What determines the national identity of Russian literature. National identity and nationality of literaturenational identity of literaturenationality of literature

Literary monuments are an important element in the culture of any civilized people. Literature reflects not only a certain historical situation, but also social consciousness and mood characteristic of this period. In addition, literature reproduces the very portrait of the people. Literature that expresses the spirit of the people is usually called "folk". However, in literary works, folk literature is often identified with national literature. But this different concepts: the first includes the work of writers of different nationalities who cover topics of national life and raise the problems of the people (which are multinational). National literature is the literature of a certain nation, which also touches on folk themes, but with an emphasis on the peculiarities of mentality.

There is also another literary gradation. The territory of any state consists of several regions that differ from each other in relief, climate, way of life, social environment, etc. Works created in one area and reflecting its uniqueness belong to regional literature.

Works on the study of national and regional literature in national science appeared relatively recently (in the last quarter XX century). At the same time, the regional aspect has been studied less theoretically than the national one. However, in the work of many writers these aspects are found, consciously or not, included in the works. The term “national literature” is broader than regional literature. Following works literary scholars(identifying “folk” and “national” literature), we will define the main features of this concept.

The main component of national literature is its reflection of the characteristics of the mentality of any ethnic group. The psychological portrait of the nation, moral standards, connection with nature - all this, one way or another, is present in works about the people as a single whole.

The historical component is also important. In the literature of any country, one can trace the attitude of society to its past directly through works of art, in particular, through the example of artistic texts.

Russian national literature has always been distinguished by humanity, philanthropy, and the victory of good over evil. Works about the people are often based on Orthodox canons. Events most often occur against the backdrop of a specific historical situation. The characters are endowed with both negative (laziness, slowness) and positive (responsiveness, generosity) traits characteristic of the Russian mentality.

National literature includes regional literature. There are several opinions regarding the last term. For example, A.N. Vlasov includes in regional literature works “created by local authors and in demand by local readers.” IN“The Literary Encyclopedia of Terms and Concepts” (2001) understands regional literature as a set of “works of writers who concentrate their attention on depicting a certain area (usually rural) and the people inhabiting it.”

In addition, literary scholars offer synonymous concepts with the term “regional literature”. So, in “Literary encyclopedic dictionary"(1987) the concept of “local color” (from the French. couleur locale ) as “reproduction in fiction of features national life, landscape, language, characteristic of a particularly specific locality or region." The same publication provides a reference to the everyday descriptive tendency of Costumbrism (from Spanish with ostumbrismo, costumbre - character, custom), which captures “the desire for the most accurate descriptions of nature, the characteristics of national life, often with the idealization of patriarchal morals and customs.” Verism (from Italian. vero - truthful). Verists, when describing the life of low-income social strata, are known to have widely used vernacular and its dialectal manifestations, which was a necessary means of illustrating the naturalistic proximity of the described phenomena and events to the realities of true human nature, not embellished by artistic means. In addition, there are the concepts of “regionalism”, “veritism”, “zonal literature”, etc.

Despite the obvious differences, these definitions form a synonymous series of regional literature, where the common feature is the geographical and social description of a particular area.

The embodiment of the national and regional aspect can be traced through the example of the book by A.P. Chekhov (1860-1904) “Sakhalin Island” (1895). Known not only in Russia, but also abroad, this work revealed to the world the Russian soul, compassionate and sympathetic. Compassion, the ability to see the pain of another - Russians national traits. In “Sakhalin Island” these qualities are shown through the author’s feelings. From the writer’s first impressions of the island and throughout the entire work, one can grasp the experiences of A.P. Chekhov about convicts, free settlers, about the island as a part of Russia, as well as about Russia itself.

The book “Sakhalin Island” reflects, first of all, the hard life of convicts and settlers, who “feel the absence of something important.” The convicts “lack a past, traditions,” they “have no customs,” “and most importantly, no homeland.” This mood is promoted by climatic conditions (“Good weather is very rare here”) and terrain features (“the coast is completely steep, with dark gorges and coal seams... a gloomy coast!”). Almost everyone who arrives on Sakhalin is guided by the phrase: “It’s better here in Russia.” This comparison creates an even greater gap between the mainland and the island, separating Sakhalin from Russia.

In Chekhov's book there is often a hidden opposition between “Russian and non-Russian”, a kind of antithesis between “Russia and Sakhalin”. This artistic technique is stated on the first pages of the work during A.P.’s visit. Chekhov Nikolaevsk. Due to the lack of a hotel in the city, the writer dined at the meeting, where he became an involuntary witness to the conversations of the visitors there. “If you listen carefully and for a long time,” A.P. concludes. Chekhov, - then, my God, how far life here is from Russia!<…>in everything you feel something of your own, not Russian <…>not to mention the original one, not Russian nature, it always seemed to me that the way of our Russian life was completely alien to the native Amurians<…>and we, visitors from Russia, seem foreigners"even" the morality here is somehow special, not ours"(Italics are ours. - T.P.) A.P. Chekhov, like other residents of central Russia, does not associate the island with the mainland as part of Russian state. For him, Sakhalin is an unknown, different land.

A.P. Chekhov often uses the combinations “on our Russian arshin”, “in our Russian villages”, “Russian field”, “Russian Tsar”, etc., drawing a parallel between Russia And non-Russian, big and small land.

However, on the island the writer also sees what makes him in common with the Russian state - faith, thanks to which people do not allow themselves to sink, overcome inhuman torment, and, having overcome them, begin to live again. Churches have been built for believers on Sakhalin. And A.P. Chekhov often mentions them: “There are several houses and a church on the shore”; "six miles from Douai<…>in the neighborhood, little by little, a residence began to grow: premises for officials and offices, a church<…>" ; “the main essence of the post is its official part: the church, the house of the head of the island, his office”; "gray wooden church"; “the church is white, old, simple and therefore beautiful architecture”, etc. As can be seen from the examples, the description of any settlement, post of A.P. Chekhov often begins by pointing out the presence or absence of a church, which indicates the importance of faith in the spiritual life of people. Let us note that representatives of various confessions and religions lived on Sakhalin (the island was and remains multinational), who, however, peacefully coexisted with each other. This is how A.P. writes about it. Chekhov: “Catholics complained to me that the priest comes very rarely, children remain unbaptized for a long time, and many parents, so that the child does not die without baptism, turn to Orthodox priest <…>When a Catholic dies, in the absence of one of his own, they invite a Russian priest to sing “Holy God.”

Having touched on the religious topic, one cannot help but mention such a feature of Sakhalin as its multinationality (which is the reason large quantity religions on the island). The rich ethnic composition of Sakhalin is due to the fact that people were sentenced to exile regardless of nationality. “The local residents,” describes A.P. Chekhov one of the villages is a disorderly rabble Russians, Poles, Finns, Georgians <…>". On the one hand, such mixing did not interfere with maintaining human relations, but, on the contrary, contributed to the assimilation of cultures; on the other hand, people did not strive to settle this land, since for everyone it was a stranger, a temporary place of residence, as people believed. “The rural residents here do not yet form societies. There are still no adult natives of Sakhalin for whom the island would be their homeland, there are very few old-timers, the majority are newcomers; the population changes every year; some arrive, others leave; and in many villages, as I have already said, the inhabitants give the impression not of a rural society, but of a random rabble. They call themselves brothers because they suffered together, but they still have little in common and are alien to each other. They do not believe the same and speak different languages. The old people despise this diversity and laughingly say that what kind of society can there be if Russians, crests, Tatars, Poles, Jews, Chukhons, Kyrgyz, Georgians, Gypsies live in the same village?...".

On Sakhalin, which A.P. saw Chekhov, there was no specific way of life, each of the settlers and convicts lived in their own way. An example of this is the description of A.P. Chekhov of Sakhalin life: “On Sakhalin you come across huts of all kinds, depending on who built it - a Siberian, a crest or a Chukhonian, but most often it is a small log house<…>without any external decoration, thatched<…>There is usually no yard. Not a single tree nearby.<…>If there are dogs, then they are lethargic, not angry.<…>And for some reason these quiet, harmless dogs are on a leash. If there is a pig, then with a block on the neck. The rooster is also tied by the leg.

Why are your dog and rooster tied? - I ask the owner.

“Everything is on a chain here on Sakhalin,” he jokes in response. “The earth is just like that.”

“Such” means different, different, alien. The reluctance of people to recognize the island as part of Russia can be explained by its purpose. Sakhalin as a place of exile at the border XIX - XX for centuries it evoked negative emotions, fear, and instilled horror in Russians. Heavy impressions contributed to the writer’s similar perception of Sakhalin nature. “From a high bank,” writes A.P. Chekhov, - stunted, diseased trees looked down; here in the open, each of them alone wages a fierce struggle with frost and cold winds, and each has to spend long periods of time in the fall and winter. scary nights, sway restlessly from side to side, bend to the ground, creak pitifully - and no one hears these complaints.” Just as natural complaints remain unanswered, so the groans of people, punished by the law and the surrounding reality, do not reach high authorities. But Chekhov’s Sakhalin residents, like trees, defend their right to life, and sometimes even to existence. The entire “Sakhalin Island” is permeated with such a depressing mood, because A.P. Sakhalin felt this way. Chekhov.

Thus, in the travel notes of A.P. Chekhov's "Sakhalin Island" can be roughly distinguished "big"(Russia) and "small"(Sakhalin) worlds, “central” and “regional” concepts, which are embodied in the following features:

1) features of the Russian mentality. A.P.’s first impressions of a different, “non-Russian” life from Nikolaevsk change. Chekhov as we learn about the real situation on Sakhalin. A.P. Chekhov sees thieves, murderers who have fallen in moral and physical sense of people. But, at the same time, a convict who is a believer, tolerant, and loves Russia is revealed to him. The writer sees on the island a unique model of the Russian state, where the church plays an important role and where representatives of different ethnic groups. This reveals such traits of the Russian person as conciliarity and tolerance;

2) historical authenticity. A.P. Chekhov in writing recorded the history of hard labor in its most active period. The book made a revolution in public consciousness, as it was created by an eyewitness to those events;

National

the specificity of literature is an anachronism

or inherent quality?

In the era of romanticism, the presence of national traditions, the national identity of each of the literatures that made up world literature was not questioned. Yes, and later - it was unlikely, say, that it could have been confused English literature from the time of Dickens or Galsworthy, French from the time of Balzac or Zola, and Russian from the time of Dostoevsky or Chekhov. But in the outgoing twentieth century, the processes of globalization of the world increasingly developed. They undoubtedly affected culture in general and literature. Already in the middle of the century, the process of mutual influence was noticeably felt even in the work of major authors. Nowadays, the question of the national specificity of literature seems to only cause a smile. Many believe that the world literary flow is now absolutely homogeneous, and its beacons and landmarks - the works of Umberto Eco, Milorad Pavic, Kingsley Amis, Joseph Michael Coetzee and others - have only qualitative, not national differences. Moreover, if in the middle of the century, with all the tangible influence that, say, the prose of Faulkner or Hemingway had on Russian authors, the realities they described still remained different and at least contributed to their originality, now the everyday realities of our lives are becoming more and more similar to global...

And yet, at the risk of seeming “out of date,” we propose to reflect on whether the national originality of literature has been preserved to this day and will be preserved in the next century? It is clear that we are mainly interested in Russian literature, its current situation and prospects. Wherein we're talking about, of course, not about external attributes; as the classic said, nationality is not in the cut of the sundress, but in the spirit of the people...

The editors approached several domestic writers, critics, and translators with this proposal.

Lev Anninsky

Global and national: who will win?

Goethe did not know the word “globalization”. However, as far as I know, he was the first to use the phrase “world literature.” So it’s tempting to assume that’s when it started. Although it started earlier. Always, at all times there was a correlation of parts human culture- despite the irregularity of direct contacts and roll calls; We are now, compiling and studying the history of “world literature”, we quite logically “read” this general history from unimaginably distant texts: something is inherent, something is hidden, something universal is present in the plan for humanity, and there is just as much as much as human culture itself.

