What did Soviet children read? Favorite books of conscientious people. Time for business, time for fun

Elena Fanailova: Our topic today is “Reading by Year.” How people read in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, how they read in Soviet times and how they read now. The project “Reading by Year” is presented on the website of the Memorial Society and was presented at the Non-Fiction fair. I asked the participants of this conference to come to the studio and partly repeat and partly develop what we discussed.

At our table is a historian, head of educational programs of the Memorial Society. Irina Shcherbakova, who came up with this design; culturologist Vladimir Paperny; translator and sociologist Boris Dubin; philosopher and Chief Editor published by Ad Marginem Alexander Ivanov; writer Vladimir Sharov.

I'd like us to start with your very specific memories of how you read, what you read before 1991.

Irina Shcherbakova: I am not a very typical case. My family had a direct connection to Soviet literature; nothing was ever hidden from me. Nobody told me that I had to read it, but I knew what my parents and their friends were discussing, and secondly, I knew what was where. I knew this place well, and I periodically checked what appeared there and read. By the way, some things maybe shouldn’t have been read so early, I didn’t understand them. For example, the following story happened to me with Shalamov, I read “Kolyma Tales” too early and was terribly scared, and for a long time I was even afraid to touch him afterwards, I almost felt traumatized. I must say that Solzhenitsyn did not make a strong impression on me. I read “One Day...”, my parents got it before it was published.

And I heard my father once say to my mother: “You know, I was asked to read one manuscript from Yunost, this is a short story by some guy whom absolutely no one knows, with some Jewish-German surname. They in “Youth” they don’t know what to do with it…” And I read it too, and it was told by Friedrich Gorinshtein “The House with a Turret.” After that, Friedrich appeared in our house. This story made an absolutely incredibly strong impression on me. I was 11 years old, and my heart was completely breaking with pity for this boy who was left there alone. And when I saw Friedrich, he had just arrived from Kyiv, this story was superimposed on his image. And it must be said that Friedrich is generally always worth remembering when we talk about what we have read. Because I don’t know of such a case yet - a man who wrote 8 novels before leaving for Germany, and I know when this happened, because I filled out his questionnaire in German, and only a few people read everything he wrote. And he, leaving the archive with his father, said: “Don’t give it to anyone, only with my permission.” And it still seems to me that it was his big mistake and tragedy that some things did not reach the readers at all then.

Vladimir Paperny: It so happened that I turned out to be one of the first readers of two works, which later became very famous, and at that time no one knew either the authors or the works themselves. My mother worked as the head of the magazine's criticism department." New world", and her closest friend Asya Berzer, they were so closely connected since school days that from childhood I perceived her as my aunt, she was the head of the prose department. And then one day my mother comes home and says: “Asya gave me, to She accidentally got the manuscript of some strange writer from Ryazan, and this is wonderful, in my opinion, but what to do with it is unclear, publishing it, of course, is impossible." She gave it to dad first, dad read it quite quickly, said it was amazing, but it will never be published. Then they gave it to me, I, too, was delighted and also said that it would not be published.

And then a fairly well-known story began, described by Solzhenitsyn himself, and there are other versions of how Asya Berzer decided, roughly speaking, to deceive the Soviet authorities and publish this work. The first step is that this manuscript came to Tvardovsky. Tvardovsky, despite his liberal views, was still a Soviet boss, and the head of the prose department could not easily get into his office, this would be a violation of the hierarchy. She had to act through the editorial board, but she understood perfectly well that in the editorial board, where everyone was their own, they would have told her: “Asya, you’re crazy! You know that this will never be published.” Asya thought for a long time about how to get into Tvardovskaya’s office and what key phrase to say to make him interested in this. She somehow got into his office and, having discussed what she had to discuss, said: “By the way, here an interesting manuscript came by gravity - a peasant in a camp. A very popular thing.” This phrase, which she had thought about for a long time, was very precisely calculated, and it worked. Because Tvardovsky had a guilt complex towards the peasants, in particular towards his parents, who were dispossessed, exiled to Siberia and from there they wrote him letters: “Sasha, you are a big man in Moscow, help us.” And he answered them: “Dad, I’m sorry, we different sides barricades, I can’t help you.” And when he heard Asya’s phrase, he said: “Oh, let me read.” The calculation worked 100 percent.

And then he came home, read, woke up his wife at three in the morning, after that he started calling his friends, calling them to come to him immediately. They read everything, and they all said: brilliant, but it will never be published. And then the second phase of this drama began, when he decided to apply the same technique in relation to Khrushchev. He understood that this could only be permitted if there was Khrushchev’s personal sanction. The task was to not get through the referents again, so they spent a long time looking for a person who could put it on the table. And there was this Lebedev, if I’m not mistaken, who was an old front-line soldier, for whom “Vasily Terkin” was such a sacred text, so he said: “I will do this for you.” And he put this text on Khrushchev’s desk, who immediately called Tvardovsky and said: “Print.” And why Khrushchev so willingly agreed to this, because he had problems with the entire Central Committee, which was against his speech at the 20th Congress, against de-Stalinization in general, and he saw in this some kind of ideological support. Thus this work was published.

And it seems to me that this is the best thing he wrote, because at that time he had not yet invented the Church Slavonic language, did not teach the West how to live, there was no propaganda there, relatively speaking. Losev had a dissertation called “On the Benefits of Censorship,” and this is a case where censorship could get rid of everything unnecessary, and the result was a truly amazing literary work.

Vladimir Sharov: Everything here was closed, but with books everything was open, and the world was diverse and colorful. As for translated literature, there were absolutely brilliant translators, incredibly talented people, and the selection was already underway here, the translators agreed to translate only very good, high-quality books. And they translated it all diligently and lovingly. The only thing that kills the text in the bud is the comments, they break the structure of the phrase, the rhythm, the music, and there’s not a damn thing left of the text. It seems to me that books were a kind of flow. I came after school and read until 4-5 o’clock.

The most powerful impression... My father was given, when I was 15 years old, a 1967 blind copy of "The Pit". And I was completely shocked. In general, I listened to all this quite a lot, because since 1957, many people who had served 15-20 years in camps stayed and lived with us, and I prevented them, of course, from living in the first category, but I was sure that they they came for my sake, and not at all for my father’s sake, and I didn’t understand why they had to force me to sleep. In general, everything that I read before seemed to me from the outside. People of a different culture, a different education, a different understanding of the world and essence. This is the first book, and I still think that it is the most important and best for me, where the revolution and what happened after the revolution was seen in all respects, from all sides, and from the inside. And the verdict was passed. In general, there was more real and authentic here.

Alexander Ivanov: There is a feeling, remember, there was a period in the history of Egypt when one political model was replaced by the reform of Amenhotep. Speaking about the Soviet period, I have the feeling that we are engaged in such Egyptology. I envy colleagues who were very close to Amenhotep's reform, for example, feeling its pulse and the aesthetic details that shaped that era. Unfortunately, I was not involved in the secret readings. My most secret reading was reading in English." Godfather“Mario Puzo, especially erotic scenes. And this made a strong impression on me. Then I exchanged this book for the book “The Golden Bough” by Fraser.

It seems to me that the problem that we are addressing is the problem that the language that opposed the official culture is, in some aesthetic sense, the same language. Roughly speaking, I do not see a significant difference between the language of even the early Solzhenitsyn, for example, and the language of the early Rasputin. Or the language of, for example, Shalamov and the language of the most successful things, say Tendryakov. Platonov is an interesting topic; it seems to me the most important in the circle of such late Soviet reading. This is a theme that I would call repressed modernism. Platonov can be considered a dissident, but I really liked how Viktor Golyshev read him in one of his lectures, there was, rather, this amazement at the very aesthetic world of Platonov, from which some kind of his already grows, or maybe does not grow different ideological position. Like any real writer, he does not come from some kind of ideological background, but he comes from some very sensual matter of language. And here it is difficult to say what position he takes in this regard, whether he is Soviet or anti-Soviet.

Elena Fanailova: He was a completely Soviet man.

Alexander Ivanov: The circle of repressed modernism, of course, included literature, part of the literature of the Silver Age, but not all of it, of course, and, let’s say, Andrei Bely to a much greater extent than the three standard-bearers of the poetic Silver Age - Akhmatova, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva...

Elena Fanailova: But this is already later, because the Silver Age in its pure form is Blok, Bely... And the last repressed modernists are probably the Oberiuts, excluded from life directly by Stalin’s decrees, which also went through samizdat.

Alexander Ivanov: What was most condemned was not anti-Sovietism, but a situation, I would say, when a person cannot be identified in terms of the criteria that the authorities and dissidents imposed on literature. And these were serious ideological criteria; they concerned the content of literature. And questions that were asked at the level of aesthetics, stylistics, form, ideology of the form itself, these questions sometimes arose, but very rarely. And the circle of accompanying literature was very important, such as Bakhtin, for example, who slightly tried to raise this pool of questions in relation to literature. Ask literature not questions like: who are you with, masters of culture, are you for communism or against communism, but questions regarding what is worth experiencing pleasure from literature. Questions of such a special eroticism of literary form, which, of course, are very important.

