Home Grape Weill and Genis a history of cooperation. Peter Weil, Alexander Genis Native speech. Fine arts lessons. Quotes from the book “Native Speech. Lessons of fine literature "Alexander Genis, Peter Weil

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Weill and Genis a history of cooperation. Peter Weil, Alexander Genis Native speech. Fine arts lessons. Quotes from the book “Native Speech. Lessons of fine literature "Alexander Genis, Peter Weil

Peter Weil, Alexander Genis

Native speech. Fine arts lessons

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Over the years, I realized that humor for Weill and Genis is not a goal, but a means, and moreover, it is a tool for cognizing life: if you investigate some phenomenon, then find what is funny in it, and the phenomenon will unfold in its entirety ...

Sergey Dovlatov

Weil and Genis's “Native Speech” is a renewal of speech, prompting the reader to re-read all school literature.

Andrey Sinyavsky

... books familiar from childhood become over the years only signs of books, standards for other books. And they get them from the shelf as rarely as the Parisian standard of the meter.

P. Weill, A. Genis

Andrey Sinyavsky

Fun craft

Someone decided that science must be boring. Probably in order to be respected more. Boring means a solid, reputable enterprise. You can invest. Soon there will be no place on earth in the midst of serious garbage heaps erected to the sky.

But once upon a time science itself was revered as a good art and everything in the world was interesting. Mermaids were flying. Angels splashed. Chemistry was called alchemy. Astronomy is astrology. Psychology is palmistry. The story was inspired by the muse from Apollo's round dance and contained an adventurous romance.

And now what? Reproduction reproduction? The last refuge is philology. It would seem: love of the word. And in general, love. Free air. Nothing is forced. A lot of ideas and fantasies. So it is here: science. They set the numbers (0.1; 0.2; 0.3, etc.), stuck footnotes, provided, for the sake of science, an apparatus of incomprehensible abstractions through which one cannot wade through ("vermiculite", "grubber", "loxodrome", “Parabiosis”, “ultrarapid”), rewrote all this in a deliberately indigestible language - and here you are, instead of poetry, another sawmill for the production of countless books.

Already at the beginning of the twentieth century, idle second-hand booksellers thought: “Sometimes you wonder - does humanity really have enough brains for all the books? There are no more brains than books! ” “Nothing,” our cheerful contemporaries argue, “soon computers will be the only ones to read and produce books. And people will get to take out products to warehouses and landfills! ”

Against this industrial background, in the form of opposition, in refutation of the gloomy utopia, it seems to me that the book by Peter Weil and Alexander Genis - "Native Speech" - emerged. The name sounds archaic. Almost country-style. Smells like childhood. Sen. Rural school. It is fun and entertaining to read, as befits a child. Not a textbook, but an invitation to read, to a divertisman. It is not proposed to glorify the glorified Russian classics, but to look into it with at least one eye and then fall in love. The concerns of "Rodnaya Rech" are of ecological nature and are aimed at saving the book, at improving the very nature of reading. The main task is formulated as follows: “They studied the book and - as often happens in such cases - practically stopped reading”. Pedagogy for adults, by the way, by the way, well-read and educated persons.

"Native speech", gurgling like a stream, is accompanied by unobtrusive, unobtrusive learning. It assumes reading is co-creation. Everyone has their own. It has a lot of tolerances. Freedom of interpretation. Let our authors in fine literature eat the dog and give out completely original imperative decisions at every step, our business, they suggest, is not to obey, but to pick up any idea on the fly and continue, sometimes, perhaps, in the other direction. Russian literature is shown here in the form of the sea, where every writer is his own captain, where sails and ropes are stretched from “Poor Lisa” Karamzin to our poor “villagers”, from the poem “Moscow - Petushki” to “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow”.

Reading this book, we see that eternal and, indeed, unshakable values do not stand still, pinned, like exhibits, to scientific headings. They - move in the literary row and in the reader's mind and, it happens, are part of the later problematic achievements. Where they will sail, how they will turn tomorrow, no one knows. The unpredictability of art is its main strength. This is not a learning process, not progress.

Weil's and Genis's “Native Speech” is a renewal of speech that prompts the reader, even if he is seven inches in the forehead, to re-read all school literature. This technique, known since ancient times, is called defamation.

