Peter Weil, Alexander Genis Native speech. Literature lessons

Peter Weil, Alexander Genis

Native speech. Literature lessons

* * *

Over the years, I realized that humor for Weil and Genis is not a goal, but a means, and moreover, a tool for understanding life: if you study a phenomenon, then find what is funny in it, and the phenomenon will be revealed in its entirety...

Sergey Dovlatov

“Native Speech” by Weil and Genis is a renewal of speech, encouraging the reader to re-read all school literature.

Andrey Sinyavsky

...books familiar from childhood over the years become only signs of books, standards for other books. And they are taken from the shelf as rarely as the Parisian meter standard.

P. Weil, A. Genis

Andrey Sinyavsky

Fun craft

Someone decided that science must be boring. Probably to make her more respected. Boring means a solid, reputable enterprise. You can invest capital. Soon there will be no space left on earth among the serious garbage heaps raised to the sky.

But once upon a time science itself was considered a good art and everything in the world was interesting. Mermaids flew. Angels splashed. Chemistry was called alchemy. Astronomy - astrology. Psychology - palmistry. The story was inspired by the muse from Apollo's round dance and contained an adventurous romance.

And now what? Reproduction of reproduction? The last refuge is philology. It would seem: love for words. And in general, love. Free air. Nothing forced. Lots of ideas and fantasies. So here it is: science. They added numbers (0.1; 0.2; 0.3, etc.), stuck in footnotes, provided, for the sake of science, an apparatus of incomprehensible abstractions through which one cannot get through (“vermiculite”, “grubber”, “loxodrome”, “parabiosis”, “ultrarapid”), rewrote all this in obviously indigestible language - and here you have, instead of poetry, another sawmill for the production of countless books.

Already at the beginning of the twentieth century, idle second-hand book dealers thought: “Sometimes you wonder - does humanity really have enough brains for all the books? There are as many brains as there are books!” “Nothing,” our cheerful contemporaries object to them, “soon computers will be the only ones to read and produce books. And people will have to take the products to warehouses and landfills!”

Against this industrial background, in the form of opposition, in refutation of the gloomy utopia, it seems to me that the book by Peter Weil and Alexander Genis, “Native Speech,” arose. The name sounds archaic. Almost village-like. Smells like childhood. Hay. Rural school. It is fun and entertaining to read, just like a child should. Not a textbook, but an invitation to reading, to divertissement. It is not proposed to glorify the famous Russian classics, but to look into it at least with one eye and then fall in love with it. The concerns of “Native Speech” are of an ecological nature and are aimed at saving the book, at improving the very nature of reading. The main task is formulated as follows: “They studied the book and - as often happens in such cases - practically stopped reading.” Pedagogy for adults, who, by the way, are highly read and educated.

“Native speech”, babbling like a stream, is accompanied by unobtrusive, unburdensome learning. She suggests that reading is co-creation. Everyone has their own. It has a lot of permissions. Freedom of interpretation. Even if our authors have ate the dog in fine literature and give out completely original imperative decisions at every step, our job, they inspire, is not to obey, but to pick up any idea on the fly and continue, sometimes, perhaps, in the other direction. Russian literature is revealed here in the image of a sea expanse, where each writer is his own captain, where sails and ropes are stretched from Karamzin’s “Poor Liza” to our poor “villages,” from the poem “Moscow - Cockerels” to “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow.”

Reading this book, we see that eternal and, indeed, unshakable values do not stand still, pinned up like exhibits under scientific rubrics. They move in the literary series and in the reader’s consciousness and, it happens, are part of later problematic developments. Where they will sail, how they will turn tomorrow, no one knows. The unpredictability of art is its main strength. This is not a learning process, not progress.

“Native Speech” by Weil and Genis is a renewal of speech that encourages the reader, no matter how smart he is, to re-read all school literature. This technique, known since ancient times, is called defamiliarization.