Elena Fanailova: I wanted to clarify what figures we are talking about? About Zamyatin, about Krzhizhanovsky, about that corps of writers...

Alexander Ivanov: We are talking about modernism in a broad sense. For example, it is clear that late reading of Joyce, Proust and Kafka is a very big trauma for culture, that is, the experience of modernism was passed very late. And now, in the form of Russian fiction, we have precisely the consequences of such unread, undigested modernism. And a lot is written about this. And postmodernism here is perceived as absolutely not rooted, some kind of theatrical manner, eclecticism and so on. There is no understanding of the connection with the traditions of modernism. That is, of course, the situation here is very neglected, but part of this neglect is the dichotomy of prohibited and permitted literature. Now, if we go deeper there, we will move further and further away from the pain point in which we are now, in terms of reading, literature, and so on. And just as the opposition between St. Petersburg and Moscow was born in St. Petersburg, and not in Moscow, so the opposition between the Soviet and the anti-Soviet was born not in the anti-Soviet field, but in the Soviet field, and in the most negative sense of this field, in the sense of manageability, control, and so on. . Therefore, I would try to desert this front towards other problems.

Elena Fanailova: I want to say that I also read Platonov in samizdat, I read him for a long time, tried to read him all the way through, and he really began as a simple and partly even naive writer, and the super-refined features of his later are in the rather clumsy articles of the first, Voronezh period , where he fully advocates for Soviet power. And this was partly the general style of the era. If you compare the newspaper style of that time, this is a terribly interesting observation, he grew up as a very living creature.

Irina Shcherbakova: So his language was from there, he heard different voices... Now a wonderful volume of Platonov’s letters has been published.

Boris Dubin: I am not only a reader, I also study those who read. And the relationship with the book and the relationship with the library is life. My mother took me to the local library when I was five years old, and from then on I did not leave the library throughout my life. Well, maybe, except for the very last time, when there was no time to write, let alone read... And in this, as it seems to me now, there was some drama. In a sense, I was a person without cultural ancestors, my parents were first-generation employees, people born in the village and came to the city. Accordingly, their task was to adapt to the city, and cultural issues arise later. In a sense, the book and the library became my ancestors. Then 15 years of work at the Lenin Library, then another 3 years of work at the Book Chamber, and then the sociology of reading at VTsIOM and the Levada Center.

As for the reading itself, since there were no cultural ancestors, there was no circle that could advise and indicate anything. And somehow I had to do it myself, and here the path was quite crooked. Parents, as people of the first generation of employees, loved reputable publications. What was more respectable than the Great Soviet Encyclopedia? And there were Monkey’s words: decadent, decadent moods, fell into mysticism... And that’s it, I immediately took it in pencil, wrote down a list of world literature where there were decadents. What was definitely not there, and what I did not read until the moment when I had to enter the Faculty of Philology - except for school, I did not read Russian literature at all. I thought I should never read this!

The first book read in the Lenin Library was read at the age of 12, there was a children's room, then there was a youth room, and then a general room. By that time, lists of world literature had already been compiled. I arrived there as a 12-year-old boy with my classmate, he asked for Walter Scott or something, and I asked - the young man served us, it was evening, the darkening hall, the green lamps lit - Aeschylus. The young man tensed a little and said: “What?” - “Well, for example, “Chained Prometheus” ...” And this was the first book read in the Lenin Library. And then there was a lot, a lot of things.

Two words about the issues you have addressed. The contrast between Soviet and anti-Soviet, of course, belongs to the Soviet. But the Soviet itself, I think, does not disappear from experience. And I would not want it to disappear from the experience of our reading, from literature, from the experience of our memory, and so on. For me, this is a purely personal statement, I think that here it’s something like in yachting - you need to build some kind of complex angle in order to take into account what is Soviet, to take into account what was Soviet that was not Soviet. Oleg Yuryev, a wonderful poet and prose writer, literary critic and essayist, recently published a book “Filled Gap”, where he tries to show that, generally speaking, there was no gap between the Oberiuts and the second Leningrad culture of the 70-80s, but there were threads were very thin.

Well, yes, if we sharply contrast, then Platonov, most likely, especially Platonov - a literary critic, he will definitely end up in the Soviet. And Dobychin? And Vaginov? And Krzhizhanovsky? And Horus? And so it goes. And we see that this line is very long. Moreover, these people, of course, are not Soviet, some of them in everything - in habits, in clothing, in behavior, especially if it concerned Leningrad - of course, there was highest degree So. And for me, in this sense, a complex line is drawn between what was, and they persistently poked it in our eyes and said that there was nothing else and should not be, and never would be, and the authorities were really sure that never. But there was a second thing that was inside the Soviet, but was not Soviet. Next to it there was also anti-Soviet, which largely grew out of the Soviet. And I feel like a person who somehow takes into account both this, and the other, and the third, and some other power lines who work in this whole matter.

And here for me the key figure is Nabokov. When perestroika and glasnost began, and everything started to be published in magazines, I had a wonderful friend, now deceased, unfortunately, friend Seryozha Shvedov, philologist, Americanist, cultural specialist, and we argued with him. I said that, most likely, even Solzhenitsyn will be published, “Archipelago” will be published later, but Nabokov will never be published! Three years later, Nabokov's four-volume work was published. (laughs)

Elena Fanailova: I had a similar conversation with my friends in the kitchen in 1985. Lolita was a key book for this idea of never.

Boris Dubin: Stylistics, of course, is important, but Nabokov, I think, would say: it’s not stylistics that is important, metaphysics is important. And his style was so different that the whole style became different and could not help but be different. It was not un-Soviet, although it always had some relation to the Soviet.

Elena Fanailova: And it’s funny that when he makes a reference to the Soviet, it looks like some kind of prick, an absolutely intellectual remark, and this is not in his blood. And if we talk about modernism, something that doesn’t have a drop of Soviet in its blood, Nabokov is probably an almost pop example of this conversation. It seems to me that Boris Vladimirovich clearly defined these three topics - Soviet, anti-Soviet and non-Soviet. And it seems to me that the non-Soviet field is the most interesting.

Irina Shcherbakova: But I want to go a little from the other end, as a historian. If you look at literature like the Egyptian pyramids, then it is quite obvious that we need to talk about the importance of reading for people in general. And here there is no opposition between Soviet and anti-Soviet. And when I read both Shalamov and Gorinshtein, it was not about the fact that they were Soviet or they were anti-Soviet, but it was such a look, it was a door to something about which they knew nothing. now it seems as if people knew something, but they, firstly, did not have a language with which they could tell anything about it, and this language was born in pain. And he was, of course, terribly Soviet, and there was a struggle against some kind of dumbness. And those writers who were looking for some possibilities for changing this language, they were terribly afraid that they would not be understood, that they would not get through, that they would not be read, and they needed great courage, creative and artistic, in order to do this. no one really cares. They will read me, they will not read me, I will write, because literature is my life.

In our country, literature replaced not only language, it replaced knowledge. How could you find out about the war, in fact, about the camp? How was it possible to find out what this world was created from if there were no philosophers? I will never forget, I open Nathan Edelman’s diary and read, it’s almost the end of the 60s, he writes: they say Berdyaev has a book about communism... And I think: Lord, he didn’t read! What to talk about then, where is the language, traditions? Everything has been destroyed, destroyed. And of course, our great tragedy is that people’s consciousness was so straightened that modern things did not fit into it, that they made their way through with great difficulty. But dissidents generally played a very small role. Well, there was "Chronicle" current events", and I’m talking about a wide circle of readers. Which was, by the way, incredibly wide! What modernism, when I needed for thesis quotes from Freud, it was 1972, and at the university at the “triangle” I had to sign a pass to the special depository in order to read it in German, because they didn’t translate it into Russian.

Elena Fanailova: What is a "triangle"?

Boris Dubin: (laugh) The party committee, the trade union committee and the faculty...

Vladimir Paperny: I have two comments about what I heard here. Regarding the fact that literature in Russia did not go through the phase of modernism, and because of this, postmodernism was understood in some bizarre way. Absolutely the same thing happened in Soviet architecture. Let's say that all of Luzhkov's architecture simply shows a failure in architectural education. So it was in many areas, I think, in music and everywhere else.

Secondly, regarding translation. I had an interesting experience, I read “The Catcher in the Rye” in the journal “Foreign Literature” around 1962. And then I read it in English, when I was already living in America. I must say that these are two completely different books. Firstly, then there was a Soviet school of translation, which said that there is no need to translate, but to look for equivalents. Rita Wright did it brilliantly, as a result she got a completely different hero - this is a Russian boy, the Turgenev tradition follows, a lost generation, smart uselessness... Although how it turns out is a mystery. Although the translation does not violate the meaning, she somehow managed to create a completely different book.

