The Slavophiles in their literary tastes and constructions were conservative romantics and staunch opponents of critical realism. The new opponents of realism had gone through the temptations of German philosophy, and it was not easy to argue with them. They fought, one might say, with the same weapons as the adherents of realism.
Among the Slavophiles, two generations should be distinguished. The elder, who founded the doctrine itself, includes I. V. Kireevsky, his brother P. V. Kireevsky, A. S. Khomyakov. To the younger generation, who did not take the doctrine intact - K. S. Aksakov, Yu. F. Samarin. I. S. Aksakov, who spoke later, was not, in fact, a literary critic.
Initially, the Slavophiles collaborated in the journal Pogodin and Shevyrev "Moskvityanin" (1841-1845). In 1845, they independently published the first three issues of this journal under the editorship of I. Kireevsky, and then limited themselves only to the role of employees. This circumstance prevented readers from isolating in their minds a special Slavophile critique: it merged into a kind of single "Muscovite" critique. In 1846 and 1847, in order to isolate themselves, the Slavophils published two of their Moscow Literary and Scientific Collections, which, however, did not justify their hopes for success. In 1852, a similar collection was banned by the censors because of a sympathetic article about Gogol; began censorship persecution of the Slavophiles. In the pre-reform era, the Slavophiles managed to achieve some freedoms for themselves: from 1856 to 1860, with long breaks, they published, under the editorship of A. I. Koshelev, the journal Russkaya Beseda, their main organ. But the "Russian conversation" was not successful either, its direction diverged from the beginning of the public upsurge. Sovremennik waged a resolute struggle against Russkaya Conversation. From 1861 to 1865, I. Aksakov published the newspaper The Day, which attacked nihilists, materialists, and preached anti-Polish, pan-Slavist ideas, merging with the chauvinism of Russky Vestnik and Moscow Vedomosti by Katkov.
The ideas of the Slavophiles could not create artistically valuable literature. Only individual poems by Khomyakov, K. Aksakov, I. Aksakov stand out. Their trump card in competition with progressive realistic literature was S. T. Aksakov (father of Konstantin and Ivan Aksakov). But S. T. Aksakov was not actually a Slavophile, but as a realist writer he even opposed them. He was a friend of Gogol, appreciated him as the author of The Government Inspector and Dead Souls, and censured Selected passages from correspondence with friends. The Slavophiles were clearly speculating in the name of Gogol, using his friendly relations with the Aksakov family. Later, the Slavophiles unsuccessfully tried to attract Ostrovsky to themselves as a writer of everyday life of the Moskvoretsky antiquity. They tried to adapt Pisemsky's "black-earth truth" to themselves, especially since the writer himself shied away from advanced ideas and, as it were, went towards such desires. They also tried to interpret Turgenev's "Notes of a Hunter" in their "folk" spirit. But all these writers did not go along with the Slavophiles.
Feeding not so much on their own positive literary experience, but on the fear of realistic revelations of Russian reality, contributing to upheavals, the Slavophiles developed a special system of historical and aesthetic views, which, from the methodological point of view, can be qualified as conservative romanticism. The essence of the Slavophil doctrine was the idea of national unity of all Russian people in the bosom of the Christian Church without distinction of estates and classes, in the preaching of humility and obedience to the authorities. All this had a reactionary-romantic, utopian character. The preaching of the idea of a “Russian people-God-bearer”, called to save the world from destruction, to unite all the Slavs around itself, coincided with the official pan-Slavic doctrine of Moscow as the “Third Rome”.
But the Slavophiles also had moods of dissatisfaction with the existing order. The tsarist government, in turn, could not tolerate an attack on its foundations even in the vague arguments of the Slavophiles about the need for deliberative zemstvo councils, especially in statements about the need for the personal liberation of the peasants, in denunciations of an unjust court, abuses of bureaucracy, alien to truly Christian morality. The Slavophiles were representatives of the liberal nobility, who far-sightedly began to look for a way out of the impasse in order to avoid revolutionary explosions in Russia on the Western model.
The opposition of the Slavophiles was limited. Realist writers and genuine democrats, who bore the brunt of the struggle against the autocracy, criticized them for their false nationality, their refined defense of the foundations of the existing system.
The Slavophils tried to raise their prestige by the fact that after 1848 the Westerners, having experienced disappointment in bourgeois utopian socialism, began to develop the ideas of "Russian communal socialism." An eloquent example for them was the emigrant Herzen. The Slavophiles have long asserted that the spirit of genuine nationality, the unity of class interests, has been preserved in the peasant community. At a superficial glance, it turned out that the Westerners came to bow to the Slavophiles. It is known that even later there were theorists who attributed Chernyshevsky and the populists, who developed the ideas of the same peasant "communal socialism", to Slavophiles. But the resemblance is only apparent.
For the Slavophils, the community is a means of preserving patriarchy, a bulwark against revolutionary ferment, a means of keeping the peasant masses in obedience to the landlords, of instilling humility in them. And for revolutionary democrats and populists, the community is a form of transition to socialism, a prototype of the future socialist labor and community life. Let this doctrine be utopian, but nevertheless the essence of the community and its purpose were interpreted by the revolutionary democrats in the exact opposite sense compared to the Slavophils.
Slavophiles liked to pretend to be genuine representatives of Russian identity, nationality. They collected folklore as an echo of the past idealized by them in the life of the people. They claimed to create a special non-class Russian art to replace the Russian realism that already existed. All these were reactionary utopian-romantic abstractions. The Slavophiles rejoiced at any manifestations of contradictions in the life of the West and tried to present Russia as a stronghold of moral principles, allegedly having a completely different history, not fraught with revolutionary upheavals.
Kireevsky - one of the founders of Ivan Vasilyevich Slavophilism. From 1828 to 1834 he acted as a progressive thinker who was looking for a broad philosophical basis for Russian criticism. He published the magazine "European" (1832), which was closed by the government in the second issue due to the articles of the publisher himself "The Nineteenth Century" and "Woe from Wit" on the Moscow Stage. In the first article, Kireevsky argued that Western Europe had already exhausted the old forms of philosophy, civic consciousness, and social organization, while Russia would have to develop its own new forms, using the experience of the West. At the end of the article, Kireevsky rhetorically invited the readers themselves to "draw conclusions" about the nature of education in Russia. This was enough for the tsar to suspect Kireyevsky of preaching the need for a constitution. "European" was banned, and Kireevsky was placed under surveillance.
Kireevsky wrote several remarkable critical articles in his youth: “Something about the nature of Pushkin’s poetry” (“Moskovsky Vestnik”, 1828), “Review of Russian Literature for 1829” (“Dennitsa”, 1830), the already mentioned “Woe from Wit” on Moscow stage "and" The Nineteenth Century ", as well as" C% o ~ z "reni? Russian literature for 1831" ("European", 1832), "On the poems of Yazykov" ("Telescope", 1834).
Kireevsky's outstanding critical talent was revealed in the articles. Pushkin was pleased with his meaningful judgments. Belinsky borrowed several important formulations from him: about romanticism, about Pushkin as a "poet of reality."
The thoughtful, calm tone of his articles was highly appreciated by Chernyshevsky. True to his principle, Kireevsky taught Russian criticism to look for "a common color, one stigma" in the work of the analyzed poet. And he himself skillfully found it in Pushkin, Venevitinov, Baratynsky, Delvig, Podolinsky, Yazykov.
Kireevsky established the periodization of the development of Pushkin's work. The first period is characterized by the influence of the "Italian-French school" and Byron. Then came the Byronic period. Everyday scenes in Onegin, the images of Tatyana, Olga, the description of St. Petersburg, the village, the seasons, in conjunction with the then published scene in the Chudov Monastery from Boris Godunov, according to Kireevsky, constitute the third, special, Russian-Pushkin period of poetry. Pushkin appeared before readers as a “great” phenomenon, the main quality of which is conformity with the times, a living sense of modernity. Justification of the merits of this most meaningful period in the work of Pushkin Kireevsky further deepened in the article "Review of Russian Literature for 1831".
In a review of Russian literature for 1829, Kireevsky already outlined the main periods of Russian literature: Lomonosov, Karamzin, Pushkin. Pushkin's period is characterized by "respect for reality", the desire to "turn poetry into reality".
This concept, permeated with the recognition of the growing elements of artistic veracity, was included in Kireevsky's capacious concept of the "nineteenth century", the characteristics of which he devoted a special article.
But already in these articles arguments were mixed in, from which Kireevsky's Slavophile doctrine later arose. Here he began to think in an "absolute way", alternatively, in mutually exclusive categories.
The foundations of Western civilization, said Kireevsky, were determined by three conditions: Christianity, the conquests of the barbarians, and classical traditions. Russia adopted Christianity from the hands of Orthodox Byzantium, and not from the hands of depraved, heretical Rome; The Tatars did not destroy Russia and did not instill their customs in it, and Peter I made up for the lack of classical traditions.
Kireevsky has so far spoken of the differences between Russian civilization and Western European civilization, but later he will consider them advantages. He already spoke here about the "Chinese wall" dividing Russia and Western Europe, about the importance for us "of the concept that we have about the relationship of Russian enlightenment to the enlightenment of the rest of Europe."
Actually, the Slavophile theory was born in a dispute between I. Kireevsky and Khomyakov in 1839. Khomyakov orally read his article “On the Old and the New” in the salons, in which he posed the question point-blank: was the former, pre-Petrine Russia, better than Europeanized Russia? If it was, then you should return to its previous orders. Kireevsky in a special "Response to A. S. Khomyakov" disputed the categorical nature of such a formulation of the question: "If the old was better than the present, it does not yet follow that it is better now." Kireevsky has a more subtle formulation of the question. But still he leaned towards the old.
The articles “Response to A. S. Khomyakov”, “Review of the current state of literature” (“Moskvityanin”, 1845), “Public lectures by prof. Shevyrev on the History of Russian Literature" (ibid., 1846) form the Slavophile period of Kireevsky's activity. Here, the features of his programmatic Slavophilism were more clearly identified and sharper - dislike for the realistic direction, the "natural school" and Belinsky. In theoretical and historical-literary terms, this period is lower than the previous one. Talk about philosophical criticism, about the unity and breadth of literary concepts, almost lost their meaning with Kireevsky, because all these concepts now took on a narrow, utilitarian, anti-realistic orientation.
Kireevsky declared in advance uninteresting, although historically inevitable, all that part of Russian literature, which in one way or another was a "repetition" of Western European literature. It is important only for us, students, and not for world public consciousness. The negative-rationalist trend, that is, critical realism, came to us from the West. It is much more important to understand the "positive" direction. Here Russia can really be original, not imitate anyone and appear in all its height. All this was reminiscent of Shevyrev's division of literature into "black" and "light." Kireevsky's sympathies were completely determined in favor of his Russian. The West gives only a formal development of the mind, and only in this sense can it be used in the development of original content.
Kireevsky imagined that he was fighting in Russia on two fronts. He does not accept Western rationalism, Otechestvennye Zapiski, Belinsky's criticism, the "natural school" and the "positive" state-official patriotism of the Mayak magazine. Against the background of such contrasts, the Slavophiles stood out favorably. If Mayak vulgarly praises everything, then Otechestvennye Zapiski undeservedly “seeks to humiliate all our fame, trying to diminish the literary reputation of Derzhavin, Karamzin, Zhukovsky, Baratynsky, Yazykov, Khomyakov ...”. Who did Belinsky put in their place? It turns out: I. Turgenev, A. Maykov and Lermontov. But after all, Belinsky would not have committed any mistake even if he had done so. Yes, and Derzhavin, Karamzin, Zhukovsky, he just at that time, in "Pushkin's articles", appreciated highly and correctly. Before that, Belinsky criticized Yazykov and Khomyakov as militant heralds of Slavophilism. But this is a completely different question.
