Works from the 60s. Who are the poets of the sixties? What were the planned ways out of the crisis situation?

Literature of the 50-60s of the twentieth century (THAW period).

- rise of literature, popularity, publication of some previously banned authors;

- new literary associations and poetry schools emerge;

Appear new young and talented poets, and writers (E. Evtushenko, A. Voznesensky, B. Akhmadulina, B. Okudzhava, R. Rozhdestvensky, etc.);

Expanding the boundaries of what is permitted, relative freedom creativity;

- romance“socialism with a human face”, an appeal to Leninist traditions;

Participates in the literary life of Voronezh, is fond of socialist ideas, publishes poems, articles, stories of the “worker-philosopher”

Leaves the Communist Party, works, heads the commission to combat drought

Book "Electrification", poetry

Works as a provincial land reclamation specialist, engages in self-education, and reads a lot

Moves to Moscow with his wife and son

Literary success

"Epifanskie locks"

"Hidden Man"

Criticism, accusations of slander against the party

“Doubting Makar” story

Forbidden to print

Travel and work in Turkmenistan

Cooperation with the magazines “Literary Review” and “Literary Critic”

Arrest of 15-year-old son

A war correspondent is sent to the front, receives shell shock

Works about the war “Stories about the Motherland”

Illness and death of son, tuberculosis

Not printing, persecution, illness

Children's works, fairy tales

Died, buried in Moscow

Tasks:

1. Why is the writer’s fate so sad, despite his “proletarian” origin?

2. What personal qualities did the difficult, working life develop in the writer?

The artistic world of the writer:

– lived in a turbulent, difficult time and wrote about problems modernity;

– wrote on "people" in simple language, used fantastic forms (on behalf of the hero);

– works are often unfinished, have an “open” ending, and surprise the reader with a lack of logic and a clear plot;

– works are often allegorical, symbolic, with philosophical and religious-ethical issues;

- works inextricably the comic (usually satire) and the tragic are connected;

Heroes of Platonov“strange” people (sufferers, seekers of truth, people from the people, orphans at heart).

Hero types:

– “natural” person – spontaneous , "secret", with hidden spiritual qualities;

- a rationalist-work enthusiast , converter, a person with a mechanical consciousness, without a soul;

– child- the highest ethical, bearer of goodness and symbol of the future.

Personality and creativity Mikhail Alexandrovich Sholokhov().

In his works we see

Russian diamond mines

speeches...a word taken from the people...

Tsensky.

1. Biographical information:

date	Events	Creativity
	Born into the family of an employee of a trading enterprise, Kuznetsov, in the village of Veshenskaya. grew up in a merchant's house (father). Mother is a maid. Illegitimate son. Attended elementary school in the Voronezh region." href="/text/category/voronezhskaya_obl_/" rel="bookmark">Voronezh region.
	Moscow gymnasium
	Veshenskaya. Work in the food detachment	Episode in the novel “Quiet Don” (Makhnovist attack on a food detachment)
	participation in a program to eliminate illiteracy in rural areas, taking into account adults
	Moscow, worked wherever necessary + self-education
		The beginning of creative activity, the newspaper “Youthful Truth” - 1st story “Birthmark”
	Returned to Don, participated in collectivization	Conceived "Quiet Don"
	Literary fame, married the daughter of a rich Cossack
	Attempt to join the Komsomol	Romae "Virgin Soil Upturned"
	Participation in village reform
	Letter to Stalin about “excesses” in collectivization, middle peasants
	Threat of arrest, trip to Stalin in Moscow
	Participated in hostilities, worked as a war correspondent for Pravda	Essays on war, short stories (“The Science of Hate”)
		Novel “They Fought for the Motherland” (beginning)
	No printing, criticism, censorship bans	"Quiet Don" rules
	Veshenskaya	The story "The Fate of Man"
		Book 2 of “Virgin Soil Upturned”
	Social activities, awards, speeches at conventions	Didn't create anything
	Nobel Prize for the novel "Quiet Don"
	meetings with Brezhnev	An attempt to continue “They Fought for the Motherland”, but it burned a lot
	Died in Veshenskaya

3. The artistic world of the writer:

– wrote about what was happening in the country, because he was a patriot and himself participated in all significant events of the time (collectivization, wars, etc.)

– I tried to reflect the national consciousness in my works (through language (skaz), style, images, etc.);

– a combination of tragic and comic, but more tragic;

– the important role of landscape;

– the pathos of affirming the value of life;

– realism as the main method.

1. Your opinion about the character and personality of Sholokhov.

2. Draw a conclusion about Sholokhov’s contribution to Soviet literature (see topics of the works).

3. Why were Sholokhov’s relations with the government so difficult? Why has Sholokhov written practically nothing in the last 20 years?

The series “Don Stories” (1923-26).

Genre features: A cycle (several works on one topic) of 20 stories about the Civil War.

The works are tragic in content, but at the same time life-affirming.

Idea: Show the inhumanity of the fratricidal war and at the same time glorify universal human values ​​(love, devotion, duty, etc.), an attempt to understand the patterns of people's life and characters. The author thinks about the problem: are violence, murders, and class struggle justified?

Poetics: The symbolism of the images of children (the future), the landscape (corresponds to what is happening). linguistic characteristics of the characters (Cossack dialect, tale).

"Mole" (1923).

Koshevoy's White Guard father kills his son (Nikolai) on the battlefield, and he understands this by his birthmark.

Idea: Politics and war destroy the family and lead to infanticide. And the family is a unit of a united society.

"Shibalkovo seed."

Yakov Shibalok (a Red Army machine gunner) falls in love with Daria, who turns out to be an informant for the “whites,” and they have a son. Yakov, knowing about Daria's deception, kills her, and wants to raise the child.

Idea: Eternal values ​​are all-conquering - life, love. But the duty to the Motherland is higher. War divides people and makes personal happiness impossible

"Alien Blood"(1926)

Grandfather Gavrila and his wife, having lost their “white” son in the war, came out to the wounded “red” food contractor Nikolai and fell in love with him as a son.

Idea: Victory of humanistic values: despite politics, people have not forgotten how to love and help their neighbors.

1. Write a summary of one of the “Don Stories”, try to analyze it (theme, idea, characters).

2. Why did Sholokhov turn to the topic of the Civil War? What problems worried him?

3. Why will this collection immediately bring fame to Sholokhov?

Novel "Virgin Soil Upturned"(1932-60)

History of creation: Sholokhov himself participated in collectivization and wanted to prove to people the need for these transformations in the countryside. The first title of the novel is “ With sweat and blood", but the publishing house "New World" rejected it. The novel depicts the construction of a collective farm on the Don in a Cossack village.

Genre features : Chronicle novel(1 year), socio-psychological novel.

Idea: show collectivization realistically, prove it the need and irresistibility of change, legs and at the same time the tragic sides of this process.

Semyon Davydov- a former factory mechanic, a participant in the civil war, was assigned to Gremyachiy Log to create a collective farm there. The person is smart, devoted to the idea, but he also really sees the shortcomings of what is happening, in his personal life he is unhappy and lonely. Tragically dies in the finale, but creates a collective farm.

Makar Nagulnov- Chairman of the party cell, fanatically devoted to the cause of the party, dreams of a world revolution. He is unhappy in his personal life, cruel and merciless towards his “enemies”. Dies in the finale.

Andrey Razmetnov- very unhappy, lost his family in the war, is in love with a woman who does not support his views, Andrei is capable of compassion and thinks about the correctness of what is happening.

Yakov Lukich Ostrovnov- a cunning two-faced man, wanted to help organize a riot in Gremyachen Log, dreams of his former rich life. He cooperates with the new government, is very cunning and cruel, but a good master.

Grandfather Shchukar- a comic character, a parody of the fanatics of the idea (Davydov and Nagulny), the hero is far from politics. The laughter of the readers was supposed to defuse the heavy atmosphere of what was happening in the novel.

POWER PEOPLE OPPOSITORS TO CHANGE

(Davydov, Nagulnov,

Razmetnov) (Polovtsev, Lyatievsky, fists)

1. Why did Sholokhov turn to the topic of collectivization?

2. Why was the first title of the novel “With sweat and blood”, why did you have to change it?

3. What is the tragedy of collectivization? Did Sholokhov himself understand this? Prove it.

4. How is the show of collectivization different between Sholokhov and Platonov (“The Pit”), who was more objective?

5. Your impression of what you read.

6. Homework on the topic “The theme of collectivization in M. Sholokhov’s novel “Virgin Soil Upturned”

There is no art of the sixties, and there is no specific feature that would unite it, says director Marlen Khutsiev, author of one of the main sixties films, Zastava Ilyich (I’m Twenty Years Old). - If you take Voznesensky, is he similar to Yevtushenko or Akhmadulina? They are all very different, they cannot be combined into one direction. Another thing is that then conditions arose that were favorable for the existence of various artists. The fact that they were different was common - such a paradox.

