We now have something wrong in the subject:
We'd better hurry to the ball
Where headlong in a pit carriage
My Onegin has already galloped.
Before the faded houses
Along a sleepy street in rows
Double carriage lights
Cheerful pour out light ...
Here our hero drove up to the entrance;
Doorman past he's an arrow
Climbing up the marble steps
I straightened my hair with my hand,
Has entered. The hall is full of people;
The music is already tired of thundering;
The crowd is busy with the mazurka;
Loop and noise and tightness;
The spurs of the cavalry guard jingle;
The legs of lovely ladies are flying;
In their captivating footsteps
Fiery eyes fly.
And drowned out by the roar of violins
Jealous whisper of fashionable wives.
(1, XXVII–XXVIII)
Dancing was an important structural element of noble life. Their role differed significantly both from the function of dances in the folk life of that time, and from the modern one.
In the life of a Russian metropolitan nobleman of the 18th - early 19th centuries, time was divided into two halves: staying at home was devoted to family and household concerns - here the nobleman acted as a private person; the other half was occupied by service - military or civilian, in which the nobleman acted as a loyal subject, serving the sovereign and the state, as a representative of the nobility in the face of other estates. The opposition of these two forms of behavior was filmed in the “meeting” crowning the day – at a ball or a dinner party. Here the social life of a nobleman was realized: he was neither a private person in private life, nor a serviceman in the public service - he was a nobleman in the noble assembly, a man of his class among his own.
Thus, on the one hand, the ball turned out to be a sphere opposite to the service - an area of easy communication, secular recreation, a place where the boundaries of the service hierarchy were weakened. The presence of ladies, dances, the norms of secular communication introduced off-duty value criteria, and the young lieutenant, deftly dancing and able to make the ladies laugh, could feel superior to the aging colonel who had been in battles. On the other hand, the ball was an area of public representation, a form of social organization, one of the few forms of collective life permitted in Russia at that time. In this sense, secular life received the value of a public cause. The answer of Catherine II to the question of Fonvizin is characteristic: “Why are we not ashamed to do nothing?” - "... in society to live is not to do nothing."
Since the time of the Petrine assemblies, the question of the organizational forms of secular life has also become acute. Forms of recreation, communication of youth, calendar ritual, which were basically common to both the people and the boyar-noble environment, had to give way to a specifically noble structure of life. The internal organization of the ball was made a task of exceptional cultural importance, since it was called upon to give forms of communication between "gentlemen" and "ladies", to determine the type of social behavior within the noble culture. This entailed the ritualization of the ball, the creation of a strict sequence of parts, the allocation of stable and obligatory elements. The grammar of the ball arose, and it itself formed into a kind of holistic theatrical performance, in which each element (from the entrance to the hall to the departure) corresponded to typical emotions, fixed values, behavior styles. However, the strict ritual, which brought the ball closer to the parade, made possible retreats all the more significant, “ballroom liberties”, which increased compositionally towards its finale, building the ball as a struggle between “order” and “freedom”.
The main element of the ball as a social and aesthetic action was dancing. They served as the organizing core of the evening, setting the type and style of the conversation. "Mazurochka chatter" required superficial, shallow topics, but also entertaining and acute conversation, the ability to quickly respond epigrammatically. Ballroom conversation was far from that play of intellectual forces, “the fascinating conversation of the highest education” (Pushkin, VIII (1), 151), which was cultivated in the literary salons of Paris in the 18th century and which Pushkin complained about the absence of in Russia. Nevertheless, he had his own charm - the liveliness, freedom and ease of conversation between a man and a woman, who found themselves at the same time in the center of a noisy festivity, and in proximity impossible in other circumstances (“There is no place for confessions…” - 1, XXIX).
Dance training began early - from the age of five or six. So, for example, Pushkin began to study dancing already in 1808. Until the summer of 1811, he and his sister attended dance evenings at the Trubetskoy-Buturlins and Sushkovs, and on Thursdays - children's balls at the Moscow dance master Yogel. Balls at Yogel's are described in the memoirs of the choreographer A.P. Glushkovsky.
Early dance training was excruciating and resembled the tough training of an athlete or the training of a recruit by an industrious sergeant major. The compiler of the “Rules”, published in 1825, L. Petrovsky, himself an experienced dance master, describes some of the methods of initial training in this way, condemning not the method itself, but only its too harsh application: “The teacher should pay attention to the fact that students from strong stress was not tolerated in health. Someone told me that his teacher considered it an indispensable rule that the student, despite his natural inability, kept his legs sideways, like him, in a parallel line.
As a student, he was 22 years old, fairly decent in height and considerable legs, moreover, faulty; then the teacher, unable to do anything himself, considered it a duty to use four people, of whom two twisted their legs, and two held their knees. No matter how much this one shouted, they only laughed and did not want to hear about the pain - until finally it cracked in the leg, and then the tormentors left him.
I felt it my duty to tell this incident for the warning of others. It is not known who invented the leg machines; and machines with screws for the legs, knees and back: the invention is very good! However, it can also become harmless from excessive stress.
A long training gave the young man not only dexterity during dancing, but also confidence in movements, freedom and ease in posing a figure, which in a certain way influenced the mental structure of a person: in the conditional world of secular communication, he felt confident and free, like an experienced actor on the stage. Elegance, which is reflected in the accuracy of movements, was a sign of good education. L. N. Tolstoy, describing in the novel “The Decembrists” the wife of a Decembrist who returned from Siberia, emphasizes that, despite the many years she spent in the most difficult conditions of voluntary exile, “it was impossible to imagine her otherwise, as surrounded by respect and all the comforts of life . For her to ever be hungry and eat greedily, or to have dirty laundry on her, or to stumble, or forget to blow her nose - this could not happen to her. It was physically impossible. Why it was so - I don’t know, but her every movement was majesty, grace, mercy for all those who could use her appearance ... ". It is characteristic that the ability to stumble here is associated not with external conditions, but with the character and upbringing of a person. Mental and physical grace are connected and exclude the possibility of inaccurate or ugly movements and gestures. The aristocratic simplicity of the movements of people of “good society” both in life and in literature is opposed by stiffness or excessive swagger (the result of a struggle with one’s own shyness) of the gestures of a commoner. Herzen's memoirs preserved a vivid example of this. According to Herzen's memoirs, "Belinsky was very shy and generally lost in unfamiliar society." Herzen describes a typical case at one of the literary evenings at the book. V. F. Odoevsky: “Belinsky was completely lost at these evenings between some Saxon envoy who did not understand a word of Russian and some official of the III department, who understood even those words that were hushed up. He usually fell ill afterwards for two or three days and cursed the one who persuaded him to go.
Once on a Saturday, on the eve of the New Year, the host took it into his head to cook zhzhenka en petit comité, when the main guests had left. Belinsky would certainly have left, but the barricade of furniture interfered with him, he somehow hid in a corner, and a small table with wine and glasses was placed in front of him. Zhukovsky, in white uniform trousers with a gold lacing, sat down across from him. Belinsky endured for a long time, but, seeing no improvement in his fate, he began to move the table somewhat; the table gave way at first, then swayed and slammed to the ground, a bottle of Bordeaux began seriously to pour over Zhukovsky. He jumped up, red wine streaming down his trousers; there was a hubbub, the servant rushed with a napkin to stain the rest of the pantaloons with wine, another picked up broken glasses ... During this turmoil, Belinsky disappeared and, close to death, ran home on foot.
The ball at the beginning of the 19th century began with the Polish (polonaise), which replaced the minuet in the solemn function of the first dance. The minuet became a thing of the past along with royal France. “From the time of the changes that followed among the Europeans, both in dress and in the way of thinking, there were news in dances; and then the Polish, which has more freedom and is danced by an indefinite number of couples, and therefore frees from the excessive and strict restraint characteristic of the minuet, took the place of the original dance.
Polonaise can probably be associated with the stanza of the eighth chapter, which was not included in the final text of "Eugene Onegin", introducing Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna (future Empress) into the scene of the St. Petersburg ball; Pushkin calls her Lalla-Rook after the fancy dress of the heroine of T. Moore's poem, which she put on during a masquerade in Berlin.
After Zhukovsky's poem "Lalla-Ruk", this name became the poetic nickname of Alexandra Feodorovna:
And in the hall bright and rich
When in a silent, tight circle,
Like a winged lily
Hesitating enters Lalla Rook
And over the drooping crowd
Shines with a royal head,
And quietly curls and glides
Star - Harita between Harit,
And the gaze of mixed generations
Strives, with jealousy of grief,
Now at her, then at the king, -
For them without eyes one Evg<ений>;
Single T<атьяной>amazed,
He sees only Tatyana.