To use it, you don’t need much, just one effort: to look at reality and at works of art with an unbiased look. As if you were reading them for the first time. And you will see: behind every classic beats a living, newly discovered thought. I want to play it.

For Russia, literature is a starting point, a symbol of faith, an ideological and moral foundation. You can interpret history, politics, religion, national character in any way you like, but as soon as you say “Pushkin,” the ardent antagonists happily and unanimously nod their heads.

Of course, only literature that is recognized as classical is suitable for such mutual understanding. Classics is a universal language based on absolute values.

Russian literature of the golden 19th century became an indivisible unity, a kind of typological community, before which the differences between individual writers receded. Hence the eternal temptation to find a dominant feature that distinguishes Russian literature from any others - the intensity of spiritual quest, or love of the people, or religiosity, or chastity.

However, with the same - if not greater - success one could talk not about the uniqueness of Russian literature, but about the uniqueness of the Russian reader, who is inclined to see the most sacred national property in his favorite books. To offend a classic is the same as insulting one’s homeland.

Naturally, this attitude develops from an early age. The main instrument for the sacralization of the classics is the school. Literature lessons played a huge role in the formation of Russian public consciousness. First of all, because the books opposed the educational claims of the state. At all times, literature, no matter how hard it was fought, has revealed its internal inconsistency. It was impossible not to notice that Pierre Bezukhov and Pavel Korchagin are heroes of different novels. Generations of those who managed to maintain skepticism and irony in a society poorly suited for this grew up on this contradiction.

However, over the years, books familiar from childhood become only signs of books, standards for other books. And they are taken from the shelf as rarely as the Parisian meter standard.

Anyone who decides to do such an act - re-read the classics without prejudice - faces not only old authors, but also himself. Reading the main books of Russian literature is like revising your biography. Life experience accumulated along with reading and thanks to it. The date when Dostoevsky was first revealed is no less important than family anniversaries. We grow with books - they grow in us. And someday the time comes to rebel against the attitude towards the classics invested in childhood. Apparently this is inevitable. Andrei Bitov once admitted: “I spent more than half of my creativity struggling with the school literature course.”

We conceived this book not so much to refute the school tradition, but to test - and not even it, but ourselves in it. All chapters of “Native Speech” strictly correspond to the regular high school curriculum. Of course, we do not hope to say anything essentially new about a subject that has occupied the best minds in Russia. We just decided to talk about the most stormy and intimate events of our lives - Russian books.

Peter Weil, Alexander Genis New York, 1989

The legacy of “Poor Lisa”

Karamzin

There is an affectation in the very name Karamzin. It was not for nothing that Dostoevsky distorted this surname in order to ridicule Turgenev in “The Possessed.” It's so similar it's not even funny. Until recently, before the boom created by the revival of his History began in Russia, Karamzin was considered just a slight shadow of Pushkin. Until recently, Karamzin seemed elegant and frivolous, like the gentleman from the paintings of Boucher and Fragonard, later resurrected by the artists of the World of Art.

And all because one thing is known about Karamzin: he invented sentimentalism. This, like all superficial judgments, is true, at least in part. To read Karamzin today, one must stock up on aesthetic cynicism, allowing one to enjoy the old-fashioned simplicity of the text.

Nevertheless, one of his stories, “Poor Liza,” fortunately it is only seventeen pages and all about love, still lives in the minds of the modern reader.

Poor peasant girl Lisa meets the young nobleman Erast. Tired of the windy light, he falls in love with a spontaneous, innocent girl with the love of his brother. But soon platonic love turns into sensual love. Lisa consistently loses spontaneity, innocence and Erast himself - he goes to war. “No, he really was in the army; but instead of fighting the enemy, he played cards and lost almost all his property.” To improve matters, Erast marries an elderly rich widow. Having learned about this, Lisa drowns herself in the pond.

Most of all it looks like a ballet libretto. Something like “Giselle”. Karamzin, use...