You will say that it is and only now that direct contacts and continuous exchanges have significantly led to a “worldwide process,” to a “mainstream,” to a “general flow,” against the background of which the floundering of individual national organisms can only make an expert smile.

I will answer that the smiles will be mutual, because any strengthening of integral tendencies in culture is accompanied by strengthening of local resistance to them under any flags. The mutual opposition of opposing factors is inevitable, otherwise there will be systemic collapse.

You say: what about the Internet?! Is it possible to compare the speed of a postal nag, two hundred years ago pulling a cart of mutual translation, and today's electronic synchronous lightning, delivering right before my eyes everything that is being written at that moment on the other side of the Atlantic?

I agree that electronics, of course, are capable of delivering in a matter of moments everything that was written on the shores of the world’s literary ocean before my eyes, but my eyes cannot contain it. Communication is limited not by technical capabilities, but by the potential of the human body, which still lives not ten, but one life.

You will say: but the scale and growth of verbal self-expression at the turn of the third millennium of the Christian era is unprecedented, and this is a fact.

I will note that for every stubborn fact there is another stubborn fact, and for every growth there is a plug that will turn off the energy with a fatal preponderance of literary centrism. This entire alphabetic edge will break off and float off into the darkness of the archives, that is, people will simply stop reading. Which, by the way, is happening now.

I am able to perceive as much as I am able to process, master, appropriate. Of course, when reading Umberto Eco or Milorad Pavic, I can identify what they have in common and what goes to the “global” level, just as I can discern where is Italian and where is Yugoslav. So what? And the fact is that I will truly delve into this experience not when I relate it to certain intelligible entities, but only when I experience it as my own. That is, when it becomes my - Russian experience. When I bring it into the context of my culture.

Which one is “mine”? National, finally?

Only “finally”, not before. And endlessly clarifying this term.

National, local, local, specific, soil, immediate, grassroots accumulate - always. And he always tries to embrace it - the integral. When there is something that can be connected together, a unifying craving arises. Empires are attempts to combine motley things into one. All great cultures were created, if not on the basis of empires, then within the framework of empires.

What is being framed?

And that same local thing that rises “from below” and seeks context, in the final limit - the universal context.

The question is how to “mark” this particular and special when it enters the general flow and resists the flow. Meta is already a sign of fate, a trace of circumstances, a mark of an event, a technology of history, a notch of God. Marked confessionally. Marked socially. Marked by the state. It was anti-state, that is, party-oriented: based on interests.

Now it is being targeted - nationally.

Arguing with this is like arguing with the rain. National markings are as transitory, inevitable, real and ephemeral as everything before it. People try to define “theirs,” but it slips away.

Of course, nature can help: it will blacken the skin of some, and stretch out the noses of others. But for the noses to work, the spirit must give them meaning. And it is the spirit who must make the color of the skin a “sign”. And if the spirit doesn’t care, then the nose won’t hurt anyone. What did anyone care that Peter the Great’s artillery chief was a blackamoor: he served Russia, which means he was Russian.

Then why are these marks so tenacious?

Because there is no other “sign” of faith. The color of the skin, the shape of the nose and the pedigree of the grandparents - this is so natural, inalienable, automatically obtained, without effort!

So, in the end, it is indifferent to the spirit because it is obtained without effort! That is why the “national” does not fit into the “tribal” and does not coincide with it, because they are trying to give a material answer to a spiritual question.

It is stupid to argue and ridiculous to fight the fact that now it is “nation” that is the meta of everything concrete that opposes the globalism soaring in the virtual heights. The struggle takes place at another level - at the level of interpretation of the “nation” itself. Over there, the Ukrainian brothers have separated and are still struggling with the question of who they are: either brothers by blood, or fellow citizens, the support of a single state, regardless of what roots and tribes they come from. The nation is the undisputed leader in the current spiritual struggle between “top” and “bottom”. But the struggle between ethnicity and culture within a nation is a real and not yet resolved problem.

Ethnic can become national only at the cultural level if it turns out to be associated with all other values: state, social, world... The password here is not the voice of the blood or the composition of genes, but the cultural code. That is, a behavioral code that has found a language for itself.

Simply put, language is the password. This is the banner under which these communities gather. Language is a means of communication, a concentrate of spiritual experience, a guarantee that this experience will not be forgotten or wasted.

The example of Israel, promoted from Hebrew letters before the eyes of mankind, is uniquely and universally significant. By the purity of the experiment. And by the convincingness of the result.

Just don’t rely on this experience as a speculative-volitional task. A nation is realized only when power accumulates, and thirst intensifies, and energy seeks outlet.

You cannot create any special national culture and literature. And nothing specifically global. You can't shake anything but stardust out of this patented globalism. But you can’t squeeze the national out of the ethnic, even if you write the word “Russian” with two “r”s and three “s”.

We must live by what we have in reality and in spirit. History will decide where to fit it: into society, into a nation, into space, into an ethnic group...

If, of course, there is SOMETHING to enter.

Georgy Gachev

Will national literatures be preserved in the future?

This question also contains sub-questions: what is meant by literature? what is the fate of national worlds? in what future: near, distant?

But in general: why did it arise? general question? Obviously, from the involvement of countries and peoples and their cultures in the process of a single world history and civilization that connects everyone: they mutually nourish, level, but also diversify. Everyone began to read everyone: the Japanese - the Mexicans - and influence. But for what? On the authors, their individual manners: some are closer to Proust, some - Marquez, some - Solzhenitsyn... So, despite the fact that the single field of each national literature is blurred, unified with world literature, there is a diversity of writers and creative individuals in it.

But this is the result when already produced works enter the world literature market. But where do they come from? From springs, no less. Like the waters of the great rivers - the Volga or the Amazon of national literature, and then the world ocean, where everything and everyone mixes - from the springs of beating, pulsating hearts.

A genus-nickname on genus-otherwise, it is presupposed by: place, root and vertical Earth - Sky, transiting through the heart - “I” of the creative vessel. And here the native language, like a mother’s womb, is the prototype in a person’s utterance (at first); and then - a writer. Muttersprache = “mother tongue”, “mother tongue” - this is how the native language is called in German. He is the natural, or natural, Logos (God the Word, as spirit and mind), in contrast to the artificial, “created” (for “created”, “unborn”) Logos of world civilization acquired through education. The latter comes, swoops in from the horizontal surface of the Earth, where there are different cardinal directions, countries, societies, societies.

And so the person who resorts to the Word, the “writer,” immediately finds himself in the field of superpersonal energies: Vertical Earth-Sky, Mother (I) - Spirit (Father, masculine), passing like an axis through “I,” my soul. In this aspect, man = plant. The horizontal of world civilization and world literature, where the Spirit, as a “free son of the ether,” flies and “breathes where it wants.” And - Shar, the integrity of a given country and its history, culture, destiny. Life flows here, and man is an animal, a self-moving being. And all these three (at least) forces-tendencies pull in their directions: they push, but also feed and shape the individuality of the creator.

Why do they write? “Writer” - that’s what they’ll call you later. But first, you begin to wail like a bird at dawn - morning or evening (a person suddenly begins to write memoirs in old age, like confessing the day before...). Pour out your soul. The word for this is the closest material, the instrument: the voice-logos.

11.7.2000. The Word, Language is not the property of fiction, but everything. On its territory, everyday speech, philosophy, science, religion, politics are discussed... In the space of the Russian language, besides the Russians, there are the Kyrgyz Aitmatov, the Kazakh Suleimenov, the Chukchi Rytheu... What kind of literature do they write: Kyrgyz? Kazakh? Chukchi?.. They expressed the life, soul and destiny of the Kyrgyz, Chukchi people... - but they nourished Russian literature, enriched it, and diminished their relatives, they became emaciated due to the flight of their talents into a foreign language.

Or now - in Israel, emigrants from Russia write in Russian: Igor Guberman, Dina Rubina and many... So what do they write? Jewish literature in Russian?.. Or - general human literature in Russian? For as individuals, individual “I”s resort to the Russian Word-Logos as native to them, natural, although you cannot say about them what “with mother’s milk” entered into them, for the blood and flesh in them is not Russian...

In such authors there is a dialogue between Logos and Ethnos, and in the force field of tension between them - creativity, plots, problems, originality are formed - and a unique contribution to world literature. To its market-bazaar... Personal versions of the Logos are brought there, for books are written individually. But they also consume individually: the reader is alone with his eyes, as he eats with his mouth. As an individual inside the human race, Kyrgyz, Jewish... Vertical-radius inside the ball... At the level of personalities, “I”, there is a meeting between the writer and the reader. One-on-one... T
to te-a -t to te.
Here - as in a complex sentence: a word, each element is subordinate different levels: voice as a Personality, as the voice of the People, as the Logos of Humanity. Both are heard and expressed in him.

So: will national paint disappear in the painting of future literature? - that is the question. With the dynamism of modern civilization, with accelerating communication and travel, everything is so mixed up, a certain universal lubricant is formed both in souls and in sayings.

Fast life entails faster speech. Listen to how quickly informants try to pronounce words on radio and television! Like machine gun fire or the cursive writing of a typist or on a computer. The word is a means of information, not thoughts and feelings - more and more. And if this is possible without a word, then it’s better: a direct image or a formula number... The lexicon is simplified...

The virtual style of modern civilization: cinema, television, all sorts of “videos”... - detract from the space and time for reading: there is less and less need for it... a ready-made image of even literary characters (in film adaptations) directly pours into you: Pierre Bezukhov, the Prince Myshkin - without you generating and imagining them from yourself through the internal work of your productive imagination, as is the case when reading, when you first have to understand the meaning of words with your mind, then build from them these air-spiritual castles in the Logos, God the Word. That is, by exercising this divine substance within oneself... The visual style of communication atrophies it, replacing it with “lust of hair,” flattening a person, clogging up the inner man, the volume of the soul. Collapse inside.

So the fate of literature is connected with the fate of the personality in man, with the inner life of his “I”. For an Americanized individual, in the race for success, indulging in inner life is a waste of time, which = money. And this type of person is a leader in modern civilization, which leads to unification and entropy-equalization - of people, souls, languages, and countries-peoples.

Therefore, for the sake of its self-preservation, fiction is interested in ensuring that nations and languages, motherland, traditions and special destinies, histories, paths, souls of countries do not melt away. For a person to stop, think, remain in silence and meditation, and appreciate the time devoted to this. And this is all in the past style of human existence. Therefore, it is natural for us writers to be conservatives - now. And we have two supports - Nature and Personality, its need for inner life, to directly connect with God the Word. And the “words, words, words” of national literatures are intermediaries and accomplices of this. Like spirits with the Spirit. Angels are “messengers” under God the Spirit. But demons are also spirits...

So the problem remains. After all, just as those who understand (friends and spouses) communicate with souls without words, so the holy silent ones, bypassing “words, words, words,” dwell in the Word.

Fiction, it turns out, is an intermediate state-type in the Word-Logos. Both religion and modern civilization are arrogant towards it, from different sides they crush it and abolish it. Just as high religions abolish peoples (“there is no Greek and Jew” in Christ,” or as in “Doctor Zhivago” it is understood: with Christianity, peoples ceased to be significant, but only individuals), so modern industrial civilization has the vector of abolishing Priroda, replacing artificial products of Labor, and with it peoples, while words are signs, ideograms. The word is too bodily, carnal, material: it sounds, sensually, rolls in the throat, you can taste it, enjoy it, pronouncing it - with your lips, with your tongue, copulating with it, caressing the sound... And God as pure Spirit, and abstract mind-mind Sciences and Technologies - meet in the Noo-sphere, bypassing the “words, words, words” of fiction, leaving it somewhere below, like a rudiment and plusquaperfect.