(Pushkin, VI, 637)
The ball does not appear in Pushkin as an official ceremonial celebration, and therefore the polonaise is not mentioned. In War and Peace, Tolstoy, describing Natasha’s first ball, contrasts the polonaise that opens “the sovereign, smiling and out of time leading the mistress of the house by the hand” (“the owner followed him with M. A. Naryshkina, then ministers, various generals ”), the second dance - a waltz, which becomes the moment of Natasha's triumph.
The second ballroom dance is the waltz. Pushkin described it like this:
Monotonous and insane
Like a whirlwind of young life,
The waltz whirl is whirling noisily;
The couple flashes by the couple. (5, XLI)
The epithets "monotonous and insane" have not only an emotional meaning. "Monotonous" - because, unlike the mazurka, in which solo dances and the invention of new figures played a huge role at that time, and even more so from the dance-game of the cotillion, the waltz consisted of the same constantly repeating movements. The feeling of monotony was also intensified by the fact that "at that time the waltz was danced in two, and not in three pas, as it is now." The definition of the waltz as “crazy” has a different meaning: the waltz, despite its general distribution (L. Petrovsky believes that “it would be superfluous to describe how the waltz is danced at all, because there is almost no person who would not dance it himself or not seen dancing"), enjoyed a reputation in the 1820s as obscene, or at least unnecessarily free dance. “This dance, in which, as is known, persons of both sexes turn and approach each other, requires due caution.<...>so that they do not dance too close to each other, which would offend decency. Genlis wrote even more clearly in Critical and Systematic Dictionary of Court Etiquette: “A young lady, lightly dressed, throws herself into the arms of a young man who presses her to his chest, who carries her away with such swiftness that her heart involuntarily begins to beat, and her head going around! That's what this waltz is! ..<...>Today's youth is so natural that, placing no value on sophistication, they dance waltzes with glorified simplicity and passion.
Not only the boring moralist Genlis, but the fiery Werther Goethe considered the waltz a dance so intimate that he swore that he would not allow his future wife to dance it with anyone but himself.
The waltz created a particularly comfortable environment for gentle explanations: the proximity of the dancers contributed to intimacy, and the contact of hands made it possible to pass notes. The waltz was danced for a long time, it could be interrupted, sit down and then join the next round again. Thus, the dance created ideal conditions for gentle explanations:
In the days of fun and desires
I was crazy about balls:
There is no place for confessions
And for delivering a letter.
O you venerable spouses!
I will offer you my services;
I ask you to notice my speech:
I want to warn you.
You also, mothers, are stricter
Look after your daughters:
Keep your lorgnette straight! (1, XXIX)
However, the words of Genlis are also interesting in another respect: the waltz is opposed to classical dances as romantic; passionate, crazy, dangerous and close to nature, he opposes the etiquette dances of the old days. The “simplicity” of the waltz was keenly felt: “Wiener Walz, consisting of two steps, which consist in stepping on the right and on the left foot, and moreover, they danced as fast as crazy; after which I leave it to the reader to judge whether he conforms to the noble assembly or to any other. The waltz was admitted to the balls of Europe as a tribute to the new time. It was a fashionable and youthful dance.
The sequence of dances during the ball formed a dynamic composition. Each dance, having its own intonations and tempo, set a certain style not only for movements, but also for conversation. In order to understand the essence of the ball, one must keep in mind that the dances were only an organizing core in it. The chain of dances also organized the sequence of moods. Each dance entailed decent topics of conversation for him. At the same time, it should be borne in mind that conversation, conversation was no less a part of the dance than movement and music. The expression "mazurka chatter" was not disparaging. Involuntary jokes, tender confessions and decisive explanations were distributed over the composition of the dances that followed one after another. An interesting example of a change of topic in a sequence of dances is found in Anna Karenina. "Vronsky went through several waltz tours with Kitty." Tolstoy introduces us to a decisive moment in the life of Kitty, who is in love with Vronsky. She expects words of recognition from him that should decide her fate, but an important conversation needs a corresponding moment in the dynamics of the ball. It is possible to lead it by no means at any moment and not at any dance. "During the quadrille, nothing significant was said, there was an intermittent conversation." “But Kitty didn't expect more from a quadrille. She waited with bated breath for the mazurka. It seemed to her that everything should be decided in the mazurka.
<...>The mazurka formed the center of the ball and marked its climax. The mazurka was danced with numerous bizarre figures and a male solo constituting the culmination of the dance. Both the soloist and the master of the mazurka had to show ingenuity and the ability to improvise. “The chic of the mazurka lies in the fact that the gentleman takes the lady on his chest, immediately hitting himself with his heel in the center de gravité (not to say ass), flies to the other end of the hall and says:“ Mazurechka, sir, ”and the lady to him:“ Mazurechka, sir."<...>Then they rushed in pairs, and did not dance calmly, as they do now. There were several distinct styles within the mazurka. The difference between the capital and the provinces was expressed in the opposition of the "refined" and "bravura" performance of the mazurka:
The mazurka rang out. used to
When the mazurka thundered,
Everything in the great hall was trembling,
The parquet cracked under the heel,
The frames shook and rattled;
Now it's not that: and we, like ladies,
We slide on varnished boards.
(5, XXII)
“When horseshoes and high picks at boots appeared, taking steps, they mercilessly began to knock, so that when in one public meeting, where there were too two hundred young males, mazurka music began to play<...>raised such a clatter that the music was drowned out.
But there was another opposition as well. The old "French" manner of performing the mazurka demanded from the gentleman the lightness of jumps, the so-called entrecha (Onegin, as the reader remembers, "danced the mazurka easily"). Antrasha, according to one dance guide, "a leap in which the foot strikes three times while the body is in the air." The French, "secular" and "amiable" manner of the mazurka in the 1820s began to be replaced by the English, associated with dandyism. The latter demanded languid, lazy movements from the gentleman, emphasizing that he was bored of dancing and he was doing it against his will. The cavalier refused mazurka chatter and was sullenly silent during the dance.
“... And in general, not a single fashionable gentleman is dancing now, this is not supposed to! – Is that how? asked Mr Smith in surprise.<...>“No, I swear on my honor, no!” muttered Mr Ritson. - No, except that they will walk in a quadrille or turn in a waltz<...>no, to hell with dancing, it’s very vulgar!” In the memoirs of Smirnova-Rosset, an episode of her first meeting with Pushkin is told: while still a college student, she invited him to a mazurka. Pushkin silently and lazily walked around the hall with her a couple of times. The fact that Onegin "danced the mazurka with ease" shows that his dandyism and fashionable disappointment were half fake in the first chapter of the "novel in verse". For their sake, he could not refuse the pleasure of jumping in the mazurka.
The Decembrist and liberal of the 1820s adopted the "English" attitude towards dancing, bringing it to a complete rejection of them. In Pushkin's "Novel in Letters" Vladimir writes to a friend: "Your speculative and important reasoning belongs to 1818. Rule strictness and political economy were all the rage at the time. We appeared at the balls without taking off our swords (it was impossible to dance with a sword, an officer who wanted to dance unfastened his sword and left it with the doorman. - Yu. L.) - it was indecent for us to dance and there was no time to deal with the ladies ”(VIII (1), 55 ). At serious friendly evenings, Liprandi did not have dances. The Decembrist N. I. Turgenev wrote to his brother Sergei on March 25, 1819 about the surprise that caused him to learn that the latter was dancing at a ball in Paris (S. I. Turgenev was in France under the commander of the Russian expeditionary force, Count M. S. Vorontsov ): “You, I hear, are dancing. His daughter wrote to Count Golovin that she danced with you. And so, with some surprise, I learned that now in France they also dance! Une écossaise constitutionelle, indpéndante, ou une contredanse monarchique ou une danse contre-monarchique ”(constitutional ecossaise, independent ecossaise, monarchist country dance or anti-monarchist dance - the play on words is to list political parties: constitutionalists, independents, monarchists - and the use of the prefix “counter” sometimes as a dance term, sometimes as a political term). The complaint of Princess Tugoukhovskaya in “Woe from Wit” is connected with the same sentiments: “Dancers have become terribly rare!”