To use it, you need not so much, just one effort: to look at reality and at works of art with an unbiased look. As if you were reading them for the first time. And you will see: behind every classic there is a living, just discovered thought. I want to play it.

For Russia, literature is a starting point, a symbol of faith, an ideological and moral foundation. You can interpret history, politics, religion, national character as you like, but as soon as you say "Pushkin", the ardent antagonists nod their heads happily and amicably.

Of course, for such an understanding, only literature that is recognized as classical is suitable. Classics is a universal language based on absolute values.

Russian literature of the golden XIX century has become an indivisible unity, a kind of typological community, before which the differences between individual writers recede. Hence the eternal temptation to find the dominant feature that delimits Russian literature from any others - the tension of spiritual search, or love of the people, or religiosity, or chastity.

However, with the same - if not great - success, one could speak not about the uniqueness of Russian literature, but about the uniqueness of the Russian reader, who is inclined to see in his favorite books the most sacred national property. Hitting a classic is like insulting a homeland.

Naturally, such an attitude develops from an early age. The main instrument of sacralization of the classics is the school. Literature lessons have played a tremendous role in the formation of Russian public consciousness. Primarily because the books resisted the educational claims of the state. At all times, literature, no matter how they fought against it, revealed its internal contradiction. It was impossible not to notice that Pierre Bezukhov and Pavel Korchagin are heroes of different novels. On this contradiction, generations of those who managed to maintain skepticism and irony grew up in a society that was not well suited for this.

However, over the years, books familiar from childhood become only signs of books, standards for other books. And they get them from the shelf as rarely as the Parisian standard of the meter.

Anyone who decides on such an act - to re-read the classics without prejudice - encounters not only the old authors, but also himself. Reading the main books of Russian literature is how to revise your biography anew. Life experience was accumulated along the way with reading and thanks to it. The date when Dostoevsky was first revealed is no less important than family anniversaries. We grow with books - they grow in us. And sometime there comes a time of rebellion against the attitude to the classics, which was embedded in childhood. Apparently this is inevitable. Andrei Bitov once admitted: “I spent more than half of my creativity fighting against the school literature course”.

We conceived this book not so much to refute the school tradition as to test - and not even it, but ourselves in it. All chapters of "Native Speech" strictly correspond to the usual high school curriculum. Of course, we do not hope to say something fundamentally new about a subject that has occupied the best minds of Russia. We just decided to talk about the most turbulent and intimate events of our life - Russian books.

Peter Weill, Alexander Genis New York, 1989

Poor Lisa's legacy

Karamzin

In the very name of Karamzin, one can hear the coyness. It was not for nothing that Dostoevsky misrepresented this surname in order to ridicule Turgenev in The Possessed. So it looks like it's not even funny. Until recently, before the boom in Russia, produced by the revival of his History, Karamzin was considered just a slight shadow of Pushkin. Until recently, Karamzin seemed elegant and frivolous, like a cavalier from the paintings of Boucher and Fragonard, later resurrected by the artists of the World of Art.

And all because one thing is known about Karamzin: he invented sentimentalism. This, like all superficial judgments, is true, at least in part. To read Karamzin today, one must stock up on aesthetic cynicism that allows one to enjoy the old-fashioned innocence of the text.

Nevertheless, one of his stories, “Poor Liza,” - fortunately, there are only seventeen pages and everything is about love - still lives in the minds of the modern reader.

Liza, a poor peasant girl, meets a young nobleman, Erast. Tired of the windy light, he falls in love with a spontaneous, innocent girl with the love of his brother. But soon platonic love turns into sensual. Lisa consistently loses her spontaneity, innocence and Erast himself - he goes off to war. “No, he really was in the army; but instead of fighting the enemy, he played cards and lost almost all of his estate. " To improve matters, Erast marries an elderly rich widow. Upon learning of this, Lisa drowns in a pond.

Most of all it looks like a ballet libretto. Something like Giselle. Karamzin, used ...

Weill and Genis as Founding Fathers

At the presentations of the luxuriously republished book "Russian Cuisine in Exile" (Makhaon publishing house), three legendary writers appeared in front of Muscovites: Weil-y-Genis, Peter Weil and Alexander Genis.