However, from today's day, the sixties at first glance seem like an integral era. It even has clear chronological boundaries: on February 25, 1956, at the 20th Congress of the CPSU, Nikita Khrushchev read a report exposing Stalin’s personality cult - for many this became a promise of freedom and the beginning of the era of “socialism with a human face,” and on August 20–21, 1968 Soviet tanks entered Prague, crushing democratic reforms in Czechoslovakia.

In fact, the 60s were an era full of internal contradictions. And its uniqueness lay precisely in this “unity of opposites”: communism and individualism, refined taste and outright philistinism, natural science and humanitarian pictures of the world, urbanization and the desire for nature, democracy and technocracy - these oppositions, forming dialectical unities, consisted of the sixties Utopia.

Later, when this utopia collapsed, the oppositions also crumbled, turning into conflict zones of the 70s, 80s, 90s and zeros, becoming pain points and neuroses of modern society. It was the sixties who gave us today's life - with all its difficulties, contradictions, wars and hopes.

Communism - individualism

The unity of public and personal, characteristic of the 60s, was replaced by confrontation and even conflict. BeginningSince the 70s, the personal has come into conflict with the state

For us, communism is a world of freedom and creativity,” Boris Strugatsky said in the second half of the 90s. In 1961, when the CPSU adopted the Program for the Construction of Communism, the majority of Soviet intellectuals did not see any contradiction between communism and individualism. And even in 1972, after the defeat of the Prague Spring and the loss of sixties illusions, Andrei Voznesensky wrote: “Even if, as an exception // you are trampled by a crowd, // in human // purpose // ninety percent is good.”

In fact, in its program the party promised the Soviet people another utopia: “The current generation of Soviet people will live under communism.”

The party program was discussed in the kitchens, says Lev Ernst, vice-president of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences. - But no one around me believed that communism would exist in twenty years. And I then believed that it was impossible to set deadlines for the onset of communism.

The ideology of the 60s represents a striking contrast with the ideology of self-sacrifice and state over-centralization characteristic of Stalinism. The idea of ​​peaceful communist construction appeals to self-interest: “everything in the name of man, for the good of man.”

As a result of new approaches to economic policy, the most powerful economic growth in 30 years emerged in 1965–1970: an average growth rate of 8.5% per year. The population has accumulated colossal savings - more than $100 billion at the official exchange rate. The then Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin in 1966 argued to Brezhnev at a Politburo meeting the need to build an automobile plant: “Someday this money supply will collapse like an avalanche and crush everyone... Us first of all! In order to remove these billions from the money boxes, it is necessary to throw into the domestic market not jewelry and imported consumer goods, as is the case today, but something more significant. This “more significant” will be our new domestic car, created on the basis of Western technologies!”

“Well, Alexey Nikolaevich, I convinced you! - Brezhnev answered then. “Give instructions to your subordinates, the Chairman of the KGB and the Minister of Foreign Trade, so that they find out in which country it is possible to purchase a plant cheaper... We’ll give you six months.”

Thus, it was economic considerations, that is, the threat of inflation, that created the basis for the consumer boom, which inevitably led to the individualization of the life of Soviet people.

The key thesis of the CPSU Program: “Communism is a highly organized society of free and conscious workers.” This allowed advanced Marxists like Merab Mamardashvili to rethink orthodox Marxism-Leninism: “In philosophy, freedom is called internal necessity. The necessity of oneself."

The population began to move from communal apartments to separate apartments with kitchens and kitchen conversations: here they could safely invite friends, forming their own social circle. And on March 14, 1967, a five-day work week with two days off was introduced, and Soviet people finally had personal leisure.

But paradoxically, state concern for the autonomous life of a person leads to the growth of collectivism, in fact to spontaneous communism.

The sixties were remembered for the high intensity of friendly relations, recalls human rights activist and participant in the dissident movement Boris Zolotukhin. - It was the apotheosis of friendship. We had no other way to obtain information - only by communicating with each other could we learn something.

After Stalin’s repressions, when only a few people could be considered close friends without danger to one’s life and freedom, the friendly companies of the Thaw times were truly huge - 40–50 people each. Despite all the internal disagreements and contradictions, society was very consolidated: everyone communicated with everyone, and even Khrushchev argued with cultural figures, and they answered him.

The most powerful blow to this lifestyle and to the regime itself was the defeat of the Prague Spring. The Soviet intelligentsia was forced to somehow relate to this event, to take some kind of position in relation to it. And then it turned out that she did not have a single position.

The entry of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia, which then ranked first in the world in the number of communists per thousand inhabitants, consolidated the ranks of Western dissidents like Andrei Amalrik, Natalia Gorbanevskaya or Larisa Bogoraz. Romantic Marxists like Alexander Zinoviev and Roy Medvedev argued that the party leadership had deviated from the “authentic” Marx and Lenin. Soil nationalists like Igor Shafarevich and Alexander Solzhenitsyn opposed not only Marxism, but generally the entire Westernizing modernization project.

Utopia decomposed into official collectivism and various forms of illegal individualism, more or less radical. Already in the early 80s, in all universities in the country, a special lecture was given in classes on the history of the CPSU, which explained why, due to what “subjective and objective” reasons, communism was never built on time. An acute, almost allergic reaction to this unfinished communism was the total individualism of the 90s, which did not take at all the utopian forms of creative freedom that the sixties dreamed of.

Taste - philistinism

The consumer boom in the 60s gave rise to a utopia of personal taste: an item was supposed to serve the aesthetics and practice of communism, and not rampant “materialism.” In the stagnant 70s, consumption was restrained only by scarcity, but not by taste.

It was the beginning of the era of consumption, recalls writer Sergei Khrushchev, son of Nikita Khrushchev. - There is some confidence in the future. There was an increase in the birth rate: from three to five million people a year. But there was no global consumption - each new type of sausage was a discovery. The appearance of Czech bacon in stores, the opportunity to buy meat and cook barbecue - this was the consumption of those years. When suddenly you discover that you can get to Crimea by car, but before that there were only country roads.

The turn of the 50s and 60s was a unique era of cheerful consumption, a kind of consumer drive. In this short era, the item was both utilitarian and symbolic. It was a sign of communist utopia, and it was hunted as if it were something from the City of the Sun itself, invented by Tommaso Campanella.

That is why the sixties combined the fight against philistinism and “materialism” and the consumer boom of the early 60s, the desire for simplicity and functionality and the rise of industrial design, unprecedented in Soviet times.

At the turn of the 50s and 60s, the concept of Soviet “taste” appeared as a reflection of socialist culture and the concept of “beauty,” which was emphatically man-made: one could not be born beautiful, but become beautiful thanks to clothes, hairstyle and makeup.

Taste is simplicity and proportionality. It is characteristic that the first stars of the Soviet catwalk - Regina Zbarskaya, Mila Romanovskaya, Galina Milovskaya - were ordinary women over 30, and fashion models with a wide variety of figures, up to size 60, were accepted into modeling houses.

The 60s are an era of love for everything new. The consumer of that time, in a sense, felt the drive of the discoverer. New things were “mined” with the same enthusiasm as minerals: it was important to be the first. This drive seemed to remove the bourgeois, “materialistic” patina from the object and endowed it with symbolic value.

Many people say that the first jeans appeared somewhere there... This is all a lie. I had the first jeans in Leningrad, at least white ones! - says poet Anatoly Naiman. - In 1964. Real ones. American.

Things were measured like records.

Vysotsky already had a blue Mercedes at that time, the first in Moscow,” says director Alexander Mitta. - Then Nikita Mikhalkov got the same one, even bluer.

There was a duality in the aesthetic system of the 60s, which later, with the collapse of the sixties utopia, became a conflict that neuroticized the society of the 90s and zeros. The objects evoked dual feelings: they were proud of them and at the same time they were embarrassed.

I had a stunning fine corduroy sand jacket from Nabokov’s sister - they brought it to someone, it turned out to be too small,” recalls Anatoly Naiman. And he says: - Yevtushenko was a dandy. We are walking along a scary winter Moscow street, and he is coming from a restaurant, wearing some kind of fur coat that is not ours, chic, unbuttoned. A father in a cotton coat and a boy meet him. Yevtushenko spread his arms and said loudly: “These are my people!” And suddenly this dad in a quilted jacket stopped him and asked: “What circus are you from, guy?”

In many ways, the philistinism of the 60s was synonymous with comfort: faith in utopia fought against it as something that kept it in the present, preventing it from rushing into a bright future. But the paradox is that the clothes and furniture of the 60s, which were hunted and which, as in Viktor Rozov’s play “In Search of Joy,” were chopped with a saber in a fit of proletarian anger, were precisely not comfortable. They were futuristic.

The 60s were a time of craze for everything artificial, from fabrics to fur and hair: wigs and hairpieces came into fashion, hair was dyed in all colors of the spectrum, both with the help of special dyes and improvised means like hydrogen peroxide or ink diluted in water.

