Alexey Samarin.Ecology.Essay.Russia.Rostov region.Olshak. From journalism to literary text, a journey through Likhachev’s works about nature
The same noblewoman Morozova writes to Archpriest Avvakum: “For the multiplication of my sins from everywhere, a great storm is upon my soul, and I am an impatient sinner.” Why is she “impatient”? She makes sure that her eldest son finds a good “wife.” Three virtues are needed, in her opinion, for this “wife”: that she be “pious and loving of the poor and a host of strangers.” And then he asks: “Where should I get it - from a good breed, or from an ordinary one? Those who are of a better breed than girls are worse, and those girls are better who are of a worse breed.” After all, this observation speaks about the boyar’s intelligence, about her lack of boyar arrogance.
It was commonly thought that in Ancient Rus' the beauty of nature was supposedly poorly understood. This opinion was based on the fact that in ancient Russian works detailed descriptions of nature are rare, there are no landscapes, which are found in modern literature. But here is what Metropolitan Daniel writes in the 16th century: “And if you want to cool off (that is, take a break from work. - D.L.) - go to the threshold of your temple (your house. - D.L.) and see the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars, the clouds, look at the highest, and look at the lowest, and cool off in them.”
I do not give examples from well-known works recognized as highly artistic. There are so many touching human episodes in “War and Peace,” especially in everything connected with the Rostov family, or in Pushkin’s “The Captain’s Daughter,” and in any work of art! Isn’t it for them that we love Dickens, “Notes of a Hunter” by Turgenev, the wonderful “Grass and Ant” by Fyodor Abramov or “The Master and Margarita” by Bulgakov?!
Humanity has always been one of the most important phenomena of literature - large and small. It is worth looking for these manifestations of simple human feelings and concerns. They are precious. And they are especially precious when you find them in correspondence, in memories, in documents. There are, for example, a number of documents testifying to how ordinary peasants, under various pretexts, avoided participating in the construction of a prison in Pustozersk, where Avvakum was supposed to be a prisoner. And, moreover, decisively, unanimously! Their evasions, almost childish, show them to be simple and kind people.
Letter thirty-four
About Russian nature
Nature has its own culture. Chaos is not at all a natural state of nature. On the contrary, chaos (if it exists at all) is an unnatural state of nature.
What is the culture of nature expressed in? Let's talk about living nature. First of all, she lives in society, community. There are “plant associations”: trees do not live mixed together, but known species are combined with others, but not with all of them. Pines, for example, have certain lichens, mosses, mushrooms, bushes, etc. as neighbors. Every mushroom picker knows this. Well-known rules of behavior are characteristic not only of animals, but also of plants. Trees stretch towards the sun in different ways - sometimes in caps, so as not to interfere with each other, and sometimes spreading, in order to cover and protect another tree species that begins to grow under their cover. A pine tree grows under the cover of alder. The pine grows, and then the alder, which has done its job, dies. I observed this long-term process near Leningrad, in Toksovo, where during the First World War all the pine trees were cut down and the pine forests were replaced by thickets of alder, which then nurtured young pine trees under its branches. Now there are pine trees again.
Nature is “social” in its own way. Its “sociality” also lies in the fact that it can live next to a person, be a neighbor to him, if he, in turn, is social and intellectual himself, takes care of her, does not cause irreparable damage to her, does not completely cut down forests, does not litter rivers...
The Russian peasant, through his centuries-long labor, created the beauty of Russian nature. He plowed the land and thereby gave it certain dimensions. He laid the measure of his arable land, walking through it with a plow. Frontiers in Russian nature are commensurate with the work of a man and his horse, his ability to walk with a horse behind a plow or plow before turning back, and then forward again. Smoothing the ground, the man removed all the sharp edges, bumps, and stones. Russian nature is soft, it is cared for by the peasant in his own way. The peasant’s movements behind the plow, plow, and harrow not only created “strips” of rye, but evened out the boundaries of the forest, formed its edges, and created smooth transitions from forest to field, from field to river.
The poetry of the transformation of nature through the work of a plowman is well conveyed by A. Koltsov in “The Plowman’s Song,” which begins with the urging of the sivka:
Well! trudge, Sivka,
Arable land, tithes,
Let's whiten the iron
Oh damp earth.
The Russian landscape was mainly created by the efforts of two great cultures: the culture of man, which softened the harshness of nature, and the culture of nature, which, in turn, softened all the imbalances that man unwittingly brought into it. The landscape was created, on the one hand, by nature, ready to develop and cover up everything that man had disturbed in one way or another, and on the other hand, by man, who softened the earth with his labor and softened the landscape. Both cultures seemed to correct each other and create her humanity and freedom.
The nature of the East European Plain is gentle, without high mountains, but not impotently flat, with a network of rivers ready to be “roads of communication”, and with a sky not obscured by dense forests, with sloping hills and endless roads smoothly flowing around all the hills.
And with what care the man stroked the hills, descents and ascents! Here, the plowman's experience created an aesthetic of parallel lines - lines that went in unison with each other and with nature, like voices in ancient Russian chants. The plowman laid furrow to furrow - as he combed his hair, as he laid hair to hair. So in a hut, logs are placed on top of logs, blocks on blocks, in fences - poles on poles, and the huts themselves are lined up in a rhythmic row over the river or along the road - like a herd going out to water.
Therefore, the relationship between nature and man is a relationship between two cultures, each of which is “social” in its own way, communal, and has its own “rules of behavior.” And their meeting is built on a kind of moral foundation. Both cultures are the fruit of historical development, and the development of human culture has been taking place under the influence of nature for a long time (since humanity has existed), and the development of nature with its multimillion-year existence is relatively recent and not everywhere under the influence of human culture. One (natural culture) can exist without the other (human), but the other (human) cannot. But still, for many past centuries, there was a balance between nature and man. It would seem that it should have left both parts equal. But no, the balance is everywhere its own and everywhere on some kind of its own, special basis, with its own axis. In the north in Russia there was more “nature”, and the further south and closer to the steppe, the more “man”.
Anyone who has been to Kizhi has probably seen a stone ridge stretching along the entire island, like the backbone of a giant animal. A road runs near this ridge. The ridge took centuries to form. The peasants cleared their fields of stones - boulders and cobblestones - and dumped them here, near the road. A well-groomed topography of a large island was formed. The whole spirit of this relief is permeated with a sense of centuries. And it is not for nothing that the family of storytellers Ryabinins lived here from generation to generation, from whom many epics were recorded.
The landscape of Russia throughout its heroic space seems to be pulsating, it either discharges and becomes more “natural”, then it thickens in villages, graveyards and cities, and becomes more “human”.
In the countryside and in the city the same rhythm of parallel lines continues, which begins with the arable land. Furrow to furrow, log to log, street to street. Large rhythmic divisions are combined with small, fractional ones. One smoothly transitions to the other.
The old Russian city is not opposed to nature. He goes to nature through the suburbs. “Suburb” is a word that seems to have been deliberately created to connect the idea of the city and nature. The suburbs are close to the city, but they are also close to nature. The suburb is a village with trees, with wooden semi-rural houses. Hundreds of years ago, he clung to the walls of the city, to the rampart and moat, with vegetable gardens and orchards, he clung to the surrounding fields and forests, taking from them a few trees, a few vegetable gardens, a little water into his ponds and wells. And all this in the ebb and flow of hidden and obvious rhythms - beds, streets, houses, logs, pavement blocks and bridges.
The peculiarity of the Central Russian landscape is formed not only due to the landscape and climate...
Introduction
Academician D.S. Likhachev in his article analyzes the features of interaction between man and nature. D. S. Likhachev emphasizes that human influence on nature can be not only consumer in nature, but also constructive and creative.
The problem of the influence of nature on the human state of mind. The problem of human perception of nature as living matter. Is there a connection between nature and man? What is the negative impact of civilization on human life, his relationship with nature? Should a person perceive nature as something living?
Academician D.
S. Likhachev in his article analyzes the features of interaction between man and nature. D. S. Likhachev emphasizes that human influence on nature can be not only consumer in nature, but also constructive and creative.
By thoughtlessly invading the natural environment, humans violate the patterns of interaction between natural components, which ultimately destroys natural complexes and even leads to their complete destruction. When extracting minerals, plowing fertile lands, using rivers, lakes and groundwater for economic purposes, humanity does not think about future generations.
Your position on the issue
After all, the result of such activities is the depletion of natural resources and environmental pollution. Already today, nature has entered into a duel with humanity, responding to irrational impacts with forest fires, destruction of the ozone layer, catastrophic floods and drying up of water bodies. Our descendants should not inherit from the current generation a planet plundered and polluted with waste. In order to prevent the catastrophic consequences of human encroachment on nature today, we need a rational approach to its riches.
An example of a careful attitude towards the environment is the economic activity of our ancestors. D. S. Likhachev draws the attention of his contemporaries to the harmony in the relationship between man and nature that has existed among the peasants for centuries. By working on the land and taking care of its fertility, people provided themselves and their children with bread and food for many years. The economic peasant did not plow everything, but strictly demarcated the territories of arable land, pastures, meadows and forests, preserving the natural balance and improving the environment.
Arguments from literature
V.P.Astafiev novel “The Tsar Fish”
A boundless thirst for profit pushes the fisherman Ignatyich to poach. One day he comes across a giant sturgeon - the king fish, but the boat capsizes - man and fish end up on the same hook. The death of one of them will inevitably lead to the death of the other. Thus, in symbolic form, Astafiev shows the inextricable connection between man and nature.
L.N. Tolstoy novel “War and Peace”
At her parents' estate, Natasha Rostova admires the summer night with the window wide open. She feels like one with this beautiful living world, she wants to dissolve in it, she wants to live and feel the fullness of this life.
A. Fet in the poem “Learn from them - from the oak, from the birch.” The poet believes that the same psychological processes occur in nature as in human life. Therefore, people should learn from nature patience and equanimity, because difficulties are temporary, and they will definitely be replaced by something good.
L.N. Tolstoy in the novel "War and Peace". Let us recall the episode of the Battle of Austerlitz. When Prince Andrei was wounded and above him there was only the sky, high and clear, an epiphany came to him. Until this moment, Bolkonsky strived for fame, and his idol was Napoleon. Now, seeing how gray clouds solemnly and calmly crawl across the sky, he realized that there is nothing more valuable than life. A person does not need to chase awards and medals, but needs to strive for inner harmony.