I use the epithet "legendary" not for a catchphrase, but as a definition: remaining one of the most influential in the literature of the last fifteen years, these writers never became an integral part of Russian literary life. For most of us, they were and remain characters by them in many respects and the created myth about the Russian literary New York of the 70s and 80s.

A situation that provokes a conversation not so much about "Russian cuisine" itself, but about the place of its authors in contemporary Russian literature and, more broadly, culture.

Of the three books that began our reading of Weill and Genis - “60s. The World of the Soviet Man ”,“ Native Speech ”and“ Russian Cuisine in Exile ”- the latter became a bestseller. For acquaintance with its authors, this is, in general, the most closed book, although it contains all the constituent parts of their prose: energy, emotional pressure (unexpected in a cookbook), wit, an almost dapper refinement of style, innocence and sincerity of the "confessional principle" ... But even at the same time, there is precisely the maintained distance from the reader, and finally, the splendor of the very gesture of the two "highbrows" who took on the "low genre". This book has become an event not only in culinary literature.

The most humorous writers of the 90s - one of the first titles of Weil and Genis in their homeland. The reputation at that time was by no means derogatory. Against. In those years, banter was something like an everyday form of conceptualism. They joked about the "scoop" and sovietism, getting rid of the ethics and aesthetics of barracks life. For many, Weill's and Genis's "banter" was at that time correlated with Sotsart, which was the leader in Russian conceptualism. And the style of their essay prose very quickly became the style of newspaper headlines (the same Kommersant), the language of a new generation of radio hosts, the style of the most advanced television programs.

Well, in the field of intellectual life, Weil-y-Genis turned out to be surprisingly at the time thanks to the beginning boom in cultural studies - the ability to combine everything with everything, the ability to "scientifically" prove anything. In this intellectual fornication, intoxicating the consumer with the illusion of liberation of thought, and the manufacturer with the unexpected yielding of the objects of "analysis", the question of the thinker's responsibility was removed by the spectacular constructions and the absolute irrefutability of conclusions (if, of course, you agreed to play by the proposed rules). Intoxicating was the “non-triviality” of the very language of the new science, or, as they began to say then, “coolness”. This peculiar "coolness", freedom from all kind of traditions, as it seemed then to the mass reader, was taken by both "Rodnaya Rech" and "60s. The world of the Soviet man ”.

Well, and not the last role was played by the charm of the legend on whose behalf they represented - the legend of the Russian emigration of the third wave, personified, in particular, by the figures of Brodsky and Dovlatov.

No, I do not think that banter was invented by Weill and Genis, by that time banter as one of the components of the youth subculture was becoming the style of a generation. And it so happened that the stylistics of Weil and Genis codified this style as banter for the reader in Russia; banter has become a fact of literature, as it were.

The place that Weill and Genis then occupied in the minds of the general reader was unusually honorable for a writer - but also deadly.

To become a feature of time, the paint of this time, however bright, means to go down in history with this time. And history in Russia moves quickly, what was news yesterday is a commonplace today.

For example, the very idea of the book “Russian Cuisine in Exile” has degenerated into culinary TV shows with the participation of current stars, that is, into a way of keeping the largest possible mass audience at the screens for selling advertising clips.

The banter also became a TV man on duty - from the evenings of the favorite of pensioners Zadornov to the "intellectual" Svetlana Konegen. The creativity of the Sotsartists lost its relevance much faster than the aesthetics of Socialist Realism, which fed them with its energy, moreover, Sotsart is already history, and the new generation of writers in Russia, yearning - sincerely, earnestly - for "partisanship in literature" is today's reality.

Finally, the very charm of the aura of Russian life abroad has melted away - today's readers of Weill and Genis have their own image abroad.

It would seem that their time has passed.

And here the most interesting thing begins - their books remain relevant. And not only new ones, but also old ones.

To a certain extent, the appearance of two new writers played a role: separately Weil and separately Genis. If initially their joint work provoked a certain symbolism of perception: the content and poetics of Weill-i-Genis's books as a fact of collective creativity, as a certain generalized voice of the Russian emigration of the 70s-80s, then their present work separately forces us to treat it as to an individual phenomenon.