So - what will happen, “what will happen in life with me?” - God knows.

However, there is still hope - the Incarnation: that “the Word became flesh.” That God the Spirit needed to incarnate into matter in order for Life to take place in the fullness of Being. The sensuality (aka nationality) of the word of fiction has the same rights as the God-man, the unity of Spirit and Nature, art and nature.

Victor Golyshev

The question is about erasing national boundaries in literature? In my opinion, it's premature. It is better to make such generalizations from some distance. It is too early to talk about erasing borders in a century marked by outbreaks of nationalism - National Socialism, attempts to exterminate entire peoples, national liberation struggles, and the collapse of empires. It seems to me that such a legacy cannot be quickly forgotten. But I would prefer to use examples.

Social experiences in different countries were so different that even first-class writers did not cross national borders. Platonov did not become a world writer not because he cannot be translated, but because his civic experience is incomprehensible to Westerners (and, probably, to Southeasterners). Artem Vesely, whose talent was definitely not inferior to Dos Passos, is known, it seems, only to Slavists.

On the other hand, Solzhenitsyn is an active and world-famous writer. The Swiss could not write his books. He owes his world fame, of course, to his talent and the scale of the task - but also to the fact that there was a Soviet Union, and our horror and our strength became clearer to humanity after the war. That is, the boundaries are again present - and, as they called it, “bristle”.

They say that realities are being unified. Consumer goods are being unified (this has always been the case), including politics. The main realities - the history of the country, way of life, children's fairy tales, topography - are not unified.

Moreover, the US “melting pot” is moving toward “multiculturalism,” and the results of this process still have to wait. I can only guess about what is happening in our former units.

As for the literary flow, although this is more of a sociological subject, here too, avoiding generalizations, I would make do with two or three examples. Our postmodernists, filling their works with socialist realism with the opposite sign and generally second-hand domestic artistic material, protected themselves from the wide-open eyes of foreign countries. In second-rate American literature I have noticed a tendency to name things not by their purpose - a shirt, a pen, a table - but by their brands: induced fetishism. Like: “I ate Mikoyan sausage” - I imagine how an honest colleague-translator is looking for cannibalistic background. So many meaningful shades are lost.

On the other hand, there are writers who work for export, say, due to the limited availability of their genius, the smallness of their native audience and, consequently, their fee expectations. Their universal humanity is banal, their language is flat. There are, of course, transnational writers like Pavic and Eco—there are always plenty of readers willing to kill a literary goat.

Another case, separate from the previous ones. Pelevin, who understands technology and has a good grasp of the English language, is considered by many critics to be one of these globalized pop writers. But in none of the foreign authors have I encountered exactly the kind of special melancholy that permeates his books. And here there is ambiguity with these boundaries.

In short, I don’t see the whole picture. Something else is visible. The first half of the century (a little more) produced writers who crossed boundaries. The only thing that gives away a Scandinavian in Hamsun is his (external) temperament. Who is Kafka - German, Jew, Czech? A lonely, unfortunate soul does not belong to Austria-Hungary alone. What interested us more about Faulkner—cotton, mules, or what he thought about the human condition? Now there are no rulers of thoughts, and Faulkner, by the way, the further, the less he says to today's Americans. Is this not due to the retreat of literature before visual matters, symbolism of a lower order, sprint thinking? This topic seems more important to me.

Yuri Kublanovsky

Despite all the globalization of the world in the 60-90s, I can’t say - using the example of Russian literature - that I see a sharp increase in the “mutual influence” of literatures. There is no need to say how the Anglo-Saxons and continental Europeans influenced our writers from the Golden Age to the Silver Age: all our literature is imbued with them through and through - the French, the English, the Germans, and later the Scandinavians. Our writers freely drew from there everything they needed, everything that appealed to them and was dear to them - and at the same time organically preserved their national physiognomy. Our literature, like Akhmatova’s, “true tenderness cannot be confused with anything,” and thank God.

What about overseas literature? What an original power, its own epic, dramaturgy, its own great style, its own national psychology, with the unconditional influence of both Europeans and Russians. Literatures “interpenetrated”, maintaining their originality; any high-level creative world is ambivalent: in its ultimate perfection it is a child of both the national spirit and humanity as a whole, because culture is unity in diversity. It cannot but be national, if only because of the language and its secrets, which are not rented to foreigners. This is especially true in relation to poetry, where language is fully involved, not only linguistically, but also spiritually. The fact that we now have poets who seem to directly orient their texts interlinearly is more likely an indication of their weakness and career advancement than of a serious cultural trend. Language is not an autonomous and fully masterable area, but a derivative of the national spirit and history. Accordingly, poetry cannot but be national.

Here they will bring me - as an objection - Nabokov and Brodsky. I can’t help myself: I don’t like Nabokov’s novels written in English. The exception is “Lolita,” but the writer, as you know, translated this book himself and thereby warmed it with the warmth of his Russian skill. And let those who are interested read his gigantic charade novels in English.

Brodsky cannot be called a Russian poetic genius, although he is obviously the largest Russian poet of the post-war period. Domestic - without the Fatherland. But here, for me, is just the exception that confirms the rule. His creative psychology is largely a product of our nonconformist cultural aspirations of the 50s and 60s, which, over the swamp of socialist realism, tried - and, as we now see, not unsuccessfully - to return to civilization. In general, in Brodsky, judging by his interviews and essays, real “idolatry” of language bizarrely coexisted with “cosmopolitanism”; At the same time, to be honest, I don’t quite understand what he actually meant by “language,” deifying and secularizing it at once.

But still, the “globalization” of literature is really evident. Like piranha fish, gifted authors who write “internationally” are multiplying in the world - true evidence of the cultural entropy of civilization. In its own way, this literature is very ideological. No less ideological than socialist realism was. It gives food to the mind and heart of the consumer of a market civilization, averaging the demands of his spirit and dulling ideological vigilance. Ultimately, such literature is the tip of a giant iceberg of mass culture and show business, the cultural commercial industry. There are more and more writers who can live anywhere and write about anything, and preferably in English. But in the good old days, even nomadic writers like Gogol, living in a foreign land, remained creatively and “sacredly” in their homeland.

Russian classical literature, for example, is not just an aesthetic phenomenon, but also a reason for mobilizing the cultural and moral capabilities of the reader, in this sense - this is how its creators basically understood it, after all - it is a compelling “reason” to think O the main thing, step towards him. Russian writers - walking through all the horrors of existence and non-existence, through Svidrigailov's bathhouses with spiders or the Gulag archipelagos - worked on Creator, obliging the reader to do better, understanding, in the words of Baratynsky, his gift as a task over. The work of our great prose writers and poets - with all the diversity of ideas and styles - did not allow ambiguity and “ontological” damage.

Today's globalist writers work with the consumer in mind. And they seem to be seriously convinced that the future is theirs. Is it so? I'm not convinced of this. An expensive civilization, part of the ideological support of which, I repeat, is the creativity of the globalists, is a transitory thing, rooted in exploitation natural resources and biosphere. Sooner or later, but very soon, life on earth will either completely degrade and die - or market ideology will have to be “repurposed” from stimulating consumption to self-restraint.

This cannot be done without the support of talented and high-quality people; humanity will need new moral and spiritual resources to survive. (Writers, on the other hand, are globalists - despite their outward gloss - as a rule, they are sort of arithmetic mean averages, completely bound by the current cultural and everyday situation.) A qualitatively new and conscientious cultural resource will also be in demand. But the new is the well-forgotten old. Thus, traditional values will regain their meaning; The national identity of literature is one of them.

I am especially worried about our poetry. Under the communists, it seemed to all of us - both Soviet poets and samizdators - that nothing threatened poetry here in Russia, anywhere, but here, just tear off the totalitarian muzzle and a hundred flowers would bloom. Now we understand that poetry is a fragile, aristocratic thing, easily washed out of the civilized cultural layer... A poetic ear is first innate, and then developed. And it turns out that there are catastrophically few people with such an innate poetic ear. Russian verse, at once simple and mysterious, perfect and raw, has a rather subtle “spiritual organization” - one cannot allow it to be captured by stylizers and jokers, alien to the Russian precepts, dumbing down everything and everyone.

And fiction as a whole should not be left for final plunder by globalist marauders, but should remain what it was in its heyday: a spiritual and aesthetic school that nourishes people. Needless to say, this should not be an external, even the most noble, “task”: the given literature is inferior literature. But - to grow organically in the soul and creative world of a Russian writer. I would dream that our literature would not breed demons, but would contribute to their speedy expulsion - from the body of Russia, exhausted to the limit.

Understand correctly: this, I repeat, is by no means an ideological orientation task. This is the task of artistry as such.

Valentin Kurbatov

In your own words

Apparently, everything, as usually happens with us, depends on which foot to stand on and where to think about the proposed subject. Within the walls of the Library of Foreign Literature or in an editorial office in the middle of Moscow, some names will seem unconditional, but in a village corner of a distant Russian province - completely different ones. And, thank God, both will be right with their truth.

Of course, those in the capital are louder and more inventive in their means, and therefore it may seem that national literature is really over. They are more widely circulated in magazines and not on the Internet. last place, and we know better in the markets. Even if you take not street stalls, which you can’t even look at without dizziness and shame, but elite bookstores, where the “literary process” is reflected in the tall mirrors of thoughtful thought.

There will be many wonderful Russian books of literary heritage, there will be a succession of classics of Russian literature, there religious thought will put us to shame with its heights that we have not assimilated, there will be a place for good editions of current Russian poetry and prose of a strong traditional leaven, but they will already be equalized, and then they are pushed aside by the great world and European philosophical thought, classical and modern Western literature, to which the home-disdainful literature of the current emigration and latest books local legislators - V. Pelevin, L. Petrushevskaya, S. Gandlevsky, A. Kim, A. Slapovsky, D. Prigov, V. Sorokin.

“House of Oblonsky”...

What kind of “national literature” is there! Everything is fluid, fused, everything looks back at each other and imperiously affirms “all-unity and all-humanity” - alas, not at all of the Dostoevsky quality. Even if we take only this literature of today’s talkative emigration, which we equally, if not without servility, introduce into the everyday life of the local literary process. One will inevitably wonder whether it is being deliberately introduced into this use, whether it is not with a well-thought-out intention to dissolve the “interfering” boundaries of the spiritual Fatherland, make them indistinct, and finally bring the Russian person out into the open spaces of “just a person.”

Maybe that's true. In addition, a Russian person sometimes likes to have a complex that he is “behind the times,” and a writer, especially one of the young people from Moscow and St. Petersburg, will fuss, start “mowing” under the European form and dandyish abstraction of thought - fortunately, the Russian language is internally mobile and limitless in possibilities, which is why sometimes It deceptively seems that our ecos, kunderas, pavicis or borges are not inferior to the originals in depth, in play, in freedom. So maybe this “nationality” really is.

But this is not the whole truth. Of course, we won’t have a new one anymore.” village literature”, which was the last holistic national phenomenon (which is why intellectuals and “simpletons” read it with the same feeling of love and unity), but it’s too early to close the curtain. It is enough to look at the provincial magazines of Russia - “Russian Province”, “Gornitsa”, “North”, “Kulikovo Pole”, “Rise”, “Volga”, “Gostiny Dvor”, “Siberia”, to see that everything goes on as usual and the native muse does not forget her children and does not rush for a fashion magazine. It even seems, on the contrary, that we are just beginning to listen to our tradition and comprehend it, peering into the past, into the history of noble and peasant families, into our native past with the passion of not at all abstract intellectual curiosity.

It is enough to look at the all-Russian peaks - the novels of D. Balashov, V. Lichutin, V. Bakhrevsky, L. Borodin, but they do not appear in an open field, but on the living soil of universal interest in their cradle.