Pyotr Weil and Alexander Genis in their book “The 60s. The World of Soviet Man" seek to reconstruct the image of Soviet man during the Thaw, highlighting a kind of "culture category" of the "sixties", demonstrating the evolution of these views, flourishing and gradual extinction.

Each chapter examines one of the cultural categories - together they shaped the world of Soviet people in the 60s. The lifestyle and worldview of the people of this generation had a serious influence on the further history of the Soviet Union - this was all the more obvious to Weil and Genis in the late 80s, when perestroika and glasnost again returned to society many of the ideals of the sixties.

The 60s, in the understanding of Weil and Genis, are, first of all, a time utopias. This idea is transformed in various ways in the key events and phenomena of the era, but its deep essence remains unchanged. “Communism, being fundamentally a literary utopia, was realized not in deeds, but in words.” The highest manifestation of communism in this understanding was, in fact, it managed to proclaim only freedom of speech. But exactly words, spoken or printed, lay at the heart of the historical period under consideration. Weil and Genis call Khrushchev’s statement the best illustration of this: “Needs have increased, I would even say that it is not the needs that have increased, but the opportunities to talk about needs have increased.” In relation to these words lies one of the central messages of the book, openly expressed only in the epilogue - it is wrong to imagine the 60s in the Soviet Union as fruitless due to the fact that they did not actively change anything in the political system - the essence of the changes was in the expressed thoughts, ideas that experienced rise and fall during this period - but by no means disappeared without a trace.

The main poet of the era, N.S. Khrushchev, who actually proclaimed 1961 “20 years before the new communist era,” thereby directly influenced the creation of a new period in the history of Soviet society, a new worldview of Soviet people. In general, this worldview can be called more optimistic - there is space for some discussion in society, the image of Stalin the leader will be thrown off the pedestal (which is extremely important, if only because it destroys this component of the eternal Soviet “doublethink”). New ideals correspond to new views - first of all, space, which proclaimed the limitless possibilities of man (at the same time destroying religiosity), a new-old image of the revolution (the Cuban Revolution, not only as an intrinsic value, but also as an opportunity to refresh the memory of 1917).

Soviet people, formed under the influence of these events, find themselves endowed with slightly different cultural guidelines compared to previous decades. The heroes of the 60s are young scientists (such, for example, as in Romm’s film “9 Days of One Year”), athletes (but, of course, diversified, cultured people), geologists going to Siberia with a guitar and a volume of Lorca. All of them are owners of this new daring spirit, fervent optimism, romantically anti-philistine - people who believe in the possibility harmonious development(which is manifested both in the “versatility” of the person himself and in the belief in the possibility of “peaceful coexistence” with the West). The spirit of patriotism is still quite strong in these people, sanctified by the memory of the very recent “Great Patriotic War,” demonstrating the general “correctness” of the chosen communist course. For those of them who have already chosen the path of “dissent,” faith in a difficult dialogue with the authorities on its field (“observe your Constitution!”) still remains, as a possible counterbalance to Stalin’s totalitarianism.

The emerging world had a “carnival” character (precisely in the spirit of Bakhtin’s work, “rehabilitated” by that time): here is typical Soviet “doublethink”, pride in the country - and poorly hidden admiration for America, Solzhenitsyn’s publications - etc. These contradictions look very indicative in the activities of Khrushchev himself: “The dramatic conflict of the 60s in general and Khrushchev himself in particular was the gap between the style of the time and the stagnation of the mechanisms of social, political, economic, cultural life.” According to Weil and Genis, Khrushchev to some extent struggled with himself - he imposed restrictions on himself that prevented him from moving in the direction that he himself seemed to choose. In art, an illustration of this milestone was the destruction of the exhibition in the Manege - the danger of which lay precisely in apoliticality, adherence to new abstract forms of art (and therefore “unlike life,” and this “similarity” was so important for the 60s). At an even more general level, the authors note the dialogical nature of the “black and white” views of the world among the “sixties”: laughter-tears, joy-sorrow, “ours” - “not ours”. Abroad, the “myth of the afterlife” is becoming increasingly known, but that does not make the colors of propaganda any less gloomy. “We” are most definitely not like “they.” “The boundary between “ours” and “not ours” is not a state one, but a species one, like between animals and minerals.”

