Guide to rural prose. Village Writers: Was the Chance Missed? Fedor Abramov

In the 1960s, a term appeared: village writers. In fact, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev wrote a lot about the village ... But it's too obvious - they have absolutely nothing to do with this phenomenon.

Villagers are very specific names of people who also worked in a very specific era. Before the Second World War, such a phenomenon could not have taken shape: it was hardly possible to write about the countryside sincerely, with filial feelings, and at the same time sing of "revolutionary transformations." M. Sholokhov succeeded in singing in Virgin Soil Upturned - but in his books there was not and could not be a warm attitude towards peasant life. Sholokhov is a Soviet Cossack, who was called "master" in his native village of Veshenskaya - this is how he differed from his fellow villagers.

Villagers felt a blood, uterine connection with the old village, with rural life and way of life. They frankly opposed it to urban, intellectual, and consistently considered the countryside better, nobler, spiritually purer and higher than the city.

Part of the Russian Europeans - both nobles and intellectuals - also considered the people the custodian of some higher values, and the peasants - spontaneously virtuous people. But in village writers this idea is expressed with the utmost nakedness, rising to the level of a war between two different civilizations.

Not every Narodnaya Volya member would argue so zealously that in a city dweller the dead draws the living, but the village people instinctively know some higher truths, and therefore they are very moral, honest, decent, and spiritually perfect.

The city for villagers acted as a kind of collective devil, a corrupter of a pure village. Absolutely everything that came from the city - even medicines or tools - seemed to them some kind of cunning tricks to destroy the original grace of rural life. This idea was best expressed by the “enlightened soil worker” Soloukhin, who can only be counted among the “villagers” only through a pure misunderstanding. But it was he, the offspring of pernicious Europeanism, who said best of all: “It is easy to see that each of the blessings of civilization and progress exists only in order to “extinguish” some kind of trouble, generated by civilization. Great benefits - penicillin, valocordin, validol. But in order for them to be perceived as a blessing, alas, a disease is needed. A healthy person does not need them. Similarly, the blessings of civilization."

Such a position in the 1920s and 1930s could not be expressed aloud: one of the main ideas of the Bolsheviks was precisely the transformation of Russia from an agrarian country into an industrial one. And in the 1920s, there were certainly people from Russian natives who thought so - but their words did not reach (and could not reach) us.

If villagers wrote during these decades, they would either lie or perish. But no one would have allowed them to talk about the “lada” that reigned in the village. And they themselves would have perished in the Narym swamps or in the Kolyma for "idealizing patriarchalism", "propaganda of alien views" and "supporting kulak revolts". In those years, they were shot and exiled for much less.

Villagers appeared when the communist ideology was still strong - but had already passed its highest peak and began to decline. A lot has already been allowed or tacitly allowed, it has already become “possible” to be yourself at least in some way, not to bend so obligingly along with the line of the Party.

The elders of the villagers remembered collectivization, they were witnesses of the nightmare that was happening in the country: mass deportations, dispossession, revolutionary troikas, a terrible famine of the early thirties, the flight of the people to the construction of "garden cities". But they were children then, if they wanted to, they could not say their “no”.

Kochergin's stories are straightforward, the lines of his prose are slender, but the writer's life path, on the contrary, is very tortuous. He was born and studied in the capital, then went to Siberia, where he wrote his "Altai stories", which received several literary awards at once - including the Moscow Government Prize.

- Pride Soviet literature Cast: Vasily Belov, Valentin Rasputin, Viktor Astafiev...Which of the so-called village writers is closer to you?

I think that Astafiev - perhaps precisely because he was somewhat wider than his fellow writers.

At the age of 15-16, I literally read out his “Tsar-Fish” and it was because of this book that I began to dream of getting to the Yenisei someday.

- As children, we are all romantics. But it seems that the village writers had a very clear adult goal - to save the village from dying. And, alas, they did not succeed ...

And it seems to me that they already understood that it is impossible to save anything. Their literature was farewell literature and an attempt to live this farewell: just look at the titles - "Farewell to Matera", "Last bow", "Last suffering". After all, this happens very often in Russia: something grandiose happens that is comprehended not at the state level, but at the literary level.

- There is a feeling that this reflection was rather idealistic.

Belov, Rasputin, Astafiev, Shukshin - they were all idealists. That is why, thanks to them, the myth of the village arose as a powerful ideal world, on which one can rely and in which it would be good to return in order to fall back to the roots. Although even at that time there was not much to fall asleep there.

- Why was this world so interesting to urban readers?

Because he was completely unfamiliar to them - just like, say, the worlds of the Strugatsky brothers or Alexander Dumas. The unknown is always intriguing.

However, the world of Dumas and the Strugatskys is of interest to many generations, while the world of villagers today is of little interest to anyone.

It's out of fashion, yes. But the village writers themselves were partly to blame here, during perestroika, they compromised their world with almost Black Hundred statements. And, besides, they all know what is happening to the village.

- Do you think she is dying?

Yes. Although wonderful people still live in the village. In the village in the Ryazan region where I built a house, there is a farmer Vitya Nazarov.

A strong family, wonderful children and grandchildren who are already helping him. He plows gardens throughout the village, does not refuse to help in anything, I do not know when he manages to sleep. His income is low, but out of principle he does not treat his fields with pesticides: “I don’t want to poison, this is our land.” Much of the countryside rests on such stubborn people.

Village prose long ago, alas, remained in history. She is not. There are authors who write about the village - Boris Ekimov, Roman Senchin, Dmitry Novikov from Petrozavodsk, who creates wonderful "northern" prose. But these are all works of a completely different genre. I myself am a person who was born in the center of Moscow, a villager with a very big stretch.

- Well, who are you?

I am a person who settled in a village in the place where the Finno-Ugric peoples once lived, and before that, representatives of some unexplored culture of the Middle Oka burial grounds.

I write prose, I teach my son, I try to travel around the country more if I have time and opportunity. What else? I worked as a janitor, cleaner, postman, watchman. At one time he went to Siberia, where he was a forester in the reserve.

- For what?

My parents wanted me to follow in their footsteps and become a chemical engineer, and I tried to find my way. And I'm not the only one! In 1990, when I sent letters to all the reserves of the Union with a request for employment, there were no vacancies anywhere. Only with Gorny Altai I received an answer that there is a rate. All the states were filled with romantics from major cities. In the taiga huts lay collections of French poetry, literary "thick" magazines...

Apparently, there is not only an influx to the cities, but also a reverse movement. Look at the outstanding representative - the wonderful writer Mikhail Tarkovsky, the nephew of Andrei Tarkovsky, has been living for more than thirty years in the village of Bakhta on the Yenisei and works as a hunter-trader.

- Well, how did it seem to you, a Muscovite, there, in Siberia?

There was taiga romance, new beautiful spaces. Life in the "bear corner", on the cordon, where there is no electricity, where all products are delivered on pack horses. Although now I think that the most interesting thing was not this at all, but the opportunity to get in touch with a completely different life, with a different culture, to look at Moscow from a different point of view.

- Did you learn a lot there?

Still would! And milk the cows, and bake bread - food was imported to us only twice a year. And one more thing - to write long letters to his wife, thanks to which he eventually became a writer.

DIRECT SPEECH

Igor Shaitanov, critic, literary secretary of the Russian Booker Prize:

If in the 1960s and 1970s the works of villagers were published in huge circulation and caused great resonance, today they are quietly published in magazines such as Our Contemporary. Their authors are not given prizes. But, interestingly, at the same time, writers who have nothing to do with villagers, but simply write about the village - for example, Andrei Dmitriev with his novel "The Peasant and the Teenager" or Roman Senchin with "The Flood Zone" - receive these awards. Why? It's simple: in Soviet times village literature was prose of the highest order.

And today... Well, you understand.

REFERENCE

Ilya Kochergin was born in Moscow on May 30, 1970. Studied at MKhTI im. Mendeleev, at the Geological Faculty of Moscow State University. For four years he worked as a forester in the Altai Reserve. After returning to Moscow, he enters the Literary Institute. A. M. Gorky.

Winner of the Prize of the Government of Moscow in the field of literature for "Altai stories".

The study is devoted to the peculiarities of the "village prose" of the 1960s-1980s - works and ideas that expressed conservative cultural and social values ​​in a peculiar way. The work of F. Abramov, V. Soloukhin, V. Shukshin, V. Astafiev, V. Belov, V. Rasputin and others is considered in the context of “neo-pochvennichestvo”, which developed the potential inherent in the late Stalinist state ideology. The focus is on the motives and circumstances that influenced the structure and rhetoric of the self-consciousness of the writers-"village people", the themes of internal dissidence and reaction, "ecology of nature and spirit", memory and inheritance, the fate of the cultural and geographical periphery, the position of Russians and Russian culture in the Soviet state.

A series: Science Library

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by the LitRes company.

“I am a CONSERVATIVE. REVERSE RETROGRADE: NEOSOIL TRADITIONALISM – REVOLUTION AND REACTION

"Village Prose" as an Object of Critical Projections

So much has been written and said about the "villagers" that another appeal to this topic requires explanation. Attention to “non-soilism” in the “long 1970s” and the first post-Soviet decade, of course, stemmed from the special status of this trend in Russian literature. The opinion expressed by ardent admirers of “village prose” that it is the most talented, most worthy of those created in the late Soviet period, spread the wider, the stronger was the desire of a significant part of the intelligentsia, on the one hand, to find a counterbalance to the standard “Soviet” prose produced on a massive scale. texts”, and on the other hand, to save the “values ​​of high culture” from devaluation. It is not surprising that the works of "village prose" were read by philologists in some detail, and more than a few monographic studies are devoted to its main representatives. At the turn of the 1980s - 1990s, in a situation of changing political conditions, the authority of the “villagers” was shaken, interest in their works noticeably declined, however, the end of the reform period and the transition to “stability” coincided with the appearance of seemingly more balanced, reconciling ratings. When, in the early 2000s, experts (art historians, philosophers, psychologists, culturologists) were asked about the artistically wealthy names and works of the 1970s, many remembered Vasily Shukshin, Viktor Astafiev, Valentin Rasputin, stipulating that they did not attribute them “to official, or unofficial, or rather oppositional culture.” Of course, in the 2000s, only their most devoted admirers could rank the former “village writers” as in-demand writers, but it was in the 21st century that another wave of official recognition of “village prose” began. If we take into account only the largest state prizes and awards, it turns out that in 2003 V. Rasputin received the Prize of the President of the Russian Federation in the field of literature and art, in 2010 - the Prize of the Government of Russia for outstanding achievements in the field of culture, and two years later - the State award of the Russian Federation for achievements in the field of humanitarian activity for 2012. In 2003, V. Astafiev (posthumously) and Vasily Belov became laureates of the State Prize of the Russian Federation, the latter in the same 2003 was awarded the Order of Merit for the Fatherland, IV degree. It is impossible to link the conferment of a series of state awards to the “villagers” with the current popularity of their works, because such popularity is a matter of “long gone days”, it fell on the 1970s and 1980s. But what, then, guided the expert community, giving preference to one or another author-"villager"? Among the motives, one can assume a flattering, for example, for the same Rasputin, a retrospective recognition of his literary merits, regardless of the current socio-political agenda. It’s just that a prize, especially one awarded by the state, is rarely a manifestation of disinterested love for art, because, first of all, it is aimed at legitimizing certain cultural and ideological attitudes and values, in this case, at “promotion” and approval of the next version of traditionalism. The excited reaction of the journalist of the information portal "Russian People's Line" to the news of the award of the State Prize to Rasputin clearly demonstrates this:

Has something changed significantly in the minds of those on whom the formation of the ideology of our state and our people depends? Are spiritual and moral priorities in modern Russia are the traditional values ​​of the Russian people and outstanding compatriots who profess and affirm them in all spheres of the country's daily life?

I would like to believe in it! Moreover, quite recently, Valentin Rasputin was perceived and presented on the pages of very many influential publications and on the screens of federal television channels with skepticism and mockery - as an outgoing figure of a stagnant and criminal regime, as a representative of a dubious patriotic camp, which has long ceased to influence the modern intellectual life of Russia. .

A few years earlier, Alla Latynina, in connection with the award of the Alexander Solzhenitsyn Prize to V. Rasputin, suggested that the dissatisfaction of some critics with the decision of the jury was politically motivated - a categorical rejection of conservatism, which reminded her of a precedent from the 19th century - the persecution of the "obscurants" Fyodor Dostoevsky and Nikolai Leskov. And although the development of criteria for “pure” aesthetics, free from political and ideological preferences, as well as following these criteria when awarding literary prizes, is a task that is both ambitious and impossible, Latynina was right in stating the habit of critics to compare attention to the “villagers” (or lack of such) with fluctuations in the ideological course.

In fact, “village prose” was constantly at the center of ideological disputes - from the moment of its inception (suffice it to recall its proto-manifesto - the “Novomir” article by Fyodor Abramov of 1954 “People of a collective farm village in post-war prose” that caused a scandal and administrative proceedings) and until useless, according to according to V. Rasputin, the “village people” went into politics in the late 1980s - 1990s. Later, in the post-Soviet era, public speeches by its representatives were also perceived as an ideological gesture. It is worth agreeing with Kathleen Parte, who argued that no other direction of Soviet literature was subjected to political interpretation as often as "village prose". According to the researcher's observations, over several decades, while the literary production of the "non-soil" school was of great interest to readers (taking into account the downward trajectory of popularity - approximately from the mid-1950s to the early 2000s), five ideologically privileged codes for reading her texts have changed. Partet's singling out of the chronological periods within which this or that code predominantly worked is undeniable, but the scheme proposed by her can be taken as a working one when discussing the processes of constructing one or another image of "village prose" by various ideological forces.

In the 1950s, critics used the works of the future "village people" as an argument in support of N.S. Khrushchev's reforms Agriculture. In the 1960s, for right-wing critics, they personified spontaneous traditionalism and the powerful roots of national culture, and for supporters of the “New World” program, they represented the indestructibility of the master’s initiative and the ability for social creativity among the people. In the next decade and a half, the national-conservative camp, with references to "village prose", proved the "anti-bourgeois" pathos "inherent" in Russian literature and the lack of alternative realism as its main method, and liberal criticism with Sergei Zalygin and V. Astafiev, V. Belov and V. Rasputin, V. Shukshin and Boris Mozhaev pinned hopes for an honest discussion of acute social problems.