Conclusion
Academician D.S. Likhachev draws the attention of his contemporaries to the rational attitude of the Russian peasant to the natural resources and calls on them to learn from their ancestors how to protect nature. The scientist emphasizes that loving one’s homeland does not mean only praising its beauty, but one must do everything to ensure that the land on which a person was born becomes better, richer and cleaner. Only he can become a worthy son of his homeland, Likhachev emphasizes, who makes every effort to preserve its natural resources and cares about the cleanliness of the environment.
Current page: 2 (book has 30 pages total) [available reading passage: 7 pages]
Russian nature and Russian character
I have already noted how strongly the Russian plain influences the character of a Russian person. We often forget lately about the geographical factor in human history. But it exists, and no one has ever denied it.
Now I want to talk about something else - about how, in turn, man influences nature. This is not some kind of discovery on my part, I just want to think about this topic.
Starting from the 18th century and earlier, from the 17th century, the opposition of human culture to nature was established. These centuries created the myth of the “natural man,” close to nature and therefore not only not spoiled, but also uneducated. Whether openly or covertly, ignorance was considered the natural state of man. And this is not only deeply erroneous, this belief entailed the idea that any manifestation of culture and civilization is inorganic, capable of spoiling a person, and therefore one must return to nature and be ashamed of one’s civilization.
This opposition of human culture as an allegedly “unnatural” phenomenon to “natural” nature was especially established after J.-J. Rousseau was reflected in Russia in special forms of the peculiar Rousseauism that developed here in the 19th century: in populism, Tolstoy’s views on the “natural man” - the peasant, opposed to the “educated class”, simply the intelligentsia.
Going to the people in a literal and figurative sense led in some part of our society in the 19th and 20th centuries to many misconceptions regarding the intelligentsia. The expression “rotten intelligentsia” also appeared, contempt for the supposedly weak and indecisive intelligentsia. A misconception has also been created about the “intellectual” Hamlet as a person constantly wavering and indecisive. But Hamlet is not weak at all: he is filled with a sense of responsibility, he hesitates not out of weakness, but because he thinks, because he is morally responsible for his actions.
They lie about Hamlet that he is indecisive.
He is determined, rude and smart,
But when the blade is raised,
Hamlet hesitates to be destructive
And looks through the periscope of time.
Without hesitation, the villains shoot
In the heart of Lermontov or Pushkin...(From D. Samoilov’s poem The Vindication of Hamlet”)
Education and intellectual development are precisely the essence, the natural states of a person, and ignorance and lack of intelligence are abnormal states for a person. Ignorance or half-knowledge is almost a disease. And physiologists can easily prove this.
In fact, the human brain is designed with a huge reserve. Even the most backward-educated peoples have the brain size of three Oxford universities. Only racists think differently. And any organ that does not work at full capacity finds itself in an abnormal position, weakens, atrophies, and “gets sick.” In this case, the brain disease spreads primarily to the moral area.
Contrasting nature with culture is generally unsuitable for one more reason. Nature, after all, has its own culture. Chaos is not at all a natural state of nature. On the contrary, chaos (if it exists at all) is an unnatural state of nature.
What is the culture of nature expressed in? Let's talk about living nature. First of all, she lives in society, community. There are plant associations: trees do not live mixed together, and well-known species are combined with others, but not all. Pines, for example, have certain lichens, mosses, mushrooms, bushes, etc. as neighbors. Every mushroom picker remembers this. Well-known rules of behavior are characteristic not only of animals (all dog and cat owners know this, even those living outside nature, in the city), but also of plants. Trees stretch towards the sun in different ways - sometimes in caps, so as not to interfere with each other, and sometimes spreading, in order to cover and protect another tree species that begins to grow under their cover. A pine tree grows under the cover of alder. The pine grows, and then the alder, which has done its job, dies. I observed this long-term process near Leningrad in Toksovo, where during the First World War all the pine trees were cut down and the pine forests were replaced by thickets of alder, which then nurtured young pine trees under its branches. Now there are pine trees again.
Nature is “social” in its own way. Its “sociality” also lies in the fact that it can live next to a person, be a neighbor to him, if he, in turn, is social and intellectual himself.
The Russian peasant, through his centuries-long labor, created the beauty of Russian nature. He plowed the land and thereby gave it certain dimensions. He laid the measure of his arable land, walking through it with a plow. Frontiers in Russian nature are commensurate with the work of man and horse, his ability to walk with a horse behind a plow or plow before turning back, and then forward again. Smoothing the ground, the man removed all the sharp edges, bumps, and stones. Russian nature is soft, it is cared for by the peasant in his own way. The peasant's walking behind the plow, plow, and harrow not only created “strips” of rye, but evened out the boundaries of the forest, formed its edges, and created smooth transitions from forest to field, from field to river or lake.
The Russian landscape was mainly shaped by the efforts of two great cultures: the culture of man, which softened the harshness of nature, and the culture of nature, which, in turn, softened all the imbalances that man unwittingly introduced into it. The landscape was created, on the one hand, by nature, ready to develop and cover up everything that man had disturbed in one way or another, and on the other hand, by man, who softened the earth with his labor and softened the landscape. Both cultures seemed to correct each other and create her humanity and freedom.
The nature of the East European Plain is gentle, without high mountains, but not impotently flat, with a network of rivers ready to be “roads of communication”, and with a sky not obscured by dense forests, with sloping hills and endless roads smoothly flowing around all the hills.
And with what care the man stroked the hills, descents and ascents! Here, the plowman's experience created an aesthetic of parallel lines - lines that went in unison with each other and with nature, like voices in ancient Russian chants. The plowman laid furrow to furrow, as he combed his hair, as he laid hair to hair. So in the hut there lies log to log, block to block, in the fence - pole to pole, and the huts themselves line up in a rhythmic row over the river or along the road - like a herd going out to a watering hole.
Therefore, the relationship between nature and man is a relationship between two cultures, each of which is “social” in its own way, communal, and has its own “rules of behavior.” And their meeting is built on a kind of moral foundation. Both cultures are the fruit of historical development, and the development of human culture has been taking place under the influence of nature for a long time (since humanity has existed), and the development of nature, compared with its multimillion-year existence, is relatively recent and not everywhere under the influence of human culture. One (natural culture) can exist without the other (human), but the other (human) cannot. But still, for many past centuries, there was a balance between nature and man. It would seem that it should have left both parts equal and passed somewhere in the middle. But no, the balance is everywhere its own and everywhere on some kind of its own, special basis, with its own axis. In the north of Russia there was more nature, and the closer to the steppe, the more people.
Anyone who has been to Kizhi has probably seen a stone ridge stretching along the entire island, like the backbone of a giant animal. A road runs near this ridge. This ridge took centuries to form. The peasants cleared their fields of stones - boulders and cobblestones - and dumped them here, near the road. A well-groomed topography of a large island was formed. The whole spirit of this relief is permeated with a sense of centuries. And it’s not for nothing that a family of epic storytellers, the Ryabinins, lived here on the island from generation to generation.
The landscape of Russia throughout its heroic space seems to pulsate, it either discharges and becomes more natural, or condenses in villages, graveyards and cities, and becomes more humane. In the countryside and in the city the same rhythm of parallel lines continues, which begins with the arable land. Furrow to furrow, log to log, street to street. Large rhythmic divisions are combined with small, fractional ones. One smoothly transitions to the other.
The city is not opposed to nature. He goes to nature through the suburbs. “Suburb” is a word that seems to have been deliberately created to connect the idea of the city and nature. The suburbs are close to the city, but they are also close to nature. The suburb is a village with trees, with wooden semi-rural houses. He clung to the walls of the city, to the rampart and moat, with vegetable gardens and orchards, but he also clung to the surrounding fields and forests, taking from them a few trees, a few vegetable gardens, a little water into his ponds and wells. And all this in the ebb and flow of hidden and obvious rhythms - beds, streets, houses, logs, blocks of pavements and bridges 1
On how ancient Russian cities were built, there is an interesting, albeit dryly titled article by G. V. Alferova, “Organization of city construction in the Russian state in the 16th–17th centuries” (Questions of History. 1977. No. 7. pp. 50–60). Her own. On the issue of the construction of cities in the Moscow state in the 16th–17th centuries. // Architectural heritage. 1980. No. 28. pp. 20–28. Kudryavtsev M. P., Kudryavtseva T. N.. Landscape in the composition of an ancient Russian city // Ibid. pp. 3–12.
About Russian landscape painting
In Russian landscape painting there are a lot of works dedicated to the seasons: autumn, spring, winter are the favorite themes of Russian landscape painting throughout the 19th century and later. And most importantly, it does not contain immutable elements of nature, but most often temporary ones: early or late autumn, spring waters, melting snow, rain, thunderstorm, the winter sun peeking out for a moment from behind heavy winter clouds, etc. In Russian In nature, there are no eternal large objects such as mountains or evergreen trees that do not change at different times of the year. Everything in Russian nature is inconsistent in color and condition. The trees sometimes have bare branches, creating a kind of “winter graphics,” sometimes with bright, spring, picturesque foliage. The autumn forest is diverse in shades and degree of color saturation. Different states of water, taking on the color of the sky and surrounding shores, changing under the influence of strong or weak winds (“Siverko” by Ostroukhov), road puddles, different colors of the air itself, fog, dew, frost, snow - dry and wet. An eternal masquerade, an eternal celebration of colors and lines, eternal movement - within the limits of a year or a day.
All these changes exist, of course, in other countries, but in Russia they seem to be most noticeable thanks to Russian painting, starting with Venetsianov and Martynov. Russia has a continental climate, and this continental climate creates a particularly harsh winter and a particularly hot summer, a long spring shimmering with all shades of colors, in which every week brings with it something new, a protracted autumn, in which there is its very beginning with an extraordinary the transparency of the air, sung by Tyutchev, and the special silence characteristic only of August, and late autumn, which Pushkin loved so much. But in Russia, unlike the south, especially somewhere on the shores of the White Sea or White Lake, there are unusually long evenings with the setting sun, which creates a shimmer of colors on the water, changing literally in five-minute intervals, a whole “ballet of colors”, and wonderful – long, long – sunrises. There are moments (especially in spring) when the sun “plays” as if it had been cut by an experienced lapidary. White nights and “black”, dark days in December create not only a diverse range of colors, but also an extremely rich emotional palette. And Russian poetry responds to all this diversity.