Boris Dubin: A wonderful translation master said about this translation of “The Catcher in the Rye” that no, the book is excellent both in English and in Russian, but Rita Wright was the winner, and this is not suitable for Salinger’s hero.

Irina Shcherbakova: Well, in general, translators say that translation is like a woman: if she is beautiful, it means she is unfaithful.

Elena Fanailova: I must admit, I was surprised that none of you remembered the “World Literature” series, which existed in the 70s. And for me, my first book, probably seriously read, was Dante’s “The Divine Comedy” at the age of 14. And in this series there was as much erotic stuff as you wanted, horror films, and so on. My main impression, perhaps, from Soviet teenage and student reading was reading translated literature, which was still quite rich - both in connection with the journals “Foreign Literature” and simply the body of translated authors.

Alexander, what did you mean by non-Soviet? To put it quite simply, what we could now say to a conventional 20-year-old person, a philologist, here is our list of what we read in our youth, which we now evaluate as very good literature, which would tell us what modernism is, and postmodernism?

Alexander Ivanov: We cannot easily attribute a sign of Sovietness to any thing. It must become subjectivized, begin to do something, move somehow, and only then can we give it some characteristics. We have such an ability, and it goes back to what, in my opinion, determined the entire chronology of this period, the Soviet one, namely, a very respectful, almost kneeling attitude towards the classical, mainly Platonizing literary tradition. And this does not apply to 1917, because the Bolsheviks platonized in exactly the same way as, say, the anti-Bolshevik Losev or Vladimir Solovyov, who was not at all familiar with this phenomenon, or Leo Tolstoy, and so on.

We are very strongly rooted, and this has nothing to do with our political regime, or it is connected, but very indirectly, in this substantialist paradigm, when we attribute to something unchanging, eternal, absolutely heavenly qualities. We have to live with it. When you hear someone talking about something as unchangeable, you know that you are among your own. This instantly distinguishes, by the way, the Russian interlocutor at any panel discussion in any part of the world. It doesn’t matter whether a Russian, like Vladimir, lived in America for many years, or whether he is a Moscow hipster, but where there is this light whiff of Plato, this is - don’t go to a fortune teller - a Russian person on a rendezvous with literature, with art or with anything. And this is our very difficult legacy. It seems to me that modernism in this regard is an attempt to somehow problematize this heritage, at least to make it the subject of artistic or some other analysis.

We should collect bit by bit these modernist attempts in Russian literature. These include the most different types experiences that are in no way related to each other. For example, one type of modernist experience in Russian literature is an attempt to build an imaginary literary biography for oneself. There were a lot of such examples, one of the most significant examples is Brodsky, who simply built a biography for himself from the metaphysical poets of the 17th century. Why the hell did a St. Petersburg guy from the street, with no education, suddenly decide that his genealogy in the metaphysical poets of the 17th century is an absolutely impossible thing. But it took place and formed a certain type of literary manner and even Brodsky’s mannerism. It turned out to be convincing, it gave rise to a huge number of imitators.

And we live with this now, like this interesting fact culture. This concerns, for example, the fact that this generation of young sixties, such as Aksenov, lived an experience that is incredibly relevant today for many European literatures. For example, for German and French. The great European literatures are getting tired of the greatness of their classics, even those of the 20th century, and they are all discovering the Anglo-American literary tradition. For example, it is obvious that writers in the 80s, 90s and zeros, such as Houellebecq in France, and many others, for them, the English and American tradition is much more important than the French tradition. And the same thing happened with many of the sixties here - a direct orientation not towards the Russian literary tradition, but towards the American and English. With empiricism, with this amazing quality of this literature to be very empirical, very precise and at the same time very sublime. As one French philosopher said, this is a combination of empiricism and neoplatonism.

And the molecular structure of literary experience, which, it seems to me, completely protects us from any Platonizing generalizations, is very much in demand today due to the modern type of cultural practices, reading and general understanding of culture. For example, what distinguishes the modern world of cultural practices is that a certain model of such rigid discriminating, platonizing boundaries is being replaced by much softer and more complex management tactics, which are incredibly interesting. Both managerial consciousness and managerial practice allow us to pose completely differently questions related to the very technique of forming the field of literature and power relations within literature. How more people If he wants to treat culture not on his knees, but as something more personal and everyday, it seems to me that it will be more interesting.

Elena Fanailova: How has your personal experience reading, if you compare it with Soviet times? I can tell you about myself. It seems to me that this is due to computer time, and I dive into a book much less often now; I jump through articles, blogs, even quite famous writers Like a flea, I quickly jump on Facebook in the evening, and maybe twice an evening I go to bed with a serious book. Accordingly, my reading circle is more chaotic, more journalistic. And this is not because I work as a journalist, but I see that this happens to many of my comrades. What would you say about yourself, about your own management of your reading circle?

Vladimir Sharov: It is difficult for me to speak out on this issue, since I do not know how to work on a computer. One thing has changed for me, but this has also been the case for me for about 20 years; I probably half-and-half go to archives and read manuscripts, unpublished things and books. I love paper, screens make my eyes hurt. I go to the Memorial archive almost every day, and there is a typewriter, my favorite font, and it’s good and pleasant to read. This may be partly due to the fact that the world as it remains in the archives is much more real. If you read everything that gets into literature day after day, it seems that everything has been edited - by the author, the publisher, different people. And this is all a very wide field, there is no doubt, and I am not able to somehow bring it into a system and structure it. And there are so many fantastic things at that time, in the era we are talking about, the Russian 20th century...

Elena Fanailova: What period are you working in?

Vladimir Sharov: No, I just come, an unknown force guides me, and I read. I am interested in everything, and simply the very unusualness and novelty of the universe, its preservation. In general, absolute pennies remained from the 20th century, because manuscripts were burned, diaries were burned, letters were burned, parents, moreover, told their children an absolutely strictly censored version, if they told them at all. And before the war there was nothing to tell, but after the war a general and quite clear mythology appeared, and then this system, the Soviet and partly Soviet construction, began to be completed. And when I see such a colorful world, what is above my shoulders also begins to somehow think and function.

Whether Russian literature passed through modernism or not... It could not have passed! People built a world that was complete in all its parts, regulated, purely Platonic, this is the pinnacle of the Platonic world. The end of the 20th century was a setback, and now, in my opinion, with new rage and hope, they will build the same thing again. A huge number of the elite and people have a hatred of chaos as such. Competition seems endless, wrong, unfair, unnecessary. And the world that Vernadsky formulated, when everything that is on earth, not only man, but the earth itself, and the atmosphere, is a single organism, then there is no sin or murder. And now it turns out that it is possible to build such a world, completely non-platonic, and I think that now we are much closer to this. It may turn out that some year 1917 is just a false start, they just rushed 30-40 years, they didn’t wait. Because all the same questions - immortal life, Eternal youth and so on - all are geniuses, and, accordingly, culture and civilization will accelerate, all this existed and has not gone away. And there is simply really no place for modernism, postmodernism...

Boris Dubin: And I will connect several threads that were. Modernism and translation. People, I can’t say that I studied with them when I started working in translation myself at the very beginning of the 70s, but I certainly took them into account - this is the generation of my older brothers or younger uncles. These are not fathers, so there are no tense intergenerational relationships with them. What were these people doing? By the way, Golyshev, of course, is also included in it to the highest degree. These are Britanishsky, Solonovich, Geleskul, Andrei Sergeev and so on - they chose modernism. And there are echoes of modernism in great literatures, which naturally included American literature, and there are echoes of this in Eastern European literatures. Like Britanishsky did, who translated Americans and Poles, or Solonovich, who translated Italians and a little Greek. And this thing worked, and it touched us, the readers of that time, who began to write something, translate something, and in such a complex way it nevertheless entered the culture.

I am not indifferent to the fact that this was connected with translation, since I started with the fact that I had not read Russian literature once, and was apparently doomed to become a translator. This was part of the culture, and it seems to me that there is some complex play of different forces, it lies in the fact that, of course, we went through the BVL, at the same time and within this there was this very modernism that our older brothers brought in. Try - maybe Eliot will succeed, at least one poem, at least some... Here is Pound, at least insert a piece... Which, it must be said, also had a rather peculiar attitude towards the classics, it was a modernism that was not anti-classical, but which puts questions the classics and is in conversation with them all the time.

This is a classical line, this is a modernist line... And now I am concerned about what is being done in the West, and what is being done in Eastern Europe, even more interesting is the third line - new barbarism. These are people who came from completely different places and cultures and now either continue to work in their own language, or work in two languages, as in Germany, in German and Greek, in German and Turkish, in German and Serbian, or switch to German , but they use it differently than the Germans themselves. They came from countries where most often there is no literature at all, and if there is any, then there are no classics in it. And this is an incredibly interesting experience! To make literature that is not intended for school, for teaching, for classics, for commentary, but to do a completely different thing. And here is the connection of these three things, here it is precisely the tension between these things that works - some kind of similar construction with our types of reading.