And are there really only historical novels? And, for example, “Dictionary of the expansion of the Russian language” by A.I. Solzhenitsyn - what is this? And this is a sign of surprise at what Russian literature has produced in the last decades of its seemingly dead existence, because the words are most often taken from the books of that unfortunate time.

And the bitter and at the same time calmly confident prose of B. Ekimov, A. Varlamov, P. Krasnov, and the returning Orthodox branch of our culture, seizing on the faded Leskovsky or Shmelevsky tradition, is in the stories of N. Konyaev and father Yaroslav Shipov, in the stunning poems of his father Vyacheslav Shaposhnikov?

No, you can’t use names here. Not all of them are visible, but, like small Russian rivers, they flow through their native forests and valleys and gather villages and small towns along the way, and there is no exhaustion for them. Only before, the rivers of both literature flowed into a single sea, but now they flow in different directions and their waters do not mix.

Sorry for the incorrect parallel. Before the Second Vatican Council, the Papal Throne was confident in the universality of Catholicism and its inevitable victory, and after the Council, having heard life-giving truth and equal depth in the Orthodox Liturgy and exile Russian religious thought, it spoke of “light from the East” and “unity in diversity”, asserting that in the Lord's garden Copts are beautiful precisely as Copts, Orthodox as Orthodox, Protestants as Protestants, and in this diversity they are shades of the one truth of Christ. It turned out that the universality of a single faith in a forced understanding is not only not necessary, but also undesirable, because then it would not be a garden, but a collective farm field.

So in literature, I think we will soon realize that the global trends towards globalization are the destruction of the Lord’s Face, the living individual national answer to universal questions, and we will hear the old, but still youthfully fresh and life-giving truth for a long time to come - unity in diversity, if only the basis of this unity really was the Lord’s Face, and we will proudly give our best strength to his own which will be a sign of love and memory of universal.

Pskov

Alexander Ebanoidze

About national identity - with a smile

The question of the national specificity of literature makes me smile, but, it seems, not at all the one that is implied in the preamble of our correspondence discussion.

I still remember the overwhelmingly strong and fresh impression of my first acquaintance with the epics and fairy tales of different peoples: for me, Georgian fairy tales smelled of an old oak wine press filled with corn stover, and in Russian tales a cool, lily-of-the-valley freshness shimmered and the Easter gospel was spreading somewhere far away. In folklore, national specificity is expressed with impeccable taste - with minimal means, but so strongly that it is impressive even in translations. For the rest of my life, the expanses of the Kyrgyz highlands, blown by the May poppy wind, and the felt stuffiness of “Manas” have remained mine; excess sun in the bazaars of Baghdad and Damascus with hot sand on the teeth and in the folds of clothing; wet cobblestones of the Bremen pavement under roughly padded shoes and the strained creaking of an old windmill, reeking of flour and mice...

All this could be explained by childhood impressionability, if not for a discovery made decades later: finding myself in countries that I had read about in adapted editions of “The Arabian Nights” or from the Brothers Grimm, I was surprised to discover that I knew them, I knew for a long time and, I would say, intimately - the rhythm and pace of life, voices and sounds, smells and tastes and that elusively common thing that scientists call mentality.

Works of fiction have the same property (to enrich the life experience of the reader, to increase it tenfold not only morally and aesthetically, but also in the sense of physical cognition). This time, instead of my impressions, I will refer to Hemingway and Henry James, who spoke about Tolstoy’s “Cossacks” and Turgenev’s prose. Thank God, there are many examples, including chronologically close ones, and each of us has our own.

Even within the memory of the previous generation, the world was large and diverse, and literature played far from playing a role in its exploration and recognition. last role. The function of identifying national identity and presenting it to the world was subconsciously part of the writer’s task, accompanied it, and was the most organic property of literature. In a transformed form, it seems that it will forever remain inherent in it, since literature is inseparable from language. There is no national literature outside the national language; in a certain sense, it is a product of language, its deeply wise child, and as such carries within itself the genetic code, symbols and signs of national ancestral memory. Therefore, even in the most abstract, sophisticated and “advanced” works of the newest “masters of thought” it cannot but be reflected (at least in the general “sound” or intonation) Italian temperament Umberto Eco, the Slavic flourish of Milorad Pavic, the English sarcasm of Kingsley Amis. (Isn’t this the same K. Amis who made his debut in the early 60s with the novel “Lucky Jim”? If in connection with him a question arose about national specifics, which means that over the past years it has changed a lot.)

Here it is appropriate to recall the famous cycle of parables by Erlom Akhvlediani “Vano and Niko”, written in the late 50s and far ahead of their time. These parables (“the miracle of stylelessness,” in the words of A. Bitov) are “inexpressible, elusive, but deeply national, like a line in an ornament.” Strong reinforcement of my thought: it turns out that even the miracle of stylelessness can be deeply national!

However, one cannot fail to recognize what was stated in the preamble of the discussion in our conference room: the processes of globalization are developing increasingly; they have affected not only literature, but also its basis - language. Gradually and steadily, borders are blurred, national identity is leveled. Remaining in the same physical parameters, the world has become smaller due to an increase in speeds - the speed of movement, the transfer of information, its absorption, etc. Globalization is a fait accompli; the process, as they say, has begun and is in full swing. Therefore, it is appropriate to discuss not the causes of globalization, but to think about its consequences.

First of all, is this a positive process?

Not in everything. For literature, it can even turn out to be disastrous due to the selectivity, isolation, and slowness that is organically inherent in our work.

“The idea of speed has been combined with the idea of progress without any reason... One should ask oneself, is progress so understood evidence that our era is lower than the centuries of ignorance, which left us imperishable monuments of their patience, from which reason and knowledge were born?” This statement by Guillaume Apollinaire almost a century ago is a hundred times more relevant today. I will illustrate it with an example from urban planning: the wonderful difference between Samarkand, Ravenna and Suzdal is a product of the slow “centuries of ignorance”, without which we would see nothing but Chicago around us.

If the cause of globalization, so to speak, its “material base” was technological progress, then the form of its manifestation in literature was its increasing complexity and sophistication, the exposure of “frameworks,” the strengthening of conventions and the playful element. Many people call this intellectualization. I don’t think the term is accurate, since it is unlikely that the bestselling authors named in the editorial introduction are more intellectual than Stendhal, Dostoevsky and Mann. Rather, their books reflect certain compensatory efforts caused by the roots drying out and being pulled away from the soil.

It should also be noted that Western literature, where the element of convention and intellectual play has always been strong (“ The Divine Comedy”, “Don Quixote”, “Faust”), it is easier to get used to the new psychological climate of the era. That is why it is from the West that impulses of renewal and fashionable fads come. But despite all the similarities, worldwide affinity and globalization, differences remain: if in the West a wonderful writer has long been defined as a “virtuoso of the pen,” then in Russia they look for and value completely different qualities and properties:

When a line is dictated by a feeling,

It sends a slave onto the stage.

And this is where the art ends,

And the soil and fate breathe.

Needless to say, the dictates of feeling almost exclude intellectualization, and where the soil “breathes,” national specificity is certainly present.

I’ll make a reservation: the perception of a new situation, or rather, new trend both in Russia and in other literatures it is twofold; writing is such a piecemeal, individual matter that everyone solves the dilemma on their own, at their desk. (Nowadays, it seems, we should say - at your computer). There are centuries that do not feel the breath, there are those caught up in the fad and even running ahead of it, and there are carefully instilling tendencies towards national traditions. If we think about it and remember, we will see that the latter are the most significant and productive. An example is the South American and South Slavic rootstock in world literature. As for me, I would gladly refer to the Georgian - Otar Chkheidze, Chabua Amirejibi, Otar Chiladze, Guram Dochanashvili. In Russia, two small things seem to be a brilliant success in this sense - the old poem by Erofeev and the recent story by Vladislav Otroshenko “The Court of Great-Grandfather Grisha”. However, perhaps what I called a successful rootstock, the fruit of grafting, would be more accurately defined as the product of the resistance of a strong national tradition to the process of globalization. But this is a big topic that can only be outlined in a short statement.

In general, it seems that literature intuitively guesses the danger that lurks for it in the process of globalization and is looking for a strategy for confrontation. The confrontation is as obligatory and inevitable as it is, apparently, hopeless.

One can only hope that the evening dawn of literature will be as beautiful as its dawn and blooming afternoon were.

Without a variety of colors, subtle, but deeply national, such beauty is unthinkable.

Mikhail Epshtein

About the future of the language

National features of literature will disappear - and return at the meta level: play, nostalgia, irony, irrevocability and irrevocability. National identity will become a matter of taste, style, and aesthetic choice. What style do you work in? - “Metallic-Russian”, “virtually-Russian”, “metareal-Russian”, “Indo-European-Russian”, etc. Americans, preoccupied with the search for identity, add the nationalities of their distant ancestors to their self-name: “Italian-American”, “German-American”, “Irish-American”, etc. Perhaps, over time, a proud “Russian-Russian” will appear along with “Tatar-Russian”, “Euro-Russian”... The fate of literature depends on the fate of the language: will it remain Russian or, after several centuries, will it be Latinized according to the alphabet, or in vocabulary, or even in grammar, it will merge into the world language, composed, most likely, on the basis of English and Spanish. The Latinization of the Russian alphabet is a frightening prospect, but quite tangible by the end of our new century, at least for non-fiction literature. Standards of written communication, norms of intelligibility are set by electronic means of communication, and the Cyrillic alphabet is not only a small island in a sea of electronic letters, it has also split itself into several encodings, which is why many Russians correspond in Latin. This period of “new feudal” fragmentation is unlikely to pass without serious consequences for the Cyrillic alphabet: the Latin alphabet is beginning to supplant it even among Russian speakers. Even Serbs, who have special reasons for not liking the Latin alphabet, are gradually switching to it. So, perhaps, in a hundred years, the Cyrillic alphabet will remain precisely the alphabet of artistic writing, a distinctive aesthetic feature, although at the same time there will also appear works created in the “living”, colloquial and business Latin alphabet (as Dante moved from literary Latin to a living, albeit “vulgar” , Italian and became one of the founders of modern European literatures). The Latin version of Russian will begin to be aestheticized, an additional possibility of multi-valued play with words of other languages will appear... I say this with horror, but I imagine the inevitability of such a turn of things.

Another way of developing the Russian language is also possible - not through borrowing (of the alphabet, vocabulary), but through the development of the Indo-European root system, which Slavic languages share with Romance and Germanic languages. Perhaps, on the basis of Russian, a language will be built in relation to which modern Russian will be only a special case. Of the 500 words starting with “love” that will be in the language, today’s Russian only has one tenth. This is not just filling in the gaps, but recreating that linguistic volume, the verbal space that will cover both Russian and other Indo-European languages. Re-consciousness and re-creation of the Indo-European basis of modern languages, but no longer as an ancestral basis, but as a conceivable and “suggested” future - this is one of the possibilities for the “progressive return” of Russian to the world language family. It seems to me that the future world language should not be pan-English or pan-Spanish, but new Indo-European - it should restore those forms of root, lexical, grammatical community that all Indo-European languages had at the source of their development and differentiation. Perhaps, before the transition from living languages to machine ones, the time has come to develop to the end, to project in all conceivable directions the “root-crown” system of the Russian language, to embrace the tree of language development as a single whole, from the currently visible branches - not only to the Indo- European roots, but also to those crowns over which he will soon fly artificial intelligence, completely breaking away from the national-historical soil of linguistics.

I am trying to participate in this process with my project “The Gift of the Word,” which proposes alternative, expansive models of word formation: the oldest Indo-European roots begin to turn in the soil of the Russian language, re-grow and branch, and thereby intertwine with other languages of the Indo-European family.