At the same time, geometric silhouettes, silver dresses that looked like spacesuits, short trapezoidal coats in cheerful colors and abstract patterns a la Picasso came into fashion - visual futurism, copied by the Soviet everyday culture of the 60s from Christian Dior and other Western designers.

At the same time, fashionable synthetic fabrics pricked, stuck to the body and made its owner sweat in any weather; fashionable pointed heels deformed women's feet, got stuck in the ribbed steps of escalators and punched holes in the asphalt; It was uncomfortable to sit at the fashionable low coffee tables. But all these things had not a utilitarian, but a symbolic value - as material signs of a utopia that was about to become a reality.

But already in the middle and especially at the end of the 60s, when this utopia began to collapse and ceased to provide the sphere of Soviet consumption with symbolic capital, the philistinism gained unprecedented strength, because the futuristic things accumulated by Soviet citizens in an effort to bring the future closer became just things. In the early 90s, when for a short time the West became a kind of geographical utopia for us, the “thingism” of the new Russian man again became symbolic and pioneering, but even faster - with the collapse of faith in another utopia - it turned into ordinary humanism.

I wasn’t shocked by the late 60s,” says Alexander Mitta. - The real shock came later, when it turned out that for many, the late stagnation of the 80s with its stupid consumer philistinism - saving up for a car, buying a dacha, etc. - turned out to be more attractive than drive, inner freedom, creative searches and, yes, everyday disorder 60s.

Physicists - lyricists

In the 60s, there were no conflicts between the natural science and humanitarian pictures of the world: both of them were elements of a single utopia of the new man. Having gone into the profession or into dissidence, both physicists and lyricists lost their influence on society

The image of a harmonious personality, which the sixties utopia demanded, was defined by two poems by Boris Slutsky: “Physicists and Lyricists” and “Lyricists and Physicists”. In them, the physicist man with logarithms and formulas was contrasted with the lyricist man with rhyme and line, but it was clear to everyone that there was in fact no opposition.

A resident of Utopia is smart, cheerful, positive, working for the benefit of civilization, for its future. Such a hero could not be a party worker (officialdom, Stalinism), a collective farmer (lack of education, down to earth), a proletarian (the same as a collective farmer), an employee (a person from the present). Only the intelligentsia—engineering, scientific, and creative—claimed the title of new man.

There was no opposition, recalls Mikhail Marov, an engineer and astronomer who launched the first spacecraft to Venus in the early 60s. - If these were intelligent physicists, then they respected the lyricists. And they considered the introduction to lyricism an integral part of their worldview. I absolutely associate myself with the sixties. And therefore I am very worried about the death of Andrei Voznesensky. I was close to the poetry of him, Rozhdestvensky, and Yevtushenko. I ran to the Polytechnic... This was included in the concept of “intelligence.”

And Voznesensky wrote in the 60s: “A woman stands at the cyclotron - // slender, // listening magnetically, // light flows through her, // red, like a strawberry, // at the tip of her little finger...”

Physicists were interested in humanitarian problems, not only poetry, but also social ideas; lyricists were inspired by scientific and technological utopia. The philosophers and sociologists who emerged after 1953 largely adopted the scientific and engineering worldview: the world can and should be changed, and according to science, according to a project.

The films “Nine Days of One Year” and the Strugatskys’ book “Monday Begins on Saturday” became symbols of the times: ““What do you do?” - I asked. “Like all science,” said the hook-nosed man. - Human happiness."

It must be said that the “free physicist” did so much in the 50s and 60s that it is still hard to believe. Of the 19 Russian Nobel laureates, ten received their prizes in 1956–1965: two of them were writers (Mikhail Sholokhov and Boris Pasternak), and the rest were physicists and chemists. In 1954, the world's first nuclear power plant was built in Obninsk. In 1957 - a synchrophasotron at the newly created international Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, which today is the largest scientific center.

In 1957, the USSR launched a satellite into space, and already in 1961 - Gagarin with his “Let's go!” In 1955, after the “letter of the three hundred,” the creation of genetic and biochemical laboratories began, and although Academician Lysenko returned in 1961, the works of our geneticists had already appeared in international journals.

The harmonious man of the future worked in the laboratory, played the guitar, held debates about the habitability of the Universe in the Integral cafe in the Novosibirsk Academic Town, attended performances of the Taganka Theater and Sovremennik in Moscow, and poetry evenings at the Polytechnic Museum. The latter, by the way, shows well how the myth was created. Here's what Marlen Khutsiev says:

As for the poetry evenings at the Polytechnic, I accidentally revived the tradition. And such evenings became widespread precisely after that scene at Ilyich’s Outpost. Before this, the poets of the sixties performed separately at different venues. I just put them together. And only after that their performances in stadiums began.

A logical continuation of the symbiosis of physicists with lyricists was the social activity of prominent scientists, primarily Andrei Sakharov, who in 1966 signed a collective letter about the danger of reviving the cult of Stalin. Along with scientists - Kapitsa, Artsimovich, Tamm - among the “signatories” were writers: Kataev, Nekrasov, Paustovsky.

I had no intention of radically changing anything in the country,” says Mikhail Marov. - Many of the principles on which socialism was built satisfied me. And I thought that we needed to deviate a little from conservative concepts. And the champion of this direction was Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, highly respected not only by me, but by many people, who just spoke about socialism with a human face.

“The scientific method of managing politics, economics, art, education and military affairs has not yet become a reality,” wrote Andrei Sakharov in his first socio-political article, “Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom.” It was in 1968, at the height of the Prague Spring, when Soviet tanks had not yet entered Czechoslovakia. In April, Sakharov still hoped to discuss his ideas with the country's leadership and society, but by August the capital's intelligentsia no longer hoped for equal participation in the life of the country. Communism with a human face did not work out.

Here's what one of the country's main dissidents, Sergei Kovalev, says:

I have heard more than once from my colleagues: “You understand that you are an accomplished scientist, and you understand what professionalism is. Why are you getting into politics, where you are an amateur? You despise amateurism.” It seems to me that this is a disingenuous judgment. There was a desire to earn the right to self-respect. That's all. The most intelligent among us understood perfectly well that all our actions and statements were not at all political in nature. This is the nature of moral incompatibility... I was put in the midst of work. Ten years of camp and exile. Then I was evicted from Moscow. What is a 13-year break in science?

Having retreated into dissidence or pure professionalism, the sixties actually lost the opportunity to defend their ideals in discussions with the authorities. The temporary surge in activity of scientists and writers during perestroika was exclusively dissident and anti-Soviet. The sixties only helped the nomenclature to destroy the USSR, but there was no longer a positive progressive communist utopia. Physicists and lyricists - two hemispheres of a harmonious personality - went in different directions, and the ideological emptiness of the 90s formed in the space between them.

The city is virgin soil

In the 60s, urbanization and unity with nature were part of the same social reality. Today, the place of utopia remains a concrete jungle, spontaneous dachas, tourism and downshifting

For centuries, man has fled from the wild for comfort. From a cave to a hut, from a hut to an apartment with gas, electricity, running water and a toilet. The sixties turned out to be the first generation in which the reverse movement occurred en masse.

40.3% of USSR cities were built after 1945. Moreover, the peak of construction occurred precisely in the 60s. The rapid growth of the urban environment created a new image of Soviet culture: its peasant-village appearance began to fade and acquire urban features. Even the village began to urbanize thanks to the economic fashion for large agro-industrial complexes.

In the spring of 1959, three hundred physics students from Moscow State University went to Northern Kazakhstan to build houses, calf barns and chicken coops. Thus began the movement of construction brigades, which captured almost all universities in the country. Virgin land (untilled land) became another word - a symbol of the era.

On the wave of the patriotic movement for the development of virgin lands, Komsomol trains went east singing and dancing. The main slogan is “Everything to virgin soil!” - recalls actor Igor Kvasha. - And we thought: why not create our own Komsomol theater there?

The state task was being solved - to develop new lands and increase productivity. The youth drive was part of a government project. This scared many people. Then, among scientists, a fashion was born for another form of escape to nature - tourism and expeditions.

Everyone stood under the backpacks: both those who had to do this as part of their job (for example, geologists), and those whose work did not require it at all. For example, physicist and Nobel laureate Igor Tamm was an avid mountaineer (they say he owns the aphorism: “Mountaineering is not the best way to survive the winter,” which later came into widespread use with the “not” particle removed).

The expeditionary movement swept the country. In every carriage of a train or electric train one could meet cheerful guys with girlfriends in cowboy shorts and sneakers. It was a subculture of tarpaulins: storm jackets, backpacks, tents. Unlike modern synthetics, all this was shamelessly wet even in moderate rain. But still, the tarpaulin seemed more attractive than the reinforced concrete of the “bourgeois” apartments.

Now they go to Thailand or the south of India, but back then you could take a tent and a guitar and run like a savage to the sea, to the forest or somewhere else. For scientists it was a natural way of life, recalls Alexander Mitta.