The contrast between a man talking about Adam Smith and a man dancing a waltz or a mazurka was emphasized by a remark after Chatsky's program monologue: "Looks back, everyone is spinning in a waltz with the greatest zeal." Pushkin's poems:
Buyanov, my fervent brother,
He brought Tatiana and Olga to our hero ... (5, XLIII, XLIV)
They mean one of the figures of the mazurka: two ladies (or gentlemen) are brought to the gentleman (or lady) with an offer to choose. The choice of a mate for oneself was perceived as a sign of interest, favor, or (as Lensky interpreted) falling in love. Nicholas I reproached Smirnova-Rosset: "Why don't you choose me?" In some cases, the choice was associated with guessing the qualities that the dancers thought of: “Three ladies who came up to them with questions - oubli ou regret - interrupted the conversation ...” (Pushkin, VIII (1), 244). Or in “After the Ball” by L. Tolstoy: “... I did not dance the mazurka with her /<...>When we were brought to her and she did not guess my quality, she, giving her hand not to me, shrugged her thin shoulders and, as a sign of regret and consolation, smiled at me.
Cotillion - a kind of quadrille, one of the dances concluding the ball - was danced to the tune of a waltz and was a dance-game, the most relaxed, varied and playful dance. “... There they make both a cross and a circle, and they plant a lady, triumphantly bringing gentlemen to her, so that she chooses with whom she wants to dance, and in other places they kneel before her; but in order to reciprocate their gratitude, the men also sit down in order to choose the ladies they like.
Then there are figures with jokes, giving cards, knots made of scarves, deceit or jumping off in a dance from one another, jumping over a scarf high ... "
The ball was not the only opportunity to have a fun and noisy night. The alternative was:
... the games of reckless youths,
Thunderstorms of guard patrols ... (Pushkin, VI, 621)
Single drinking parties in the company of young revelers, officers-brothers, famous "naughty" and drunkards. The ball, as a decent and quite secular pastime, was opposed to this revelry, which, although cultivated in certain guards circles, was generally perceived as a manifestation of "bad taste", acceptable for a young man only within certain, moderate limits. M. D. Buturlin, prone to a free and wild life, recalled that there was a moment when he "did not miss a single ball." This, he writes, “greatly pleased my mother, as proof, que j” avais pris le goût de la bonne société.” However, the taste for a reckless life prevailed: “There were quite frequent lunches and dinners in my apartment. My guests were some of our officers and civilian acquaintances of mine in St. Petersburg, mostly from foreigners, there was, of course, a draft sea of champagne and zhzhenka.But my main mistake was that after the first visits with my brother at the beginning of my visit to Princess Maria Vasilyevna Kochubey, Natalya Kirillovna Zagryazhskaya (who meant a lot then) and among others in kinship or former acquaintance with our family, I stopped attending this high society. I remember how one day, when leaving the French Kamennoostrovsky theater, my old acquaintance Elisaveta Mikhailovna Khitrova, recognizing me, exclaimed: "Ah, Michelle!" And I, in order to avoid meeting and explicating her, rather than descend from the restyled staircase where this scene took place, turned sharply to the right past the columns of the facade; but since there was no exit to the street, I flew headlong to the ground from a very decent height, risking breaking an arm or leg. Unfortunately, the habits of a wild and open life in the circle of army comrades with late drinking at restaurants were rooted in me, and therefore trips to high-society salons burdened me, as a result of which a few months passed, since the members of that society decided (and not without reason) that I am small, mired in the whirlpool of bad society.
Late drinking, starting in one of the Petersburg restaurants, ended somewhere in the "Red Tavern", which stood at the seventh verst along the Peterhof road and was a favorite place for officers' revelry.
A cruel card game and noisy marches through the streets of St. Petersburg at night completed the picture. Noisy street adventures - "thunderstorm of the midnight watch" (Pushkin, VIII, 3) - were the usual nighttime activities of "naughty". The nephew of the poet Delvig recalls: “... Pushkin and Delvig told us about the walks that they, after graduating from the Lyceum, took along the streets of St. stopping others who are ten or more years older than us...
After reading the description of this walk, one might think that Pushkin, Delvig and all the other men who walked with them, with the exception of brother Alexander and me, were drunk, but I resolutely certify that this was not the case, but they simply wanted to shake the old one and show it to us , the younger generation, as if in reproach to our more serious and deliberate behavior. In the same spirit, although a little later - at the very end of the 1820s, Buturlin and his friends tore off the scepter and orb from the double-headed eagle (pharmacy sign) and marched with them through the city center. This “prank” already had a rather dangerous political connotation: it provided grounds for a criminal charge of “lese majesty”. It is no coincidence that the acquaintance to whom they appeared in this form "never could remember without fear this night of our visit."
If this adventure got away with it, then punishment followed for trying to feed the bust of the emperor with soup in the restaurant: Buturlin's civilian friends were exiled to the civil service in the Caucasus and Astrakhan, and he was transferred to the provincial army regiment.
This is no coincidence: “crazy feasts”, youth revelry against the backdrop of the Arakcheev (later Nikolaev) capital was inevitably painted in oppositional tones (see the chapter “Decembrist in everyday life”).
The ball had a harmonious composition. It was, as it were, some kind of festive whole, subordinated to the movement from the strict form of the solemn ballet to the variable forms of the choreographic game. However, in order to understand the meaning of the ball as a whole, it should be understood in opposition to the two extreme poles: the parade and the masquerade.
The parade, in the form that it received under the influence of the peculiar “creativity” of Paul I and the Pavlovichi: Alexander, Constantine and Nicholas, was a kind of carefully thought-out ritual. He was the opposite of fighting. And von Bock was right when he called it "the triumph of nothingness." The battle demanded initiative, the parade demanded submission, turning the army into a ballet. In relation to the parade, the ball acted as something directly opposite. Submission, discipline, erasure of personality ball opposed fun, freedom, and severe depression of a person - his joyful excitement. In this sense, the chronological course of the day from the parade or preparation for it - the exercise, the arena and other types of "kings of science" (Pushkin) - to the ballet, holiday, ball was a movement from subordination to freedom and from rigid monotony to fun and diversity.
However, the ball was subject to firm laws. The degree of rigidity of this submission was different: between thousands of balls in the Winter Palace, timed to coincide with especially solemn dates, and small balls in the houses of provincial landowners with dancing to a serf orchestra or even to a violin played by a German teacher, there was a long and multi-stage path. The degree of freedom was different at different stages of this path. And yet, the fact that the ball assumed a composition and a strict internal organization limited the freedom within it. This caused the need for another element that would play in this system the role of "organized disorganization", planned and provided for chaos. This role was taken over by the masquerade.
Masquerade dressing, in principle, was contrary to deep church traditions. In the Orthodox mind, this was one of the most enduring signs of demonism. Dressing up and elements of masquerade in folk culture were allowed only in those ritual actions of the Christmas and spring cycles that were supposed to imitate the exorcism of demons and in which the remnants of pagan ideas found refuge. Therefore, the European tradition of masquerade penetrated into the life of the nobility of the 18th century with difficulty or merged with folk mummers.
As a form of a noble festival, the masquerade was a closed and almost secret fun. Elements of blasphemy and rebellion appeared in two characteristic episodes: both Elizabeth Petrovna and Catherine II, when carrying out coups d'état, dressed up in men's guard uniforms and mounted horses like a man. Here, dressing up took on a symbolic character: a woman - a contender for the throne - turned into an emperor. This can be compared with the use of Shcherbatov in relation to one person - Elizabeth - in different situations of naming, either in the masculine or in the feminine.
From military-state disguise, the next step led to a masquerade game. One could recall in this respect the projects of Catherine II. If such masquerade masquerades were publicly held, such as, for example, the famous carousel, to which Grigory Orlov and other participants appeared in knightly costumes, then in pure secrecy, in the closed premises of the Small Hermitage, Catherine found it amusing to hold completely different masquerades. So, for example, with her own hand she drew a detailed plan of the holiday, in which separate dressing rooms would be made for men and women, so that all the ladies would suddenly appear in men's costumes, and all gentlemen in women's (Catherine was not disinterested here: such the costume emphasized her slimness, and the huge guardsmen, of course, would have looked comical).