And the first thing that the readers of the new books of Weill and Genis discovered was the disappearance of banter from their content. No, irony, paradox remained, but it was no longer a banter. The irony of Weill and Genis has changed its function for the reader.

The fact is that banter in Russia was in many ways a continuation of the so-called indifference of the 80s, a form of denial - and nothing more. The irony of Weill and Genis implied not so much denial as "clearing a place" for the approval of their own ideas, worked out both by thought and accumulated life experience, of ideas about the norm - about compliance with the laws of thinking, the laws of art, the laws of life.

In the most significant of the books published in recent years by Weill, The Genius of Place, the author does not abandon what he once did in essays with Genis. Weill continues here, but with new material and new challenges. He took up self-identification in world culture, world history. Extended essays about Joyce, Aristophanes, Borges, Wagner, Brodsky, Fellini who compiled the book; about Dublin, Athens, Tokyo, New York, Istanbul, etc. - not studies, not studies, but a gradual methodical formulation of their own image of the world and its culture.

Weill takes what is intelligible to him (and to us, his contemporaries), what is actual, what he (we) is today. In other words, when we read about Khalsa or Mishima from Weill, we read the present ones to ourselves.

The same happens when reading Genis's book "Dovlatov and the Surroundings", which discouraged critics by its very genre. Is this a memoir? Autobiography? An essay on the psychology of creativity? A portrait of the Russian emigration?

And that, and another, and the third, but - as the material on which the author reflects on modern literature as an aesthetic phenomenon. A distant analogy is the literary manifesto. But distant. Because a manifest is, by definition, a protocol of intent. Genis, on the other hand, explores an aesthetic phenomenon that has already taken place and has proven its viability. And he does it both as a theorist and as a practitioner.

In 1991, I heard from a venerable philologist a comment about the authors of the just published Native Speech: “Lazy people! At least three essays in their book are a short synopsis of the monograph, but they won't sit down for a detailed study. "

No, why, they sat down and worked.

The lightness, aphoristic, stylistic play with which Weill and Genis write, do not cancel in any way, but paradoxically create in their books the image of not light-footed runners on eternal themes, but people (writers, thinkers), tightly grappled in a tense battle with the insolubility of damned questions ...

Actually, that is why I wrote the phrase "founding fathers" before this text, meaning Weill and Genis not as writers who once literally formalized banter as the language of the era, but as writers who determined - from the very beginning - ways out of dead ends , into which this banter leads.

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Peter Weil and Alexander Genis in their book “60s. The World of Soviet Man "strive to reconstruct the image of Soviet man during the Thaw, highlighting a kind of" cultural category "of the" sixties ", demonstrating the evolution of these views, flourishing and gradual fading.

Each of the chapters examines one of the cultural categories - together they formed the world of Soviet man in the 60s. The way of life, the worldview of the people of this generation had a serious impact on the further history of the Soviet Union - this is all the more obvious to Weil and Genis in the late 80s, when perestroika and glasnost again return many ideals of the sixties to society.

The 60s in the understanding of Weill and Genis are, first of all, time utopias... This idea is transformed in various ways in the key events and phenomena of the era, but its deep essence remains unchanged. "Communism, being basically a literary utopia, was realized not in deeds, but in words." The highest manifestation of communism in this understanding became, in fact, it managed to proclaim only freedom of speech. But it is precisely the words, spoken or printed - formed the basis of the historical period in question. The best illustration of this, Weil and Genis call Khrushchev's statement: "Needs have increased, I would even say that not needs have increased, but the ability to talk about needs has increased." In relation to these words, one of the central messages of the book is concluded, which was openly expressed only in the epilogue - it is wrong to imagine the 60s in the Soviet Union as barren due to the fact that they did not actively change anything in the political system - the essence of the changes lay in the expressed thoughts, ideas that have experienced rise and fall during this period - but in no way disappeared without a trace.

The main poet of the era, N.S. Khrushchev, who actually proclaimed 1961 as “20 years before the new communist era,” thereby directly influenced the creation of a new period in the history of Soviet society, a new attitude to the Soviet people. In general, this attitude can be called more optimistic - there is space for some discussion in society, the image of Stalin the leader will be thrown off the pedestal (which is extremely important, if only because it destroys this component of the eternal Soviet "doublethink"). New ideals correspond to new views - first of all, the cosmos, which proclaimed the limitless possibilities of man (simultaneously destroying religiosity), a new-old image of the revolution (the Cuban revolution, not only as a value in itself, but also as an opportunity to refresh the memory of 1917).