In the 60s there were no obvious contradictions between the city and nature. The hero with a backpack stormed mountain passes, crossed rivers and opened a can of stew with a cleaver. Then he returned home, washed, shaved, put on a sweater and went to his laboratory to storm an atomic nucleus or a living cell. “Going into the field” was devoid of pathos, since it implied a return.

But gradually this image also ceased to be conflict-free. In Kira Muratova’s film “Brief Encounters,” the main character, played by Vysotsky, the same wanderer with a guitar, wandering back and forth, free, independent, despising a career and material wealth, finds himself between two heroines: one is a simple village girl who leaves on foot to the city for some kind of “other” life unknown to her, the second is a city district committee official who controls the commissioning of new Khrushchev buildings and who is sick of all this. And it turns out that a truly spiritual, full-fledged person (Vysotsky’s hero) can only be himself in uncultivated places, far from society, not integrated into society. Everything else breaks it.

By the beginning of the 70s, domestic tourism began to acquire features of internal emigration. The author's song constantly teetered on the brink of undergroundness and approval: gatherings of bards were either supported or prohibited.

My friends and I went hiking,” says lawyer Boris Zolotukhin. - This was an opportunity to get away from propaganda. The illusion of complete freedom is to hide in a hermetic circle of friends. And then, in Moscow, Western radio stations were jammed, but in the forest “Spidola” picked up everything perfectly...

Nowadays, attempts to escape from a comfortable but also conflict-ridden urban environment are called differently. And if in the 60s someone had told a construction worker, a geologist or a water tourist that he was engaged in downshifting, then most likely he would have received a punch in the face in response. But in vain.

Democracy - technocracy

The government in the utopia of the 60s relied on the people, but culturally and scientifically equipped progressors had to rule. With the death of the idea of ​​progress, a false choice arose between the rule of the crowd and the strong hand

“Under democratic governance, according to the wishes of the majority, progress would be stopped, since the progressive principle is concentrated in a small number of people... Therefore, the democratic principle of governing people only works when it is associated with the deception of some by others.” This aphorism of Nobel laureate Peter Kapitsa from 1960 perfectly illustrates the democratic utopia of the 60s - its logical equipment, irony, as well as the need for a consistent combination of “the power of the people” and the “power of those who know.”

In certain areas, progress, right according to Kapitsa, was stopped democratically - during perestroika. Why?

Nikita [Khrushchev], having drunk, began to very harshly accuse the writers of not helping the party in building communism. And when Margarita Aliger tried to disagree with him, he, having lost all control over himself, screamed like a knife: “You don’t understand at all what the situation is in the country. We buy herring for gold, and you write here. What are you writing?" - recalls Igor Kvasha.

But in fact, 1963, when the intelligentsia began to fear a return to Stalinism, was a time when the state was still close to the people, and the country was not yet “this country.”

It was such a rosy period of relations with the authorities,” recalls Alexander Mitta. “We needed to show both the people and the authorities that we were doing vital things.

Until 1964, I lived in the family of the head of state, and we had constant conversations about politics,” says Sergei Khrushchev, the son of the then Secretary General. - The reforms implied the democratization of the economy and political life. Relative freedom of expression did not appear by itself, relative, but unthinkable even in Stalin’s time... People lived their own lives, but without the reformation this surge would never have happened.

Marlen Khutsiev disagrees with him:

In fact, the Thaw began earlier, immediately after Stalin’s death, even before the 20th Congress. And when this congress took place, I was already filming “Spring on Zarechnaya Street.” It was then that the thaw began to be attributed to Khrushchev.

By the beginning of the Khrushchev Thaw, the USSR had great potential, accumulated by internal energy and freedom of small groups, seminars, circles, not only in physics, engineering, literature, but even in the social sciences (the Moscow Methodological Circle worked at the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University since 1952) . And poetry readings at the Polytechnic Museum, and seminars with Landau, and discussions of advanced logic using the example of Marx’s “Capital” were connected by a common style and a common utopia. It can be called “democratic,” but the essence was not just freedom of opinion, but freedom of informed creative expression. For stupidity and lack of talent you could get punished, and very harshly.

And can't political discussions and management decisions be organized as freely, scientifically and effectively as a mathematical or philosophical seminar? Nothing seemed to stop us from moving in this direction. But…

“We are ruled by rednecks and enemies of culture. They will never be with us. They will always be against us.<…>And if for us communism is a world of freedom and creativity, then for them communism is a society where the population immediately and with pleasure fulfills all the instructions of the party and government,” this is how Boris Strugatsky described the context of the creation of “It’s Hard to Be a God.” In 1963, when the Strugatsky novels were published almost without censorship, the progressors, agents of communism on a planet ruled by the wild Middle Ages, became perhaps the key characters. This can also be understood as a discussion of the role of the intelligentsia in the USSR: how much can you interfere in the affairs of savages so as not to harm, but to help them gradually move towards progress?

When, in the late 60s, it became clear that the USSR was not an experimental state building communism, but simply an empire without any lofty goals, the intelligentsia went into internal emigration. “If you happen to be born in the Empire, // It’s better to live in a remote province by the sea,” wrote Joseph Brodsky.

However, in the disappointment in the USSR, the “aggressiveness” of the empire played, perhaps, no more a role than another factor: the party elite entered the stage of hardening and no longer wanted to build communism, and certainly did not let anyone “up.” The Stalinist norms of personnel rotation were abolished - in the highest bodies of the party by 1/4 and in regional and district ones by 1/3. Thus, the conditions were created for the stagnation of the 70s and 80s and the formation of a class of party-Soviet bureaucracy - the nomenklatura. It became increasingly difficult for technocrats to come into power, and rotation and movement ceased in science and culture. As in the anecdote about Shostakovich from the book by Mikhail Ardov: “During the war, Dmitry Dmitrievich was in Kuibyshev, there he saw and remembered this wonderful announcement: “From October 1, the open canteen here will be closed. A closed dining room opens here.” Since the 70s, the USSR began to become a “closed canteen”.

Those alliances that sometimes formed between the sixties and the nomenklatura in subsequent years turned out to be tragic. Participants in the V Congress of the Union of Cinematographers, which took place on May 13, 1986, subsequently apologized for the revolutionary overthrow of the “retrogrades” and classics of Soviet cinema Lev Kulidzhanov and Sergei Bondarchuk. And the authors of the letter in support of Yeltsin in October 1993 could hardly be proud of the style and content of this message, which justified the shooting of the White House: “Thank God, the army and law enforcement agencies were with the people.” With the beginning of the first Chechen war, the meaning of dissidence again became Soviet: the sixties broke with the authorities forever.

They were the elite of a huge country in the era of its historical chance. But it was their “technocratism” and “elitism” that came into conflict, first with the authoritarianism of the party nomenklatura (and lost), and then, in 1993, with the real desires of the masses (and also lost). The dream once again could not withstand the collision with reality.

Photo: Marc Garanger/CORBIS/FOTOSA.RU; RUSSIAN LOOK; GAMMA/EYEDEA/EAT NEWS; Time & Life Pictures/GETTY IMAGES/FOTOBANK; Dean Conger/CORBIS/FOTOSA.RU; Dean Conger/CORBIS; RIA NEWS

The birth, flourishing and collapse of the sixties utopia: facts and poems by Andrei Voznesensky

25/02/1956

The beginning of the thaw: at the 20th Congress of the CPSU, Nikita Khrushchev’s report “On the cult of personality and its consequences” was made.

...Everything burned out completely.
There are plenty of police.
Everything is over!
Everything has begun!
Let's go to the cinema!

12/04/1961

A triumph for the Soviet space program: Yuri Gagarin became the first person to fly into space.

Our neighbor Bukashkin lives with us,
in blotter-colored underpants.
But, like balloons,
they are burning above him
Antiworlds!

09/1965-02/1966

The trial of writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel: they were accused of publishing abroad works that “discredited the Soviet state and social system” and anti-Soviet propaganda.

And Taras has a dark dream.
A piece of howling meat
through the crowds, streets,
grimaces,
through life, to the howl of drums,
They lead him through the gauntlet, through the gauntlet!
They are led to a collective howl:
“Those who hit poorly are shot through the gauntlet.”

20-21/08/1968

The defeat of the Prague Spring: troops of the Warsaw Pact countries were brought into the capital of Czechoslovakia; The largest contingent was provided by the USSR. Czech “socialism with a human face” is crushed by Soviet tanks.

While eyewitnesses were thinking:
Should I take it or what? —
My century, in essence, has come true
And it stands like a brick through the ages.

25/12/1979

Soviet troops were brought into Afghanistan.

I want to die looking at the era...
In which only the drunkard is honest,
When the earth is torn apart bit by bit,
I want to die before everyone else dies.

22/01/1980

Andrei Sakharov was arrested, together with his wife Elena Bonner he was exiled to Gorky without trial and stripped of most of his titles.