The masquerade that we encounter when reading Lermontov's play - the St. Petersburg masquerade in Engelhardt's house on the corner of Nevsky and Moika - had the exact opposite character. It was the first public masquerade in Russia. Anyone who paid the entrance fee could visit it. The fundamental confusion of visitors, social contrasts, the permitted licentiousness of behavior, which turned the Engelhardt masquerades into the center of scandalous stories and rumors - all this created a spicy counterbalance to the severity of St. Petersburg balls.
Let us recall the joke that Pushkin put into the mouth of a foreigner who said that in St. Petersburg morality is guaranteed by the fact that the summer nights are bright and the winter ones are cold. For the Engelhardt balls, these obstacles did not exist. Lermontov included a significant hint in "Masquerade":
Arbenin
It would not be bad for both you and me to scatter.
After all, today is the holidays and, of course, a masquerade
Engelhardt...<...>
Prince
There are women there ... a miracle ...
And even there they say...
Arbenin
Let them say, what do we care?
Under the mask, all ranks are equal,
The mask has neither a soul nor a title, it has a body.
And if the features are hidden by the mask,
That mask from feelings is boldly torn off.
The role of the masquerade in prim and uniformed St. Nicholas' Petersburg can be compared to how satiated French courtiers of the Regency era, having exhausted all forms of refinement during a long night, went to some dirty tavern in a dubious district of Paris and greedily devoured fetid boiled unwashed intestines. It was the sharpness of the contrast that created here a refined and jaded experience.
To the words of the prince in the same drama by Lermontov: “All masks are stupid,” Arbenin replies with a monologue glorifying the unexpectedness and unpredictability that the mask brings to a stiff society:
Yes, there is no stupid mask: Silent ...
Mysterious, talking - so cute.
You can give her words
A smile, a look, whatever you want ...
For example, take a look there -
How to act nobly
A tall Turkish woman ... how full,
How her chest breathes both passionately and freely!
Do you know who she is?
Perhaps a proud countess or princess,
Diana in society... Venus in masquerade,
And it may also be that the same beauty
Tomorrow evening he will come to you for half an hour.
The parade and masquerade formed a brilliant frame of the picture, in the center of which was the ball.
Yu. M. Lotman
CONVERSATIONS ABOUT RUSSIAN CULTURE
Life and traditions of the Russian nobility (XVIII - early XIX century)
In blessed memory of my parents Alexandra Samoilovna and Mikhail Lvovich Lotmanov
The publication was published with the assistance of the Federal Target Program for Book Publishing in Russia and the International Foundation "Cultural Initiative".
“Conversations about Russian Culture” was written by the brilliant researcher of Russian culture Yu. M. Lotman. At one time, the author responded with interest to the proposal of "Art - St. Petersburg" to prepare a publication based on a series of lectures with which he appeared on television. The work was carried out by him with great responsibility - the composition was specified, the chapters were expanded, new versions of them appeared. The author signed the book into a set, but did not see it published - on October 28, 1993, Yu. M. Lotman died. His living word, addressed to an audience of millions, has been preserved in this book. It immerses the reader into the world of everyday life of the Russian nobility of the 18th - early 19th centuries. We see people of a distant era in the nursery and in the ballroom, on the battlefield and at the card table, we can examine in detail the hairstyle, the cut of the dress, the gesture, the demeanor. At the same time, everyday life for the author is a historical-psychological category, a sign system, that is, a kind of text. He teaches to read and understand this text, where everyday and existential are inseparable.
The “Collection of Motley Chapters”, whose heroes are prominent historical figures, royal persons, ordinary people of the era, poets, literary characters, is linked together by the thought of the continuity of the cultural and historical process, the intellectual and spiritual connection of generations.
In a special issue of the Tartu “Russkaya Gazeta” dedicated to the death of Yu. Not titles, orders or royal favor, but the “independence of a person” turns him into a historical figure.
The publishing house would like to thank the State Hermitage Museum and the State Russian Museum, which donated the engravings kept in their collections for reproduction in this publication.
INTRODUCTION:
Life and culture
Having devoted conversations to Russian life and culture of the 18th - early 19th centuries, we must first of all determine the meaning of the concepts "life", "culture", "Russian culture of the 18th - early 19th centuries" and their relationship with each other. At the same time, we will make a reservation that the concept of “culture”, which belongs to the most fundamental in the cycle of human sciences, can itself become the subject of a separate monograph and has repeatedly become one. It would be strange if in this book we set ourselves the goal of resolving controversial issues related to this concept. It is very capacious: it includes morality, and the whole range of ideas, and human creativity, and much more. It will be quite enough for us to confine ourselves to that aspect of the concept of "culture" which is necessary for elucidating our comparatively narrow topic.
Culture is first and foremost the concept of the collective. An individual person can be a bearer of culture, can actively participate in its development, nevertheless, by its nature, culture, like language, is a social phenomenon, that is, a social one.
Consequently, culture is something common to any collective - a group of people living at the same time and connected by a certain social organization. It follows from this that culture is form of communication between people and is possible only in a group in which people communicate. (The organizational structure that unites people living at the same time is called synchronous, and we will use this concept in the future when defining a number of aspects of the phenomenon of interest to us).
Any structure serving the sphere of social communication is a language. This means that it forms a certain system of signs used in accordance with the rules known to the members of this collective. We call signs any material expression (words, pictures, things, etc.), which has the meaning and thus can serve as a means conveying meaning.
Consequently, culture has, firstly, a communicative and, secondly, symbolic nature. Let's focus on this last one. Think of something as simple and familiar as bread. Bread is material and visible. It has weight, shape, it can be cut, eaten. Eaten bread comes into physiological contact with a person. In this function, one cannot ask about it: what does it mean? It has a use, not a meaning. But when we say: “Give us our daily bread today,” the word “bread” means not just bread as a thing, but has a broader meaning: “food necessary for life.” And when in the Gospel of John we read the words of Christ: “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will not hunger” (John 6:35), then we have a complex symbolic meaning of both the object itself and the word denoting it.
The sword is also nothing more than an object. As a thing, it can be forged or broken, it can be placed in a museum display case, and it can kill a person. This is all - the use of it as an object, but when, being attached to a belt or supported by a sling, placed on the hip, the sword symbolizes a free man and is a "sign of freedom", it already appears as a symbol and belongs to culture.
In the 18th century, a Russian and European nobleman does not carry a sword - a sword hangs on his side (sometimes a tiny, almost toy front sword, which is practically not a weapon). In this case, the sword is a symbol of a symbol: it means a sword, and a sword means belonging to a privileged class.
Belonging to the nobility also means the obligatory nature of certain rules of conduct, principles of honor, even the cut of clothing. We know cases when “wearing clothes indecent for a nobleman” (that is, a peasant dress) or also a beard “indecent for a nobleman” became a matter of concern for the political police and the emperor himself.
A sword as a weapon, a sword as a piece of clothing, a sword as a symbol, a sign of nobility - all these are various functions of an object in the general context of culture.
In its various incarnations, a symbol can simultaneously be a weapon suitable for direct practical use, or completely separated from its immediate function. So, for example, a small sword specially designed for parades excluded practical use, in fact, being an image of a weapon, and not a weapon. The parade realm was separated from the combat realm by emotion, body language, and function. Let us recall the words of Chatsky: "I will go to death as to a parade." At the same time, in Tolstoy's "War and Peace" we meet in the description of the battle an officer leading his soldiers into battle with a parade (that is, useless) sword in his hands. The very bipolar situation of "fight - game of battle" created a complex relationship between weapons as a symbol and weapons as reality. So the sword (sword) is woven into the system of the symbolic language of the era and becomes a fact of its culture.
And here is another example, in the Bible (Book of Judges, 7:13-14) we read: “Gideon came [and hears]. And so, one tells the other a dream, and says: I dreamed that round barley bread rolled along the camp of Midian and, rolling to the tent, hit it so that it fell, overturned it, and the tent fell apart. Another said in response to him: this is nothing but the sword of Gideon ... ”Here bread means the sword, and the sword means victory. And since the victory was won with a cry of “The sword of the Lord and Gideon!”, Without a single blow (the Madianites themselves beat each other: “the Lord turned the sword of one against another in the whole camp”), then the sword here is a sign of the power of the Lord, and not a military victory .
So, the area of culture is always the area of symbolism.
Yuri LotmanCONVERSATIONS ABOUT RUSSIAN CULTURE
See Russia, 18-19 centuries.
Lotman Yu.M. Conversations about Russian culture. Life and traditions of the Russian nobility (XVIII-early XIX century). St. Petersburg: Art-SPb., 1994. 558 p.