The last years of the activity of Kireevsky the Slavophil include the articles: “On the nature of the enlightenment of Europe and on its relation to the enlightenment of Russia” (“Moscow Literary and Scientific Collection for 1852”), “On the Necessity and Possibility of New Beginnings for Philosophy” (“Russian Conversation ", 1856). In these articles, the concepts of "enlightenment", "Russian", "French", "German" were still abstractly interpreted. The totality of Kireevsky's categories, their "romanticism" makes itself felt at every step. Again, he recalls the three elements of civilization: barbarism, Christianity and the classical heritage, but somewhat varies his “triad”, now it is important to him: a special form through which Christianity penetrated into Russia, a special form in which the ancient classical heritage passed to it, and, finally , special forms of statehood. The last, clearly “loyal” element was not previously in the “triad”. The Russian land supposedly did not know the conquerors and the conquered, the violence of power, all classes of the population were imbued with the same spirit, there were no embarrassing advantages and "dreamy equality" (which the socialists are fussing about - V.K.). Only in the West has a class and hierarchical pyramid been formed, while in Russia everything is based on a communal spirit, beliefs and opinions, and not on law and laws. But the idyll painted by Kireevsky only confirmed the generally accepted opinion about the dominance of lawlessness in tsarist Russia, the absence of any guarantees for the individual, and the complete arbitrariness of power. Belinsky wrote about this in his famous letter to Gogol.
In his last article - "On the New Principles of Philosophy" - Kireevsky frankly signed his adherence to the teachings of the Church Fathers, no longer believing in any of the philosophical systems. "It's a miserable job to compose a faith for yourself," said Kireevsky, but he nevertheless composed it. The Slavophils voluntarily went into the bosom of the church, put up with the authorities, losing all the battles with their opponents.
Alexei Stepanovich Khomyakov (1804-1860). Khomyakov stood further from literary criticism than I. Kireevsky. Khomyakov wrote poems, plays, and occasionally critical reviews, but his main works dealt with philosophical issues, land relations in Russia, problems of reform, inter-Slavic solidarity, and the Slavophile doctrine of the original ways of Russia.
In the article "On the Old and the New" (1839), Khomyakov expressed the foundations of his teaching in the sharpest form. Without hiding the backwardness of Russia at all, the author believed that the reason for this was the reforms of Peter the Great, which cut Russia off from its past and changed its original path of development. Now it's time to remember this, since Khomyakov considers the western paths passed: the West is on the eve of a catastrophe.
Resentment at Russian self-abasement and Western arrogance pervaded two articles by Khomyakov: “The opinion of foreigners about Russia” (“Moskvityanin, 1845) and “The opinion of Russians about foreigners” (“Moscow collection for 1846”). For him, England was an exemplary country that could preserve patriarchy (Letter on England, 1848). Khomyakov visited England in 1847, and he fell in love with her "Thorian" spirit: "here are the peaks, but here are the roots." Khomyakov even finds a similarity between Moscow and London: "in both, historical life is still ahead." However, Khomyakov went too far: he believed that the very word "English" comes from the Slavic "English".
In the programmatic preface to the first issue of Russkaya Conversation in 1856, having learned nothing from the experience of the defeat in the Crimean War, Khomyakov called again and again to "reconsider all those propositions, all those conclusions made by Western science, which we believed so unconditionally."
Many times, on various occasions, Khomyakov returned to the assessment of German philosophy from Kant to Feuerbach and came to the same conclusions as I. Kireevsky: this is an extreme expression of Western "rationalism" and "analysis", a "rational" school that has reached a dead end. One of the crimes was that Hegel himself prepared the transition to philosophical materialism, that is, according to Khomyakov, to the liquidation of philosophy in general. Khomyakov succeeds in noticing several real exaggerations in Hegel: his "unlimited arbitrariness of a learned taxonomist", when "the formula of a fact is recognized as its cause." But the whole point is that Khomyakov does not accept Hegel's teachings on causality and necessity. Schelling himself, to whom he clearly felt sympathy as the "recreator of the whole spirit", who came to the "philosophy of faith", is reproached for being too rational philosopher. The Slavophils reproached Hegel and the materialists, Feuerbach in particular, for liquidating philosophy, but they themselves actually liquidated it, for where faith begins, all trust in human reason, in philosophy, ends there. Philosophy becomes the servant of theology. Khomyakov said so: "... there is the possibility of a more complete and deeper philosophy, the roots of which lie in the knowledge of the faith of Orthodoxy."
As a literary critic, Khomyakov always spoke with one "eternal" theme: is a Russian art school possible? The question itself arose, as it were, in the heat of a controversy with the "natural school". One school wanted to oppose another school. But where was to take "their" school? Khomyakov denied the "natural school" as the result of Western influence.
In a special article “On the Possibility of a Russian Art School” (“Moscow Collection for 1847”), Khomyakov stated that there can be no Russian school as long as “the vital principle has been lost by us” due to “inoculated false half-knowledge”. Khomyakov spoke about the "Russian school" in general, about "reason" in general, about the "life principle" in general, about "nationality" in general in this article.
But he strove, following Shevyrev, at least in pieces, at the cost of exaggeration, to collect some kind of nascent Russian school in art. This can be seen from his tendentious and only sometimes fair analysis of works of various types of art: Glinka's opera A Life for the Tsar (Ivan Susanin), A. Ivanov's painting The Appearance of Christ to the People, reviews of Gogol, Venevitinov, S. Aksakov, L Tolstoy. With pathos, Khomyakov argued that it is imperative for truly Russian artists to be “completely Russian” and “to live a completely Russian life.” Khomyakov is seduced by the pathetic finale of Glinka's opera, which glorifies the unity of the Russian land with "copper bells from forty forty", as a blessing of the future all-human brotherhood. The distant plan, on which Ivanov puts the figure of Christ, is a manifestation of a purely Byzantine-Russian planar icon painting, which avoided the volumetric sensuality of Catholic art. “Never has a material image,” Khomyakov says of Ivanov’s painting, “clothed the mystery of Christian thought so transparently ...” Contemplating Ivanov’s painting is not only a pleasure, “it is an event in life.”
Naturally, Khomyakov did not agree with the theory of "pure art", he stood for tendentious art in the spirit of the Slavophiles and therefore executed Pisemsky's one-sidedly negative drama "A Bitter Fate", rejected the traditional praise of critics S. T. Aksakov for "objectivity » of his work. The essence of this writer, Khomyakov explained, is not at all in objectivity, generally "inaccessible to man." The essence of Aksakov's creativity is that "he was the first of our writers to look at our life from a positive, and not from a negative point of view." Positivity, according to Khomyakov, is characterized by the absence of satire. This is the essence of the "Russian" school in art. Khomyakov recognized the right of art to social denunciation, but limited it only to satire on "types of vices", and not on "private persons". In this sense, he praised the accusatory spirit of L. Tolstoy's story "Three Deaths".
The sound idea of a “Russian school” in art was distorted by Khomyakov to the point of absurdity and perished without finding its progressive justification. But in reality there was a school - a school of realism, but it aroused hostility in Khomyakov.
Konstantin Aksakov was justly considered "the foremost fighter of Slavophilism" (S. A. Vengerov). Contemporaries remember his youthful friendship with Belinsky in Stankevich's circle and then a sharp break with him. A particularly violent clash between them occurred in 1842 over Dead Souls.
K. Aksakov wrote a pamphlet “A few words about Gogol’s poem“ The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls ”- (1842) for the release of Dead Souls. Belinsky, who also responded (in Otechestvennye Zapiski) to Gogol's work, then wrote a bewildering review of Aksakov's pamphlet. Aksakov replied to Belinsky in an article. Explanation of Gogol's poem "The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls" ("Moskvityanin"). Belinsky, in turn, wrote a merciless analysis of Aksakov's answer in an article entitled "An Explanation for an Explanation Regarding Gogol's Poem Chichikov's Adventures, or Dead Souls." Obscuring the significance of realism and satire in Gogol's work, Aksakov focused on the subtext of the work, its genre designation as a "poem", on the writer's prophetic promises to depict gratifying pictures of Russian life. Aksakov built a whole concept in which, in essence, Gogol was declared the Homer of Russian society, and the pathos of his work was seen not in the denial of the existing reality, but in its affirmation. Aksakov clearly wanted to adapt Gogol to the Slavophile doctrine, that is, to turn him into a singer of "positive principles", the "bright side" of reality.
The Homeric epic in the subsequent history of European literature lost its important features and became shallow, "descended to novels and, finally, to the extreme degree of its humiliation, to the French story." And suddenly, Aksakov continues, an epic appears with all the depth and simple grandeur, like in the ancients, - Gogol's "poem" appears. The same deep-penetrating and all-seeing epic gaze, the same all-encompassing epic contemplation. In vain, then, in the polemic, Aksakov argued that he did not directly liken Gogol to Homer. It exists, and it is very natural for the Slavophiles. No wonder they advertised in the 40s Zhukovsky's translation of Homer's Odyssey, supposedly having the value of a healthy counterbalance to the modern "natural school", mired in criticism.
Aksakov pointed to the inner quality of Gogol's own talent, striving to link all the impressions of Russian life into harmonious harmonic pictures. We know that Gogol had such a subjective striving, and, abstractly speaking, Slavophile criticism correctly pointed to it. But this observation was immediately completely devalued by them, since such "unity" or such "epic harmony" of Gogol's talent was called upon in their eyes to destroy Gogol the realist. Epicness killed the satirist in Gogol - the exposer of life. Aksakov is ready to look for "human movements" in Korobochka, Manilovo, Sobakevich and thereby ennoble them as temporarily lost people. The carriers of the Russian substance turned out to be primitive serfs, Selifan and Petrushka.
Belinsky ridiculed all these exaggerations and attempts to liken the heroes of Dead Souls to the heroes of Homer. According to the logic set by Aksakov himself, Belinsky sarcastically drew obvious parallels between the characters: “If so, then, of course, why shouldn’t Chichikov be the Achilles of the Russian Iliad, Sobakevich - the frantic Ajax (especially during dinner), Manilov - Alexander Paris, Plyushkin - Nestor, Selifan - Automedon, police chief, father and benefactor of the city - Agamemnon, and a quarterly with a pleasant blush and in varnished boots - Hermes? .. ".
The Slavophils have always laid claim to what seemed to them to be the deepest understanding of Gogol. They emphasized that they know Gogol "from the inside", they see behind the mask of a humorist and satirist that "second" Gogol, who eludes the gaze of the uninitiated and is true. Belinsky, who saw in Gogol the main thing, i.e., a realist, indeed, before the publication of Dead Souls and even, more precisely, before the polemic with K. Aksakov, he did not ask the question of Gogol’s “duality” and left the writer’s preaching “manners” in the shade. True, already "Rome", as his letter to Gogol dated April 20, 1842, that is, a month before the publication of "Dead Souls", alerted Belinsky - he wished the writer "spiritual clarity". Let us add that only Chernyshevsky later, relying on published letters and the second volume of Dead Souls, deeply understood Gogol's contradictions. But the Slavophiles have nothing to do with it, they missed the main thing from the very beginning - they denied the social significance and realism of Gogol's work. They attached decisive importance to that inner desire to sing of the "innumerable riches" of the Russian spirit, which Gogol had.
In order to make the comparison of Gogol with Homer not look too odious, Aksakov invented the similarity between them even "by the act of creation." At the same time, he put Shakespeare on an equal footing with them. But what is the "act of creation", "the act of creation"? This is a contrived, purely a priori category, the purpose of which is to confuse the issue. Who will measure this act and how? Belinsky proposed to return to the category of content: it is the content that should be the source material when comparing one poet with another. But it has already been proved that Gogol has nothing in common with Homer in the field of content.
In the midst of a new round of controversy between the Slavophiles and the "natural school" in 1847, Aksakov published "Three Critical Articles" in the "Moscow Literary and Scientific Collection" under the pseudonym "Imrek".
