Pushkin Is Our Everything
What makes Pushkin the focus of the "Russian mentality"? This question haunts thinking people not only in Russia. In London, on the day of the 215th anniversary of the poet's birth, the American director M. Becklheimer presented a new documentary "Pushkin is our everything."
Centuries pass, but the name of Pushkin is still significant for world culture. Life studied up to the day and hour, volumes of studies of literary wealth, memoirs of contemporaries do not shed light on the phenomenon of Pushkin - "our first poet, prose writer, historian, citizen, lover and friend", the one about whom it is said: Pushkin is our everything.
Philologists, writers, cinematographers and simply not indifferent people do not abandon their efforts to penetrate the essence of the mysterious phrase of Apollo Grigoriev and decipher, finally, the "cultural genome", which with the first lines of verse "Near the Lukomorye …" is embedded in our mentality: "Pushkin is our everything" …
A documentary by the American director Michael Beckelhimer with this name was first shown at the London Pushkin House on June 6, 2014 in honor of the birthday of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin and the Day of the Russian Language. The director tried to answer the question of why the poet, who died in a duel in 1837, remains to this day the most widely read author in Russia. “Now Russia needs Pushkin more than ever,” says one of the heroes of the film.
Taken out of context, the words of A. Grigoriev may seem controversial. Why exactly Pushkin is our everything, and not Lermontov or, for example, Tolstoy? Why is the name of Pushkin invariably the first to appear in the mind as a generalizing symbol of Russian poetry, the Russian language, and the Russian worldview? Why did quotations from the works of the First Russian poet become so much a part of living speech that we no longer realize their authorship? Why exactly Pushkin is our everything?
Before answering these questions, let us read A. Grigoriev's statement in full: “Pushkin is our everything: Pushkin is the representative of everything that is spiritual, special, such that will remain our spiritual, special after all collisions with strangers, with other worlds. Pushkin is so far the only complete sketch of our national personality, a nugget that has taken into itself … everything that should be accepted, removed everything that should be removed, a complete and integral … image of our national essence. The sphere of Pushkin's emotional sympathy does not exclude anything that was before him and nothing that after him was and will be correct and organically - ours. In general, not only in the world of art, but also in the world of our social and moral sympathy - Pushkin is the first and complete representative of our physiognomy. Indeed, he is our everything.
Everyone reading these lines will surely hear an echo of their own feelings in them. At the level of subjective feelings, it is. But is there an objective law? What is the reason and what is the mechanism of consonance of the creativity of one person with the attitude of the people? Yuri Burlan at the training "System-vector psychology" for the first time explains the phenomenon of Pushkin at the level of the mental unconscious. Systematically examining the vector matrix of Russian mentality and the structure of the psychic organization of the poet A. Pushkin, we can say with confidence: the urethral-sound Pushkin, with all his “saintly freedom,” was doomed to the role of the leader of Russian literature, “the ruler of thought,” by his own definition.
Providence ordained him to be a model for the transmission in time of the best qualities of the Russian mentality: love of freedom, fearlessness, easy surrender of his own life in the name of a higher goal, mercy to the fallen, eternal and endless spiritual search. Pushkin really deserves to be said about him that he is our everything.
Pushkin's creativity and life are inseparable. The poet created a new reality with the written Word, brilliantly reforming the Russian literary language with his wonderful stanzas. Already in the Lyceum, the 17-year-old was visited by eminent poets: Zhukovsky, Vyazemsky, Batyushkov, like magi to worship. Seeing in the restless young man the future sun of Russian poetry, the piits took him under their wing. Zhukovsky remained for the rest of his life a "defeated teacher", and in fact, an intercessor before the tsar and the Poet's savior from himself - uncompromising, quick to anger and not wanting to be a jester with the sovereign.
The modern Russian language in its usual form is inconceivable without the tectonic shift made by Pushkin. "Ruslan and Lyudmila", "Boris Godunov", "Eugene Onegin" were the heralds of the new literary Russian language. Before Pushkin, they did not write that way. They didn't dare, for example, call a leg a leg, but he dared. He dared to violate the boundaries of what was permitted and establish his own rules of the game in the Russian literary field, identifying all the themes and ideas of the subsequent development of Russian literature.
What did Pushkin do for us? We all learned a little something and somehow and we know that Koschey is withering over gold - such is his share in our forest-steppe; that a sorcerer sometimes carries a hero, but not for long; that you cannot acquire material benefits - you will find yourself at a broken trough; that the people are silent, and then how the battle breaks out, the Battle of Poltava, and hurray! we break, the Swedes bend … We think in the language that Pushkin gave us, in the truest sense of the word. It is no coincidence that since 2011, the Day of the Russian Language has been celebrated on June 6, the poet's birthday. The philosopher I. Ilyin wrote: “We do not come together to remember or“remember”Pushkin as if there were times of oblivion or loss…. But in order to testify both to himself and to him that everything that he created beautiful has entered the very essence of the Russian soul and lives in each of us; that we are inseparable from him sohow he is inseparable from Russia; that we test ourselves by his vision and his judgments; that we learn from it to see Russia, to comprehend its essence and its fate; that we are happy when we can think with his thoughts and express our feelings in his words; that his creations became the best school of Russian art and the Russian spirit; that the prophetic words "Pushkin is our everything" are true even now and will not fade away in the whirl of times and events …"
The great-grandson of the Ethiopian, who wrote the first poems in French, the urethral-sound Pushkin with all his spiritual structure turned out to be Russian. Not knowing Russian as he should in his youth, this "Frenchman" made Russian literature a way of survival for millions of Russians, and the Russian language - a powerful tool for mastering the multilingual expanses of the Empire.
A gambler and a wit, a duelist and a reveler, a dandy and lover of all pretty women, Pushkin is immeasurably more than anything written about him. He determined the development not only of literature, not only of language - all these are only consequences of the main thing. The creator of the encyclopedia of Russian life has branded the collective unconscious of Russia for centuries with his famous talisman seal. By this stigma, by this seal, we recognize our own people, regardless of nationality, race and country of residence. A. S. Pushkin is both the password with which we respond to each other in the darkness of timelessness, and the victory cry at the pinnacle of success: Ay yes, Pushkin! Oh yes son of a bitch!
Pushkin is our everything. He concentrated in himself the main, best, decisive properties of the Russian mentality. Like Noah's Ark, Pushkin's art has absorbed everything that must be preserved in any disaster. To survive - by all means - and remain yourself.