Introduction: Life and culture 5
Part one 21
People and ranks 21
Women's World 60
Women's education in the XVIII - early XIX century 100
Part two 119
Matchmaking. Marriage. Divorce 138
Russian dandyism 166
Card game 183
Art of Living 244
Total path 287
Part three 317
"Chicks of Petrov's Nest" 317
Age of heroes 348
Two women 394
People of 1812 432
Decembrist in everyday life 456
Instead of a conclusion: “Between the double abyss. » 558
Notes 539
“Conversations about Russian Culture” was written by the brilliant researcher of Russian culture Yu. M. Lotman. At one time, the author responded with interest to the proposal of "Art - St. Petersburg" to prepare a publication based on a series of lectures with which he appeared on television. The work was carried out by him with great responsibility - the composition was specified, the chapters were expanded, new versions of them appeared. The author signed the book into a set, but did not see it published - on October 28, 1993, Yu. M. Lotman died. His living word, addressed to an audience of millions, has been preserved in this book. It immerses the reader into the world of everyday life of the Russian nobility of the 18th - early 19th centuries. We see people of a distant era in the nursery and in the ballroom, on the battlefield and at the card table, we can examine in detail the hairstyle, the cut of the dress, the gesture, the demeanor. At the same time, everyday life for the author is a historical-psychological category, a sign system, that is, a kind of text. He teaches to read and understand this text, where everyday and existential are inseparable.
The “Collection of Motley Chapters”, whose heroes are prominent historical figures, royal persons, ordinary people of the era, poets, literary characters, is linked together by the thought of the continuity of the cultural and historical process, the intellectual and spiritual connection of generations.
In a special issue of the Tartu “Russkaya Gazeta” dedicated to the death of Yu. Not titles, orders or royal favor, but the “independence of a person” turns him into a historical figure.
The publishing house would like to thank the State Hermitage Museum and the State Russian Museum for providing free of charge the engravings kept in their collections for reproduction in this publication.
Compilation of an album of illustrations and comments to them by R. G. Grigorieva
Artist A. V. Ivashentseva
Layout of the landscape part of Ya. M. Okun
Photographs by N. I. Syulgin, L. A. Fedorenko
© Yu. M. Lotman, 1994 44020000-002
©R. G. Grigoriev, compiling an album of illustrations and comments on them, 1994 -
© Art - SPB Publishing House, 1994
Yuri Lotman
^ CONVERSATIONS ABOUT RUSSIAN CULTURE
Introduction: Life and culture
Having devoted conversations to Russian life and culture of the 18th - early 19th centuries, we must first of all determine the meaning of the concepts "life", "culture", "Russian culture of the 18th - early 19th centuries" and their relationship with each other. At the same time, we will make a reservation that the concept of “culture”, which belongs to the most fundamental in the cycle of human sciences, can itself become the subject of a separate monograph and has repeatedly become one. It would be strange if in this book we set ourselves the goal of resolving controversial issues related to this concept. It is very capacious: it includes morality, and the whole range of ideas, and human creativity, and much more. It will be quite enough for us to confine ourselves to that aspect of the concept of "culture" which is necessary for elucidating our comparatively narrow topic.
Culture, first of all, is a collective concept. An individual can be a bearer of culture, can actively participate in its development, nevertheless, by its nature, culture, like language, is a social phenomenon, that is, a social one *.
Consequently, culture is something common to any collective - a group of people living at the same time and connected by a certain social organization. It follows from this that culture is a form of communication between people and is possible only in a group in which people communicate. (The organizational structure that unites people living at the same time is called synchronous, and we will use this concept in the future when determining a number of aspects of the phenomenon of interest to us).
Any structure serving the sphere of social communication is a language. This means that it forms a certain system of signs used in accordance with the rules known to the members of this collective. We call signs any material expression (words, pictures, things, etc.) that has a meaning and, thus, can serve as a means of conveying meaning.
Consequently, culture has, firstly, a communicative and, secondly, symbolic nature. Let's focus on this last one. Think of something as simple and familiar as bread. Bread is material and visible. It has weight, shape, it can be cut, eaten. Eaten bread comes into physiological contact with a person. In this function, one cannot ask about it: what does it mean? It has a use, not a meaning. But when we say: “Give us our daily bread today,” the word “bread” means not just bread as a thing, but has a broader meaning: “food necessary for life.” And when in the Gospel of John we read the words of Christ: “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will not hunger” (John 6:35), then we have a complex symbolic meaning of both the object itself and the word denoting it.
The sword is also nothing more than an object. As a thing, it can be forged or broken, it can be placed in a museum display case, and it can kill a person. This is all - the use of it as an object, but when, being attached to a belt or supported by a sling, placed on the hip, the sword symbolizes a free man and is a "sign of freedom", it already appears as a symbol and belongs to culture.
In the 18th century, a Russian and European nobleman does not carry a sword - a sword hangs on his side (sometimes a tiny, almost toy front sword, which is practically not a weapon). In this case, the sword is a symbol of a symbol: it means a sword, and a sword means belonging to a privileged class.
Belonging to the nobility also means the obligatory nature of certain rules of conduct, principles of honor, even the cut of clothing. We know cases when “wearing clothes indecent for a nobleman” (that is, a peasant dress) or also a beard “indecent for a nobleman” became a matter of concern for the political police and the emperor himself.
A sword as a weapon, a sword as a piece of clothing, a sword as a symbol, a sign of nobility - all these are various functions of an object in the general context of culture.
In its various incarnations, a symbol can simultaneously be a weapon suitable for direct practical use, or completely separated from its immediate function. So, for example, a small sword specially designed for parades excluded practical use, in fact, being an image of a weapon, and not a weapon. The parade realm was separated from the combat realm by emotion, body language, and function. Let us recall the words of Chatsky: "I will go to death as to a parade." At the same time, in Tolstoy's "War and Peace" we meet in the description of the battle an officer leading his soldiers into battle with a parade (that is, useless) sword in his hands. The very bipolar situation of "fight - game of battle" created a complex relationship between weapons as a symbol and weapons as reality. So the sword (sword) is woven into the system of the symbolic language of the era and becomes a fact of its culture.
And here is another example, in the Bible (Book of Judges, 7:13-14) we read: “Gideon came [and hears]. And so, one tells the other a dream, and says: I dreamed that round barley bread rolled along the camp of Midian and, rolling to the tent, hit it so that it fell, overturned it, and the tent fell apart. Another said in answer to him: this is none other than the sword of Gideon ... ”Here bread means a sword, and a sword means victory. And since the victory was won with a cry of “The sword of the Lord and Gideon!”, Without a single blow (the Madianites themselves beat each other: “the Lord turned the sword of one against another in the whole camp”), then the sword here is a sign of the power of the Lord, and not a military victory .
So, the area of culture is always the area of symbolism.
Let us give one more example: in the earliest versions of the Old Russian legislation (“Russkaya Pravda”), the nature of the compensation (“vira”) that the attacker had to pay to the victim is proportional to the material damage (the nature and size of the wound) suffered by him. However, in the future, legal norms develop, it would seem, in an unexpected direction: a wound, even severe, if it is inflicted by the sharp part of the sword, entails less damage than not so dangerous blows with an unsheathed weapon or with a sword hilt, a bowl at a feast, or "rear » (back) side of the fist.
How to explain this, from our point of view, paradox? The morality of the military class is being formed, and the concept of honor is being developed. A wound inflicted by the sharp (combat) part of a cold weapon is painful, but not dishonorable. Moreover, it is even honorable, because they fight only with an equal. It is no coincidence that in the everyday life of Western European chivalry, initiation, that is, the transformation of the “lower” into the “higher”, required a real, and subsequently significant blow with a sword. Anyone who was recognized as worthy of a wound (later - a significant blow) was simultaneously recognized as socially equal. A blow with an undrawn sword, a handle, a stick - not a weapon at all - is dishonorable, because a slave is beaten like that.
Characteristic is the subtle distinction that is made between an "honest" punch and a "dishonest" one, the back of the hand or fist. Here there is an inverse relationship between real damage and the degree of significance. Let us compare the replacement in knightly (and later in dueling) life of a real slap in the face with a symbolic gesture of throwing a glove, as well as in general equating an insulting gesture with an insult by action when challenged to a duel.