What changed? If speak about own experience, I grew up from the culture of books, then entered the culture of texts. Because the culture of samizdat, tamizdat and everything else was a culture of texts, it was not a culture of books. Behind the book was a library, government agency, right up to BVL, and behind the texts there were their own referent authorities, where there was no dimension of power. And now we have entered into some third thing, I would call it the culture of quotation: we jump from point to point, and it is important for us to finally snatch a quote. But we have somehow learned to read in such a way that we make an injection into this very quote. Apparently, I feel like such a sad wreck, quoting Annensky, in which things are connected that, perhaps tomorrow, will be completely disconnected. But for myself today I feel the problem is in the tense connection of these things. The entire structure has changed.

Vladimir Paperny: I have a little story related to Plato. Because of my lifestyle, I spend a lot of time in the car, and I realized that I couldn't read, so I switched to audiobooks. There is a company called the Zeitchen Company that sells university courses in a variety of subjects, and I took a course there in the history of philosophy, history in English. And there was an episode when I had to go skiing with my daughter, who was then 10 years old, and I said that we would go by car, it would be a three-day journey, and we would listen to some university courses, and you you will get smarter. And she is an obedient girl, she didn’t want it at all, but she says: “Okay.” And I set up a university course on the history of Western philosophy; in three days we only managed to listen to Plato. But she had the feeling that Russian parents always have some idiotic ideas that no one except them knows about, and in general they talk about something that does not exist at all. Several years passed, and she studied at a very good school, she was already in the 7th grade, and suddenly she comes running in some terrible excitement and says: “Dad, can you imagine, all this nonsense that you shoved at me then in the car, it's all true! We had a lesson today, and they talked about Plato, and it turned out that I was the only one in the whole class who knew everything and answered all the questions, no one else knew this! " And then I felt like a real father.

Yes, good books and it was extremely difficult to get magazines, because the economy was planned with an ideological orientation. Bookstores were usually filled with unsellable waste paper. Interesting works could be read in periodicals such as “New World”, “October”, “Moscow”, “Roman-Gazeta”, “Smena” and many others.

There was such a magazine as “Rural Youth”, and so the supplement “Feat” was published for it; works of the detective-adventure genre were published in it. These novels and stories aroused keen interest among readers.

There was also a “Seeker” supplement to the magazine “Around the World,” which published science fiction, but this supplement was very difficult to get, it was passed from hand to hand and read to the gills.

What books did they read in the USSR? Of course, first of all, it was the classics - L. Tolstoy, A. Pushkin, F. Dostoevsky, A. Chekhov, as well as works of revolutionary and military themes, by such authors as N. Ostrovsky, B. Lavrinev, V. Vishnevsky, Yu. Boldarev, V. Vasiliev and V. Bykov.

The novel “Walking Through Torment” was very popular in the Soviet Union. From the earliest years, Soviet people read the novels of Alexandre Dumas and Walter Scott. Almost all boys and girls read Conan Doyle's book about the adventures of Sherlock Holmes and his friend Doctor Watson.

In the USSR, such a historical character as Giuseppe Garibaldi was very loved. The book he loved, “Spartacus” by the author Raffaello Giovagnoli, was re-read by every second resident of the USSR. And the book “The Gadfly” by the writer Ethel Voynich sold out instantly from store shelves. In the 50-60s of the last century, the dramatic works of the English writer Archibald Cronin, the author of such novels as “The Citadel”, “Castle Brody”, “The Stars Look Down” aroused great interest among Soviet readers.

The works of Jack London, whom everyone read and loved, stand out separately. Everyone knew such characters as Smoke Belew, the Kid from Northern Tales and Martin Eden from the novel of the same name.

But this is only prose; in the USSR they also read poetry - E. Yevtushenko, R. Rozhdestvensky and M. Tsvetaeva.

In recent years Soviet power Mikhail Bulgakov became very popular. You can write a lot about books in the USSR, but you can show how popular reading was using one example. My mother, who lived in a remote Ukrainian village, returning from hard work in the field, fed the children and sat down to read a book in the evening. When people met, they always asked what book you read last year. Lately and is it possible to borrow it from you? Spiritual food was much more important than other values. At the present time, this is strongly felt when the material component has come to the fore.

Exactly two years later, I decided to return again to my favorite topic - nostalgia for all the good things that happened in the USSR. Everything without which it was impossible to imagine our childhood. Happy and carefree (until the 90s) childhood during perestroika. You can find links to the previous 9 parts, which have become internet classics, at the very end of the post. And in the near future I am going to delight you with new continuations of this series.

Let's try to remember WHAT WE READ.

Reading was the second, after the courtyard, entertainment for Soviet children. Perhaps some of you will object, considering that the TV was in second place. But I wouldn't say that we watched it often. A couple of cartoons, 15 minutes each, after "International Panorama" and " Good night, kids." Plus, during the holidays, 1 hour each of the next episode of "Children of Captain Grant" or "Guest from the Future". And that's all. And during the holidays, someone was generally driven to the village, where strict grandparents watched the TV and were not allowed in. Therefore, the only legal entertainment was books, newspapers and magazines.

It must be said that Soviet television even seemed to fuel interest in books. Well, who didn’t want to find out for themselves what happened to Robert when he was carried away by the condor? Well, don’t wait for tomorrow :) So we came to read everything by Jules Verne. Book after book: "The Children of Captain Grant", "2000 Leagues Under the Sea", "The Mysterious Island". And who personally, without prompting, after reading the last book realized that this was an interconnected story-trilogy? Personally, I simply glowed with happiness when this discovery came to me. Books captivated me, took me to other worlds, allowed me to become someone else, live someone else’s life, gain someone else’s experience. Rare pictures in the thick book forced the imagination to draw its own vision of the scenes described there. Probably many have done this: after reading some interesting place, put the book down, closing their eyes and imagining the described scene.

My favorite genre was science fiction. I voraciously, several times, read the works of the Soviet science fiction writer Alexander Belyaev: “The KETS Star”, “The Head of Professor Dowell”, “Amphibian Man”, “The Inventions of Professor Wagner” and much more. We had a personal Belyaev at home. All:

The second most “favorite” was H.G. Wells: “War of the Worlds”, “The Invisible Man”, “The Island of Doctor Moreau”. These three works were part of the greatest collection in the history of Soviet book publishing - "Libraries of World Literature":

Two hundred volumes of works from antiquity to modern times. A unique publication that we also have :) My father loved books and spent a lot of money and time to get them. I handed in waste paper, signed up in stores, stood in lines... I learned from these books and didn’t need to go to the library at all. At the beginning of each volume there were voluminous critical articles, which helped a lot in the final grades when preparing essays on literature :)

One of the variations of "BVL" was the series "Classics and Contemporaries". Almost everything is the same, but only on a smaller scale.

I put Wells separately :)

Another pearl of Soviet book publishing was this:

This was our Wikipedia, our Internet.. How much time my classmates spent in libraries copying out yet another encyclopedia article for a report on chemistry, geography or biology. But I was lucky again - we had our own personal encyclopedia. All 30 volumes, plus some kind of yearbook, which was not at all interesting. There were a lot of pictures in the TSB. I also loved these books very much, spending hours hanging on the pages with snakes, fish, animals, bugs, stones, swords and maps of the world.

I don’t think the books we read as children can be included in one or even 10 reviews. I won't even try to remember them all. There were not just a lot of them - they were like bread, water and air, and is it possible to count how much we drank or ate in 10-15 years?

But it is quite possible to remember what magazines and newspapers we and our parents read. In the USSR, everyone always wrote something down. Some more, some less, but every month at least two or three magazines dropped into the mailbox, with a stack of weekly or daily newspapers and letters from relatives.

Usually the conscious childhood of a Soviet child began with this magazine:

It is probably difficult to remember any other, more famous children's magazine. Even the name itself and the font in which it was typed were already fun and interesting. Do you remember how long you looked at these letters before you started reading the latest issue? And you could get stuck on the pages themselves for a long time:

There wasn’t much text in “Pictures”, so when we mastered the Russian language, they began to subscribe to us the following magazine:

"Murzilka" was assigned to me until the 5th grade. There were cool comics about Murzilka, his dog Trishka and the evil sorceress Yabeda Koryabeda.

These were not dumb Spider-Man comics, but filled with new knowledge in the field of computer technology.

Average school age When the Pioneer tie was already turning red on his neck, my parents usually subscribed to the magazines “Pioneer”, “Koster” and the newspaper “Pionerskaya Pravda”.
My favorite was "Bonfire". Remember, at the end there was a section “And everyone laughed”? Or was it in another magazine? :) “Kostre” published the works of young poets, prose writers, and simply letters from peers - this is how we learned how children live in other cities.

We did not subscribe to Pioneer magazine. Can anyone tell me what they wrote about there?

But I always read “Pioneerka” from cover to cover.

It was nice to feel like part of one big community, with the ideals of honor, kindness and mutual assistance.

