What kind of cultural front does Russia need

A few months ago, the initiative of the People’s Artist of the Russian Federation (now also a State Duma deputy) Nikolai Burlyaev to create a kind of cultural front sounded somehow unusual, since the level of cultural development in Russia is extremely low. It is hard to disagree, remembering, for example, young people with higher education who, in N.S. Mikhalkov’s Besogon program, cleverly discuss the journalist’s question: “Why did Stalin shoot Kutuzov?” or claim that Napoleon Bonaparte is two different people. In Moscow academic theaters directors without a big name are trying to shock the audience with their attitude to Russian classics. If you read on the poster that the performance is “based on” your favorite writer, then don’t go: it will be a modern perversion of the classics. And what can we say about the series on television, where everything is put together very mediocre and the deep intention is not even visible.

At the same time, Metropolitan Tikhon (Shevkunov) of Pskov and Porkhov, who is also the “Minister of Culture” of the Russian Orthodox Church, gave a meaningful interview for leading TV channels, where he gave examples of the low ethical level of much of what is served to the viewer and reader and does not correspond to the meaningful concept of culture.

The content of the phenomenon of “culture” has long been studied by philosophers with Christian thinking. Almost a hundred years ago, Nikolai Berdyaev wrote: “Culture is associated with a cult, it develops from a religious cult … Philosophical thought, scientific knowledge, architecture, painting, sculpture, music, poetry, morality – everything is contained organically and integrally in a church cult … Culture is associated with a cult ancestors, with tradition and tradition. 30 years earlier than Berdyaev, the German Christian thinker Oswald Spengler, who revealed the decline of the Western world for us, remarked (precisely for the non-Western world): “Culture and civilization are the living body of soulfulness and its mummy … Culture and civilization are an organism that has grown in the middle of the landscape and emerged as a result of its ossification mechanism. A man of culture lives inside, a man of civilization lives outside, in space among bodies and “facts”… Civilization finds the concept of “people” ready-made and destroys it with the concept of the fourth estate, the mass that fundamentally rejects culture with its organic forms… masses where a person is presented completely lost roots and this “it” does not recognize its past and does not have a future. The mass is the end, the radical nothing.” There is another look at the crisis of Western and world culture from the poet and playwright of the 20th century, Paul Valery, where the cause of the crisis is “the extinction of the European soul”, “…but that’s not all. The burning lesson has not yet been learned.

All this was written by talented witnesses and contemplators of the decline of culture in the face of mass non-resistance to the advance of mechanical and technical civilization. If this is not noticed, then the material mechanics of civilization will not allow even a sprout of culture to break through. This was noticed by a small circle of representatives of the so-called. moral philosophy. Technological progress has long been at the forefront. Note that both under the action of the unforgettable communist ideology and with the ban on obligatory ideology now (Article 13 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation), what happened and is happening is what N.A. Berdyaev noted a hundred years ago: “Culture is becoming soulless and turning into civilization. The spirit is waning… All the beauty of culture, associated with temples, palaces, estates, goes into museums, filled with only the corpses of beauty. The cult of life without its meaning begins. This should be familiar to us simply from ordinary life in the phrase “internal culture”, which differs from “external upbringing”. Those who lived in the USSR will also remember the age-old call – “culture to the masses”, and mainly to some “proletarian”, i.e. for workers and collective farmers. According to the theory of Marxism-Leninism, the so-called. the creative and other intelligentsia were called a layer within the working masses, and the learned class was also called “the proletarians of mental labor.” Philosophy could only be Marxist-Leninist; materialistic, and the other was under strict prohibition and control. And, of course, the main persecution fell on the dominant religion in Russia – Orthodoxy. Lenin rested in his directives on the requirement to shoot priests as much as possible and everywhere and quickly “do away with priests and religion … seal the premises of temples and turn them into warehouses.” I remind you of this not just like that, but because for decades in Soviet Russia it was the national Russian culture that was destroyed, which originated and had its root in the state cult – religion. Those who did not want to accept the satanic proletarian culture were mercilessly pressed physically and morally. It is difficult to count how many representatives of the Russian cultural intelligentsia from among those who did not want or did not have time to emigrate were shot and rotted in the Gulag system (only the names of prominent ones are heard).