Who am I based on my cultural roots? Yes, the same one in terms of language: Indo-European. Not a Westerner and not an Easterner, not a Russian, not an American, not a Jew - these are all more specific characteristics that are necessary, but not sufficient. All these cultures have a common Indo-European heritage, which is preserved primarily - and almost exclusively - in languages (partly in myths and archetypes). And this means that as humanity unites and a common language is developed, Indo-European roots will begin to be revealed anew in the converging perspective of different languages. Now, perhaps, a grandiose reform of the Russian language is brewing: not a horizontal entry into modernity, through borrowing, imitation - but vertically: not anglicization, not Europeanization, but Indo-Europeanization, i.e. ascent to the original roots, and through them - to generally understood derivatives, with clear Indo-European roots and branches. For us Russian speakers who have spread all over the world: Russians, Americans, Israelis, Australians, Canadians, Germans, language is the only common heritage. It is in vain to look for commonality on some political platforms or in cultural programs - here we are divided by age, upbringing, place of residence, tastes, etc. But we have one language, a sign system that has shaped our thinking, a cultural gene pool, and, therefore, the primary concern and point of convergence is not to let the language die out and fade away.

Today's Russian is “withering on the vine.” The most alarming thing is that the roots of the Russian language in the 20th century slowed down and even stopped growing, and many branches were cut down. A general look at the state of the language brings a sad picture: several scattered branches stick out from the deep, primordial roots, and not only does no further branching occur, but, on the contrary, the branches fall, and the word forest becomes bald. Dahl contains about 150 words in the root nest “-love-”, from “to love” to “lovingly generous”, from “lyubushka” to “fornication” (this does not include prefixes). The four-volume Academic Dictionary of 1982 contains 41 words. It turns out that for a hundred years the root “lyub” not only did not produce growth or new branches, but, on the contrary, began to sharply wither and lose its crown. Dalev's words cannot be restored in the language, because many are associated with a circle of outdated, local meanings, Church Slavonicisms, etc.; but in a living language, the roots must grow, branch, and bring new words. It is significant that Solzhenitsyn, who is trying to expand the modern Russian language by introducing words from the Dalevsky dictionary, was forced to thin out not only the composition of words in his selection, but also to shorten their interpretations and narrow their meanings (see my article “The Word as a Work. On the One-Word Genre” , “New World”, No. 9, 2000). All dictionaries of the Russian language of the Soviet era contain a total of 125 thousand words - this is very little for a developed language, especially with a huge literary past and potential. Moreover, a significant part of this fund consists of monotonous and rarely used suffix formations such as “sudbinushka, spinushka, perinushka, detinushka, kalinushka, dolinushka, bylinushka...”. Almost 300 words of only feminine gender with the suffix “ushk” were included by the compilers in the seventeen-volume Great Academic Dictionary (1960s) to represent the development and richness of the language; and meanwhile, many meaningful branches from truly prolific, meaningful roots have dropped out of the language.

The same thing happens to language as to population. The population of Russia is almost three times less than what it should have been according to demographic estimates at the beginning of the 20th century. And it’s not just a matter of population decline, but also a shortage of crops. 60 or 70 million died as a result of historical experiments and disasters, but twice as many of those who could have been born, demographically, should have been born, were not born, their social environment did not accept them from those genetic depths from which they were eager to be born. This is how it is in the Russian language: not only is there a decline, but also a shortage of food. Dead words can hardly be completely resurrected, although Solzhenitsyn’s attempt deserves great respect; rather, new words need to be born, not from scratch, but grown from ancient roots in accordance with semantic needs.

I said almost nothing about literature - but now it is clearer than ever that literature in the narrow sense of the word is not writing in general, but artistic literature- there is only one of the ways and even one of the stages in the life of a language. As national as the language is, literature will be as national.

Significant changes in the content and forms of Russian fiction, marking its transition to a new stage of historical development, took place already in the 1840s. The country was dominated by an atmosphere of heavy government reaction. Literature and journalism were under unbearable censorship. But the profound changes that emerged in the depths of Russian society intensified social thought and aroused new ideological interests. By the mid-1840s, a certain social upsurge was again emerging in the country, and literary life was reviving.

Much more clearly and sharply than in the 1830s, two camps opposed each other in literature and criticism: progressive and conservative. In each of them, young writers and critics appeared who sought to express new social ideas. Both sides put forward new views on the tasks and essence artistic creativity. New literary trends were clearly taking shape in Russian literature.

The progressive literary movement, in which a whole group of new, young talented writers gradually united, continued the traditions of Russian realism of 1820-1830. – traditions of realistic creativity of Pushkin, Lermontov and especially Gogol. Back in the 1830s, Gogol’s work was highly appreciated by Belinsky, who even then saw in Gogol the “head” of Russian literature, a writer who took the place left by Pushkin.

At the beginning of the 1840s, Belinsky entered a new period of ideological development. He sought to influence new progressive writers with his articles, demanding from their work “fidelity to reality,” to the traditions of Gogol’s realism. Soon Belinsky began to call them the “Gogol school” in Russian literature, and then also the “natural school”.

The most important aspect of the creativity of the writers of this school was the sharply increased interest in the moral and everyday relations of the life of urban, democratic strata of the population to the inner world of their representatives, the desire to show and protect their moral dignity. By the mid-1840s, in the work of the nipples of the new school, the depiction of disadvantaged people in their everyday life became one of the important tasks of fiction. Writers portrayed the urban poor doomed to an abnormal existence, and contrasted their deprivation with the brilliant and prosperous life of the privileged strata of society. Of the writers of the older generation, Gogol came closest to such an understanding of life in “The Overcoat,” published just three years before the “natural school” took shape. And Dostoevsky had every reason to subsequently say about himself and other representatives of this school: “We all came out of Gogol’s “The Overcoat.”

Soon, progressive literature of the 1840s began to depict the serf peasantry from the same positions. This topic was not new in Russian literature. But there was essentially no realistic depiction of everyday life and the inner world of the peasantry before the 1840s.

Writers of the new school showed the life of the people in the irreconcilable social contradictions that define it. At the same time, they revealed not only the suffering of the peasants under the rule of the landowners, but also those internal riches, those inclinations human development, which lurked in people doomed by serfdom to downtroddenness and underdevelopment.

Advanced writers of the 1840s followed Gogol in the very principles of depicting life. One of Gogol’s most important aesthetic achievements was the awareness of life in its social and everyday characteristics and the use of many portrait, everyday and speech details as a means of typifying characters. Thus, the progressive literature of the 1840s made a significant step forward in expanding and deepening the problems of realistic depiction of life. At the same time, she also possessed significant aesthetic principles. Belinsky supported the realistic quests of young writers. So, in the 1840s, the struggle between sharply defined literary trends intensified again. In them, new trends in social thought that were just emerging at that time found their creative and theoretical expression.

Therefore, it is very important to find out the main features of the social views of the most significant writers and critics of this time. Social and literary views Belinsky.

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National identity Russian literature. Literary movements of the 1840s

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Dead souls

You can start the lesson by discussing the words of Academician Dmitry Sergeevich Likhachev, included in the epigraph. Questions for discussion What is the main content of the concepts...
In the 1950s, the genre of art song arose and subsequently became widely popular - B. Okudzhava, A. Galich, Yu. Vizbor,...

Literature is the art of words, therefore the features of the national language in which it is written are a direct expression of its national identity. The lexical riches of the national language affect the nature of the author’s speech and the speech characteristics of the characters; the syntax of the national language determines the intonation moves of prose and poetry, phonetic

This unique structure creates the uniqueness of the sound of the work.

Since there are now more than two and a half thousand languages in the world, we can assume that there is the same number of national literatures. However, there are significantly fewer of the latter.

Despite differences in language, some peoples that have not yet formed into nations often have a commonality literary traditions, first of all - a single folk epic. From this point of view, the example of peoples is very indicative North Caucasus and Abkhazia, which are represented by more than fifty languages, but have a common epic cycle - “Narts”. The epic heroes of the Ramayana are common to the peoples of India who speak different languages, and even to many peoples of Southeast Asia. Such a community arises because, although individual nationalities live in remote places, often closed, isolated from the outside world, which is why differences in language arise, their living conditions are nevertheless close to each other. They have to overcome the same difficulties in their encounter with nature, and they have the same level of economic and social development. There are often many similarities in their historical destinies. Therefore, these nationalities are united by common ideas about life and human dignity, and hence, in literature, the imagination is captivated by the images of the same epic heroes.

Writers can also use the same language, and their work represents different national literatures. For example, Egyptian, Syrian, and Algerian writers write in Arabic. The French language is used not only by French, but also to some extent by Belgian and Canadian writers. Both the British and the Americans write in English, but the works they create bear a vivid imprint of various features of national life. Many African writers, using the language of former colonialists, create works that are completely original in their national essence.

It is also characteristic that with a good translation into another language, fiction may well retain the stamp of national identity. “It would be ideal if every work of every nationality included in the Union was translated into the languages of all other nationalities of the Union,” dreamed M. Gorky. - In this case

We would all quickly learn to understand the national-cultural properties and characteristics of each other, and this understanding, of course, would greatly speed up the process of creating... a unified socialist culture.” (49, 365-366). Consequently, although the language of literature is the most important indicator of its nationality, it does not exhaust its national identity.

A very important role in the formation of the national identity of artistic creativity is played by the commonality of territory, because in the early stages of the development of society, certain natural conditions often give rise to common tasks in the struggle of man with nature, common labor processes and skills, and hence customs, life, and worldview. Therefore, for example, in the mythology that developed during the clan system among the ancient Chinese, the hero is Gong, who managed to stop the flood of the river (a frequent occurrence in China) and saved the people from the flood, obtaining a piece of “living earth”, and among the ancient Greeks - Prometheus, who mined sky fire. In addition, impressions of the surrounding nature influence the properties of the narrative, the features of metaphors, comparisons and other artistic means. Northern peoples rejoice in the warmth and sun, so they most often compare a beauty to the clear sun, while southern peoples prefer the comparison With the moon, because the night brings coolness that saves from the heat of the sun. In Russian songs and fairy tales, a woman’s gait is compared to the smooth stride of a swan, and in India - with the “wonderful gait of royal elephants.”

Territorial community often leads to common paths economic development, creates a community of historical life of the people. This influences the themes of literature and gives rise to differences in artistic images. Thus, the Armenian epic “David of Sasun” tells about the life of gardeners and cultivators, about the construction of irrigation canals; the Kyrgyz “Manas” captured the nomadic life of cattle breeders, the search for new pastures, life in the saddle; in the epic of the German people, “The Song of the Nibelungs,” the search for ore, the work of blacksmiths, etc. are depicted.

As a nation is formed from a nationality and the community of spiritual make-up of the people crystallizes, the national identity of literature is manifested not only in labor and everyday customs and ideas, peculiarities of perception of nature, but also in

benefits of social life. The development of class society, the transition from one socio-economic formation to another: from slave-owning to feudal and from feudal to bourgeois - occurs among different peoples at different times, under different conditions. External and internal develop differently political activity nation state, which influences the organization and strengthening of property and legal relations, the emergence of certain moral norms, and hence the formation of ideological (including religious) ideas and traditions. All this leads to the emergence of a national characteristic of the life of society. From childhood, people are brought up under the influence of a complex system of relationships and ideas of national society, and this leaves an imprint on their behavior. This is how the characters of people of different nations - national characters - are historically formed.

Literature has an honorable place in revealing the peculiarities of national character. The versatility of this phenomenon, its connection with the main subject of artistic knowledge - man in his social character - give the artist advantages over the scientist. “Images of fiction,” writes I. Kon, “embrace national-typical features deeper and more multifaceted than scientific formulas. Fiction shows the diversity of national types, their specific class nature, and their historical development.” (63, 228).