Thus, the text of the later editions of Russkaya Pravda reflected changes, the meaning of which can be defined as follows: protection (primarily) from material, bodily harm is replaced by protection from insult. Material damage, like material wealth, like things in general in their practical value and function, belongs to the field of practical life, while insult, honor, protection from humiliation, self-esteem, politeness (respect for another's dignity) belong to the sphere of culture.
Sex belongs to the physiological side of practical life; all experiences of love, the symbolism associated with them, developed over the centuries, conditional rituals - everything that A.P. Chekhov called "ennoblement of sexual feelings" belongs to culture. Therefore, the so-called “sexual revolution”, captivating by the elimination of “prejudices” and, it would seem, “unnecessary” difficulties on the path of one of the most important human inclinations, in fact, was one of the powerful battering rams with which the anticulture of the 20th century hit the centuries-old building of culture.
We have used the expression "secular building of culture". It is not accidental. We talked about the synchronous organization of culture. But it must immediately be emphasized that culture always implies the preservation of previous experience. Moreover, one of the most important definitions of culture characterizes it as the "non-genetic" memory of the collective. Culture is memory. Therefore, it is always connected with history, always implies the continuity of the moral, intellectual, spiritual life of a person, society and mankind. And therefore, when we talk about our modern culture, we, perhaps without suspecting it ourselves, are also talking about the huge path that this culture has traveled. This path spans millennia, crosses the boundaries of historical eras, national cultures and immerses us in one culture - the culture of mankind.
Therefore, culture is always, on the one hand, a certain number of inherited texts, and on the other, inherited symbols.
Symbols of a culture rarely appear in its synchronic slice. As a rule, they come from the depths of centuries and, changing their meaning (but without losing the memory of their previous meanings), are transferred to the future states of culture. Such simple symbols as a circle, a cross, a triangle, a wavy line, more complex ones: a hand, an eye, a house - and even more complex ones (for example, rituals) accompany humanity throughout its many thousands of years of culture.
Therefore, culture is historical in nature. Its very present always exists in relation to the past (real or constructed in the order of some mythology) and to forecasts of the future. These historical connections of culture are called diachronic. As you can see, culture is eternal and universal, but at the same time it is always mobile and changeable. This is the difficulty of understanding the past (after all, it is gone, moved away from us). But this is also the need for understanding a bygone culture: it always has what we need now, today.
We study literature, read books, we are interested in the fate of heroes. We are concerned about Natasha Rostova and Andrei Bolkonsky, the heroes of Zola, Flaubert, Balzac. We are happy to pick up a novel written a hundred, two hundred, three hundred years ago, and we see that its characters are close to us: they love, hate, do good and bad deeds, know honor and dishonor, they are faithful in friendship or traitors - and all this is clear to us.
But at the same time, much in the actions of the heroes is either completely incomprehensible to us, or - worse - understood incorrectly, not completely. We know why Onegin and Lensky quarreled. But how did they quarrel, why did they duel, why did Onegin kill Lensky (and Pushkin himself later put his chest under the gun)? Many times we will meet with the reasoning: it would be better if he did not do this, somehow it would have worked out. They are not accurate, because in order to understand the meaning of the behavior of living people and literary heroes of the past, it is necessary to know their culture: their simple, ordinary life, their habits, ideas about the world, etc., etc.
The eternal always wears the clothes of time, and this clothes grows together with people so much that sometimes under the historical we do not recognize the present, ours, that is, in a sense, we do not recognize and do not understand ourselves. Once upon a time, in the thirties of the last century, Gogol was indignant: all novels about love, on all theatrical stages - love, and what kind of love in his, Gogol's time - is it the way it is portrayed? Don't advantageous marriage, the "electricity of rank", money capital act more strongly? It turns out that the love of the Gogol era is both eternal human love, and at the same time the love of Chichikov (remember how he looked at the governor's daughter!), The love of Khlestakov, who quotes Karamzin and declares his love immediately to both the mayor and her daughter (after all, him - "lightness in thoughts is extraordinary!").
A person changes, and in order to imagine the logic of the actions of a literary hero or people of the past - and after all, we look up to them, and they somehow maintain our connection with the past - we must imagine how they lived, what kind of world surrounded them, what they were like. their general ideas and moral ideas, their official duties, customs, clothes, why they acted this way and not otherwise. This will be the topic of the proposed conversations.
Having thus determined the aspects of culture that interest us, we have the right, however, to ask the question: does the expression “culture and way of life” itself contain a contradiction, do these phenomena lie on different planes? Indeed, what is life? Life is the usual flow of life in its real-practical forms; life is the things that surround us, our habits and everyday behavior. Life surrounds us like air, and, like air, it is noticeable to us only when it is not enough or it deteriorates. We notice the features of someone else's life, but our own life is elusive for us - we tend to consider it "just life", a natural norm of practical life. So, everyday life is always in the sphere of practice, it is the world of things first of all. How can he come into contact with the world of symbols and signs that make up the space of culture?
Turning to the history of everyday life, we easily distinguish in it deep forms, the connection of which with ideas, with the intellectual, moral, spiritual development of the era is self-evident. Thus, ideas about noble honor or court etiquette, although they belong to the history of everyday life, are also inseparable from the history of ideas. But what about such seemingly external features of the time as fashions, the customs of everyday life, the details of practical behavior and the objects in which it is embodied? Is it really so important for us to know what “Lepage's fatal trunks” looked like, from which Onegin killed Lensky, or, more broadly, to imagine the objective world of Onegin?
However, the two types of everyday details and phenomena identified above are closely related. The world of ideas is inseparable from the world of people, and ideas from everyday reality. Alexander Blok wrote:
Accidentally on a pocket knife
Find a speck of dust from distant lands -
And the world will again appear strange...
The "motes of distant lands" of history are reflected in the texts that have survived for us - including the "texts in the language of everyday life." Recognizing them and imbued with them, we comprehend the living past. Hence, the method offered to the reader of "Conversations on Russian Culture" is to see history in the mirror of everyday life, and illuminate small, sometimes seemingly disparate everyday details with the light of large historical events.
In what ways does the interpenetration of life and culture take place? For the objects or customs of "ideologized everyday life" this is self-evident: the language of court etiquette, for example, is impossible without real things, gestures, etc., in which it is embodied and which belong to everyday life. But how are those endless objects of everyday life, which were mentioned above, associated with culture, with the ideas of the era?
Our doubts will be dispelled if we remember that all the things around us are included not only in practice in general, but also in social practice, become, as it were, clots of relations between people and, in this function, are capable of acquiring a symbolic character.
In Pushkin's The Miserly Knight, Albert waits for the moment when his father's treasures pass into his hands in order to give them a "true", that is, practical use. But the baron himself is content with symbolic possession, because gold for him is not yellow circles for which you can buy certain things, but a symbol of sovereignty. Makar Devushkin in Dostoevsky's "Poor People" invents a special gait so that his holey soles are not visible. The holey sole is the real thing; as a thing, it can cause trouble to the owner of the boots: wet feet, a cold. But for an outside observer, a torn outsole is a sign whose content is Poverty, and Poverty is one of the defining symbols of St. Petersburg culture. And Dostoevsky's hero accepts the "view of culture": he suffers not because he is cold, but because he is ashamed. Shame is one of the most powerful psychological levers of culture. So, life, in its symbolic key, is part of culture.
But this issue has another side. A thing does not exist separately, as something isolated in the context of its time. Things are connected. In some cases, we have in mind a functional connection and then we talk about "unity of style." The unity of style is belonging, for example, to furniture, to a single artistic and cultural layer, a "common language" that allows things to "speak among themselves." When you enter a ridiculously furnished room filled with all sorts of different styles, you get the feeling that you have entered a market where everyone is screaming and no one is listening to the other. But there may be another connection. For example, you say: "These are my grandmother's things." Thus, you establish some kind of intimate connection between objects, due to the memory of a person dear to you, of his long gone time, of your childhood. It is no coincidence that there is a custom to give things "as a keepsake" - things have a memory. It is like words and notes that the past passes on to the future.
On the other hand, things imperiously dictate gestures, behavioral style and, ultimately, the psychological attitude of their owners. So, for example, since women began to wear trousers, their gait has changed, it has become more athletic, more “masculine”. At the same time, a typically “masculine” gesture invaded women’s behavior (for example, the habit of crossing one’s legs high while sitting is a gesture not only masculine, but also “American”, in Europe it was traditionally considered a sign of indecent swagger). A careful observer may notice that the previously sharply different male and female manners of laughing have now lost their distinction, and precisely because women in the mass have adopted the male manner of laughter.
