If art teaches something (and the artist first and foremost), it is precisely the particulars of human existence. Being the most ancient - and most literal - form of private enterprise, it, wittingly or unwittingly, encourages in a person precisely his sense of individuality, uniqueness, separateness - turning him from a social animal into a person. Many things can be shared: bread, a bed, beliefs, a lover - but not a poem, say, by Rainer Maria Rilke. Works of art, literature in particular, and poetry in particular, address a person one-on-one, entering into a direct relationship with him, without intermediaries. This is why art in general, literature in particular, and poetry in particular are disliked by the zealots of the common good, the rulers of the masses, the heralds of historical necessity. For where art has passed, where a poem has been read, they discover in the place of expected agreement and unanimity - indifference and discord, in the place of determination to action - inattention and disgust. In other words, in the zeros with which the zealots of the common good and the rulers of the masses strive to operate, art enters a “dot, dot, comma with a minus,” turning each zero into a human face, if not always attractive.
The great Baratynsky, speaking about his Muse, described her as having “an unusual expression on her face.” Apparently, the meaning of individual existence lies in the acquisition of this non-general expression, for we are already, as it were, genetically prepared for this non-community. Regardless of whether a person is a writer or a reader, his task is to live his own life, and not one imposed or prescribed from the outside, even the most noble-looking life, for each of us has only one, and we know well what it all ends. It would be a shame to waste this only chance on repeating someone else’s appearance, someone else’s experience, on a tautology - especially since the heralds of historical necessity, at whose instigation a person is ready to agree to this tautology, will not lie in the grave with him and will not say thank you.
Language and, I think, literature are things more ancient, inevitable, and durable than any form of social organization. Indignation, irony or indifference expressed by literature in relation to the state is, in essence, a reaction of the permanent, or better yet, the infinite, in relation to the temporary, limited. At least as long as the state allows itself to interfere in the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere in the affairs of the state. A political system, a form of social order, like any system in general, is, by definition, a form of the past tense, trying to impose itself on the present (and often the future) and a person whose profession is language is the last one who can forget about this. The real danger for a writer is not only the possibility (often the reality) of persecution by the state, but the possibility of being hypnotized by its, the state's, monstrous or changed for the better - but always temporary - outlines.
The philosophy of the state, its ethics, not to mention its aesthetics, are always “yesterday”; language, literature - always "today" and often - especially in the case of the orthodoxy of a particular system, even "tomorrow". One of the merits of literature is that it helps a person clarify the time of his existence, distinguish himself from the crowd of both his predecessors and his own kind, and avoid tautology, that is, the fate known under the honorary name of “victim of history.” What is remarkable about art in general and literature in particular, is that it differs from life in that it always runs into repetition. In everyday life, you can tell the same joke three times and three times, causing laughter, you can be the soul of the party. In art, this form of behavior is called “cliché.” Art is a recoilless weapon and its development is determined not by the individuality of the artist, but by the dynamics and logic of the material itself, the previous history of means that require finding (or prompting) each time a qualitatively new aesthetic solution. Possessing its own genealogy, dynamics, logic and future, art is not synonymous, but, at best, parallel to history, and the way of its existence is to create each time a new aesthetic reality. That is why it often turns out to be “ahead of progress,” ahead of history, the main tool of which is - should we clarify Marx - precisely the cliché.
Today it is extremely common to assert that a writer, a poet in particular, must use the language of the street, the language of the crowd, in his works. For all its apparent democracy and tangible practical benefits for the writer, this statement is nonsense and represents an attempt to subordinate art, in this case literature, to history. Only if we have decided that it is time for “sapiens” to stop in its development, literature should speak the language of the people. Otherwise, the people should speak the language of literature. Every new aesthetic reality clarifies the ethical reality for a person. For aesthetics is the mother of ethics; the concepts of “good” and “bad” are primarily aesthetic concepts, preceding the concepts of “good” and “evil.” In ethics it is not “everything is permitted”, because in aesthetics it is not “everything is permitted”, because the number of colors in the spectrum is limited. A foolish baby, crying, rejecting a stranger or, on the contrary, reaching out to him, rejects him or reaches out to him, instinctively making an aesthetic choice, not a moral one.
Aesthetic choice is individual, and aesthetic experience is always a private experience. Any new aesthetic reality makes the person experiencing it an even more private person, and this particularity, which sometimes takes the form of literary (or some other) taste, can in itself turn out to be, if not a guarantee, then at least a form of protection from enslavement. For a person with taste, particularly literary taste, is less susceptible to the repetitions and incantations inherent in any form of political demagoguery. The point is not so much that virtue is no guarantee of a masterpiece, but that evil, especially political evil, is always a poor stylist. The richer the aesthetic experience of an individual, the firmer his taste, the clearer his royal choice, the freer he is - although perhaps not happier.