“Socialist realism” came to the place of cultural reality, and if something managed to slip somewhere (“Doctor Zhivago” by B.L. Pasternak or “The Master and Margarita” by M.A. Bulgakov, films by A. Tarkovsky), this it was immediately sealed and hidden as contrary to socialist realism. But this lasted from 1918 to 1991 (that is, 73 years).

No one will deny the elementary benefits of the material achievements of civilization, but we must not forget that “civilization is bourgeois in nature, and “bourgeoisness” is slavery to decay, hatred for the eternal … responsibility for the crime of deicide lies with it, and revolutionary socialism is only he assimilated the spirit of the “bourgeois” civilization and accepted its negative heritage … The spirit of civilization is the petty-bourgeois spirit” (N.A. Berdyaev).

The most noticeable non-spiritual manifestation of civilization in human life is the petty-bourgeois way of thinking and, as a result, the arrangement of life, when nothing sublime is needed for the soul, but if only all conveniences were at hand. All forces and means are spent on it. It seems, well, what’s wrong with that? Are negative consequences possible? Yes, they are possible, and the writer and religious philosopher D.S. Merezhkovsky warned us about this at the beginning of the 20th century: the reigning boor is the devil … really terrible, more terrible than he is painted – the coming Prince of this world, the coming Ham ”(see his pamphlet“ The Coming Ham ”, 1906). Then they were not afraid, and the demonic boorish communist power reigned for 73 years.

Since 1991, liberal democrats in Russia have remembered the well-known slogan of the communist N. Bukharin – “enrich yourself.” And we immediately had a new bourgeoisie, a God-desert civilization with its petty-bourgeois slavery and the corresponding lack of culture everywhere and everywhere – the so-called. “entertainment industry”.

Let us pay attention to what the Christian philosophers mentioned above saw long ago: culture exists only when there is a people (Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, etc.), and not a faceless mass – “population”, “radical nothing”. The soulless politicized Soviet culture disappeared along with the death of Soviet Russia and dragged the so-called. “Soviet people”. N.P. Burlyaev, a believer and churchman, but in the State Duma he is employed in the development committee of the so-called. “civil society”. He and many others would have to believe the far-sighted O. Spengler: “Civil society is a laboratory product of Western civilization. And civilization destroys the cultural layer of the people of any country … by the concept of mass. The believer is free, because knows from the Gospel: “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom”, and “civil society” needs only liberal-democratic legalized civil liberties. The secular state will lead “civil society”, as Berdyaev remarked, into “evil infinity” (or the faceless mass of society will lead the state there).

A secular liberal-democratic state always gravitates towards atheism, and it is all the more secular-civilized, the farther it moves away from religion and the church, through a long-standing method of the so-called. “freedom of conscience”, which always leads to freedom from conscience.

Here, as always, one of the eternal questions: what to do? This question is not interesting only to the bigwigs of the “entertainment industry”. There everything is clear – to earn money. The answer to this question was suggested to us a hundred years ago, for example, by the same D.S. such an idea can only be given by a religious revival together with a social revival… only a religious community will save Russia.” Religion, translated from Latin, is in itself a cult of an idealistic worldview, it is the idea of ​​an ideal, leading to faith in God as absolute knowledge, it is from the realm of human feelings. God forbid to set the goal to bring religion to the abstract masses – civil society. God’s relationship with man is exclusively individual. In the state, any idea needs some legalized form, supported by the authorities. So, in the National Anthem of the Russian Federation there are the words “God-protected native land”, and the anthem is part of the Constitution. The implementation of the idea can only be available to the Russian Orthodox Church, which in 2000 adopted the “Fundamentals of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church”, where there is a small section on culture. The concept was accepted and forgotten about. There is a good way to start the cultural front – to accept the “Fundamentals of the Cultural Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church”, agreed (approved) by the President of the Russian Federation and leaders of other confessions traditional for Russia. Otherwise, the Coming Ham will win. After all, according to the mentioned conclusion of P. Valeri, “the topical lesson has not yet been learned”.