The heroes of Russian classics turned out to be a community of laziness, ignorance and rudeness

“Hero of our time”. An enlightened reader will immediately remember the famous work of M.Yu. Lermontov, based on which feature films were made more than once. Well, he will say, that was when: a century and a half ago. How much water has flowed under the bridge? And then, this was under the Tsar-Father and under the nobles, bourgeois, peasants, but now there are no classes – everyone is equal. And one more thing: what is heroism and who is the real hero? Look, modern Ukrainians have Bandera and Shukhevych as heroes of Ukraine, and look how many innocent children, women and old people the fascist bandits killed. And Russia has its own heroes – those of our great-grandfathers, grandfathers and fathers who fought against this fascism.

Now, moving away from the Soviet interpretation of history, we have remembered, one might say, the epic heroes – Ilya Muromets, Peresvet, Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoy, Alexander Suvorov, Mikhail Kutuzov. A number of them were remembered in 1943 by Comrade. Stalin, having restored the patriarchate destroyed in 1721 by Peter I, when he realized that the history of Russia needed heroes not like Budyonny, Voroshilov, Shchors, but those who had spiritual strength and content in the genetic memory of the people. The plans of the fascists were to destroy most of the Slavs as a kind of inferior race, and, while retreating, they destroyed everything that was symbols of the Orthodox faith: churches, monasteries were already blown up and everything from the temples that had material value was stolen. In modern times, this is repeated one to one in the rabid Ukraine: the shrines of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra are being sold to Europe. Wait, escaping to the West, they will still blow up everything that is available to them. And they will feel like some kind of heroes of their time.

More about the time a little later. But who is a hero? I looked in philosophical dictionaries, in the works of famous philosophers – there is no such concept there. It is in the “Big Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language” from V.I. Dahl. So, “a hero is an hero, a knight, a brave warrior, a valiant warrior, a hero, a miracle warrior; a valiant companion in general, in war and in peace, a selfless person. The hero of the story is the main thing, the first person.” Returning to Lermontov’s work, this definition of a hero is only suitable for Pechorin, because all other signs of heroism were absent. Moreover, even from school, he disgusted me: a proud egoist, an insincere and unkind person, not a Russian officer, but some kind of dude. He always reminded me of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. The same slacker who “lived idle, without work, until he was twenty-six years old, languishing in the inactivity of leisure, without service, without a wife, without business, and did not know how to do anything.”

Very close by is A.S. Griboedov and his “Woe from Wit”, where Chatsky is. Notice how his image is similar to Onegin. He arrives from Europe and immediately, “from the ship to the ball,” ends up in the house where his bride lives. What was Chatsky doing in Europe? Maybe he studied some profession useful for Russia? No, he used the money he didn’t earn to attend lectures by fashionable liberal philosophers, to theaters, eat deliciously and sleep sweetly. And then it turns out that his bride is making dates with the absolute dullness – Molchalin, whose position is “to please everyone in everything” and at his age “should not dare to have his own opinion.” There is also another contender for the hand of his bride – Colonel Skalozub, whose credo is against proper education – “in order to stop this evil, collect all the books and burn them.” But these are all heroes of their time, and this is the middle of the 19th century. I specifically took all five of my children to see “Woe from Wit” at the Maly Theater and then asked them to evaluate Chatsky and everyone else. The opinion was unanimous (I didn’t suggest it): this is some kind of terrible community of laziness, ignorance and rudeness. I only liked Skalozub because he fought against Napoleon and had military awards. Here are just three heroes of the time, and how similar they all are in their pride and progressive egoism and, if you like, the complete lack of desire to serve the Motherland simply out of your duty to this very Motherland, simply because you owe your entire position to it.