It is often believed that national character is determined by one dominant psychological trait inherent only to one nation, exclusively to it. But common features can manifest themselves in representatives of different nations. The uniqueness of the national character lies in a certain relationship between these traits and the trends in their development. Literary characters They perfectly show how one and the same character trait, in unity with others, takes on different national incarnations. So, for example, Balzac portrays Gobsek’s stinginess, but it is not at all similar in its psychological manifestation to the stinginess of Gogol’s Plyushkin. Both characters, striving to accumulate wealth, have ceased to distinguish what is necessary from what is unnecessary, and for both it is senselessly rotting under the watchful supervision of

Miser's rum. However, these common features are formed in different ways - by bourgeois society for one and feudal-serf society for the other. The most important role in reflecting national character traits in literature belongs to critical realism. Critical realists, to a much greater extent than romanticists or even more so classicists, had the opportunity to reveal in their works all the contradictory complexity of the national characters of their characters who belonged to different strata of society. An artist who has mastered the art of the finest realistic detail conveys both the social determination of a certain character trait or manifestation of feeling, and his national identity.

With the emergence of critical realism in literature, an important quality of national originality is revealed. Since a realistic work bears the imprint of the writer’s personality, his individuality, and the writer himself acts as a bearer of national character, national originality becomes an organic property of the work itself. The characters of people in their national characteristics not only act as an object of artistic knowledge, but are also depicted from the point of view of the writer, who also carries within himself the spirit of his people, his nation. The first profound exponent of the national Russian character in literature is Pushkin. Belinsky wrote about this more than once, Gogol expressed it especially aptly: “Pushkin is an extraordinary phenomenon and, perhaps, the only manifestation of the Russian spirit: this is the Russian man in his development, in which he may appear in two hundred years. In it, Russian nature, Russian soul, Russian language, Russian character were reflected in the same purity, in such purified beauty, in which the landscape is reflected on the convex surface of optical glass.” (46, 33).

The imprint of national originality is borne not only by those works that directly depict the characters and events of national reality or history (“Eugene Onegin” and “Poltava” by Pushkin, “War and Peace” or “Resurrection” by L. Tolstoy), but also those , which reflect the life of other peoples (for example, “Lucerne” or “Hadji Murat”), but comprehend and evaluate its contradictions from the point of view of a person shaped by Russian reality.

At the same time, national identity is not limited to

only depicting individual characters, it covers the creative process so deeply that it manifests itself in the plots and themes of the works. Thus, in Russian literature the theme of the “superfluous man” has become widespread - a nobleman, a person of progressive views, who is in conflict with the surrounding reality, but is unable to realize his dissatisfaction with the existing order. For French literature, the conflict of a person making his way in the bourgeois world turned out to be typical. As a result, certain genres received preferential development in national literature (the novel of education, for example, in German and English literature).

Thus, the literature of critical realism, developing in Europe in the 19th century, contains the most complete, profound expression of national identity.

National character plays a large role in determining the national identity of literature, however, when analyzing, it is necessary to take into account that this is not only a psychological, but also a socio-historical category, because the formation of character is determined by the socio-historical conditions prevailing in society. Therefore, national character cannot be considered as something given forever. Development historical life can change the national character.

Some writers and critics, taking a superficial approach to the problem of national identity, idealize patriarchal life with its stability and even rigidity. They do not try to understand the national identity in the life of those sections of society that have become involved in the achievements international culture. As a result, a falsely interpreted love for their nation leads them to misunderstanding the progressive phenomena of national life. An exclusive interest only in what distinguishes one nation from others, a belief in the chosenness of one’s nation, in the superiority of its ancestral customs, rituals and everyday habits leads not only to conservatism, but also to nationalism. Then the national feeling of the people is used by the exploiting classes in their own interests. Therefore, the concept of national identity must be considered in relation to the concept of nationality.