The children of perestroika were already ready “to fight for the cause of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,” but things didn’t work out. :)

In "Pioneer" on the last page I always found a portion of my favorite science fiction. Kir Bulychev was almost always there, but sometimes other authors dropped by.

Around the same time, my mother began to subscribe to me a new wave magazine - "Tram". He differed from all the others in some kind of democracy, freedom and recklessness.

"Tram" - you're just space! I have learned so many new things from your pages. :) I even sent something to the editor - either a review or answers to competition questions.
These magazines are lying somewhere, gathering dust.

We did not subscribe to other magazines. But I had older brothers and sisters, and they were also prescribed something. In addition, then magazines were usually not handed over to waste paper, thick files were stored on mezzanines or in special chests of drawers, like ours:

They contained thick stacks of other popular magazines in the USSR.

Of those that we kept, my favorite was the magazine “Technology for Youth”:

I don't even want to tell you how interesting he was. There was so much about space exploration, about various expeditions, like the search for the Tunguska meteorite.

All the new products of Soviet industry, fantastic projects of new cities, transport links, ideas for our “bright future”. What else could a simple Soviet boy dream of?

And there was so much of my favorite science fiction!

Characteristics of Soviet and other weapons...

And plans, plans, plans for the future.

And from “Modelist-Constructor” we loved to cut out beautiful and outlandish cars, pasting them over the covers of notebooks and diaries.

There were also magazines for botanists:

I didn’t particularly like all the flowers there, but I enjoyed reading about animals. And from there it was possible to draw or cut something out for a report on natural history.
Yes, Soviet children also wrote posts with pictures. Only with the help of a ballpoint pen, felt-tip pens and scissors.

For children whose hands grew out of place, they also had their own magazines. " Young Technician" For example:

It's like Burda Moden, but for boys.

I also loved making all sorts of flying machines, but not using these patterns, but following my friends’ master classes :)
Although once, following instructions from this magazine, he himself hollowed out a boat from a block, which was called “Arizona”, as in “Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin”.

Senior school children read the popular magazine "Youth"

and "Coeval":

Sometimes you could find posters of idols there, which were used to cover scuffs on the wallpaper :)

In the 9th grade, I became fiercely addicted to the subscription brochure “Question Mark”. This was real food for the imagination! What topics were not covered there? And about the mystery of the experiment with the destroyer "Eldridge", and about the Tunguska meteorite ("What was that?"), and about the cosmological theory of Academician Kozyrev (which simply completely blew my mind in 10-11 grade) and about much more, interesting and mysterious .

When I decided to connect my future with computer science and mechanical engineering, I began reading this interesting magazine:

In "Kvant" there was not harsh mathematics, like "for any epsilon greater than zero, there is a delta blablabla...", but rather interesting life situations, described by formulas. Something like Perelman's "Entertaining Physics". At that time, I was already finishing the 4th grade at the ZFTSH at MIPT and the magazine was very useful to me.

I didn’t really read the following magazines, flipping through only the pictures:

Health magazine:

Women's magazines "Peasant"...

.. "Worker":

Women's magazine No. 1 in the USSR - "Burda Moden". It seems that it could only be bought, but basically it just passed from hand to hand, “settling” with the next owner for years.

He was a window into European fashion. In the USSR, it was simply impossible to buy such clothes, so they tried to keep up with European fashionistas with their own hands. Everyone sewed back then. And those who did not sew themselves, ordered them from an atelier or from friends. Last year I was able to visit the homeland of this magazine, the German town.

And here is the Russian version of “Burda” - the yearbook “Knitting”:

Magazine for parents "Family and School":

But we didn’t have the popular “Ogonyok”.

Just like "Crocodile":

Only in "Crocodile" could one find very sharp jokes on the topic of the day. Although there was already glasnost, the magazine was very popular.

Journal of true bibliophiles - "Roman-newspaper":

Usually, Roman-Gazeta slowly ended its days in village toilets. We read it there from cover to cover.

Well, how can you ignore “Behind the Wheel”?! True, the “steering wheel” in our family for a long time there wasn’t, so I didn’t know this magazine at all.

Now let's go through Soviet newspapers. I managed to remember these:

"News":

Well, of course, Komsomolskaya Pravda! There were simply wonderful notes from naturalist Vasily Peskov, which I always carefully cut out and folded

"Arguments and Facts":

Well, the harsh, Soviet “Pravda”. There was so much truth in the USSR, and everyone had their own - the pioneers, Komsomol members and everyone else.

For dessert I decided to leave some goodies like board games from magazines. “Journey,” however, was sold separately, but it was simply impossible not to remember it.

Just don't cry...

What else have I forgotten?

What did your family prescribe? Are you writing it out now? In general, insert pictures of magazines directly into the comments.

This was a warm-up. The next parts will be filled with more dense nostalgia, so get more scarves ready! :)

The population of the Soviet Union loved to read and it’s hard to argue with that. We read newspapers and magazines, every morning you could see a line at the Soyuz Printing kiosk. People always bought Soviet periodicals on their way to work. Yes, it was extremely difficult to get good books and magazines, because the economy was planned with an ideological orientation. Bookstores were usually filled with unsellable waste paper. Interesting works could be read in periodicals such as “New World”, “October”, “Moscow”, “Roman-Gazeta”, “Smena” and many others. There was such a magazine as “Rural Youth”, and so the supplement “Feat” was published for it; works of the detective-adventure genre were published in it. These novels and stories aroused keen interest among readers. There was also a “Seeker” supplement to the magazine “Around the World,” which published science fiction, but this supplement was very difficult to get, it was passed from hand to hand and read to the gills.

What books did they read in the USSR?
Of course, first of all, it was the classics - L. Tolstoy, A. Pushkin, F. Dostoevsky, A. Chekhov, as well as works of revolutionary and military themes, by such authors as N. Ostrovsky, B. Lavrinev, V. Vishnevsky, Yu. Boldarev, V. Vasiliev and V. Bykov.

But this is only prose; in the USSR they also read poetry - E. Yevtushenko, R. Rozhdestvensky and M. Tsvetaeva.

In the last years of Soviet power, Mikhail Bulgakov became very popular. You can write a lot about books in the USSR, but you can show how popular reading was using one example. My mother, who lived in a remote Ukrainian village, returning from hard work in the field, fed the children and sat down to read a book in the evening. When people met, they always asked what book you had read lately and could they borrow it from you? Spiritual food was much more important than other values. At the present time, this is strongly felt when the material component has come to the fore.

Traditionally, the main result of studying literature at school is considered to be the mastery of books included in the so-called national literary canon. Whose names and works should be there? Each writer has his own lobby in academic and pedagogical circles; the same authors who during their lifetime claim to be classics can personally take part in the struggle for the right to appear in a textbook. Even the concept of a “school canon” arose - this is also a list, hierarchically organized and derived from the national literary canon. But if a large national canon is formed by the very mechanisms of culture, then the list of compulsory reading for schoolchildren is compiled differently. Thus, the selection of a specific work for the school canon, in addition to its generally recognized artistic and cultural-historical value, is influenced by:

the age of the reader, that is, to whom it is addressed (the school canon is divided into reading groups - academic classes);
the clarity of the embodiment in it of literary or social phenomena that are studied at school (at the same time, average, straightforward works can be much more convenient than masterpieces);
educational potential (how the values, ideas, even its artistic features can have a beneficial effect on the student’s consciousness).

In the USSR, the school canon strived for immutability and at the same time was constantly changing. Literature programs of different years - 1921, 1938, 1960 and 1984 - reflected all the changes taking place in the country, as well as processes in literature itself and the education system.

Attention to the student and the absence of strict regulations

War communism gradually ended and the NEP era began. The new government considered education one of the priority areas of its activity, but the crisis that began after the revolution did not allow a radical restructuring of the pre-revolutionary education system. The regulation “On the Unified Labor School of the RSFSR,” which guaranteed everyone the right to free, joint, non-class and secular education, was issued back in October 1918, and only in 1921 the first stabilized program appeared. It was made for a nine-year school, but due to the lack of money in the country for education and general devastation, education had to be reduced to seven years and divided into two stages: the third and fourth years of the second stage correspond to the last two graduating classes of the school.