Aksakov subjected the "Petersburg Collection" published by Nekrasov to a critical analysis. Prejudice of opinion comes through Aksakov in every paragraph. Dostoevsky's novel "Poor People" is called a work imitative in relation to Gogol, "not artistic", "devoid of sincerity", spoiled by a philanthropic tendency. The impression from the novel Poor Folk, says Aksakov, is “difficult,” Dostoevsky “is not an artist and never will be.”
Aksakov began to look for cracks in the "natural school". Perhaps, due to personal Moscow salon sympathies, not yet understanding the true spirit of his thoughts, Aksakov spoke very kindly about Iskander (Herzen), the author of "Caprices and Reflections." And even this thing itself did not yet fully betray Herzen's anti-Slavophilism. Scolded for the "Landlord" Turgenev was also kindly treated by Aksakov in a special note in which he responded to the appearance in the Sovremennik of the story "Khor and Kalinich". “This is what it means to touch the land and the people! Aksakov exclaimed in his own way, pleased with this story, “power is given in an instant! .. God grant Turgenev continue along this road.” Aksakov tried in vain to bring Turgenev's folk stories closer to Slavophilism.
About Belinsky's article "Thoughts and Notes on Russian Literature", placed in the "Petersburg Collection", Aksakov responded with hostility, but he was afraid to enter into a detailed polemic. He only noted Belinsky's contradiction: earlier the critic spoke of the untranslatability of Gogol's extremely original style into foreign languages, and now he was glad that Gogol was translated in France. Aksakov was pleased with another statement by Belinsky - that in the future Russia, in addition to the "victorious sword", would also put "Russian thought" on the scales of European life. But this statement in Belinsky had a completely different meaning than the Slavophile hopes for a special mission for Russia, their talk about “Russian thought”, “Russian science” isolated from the whole world. Belinsky spoke about something else: about Russia's ability to contribute to the spiritual treasury of mankind. In Aksakov's critical method traces of the study of dialectics were felt; he, like the early Belinsky, first deduced the phenomenon "abstractly", and then "applied" the theory to the facts. Unlike I. Kireevsky, who loved the moment of rest in dialectics, Aksakov loved the moment of movement, he believed that “one-sidedness is the lever of history”, i.e., as Belinsky would say, “the idea of negation”, “the struggle of opposites” is the lever stories. Aksakov used this method in his monograph “M. V. Lomonosov in the history of Russian literature and the Russian language, defended in 1847 as a master's thesis. Here the method came into further conflict with the doctrine. After all, according to the Slavophiles, the reforms of Peter I distorted the Russian people. Consequently, Lomonosov, who introduced a new versification in Russia according to the German model, and began to write court odes, directed Russian literature along the wrong path. But Aksakov is trying first to build a dialectical "triad" and in its light to assess the role of Lomonosov. According to this triad, the reforms of Peter I, for all their one-sidedness, were historically a "necessary moment" in the development of Russia. And "the phenomenon of Lomonosov in our literature is also a necessary moment."
Subsequent critical speeches by K-Aksakov - “Experience of synonyms. The audience is the people ”(“ Rumor ”, 1851) and others - were of little originality. In the Review of Modern Literature (Russian Conversation, 1857), the Review of Contemporary Journals (Molva, 1857), and the article Our Literature (The Day, 1861), he praised Shchedrin’s Gubernsky Essays, feeling in them some sort of “Russian spirit” related to itself, then cursed them when he saw that Shchedrin was not at all the writer for whom he took him. In recent years, K. Aksakov has promoted the "positive" direction in the work of the less talented writer N. S. Kokhanovskaya (Sokhanskaya). All this was done out of a desire to maintain the authority of Slavophilism at any cost.
The political meaning of the positions of Slavophilism was fully revealed in the "Note on the internal state of Russia", presented by K. Aksakov to Emperor Alexander II in 1855 and published only in 1881 (in the newspaper "Rus"). K. Aksakov drew the attention of the new tsar to the "oppressive system" in Russia, bribery, arbitrariness. Internal discord, covered up by the "shameless lies" of the government and the "tops", separated them from the "people", as a result of which the people have no "confidence" in the government. We must "understand Russia," Aksakov urged the young tsar, "and return to the Russian foundations." Russia has only one danger - "if it ceases to be Russia."
Samarin was younger than the founders of Slavophilism and gave the impression of a free man in dealing with their doctrines. Of his many works, only two articles belong to the history of criticism: a review of V.A. ", 1847, No. 2). Both are signed "M. Z.K.
Samarin tried to assure that the Slavophiles did not at all demand a return to pre-Petrine Russia, they did not at all deny the development of the principle of personality in Russia. And under Alexei Mikhailovich, there were already Western influences, and Ilya Muromets, and Churila Plenkovich - than not daring and not "personalities". But these stretches of Samarin could not convince anyone.
In his review of Sollogub's Tarantas, he showed a refinement of judgment, which forced Belinsky, who had also written about Tarantas before, to call his article "intelligent content and masterful presentation" ("A Look at Russian Literature of 1846"). In Samarin's article, Belinsky might have liked the fact that the author did not try to exalt the Slavophile virtues of any of the heroes of Tarantas. And the steppe landowner Vasily Ivanovich is a too simplified copy of the primordially Russian principles, and the Slavophilist Ivan Vasilyevich, who had seen enough of Europe during his travels, turned out to be too unreliable, almost a parody propagandist of the Slavophil doctrine. All this might have seemed to Belinsky like a caricature, close to his own interpretation of Sollogubov's "Tarantas"; after all, Belinsky transparently hinted that the hero Ivan Vasilyevich was Ivan Vasilyevich Kireevsky ... But Samarin did not even think of looking for parodies in Tarantas, he simply seriously reproached the heroes of the story for worthlessness, and the author for a superficial attitude to serious issues.
Belinsky no longer had any illusions about Samarin's positions in the article "On the Opinions of Sovremennik, Historical and Literary". Samarin was an open opponent of the "natural school" and, unlike Khomyakov, tried to talk not about its impossibility, but about the internal contradictions between its "prophets", about the contradictions between Gogol and his students. Samarin's attack was all the more insidious because it seemed to be based on facts and aimed at rehabilitating Gogol after the publication of Selected passages from correspondence with friends. Belinsky parried Samarin's attack in the article "Answer to the Moskvityanin". In a letter to K. D. Kavelin on November 22, 1847, Belinsky explained the harsh tone of his “Response to the Muscovite”: “Believe me that in my eyes, Mr. Samarin is no better than Mr. Bulgarin, in his attitude towards a natural school ...”
What is the essence of Samarin's attack? In the updated Sovremennik, which from January 1847 began to appear under the tacit editorship of N. A. Nekrasov and I. I. Panaev, the main forces of the “natural school” were now concentrated, and Belinsky also collaborated here. But the censorship did not allow Nekrasov and Panaev to publish Sovremennik under their own names. Then the editors had to make a compromise: she invited Professor of St. Petersburg University A.V. Nikitenko, who was not alien to literary interests and at the same time served in the censorship committee, as the executive editor. Nikitenko was known for his liberalism: it was he who allowed Gogol's Dead Souls to be published, with some alterations. Nekrasov and Panaev intended to use Nikitenko as a front.
The first issue of Sovremennik for 1847 contained two program articles: Belinsky's article "A Look at Russian Literature in 1846" and Nikitenko's article "On the Modern Trend in Russian Literature." The articles contradicted one another not only in quality, but also in some settings. Samarin immediately noticed this and tried to use it in the fight against the "natural school". By the way, Belinsky tried to cover up his differences with Nikitenko only for tactical purposes in his Reply to Moskvityanin, to take the responsible editor of Sovremennik under his protection. But contradictions were already brewing in the editorial office itself, and Nikitenko was soon forced to leave Sovremennik.
Samarin noted, not without satisfaction, that Nikitenko was a very ambiguous supporter of the "natural school", although he was nominally the head of Sovremennik. Indeed, Nikitenko only repeated, following Belinsky, that literature must have a certain direction and that in modern Russian literature, although there are no talents equal to Gogol, nevertheless "the vital principles of further development and activity have settled down and subsided." But Nikitenko expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that the "natural school" one-sidedly depicts Russian reality, violates the "eternal laws of art." Completely in the spirit of the writings of the Slavophils themselves, Nikitenko asserted: “If we have Nozdrevs, and Sobakevichs, and Chichikovs, then next to them there are landowners, officials, expressing in their morals the wonderful hereditary qualities of their people with the concepts of the educated world accepted and assimilated by them .. .".
Using the reproaches of the "natural school" for being one-sided, Samarin sharpened some of Nikitenko's thoughts on his own, choosing from his article many covert and overt attacks against the "natural school".
We note in passing that it was Samarin who turned the designation of the method of the "natural school" into the term "naturalism", while Belinsky had not yet used this term in such an edition, although he did not see in it a malicious distortion of the very concept of "natural image of life". However, the term "naturalism" did not hold out in the then criticism and arose later, in a completely different connection.
Samarin saw the main sin of the "natural school" in the fact that it adopted from Gogol only his one-sidedness, one content. It is based on a "double imitation": it takes its content not from life, but from Gogol, and even then not completely.
Since the Slavophiles had more than once clashed with Belinsky on the basis of the formula expressed by him: "... everything national, in which there is no human, must be rejected," Samarin decided to fight here as well. He asked: who will explain to us what, in fact, this human consists of? For one it is in one, for another in another. "With the question: what is universal and how to distinguish it from the national dispute is just beginning." But Samarin did not answer the question, he only frightened with the difficulties of his solution, but in fact he signed his sympathy for old Russia, which was no longer new. This was the essence of the long-begun struggle of the camps around this question, that they gave different answers to it. History has shown who was right. Under the humanity and truth of relations, the Slavophils meant patriarchy, backward social forms, the humility of the people and submission to prejudices, the idealization of the church and power. This was their reactivity.
Belinsky, by humanity, meant fundamental social changes in Russia, the essence of which he speaks in all his articles and in his Letter to N.V. Gogol. In the speeches against the realistic trend, the conservatism of Slavophilism was fully revealed.
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Russian literary-critical and philosophical thought of the second half of the 19th century
(Literature lesson in grade 10)
Type of lesson - lesson-lecture
slide 1
Our turbulent, impetuous time, which has sharply liberated spiritual thought and social life, requires an active awakening in a person of a sense of history, personal, deliberate and creative participation in it. We should not be "Ivans who do not remember kinship", we should not forget that our national culture is based on such a colossus as Russian literature of the 19th century.
Now, when on television and video screens the dominance of Western culture, sometimes empty and vulgar, when petty-bourgeois values are being imposed on us and we are all wandering along the side of a stranger, forgetting our own language, we must remember that the names of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov are incredibly revered in the West, that Tolstoy alone became the ancestor of a whole creed, Ostrovsky alone created a national theater, that Dostoevsky spoke out against future rebellions if a tear of at least one child was shed in them.
Russian literature of the second half of the 19th century was the ruler of thoughts. From the question "Who is to blame?" she moves on to the question "What to do?" Writers will decide this question in different ways due to their social and philosophical views.
According to Chernyshevsky, our literature was elevated to the dignity of a national cause, the most viable forces of Russian society came here.
Literature is not a game, not fun, not entertainment. Russian writers treated their work in a special way: for them it was not a profession, but a service in the highest sense of the word, service to God, people, Fatherland, art, high. Beginning with Pushkin, Russian writers saw themselves as prophets who came into this world "to burn people's hearts with the verb."
The word was perceived not as an empty sound, but as a deed. This belief in the miraculous power of the word was also hidden in Gogol, dreaming of creating a book that itself, by the power of only the only and undeniably true thoughts expressed in it, should transform Russia.
