Zoological element among the modern intelligentsia. [Rec. on: Artsybashev M. Sanin. First thousand.]

Our fiction is making amazingly rapid progress. Just recently, M. Gorky was looking for a man in the scum of our society and finally found him, singing a hymn to “man” at the end of his happy find. G. Artsybashev had an equally happy idea to look among our intelligentsia for our hope and people of the future - monkeys, mares, etc. animals and he found them, presenting to the public several types of his findings. The plot of Mr. Artsybashev’s work is very simple. Several young people - students, including their main character, Vladimir Sanin - arrived in the provincial town in the summer. – Those who arrived in a fairly close circle of relatives and friends from the local intelligentsia walked, courted the girls, talked, had scandals... some died, others remained in place to experience the unpleasant consequences of their vacation adventures, and the main character fled, not seeing the success of his mission. That's it. But the interest is not in the plot, but in the types, their figures, monologues, debates and actions. All these are young people of both sexes. The old people, the elderly, and especially children were almost not touched by the artist’s hand, as if they were not in the provincial city. Only the mother of the hero and one of the main heroines, Lida, was given a few touches by the artist, for example: “He (Sanin) looked at his mother and for the first time consciously noticed what a dull and insignificant expression she had in her eyes, and how absurdly the tattoo, ruffled like a chicken comb, stuck out on her head.” “Marya Ivanovna was silent and looked at Sanin with all her eyes, and the chicken comb combed even more absurdly on her head” (p. 209). Yes, the artist is only interested in young people. If you listen more carefully to their judgments, then old people and children, strictly speaking, are not needed at all for anyone. They either spoil the happiness of the young with their prejudices, or they represent boring, dirty and useless ballast. Life is in full swing only in young intelligent and non-intelligent people. What are these people like? All young people in Artsybashev seem to be burdened by one immutable conviction that all people are animals. That all women, including intelligent heroines with whom some are in love, are females, this is a universal belief. “A woman is a female, and that’s first of all,” Ivanov teaches; “among men, at least one in a thousand can still be found who deserves the name of a human... and women... not a single one between them! Naked, pink, fat, tailless monkeys, that’s all.” - Originally said! – von Reitz noted with pleasure. - It’s true! – Novikov thought bitterly” (p. 131). Apparently, an exception should be made from this general verdict for Lida, a very intelligent girl. G. Artsybashev, by the way, depicts her mood this way after her unhappy infatuation with Zarudin: "A series of books read, a series of great and free ideas passed through her brain, and she saw that her act was not only natural, but even good. It did not harm anyone, but gave her and the other person pleasure. And without this pleasure she would not have had youth, and life would have been dull, like a tree in the fall when it leaves all the leaves. The idea that religion had not sanctified her union with a man was ridiculous to her, and all the foundations of this thought had long been worn out and destroyed by free human thought. It turned out that she should have rejoiced, like a flower rejoicing, pollinated with new life on a sunny morning, but she suffered and felt at the bottom of the abyss, below all people. And no matter how she called for great ideas and unshakable truths, before. Tomorrow's day of shame they melted away like wax melts from fire. And instead of putting her foot on the necks of people whom she despised for their stupidity and narrow-mindedness, Lida thought only about saving herself and deceiving them” (p. 175). It would seem that an exception should be made for such a woman. But the hero Sanin, her brother, did not make an exception for her: he saw in her a very beautiful, but stupid female, and Mr. Artsybashev himself noted as her main quality that she waddled her body like a “young, beautiful mare,” and illuminated her connection with officer Zarudin as a connection “with a young hot stallion.” So, all women, even intelligent girls, or tailless females, or beautiful mares Well, what are men like? Men are even worse. For example: Zarudin’s psyche: “At first, she (Lydia) seemed so smart to him, so different from all those girls and women, caressing whom he proudly recognized his superiority, so proud that when hugging her, he froze, as if expecting to receive a slap in the face (!)