Program composition
The list of books basically repeats the pre-revolutionary gymnasium programs

Number of hours
Not regulated

III year of the second stage 3rd year 2nd stage

Oral poetry: lyrics, antiquities, fairy tales, spiritual poems
Ancient Russian writing: “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”, “The Tale of Juliania Lazarevskaya”; stories about Ersha Ershovich, about Misfortune-Grief, about Savva Grudtsyn, about Frol Skobeev
Mikhail Lomonosov. Lyrics
Denis Fonvizin. "Undergrown"
Gavrila Derzhavin. “Felitsa”, “God”, “Monument”, “Eugene. Life Zvanskaya"
Nikolai Karamzin. “Poor Lisa,” “What does the author need?”
Vasily Zhukovsky. "Theon and Aeschines", "Camoens", "Svetlana", "The Unspeakable"
Alexander Pushkin. Lyrics, poems, “Eugene Onegin”, “Boris Godunov”, “The Miserly Knight”, “Mozart and Salieri”, “Belkin’s Tales”
Mikhail Lermontov. Lyrics, “Mtsyri”, “Demon”, “Hero of Our Time”, “Song about the Merchant Kalashnikov”
Nikolay Gogol. “Evenings on a farm near Dikanka”, “Taras Bulba”, “Old World Landowners”, “The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich”, “Overcoat”, “Portrait”, “Inspector General”, “Dead Souls”
Alexey Koltsov, Evgeny Baratynsky, Fyodor Tyutchev, Afanasy Fet, Nikolay Nekrasov. Selected Lyric Poems

IV year of the second stage 4th year 2nd stage

Alexander Herzen. “The Past and Thoughts” (excerpts)
Ivan Turgenev. “Notes of a Hunter”, “Rudin”, “Noble Nest”, “On the Eve”, “Fathers and Sons”, “New”, “Prose Poems”
Ivan Goncharov. "Oblomov"
Alexander Ostrovsky. “We’ll count our own people” or “Poverty is not a vice”, “Profitable place”, “Thunderstorm”, “Snow Maiden”
Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin. Fairy tales (three or four at the teacher’s choice), “Poshekhon Antiquity”
Fedor Dostoevsky. "Poor People", "The Brothers Karamazov" or "Crime and Punishment"
Lev Tolstoy. “Childhood”, “Adolescence”, “Youth”, “War and Peace”, “Hadji Murat”, “Confession”, “Alyosha Gorshok”
Gleb Uspensky. “Morals of Rasteryaeva Street”, “Power of the Earth”
Vsevolod Garshin. "Artists", "Red Flower"
Vladimir Korolenko. “Makar’s Dream”, “The Blind Musician”, “The River Is Playing”, “The Forest is Noisy”
Anton Chekhov. “Steppe”, “Men”, “The Cherry Orchard”
Maksim Gorky. “Chelkash”, “Song about the Falcon”, “Former People”, “Song about the Petrel”, “At the Depth”, “Mother”, “Childhood”
Leonid Andreev. “Once upon a time,” “Silence,” “Human Life”
Konstantin Balmont, Valery Bryusov, Alexander Blok. Selected Poems
Peasant and proletarian poets of our time

In 1921, the State Academic Council of the People's Commissariat for Education presented the first stable list after the confusion of post-revolutionary lists in the “Programs for the I and II stages of the seven-year unified labor school.” The work on creating a program in literature was led by literary critic and linguist Pavel Sakulin, and it clearly shows the ideas discussed in the pedagogical environment shortly before the revolution, in particular in 1916-1917 at the First All-Russian Congress of Russian Language Teachers and literature. Sakulin reproduced in his program many of the principles formulated at this congress: variability in teaching (four program options instead of one with four corresponding lists of works), attention to the interests and needs of not only teachers, but also students. The program was based mainly on Russian literary classics of the 19th century, while the literature of previous centuries, as well as the nascent Soviet literature, occupied a rather modest place in it.

Literature lesson at the school at the Krasny Bogatyr plant. Early 1930s Getty Images

The task of overcoming this list in its entirety was not set—for the compilers of the program, the students’ emotional perception and independent comprehension of what they read were much more important.

“Students’ attention, of course, is always fixed on the text of the works themselves. Classes are conducted using the inductive method. Let students first learn about Rudin and Lavretsky, and then about the philosophical sentiments of the Russian intelligentsia, about Slavophilism and Westernism; Let them first get used to the image of Bazarov, and then hear about the thinking realists of the sixties. Even the writer’s biography should not precede students’ direct acquaintance with the works. In a second-level school there is no opportunity to strive for an exhaustive study of historical and literary trends. If necessary, let the teacher exclude from the list proposed below certain works, even of this or that writer. Once again: non multa, sed multum “Many, but not much” is a Latin proverb meaning “many in meaning, not in quantity.”. And most importantly, the works of art themselves are in the center.” Programs for the I and II stages of the seven-year unified labor school. M., 1921..

Literary education, closely related to the pre-revolutionary one, could hardly suit the ideologists of the party state, in which literature, along with other types of art, should serve the propaganda of the ruling ideology. In addition, the program initially had a limited scope of distribution - both because there were few schools of the second level in the country (most of the graduates of the first level joined the ranks of the proletariat or peasantry), and because many regions had their own educational programs. Within a few years, it lost the power of a regulatory document, remaining a monument to Russian humanitarian and pedagogical thought.

The teacher and the textbook are the only sources of knowledge

Between the programs of 1921 and 1938 there lies the same gulf as between the revolution and the last pre-war years. The bold searches of the 1920s in various fields of science, culture and education gradually faded away. Now the task of science, culture and education has become the construction of a super-industrial and militarized totalitarian state. As a result of purges and political repression, the composition of those who led changes in education and culture changed dramatically.

Program composition
80% Russian classics, 20% Soviet literature

Number of hours
474 (since 1949 - 452)

8th grade

Oral folk poetry (folklore)
Russian epics
"The Tale of Igor's Campaign"
Mikhail Lomonosov. “Ode on the day of the accession to the throne of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna”, “Conversation with Anacreon”
Gavrila Derzhavin. "Felitsa", "Invitation to Dinner", "Monument"
Denis Fonvizin. "Undergrown"
Alexander Radishchev. “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” (excerpts)
Nikolai Karamzin. "Poor Lisa"
Vasily Zhukovsky. “Svetlana”, “Theon and Aeschines”, “The Forest King”, “Sea”, “I used to be a young muse...”
Kondraty Ryleev. “To a temporary worker”, “Citizen”, “Oh, I’m sick of…”
Alexander Griboyedov. "Woe from Wit"
Alexander Pushkin. Lyrics, odes, “Gypsies”, “Eugene Onegin”
Vissarion Belinsky. "Works of Alexander Pushkin"
George Gordon Byron. "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" (excerpts)
Mikhail Lermontov. Lyrics, "Hero of Our Time"

9th grade

Nikolay Gogol. "Dead Souls", vol. 1
Vissarion Belinsky. “The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls,” letter to Gogol, July 3, 1847
Alexander Herzen. "Past and Thoughts"
Ivan Goncharov. "Oblomov"
Alexander Ostrovsky. "Storm"
Ivan Turgenev. "Fathers and Sons"
Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin. "Messrs. Golovlevs"
Lev Tolstoy. "Anna Karenina"
Vladimir Lenin. “Leo Tolstoy as a mirror of the Russian revolution”, “L. N. Tolstoy and the modern labor movement", "L. N. Tolstoy and his era"

10th grade

Anton Chekhov. "Gooseberry", "Cherry Orchard"
Maksim Gorky. “Old Woman Izergil”, “Konovalov”, “At the Bottom”, “The Artamonov Case”
Vladimir Lenin about Maxim Gorky
Vyacheslav Molotov. "In memory of A. M. Gorky"
Alexander Serafimovich. "Iron Stream"
Alexander Fadeev. "Devastation"
Vladimir Mayakovsky. Poems
Songs of the peoples of the USSR

By 1923-1925, literature as a subject disappeared from curricula, dissolving in social science. Now literary works were used as illustrations for the study of socio-political processes and phenomena in order to educate the younger generation in the communist spirit. However, in the second half of the 1920s, literature returned to the grid of subjects - significantly updated. For the next fifteen years, the program will be polished, adding works of Soviet literature.

By 1927, the GUS released a set of stabilized programs, that is, unchanged for the next four years. The teacher has less and less rights to replace some works with others. More and more attention is being paid to “social ideologies” - primarily revolutionary ideas and their reflection in the literature of the past and present. Half of the ninth, graduating class of the nine-year school was devoted to young Soviet literature, which had just celebrated its tenth anniversary: next to Gorky, Blok and Mayakovsky the names of Konstantin Fedin, Vladimir Lidin, Leonid Leonov, Alexander Neverov, Lydia Seifullina, Vsevolod Ivanov, Fyodor Gladkov, Alexander Malyshkin, Dmitry Furmanov, Alexander Fadeev, most of whom are known today only to the older generation and specialists. The program outlined in detail how to interpret and from what angle to consider this or that work, referring to Marxist criticism for the correct opinion.

In 1931, a draft of another stabilized program, even more ideologically verified, was prepared. However, the thirties themselves, with their upheavals and constant rush, the purge of elites and the restructuring of all the principles on which both the state and society rested, did not allow the programs to settle: during this time, as many as three generations of school textbooks were replaced. Stability came only in 1938-1939, when a program was finally prepared, which lasted without any special changes until the Khrushchev thaw, and in its core - until today. The approval of this program was accompanied by the suppression of any attempts to experiment with the organization educational process: after the experiments with the introduction of the American method, which were recognized as unsuccessful, when the teacher had not so much to give new knowledge as to organize the independent activities of students in obtaining and applying it in practice, the system returned to the traditional classroom, known since pre-revolutionary times. lesson form, where the teacher and textbook are the main sources of knowledge. Consolidation of this knowledge was carried out using a textbook - the same for all students. The textbook had to be read and taken down, and the knowledge gained should be reproduced as closely as possible to the text. The program strictly regulated even the number of hours allocated to a particular topic, and this time did not involve detailed work with the text, but the acquisition, memorization and reproduction of ready-made knowledge about the text without much reflection on what was read. The most important importance in the program was attached to memorizing works of art and their fragments, the list of which was also strictly defined.

