“We Cannot Retreat in the Field of the Mind.” Pushkin's Credo

Abstract

The author examines one of the most serious problems in the development of Russian intellectual culture. Russia stepped into high culture, lagging behind the West for several centuries. The task set by Pushkin for Russian culture is to become on a par with the century in education. It was he who first introduced Kant into the consciousness of Russian readers.

According to Pushkin's logic, Russia is already equal to Europe. It is necessary to judge by the tops of spirit. Napoleon, calling the Kremlin temples barbaric Buddhist, in fact expressed the customary attitude of the Frenchman towards Russia. Moreover, the West has often called and still calls Russian culture impersonal. Alas, the authors who insist on the “originality” of Russia, reinforced such ideas. Opposing the Russian peculiarity of European spirituality, Tolstoy thought that by doing so he himself was overcoming the West. Tolstoy chooses the path of rejection. In the treatise “What is Art?” to “rational, invented” he attributed "Greek tragedians, Dante, Tass, Milton, Shakespeare, Goethe (almost everything in a row); of the new ones — Zola, Ibsen, music of the last Beethoven period”. Tolstoy humiliated European geniuses; but also casually and backhand slandered Pushkin: a monument, de, was erected to him as if he had started an attempt to murder another person and wrote indecent poetry. As if there was no “Poltava”, “The Bronze Horseman”, “The Captain's Daughter”, “The History of the Pugachev Revolt”, “Eugene Onegin”. But contrary to him — passionate, a passionate, personal, Descartesian phrase of Pushkin: “I want to live in order to think and suffer”.

The author concludes that retreat in the field of mind is fraught with the death of the state. It was Pushkin, as the post-revolutionary Russian thinkers-exiles noted, following Lomonosov and Derzhavin and to an infinitely greater degree than they, continued the work of the Europeanization of Russia, the work of Peter the Great and Catherine.