... But after today’s promise... he suddenly felt his strength... And to the sweet, languid feeling of voluptuous expectation, a subtle and unconscious shade began to be mixed gloating that this proud, smart, pure and well-read girl would lie under him like any other and he would also do with her what he wanted, just like with all the others. He suddenly saw her clearly on the floor, heard the whistle of a whip, saw a pink stripe on her naked, tender, submissive body and, shuddering, staggered from the blow of blood to his head... It was then physically unbearable to think about it with trembling fingers and lit a cigarette. Once he trembled on his strong legs and went to the rooms.” – And such animals are lucky! - thought Sanin. - The devil knows what it is. Lida and him! (pp. 24–25).“ Another animal - millionaire Voloshin, visiting from St. Petersburg, is even more voluptuous. “The loose human body, like the tip of a naked nerve, painfully sharpened by almost violent pleasures, responded painfully to the very word “woman.” Invariably naked, invariably possible, she stood before Voloshin at all moments of his life, and every woman’s dress fitted on the flexible, round full body of a female excited him to the point of painful trembling in his knees” (p. 200). But these are negative types - products of the existing structure - the officer and bourgeois environment. Among other huge issues, the intellectuals featured in the story are trying to resolve the issue of fighting animal instincts. Tolstoyan von Deitz is convinced that the only salvation is in Christianity. The artist-philosopher Yuri Svarozhich decisively declares that Christianity turned out to be completely powerless in the fight against animal instincts (p. 183); Christianity has no future. Instead, Yuri tried to invent some new worldview, but in a fruitless attempt, he shot himself. The solution to the problem was Vladimir Sanin. What type is this? As the main character of the story, he is depicted quite fully, even from the outside. In appearance, he is “a tall, fair-haired and broad-shouldered figure with a calm and slightly mocking expression on his face at just the corners of his lips, (in which) neither fatigue nor weariness is noticeable. His muscles are “like iron,” his hands are “steel" (p. 299). The women he had to hug, not excluding his own sister Lida, were embarrassed and shuddered, as if “sensing the approach of a beast” (p. 5). Appetite and sleep are amazing: Sanin eats and drinks beer and wine more than anyone else and never gets drunk, on the contrary, “a drunk becomes kinder" (p. 49). Sanin’s clothes are incredibly simple, even on the city boulevard he walks “without a hat in his wide shirt, but already green on the shoulders. His strength is terrible: with one blow of his fist he so wounded Zarudin, How can a young and healthy officer be wounded only with a hefty club (pp. 334, 335). A whole crowd is nothing for our hero.... Sanin is a very smart person; in all conversations and disputes, the last word remains with him. Everyone is weak and stupid in comparison with him. G. Artsybashev puts into the mouth of our hero entire monologues on lofty topics about God, Christianity, women, and the worldview. And he resolves these topics extremely simply and clearly. What is worldview? "The worldview - our hero teaches - is given by life itself, in all its volume, of which literature and human thought itself are only an insignificant particle. A worldview is not a theory of life, but only the mood of an individual human personality and, moreover, it changes as long as a person’s soul is still alive" (p. 195). “I know one thing: I see and want life not to be a torment for me... To do this, I must first of all satisfy my natural desires... Desire is everything: when desires die in a person, his life dies, and when he kills desires, he kills himself.” – But desires can be evil? “Also,” Sanin answered affectionately and looked into Yuri’s face with bright, unblinking eyes” (pp. 94–95). The reader is interested, of course, to know how Sanin reached such a worldview? G. Artsybashev, although briefly, satisfies this desire. "That most important time in life - this is how the story begins - when, under the influence of the first clashes with people and nature, character is formed, Vladimir Sanin lived outside his family. No one watched him, no one's hand bent him, and the soul of this man developed freely and uniquely, like a tree in a field" (p. 1). To the mother’s question: “Well, tell me, how did you live there, what did you do?” Sanin answered: What did you do?... well?... I drank, ate, slept, sometimes worked, sometimes did nothing” (p. 2). What this work consisted of is unknown. But there is no doubt that Sanin was a student and read “hundreds of books from Ecclesiastes to Marx” (p. 195), although reading apparently was not his favorite pastime. The story mentions only once that Sanin decided to read “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” at night - which he found from Lida, but from the very first pages he became annoyed and bored. Pompous images did not touch his soul. He spat and, throwing the book, instantly fell asleep” (p. 28). “The soul of this man was so free and original!” – What is free - this may be true: but what is peculiar here, for example. compared to Zarudin and Voloshin? After all, their desires are everything?... And yet they are animals, and for some reason Sanin is