Natural devaluation. Why Pushkin has no place on the ship of modernity

Dmitry Luchikhin, philosopher

Let me put the question this way: is Pushkin a great poet today? To get an impartial and reliable answer to it, two thought experiments can be used.

You can imagine a young citizen, not very familiar with poetry, but with a lively and sensitive mind, and slip him a collection of various poems, by various authors, but without identifying signs. And then ask for a rating. And now it seems to me that Pushkin, compared with the equally nameless Akhmatova and Blok, Mandelstam and even Yevtushenko, will clearly be at the bottom of the list. How empty and worthless.

Or you can go even further and imagine that Pushkin's poems, which you yourself are already reading, belong to some young talent who published them in the Blue-Pink March magazine.

If you manage to achieve the effect of non-recognition, then with a modicum of honesty, you will have to admit that the poems are smooth, pretty, professionally strong, but empty, banal and even vulgar with this banality.

According to the principle: the first one who compared a woman with a rose is a poet, the second is a vulgar one. And the nameless Pushkin today is far from being the second or even the tenth. The phrase "I remember a wonderful moment" is beautiful as long as we remember its origin. But if you manage to “forget”, to survive it, as if it was created for the first time today, your cheekbones will shrink.

For those who have not yet died of irritation, I will try to console a little. Reading Hegel today, after Husserl and Heidegger, Derrida and Bakhtin, is impossible without a sad smile.

Well, with all due respect to Galileo, who really stands at the origins of the scientific method and scientific thinking - anyone who tries to use his own practical approaches to physics, we will consider a second-grader to be a dropout - I think any reasonable person will agree.

Exactly the same process of devaluation takes place with cultural phenomena. Moreover, the more significant the author's contribution to culture, the greater the impact he had on its development. The more he entered her flesh and blood. And the more banal his own works look in the eyes of those who have been formed in the cultural reality he created. Who, in the very organization of his consciousness, reproduces his creative act, even if he has never read it directly.

Just as we think with Hegel, so we experience the world with Pushkin. And it is simply impossible to get any inside information when reading, revealing to a person his already taken place.

I suggest that the fixation on the literature of the 19th century is not a hope of resolving the history that has taken place and passing into the alternative future supposed by this literature. God bless him that this is an illusion, but the hope itself is different. It is a hope to return to the world that gave birth to this literature. The world is simple and understandable, with easily distinguishable (in our opinion today) - good and evil. A world of familiar questions and already known answers.

Another version of "escape from unbearable freedom".