainment.

Ivan Yesaulov: Maybe we can entertain the fact that for the understanding that I propose, it is necessary to recall the two not literary, but purely vital approaches to which we are all involved. For example, you can interpret the same Dostoevsky as a person who wrote anti -nigilistic novels and lived at a certain historical time, and died at a certain time, that is, to understand it as a narrowly understood part of the history of Russian literature. And in the same way you can relate to Pushkin and to anyone. This is one absolutely necessary approach, I, pay attention, do not poke with it at all and do not deny it. I only show that another approach is possible.

I show that another approach is possible - from the standpoint of the so -called "big time", in which no Dostoevsky died

What other approach? The approach from the standpoint of the so -called "big time", in which no Dostoevsky died, as one character of Bulgakov formulated, is immortal. What is this "big time"? Again, I will refer to Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin. Because Bakhtin very rightly pointed out that Shakespeare of the Globus Theater is one small Shakespeare (“small” is my words), and Shakespeare of our time is a genuine, real, and not modernized Shakespeare. Because this "Great Time" allows you to reveal such depths that Shakespeare's contemporaries did not understand at all. And in this sense, Shakespeare has already taken place, but Dostoevsky did not take place, Bakhtin insisted. Why? Because he is always reduced to the position of this only a tenant of the 19th century. And it’s not even that he did a revolution in the “demons”. No, Bakhtin insisted that he should be considered in "Great Time". I am making a big amendment in this book, because the "Great Time" for me is some abstraction.

Ivan Tolstoy: And what does Fedor Mikhailovich turn out from the point of view of "Great Time", in your opinion?

Ivan Yesaulov: I believe that Dostoevsky in his artistic work expressed some kind of unity of the Russian Orthodox image of the world that had not yet been expressed before him. It is the Russian Orthodox image of the world, which does not at all rest against our national characteristics, but which lives within the framework of a certain civilization, in a dialogue with other civilizations. Dostoevsky, for example, has one of the fundamental oppositions, if we speak the Tartus-Moscow language, is the opposition of law and grace. For example, he shows that the most hated characters for him are legalists, and so on. And he did not express this at the level of some school theology, catechism, some constructions that were always weak in Russia, has always been weakly Russian theology, and he expressed it in an artistic form. Moreover, in each of his work, he showed this. He showed that which is not reduced only to the 19th century. And here Dostoevsky himself insisted that the matter was not in ideology at all, but in the vision of the world. So he saw the world in this way. Because he and Prince Myshkin is a holy fool. He tried to make him at first serious so, but then he realized that this seriousness would only lead to a breakdown.

For example, in this book one of the chapters is devoted to the category of foolishness. Without this, it is impossible to understand Russian literature, without the fact that foolishness in the Russian consciousness borders on holiness. We do not have to move in such a blade into Orthodoxy, but we must understand that this was for Dostoevsky the value of the unconditional, in order to enter the ordinary, normal dialogue with his works in order to see the consciousness of Dostoevsky behind his text as a thing, otherwise understanding is impossible.

Ivan Tolstoy: What is your Lev Nikolaevich, what does he dream about, how does he see the world?

Ivan Yesaulov: My Lev Nikolaevich ... I still begin from the fact that the phrase "My Pushkin", which some of our poets allowed themselves ...

Ivan Tolstoy: Yes, indeed, some petty poets, on a bazaar day a bunch is a patch.

Ivan Yesaulov: These poets, they have an absolutely brilliant interpretation of Pushkin. I still insist that my Lev Nikolaevich is not only my Lev Nikolaevich, unlike some poets, who believed that it would be better, as you know, to marry Pushkin not in Natalia Nikolaevna, but in one of these poets, I still begin from the fact that Tolstoy Lev Nikolaevich is our property in common. But in what sense? I just show here ...

Lev Nikolaevich deeply embodies the same settings in the subtext as his antagonist Fedor Mikhailovich

Please note that I am engaged only in artistic texts, that is, I do not touch the journalism - neither Dostoevsky publicist nor a fat publicist, I attract her, but only auxiliary. So, in his artistic texts, in my opinion, the rationalist, utopian, anarchist, a fighter with Shakespeare, and so on, Lev Nikolaevich in his work deeply embodies in the subtext (I show how this is happening) the same attitudes, in a sense, his antagonist Fedor Mikhailovich. Moreover, unconsciously. I enter the category of "cultural unconscious" there.

Ivan Tolstoy: Are you introducing it?

Ivan Yesaulov: I introduce it, because Jung wrote just about the collective unconscious, Freud wrote about the personal unconscious. And in the introduction to this book, not arguing with one and the other, but being in the dialogue with them, I really ... Listen, I didn’t write this book yesterday, I thought for a long time, a quarter of a century, this is a fairly long period.

Ivan Tolstoy: I do not argue with you.

Ivan Yesaulov: So I can also introduce some categories. Moreover, this is not one new category that is proposed in this book. Here is one example for you. This example is very important, like Auerbach in Mimesis. An example with Lev Nikolayevich. Lev Nikolaevich writes the work "After the Ball." The conscious goal of Leo Nikolaevich is to expose the damned society. He wants to show consciously that this society is so lying that he has one thing at the ball, and after the ball ... Moreover, Christian society, he will luke this Tatar, it is very important that it is Tatar for Lev Nikolayevich, because Christians - but they do not merciful to this foreigner, as they said then in the Russian empire.