In general, in the discursive appropriation of "village prose" national conservative criticism was more successful than its opponents. This is partly due to the greater ideological and “gustatory” affinity with the “villagers” (prominent figures of the “Russianists” movement, for example, Ilya Glazunov, Sergey Semanov, were directly involved in their political enlightenment in the 1960s and 1970s) and the successful supervision of the professional advancement of these writers. In addition, Mark Lipovetsky and Mikhail Berg note that the national-conservative wing was relatively more united than the conditional liberals, who were little concerned about considerations of consolidation. During the decade that symbolically began with the publication of Alexander Yakovlev's article "Against anti-historicism" (1972) about the dangerous nationalist tendencies of "neo-pochvennichestvo" and just as symbolically ended, under another Secretary General, with the condemnation of Mikhail Lobanov's article "Liberation" (1982), the national-conservative Criticism was able to impose its own style of speaking about "village prose" on the literary-critical officialdom. However, the word “impose” too much emphasizes the strong-willed, almost violent nature of the action, while in the glossary of “non-society” and official criticism there were initially coinciding positions, and in this case it is more appropriate to speak of mutual influence. The image of "village" literature created by the National Conservatives - a stronghold of "nationality", a reliable successor to the classics, pedaling the "Russian theme" and paying attention to the traumatic pages of recent Soviet history(collectivization, first of all) sometimes discouraged the official authorities responsible for ideological work, provoked a desire to shorten the overly frisky right-wing “revisionists”, but on the whole did not contradict the picture of cultural life that suited them. As a result, since the late 1970s - early 1980s, when discussing the aesthetics of the "villagers", the stylistic stencil of "loyalty to tradition" and its "updating" almost certainly arose, and the ideology of the school was reduced to the formulas "return to the roots", "man on earth ”, etc., which arose in the 1960s, but gradually lost the patina of the former opposition.

During the years of perestroika, domestic criticism, more precisely, its democratic wing, responded vividly to the social activities of the "villagers" and the obvious crisis of the once popular trend. “We are becoming more sober and looking at our former favorites with new eyes,” one of the participants in the “debunkings” explained this position. A massive revision of the literary heritage of yesterday's idols of a considerable part of the Soviet intelligentsia was largely provoked by their political statements. Despite the fact that the crisis of ideas and the collapse of the aesthetic system of "village prose" became noticeable earlier - they were talked about in connection with the publication of "Fire" (1985), "The Sad Detective" (1985), "Everything Ahead" (1986), only in the perestroika era, critics and literary critics went beyond sad bewilderment about the transformation of artists into publicists and put forward programmatic claims against the "villagers". The loss of moral authority in the eyes of the intelligentsia and the surrender of former creative positions was now interpreted as a logical consequence, firstly, of the reactionary denial of modernity, for the description of which the "villagers" did not create an artistic language, and secondly, an apology for archaic social norms and the poverty of ideas about autonomous existence an individual outside the values ​​of "kind" and "tradition", thirdly, social conformism, which grew out of the romanticization of the "lawfulness of being" and the underestimation of personal freedom and choice. Reproaches of collaborationism, which had previously been heard mainly from abroad, became common in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For example, Vasily Aksenov in 1982, expressing the general criticism of the dissident part of the emigration towards the Soviet cultural establishment (including the "village people"), but trying to maintain objectivity, explained to John Glad:

happened to them tragic story. I would emphasize precisely this word "tragic". They started very well, they are not mediocre people. And among them there are many really bright ones, I would first of all name Vasily Belov and Boris Mozhaev. They felt both artistic and social protest against stagnation. But here a very clever action took place on the part of the ideological apparatus. They did not let them turn into dissidents, although they took a much shorter path to this than I did with my formalist searches.

Later, in the sensational article “Commemoration of Soviet Literature,” Viktor Erofeev continued to strike at the sore spot. Sharpening his own dissent by emphasizing the conformism of the “villagers”, he declared their works a typical example of Soviet literature, another transformation of social realism, which always successfully exploited “the weakness of the human personality of a writer who dreams of a piece of bread, glory and the status quo with the authorities ...” With frankness, the delight of liberation from former authorities were splashed out in the early 1990s by critic Yevgeny Yermolin:

And I am already without piety, fiercely and, perhaps, frantically formulating: here are the writers who have not fulfilled their calling. They did not have the inner determination to follow the most risky path, they lacked the will to search, to life's disorder, to uncompromising service to the truth. And they became self-confident apostles of banal faith, publicists-moralists.

It is obvious that both points of view, which arose within the literary process of the 1970s and were voiced in an extreme form at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, are the result of an assessment of the late Soviet cultural reality by various intellectual groups, its adaptation to the model of the mythological confrontation between good and evil. Mutually denying discourses about “villagers” (national-conservative and liberal), created and belonging to the “long 1970s”, in the 2000s were re-equipped with scientific (or quasi-scientific) argumentation and repeatedly reproduced in journalism and research literature. Right-wing criticism in the person of V. Bondarenko, who continued the line of Vadim Kozhinov, Anatoly Lanshchikov, M. Lobanov and Yuri Seleznev, gave new ideological shades to the old idea, expressed back in the 1970s, according to which the national literature of the second half of the twentieth century is predicted by Russian classics the triumph of the "common people", which came as a result of the merger of the "high" noble and "grassroots" peasant traditions:

In the early 20s of the last century, watching the perishing Russian culture, many of its connoisseurs sincerely believed that Russian literature had only its past.<…>

Suddenly, from the very depths of the Russian people, from among the artisans and peasants, writers began to appear like epic heroes, saving honor and dignity. national literature. The place of the dead, gone, broken Russian intelligentsia<…>once again it turned out to be occupied by artists comprehending the fate of their people ... Let's be honest, the people who came from the people had a wrong culture, a too thin layer of education, a lot of gaping voids.<…>but the level of spiritual energy, the level of artistic knowledge of time, the level of responsibility to the people is comparable to Russian classical literature of the 19th century. The experiment to uproot our core literature failed.

On the contrary, the liberal community continued to question the cultural merit of the "village" prose. M. Berg ironically explained the impossibility of awarding the A. Solzhenitsyn Prize to “manipulators”, like Dmitry Prigov or Vladimir Sorokin, and the distressing logic for him of awarding it to V. Rasputin:

How could they be awarded with the wording "for the piercing expression of poetry and the tragedy of folk life in fusion with Russian nature and speech, sincerity and chastity in the resurrection of good principles"? No, because this formula is an expression of an inferiority complex multiplied by a superiority complex. But Rasputin, who at the time Soviet censorship was (or seemed to be) a bold accuser and guardian of the people's truth, and now it has become a boring and gloomy archaic, all, like Aphrodite from the foam, came out of this very “fusion”, “piercing expressions” and “chastity”, which, let him, will cut off heads again.

Delightedly exposed the "village prose" Dmitry Bykov. True, he led Shukshin, Mozhaev, Rasputin, Astafiev, Ekimov out of its borders, making " typical representatives” Anatoly Ivanov and Petr Proskurin and unleashed their anger on the standard literary and cinematic narrative about the village of the 1970s and early 1980s, identified in polemical fervor with “village prose”:

The villagers didn't care real life villages. They were tempted to denounce the Jewishness and groundlessness of the new people that imperceptibly grew up under their noses - and into which they were not allowed, because for the most part they were evil, vindictive, mediocre and unfriendly. Their poetry - both lyric and epic - did not rise above the level set by their standard-bearer Sergei Vikulov and honorary laureate Yegor Isaev. Their prose was reduced to the purest epigonism. If there were any social stratum in Russia more unhappy than the peasantry, they would overthrow culture in its name.<…>

... I can’t remember in any literature of the world such an apology for savagery and barbarism, to which village prose eventually sank: everything that was rude, animal, arrogant, dirty and embittered was declared root, and the pure was to blame for the mere fact that it is pure.<…>The villagers defended not morality, but Domostroev's ideas about it, with a brilliant flair - generally very inherent in base nature - choosing and praising all the most wild, rude, mediocre.

A clear symmetry was observed in the apologetics of “village prose” and its debunkings: on the one hand, the “villagers” appeared as bearers and defenders of “Russianness” against “Sovietness”, defending traditional national values ​​in the face of power, whose political genesis was associated with the “internationalist” ideology destruction; on the other hand, the "villagers" seemed to be opportunists who managed to deftly sell their talents, carriers of social and cultural archaism, as well as the government that supported them, incapable of innovation and integration into the civilized world. The reference to the Soviet project remained a constant in both definitions: achievements or failures were thought to be derived from its political and cultural nature and attitude towards it as a variant of the global modernization process. The liberal opponents of the “village people” reacted to signs of stagnation in the post-Stalin phase of the development of the Soviet system, while the “village people” themselves determined themselves in distancing themselves from its first phase, which concentrated the energy of modernization. In essence, their conservatism, combined with nationalism, became one of the ideological manifestations of the slow degradation of the system and the disintegration of its institutions. Subsequently, in a situation of changing the political course, the liberals identified the conservatism of the "villagers" with "obscurantism" and proclaimed conformism the dominant of their style of thinking and type of personality, forgetting that "implanting reactionary ideals" was once a non-conformist step, and accusations of "patriarchalism" with different the degree of bitterness sounded against the "village prose" throughout the late Soviet period and their mouthpiece was most often official criticism. In other words, the card of accusations of conservatism (ideological and aesthetic) at different times and in different discursive combinations was played by opposing forces, so it makes sense to see in the complementary denunciations of the “reactionary delusions” of the “villagers” a sign of a regrouping of forces and changes in the intellectual and ideological trends during the transition from the late Soviet period to the policy of perestroika.

The “conservative turn” of the “long 1970s”: as an “articulated audience”

The conservative course, which in the 1970s made itself felt in the economy, politics, culture, was the result of the transformation of the Soviet system, which, having abandoned the massive repressive impact on the population, was forced to look for "peaceful" ways to maintain itself in a functional state. A conservative orientation was prompted by the authorities and external conditions (from rising world energy prices to the ever-wider penetration of Western standards of the consumer society), and considerations of self-preservation. According to Alex Berelovich, the term "advanced socialism", which is now considered to be an ideological simulacrum, quite accurately revealed a significant reorientation of the system. He gave the public a signal that the building of communism no longer determines the agenda and power is moving to conservative positions. Instead of asceticism, labor exploits and a missionary-charged impulse towards communism, the population was offered the existence of "here and now", in an atmosphere of stability and relative prosperity. The conservative trend was due not only to considerations of "big politics" and the concerns of the party elite about strengthening their own position in a situation of weakening the mobilization tone. "Normalization" also met popular expectations. Society was recovering from the extreme stress of the Stalinist mobilization of the 1930s, the war, post-war devastation, and gradually “bourgeoisized”: prosperity grew, consumer interests took shape, opportunities appeared to travel abroad (primarily to countries of people’s democracy), to get acquainted with a different way of life, higher education became widely available and more accessible - the possession of technical and household innovations.

Despite the “conservative turn”, the authorities left the system of key historical and cultural landmarks (dates and milestones) that structured the collective Soviet identity the same: the official historical myth that legitimized the regime still dated back to 1917, and the official political language was we can still distinguish the lexical-rhetorical substratum formed by the ideology of "revolutionary renewal" (hence the reminders of the principles of internationalism, the appeal to the world labor movement, assurances of loyalty to the ideals of progress). In general, the Soviet Union continued its steady march along the "path of peace, progress and socialism", but not as cheerfully as before, constantly stopping to reflect on the "lessons of history".

The conservatism needed to maintain the status quo of the Soviet system involved expanding the foothold, which resulted in the use of a more diverse set of symbolic resources and cultural languages , to which the authorities turned for the purpose of self-legitimization, even if these languages ​​and resources were previously tabooed or existed on the cultural periphery. Conservative meanings were usually not presented to society directly, but could be actualized in different contexts (as, for example, the already mentioned “developed socialism”), integrated into the official political discourse in part and, of course, in submission to the general progressive semantics. However, there was an ongoing interaction between the language of power and the language of groups that were aware of the conservatism of their own attitudes and tried to articulate it (“neo-foundationism”). Initially, at the end of the 1960s, the ideologemes and metaphors of the "non-soil" camp - "return to the roots", "a single stream of Russian culture", "preservation of traditions", etc. - if we consider them not in isolation, but in aggregate, as internally coherent manifestation of a certain position, carried an obvious counter-modernization charge, problematized the postulates of the official ideology and gave the national-conservative views the character of freethinking. Of course, the national conservatives played by the existing rules and used the language of the enemy for tactical purposes, but these tricks did not obscure the “conceptuality” of their collective statement, to which the officialdom reacted with accusations of “militant apology for peasant patriarchy” and “anti-historicism”. Such assessments sharpened the differences between the positions of the “non-soilers” and official structures: the boundary between them in defining key values ​​and symbols became sharper, but the proximity of their languages ​​remained somewhat “blurred” for the time being, although noticeable to an attentive observer. Coincidences in rhetoric were not accidental, they turned into closer contacts and support for some initiatives of the patriotic public from the authorities (for example, the All-Russian Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments (VOOPIIK), which Oleg Platonov calls "the main patriotic organization ... one of the centers for the revival of the Russian national consciousness”, created by the Decree of the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR on July 23, 1965). The tolerance of power structures towards the national conservative camp was determined not only by the similarity of certain ideological goals. Last but not least, it was based on the common social experience of Soviet officials who controlled the literary process, and "non-soccer" authors who periodically violated the "rules of the game." Vladimir Maksimov, noting that the "villagers" got into literature under the "roof" of Solzhenitsyn, specified:

... this phenomenon had a number of other reasons. Rural literature has managed to make itself known also thanks to the fact that now the ruling class in our country is about ninety percent from the peasantry. And they have a subconscious nostalgia for the past - both famine and collectivization passed there. And they decide what to allow, what not.

By the early 1970s, the contours of the new literary and ideological position had become more or less clear. Liberals - employees of the "New World" - among themselves with irony dubbed her "balalaika", that is, "1) A person making a career, striving for power, 2) A person who has chosen an anti-official idea for this, safe enough and attractive enough for the masses ( commonly understood).

The reasons and forms for the inclusion of the national-conservative camp (“villagers” as part of it) in the political life of the “long 1970s”, giving it certain powers, which, however, were not (and could not be) fully implemented, long ago became subject of study for historians. This issue is most thoroughly considered on the basis of late Soviet material in the works of Yitzhak Brudny “Creating Russia anew. Russian nationalism and soviet state, 1953–1991” (1998) and Nikolai Mitrokhin “Russian Party. The movement of Russian nationalists in the USSR. 1953-1985" (2003). If Brudny is interested in the “village people” and the national conservative camp as the main guide to the masses of the power policy of blocking economic and political and cultural reforms, then Mitrokhin aims to describe both officially allowed and illegal forms of the nationalist opposition that developed in line with dissidence, one of the groups which were the "villagers".