National literature

NATIONAL LITERATURE. - In bourgeois literary criticism and criticism, this term was usually used to designate the literature of national minorities, the literature of oppressed peoples, in contrast to the literature of the dominant nation. So, in pre-war Austria under N. l. meant the literature of all the peoples inhabiting this state except the Germans, whose literature was considered basic, dominant, and guiding. In old pre-October Russia under N. l. understood literature not in Russian, but in the language. other peoples oppressed by the tsarist government, Russian landowners and bourgeoisie. In the mouths of the ideologists of the property classes (landowners, bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie) of the ruling nation N. l. denoted second-class literature. The ideologists of the Russian autocracy, the landowners, in their attitude towards the literature of other peoples inhabiting Russia, showed their special zoological chauvinism, treated these literatures as barbaric dialects, like jargons, considered them carriers of all kinds of harmful tendencies, a manifestation of bad taste, a product of low culture and fought against these literatures not only and not so much as means of ideological influence, but rather through measures of police oppression and extermination. The most open forms of oppression of N. l. practiced by the Russian autocracy. This struggle was part of the entire national policy of the tsarist government.
The ongoing policy of Russification of Poles, Ukrainians, Georgians, Tatars and many others. other peoples, restrictions on the most basic rights of a number of peoples, especially Jews, a ban on teaching in their native language in schools. or in general the language and literature of these peoples, the prohibition of using any other language other than Russian in government institutions, the prevention of the opening of Ukrainian, Georgian, Lithuanian or Polish universities and gymnasiums in a number of cities, or the establishment of a percentage norm for Jews when entering educational institutions, secondary and higher, extremely ferocious persecution of the press in non-Russian languages, frequent bans on theaters - all this is extremely a complex system the persecution and eradication of non-Russian culture could not but affect the development of the literature of these peoples.
Hiding behind liberal phrases, the ideologists of the bourgeoisie of the dominant nation essentially always pursued an equally nationalistic policy of oppression in relation to the literature of the conquered peoples. The bourgeoisie of the ruling nation, or more precisely the dominant national bourgeoisie, shows some philanthropic concern and humanistic sympathy for literature, as in general for the culture of other peoples of the country, until it itself becomes in power. This was the case with the Russian liberals of the Cadet persuasion, with the Polish people's democrats. The behavior of the ideologists of the Russian bourgeoisie during the years of the Stolypin reaction and especially during the months when the Provisional Government was in power was extremely significant. Forgetting its former preaching of a fraternal attitude towards the culture of other peoples, the Russian bourgeoisie tried in every possible way to push back, squeeze, and delay the development of the culture of other peoples. And if the ideologists of the landowners, “Messrs. Purishkevich, would not even be averse to completely banning ‘dog dialects, which are spoken by up to 60% of the non-Russian population of Russia,” then “the position of the liberals is much more cultured and subtle” (Lenin, Is a mandatory state language?, 3rd ed., vol. XVII, p. 179). They express their sympathy in every possible way for the development of the culture of other peoples, but they defend the obligatory nature of the state language. from higher, supposedly state reasons.
The defense of “the state expediency of the Russian literary language,” writes Lenin, “was a unique form of struggle against the culture and literature of other peoples, which extremely hampered the development of these cultures and literature. Lenin cites the current argument of national-liberal “defenders” of the culture and literature of foreigners: “The Russian people are great and powerful, the liberals tell us. So don’t you really want everyone who lives on any outskirts of Russia to know this great and powerful language? Don’t you see that the Russian language will enrich the literature of foreigners, give them the opportunity to become familiar with great cultural values, etc.?” (Vol. XVII, p. 180).
Lenin exposes the falsely hypocritical nature of this desire of Russian liberals to benefit the oppressed peoples and “enrich the literature of foreigners.” He writes: “All this is true, gentlemen liberals,” we answer them. We know better than you that the language of Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dobrolyubov, Chernyshevsky is great and powerful. We, more than you, want the closest possible communication and fraternal unity to be established between the oppressed classes of all the nations inhabiting Russia without distinction. And we, of course, stand for every resident of Russia to have the opportunity to learn the great Russian language. We don't want just one thing: an element of coercion. We don't want to drive people into heaven with a club. Because no matter how many beautiful phrases you say about “culture,” a compulsory state language is associated with coercion and indoctrination. We think that the great and powerful Russian language does not need anyone to study it under pressure” (vol. XVII, p. 180).
In the same way, the dominant German bourgeoisie in pre-Versailles Austria or the dominant Polish bourgeoisie in modern Poland, each in its own way expressing liberal sympathy and sympathy for the culture and literature of other peoples of old Austria or modern Poland, essentially treats these cultures and literatures as dubious values of a third-rate kind. ; under the guise of phrases about the exceptional importance of the great German or Polish literature for the growth of Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian or Jewish “lesser brothers,” they carried out and are carrying out, both through measures of ideological struggle and by means of administrative and police influence, the Germanization or Polonization of these cultures and in every possible way hinder the development liter of these oppressed nations. If the ruling national bourgeoisie, boasting the names of Goethe and Schiller, Pushkin and Tolstoy, sought to intimidate the peoples it oppressed with the “great cultural values” of its literature, then the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie of the oppressed peoples presented their literature as a source of humanism, disinterested love of humanity, natural democracy and love of the people. They endlessly talked about the messianic role of their literature as the intercessor of all the oppressed. These motifs varied in different ways in classical Polish literature, Ukrainian, Georgian, Armenian, Jewish, Belarusian and a number of other literatures. But if in “Grandfathers” and “Pan Tadeusz” by Mickiewicz, in “The Nag” by Mendel-Moicher-Sforim, in the works of Shevchenko and many other poets of the oppressed peoples of old tsarist Russia, especially before the 60-70s. XIX century, all these motives, generated by the oppression of the tsarist autocracy and Russian landowners, and then the Russian bourgeoisie, were an expression of protest against the oppressors; if the very fact of the literary formation of national identity in this literature was a kind of rebellion against rapists; if this literature at this stage to some extent nourished liberation sentiments, then already from the end of the 19th century, when the revolutionary proletariat entered the scene, and even more so after October revolution, this literature in the hands of the nationalist bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie became an instrument of chauvinist nationalist propaganda. The nationalist apologetics of the described motives, the epigonic variation of these motives by modern nationalist poets and writers of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie of the “small nations” become factors in the conservation of backwardness, the fascisation of the backward layers of the urban and rural petty bourgeoisie and the distraction of certain individual groups of the working class from the revolutionary struggle.
The ideologists of the ruling classes of great-power nations, as well as small oppressed peoples, all of them, in their own way, gave a chauvinistic reactionary formulation of the question of historical literature, and these metaphysical and ahistorical statements must be contrasted with a concrete historical formulation of the problem of scientific literature.
The very use of the term N. l. is incorrect. only to the literature of peoples oppressed by the ruling national bourgeoisie, or even to the literature of small liberated peoples, like ours in the USSR, but representing a minority in one or another republic of our Union. This is incorrect, first of all, because then the literature of one or another people of one era would have to be considered as national, and the literature of another era would have to be excluded from the category of literary literature. For example, Czech or Polish literature, which before the imperialist war was considered by German or Russian bourgeois historians and critics to be non-fiction, probably according to the logic of the same historians after the imperialist war can no longer be considered as non-fiction; It is also impossible to indicate any special signs and qualities that would characterize the so-called. N. l. and which, in one form or another, would not have been inherent in the literature of “big” nations during the period of their capitalist formation, during the period of their struggle for national unification or for national liberation.
N. l. The literature of any people is equally the literature of the oppressed and the literature of the oppressing nation, both those who represent the majority and those who are the minority in a given country. N. l., like the nations themselves, begins to primarily form together with the beginning of the formation of elements of capitalism within feudal society. It is a unique form of ideological consolidation in the images of the social struggle of a given people, the characteristics of the class struggle in it throughout its origin and development. Regarding the period of capitalist formation, when Ch. arr. modern nations took shape and took shape, Lenin established that “developing capitalism knows two historical trends in the national question. First: the awakening of national life and national movements, the struggle against all national oppression, the creation of national states. Second: the development and intensification of all kinds of relations between nations, the breaking down of national barriers, the creation of the international unity of capital, economic life in general, politics, science, etc.
Both trends are the world law of capitalism. The first predominates at the beginning of its development, the second characterizes capitalism that is mature and moving toward its transformation into a socialist society” (“Critical Notes on the National Question,” Vol. XVII, p. 140).
What Lenin said entirely applies to N. l. N. l. reflects these two historical trends. With the beginning of the penetration of capitalism into a given nation, its literature becomes a factor in the awakening of national life and the formation of national self-awareness. It is a factor in the struggle for the creation of a national state, a factor in the liberation of these peoples from dependence on foreign landowners, the bourgeoisie, in the struggle against any national oppression, since the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie that follows it are interested in constructing themselves into a separate state organism or defending themselves as a special national organism within the state, dominated by a stronger national bourgeoisie. This first period is characterized by intensive artistic consolidation of “national characteristics”. Hence the exceptional interest of the young bourgeoisie in the epic: among the Germans in the songs of the Nibelungs, Hildenbrand and Gudrun; among Russian Slavophiles - to collecting folk songs and fairy tales; The poets and writers of these young peoples, awakening to the national life, have a great interest in the poetic processing of folk art and the development of legends of the historical past, as well as in an artistic story about actual events of the historical past. These processes are revealed in different ways in N. l. different peoples in accordance with the characteristics of the class struggle of a given people and the general historical situation, which determines the awakening of national life and the struggle against national oppression. All this leads to such diverse literary phenomena as Goethe's "Götz von Berlichengen", Pushkin's fairy tales or the already mentioned "Grandfathers" and "Pan Tadeusz" by Mickiewicz.
At this first stage, which characterizes the various degrees of penetration of capitalism into a given national environment, features appear in the literature that sharply distinguish one people from another and reflect the features of their centuries-old life behind strong feudal walls.
But N. l. begin to lose many of their features in the second period of “capitalism that is mature and moving toward its transformation into a socialist society.” The features of the second period noted by Lenin: “the development and intensification of all kinds of relations between nations, the breaking down of national barriers, the creation of the international unity of capital, economic life in general, politics, science” (“Critical Notes on the National Question”, vol. XVII, p. 140), affected especially in the culture and literature of the same class of different peoples. That is why the petty-bourgeois Scandinavian writer Ibsen became so in tune with Russian literature already in the last 10 years before 1905 and especially during the years of reaction, and before the revolution he became close to the Russian bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie with some of his features, and during the years of reaction with others. These general tendencies of capitalism at the end of the industrial era and the beginning of imperialism explain the special closeness and similarity of the modernist literature of France, England, Germany or the modernist writers of these countries with the work of many Russian writers: symbolists and decadents. With the approach of imperialism. war, during the war years and after the Treaty of Versailles, when the imperialist governments of all countries began to prepare for the second round of imperialist wars, the bourgeoisie strengthened its social order for nationalist literature. N. l. They again began to cultivate nationalist, ultra-chauvinistic motives in every possible way. However, these literatures did not gain in any way in their national identity, because the pan-German or pan-English vestments of these literatures do not neutralize the imperialist fascist character common to all of them. Fundamental to all literature of the era “remains that world-historical tendency of capitalism to break down national barriers, to erase national differences, to assimilate nations, which manifests itself more and more powerfully with every decade, which constitutes one of the greatest engines transforming capitalism into socialism.” This does not mean that even under capitalism the boundaries between one literature and another will be erased and the process of assimilating the literature of different peoples into one literature will take place. Lenin, and then Stalin, relying on Lenin, always argued that this task would be solved only in a socialist society. Lenin wrote that “national and state differences between peoples and countries... will persist for a very, very long time, even after the implementation of the dictatorship of the proletariat on a worldwide scale” (i.e. XXV, p. 229). Based on this position of Lenin, Stalin will conclude. words on the political report of the Central Committee of the XVI Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks said: “As for the longer term national cultures and national languages, then I have always held and continue to hold to that Leninist view that during the period of the victory of socialism on a global scale, when socialism gets stronger and enters everyday life, national languages must inevitably merge into one common language, which of course will be neither Great Russian nor German , but something new” (“Questions of Leninism”, p. 571, 9th ed.). “...The question of the withering away of national languages and their merging into one common language is not a domestic question, not a question of the victory of socialism in one country, but an international question, a question of the victory of socialism in internationally"(ibid., p. 572, 9th ed.).
The world-historical tendency of capitalism, indicated by Lenin, to break down national barriers and erase national differences is of great importance for N.L. in the sense of an ever-increasing increase in themes, motifs common to various literary works, social types, ideological sentiments, the nature of the artistic expression of these motives and sentiments in the literature of the same classes, homogeneous social groups various peoples. This is where one of the most characteristic contradictions emerges between the current state of the productive forces of capitalist countries and the ideological tasks of the imperialist fascist bourgeoisie. The state of the productive forces and the entire economic life generated by them contributes to the erasure of national differences and the breakdown of national barriers. On the other hand, the struggle between the imperialist bourgeoisies dictates the N.L. the need to create nationalist, chauvinistic ideological barriers, the need to cultivate all kinds of ideas of national chosenness, racial exclusivity, the need to preserve the “purity” of the “national spirit.” Along all lines, interest is being cultivated in those phenomena of the past of N.L., when the features of national isolation and isolation were strong in them. Publishers are intensively re-publishing such literary monuments, literary historians and critics endlessly apologize them, poets and writers epigonously vary and modernize them in an imperialist fascist way.
Nationalist ideologists of the proprietary classes always sought and found in the features of the epic and the works of the classics of their people an expression and confirmation of national “chosenness”. Depending on trends of this class these ideologists revealed in these works the essence of the “national genius”, which coincides with their landowner-Black Hundred, bourgeois-liberal or petty-bourgeois-democratic ideal. Over the last decades of imperialism and fascism, ideologists of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie draw from the same sources arguments to affirm the imperialist and fascist essence of the “national genius,” revealing the unity of the “national spirit” of the song about the Nibelungs and Hildenbrand with the fascist anthem. By this openly class character of the interpretation of the “national genius” embodied in N. l., the “national spirit” revealed in N. l., the ideologists of the property classes expose the falsity of their metaphysical, reactionary-idealistic formulation of the question of the essence of N. l.
In essence, the features of a given national literature, from which nationalist ideologists derive their chauvinistic theories of “national genius,” are only an expression and reflection of those specific historical conditions in which the liquidation of feudalism and the formation of capitalism took place among a given people: expression features of the class struggle of a given people during the entire process of the elimination of feudalism and the development of capitalism, or in general the entire historical process of their existence, since we are talking about peoples whose development goes beyond the framework of feudal and capitalist formations and literature, which have managed to go through a number of significant historical stages . National literature is not the expression of some eternal, unchanging “national spirit”; it is not the revelation of some immanent “national genius”. This is also evident from the fact that essentially not a single N. l. At no stage of its development does it represent a single whole, but is sharply divided into very different literature of the oppressed and the oppressors, reactionary and progressive or revolutionary literature. Moreover, since the opportunity to create culture and create literary values was incomparably greater among the exploiting classes, among the propertied property classes, the tendencies of these classes most of all determined the character of any N. l.; then, as some classes were replaced by others or as the same classes acquired new ones historical functions- from revolutionary turned into reactionary, the nature of any N.L. continuously changed in accordance with the specific alignment of class forces and the specific forms and conditions of the class struggle. Therefore, about no ahistorical character of N. l. how the revelation of the “eternal” “national genius” is out of the question. Any N. l. there is a specific class, specific historical category. Lenin wrote in the already cited work “Critical Notes on the National Question”: “There are two nations in each modern nation, - we will say to all National Socialists. There are two national cultures in every national culture. There is a Great Russian culture of the Purishkevichs, Guchkovs and Struves, but there is also a Great Russian culture characterized by the names of Chernyshevsky and Plekhanov. There are the same two cultures in Ukraine, as in Germany, France, England, among the Jews, etc.” (Vol. XVII., p. 143).