The polemic thus at times takes on an absurd character, from the point of view of people of a later time. The debate “what kind of person is Shukhov?” seems naive. or discussions about the personal qualities of Matryona from “Matryona’s Dvor” - behind the literary hero they always see a real person, they argue about him, his position is discussed. It is absolutely no coincidence that Khrushchev once called Solzhenitsyn “Ivan Denisovich” (the Aesopian language of samizdat also calls him “Isaich”). “The 60s did not have a literary look, because the 60s themselves were a literary work: you can’t see yourself sleeping that way.”

However, this young, healthy aspiration for “harmony” (consisting of many directions, including the dissident one) greatly changed its vector of development by the end of the 60s. “Home” replaces “road”, “Christianity” (more precisely, the aspiration to religiosity) “science”, “truth” - “truth”, “Russian” - “Soviet”, “past” - “future”. A turn to imperial values is taking place in the country and society - friendship with Cuba is losing inspiration, sports from “Faster! Higher! Stronger!" is again perceived as a weapon of world politics and must “punish”, “defeat”, “demonstrate superiority”. At the same time, there is a certain split in the “human rights” movement, which has realized the impossibility of further struggle according to the old rules. The dissident environment is somewhat closed around “cult” figures, and in some ways even takes on an unpleasant partisan character (like compiling “lists of those who have not signed an appeal to the authorities”).

The final collapse of the ideology of the 60s was the entry of troops into Czechoslovakia in August 1968. For the communist movement, he played an ambiguous role: on the one hand, he demonstrated the cruelty and totalitarian character of its leader, the USSR, on the other, he forever preserved the ideal of “socialism with a human face,” which meant the possibility of building a communist utopia in the future. Within the Soviet Union, it proved destructive - dividing the state and the intelligentsia - and even society itself, in a broader sense. Every citizen was faced with a choice: either recognize the criminal nature of the Soviet system, or close his eyes, remain silent - and become an “accomplice” to the lawlessness that had taken place. Utopia was lost - faith in the Soviet communist path, if not completely disappeared, was again pushed back into some uncertain future.

“Reading the main books of Russian literature is like revising your biography again. Life experience accumulated along with reading and thanks to it... We grow together with books - they grow in us. And someday the time comes to rebel against what was invested in childhood... attitude towards the classics “- wrote Peter Weil and Alexander Genis in the preface to the very first edition of their “Native Speech” twenty years ago. Two journalists and writers who emigrated from the USSR created a book in a foreign land, which soon became a real, albeit slightly humorous, monument to the Soviet school literature textbook. We have not yet forgotten how successfully these textbooks forever discouraged schoolchildren from any taste for reading, instilling in them a persistent aversion to Russian classics. The authors of “Native Speech” tried to reawaken the unfortunate children (and their parents) interest in Russian fine literature. It looks like the attempt was a complete success. The witty and fascinating “anti-textbook” by Weil and Genis has been helping graduates and applicants successfully pass exams in Russian literature for many years.

Peter Weil, Alexander Genis
Native speech. Fine Literature Lessons

Andrey Sinyavsky. FUN CRAFT

But once upon a time science itself was considered a good art and everything in the world was interesting. Mermaids flew. Angels splashed. Chemistry was called alchemy. Astronomy - astrology. Psychology - palmistry. The story was inspired by the Muse from Apollo's round dance and contained an adventurous romance.

And now what? Reproduction of reproduction?

The last refuge is philology. It would seem: love for words. And in general, love. Free air. Nothing forced. Lots of ideas and fantasies. That's how science works here. They added numbers (0.1; 0.2; 0.3, etc.), stuck in footnotes, provided, for the sake of science, an apparatus of incomprehensible abstractions through which one cannot get through (“vermeculite”, “grubber”, “loxodrome”, “parabiosis”, “ultrarapid”), rewrote all this in obviously indigestible language - and here you have, instead of poetry, another sawmill for the production of countless books.

