This way it was easier, more convenient, less energy was spend. Already by the end of the 20s the power has stepped on this path, this is why seventy years after the proletarian revolution Russia came out before the world and herself in the mirror as an in the most vulgar way twisted, old fashioned granny KARAMAZOFF in Chekhovian glasses. All the cultural, philosophical and political discoveries of Europe as of Asia passed Russia by and stayed unknown to her. Russia did not read the useful, opening books explaining modernism: not Celine, nor Miller, nor Andre Gide, no Jean Genet, nor Fraser’s “Golden Bough”, nor Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”, nor Evola’s “Revolt Against the Modern World”. (The most important is that she did not read these fundamental books in time!) Russia absolutely ignored the truth about the powerful movements of European XX century nationalism, contemporary to her own revolution.
Instead, as a mushroom mould had the XIX century poisonously grown! Because the power did not forbid it, that’s why! XIX century was safe for the power. Its Decembrists who turned into jokes, Belinskys, Katkovs, the chocolate dwarf Pushkin, the twit Natalya Goncharova, the apathetic reasoners of “The Cherry Orchard”, hussars, officers, functionaries of various rank, even Bazarov – big mouths, vomiting tons of words could not pervert, draw anybody into anti-government activity, so they were encouraged.
Well, naturally, the top intelligentsia read something in languages, something was brought, some books of the 20s were available to a narrow circle of “refined” individuals, but it was not in any way available to the massive Russia, which means it did not help Russia to grow, to change, to produce modern people. For her time has stopped in 1917. And culture. And politics. The clock stayed still for 70 years. Obviously it was convenient for the nation’s security. People presented themselves the “fascists” almost with fangs, “anarchists” in shows were all drunk sailors-tramps, the capitalist – a potbellied type with a cigar – these were the stereotypes of people that were not of our ideology. But for the present and the future of the country – when generations lived in a fatal ignorance of the world – it was tantamount to a death sentence.
We were not immediately thrown into the XIX century. At first the power tried to win the competition. Hushing up the world during the first years after the revolution it went hand in hand with time. The terrible power of the Stalinism epoch compelled to love workers and tractor drivers, Stahanov, Tchkalov, Grizodubova. The weakening power of Kruschev and Brezhnev constantly increased the XIX century dose. The sickening ladies and hussars and Pushkin, thanks God, gave birth to a popular return – a taunt in the form of porno jokes. However the soviet person still formed herself under the influence of XIX century literature, with a consciousness older than modernism by a hundred years.
It occurred to me and still occurs to live in other people’s apartments because I don’t own one. The soviet person library is abject. Together with soviet castrated writers of the second half of the XX century it has Russian classics and translated literature, selected by the censors for translation in Soviet times. Feihtvangers and Romain Rollands and all kind of similar western pettiness are simply banal. (But they are anti-fascists.) Soviet classics created an artificial world without flesh and its urges, without social passions (except for maybe production conflicts) and this is why they constitute a peculiar phenomenon, unique in the world: they created literature for eunuchs. Russian classics: Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy and gentle letters men of smaller kind consist of thousands of pages of moans, weeping. Inside it is wet from tears, disgusting from darkness. The dog’s old age of Chekhov’s characters, their depressive elderly bourgeoisiness, multiplied in complete works of and plays perverted the educated Russian person. Chekhov’s characters always wait for something, declaim, don’t leave to Moscow never, though they should have, from the first minutes of the first act, burn the fucking cherry orchard down and leave to Moscow with the very first train. Umbrellas, laces, the bitter smell of armpits and body that nobody uses for their purposes (because Chekhov had consumption) of the three sisters. In fact Chekhov is a perversion. With his ode to the closet, it’s not an ode to the closet but an ode to middle class conventionality. After Chekhov’s books it is not surprising that a revolution broke out. After all somebody had to hit this kind of world with a club. As for Dostoevsky – then his books are a fastened by the author’s epilepsy rapid hysterical world, where everybody screams, complains and confesses in dusty thoughts over endless samovars with tea. The exhaustingly multi worded count Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy mockingly moralizes and exaggerates the most banal life collisions to the size of “The Odyssey” and “The Iliad”. The worldview of the Russian classics follows exactly their illnesses – the depressing yellow world of the consumptive Chekhonte (the family name suits him: Chekhov, Chahov, that is sickly, consumptive) and the epileptic hysterical world of Fedor Mikhailovich. New monuments set up in these writers honor just recently in Moscow, by the way, authentically transmit their characters. The ill Fedor Mikhailovich slipping down from some seat near the building of Lenin’s Library, the bony staggering Chekhov on the passage of the Artistic theater. The sculptors Rukavishnikovs, father and son, have perfectly understood the writers.
Tolstoy probably was not openly ill. Until middle life he lived as a women’s man and a sinner, the second half of his life he spent under his wife’s thumb and in Christianity cobweb. The Church, though it has excommunicated him – bothered with him and he with her. As a result of these boring fighting came out “Sunday” and “Death of Ivan Ilyich”. And from the fighting with his wife Sofia Andreevna who had enslaved him, came out the vengeful “Anna Karenina”, where he throws Anna (Sophia Andreevna in reality) under the train. All of this is XIX century common stuff, however. No high passions, no big themes… cheating on his husband, that’s all!
Dostoevsky from his experience of jerking in Christianity’s cobweb created the second part of “Crime and Punishment” and desecrated his own book, wonderfully began and his unique character – Raskolnikov. It is amazing but in Russian XIX century classical literature there is no happy books. (In the 18th century there is: Derjavin, Lomonosov…) In the XIX century there is no books of military bravery, with the exception of the truly genial book of Gogol “Taras Bulba”. However one gets the impression that it was created by accident, more as an attempt to write an imitation on the fashionable theme, started by the French dandy Prosper Merimee: legends and songs of European barbarians: Hungarians, Gypsies, habitants of Transylvanian regions and eastern Slavs. The result exceeded all expectations. If there were any. “Taras Bulba” is a happy heroic epic. The second happy figure in Russian XIX century literature is Constantine Leontiev. He was called the Russian Nietzsche and in the essay “Average European as a Weapon of Mass Destruction” he foresaw the danger of arranging the world according to the tastes of the commoner. As a writer he can be defined as the forefather of impressionism or even an expressionist (Leontiev died in 1891). But the Gogol of “Taras Bulba” and the happy Leontiev are exceptions!
In the XX century happy writers were Nikolai Gumilev and Vladimir Mayakovsky. In them are easily found today the roots of Russian fascism. There were notes of Nietzscheanism or if put differently – proto-fascism in Leonid Andreev and in Ropshin-Savinkov, in the early Maxim Gorky (he even wore a mustache a la Nietzsche and the characters of his play “On the Bottom” retell, shamelessly, Nietzschean ideas). But later literature was muzzled. As a result not only what was printed but also that what was written became lifeless, like ersatz-coffee and ersatz-margarine. And here seventy years of consumption of this, so to speak literature – gave birth to genetically weak people.