Russian literature in the second half of the 19th century was closely connected with the social life of the country and was even politicized. Literature was the mouthpiece of ideas. Therefore, we need to get acquainted with the socio-political life of the second half of the 19th century.
slide 2
The socio-political life of the second half of the 19th century can be divided into stages.
*Cm. slide 2-3
slide 4
What parties existed in the political horizon of that time and what did they represent?(Teacher announces slide 4, animated)
slide 5
In the course of the slide demonstration, the teacher gives definitions, students write them in a notebook
vocabulary work
Conservative (reactionary)- a person who defends stagnant political views, averse to everything new and advanced
Liberal - a person who adheres to middle positions in his political views. He talks about the need for change, but in a liberal way
Revolutionary - a person who actively calls for changes, who does not go to them in a peaceful way, defending a radical break in the system
slide 6
This slide organizes the subsequent work. Students draw the table in a notebook to fill it in during the lecture.
The Russian liberals of the 1960s advocated reforms without revolutions and pinned their hopes on social reforms "from above". The liberals were divided into Westerners and Slavophiles. Why? The fact is that Russia is a Eurasian country. She absorbed both eastern and western information. This identity has taken on a symbolic meaning. Some believed that this originality contributed to the lag of Russia, others believed that this was its strength. The first began to be called "Westerners", the second - "Slavophiles". Both trends were born on the same day.
Slide 7
In 1836, the article "Philosophical Letters" appeared in the "Telescope". Its author was Pyotr Yakovlevich Chaadaev. After this article, he was declared insane. Why? The fact is that in the article Chaadaev expressed an extremely bleak view of Russia, the historical fate of which seemed to him "a gap in the order of understanding."
Russia, according to Chaadaev, was deprived of organic growth, cultural continuity, in contrast to the Catholic West. She had no "tradition", no historical past. Her present is extremely mediocre, and her future depends on whether she enters the cultural family of Europe, refusing historical independence.
Slide 8
Westerners included such writers and critics as Belinsky, Herzen, Turgenev, Botkin, Annensky, Granovsky.
Slide 9
The press organs of the Westerners were the journals Sovremennik, Otechestvennye Zapiski, and Library for Reading. In their journals, Westerners defended the traditions of "pure art". What does "pure" mean? Pure - devoid of teaching, any ideological views. They tend to portray people as they see them, like, for example, Druzhinin.
Slide 10
slide 11
Slavophilism is an ideological and political movement of the mid-19th century, whose representatives contrasted the historical path of Russia's development with the development of Western European countries and idealized the patriarchal features of Russian life and culture.
The founders of Slavophile ideas were Peter and Ivan Kireevsky, Alexei Stepanovich Khomyakov and Konstantin Sergeevich Aksakov.
In the circle of Slavophiles, the fate of the Slavic tribe was often discussed. The role of the Slavs, according to Khomyakov, was belittled by German historians and philosophers. And this is all the more surprising that it was the Germans who most organically assimilated the Slavic elements of spiritual culture. However, while insisting on the original historical development of Russia, the Slavophiles spoke disparagingly of the successes of European culture. It turned out that the Russian person had nothing to console himself with in the West, that Peter the Great, who opened a window to Europe, distracted her from her original path.
slide 12
The mouthpieces of the ideas of Slavophilism were the magazines Moskvityanin, Russkaya Beseda, and the newspaper Severnaya Pchela. The literary-critical program of the Slavophiles was connected with their views. They did not accept socio-analytical principles in Russian prose and poetry; refined psychologism was alien to them. They paid much attention to CNT.
slide 13
Critics in these journals were Shevyryov, Pogodin, Ostrovsky, Apollon Grigoriev.
Slide 14
The literary activity of Russian writers has always been associated with the socio-political situation in the country, and the second half of the 19th century is no exception.
In the 40s of the 19th century, the dominance of the "natural school" in literature. This school fought against romanticism. Belinsky believed that "it is necessary to crush romanticism with the scourge of humor." Herzen called romanticism "spiritual scrofula". Romanticism was opposed to the analysis of reality itself. Critics of that time believe that "literature should follow the path blazed by Gogol." Belinsky called Gogol "the father of the natural school."
By the beginning of the 1940s, Pushkin and Lermontov were dead, and romanticism was leaving with them.
In the 40s, such writers as Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Goncharov came to literature.
slide 15
Where did the term "natural school" come from? So Belinsky called this current in 1846. This school is condemned for being "filthy", for the fact that the writers of this school draw the details of the life of poor people, humiliated and offended. Samarin, an opponent of the "natural school", divided the heroes of these books into beaten and beating, scolded and scolded.
The main question that the writers of the “natural school” pose to themselves is “Who is to blame?”, Circumstances or the person himself in his miserable life. Until the 1940s, it was believed in literature that circumstances were to blame; after the 1940s, it was believed that the person himself was to blame.
Very characteristic of the natural school” is the expression “environment stuck”, that is, much in a person’s distress was attributed to the environment.
The "Natural School" took a step towards the democratization of literature, putting forward the most important problem - the personality. Since a person begins to move to the forefront of the image, the work is saturated with psychological content. The school comes to the traditions of Lermontov, seeks to show a person from the inside. The "natural school" in the history of Russian literature was necessary as a transition from romanticism to realism.
slide 16
How is realism different from romanticism?
- The main thing in realism is the representation of types. Belinsky wrote: “It’s a matter of types. Types are representatives of the environment. Typical faces should be looked for in different classes. It was necessary to pay all attention to the crowd, to the masses.
- The subject of the image was not heroes, but typical faces in typical circumstances.
- Since the subject of the image is an ordinary, prosaic person, then the genres, therefore, are prosaic: novels, short stories. During this period, Russian literature moves from romantic poems and poems to realistic stories and novels. This period affected the genres of such works as Pushkin's novel in verse "Eugene Onegin" and Gogol's prose poem "Dead Souls". The novel and the story makes it possible to present a person in public life, the novel admits the whole and the details, it is convenient for combining fiction and the truth of life.
- The hero of the works of the realistic method is not the hero of the individual, but a small person like Gogol's Akaki Akakievich or Pushkin's Samson Vyrin. A small person is a person of low social status, depressed by circumstances, meek, most often an official.
So, realism becomes the literary method of the second half of the 19th century.
Slide 17
In the early 1960s, an upsurge in the socio-political struggle is planned. As I said earlier, the question “who is to blame?” replaced by the question "what to do?" Literature and social activity include "new people", no longer contemplatives and talkers, but figures. These are revolutionary democrats.
The rise of the socio-political struggle was associated with the inglorious end of the Crimean War, with the amnesty of the Decembrists after the death of Nicholas 1. Alexander 2 carried out many reforms, including the peasant reform of 1861.
Slide 18
The late Belinsky developed socialist ideas in his articles. They were picked up by Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky and Nikolai Alexandrovich Dobrolyubov. They are moving from a shaky alliance with the liberals to an uncompromising struggle against them.
Dobrolyubov is in charge of the satirical department of the Sovremennik magazine and publishes the Whistle magazine.
Revolutionary democrats are promoting the idea of a peasant revolution. Dobrolyubov becomes the founder of the critical method, creates his own "real criticism". Democratic revolutionaries unite in the Sovremennik magazine. These are Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, Nekrasov, Pisarev.
Slide 19
In the 60s, realism - the only method in Russian literature - was divided into several currents.
Slide 20
In the 1960s, the “superfluous person” was condemned. Eugene Onegin and Pechorin can be attributed to the "superfluous people". Nekrasov writes: “People like him roam the earth, looking for gigantic business for themselves.” They can't do it and they don't want to. These are people who "think at a crossroads." These are reflective people, that is, people who subject themselves to introspection, constantly analyzing themselves and their actions, as well as the actions and thoughts of other people. The first reflective personality in literature was Hamlet with his question "To be or not to be?" The “superfluous person” is being replaced by a “new person” - a nihilist, a revolutionary, a democrat, a native of a heterogeneous environment (no longer a nobleman). These are people of action, they want to actively change lives, they are fighting for the emancipation of women.
slide 21
After the manifesto that liberated the peasants in 1861, contradictions escalate. After 1861, government reaction sets in again:*Cm. slide
A dispute broke out between Sovremennik and Russkoye Slovo over the peasantry. The activist of the Russian Word, Dmitry Ivanovich Pisarev, saw revolutionary force in the proletariat, raznochintsy revolutionaries, carrying natural science knowledge to the people. He condemned the figures of Sovremennik Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov for embellishing the Russian peasant.
slide 22
The 1970s are characterized by the activities of the revolutionary Narodniks. The Narodniks preached "going among the people" in order to teach, heal, and enlighten the people. The leaders of this movement are Lavrov, Mikhailovsky, Bakunin, Tkachev. Their organization "Land and Freedom" split, the terrorist "Narodnaya Volya" emerged from it. Populist terrorists make many attempts on Alexander 2, who is eventually killed, after which the government reacts.
slide 23
In parallel with the Narodnaya Volya, Narodniks, there is another thought - religious and philosophical. The ancestor of this trend was Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov.
He believes that God is the creator of the universe. But why is the world imperfect? Because man has contributed to the inferiority of the world. Fedorov correctly believed that a person spends his strength on the negative. We have forgotten that we are brothers and perceive the other person as a competitor. Hence the decline of human morality. He believes that the salvation of mankind in unification, catholicity, and Russia contains the makings of a future unification, as in Russia.*See next slide
slide 24
Homework:
Learn the lecture, prepare for the test work
Prepare for the test work on the questions:
- Liberal Western Party. Views, figures, criticism, magazines.
- Liberal Slavophile Party. Views, criticism, magazines.
- Public Program and Critical Activities of Soil Workers
- Literary and critical activity of revolutionary democrats
- Disputes between Sovremennik and Russkoye Slovo. Conservative ideology of the 80s.
- Russian liberal populism. Religious and philosophical thought of the 80-90s.
Task: Read the article and answer the following questions:
1. What are the features of Russian criticism of the 2nd half of the 19th century?
2. What explains the diversity of trends in Russian criticism of the second half of the 19th century?
3. What did the Slavophiles not accept in Russian prose and poetry?
4. What traditions in literature and art were defended by Western liberals?
5. What art did the critic Druzhinin consider authentic?
6. What are the advantages of liberal Western criticism?
7. What are the shortcomings of liberal Western criticism?
8. What is the task of "real" criticism, according to Dobrolyubov?
9. What are the disadvantages of "real" criticism?
Lebedev Yu.V. — Russian literary-critical and religious-philosophical thought of the second half of the 19th century.
On the originality of Russian literary criticism. “As long as our poetry is alive and well, until then there is no reason to doubt the deep health of the Russian people,” wrote the critic N. N. Strakhov, and his associate Apollon Grigoriev considered Russian literature “the only focus of all our highest interests.” V. G. Belinsky bequeathed to his friends to put in his coffin an issue of the journal "Domestic Notes", and the classic of Russian satire M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin said in a farewell letter to his son: "Most of all, love your native literature and prefer the title of a writer to any other" .
According to N. G. Chernyshevsky, our literature was elevated to the dignity of a national cause that united the most viable forces of Russian society. In the mind of the 19th century reader, literature was not only "belle literacy", but also the basis of the spiritual existence of the nation. The Russian writer treated his work in a special way: it was not a profession for him, but a service. Chernyshevsky called literature "a textbook of life", and Leo Tolstoy was later surprised that these words did not belong to him, but to his ideological opponent.
The artistic development of life in Russian classical literature has never turned into a purely aesthetic pursuit, it has always pursued a living spiritual and practical goal. "The word was perceived not as an empty sound, but as a deed - almost as "religious" as the ancient Karelian singer Veinemeinen, who "made a boat with singing." Gogol also concealed this faith in the miraculous power of the word, dreaming of creating such a book that itself, by the power of the only and undeniably true thoughts expressed in it, should transform Russia," notes the modern literary critic G. D. Gachev.