Brudny proposed to consider legal Russian nationalists, and "villagers" in particular, as the main object of the "politics of inclusion" that was born in the depths of the party apparatus of the Brezhnev era. From his point of view, Khrushchev’s agricultural reforms and the de-Stalinization course in the mid-1960s brought the country’s new leadership to the point of using an “articulated audience” to achieve their political goals, that is, Brudny refers to Kenneth Jovit, “politically aware and oriented groups capable of offering differentiated and sophisticated forms of support to the regime. Unlike the public - citizens who, on their own initiative, determine their position on important political issues, this audience is limited in political behavior to those roles and actions that are prescribed by the regime itself. The functions of the “articulate audience” were performed by Russian nationalist intellectuals, whose criticism of the government was ready to endure, since it did not affect its authoritarian nature, but whose creative potential helped “provide a new ideological legitimacy for the regime.” The authorities provided the "villagers" with some privileges (censorship indulgence, solid circulation) and undeniable relevance rustic theme justified huge investments in agriculture. The anti-Western and anti-modernist attitude of the nationalists, including the "villagers", contributed to the achievement of several more important goals - increasing the level of political mobilization of the largest part of the "Soviet people" - ethnic Russians and deepening the split in the ranks of the intelligentsia, increasing tension between its liberal and conservative flanks. From time to time, nationalists got out of control and tried to play their own game, initiating discussions on acute problems of the country's development, however, only serious structural changes in the very nature of Soviet political and economic life, unthinkable in the Brezhnev period, could give an effective answer to the questions posed. The decision to launch such reforms, the development of a market economy and the democratization of public life undermined the influence of the Russian nationalist movement, which in the early 1990s naturally shared the political fate of the counter-reformist forces.

In the context of the political struggle within the party-state apparatus, N. Mitrokhin also includes Russian nationalists, who rightly emphasized the amazing one-sidedness of the myth created by Soviet liberals in the late 1980s and 1990s and adopted by the intelligentsia audience: according to him, only a thin liberal layer. The extensive factual material collected by the researcher demonstrates the existence of a “conservative alternative to the “average” party course” – the movement of Russian nationalists. It declared itself both at the level of underground dissident organizations, and in the version allowed from above. Legal nationalists were represented in the party and state apparatus, had a wide range of supporters in various creative unions, especially in the Writers' Union of the USSR.

... the "guild" spirit and mentality of an independent political force allowed the writers' corporation as a whole or its individual factions to act in relation to outside world as a highly effective lobbyist, albeit often unconsciously defending his interests both in the political (first of all, freedom of expression) and in economic spheres. <…>Thanks to these qualities, a part of the members of the SP of the USSR, united in a broad coalition, called by us<…>"conservatives", managed to become an equal partner of the conservative political groups of the 1950s - 1960s. in the spread of Russian nationalism in the USSR, and later even lead this process.

Mitrokhin believes that the "villagers" and former front-line soldiers who graduated from the Literary Institute. A.M. Gorky, formed the core of the nationalist forces in the writers' environment in the 1960s-1980s. Some aspects of their views (anti-Westernism, anti-Semitism, statism) fit perfectly into the system of ideological guidelines proclaimed by the authorities, others (anti-Stalinism and anti-Sovietism of many members of the nationalist "faction", sometimes militant anti-modernism), on the contrary, were subject to control - administrative and censorship. In Mitrokhin's interpretation, "village prose" was a translator of nationalist ideas advocated by some of the party functionaries and conservative intellectuals, so he focuses on the efforts of the latter to select talents of the "Russian direction". True, the “constructivist” activity of the party apparatus so captivates the researcher that he ignores other mechanisms and motives for the emergence of literary groups. As a result, in his book "village prose" appears as a product of the caring activity of party "breeders".

The authors of another recent work on the nationalist movement in the late Soviet period categorically disagree with Mitrokhin, who, in their opinion, exaggerated the strength and authority of the “Russian Party”, but agree with Brudny’s thesis about the ambivalent cultural and political status of legal “Russianists”. They believe that to enlist the relative loyalty of "village" literature

was possible only by giving it at least a partial right to vote. Therefore, the relationship between the nationalists and the communist government was not limited to the vulgar use of power by the nationalists (in this case, the writers-“village people”), but became a two-way street.<…>Brezhnev not only needed the "villagers" to legitimize his domestic policy, in a sense, this policy itself was a response to the Russian national request, as it was seen, formulated, expressed by the cultural elite of the Russophile persuasion.

Considering “village prose” by historians as a literary representation of late Soviet nationalism, of course, has a number of costs. The main ones have already been named - literary discourse is identified with propaganda, and the logic of the group's action, reconstructed by researchers, levels out the diversity of personal motives and the ambiguity of personal position. In addition, the analysis of the institutional component of the “policy of inclusion” and the zigzags of its deployment overshadows the problems associated with the self-determination of various “factions” of national conservatives, or considers them in general. Mitrokhin, for example, repeatedly mentions the search by "theorists" and "communicators" of national conservative forces for channels of influence on power, support for their activities in party and government structures, but the question arises - how typical is this for "villagers", some of whom at the end of 1960 1970s - 1970s was freer from pro-Soviet sympathies and "statism" than, for example, S. Semanov or Viktor Petelin, and in general - from the desire to directly influence politicians? For obvious reasons, there is no differentiated description of the positions of "theoreticians" and "artists" of a national conservative orientation in these works, but their indisputable merit, which is especially significant for philologists who limit themselves to best case mentioning the struggle between the "New World" and the "Young Guard" of the late 1960s, or building diachronic schemes, certainly necessary and important, but depriving the "villagers" of the "air of the era" in which they existed, is the return of "non-soil" writers in the context of the history of the "long 1970s", primarily the history of politics and, to a certain extent, the history of ideas. But this problematic also has an obvious philological dimension - the representation of the ideological topic in the literary text (with the necessary caveat - it was not an illustration of the ideological doctrine: the late Soviet conservatism of the nationalist version, which did not have access to the mechanisms for implementing "real politics", was realized mainly in the literary critical form; its “literariness” (motive complexes, metaphor, style) in itself can become the subject of analysis only not as a formal “shell” of ideas, but as a symbolic system that produces ideological meanings, which in turn experienced the influence of ideology).

It is clear that in the literary studies of “village prose” created in the Soviet era, the circle of its ideas (“ideology”, “problematics”) and the position of writers in the “literary struggle” were interpreted taking into account the restrictions imposed by official discourse and the requirements of disciplinary purity. In the 1970s - the first half of the 1980s, with a metaphor for gaining maturity, criticism often emphasized the superiority of the "villagers" in relation to the literary embodiment of the "sixties" - "confessional prose", and considered their main ideas as the development of "eternal" themes for Russian literature (" man and earth”, “man and nature”, “love for the native ashes”, etc.). The reference to the tradition of the 19th century adapted the problem-thematic complex of “village prose” to the stereotyped image of Russian classics, emphasized the continuity of cultural tradition (“continuity”) and thus gently “de-ideologized” the “neo-soil” authors. In the 1970s, when the “village” school began to actively explore literary criticism, the analysis of the text from the point of view of reflecting certain ideological postulates in it (“vulgar sociologism”) looked like an obvious anachronism, but the tendency to comprehend the structure of the text, distancing itself from ideology, his poetics spread more and more successfully. One article in the late 1970s noted that "village prose" "gave birth to its own critical literature", but in Lately she did not express any new opinions. Perhaps, the author of the article suggested, one should proceed to the analysis of "village prose" as a stylistic phenomenon. Such a shift of interests from the “ideological” to the “artistic” brought mutual benefit to both the “village people” and the part of the philological community that studied them. The emphasized interest of philologists in the poetics of “village” literature symbolically emancipated it from “ideology” and finally confirmed Shukshin, Rasputin, Astafiev, Belov and others not only as “troublemakers”, signaling acute social problems, but also as a significant artistic quantities. In turn, researchers of modern literature, whose occupations, according to the popular opinion among the intelligentsia, usually involved compromise, received for analysis an object that was aesthetically convincing, sociopsychologically relevant, and at the same time ideologically legitimate. In general, Soviet literary criticism, from within the generally accepted ideological discourse, characterized in some detail the range of problems, the motive structure of “village prose”, and the “folk” types it created.

It is significant that one of the key works on "village prose" - the monograph "Russian Village Prose: A Bright Past" (1992) by the American researcher C. Parte, was inspired by the desire to distinguish between "artistic" and "ideological" in the analyzed texts (the latter was understood as a direct articulation artist of politically biased views). In the situation of the overthrow of yesterday's idols of the Soviet intelligentsia, the author of the book tried to separate the wheat from the chaff and recall the recently seemingly undoubted merits of the "villagers". She argued that "villagers" are primarily artists, and exaggerated accusations of political inconsistency and conservatism dehistoricize and decontextualize the understanding of this phenomenon. Parte did not avoid evaluating the anti-Semitic attacks of the “villagers” and their position in relation to the “Memory” movement, but she emphatically shifted her research focus to questions of poetics and the rethinking of the socialist realist canon by the “non-soccers”. She reconstructed the ideology of the direction not as a coherent narrative, but as a system of metaphors, key concepts that set off the inconsistency of the views of many "villagers", the drift between different political discourses.

A new surge of attention to the ideology and historiosophy of the "villagers" occurred due to a change in the perspective of perception of their prose in the cultural situation of the late 1990s, which by that time domestic humanities began to unanimously call "postmodernist". Interest in the traditionalist type of artistic thinking for a part of the reader and research community became a semi-conscious therapy for the culture shock of the 1990s, and “village prose” in the globalizing world of value relativism and fluid meanings seemed to embody the stable properties of the national mentality. Therefore, for some researchers who are not indifferent to the tasks of ideological self-determination that confronted Russia at the turn of the 1990s and 2000s, it seemed reasonable to turn again to “neo-soilism”. So, Alla Bolshakova in a number of her works spoke about the need for “mental “rehabilitation”” of “village prose”. The identity of the modern Russian society, from her point of view, should be formed based on the “pre-ideological” layers of consciousness, and here the experience of the “villagers” is most welcome:

The paths for the formation of a new ideology of the 21st century are being laid now in a thickened atmosphere of ideological debates and battles on the most acute issues of our time. In such an atmosphere, the task of national self-knowledge comes to the fore. Consideration from these positions of the triad "ideology - self-consciousness - mentality" (as corresponding to the structure "state - society - people - nation") allows us to single out the latter as the primary sphere of study ...

In Russia of the 21st century, the solution of the problem of national self-knowledge<…>associated with the restoration of rights and the return to the public consciousness of the repressed, repressed, so to speak, "forbidden" mental layers.

Since the ““forbidden” mental layers” were best preserved precisely in the “village prose”, structural elements Russian mentality (“national soul”, “national identity” and “national character”), according to the researcher, should be described using this material:

now, neglect of those “out of fashion” phenomena of Russian culture, which, perhaps, are not really known, turns out to be a particularly unforgivable luxury ... First of all, archetypal forms of national self-consciousness should be attributed to such phenomena<…>- in particular and in particular, the historical and literary, archetypal image of the Russian village, associated with the archaic layers of Russian antiquity.

If we discard the terminology of "mentality", "reader", "receptive dominant", then it turns out that the subject of Bolshakova's works is not new - it is the specifics of the national cultural tradition, which occupied both domestic researchers (including the national conservative persuasion) and foreign ones. . Bolshakova comprehends the “Russian question”, combining the analysis of archetypal structures and the ideological reception of the texts of the “villagers”. She believes that the archetype can undergo "ideologization", as happened in socialist realist culture with the "basic archetype of the Village":

The “cold” mental world, alien to the archetypal Village, also consists of a socialist realist search for a positive hero in Matryona and Darya<…>as well as the canonized collective farm paradise near Babaevsky<…>from the anti-peasant Stalinist reality.

But if we follow this logic, it turns out that the archetype of the Village in Bolshakova’s works is also “ideologized”, set into a recognizable, but terminologically updated scheme: the archetype is declared synonymous with the genuine Russian cultural tradition, which Soviet anti-traditionalism distorted, discredited or rejected.

Interest in "artistic mythologism", stable semantic structures, archetypes, "meaning-generating matrices" - in a word, in the mechanisms that ensure the reproducibility of tradition, was generally characteristic of a number of works written about "village prose" in the post-Soviet period. To a certain extent, it was justified by the influence of the method of interpreting the text through mythopoetics, disseminated in the 1990s (all the more so since the “ontological” prose of the “villagers”, which, with rare exceptions, eschewed “literaryness”, seemed to appeal precisely to this method of reading). In the 2000s, another version of the interpretation of the texts of the "villagers" made itself felt, the emergence of which is too symptomatic to be declared marginal. We are talking about works in line with the “ontologically oriented” literary criticism, which defiantly distanced itself from positivism and the anthropocentric scientific paradigm and fit itself into the “metaphysical” paradigm, based on rethinking the space-time continuum and taking into account the moments of sacralization of lost meanings…. There is no discovery in understanding the “ontological” aspect of the work of the “villagers”: Galina Belaya offered to consider the “ontological” layers of their works back in Soviet times, articles that interpreted “ontologism” as a special perspective on the image of the world, in which the artist’s primary orientation to the “deep” , unchanging, natural beginnings of being, over time also ceased to be a rarity. But in the 2000s, the “ontologism” of the “villagers” began to be associated by researchers with Orthodox religiosity, and statements axiomatic for religious experience turned into the foundations of scientific theses. For example, the author of a dissertation on V. Belov submits the following statement for defense:

The Orthodox understanding of human life as a tragedy lies in the free renunciation of a person from his will and submission to the will of God. The affirmation of the highest destiny of the personality, the manifestation of the image of God in it is associated with suffering, deprivation, loss and death. A person's awareness of the inevitability of life's tragedy is the most important feature of the ideological and aesthetic embodiment of the catholicity category, implemented in a number of works of Russian classical literature and V. Belov's "small" prose of the 60s - 90s of the twentieth century.

"Catholicity", "non-possessiveness" and other similar categories are also considered as invariant structures, "pre-texts", then realized in culturally specific forms in the prose of Belov, Astafiev, Rasputin. The “non-verbal system of semantic connections”, revealing, in the esoteric expression of Irina Gratsianova, “the transcendent essence of the concept “Russian world””, is affirmed as a generator of the plot-motivated topic of texts, while other mechanisms of semantic production for the most part leave the researcher indifferent.