Already at the beginning of the century, idle second-hand book dealers thought: “Sometimes you wonder - does humanity really have enough brains for all the books? There are not as many brains as there are books!” “It’s okay,” our cheerful contemporaries object to them, “soon computers will be the only ones reading and producing books. And people will have to transport the products to warehouses and landfills!”

“Native speech”, babbling like a stream, is accompanied by unobtrusive, unburdensome learning. She suggests that reading is co-creation. Everyone has their own. It has a lot of permissions. Freedom of interpretation. Even if our authors have ate the dog in fine literature and give out completely original imperative decisions at every step, our job, they inspire, is not to obey, but to pick up any idea on the fly and continue, sometimes, perhaps, in the other direction. Russian literature is revealed here in the image of a sea expanse, where each writer is his own captain, where sails and ropes are stretched from Karamzin's "Poor Liza" to our poor "villages", from the story "Moscow - Petushki" to "Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow."

“Native Speech” by Weil and Genis is a renewal of speech that encourages the reader, even if he is smart, to re-read all school literature. This technique, known since ancient times, is called defamiliarization.

FROM THE AUTHORS

Of course, only literature that is recognized as classical is suitable for such mutual understanding. Classics is a universal language based on absolute values.

Naturally, this attitude develops from an early age. The main instrument for the sacralization of the classics is the school. Literature lessons played a huge role in the formation of Russian public consciousness, primarily because books resisted the educational claims of the state. At all times, literature, no matter how hard it was fought, has revealed its internal inconsistency. It was impossible not to notice that Pierre Bezukhov and Pavel Korchagin are heroes of different novels. Generations of those who managed to maintain skepticism and irony in a society poorly suited for this grew up on this contradiction.

However, the dialectics of life leads to the fact that the admiration for the classics, firmly learned at school, prevents us from seeing living literature in it. Books familiar from childhood become signs of books, standards for other books. They are taken off the shelf as rarely as the Parisian meter standard.

We grow with books - they grow in us. And someday the time comes to rebel against the attitude towards the classics invested in childhood. (Apparently, this is inevitable. Andrei Bitov once admitted: “I spent more than half of my creativity struggling with the school literature course.”)

Native speech. Literature lessons Alexander Genis, Peter Weil

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Title: Native Speech. Literature lessons

About the book “Native Speech. Lessons in Fine Literature" Alexander Genis, Peter Weil

“Reading the main books of Russian literature is like revising your biography. Life experience accumulated along with reading and thanks to it... We grow with books - they grow in us. And someday the time comes to rebel against the attitude towards the classics invested in childhood,” wrote Peter Weil and Alexander Genis in the preface to the very first edition of their “Native Speech”.

The authors, who emigrated from the USSR, created a book in a foreign land, which soon became a real, albeit slightly humorous, monument to the Soviet school literature textbook. We have not yet forgotten how successfully these textbooks forever discouraged schoolchildren from any taste for reading, instilling in them a persistent aversion to Russian classics. The authors of “Native Speech” tried to reawaken the unfortunate children (and their parents) interest in Russian fine literature. It looks like the attempt was a complete success. Weil and Genis’s witty and fascinating “anti-textbook” has been helping graduates and applicants pass exams in Russian literature for many years.

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Quotes from the book “Native Speech. Lessons in Fine Literature" Alexander Genis, Peter Weil

“They knew they were rebelling, but they couldn’t help but kneel.”

Alexander Genis

NATIVE SPEECH. FINE LITERATURE LESSONS.

CELEBRATION OF THE UNDERGROUND.

Fonvizin

The case of "Undergrowth" is special. Comedy is studied at school so early that by the final exams nothing remains in your head except the famous phrase: “I don’t want to study, I want to get married.” This maxim can hardly be felt by sixth-graders who have not reached puberty: the ability to appreciate the deep connection between spiritual (“learn”) and physiological (“get married”) emotions is important.