Belief in the effective, world-changing power of the artistic word also determined the characteristics of Russian literary criticism. From literary problems, she always rose to social problems that are directly related to the fate of the country, people, nation. The Russian critic did not limit himself to discussions about the art form, about the skill of the writer. Analyzing a literary work, he came to the questions that life put before the writer and reader. The orientation of criticism to a wide range of readers made it very popular: the authority of the critic in Russia was great and his articles were perceived as original works, enjoying success on a par with literature.
Russian criticism of the second half of the 19th century develops more dramatically. The public life of the country at that time became extraordinarily complicated, many political trends arose that argued with each other. The picture of the literary process also turned out to be motley and multilayered. Therefore, criticism has become more discordant compared to the era of the 30s and 40s, when the whole variety of critical assessments was covered by the authoritative word of Belinsky. Like Pushkin in literature, Belinsky was a kind of generalist in criticism: he combined sociological, aesthetic, and stylistic approaches in evaluating a work, embracing the literary movement as a whole with a single glance.
In the second half of the 19th century, Belinsky's critical universalism proved to be unique. Critical thought specialized in certain directions and schools. Even Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, the most versatile critics, who possessed a broad public view, could no longer claim not only to cover the literary movement in its entirety, but also to holistically interpret an individual work. Their work was dominated by sociological approaches. Literary development as a whole and the place in it of the individual work were now revealed by the totality of critical trends and schools. Apollon Grigoriev, for example, arguing with Dobrolyubov's assessments of A. N. Ostrovsky, noticed in the work of the playwright such facets that eluded Dobrolyubov. Critical reflection on the work of Turgenev or Leo Tolstoy cannot be reduced to the assessments of Dobrolyubov or Chernyshevsky. N. N. Strakhov's works on "Fathers and Sons" and "War and Peace" significantly deepen and clarify them. The depth of understanding of I. A. Goncharov's novel "Oblomov" is not limited to Dobrolyubov's classic article "What is Oblomovism?": A. V. Druzhinin introduces significant clarifications into the understanding of Oblomov's character.
The main stages of the social struggle of the 60s. The variety of literary critical assessments in the second half of the 19th century was associated with the growing social struggle. From 1855 two historical forces—revolutionary democracy and liberalism—revealed in public life, and by 1859 entered into an uncompromising struggle. The voice of the "peasant democrats", gaining strength on the pages of Nekrasov's Sovremennik magazine, begins to determine public opinion in the country.
The social movement of the 60s goes through three stages in its development: from 1855 to 1858; from 1859 to 1861; from 1862 to 1869. At the first stage there is a delimitation of social forces, at the second - a tense struggle between them, and at the third - a sharp decline in the movement, culminating in the onset of government reaction.
Liberal Western Party. The Russian liberals of the 1960s advocated the art of "reforms without revolutions" and pinned their hopes on social transformations "from above." But in their circles, disagreements arise between Westerners and Slavophiles about the paths of the emerging reforms. Westerners begin the countdown of historical development with the transformations of Peter I, whom Belinsky called "the father of the new Russia." They are skeptical about pre-Petrine history. But, denying Russia the right to a "pre-Petrine" historical tradition, Westerners deduce from this fact a paradoxical idea about our great advantage: a Russian person, free from the burden of historical traditions, can turn out to be "more progressive" than any European due to his "receptiveness". The land, which does not conceal any of its own seeds, can be plowed up boldly and deeply, and in case of failure, according to the Slavophil A.S. Khomyakov, "to calm the conscience with the thought that no matter how you do, you will not do worse than before." "Why worse?" objected the Westerners.
Mikhail Nikiforovich Katkov, on the pages of the liberal magazine Russky Vestnik, founded by him in 1856 in Moscow, promotes English ways of social and economic reforms: the liberation of peasants with land when it is bought out by the government, granting the nobility the rights of local and state administration following the example of English lords.
Liberal Slavophile Party. The Slavophils also denied the "unaccountable worship of past forms of our antiquity." But they considered borrowings possible only if they were grafted onto an original historical root. If the Westerners argued that the difference between the enlightenment of Europe and Russia exists only in degree, and not in character, then the Slavophiles believed that Russia already in the first centuries of its history, with the adoption of Christianity, was formed no less than the West, but "the spirit and basic principles "Russian education differed significantly from Western European.
Ivan Vasilyevich Kireevsky, in his article "On the Character of the Enlightenment of Europe and its Relationship to the Enlightenment of Russia," singled out three essential features of these differences: 1) Russia and the West adopted different types of ancient culture, 2) Orthodoxy had pronounced distinctive features that distinguished it from Catholicism, 3) the historical conditions under which Western European and Russian statehood took shape were different.
Western Europe inherited ancient Roman education, which differed from ancient Greek in formal rationality, admiration for the letter of legal law and disregard for the traditions of "common law", which rested not on external legal regulations, but on traditions and habits.
Roman culture left its mark on Western European Christianity. The West sought to subordinate faith to the logical arguments of reason. The predominance of rational principles in Christianity led the Catholic Church, first to the Reformation, and then to the complete triumph of reason that deified itself. This liberation of reason from faith culminated in German classical philosophy and led to the creation of atheistic teachings.
Finally, the statehood of Western Europe arose as a result of the conquest by the Germanic tribes of the indigenous inhabitants of the former Roman Empire. Starting with violence, the European states were to be developed by periodic revolutionary upheavals.
In Russia, things were different. She received a cultural inoculation not of a formally rational, Roman, but of a more harmonious and integral Greek education. The Fathers of the Eastern Church never fell into abstract rationality and cared primarily about "the correctness of the inner state of the thinking spirit." In the foreground they had not mind, not rationality, but the highest unity of the believing spirit.
The Slavophils considered the Russian statehood to be unique as well. Since in Russia there were no two warring tribes - the conquerors and the vanquished, social relations in it were based not only on legislative and legal acts that fettered the life of the people, indifferent to the inner content of human ties. Our laws were more internal than external. "Holiness of tradition" was preferred to legal formula, morality - to external benefit.
The Church has never tried to usurp secular power, to replace the state with itself, as it happened more than once in papal Rome. The basis of the original Russian organization was the communal structure, the grain of which was the peasant world: small rural communities merged into broader regional associations, from which the consent of the entire Russian land, headed by the Grand Duke, arose.
The Petrine reform, which subordinated the church to the state, abruptly broke the natural course of Russian history.
In the Europeanization of Russia, the Slavophiles saw a threat to the very essence of Russian national existence. Therefore, they had a negative attitude towards the Petrine reforms and government bureaucracy, and were active opponents of serfdom. They stood up for freedom of speech, for the solution of state issues at the Zemsky Sobor, consisting of representatives of all classes of Russian society. They objected to the introduction in Russia of forms of bourgeois parliamentary democracy, considering it necessary to preserve the autocracy, reformed in the spirit of the ideals of Russian "sobornost". The autocracy must take the path of voluntary cooperation with the "land", and in its decisions rely on the opinion of the people, periodically convening the Zemsky Sobor. The sovereign is called upon to listen to the point of view of all estates, but to make the final decision alone, in accordance with the Christian spirit of goodness and truth. Not democracy with its voting and the mechanical victory of the majority over the minority, but consent, leading to unanimous, "cathedral" submission to the sovereign will, which should be free from class restrictions and serve the highest Christian values.
Literary-critical program of the Slavophiles was organically connected with their social views. This program was proclaimed by the "Russian conversation" published by them in Moscow: "The highest subject and task of the people's word is not to say what is bad in a certain people, what it is sick with and what it does not have, but in the poetic recreation of what given to him the best for his historical destiny.
Slavophiles did not accept socio-analytic principles in Russian prose and poetry, they were alien to refined psychologism, in which they saw the disease of the modern personality, "Europeanized", detached from the popular soil, from the traditions of national culture. It is precisely such a painful manner with "flaunting unnecessary details" that K. S. Aksakov finds in the early works of L. N. Tolstoy with his "dialectics of the soul", in the stories of I. S. Turgenev about the "superfluous person".
Literary and critical activity of Westerners. Unlike the Slavophiles, who stand up for the social content of art in the spirit of their "Russian views", Western liberals represented by P.V. Annenkov and A.V. day and faithful to the "absolute laws of artistry".
Alexander Vasilyevich Druzhinin in his article "Criticism of the Gogol Period of Russian Literature and Our Relationship to It" formulated two theoretical ideas about art: he called one "didactic" and the other "artistic". Didactic poets "want to act directly on modern life, modern customs and modern man. They want to sing, teaching, and often achieve their goal, but their song, winning in an instructive way, cannot but lose a lot in terms of eternal art."
True art has nothing to do with teaching. "Firmly believing that the interests of the moment are transient, that humanity, changing incessantly, does not change only in the ideas of eternal beauty, goodness and truth," the poet-artist "sees his eternal anchor in selfless service to these ideas ... He depicts people as he sees them without instructing them to improve, he does not give lessons to society, or if he gives them, he gives them unconsciously.He lives in the midst of his sublime world and descends to earth, as the Olympians once descended to it, firmly remembering that he has his own home on high Olympus."
An indisputable merit of liberal-Western criticism was close attention to the specifics of literature, to the difference between its artistic language and the language of science, journalism, and criticism. Also characteristic is the interest in the imperishable and eternal in the works of classical Russian literature, in what determines their unfading life in time. But at the same time, attempts to distract the writer from the "everyday unrest" of modernity, to muffle the author's subjectivity, distrust of works with a pronounced social orientation testified to the liberal moderation and limited public views of these critics.
Public Program and Literary Critical Activities of the Podvenniks. Another socio-literary trend of the mid-60s, which removed the extremes of the Westerners and Slavophiles, was the so-called "pochvennichestvo". Its spiritual leader was F. M. Dostoevsky, who published two magazines during these years - Vremya (1861-1863) and Epoch (1864-1865). Companions of Dostoevsky in these journals were literary critics Apollon Alexandrovich Grigoriev and Nikolai Nikolaevich Strakhov.
The Pochvenniks to some extent inherited the view of the Russian national character expressed by Belinsky in 1846. Belinsky wrote: “Russia has nothing to compare with the old states of Europe, whose history was diametrically opposed to ours and has long since given color and fruit ... It is known that the French, the British, the Germans are so national each in their own way that they are not able to understand each other, then as a Russian is equally accessible to the sociality of a Frenchman, and the practical activity of an Englishman, and the vague philosophy of a German.
The Pochvenniks spoke of "all-humanity" as a characteristic feature of the Russian people's consciousness, which A. S. Pushkin most deeply inherited in our literature. “This idea is expressed by Pushkin not only as an indication, teaching or theory, not as a dream or a prophecy, but is actually fulfilled, it is enclosed forever in his brilliant creations and proved by him,” Dostoevsky wrote. “He is a man of the ancient of the world, he and a German, he and an Englishman, deeply aware of his genius, the anguish of his aspiration ("Feast during the plague"), he is a poet of the East. He told and declared to all these peoples that the Russian genius knows them, understood them, touched with them as a native, that it can be reincarnated in them in its entirety, that only the Russian spirit is given universality, given the assignment in the future to comprehend and unite all the diversity of nationalities and remove all their contradictions.
Like the Slavophiles, the soil-men believed that "Russian society must unite with the people's soil and take into itself the people's element." But, unlike the Slavophiles, they did not deny the positive role of the reforms of Peter I and the "Europeanized" Russian intelligentsia, called upon to bring enlightenment and culture to the people, but only on the basis of popular moral ideals. It was precisely such a Russian European that A. S. Pushkin was in the eyes of the soil-dwellers.
According to A. Grigoriev, Pushkin is "the first and full representative" of "our social and moral sympathies." “In Pushkin, for a long time, if not forever, our whole spiritual process, outlined in a broad outline, ended, our “volume and measure”: all subsequent development of Russian literature is a deepening and artistic comprehension of those elements that affected Pushkin. A. N. Ostrovsky most organically expressed Pushkin's principles in modern literature. "Ostrovsky's new word is the oldest word - nationality." "Ostrovsky is as little a detractor as he is a little idealizer. Let him be what he is - a great folk poet, the first and only exponent of the people's essence in its diverse manifestations ..."