To complete the characterization of trends in the studies of "village prose", I will outline a few more trends. In addition to the analysis of mythopoetics, the typology of heroes and traditionalist ideologemes, modern literary criticism has turned towards psychoanalytic studies. This new in relation to the Soviet period and somewhat eccentric trend emerged in the works of Alexander Bolshev and Arsamak Martazanov. Bolshev, in a monograph on the confessional-autobiographical beginning of Russian literature, assigned a chapter to the “villagers” under the expressive title “Eros and Thanatos of “village prose””. Focusing on the psychobiographical experiments of Alexander Zholkovsky, he interpreted the rhetorical organization of the works of Belov and Shukshin, taking into account the effect of the psychological principle of transference. The researcher noted the projection of the emotions repressed by the authors onto negative characters and, more importantly, considered the influence of such “repression” on the poetics of texts. One can argue about the verifiability of individual author's conclusions, about the limitations imposed by such a technique, but the very attempt to see and describe the neurotic nature of reactions to the disintegration of the traditional world is really new and deserves attention. Martazanov minimized the use of psychoanalytic terms, however, in the logic of his research on the ideology and the artistic world of "village prose" he followed Bolshev - he considered the discrepancy between the ideas and "scenes" declared by the writers, the neurotic rhetoric of the characters and the ambiguity of the plot-symbolic series. In the chapters of his monograph on Belov and Rasputin, this leads to interesting research results.

Another relatively recently crystallized trend originates in the tradition associated with the name and work of Vladimir Toporov on the study of the "Petersburg text", more widely generated by certain topological structures of "urban texts". The works of the "village people", who personified the "periphery" in the literary process of the "long 1970s", are considered by researchers as variants of the regional literary supertext - in this case, the Northern (Abramov, Belov, Vladimir Lichutin) or Siberian (Astafiev, Rasputin, Zalygin, Shukshin) . In a few works, the authors of which take into account the experience of post-colonial studies, the principles of studying "mental geography" and geopoetics, the literary imagination of the "villagers" of the outskirts (the Russian North or Siberia) is correlated with a wide range of historical and political problems - the processes of symbolic construction of the national state-political integrity, the development of regional self-consciousness and reflection of the processes of modernization/colonization of the periphery initiated by the center.

The assertion of some "villagers" in the role of modern classics and the parallel formation of the corresponding myths stimulated a number of "monographic" projects implemented mainly by philologists of regional scientific schools. The cumulation of efforts within a certain region, apparently, is partly explained by the need for the local scientific community to convincingly position itself on an all-Russian scale, and since the “village people” have long turned into territorial literary “brands” (in Biysk and Srostki, this is V. Shukshin, in Arkhangelsk and Verkole - F. Abramov, in Vologda - V. Belov, in Krasnoyarsk and Ovsyanka - V. Astafiev, in Irkutsk - V. Rasputin), the focus of regional philology on the territorially "own" author is quite logical. The most impressive are the results of the work of philologists from Altai, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk.

I would like to get away from the use of mythologized oppositions, which are characteristic of a number of works on “village people”, as a tool for analyzing mythologized oppositions born in the “long 1970s” (nationalists against cosmopolitans, conservatives against liberals, where the distribution of assessments corresponds to the political preferences of the researcher). In my opinion, it is more important to contextualize them and show how these reputations were formed, how they were maintained, what role they played in group and personal self-determination, how they influenced the conceptualization of the literary process by criticism. Otherwise, the unreflected position of the researcher, his, simply speaking, "party affiliation" is often projected onto the hero, who becomes a "comrade-in-arms" in the struggle and a mouthpiece of ideas close to the author. So, for example, in one of the recent monographs on the work of Shukshin, the task is to answer the question, “... how, through generative aesthetics, Shukshin even today argues not only about “neo-Bolshevism”, but also about the path of Russia - with today's cynical conductors of neoliberal reforms and subsequent upgrades. Cases when a literary critic chooses as a starting point for analysis the opposition of “ground” to “postmodern games”, national to civilized and impersonal and begins to defend the first from the second with the help of Shukshin or another author, are not uncommon in domestic studies of “village prose” (it is possible, by the way, and the inverse variant - modernization-enlightenment versus backward-patriarchal; however, authors adhering to this scheme rarely turn to "village prose"). The researcher, indeed, can semi-consciously camouflage his own position, and then interesting collisions arise during the reception of his text. For example, A. Bolshakova, proclaiming the “objectivism” of her scientific position, operates, in general, with traditionalist mythologems (say, “spontaneity and rejection of any formality”, supposedly characteristic of the Russian “type of thinking”, or “harmony of the city and countryside”, achievable “through rehabilitation of primordial mental categories, once contemptuously relegated by “Ivans who do not remember kinship””). Then Mikhail Golubkov, reacting to the “rehabilitation of primordial mental categories”, reads Bolshakova’s book “Nation and mentality: the phenomenon of “village prose” of the 20th century” as a continuation of the ideas of “non-soil” criticism of the 70s and 80s, while Yuri Pavlov puts the researcher is blamed for the lack of references to the works of V. Kozhinov, M. Lobanov, Yu. Seleznev and copious quotations from Harry Morson, J. Hosking, Rosalynn Marsh "and their like browns." In general, both reviewers "read" the ideological message from Bolshakova's work, but define it in the opposite way.

It also seems to me important to move away from the analysis of "village prose" as a kind of "thing in itself" - a given by the researcher with a fixed set of names, typologically significant motifs, recognizable style. In this approach, the question of the representatives of the direction becomes fundamental (hence, the considerations from the category “X is not a “villager” at all, but Y is a real “villager”), since it is the set of names, the definition of primary and peripheral figures that sets the image constructed by the researcher "village" school. It is obvious that literary critics, who evaluate its artistic viability depending on the ability of the authors to dive into “ontological” depths, tend to highlight V. Rasputin, V. Belov, some works of V. Astafiev, leaving out of sight S. Zalygin, V. Soloukhin or B. Mozhaev. On the contrary, those who place a high value on the ability to problematize stable literary forms are focused on the experiments of V. Shukshin. In these cases, the “village” school (to which the term “school” has always been applied with reservations, since its supporters had neither systematic creative communication nor joint manifestos) is nothing more than a construct created by the researcher, equipped to a greater or lesser extent degree features of organizational, ideological and poetic completeness.

Meanwhile, the members of the community's vision of its boundaries, extra-literary factors that ensured intuitive attribution to "their own" are no less significant for understanding the analyzed phenomenon than the research will that forms the textual reality into a concept. In this work, the question of whether this or that author belongs to “village prose” will be resolved in the simplest way - “village people” are writers who, from the inside of the 1970s, were attributed to the “village” literary clip by critics and representatives of the movement themselves. The list of names will change from chapter to chapter, since each author had his own thematic priorities and, plunging into, for example, environmental issues, he could ignore regional issues. However, as I will try to show, a more or less general perspective on the perception of reality, the taste affinity arising from the “origin” and the nature of socialization, adherence to certain emotional and rhetorical standards turn out to be criteria no less significant than the author’s obligatory reference to an equally obligatory set of topics. Of course, it is pointless to deny the existence of figurative-verbal markers or concepts of direction, but it is just as pointless to make them absolute, because then we lose sight of the simple fact that the meanings transmitted by "village prose", its poetics, the rhetoric of journalistic writings were born in the processes of social and cultural interaction, were mediated by a variety of contexts - from everyday to political, and expressed subjective emotional and cultural experience. Based on the fact that the "villagers" were not carriers of the essential "Russianness" materialized in the figurative and symbolic structure of their works, but "Russianness" was a key element of their self-perception, we can shift the research focus to the analysis of the structures of self-understanding and self-representation of the heroes of the work, who reveal them no less than the analysis of literary critics, for example, genre structures.

Villagers as Conservatives

Allowed Fronde

In this case, the question arises - who did the “villagers” feel like? What definitions are relevant to express their sense of self? Exceptional in terms of predictability and banality, but, nevertheless, requiring nuance, the answer may sound like this - the “village people” perceived themselves as “village people”. The definition of “village prose” that arose in the late 1960s irritated many representatives of the movement. F. Abramov explained to his correspondent: “Why is this term unacceptable. Because he smacks of arrogance, condescension…” V. Astafiev saw in the absurd definition the desire of officialdom to simplify both the real complexity of the literary process and the possible reception of texts that, as it were, were suggested in advance to be read through thematic classifiers (prose “village”, “urban”, “ production”, etc.). In other words, the writers felt the derogatory and restrictive meanings of this definition very well, but as their professional positions strengthened, it began to involuntarily remind them of another, much more flattering fact for them - of successfully overcoming circumstances unfavorable for a professional start - in a word, the definition of "village prose" has evolved over time into a kind of sign of literary quality. Anatoly Zabolotsky, cameraman of V. Shukshin’s latest films, recalled that at some point the word “village worker” stopped hurting the writer:

In his memoirs, Burkov writes<…>that Shukshin allegedly experienced the label “village worker” very painfully, was terribly indignant when he was called that<…>If he was offended, then in the first post-graduate years, which he later re-evaluated, recalling his life. But in the days when he was on the set in Kletskaya (we are talking about the film "They Fought for the Motherland." - A.R.), he was already flattered by the “village worker”, he was mature, and other labels offended him: when he talked about Yesenin, Mikhail Vorontsov, Pobedonostsev, Stolypin, Leskov, about the oppression of the Russians, he was branded a nationalist, Slavophile, anti-Semite. “Only a cosmopolitan has never been dubbed,” Shukshin reassured himself.

I will return to definitions like “nationalist”, “Slavophile”, but for now I will clarify that the scorn that other “village people” caught in the definition of their literary community identified them with “homely” unacceptable for “elegant taste” and the lack of artistic sophistication of writing . Subsequently, the "villagers" will stubbornly prove their professional viability, but initially they really perceived themselves as representatives of an "uncivilized", or, more precisely, "uncivilized" village in the eyes of intellectuals, who came to literature "from the bottom" with a willingness to testify on behalf of limited in rights, socially deprived peasantry. The narrative of the dramatic experience of their native class (especially over the past four decades, from the 1920s to the 1950s), portraying - in polemics with socialist realist clichés - a huge mass of "subordinates" who bore the brunt of historical cataclysms and social transformations , they considered their main task. In 1975, Igor Dedkov wrote about "village prose", unconditionally recognizing its primacy in modern literature, as about "provincial" prose, experiencing, among other things, a genuine interest in "the deprived, bypassed, as if not invited to the celebration of life", then is located not so much on the geographical, but on the social periphery. For the “villagers”, its inhabitants are mostly peasants (though not only), often old, and, despite the talent of nature, amazing endurance, their subjective feeling of the fullness of their lives (these qualities were pedaled by Rasputin, partly Astafiev, Zalygin and Shukshin) who are the suffering face in the processes of inevitable change.

Started by the “village workers” (and before them and in parallel with them - Alexander Tvardovsky, A. Yashin, A. Solzhenitsyn), the cultural rehabilitation of the peasantry was long and caused resistance from different sides: A.N. Yakovlev, who in 1972 acted as head of the Department of Propaganda and Agitation in the Central Committee of the CPSU, considered the idealization of the peasantry an attempt on the officially fixed parity position of social strata and strata in the USSR; on the contrary, Grigory Pomerants, published in dissident publications, in one of his articles stated that the focus on solving the problems of the peasantry and “populist” worship of him are absolutely anti-modernization and therefore harmful gestures. This rehabilitation ran into censorship restrictions and was accompanied by ideological trials, in the center of which were not only writers (for example, F. Abramov in connection with the publication of the story “Around and Around” in 1963), but also representatives of right-wing criticism (V. Chalmaev , M. Lobanov, Yu. Seleznev), even more zealously than the "villagers", who convinced the reader that the hero from the peasants is the bearer of the national spirit, traditional national values ​​and the "support of the state" for all time. It must be admitted that these consolidated efforts bore fruit, however, not so much in the field of education and morality, but in the field of rhetorical support for government decisions: in the 1980s, the problems of the agrarian complex, long-term plans for the development of the modern village were already unconditionally perceived as the most important direction of social economic policy, and journalism on agricultural topics and the writings of prose writers-“non-soilers” formed an officially recognized trend of the current literary process as especially relevant.

The rhetoric of "non-soil" criticism of the 1960s and early 1980s exposed another important "genealogical" dimension of the sociocultural rehabilitation of the peasantry. The fact is that the formation of "village prose" was the development of the potentialities inherent in the late Stalinist state ideology, and at the same time a dispute with it, at least as far as the fate of the peasant world is concerned:

Having rehabilitated Russian statehood and Russian classics as absolute values, Stalin opened the way, above all, to the rehabilitation of the Russian peasantry. The logic of this ideological operation was extremely simple. If Russian statehood is the highest value, then its foundation and, above all, the Russian people who created it, should be the value. The ideologists of pochvenism still move within the framework of socialist ideology, the peasantry as a working class is more important and valuable to them than the nobility. But nevertheless, by shifting the emphasis from the working class to the peasantry, they break even more than Stalin with orthodox Marxism.

<…>Soil writers, including Solzhenitsyn, appear at the end of the Khrushchev thaw, but they all come from Stalinist revisionism. Zalygin, Shukshin, Belov, Astafiev, Rasputin complete the ideological revolution started by Stalin. The "Young Guard" of the second half of the sixties, and then "Our Contemporary" translates the language of National Bolshevism into the language of outright anti-communism. The idea of ​​Russian patriotism and Russian statehood, revived by Stalin, leads already in the open press to a total criticism of it, Stalin's collectivization, as an action directed against the foundations of people's life.