Even the word “minor” itself is not perceived as intended by the author of the comedy. In the time of Fonvizin, this was a completely definite concept: this was the name given to nobles who had not received proper education, and who were therefore forbidden to enter the service and marry. So the underage could be more than twenty years old. True, in the Fonvizin case, Mitrofan Prostakov is sixteen.

With all this, it is quite fair that with the advent of Fonvizin’s Mitrofanushka, the term “minor” acquired a new meaning - a dunce, a dumbass, a teenager with limited vicious inclinations.

The myth of the image is more important than the truth of life. The subtle, spiritual lyricist Fet was a efficient owner and during his 17 years as a landowner he did not write even half a dozen poems. But we, thank God, have “Whispers, timid breathing, trills of a nightingale...” - and this is the end of the poet’s image, which is only fair, even if it is not true.

The terminological “minor” has forever, thanks to Mitrofanushka and his creator, turned into a common condemnatory word from school teachers, a groan from parents, and a curse.

Nothing can be done about it. Although there is a simple way - read the play.

Its plot is simple. In the family of provincial landowners the Prostakovs, their distant relative lives - Sophia, who remained an orphan. Mrs. Prostakova’s brother, Taras Skotinin, and the Prostakovs’ son, Mitrofan, have marriage plans for Sophia. At a critical moment for the girl, when she is desperately divided by her uncle and nephew, another uncle appears - Starodum. He becomes convinced of the evil nature of the Prostakov family with the help of the progressive official Pravdin. Sophia comes to her senses and marries the man she loves - officer Milon. The Prostakovs' estate is taken into state custody for cruel treatment of serfs. Mitrofan is sent to military service.

Everything ends well, then. The enlightening happy ending is overshadowed by only one, but very significant circumstance: Mitrofanushka and his parents, disgraced and humiliated in the finale, are the only bright spot in the play.

Lively, full-blooded people, carrying natural emotions and common sense, the Prostakovs are among the darkness of hypocrisy, hypocrisy, and officialdom.

The forces gathered around Starodum are gloomy and inert.

Fonvizin is usually attributed to the tradition of classicism. This is true, and this is evidenced by even the most superficial, noticeable details at first glance: for example, the names of the characters. Milon is handsome, Pravdin is a sincere person, Skotinin is understandable. However, upon closer examination, we will be convinced that Fonvizin is a classicist only when he deals with so-called positive characters. Here they are current ideas, embodied treatises on moral topics.

But negative heroes do not fit into any classicism, despite their “speaking” names.

Fonvizin did his best to depict the triumph of reason, which had comprehended the ideal pattern of the universe.

As always and at all times, the organizing mind confidently relied on a beneficial organized force: punitive measures by Starodum’s team were taken - Mitrofan was exiled as a soldier, guardianship was taken over his parents. But when, and what kind of justice, was terror established with the noblest intentions served?

Ultimately, true beingness, individual characters and the very living diversity of life turned out to be stronger. It was the negative heroes of "The Minor" who became part of Russian proverbs and acquired archetypal qualities - that is, they won, if we take into account the balance of power over the long course of Russian culture.

But this is precisely why we should pay attention to the positive heroes who won the victory in the course of the plot, but passed by as indistinct shadows in our literature.

Their language is deathly terrible. In some places, their monologues are reminiscent of Kafka’s most sophisticated texts in horror. Here is Pravdin’s speech: “I have orders to travel around this district; and, moreover, out of my own deed of heart, I do not allow myself to notice those malicious ignoramuses who, having complete power over their people, use it inhumanly for evil.”