It ends with the fact that the narrator Ivan Vasilievich, his life did not set at all in the service or in life. This was the task of the biographical Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy, who wrote this story completely consciously. But I show that, nevertheless, Lev Nikolaevich was in a certain type of culture, this type of culture can be called an Orthodox country, an Orthodox culture. And this somehow imprinted in this text. How? Yes, so that this is a work about love! And Ivan Vasilievich begins his story, he is a storyteller, this is very important, because it was so that I was very in love. And I show that the subject of his love, Varenka, the one who has a pink dress, and which then in the minds of Ivan Vasilyevich, as it were, rhymes with the strained back of this unfortunate Tatar, this Varenka was the subject of this love. And then Ivan Vasilievich, in essence, and I write it, renounces my love. That is, this story is not about the exposure of the damned order, but the story of the impoverishment of love. And, by the way, Ivan Vasilievich himself, when he is asked by the listeners: “Well, with love?”, He completely forgets that he began his story as a love story.

I enter the category of "cultural unconscious"

And what is this Varenka to blame? She has, of course, terrible wine. She loves Ivan Vasilyevich very much, but how does he do with her? He acts with her even more cruelly than these soldiers with a Tatar: he renounces her. Why is he renouncing her? But because she is the daughter of the colonel. All. There is no more fault. And he was punished for this by the fact that he did not succeed in any line and his life failed. This is a negligence ...

After all, Tolstoy speaks of an interchange, but his storyteller demonstrates this negligence in relation to the subject of his love. I draw attention to the fact that this story is so artistically, and not ideologically, that this ball is the last ball in front of the great post. Then, in the morning - a day called a pure Monday. How did Ivan Vasilievich Pure Monday meet? He and his friend got drunk completely drunk. In this way, not someone there, not a damned society, and he himself destroys his possible happiness with his own hands. It is this, as I show, that lies in the cultural matrix, in the cultural unconscious Lev Nikolayevich, and Lev Nikolaevich himself would have agreed with me. Do you know why he would agree with me?

Ivan Tolstoy: I don't know.

Ivan Yesaulov: And because he wrote the afterword to Chekhov’s story “Darling”, where exactly as I did now in relation to Leo Nikolaevich, he acted in relation to Chekhov. He tried to show that consciously, at the level of Czech’s consciousness, he wanted to curse his heroine, but the god of poetry, wrote Tolstoy, forbade him to curse the heroine, and he glorified her outside his conscious intention. That is, Lev Nikolaevich himself admitted such cases. It happened artistically.

And so I'm trying to show that the same thing in the "War and the World." Exactly the same is manifested by the rationalist Tolstoy in the "war and the world." Please note: we are talking only about works of art, we do not touch the journalism, do not touch the denunciation of Lev Nikolaevich, do not touch his life track. You know, there is such a thing in football - "work with clean balls." So I work with pure artistic texts, this is the peculiarity, but I show how the mechanisms of the "large time" of the Orthodox culture, how they correct it ... This, of course, work, work on this Piglet Small. It may seem strange to you, but within a short conversation I can only speak with name offers, but in fact this book is fat, you see, and there I show it more carefully than in a conversation with you.

Ivan Tolstoy: Ivan Andreevich, you always use the expressions "Orthodox culture", "Orthodox subtext", "Orthodox tradition". What does this mean to you as a methodology, why is the Orthodox category all the time, did it mean something for the writers themselves that you write about? For Turgenev, for example?

Ivan Esaulov: I think that, of course, I meant, because after all, these writers, simply put, lived in the Orthodox country of Russia.

Ivan Tolstoy: The writer often lives in the country in which he, perhaps, would not want to exist ideologically, and with an ideology with which he does not associate himself.

Ivan Yesaulov: Yes, you are completely right, and this is one of the nodular places of this book. Just here I am trying to show such a paradox, some semantic paradox. Мне кажется, что мы сейчас, как люди пишущие, как исследователи, больше можем увидеть в тех прошедших эпохах, чем видели сами писатели этих эпох. В том числе и писатели 18–19-го века.

В каком смысле больше? Именно в том смысле как в старой русской гимназистской шутке. "Что самое главное, чего не знали о себе древние греки?" Ответ понятный: "Что они древние". Вот эти писатели могли сколько угодно сражаться, как Толстой, который не только с церковью сражался, он и с государством сражался, как Тургенев, как Салтыков-Щедрин. Они жили в "малом времени" их жизни, как и мы с вами. Мы живем в определенное время, тут ничего не поделаешь. Может, нам не нравится идеология страны, в которой живем, – это другое дело. Но когда эта эпоха заканчивается, а она закончилась, то мы видим, что греки, при всей их разнице, были древними греками, это самое главное. И я как раз пытаюсь показать, что при всех спорах (например, споре Общества любителей российской словесности и "Арзамаса" – вот ожесточенный спор: одни – квазиконсерваторы, другие – квазиноваторы, они сражаются, высмеивают друг друга), но я показываю, что такого рода полемика, которая очень ожесточенная в "малом времени" их жизни, на самом деле является репликами разных сторон, но в пределах единой Cultures. И эта культура все-таки православная. Но не идеологически, не то что, знаете, человек может безостановочно учебник по катехизису вам изложить, вы его поймаете, а он будет вам с первого пункта по десятый говорить, а то, что, например, любовь выше закона, что юродивый – это святой… Как у Толстого в "Детстве". Он показывает, что очень любили юродивых, он не совсем дурак юродивый, потому что он что-то прозревает, а шут – это плохо. В каких-то базовых понятиях русские писатели, как это ни странно, были едины. В конце концов, и Герцен об этом писал, когда он говорил о полемике со славянофильством. Вот это как раз для меня очень существенно.