The “non-soil” opposition was generated by the logic of the development of Stalinist revisionism, which facilitated the integration of the “villagers” into the cultural order that had developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But to no lesser extent, it grew out of the political, economic and socio-cultural features of domestic modernization - instrumental, forced, and ultimately archaic. The Soviet-specific version of resolving the conflict between the peasantry and the state and, as a result, the necessary overcoming of “peasant backwardness,” Andrea Graziosi believes, consisted in “maximum suppression of the autonomous on their own initiative(author's italics. - A.R.) - the participation of peasants in the process of modernization ... ". The events of the Civil War and "modernization from above" the researcher explains the conservative-traditionalist symptomatology of subsequent public sentiments - "the extreme forms that such a more or less universal phenomenon took in the USSR as popular antipathy towards modernity in general, including its positive aspects ...<…>constantly[e] available in the USSR<…>huge reservoir reactionary both psychological and ideological. In the words of a Russian historian, the modern USSR was a state with a clearly visible imprint of “ruralization”, which arose, so to speak, “in reverse order”, “through the destruction of the peasant class proper”. The trauma of the destruction of the native estate, accelerated by the “evil will” of the state, the “villagers” tried to utter, which did not prevent them, as a cultural movement, from remaining one of the most impressive products of the Soviet project, eloquent proof of the effective work of social elevators. After that, the ambiguity of their status (undoubtedly a systemic element of Soviet culture, which, nevertheless, had a relatively wide corridor of opportunities for criticizing the system) no longer seems the result of clever manipulations, since it was set by the very nature of Soviet modernity:

The hybrid nature of Soviet modernity brings to life the opposite strategies of its criticism: either from the point of view of the lost and "defiled" pre-modern traditions, or from the point of view of the inferiority and underdevelopment of the modern project itself. The first (re-sacralizing) type of criticism is represented by the nationalist discourse of Russia's "special path", irrational "Russian spirituality", Orthodoxy, "original" (peasant and patriarchal) traditions. Criticism of modernity in this discourse (ranging from Solzhenitsyn and the “villagers” to the authors of Our Contemporary, Molodaya Gvardiya, and Veche magazine, various variations of the New Right and Russian fascism) is expressed in the interpretation of the Soviet regime as a result of the invasion of foreign Russian culture of forces, in turn represented by the West and the Jews as agents of colonization (modernization), as well as industrial-urban civilization as a whole.

This explains why, to different addressees, the "villagers" seemed to be either "Vendee", which cast doubt on the conquests of October (primarily in the transformation of the peasant world), or "fists from literature." By the way, the object of their critical statements was also floating - representing the system (state repressive institutions, bureaucracy) or rejected by it (pro-Western groups of intelligentsia with a bias towards dissent, youth subcultures, etc.). The strategy of the "villagers" was a strange combination of elements of conformism and non-conformism. On the one hand, both in the phase of the formation of the direction, and later, the writers were clearly focused on dismantling the “lie” of socialist realism and expanding the boundaries of what is officially permissible, on the other hand, they hardly ever thought it possible for themselves to take dissident steps that threatened to be excommunicated from the reader, and not only because of caution, but also because of the awareness of the counterproductiveness of such steps. Still, successful professionalization, the ability to write and publish, despite the cavils of censorship, meant a lot to them, and they always identified themselves as legitimate participants in the literary process, who occupied a cultural niche that allowed, in spite of everything, to work.

In the post-Soviet period, some authors sympathetic to the "villagers" generally refused to emphasize Frondist moments in their activities: they say, the "villagers" worked without wasting time on fruitless debates with the Soviet authorities, as if not noticing it. There are certain reasons for such arguments, especially if we recall not only the restrictions associated with the position of the “villagers” in the field of censored culture, but also the rejection by most of them of self-realization through negative acts of resistance, protest, rebellion, and the overthrow of established norms. It is curious that Solzhenitsyn credited the lack of visible resistance to the "villagers";

At the turn of the 1970s and into the 1970s in Soviet literature there took place a silent revolution without a revolt, without a shadow of a dissident challenge. Without overthrowing or blowing up anything declaratively, a large group of writers began to write as if no "socialist realism" had been declared and dictated - neutralizing it silently, began to write in simplicity(author's italics. - A.R.), without any pleasing, incense to the Soviet regime, as if forgetting about it.

The ethical and aesthetic superiority of the “villagers” (and Solzhenitsyn was sure that they had made a literary revolution and revived traditional morality) in this case is only sharper shaded by the “silence” of their protest, which contrasts with the “dissident challenge”. Leonid Borodin, who served two terms, also emphasized that in their midst, frankly protest actions were not expected from the "villagers" and even considered them undesirable. The activities of writers in the field of public education in the national spirit seemed much more effective:

... we, the "Russian dissidents", which, by the way, could be counted on the fingers, we did not at all dream of replenishing our ranks at the expense of, let's say, Russian writers. Somewhere in the late 1970s, I learned that Valentin Rasputin, being invited to a meeting with employees of the Irkutsk television, told them such things that the TV party members were later summoned to the party committee and asked why they, the communists, did not object to Rasputin ... I then scribbled a short letter to his compatriot, where he directly said that the dissident Rasputin was a loss for Russia. He asked for caution ... The letter, sent by courier, was intercepted.

The retrospective recovery by the researcher of the overlap of conformist and nonconformist motivations is always approximate, but, in my opinion, several episodes from the creative biography of V. Astafiev are able to give an idea of ​​the strategy of the "villagers" to "reconquer" the space of freedom without encroaching on the powers of existing institutions. Astafiev, more actively than his colleagues in "village prose", modeled his autobiographical myth through the motives of rebellion and protest, coming from "nature", its anarchic spontaneity. The more curious What he recognized as the most effective limiter of his own disagreement. In 1967, in a letter to his wife, he complains about the offensive editing in "Our Contemporary" of his story, which came out in an "emasculated" form:

How to live? How to work? These questions do not leave me even for a minute, and then the last glimmers of light are plugged with a dirty paw ...<…>

A great bankruptcy awaits us, and we are powerless to resist it. Even the only opportunity - talent - and even then we are not allowed to realize and use it for the benefit of people. We are being pushed harder and harder. Thought begins to work sluggishly, to submit. And to create, you need to be a rebel. But against whom and against what to rebel? There are only well-wishers around, everything seems to be kind to you, and then they will “edit it”. Hands go down. And it is a pity that this craft cannot be abandoned.

A possible protest is paralyzed by the absence of an obvious opponent (“everything is good to you”) and the inability to give up creativity - because of the desire to fulfill oneself and the need to earn a living “by this craft”. But three years later, according to Astafiev, he sent a letter to the Writers' Union of the USSR in support of Solzhenitsyn, who was expelled from the joint venture, in which he sharply condemned the established "supervision of the writer's word<…>which did not dream<…>in the "cursed past". This document, in fact, was a protest document, violating the consent to a compromise imputed to the rank and file members of the joint venture, and by the end “sliding” into political disloyalty (Astafiev announced the threatening prospect of isolation for “ iron curtain”, warned of the danger of the practice of denunciation, in which he saw a sign of re-Stalinization). However, the writer appealed to the official structure, stated the non-compliance with legal and ethical standards in relation to Solzhenitsyn, that is, he acted, recognizing the legitimacy of the established political and administrative order and assuming a possible change in the situation. Stylistically, this strategy was crowned by Astafiev's sharpened contrast between Solzhenitsyn's "open" actions and the "cunning" of Anatoly Kuznetsov, who had recently emigrated and was denounced by the Soviet press, on the sly, gradually getting ready to escape. Subsequently, Astafiev interpreted his social and literary position in relation to two models of nonconformism, one of which was personified by Solzhenitsyn, and the other by dissidents. In 1994, he confirmed the rejection of consistent and radical manifestations of disagreement, rhetorically motivating this with considerations in the spirit of Solzhenitsyn's ethics:

I could not become a dissident either for the sake of freedom, or for the sake of popularity, or just like that, because I was not ready to become one: the family is large, therefore, the measure of courage is small. Yes, and internal readiness, looseness (which, however, among the dissidents over time "imperceptibly" turned into unbridledness, self-praise, and for some into obscenity) - I did not have enough. But most of all, the spiritual principle, which is stronger than any force, was lacking.

Astafiev readily recognized the non-conformism of dissidents and Solzhenitsyn as evidence of great spiritual strength, but psychologically and culturally this sacrificial maximalism of protest, which, by the way, was mainly characteristic of dissidents from the intelligentsia public, remained alien to him. The strategy of the "villagers", and Astafyev in particular, consisted in something else: in agreement with the existing situation and gradually adapting to it, and it to oneself - in finding a shaky balance between retaining the right to artistically honest expression and using the advantages that were given by the absence confrontation with the system. However, the principles of agreeing or disagreeing with the system, the conditions for making inevitable compromises, the size of the stakes and the expected losses in the event of public disagreement, each writer determined for himself, and the (non)conformist strategies of the "villagers" must be carefully individualized. Astafiev’s, sometimes affective, “rebelliousness” and Zalygin’s conscientious professionalism, which developed under the direct influence of the ethics of the Zemstvo intelligentsia (the writer’s parents) and the unwritten code of “specialists” (in this case, the pre-revolutionary professors who taught Zalygin in Omsk at the Agricultural Academy), were significantly determined by the biographical context , but as it turns out, were quite effective as self-promotion strategies.

It is also important that the “villagers” fundamentally renounced the sharp nonconformist aesthetic gestures characteristic of the modernist avant-garde public, and, of course, the consequences of such a choice went beyond poetics. The degree of ideological non-conformism in this case was regulated by the very language of traditionalism: the desire to refute the “varnished reality” of socialist realism and “tell the truth” was carried out within the framework of the former realistic system, the elements of which the “villagers” could recombine and change signs, while avoiding radical problematization of its norms.

“…there hasn’t been a case yet…. so that traditions… disappear without a trace…”: tradition and “non-soil” identity

The appeal to tradition was fundamental for the self-determination and self-naming of "villagers". Contrary to popular belief, it was not at all limited to stylization, the use of dialect vocabulary, folklorization (or pseudo-folklorization) in the spirit of “ornamental” prose, and was not limited to calls to return back to the “splinter and plow”, although since the mid-1960s it has just become noticeable mass interest, figuratively speaking, it is to the "splinter and plow". The “popularity fashion”, which became one of the side effects of the return to the “sources” begun by urban intellectuals back in the late 1950s, included a craving for “simplification”, “peasantization” and “archaization” and manifested itself in the decoration of apartments in the style of a peasant huts, collecting icons and old household utensils, the increased popularity of Russian cuisine, trips to the cities of the “golden ring” of Russia, elements a la russe in clothes, etc. The intelligentsia interpreted new fashion hobbies and consumer preferences as “foam” that should come down , or as an expression of serious processes adapted to the parameters of mass culture (“entertainment-drinking-eating attraction”) - awakening a taste for historical self-knowledge, discovering the riches of national culture, etc. One way or another, overcoming disunity with one’s own past, whether it manifested itself in various areas of cultural consumption or prompted a specialized (ethnographic, historical, philological or f philosophic) research, was experienced and presented by the intelligentsia public, first of all, as a sign of the "normalization" of the spiritual life of Soviet society.

Official ideological institutions, since the 1960s, have also been interested in the "traditions of the past." The ideological apparatus was looking for "intellectual means of expressing the Soviet civilizational identity", therefore, the consolidation of new ("Soviet") traditions and the spread of new rituals turned into a task of paramount importance. “Invented”, almost according to Eric Hobsbawm, Soviet traditions and rituals helped legitimize the period of history that began after 1917 as a full-fledged fragment of the past: the USSR was declared the heir to all “progressive” social traditions, whose list changed depending on the tasks set by the official ideology at each specific stage. The study of tradition became an important trend in the Soviet humanities of the “long 1970s”. “Interest in the cultural traditions of the past” in the works of Soviet sociologists and philosophers, continues Vitaly Averyanov, was “genuine[m] and essentially non-ideological[m],” although, I note in passing, the absence of external signs of ideological bias does not mean “non-ideological.” Large-scale structuralist studies of myth and mythopoetics, which contained elements of an intellectual challenge in relation to the "ideologization" of official literary criticism, did not cancel the "epistemological relationship between structuralist and Marxist methodology, both striving for ultimate reductionism and exhaustive explanation of the world." The "non-soil" versions of the past, which opposed both structuralism and the official Marxist-Leninist ideological scheme, were also the result of a revision and recombination of former ideologies in a romantic-conservative vein. In the wake of almost universal interest in tradition in the early 1980s, Eduard Markaryan spoke in favor of introducing the term “traditionology” that unites a number of scientific disciplines. The proposal was rejected by colleagues, but marked the peak of the wide expansion of this problem in various branches of the humanities.

Nevertheless, in the spirit of liberal journalism at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, it would be wrong to attribute the traditionalist orientation only to the censored culture of the “long 1970s”, and even more so to consider it as unambiguous evidence of stagnation. The irony of ambitious plans to create a new artistic language and the reflection of immersion in culture stimulated the emergence of traditionalist sentiments in the field of uncensored culture as well. Associated with the underground, Boris Ostanin and Alexander Kobak, using their own cultural chronology, where the 1960s and 1980s (decades of “lightning” and “rainbow”) were distinguished, proved that the increased role of museums and archives, extensive restoration activities, “retrospective orientation”, common for the uncensored and uncensored segments and having different political shades, institutionally and discursively made the 1980s a time of conservatism, overcoming the utopias of the 1960s, “respect for the fathers”, “compromise”. In this regard, the traditionalism of the "villagers", and more broadly, of the "non-soil" community, was not something exceptional, on the contrary, it corresponded to the passeist moods of the 1970s and expressed the process of the formation of a new collective identity, in which the experience of the "eventless" present was predictably combined with nostalgia for an irretrievably lost past. Speaking about the pervasive nature of cultural conservatism in the late Soviet era, it is necessary to mention the subtle observations of Maxim Waldstein, who noted that the structuralist scientific project, which asserted the liberal intelligentsia as, on the one hand, “tacit opposition to the totalitarian regime”, and on the other hand, the defender of genuine culture from aggressive modern cultural trends, paradoxically combined in his "culturalism" "a promising approach to art with dilapidated quasi-Marxist and functionalist patterns", "a conservative aversion to transgression with its cult in the sphere of high culture", "social conformism with intellectual non-conformism, a populist cult" normality” and belonging to the “majority” with cultural elitism and individualism”.

But none of the leading intellectual groups of the “long 1970s” worked with tradition, selecting its relevant elements for the modern situation, so purposefully, no one used its potential in the current ideological struggle as consistently as the “non-soilers”, primarily critics and publicists. Despite this, they did not give a detailed, logically intelligible definition of tradition. V. Kozhinov, speaking about stylistic traditions, resisted their reduction to a set of techniques and argued that

tradition comes to life in literature only when the successor finds its underlying basis, its deepest soil in the very life that he masters artistically.<…>She (tradition. - A.R.) proceeds in one way or another from life in its entirety, while the actual literary sources of tradition appear primarily as its artistic consolidation ...