We are troubadours from the word “fools”.
You were right to trample us.
You have populated all cubic areas.
The space is yours. But the time is ours.

19/07-3/08/1980.

The XXII Summer Olympic Games took place in Moscow.

Getting sharper and redder
My friends' squirrels.
And it matures, having hidden the deadlines,
National explosion.

26/04/1986

A major accident occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which resulted in a large-scale environmental disaster.

Nuclear winter, nuclear winter...
Science discovered this phenomenon only a year ago.
Turns into an icicle
the winning side.

26/03/1989

The first parliamentary elections in history are taking place in the USSR, in which voters chose from several candidates for deputies.

Our Marys are pregnant from Beria.
The whole people became like the collective Christ.
We, the unbaptized children of the Empire,
We grope for faith from the opposite.

19/08/1991

August putsch: in order to prevent the collapse of the USSR, a group of conspirators from the leadership of the CPSU Central Committee and the government formed the State Committee for a State of Emergency, removed Mikhail Gorbachev from power and sent troops into Moscow.

Punka spotted, bunnies on heels.
Where are you circling? Did you get a visa?
Which countries are you putting in order?
OMON Lisa?

11/12/1994

The beginning of the first Chechen war: in order to “ensure law, order and public safety,” units of the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Internal Affairs were introduced into the territory of the Chechen Republic.

sun black and red
nega nega negative
river brown-eyed river
snow snow inextinguishable

02/2001

The birth of the Russian blogosphere: the first Russian-speaking users of the blog service LiveJournal.com appeared on the Internet.

You weren't saved.
I will collect it into my soul
Seventh of the earth
With a short name - ru...

25/10/2003

Businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested at Novosibirsk airport on charges of tax evasion and theft.

Money smells like the future
What we spend it on -
For kindergarten bun
Or a terrorist attack.
…
They smell like will, Lord,
Sometimes in jail.
The more you save them -
You lose more of them.

09/2008

The global financial crisis has come to Russia.

The donut will turn into a hole,
I can't stand anything else.
And then I won't be there.
Without me. And without you.

The poetry of the post-war decades and especially the second half of the 60s is marked by extraordinary richness and diversity of creative quests and discoveries. This is an interesting and difficult period in the development of Soviet poetry. Its study, which has been intensively conducted over the past two decades, still does not sufficiently fully represent this phenomenon in Soviet literature.

The beginning of the 60s was also marked by the vivid establishment in literature of such diverse young poets as E. Evtushenko, R. Rozhdestvensky, A. Voznesensky, R. Kazakova, N. Matveeva, V. Tsybin, B. Akhmadulina and others. An era of rapidly growing The enthusiasm of the people was raised to the crest of the wave by the youth, who sensitively sensed the new mood. Loud poetry heard from the stands became a sign of the times. By the middle of the decade, a new direction in poetry had clearly emerged. It was determined by a qualitatively different desire to comprehend reality, believing it through the experience of history. In the work of poets, representatives of philosophical poetry, as well as the so-called “quiet lyricism,” there has been a turn towards the study of the classical tradition of Russian verse. In general, in the second half of the 60s, a process of moral elevation of the individual began, which significantly increased the requirements of citizenship. Perhaps the closest to resolving these issues among the young people were N. Rubtsov, V. Kazantsev, A. Prasolov, A. Peredreev, A. Zhigulin, “Polar Flowers”.

Actually, the presence in the poetry of the 60s of two completely opposite directions, coming from different traditions: one from the tribune, loud poetry of Vl. Mayakovsky - E. Yevtushenko, A. Voznesensky, etc. - and the other - from Tyutchev-Yesenin - N. Rubtsov, A. Prasolov, A. Zhigulin, V. Sokolov and others, rather characterized the extraordinary richness of the poetic process of those years, rather than testifying to its incompleteness. The work of these very different artists expressed the uniqueness of that time, and also reflected the great potential of the literature of socialist realism. But the most “capable” was the generation of poets who declared themselves before the start of the Great Patriotic War and during it, many took a direct part in the war - E. Vinokurov, S. Narovchatov, M. Lukonin, O. Berggolts, A. Mezhirov, M .Dudin et al.

For front-line poets, as well as for A. Tvardovsky, L. Martynov, V. Fedorov, V. Bokov, S. Vikulov, A. Prokofiev, V. Soloukhin, V. Sokolov, A. Yashin and others, the second half of the 60s The 1980s was marked by the fact that in their work there was a particularly clear turn towards a deeper mastery of the traditions of Russian classical verse, and their interest in Russian history, in the heroic principle in man, intensified. The poets sought to philosophically comprehend the path of the Soviet people to revolution, to socialism. The civic-sounding lyrics in their works acquired decisive importance at that time. Poetry was filled with intonations of a meditative, philosophical nature. It is no coincidence that poets turn to the poem by S. Vikulov “Overcoming” 1964, “Windows on the Dawn”, 1965, E. Evtushenko “Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station” 1965, A. Voznesensky “Longsho” 1963, R. Rozhdestvensky “Requiem” 1961, “Letter to XXX century" 1965, V. Fedorov "The Seventh Heaven" 1965-1967, A. Tvardovsky "Beyond the Distance - the Distance" 1961, E. Isaev "Memory Court" 1963, etc.

This circumstance testified to the coming time of a generalized-scale understanding of reality by our artists.

This site is dedicated to famous Soviet poets of the mid-60s of the 20th century with the aim of preserving and popularizing the literary heritage of their work.

The purpose of the lesson: give a brief overview of poetry, show its role in the social life of the country.

Lesson equipment:

• audio recordings of poets' poems performed by the author;
• stills from Khutsiev's film "Ilyich's Outpost".

Methodical techniques: lecture, student presentations about poets, expressive reading of poetry by heart.

Every generation considers itself
more intelligent than the previous one,
and wiser than what follows.
George Orwell

During the classes

I. The main orientation (pathos) of poetry of the 60s.

1. The teacher's word.

In 1988, Ogonyok magazine published photographs of 4 of the most talented poets of the sixties. These were Robert Rozhdestvensky, Evgeny Yevtushenko, Andrei Voznesensky, Bella Akhmadulina. A new genre appeared, later called the “author’s” song. Bulat Okudzhava, Alexander Galich, and later V. Vysotsky and Yuliy Kim sang their poems with a guitar.

It was they who brightly began the now mythical legendary years of Soviet poetry, when poems suddenly became extremely popular, when the Polytechnic Museum had to be cordoned off by mounted police during poetry evenings, and stadiums with hundred thousand seats could not accommodate everyone who wanted to listen to poetry. This was the time when “poems could be read at a meeting, and they could decide the outcome of the vote” (I. Zolotussky), when “people came to poetry evenings, ready to put their all into it, ready to think, empathize, feel” (A. Imermanis ). Time, changing 10 times a day and promising even sharper changes, helped its poets, creating a powerful resonance for their poems.

Amazingly powerful echo!
Obviously, this is the era.

L. Martynov

But poets also helped the times, almost instantly responding to the latest events and trends, formulating public opinion both “about the ways of the former Russia and about the present Russia.”

What was new in poetry in the 60s?

New topics.

New geography– Siberia, Central Asia, Kolyma, foreign countries, Russian outback.

New heroes– knights of immediate action, i.e. young romantics (saleswomen, astronauts, workers of various factories, retired house workers, intellectual workers, etc.).

Main problems.

Problems of truth and justice, light and shadow in the assessment of persons, events, processes.

They remembered the civil, educational, moral mission of poetry.

Poetry became a matter of state. Speaking on behalf of young people, the poets of that era appealed primarily to the state; it was from it that they expected to receive both response and recognition, and insisted that their opinion be accepted when determining the strategy of the state.

2. Watching footage from Khutsiev’s film “Ilyich’s Outpost” (evening at the Polytechnic).

Students recite poems by the above-mentioned poets by heart.

Teacher: Of course, there were other poems, other directions in poetry - appeals to eternity, to nature, when “everything disappears, only space, stars and a singer remain” (O. Mandelstam “The bread is poisoned and the air is drunk”). But, assessing the situation as a whole, we can say that the civic journalistic orientation was the main one.

Every coin has two sides, and the dominant position of civil poetry has pushed aside and made deep philosophical quiet lyrics invisible.

According to L. Annensky, “...the frank man defeated the hidden man, noise defeated silence, the external turned out to be brighter than the internal. The difficult experience gave way to mild excitement, and many poets who have gained popularity seem to have forgotten that they are not only publicists and teachers at an adult school, but also (first and foremost) poets.”

At the end of the 60s, poetry began to move towards the boundaries of classical traditions.

II. Features of poetry of the 70s.

Time seems to be empty
What was there is not there.
But also what wanted to be
Didn't follow a clear path
As if the body was left to live,
But the body has no soul.