The Soviet person, who is being shaped under the influence of these events, is endowed with somewhat different, in comparison with the previous decades, cultural landmarks. The heroes of the 60s are young scientists (such as, for example, in Romm's film "9 Days of One Year"), athletes (but, of course, versatile, cultured people), geologists who go to Siberia with a guitar and a volume of Lorca. All of them are owners of this new daring spirit, perky optimism, romantically anti-philistine - people who believe in the possibility harmonious development(which is manifested both in the “versatility” of the person himself, and in the belief in the possibility of “peaceful coexistence” with the West). The spirit of patriotism is still strong enough in these people, sanctified by the memory of the very recent “Great Patriotic War”, which demonstrates the general “correctness” of the chosen communist course. For those of them who have already chosen the path of "dissent" still remains, as a possible counterbalance to Stalinist totalitarianism, the belief in a difficult dialogue with the authorities in its field ("observe your Constitution!").

The emerging world bore the character of a "carnival" (just in the spirit of Bakhtin's work "rehabilitated" by that time): here is a typically Soviet "doublethink", pride for the country - and poorly concealed admiration for America, Solzhenitsyn's publications - and. These contradictions look very indicative in the activities of Khrushchev himself: "The dramatic conflict of the 60s in general and Khrushchev himself in particular consisted in the gap between the style of the time and the stagnation of the mechanisms of social, political, economic, cultural life." According to Weill and Genis, Khrushchev to some extent fought with himself - he imposed restrictions on himself that prevented him from moving in the direction that he, it would seem, himself chose. In art, an illustration of such a milestone was the defeat of the exhibition at the Manege - the danger of which lay precisely in apoliticality, adherence to new abstract forms of art (which means “unlike life,” and this “similarity” is so important for the 60s). At an even more generalized level, the authors note the dialogical nature of the “black-and-white” views of the world among the “sixties”: laughter-tears, joy-sorrow, “ours” - “not ours”. Abroad, as a "myth of the afterlife", is becoming more and more famous, but that is why the colors of propaganda are not becoming less gloomy. “We” are most definitely not like “they”. "The border between 'ours' and 'not ours' is not a state border, but a specific one, as between animals and minerals."

Thus, polemics at times acquire an absurd character from the point of view of people of later times. Disputes "what kind of person is Shukhov?" or arguments about the personal qualities of Matryona from "Matryonin's Dvor" - they always see a real person behind a literary hero, they argue about him, his position is discussed. It is no coincidence that Khrushchev somehow calls Solzhenitsyn "Ivan Denisovich" (the Aesopian language of samizdat also calls him "Isaich"). "The 60s did not have a literary outlook, because the 60s themselves were a literary work: you cannot see yourself sleeping like that."

However, this young, healthy striving for “harmony” (which consisted of many directions, including the dissident one) strongly changes its vector of development by the end of the 60s. “Home” replaces “road”, “Christianity” (more precisely, the aspiration to religiosity) “science”, “truth” - “truth”, “Russian” - “Soviet”, “past” - “future”. The country and society are turning towards imperial values - friendship with Cuba, sports from Faster! Above! Stronger!" is again perceived as a weapon of world politics and must “punish”, “defeat”, “demonstrate superiority”. At the same time, there is a certain split in the “human rights” movement, which has realized the impossibility of further struggle according to the old rules. The dissident environment is somewhat closed around “cult” figures, in some ways it even acquires an unpleasant party character (like compiling “lists of those who have not signed appeals to the authorities”).

The final collapse of the ideology of the 60s was the entry of troops into Czechoslovakia in August 1968. For the communist movement, he played an ambiguous role: on the one hand, he demonstrated the cruelty and totalitarian character of its leader - the USSR, on the other - he forever preserved the ideal of "socialism with a human face", which meant the possibility of building a communist utopia in the future. Within the Soviet Union, it turned out to be destructive - delimiting the state and the intelligentsia - and even society itself, in a broader sense. Every citizen was faced with a choice: either to admit the criminal nature of the Soviet system, or to close their eyes, to remain silent and become a "complicit" in the lawlessness that had taken place. The utopia was lost - the belief in the Soviet communist path, if not completely disappeared, was again pushed back into some uncertain future.

