What’s cool for Russians – Weekend

Italians are temperamental, loud, amorous slobs. The French are gallant, prone to frivolity, but prudent. The English are eccentrics, phlegmatic and hoarders. The Germans are good-natured, but their Ordnung is above all else. We do not take such stereotypes seriously, because everyone will probably find many Italians, French or English who are completely different from these walking types. But in everyday life they continue to live at least at the level of jokes and anecdotes – and once they were part of the department of serious reflections on the structure of the universe and human society.

Text: Sergey Khodnev

Once, out of journalistic necessity, I happened to find myself in an international group, which was simply miraculously good in the sense of “ideal types.” The Frenchman joked and flirted with all the ladies in turn. The Englishman, an eccentric-looking middle-aged gentleman, at moments of general animation, raised an eyebrow and said “oh” (in his own animated way, one must assume, and even sincerely). The couple of young Spaniards, due to shyness or something else, behaved with the arrogance of grandees. The Chinese woman bowed, spoke a little and laughed thinly precisely at those moments when politeness required it. An emancipated Arab woman from a moderate Sharia Middle Eastern country looked languidly like an odalisque and smiled sensually.

It’s not that patterns were never broken – let’s say, small talk started about favorite drinks, it was the turn of the Spaniards, and everyone expected them to sparkle with their eyes and babble hotly: oh, wine, of course! Tempranillo! oloroso! manzanilla! amontillado! Instead they said, “Beer. So what? It is hot over here. And the food is spicy and salty.” After I praised champagne instead of vodka, it seems, the conversation somehow faded. But for the most part, everyone was terribly pleased with each other – and even felt obliged to play along a little, or something.

You know, it’s like Proust’s Swann, “having fallen in love with some Breton woman, he would be glad to see her in a local headdress and hear her admit that she is afraid of ghosts.” The pleasure is not very conscious and shameful (it seems like all adults, modern, educated people), but where does it come from? Stereotypes about national character may be liked mainly because they, like all stereotypes, are situationally and psychologically convenient. They bring at least an imaginary predictability to the diversity of nations, multiplied by the absolutely astronomical diversity of personalities. And at the same time they give pleasant shades of primitive dichotomy – friend/alien, native/outsider.

I think it all began with this black-and-white distinction. The inhabitants of the neighboring settlement, of course, are completely different, not like us, but what is their otherness, what can we expect from them? From randomly selected empirical data, a generalization emerges (here, as with the “survivor’s error”) – they are all cunning, or, conversely, they are all simple-minded, and then it continues to live with the saying “what can we take from them.”

But it is interesting that the differentiation of these psychological characteristics among different nationalities arose rather slowly. For the Greeks, all the barbarians somehow seemed uncultured, effeminate, and immoral, although in parallel there was an idea that in different regions of Hellas itself and in its colonies, the everyday ethos was different – but this was due to local customs. At first, the Romans had about the same thing – we are virtuous and therefore cultured, and there is nothing special to understand about the funny shades of other people’s immorality; There are occasional tidbits about some superstition of the Egyptians, and only then does Tacitus appear, for example, with his notes on the habits of individual Germanic tribes.

On domestic soil, it seems to me that the first sign of such considerations is the remark in “The Tale of Bygone Years”: “the essence of Greece is flattering (i.e., deceitful) even to this day.” But in general in Europe, such stereotypes more or less confidently declare themselves not even in the Middle Ages, but later, when, firstly, the very idea of ​​natio appears, of what unites this or that large community “naturally”, and not by place of residence or citizenship. Secondly, these initially popular beliefs received a certain reinforcement in Renaissance scholarship: she believed in typicality as a manifestation of the orderliness of the universe, believed in the Hippocratic doctrine of temperaments and in astrology that organically merged with it; if an individual, by the will of the stars, turned out to be sanguine or phlegmatic, then in the case of nations this could also work – the peoples had their own star rulers.