A. Tvardovsky

1. The desire of poetry of the 60s to open more and more new territories, to expand the radius of action(space, hydroelectric power stations, etc.) was replaced by a cult of stability, reluctance to change places and generally a return to home, under one’s own wing.

Back to simple things
Towards the small light in a small window.
I partake of the steaming cabbage soup,
I'm taming myself to a homemade spoon.

A. Peredreev (“Back to simple things...”)

The theme of a small homeland- the main one in the work of N. Rubtsov, V. Sokolov, N. Tryapkin, A. Zhigulin who left us early and tragically.

We read the poems by heart:

• N. Rubtsova “My Quiet Homeland”, “Star of the Fields”;
• V. Sokolova “How I want these lines...”

2. The idea of ​​the tasks of poetry, its place and role in the spiritual life of society also changed in the 70s. Instead of a dialogue with the state, there is a confession, a cleansing confession of a troubled heart before the people, and the key words are not the words “truth” and “justice”, but the words and concepts: “conscience”, “love”, “filial duty”, “responsiveness” and etc.

The pathos of creation, struggle and enthusiasm, the destruction of old authorities was replaced by the pathos of reflection, delving into the eternal questions of existence.

Gleb Gorbovsky "To be".

3. There is increased attention to the inner world of the individual, to the human soul, inquisitive interest in ontological issues, i.e. to questions of life and death, the ultimate goals of existence, human responsibility to nature.

A. Peredreev “The merciless essence of knowledge...”.
Yu. Kuznetsov “Atomic fairy tale”.

And, naturally, the civic tone of poetry decreased, the feeling of closeness to modernity was lost.

E. Yevtushenko insulted many of his fellow poets, accusing them of “... all this falsely exalted fetishism, // purring with a view to the ages, // from rats and from fighting them - // escape to that corner , // where is the saucer of milk” (“Quiet” poetry).

And he angrily called:

Poetry was not born from a pop dandy,
But there is no shame in struggle.
Poetry, be it loud or quiet -
Never be a quiet, deceitful person!

Or: We must not hide - we must fight!

"Bratskaya HPP"

But no calls, accusations, or discussions about the behests of V. Mayakovsky helped, nor did reminders that the traditions of great Russian poetry are not only in elegies and philosophical lyrics, but also in the civic-passionate lines of the Decembrist poets, A. Pushkin, M Lermontov, N. Nekrasova. The prestige of poetry fell uncontrollably.

The following circumstances should also be taken into account: many talented poets have passed away.

These are A. Akhmatova - 1966, A. Yashin - 1968, N. Rylenkov - 1969, N. Rubtsov, A. Tvardovsky, S. Prokofiev - 1971, Y. Smelyakov - 1972, G. Shpalikov - 1974, etc.

Some were forced to go abroad: I. Brodsky - 1972, A. Galich - 1974.

Others went deep underground.

The reasons for the change in poetry styles are also explained literary: an acute reaction to the preponderance of journalism in the previous decade, both socio-politically and socially. An era of long calm, stagnation, loss of the content of words and concepts, an era of hypocrisy, a complete discrepancy between deeds and words has arrived. It has become almost indecent to utter loud words that are not backed by action.

4. What were the planned ways out of the crisis situation?

a) Yevtushenko and Voznesensky immoderately raised, forced, strained their voices, broke into screams, drawing attention to the tragedies of the world and the extreme situations and characters of their native reality:

I would like to fight on all your barricades, humanity!
E. Yevtushenko “I would like...”

During these years, E. Yevtushenko’s poems appeared: “Bullfight” - 67, “Under the Skin of the Statue of Liberty” - 68, “Snow in Tokyo” - 74, “Dove in Sant Iago” - 80.
A. Voznesensky “Ice - 69”.

Later the poet will say about these verses like this:

Oh, what a gourmet you were!
Pain mixed in like sauce
Into an enchanted romance,
My conscience was already sucking...

b) The appeal of a number of poets to the national history of past centuries and to the prehistoric past, to cave times, to pagan folklore, to mystical revelations, magical secrets. The choice of options is huge: here are the ideas of Tibetan sages, and modern psychics in the poems of V. Sidorov, and the great-power, almost imperial lyrics of S. Kunyaev, the works of Yu. Kuznetsov and other poets. With all the diversity of these mental hobbies and fads, one can notice a common thing, which was brilliantly reflected in the poem “Prose in Verse” by A. Mezhirov in his social insight and poetic power (journal “Smena” November, December 1988):

Care for Christ,
However, soon
They preferred Perun to Jesus.
And with the four Gospels in dispute
They thought of reaching India.
And there is only one meaning of this joy,
Promising only quarrel and fuss,
In an animal thirst for self-affirmation,
For which I blame myself first of all.
Some are keen on Aryanism, some on shamanism,
Who in that who sees the essence in this,
If only I could get rid of Christianity
And cross out two thousand years.

c) The image of Russia, the Russian national, the so-called Russian spirit, way of life was also raised in a unique way and presented in the poems of a number of poets, especially Yu. Kuznetsov. This is (in his depiction) an island, equally hostile to both the East and the West, opposing all the world's thunderstorms and storms of time, plunged into epic oblivion. The poem “And I had a dream about Russia.”

The poet has only one hope, that in this world what is foreign will perish, but what is dear will be clenched into a fist.
Yu. Kuznetsov “Russian Thought”.

III. 80s.

What fed and determined the verse of most poets, what served as the energy base of their creativity? Memory. The leading theme is memory. Even the titles of the poems contained this word.

And even what is forgotten
Lives invisible in the soul.

A. Zhigulin (“My poor brain, my fragile mind...”)

Everyone remembers, even young people. About what?

1. They remember the historical glory of our people. The 800th anniversary of the Battle of Kulikovo evoked a particularly friendly response.

Poetic memories appear about the great men of Russia, about the warriors of ancient Rus', about S. Radonezh, about Ivan the Terrible, Peter I, Stepan Razin, about the heroes of the Battle of Borodino (I. Shklyarevsky, V. Ustinov, M. Dudin, F. Chuev, etc. .)

2. Memories of the Great Patriotic War.

There are especially many of them. Why? The reason is historical: decades have not erased anything from memory. The war showed examples of the highest heroism, nobility and at the same time monstrous baseness, revealing something that would be criminal to forget. In the fate of the front generation, these 1418 days, as it turned out, were central, and nothing could compare with them or overshadow them. Younger generations, only marginally caught up in the military disaster, discovered that the foundation of their system of civil and moral values ​​was the memory of the time of the greatest trial. Of course, the best poems and poems about the past are saturated with the living blood of those few poets who forced people to talk about themselves.

Gennady Rusakov. The poems are imbued with the tragic motif of early orphanhood, homelessness, and a terrible stay in an orphanage.

I had a sweet time
Golytba, successor of the family.
I slept on the iron ground
Under the supervision of a large crowd.
Rusakovs, stingy relatives!
Answer me - I’ll become hoarse from the howling:
"Someone find me
In a children's home near Lozovaya"!
I'm hoarse from crying in orphanages,
I steal rations from distribution stations.
Wow, how little there is in my bins!
I feast on rotten cakes...

"Kinship"

This tragic motif of loneliness unites the poems of Rusakov and his peers: I. Shklyarevsky, V. Ustinov, Yu. Kuznetsov. Their conclusions from bitter experience are different, but B. Slutsky is right when he noted that the last of the war generations is chained to the terrible impressions of infancy, crossed out by fatherlessness:

They have no memory of the war,
War is only in their blood,
In the depths of hemoglobin
Contains soft bones...

"The Last Generation".

V. Ustinov “When my father died behind the Red Stone...”
Yu. Kuznetsov “Father was walking...”

Father was walking. The father walked unharmed through the minefield.
Turned into billowing smoke - no grave, no pain.
Whenever his mother is waiting for him,
Through the field and arable land
A column of swirling dust wanders
Lonely and scary.

This feeling of loneliness makes you look for a pier. A cult of family has emerged to cling to. The only way out is to feel a blood connection with everyone living and with those already in the earth.

G. Rusakov “And I am Ivan, who does not remember kinship...”

This is how the destructive power of war is revealed. It is also inescapable in the memory of those poets who went through the war.

This is Yu. Voronov (wrote about the siege of Leningrad), D. Samoilov, who tried to forbid himself to remember, but could not. This is Yu. Levitansky, who also exclaimed: “I almost forgot all this. // I want to forget all this,” but discovered, like all the poets of the front-line generation: “I am not participating in the war - it is participating in me.” (Poem “So what if I was there”).

Images of war are highlighted in different ways by M. Dudin, K. Vanshenkin, Yu. Drunina and others.

But even among these glorious names, Yuri Belash attracts attention.

He is an artist who came to literature only at the age of 50. His poems are striking in their density of signs of life at the front, and in their unique ability to not look away from the cruel details of the war. Is it necessary to write about war like this? He is convinced that it is necessary for everyone to understand how difficult it was to keep a living soul within oneself during the war.