Sergey Dovlatov

Weil and Genis's “Native Speech” is a renewal of speech, prompting the reader to re-read all school literature.

Andrey Sinyavsky

... books familiar from childhood become over the years only signs of books, standards for other books. And they get them from the shelf as rarely as the Parisian standard of the meter.

P. Weill, A. Genis

Andrey Sinyavsky

Fun craft

Of course, for such an understanding, only literature that is recognized as classical is suitable. Classics is a universal language based on absolute values.

However, over the years, books familiar from childhood become only signs of books, standards for other books. And they get them from the shelf as rarely as the Parisian standard of the meter.

Alexander Genis

NATIVE SPEECH. LESSONS OF FINE FINE WORK.

TRIUMPH OF UNGROUP.

Fonvizin

The case of the "Minor" is a special one. Comedy is studied at school so early that by the time of the final exams nothing remains in my head except the famous phrase: "I don't want to study, I want to get married." This maxim can hardly be felt by sixth-graders who have not reached puberty: the ability to appreciate the deep connection between spiritual ("learning") and physiological ("getting married") emotions is important.

Even the word "undersized" itself is not perceived as intended by the author of the comedy. At the time of Fonvizin, this was a completely definite concept: the so-called nobles who did not receive the proper education, who were therefore forbidden to enter the service and marry. So the undersized could have been more than twenty years old. True, in the case of Fonvizin, Mitrofan Prostakov is sixteen.

With all this, it is quite true that with the advent of Fonvizinsky Mitrofanushka, the term "undergrowth" acquired a new meaning - a dunce, a dumbass, a teenager with limited vicious inclinations.

The myth of the image is more important than the truth of life. The subtle, spiritualized lyricist Fet was an efficient owner and did not write half a dozen poems for the landlord's 17 years. But we, thank God, have "Whispers, timid breathing, the trills of a nightingale ..." - and this exhausts the image of the poet, which is only fair, albeit incorrect.

Thanks to Mitrofanushka and his creator, the terminological "ignoramus" has become a common condemnatory word of school teachers, a groan of parents, a curse.

Nothing can be done about it. Although there is an easy way - to read the play.

Its plot is simple. In the family of provincial landowners Prostakovs lives their distant relative - the orphaned Sophia. The brother of Mrs. Prostakova, Taras Skotinin, and the son of the Prostakovs, Mitrofan, have marital views on Sophia. At a critical moment for the girl, when her uncle and nephew are desperately divided, another uncle appears - Starodum. He is convinced of the evil nature of the Prostakov family with the help of the progressive official Pravdin. Sophia comes to her senses and marries the man she loves - officer Milon. The estate of the Prostakovs is taken into state custody for cruel treatment of serfs. Mitrofan was sent to military service.

This way everything ends well. The enlightening happy ending is overshadowed by only one, but a very significant circumstance: the disgraced and humiliated in the finale Mitrofanushka and his parents are the only bright spot in the play.

Living, full-blooded people carrying natural emotions and common sense are Prostakovs - amid the darkness of hypocrisy, hypocrisy, officialdom.

The forces gathered around Starodum are gloomy and inert.

It is customary to refer Fonvizin to the classicism tradition. This is true, and this is evidenced by even the most superficial, at first glance noticeable details: for example, the names of the characters. Milon is handsome, Pravdin is a sincere man, Skotinin is understandable. However, upon closer examination, we will make sure that Fonvizin is a classicist only when he deals with the so-called positive characters. Here they are Walking ideas, embodied treatises on moral topics.

But the negative heroes do not fit into any classicism, despite their "speaking" names.

Fonvizin with all his might portrayed the triumph of reason, which comprehended the ideal regularity of the universe.

As always and at all times, the organizing mind confidently relied on a beneficial organized force: the punitive measures of Starodum's team were taken - Mitrofan was exiled to the soldiers, custody was taken over his parents. But when, and what justice did the terror, instituted with the noblest intentions, serve?