Things impose a manner of behavior on us, because they create a certain cultural context around them. After all, one must be able to hold an ax, a shovel, a dueling pistol, a modern machine gun, a fan or a steering wheel of a car in one's hands. In the old days they said: "He knows how (or does not know how) to wear a tailcoat." It is not enough to sew a tailcoat for yourself at the best tailor - for this it is enough to have money. One must also be able to wear it, and this, as the hero of Bulwer-Lytton's novel Pelham, or the Adventure of a Gentleman argued, is a whole art that is given only to a true dandy. Anyone who held in his hand both modern weapons and an old dueling pistol cannot help but be amazed at how well, how well the latter fits in his hand. Its heaviness is not felt - it becomes, as it were, an extension of the body. The fact is that ancient household items were made by hand, their shape was worked out for decades, and sometimes for centuries, the secrets of production were passed from master to master. This not only worked out the most convenient form, but also inevitably turned the thing into the history of the thing, into the memory of the gestures associated with it. The thing, on the one hand, gave the human body new possibilities, and on the other hand, included the person in the tradition, that is, it developed and limited his individuality.
However, life is not only the life of things, it is also customs, the whole ritual of daily behavior, the structure of life that determines the daily routine, the time of various activities, the nature of work and leisure, forms of recreation, games, love ritual and funeral ritual. The connection of this side of everyday life with culture does not require explanation. After all, it is in it that those features are revealed by which we usually recognize our own and others, a person of one era or another, an Englishman or a Spaniard.
Custom has another function. Not all laws of behavior are fixed in writing. Writing dominates in the legal, religious, and ethical spheres. However, in human life there is a vast area of customs and propriety. “There is a way of thinking and feeling, there is a mass of customs, beliefs and habits that belong exclusively to some people”2. These norms belong to culture, they are fixed in the forms of everyday behavior, everything that is said: "it's accepted, it's so decent." These norms are transmitted through everyday life and are in close contact with the sphere of folk poetry. They become part of the cultural memory.
Now it remains for us to determine why we chose the era of the 18th - early 19th centuries for our conversation.
History is bad at predicting the future, but it is good at explaining the present. We are now in a time of fascination with history. This is not accidental: the time of revolutions is anti-historical in nature, the time of reforms always turns people to reflections on the paths of history. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his treatise On the Social Contract, in the pre-stormy atmosphere of the impending revolution, the approach of which he registered as a sensitive barometer, wrote that the study of history is useful only to tyrants. Instead of studying how it was, one should know how it should be. Theoretical utopias in such eras attract more than historical documents.
When society passes through this critical point, and further development begins to be depicted not as the creation of a new world on the ruins of the old, but as an organic and continuous development, history again comes into its own. But here a characteristic shift occurs: interest in history has awakened, and the skills of historical research are sometimes lost, documents are forgotten, old historical concepts do not satisfy, but there are no new ones. And here the usual tricks offer crafty help: utopias are invented, conditional constructions are created, but not of the future, but of the past. A quasi-historical literature is being born, which is especially attractive to the mass consciousness, because it replaces the difficult and incomprehensible, not amenable to a single interpretation of reality with easily digestible myths.
True, history has many facets, and we still usually remember the dates of major historical events, the biographies of “historical persons”. But how did the "historical figures" live? But it is in this nameless space that the real story most often unfolds. It is very good that we have a series of "Life of Remarkable People". But wouldn't it be interesting to read The Lives of Unremarkable People? Leo Tolstoy in "War and Peace" contrasted the truly historical life of the Rostov family, the historical meaning of the spiritual quest of Pierre Bezukhov, with the pseudo-historical, in his opinion, life of Napoleon and other "statesmen". In the story “From the notes of Prince D. Nekhlyudov. Lucerne” Tolstoy wrote: “On July 7, 1857, in Lucerne, in front of the Schweitzerhof Hotel, where the richest people stay, a wandering beggar singer sang songs and played the guitar for half an hour. About a hundred people listened to him. The singer three times asked everyone to give him something. No man gave him anything, and many laughed at him. "<...>
Here is an event that the historians of our time must record in fiery, indelible letters. This event is more significant, more serious and has the deepest meaning than the facts recorded in newspapers and stories.<...>This is a fact not for the history of human deeds, but for the history of progress and civilization.
Tolstoy was profoundly right: without knowledge of simple life, its seemingly "little things" there is no understanding of history. It is understanding, because in history knowing any facts and understanding them are completely different things. Events are made by people. And people act according to the motives of their era. If you do not know these motives, then the actions of people will often seem inexplicable or meaningless.
The sphere of behavior is a very important part of the national culture, and the difficulty of studying it is due to the fact that stable features that may not change for centuries collide here, and forms that change at an extraordinary speed. When you try to explain to yourself why a person who lived 200 or 400 years ago did this and not otherwise, you must say two opposite things at the same time: “He is the same as you. Put yourself in his place" - and: "Do not forget that he is completely different, he is not you. Give up your habitual ideas and try to reincarnate in it.
But why did we choose this particular era - the 18th - early 19th centuries? There are good reasons for this. On the one hand, this time is close enough for us (what do 200-300 years mean for history?) and is closely connected with our life today. This is the time when the features of the new Russian culture took shape, the culture of the new time, to which, whether we like it or not, we also belong. On the other hand, this time is quite distant, already largely forgotten.
Objects differ not only in their functions, not only in the purpose for which we pick them up, but also in what feelings they evoke in us. With one feeling, we touch the ancient chronicle, "shaking off the dust of centuries from the charters", with another - to the newspaper, still smelling of fresh printing ink. Antiquity and eternity have their own poetry, their own - the news that conveys to us the hasty run of time. But between these poles there are documents that evoke a special relationship: intimate and historical at the same time. Such, for example, are family albums. Familiar strangers are looking at us from their pages - forgotten faces (“Who is it?” - “I don’t know, my grandmother remembered everyone”), old-fashioned costumes, people in solemn, now already ridiculous poses, inscriptions reminiscent of events that are now no one remembers anyway. And yet this is not someone else's album. And if you look closely at the faces and mentally change hairstyles and clothes, you will immediately find related features. The 18th - early 19th centuries is a family album of our current culture, its "home archive", its "close-distant". But hence the special attitude: ancestors are admired - parents are condemned; ignorance of ancestors is compensated by imagination and romantic imaginary understanding, parents and grandfathers are remembered too well to understand. Everything good in oneself is attributed to the ancestors, everything bad is attributed to the parents. In this historical ignorance or half-knowledge, which, unfortunately, is the lot of most of our contemporaries, the idealization of pre-Petrine Rus' is just as widespread as the denial of the post-Petrine path of development. The matter, of course, is not reduced to a rearrangement of these estimates. But one should abandon the schoolboy habit of evaluating history according to a five-point system.
History is not a menu where you can choose dishes to taste. This requires knowledge and understanding. Not only in order to restore the continuity of culture, but also in order to penetrate into the texts of Pushkin or Tolstoy, and even authors closer to our time. So, for example, one of the wonderful "Kolyma stories" by Varlam Shalamov begins with the words: "We played cards at Naumov's konogon." This phrase immediately draws the reader to the parallel - "The Queen of Spades" with its beginning: "... they played cards with the horse guard Narumov." But in addition to the literary parallel, the real meaning of this phrase is given by the terrible contrast of everyday life. The reader must appreciate the extent of the gap between the horse guard - an officer of one of the most privileged guards regiments - and the konogon - belonging to the privileged camp aristocracy, where access is closed to "enemies of the people" and which is recruited from criminals. There is also a significant difference, which may elude an uninformed reader, between the typically noble surname Narumov and the common people - Naumov. But the most important thing is the terrible difference in the very nature of the card game. The game is one of the main forms of everyday life and it is one of those forms in which the era and its spirit are reflected with particular sharpness.