Poems about war are poems about life, not divided into peace and war; according to A. Mezhirov, this is an invisible but strong bridge from the past through the present to the days to come.

The memory of the war, as well as other difficult national trials, makes us think about life, not about death, about its greatest fragility, about how to prevent a possible world massacre, how to avert the threat of self-destruction of humanity.

3. The theme of memory of the terrible years of repression, the horrors of the fratricidal civil war, the years of fear of each other, spy mania, etc. The dark and terrible pages of our history appeared before readers in poetry after the 20th Congress. These are prophetic poems by Osip Mandelstam, defending human values, written not later, but in the midst of a terrible snowstorm. “The Age of the Wolfhound,” he gave this definition of time.

This "Requiem" by Anna Akhmatova, in which human torment is expressed in a high poetic style.

This A.T. Tvardovsky and his poem “By the right of memory” with an in-depth study of Stalinism, its crippling essence.

Y. Smelyakov “Overcoat”.

V. Kornilov. Bitter poems about N. Gumilyov as a memory of those poets who were later subject to repression.

The poems of those who lived in freedom during these decades, but from whom the living soul was taken out by the spectacle of reprisals against poets and artists, have a special accusatory power. It was life among lies and hypocrisy, among unbelief and despair, discrepancies between words and deeds, leading to indifference and indifference, to the spiritual swamp of an entire generation.

These are poems by B. Slutsky, O. Berggolts and others (magazine “Znamya No. 8, 1987”).

Classics have always been the salvation for poets of the 20th century.

B. Slutsky “Novels from the school curriculum.”

Far from all Parnassus,
From petty vanities
Nekrasov is with me again
And Afanasy Fet.

V. Sokolov.

Literature:

1. I. Grinberg “The Ways of Soviet Poetry.” -M., “Fiction”, 1968.
2. P. Vykhodtsev “Poets and Time.” -M., “Fiction”, 1976.
3. V. Ivanisenko “Poetry, life, man. About the lyrics." -M., “Soviet Writer”, 1982.
4. S. Kunyaev “Poetry. Fate. Russia". -M., “Our Contemporary”, 2001.

In literature and art of the second half of the 60s, two lines of development are clearly visible. The first is officially recognized. It was represented by published novels and stories, artistic paintings exhibited at exhibitions, and dramatic and musical works performed on stage. In addition, there was the work of cultural figures unknown or little known to most readers and viewers, created not within the framework of the traditional method of socialist realism. Some of the works of official art, highly valued at one time by the governing bodies of culture, turned out to be "ephemera." Conversely, many works of the second, previously unrecognized direction have taken a prominent place in Russian culture.

The work of many representatives of literature and art during the period under review was occupied by the theme of the Great Patriotic War. Movies about the war were shown on cinema screens (including “Ordinary Fascism” by M.I. Romm). Monuments to the heroes and victims of the war were erected in cities and workers' settlements (for example, the memorial to the "Heroic Defenders of Leningrad" by sculptor M.K. Anikushin).

At the turn of the 60s and 70s, a large group of prose writers entered literature, the theme of whose work was the contemporary village. In the works of V.P. Astafieva, B.P. Mozhaeva, V.G. Rasputina, V.M. Shukshin, the central place was occupied by the fate of the Russian peasantry, the relationship between the village and the city. A.N. worked in the science fiction genre. and B.N. Strugatsky. Writers' interest in the country's historical past has increased. Memoir literature has been replenished with memoirs of famous military leaders of the period of the Patriotic War (books by G.K. Zhukov “Memories and Reflections”, A.M. Vasilevsky “The Work of a Whole Life”, etc.). However, many talented works written during this period were unable to overcome censorship restrictions and were released after a long time.

The idealization of social life had a heavy impact on the development of painting and cinema. The organizers of exhibitions of one of the most talented artists, I. S. Glazunov, had to overcome great difficulties. As before, paintings by avant-garde artists of the 1930s were collecting dust in museum storerooms. Paintings and literary works on historical topics could see the light only if they corresponded to the prevailing official views on the events of the past. At the same time, a “green street” was opened for the publication of works that were obviously weak, but corresponded to the ideological foundations of socialist culture. In the second half of the 70s, L. I. Brezhnev’s book “Malaya Zemlya” was published in multi-million copies. "Virgin Land" and "Renaissance". The memoir books, written on the instructions of the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, were of a journalistic nature and were intended mainly for study on the party educational network. However, the board of the USSR Writers' Union considered it possible to accept L.I. Brezhnev into the ranks of the Writers' Union.

Literary works prohibited by the authorities were published, as a rule, in samizdat. This is the way the book of A.I. first came to the reader. Solzhenitsyn "The Gulag Archipelago", A.P. Platonov "Chevengur", B.L. Pasternak "Doctor Zhivago".

In the 60s socio-political processes in the country that had entered the period of mature socialism, the deep interpenetration of national and international principles in artistic creativity, the level of artistic development of Soviet literature, the experience accumulated by it for the multifaceted reflection of the main vital conflicts, created the prerequisites for the final formation of a new, modern stage development of Soviet literature. Important changes in the literary life of the country were expressed in the revitalization of the activities of creative unions, in the passage of heated discussions, in the intensification of the work of magazines and publishing houses. After the 2nd Congress of Writers of the USSR (1954; subsequent congresses took place in 1959, 1967, 1971, 1976), the number and circulation of magazines and almanacs increased sharply, and the map of their “distribution” expanded. The almanac "Friendship of Peoples" has turned into a monthly literary, artistic and socio-political magazine. A new publishing house, "Soviet Russia", was created in Moscow. New publishing houses were organized in the Kalmyk, Kabardino-Balkarian, Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republics and a number of regions. Since 1958, a second literary newspaper, Literature and Life, began to be published in Moscow, later reorganized into the weekly Literary Russia. The days of Soviet literature, held in the republics, territories, and various regions of the USSR, have become a constant fact of literary life.

The formation and development of Soviet literature in inextricable connection with the socio-historical development and cultural construction in the USSR, their steady growth - quantitative and qualitative - is the most important pattern of the spiritual life of Soviet society and one of the characteristic typological features of the literary process.

An objective study of all layers and social groups of society, a truthful disclosure of conflicts of the past and present from the standpoint of party affiliation, nationality, adherence to the principle of historicism contributed to the flourishing of national literatures, the identification of the deepest potentials and created solid foundations for their international unity.

In the late 50s - early 60s. The achievements of Soviet poetry were associated primarily with those works that posed the most large-scale, fundamental problems for the modern era. The biography of the century, the path of a new society, personality in its relationship with history - such topics became the subject of artistic research in the epic poems “Mid-Century” (published in 1958) by V.A. Lugovsky, "Strict Love" (1956) Y.V. Smelyakov, "Lyubava" (1958--62) B.A. Ruchyova, “Palestine, Palestine...” I.V. Abashidze, “The Voice of Asia” (1956) Tursun-zade, “Blood and Ashes” (1960), “The Wall” (1965) by Y. Marcinkevichyus, “Venus Sold” (1958) by V.D. Fedorov, “Memory Court” (1962) E.I. Isaeva and others; in large poetic cycles that claim to have deep philosophical and social generalizations, “Man” (1961) by E. Mezhelaitis, “Roses and Grapes” (1957) by Rylsky, “When it clears up” (1956-59) by Pasternak and others; in the poetry collections "Poems" (1957) N.A. Zabolotsky, "Lad" (1961) by Aseev. The spiritual wealth of his young contemporary, the sensitivity, diversity and complexity of his intellectual and emotional reactions were reflected in his work by B.A. Akhmadullina, A.A. Voznesensky, E.A. Evtushenko, N.N. Matveeva, M. Machavariani, B.Sh. Okudzhava, R.I. Rozhdestvensky, D. Charkviani and others.

At every stage of the development of Soviet society, it is natural for writers to return to the theme of Lenin. In the creation of a multi-genre and multi-problem Leninian, which opens up prospects for the artistic embodiment of a typical image of a person at a qualitatively new level of understanding of this task, the multinational community of Soviet literature finds its expression. Significant achievements in this area are marked by such works as the last part of Pogodin’s dramatic trilogy “The Third Pathetic” (1959), chronicle novels by M.S. Shaginyan "The Ulyanov Family" (1938, revised edition 1957), "The First All-Russian" (1965), Kazakevich's story "The Blue Notebook" (1961), Kataev's lyrical diary "The Little Iron Door in the Wall" (1964), artistic and documentary book by E. Ya. Drabkina “Black Rusks” (1957-60).