During the times of Lermontov and Griboedov, there were other heroes of their time: warriors, statesmen, conscientious officials, philosophers, composers, artists, entrepreneurs, on whom Russian statehood and culture rested. Why did they, and later Chekhov, Kuprin and Dostoevsky, see precisely negative faces? M.Yu. Lermontov outlined the topic more clearly than others: “I look sadly at our generation – its coming one is either empty or dark.” And from his “Borodino”: “Yes, there were people in our time, a powerful, dashing tribe: heroes – not you.” This could be called the private opinion of an individual poet if the line of social cross-section had not been anticipated and continued by Pushkin, Griboyedov, Chekhov, Kuprin, Dostoevsky, Merezhkovsky. We can safely say that the negative heroes of these authors are accurate portraits of the developing disease of the spiritual crisis in Russian society, which led to the revolutionary atheistic revolution and the collapse of the great Russian Empire, the fratricidal Civil War, famines in Ukraine and the Volga region, and terrible Stalinist repressions.

Saint Nicholas of Serbia reminded us that “crisis” is a Greek word and means God’s judgment for sins, and economic disorders are only its consequences. Marxism-Leninism did a disservice to humanity by asserting that only relations of production stand at the forefront of all relations between state power and people. In the USSR, for 73 years they built a kind of socialism and communism, making religious spirituality a kind of moral code for the builder of communism. In 1991, this entire materialistic Tower of Babel collapsed overnight and crushed the second Russian Empire – the USSR. And again famine, war, fratricide. The word “crisis” has become fashionable again without understanding its causes and content. But humanity and the so-called. “civil society” was warned by Christian philosophers at the beginning of the 20th century, for example, O. Spengler: “Socialism is a sense of life that has become irreligious… a socialist insists on his own non-confessional religiosity… This is the extinction of living inner religiosity, which gradually formulates and fills even the most insignificant features of existence and represents what turns out to be in the historical picture of the world the turn of culture to civilization as the climax of culture. civilization, Russia will constantly be led toward decline into that lack of culture into which once-cultured Europe has found itself.

The most difficult things for our human understanding are the phenomena of time and space. The easiest way is to establish the thought: well, what a time, so are its heroes. But this is a fatal mistake of a lazy and primitive mind. Judge for yourself: we are in the 21st century, and the heroes of the Poltava and Borodino battles, the defense of Sevastopol (XIX and XX centuries), Stalingrad, Moscow (almost a century will soon pass) aren’t they modern? It is clear that there is no need to explain to modern Russian people that the guys fighting Ukrainian and European neo-fascists are also heroic. And why? Yes, because, despite external circumstances, they have not lost their “living inner religiosity”, from which grows love for one’s neighbor and for the space where this religiosity has survived and exists. In them, civilization will not kill culture. They definitely won’t disappear, and they are the future.

The writers I mentioned did not even think that the images they created of the heroes of their time were part of Russian history, and these were definitely symbols that already existed, but these are symbols from which much more terrible images can develop. This was noticed by two people known to us – F.M. Dostoevsky and D.S. Merezhkovsky. Read “Demons” – there is no longer Pechorin, no Onegin and no Chatsky, but much more terrible faces, and they showed themselves under fictitious pseudonyms: Lenin, Trotsky, Sverdlov, Stalin… The demons have incarnated.

D.S. Merezhkovsky also warned us: “Be afraid of slavery, and the worst of all slavery – philistinism, and the worst of all philistinism – boorishness, for the reigning slave is a boor, and the reigning boor is the devil – no longer old, fantastic, but a new, real devil, truly terrible, more terrible than he is painted – the coming Prince of this world, the Coming Ham.” Written shortly before the communist takeover of 1918. And then the demons incarnated and seized power in Rus’ for 72 years. Now they have mostly moved to the USA, European countries, and, of course, to the so-called. Ukraine. And in our Russia, the devils are only lurking and for thirty years now they have been seducing people with philistinism – they say, get rich financially. Instead of culture, bureaucratic positivism prevails, and instead of classical art, pro-Western modernism prevails. The devils know their job and do it. We rarely learn lessons from the past. Although now there is some direction – an antidote, suggested by the same Merezhkovsky: “Not against Christ, but with Christ – towards freedom. Christ will liberate the world – and no one but Christ. With Christ – against slavery, philistinism and rudeness. Only the Coming Christ will defeat the Ham of the Coming.”