From slogans to philosophy‎

Philologist Dmitry Simanovsky - about what path Alexei Navalny went in his last words

The last word of Alexei Navalny in the court on the case of "extremism" is called "Conscience and intellect". And this is the peak of his public speaking. So says the philologist and translator Dmitry Simanovsky. As the main Russian oppositionist, he went from street slogans to talk about philosophy and ethics and quotes from cultural scientists - Simanovsky writes about this in a new column for Kholod.

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The last word in the Russian court has already taken shape in an independent genre of political journalism. Navalny, who appeared in court more than 10 times in 2021 and 2022 alone, unwittingly became one of the luminaries of the genre. So, on February 20, 2021, he had to say the last two words . The number of speeches, of course, significantly reduces the media hype around them, but even obvious truths (corruption is evil, criminals are in the Kremlin, politics is everyone's business) Navalny does not get tired of pronouncing, finding new images and arguments for this. He resorts to a variety of rhetorical and stylistic devices. The content of these techniques changes over time, and the public image of a politician evolves along with them.

Most of Navalny's pre-war last words are part of his metatext ( texts that are interconnected, helping to understand the role of the phenomenon in culture. - Approx. " ‎ Kholoda ") : he does not need references to authorities, he rests on the obvious absurdity of the accusation, forcing memes of his own essays and the main provisions of his program. The politician and publicist hits, perhaps, the most painful (before the war) point of the regime - corruption. And it was this struggle, and not a liberal idea and not “spontaneous nationalism”, that allowed Navalny to reach out to millions.

Navalny is making every effort to ensure that the widest audience is ready to listen to him. The phrases “poor salary” and “richest country” are present in almost all of his texts, but he carefully avoids lofty words and even a hint of moralizing. By branding Putin and his entourage, he goes beyond the limits of crimes stipulated by the Criminal Code, only to emphasize some memogenic detail like "ducks" or "waterdisco". I explain the caution with ethically loaded statements in Navalny's previous speeches by an allergy to the "public spirituality" characteristic of people whose formation took place in the post-Soviet period.

Analyzing Navalny's texts, it is easy to find that almost all of them contain four tropes: irony/self-irony, incorrigible optimism (“beautiful Russia of the future”), a call to action (“don't give up!”) and a derogatory reference to Putin. In this, he shows extreme consistency, even if his mockery of the “bunker” may remind someone of the scene with the black knight from Monty Python. However, after returning to the Russian Federation and from the other world, something changed: quotes began to penetrate Navalny's self-sufficient metatext. In a speech dated February 20, 2021, Navalny refers to authoritative sources: the Bible, Harry Potter and the animated series Rick and Morty.

The first last word after the start of the war begins with a reference to the work of the singer Monetochka, and ends with a quote from Tolstoy: “War is a product of despotism. Those who want to fight war must only fight despotism.” In order to reduce the pathos, Navalny accompanies the quote with a description of a routine search in a classroom for prisoners: “And here I am standing naked and looking at the wall, and Leo Tolstoy is looking at me from the wall.”

published last week, In his final remarks Navalny goes further: for the first time he speaks of conscience as a lost pillar of Russian society and quotes Professor Lotman.

Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman is a cultural historian, in the late 1980s his lectures on Russian literature were shown on Central Television, but he is known primarily as the head of the Moscow-Tartu semiotic school. One of the key concepts of semiotics, intertextuality, is a dialogue between texts. Text in this context is any message from a flag semaphore to a novel or television series.

Intertextuality in the form of cultural references has been encountered by Navalny before. Back in the 2000s, he chose a paraphrase of a line from the Futurama series as the subtitle of his blog , in which the narcissistic and dim-witted Captain Zapp Brannigan is about to ram an unsuspecting Neutral planet, because the neutrals seem unreliable and prone to betrayal. Yes, there were enough cultural references before, nevertheless, I will allow myself to assert: the hotter the “final battle between goodness and neutrality” flares up , the more clearly Navalny’s metatext becomes an intertext, the more humanistic his rhetoric, the more sober his judgments.

Lotman develops the thesis borrowed by Navalny in his work Clio at the Crossroads. In this article, the great philologist suggests that history in the future will be seen not as a chain of the only possible "big" events, but as an endless branching of roads and crossroads, moving along which each of us makes a daily choice. “The cross, the crossroads already in Sanskrit meant choice, fate, human principles: reason and conscience. The crossroads provides a choice for the walker. Clio has come to a crossroads.” And let “beautiful Russia of the future” turn from hyperbole into an oxymoron before our eyes, no one will take away our choice.

“You can’t judge a stone because it falls down, but don’t say to yourself: “I was in such a position, I didn’t want anything bad, but there were such circumstances, I couldn’t do otherwise ...” This is not true! There are no circumstances when it is impossible to do otherwise. And if we still have such circumstances, then we have no conscience. Conscience is what dictates what to do when there is a choice. And there is always a choice ... "

The opinion of the author may not coincide with the opinion of the editors.