Tradition in Kozhinov's interpretation is an essential essence, an artist can "acquire" it under certain conditions (a creative gift and sensitivity to the past are necessary), but in any case it determines the uniqueness of a cultural type. “... The very concept of “tradition” carries, in my opinion, only a positive connotation. Over the course of centuries, art peels off, everything petty and false disappears, and a tradition is developed ... ”V. Soloukhin insisted. Artistic traditions, according to S. Zalygin, are so strong and stable that “they give a certain stability and traditional character even to everything that denies tradition ... However, this does not mean at all that the traditions themselves are very definite, definite to the end, that they are easy to understand and formulate, study and even memorize. Tatiana Glushkova's article "Tradition is the Conscience of Poetry", which was sensational at the time, offered a whole cascade of definitions of tradition, created, however, according to the principle of "the unknown ... through the unknown":

Tradition is the very life of poetry, eternally lasting (author's discharge. - A.R.), a prerequisite valid for every poet and a general “formula” of all creativity.<…>

Tradition cannot influence from outside. Tradition cannot serve as a distant or near “landmark”. To be the subject of “search” or “acquisition”. In tradition, one can only be, abide.

Having analyzed in the early 1980s a large array of “non-soil” articles, G. Belaya stated that in them the very word “tradition” “has become a distinctive sign, a metaphor for a special worldview.” It did not require conceptual clarity, because it was understood by "its" reader suggestively, through context, associations and allusions. In interpreting tradition as a mechanism for the continuous transmission of cultural experience and a system of symbols that set the boundaries of collective identity, the “non-soilers” followed generally accepted ideas, but in their understanding of tradition there were several “axial” themes of their own, which were articulated especially persistently and supplied with subtexts that were significant for national conservatives. .

First, the “non-soilers” saw in the tradition symbol of the evolutionary development of society(at the same time, the mechanisms of cultural transmission were simultaneously ontologized and politicized). Its powerful stabilizing force was opposed to abrupt, as it was implied, inspired by the will of individual political groups, social changes (it was primarily about 1917, the first post-revolutionary decade, but also about modernization as such), provoking gaps in national histories and culture. In 1978, David Samoilov characterized "village prose" as "the literature of the semi-urban people who won and came to power", who appropriated the cultural results of the 1917 revolution: A.R.) understand, and therefore rare among them scold the revolution and all its consequences.” Leaving aside the question of who and how in 1978, being in the field of censored culture, could “scold” the revolution, I note that the “villagers” and right-wing criticism problematized the symbolic meaning of the revolution with others, more akin to the poetics of associations and allegories, and not “scold ", ways. They turned tradition into a positive pole of the antithesis "old - new" and dubbed the latter with the antithesis "us - alien", where "alien" sometimes had an ethno-cultural coloring. The consequence of this operation was the spread of the semantics of negativity to the revolution and the avant-garde culture that “served” it. Revolution and tradition among the “non-soilers” turned out to be two diametrically opposed modes of existence and social action. The first symbolized the destruction and violent intrusion into the historically established "organism" of national life, the second - the "positivity" and creativity of the position aimed at "restoration" and "revival" of the destroyed. Critics, publicists and some writers of the “non-soil” direction (for example, V. Soloukhin) rethought the structure of the historical narrative, within which the events of the distant and not very distant past were ordered: they shifted the plot-rhetorical center from the situation of the break and the birth of the “new world” to "continuation of time", in other words, on the mechanisms of "succession". S. Semanov spoke in this connection about the "new traditionalism", which makes the boundary between the pre-Soviet and the Soviet permeable. He prudently stipulated that "new traditionalism" born of revolution, popular, like the "old" traditionalism, and just as capable of giving authoritative values ​​to society:

It is these traditions, both old, born in the depths of the working people, and new, associated with Soviet reality,<…>create<…>social authority.

Such traditionalism and persistently declared respect for the past established a connection between the pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary periods of national history, reducing the symbolic significance of the revolution, referring to it as an important milestone, but constructing continuity, as it were, over the historical barrier. This happened through a discursive reshaping of the fault, emphasizing its leakiness and hinting, according to the principle of "by contradiction", to the excessive nature of revolutionary changes. The revolution lost its sacred halo and if it retained the status of a “super-event”, then often it symbolized the painfulness of historical changes (in general, national-conservative criticism continued to talk about the revolution in a normative way, however, using opposing or concessive constructions - “but”, “although ”, and, of course, with a reminder of the “excesses”).

Secondly, for the “non-soil” writing-critical community, tradition has become the embodiment of the substantial properties of Russian culture, its ability to regenerate in changing historical circumstances. The "theory of a single stream", which was mentioned above, was just based on the belief in the existence of "deep", indestructible, but at the same time capable of "reformatting" the foundations of national culture, spirit, character. As a result, the nation (where the ethnic and "democratic" were united in the figure of the "Russian people"), and not class contradictions and objective economic laws, turned into the main culture-generating force. In the authorities, such an approach periodically aroused a desire to put his preachers in their place (as happened, for example, with the author of the article "Inevitability" V. Chalmaev), but in general, the identification of tradition with national originality and greatness, if there was no pedaling of ethnicity, seemed perfectly acceptable. An article in the "Young Guard" "Protect our shrine!" (1965), signed by three authoritative characters of Soviet culture - Sergei Konenkov, Pavel Korin and Leonid Leonov, became a guide for the "non-soil" for years to come on the "use" of tradition in a special - "stabilizing" - mode. In the article, the need to protect “material relics of the former national greatness” was remarkably motivated by the fact that “all national self-consciousness crystallizes around these stones.” In general, the tradition as a "receptacle" of people's experience, a "stronghold" in the fight against unifying civilizational influences, a powerful patriotic force, as the course of events showed, was in demand both by official authorities and "non-soilers". Moreover, criticism, far from trying to reinterpret the national literary tradition in a conservative spirit, also actively reproduced the antitheses of civilization and tradition, since it followed the widely held notions of the "individualizing" power of national traditions. Tradition was seen as a repulsion "from abstract standardization, from faceless dynamics, from mechanical functionalism", "from the Americanizing way of life, from the gradually eroding national foundations of life." Obeying this logic, Astafiev in his "Sighted Staff" (1978-1982, published 1988) called "village prose" "the last cry of that creative individuality that was laid down in our Russian people ...", and in Once again emphasized the importance of the dichotomy “tradition vs. civilization" in the self-description of the school he represented.

Returning to the "non-soil" strategy of cautious desacralization of the revolution and radical social changes, it should be noted that, on the whole, it was simple and forcedly limited to the use of not the widest range of discursive rhetorical means. For example, the "rediscovery" of the positive semantics of conservative social and cultural practices - small and slow changes accumulated in the process of everyday work, relying on existing experience, rejecting large-scale goal-oriented design. The “villagers” mainly convinced with “pictures”, although in their works of the 1980s and journalism there are attempts to resonate frankly to state the essence of their own views. So, in the play "On the 206th" (1982), V. Belov makes the secretary of the district committee the bearer of "healthy conservatism", who, as a "man of action", enters into an argument with his main antagonist - a rhetorician journalist. He asks the journalist to explain to him the stamp about "patriarchal prejudices" and receives in response: "... patriarchy always interferes with everything new." Contrary to this point of view, the secretary of the district committee argues that "constancy is one of the signs of the spiritual health of the individual" and "the advanced does not have to be new, and the new is by no means always advanced." “Stagnation and routine” (Belov used a term that would become a common characteristic of the Brezhnev period during perestroika) the hero considers the result of “the inconstancy of nature, a kind of social fever.” Finally, the secretary comments on the opponent's quotation of Nekrasov's lines ("Go and die flawlessly, you won't die in vain, things are strong when blood flows under him!"), approving the heroic impulse: "Hey, my friend, don't knock me down! It was about a revolutionary upheaval. Now, why do you have to die? Need to live! And not every deed is lasting from blood, this must be understood. Perhaps the last remark contains allusions to Ivan Turgenev’s novel “Nov” (1876), in which the author critically comprehended the idea of ​​“going to the people” and opposed the “gradualist” Solomin who did not know real life, burdened by a mass of complexes. He convinced Marianna Sinetskaya that the true improvement of Russian life is achieved not by an act of heroic self-sacrifice, but by daily unobtrusive activity - “to teach some Lukeria” “something good”, to give a sick medicine, “to comb a mangy boy’s hair”. And when Marianne agreed that it was necessary to do this, and then at least die, he objected: “No, live ... live! That's the main thing." Such typological convergences allowed “non-soil” criticism in the “long 1970s” to establish continuity between the “village people” and Russian classics, digressing from the specific political and ideological circumstances of the formation and articulation of their position, but sharpening the “reactionary” nature of the latter: in this case, the Westerner both the liberal Turgenev and the Russian nationalist Belov turned out to be united in their “gradualism” and rejection of political radicalism.

Actually, the principles of the late Soviet “gradualism” were sought to be formulated by the “villagers”, distancing themselves from the ideology of radical social transformations and giving their “theory” a characteristic organicist-“soil” flavor: here the “new” (ideas or institutions) was mediated by tradition, not brought in from outside , but slowly grew out of the experience of "people's life". It will not be possible to find a detailed program of action in the works of the “villagers” (with the exception of V. Soloukhin’s “The Last Step”), since in most cases they only defended the principles themselves (hierarchy, authority, anti-individualism, etc.), which allowed, as it seemed to them, , correct and control changes. They could confirm the effectiveness of these principles of organizing social life with retrospective pictures of the past and the accompanying mythologization of what is depicted (in this case, it doesn’t matter whether we are talking about the introduction of ready-made mythological forms into the narrative, as in S. Zalygin’s “Commission”, about plot construction focused on the model of the “lost paradise”, as in the first edition of “The Last Bow” by V. Astafiev, or about the ordering of historical reality in accordance with the mythomodel of the cosmos, as in “Lada” by V. Belov).

After injury

Motifs of prose and journalism characteristic of “non-soilers” (memory, soil in the literal and figurative sense, “roots”, “sources”, small homeland), the main areas of social activity (protection of architectural monuments, participation in the environmental movement, resuscitation of interest in local cultural traditions and folklore - in a word, everything that can be described in one way or another by Laura Olson's expression “performing Russia” (performing Russia), satisfied the tangible collective need to confirm their own continuity, self-identity, in other words, in identity - “fixed, unique, internally harmonious marked by historical longevity, if not rooted in nature", that is, interpreted in such a way that the procedural meanings of the concept turned out to be secondary in relation to the "stabilizing" ones. Exactly from here - from the focus on problems of identity - the attention of a part of the "non-soilers" to ethnic origin, which made some fully involved in the Nazis onal tradition, and others - on the basis of ethno-cultural "alienity" - were transferred to the category of its "destroyers". They wanted to discover and affirm “Russian identity” in new circumstances, taking into account the recent experience of painful social transformations, they also wanted to protect it from destructive modern influences, dangerous contacts with strangers cultures, ethnic groups, ideologies. However, efforts to reconstruct or restore collective identity are "empirically the most visible manifestation of cultural trauma". The admiration of “non-soilers” for tradition - a mechanism for ordering social experience and continuous transmission of cultural meanings, as well as a persistent denial of the creative potential of negativity in the cultural and political fields, are, in my opinion, nothing more than a variant of adaptation to the consequences of trauma (although see in that exclusively reaction to injury is not worth it).

Speaking of trauma, I, following the “cultural-sociological” approach, mean a reaction to a chain of events that had a “destructive effect on the social body” and experienced as a sharp and painful destruction of the former estate / group values, norms, ideals, the loss of “existential security ". When tying trauma to specific historical events, it is important, according to Jeffrey Alexander, to avoid its "naturalization" and to understand that events are not traumatic in themselves:

The status of trauma is attributed to real or imagined phenomena, not because of their actual harmfulness or objective harshness, but because these phenomena are considered to have a sudden and detrimental effect on the collective identity.<…>

Identity implies a reference to culture. An event receives the status of a trauma only if the patterns of collective meanings shift sharply. It is the meanings that provide the feeling of shock and fear, but not the events themselves.<…>

Trauma is not the result of pain experienced by this or that group. It is the result of acute discomfort that cuts to the core of the community's experience of its own identity. Collective actors "decide" to present social pain as a major threat to their idea of ​​who they are, where they come from, and where they want to go.

According to Neil Smelser, no "historical event or situation automatically and necessarily qualifies in itself as a cultural trauma, and the range of events or situations that can become a cultural trauma is vast", so trauma is not "a thing in itself". , but is reified by the context in which it is implanted.” Thus, the focus of research attention should be on the process of “creating” trauma by “carrier groups” – attributing traumatic meanings to certain events through their symbolization and narrativization. The role of literature, Alexander emphasizes, in this process is great: traces of trauma in the collective memory enter social life through the creation of literary images, that is, literature captures the trauma in the collective memory and offers options for its interpretation. In the case I am considering, the “central group”, most clearly affected by the traumatic socio-political changes, turned out to be the Soviet peasantry, and the “village” writers, its intellectual elite, tried to “declare” the trauma they had experienced. Leaving aside the question of how justified and historically correct is the view of the destruction of the Russian village as a trauma (the list of events that claim to be “traumatic” can be very long and determined by the intentions of the researcher), it should be noted that it reflected social and emotional experience , the credibility of which for the "villagers" was undoubted: the collapse of the traditional village world, accelerated by collectivization and war, was experienced by them as a personal and historical drama. It is unlikely that, addressing the topic of collectivization from the beginning of the 1960s, they initially set themselves the task of “shaking the foundations” of the system and revising the prevailing interpretation of the event. However, they understood that they possessed - partly due to their own experience, partly due to family traditions - unique artistic material that undermined the canonical ideas about collectivization, reproduced, among other things, by M. Sholokhov's "strikebreaking" novel "Virgin Soil Upturned". This most powerful emotional impulse prompted some of the “villagers” to engage in literature: “I became a writer ... out of necessity,” explained V. Belov, “my heart boiled too much, silence became unbearable, bitterness choked.” In a seemingly spontaneous outburst of accumulated dramatic impressions, traumatic semantics increased gradually, usually due to associative reserves: in writings about the modern village, even without historical digressions, its current state made one think about what preceded it, and in works about the “great turning point” he, as a rule, marked a retreat from the moral norms of the peasantry. It is no coincidence that in one of the first high-profile works about collectivization - Zalygin's story "On the Irtysh" (1964), the author captured a pattern characteristic of the new social order - the civil defeat of the independent and humane Stepan Chauzov and the triumph of narrow-minded fanatics like Koryakin or easily controlled mediocrities like Mitya authorized. Sometimes such conceptually loaded oppositions received psychobiological detailing from the villagers, for example, in Belov's Eve (first published in 1972), where Pavel Pachin, personifying inner health, was involved in a confrontation with the flawed Ignakha Sapronov, the main conductor of the new policy in Shibanikha. Even more characteristic of the discourse on trauma is the desire of individual “villagers” to see collectivization as something like a trigger that launched the mechanisms of self-destruction in the peasant environment, and in Russian society as a whole, although for obvious reasons they were able to publicly reveal their position quite late (however, , already in Astafiev's "Tsar-fish" (1975-1977) the connection between dispossession and special resettlement with the modern cultural and economic crisis of the region was indicated). In general, most of the works whose plot is subject to the discourse of trauma are the second and third novels by V. Belov from the trilogy "The Sixth Hour" (1994, 1998), the second book of B. Mozhaev's novel "Men and Women" (1978–1980, published in 1987) , the novels by V. Soloukhin “The Last Step” (1976, publ. 1995), “Laughter over the left shoulder” (1989), the novel “Cursed and Killed” (1992–1994) and the military stories adjoining it by V. Astafiev were published, and partly written by "villagers" in the conditions of ideological emancipation of the late 1980s - 1990s, but the presence of traumatic experience is discernible in the "non-soil" prose and journalism of earlier periods.