a person. This bewilderment is especially striking when characterizing Sanin’s relationship with women: he hunted for them in exactly the same way as Zarudin, for example... but Zarudin, even worse - his view on this subject was simplified to the last extreme. For him, a woman is even less than a female, not excluding her own sister. It is simply an object of well-known special pleasure, just as a man is for a woman. This is the whole essence of solving the question of happiness. Voluptuousness, if it sometimes leads to trouble, is not on its own, but because of human stupidity (p. 276). "Here, you're pregnant - he lectures his sister - it's bad. Bad, firstly, because giving birth to babies is the most boring, dirty, painful and meaningless thing, and secondly, because people will torture you... I would tell you what needs to be done, but you are too weak and stupid for that... You don’t have enough audacity or courage... but the fact that you put it between yourself and life, and think that there is nothing behind it... you are afraid and afraid not of those people who do not know you, but who know and love you and for whom your “fall” is only because it took place not on the marriage bed, but somewhere in the forest, on the grass “Will it be a terrible blow?”... "Lida had a strange feeling: at first, acute shame, such shame, as if they had stripped her naked and rummaged with rough fingers in the very recesses of her body. She was afraid to look at her brother, lest they both die of shame. But Sanin’s gray eyes did not blink, looked clearly and firmly" (p. 151). Sanin justified this simplified view of a woman by the very fact of gross rape by Karsavina. The fact is described in detail, in the style of a police report. "Let me go for God's sake!.. What are you doing?.. Karsavina said in a breathless whisper after a moment of terrible silence, tearing it off her waist. But Sanin with force, almost crushing her elastic chest, pressed the girl to himself and she felt stuffy" (p. 305). Our hero ended his adventures somehow strangely. Suddenly he had the desire to leave his home and city and go wherever his eyes led him. Without saying goodbye to his mother and sister, he, accompanied by his friend Ivanov, boarded the first train leaving in the evening. Somehow he couldn’t sleep that night on the train, before dawn he went out onto the platform of the carriage and rushed off the train at full speed. "With a roar and whistle, a train flashed past: the ground jumped out from under his feet, and Sanin fell onto the wet sand of the embankment. The red taillight was already far away when Sanin stood up, laughing to himself: - And that’s good! He said loudly with pleasure, letting out a free, loud cry.” "Sanin breathed easily and with cheerful eyes looked into the endless expanse of the earth, with wide strong steps going farther and farther, towards the bright and joyful radiance of dawn. And when the steppe, awakening, flared up with earthly and blue distances, was clothed with an immense dome of the sky and, right opposite Sanin, the sun rose, sparkling and sparkling, it seemed that Sanin was walking towards him." (p. 342). These words end the work of Mr. Artsybashev. It would, of course, be very consistent to end the story not with such artistic claims, but more naturally, for example. so that Sanin broke his neck, leg, or something like that and in pain screamed obscenities throughout the whole steppe... Such an end would be quite worthy of this “freely and uniquely formed person,” that is, who has developed within himself a strong and arrogant animal, who has exterminated from himself, and is extorting from others, an eternal moral and aesthetic feeling and attitude, at least only towards his mother and his beautiful and intelligent my own sister. The story would have turned out to be at least a consistent, albeit grossly unfair, pamphlet addressed to our Russian intelligentsia. But the trouble with Mr. Artsybashev is that he, apparently, did not want to write a pamphlet at all, but decided to depict reality, tinted with an ideal - Sanin. Sanin is not an arrogant animal, as he actually came out of the artist’s brush, but a positive type of “new man”, called upon to renew humanity. The epigraph of the story speaks for this: “Only this I found, that God created man upright, and people indulged in many thoughts” (Eccles. VII, 23). The ending of the story also speaks for this, clothing the hero’s stupidity in some kind of poetic leap, greeted by the dawn and the sun. Sanin is a right person, such as God or nature creates; Simply put: “Behold a lion, not a dog.” The artist's intention was to create Apollo, but in reality it was a monkey... not an important breed. The story was published as a separate book with the note: “the first thousand, 1908.” The author obviously assumes that a second thousand will be required. Surely he won't be mistaken in his calculations? Then it will be a shame for the Russian public. We think that at least our youth should respond with the most decisive boycott of the artist who depicted them in this way. You might be interested in: