The modern language is covered with tattoos

In the second part of this issue: a conversation about the perishable and incompetent in culture. “My favorite records” with a rock musician and poet is smart.

In the section “Native Language” - Oleg Lekmanov, Moscow Philologist, author of literary research, mainly about the Russian Silver Age, books about poetry and poets, professor at the faculty of philology of the Higher School of Economics.

Igor Pomerantsev: How does language affect politics, and how does politics affect the language?

- Rather, the language affects politics, but then politics begins to influence the tongue. This is an extreme distribution of a thieves language like “wet in the toilet”, but not only. In general, it feels that we all spoke a little at the hairdryer, in the attached language of politics. Previously, there were tattoos of a certain type of people who have served, and now you go around Moscow, as in Prague, as in any other city, and people around are covered with tattoos from head to toe. In the same way, it seems to me, with the language. The language of the camp, prison became almost an official political language. It also seems to me that he penetrated household speech. I am not a purple. The mat is expressive. Previously, sitting in the kitchen with friends, including women, I listened to women who cursed better than men, and I used to give myself will, allowed myself, anything. It is one thing when the mat is an exquisite seasoning for speech, and another thing is when someone just swells, because it cannot differently. With such people I do not want to mix.

The language of the camp, prison became almost an official political language

- By language, one can judge the state of society, the health of society. Language is a pulse of society. You are talking about the dominance of prison, camp jargon. Does this mean that the camp, Gulag start in culture and language won?

-categorical words: “Won, not won,” they are still too strong. This is a terrible banality to say - "everything is more complicated." On the one hand, this trend in language and society, of course, is. Indeed, there are people who speak the hairdryer, people squatting in front of the store, people who calmly pronounce "wet in the toilet." On the other hand, there are Englishisms, now there are also a lot of them in another environment. On the third hand, I even notice it: there is a softening of harsh rules. Of course, I will never say “coffee” in average kind, but if earlier a person pronounced “one coffee”, then I was jarked, and now I have become much calmer to relate to this. It seems to me that the language is Russian, as powerful and strong as the stomach is powerful, that it will digest everything. It still remains expressive, alive. And the fact that he assimilates some new vaccinations is not always pleasant for us-this is normal.

- Oleg, you have been teaching for almost 30 years. How do youth jargons change, what is the social mechanism in this shift, in which direction do they change?

When I studied at the institute, knowledge of English turned a person into a perfect king, the girl fell to him where they should fall because you said in English

- Among intelligent people and teachers, it is customary to scold young people. In Russia, at least this is so. Here, young, they do not study at all, literature has ceased to be an important subject at school. I note in brackets, this is true, the meaning of literature has decreased very much. I can say that it seems to me rather that everything is good here and even may be good. Because, for example, when I studied at school, and then at the institute, the knowledge of the English language turned a person into a perfect king, he simply became inaccessible, the girls fell to him where they should fall, because you said in English-that’s all. The special school provided this, or you were engaged in a special teacher. Now students who come to study know one or two languages, all decently know English, and this is fine. This is the opportunity to read, watch, perceive, and so on, not to be slaves of the Russian TV. As for the language, I would say so, there is some proportion, there is some kind of not very large percentage of people who speak an excellent language who read a lot, the main thing is to read a lot of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, anyone, Solzhenitsyna, put a writer with a rich tongue any surname. There are a certain number of people speaking in the average language who can express their thought when they want to express it. And there is some percentage of people who speak terribly, for different reasons not learned to speak. It does not seem to me that something cardinal has changed compared to the time I studied, that is, from the mid-80s. Due to the fact that the boundaries opened, the Internet arose and so on, the specific composition of the language changes, but in fact everything does not change very much.

Moscow, 1990

-Is there any algorithm for changes in youth jargons?

- In my time, those groups that were then called informal were very strongly stood out. These were on the one hand hippies, who said “walking on Flat”, there were a lot of interspersed in English-this distinguished them from the rest.

- And you yourself were not an "old nephor"?

- I was close, I had friends. I can tell one story. When I studied in my second year, I studied at the Pedagogical Institute, I started before the start of perestroika in 1984, when I returned from the army, it was 1987, that is, some kind of relaxation began slowly. We had a young teacher who led a special course in languages of different groups of subcultural youth. There it was necessary to write a term paper, as usual with students. She said that if someone brings the record, he would record some kind of informal on the tape recorder that will speak such a language, then she puts the test immediately. I did not write a term paper, I did not study very well in the first years, in the end well. I feverishly recalled all the words that I knew from the hippovsky jargon, wrote them on a leaflet and planted my holy, now deceased mother, who was artistically read all the piece of paper, and I portrayed the sound in the back, as if it were recorded in a cafe, rang with cups, spots. The teacher was delighted completely from this entry, put me off. Of course, now I understand that this was very unprofessional, because there was an excess of all these words. Returning to division. I studied at the institute, but on the other hand, I was a courtyard teenager, there was the language of the "Spartak" fans, generally fans, their specific words. There was an average ordinary tongue. When I joined the army, I served honest for two years, there were also slices there. Everything was mixed, it seems to me. My feeling is that there are no people who speak each other, people who speak languages, individual from each other, everything is interfered.

- Oleg, you are the author of research on the poetry of the Silver Age, books about Mandelstam. I have a question for you as a philologist: does the language of philology change, does the language of description of certain genres, types of literature change?