It is interesting that Russian artists, when they found themselves abroad, looked for these changes in the seasons, the time of day, these “atmospheric” phenomena in their landscapes. Such was, for example, the magnificent landscape painter who remained Russian in all his landscapes of Italy precisely because of his sensitivity to all changes “in the air” - Sylvester Shchedrin.
The first essentially Russian landscape painter, Venetsianov, already has a characteristic feature of the Russian landscape. It is also present in Vasiliev’s early spring. It had a major impact on Levitan’s work. This inconstancy and instability of time is a feature that seems to connect the people of Russia with its landscapes.
But don't get carried away. National traits cannot be exaggerated or made exceptional. National characteristics are only some accents, and not qualities that are absent in others. National characteristics bring people together, interest people of other nationalities, and do not remove people from the national environment of other peoples, do not close peoples within themselves. Nations are not walled communities, but harmoniously coordinated associations. Therefore, if I talk about what is characteristic of Russian landscape or Russian poetry, then these same properties, but, however, to some other extent, are also characteristic of other countries and peoples. The national traits of a people exist not in themselves and for themselves, but for others. They become clear only when viewed from the outside and in comparison, therefore they must be understandable for other peoples; they must exist in some other arrangement among others.
If I say now that the Russian artist is especially sensitive to changes in annual, daily, atmospheric conditions and why, then the great French artist K. Monet immediately comes to mind, who painted London Bridge in the fog, or Rouen Cathedral, or one and the same haystack in different weather and at different times of the day. These “Russian” features of Monet in no way cancel the observations I made; they only say that Russian features are, to some extent, universal traits. The difference is of degree.
Does what was said apply? only to realistic painting of the 19th and early 20th centuries, for example, to the painters of the “World of Art” circle? I really appreciate painting of various directions, but I must say that the “art of pure painting”, as the painting of “Jack of Diamonds”, “Donkey’s Tail”, “Blue Knight”, etc. seems to me, is less connected with the national traits of the type about which I just said, and yet it is connected with Russian “material folklore” - with the art of embroidery, even signboards, clay toys and toys in general, since in this painting there is a lot of play, a lot of invention, invention. The twist for this art is praise, because it is thoroughly mischievous and cheerful. It is no coincidence that this art required exhibitions and was so associated with noisy opening days. It had to be demonstrated to a large public, it had to amaze and excite talk. In Russian culture of the early 20th century, there was generally a lot of masquerade and theatricality, which is so well emphasized by Akhmatova in “Poem without a Hero.”
Nature of other countries
I have long felt that it is time to answer the question: do other peoples not have the same sense of nature, do they not have a union with nature? Yes, of course! And I am not writing to prove the superiority of Russian nature over the nature of other peoples. But every nation has its own union with nature.
In order to compare different landscapes created by the joint efforts of people and elements, it seems to me that it is necessary to visit the Caucasus, Central Asia, as well as Spain, Italy, England, Scotland, Norway, Bulgaria, Turkey, Japan, Egypt. You cannot judge nature from photographs and landscape paintings.
Of all the regions and countries I have listed, I can only superficially judge the Caucasus and also England, Scotland, and Bulgaria. And each of these “ethno-natures” has its own unique relationship between nature and man - always touching, always exciting, testifying to something very spiritually lofty in a person, or rather, in a people.
Agricultural labor, as in Russia, shaped the nature of England. But this nature was created not so much by agriculture as by sheep breeding. That is why there are so few bushes and such good lawns. The cattle “plucked” the landscape, making it easily visible: there were no bushes under the canopy of trees and it was visible far away. The British plant trees along roads and paths, leaving meadows and lawns between them. It is no coincidence that cattle were an indispensable part of landscape parks and English landscape painting. This was noticed in Russia as well. And even in the Russian royal landscape gardens, the taste for which was brought to Russia from England, dairies and farms were set up, cows and sheep grazed.
The British love parks almost without bushes, they love the bare banks of rivers and lakes, where the boundary of water and land creates clear and smooth lines, they love “solitary oaks” or groups of old trees, bosquets standing among the lawns like giant bouquets.
In the landscapes of Scotland, in the Highlands, which many consider (I admit, me too) to be the most beautiful, one is struck by the extraordinary laconicism of the lyrical feeling. This is almost naked poetry. And it is no coincidence that one of the world’s best poetry was born there - the English “lake school”. The mountains, which have raised meadows, sheep pastures, and, after them, people, onto their powerful slopes, inspire some kind of special trust. And people entrusted themselves and their livestock to the mountain fields, leaving the livestock without a barn or shelter. Cows with unusually warm and thick wool graze in the mountains, accustomed to the night cold and mountain dampness under the clouds, sheep that produce the best wool in the world and can spend the night huddled together in herds, people walk around who wear simple kilts so that it is convenient to straighten and dry them in front of the fires, and blankets, which are no less convenient to dry in front of the fires and wrap yourself in them on damp nights. The fields are blocked off by haiks - fences made of stones. They were built by patient hands. The Scots did not want to build them from material other than their native mountains. Therefore, stone haiks are as much a part of nature as our northern fences made of poles. Only the rhythm in them is different.
In Bulgaria, the nature of the relationship between nature and man has one amazing feature: the feature of their reciprocity to each other, mutual openness. This feature is still weakly expressed in the first capital of Bulgaria - Pliska. The name of the city of Pliska is based on the same root as the name of one of the oldest cities in Russia - Pskov (in ancient times it was Pleskov - a “sister city” named after Pliska). Both cities are located on a level flat the place from which they got their names. In the remains of the magnificent palace in Pliska, its walls, Pliska roads and pavements lie large stone blocks. With their monumentality and heaviness, these stone blocks seem to affirm the mighty horizontals of the surrounding space. The Bulgarians, having founded Pliska, had just moved from a nomadic life to a sedentary one. In Pliska they “dropped anchor”, established themselves on the plain, stopped wandering, but still loved the nomadic life from which they wanted to break away, they loved this plain. They gave the cattle and horses pastures, and they themselves hid behind walls made of giant stones. Pliska stopped the movement that led them from the Volga and the North Caucasus to the Balkans.
The second capital of Bulgaria, Preslav, is located differently: in a huge bowl of the surrounding mountains. In the center of the bowl-shaped valley is the famous Round Church. The surrounding mountains admire Preslav with its center - the Round Church, and Preslav admires the mighty fence of the wooded mountains surrounding it.
This mutual circulation of nature and man is even more unique and stronger in the third capital of Bulgaria - Veliko Tarnovo. Veliko Tarnovo with its main areas is located on high hills - these are the two most important - Tsarevets with an impregnable fortress and Trapezitsa with numerous churches and monasteries. And between the hills the Yantra winds in complex loops, repeating in its waters the trembling beauty of the city. And above all this complex relationship between mountains, city and river rise even higher mountains. The Tarnovo residents christened one of them with the name Momina Fortress: Maiden Fortress - a fortress that even girls could defend - it is so impregnable in itself. A mountain is like a city, a city is like mountains... Mountains and cities are fused into unity to the point of indistinguishability, as if they live together. The mountains lifted the Bulgarians to their mighty peaks. They not only accepted their inhabitants, but lifted them up and glorified them.
Even the relatively new, “revival” cities of Bulgaria are the same - allied to nature. One of them is Koprivshtitsa. Koprivshtitsa is the city of the “first cannon”. The liberation uprising against the centuries-old Ottoman yoke began here. This uprising was supported by nature itself - the mountains and dark forests surrounding Koprivshtitsa. And look: in what union the city, forest and mountains still live here. In the center of the city, among the two-story typically Bulgarian houses, live dark, mighty, unusually tall forest spruce trees. This forest has entered the city... And from every house you can see mountain meadows with herds of sheep; the area surrounding the city is visible; precisely from everyone(of course, old, because modern architects do not understand this) house. The fact is that the Bulgarians invented amazing houses. The floors in these houses are placed freely to each other, and the second, residential floor is always turned so that from its windows there is a perspective of the street and a view of the nature surrounding the city: in the mountains - on the mountains, in the coastal ones - on the sea. With high artistic meaning, a smooth line is repeated in houses, fences and gates - a “mare” (yoke), as if echoing the line of the Bulgarian mountains.
Perhaps because the wonderful Bulgarian architect of the 19th century, Kolya Ficheto, did not study anywhere, he understood architecture in his own way and in such a folk, Bulgarian way. For him, architecture was a continuation of nature and people’s way of life. The arches of his bridges not only describe, together with their reflection in the water, ideal ellipses, ovals, circles, but also with amazing smoothness they transform into the arches of the bridge abutments, and the columns of his other buildings not so much “carry” the arches above them, but simply and friendlyly “ finishing the drawing."
How much peace, silence and tranquility there is in any architecture in the world, how little of the now fashionable “brutalism” and urban aggressiveness is in the folk architecture!
Let's turn to the nature of our native Transcaucasia.
In Georgia, people seek protection from powerful mountains, sometimes reach for them (in the towers of Svaneti), sometimes resist the mountain verticals with the horizontals of their homes. But the most important thing is that in Georgia nature is so enormous that it is no longer in a simple union with man, it powerfully protects him, embraces him, breathes into him the heroic spirit.
Many people have written about Georgia. I will not list the great Russian poets of the 19th century, but I will remind you of the Soviet poets: P. Antokolsky, B. Akhmadulina, A. Voznesensky, E. Evtushenko, N. Zabolotsky, O. Mandelstam, A. Mezhirov, Yu. Moritz, B. Pasternak , A. Tarkovsky, etc. But to imagine the relationship between nature and man in Georgia, I will cite one poem by N. Zabolotsky. May the reader not complain to me for quoting this poem in full. It is always a great pleasure to recount the poems of N. Zabolotsky.