N. N. Strakhov was the only profound interpreter in the history of Russian criticism of the second half of the 19th century of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. It was not by chance that he called his work "a critical poem in four songs." Leo Tolstoy himself, who considered Strakhov his friend, said: "One of the happiness for which I am grateful to fate is that N.N. Strakhov exists."
Literary and critical activity of revolutionary democrats. The social, socially critical pathos of the articles of the late Belinsky with his socialist convictions was picked up and developed in the sixties by the revolutionary-democratic critics Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky and Nikolai Aleksandrovich Dobrolyubov.
By 1859, when the government program and the views of the liberal parties became clear, when it became obvious that the reform "from above" in any of its variants would be half-hearted, the revolutionary democrats moved from a shaky alliance with liberalism to a break in relations and an uncompromising struggle against it. The literary-critical activity of N. A. Dobrolyubov falls on this, the second stage of the social movement of the 60s. He devotes a special satirical section of the Sovremennik magazine called Whistle to denouncing liberals. Here Dobrolyubov acts not only as a critic, but also as a satirical poet.
Criticism of liberalism then alerted A. I. Herzen, who, being in exile, unlike Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, continued to hope for reforms "from above" and overestimated the radicalism of the liberals until 1863. However, Herzen's warnings did not stop the revolutionary democrats of Sovremennik. Beginning in 1859, they began to carry out the idea of a peasant revolution in their articles. They considered the peasant community to be the core of the future socialist world order. Unlike the Slavophiles, Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov believed that the communal ownership of land rested not on the Christian, but on the revolutionary-liberation, socialist instincts of the Russian peasant.
Dobrolyubov became the founder of the original critical method. He saw that the majority of Russian writers do not share the revolutionary-democratic way of thinking, do not pronounce sentence on life from such radical positions. Dobrolyubov saw the task of his criticism in completing the work begun by the writer in his own way and formulating this sentence, based on real events and artistic images of the work. Dobrolyubov called his method of comprehending the work of the writer "real criticism".
Real criticism "analyzes whether such a person is possible and really; having found that it is true to reality, it proceeds to its own considerations about the reasons that gave rise to it, etc. If these reasons are indicated in the work of the author being analyzed, criticism uses them and thanks the author; if not, does not stick to him with a knife to the throat - how, they say, he dared to draw such a face without explaining the reasons for its existence? In this case, the critic takes the initiative in his own hands: he explains the causes that gave rise to this or that phenomenon from revolutionary-democratic positions and then pronounces a sentence on him.
Dobrolyubov positively evaluates, for example, Goncharov's novel Oblomov, although the author "does not and, apparently, does not want to give any conclusions." It is enough that he "presents to you a living image and vouches only for its resemblance to reality." For Dobrolyubov, such authorial objectivity is quite acceptable and even desirable, since he takes the explanation and the verdict on himself.
Real criticism often led Dobrolyubov to a kind of reinterpretation of the writer's artistic images in a revolutionary democratic way. It turned out that the analysis of the work, which developed into an understanding of the acute problems of our time, led Dobrolyubov to such radical conclusions that the author himself did not in any way assume. On this basis, as we shall see later, there was a decisive break between Turgenev and the Sovremennik magazine, when Dobrolyubov's article on the novel "On the Eve" saw the light of day in it.
In Dobrolyubov's articles, the young, strong nature of a talented critic comes to life, sincerely believing in the people, in which he sees the embodiment of all his highest moral ideals, with whom he connects the only hope for the revival of society. "His passion is deep and stubborn, and obstacles do not frighten him when they need to be overcome in order to achieve the passionately desired and deeply conceived," Dobrolyubov writes about the Russian peasant in the article "Features for Characterizing the Russian Common People." All the activity of criticism was aimed at the struggle for the creation of "the party of the people in literature." He devoted four years of vigilant labor to this struggle, writing nine volumes of works in such a short time. Dobrolyubov literally burned himself on the ascetic journal work, which undermined his health. He died at the age of 25 on November 17, 1861. About the premature death of a young friend, Nekrasov said heartfeltly:
But your hour has struck too soon
And the prophetic feather fell from his hands.
What a lamp of reason has gone out!
What heart stopped beating!
The decline of the social movement of the 60s. Disputes between Sovremennik and Russkoe Slovo. At the end of the 1960s, dramatic changes took place in Russian public life and critical thought. The Manifesto of February 19, 1861 on the emancipation of the peasants not only did not mitigate, but even more exacerbated the contradictions. In response to the upsurge of the revolutionary-democratic movement, the government launched an open offensive against progressive ideas: Chernyshevsky and D. I. Pisarev were arrested, and the publication of the Sovremennik magazine was suspended for eight months.
The situation is aggravated by a split within the revolutionary-democratic movement, the main reason for which was the disagreement in assessing the revolutionary-socialist possibilities of the peasantry. The activists of Russkoye Slovo, Dmitri Ivanovich Pisarev and Varfolomey Aleksandrovich Zaitsev, sharply criticized Sovremennik for its alleged idealization of the peasantry, for its exaggerated idea of the revolutionary instincts of the Russian muzhik.
Unlike Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky, Pisarev argued that the Russian peasant was not ready for a conscious struggle for freedom, that for the most part he was dark and downtrodden. Pisarev considered the "intellectual proletariat", revolutionary raznochintsev, carrying natural science knowledge to the people, as the revolutionary force of modernity. This knowledge not only destroys the foundations of official ideology (Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality), but also opens the eyes of the people to the natural needs of human nature, which are based on the instinct of "social solidarity." Therefore, enlightening the people with the natural sciences can lead society to socialism not only in a revolutionary ("mechanical"), but also in an evolutionary ("chemical") way.
In order to make this "chemical" transition faster and more efficient, Pisarev suggested that Russian democracy be guided by the "principle of economy of forces." The "intellectual proletariat" must concentrate all its energy on destroying the spiritual foundations of the society that exists today by propagating the natural sciences among the people. In the name of the so-understood "spiritual liberation", Pisarev, like Turgenev's hero Yevgeny Bazarov, proposed to abandon art. He really believed that "a decent chemist is twenty times more useful than any poet," and recognized art only to the extent that it participates in the promotion of natural science knowledge and destroys the foundations of the existing system.
In the article "Bazarov" he glorified the triumphant nihilist, and in the article "Motives of Russian Drama" he "crushed" the heroine of A. N. Ostrovsky's drama "Thunderstorm" Katerina Kabanova, erected on a pedestal by Dobrolyubov. Destroying the idols of the "old" society, Pisarev published the infamous anti-Pushkin articles and the work The Destruction of Aesthetics. The fundamental disagreements that emerged in the course of the controversy between Sovremennik and Russkoye Slovo weakened the revolutionary camp and were a symptom of the decline of the social movement.
Public upsurge in the 70s. By the beginning of the 1970s, the first signs of a new social upsurge associated with the activities of the revolutionary Narodniks appeared in Russia. The second generation of revolutionary democrats, who made a heroic attempt to rouse the peasants to the revolution by "going to the people", had their own ideologists, who developed the ideas of Herzen, Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov in the new historical conditions. "Faith in a special way, in the communal system of Russian life; hence the belief in the possibility of a peasant socialist revolution - that's what inspired them, raised tens and hundreds of people to the heroic struggle against the government," V. I. Lenin wrote about the populists of the seventies . This belief, to one degree or another, permeated all the works of the leaders and mentors of the new movement - P. L. Lavrov, N. K. Mikhailovsky, M. A. Bakunin, P. N. Tkachev.
Mass "going to the people" ended in 1874 with the arrest of several thousand people and the subsequent trials of the 193rd and 50th. In 1879, at a congress in Voronezh, the populist organization "Land and Freedom" split: "politicians" who shared Tkachev's ideas organized their own party, "Narodnaya Volya", proclaiming the main goal of the movement to be a political coup and terrorist forms of struggle against the government. In the summer of 1880, the Narodnaya Volya organized an explosion in the Winter Palace, and Alexander II miraculously escaped death. This event causes shock and confusion in the government: it decides to make concessions by appointing the liberal Loris-Melikov as a plenipotentiary ruler and appealing to the country's liberal public for support. In response, the sovereign receives notes from Russian liberals, in which it is proposed to immediately convene an independent assembly of representatives of the zemstvos to participate in the government of the country "in order to develop guarantees and individual rights, freedom of thought and speech." It seemed that Russia was on the verge of adopting a parliamentary form of government. But on March 1, 1881, an irreparable mistake is made. The Narodnaya Volya, after repeated assassination attempts, kill Alexander II, and after this, a government reaction sets in in the country.
Conservative ideology of the 80s. These years in the history of the Russian public are characterized by the flourishing of conservative ideology. It was defended, in particular, by Konstantin Nikolaevich Leontiev in the books "The East, Russia and the Slavs" and "Our" New Christians "by F. M. Dostoevsky and Count Leo Tolstoy". Leontiev believes that the culture of each civilization goes through three stages of development: 1) primary simplicity, 2) flourishing complexity, 3) secondary mixing simplification. Leontiev considers the spread of liberal and socialist ideas with their cult of equality and general welfare to be the main sign of decline and entry into the third stage. Leont'ev contrasted liberalism and socialism with "Byzantism"—strong monarchical power and strict ecclesiasticism.
Russian literary-critical and philosophical thought of the second half of the 19th century
Yu.V.Lebedev
On the originality of Russian literary criticism.
“As long as our poetry is alive and well, until then there is no reason to doubt the deep health of the Russian people,” wrote the critic N. N. Strakhov, and his associate Apollon Grigoriev considered Russian literature “the only focus of all our highest interests.” V. G. Belinsky bequeathed to his friends to put in his coffin an issue of the journal "Domestic Notes", and the classic of Russian satire M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin said in a farewell letter to his son: "Most of all, love your native literature and prefer the title of a writer to any other" .
According to N. G. Chernyshevsky, our literature was elevated to the dignity of a national cause that united the most viable forces of Russian society. In the mind of the 19th century reader, literature was not only "belle literacy", but also the basis of the spiritual existence of the nation. The Russian writer treated his work in a special way: it was not a profession for him, but a service. Chernyshevsky called literature "a textbook of life", and Leo Tolstoy was later surprised that these words did not belong to him, but to his ideological opponent.
The artistic development of life in Russian classical literature has never turned into a purely aesthetic pursuit, it has always pursued a living spiritual and practical goal. “The word was perceived not as an empty sound, but as a deed - almost as “religious” as the ancient Karelian singer Veinemeinen, who “made a boat with singing.” Gogol also concealed this belief in the miraculous power of the word, dreaming of creating such a book that itself, by the power of the only and undeniably true thoughts expressed in it, should transform Russia," notes the modern literary critic G. D. Gachev.
Belief in the effective, world-changing power of the artistic word also determined the characteristics of Russian literary criticism. From literary problems, she always rose to social problems, having a direct relation to the fate of the country, people, nation. The Russian critic did not limit himself to discussions about the art form, about the skill of the writer. Analyzing a literary work, he came to the questions that life put before the writer and reader. The orientation of criticism to a wide range of readers made it very popular: the authority of the critic in Russia was great and his articles were perceived as original works, enjoying success on a par with literature.
Russian criticism of the second half of the 19th century develops more dramatically. The public life of the country at that time became extraordinarily complicated, many political trends arose that argued with each other. The picture of the literary process also turned out to be motley and multilayered. Therefore, criticism has become more discordant compared to the era of the 30s and 40s, when the whole variety of critical assessments was covered by the authoritative word of Belinsky. Like Pushkin in literature, Belinsky was a kind of generalist in criticism: he combined sociological, aesthetic, and stylistic approaches in evaluating a work, embracing the literary movement as a whole with a single glance.