The deepening of historicism in Soviet literature caused in the 60s and 70s. a new rise in historical-revolutionary prose. In works of this genre, writers pose current problems of an active, heroic attitude to life, in a broad historical and philosophical context they reveal important trends in social development: the novels “Father and Son” (1963--64), “Siberia” (1969--73) by Markov , “Towards the Dawn” (book 1--2, 1956--57) V.M. Kozhevnikova, “The Creation of the World” (book 1--2, 1955--1967) V.A. Zakrutkina, “Land and People” (1956) R. Sirge, “Dawn over the Sea” (1956) Yu.K. Smolich, "The Twelve Gates of Bukhara" (1967--68) D. Ikrami, "People in the Swamp" (1962) Melezha, "Blood and Sweat" (1961--70) A. Nurpeisova and others. Acutely dramatic carotenes of the class struggle in the post-war Lithuanian village was painted by M. Slutsky in the novel “Stairway to Heaven” (1963). Many of these works, as well as novels and stories by M.N. Alekseev's "Cherry Whirlpool" (1961), "Bread is a noun" (1964), "Karyukha" (1967), Zalygina's "Salty Pad" (part 1--2, 1967--68), "Commission" ( 1975), A.S. Ivanov’s “Shadows Disappear at Noon” (1963), “Eternal Call” (1970) turn to the origins of folk life, seeking to artistically explore the roots and prerequisites of a new historical community of people, its problems, and prospects for the future. Evidence of the maturity of Soviet multinational literature in general is the appearance of significant epic works in the literatures of small nations: novels by Chuvash writers V. Krasnov-Asli, N. Ilbekov, Kabardians Kh. Teunov and A. Shortanov, Adyghe D. Kostanov and others.

A comprehensive study of the complex processes occurring in the post-revolutionary village is combined in Soviet literature with close attention to a person’s personality, his moral character, and his place in the system of social relations. Trilogy F.A. Abramov "Pryasliny" (1958--73), novels by P.L. Proskurin ("Bitter Herbs", 1964; "Fate", 1972), Avizhus ("Village at the Crossroads", 1964), as well as such works as "Lipyagi" (1963-65) by S.A. Krutilin, "Village Diary" (1956--71) E.Ya. Dorosh are characterized by an accurate knowledge of the language and life of the collective farm village, a meaningful artistic analysis of life, characters, relationships between people, a subtle understanding of their native nature, the poetry of peasant labor and the moral values ​​based on it. A wide gallery of original folk characters was created by V.M. Shukshin, who affirmed moral maximalism and high pathos of spirituality in his works.

Talent V.M. Shukshina is increasingly measured by the standards of Leskov, Chekhov, Bunin. His characters struggle with problems that have captivated the attention of the greatest writers of the past: what is the meaning of life, “what is happening to us,” what is the secret of the world, beauty, movement, “why is everything?” The spiritual tension of his stories is connected with the heroes’ attempts to explain the world and themselves, to understand the connection, to “get to the bottom.”

As a writer, Shukshin tried his hand at the genres of the novel ("Lyubavins", "I came to give you freedom"), the story ("There in the Distance", "Kalina Krasnaya").

The main characters of most of Shukshin's stories are village people: tractor drivers, drivers, accountants, foremen, in a word - sowers and guardians of the land. As a rule, V. Shukshin’s heroes are inquisitive people, often “eccentric”, but in their thoughts and feelings they are spontaneous, sometimes simple-minded, and touchingly charming.

In his stories, Shukshin ridiculed human vices and knew how to show where good is and where evil is.

In the story "The Hunt to Live" evil and good are shown in direct combat. The old hunter Nikitich, a man of boundless kindness, an open soul, sheltered a criminal, actually saved his life - and received a bullet from him in the back. Shukshin’s uncompromisingly negative attitude towards evil, in this case performed in the form of a criminal. It is all the more important to emphasize that the writer subsequently more than once addressed in his works people who, for one reason or another, were serving prison sentences.

The problem of human happiness, which V. Shukshin was acutely concerned about, remained unresolved by him until the end, but it was solved in favor of our lives with increasing success.

Military prose still occupies an important place in the literary process. Artistically accurate embodiment of rich factual material, in-depth reflections on the tragic and heroic four-year war and its place in history distinguish Simonov’s trilogy “The Living and the Dead” (1959–71). The inner world of a person in war, the social and moral motives of his behavior in Sholokhov’s story “The Fate of a Man” (1956-57), in the stories “An Inch of Earth” (1959) and “The Dead Have No Shame” (1961) are analyzed with deep psychological authenticity. G. Ya. Baklanova, “Sotnikov” (1970) and “To Live Until Dawn” (1972) by V. Bykov, in the story “Ivan” (1958) and the novel “In August forty-four” (1974) by V. Bogomolov. A significant contribution to the creation of the military epic was made by the works of K.D. Vorobyova, A.A. Ananyeva, N. Dumbadze, B. Hovsepyan, T. Akhtanova. Bondarev gave a multifaceted portrayal of the Great Patriotic War in his novels “Hot Snow” (1969) and “The Shore” (1975). The novels “The Cry of the Swift” (1969) by V. Beshlyaga and “The Moon, Like the Muzzle of a Cannon” (1970) by S. Shlyahu are distinguished by their formulation of complex social problems, the desire to penetrate into national psychology, to show its class conditionality, and to depict the character of a new person.

The genre and stylistic range of documentary prose, enriched with lyricism, depth of philosophical generalizations, and passionate journalism, is expanding. Significant pages in the chronicle of the Great Fatherland. war entered by S.S. Smirnov’s books “Brest Fortress” (1957), “Stories about Unknown Heroes” (1963). “The Khatyn Tale” (1973) by A.M. is dedicated to one of the tragic episodes of the military past. Adamovich. The desire to more fully express personal experience and attitude to life in a direct conversation with the reader caused the appearance of such original books in terms of genre as “Day Stars” (1959) by Bergholz, “The Ice Book” (1959) by Y. Smuul. In the lyrical and prose book “My Dagestan” (1968), Gamzatov reflects on the beauty of his Motherland, on the fate of its history and culture, on the place of tradition in the formation of the spiritual image of a contemporary.

When developing social and moral problems, writers use the techniques of “polyphony” of narration, which opens up the possibility of comparing different points of view, characters and positions in life, the “looseness” of the novel’s time, which allows one to more fully express the intense introspection of the characters, their “confessional” thoughts (produced by A.G. Bitov, Yu.V. Trifonov, Slutskis, etc.). Similar processes are observed in dramaturgy. In the plays of A.V. Vampilov, acute conflict situations become a test of the moral and volitional potential and internal culture of the heroes.

Soviet literature comprehensively reveals the philosophical and cultural-economic meaning of the changes taking place, reflects the new production relations of people in the moral and ethical sphere of their existence: V. Kozhevnikov’s novels “Meet Baluev!” (1960), G.N. Vladimova “Big Ore” (1961), A.E. Rekemchuk "Young-green" (1961). Acute problems of modern production and relationships in the working environment are becoming increasingly attractive material for literature that is looking for new, effective means of depicting a person, a citizen, a fighter.

The Party highly appreciates the achievements of Soviet literature and notes the intensification of the activities of the creative intelligentsia, which is making an increasingly significant contribution to the all-party, national cause of building a communist society. The party calls for a further increase in the role of socialist culture and art in the ideological, political, moral and aesthetic education of Soviet people and the formation of their spiritual needs. The resolution of the CPSU Central Committee “On Literary and Artistic Criticism” (1972) calls for fighting for the high ideological and aesthetic level of Soviet art, consistently opposing bourgeois ideology, and boldly exploring the processes taking place in society. The resolution had a significant impact on the development of literary criticism and literary criticism, which seek to more actively, from party positions, influence the course of the literary process, shape the beliefs and tastes of readers. Public authority is increasing, Marxist-Leninist methodological equipment is strengthening, the professional level of literary criticism is increasing (see Literary criticism in the Science section, as well as the article Literary criticism). The party pays great attention to the preparation and education of creative successors as one of the most important tasks for the fruitful development of Soviet artistic culture. The resolution of the CPSU Central Committee “On working with creative youth” (1976) provides an extensive program for improving the entire system of vocational training and the ideological and political training of the younger generation of artistic intelligentsia.

The formation of Soviet literature as a new stage in the development of the spiritual culture of mankind has always attracted the attention of the progressive artistic intelligentsia of various countries. In the social activities and creativity of A. Barbusse and R. Rolland, B. Brecht and I. Becher, T. Dreiser and M. Andersen-Nexo, Premchand and Lu Xun, R. Fox, N. Hikmet and many other outstanding representatives of literature 20th century the world-historical significance of the revolutionary experience of Soviet writers in the creation of a unified socialist multinational literature was affirmed and the paths of its future decisive influence on the course of development of "... the international culture of democracy and the world labor movement" were drawn (Lenin V.I., Complete collection of works. , 5th ed., vol. 24, p. 120). Embodied in the works of Soviet literature, the ideas of socialist internationalism equip writers from different countries with a new vision of the world and open up a real prospect of breaking out of the dead ends of bourgeois society. The growing international authority of Soviet literature clearly expresses the triumph of Lenin's national policy (see section International cultural relations).