The language of the positive characters of "The Minor" reveals the ideological value of the play much better than its deliberately moralizing attitudes. Ultimately, it is clear that only such people can impose troops and a curfew: “I did not know how to guard against the first movements of my irritated curiosity. Irritation did not allow me to judge that a truly inquisitive person is jealous of deeds, and not of ranks; that ranks are often are begged for, but true respect must be earned; that it is much more honorable to be treated without guilt than to be rewarded without merit.”

It is easiest to attribute this entire linguistic panopticon to the era - after all, the 18th century. But nothing comes of it, because in the same play the negative characters living next to the positive ones take the floor. And what modern music the Prostakov family’s replicas sound like! Their language is alive and fresh, it is not hampered by the two centuries that separate us from the Minor. Taras Skotinin, boasting about the merits of his late uncle, expresses himself as Shukshin’s heroes could speak: “Riding on a greyhound pacer, he ran drunkenly into the stone gate. The man was tall, the gate was low, he forgot to bend down. How could he hit his forehead against the lintel... I would like to know if there is a learned forehead in the world that would not fall apart from such a blow; and my uncle, eternal memory to him, having sobered up, only asked if the gate was intact?

Both the positive and negative heroes of "The Minor" appear most clearly and expressively in the discussion of problems of education and upbringing. This is understandable: an active figure in the Enlightenment, Fonvizin, as was customary then, paid a lot of attention to these issues. And - again a conflict.

In the play, the dried-up scholasticism of the retired soldier Tsifirkin and the seminarian Kuteikin collide with the common sense of the Prostakovs. A remarkable passage is when Mitrofan is given a problem: how much money would each person have if he and two comrades found three hundred rubles? The preaching of justice and morality, which the author puts into this episode with all his causticism, is negated by Mrs. Prostakova’s powerful instinct of common sense. It’s hard not to detect an ugly but natural logic in her simple-minded energetic protest: “He’s lying, my dear friend! He found the money, don’t share it with anyone. Take it all for yourself, Mitrofanushka. Don’t learn this stupid science.”

Strictly speaking, the immature doesn’t even think about studying stupid science. This dense young man - unlike Starodum and his entourage - has his own ideas about everything, clumsy, unarticulated, but not borrowed or rote. Many generations of schoolchildren learn how ridiculous, stupid and absurd Mitrofan is in mathematics class. This ferocious stereotype makes it difficult to understand that the parody turned out - probably against the wishes of the author - not on ignorance, but on science, on all these rules of phonetics, morphology and syntax.

Pravdin. Door, for example, which name: a noun or an adjective?
Mitrofan. A door, which is a door?
Pravdin. Which door! This one.
Mitrofan. This? Adjective.
Pravdin. Why? Mitrofan. Because it is attached to its place. Here at the closet of the pole for a week the door has not yet been hung: so for now that is a noun."

For two hundred years they have been laughing at his immature stupidity, as if not noticing that he is not only witty and accurate, but also in his deep insight into the essence of things, in the true individualization of everything that exists, in the spiritualization of the inanimate surrounding world - in a certain sense, the forerunner of Andrei Platonov . And as for the method of expressing words, he is one of the founders of a whole stylistic movement of modern prose: Maramzin can write “the mind of the head” or Dovlatov - “the toes and ears of the head are frozen.”

The simple and clear truths of the negative Prostakovs, condemned by the school, shine against the gray cloth background of the capital exercises of the positive characters. Even about such a delicate matter as love, these rude, uneducated people are able to speak more expressively and brightly.

Handsome Milon gets confused in spiritual confessions, as if in a poorly learned lesson: “Noble soul!.. No... I can no longer hide my heartfelt feeling... No. Your virtue extracts by force the whole mystery of my soul. Once it is happy, it depends on you to make it happy.” Here the confusion is not so much from excitement as from forgetfulness: Milon read something like this in the breaks between drill classes - something from Fenelon, from the moralistic treatise “On the Education of Girls.”

Mrs. Prostakova has not read any books at all, and her emotion is sound and pure: “Listen! Go for whoever you want, as long as the person is worth her. Yes, my father, so. Here, just don’t let suitors through. If you have it in your eyes a nobleman, a young fellow... Who has wealth, albeit small..."

