The art of bulky abbreviations

Is it possible to deal with culture when people die?

"Well, you are dick!" - So the editor -in -chief of Novaya Gazeta reacted Dmitry Muratov, when Olga Timofeeva and I, the editor of the culture department, offered him the idea of ​​a column about culture. And in a sense, of course, he was right. What jazz, what films, books and still lifes in our times? L'RT POUR L'ART does not go well with a bloody massacre, beating journalists and other horrors that you, dear reader, are better than ours. The picture is good: you wake up, first pick up the phone, open Telegram and among the posts about the next trial of the political prisoners suddenly run into the column of Ivan Chekalov. What is he (well, that is, of course you) is going to teach?

Nothing.

Nothing decisively, irrevocably and finally. Consider this thought - unwillingness to teach - the center of this column, its main message, the main state.

I'm not learning anyone. I want to learn.

The Russian man is confused, frightened, confused. In Turkey and Kazakhstan, he feels unnecessary, in Moscow and St. Petersburg inappropriate.

It is impossible to think in former categories, there are no one to formulate new ones. Write - yes, but what to write about? Speak - but can we say when people die?

They kill people.

All his thoughts are about one. All conversations too. All leisure - turning over news, all work - their reading.

The life that we led before has ended. The world has changed. But this does not mean that culture is no longer needed. On the contrary, it is needed more than ever.

Rome gave us the right and aqueducts to live the crop, and the city lived with it.

England gave the courts and the constitutional monarchy.

What did Russia give us? Absolutism? Serfdom?

Culture.

Culture saved the Russian man where the European saved civil society. Culture helped not to forget about dignity and honor.

There is nothing to replace Russian art. Our culture draws itself by the hair - from any swamp, over and over again.

But again we ask ourselves: is it possible to deal with culture in our time? When you just hear around that bulky abbreviations: Sw, PMC, APU? Why create?

Can. Need to.

There will be no better time to start.

Any art is political in the extent that the system that gave rise to it is politically. In the most terrible years of the Stalinist terror and Nikolaev frosts, people thought about the injustice of the authorities, reflected, analyzed, thought. The thaw shows the results of these works. And at the same time - gives the opportunity to compose about another, eternal, about what is many times more significant than tyrannical tyranny.

We have already learned to think about soldiers, about killed people, read about the authorities and people, the blue fingers of officers and to the death of intimidated conscripts. And we will never study.

That is why - at the same time - we need to learn to live again. See life.

Despite everything, through the veil of non -freedom, to be able to find a three -centimeter bulb of a snowdrop under a meter layer of snow. Months will pass, maybe years, we will dig up the snow - and the flowers will bloom the brighter the more attentive we cherished them earlier.

Russia is the country of Pushkin, not Benckendorf.

Thoughts about music, literature and cinema require the same attentiveness as letters to investigative insulators. My column will be about the happiness that culture is able to give. The fact that life is is and will be, that it is different and sings to us at a different way. And there is no better way to hear her than buying a Billy Hollide plate, to see a beautiful bouquet of mallow or, in the end, drink New York Sauer with friends.

Culture is not only “war and peace”. It is also to stroke the shirt before leaving the house.

And then in the new Russia, once again stretching out of the hair from a vile swamp, we will be able to listen to the jazz ensemble together.