The Other Russia

(Old-fashioned Russian culture is guilty in the Russian person’s apathy)

I will begin with a paradox. I affirm that it is precisely because Russia consumed Chekhov, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Dostoevsky in huge doses, it is precisely because of that that we are a backward State, suffering defeat after defeat. And not only consumed but continues to consume – slurps, slobbers, relishes, spreads in movie versions and bad plays. And from there, the XIX century, we are being latently dictated (like the passes of an hypnotist, his monotonous voice that marks the counting off) the XIX century worldview.

No, it is not the abnormal love of the citizens to the XIX century that led to the phenomenon of the dominance of XIX century culture. Simply, having won in 1917 the new power banally did not go for the artistic fight with the surrounding modern world and with its culture and esthetics but went for prohibitions.

This way it was easier, more convenient, less energy was spend. Already by the end of the 20s the power has stepped on this path, this is why seventy years after the proletarian revolution Russia came out before the world and herself in the mirror as an in the most vulgar way twisted, old fashioned granny KARAMAZOFF in Chekhovian glasses. All the cultural, philosophical and political discoveries of Europe as of Asia passed Russia by and stayed unknown to her. Russia did not read the useful, opening books explaining modernism: not Celine, nor Miller, nor Andre Gide, no Jean Genet, nor Fraser’s “Golden Bough”, nor Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”, nor Evola’s “Revolt Against the Modern World”. (The most important is that she did not read these fundamental books in time!) Russia absolutely ignored the truth about the powerful movements of European XX century nationalism, contemporary to her own revolution.

Instead, as a mushroom mould had the XIX century poisonously grown! Because the power did not forbid it, that’s why! XIX century was safe for the power. Its Decembrists who turned into jokes, Belinskys, Katkovs, the chocolate dwarf Pushkin, the twit Natalya Goncharova, the apathetic reasoners of “The Cherry Orchard”, hussars, officers, functionaries of various rank, even Bazarov – big mouths, vomiting tons of words could not pervert, draw anybody into anti-government activity, so they were encouraged.

Well, naturally, the top intelligentsia read something in languages, something was brought, some books of the 20s were available to a narrow circle of “refined” individuals, but it was not in any way available to the massive Russia, which means it did not help Russia to grow, to change, to produce modern people. For her time has stopped in 1917. And culture. And politics. The clock stayed still for 70 years. Obviously it was convenient for the nation’s security. People presented themselves the “fascists” almost with fangs, “anarchists” in shows were all drunk sailors-tramps, the capitalist – a potbellied type with a cigar – these were the stereotypes of people that were not of our ideology. But for the present and the future of the country – when generations lived in a fatal ignorance of the world – it was tantamount to a death sentence.

We were not immediately thrown into the XIX century. At first the power tried to win the competition. Hushing up the world during the first years after the revolution it went hand in hand with time. The terrible power of the Stalinism epoch compelled to love workers and tractor drivers, Stahanov, Tchkalov, Grizodubova. The weakening power of Kruschev and Brezhnev constantly increased the XIX century dose. The sickening ladies and hussars and Pushkin, thanks God, gave birth to a popular return – a taunt in the form of porno jokes. However the soviet person still formed herself under the influence of XIX century literature, with a consciousness older than modernism by a hundred years.

It occurred to me and still occurs to live in other people’s apartments because I don’t own one. The soviet person library is abject. Together with soviet castrated writers of the second half of the XX century it has Russian classics and translated literature, selected by the censors for translation in Soviet times. Feihtvangers and Romain Rollands and all kind of similar western pettiness are simply banal. (But they are anti-fascists.) Soviet classics created an artificial world without flesh and its urges, without social passions (except for maybe production conflicts) and this is why they constitute a peculiar phenomenon, unique in the world: they created literature for eunuchs. Russian classics: Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy and gentle letters men of smaller kind consist of thousands of pages of moans, weeping. Inside it is wet from tears, disgusting from darkness. The dog’s old age of Chekhov’s characters, their depressive elderly bourgeoisiness, multiplied in complete works of and plays perverted the educated Russian person. Chekhov’s characters always wait for something, declaim, don’t leave to Moscow never, though they should have, from the first minutes of the first act, burn the fucking cherry orchard down and leave to Moscow with the very first train. Umbrellas, laces, the bitter smell of armpits and body that nobody uses for their purposes (because Chekhov had consumption) of the three sisters. In fact Chekhov is a perversion. With his ode to the closet, it’s not an ode to the closet but an ode to middle class conventionality. After Chekhov’s books it is not surprising that a revolution broke out. After all somebody had to hit this kind of world with a club. As for Dostoevsky – then his books are a fastened by the author’s epilepsy rapid hysterical world, where everybody screams, complains and confesses in dusty thoughts over endless samovars with tea. The exhaustingly multi worded count Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy mockingly moralizes and exaggerates the most banal life collisions to the size of “The Odyssey” and “The Iliad”. The worldview of the Russian classics follows exactly their illnesses – the depressing yellow world of the consumptive Chekhonte (the family name suits him: Chekhov, Chahov, that is sickly, consumptive) and the epileptic hysterical world of Fedor Mikhailovich. New monuments set up in these writers honor just recently in Moscow, by the way, authentically transmit their characters. The ill Fedor Mikhailovich slipping down from some seat near the building of Lenin’s Library, the bony staggering Chekhov on the passage of the Artistic theater. The sculptors Rukavishnikovs, father and son, have perfectly understood the writers.