Ultimately, the true beingness, individual characters and the very living variety of life turned out to be stronger. It was the negative heroes of "The Nedorosl" that entered Russian sayings, acquired archetypal qualities - that is, they won, if we take into account the balance of power over the long course of Russian culture.

But that is precisely why one should pay attention to the positive heroes who won the victory in the course of the plot, but passed through indistinct shadows in our literature.

Their language is deathly terrible. In places, their monologues are reminiscent of Kafka's most exquisite horror texts. Here is Pravdin's speech: "I have a command to go around the local district; and, moreover, from my own deed of my heart, I do not leave to notice those malicious ignoramuses who, having complete power over their people, use it for evil inhumanly."

The language of the good characters of "The Little Growth" reveals the ideological value of the play much better than its deliberately preaching attitudes. Ultimately, it is clear that only such people can impose troops and curfews: “I could not beware of the first movements of my irritated curfew. The fervor did not allow me to judge that an outright loving person was jealous of deeds, and not of ranks; that ranks were often begging for, and true respect must be earned; that it is much more honest to be bypassed without guilt than granted without merit. "

The easiest way to attribute this whole linguistic freak show to the account of the era is the 18th century. But nothing comes of it, because in the same play the negative characters living next to the positive ones take the floor. And what modern music the replicas of the Prostakov family sound like! Their language is alive and fresh, it is not disturbed by the two centuries that separate us from the "Minor". Taras Skotinin, bragging about the merits of his late uncle, expresses himself as Shukshin's heroes might say: “Riding a greyhound pacer, he ran headlong into the stone gate. I would like to know if there is a learned forehead in the world that would not fall apart from such a cuff; and my uncle, his eternal memory, sobering up, asked only if the gate was intact? "

Both the positive and negative characters of "The Minor" are most vividly and expressively manifested in the discussion of the problems of education and upbringing. This is understandable: an active figure in the Enlightenment, Fonvizin, as it was then customary, paid a lot of attention to these issues. And - again the conflict.

In the play, the dry scholasticism of the retired soldier Tsifirkin and the seminarian Kuteikin collides with the common sense of the Prostakovs. A remarkable passage is when Mitrofan is given a problem: how much money would each have had if he and two comrades had found three hundred rubles? The preaching of justice and morality, which the author puts into this episode with all sarcasm, is nullified by the powerful instinct of common sense of Mrs. Prostakova. It is hard not to find an ugly, but natural logic in her simple-minded energetic protest: "He's lying, my hearty friend! He found the money, didn't share it with anyone. Take everything for yourself, Mitrofanushka. Don't study this stupid science."

An undersized stupid science, in fact, does not think. This dense youth - unlike Starodum and his entourage - has his own notions about everything, clumsy, unarticulated, but not borrowed, not jagged. Many generations of schoolchildren learn how ridiculous, stupid and absurd Mitrofan is in a math lesson. This ferocious stereotype makes it difficult to understand that the parody turned out - probably against the wishes of the author - not for ignorance, but for science, for all these rules of phonetics, morphology and syntax.

Pravdin... Door, for example, what's a noun or an adjective?
Mitrofan... Door, which door?
Pravdin... Which door! This one.
Mitrofan... This? Adjective.
Pravdin... Why is that? Mitrofan. Because it is attached to its place. Here at the closet of the pole for a week the door has not been hung yet: so that is still a noun. "

Two hundred years they laugh at the stupid stupidity, as if not noticing that he is not only witty and accurate, but also in his deep penetration into the essence of things, in the true individualization of everything that exists, in the spiritualization of the inanimate world around him - in a certain sense, the forerunner of Andrei Platonov ... And as for the way of expression - one of the founders of the whole stylistic trend of modern prose: Maramzin can write "mind of the head" or Dovlatov - "frostbitten toes and ears of the head."

The simple and intelligible truths of the negative and condemned by the Prostakov school shine against the gray cloth background of the ordinary exercises of positive characters. Even about such a delicate matter as love, these rude, uneducated people know how to speak more expressively and brighter.

Handsome Milon gets confused in spiritual confessions, as in a poorly memorized lesson: "Noble soul! .. No ... I cannot hide more than my heartfelt feeling ... No. Your virtue draws out by force all the mystery of my soul. If my heart is virtuous, if if it is to be happy, it depends on you to make it happy. " Here the confusion is not so much from excitement as from forgetfulness: Milon read something like that in the intervals between drill training - something from Fenelon, from the moralistic treatise "On the upbringing of girls."