Despite the fact that the conversation about “village prose” through the paradigm of trauma is not accepted, it is not uncommon to state in criticism the extremeness of the social experience captured by the authors-“non-soccers”. At the end of the 1980s, V. Chalmaev saw in the writings of the "villagers" a reaction to existence in the regime of catastrophes ("For many years and, perhaps, decades, we lived constantly in the experience of catastrophes. We legitimized such an experience"), although he immediately turned the conversation towards healing the trauma. From his point of view, the traumatic experience was even useful for writers, because it "enriched," made "wiser" ... the thoughts of artists, developed the gift of compassion, readiness to resist dogma ... ". As a result, the critic considered the “village prose” to be the most “healthy” direction of late Soviet literature, which transformed “the sad, harsh, unique experience of grief and catastrophes into vivid artistic worlds.” In a relatively recent essay, Alexander Prokhanov linked the emergence of literary opposition to officialdom in the 1960s with the need to throw out the strongest frustration with a whole series of upheavals (from the 1917 revolution to the Great Patriotic War). According to Prokhanov, the choice of events to mourn and remember, that is, to actually turn them into a kind of "places of memory", was an important indicator of group demarcation. The "liberal-democratic" literature concentrated on the tragedy of 1937, while the "villagers" focused on the pain "over the disappearance of the village":

And the village began to disappear, according to the "villagers", when it was hit by dispossession - the expulsion of the most able-bodied people from the village and the burden of Stalin's industrialization, the war, on the village. And in the depths of village prose, too, there was a moan of the people.

However, for the "villagers" themselves, the discussion of the collective sociohistorical experience as painful was more natural than for the reader or critics. At the first signs of the liberalization of the social atmosphere in the mid-1980s, they began to articulate the experience of pain quite frankly in relation to that fragment of Soviet history where the rhetoric of trauma was most appropriate, although most codified - the Great Patriotic War (of course, we are talking primarily about the late Astafiev's prose).

And yet, the concepts of trauma and "traumatic" in relation to the "village people" need additional differentiation. If we specify which events the traditionalist authors attributed traumatic in nature, we will see that it is sometimes difficult to localize them, because we are talking, firstly, about the modernization process as such. Obviously, the “villagers” tried to express in the specific language of the political and cultural reaction the mass experience of being traumatized by modernization, but, I think, it is precisely because of the global nature, multi-stage and multifaceted nature of the modernization process that it is more appropriate to talk not about trauma, but about “existential anxiety” (existential anxiety) that accompanies existence in "fluid modernity" (Z. Bauman) and "pluralization of life worlds" (P. Berger). This kind of anxiety arises in a situation of “blurring” of the threat object (objects) and is perceived as disorientation and loss of support. The marginal position of the “village people” who were in contact with successful urbanized groups and groups that the “village people” themselves perceived as traditional, in my opinion, exacerbated the experience of “existential anxiety”, clothed by writers in counter-modernization rhetoric.

Secondly, in a relatively close historical context, the status of traumatic events was given to the events from which the late Soviet right built a collective identity – the revolution of 1917, the Civil War, and especially collectivization. These events, united by the semantics of “breaking”, became symbols of the forcible-compulsory nature of modernization, they were assigned the role of a catalyst for the processes of disintegration of the peasant world (cf. we reap today. One could talk endlessly about this pain, about these wounds that still bleed today.") The “great turning point” was seen by the “villagers” not so much as a symbol, but as a materialized metaphor - it changed the very “people’s body”, “perverting” the way of its existence (for example, the Civil War, dispossession, repressions against the “indigenous” Russian estates in "The Last Step" by Soloukhin). Already in the years of perestroika, Astafiev will develop a metaphor fault/fracture into images of social and biological anomalies, extending the latter to b O most of Soviet history:

There was a terrible fright and humiliation. And humiliation does not pass in vain - the people were "ground" in these years. Shuffled the fate of people how much in vain. Some were sent to the northern distances, others from hot lands were resettled to us.<…>

So, people were mixed up - souls were erased into powder. Add to that the years of repression. Then the war. The percentage of losses of peasants in the war is huge: after all, the village has always supplied soldiers. Recovering from this is extremely difficult. Yes, if even in the post-war years and later - up to the present day - they “were not weird” with the village ...

<…>What happened to the people who survived all these hard times, who turned out to be, as it were, shifted from the earth's axis. Boltukhin (one of the collectivization activists in Ovsyanka, Astafyev's native village. - A.R.) after the party card was thrown on the table: “Here,” he shouted, “I will not pay dues. Not for what!”. And after that, he still hung around the village and drank without drying out. It was as if everything had rolled off of him. But the worst thing is that he and others like him gave birth to such a tribe. His eldest son hacked his nephew to death, went to prison three times, and was killed there. The younger son raped the pioneer leader, after leaving prison, abused his own sister, after which she lost her mind. Then he was "sewn" somewhere. Boltukhin himself fell drunk near the house in the winter and froze. Now his nephews are in prison. All around, all around.

In the early 2000s, V. Belov persistently drew attention to the experience of pain and deprivation with which he and V. Shukshin came to literature: “Shukshin’s mental pain was clearly of an all-Russian scale, we inherited this pain from our own mothers and dead fathers.” The feeling of novelty caused by the appearance of "villagers" in the culture of the 1960s, in my opinion, was partly determined by the fact that they concentrated on depicting a social (and emotional) of experience: the reader perceived this prose as a “truthful”, “unadorned” depiction of life, not only because of its “factual material”, but also because it channeled emotions and feelings that were repressed or devalued by Soviet culture.

“Pain” is generally the key concept in the dictionary of emotions of “village prose”. The characterization of one's own state as "pain" was a verbal sign of the subject's stay in a post-traumatic situation, when something valuable was lost. Awareness of deprivation and the irretrievability of what was lost, on the one hand, prompted the writers to speak out (“shout”), and on the other hand, required therapeutic intervention that reduced the degree of feelings. This partly explains the nature of the dual rhetorical strategy of some "villagers" who combined criticism, accusatory preaching pathos with elegiacism and sentimentalism. In other words, the literary representation of trauma in "village prose" did not fit into the framework of "mimetic" poetics. In addition to the historical narrative about events that were perceived as traumatic (the same Belov's "Eve"), there were other figurative and motivic signs of trauma, in particular, the central motives of pain and loss in the villagers' repertoire. They were a kind of emotional markers of the “traumatic”, and at the same time they expanded ideas about it, made it possible to focus, for example, on moralization about the consequences of traumatic processes or their politicization. Thus, the evidence of the “degradation of the people” that aroused the writers’ concern – drunkenness and the breakdown of families, the growing alienation, disorientation of yesterday’s rural residents – were perceived as a consequence of the violent destruction of the “organic” order of peasant life, caused by “objective reasons” (the initial “wrongness” of civilizational development), however, accelerated by the "evil will" of individual groups. It is not surprising that in their biography some “villagers” found post-traumatic symptoms: “I, with my drama of drinking, is the answer: was collectivization necessary? I AM THE EXPRESSION OF THE PEASANTRY,” wrote V. Shukshin, as if confirming the prolonged nature of the traumatic impact.

The biologo-organicist metaphor used by the "villagers" when constructing trauma and its consequences - the invasion of a foreign body (an optional motif), illness, fatigue, exhaustion, the overstretched collective organism - is, in fact, natural for the "conservative imagination", which prefers a specific , materialized, bodily abstractions and allegories. True, giving such a metaphor the status of a “symptom” of a possible crisis of meaning formation and the internal frustration associated with it deprives the constructivist approach of the desired conceptual “purity”, since it already “essentializes” trauma at the level of figurative language. It is unlikely that this contradiction can be completely overcome: we can consistently adhere to the point of view according to which trauma created, constructed, But being constructed it is based on the fact that the subject lives and experiences it as a psychological reality, which is transformed into the "material" and "basis" of further construction.

Probably, the circumstances of their socialization in the city and the accompanying conflicts with the metropolitan elite were perceived as, if not traumatic, then painful by the "villagers" (since we are moving to the level of subjective stories, it is difficult to say which aspects of those events were not spoken out, forced out) . In principle, these situations in terms of their experience also correlate with emotions of pain (and, I will add, indignation) - in this case, pain from the deprivation of the peasantry, whose representatives were forced to overcome additional obstacles to social self-realization. If the narratives associated with the metaphorically understood trauma of modernization and the more or less specific "historical" trauma of the Civil War, collectivization, military and post-war overvoltage, were addressed to the maximum a wide range potential recipients (in fact, their purpose was to “infect” as many readers as possible with a certain, emotionally biased version of history and historiosophy), then evidence of frustration from contacts with the city’s creative elite not only exposed fictitious equality in Soviet society (and in in this sense, they had a generally significant interest), but they worked as a tool creating a community (respectively, outlining the contours of the opposition community, "traditionalists" vs. "innovators", "conservatives" vs. "liberals", "periphery" vs. "capital" absorbed the immediate painful experience of deprivation and "deprivation").

The specificity of the situation of the “long 1970s”, in which the “villagers” worked with traumatic experience, was determined by restrictions on the articulation of a destructive event, raising questions about the nature of pain, the nature of the victim, and the need to comply with existing cultural and ideological conventions. “Reacting” and “working through” the trauma, if one resorts to psychoanalytic terminology, the discovery of new symbolic and interpretive resources for its discussion in the conditions of the “long 1970s” could hardly be effective: the trauma was spelled out partially, “haltingly” and then “ started talking”, that is, the narrative, the meaning-forming beginning of which was trauma, was initially deformed by the impossibility of its full-fledged articulation and discussion. Instead of a consistent (as far as it can be) elaboration of traumatic experience, ideally supported by changes in the institutional system of society and a correction of the political course, a description of a negative event adapted to existing conventions or, more often, its consequences, a kind of “references”, “signs » Deformations that have occurred in the past. Thus, the originality of the position of the "villagers" in the field of symbolic reconstruction of trauma can be deduced from the fact that the writers are in the official institutional arena (and, moreover, from the peculiarities of the intellectual tradition they continued - the Slavophile-soil).

The "village people" were looking for ways and means of pronouncing "pain" and at the same time made active attempts to "normalize" the accompanying experience. The latter was predetermined both by the need to process painful events and by the traditionalist attitude itself. As you know, the choice of symbolic models for describing and explaining a traumatic event depends on what is “available” (on the existing repertoire of interpretative schemes), and on the ability to create new language and means for pronouncing destructive experience (and this requires serious work, since trauma is poorly compatible with ready-made “narrative traditions and semantic conventions oriented towards the orderliness of experience and the coherence of its representation”). And here the need of the “villagers” to “tell the truth” came into conflict with the traditionalist orientation towards recognizable, tradition-tested discursive forms and “ordering” narratives. Traumatic events in texts with a historical retrospective, devoted, for example, to collectivization, were often included in the framework of the traditional intellectual discourse about the confrontation between the authorities and the people, however, with the “internal colonial” accents characteristic of the “subordinate” side, emphasizing that the peasantry for the authorities and intellectuals - a resource in an undertaking "social redevelopment", which is disposed of by methods of discredit and violence. "Traditionalization", by which in this case I mean an ideologically and emotionally charged reconstruction of the past, a retrospectively oriented search for "organic", rooted in the "soil" social structures, a value system that can create a sense of security and restore undermined by "abnormal" historical events cultural identity, became the main mechanism for getting rid of internal anxiety, anxiety, pain, and discomfort among the "village people".

A certain emotional attitude, supported not least by the consciousness of bitterness, guilt and deprivation that arose during the “break” with the past, was also implied by the concept of “memory”, which is central to “non-soil” prose. However, with all the love, sometimes exalted, for the old peasant way of life (suffice it to recall V. Belov’s “Lad”), the “villagers” were sober enough to understand the obvious: a return to the old cultural forms is hardly possible, and “preservation of traditions” implies at best agreement, even if partial, with the former ethical and behavioral norms. Belov, who at the end of the 1960s spoke rather cautiously about the prospects for resuscitation of the outgoing way of life, after a quarter of a century in the novel “Everything is ahead”, on the wave of alarmist sentiments, suggested returning to a village hut, where it is easier to cope with the environmental crisis, but in general, the resumption in modern conditions valuable social and cultural resources created by a traditional society (“work and family ethics, asceticism of public service, the potential for trust and solidarity, a religiously defined standard of a person”), apparently, seemed to the “villagers” both a desirable and difficult to achieve goal, and this made their traditionalism was an action, whose failure in the depths of their souls was realized even by its initiators.

Reactivity of Reactionaryness: More on “Neosoil” Traditionalism

Obviously, the traditionalism of the "villagers" was not something homogeneous. It can be scaled and analyzed in different ways - as a set of ideas and poetics, an ideological attitude and cultural strategy, position in the political field (conservatism) and type of thinking. There was an unreflexed, "unconscious" component in it, because traditionalist preferences, as the case of the "village people" confirms, in the social, aesthetic and other areas are to a certain extent predetermined by the habitual characteristics of the individual. The point here is not yet another stigmatization of the peasantry, with whom most of the "village people" were connected by origin, as an inert mass, weakly amenable to "modernization" and the assimilation of "advanced ideals". It's about something else: the aesthetic and axiological traditionalism of the "villagers" (commitment to realistic writing, a wary attitude towards any kind of innovation, the search for an "ideal hero" in the outgoing peasant world, an apology for social resources created by traditional society) was to a certain extent determined by the peculiarities of the socialization of writers, their position in the social and cultural space. In addition, this traditionalism is not equal to the "primitive", pre-reflexive orientation towards tradition, "the tendency to preserve old patterns, vegetative ways of life, recognized as universal and universal." On the contrary, it was reflective and, to a certain extent, aestheticized (in defending the value of tradition, the “village people” quite often argued about its beauty, which cannot be completely lost). He justified himself in an incessant polemic with views (“fashion fads”) that seemed to the traditionalists harmful, but at the same time unjustifiably dominant. In traditionalism, right-wing criticism of the “long 1970s” saw an antidote to social projecting and, in its opinion, dangerous civilizational innovations, that is, it was a completely rational ideological setting, the arguments for justifying which were easily found in Russian history. These arguments, ideally, should have influenced both those who make political decisions and public sentiment. We have the right to compare this kind of traditionalism with "ideological" traditionalism (E. Shils), usually "arising in a crisis of tradition and being a purposeful attempt to protect it", or "conservatism", in the terminology of Karl Mannheim.