In the second half of the 19th century, Belinsky's critical universalism proved to be unique. Critical thought specialized in certain directions and schools. Even Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, the most versatile critics, who possessed a broad public view, could no longer claim not only to cover the literary movement in its entirety, but also to holistically interpret an individual work. Their work was dominated by sociological approaches. Literary development as a whole and the place in it of the individual work were now revealed by the totality of critical trends and schools. Apollon Grigoriev, for example, arguing with Dobrolyubov's assessments of A. N. Ostrovsky, noticed in the work of the playwright such facets that eluded Dobrolyubov. Critical reflection on the work of Turgenev or Leo Tolstoy cannot be reduced to the assessments of Dobrolyubov or Chernyshevsky. N. N. Strakhov's works on "Fathers and Sons" and "War and Peace" significantly deepen and clarify them. The depth of understanding of I. A. Goncharov's novel "Oblomov" is not limited to Dobrolyubov's classic article "What is Oblomovism?": A. V. Druzhinin introduces significant clarifications into the understanding of Oblomov's character.
The main stages of the social struggle of the 60s.
The variety of literary critical assessments in the second half of the 19th century was associated with the growing social struggle. From 1855, two historical forces emerged in public life, and by 1859 they entered into an uncompromising struggle - revolutionary democracy and liberalism. The voice of the "peasant democrats", gaining strength on the pages of Nekrasov's Sovremennik magazine, begins to determine public opinion in the country.
The social movement of the 60s goes through three stages in its development: from 1855 to 1858; from 1859 to 1861; from 1862 to 1869. At the first stage, there is a demarcation of social forces, at the second - a tense struggle between them, and at the third - a sharp decline in the movement, culminating in the onset of government reaction.
Liberal Western Party. The Russian liberals of the 1960s advocated the art of "reforms without revolutions" and pinned their hopes on social transformations "from above." But in their circles, disagreements arise between Westerners and Slavophiles about the paths of the emerging reforms. Westerners begin the countdown of historical development with the transformations of Peter I, whom Belinsky called "the father of the new Russia." They are skeptical about pre-Petrine history. But, denying Russia the right to a "pre-Petrine" historical tradition, Westerners deduce from this fact a paradoxical idea about our great advantage: a Russian person, free from the burden of historical traditions, can turn out to be "more progressive" than any European due to his "receptiveness". The land, which does not conceal any of its own seeds, can be plowed up boldly and deeply, and in case of failure, according to the Slavophil A.S. Khomyakov, "to calm the conscience with the thought that no matter how you do, you will not do worse than before." "Why worse?" objected the Westerners.
Mikhail Nikiforovich Katkov, on the pages of the liberal magazine Russky Vestnik, founded by him in 1856 in Moscow, promotes English ways of social and economic reforms: the liberation of peasants with land when it is bought out by the government, granting the nobility the rights of local and state administration following the example of English lords.
Liberal Slavophile Party. The Slavophils also denied the "unaccountable worship of the past forms (*6) of our antiquity." But they considered borrowings possible only if they were grafted onto an original historical root. If the Westerners argued that the difference between the enlightenment of Europe and Russia exists only in degree, and not in character, then the Slavophiles believed that Russia already in the first centuries of its history, with the adoption of Christianity, was formed no less than the West, but "the spirit and basic principles "Russian education differed significantly from Western European.
Ivan Vasilyevich Kireevsky, in his article "On the Character of the Enlightenment of Europe and its Relationship to the Enlightenment of Russia," singled out three essential features of these differences: 1) Russia and the West adopted different types of ancient culture, 2) Orthodoxy had pronounced distinctive features that distinguished it from Catholicism, 3) the historical conditions under which Western European and Russian statehood took shape were different.
Western Europe inherited ancient Roman education, which differed from ancient Greek in formal rationality, admiration for the letter of legal law and disregard for the traditions of "common law", which rested not on external legal regulations, but on traditions and habits.
Roman culture left its mark on Western European Christianity. The West sought to subordinate faith to the logical arguments of reason. The predominance of rational principles in Christianity led the Catholic Church, first to the Reformation, and then to the complete triumph of reason that deified itself. This liberation of reason from faith culminated in German classical philosophy and led to the creation of atheistic teachings.
Finally, the statehood of Western Europe arose as a result of the conquest by the Germanic tribes of the indigenous inhabitants of the former Roman Empire. Starting with violence, the European states were to be developed by periodic revolutionary upheavals.
In Russia, things were different. She received a cultural inoculation not of a formally rational, Roman, but of a more harmonious and integral Greek education. The Fathers of the Eastern Church never fell into abstract rationality and cared primarily about "the correctness of the inner state of the thinking spirit." In the foreground they had not mind, not rationality, but the highest unity of the believing spirit.
The Slavophils considered the Russian statehood to be unique as well. Since there were no two warring tribes in Russia - the conquerors and the vanquished, social relations in it were based not only on legislative and legal acts that fetter the people's life, indifferent to the inner content of human ties. Our laws were more internal than external. "The holiness of tradition" was preferred to the legal formula, morality - to external benefit.
The Church has never tried to usurp secular power, to replace the state with itself, as it happened more than once in papal Rome. The basis of the original Russian organization was the communal structure, the grain of which was the peasant world: small rural communities merged into broader regional associations, from which the consent of the entire Russian land, headed by the Grand Duke, arose.
The Petrine reform, which subordinated the church to the state, abruptly broke the natural course of Russian history.
In the Europeanization of Russia, the Slavophiles saw a threat to the very essence of Russian national existence. Therefore, they had a negative attitude towards the Petrine reforms and government bureaucracy, and were active opponents of serfdom. They stood up for freedom of speech, for the solution of state issues at the Zemsky Sobor, consisting of representatives of all classes of Russian society. They objected to the introduction in Russia of forms of bourgeois parliamentary democracy, considering it necessary to preserve the autocracy, reformed in the spirit of the ideals of Russian "sobornost". The autocracy must take the path of voluntary cooperation with the "land", and in its decisions rely on the opinion of the people, periodically convening the Zemsky Sobor. The sovereign is called upon to listen to the point of view of all estates, but to make the final decision alone, in accordance with the Christian spirit of goodness and truth. Not democracy with its voting and the mechanical victory of the majority over the minority, but consent, leading to unanimous, "cathedral" submission to the sovereign will, which should be free from class restrictions and serve the highest Christian values.
The literary-critical program of the Slavophiles was organically connected with their social views. This program was proclaimed by the Russian conversation published by them in Moscow: “The highest subject and task of the popular word is not to say what is bad in a certain people, what is sick with it and what it does not have, but in poetic (* 8 ) the physical recreation of what is best given to him for his historical destiny.
Slavophiles did not accept socio-analytic principles in Russian prose and poetry, they were alien to refined psychologism, in which they saw the disease of the modern personality, "Europeanized", detached from the popular soil, from the traditions of national culture. It is precisely such a painful manner with "flaunting unnecessary details" that K. S. Aksakov finds in the early works of L. N. Tolstoy with his "dialectics of the soul", in the stories of I. S. Turgenev about the "superfluous person".
Literary and critical activity of Westerners.
Unlike the Slavophiles, who stand up for the social content of art in the spirit of their "Russian views", Western liberals represented by P.V. Annenkov and A.V. day and faithful to the "absolute laws of artistry".
Alexander Vasilyevich Druzhinin in his article "Criticism of the Gogol Period of Russian Literature and Our Relationship to It" formulated two theoretical ideas about art: he called one "didactic" and the other "artistic". Didactic poets "want to act directly on modern life, modern customs and modern man. They want to sing, teaching, and often achieve their goal, but their song, winning in an instructive way, cannot but lose a lot in terms of eternal art."
True art has nothing to do with teaching. "Firmly believing that the interests of the moment are transient, that humanity, changing incessantly, does not change only in the ideas of eternal beauty, goodness and truth," the poet-artist "sees his eternal anchor in selfless service to these ideas ... He depicts people as he sees them without prescribing them to improve, he does not give lessons to society, or if he gives them, he gives them unconsciously. your home on high Olympus."
An indisputable merit of liberal-Western criticism was close attention to the specifics of literature, to the difference between its artistic language and the language of science, journalism, and criticism. Also characteristic is an interest in the eternal and eternal in the works of classical Russian literature, in what determines their unfading (*9) life in time. But at the same time, attempts to distract the writer from the "everyday unrest" of modernity, to muffle the author's subjectivity, distrust of works with a pronounced social orientation testified to the liberal moderation and limited public views of these critics.
Social program and literary-critical activity of the Pochvenniks.
Another socio-literary trend of the mid-60s, which removed the extremes of the Westerners and Slavophiles, was the so-called "pochvennichestvo". Its spiritual leader was F. M. Dostoevsky, who published two magazines during these years - "Time" (1861-1863) and "Epoch" (1864-1865). Companions of Dostoevsky in these journals were literary critics Apollon Alexandrovich Grigoriev and Nikolai Nikolaevich Strakhov.
The Pochvenniks to some extent inherited the view of the Russian national character expressed by Belinsky in 1846. Belinsky wrote: “Russia has nothing to compare with the old states of Europe, whose history was diametrically opposed to ours and has long since given color and fruit ... It is known that the French, the British, the Germans are so national each in their own way that they are not able to understand each other while the sociality of the Frenchman, the practical activity of the Englishman, and the vague philosophy of the German are equally accessible to the Russian.
The Pochvenniks spoke of "all-humanity" as a characteristic feature of the Russian people's consciousness, which A. S. Pushkin most deeply inherited in our literature. “This idea is expressed by Pushkin not only as an indication, teaching or theory, not as a dream or a prophecy, but is actually fulfilled, it is enclosed forever in his brilliant creations and proved by him,” Dostoevsky wrote. “He is a man of the ancient of the world, he and a German, he and an Englishman, deeply aware of his genius, the anguish of his aspiration ("Feast during the plague"), he is a poet of the East. He told and declared to all these peoples that the Russian genius knows them, understood them, touched with them as a native, that it can be reincarnated in them in its entirety, that only the Russian spirit is given universality, given the assignment in the future to comprehend and unite all the diversity of nationalities and remove all their contradictions.
Like the Slavophiles, the soil-men believed that "Russian society must unite with the people's soil and take into itself the people's element." But, unlike the Slavophiles, (*10) they did not deny the positive role of the reforms of Peter I and the "Europeanized" Russian intelligentsia, called upon to bring enlightenment and culture to the people, but only on the basis of popular moral ideals. It was precisely such a Russian European that A. S. Pushkin was in the eyes of the soil-dwellers.
According to A. Grigoriev, Pushkin is "the first and full representative" of "our social and moral sympathies." “In Pushkin, for a long time, if not forever, our entire spiritual process, outlined in a broad outline, ended, our “volume and measure”: all subsequent development of Russian literature is a deepening and artistic comprehension of those elements that affected Pushkin. A. N. Ostrovsky most organically expressed Pushkin's principles in modern literature. "Ostrovsky's new word is the oldest word - nationality." "Ostrovsky is as little a detractor as he is a little idealizer. Let him be what he is - a great folk poet, the first and only exponent of the people's essence in its diverse manifestations ..."
N. N. Strakhov was the only profound interpreter in the history of Russian criticism of the second half of the 19th century of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. It was not by chance that he called his work "a critical poem in four songs." Leo Tolstoy himself, who considered Strakhov his friend, said: "One of the happiness for which I am grateful to fate is that N.N. Strakhov exists."
Literary and critical activity of revolutionary democrats
The social, socially critical pathos of the articles of the late Belinsky with his socialist convictions was picked up and developed in the sixties by the revolutionary-democratic critics Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky and Nikolai Aleksandrovich Dobrolyubov.