- This language has always been very different. You just look that you are closer and you absorb it. Plus there are people who have a very strong effect on you. My teacher was an absolutely wonderful philologist Oleg Anatolyevich Proskurin, the Pushkinist is very good. I began to write with the language, relatively speaking, close to the Tartu, Moscow school. Already all this was at an end, Tartu philologists and Moscow, when they did it in the 60s, in many ways they wrote, the language that they chose was the language that saved them, which separated them, firstly, from the Soviet vile official, official literary criticism, that is, you will speak in the exact language. And on the other hand, it was just darling. When one of the best works about Mandelstam was called “Russian semantic poetics as a potential cultural paradigm,” the reader had to first pass some selection, reading this title. Thus, the reader who will read this was chosen. A picket fence of philological words was placed, if you wanted, you could continue to read and through this to penetrate into some meanings. In this sense, it seems to me that the work of Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman, one of the best philologists of the era, is very indicative. Not that Lotman is so complicated, but still it required some preparation. On the other hand, many of his historical and literary works are written in an excellent clear language with a minimum amount of some terms. When they ask me who is the best prose writer for the last 20 years, I always honestly answer - Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov. Open it “entertaining Greece”, only look for the best language. His philological works, of course, are written a little in another language. He also strives for clarity and clarity, but he had to use some kind of terminology as a poet. Now, it seems to me, the crisis of philology, great philology. To say that now some group of people who describe in a completely new way, I talk about Russia, in any case, describes poetry about the Russian situation in a completely new way, uses a completely new language for this, it seems to me, I can’t see it. Some words penetrate. A bright Italian philologist Franco Moretti appeared, some terms that he proposed, in some works they arise. The most important thing is that it is still terrible, which should be avoided, that still strangles philology-it is again the language of sincere conversation. There are quite good books in the series “Life of wonderful people”, but since I wrote not only about poetics, but also the biographies of different authors, I now wrote about Venedikt Erofeev, I read my colleagues too. When you read in some book, conditionally: "Osip went out on the porch and looked at Nadenka, and she ...". That's it, it just starts to feel sick. I understand that I was far away from your question that you asked. I would say so when people write in human language, when the terms that they use, work and not very many of them, when they dissolve the rest of the language stream, such works seem good to me.

- In linguistics and in philology, there is such a concept “literary language”. Is this a fiction, is this a reality? Do you use such a phrase?

- No, I do not use. I hope that I understand what it is, but for me this is not an actual term.

- Literary scholars have another concept, another phrase “language (name)”: Gogol language, Pushkin’s language, Shakespeare's language. You write about Mandelstam. For you, the concept of "writer's language" is real matter?

The feeling of reading the poems of the late Mandelstam, as if a hole was pierced in the brain, and the flow of already uncontrolled words poured out of this brain

- Of course, this is absolutely real matter. Not only the language of Mandelstam differs from the language of Akhmatova or Khlebnikov, the language of the late Mandelstam, the author of Voronezh verses, and the language of Mandelstam of the early, verses written for the book “Stone” are very different organisms. Lukavo, knowing that this is also to Mandelstam, you can find some common points, common words, common moves that the early Mandelstam makes in comparison with Mandelstam late. I am not saying as a philologist now, but rather as a reader of poems. After the Stalinist poem, after a terrible stay in Lubyanka, it seems to be a soft, but still terrible move to Cherdyn and attempts at suicide, when he jumped out of the window, it happened ... This can be called in different words: breakdown, the change, the change is radical. The feeling that any reader is experiencing from reading the verses of the late Mandelstam that it was a stream that a hole was pierced in the brain, and a stream of uncontrolled words, adhesions of semantic poured from this brain. The late remarkable philologist Viktor Davydovich Levin called this poetics “unconventional”: when the poet ceased to conclude conventions, some agreements at different levels with readers. "In a dry river, an empty shuttle is floating." What is a dry river? The Convention is no longer respected, Mandelstam partly begins to be crazy, partly the influx of the tongue. This can probably be seen in his early texts, but in the late ones it is very thick.

- What is the best name - Mandelstam languages or the language of Mandelstam?

- I think that this is the language of Mandelstam at different periods of his work, it clearly beats for different periods. First, Mandelstam, relatively speaking, is a symbolist from 1908 to 1912, then from 1912 to 1915 or 1916 - this is acmeistic poetics with a clear, clear architectural style, then everything is complicated. Then it begins that Lidia Yakovlevna Ginzburg called the poetics of associations, the language is still complicated. What began in Voronezh, that is, since 1935 - this is an unprecedented Mandelstam, Mandelstam, who violates all kinds of conventions.

When you are dealing with your son, I want to speak the same language with him

- Your son is 25 years old. You speak the same language with him, do you have a common language?

- Yes, sure. Immediately imagine your son, who sits, listens to this program and says: Ha ha ha. It is clear that I always want to speak the same language not with youth, without lifting my pants to run after the Komsomol, not at all with abstract youth. I am pleased with my age and my ... not a position, not myself ... I want to speak the language in which I speak. But specifically, when you are dealing with your son, I want to speak the same language with him. Once since childhood, it turned out that we are very friends. We have our own language, as always it happens, our own words, jokes, jokes. Now I, thank God, got married, and my wife Anya, too, I hope, entered this world. My son is studying in France. When he comes to Moscow, he crosses the threshold, we begin to check each other: do you remember another language? Usually this is a mutual stream of words, not perfect, but it seems, there is a common language. True, sometimes I think that what I say and how I say it seems obsolete, not very relevant, but he is a polite boy, he does not say this. All the same, there are some points in which we coincide, I hope that we will continue to coincide.

The culture is crying and imperishable.

A conversation with a restorer, cultural historian, theater director.

“My favorite records” with a rock musician, a poet of a smart (Anna Gerasimova).