Therefore, Lenin insists that it is equally incorrect to talk about the complete reactionary nature of the culture of some nations, whose landowners and bourgeoisie are dominant in a given country, as it is to talk about the complete revolutionary nature of the literature of the oppressed peoples. He writes: “In every national culture there are, even if not developed, elements of a democratic and socialist culture, for in every nation there is a working and exploited mass, whose living conditions inevitably give rise to a democratic and socialist ideology. But in every nation there is also a bourgeois culture (and in the majority also Black Hundred and clerical), and not only in the form of “elements”, but in the form of the dominant culture. Therefore, “national culture in general is the culture of landowners, priests, and bourgeoisie” (ibid., p. 137).
What Lenin said about national culture applies entirely to N. l. In the main features of national cultures indicated by Lenin, all the features of the content and form of any national culture find their explanation. If we talk about the capitalist formation, then the dominant literature, as part of the dominant culture in all countries and among all peoples in which capitalism has triumphed, is bourgeois literature. Bourgeois content is what is common to the capitalist literatures of all nations that dominate within their own nation. But these N. l. different from each other in their shape.
It is known that form is determined by content (see in detail about this Literature, section “Form and Content”, and in the article “Form and Content” specifically devoted to this issue).
Why, however, is the general bourgeois content of N. l. gives rise to very different national forms? This is explained by the peculiarities of the content itself. Over the past 200-300 years, all European peoples have made their way from feudalism to capitalism, through industrial capitalism to imperialism, and the peoples of our USSR - to the construction of socialism. But each of these peoples made this journey under very different conditions. In some conditions, the liquidation of feudalism took place in England or France, in others - in Germany or among the peoples who made up Russian Empire. The elimination of feudalism in these countries, the struggle of the third estate against the old regime, the struggle of classes among themselves within the third estate for the forms and methods of eliminating the old order and for ways of further capitalist development, for a greater or lesser triumph of one or another of the two main historical paths capitalist development - all this represented specific content within the same basic process; It is not surprising that this content determined the forms of N. l. that were extremely different from each other. bourgeoisie. Only in the various conditions of the struggle of the English Puritan bourgeoisie against the English aristocracy of the 17th century, the French third estate against the old regime in the 18th century, the fragmented and weak German bourgeoisie against its feudal overlords, the extremely backward Russian bourgeoisie against the Russian autocracy and landowners who managed to preserve serfdom until the middle of the 19th century, only in specific features social processes in England, France, Germany and Russia, only in the peculiarities of the content of the class struggle of these peoples lie the reasons for the identification of such different, different forms of N.L., as for example. the form of Milton's Paradise Lost and Regained or Richardson's novels in England, the work of the great encyclopedists and educators in France, the poets and writers of Sturm und Drang in Germany, or finally the work of the so-called. repentant nobles and commoners in Russia.
In the same way, all the features of the further development of the literature of these peoples during the era of industrial capitalism and imperialism, and here, in the USSR, during the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the construction of socialism, all the features of the form of these literary works. are entirely determined by the peculiarities of the class struggle in these countries and among these peoples. Nationalist ideologists of the property-owning classes, based on these features and in every possible way denying the class genesis of these features, boasted of their national spirit, their national traditions, which had, to one degree or another, world-historical significance. Lenin sometimes spoke about the world-progressive features of certain national cultures, but he proceeded from the fact of the existence of two nations and two national cultures within every modern nation and every modern national culture. Polemicizing with the Bund, Lenin wrote that in that part of the Jewish nation that does not have “caste isolation, the great world-progressive features in Jewish culture were clearly reflected there: its internationalism, its responsiveness to the progressive movements of the era (the percentage of Jews in the democratic and proletarian movements everywhere higher than the percentage of Jews in the population in general)” (“Critical Notes on the National Question,” vol. XVII, p. 138).
Rejecting the Bundist formulation of the question of national culture as the formulation of “an enemy of the proletariat, a supporter of the old and caste in Jewry, an accomplice of the rabbis and the bourgeoisie” (ibid., p. 42), Lenin believes that those Jews who participate “in the creation of an international culture of the worker movements..." "making their contribution (both in Russian and in Jewish)..." "those Jews... continue the best traditions of Judaism" (ibid., p. 139).
Lenin rejects operating with the peculiarities of national culture in general: under capitalist conditions, “national culture” in general “is the culture of the landowners, priests, and bourgeoisie.” He talks about world-progressive features, about the best traditions of N. l. and culture, investing in them a certain historical, class meaning. World-progressive features, the best traditions in the Leninist sense, that’s how it should be. arr. look only along the line of Russian N.L., which comes from Chernyshevsky, but not along the line that comes from Dostoevsky’s “Demons”: the latter express a different tradition of “national culture” in general. The form of this national literature is determined by the content of the class existence of reactionary Russian forces.
N. l. the oppressed revolutionary part of the nation differs from N. l. property classes not only in their content, but also in their form. At the 16th Party Congress, Stalin said: “What is national culture under the rule of the national bourgeoisie? A culture that is bourgeois in its content and national in its form, with the goal of poisoning the masses with the poison of nationalism and strengthening the dominance of the bourgeoisie. What is national culture under the dictatorship of the proletariat? A culture that is socialist in content and national in form, with the goal of educating the masses in the spirit of internationalism and strengthening the dictatorship of the proletariat” (“Questions of Leninism,” p. 565).
At the 16th Party Congress, Stalin raised the question of the culture of the proletariat under the conditions of the dictatorship of the proletariat. But even under the conditions of a bourgeois dictatorship, the proletariat creates its own proletarian socialist literature, which is distinguished by its qualities and is proletarian in content and national in form. This literature is not dominant in general scientific literature, and its share in all scientific literature is of course, much less than under the dictatorship of the proletariat, but, as Lenin established in his time, “in every national culture there are at least undeveloped elements of democratic and social-democratic culture, for in every nation there is a working and exploited mass, living conditions which inevitably give rise to democratic and socialist ideology.” It does not at all follow from Comrade Stalin’s formula that national cultures and literatures under the rule of the national bourgeoisie and under the dictatorship of the proletariat differ from each other only in their content and represent something uniform in their form. Not at all, because the national form manifests itself in one case as bourgeois, and in another as proletarian, socialist. Here it goes like this. arr. the general problem of class analysis of form, the class character of style.
The works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Chernyshevsky, Chekhov and Gorky differed from each other not only in their content, but also in their form. These differences are due to the fact that the work of these writers expressed the ideology of different classes and different ideological contents found their adequate expression in different forms. All these writers were Russian writers. Their work, contrasted with the work of Goethe, Schiller, Heine or Nikolai Baratashvili or Chavchavadze and Akaki Tseretelli, represents examples of Russian literary fiction. unlike the German N. l. or from Georgian N. l. But within the Russian N. l. itself. In each given era we distinguish special styles, artistic forms, generated by different and opposing class content. Therefore, it is impossible to talk about any single national form, such does not exist; in reality, there is a literary form among the various classes of a given people, representing a dialectical unity with the content of the literature of a given class, a given people. We therefore have to talk not in general about Russian, Belarusian or Ukrainian national literature and national form, but about Russian noble bourgeois or proletarian literature and about a special form of Russian noble literature, different from German or Polish noble literature; Russian bourgeois literature, which differs, say, from Jewish or Ukrainian bourgeois literature; Belarusian peasant literature, in contrast to Russian or Ukrainian peasant literature, and this class national form corresponds to a given class national content. In the same way we distinguish national proletarian literatures from each other by their national form. But here is a special form of, say, Russian proletarian literature, in contrast to a number of proletarian literatures - Ukrainian, Belarusian, Jewish or from proletarian literatures Turkic peoples- is determined by the peculiarities of the entire history of the struggle of the Russian proletariat with its oppressors, in contrast to those unique historical conditions in which the struggle of the working people of these peoples developed to overthrow the power of the landowners and bourgeoisie and in which the struggle for the construction of socialism is currently taking place.
Precisely because the characteristics of the form are determined by the specific conditions of the class struggle of a given people, the various forms of proletarian or bourgeois literature among different peoples are not reduced only to linguistic differences. Let's take this example: there is a struggle for the elimination of the kulaks and the collectivization of agriculture in our Union. The kulaks of all nations are resisting the revolution. But the process of collectivization and liquidation of the kulaks, on the one hand, as well as the resistance of the kulaks, on the other, are extremely unique among the various peoples of the USSR. The Ukrainian “kurkul” (fist) covers up its resistance with a phrase about national independence and seeks to discredit collectivization by treating the 25 thousand people who came from Leningrad or Ivanovo as “Muscovites.” The Jewish kulak, yesterday's small-town shopkeeper, covers up his resistance with lamentations and lamentations about the pogroms he experienced, about tsarist oppression, about anti-Semitism, etc., etc. The North Caucasian kulak, from former Cossacks, conducts his agitation against collective farms through the romanticization of the old Cossack way of life and praising the privileges of the Cossacks under the autocracy. The originality of the past kulaks of these various peoples, the peculiarities of their resistance to the revolution, the peculiarities of the struggle of the proletariat and the collective farm peasantry of these peoples against kulak counter-revolutionism, reflected in Ukrainian, Russian, Belarusian, Georgian, Armenian or Jewish proletarian literature - all this is the dominant factor in the creation specific forms national proletarian literatures. This uniqueness of the class struggle of a given nation is rooted in its entire past. Proletarian literature seeks and finds an adequate expression of this uniqueness in the entire historically formed form of a given people in the process of class struggle and from it creates a new proletarian national form. Russian, Ukrainian or Jewish proletarian writers, whose work is an ideological factor in socialist construction, are doing an international socialist cause common to the entire proletariat. Their work is internationalist, socialist in its attitude, national in its form insofar as it reveals the uniqueness of the struggle for socialism in the conditions of a given people. This example clearly reveals the difference between the proletarian national form and the bourgeois one. Three kulak writers - Ukrainian, Russian and Jewish - developing the same theme of collectivization and liquidation of the kulaks, will create works imbued with the idea of capitalist restoration, the idea of defeating the revolution. They are united by a common bourgeois task, a common proprietary essence. But they will also be imbued with the spirit of mutual national hostility: anti-Semitism, Russophobia or Ukrainophobia. Their national form expresses and reflects their deeply chauvinistic essence.
The bourgeois national form, therefore, is a means of consolidating national isolation, narrow-mindedness, and cultivating national enmity, since it is determined by proprietary content. The proletarian national form is a means of overcoming national hatred, since it is imbued with internationalist content and socialist ideology.
Highlighted Features historical fate classes of different peoples are reflected throughout artistic system N. l., in particular and ch. arr. in the nature of assimilation of N. l. cultural heritage. While the bourgeois literature of our time varies the motives in every possible way religious literature, decorates its language in every possible way with biblical metaphors and images or various kinds of comparisons taken from religious and church usage, proletarian literature starts from these sources and uses them only in terms of exposure and denial. The literature of oppressed nations romanticized the national past. In many cases, this romanticization had some progressive significance, since it aroused protest against the oppressors of the dominant nation. This was the meaning of romance in Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Georgian literature at the beginning, and in some literature throughout the first half of the 19th century. But this romance later, with growth revolutionary movement of the working masses, acquired a definitely reactionary nationalist character. The literary epigones of the proprietary classes are still intensively cultivating this romance. It becomes an essential part of their national form precisely because it corresponds to their nationalistic content and serves the main goal of bourgeois N.L. “to poison the masses with the poison of nationalism and strengthen the rule of the bourgeoisie” (Stalin).
On the contrary, proletarian literature, precisely in terms of internationalist tasks, starts from nationalist romance and in every possible way protects its creativity from the idealistic-formal elements characteristic of bourgeois romantic literary fiction. Proletarskaya N. l. is looking for prototypes for his romance in world revolutionary literature on a large scale. Romantic elements of the form of proletarian N. l. therefore, they differ significantly from the form of romantic N. l. proprietary classes (for more information about this issue, as well as in general about the problem of N. l. under the dictatorship of the proletariat and under socialism, see Proletarskaya and socialist literature).
The national form, determined by bourgeois content, is a factor in the cultivation of national backwardness and isolation, national enmity and, consequently, reaction. The national form, determined by socialist content, imbued with international ideology, becomes a factor in the cooperation of working people of all nations, a factor in the revolution. That is why, under the conditions of the dominance of landowners and the bourgeoisie, the development of N. l. was possible. only the bourgeoisie and landowners of the dominant nationalities and in every possible way the development of the literature of the oppressed peoples was hampered, stifled, and persecuted. Under the conditions of the dictatorship of the proletariat, an exceptional flourishing of national cultures and literature becomes possible: “The flourishing of cultures that are national in form and socialist in content under the conditions of the dictatorship of the proletariat in one country for merging them into one common socialist (both in form and in content) culture with in one common language, when the proletariat wins throughout the world and socialism enters everyday life - this is precisely the dialectical nature of Lenin’s formulation of the question of national culture” (Stalin, Questions of Leninism, p. 566).
“...The flourishing of national cultures (and languages),” being international in its socialist content, prepares the conditions “for their withering away and merging into one common socialist culture (and into one common language) during the period of the victory of socialism throughout the world” (there same, pp. 566-567).
Bourgeois N. l. were born and took shape in the struggle for liberation from feudal domination and were factors in national unification, so important for creating the conditions for the successful development of capitalism. At this progressive stage, bourgeois N. l. put forward slogans of religious tolerance and brotherhood of peoples, created such masterpieces of propaganda for the unity of peoples as Lessing’s “Nathan the Wise”. Those days are long gone for N.L. proprietary classes. The conditions of capitalist competition, the imperialist struggle for the redivision of the world, the need to fight the international ideas of the revolutionary proletariat have long forced the bourgeoisie to betray the covenants of the brilliant fighters for its own liberation and replace the slogans of the “brotherhood of peoples” with the propaganda of zoological nationalism and chauvinism. The threat of the triumph of socialism long ago forced the bourgeoisie to begin cultivating “socialism for fools,” as Bebel called anti-Semitism, mutual national hatred. From “Nathan the Wise” to fascist pulp novels about the godlikeness of one’s own people and the bestial, devilish nature of other peoples - this is the path of bourgeois N.L. Nationalist fascist tendencies take on a different character in the literature of the property-owning classes of the ruling nations and in the literature of the property-owning classes of the oppressed nations. But the most characteristic feature of all national literature of the proprietary classes of the era of decay of capitalism is a clearly expressed fascist orientation. Tendencies of bourgeois N. l. capitalist countries in one disguised form or another are also found in the literature of the nationalities of the USSR, expressed mainly in great-power chauvinism, national democracy and national opportunism, in manifestations of anti-Semitism, etc.
Both great-power chauvinism and national democracy, national opportunism or anti-Semitism in N.L. represent a unique form of struggle of the class enemy, the bourgeoisie, the kulaks, against socialist construction, the struggle for the restoration of capitalism. Therefore, it is not accidental that this or that degree of closure between Russian writers, whose work was affected by manifestations of great-power chauvinism, with white emigration or the direct participation of a number of Belarusian and Ukrainian national democratic writers in counter-revolutionary organizations. On the other hand, it is extremely natural that the process of ideological restructuring of petty-bourgeois Ukrainian, Jewish, Belarusian writers or petty-bourgeois writers of a number of Turkic peoples was closely connected with their elimination of their nationalist sentiments, with their break with national democracy, with their renunciation of their nationalist opportunism.
Socialist N. l. on their internationalist basis they are fighting both great-power chauvinism and all kinds of manifestations of local nationalism, and this active struggle is developing all the more successfully the more this literature, socialist in content, is national in form, for “only if national cultures develop truly backward nationalities to the cause of socialist construction" (Stalin).

Literary encyclopedia. - At 11 t.; M.: Publishing House of the Communist Academy, Soviet encyclopedia, Fiction. Edited by V. M. Fritsche, A. V. Lunacharsky. 1929-1939 .