Another thing is that there were two layers to this process. At one level, they tried to catalog peoples dispassionately, as if in a scientific manner, pinning labels on them, as if in a cabinet of curiosities – these are comfortable with fornication, these with vanity. On the other, they continued to use stereotypes as name-calling for strangers, saturating these same stereotypes with the most unpleasant details that are supposedly completely alien to us. Throughout Europe, syphilis was long called the “Gallic” or “French disease” – but in France, naturally, they said “Neapolitan disease”. Homosexuality was either “Italian (option: Florentine) love”, sometimes an “English vice”, sometimes a “German disease”. And so on.

But for all this to have serious government or artistic consequences, this has not happened until now. By the 18th century, considerations about the “qualities of peoples” had turned into fables that were rather used to entertain oneself—here, as an analogy, one can recall the innumerable “international” anecdotes of later times. In the end, in the USSR there were jokes not only about Georgians, Estonians and Chukchi, but also of a wider scope – all kinds of “French, American and Russian meet.” So in the once famous “Pismovnik” of Nikolai Kurganov (1793), a home-grown encyclopedia of useful knowledge for all occasions, we will find a table of information about the “most noble” nations of Europe (probably dragged from some European almanac, here it’s not a fortune teller go), from which you can learn that the Frenchman is polite in behavior, the German is simple, the Italian is polite, the Spaniard is contemptuous, and the Englishman is stately. French women are “proud,” Italian women are “evil,” English women are “willful,” German women are “homely,” and Spanish women are “pliable.” But in science, the Spaniards are “profound,” the Italians are “scientists,” the English are “philosophers,” the Germans are “experts,” and only the French are “mediocre.” There are many more characteristics – “in clothes”, “in food” (the Spaniards are stingy, the British are luxurious), “in law”, “in marriage” and so on. But it is characteristic that all this is placed not in the section that contains truly important and relevant information about the world at that time, but among entertaining tales reminiscent of Kozma Prutkov’s “Historical Materials”.

Even the “new ethics” is not really armed against such observations and fables – in those cases, of course, when the colonial past is not attached to them. Although their inconsistency and direct anti-science seem to be obvious. Sicilians and Lombards are terribly different – how can you classify them as uniformed “Italians” who should react to everything in the same way? What about the Berliners and Munichers, who would most likely be offended if we said that they have the same worldview and the same mentality? And then, if all people are born equal, then it seems indecent to believe that nationality condemns someone to politeness, someone to pliability, and someone to mediocrity in the sciences.

And yet, national stereotypes had their finest hour. It came in the 19th century, when, in fact, everything national acquired its most burning resonance. They talk about national character with ecstasy in fiction – and they strive to draw grandiose conclusions from seemingly superficial generalizations. Just remember Gogol: “The word of a Briton will echo with knowledge of the heart and wise knowledge of life; The short-lived word of a Frenchman will flash and spread like a light dandy; will intricately come up with his own, not accessible to everyone, clever-thin word German…” But, starting from labels, they are trying to construct a native national character – already quite seriously and with definitely mass success: there are still many who talk about the Russian soul judges by the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and judges the English soul by Dickens.

However, loud comparisons of national characters were made not only in novels, but also in journalism. And often it was journalism, to put it mildly, unkind. Not only both world wars, but also the ideas of “blood and soil” come from the 19th century – and in skillful hands, considerations about the natural qualities of different peoples, as it turns out, quite often lead exactly there.

It seems that now some stereotypical French or stereotypical Italians are characters in gentle comedies. Well, probably marketers, armed with quite modern scientific methods, are slowly building something like essays on national psychology, planning the release of such and such a product on such and such a market (although they do not turn this knowledge into any pamphlets). And yet it turns out that, as soon as an interethnic contradiction arises, the language of hostility slides into that very stereotype: they are wretched, stupid, malicious, soulless, we are pious, open, brave and invariably fair.

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