Mrs. Prostakova has not read books at all, and her emotion is healthy and innocent: "Here you listen! Go for whoever you want, if only the person is worth it. So, my father, so. Here you just don’t need to let the suitors pass. If you have it in your eyes.” a nobleman, a small young ... Who has wealth, albeit small ... "

The entire historical and literary fault of the Prostakovs is that they do not fit into the ideology of Starodum. Not that they had any ideology of their own - God forbid. It's hard to believe in their serfdom cruelty: the plot move seems far-fetched to make the finale more convincing, and it even seems that Fonvizin convinces himself first of all. Simpleton are not evil

dei, for this they are too spontaneous anarchists, shameless oglamons, pea buffoons. They just live and, if possible, want to live as they want. Ultimately, the conflict between the Prostakovs - on the one hand, and Starodum and Pravdin - on the other, is a contradiction between ideological and individuality. Between authoritarian and free minds.

In the search for today's analogies, natural for the modern reader, the rhetorical wisdom of Starodum meets in a strange way with the didactic pathos of Solzhenitsyn. There are many similarities: from hopes for Siberia ("to the land where they get money without exchanging it for conscience" - Starodum, "Our hope and our settler" - Solzhenitsyn) to an addiction to proverbs and sayings. "From his childhood his tongue did not say yes, when his soul felt no," says what Pravdin says about Starodum Pravdin, which in two centuries will be expressed in the coined formula "to live not by a lie." The common thing is in a wary suspicious attitude towards the West: Starodum's theses could have been included in the Harvard speech without violating its ideological and stylistic integrity.

Starodum's remarkable reasoning about the West ("I am afraid of today's sages. I happened to read them everything that has been translated in Russian. True, they strongly eradicate prejudices, but root out virtue") remind of the constant urgency of this problem for Russian society. Although not much space is devoted to it in The Nedorosl itself, all of Fonvizin's work as a whole is replete with reflections on the relationship between Russia and the West. His famous letters from France are striking with a combination of the finest observations and areal abuse. Fonvizin is constantly caught up in it. He sincerely admires the Lyons textile factories, but immediately remarks: "You must hold your nose when entering Lyon." Immediately after the raptures in front of Strasbourg and the famous cathedral, there is a mandatory reminder that in this city, too, "the inhabitants are head over heels in uncleanness."

But the main thing, of course, is not in hygiene and sanitation. The main thing is the difference between the human types of Russians and Europeans. Fonvizin noted the peculiarity of communication with a Western person very gracefully. He would have used the words "alternative opinion" and "pluralism of thought" if he knew them. But Fonvizin wrote about this, and the Russian writer did not escape the extreme of these clearly positive qualities, which in Russian in a condemnatory sense is called "spinelessness" (in a commendable way it would be called "flexibility", but the praise of flexibility is not). He writes that a man of the West "if asked in the affirmative, answers: yes, and if negative about the same matter, answers: no." This is subtle and completely fair, but such, for example, words about France are rude and completely unfair: "Empty brilliance, extravagant arrogance in men, shameless obscenity in women, I really don't see anything else."

There is a feeling that Fonvizin really wanted to be Starodum. However, he was hopelessly lacking in gloom, consistency, and straightforwardness. He stubbornly fought for these merits, even was going to publish a magazine with a symbolic name - "Friend of honest people, or Starodum." His hero and ideal was Starodum.

But nothing came of it. Fonvizin's humor was too brilliant, his judgments were too independent, his characteristics were too caustic and independent, his style was too bright.

The Minor was too strong in Fonvizin to become Starodum.

He constantly strays from didactics to funny nonsense and, wishing to condemn Parisian debauchery, writes: “Whoever has recently been in Paris, the local residents are betting that when you go across it (on the New Bridge), every time a white horse will meet on it , priest and obscene woman. I purposely go to this bridge and every time I meet them. "

Starodum would never achieve such ridiculous ease. He will denounce the fall in morals with the right turns, or, what good, will actually go to the bridge to count obscene women. But such a stupid story will gladly tell a Minor. That is - that Fonvizin, who managed to never become Starodum.