Tolstoy probably was not openly ill. Until middle life he lived as a women’s man and a sinner, the second half of his life he spent under his wife’s thumb and in Christianity cobweb. The Church, though it has excommunicated him – bothered with him and he with her. As a result of these boring fighting came out “Sunday” and “Death of Ivan Ilyich”. And from the fighting with his wife Sofia Andreevna who had enslaved him, came out the vengeful “Anna Karenina”, where he throws Anna (Sophia Andreevna in reality) under the train. All of this is XIX century common stuff, however. No high passions, no big themes… cheating on his husband, that’s all!

Dostoevsky from his experience of jerking in Christianity’s cobweb created the second part of “Crime and Punishment” and desecrated his own book, wonderfully began and his unique character – Raskolnikov. It is amazing but in Russian XIX century classical literature there is no happy books. (In the 18th century there is: Derjavin, Lomonosov…) In the XIX century there is no books of military bravery, with the exception of the truly genial book of Gogol “Taras Bulba”. However one gets the impression that it was created by accident, more as an attempt to write an imitation on the fashionable theme, started by the French dandy Prosper Merimee: legends and songs of European barbarians: Hungarians, Gypsies, habitants of Transylvanian regions and eastern Slavs. The result exceeded all expectations. If there were any. “Taras Bulba” is a happy heroic epic. The second happy figure in Russian XIX century literature is Constantine Leontiev. He was called the Russian Nietzsche and in the essay “Average European as a Weapon of Mass Destruction” he foresaw the danger of arranging the world according to the tastes of the commoner. As a writer he can be defined as the forefather of impressionism or even an expressionist (Leontiev died in 1891). But the Gogol of “Taras Bulba” and the happy Leontiev are exceptions!

In the XX century happy writers were Nikolai Gumilev and Vladimir Mayakovsky. In them are easily found today the roots of Russian fascism. There were notes of Nietzscheanism or if put differently – proto-fascism in Leonid Andreev and in Ropshin-Savinkov, in the early Maxim Gorky (he even wore a mustache a la Nietzsche and the characters of his play “On the Bottom” retell, shamelessly, Nietzschean ideas). But later literature was muzzled. As a result not only what was printed but also that what was written became lifeless, like ersatz-coffee and ersatz-margarine. And here seventy years of consumption of this, so to speak literature – gave birth to genetically weak people.

All of these are not exercises in literature science, I am doing humans science. I confidently affirm: man in a significant part is what he reads. Because books present defined sets of ideas that are living or already dead. Unheroic, tearful, hysterical books gave birth to weak, unheroic men and women. I recall in 1981 I met in California a rich person who with a smile presented himself to me as a writer of trash books. This honest American truly realized what he was creating. Practically all of Russian literature after the end of the 20s until 2001 including the books of dissidents – are nothing more than drifts of trash books.

And what happened in the rest of the world, while the hermetically sealed Russia marinated like in a conserve can, rotted and moldered in the sauce of the XIX century? Freud appeared – the great Conquistador of the subconscious and the first discoverer of libido, the Surhuman was chanted, Wagner adored in Germany, fascism came to Italy, D’Annuncio appeared, Andre Gide with his “Immoralist”, Joyce, books of Chamberlain, Guenon, Evola. Knut Hamsun, Celine, Miller. From the above enumerated only Hamsun reached Russia. After the victory over the nationalists in Europe came the existentialists, Sartre, Jean Genet, the Theater of absurd, the hippie movement, the cultural revolution of 1966-2976 in China, the student revolts of 1968-69 in Europe, Che Guevara, the youth terrorism of the “Red Brigades” and the RAF: Curcio, Cagol, Baader, Mainhof.

In Russia appeared: the old, depressing Brezhnev, the enigmatic persistently -unintelligent KGB, on television KVN, in official literature the veneer Egor Isaev, Yuri Bondarev, the untalented Okudzhava (by the way he created an entire series of historical novels about the XIX century) and Evtushenko, anti-soviet but depressing anyway, veneer writers-dissidents headed by Solzhenitsyn (who had mixed up centuries, his novels are written from a XIX century ideology and worldview).

