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Book: Native speech. Fine Arts Lessons - Peter Weill

10.08.2021

Peter Weil, Alexander Genis

Native speech. Fine arts lessons

* * *

Over the years, I realized that humor for Weill and Genis is not a goal, but a means, and moreover, it is a tool for learning about life: if you investigate a phenomenon, then find what is funny in it, and the phenomenon will unfold in its entirety ...

Sergey Dovlatov

Weil and Genis's “Native Speech” is a renewal of speech, prompting the reader to re-read all school literature.

Andrey Sinyavsky

... books familiar from childhood become over the years only signs of books, standards for other books. And they get them from the shelf as rarely as the Parisian standard of the meter.

P. Weill, A. Genis

Andrey Sinyavsky

Fun craft

Someone decided that science must be boring. Probably in order to be respected more. Boring means a solid, reputable enterprise. You can invest. Soon there will be no place on earth in the midst of serious garbage heaps erected to the sky.

But once upon a time science itself was revered as a good art and everything in the world was interesting. Mermaids were flying. Angels splashed. Chemistry was called alchemy. Astronomy is astrology. Psychology is palmistry. The story was inspired by the muse from Apollo's round dance and contained an adventurous romance.

And now what? Reproduction reproduction? The last refuge is philology. It would seem: love of the word. And in general, love. Free air. Nothing is forced. A lot of ideas and fantasies. So it is here: science. They set the numbers (0.1; 0.2; 0.3, etc.), stuck footnotes, provided, for the sake of science, an apparatus of incomprehensible abstractions through which one cannot wade through ("vermiculite", "grubber", "loxodrome", “Parabiosis”, “ultrarapid”), rewrote all this in a deliberately indigestible language - and here you are, instead of poetry, another sawmill for the production of countless books.

Already at the beginning of the twentieth century, idle second-hand booksellers thought: “Sometimes you wonder - does humanity really have enough brains for all the books? There are no more brains than books! ” “Nothing,” our cheerful contemporaries argue, “soon computers will be the only ones to read and produce books. And people will get to take out products to warehouses and landfills! ”

Against this industrial background, in the form of opposition, in refutation of the gloomy utopia, it seems to me that the book by Peter Weil and Alexander Genis - "Native Speech" - emerged. The name sounds archaic. Almost country-style. Smells like childhood. Sen. Rural school. It is fun and entertaining to read, as befits a child. Not a textbook, but an invitation to read, to a divertisman. It is not proposed to glorify the glorified Russian classics, but to look into it with at least one eye and then fall in love. The concerns of "Rodnaya Rech" are of ecological nature and are aimed at saving the book, at improving the very nature of reading. The main task is formulated as follows: “They studied the book and - as often happens in such cases - practically stopped reading”. Pedagogy for adults, by the way, by the way, well-read and educated persons.

"Native speech", gurgling like a stream, is accompanied by unobtrusive, unobtrusive learning. It assumes reading is co-creation. Everyone has their own. It has a lot of tolerances. Freedom of interpretation. Let our authors in fine literature eat the dog and give out completely original imperative decisions at every step, our business, they suggest, is not to obey, but to pick up any idea on the fly and continue, sometimes, perhaps, in the other direction. Russian literature is shown here in the form of the sea, where every writer is his own captain, where sails and ropes are stretched from “Poor Lisa” Karamzin to our poor “villagers”, from the poem “Moscow - Petushki” to “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow”.

Reading this book, we see that eternal and, indeed, unshakable values do not stand still, pinned, like exhibits, to scientific headings. They - move in the literary row and in the reader's mind and, it happens, are part of the later problematic achievements. Where they will sail, how they will turn tomorrow, no one knows. The unpredictability of art is its main strength. This is not for you studying proccess, not progress.

Weil's and Genis's “Native Speech” is a renewal of speech that prompts the reader, even if he is seven inches in the forehead, to re-read all school literature. This technique, known since ancient times, is called defamation.

To use it, you need not so much, just one effort: to look at reality and at works of art with an unbiased look. As if you were reading them for the first time. And you will see: behind every classic there is a living, just discovered thought. I want to play it.

For Russia, literature is a starting point, a symbol of faith, an ideological and moral foundation. You can interpret history, politics, religion, national character as you like, but as soon as you say "Pushkin", the ardent antagonists nod their heads happily and amicably.

Of course, for such an understanding, only literature that is recognized as classical is suitable. Classics is a universal language based on absolute values.

