Russian passions. Passion
It should not be assumed that gambling in Russia appeared only in the 19th century and that the Russian national game has always been bingo, as homegrown historians claim. The younger generation played grandmother, but adults did not disdain them at fairs and in taverns, making serious monetary bets to the delight of the audience.
It should not be assumed that gambling in Russia appeared only in the 19th century and that the Russian national game has always been bingo, as homegrown historians claim. The younger generation played grandmother, but adults did not disdain them at fairs and in taverns, making serious monetary bets to the delight of the audience.
Fist fights, which existed until the beginning of the twentieth century, were considered a traditional folk totalizator. The participants themselves avoided making money “on cams”. This was considered an unworthy deed. But merchants often put their workers into battle, getting from this not only entertainment, but also considerable benefit.
Oddly enough it sounds, but foreigners who visited Russia as travelers or diplomats were sure that card games were a national Russian entertainment. Cards came to Russia at the end of the 16th century and were soon banned by Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich along with grain, an analogue of dice. Illegal gambling was viewed as a serious crime, for which those who disobeyed were severely punished by “writing off property to the sovereign, whipping and cutting off their ears,” if this did not help, then cutting off fingers and hands. Inveterate gamblers, caught for the fourth time, faced the death penalty. Only this did not help - the bans increase the temptation, especially in the Russian environment, where any law is not only not in honor, but, it seems, was created in order to violate it.
Peter I understood that it was pointless to betray this passion to disgrace and prohibitions. He decided to change attitudes towards gambling by allowing them in the army and navy, reasonably limiting the maximum amount of loss. At the same time, the first lotteries appeared in Russia, which were regularly imposed on citizens.
Under Catherine II, there was practically no ban on gambling, which led to an outbreak of the real epidemic itself. Gambling has embraced all sectors of society. If we compare today's computer dependence of the population with the passion for cards in the 18th-19th centuries, then the advantage will be far from in favor of the computer.
Is it the only place where people gamble? Of course no. But why are they so loved in Russia? The answer is simple. The mentally archetypal Russian skin gives such a specific skew of the collective consciousness that every Russian lives with the dream of getting rich, lying on the stove, like that fabulous Emelya. Our people naively believe in a miracle, when treasures fall out of nowhere according to the pike's command, then according to the gold-fish desire, the main thing is not to get off the stove and not strain too much. And if the hope of one day chopping the dough suddenly comes true (and it happens sometimes!), Then, not knowing what to do with it, drink it up with friends-comrades, treating the whole neighborhood and boasting, so that in the morning you wake up as naked and barefoot and dream again about the feather of the Firebird.
“It is impossible to build stone chambers from the works of the righteous,” this folk wisdom is soldered into the consciousness of our people. Russian culture and Orthodoxy have always emphasized the fact that being rich is bad and even indecent, while wealth itself has always been associated with something unfair, dishonest and even obscene. However, this did not stop hoping for easy, as they would say today, free money from winning.
There were always a lot of people who wanted to tempt fortune. Not only their own, but also state money was lost. The society, surprisingly enough, treated officials with understanding and sympathy, who made bets out of money, for example, the regimental cash register, not considering this fact as theft, but only sympathizing with their loss. You can't forbid living beautifully, but you really wanted to live beautifully, but with what means? Russian archetypal skin has never hesitated to put its hand into the state pocket.
They played for everything - for money, jewelry, estates, forest and land holdings, serfs and even their own wives. Card debt turned into a debt of honor. Unable to pay it, he shot himself.
The desire to get rich overnight at the wave of the dealer or a dashing card led to the most unpredictable consequences - suicide and insanity.
A lot of mysticism has always been associated with the card game. The game itself was played on a green cloth with dimly gleaming gold coins in the light of candelabra, bewitching any spectator and skinner. Amazing in its intensity, style and sacredness is the ironic story of Alexander Pushkin "The Queen of Spades". It slightly opens the curtain and allows you to see what meaning the card game had in the society of the 18th - 19th centuries and what the word of a nobleman was.
Playing to smithereens at the French court, Pushkin's "lVénus moscovite" was completely ignorant of the state of affairs, not assuming that "in six months they spent half a million" of Russian gold ducats, "that they have neither the Moscow Region nor the Saratov village near Paris ". Pushkin wrote a magnificent visual intrigue with the Comte Saint-Germain, magic of three cards and with the cruel revenge of the "Queen of Spades". In general, for spectators, the fullness of the game with various rituals and mystical paraphernalia is mandatory, and the more foggy and confusing they are, the better, they are more believed in.
The game for Russians is a blind chance. Everything here is based on the desire to test your fortune. A kind of duel with fate and a huge hope for luck. Urethral people are not important about winning, but the very fact of victory. The money won were immediately squandered, given away, burned in the fireplace in front of the astonished leather workers. "Despicable metal" was not of value to the urethral person. Courage, passion, drive are important for him.
Urethral-sound Mayakovsky was an avid player in everything: from cards to billiards and croquet, while he was very upset about his losses. For him it was a humiliating demotion.
In post-Petrine times, an interesting transformation of the game takes place, its new behavioral ethics and meaning are formed. Card games are beginning to take on not only a socio-cultural aspect, but also a diplomatic one. In the game, you can settle scores, for example, ruin and expose a political or economic opponent in an unsightly light, or you can subtly and imperceptibly transfer a bribe.
One can only be amazed at the brilliant insight of N. V. Gogol, who, with his olfactory intuition and foreboding of the spectator, 20 years before the abolition of serfdom in Russia, created the literary image of the Russian skin wicked Chichikov, who bought up "dead souls" for their further implementation by the state.
Earlier, before the advent of the mass media, art and literature dictated norms of behavior to society. There is no research yet on this topic, but one can only guess how many skin archetypes were inspired by the antics of the collegiate counselor and made themselves a fortune. How many shenanigans and manipulations in the style of "a la Chichikov" were carried out by Russian noblemen-soul-owners, who set their peasants free, according to the reform of 1861. What size of the ransom money they received from the state treasury, if it was "three annual budgets".
Where did this money go? They were safely taken out of Russia and happily launched abroad at the famous Karlsbad, Baden-Baden resorts and in Monte Carlo.
An interesting historical coincidence. The abolition of serfdom in Russia and the beginning of payments on the ransom payments fell on 1861. Opening of Casino Monte Carlo - the first gambling house in Europe - in 1862. Time-consuming card games that could be played by a small group were replaced by roulette, a fast paced betting process. The players no longer sat at the card table. The frivolous roulette ball in a matter of minutes determined the results of jubilation when winning for some and the bitter disappointment of losing for others.
The pragmatic representative of the Grimaldi family, Charles successfully used the geographical conditions of his principality, located in the center of Europe on the picturesque coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Having connected the provincial poverty-stricken principality with a ribbon of railroads passing through the Alps with the major port cities of France and Italy, he invited specialists to put the gambling business in it on a grand scale. The famous "Joint Stock Company of Sea Baths", which exists to this day, is in fact engaged exclusively in gambling, bringing fantastic profits to the prince's treasury. In the season, which lasts from April to October in the Mediterranean, the population of Monaco and its capital Monte Carlo increases several times due to those willing to voluntarily give their money.
The whole game is built on archetypal skin qualities - greed, passion and love for freebies. The idea of creating a roulette wheel is attributed to Pascal. Probably, he, like many scientists-alchemists, tried to derive the highest formula for obtaining gold from lead, and he succeeded. As long as there are those willing to receive easy money, the "wheel of fortune" will not rust.
It was there, to the shore of the warm sea, that the Russians went for gambling passions. There they also lost their fortunes and inheritances. They played in an urethral way beautifully, with chic, revelry and noise, the echoes of which echoed throughout Europe for a long time and crawled into snowy Russia like a heavy hangover.
The urethral-muscular mentality of Russians has never encouraged skin entrepreneurship, so the bulk of the money received from the state was safely exported to Europe and lost, settling in the accounts of their new owners. Instead of being invested in entrepreneurship and the social needs of bastard Russia, they quickly created one of the richest states in the world from an insignificant, pitiful principality of Monaco.
Feeling the lack of finances associated with the revolutions and war in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, the House of Grimaldi relies on American private capital and accepts American actress Grace Kelly into its family. The popularity of the actress, who became the princess of Monaco, once again stirred up a wave of casino tourism, which began to decline in connection with the death of the princess in 1982. Then the Russians seized the initiative again. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the division of its property, together with the disappearance of party money, revived this piece of paradise once again, which has flourished for the past 20 years.
Today, in essence, the same thing is happening as in 1861. The money stolen from the country and its citizens is laundered abroad and goes down to the casinos. Quite often leather workers, imagining themselves to be urethralists, refusing to win, leave the halls of the gambling house with their heads held high, leaving tens and hundreds of thousands of euros to tip the employees of the establishment: "Know ours!"
On the skin west, such actions make an impression, but not at all what the presumptuous Russians dream of.
In Russia, the game has always reflected a certain social model, everything depended on the stratum of society in which it was played. The hussars with its aristocratic "pharaohs" and "whists" are being replaced by representatives of the new society - the children of those very ruined nobles and commoners, whose skin-visual deficiencies at the card table can fill "preference". The language is changing, French is almost forgotten, the terminology in the game is changing, it becomes merchant, that is, commercial: "trade", "bribe", "buy-in".
Among the Russian writers of the 19th century there was, perhaps, not a single one who did not take cards in their hands. The story of Fyodor Dostoevsky's gambling addiction is well known, but Nikolai Nekrasov, also an avid gambler, very wisely used the money he won, amassing not only a significant fortune with it, but also publishing the Sovremennik magazine.
The excitement of cards ceases to excite the blood when, during the Russian-Turkish campaign, the military has a new risky hobby - "Russian roulette". The officer corps of the Russian army was armed with Smith and Wesson revolvers. Flaunting his courage, the tone in behavior was set by Commander-in-Chief Mikhail Skobelev, who loved to tease death as a urethral man. All skin officers tried to imitate him. Russian roulette with one cartridge tucked into the drum easily fit into a new kind of relationship.
Even the courts of the sovereign emperor, mercilessly cutting off officers' shoulder straps and orders for playing Russian roulette, did not save the day. A new rise in urethral passion began, which the staff adjutants and clerks could not understand.
Historians and literary critics never stop talking about people with a “mysterious Russian soul”, full of restless passions and excitement, with the most unpredictable behavior, capable of the most desperate actions and deeds. These are people with an urethral vector who easily walk through the minefield of life, without looking at their feet, without stumbling or looking around, open to everything new, towards the future calling them, or desperately, without regret, throwing themselves into the arms of death.
The true natural role of urethral people is not to revel, duel, or unreasonable excitement when life is at stake. The fate of the urethral is always closely connected with his flock, with its well-being, with its present and future. In her and for her, he becomes a leader, a hero, a pioneer. The natural properties of urethral people are clearly manifested during the period of wars, revolutions and coups, when the risk of their lives acquires true meaning, helps to preserve their flock, their people, their ethnic group. It is in this that the urethralists manifest their true greatness and divine purpose.