Night in Pasanauri
The night shone, playing the panduri,
The moon floated into the refuge of love,
And again to me in the gardens of Pasanauri
Nightingales sang on two Aragvahs.Descending from the Cross Pass,
Where there is snow and rocky ice in May,
I was so tired that I didn't want to
No nightingales, no songs, no beauties.To the sounds of a nightingale
I took a lantern, stripped naked,
And here is the river, like a mad maiden,
My big body was hugged.And I lay there, clutching the stones,
And above me, sparkling, the stream howled,
And the stones moved in a frenzy
And they muttered, jumping at their feet.And I looked at the pale light of the cinder,
who wavered in the distance,
And from the shore a huge shepherd
She moved majestically towards the river.And I went ashore like a warrior,
Cold, pure, strong and earthy,
And the proud dog, like a deity, is calm,
Having recognized me, he lay down in front of me.And that night in the gardens of Pasanauri,
Having tasted the cold of primeval streams,
I accepted the first sound of panduri in my heart,
Like in adolescence - the first kiss.
The nature of Georgia really powerfully accepts a person and makes him strong, majestic and chivalrous.
Fresh impressions of the nature of Armenia force me to say a little more about its landscapes. The centuries-old culture of Armenia has conquered even the mountains. “Round dance of centuries,” writes Andrei Bely in “Wind from the Caucasus.” “The antiquities are soldered into the soil; and natural stones - they deteriorated the sculpture; and the statues, having cracked and gone into the ground, raise the bushes; You won’t understand what you see: is it nature, is it culture? In the distance, the bare-pink, yellow-white and faceted ridge is raised with a through color above Gegharkunik, separating Sevan; the soil there is hollowed out by temples, the temples are pieces of solid rocks.” 2
Quote according to the article: Gonchar N. A. Travel prose of Andrei Bely and his essay “Armenia” // Russian-Armenian literary connections. Research and materials. Literary connections. T. 2. Yerevan, 1977. P. 156.
I can’t help but quote from the same book an excerpt where Bely describes his first impressions of Armenia, which he received early in the morning from the carriage window.
"Armenia!
The top of the twilight tears; the distance formed shades of gloomy blue, graying, turquoise gorges under a pale star: in the haze of weakening greenery; but he struck the scratched top under the sky with a crooked blade, like a stuck knife; and the earth climbed like a comb of cliffs, blue below, in wild gaps; like the blows of knives crawling out of cracked stone gates - into the center of the sky; the world is jagged over a terrible spread of hanging boulders, where there are no lines without fury!” 3
Gonchar N. A. Travel prose of Andrei Bely... P. 154.
That this is not a fleeting impression from Bely is shown by the fact that the brilliant Armenian painter Martiros Saryan himself responded to him, and what could be more authoritative than just such a response from the artist. In his letter to Bely, inspired by the impression of the essay “Armenia,” Saryan writes that he retains the memory of those days when they together “drove or walked around this scorched naked mountainous country, admiring the piling bluish-violet stones rearing up in the form of the highest peaks of Ararat and Aragats" 4
Right there. P. 163.
I don’t dare correct Saryan, and yet sometimes it seems to me that the landscape of Eastern Armenia is harsher than in Saryan’s paintings. Treeless mountains, furrowed by rain, streams and stripes of vineyards, mountains from which stones rolled down, thick dense colors: this is nature, as if it had absorbed the blood of the people. I wrote above that Russian nature, humanized by the peasant, is very characterized by the rhythm of plowed land, the rhythm of fences and log walls. Rhythm is also characteristic of Armenian landscapes, but in Armenia it is different. The same Saryan’s painting “Earth” (1969) leaves a huge impression. It all consists of stripes, but bright, wavy stripes - completely different from the rhythm created by man in Russia.
The same wave-like rhythm is captured in the paintings of the most remarkable Armenian artist Minas Avetisyan. In his painting “Parents” (1962), the father and mother are depicted against the backdrop of an Armenian landscape. It is amazing that the rhythm of Armenian nature seems to be repeated in the spiritual rhythm of people. Even the mountains in the film “Parents” became waves of labor rhythm.
The labor rhythms of Armenia are surprisingly diverse, just as the labor of its people is diverse. In Saryan’s painting “Afternoon Silence” (1924), squares of cultivated fields seem to be superimposed on the ground, as if multi-colored carpets were laid out to dry. The rhythms of mountains and fields combine and at the same time oppose each other.
The rhythm in Hakob Kozhdoyan’s film “Ararat Valley” is completely free and easy. The mountains in it are waves, the stripes of the valley are just a light swell of the sea.
The richness of Armenian nature is also evidenced by the fact that it is reflected in amazingly diverse ways in painting. The same artist saw it differently. And at the same time, we will always say: this is Armenia -
Country of Mosquito Fires
And dead pottery valleys...
Since these lines of O. Mandelstam come to mind, it is impossible not to recall the poems of Valery Bryusov addressed to the Armenians:
Yes! You're on the edge
Two different arguing worlds,
And in the depths of native legends
You hear the echoes of centuries.All the storms, all the worries of the world,
While flying, they touched you with their wings, -
And the muffled thunder of Cyrus’s campaigns,
And Alexandra has an abusive fight...
How good it is! – the greatness of a people lies in its connection to world events! The spirit of the Armenian people lies in this suffering involvement.
It was cut like the hardness of a diamond,
Keeping all the reflections in myself:
And the colors of the delicate roses of Shiraz,
And the brilliance of Homeric fire.
Even the poor shepherd's crook at the foot of Ararat becomes like the scepter of a king.
Down on the rocky field
The gray-haired shepherd leads the sheep,
And a long staff, in the hazy light,
Looks like an age-old scepter.
And in the same vein, Nikolai Tikhonov speaks about Armenian nature:
In the palms of mountains split
A hundred-sounding crowbar of time,
Like an apple of gold
Armenia is showing off...
The golden apple, that is, the royal sign - the power, and the scepter - all this was presented by Russian poets to the long-suffering and significant happy Armenia. Isn't this a royal gift?
After I sent the text of this book to the publishing house, I read “From the diary entries of an art critic” by M. V. Alpatov 5
See: Decorative arts. 1982. No. 11. pp. 43–45.
What he wrote there about Greece amazingly continues, diversifying, what I write above about Scotland, Georgia and Armenia. With his permission, let me cite some of these notes.
“The country does not have a clearly emphasized dominance. In this, Greece is decidedly different from small Armenia, which is overshadowed from everywhere by the snow-white peak of Ararat, from Sicily with its fire-breathing Etna. At the foot of Parnassus one can recognize it as very majestic and huge. But as soon as you move away from it, it is already included in the chain of other mountains, other peaks begin to dominate and push it aside. Here axes are constantly shifting, one thing gives way to another, the big one retreats, the small one comes out. The silhouettes of the mountains form, then part, and then form again. It is difficult to express in words how beautiful this round dance of mountain peaks is when driving along the roads of Greece. Mountains rise above the sea. The sea, for its part, crashes into the mainland. Here you see with your own eyes what the words from the geography textbook “rugged shores” mean. Mountains soar into the sky. The sea reflects the blue sky. Mountains separate one from the other. The sea connects them again. It’s not for nothing that the very word “sea” - “pontos” in Greek meant “road.”
“In the clear light of the day, the measured breathing of the earth’s crust clearly sounds here. One turns to them again and again as something sublime, pure, beautiful in its detachment from the everyday prose of life.”
“Volcanoes speak about the inner life of the archipelago. A map of the country with mountain ranges sliding from north to south makes it possible to grasp its general rhythm. But even in what the eye of a traveler with little knowledge of geography can notice, its own consistency and pattern clearly emerges. Mountains break off or settle, and then deep ring folds form on their surface. Sometimes sharp light stones stick out from under the sparse bushes, as if it were the grin of the Dragon’s teeth, sown by Cadmus and turned into warriors.”
“The Greeks possessed a rare gift of figurative expression of the fruits of their thoughts. Pericles owns a metaphorical expression, the greatness of which you comprehend on the Field of Marathon: “The whole earth serves as the grave of people.”
“Greek nature helped man create forms of community life. The sea, bays, gulfs, and mountains separated, but also helped each local community develop independence. But these barriers were not impassable: people swam across seas, crossed mountains, every peasant lived hidden behind the mountains, and in difficult days of enemy invasion they lured them into a narrow gorge and destroyed them, despite their superiority. In a country cut by the sea, fragmented by mountain ranges, small states arose, but in mortal danger they could forget mutual claims, unite their forces and move together against the enemy. Here there were blood ties, a community of interests, and a common language, but not the least argument was that the person saw the whole country as if covered by one blue sky. In Greece, a person never feels crushed by the inexplicable mystery of the world.”
ABOUT RUSSIAN LANDSCAPE PAINTING
In Russian landscape painting there are a lot of works dedicated to the seasons: autumn, spring, winter are the favorite themes of Russian landscape painting throughout the 19th century. and later. And most importantly, it does not contain immutable elements of nature, but most often temporary ones: early or late autumn, spring waters, melting snow, rain, thunderstorms, the winter sun peeking out for a moment from behind heavy winter clouds, etc. In Russian There are no eternal large objects in nature that do not change at different times of the year, such as mountains or evergreen trees. Everything in Russian nature is inconsistent in color and condition. Trees with bare branches, creating a kind of “winter graphics,” or with bright, spring, picturesque foliage. The autumn forest is diverse in shades and degree of color saturation. Different states of water, taking on the color of the sky and surrounding shores, changing under the influence of strong or weak winds ("Siverko" by Ostroukhov), road puddles, different colors of the air itself, fog, dew, frost, snow - dry and wet. An eternal masquerade, an eternal celebration of colors and lines, eternal movement - within the limits of a year or a day.
All these changes exist, of course, in other countries, but in Russia they seem to be most noticeable thanks to Russian painting, starting with Venetsianov and Martynov. Russia has a continental climate, and this continental climate creates a particularly harsh winter and a particularly hot summer, a long spring shimmering with all shades of colors, in which every week brings with it something new, a protracted autumn, in which there is its very beginning with an extraordinary the transparency of the air, sung by Tyutchev, and the special silence characteristic only of August, and late autumn, which Pushkin loved so much. But in Russia, unlike the south, especially somewhere on the shores of the White Sea or White Lake, there are unusually long evenings with the setting sun, which creates a shimmer of colors on the water, changing literally in five-minute intervals, a whole “ballet of colors”, and wonderful - long, long sunrises. There are moments (especially in spring) when the sun “plays” as if it had been cut by an experienced lapidary. White nights and “black”, dark days in December create not only a diverse range of colors, but also an extremely rich emotional palette. And Russian poetry responds to all this diversity.
