How schoolchildren are tempered: the literature program is fraught with schizophrenia

The return to school of the novel by Nikolai Ostrovsky was announced by the Minister of Education of Russia Sergey Kravtsov himself. Not only this work is being returned, but also a number of other works of Soviet literary classics. But in this series, and in the literature of the Soviet period as a whole, “How the Steel Was Tempered” still occupies a special place.

It’s not just a novel. Not today it has been noticed that in its form “How the Steel Was Tempered” is closest to the lives of Orthodox saints. The novel became one of the important elements of the communist cult, which replaced the former state religion. The novel is so charged with ideology that it is impossible to separate it from it, to consider it as a purely literary phenomenon.

In this sense, it is very similar to “How the Steel Was Tempered” by another work that has long been present in the school curriculum – “The Gulag Archipelago” by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It was also created in the USSR (although it was published for the first time abroad), and there is also much more ideology than literature. Only this ideology with the opposite sign is anti-communist.

By the way, it can hardly be considered an accident that the “rehabilitation” of Ostrovsky’s novel, withdrawn from the school curriculum more than 30 years ago, in 1989, occurred shortly after an attempt to “repress” Solzhenitsyn’s “experience of artistic research” (this is how he defined the genre of his creation the author of The Archipelago).

Recall that it all started with a statement by Dmitry Vyatkin, First Deputy Head of the United Russia faction in the State Duma: Alexander Isaevich were “sucked from the finger”, invented … He blotted out his own Motherland in the mud.

A number of Duma and regional colleagues managed to support Vyatkin, but as soon as it began, the campaign was immediately curtailed. The next day, January 22, an explanation of the head of the Duma Committee on Education Olga Kazakova appeared on the official website of “ER”: “The question of excluding Solzhenitsyn’s novel The Gulag Archipelago from the school curriculum is not and never was … Our children should know not only glorious, but also dramatic pages of our history, the history of a great people.

The command “hang up” was given, presumably, for the following reasons. Firstly, due to the fact that it appeared in the school curriculum not just like, not at the whim of some Democratic official in the “dashing 1990s.” In the “dashing 1990s” “Archipelago” was not in the school literature curriculum. It was included in it in 2009 – after such an idea was expressed by the then prime minister, current president Vladimir Putin. That is, to exclude now Solzhenitsyn’s work means to admit that the president was wrong. Can this be invoked?

The second reason is closely related to the first: the president’s sympathy for the writer did not arise, of course, from scratch. Alexander Isaevich was not a liberal even during the creation of the Archipelago, and over the years his conservatism only intensified. And Solzhenitsyn’s statements relating to the very last segment of his life (the writer died on August 3, 2008) were practically no different from the narratives of Russian state propaganda.

“Clearly seeing that today’s Russia does not pose any threat to them, NATO is methodically and persistently developing its military apparatus – to the East of Europe and to the continental coverage of Russia from the South,” he said, for example, two years before his death, in 2006 “This includes open material and ideological support for the “color” revolutions, the paradoxical introduction of North Atlantic interests into Central Asia. All this leaves no doubt that a complete encirclement of Russia is being prepared, and then the loss of its sovereignty.”

In short, not all, far from all of Solzhenitsyn is equally harmful to the state ideology that is being built. On the one hand – harmful, on the other – useful. Exactly the same duality is present in the work of Ostrovsky, who clearly set out to balance the “pardoned” Solzhenitsyn. Let’s start with useful elements.

“What nourished this courageous nature?” journalist Mikhail Koltsov wrote about Ostrovsky in his essay “Courage”, after which Ostrovsky’s real literary glory began. “What still supports the spiritual, physical strength of this person? Only boundless love for the team, for the party , to the motherland, to the great construction site. Only the desire to be useful to her. “

Actually, the work itself, which in all the annotations is called “partially biographical”, is about the same. About the fact that the main thing for a person is not private, personal, but general. A great idea, for which it is not a pity to sacrifice everything, including life itself. This super-idea is more than in demand at the current stage of our historical development.

No less in demand is the rejection of what the novel calls “independent chauvinism”: a significant part of the novel is devoted to the struggle of the Bolsheviks against the Petliurists. But! Neither the main character of the work, Pavka Korchagin, the “double”, the alter ego of the author, nor, accordingly, the author himself can be attributed to the adherents of the “Russian world”.

Pavka calls Ukrainian his native language. Apparently, he was native to Ostrovsky too: it is known that the first literary experiments of the writer were in this language – written Russian was not given immediately. He, of course, did not boast of his Ukrainianness. But he didn’t give up on her either. As constantly emphasized in the novel, its hero fought for the liberation of Soviet Ukraine.

And in any case, the struggle was not for, but against what we now call traditional values. And the fight is extremely fierce. It begins already on the first pages of the novel. You can even say, from the first lines: “Father Vasily got up, pushed back his chair and came close to the guys huddled together:

– Which one of you scoundrels smokes?

All four quietly replied:

We don’t smoke, sir.

The priest’s face turned purple.

– Don’t smoke, bastards, but who poured shag into the dough? Do not smoke? And now we’ll see! ..

Pavka was choked with tears. “Well, what should I do now? And all because of this damned priest. And did I pour terrycloth on him? Seryozhka knocked it out. “Come on, he says, we’ll pour a harmful viper.” “.

In the Soviet school, in which children were taught that “religion is the opium of the people,” little Pavka’s war with the priest Vasily fit, as they say, like a native. About the current school, which, according to Minister Kravtsov, is based on “traditional spiritual and moral values”, in which at least the basics of Orthodox (Islamic) culture are taught, and in some places, they say, directly “God’s Law” (Koran), this cannot be said. Cognitive dissonance is inevitable.

The intolerance of the author and his hero towards social injustice does not fit into our educational system just as badly as it does into the socio-political system. Here is a characteristic passage: “At night, when the hustle stopped in both halls of the buffet, downstairs, in the pantries of the kitchen, waiters gathered. Reckless gambling began … “Damned bastard! he thought. – Here is Artem – a first-hand locksmith, and receives forty-eight rubles, and I ten; they row so much per day and for what? Bring – take away. They drink and lose.” Pavka considered them, just like the owners, strangers, hostile.”

This, we repeat, is the attitude of the hero towards the waiters. I wonder what Pavka would say about the current powers that be – politicians, officials, oligarchs? However, the question is perhaps redundant. It’s clear what he would say.

And let’s not forget that the commandments of the steely, uncompromising Pavka will face in the process of learning not only the reality that categorically contradicts them, but also Solzhenitsyn’s “Archipelago”. What kind of mess will arise after this in the minds of unfortunate children, it is difficult even to imagine.

If we were talking about gastronomy, then this way of cooking could be called “Irish stew” – whoever read Jerome’s “Three in a boat, not counting the dog” will understand. The principle here is simple: put everything that is at hand into the cauldron.

But one who dares to taste such a dish risks a maximum of indigestion. The consequences of the literary-ideological “stew” can be much more serious. Including in a purely medical sense. Such eclecticism is a direct road to schizophrenia.