But how reasonable is it to speak of the "villagers" as conservatives? It seems that there is no problem with this: in the “long 1970s”, opponents perceived “non-soccers” as the embodiment of conservative forces (not so much in the political, but in the “popular” sense of the word, when “conservative” goes through a comma with “retrograde”) , addressed to them accusations of planting the ideals of "patriarchy", inattention to the new, directly and indirectly pointed to this. In addition, to justify the use of the term "conservatism" when talking about "villagers" and "neo-pochvennichestvo" as such, it is possible with elementary nominalism ("A conservative is one who calls himself a conservative"). In relation to the “non-soccers” this principle will work, since they really unsystematically and sometimes pathetically called themselves conservatives. One of the autopsychological heroes of V. Belov’s novel “Everything is ahead” defiantly explained:

“Wherever you go, there are only revolutions everywhere. In Iran it is social, in Sweden it is sexual. In Italy... The boys from the red brigades demand millions of ransoms for the kidnapped. They cut off the ears of the hostages and send them to their relatives. They're also revolutionaries, damn it! No, I am not a revolutionary.

– Who are you? Liberal?

- I conservative. A notorious retrograde. And, imagine, I'm even a little proud of it.

In the 1990s, the “villagers” used this term for self-assessment even more willingly, pushing into the background the previous definitions, often built on the analogy with Russian intellectual movements of the 19th century (“Neo-Slavophilism”, “Neo-pochvennichestvo”). At the same time, the “ecological conservatism” of S. Zalygin, his own statement that “ New world” of the early 1990s - a “conservative” magazine, not in a hurry to join one or another political force, and not without despair, V. Rasputin’s “confession” of being a conservative in 2000 differ from each other not only in individual “author’s” meanings, but in reference to different political and cultural contexts. The conversation about the conservatism of the "villagers" requires constant clarification: what kind of conservatism do we mean, what part of the literary history does it turn out to be? why did the “villagers” consider it possible and necessary to resort specifically to the term “conservatism”? what exactly in their position did they consider “conservative”?

Political theory fixes the indefinability of "conservatism", especially if we seek to "derive" this concept from the institutions that at different times the conservatives thought to protect/preserve. Samuel Huntington's longstanding work emphasized that conservatism is situational—it is a response to painful situations arising in different national contexts and at different periods. social change. Its forms are variable, therefore, according to Huntington, conservatism is a positional ideology. There is an even older tradition, coming from K. Mannheim, of understanding conservatism as a “style of thinking”. The German sociologist sought to describe the circumstances of the emergence of conservatism as an "objective historical and structural configuration", linking it with the activities of romantics (German, primarily), who brought traditionalist principles into the sphere of reflection and aestheticization. Mannheim gives a list of the main structural features (markers) of conservative thinking: preference for concrete abstract, irrational rational, qualitative quantitative, whole part, organicism mechanism. These observations were subsequently partially challenged, largely concretized, theoretically substantiated, introduced into more transparent logical and classificatory structures, but on the whole they seriously influenced the cultural and political identification of conservatism. Later in scientific literature opinions were expressed in favor of differentiating traditionalism, conservatism and radical conservatism, the connection of conservatism with the tradition of religious orthodoxy and various particularist ideologies, primarily aimed at asserting ethnocultural uniqueness, was emphasized, the correlation between conservative beliefs and a certain “structure of feelings” was analyzed. From numerous theoretical and historical studies of conservatism, which describe its ideological contours, intellectual and figurative structure, historically specific forms, one can draw arguments of a systematizing nature, but to what extent are they applicable to writers who did not pretend to be political thinkers and, moreover, acting politicians? In my opinion, talking about "village prose" as one of the options for the artistic representation of conservative views is still justified. If a historian and a sociologist would explain their motivation by the fact that the texts created by the "villagers" are "statements of a group" that expressed conservative mindsets and beliefs, and therefore deserve study, then the philologist is more interested in the features of the articulation of anti-modernist values ​​in a literary text (that is, all the same metaphor traditionalism/conservatism, marking the social space and orienting in it), legitimation by writers of their own conservatism through philosophy and literature, in general - conservative imagination (conservative imagination). It must be admitted that in the "aesthetic conservatism" of the "villagers" politically intelligible connotations are rarely seen (perhaps, they are undeniable only in V. Soloukhin's "Last Step"). For these authors, conservatism was not a political philosophy, it was presented and realized to a greater extent as an “ontological” position formed by the rejection of the “historical” and “political” – a symbol of stability and gradualness, trust in the “self-development” of life, an expression of “counter-revolutionary” and positively colored "protection". Therefore, for example, in connection with the "villagers" it is possible to speak of traditionalism, which opposed itself to revolutionism, and of conservatism, the antipode of which was liberalism. The nature of the occasional use of these antitheses in this case is secondary, since the right-wingers of the “long 1970s” defined themselves, criticizing the revolutionaryism of the 1920s and considering modern liberals the main propagandists of the ideology of modernization changes, and therefore the heirs of the revolutionaries, and the heirs in the most literal sense - children and the grandchildren of those who made the revolution and established Soviet power (hence the sarcasm towards the “children of the 20th Congress” and “the children of the Arbat”).

In the now textbook work Conservative Thinking (1927), Mannheim put forward the thesis about the reactive nature of conservatism: as a certain trend”, in other words, conservatism takes shape and exists as a movement “against”. Reactivity, that is, self-justification through the negation of the views of the opponent, is sometimes considered as a constitutive principle of conservative thinking, whose historical modifications are also united by the concept of "reaction". The latter definition appears more often in works that explore the philosophical, semiotic or rhetorical aspects of conservatism. Thus, Jean Starobinsky traces the migration of the “action-reaction” pair in Western European intellectual history and demonstrates how, in the course of rethinking the revolutionary experience, “reaction” became the designation of political movements guided by the idea of ​​restoring order. The author notes that psychological "reactivity" can be a "shadow" of political "reaction": the connection between the reaction as such and the "delayed", "secondary" reaction - ressentiment seems to him very distinct, however, as well as the parallels between the immediate secondary type of reaction, on the one hand, and Freud's ideas of "reaction" and "neurotic repression" on the other. Albert Hirschman observes the crystallization in the ideological discussions of the 19th and 20th centuries of the three basic theses of the "rhetoric of reaction" - about perversion, futility and danger. He believes that each thesis was another ideological counterattack against liberal intellectual and political innovations (from the idea of ​​universal equality to the idea of ​​a "welfare state"). Replacing the concept of “reaction” with particular political definitions (like “conservative revolution”) or the extremely broad term “antimodernism” seems unjustified to Igor Smirnov: the proposed alternatives remove the distinction between action and reaction and obscure the “dialectical” nature of the reaction, which is essentially the “negation of negation”. ". Smirnov, on the other hand, derives the cultural specificity of the reaction from the principle of retaliatory action: it can be restoration or utopian, but it always tries to "exhaust ... the circumstances" that caused it; it presupposes protection, that is, it operates from an “objective state”, which becomes the “absolute prerequisite for worldview” and contributes to the “naturalization” of proclaimed truths and protected institutions; it tends to reject the "intellectual initiative" and is communicatively oriented towards appealing to the charismatic authority of the leader and state institutions, on the one hand, and to the people, on the other.

The remark about the reactive nature of conservative thought, in my opinion, is potentially heuristic in relation to the “villagers” and “neo-soilism” in general, since it allows, firstly, to consider their collective conservative statement as emotionally colored reaction to "extraordinary" historical events, secondly, to establish a connection between various aspects of the structural (related to the position in the field of literature) and the actual artistic position of writers - we are talking about a combination of conformist and nonconformist strategies, opposition within the designated boundaries, a significant role in the plot organization of the basic opposition "one's own - alien”, a special rhetoric of journalistic articles, as if calculated on a constant dispute with an implied opponent. The problem, of course, is not to find a key typological principle that would explain the specifics of “non-soil” constructions by the structural features of the reactionary discourse and help to include the “village people” in the next classification grid, but with supposedly more theoretical foundations than before. On the contrary, a specific case (the case of "villagers") is more interesting and, in a sense, "more dramatic" than the invariant, and its consideration will be proposed in the paper. This will require contextualization and answering the questions: when and why does reactivity occur? is it recognized as a starting point in constructing one's own position? to what extent is it determined by the alignment of forces in the cultural and political fields? how much does it depend on individual biographical circumstances? Perhaps, reflecting on these questions, we will come closer to a more voluminous reconstruction of the content of the conservative discourse of “village prose” and an understanding of what cultural situations triggered it, how it worked, how it was emotionally mediated. In general, we have a chance to return the subjective dimension of the history of "village prose" and its authors, who too often were either taken into the space of archetypes and "spiritual bonds", or figured as a caricature character symbolizing the "squalor" of Soviet culture.

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The following excerpt from the book Village Writers: Literature and Conservative Ideology of the 1970s (Anna Razuvalova, 2015) provided by our book partner -

Kochergin's stories are straightforward, the lines of his prose are slender, but the writer's life path, on the contrary, is very tortuous. He was born and studied in the capital, then went to Siberia, where he wrote his "Altai stories", which received several literary awards at once - including the Moscow Government Prize.

- The pride of Soviet literature: Vasily Belov, Valentin Rasputin, Viktor Astafiev...Which of the so-called village writers is closer to you?

I think that Astafiev - perhaps precisely because he was somewhat wider than his fellow writers.

At the age of 15-16, I literally read out his “Tsar-Fish” and it was because of this book that I began to dream of getting to the Yenisei someday.

- As children, we are all romantics. But it seems that the village writers had a very clear adult goal - to save the village from dying. And, alas, they did not succeed ...

And it seems to me that they already understood that it is impossible to save anything. Their literature was farewell literature and an attempt to live this farewell: just look at the titles - "Farewell to Matera", "Last bow", "Last suffering". After all, this happens very often in Russia: something grandiose happens that is comprehended not at the state level, but at the literary level.

- There is a feeling that this reflection was rather idealistic.

Belov, Rasputin, Astafiev, Shukshin - they were all idealists. That is why, thanks to them, the myth of the village arose as a powerful ideal world, on which one can rely and in which it would be good to return in order to fall back to the roots. Although even at that time there was not much to fall asleep there.

- Why was this world so interesting to urban readers?

Because he was completely unfamiliar to them - just like, say, the worlds of the Strugatsky brothers or Alexander Dumas. The unknown is always intriguing.

However, the world of Dumas and the Strugatskys is of interest to many generations, while the world of villagers today is of little interest to anyone.

It's out of fashion, yes. But the village writers themselves were partly to blame here, during perestroika, they compromised their world with almost Black Hundred statements. And, besides, they all know what is happening to the village.

- Do you think she is dying?

Yes. Although wonderful people still live in the village. In the village in the Ryazan region where I built a house, there is a farmer Vitya Nazarov.

A strong family, wonderful children and grandchildren who are already helping him. He plows gardens throughout the village, does not refuse to help in anything, I do not know when he manages to sleep. His income is low, but out of principle he does not treat his fields with pesticides: “I don’t want to poison, this is our land.” Much of the countryside rests on such stubborn people.

Village prose long ago, alas, remained in history. She is not. There are authors who write about the village - Boris Ekimov, Roman Senchin, Dmitry Novikov from Petrozavodsk, who creates wonderful "northern" prose. But these are all works of a completely different genre. I myself am a person who was born in the center of Moscow, a villager with a very big stretch.

- Well, who are you?

I am a person who settled in a village in the place where the Finno-Ugric peoples once lived, and before that, representatives of some unexplored culture of the Middle Oka burial grounds.

I write prose, I teach my son, I try to travel around the country more if I have time and opportunity. What else? I worked as a janitor, cleaner, postman, watchman. At one time he went to Siberia, where he was a forester in the reserve.

- For what?

My parents wanted me to follow in their footsteps and become a chemical engineer, and I tried to find my way. And I'm not the only one! In 1990, when I sent letters to all the reserves of the Union with a request for employment, there were no vacancies anywhere. Only from Gorny Altai I received an answer that there is a rate. All states were filled with romantics from large cities. In the taiga huts lay collections of French poetry, literary "thick" magazines...

Apparently, there is not only an influx to the cities, but also a reverse movement. Look at the outstanding representative - the wonderful writer Mikhail Tarkovsky, the nephew of Andrei Tarkovsky, has been living for more than thirty years in the village of Bakhta on the Yenisei and works as a hunter-trader.

- Well, how did it seem to you, a Muscovite, there, in Siberia?

There was taiga romance, new beautiful spaces. Life in the "bear corner", on the cordon, where there is no electricity, where all products are delivered on pack horses. Although now I think that the most interesting thing was not this at all, but the opportunity to get in touch with a completely different life, with a different culture, to look at Moscow from a different point of view.

- Did you learn a lot there?

Still would! And milk the cows, and bake bread - food was imported to us only twice a year. And one more thing - to write long letters to his wife, thanks to which he eventually became a writer.

DIRECT SPEECH

Igor Shaitanov, critic, literary secretary of the Russian Booker Prize:

If in the 1960s and 1970s the works of villagers were published in huge circulation and caused great resonance, today they are quietly published in magazines such as Our Contemporary. Their authors are not given prizes. But, interestingly, at the same time, writers who have nothing to do with villagers, but simply write about the village - for example, Andrei Dmitriev with his novel "The Peasant and the Teenager" or Roman Senchin with "The Flood Zone" - receive these awards. Why? It's simple: in Soviet times, village literature was prose of the highest level.

And today... Well, you understand.

REFERENCE

Ilya Kochergin was born in Moscow on May 30, 1970. Studied at MKhTI im. Mendeleev, at the Geological Faculty of Moscow State University. For four years he worked as a forester in the Altai Reserve. After returning to Moscow, he enters the Literary Institute. A. M. Gorky.

Winner of the Prize of the Government of Moscow in the field of literature for "Altai stories".