It is interesting that Russian artists, when they found themselves abroad, looked for these changes in the season, the time of day, these “atmospheric” phenomena in their landscapes. Such was, for example, the magnificent landscape painter who remained Russian in all his landscapes of Italy precisely because of his sensitivity to all changes “in the air” - Sylvester Shchedrin.
The first essentially Russian landscape painter, Venetsianov, already has a characteristic feature of the Russian landscape. It is also present in Vasiliev’s early spring. It had a major impact on Levitan’s work. This inconstancy and instability of time is a feature that seems to connect the people of Russia with its landscapes.
But don't get carried away. National traits cannot be exaggerated or made exceptional. National characteristics are only some accents, and not qualities that others lack. National characteristics bring people together, interest people of other nationalities, and do not remove people from the national environment of other peoples, do not close peoples within themselves. Nations are not walled communities, but harmoniously coordinated associations. Therefore, if I talk about what is characteristic of Russian landscape or Russian poetry, then these same properties, but, however, to some other extent, are also characteristic of other countries and peoples. The national traits of a people exist not in themselves and for themselves, but for others. They become clear only when viewed from the outside and in comparison, therefore they must be understandable for other peoples; they must exist in some other arrangement among others.
If I say now that the Russian artist is especially sensitive to changes in annual, daily, atmospheric conditions and why, then the great French artist K. Monet immediately comes to mind, who painted London Bridge in the fog, or Rouen Cathedral, or one and the same haystack in different weather and at different times of the day. These “Russian” features of Monet in no way cancel the observations I made; they only say that Russian features are, to some extent, universal traits. The difference is of degree.
Does what has been said only apply to realistic painting of the 19th and early 20th centuries, for example, to the painters of the “World of Art” circle? I really appreciate painting of various directions, but I must say that the “art of pure painting”, as the painting of “Jack of Diamonds”, “Donkey’s Tail”, “Blue Knight”, etc. seems to me, is less connected with the national traits of the type about which I just said, and yet it is connected with Russian “material folklore” - with the art of embroidery, even signboards, clay toys and toys in general, since in this painting there is a lot of play, a lot of invention, invention. The twist for this art is praise because it is mischievous and fun through and through. It is no coincidence that this art required exhibitions and was so associated with noisy opening days. It had to be demonstrated to a large public, it had to amaze and excite talk. In Russian culture at the beginning of the 20th century. in general there was a lot of masquerade and theatricality, which is so well emphasized by Akhmatova in “Poem without a Hero.”
NATURE OF OTHER COUNTRIES
I have long felt that it is time to answer the question: do other peoples not have the same sense of nature, do they not have a union with nature? Yes, of course! And I am not writing to prove the superiority of Russian nature over the nature of other peoples. But every nation has its own union with nature.
In order to compare different landscapes created by the joint efforts of people and elements, it seems to me that it is necessary to visit the Caucasus, Central Asia, as well as Spain, Italy, England, Scotland, Norway, Bulgaria, Turkey, Japan, Egypt. You cannot judge nature from photographs and landscape paintings.
Of all the regions and countries I have listed, I can only superficially judge the Caucasus and also England, Scotland, and Bulgaria. And each of these “ethno-natures” has its own unique relationship between nature and man - always touching, always exciting, testifying to something very spiritually lofty in a person, or rather, in a people.
Agricultural labor, as in Russia, shaped the nature of England. But this nature was created not so much by agriculture as by sheep breeding. That is why there are so few bushes and such good lawns. The cattle “plucked” the landscape, making it easily visible: there were no bushes under the canopy of trees and it was visible far away. The British plant trees along roads and paths, leaving meadows and lawns between them. It is no coincidence that cattle were an indispensable part of landscape parks and English landscape painting. This was noticed in Russia as well. And even in the Russian royal landscape gardens, the taste for which was brought to Russia from England, dairies and farms were set up, cows and sheep grazed.
The British love parks almost without bushes, they love the bare banks of rivers and lakes, where the boundary of water and land creates clear and smooth lines, they love “solitary oaks” or groups of old trees, bosquets standing among the lawns like giant bouquets.
In the landscapes of Scotland, in the Highlands, which many consider (I admit, me too) to be the most beautiful, one is struck by the extraordinary laconicism of the lyrical feeling. This is almost naked poetry. And it is no coincidence that one of the world's best poetry was born there - the English "lake school". The mountains, which have raised meadows, sheep pastures, and, after them, people, onto their powerful slopes, inspire some kind of special trust. And people entrusted themselves and their livestock to the mountain fields, leaving the livestock without a barn or shelter. Cows with unusually warm and thick wool graze in the mountains, accustomed to the night cold and mountain dampness under the clouds, sheep that produce the best wool in the world and can spend the night huddled together in herds, people walk around who wear simple kilts so that it is convenient to straighten and dry them in front of the fires, and blankets, which are no less convenient to dry in front of the fires and wrap yourself in them on damp nights. The fields are blocked off by haiks - fences made of stones. They were built by patient hands. The Scots did not want to build them from material other than their native mountains. Therefore, stone haiks are as much a part of nature as our northern fences made of poles. Only the rhythm in them is different.
In Bulgaria, the nature of the relationship between nature and man has one amazing feature: the feature of their reciprocity to each other, mutual openness. This feature is still weakly expressed in the first capital of Bulgaria - Pliska. The name of the city of Pliska is based on the same root as the name of one of the oldest cities in Russia - Pskov (in ancient times it was Pleskov - a “sister city” named after Pliska). Both cities are located on a flat, flat place, from which they got their names. In the remains of the magnificent palace in Pliska, its walls, Pliska roads and pavements lie large stone blocks. With their monumentality and heaviness, these stone blocks seem to affirm the mighty horizontals of the surrounding space. The Bulgarians, having founded Pliska, had just moved from a nomadic life to a sedentary one. In Pliska they “drove anchor”, established themselves on the plain, stopped wandering, but still loved the nomadic life from which they wanted to break away, they loved this plain. They gave the cattle and horses pastures, and they themselves hid behind walls made of giant stones. Pliska stopped the movement that led them from the Volga and the North Caucasus to the Balkans.
The second capital of Bulgaria, Preslav, is located differently: in a huge bowl of the surrounding mountains. In the center of the bowl-shaped valley is the famous Round Church. The surrounding mountains admire Preslav with its center - the Round Church, and Preslav admires the mighty fence of the wooded mountains surrounding it.
This mutual circulation of nature and man is even more unique and stronger in the third capital of Bulgaria - Veliko Tarnovo. Veliko Tarnovo with its main areas is located on high hills - these are the two most important - Tsarevets with an impregnable fortress and Trapezitsa with numerous churches and monasteries. And between the hills the Yantra winds in complex loops, repeating in its waters the trembling beauty of the city. And above all this complex relationship between mountains, city and river rise even higher mountains. The Tarnovo residents christened one of them with the name Momina Fortress: Maiden Fortress - a fortress that even girls could defend - it is so impregnable in itself. A mountain is like a city, a city is like mountains... Mountains and cities are fused into unity to the point of indistinguishability, as if they live together. The mountains lifted the Bulgarians to their mighty peaks. They not only accepted their inhabitants, but lifted them up and glorified them.
Even the relatively new, “revival” cities of Bulgaria are the same - allied to nature. One of them is Koprivshtitsa. Koprivshtitsa is the city of the “first gun”. The liberation uprising against the centuries-old Ottoman yoke began here. This uprising was supported by nature itself - the mountains and dark forests surrounding Koprivshtitsa. And look: in what union the city, forest and mountains still live here. In the center of the city, among the two-story typically Bulgarian houses, live dark, mighty, unusually tall forest spruce trees. This forest has entered the city... And from every house you can see mountain meadows with herds of sheep; the area surrounding the city is visible; precisely from every (of course, old, because modern architects do not understand this) house. The fact is that the Bulgarians invented amazing houses. The floors in these houses are placed freely to each other, and the second, residential floor is always turned so that from its windows there is a perspective of the street and a view of the nature surrounding the city: in the mountains - on the mountains, in the coastal ones - on the sea. With high artistic meaning, a smooth line is repeated in houses, fences and gates - a “mare” (yoke), as if echoing the line of the Bulgarian mountains.
Maybe because the wonderful Bulgarian architect of the 19th century. Kolya Ficheto did not study anywhere, he understood architecture in his own way and in such a folk, Bulgarian way. For him, architecture was a continuation of nature and people’s way of life. The arches of his bridges not only describe, together with their reflection in the water, ideal ellipses, ovals, circles, but also with amazing smoothness they transform into the arches of the bridge abutments, and the columns of his other buildings not so much “carry” the arches above them, but simply and friendlyly “ finishing the drawing."
How much peace, silence and tranquility there is in any architecture in the world, how little of the now fashionable “brutalism” and urban aggressiveness is in the folk architecture!
Let's turn to the nature of our native Transcaucasia.
In Georgia, people seek protection from powerful mountains, sometimes reach for them (in the towers of Svaneti), sometimes resist the mountain verticals with the horizontals of their homes. But the most important thing is that in Georgia nature is so enormous that it is no longer in a simple union with man, it powerfully protects him, embraces him, breathes into him the heroic spirit.
Many people have written about Georgia. I will not list the great Russian poets of the 19th century, but I will remind you of the Soviet poets: P. Antokolsky, B. Akhmadulina, A. Voznesensky, E. Yevtushenko, N. Zabolotsky, O. Mandelstam, A. Mezhirov, Y. Moritz, B. Pasternak, A. Tarkovsky and others. But to imagine the relationship between nature and man in Georgia, I will cite one poem by N. Zabolotsky. May the reader not complain to me for quoting this poem in full. It is always a great pleasure to recount the poems of N. Zabolotsky.
NIGHT IN PASANAURI
The night shone, playing the panduri,
The moon floated into the refuge of love,
And again to me in the gardens of Pasanauri
Nightingales sang on two Aragvahs.
Descending from the Cross Pass,
Where there is snow and rocky ice in May,
I was so tired that I didn't want to
No nightingales, no songs, no beauties.
To the sounds of a nightingale
I took a lantern, stripped naked,
And here is the river, like a mad maiden,
My big body was hugged.
And I lay there, clutching the stones,
And above me, sparkling, the stream howled,
And the stones moved in a frenzy
And they muttered, jumping at their feet.