At a meeting on the teaching of literature in high school, on March 2, 1940, the famous educator and literature teacher Semyon Gurevich expressed great concerns about the new approach:

“First of all, one big problem we have in teaching literature is that teaching has become a stencil... The stencil is incredible. If you throw out the last name and start talking about Pushkin, Gogol, Goncharov, Nekrasov, etc., then they are all people’s people, they are all good and humane. The word “defacement” of literature, coined by someone, has occupied the same place in the teaching of literature as these sociological definitions occupied several years ago... If a few years ago children left school with the opinion that Nekrasov - this is a repentant nobleman, Tolstoy is a philosophizing liberal, etc., then now all writers are such amazing people, with crystalline characters, with wonderful works, who only dreamed of a social revolution.”

At the end of the 1930s, the general list of the literature course coincided by more than two-thirds with the list of 1921 According to the calculations of the German researcher Erna Malygina.. The basis was still based on the works of Russian classics, but the main task of these works was rethought: they were ordered to tell about the “leaden abominations of life” under tsarism and the maturation of revolutionary sentiments in society. Young Soviet literature told about what these sentiments led to and what the successes were in building a new state of workers and peasants.

Literature lesson in 5th grade. At the blackboard — future Young Guard member Oleg Koshevoy. Ukrainian SSR, Rzhishchev, January 1941 TASS photo chronicle

The selection of works was determined not only by their unconditional artistic merits, but also by their ability to fit into the logic of the Soviet concept of literary development of the New and Contemporary times, reflecting the country’s progressive movement towards revolution, the construction of socialism and communism. In 1934, school education became ten years and the historical and literary course took three years instead of two. The works of folklore, Russian and Soviet literature faced another important educational task - to provide examples of genuine heroism, combat or labor, which young readers could look up to.

“To show the greatness of Russian classical literature, which educated many generations of revolutionary fighters, the enormous fundamental difference and moral and political height of Soviet literature, to teach students to understand the main stages of literary development without simplification, without schematism - this is the historical and literary task of the course in grades VIII-X high school." From the secondary school literature program for grades VIII-X, 1938.

Reducing hours and expanding the list: the collapse of hopes for updating the subject

After the devastation of the war and the first post-war years, there came a time of harsh ideological pressure and campaigns: entire branches of science became objects of repression, facts were distorted for the sake of ideology (for example, the superiority of Russian science and its primacy in most branches of scientific knowledge and technology was extolled). Under these conditions, the teacher turned into a conductor of the official line in education, and the school became a place where the student was subjected to ideological pressure. Humanities education is increasingly losing its humanistic character. The death of Stalin in 1953 and the subsequent thaw were accompanied by hope for changes in the country, including in the field of education. It seemed that the school would pay attention to the student and his interests, and the teacher would receive more freedom in organizing the educational process and selecting educational material.

Number of hours
429

8th grade

"The Tale of Igor's Campaign"
Denis Fonvizin. "Undergrown"
Alexander Radishchev. “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” (selected chapters)
Alexander Griboyedov. "Woe from Wit"
Alexander Pushkin. Lyrics, "Gypsies", "Eugene Onegin", "The Captain's Daughter"
Mikhail Lermontov. Lyrics, "Mtsyri", "Hero of Our Time"
Nikolay Gogol. “The Inspector General”, “Dead Souls”, vol. 1

9th grade

Ivan Goncharov. "Oblomov" (selected chapters)
Alexander Ostrovsky. "Storm"
Ivan Turgenev. "Fathers and Sons"
Nikolai Chernyshevsky. "What to do?" (selected chapters)
Nikolay Nekrasov. Lyrics, “Who lives well in Rus'”
Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin. “The Tale of How One Man Fed Two Generals”, “Horse”, “The Wise Minnow”
Lev Tolstoy. "War and Peace"
William Shakespeare. "Hamlet"
Johann Wolfgang Goethe. "Faust", part 1

10th grade

Maksim Gorky. “Old Woman Izergil”, “At the Bottom”, “Mother”, “V. I. Lenin" (abbreviated)
Vladimir Mayakovsky. “Left March”, “The Satisfied”, “To Comrade Nette - the Ship and the Man”, “Poems about the Soviet Passport”, “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin”, “Good!”, introduction to the poem “At the top of my voice”
Nikolai Ostrovsky. "As the Steel Was Tempered"
Mikhail Sholokhov. "Virgin Soil Upturned"
Alexander Fadeev. "Young guard"

As already mentioned, the Soviet school canon that had developed by the end of the 1930s subsequently changed little. There was still no place in it for the “dubious” Dostoevsky and Yesenin, the melodramatic “Anna Karenina” with its “family thought” was replaced by the patriotic “War and Peace” with its “people’s thought” during the war years, and the modernist the currents of the turn of the century were squeezed into six hours at the very end of the ninth grade. The tenth, graduation, class was completely devoted to Soviet literature.

Schoolgirls in the Pushkin Museum-Reserve “Boldino”. 1965 Zhiganov Nikolay / TASS Photo Chronicle

During this period, the quadriga of Russian classics was determined, imprinted on the pediments of typical five-story school buildings of the 1950s: two great poets - the Russian pre-revolutionary genius Pushkin and the Soviet Mayakovsky - and two great prose writers - the pre-revolutionary Leo Tolstoy and the Soviet Gorky At one time, instead of Tolstoy, Lomonosov was sculpted on the pediments, but his figure violated the geometric harmony of the quadrangular pyramid of the school canon, crowned by the first authors of his era (two poets - two prose writers, two pre-revolutionary - two Soviet authors).. The compilers of the program devoted especially a lot of time to the study of Pushkin: in 1938 - 25 hours, in 1949 - already 37. The rest of the classics had to have their hours cut, since they simply did not fit into the ever-expanding time, primarily due to Soviet classics, school canon.

It was possible to talk not only about updating the composition of the school canon, but also about approaches to its formation and content, as well as the principles of organizing literary education in general, only in the second half of the 1950s, when it became clear that the country has set a course for some softening of the ideological regime. A publication for teachers, the magazine “Literature at School,” published transcripts of discussions of the draft new program in literature, as well as letters from ordinary teachers, school and university methodologists and librarians. There have been proposals to study twentieth-century literature not just for one year, but for the last two years, or to include it in the course for grades 8-10. There were even brave souls who argued that War and Peace should be studied in full: according to teachers, most of their students were unable to master the text.

Literature lesson in 10th grade. A student reads a poem by Alexander Blok. Leningrad, 1980 Belinsky Yuri / TASS Photo Chronicle

However, the long-awaited program, released in 1960, was a big disappointment for everyone who was hoping for change. A larger volume had to be squeezed into an even smaller number of hours - the creators of the program suggested that teachers solve the problem themselves and somehow manage to complete everything prescribed without compromising the depth of comprehension.

Neither the study of some works in an abbreviated form, nor the reduction of hours on foreign literature helped. In the study of literature, the principles of systematicity and historicism were proclaimed: the living literary process fit into the Leninist concept of “three stages of the revolutionary liberation movement in Russia” The periodization of the pre-revolutionary literary process in post-war programs and textbooks was based on the three stages of the revolutionary liberation movement in Russia, highlighted by Lenin in the article “In Memory of Herzen” (1912). The noble, razno-chinsky and proletarian stages in the history of literature corresponded to the first and second halves of the 19th century and the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. After this, the history of Russian literature ended, giving way to Soviet literature.. The material was still simply required to be memorized as presented by the teacher and/or textbook.

“It is necessary to warn teachers against an overly detailed analysis of a work, as well as against simplified interpretations of literary phenomena, as a result of which the study of fiction may lose its figurative and emotional essence.” From the high school program for the 1960/61 academic year.

Educating feelings instead of ideology

After the thaw, the whole country lined up for the shortage - and not only for Yugoslav boots or domestic televisions, but also for good literature, shelves with which it became fashionable to decorate the interiors of apartments. The flourishing of the book market, including the underground, mass cinema, Soviet literary and illustrated magazines, television, and for some, became serious competition for the dull Soviet school subject “literature”, which could only be saved individual ascetics and teachers. Ideology is being replaced in school literature by the education of feelings: their spiritual qualities in heroes begin to be especially valued, and poetry in works.