The whole historical and literary fault of the Prostakovs is that they do not fit into the ideology of Starodum. It’s not that they have any ideology of their own - God forbid. One cannot believe in their feudal cruelty: the plot device seems far-fetched to make the ending more convincing, and it even seems that Fonvizin is convincing himself first of all. Prostakovs are not evil

they are too spontaneous anarchists, shameless clowns, clowns for that. They simply live and, if possible, want to live as they want. Ultimately, the conflict between the Prostakovs, on the one hand, and Starodum and Pravdin, on the other, is a contradiction between ideology and individuality. Between authoritarian and free consciousness.

In a natural search for today's analogies for the modern reader, the rhetorical wisdom of Starodum strangely meets with the didactic pathos of Solzhenitsyn. There are many similarities: from hopes for Siberia (“for the land where money is obtained without exchanging it for conscience” - Starodum, “Our hope and our septic tank” - Solzhenitsyn) to a passion for proverbs and sayings. “From birth his tongue did not say yes, when his soul felt no,” Pravdin says about Starodum what, two centuries later, would be expressed in the coined formula “do not live by a lie.” The common denominator is a wary, suspicious attitude towards the West: Starodum’s theses could have been included in the Harvard speech without violating its ideological and stylistic integrity.

Starodum’s remarkable arguments about the West (“I am afraid of today’s sages. I happened to read all of them that were translated into Russian. They, however, strongly eradicate prejudices and uproot virtue”) remind of the ever-present relevance of this problem for Russian society. Although in “Nedorosl” itself not much space is devoted to it, Fonvizin’s entire work as a whole is replete with reflections on the relationship between Russia and the West. His famous letters from France are striking in their combination of subtle observations and vulgar abuse. Fonvizin always catches himself. He sincerely admires the Lyon textile enterprises, but immediately remarks: “You have to hold your nose when entering Lyon.” Immediately after admiration for Strasbourg and the famous cathedral, there is an obligatory reminder that in this city, too, “the inhabitants are up to their ears in uncleanness.”

But the main thing, of course, is not hygiene and sanitation. The main thing is the difference between the human types of Russians and Europeans. Fonvizin noted the peculiarity of communicating with a Westerner very elegantly. He would have used the words “alternativeness of opinion” and “pluralism of thinking” if he had known them. But Fonvizin wrote precisely about this, and the extreme nature of these clearly positive qualities, which in Russian in a condemnatory sense is called “spinelessness” (in a laudable sense it would be called “flexibility”, but there is no praise for flexibility), did not escape the Russian writer. He writes that a Westerner “if asked in the affirmative, answers: yes, and if asked negatively about the same matter, answers: no.” This is subtle and completely fair, but such words about France, for example, are rude and completely unfair: “Empty brilliance, eccentric arrogance in men, shameless lewdness in women, I really don’t see anything else.”

One gets the feeling that Fonvizin really wanted to be Starodum. However, he was hopelessly lacking in gloom, consistency, and straightforwardness. He fought hard for these virtues, even going to publish a magazine with a symbolic name - “Friend of Honest People, or Starodum.” His hero and ideal was Starodum.

But nothing came of it. Fonvizin's humor was too brilliant, his judgments were too independent, his characterizations were too caustic and independent, his style was too bright.

The Minor was too strong in Fonvizin for him to become Starodum.

He constantly strays from didactics into cheerful nonsense and, wanting to condemn Parisian debauchery, writes: “Whoever has recently been to Paris, the local residents bet that whenever you walk along it (the New Bridge), every time you will meet a white horse on it ", a priest and an indecent woman. I purposely go to this bridge and meet them every time."

An old man will never achieve such ridiculous ease. He will begin to denounce the decline of morals in the correct phrases, or, what good, he will actually go to the bridge to count obscene women. But Minor will gladly tell such a stupid story. That is, that Fonvizin who managed to never become Starodum.