And I looked at the pale light of the cinder,
who wavered in the distance,
And from the shore a huge shepherd
She moved majestically towards the river.
And I went ashore like a warrior,
Cold, pure, strong and earthy,
And the proud dog, like a deity, is calm,
Having recognized me, he lay down in front of me.
And that night in the gardens of Pasanauri,
Having tasted the cold of primeval streams,
I accepted the first sound of panduri in my heart,
Like the first kiss in adolescence.
The nature of Georgia really powerfully accepts a person and makes him strong, majestic and chivalrous.
Fresh impressions of the nature of Armenia force me to say a little more about its landscapes. The centuries-old culture of Armenia has conquered even the mountains. “Round dance of centuries,” writes Andrei Bely in “Wind from the Caucasus.” “Antiquities are soldered into the soil; and natural stones have deteriorated the sculpture; and statues, having cracked and sunk into the ground, are raising bushes; you won’t understand what you are seeing: is it nature, is it culture? In the distance, the bare-pink, yellow-white and faceted ridge is lifted with a through color above Gegharkunik, separating Sevan; the soil there is covered with temples, the temples are pieces of solid rocks.” 2
I can’t help but quote from the same book an excerpt where Bely describes his first impressions of Armenia, which he received early in the morning from the carriage window:
"Armenia!
The top of the twilight tears; the distance formed shades of gloomy blue, graying, turquoise gorges under a pale star: in the haze of weakening greenery; but he struck the scratched top under the sky with a crooked blade, like a stuck knife; and the earth climbed like a comb of cliffs, blue below, in wild gaps; like the blows of knives crawling out of cracked stone gates into the center of the sky; the world is jagged over a terrible spread of hanging boulders, where there are no lines without fury!" 3
That this is not a fleeting impression from Bely is shown by the fact that the brilliant Armenian painter Martiros Saryan himself responded to him, and what could be more authoritative than just such a response from the artist. In his letter to Bely, inspired by the essay "Armenia", Saryan writes that he retains the memory of those days when they were together " drove or walked around this scorched, naked mountainous country, admiring the piled-up stones of a bluish-violet color, rearing up in the form of the highest peaks of Ararat and Aragats". 4
I don’t dare correct Saryan, and yet sometimes it seems to me that the landscape of Eastern Armenia is harsher than in Saryan’s paintings. Treeless mountains, furrowed by rain, streams and stripes of vineyards, mountains from which stones rolled down, thick dense colors: this is nature, as if it had absorbed the blood of the people. I wrote above that Russian nature, humanized by the peasant, is very characterized by the rhythm of plowed land, the rhythm of fences and log walls. Rhythm is also characteristic of Armenian landscapes, but in Armenia it is different. The same Saryan’s painting “Earth” (1969) leaves a huge impression. It all consists of stripes, but bright, wavy stripes - completely different from the rhythm created by man in Russia.
The same wave-like rhythm is captured in the paintings of the most remarkable Armenian artist Minas Avetisyan. In his painting “Parents” (1962), the father and mother are depicted against the backdrop of an Armenian landscape. It is amazing that the rhythm of Armenian nature seems to be repeated in the spiritual rhythm of people. Even the mountains in the film “Parents” became waves of labor rhythm.
The labor rhythms of Armenia are surprisingly diverse, just as the labor of its people is diverse. In Saryan’s painting “Afternoon Silence” (1924), squares of cultivated fields seem to be superimposed on the ground, as if multi-colored carpets were laid out to dry. The rhythms of mountains and fields combine and at the same time oppose each other.
The rhythm in Hakob Kozhdoyan’s film “Ararat Valley” is completely free and easy. The mountains in it are waves, the stripes of the valley are just a light swell of the sea.
The richness of Armenian nature is also evidenced by the fact that it is reflected in amazingly diverse ways in painting. The same artist saw it differently. And at the same time, we will always say: this is Armenia -
Country of Mosquito Fires
And dead pottery valleys...
Since these lines of O. Mandelstam come to mind, it is impossible not to recall the poems of Valery Bryusov addressed to the Armenians:
Yes! You're on the edge
Two different arguing worlds,
And in the depths of native legends
You hear the echoes of centuries.
All the storms, all the worries of the world
While flying, they touched you with their wings,
And the muffled thunder of Cyrus’s campaigns,
And Alexandra has an abusive fight...
How good it is! - the greatness of a people lies in its connection to world events! The spirit of the Armenian people lies in this suffering involvement.
It was cut like the hardness of a diamond,
Keeping all the reflections in myself:
And the colors of the delicate roses of Shiraz,
And the brilliance of Homeric fire.
Even the poor shepherd's crook at the foot of Ararat becomes like the scepter of a king.
Down on the rocky field
The gray-haired shepherd leads the sheep,
And a long staff, in the hazy light,
Looks like an age-old scepter.
And in the same vein, Nikolai Tikhonov speaks about Armenian nature:
In the palms of mountains split
A hundred-sounding crowbar of time,
Like an apple of gold
Armenia is showing off...
The golden apple, that is, the royal sign - “power”, and the scepter - all this was presented by Russian poets to the long-suffering and significant happy Armenia. Isn't this a royal gift?
After I sent the text of this book to the publishing house, I read “From the Diary Notes of an Art Critic” by M. V. Alpatov. 5 What he wrote there about Greece amazingly continues, diversifying, what I write above about Scotland, Georgia and Armenia. With his permission, let me cite some of these notes.
“The country does not have a clearly emphasized dominant. In this, Greece is decisively different from small Armenia, which is overshadowed from everywhere by the snow-white peak of Ararat, from Sicily with its fire-breathing Etna. At the foot of Parnassus, one can recognize it as very majestic and huge. But as soon as you move away from it, and already it is included in the chain of other mountains, other peaks begin to dominate, to push it aside. There is a constant shift of axes, one thing gives way to another, the big one recedes, the small one emerges. The silhouettes of the mountains either fold, then part, then fold again. It is difficult to convey in words how beautiful it is. this round dance of mountain peaks, when you move along the roads of Greece. The mountains rise above the sea. The sea, on its side, crashes into the mainland. Here you see with your own eyes what the words from the geography textbook mean: “The mountains are carried away into the sky.” fenced off one from the other. The sea connects them again. It is not for nothing that the very word sea - “pontos” in Greek - means “road”.
“In the clear radiance of the day, the measured breath of the earth’s crust clearly sounds here. Everyone turns to them again and again as something sublime, pure, beautiful in its detachment from the everyday prose of life.”
“Volcanoes speak of the inner life of the archipelago. A map of the country with mountain ranges sliding from north to south makes it possible to grasp its general rhythm. But even in what the eye of a traveler with little knowledge of geography can notice, its own sequence and pattern clearly emerges. Mountains break off or settle , and then deep ring folds form on their surface. Sometimes sharp light stones protrude from under the scanty bushes, as if it were the grin of the Dragon’s teeth, sown by Cadmus and turned into warriors.”
“The Greeks possessed a rare gift of figurative expression of the fruits of their thoughts. Pericles owns a metaphorical expression, the greatness of which you comprehend on the Marathon field: “The whole earth serves as the grave of people.”
“Greek nature helped man create forms of community life. The sea, bays, bays, mountains separated, but also helped each local community develop independence. But these barriers were not impassable: people swam across the seas, crossed mountains, every peasant lived, hidden behind the mountains, and in difficult days of enemy invasion, they lured them into a narrow gorge and destroyed them, despite their superiority. In a country cut by the sea, fragmented by mountain ranges, small states arose, but in mortal danger they could forget mutual claims, unite their forces and work together. move against the enemy. There were blood ties, a community of interests, and a common language, but not the last argument was that a person saw the whole country as if covered by one blue sky. In Greece, a person never feels crushed by the inexplicable mystery of the world." .
A people is not created by nature, but it lives where nature is most consonant with its character. M. V. Alpatov quotes Hegel’s words that the nature of Greece cannot explain the flourishing of Greek culture. It is not for nothing that it did not change its character during the time of Turkish rule and later (but it did change - the forests were replaced by bushes), but did not give birth to a second Homer.
Nature does not give birth to Homers, but for culture to flourish, they must be in union and mutual assistance...
I regret that I have not visited the republics of our country much and cannot write about each one. Each has its own beauty - you just have to see it. But from the examples given, the following is clear: the landscape of a country is as much an element of national culture as anything else. Not preserving your native nature is the same as not preserving your native culture, not loving your parents. She is an expression of the soul of the people.
Each country is an ensemble of arts. The Soviet Union is also a grandiose ensemble of cultures or cultural monuments. Cities in the Soviet Union, no matter how different they may be from each other, are not isolated from each other. Moscow and Leningrad are not just different from each other - they contrast with each other and, therefore, interact. It is no coincidence that they are connected by a railway so straight that, having traveled on a train overnight without turns and with only one stop and getting to a station in Moscow or Leningrad, you see almost the same station building that saw you off in the evening: the facades of the Moscow station in Leningrad and Leningradsky in Moscow are the same. But the sameness of the stations emphasizes the sharp dissimilarity of the cities, the dissimilarity is not simple, but complementary.
Even objects of art in museums are not just stored, but constitute some cultural ensembles associated with the history of cities and the country as a whole. The composition of museums is far from accidental, although there are many individual accidents in the history of their collections. It is not for nothing that, for example, in the museums of Leningrad there is so much Dutch painting (this is Peter I), as well as French (this is the St. Petersburg nobility of the 18th and early 19th centuries).
And look in other cities. The icons in Novgorod are worth seeing. This is the third largest and most valuable center of ancient Russian painting.
In Kostroma, Gorky and Yaroslavl you should see Russian painting of the 18th and 19th centuries. (these are centers of Russian noble culture), and in Yaroslavl also the “Volga” culture of the 17th century, which is represented here as nowhere else.
But if you take our entire country, you will be surprised at the diversity and originality of the cities and the culture stored in them: in museums and private collections, and just on the streets, after all, almost every old house is a treasure. Some houses and entire cities are beautiful with their wooden carvings, others with their amazing layout, embankments, boulevards (Kostroma, Yaroslavl), others with stone mansions, fourth with intricate churches, and others with a “carelessly” network of streets thrown onto the hills.