Russian literature of the golden XIX century has become an indivisible unity, a kind of typological community, before which the differences between individual writers recede. Hence the eternal temptation to find the dominant feature that delimits Russian literature from any others - the tension of the spiritual search, or love of the people, or religiosity, or chastity.

However, with the same - if not great - success, one could speak not about the uniqueness of Russian literature, but about the uniqueness of the Russian reader, who is inclined to see in his favorite books the most sacred national property. Hitting a classic is like insulting a homeland.

Naturally, such an attitude develops from an early age. The main instrument of sacralization of the classics is the school. Literature lessons have played a tremendous role in the formation of Russian public consciousness. Primarily because the books resisted the educational claims of the state. At all times, literature, no matter how they fought against it, revealed its internal contradiction. It was impossible not to notice that Pierre Bezukhov and Pavel Korchagin are heroes of different novels. On this contradiction, generations of those who managed to maintain skepticism and irony grew up in a society that was not well suited for this.

However, over the years, books familiar from childhood become only signs of books, standards for other books. And they get them from the shelf as rarely as the Parisian standard of the meter.

Anyone who decides on such an act - to re-read the classics without prejudice - encounters not only the old authors, but also himself. Reading the main books of Russian literature is how to revise your biography anew. Life experience was accumulated along the way with reading and thanks to it. The date when Dostoevsky was first revealed is no less important than family anniversaries. We grow with books - they grow in us. And sometime there comes a time of rebellion against the attitude to the classics, which was embedded in childhood. Apparently this is inevitable. Andrei Bitov once admitted: “I spent more than half of my creativity fighting against the school literature course”.

We conceived this book not so much to refute the school tradition as to test - and not even it, but ourselves in it. All chapters of "Native Speech" strictly correspond to the usual program high school... Of course, we do not hope to say something fundamentally new about a subject that has occupied the best minds of Russia. We just decided to talk about the most turbulent and intimate events of our life - Russian books.

Peter Weill, Alexander Genis New York, 1989

Poor Lisa's legacy

Karamzin

In the very name of Karamzin, one can hear the coyness. It was not for nothing that Dostoevsky misrepresented this surname in order to ridicule Turgenev in The Possessed. So it looks like it's not even funny. Until recently, before the boom in Russia, produced by the revival of his History, Karamzin was considered just a slight shadow of Pushkin. Until recently, Karamzin seemed elegant and frivolous, like a cavalier from the paintings of Boucher and Fragonard, later resurrected by the artists of the World of Art.

And all because one thing is known about Karamzin: he invented sentimentalism. This, like all superficial judgments, is true, at least in part. To read Karamzin today, one must stock up on aesthetic cynicism that allows one to enjoy the old-fashioned innocence of the text.

Nevertheless, one of his stories, “Poor Liza,” - fortunately, there are only seventeen pages and everything is about love - still lives in the minds of the modern reader.

Liza, a poor peasant girl, meets a young nobleman, Erast. Tired of the windy light, he falls in love with a spontaneous, innocent girl with the love of his brother. But soon platonic love turns into sensual. Lisa consistently loses her spontaneity, innocence and Erast himself - he goes off to war. “No, he really was in the army; but instead of fighting the enemy, he played cards and lost almost all of his estate. " To improve matters, Erast marries an elderly rich widow. Upon learning of this, Lisa drowns in a pond.

Most of all it looks like a ballet libretto. Something like Giselle. Karamzin, using the common plot of the European philistine drama at that time, not only translated it into Russian, but also transplanted it onto Russian soil.

The results of this unpretentious experiment were tremendous. Telling the sentimental and sugary story of poor Liza, Karamzin - along the way! - opened prose.

He was the first to write smoothly. In his works (not poetry), words were intertwined in such a correct, rhythmic way that the reader was left with the impression of rhetorical music. The smooth weaving of words was hypnotic. This is a kind of rut, once in which one should no longer care too much about the meaning: a reasonable grammatical and stylistic necessity will create it by itself.

Smoothness in prose is the same as meter and rhyme in poetry. The meaning of words that find themselves in the rigid scheme of prosaic rhythm plays a lesser role than this scheme itself.

Listen: “In blooming Andalusia - where proud palms rustle, where myrtle groves are fragrant, where the majestic Guadalquivir rolls its waters slowly, where the rosemary-crowned Sierra Morena rises - there I saw a beautiful one”. A century later, with the same success and just as beautifully, the Severyanin wrote.

Many generations of writers have lived in the shadow of such prose. They, of course, got rid of a little beauty, but not the smoothness of the style. The worse the writer is, the deeper the rut in which he crawls. The more is the dependence of the next word on the previous one. The higher the overall predictability of the text. Therefore, Simenon's novel is written in a week, read in two hours, and everyone likes it.