At the end of this introductory chapter, I consider it my duty to warn readers that the real content of the entire subsequent conversation will be somewhat narrower than the title "Conversations on Russian Culture" promises. The fact is that any culture is multi-layered, and in the era of interest to us, Russian culture existed not only as a whole. There was a culture of the Russian peasantry, also not united within itself: the culture of the Olonets peasant and the Don Cossack, the Orthodox peasant and the Old Believer peasant; there was a sharply isolated life and a peculiar culture of the Russian clergy (again, with profound differences in the life of white and black clergy, hierarchs and grassroots rural priests). Both the merchant and the city dweller (philistine) had their own way of life, their own circle of reading, their own rituals of life, forms of leisure, and clothes. All this rich and varied material will not enter our field of vision. We will be interested in the culture and life of the Russian nobility. There is an explanation for this choice. The study of folk culture and life according to the established division of sciences usually belongs to ethnography, and not so little has been done in this direction. As for the everyday life of the environment in which Pushkin and the Decembrists lived, for a long time it remained "no man's land" in science. Here, the well-established prejudice of a slanderous attitude to everything to which we apply the epithet "noble" affected. For a long time, the image of an “exploiter” immediately arose in the mass consciousness, stories about Saltychikha and much that was said about this were recalled. But at the same time, it was forgotten that that great Russian culture, which became the national culture and gave Fonvizin and Derzhavin, Radishchev and Novikov, Pushkin and the Decembrists, Lermontov and Chaadaev, and which formed the basis for Gogol, Herzen, the Slavophiles, Tolstoy and Tyutchev, was a noble culture . Nothing can be deleted from history. It's too expensive to pay for it.
The book brought to the attention of readers was written in difficult conditions for the author. She would not have been able to see the light if it were not for the generous and disinterested help of his friends and students.
Throughout the work, invaluable help on the verge of co-authorship was provided by Z. G. Mints, who was not destined to live to see the publication of this book. Great help in the design of the book, often in spite of their own studies, was provided to the author by Associate Professor L. N. Kiseleva, as well as other employees of the laboratories of semiotics and history of Russian literature of the University of Tartu: S. Kuzovkina, E. Pogosyan and students E. Zhukov, G. Talvet and A. Shibarova. To all of them the author expresses his deepest gratitude.
In conclusion, the author considers it his pleasant duty to express his deep gratitude to the Humboldt Society and its member, Professor W. Stempel, as well as to his friends E. Stempel, G. Superfin, and the doctors of the Bogenhausen (Miinchen) hospital.
Tartu - Munchen - Tartu. 1989-1990
Author: Lotman Yuri
Title: Conversations about Russian culture
Artist: Ternovsky Evgeniy
Genre: historical. Life and traditions of the Russian nobility in the 18th and early 19th centuries
Publisher: You can't buy anywhere
Year of publication: 2015
Read from the publication: St. Petersburg: Art - St. Petersburg, 1994
Cleaned up: knigofil
Edited by: knigofil
Cover: Vasya s Marsa
Quality: mp3, 96 kbps, 44 kHz, Mono
Duration: 24:39:15
Description:
The author is an outstanding theorist and historian of culture, the founder of the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school. Its readership is huge - from specialists to whom works on the typology of culture are addressed, to schoolchildren who have taken the "Commentary" to "Eugene Onegin" in their hands. The book was created on the basis of a series of television lectures about the culture of the Russian nobility. The past era is presented through the realities of everyday life, brilliantly recreated in the chapters "Duel", "Card Game", "Ball" and others. The book is populated by the heroes of Russian literature and historical figures - among them Peter I, Suvorov, Alexander I, the Decembrists. The factual novelty and a wide range of literary associations, the fundamental nature and liveliness of the presentation make it the most valuable publication in which any reader will find something interesting and useful for himself.
For students, the book will be a necessary addition to the course of Russian history and literature.
The publication was published with the assistance of the Federal Target Program for Book Publishing in Russia and the International Foundation "Cultural Initiative".
“Conversations about Russian Culture” was written by the brilliant researcher of Russian culture Yu. M. Lotman. At one time, the author responded with interest to the proposal of "Art - St. Petersburg" to prepare a publication based on a series of lectures with which he appeared on television. The work was carried out by him with great responsibility - the composition was specified, the chapters were expanded, new versions of them appeared. The author signed the book into a set, but did not see it published - on October 28, 1993, Yu. M. Lotman died. His living word, addressed to an audience of millions, has been preserved in this book. It immerses the reader into the world of everyday life of the Russian nobility of the 18th - early 19th centuries. We see people of a distant era in the nursery and in the ballroom, on the battlefield and at the card table, we can examine in detail the hairstyle, the cut of the dress, the gesture, the demeanor. At the same time, everyday life for the author is a historical-psychological category, a sign system, that is, a kind of text. He teaches to read and understand this text, where everyday and existential are inseparable.
The “Collection of Motley Chapters”, whose heroes are prominent historical figures, royal persons, ordinary people of the era, poets, literary characters, is linked together by the thought of the continuity of the cultural and historical process, the intellectual and spiritual connection of generations.
In a special issue of the Tartu “Russkaya Gazeta” dedicated to the death of Yu. Not titles, orders or royal favor, but the “independence of a person” turns him into a historical figure.
The publishing house would like to thank the State Hermitage Museum and the State Russian Museum for providing free of charge the engravings kept in their collections for reproduction in this publication.
INTRODUCTION: Life and culture
PART ONE
People and ranks
Women's World
Women's education in the 18th - early 19th centuries
PART TWO
Ball
Matchmaking. Marriage. Divorce
Russian dandyism
Card game
Duel
art of living
Outcome of the path
PART THREE
"Chicks of Petrov's Nest"
Ivan Ivanovich Neplyuev - reform apologist
Mikhail Petrovich Avramov - critic of the reform
Age of heroes
A. N. Radishchev
A. V. Suvorov
Two women
People of 1812
Decembrist in everyday life
INSTEAD OF CONCLUSION: “Between the double abyss…”
The author is an outstanding theorist and historian of culture, the founder of the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school. Its readership is huge - from specialists to whom works on the typology of culture are addressed, to schoolchildren who have taken the "Commentary" to "Eugene Onegin" in their hands. The book was created on the basis of a series of television lectures about the culture of the Russian nobility. The past era is presented through the realities of everyday life, brilliantly recreated in the chapters "Duel", "Card Game", "Ball" and others. The book is populated by the heroes of Russian literature and historical figures - among them Peter I, Suvorov, Alexander I, the Decembrists. The factual novelty and a wide range of literary associations, the fundamental nature and liveliness of the presentation make it the most valuable publication in which any reader will find something interesting and useful for himself.
For students, the book will be a necessary addition to the course of Russian history and literature. The publication was published with the assistance of the Federal Target Program of Book Publishing in Russia and the International Foundation "Cultural Initiative".
“Conversations about Russian Culture” was written by the brilliant researcher of Russian culture Yu. M. Lotman. At one time, the author responded with interest to the proposal of "Art - St. Petersburg" to prepare a publication based on a series of lectures with which he appeared on television. The work was carried out by him with great responsibility - the composition was specified, the chapters were expanded, new versions of them appeared. The author signed the book into a set, but did not see it published - on October 28, 1993, Yu. M. Lotman died. His living word, addressed to an audience of millions, has been preserved in this book. It immerses the reader into the world of everyday life of the Russian nobility of the 18th - early 19th centuries. We see people of a distant era in the nursery and in the ballroom, on the battlefield and at the card table, we can examine in detail the hairstyle, the cut of the dress, the gesture, the demeanor. At the same time, everyday life for the author is a historical-psychological category, a sign system, that is, a kind of text. He teaches to read and understand this text, where everyday and existential are inseparable.
The “Collection of Motley Chapters”, whose heroes are prominent historical figures, royal persons, ordinary people of the era, poets, literary characters, is linked together by the thought of the continuity of the cultural and historical process, the intellectual and spiritual connection of generations.
In a special issue of the Tartu “Russkaya Gazeta” dedicated to the death of Yu. Not titles, orders or royal favor, but the “independence of a person” turns him into a historical figure.
The publishing house would like to thank the State Hermitage Museum and the State Russian Museum for providing free of charge the engravings kept in their collections for reproduction in this publication.--
Hidden text
INTRODUCTION: Life and culturePART ONEPeople and ranks
Women's World
Women's education in the 18th - early 19th centuriesPART TWOBall
Matchmaking. Marriage. Divorce
Russian dandyism
Card game
Duel
art of living
The result of the pathPART THREE"Chicks of Petrov's nest"
Ivan Ivanovich Neplyuev - reform apologist
Mikhail Petrovich Avramov - critic of the reform
Age of heroes
A. N. Radishchev
A. V. Suvorov
Two women
People of 1812
Decembrist in everyday life INSTEAD OF CONCLUSION"Between the double abyss ..."
Add. Information:Cover: Vasya s MarsaThanks for the book Naina Kievna (AudioBook Lovers Club)--