But they have a lot in common. One of the most typical features of Russian cities is their location on a high river bank. The city is visible from afar and is, as it were, drawn into the movement of the river: Veliky Ustyug, the Volga cities, the cities along the Oka. There are such cities in Ukraine: Kyiv, Novgorod-Seversky, Putivl. These are the traditions of Ancient Rus' - Rus', from which came Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and then Siberia with Tobolsk and Krasnoyarsk...
A city on the high bank of a river in perpetual motion. He "floats" past the river. And this is also the feeling of native spaces inherent in Rus'.
A country is a unity of people, nature and culture.
Preserving the diversity of our cities and villages, preserving their historical memory, their common national-historical identity is one of the most important tasks of our city planners. The whole country is a grandiose cultural ensemble. It must be preserved in its amazing richness. It is not only the historical memory that educates in one’s city and village, but one’s country as a whole that educates a person. Now people live not only in their “point”, but throughout the whole country, and not only in their own century, but in all the centuries of their history.
ENSEMBLES OF ART MONUMENTS
Human interaction with nature, with the landscape, does not always last for centuries and millennia and is not always of a “naturally unconscious” nature. The trace in nature remains not only from the rural labor of man, and his labor is not only shaped by nature: sometimes man consciously strives to transform the landscape around him, building gardens and parks.
Gardens and parks create a kind of “ideal” interaction between man and nature, “ideal” for every stage of human history, for every creator of a landscape work.
And here I would like to say a few words about the art of gardens and parks, which was not always fully understood at its core by its interpreters and specialists (horticulture theorists and practitioners).
Landscape art is the most exciting and most affecting of all the arts. This statement seems strange at first glance. It seems difficult to agree with him. Why, in fact, should gardening art be more effective than poetry, literature in general, philosophy, theater, painting, etc.? But think about it impartially and remember your own impressions from visiting the historical parks that are most dear to us all, even if they are neglected.
You go to the park to relax - to surrender to impressions without resistance, to breathe in the clean air with its aroma of spring or autumn, flowers and herbs. The park surrounds you on all sides. You and the park are facing each other: the park opens up new views for you - meadows, bosquets, alleys, perspectives - and by walking you only make it easier for the park to show itself. Silence surrounds you, and in the silence, with particular poignancy, the noise of spring leaves in the distance or the rustling of fallen autumn leaves underfoot, or the singing of birds or the light cracking of a twig close up is heard, some sounds overtake you from afar and create a special feeling of space and spaciousness. All your senses are open to the perception of impressions, and the change of these impressions creates a special symphony - colors, volumes, sounds and even sensations that air, wind, fog, dew bring you...
But what does man have to do with it? - they will ask me. After all, this is what nature brings to you, what you can perceive, and even more powerfully, in the forest, in the mountains, on the seashore, and not just in the park.
No, gardens and parks are that important boundary where man and nature unite. Gardens and parks are equally important - both in the city and outside the city. It is no coincidence that there are so many wonderful parks in our native Moscow region. And it is no coincidence that so many landowners went completely bankrupt by setting up parks on their estates. There is nothing more exciting, captivating, exciting than bringing humanity into nature, and introducing nature solemnly, “by the hand,” into human society: look, admire, rejoice.
And the wilder nature is, the sharper and deeper its community with humans. That is why the Crimean Park in Alupka, designed by Vorontsov, and the Vyborg Monrepos Park on the typically Russian estate of the barons Nikolai make such a huge impression. In Alupka, mountains pile up above the park and “show themselves,” and beneath the park the waves of the Black Sea beat against giant rocks. In Mon Repos Park, pine trees grow on bare red granite rocks, offering endless views of the skerries with their islands floating in the blue water. But in both parks, with all the Ossianic grandeur of nature, the intelligent hand of man is visible everywhere, and the cozy palaces of the owners affably crown the surrounding pristine wildness of the landscape.
It is no coincidence that Peter also brought the sea through canals to his country and park palaces - in New Peterhof, Strelna, Oranienbaum. Canals connected palaces and parks with the sea not only with water, but also with air—the vista that opened out to the sea—and introduced sea water into an environment of trees and Peter’s favorite fragrant flowers.
There is one more area that a person is given mainly by a park, or even just a park. This is the sphere of historical time, the sphere of memories and poetic associations.
Historical memories and poetic associations are what most humanize nature in parks and gardens, which is their essence and specificity. Parks are valuable not only for what they have, but also for what was in them. The temporal perspective that opens up in them is no less important than the visual perspective. “Memories in Tsarskoe Selo” - this is what Pushkin called the best of his earliest poems.
The attitude towards the past can be of two kinds: as a kind of spectacle, theater, performance, decoration, and as a document. The first relationship seeks to reproduce the past, to revive its visual image. The second seeks to preserve the past at least in its partial remains. For the first in gardening art, it is important to recreate the external, visual image of a park or garden as it was seen at one time or another in its life. For the second, it is important to feel the evidence of time, documentation is important. The first says: this is how he looked; the second testifies: this is the same one, he may not have been like that, but this is truly the one, these are those linden trees, those garden buildings, those very sculptures. The second attitude is more tolerant towards the first than the first towards the second. The first attitude towards the past requires cutting down old trees in the alley and planting new ones: “this is how the alley looked.” The second relationship is more complicated: preserve all the old trees, extend their life and plant young ones in place of the dead ones. Two or three old hollow linden trees among hundreds of young ones will testify: this is the same alley - here they are, the old-timers. And you don’t need to take care of young trees: they grow quickly, and soon the alley will take on its previous appearance.
But there is another significant difference in the two attitudes towards the past. The first will require: only one era - the era of the creation of the park, or its heyday, or significant in some way. The second will say: let all eras live, significant in one way or another, the whole life of the park as a whole is valuable, memories of different eras and different poets who glorified these places are valuable - and it will demand from restoration not restoration, but preservation. The first attitude towards parks and gardens was discovered in Russia by Alexander Benois with his aesthetic cult of the time of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna and her Catherine Park in Tsarskoye. Akhmatova, for whom it was not Elizabeth who was important at Tsarskoe, but Pushkin, poetically polemicized with him: “Here lay his cocked hat and the disheveled volume of Guys.”
Yes, you understood me correctly: I am on the side of the second attitude towards the monuments of the past. And not only because the second attitude is broader, more tolerant and cautious, less self-confident and leaves more to nature, forcing an attentive person to respectfully retreat, but also because it requires more imagination, more creative activity from a person. The perception of a monument of art is only complete when it mentally recreates, creates together with the creator, and is filled with historical associations.
The first attitude towards the past creates, in general, teaching aids, educational models: look and know. The second attitude towards the past requires truth, analytical ability: one must separate age from the object, one must imagine how it was here, one must explore to some extent. This second attitude requires greater intellectual discipline, greater knowledge from the viewer himself: look and imagine. And this intellectual attitude towards the monuments of the past sooner or later arises again and again. You cannot kill the true past and replace it with a theatrical one, even if the theatrical reconstructions have destroyed all the documents, but the place remains: here, in this place, on this soil, in this geographical point, there was - he was, it, something memorable, happened.
And one more side note about gardens. It is impossible to strive to restore gardens in their original form for one reason: the garden is inextricably linked with garden life and the social structure of society. In Tsarskoe Selo, 400 gardeners worked, rare flowers were grown in numerous greenhouses, tree trunks were washed with soap, and for festivities in the Peterhof Garden, courtiers were required to wear the so-called “Peterhof dresses,” dark green with silver embroidery. Dark green color - to harmonize with the color of the trees, and silver - to harmonize with the white foam of the fountains. It is absolutely impossible to imitate the original court appearance of gardens without a courtyard and palace receptions in the gardens: the garden and garden life were too closely connected with the class structure of society.
Theatricalization of antiquity overwhelms memorial apartment-museums. Furniture and things in the style of the era are brought into authentic places, and genuine objects are lost and hidden among them. Not only are they not recognized by visitors, but they are often confused with things from the same period, be it an inkwell or a cabinet. They bought a bookcase exactly like the original one, bought it for the ensemble, and after a while they confused the original with the purchased one and do not know which of the two belonged to the owner of the memorial apartment. This case is not fiction. And, besides, when selecting things from “that era” for a memorial apartment, aren’t we already mistaken in the very principle of such a selection? Was it necessary for a writer or politician to live among the things only of his time? Couldn't there be things from his childhood or just old ones in his house, in his apartment? And who can guarantee that the era has been restored correctly; who can guarantee that the individual manner of arranging things, household routine, the character of which is determined by many components, have been correctly restored?
Theatricality also penetrates into the restoration of architectural monuments. Authenticity is lost in the supposedly restored. Restorers trust anecdotal evidence if this evidence allows them to restore this architectural monument to the way it might have been especially interesting. This is how the Euthymius Chapel was restored in Novgorod: it turned out to be a small temple on a pillar. Something completely alien to Novgorod and the 15th century.
How many monuments were destroyed by restorers in the 19th century? due to the introduction of elements of modern aesthetics into them. Restorers sought symmetry where it was alien to the very spirit of the style - Romanesque or Gothic - they tried to replace the living line with a geometrically correct, mathematically calculated one, etc. This is how Cologne Cathedral, Notre Dame in Paris, and the Abbey of Saint-Petersburg were dried up. Denis. Entire cities in Germany were dried up and mothballed, especially during the period of idealization of the German past.
I am writing all this for a reason. The attitude towards the past forms one's own national image. For every person is a bearer of the past and a bearer of national character. Man is part of society and part of its history. Without preserving the memory of the past within himself, he destroys part of his personality. By cutting himself off from national, family and personal roots, he dooms himself to premature decline. What if entire sections of society become unconscious? Then this inevitably affects the moral sphere, their relationship to family, children, parents and to work, namely to work and labor traditions.
No principle can be carried out thoughtlessly and mechanically. In Pushkin's places in the Pskov region - in the villages of Mikhailovskoye, Trigorskoye, Petrovskoye - partial theatricalization is necessary. The disappeared houses and huts were organic elements of the landscape there. Without the Osipov-Wulf house, there is no Trigorsky in Trigorskoye. And the restoration of this house, like the houses in Mikhailovsky and Petrovsky, does not destroy authenticity. Only bushes and young trees had to be cut down, not old ones. This is the fundamental difference between the restoration of old houses in Mikhailovsky places and the rejuvenation of parks in the city of Pushkin, carried out several years ago. In Pushkin places they restored, in Pushkin they cut down...