Great writers always, and especially in the 20th century, ...

Sergey Dovlatov

Weil and Genis's “Native Speech” is a renewal of speech, prompting the reader to re-read all school literature.

Andrey Sinyavsky

... books familiar from childhood become over the years only signs of books, standards for other books. And they get them from the shelf as rarely as the Parisian standard of the meter.

P. Weill, A. Genis

Andrey Sinyavsky

Fun craft

Of course, for such an understanding, only literature that is recognized as classical is suitable. Classics is a universal language based on absolute values.

However, over the years, books familiar from childhood become only signs of books, standards for other books. And they get them from the shelf as rarely as the Parisian standard of the meter.

We conceived this book not so much to refute the school tradition as to test - and not even it, but ourselves in it. All chapters of "Native Speech" strictly correspond to the usual high school curriculum. Of course, we do not hope to say something fundamentally new about a subject that has occupied the best minds of Russia. We just decided to talk about the most turbulent and intimate events of our life - Russian books.

Peter Weil, Alexander Genis

Native speech. Fine Arts Lessons

Andrey Sinyavsky. FUN CRAFT

But once upon a time science itself was revered as a good art and everything in the world was interesting. Mermaids were flying. Angels splashed. Chemistry was called alchemy. Astronomy is astrology. Psychology is palmistry. The story was inspired by the Muse from Apollo's round dance and contained an adventurous romance.

And now what? Reproduction reproduction?

The last refuge is philology. It would seem: love of the word. And in general, love. Free air. Nothing is forced. A lot of ideas and fantasies. The same is science here. They set the numbers (0.1; 0.2; 0.3, etc.), stuck footnotes, provided, for the sake of science, an apparatus of incomprehensible abstractions, through which one could not wade through ("vermeculite", "grubber", "loxodrome", “Parabiosis”, “ultrarapid”), rewrote all this in a deliberately indigestible language - and here you are, instead of poetry, another sawmill for the production of countless books.

Already at the beginning of the century, idle second-hand booksellers thought: “Sometimes you wonder - does humanity really have enough brains for all the books? There are not as many brains as there are books! " “Nothing,” our cheerful contemporaries argue, “soon only computers will read and produce books. And people will get to take out products to warehouses and landfills! "

Against this industrial background, in the form of opposition, in refutation of the gloomy utopia, it seems to me that the book by Peter Weil and Alexander Genis - "Native Speech" - emerged. The name sounds archaic. Almost country-style. Smells like childhood. Sen. Rural school. It is fun and entertaining to read, as befits a child. Not a textbook, but an invitation to read, to a divertisman. It is not proposed to glorify the glorified Russian classics, but to look into it with at least one eye and then fall in love. The concerns of "Rodnaya Rech" are of ecological nature and are aimed at saving the book, at improving the very nature of reading. The main task is formulated as follows: "The book was studied and - as often happens in such cases - practically stopped reading." Pedagogy for adults, by the way, by the way, well-read and educated persons.

"Native speech", gurgling like a stream, is accompanied by unobtrusive, unobtrusive learning. It assumes reading is co-creation. Everyone has their own. It has a lot of tolerances. Freedom of interpretation. Let our authors in fine literature eat the dog and give out completely original imperative decisions at every step, our business, they suggest, is not to obey, but to pick up any idea on the fly and continue, sometimes, perhaps, in the other direction. Russian literature is shown here in the form of the sea, where every writer is his own captain, where sails and ropes are stretched from "Poor Lisa" Karamzin to our poor "villagers", from the story "Moscow - Petushki" to "Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow."

Weil's and Genis's “Native Speech” is a renewal of speech that encourages the reader, even if he is seven inches in the forehead, to re-read all school literature. This technique, known since ancient times, is called defamation.

Of course, for such an understanding, only literature that is recognized as classical is suitable. Classics is a universal language based on absolute values.

Russian literature of the golden XIX century has become an indivisible unity, a kind of typological community, before which the differences between individual writers recede. Hence the eternal temptation to find a dominant feature that delimits Russian literature from any other - the tension of spiritual search, or love of the people, or religiosity, or chastity.

Naturally, such an attitude develops from an early age. The main instrument of sacralization of the classics is the school. Literature lessons played a tremendous role in the formation of Russian public consciousness, primarily because the books resisted the educational claims of the state. At all times, literature, no matter how they fought against it, revealed its internal contradiction. It was impossible not to notice that Pierre Bezukhov and Pavel Korchagin are heroes of different novels. On this contradiction, generations of those who managed to maintain skepticism and irony grew up in a society that was not well suited for this.