By 1859, when the government program and the views of the liberal parties became clear, when it became obvious that the reform "from above" in any of its variants would be half-hearted, the revolutionary democrats moved from a shaky alliance with liberalism to a break in relations and an uncompromising struggle against it. The literary-critical activity of N. A. Dobrolyubov falls on this, the second stage of the social movement of the 60s. He devotes a special satirical section of the Sovremennik magazine called Whistle to denouncing liberals. Here Dobrolyubov acts not only as a critic, but also as a satirical poet.
Criticism of liberalism then alerted A. I. Herzen, (*11) who, being in exile, unlike Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, continued to hope for reforms "from above" and overestimated the radicalism of the liberals until 1863.
However, Herzen's warnings did not stop the revolutionary democrats of Sovremennik. Beginning in 1859, they began to carry out the idea of a peasant revolution in their articles. They considered the peasant community to be the core of the future socialist world order. Unlike the Slavophiles, Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov believed that the communal ownership of land rested not on the Christian, but on the revolutionary-liberation, socialist instincts of the Russian peasant.
Dobrolyubov became the founder of the original critical method. He saw that the majority of Russian writers do not share the revolutionary-democratic way of thinking, do not pronounce sentence on life from such radical positions. Dobrolyubov saw the task of his criticism in completing the work begun by the writer in his own way and formulating this sentence, based on real events and artistic images of the work. Dobrolyubov called his method of comprehending the work of the writer "real criticism".
Real criticism "analyzes whether such a person is possible and really; having found that it is true to reality, it proceeds to its own considerations about the reasons that gave rise to it, etc. If these reasons are indicated in the work of the author being analyzed, criticism uses them and thanks the author; if not, he does not stick to him with a knife to his throat - how, they say, he dared to draw such a face without explaining the reasons for its existence? In this case, the critic takes the initiative in his own hands: he explains the causes that gave rise to this or that phenomenon from revolutionary-democratic positions and then pronounces a sentence on him.
Dobrolyubov positively evaluates, for example, Goncharov's novel Oblomov, although the author "does not and, apparently, does not want to give any conclusions." It is enough that he "presents to you a living image and vouches only for its resemblance to reality." For Dobrolyubov, such authorial objectivity is quite acceptable and even desirable, since he takes the explanation and the verdict on himself.
Real criticism often led Dobrolyubov to a kind of reinterpretation of the writer's artistic images in a revolutionary democratic way. It turned out that the analysis of the work, which developed into an understanding of the acute problems of our time, led Dobrolyubov to such radical conclusions that the author himself did not in any way assume. On this basis, as we shall see later, there was a decisive break between Turgenev and the Sovremennik magazine, when Dobrolyubov's article on the novel "On the Eve" saw the light of day in it.
In Dobrolyubov's articles, the young, strong nature of a talented critic comes to life, sincerely believing in the people, in which he sees the embodiment of all his highest moral ideals, with whom he connects the only hope for the revival of society. "His passion is deep and stubborn, and obstacles do not frighten him when they need to be overcome in order to achieve the passionately desired and deeply conceived," Dobrolyubov writes about the Russian peasant in the article "Features for Characterizing the Russian Common People." All the activity of criticism was aimed at the struggle for the creation of "the party of the people in literature." He devoted four years of vigilant labor to this struggle, writing nine volumes of works in such a short time. Dobrolyubov literally burned himself on the ascetic journal work, which undermined his health. He died at the age of 25 on November 17, 1861. About the premature death of a young friend, Nekrasov said heartfeltly:
But your hour has struck too soon
And the prophetic feather fell from his hands.
What a lamp of reason has gone out!
What heart stopped beating!
The decline of the social movement of the 60s. Disputes between Sovremennik and Russkoe Slovo.
At the end of the 1960s, dramatic changes took place in Russian public life and critical thought. The Manifesto of February 19, 1861 on the emancipation of the peasants not only did not mitigate, but even more exacerbated the contradictions. In response to the upsurge of the revolutionary-democratic movement, the government launched an open offensive against progressive ideas: Chernyshevsky and D. I. Pisarev were arrested, and the publication of the Sovremennik magazine was suspended for eight months.
The situation is aggravated by a split within the revolutionary-democratic movement, the main reason for which was the disagreement in assessing the revolutionary-socialist possibilities of the peasantry. The activists of Russkoye Slovo, Dmitri Ivanovich Pisarev and Varfolomey Aleksandrovich Zaitsev, sharply criticized Sovremennik for (*13) its alleged idealization of the peasantry, for its exaggerated idea of the revolutionary instincts of the Russian muzhik.
Unlike Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky, Pisarev argued that the Russian peasant was not ready for a conscious struggle for freedom, that for the most part he was dark and downtrodden. Pisarev considered the "intellectual proletariat", revolutionary raznochintsev, carrying natural science knowledge to the people, as the revolutionary force of modernity. This knowledge not only destroys the foundations of official ideology (Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality), but also opens the eyes of the people to the natural needs of human nature, which are based on the instinct of "social solidarity." Therefore, enlightening the people with the natural sciences can lead society to socialism not only in a revolutionary ("mechanical"), but also in an evolutionary ("chemical") way.
In order to make this "chemical" transition faster and more efficient, Pisarev suggested that Russian democracy be guided by the "principle of economy of forces." The "intellectual proletariat" must concentrate all its energy on destroying the spiritual foundations of the society that exists today by propagating the natural sciences among the people. In the name of the so-understood "spiritual liberation", Pisarev, like Turgenev's hero Yevgeny Bazarov, proposed to abandon art. He really believed that "a decent chemist is twenty times more useful than any poet," and recognized art only to the extent that it participates in the promotion of natural science knowledge and destroys the foundations of the existing system.
In the article "Bazarov" he glorified the triumphant nihilist, and in the article "Motives of Russian Drama" he "crushed" the heroine of A. N. Ostrovsky's drama "Thunderstorm" Katerina Kabanova, erected on a pedestal by Dobrolyubov. Destroying the idols of the "old" society, Pisarev published the infamous anti-Pushkin articles and the work The Destruction of Aesthetics. The fundamental disagreements that emerged in the course of the controversy between Sovremennik and Russkoye Slovo weakened the revolutionary camp and were a symptom of the decline of the social movement.
Public upsurge in the 70s.
By the beginning of the 1970s, the first signs of a new social upsurge associated with the activities of the revolutionary Narodniks appeared in Russia. The second generation of democratic revolutionaries, who made a heroic attempt to raise the peasants to (*14) revolution by "going among the people," had their own ideologists, who developed the ideas of Herzen, Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov in the new historical conditions. "Faith in a special way, in the communal system of Russian life; hence the belief in the possibility of a peasant socialist revolution - that's what inspired them, raised tens and hundreds of people to the heroic struggle against the government," V. I. Lenin wrote about the populists of the seventies . This belief, to one degree or another, permeated all the works of the leaders and mentors of the new movement - P. L. Lavrov, N. K. Mikhailovsky, M. A. Bakunin, P. N. Tkachev.
Mass "going to the people" ended in 1874 with the arrest of several thousand people and the subsequent trials of the 193rd and 50th. In 1879, at a congress in Voronezh, the populist organization "Land and Freedom" split: "politicians" who shared Tkachev's ideas organized their own party, "Narodnaya Volya", proclaiming the main goal of the movement to be a political coup and terrorist forms of struggle against the government. In the summer of 1880, the Narodnaya Volya organized an explosion in the Winter Palace, and Alexander II miraculously escaped death. This event causes shock and confusion in the government: it decides to make concessions by appointing the liberal Loris-Melikov as a plenipotentiary ruler and appealing to the country's liberal public for support. In response, the sovereign receives notes from Russian liberals, in which it is proposed to immediately convene an independent assembly of representatives of the zemstvos to participate in the government of the country "in order to develop guarantees and individual rights, freedom of thought and speech." It seemed that Russia was on the verge of adopting a parliamentary form of government. But on March 1, 1881, an irreparable mistake is made. The Narodnaya Volya, after repeated assassination attempts, kill Alexander II, and after this, a government reaction sets in in the country.
Conservative ideology of the 80s.
These years in the history of the Russian public are characterized by the flourishing of conservative ideology. It was defended, in particular, by Konstantin Nikolaevich Leontiev in the books "The East, Russia and the Slavs" and "Our" New Christians "by F. M. Dostoevsky and Count Leo Tolstoy". Leontiev believes that the culture of each civilization goes through three stages of development: 1) primary simplicity, 2) flourishing complexity, 3) secondary mixing simplification. Leontiev considers the main sign of decline and entry into the third stage to be the spread of liberal and socialist ideas with their cult (*15) of equality and general welfare. Leontiev contrasted liberalism and socialism with "Byzantism" - strong monarchical power and strict ecclesiasticism.
Leontiev strongly criticized the religious and ethical views of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. He argued that both writers are influenced by the ideas of socialism, that they turn Christianity into a spiritual phenomenon, derived from earthly human feelings of brotherhood and love. Genuine Christianity, according to Leontiev, is mystical, tragic and terrible for a person, because it stands on the other side of earthly life and evaluates it as a life full of suffering and torment.
Leontiev is a consistent and principled opponent of the very idea of progress, which, according to his teaching, brings this or that nation closer to a mixture of simplification and death. To stop, delay progress and freeze Russia - this idea of Leontiev came to the court of the conservative policy of Alexander III.
Russian liberal populism of the 80-90s.
In the era of the 1980s, revolutionary populism was going through a deep crisis. The revolutionary idea is being replaced by the "theory of small deeds", which in the 1990s will take shape in the program of "state socialism". The transition of the government to the side of peasant interests can peacefully lead the people to socialism. The peasant community and the artel, handicrafts under the patronage of the zemstvos, the active cultural assistance of the intelligentsia and the government can withstand the onslaught of capitalism. At the dawn of the 20th century, the "theory of small deeds" quite successfully develops into a powerful cooperative movement.
Religious and philosophical thought of the 80-90s. The time of deep disappointment in the political and revolutionary forms of combating social evil made Tolstoy's preaching of moral self-improvement extremely topical. It was during this period that the religious and ethical program for the renewal of life in the work of the great writer was finally formed, and Tolstoyism became one of the popular social movements.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the teachings of the religious thinker Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov began to gain popularity. At the heart of his "Philosophy of the Common Cause" lies the grandiose in its audacity idea of the great vocation of man to fully master the secrets of life, conquer death and achieve god-like power and power over the blind forces of nature. Mankind, according to Fedorov, by its own (*16) efforts can transform the entire bodily composition of a person, making him immortal, resurrect all the dead and at the same time achieve control over "solar and other star systems." "Born from the tiny earth, the spectator of boundless space, the spectator of the worlds of this space must become their inhabitant and ruler."
In the 80s, along with the democratic ideology of the "common cause", along with V. S. Solovyov's "Readings on God-manhood" and "Justification of the Good", the first sprouts of the philosophy and aesthetics of the future Russian decadence appeared. NM Minsky's book "In the Light of Conscience" is published, in which the author preaches extreme individualism. The influence of Nietzschean ideas is growing stronger, Max Stirner is being pulled out of oblivion and becoming almost an idol with his book "The Only One and His Own", in which frank egoism was proclaimed the alpha and omega of modernity...
Questions and tasks: What explains the diversity of trends in Russian criticism of the second half of the 19th century? What are the features of Russian criticism and how are they related to the specifics of our literature? Where did Westerners and Slavophiles see the weaknesses and advantages of Russian historical development? What, in your opinion, are the strengths and weaknesses of the public programs of Westernizers and Slavophiles? How does the program of the Pochvenniks differ from the Western and Slavophil programs? How did the Pochenniks determine the significance of Pushkin in the history of modern Russian literature? Describe the principles of Dobrolyubov's "real criticism". What is the originality of the social and literary-critical views of D. I. Pisarev? Give a description of the social and intellectual movement in Russia in the 80s - 90s.
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