You can theatricalize one side or another in yourself. You can wear a beard and a robe a la Russe, cut your hair in a circle, and turn yourself into a spectacle. But another attitude towards one’s nationality is also possible: to value a genuine connection with one’s village, city and country, to preserve and develop the good side, the good national traits of one’s people, to develop a deep mentality, a sense of language, knowledge of history, native art, etc. The entire historical life of one’s country, and at higher levels, the development of the entire world, must be brought into the circle of human spirituality.
And what does the garden and park with which I started this note have to do with it? Yes, despite the fact that the culture of the past and present is also a garden and a park. It is not for nothing that the “golden age”, the “golden childhood” of humanity - the medieval “paradise” - have always been associated with the garden. A garden is an ideal culture, a culture in which ennobled nature is ideally fused with people who are kind to it.
It is no coincidence that Dostoevsky dreamed of turning the hottest places in St. Petersburg into a garden: connecting the Yusupov Garden on Sadovaya Street with the Mikhailovsky Garden at the Mikhailovsky Castle, where he studied, planting the Field of Mars and connecting it with the Summer Garden, stretching a strip of gardens through the busiest shopping center and where There lived an old money-lender and Rodion Raskolnikov, who created a kind of heaven on earth. For Dostoevsky there were two poles on earth - Petersburg near the Sennaya and nature in the spirit of the landscape of Claude Lorrain, depicting the “golden age” - Lorrain, whom he loved very much for the heavenly ideality of the life depicted.
Have you noticed that the brightest episode of Dostoevsky's "The Idiot" - the meeting of Prince Myshkin and Aglaya - takes place in Pavlovsky Park in the morning? This meeting could not have happened anywhere else. It is for this meeting that Dostoevsky needs Pavlovsk. This whole scene seems to be woven into the friendly landscape of Pavlovsk.
The happiest moment in Oblomov's life - his declaration of love - also takes place in the garden.
In Pushkin’s “The Captain’s Daughter,” the joyful completion of Masha Mironova’s troubles also takes place precisely in the “Lorrain” part of Catherine Park. It was there, and not in the palace premises, that it could only take place.
NATURE OF RUSSIA AND PUSHKIN
Claude Lorrain? And what does Russian character and Russian nature have to do with it, you ask?
Be patient a little and all the threads will come together again.
We have a primitive idea of the history of gardening art: a regular park, a landscape park; the second type of park abruptly replaced the first somewhere in the 70s. XVIII century in connection with the ideas of Rousseau, and in pre-Petrine Rus' there were supposedly only utilitarian gardens: fruits, vegetables and berries were grown in them. That's all! In fact, the history of landscape art is much more complex.
In "The Tale of the Destruction of the Russian Land" of the 13th century. Among the most significant beauties with which Rus' was marvelously surprised, monastery gardens are also mentioned. Monastery gardens in Rus' were basically the same as in the West. They were located inside the monastery fence and depicted the earthly “paradise”, Eden, and the monastery fence - the fence of paradise. In the Garden of Eden there should have been trees of paradise - apple trees or vines (at different times the breed of the “paradise tree of the knowledge of good and evil” was understood differently), everything should have been beautiful in them for the eye, for the ear (birds singing, murmur water, echo), for smell (smells of flowers and fragrant herbs), for taste (rare fruits). They were supposed to contain an abundance of everything and great variety, symbolizing the diversity and richness of the world. Gardens had their own semantics, their own meaning. Outside the monasteries there were sacred groves, partially preserved from pagan times, but sanctified and “Christianized” by some appearance of an icon in them or another church miracle.
We have very little information about Russian gardens before the 17th century, but one thing is clear - that there were “paradise gardens” not only in monasteries, but also in princely country villages. There were gardens in the Kremlins, for the townspeople, despite all the cramped urban development.
In the 17th century Baroque gardens appeared in Russia under Dutch influence.
The fact is that gardens, by their nature, are not at all divided into regular and landscape gardens. This is an old art historical myth, which has now, in general, been dispelled by numerous studies by art historians. Landscape art develops in step with other arts and especially in connection with the development of poetry. There are Renaissance gardens, Baroque gardens, Rococo gardens, Classicist gardens, Romanticist gardens. Within each great style there are its own national characteristics, and within the national style there is the handwriting of individual gardeners (John Evelyn wrote at the end of the 17th century: “Like the gardener, so is the garden”). There are, for example, gardens of French classicism (the Garden of Versailles, created by Le Nôtre), and there are gardens of the Dutch Baroque.
Those numerous materials about Russian gardens of the 17th century, which the historian I. Zabelin published in the 19th century, but did not comprehend as an art historian, clearly indicate that people came to us in Moscow from the middle of the 17th century. The Dutch Baroque style penetrated into gardening.
Gardens in the Moscow Kremlin were made at different levels, terraced, as required by Dutch taste, enclosed by walls, decorated with gazebos and towers. The gardens featured ponds in giant lead baths, also at different levels. Amusing flotillas swam in the ponds, rare plants (in particular, Astrakhan grapes) were grown in boxes, nightingales and quails sang in giant silk cages (the singing of the latter was valued on a par with nightingales), fragrant herbs and flowers grew there, in particular, the favorite Dutch tulips ( the price of bulbs of which especially increased in the middle of the 17th century), they tried to keep parrots, etc., etc.
The Baroque gardens of Moscow differed from the Renaissance ones in their ironic character. They, like the Dutch gardens, sought to be furnished with picturesque paintings with deceptive perspective views (tromp l'oeil), places for solitude, etc., etc.
Peter later began to arrange all this in St. Petersburg. Except that there were more sculptures in Peter’s gardens, which were feared in Moscow for “ideological” reasons: they were taken for idols. Yes, more Hermitages have been added - of different types and for different purposes.
The same ironic gardens with a bias towards Rococo began to be built in Tsarskoe Selo. The Dutch Garden was laid out in front of the garden facade of the Catherine Palace, and the garden retained this definition - Dutch - even at the beginning of the 20th century. (dates were arranged in the Dutchwoman). This was not only the name of the garden, but also a definition of its type. It was a garden of solitude and variety, a garden of the Dutch Baroque, and then Rococo, with its penchant for cheerful jokes and solitude, but not philosophical, but loving. Soon the Dutch Garden, a Rococo garden, was surrounded by a vast pre-Romantic park, in which “garden ideology” regained its seriousness, where a significant share belonged to memories - heroic, historical and purely personal - where sensitivity of gardens received its right to exist. and the serious meditativeness banished from Baroque gardens or parodied in them was rehabilitated.
If we turn from this brief excursion into the field of Russian gardening art to Pushkin’s Lyceum Lyrics, then we will find in it all the semantics of Rococo gardens and the period of pre-romanticism. Pushkin in his Lyceum poems cultivates the theme of his “ironic monasticism” (“Know, Natalya! - I am ... a monk!”), garden solitude - loving and with comrades. For Pushkin, the Lyceum was a kind of monastery, and his room was a cell. It's a little serious and a little bit ironic. Pushkin himself in his Lyceum poems appears as a violator of the monastic rule (feasts and love pleasures). These themes are a tribute to Rococo. But there is also a tribute to pre-romantic parks - his famous poems “Memories in Tsarskoye Selo”, where “memories are monuments to Russian victories and where Ossian motifs are found (rocks, mosses, “gray shafts”, which in fact are on the Big Lake in Tsarskoye and never happened).
The discovery of Russian nature occurred with Pushkin in Mikhailovsky. Mikhailovskoe and Trigorskoe are the places where the Columbus of Russian poetry, Pushkin, discovered the Russian simple landscape. It was here that Pushkin’s “poetic caravels” landed. That is why Mikhailovskoye and Trigorskoye are as sacred for every Russian person as the place on the coast where Columbus and his Spanish companions first set foot was sacred for the first settlers to America. We must preserve the nature of Mikhailovsky and Trigorsky with all the trees, forests, lakes and the Sorotya River with special attention, because here, I repeat, a poetic discovery of Russian nature took place.
Pushkin, in his poetic attitude to nature, went from the Dutch Garden in the Rococo style and the Catherine Park in the pre-Romantic style to the purely Russian landscape of Mikhailovsky and Trigorsky, not surrounded by any garden walls and lived in Russian, well-groomed, “caressed” by the Pskovites since the time of Princess Olga , or even earlier, that is, for a whole thousand years. And it is no coincidence that it was precisely in the setting of this Russian “historical” nature (and history, as you have already noticed from my notes, is the main component of Russian nature) that Pushkin’s truly historical works were born - and above all “Boris Godunov”.
I would like to give one large and historically extensive analogy. Near the palace there were always more or less extensive regular gardens. Architecture was connected with nature through the architectural part of the garden. This was the case at the time when the fashion for romantic landscape gardens came. This was the case under Paul and in the noble estates of the 19th century, in particular, in the famous ones near Moscow. The further from the palace, the more natural nature there is. Even during the Renaissance in Italy, outside the Renaissance architectural gardens, there was a natural part of the owner’s domain for walks - the nature of the Roman Campania. The longer a person’s walking routes became, the further he went from his home, the more the nature of his country opened up for him, the wider and closer to home was the natural, landscape part of his parks. Pushkin discovered nature first in the Tsarskoye Selo parks near the palace and the lyceum, but then he went beyond the boundaries of “well-groomed nature.” From the regular lyceum garden he moved to its park part, and then to the Russian village. This is the landscape route of Pushkin's poetry. From garden to park and from park to rural Russian nature. Accordingly, his national and social vision of nature grew (remember his poems “The Village” with their denunciation of “skinny slavery”).
It is impossible to change anything in Mikhailovskoye and Trigorskoye, and in general in Pushkin’s places of the former Pskov province (the new word “Pskov region” does not suit these places at all), just like in any memorable object dear to our hearts. Even a precious frame is not suitable here, since Pushkin’s places are only the center of that vast part of Russian nature, which we call Russia.
2 Quote. according to the article: Gonchar N.A. Travel prose of Andrei Bely and his essay “Armenia” // Russian-Armenian literary connections. Research and materials. Literary connections. T. 2. Yerevan, 1977. P. 156.
3 Gonchar N.A. Travel prose of Andrei Bely... P. 154.
4 Gonchar N.A. Travel prose of Andrei Bely... P. 163.
5 See Decorative arts. 1982. No. 11. P. 43-45.
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