However, the dialectic of life leads to the fact that admiration for the classics, firmly mastered in school, prevents us from seeing living literature in it. Books familiar from childhood become signs of books, standards for other books. They are taken from the shelf as rarely as the Parisian standard of the meter.

Peter Weil, Alexander Genis

Native speech. Fine Arts Lessons

Andrey Sinyavsky. FUN CRAFT

But once upon a time science itself was revered as a good art and everything in the world was interesting. Mermaids were flying. Angels splashed. Chemistry was called alchemy. Astronomy is astrology. Psychology is palmistry. The story was inspired by the Muse from Apollo's round dance and contained an adventurous romance.

And now what? Reproduction reproduction?

Against this industrial background, in the form of opposition, in refutation of the gloomy utopia, it seems to me that the book by Peter Weil and Alexander Genis - "Native Speech" - emerged. The name sounds archaic. Almost country-style. Smells like childhood. Sen. Rural school. It is fun and entertaining to read, as befits a child. Not a textbook, but an invitation to read, to a divertisman. It is not proposed to glorify the glorified Russian classics, but to look into it with at least one eye and then fall in love. The concerns of "Rodnaya Rech" are of ecological nature and are aimed at saving the book, at improving the very nature of reading. The main task is formulated as follows: "The book was studied and - as often happens in such cases - practically stopped reading." Pedagogy for adults, by the way, by the way, well-read and educated persons.

"Native speech", gurgling like a stream, is accompanied by unobtrusive, unobtrusive learning. It assumes reading is co-creation. Everyone has their own. It has a lot of tolerances. Freedom of interpretation. Let our authors in fine literature eat the dog and give out completely original imperative decisions at every step, our business, they suggest, is not to obey, but to pick up any idea on the fly and continue, sometimes, perhaps, in the other direction. Russian literature is shown here in the form of the sea, where every writer is his own captain, where sails and ropes are stretched from "Poor Lisa" Karamzin to our poor "villagers", from the story "Moscow - Petushki" to "Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow."

Of course, for such an understanding, only literature that is recognized as classical is suitable. Classics is a universal language based on absolute values.

Russian literature of the golden XIX century has become an indivisible unity, a kind of typological community, before which the differences between individual writers recede. Hence the eternal temptation to find a dominant feature that delimits Russian literature from any other - the tension of spiritual search, or love of the people, or religiosity, or chastity.

We grow with books - they grow in us. And sometime there comes a time of rebellion against the attitude to the classics, which was embedded in childhood. (Apparently, this is inevitable. Andrei Bitov once admitted: “I spent more than half of my creativity fighting against the school literature course”).

We conceived this book not so much to refute the school tradition as to test - and not even it, but ourselves in it. All chapters of Native Speech strictly correspond to the secondary school curriculum.

Of course, we do not hope to say something fundamentally new about a subject that has occupied generations of Russia's finest minds. We just decided to talk about the most turbulent and intimate events of our life - Russian books.

Peter Weil, Alexander Genis

New York, 1989

INHERITANCE OF "POOR LISA". Karamzin

In the very name Karamzin - there is a certain coyness. It was not for nothing that Dostoevsky misrepresented this surname in order to ridicule Turgenev in Demons. So it looks like it's not even funny.

Until recently, before the boom in Russia, produced by the revival of his History, Karamzin was considered just a slight shadow of Pushkin. Until recently, Karamzin seemed elegant and frivolous, like a cavalier from the paintings of Boucher and Fragonard, later resurrected by the artists of the World of Art.

And all because it is known about Karamzin that he invented sentimentalism. Like all superficial judgments, and this is true, at least in part. To read Karamzin's novels today, you need to stock up on aesthetic cynicism that allows you to enjoy the old-fashioned innocence of the text.

Nevertheless, one of the stories, "Poor Liza" - fortunately there are only seventeen pages and everything is about love - still lives in the minds of the modern reader.

Liza, a poor peasant girl, meets a young nobleman, Erast. Tired of the windy light, he falls in love with a spontaneous, innocent girl with the love of his brother. However, soon platonic love turns into sensual. Lisa consistently loses her spontaneity, innocence and Erast himself - he goes off to war. "No, he really was in the army, but instead of fighting the enemy, he played cards and lost almost all of his estate." To improve matters, Erast marries an elderly rich widow. Upon learning of this, Lisa drowns in a pond.

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