Kirill Kobrin: On the way to isolation

The publishing house "New Literary Review" represents the book of Cyril Kobrin "On the way to isolation. Diary of the pre -Russian years (+ quarantine epilogue). "

Before the SARS-COV-2 virus sent humanity under house arrest, historian and writer Kirill Kobrin spent time in constant movements-between internal China and polar Norway, the American middle West and Russian Volga, between Riga, London, St. Petersburg and other points on the map. During these trips, Kobrin kept a diary, fixing in it the prevailing cultural and political context of the era, which ultimately led to the current isolation. Thinking about things, artifacts, texts and music that have met on his way in the last three years, the author leaves us a detailed description of the past world of the proper era. But what awaits us in new times - overcoming threats or the end of the world? Will the world become more honest and more correct after the pandemic? Will we extract from the World Catastrophe lessons in solidarity, frugality and humanity? Answering these questions with his inherent skepticism, the author invites the reader to the dialogue, and possibly a dispute about what happened to us recently and what will happen now.

We offer to read a fragment of the book.

April 6, 2019

“Life imitates more art than art - life,” wrote Oscar Wilde in the essay of The Decay of Lying. Nabokov converted this maxim - only at first glance paradoxical - into his “life sometimes slavishly imitates art”, missing the main thing in the Wilde Mot , missing the thought. Moreover, the thought is strong, lively, the thought is more likely social than the lazy thought of the Hole aesthet (which neither Oscar nor Vladimir were, of course, however, the first one wanted to look like that - and looked, but the second though he wanted, but did not work out). Wilde develops reasoning on a specific example, partly still modern; We are talking about the type of beauty, nicknamed the “pre -Raphaelite”, and about its influence on the minds - and especially on the appearance - some representatives of the British public. “Modern England had the opportunity to personally see how a certain strange and bewitching type of beauty, invented and developed by two artists with a bright imagination, was so influenced by life that wherever you go - to a private exhibition or in an art salon - these mysterious eyes of the Rossetti dreams, a high chisel neck, a strange angular jaw, dissolved, dissolved jaws The hair shade of the skin, that he loved so ferviously, charming femininity from the "golden staircase", blooming mouth and tired pretty pretty from "Laus amoris", Andromeda's passionate-pale face, thin hands and flexible beauty of Vivienne from the "dreams of Merlin." And so it was always. The great artist creates a type, and life is trying to copy it and reproduce in a popular form as an enterprising publisher. <...> They (ancient Greeks. - K.K. ) had the feeling that realism disfigures people, and they were completely right. We try to improve the living conditions of the nation with pure air, sunlight, high -quality water and the disgusting appearance of boxes, conceived as improved housing for the lower classes. All this improves health, but does not create beauty. She needs art ... ”The plot turns out amazing, isn't it? Rossetti and Ko in the middle - second half of the 19th century make “beautiful art” for the new British middle class, which created the industrial of new cities of Middle and Northern England, like Manchester and Sheffield at that time. This art appeals to the world, as if it has nothing to do with the steaming pipes and reflections of the hellish flame of the foundry shops, it seductively nostalgic for the craft-chief late Middle Ages, doomed and fragile, nostalgies in the spirit and images of the death of Arthur Malori. It supplies the opium of escapism to enlightened breeders and merchants, offers their wives and daughters the ideal of a chakhotochny beautiful, to whom they will follow with a quiet enthusiasm. The workers at the factories are sick and freezing from smoke, soot, fire, cars tearing their arms and legs to them, and those who can afford to suffer in beauty for the money proceeds for the suffering of the proletarians are also ill and dumb, because it is so prescribed in artifacts made for their entertainment. It turns out something like a circle of suffering and death-both money and beauty. Gloomy justice triumphs - no one can get out of such a maze. Although, of course, there is a way out - pure air, sunlight and good water, not to mention the human living conditions for those whose labor contains the whole circus, but this has nothing to do with beauty, this is life , ugly boxes for decent residence inside. And beauty (read: art) - it is about death, or something. Art almost reluctantly imitates life in the fact that at least a conventional connection with it, does not break away from it into the astral, that's all. But life eagerly peers into art, imitates, monkey. Life is trying to become “beautiful” - and then it turns out to be dead, thick plaster on the face of the singer Kobzon, whiteness and samovar gold decoration of the Kremlin palaces, species of Montmartre, decorating the walls of a dirty guernsion in the Greennell, forgotten town, Aiva.

The last reasoning I turned in my head, enjoying a dull breakfast in a hotel called "Happy Pushkin", which is located on the English embankment of the city of St. Petersburg. In the dining room, paintings depicting either the happiest Alexander Sergeyevich, then the plots from the compositions of the lucky man are hung. Here is a cat, nearby - a chain, under a thick cat barrel - a thick barrel of an oak. Everything is very beautiful. And here is the ancestor of Pushkin, the famous Arap, goes in a pale blue sheepskin coat with red fur lapels and a collar, with his head uncovered under the handle with Peter the Great himself, the Emperor of Moroz is not afraid, he is in a long camisole over a snow-white shirt with lace lips of sleeves, on the neck-a snow-white scarf, wild curls, seventy curls They were thrown back by the Neva Wind, however, the face disappeared, the ruler of the comedian from the old humorous television program “Gorodok” was slightly similar. However, the program was St. Petersburg. The king looks somewhere over a curly Arapy head, a little mournfully, as if to suffer pain, they say, suffered from prostatitis. But the ancestor of Alexander Sergeyevich himself has the face of Alexander Sergeyevich, only beautiful, to indecent. We also note a funny anachronism: the emperor with Arap is walking along the Neva Embankment, behind them either Kunstkamera, or the Menshikov palace, and a little further - the Admiralty Needle. It turns out as in the story of the same name by Nabokov: instead of genuine memory and genuine life - a ladies' novel, pretentious nonsense, kitsch. My hotel is a masterpiece of this case. Therefore, it is worth taking a closer look at him more closely, because he’s about beautiful, about beauty and about life, that is, it turns out that about the modern art and its environs.

Let's start with the name. Why is our Alexander Sergeyich happy? Did he get into the cards? Or composed something like that, after which it remains only to clap himself on the thighs and scream: “Ay yes Pushkin! Ah yes bitch son! " No, no and no. What are the works? We know that he ran into Russian poetry on thin erotic legs. So happiness to him, the love of, one - and it is clear what properties.

Therefore, my hotel is in aspirations and execution (but, I hope, not according to the utilitarian destiny) brothel - with red walls and with appropriate painting, with heavy large beds - and, most importantly, each room has a female name. My room is called Katya. The rest are in every way, from Annetta to Maria Alexandrovna and Carolina. There is a temptation to consider it a double game - they say, hiding behind the so -called Don Juan list of Pushkin, they opened an aesthetic public house where girls are recruited according to the corresponding real names (and not, say, Kristina to pretend to Polina), and each works in the named after themselves. But this idea greatly gives serfdom at times, especially the last decades of the XVIII - the first decades of the XIX century; Then the enlightened landowners did not run such undertaking, I think some Nikolai Yeremeyevich Struisky could come up with this. However, he lived to Pushkin.

I think here, on the English embankment, the situation is wrong. That is, not quite so. They did not a brothel, but beautiful, culture, history. Pushkin is responsible for all this in this particular country. Pushkin is beautiful. Pushkin is a culture. Pushkin is a story. And who else? Accordingly, in the city of Peter, in the city of Pushkin, on the same English embankment that around the corner from the New Holland, from the Bobrinsky Palace, you need to make a hotel called “Happy Pushkin” - for Pushkin is simply obliged to rejoice in the next world: everything was possible! The city stands, the sovereigns are respected, the power of the neighbors was revived and the respect of the neighbors, the public is found in the public (some part of it, of course, but still), respectively, everything is fine and it is time to start, finally, enjoy life in the most beautiful way.

I am not ironic. The Happy Pushkin Hotel is the embodiment of the very cultural policy of the national identity that the current Russian government contrasts modern art, the very idea of ​​modernity. After all, “contemporary art” is about society and consists of social, it is fundamentally “ugly”; As the fools, dreaming of beautifully walking on a beautiful Montmartre in beautiful wide -brimmed hats, it is “unaesthetic”. Yes, and modernity is also ugly - for it is modernity, for it is life, it is alive. In the area of ​​"Happy Pushkin" the present is present: students and teachers of Smolny College are in a hurry on business, in the new Admiralty something is incomprehensible, but it happens, not construction, of course, but people are swarming there, in the offices there are aunts and uncles, they go to dine in subtle tables, they are drunk at the gasters, they smoke, smokes, smoke Laugh, almost at the corner, at the Square of Labor with the palace of Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich - Egyptian Kebabby. And here is a dressed new Holland with its empty ventures. In general, the beginning of April, the Sun, and for this time, even very warm - that is why the dust, mixed, as one of my young familiar, with a suspension of dried feces of pets and people noted everywhere, because the snow melted and duckling, and the waste of the organisms remained and rushed in the air. In general, all this is life - dressing, and feces, and monstrous traffic, and Egyptian kebabs. That is, according to the classification of Oscar Wilde, life. And art (read: beauty) - at the Happy Pushkin Hotel. That's why this is so important, one of the pillars of the current Russian life. One pillar is life. Another is art. And the first more imitates the second than the second first.