All the above enumerated is so wretched and contemptible that it lies lower… lower than see level, lower everything. Actually there was an even lower level – the mass soviet culture. It suffices to say about the tastes of the soviet person in the 70s – 80s. First of all, the genre that impressed the most the “sovki” was parody: “Dog Heart” (a hideous anti-proletarian book), “Kotlovan” (a hideous book), “The twelve Chairs” (a philistine’s chamber-pot, mucus and vomit). In cinematography the morons’ threesome was sneaking all over the screen: Nikulin, Vitsin, Morgunov – themselves a parody on movie characters. Their masterpieces: “The Diamond Arm”, “Watch out the Automobile” and other scum. It should be said that the commoner’s masterpiece as well, Bulgakov’s volume “The Master and Margarita” by its genre is also a parody on a historical novel. The crystal dream of the philistine to elevate his sunflower oil, his primus-stove, chamber-pot, JEK [house-exploitation] to the level of Jesus Christ and the procurator of Judah came true in this commoner’s Moscow bestseller. By the way “The Master and Margarita” and “The 12 Chairs” are strikingly related: the mounted brigade of Voland makes one think about Ostap Bender’s brigade. All these types could be nicely interpreted by Nikulin, Vitsin, Morgunov. They would have nicely played in “The Master and Marguarita” but they are dead. Comedy and parody are genres of fading States and nations. This was already noticeable in ancient literature. Tragedy is the genre of a healthy powerful Sate. Authors of tragedies – Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes created in a healthy Greece. When Greece lost its strength -the parodists appeared.

Here in the USSR robust events took place. Living waves of Chinese soldiers pressed on to the Damanski Island and they were roasted from flame-throwers. But the authorities dissimulated the heroes. But those who should have chanted the heroes did not know how to do this even if they were allowed. They did not know and they did not have the talent. From their spirituality only a chamber pot could be blown and not a Greek vase for nectar and ambrosia. Pettiness, lack of presence – this is how Russia’s culture after the 20s can be characterized.

By the beginning of the 80s in Europe “democracy” has won totally, that is totalitarian capitalism. And simultaneously art disappeared. The last of the Mohicans swiftly died out, the most closing one from the Great ones in 1986 Jean Genet died in an Arab hotel in Paris. He was so disgusted of Paris that he adjured to be buried in North Africa in an Arab cemetery. It is symbolical that it was me who wrote Jean Genet’s necrology on the demand of the editors of “La revolution” – France’s Comparty newspaper…

Conclusion: Soviet power artificially detained the information about the word outside of USSR limits and in this way artificially froze Russia, leaving her live in an authentic XIX century, well, hardly in the very beginning of the XX. So why should anyone be surprised that even our anti-Semitism is not modern, by its attributes it lives in the times of “The Beilis affair” (matza, blood of Christian newborns and other Middle Ageisms, when an anti-Semite in the West refutes the existence of gas chambers and the extermination of six million Jews), that our “fascism” copies the Hitlerism of the 20s, that our “democrats” finally are as insolent as the American liberals before the crisis of 1929 and our rich are insolent and arrogant as the American rich before the world shock therapy of 1917.

What we have now: disgusting types of zombie-people insecure about themselves, apathetic, undeveloped, country-people – is the consequence of the last sixty from the seventy years of Soviet power. The example to follow were false propaganda, books for eunuchs, parodies and comedies. This is why people-parodies, grotesque characters dominate in Russian society. They did not read the right books because they did not watch the right movies.

In the 80s appear, thanks God, in Russia popular culture, audiotapes at first because music was considered the least dangerous, this is why the authorities stopped to pay attention to it first. In the perestroika period books of the 20s, 30s, 40s, years after the war are finally published with a huge delay- all that was lost once goes in flow. Noisily falls on the heads. But it is too late: even our underground culture had the time to contact the ptomaine poison of the XIX century. Our punks are suicidal like Nadson, our hippies are like holy fools. Only the generation born in the 80s is not entirely poisoned.

Well, obviously electricity, radio, industrialization, television, refrigerators – all that in due date appeared in the USSR as well but I’m talking about the worldview, the social consciousness, the understanding of one’s time, the understanding of man. All of this in the USSR and in Russia stayed on the XIX century level. One does not have to be a Freud adept, but without the knowledge of his discoveries (the world of sub-consciousness, libido, etc.), guesses and even errors man is blind. And without the knowledge of the true stories of Mussolini, Hitler, the entire national-socialist great rebellion of Europe from the 20s to the 40s – man is blind in the social sense, he is hopeless. It is interesting that by protesting against extremist publications the liberal-democrats imitate the soviet power – they demand to close the publishing companies down, to suppress the information. But suppression has a negative impact on nations’ fate. Ideas have to win in a just civil and military competition. Then a new nation is formed.