Program composition
The list is gradually expanding, on the one hand, due to previously not recommended works of Russian classics (Dostoevsky), on the other, due to works of Soviet literature recent years, which should have been read independently followed by discussion in class

Number of hours
340

8th grade

"The Tale of Igor's Campaign"
Jean-Baptiste Moliere. "A tradesman among the nobility"
Alexander Griboyedov. "Woe from Wit"
Alexander Pushkin. “To Chaadaev” (“Love, hope, quiet glory...”), “To the sea”, “I remember a wonderful moment...”, “Prophet”, “Autumn”, “On the hills of Georgia”, “I loved you...”, “Again I visited...”, “I erected a monument to myself...”, “Eugene Onegin”
George Gordon Byron. "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" (Cantos I and II), "My Soul Is Gloomy"
Mikhail Lermontov. “Death of a Poet”, “Poet”, “Duma”, “How often, surrounded by a motley crowd...”, “I go out alone on the road”, “Motherland”, “Hero of our time”
Nikolay Gogol. "Dead Souls"
Vissarion Belinsky. Literary critical activity

Anatoly Aleksin. “Meanwhile, somewhere...”, “In the rear as in the rear”
Chingiz Aitmatov. "Jamila", "The First Teacher"
Vasil Bykov. "Alpine Ballad", "Until Dawn"
Oles Gonchar. "Man and Weapons"
Savva Dangulov. "Trail"
Nodar Dumbadze. "I see the sun"
Maksud Ibragimbekov. “For everything good - death!”
“The names are verified. Poems of soldiers who died on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War"
Vadim Kozhevnikov. "Towards the Dawn"
Maria Prilezhaeva. “An Amazing Year”, “Three Weeks of Peace”
Johan Smuul. "Ice Book"
Vladislav Titov. "To Spite All Deaths"
Mikhail Dudin, Mikhail Lukonin, Sergei Orlov. Selected Poems

9th grade

Alexander Ostrovsky. "Storm"
Nikolai Dobrolyubov. "A Ray of Light in a Dark Kingdom"
Ivan Turgenev. "Fathers and Sons"
Nikolai Chernyshevsky. "What to do?"
Nikolay Nekrasov. “Poet and Citizen” (excerpt), “In Memory of Dobrolyubov”, “Elegy” (“Let changing fashion tell us...”), “Who Lives Well in Rus'”
Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin. "The Wise Minnow", "The Wild Landowner"
Fedor Dostoevsky. "Crime and Punishment"
Lev Tolstoy. "War and Peace"
Anton Chekhov. “Ionych”, “The Cherry Orchard”
William Shakespeare. Hamlet (review)
Johann Wolfgang Goethe. "Faust": "Prologue in Heaven", scene 2 - "At the City Gate", scenes 3 and 4 - "Faust's Study", scene 12 - "Garden", scene 19 - "Night. Street in front of Gretchen's house", scene 25 - "Prison"; Faust's last monologue from Part II (review)
Honore de Balzac. "Gobsek"

For discussions on Soviet literature

Ales Adamovich. "Partisans"
Sergey Antonov. "Alenka", "Rains"
Mukhtar Auezov. "Abai"
Vasil Bykov. "Obelisk"
Boris Vasiliev. “And the dawns here are quiet...”
Ion Druta. "Steppe Ballads"
Afanasy Koptelov. “Big Beginning”, “The Flame Will Kindle”
Vilis Latsis. "To a new shore"
Valentin Rasputin. "French lessons"
Robert Rozhdestvensky. "Requiem", "Letter to the 20th Century"
Konstantin Simonov. "The Living and the Dead"
Konstantin Fedin. “First Joys”, “An Extraordinary Summer”
Vasily Shukshin. Selected stories

10th grade

Maksim Gorky. “Old Woman Izergil”, “At the Bottom”, “Mother”, “V. I. Lenin"
Alexander Blok. “Stranger”, “Factory”, “Oh, spring without end and without edge...”, “Russia”, “About valor, about exploits, about glory...”, “On railway", "Twelve"
Sergey Yesenin. “Soviet Rus'”, “Letter to Mother”, “Uncomfortable liquid moonlight...”, “Bless every work, good luck!”, “To Kachalov’s dog”, “The feather grass is sleeping. Dear plain...", "I'm walking through the valley. On the back of the cap...", "The golden grove dissuaded me...", "I don’t regret, I don’t call, I don’t cry..."
Vladimir Mayakovsky. “Left March”, “Seated”, “About rubbish”, “Black and White”, “To Comrade Netta - the ship and the man”, “Letter to Comrade Kostrov from Paris about the essence of love”, “Conversation with the financial inspector about poetry”, “Poems about the Soviet passport", "Vladimir Ilyich Lenin", "Good!", "At the top of my voice" (first introduction to the poem)
Alexander Fadeev. "Devastation"
Nikolai Ostrovsky. "As the Steel Was Tempered"
Mikhail Sholokhov. "Virgin Soil Upturned", "The Fate of Man"
Alexander Tvardovsky. “I was killed near Rzhev”, “Two forges”, “On the Angara” (from the poem “Beyond the distance - the distance”)

Schoolchildren write an essay for the final exam. June 1, 1984 Kavashkin Boris / TASS Photo Chronicle

The number of hours allocated to literature in grades 8-10 continues to decline: in 1970 it was only 350 hours, in 1976 and for the next four decades - 340. The school curriculum is mainly replenished with works that are especially are close to conservatives: in place of Saltykov-Shchedrin’s novel “The Golovlevs,” which was too critical of the traditional way of life, in the early 1970s the program included the novel “Crime and Punishment,” which contrasts the rebellion against existing order, the idea of personal salvation. Next to the “urbanist” Mayakovsky stands the “peasant” Yesenin. The block is mainly represented by poems about the Motherland. "Mosfilm", "KinoPoisk"

Still from Sergei Solovyov’s film “The Station Agent”. 1972"Mosfilm", Kinomania.ru

Still from Vyacheslav Nikiforov’s film “The Noble Robber Vladimir Dubrovsky.” 1988"Belarusfilm", "KinoKopilka"

Still from Eldar Ryazanov’s film “Cruel Romance.” 1984"Mosfilm", "KinoPoisk"

In the 1960-70s, films were made based on many works of the school canon, which immediately gained wide popularity: they solved the problems of both non-reading and adaptation of complex or historically distant meanings of classical works to their perception by the broad masses, shifting the emphasis from ideological issues to the plot, the feelings of the characters and their fates. The idea that classics is universal is becoming more and more firmly established: it seems to combine the accessibility of mass literature with the highly artistic quality of timeless masterpieces (in contrast to unrealistic works, especially “modernist” ones, addressed mainly to individual groups "aesthetes").

“Classical literature is literature that has reached the highest degree of perfection and has stood the test of time, retaining the significance of an immortal creative example for all subsequent writers.” S. M. Florinsky. Russian literature. Textbook for 8th grade of secondary school. M., 1970.

Works about the revolution, the Civil War and collectivization are included in abbreviated or overview study (four hours on “How the Steel Was Tempered”) or in extracurricular reading Concept extracurricular reading existed in gymnasiums, but in the 1930s it became regulated: it was proposed to choose from approved lists., the volume of which is increasing. But more and more works are about the Great Patriotic War: eight hours, previously allotted for studying Sholokhov’s “Virgin Soil Upturned,” are now divided between this epic and the story “The Fate of a Man.” The literature of recent decades is read at home independently, after which one of four topics is discussed in class: the October Revolution, the Great Patriotic War, the image of Lenin, the image of our contemporary in the works of modern authors. Of the 30 prose works by Soviet writers offered for discussion in grades 8-9, ten books are devoted to wartime, three to the revolution and the Civil War, five to the life and work of Lenin. Nine of the 24 writers represent the national literature of the USSR. However, the very appearance of the section “For conversations on Soviet literature” became a sign of the approach of new times in domestic education, including literary education: from a lecture followed by a survey, a lesson at least sometimes turns into a conversation; at least some variability appears in the mandatory list, albeit only in the selection of works of the current literary process. And yet, despite these concessions, literary education The late Soviet era offered a falsified, ideologically and censorship-mangled history of Russian literature, in which there was no place for much. The authors of the 1976 program, the text of which migrated almost unchanged to the 1984 program, did not hide this:

“One of the most important tasks of the teacher is to show students what unites Soviet literature with the advanced heritage of the past, how it continues and develops the best traditions of classical literature, and at the same time to reveal qualitatively new character literature of socialist realism, which is a step forward in artistic development humanity, the class basis of its universal communist ideal, the diversity and aesthetic richness of Soviet literature.”

Tenth graders before a Russian literature lesson. Kazakh SSR, 1989 Pavsky Alexander / TASS Photo Chronicle

In just a few years, another state will emerge in place of the USSR, and in place of the bloated mandatory list, an even more voluminous advisory state, finally, again, as in the early 1920s, entrusting the teacher with the right to choose from the proposed list. names and works, taking into account the interests and level of students. But this will be the history of the post-Soviet school canon, no less dramatic, in which the parent community, the teaching community, and even the country’s top leadership will take an active part.