It is in this applied, and not platonic, sense that Dostoevsky’s remark that “beauty will save the world” or Matthew Arnold’s statement that “poetry will save us” should be understood. The world may not be able to be saved, but an individual can be saved. The aesthetic sense in a person develops very rapidly, because even without being fully aware of what he is and what he really needs, a person, as a rule, instinctively knows what he does not like and what does not suit him. In an anthropological sense, I repeat, man is an aesthetic being before he is an ethical one. Art, therefore, in particular literature, is not a by-product of species development, but vice versa. If what distinguishes us from other representatives of the animal kingdom is speech, then literature, and in particular poetry, being highest form literature, represents, roughly speaking, our specific goal.
I am far from the idea of universal teaching of versification and composition, however, dividing people into the intelligentsia and everyone else seems unacceptable to me. In moral terms, this division is similar to the division of society into rich and poor; but, if some purely physical, material justifications are still conceivable for the existence of social inequality, they are unthinkable for intellectual inequality. In what, in what, and in this sense, equality is guaranteed to us by nature. It's about not about education, but about the formation of speech, the slightest approach to which is fraught with the invasion of a person’s life by a false choice. The existence of literature implies existence at the level of literature - and not only morally, but also lexically. If musical composition still leaves a person the opportunity to choose between the passive role of a listener and an active performer, a work of literature - art, as Montale puts it, hopelessly semantic - condemns him to the role of only a performer.
It seems to me that a person should act in this role more often than in any other. Moreover, it seems to me that this role, as a result of the population explosion and the associated ever-increasing atomization of society, that is, with the ever-increasing isolation of the individual, is becoming increasingly inevitable. I don't think I know more about life than anyone my age, but I think a book is more reliable as a companion than a friend or a lover. A novel or poem is not a monologue, but a conversation between the writer and the reader - a conversation, I repeat, extremely private, excluding everyone else, if you like - mutually misanthropic. And at the moment of this conversation, the writer is equal to the reader, as well as vice versa, regardless of whether he is a great writer or not. Equality is the equality of consciousness, and it remains with a person for the rest of his life in the form of a memory, vague or clear, and sooner or later, by the way or inappropriately, determines the behavior of the individual. This is exactly what I mean when I talk about the role of the performer, all the more natural since a novel or poem is a product of the mutual loneliness of writer and reader.
In the history of our species, in the history of “sapiens,” the book is an anthropological phenomenon, essentially analogous to the invention of the wheel. Having arisen in order to give us an idea not so much of our origins, but of what this “sapien” is capable of, the book is a means of moving through the space of experience at the speed of turning a page. This movement, in turn, like any movement, turns into a flight from the common denominator, from an attempt to impose on this denominator a feature that has not previously risen above the waist, on our heart, our consciousness, our imagination. Flight is flight towards a non-general facial expression, towards the numerator, towards the individual, towards the particular. In whose image and likeness we were not created, there are already five billion of us, and man has no other future than that outlined by art. Otherwise, the past awaits us - primarily political, with all its mass police delights.
In any case, the situation in which art in general and literature in particular is the property (prerogative) of a minority seems to me unhealthy and threatening. I am not calling for replacing the state with a library - although this thought has crossed my mind many times - but I have no doubt that if we chose our rulers on the basis of their reading experience, and not on the basis of their political programs, there would be less grief on earth. I think that the potential ruler of our destinies should be asked, first of all, not about how he imagines the course foreign policy, but about how he relates to Stendhal, Dickens, Dostoevsky. If only for the fact that the daily bread of literature is precisely human diversity and ugliness, it, literature, turns out to be a reliable antidote to any - known and future - attempts at a total, mass approach to solving the problems of human existence. As a system of moral insurance, at least, it is much more effective than this or that belief system or philosophical doctrine.
Because there can be no laws that protect us from ourselves, not a single criminal code provides for punishment for crimes against literature. And among these crimes, the most serious are not censorship restrictions, etc., not committing books to the fire. There is a more serious crime - neglecting books, not reading them. For this crime, a person pays with his whole life; if a nation commits this crime, it pays for it with its history. Living in the country in which I live, I would be the first to believe that there is some proportion between a person's material well-being and his literary ignorance; What keeps me from doing this, however, is the history of the country in which I was born and raised. For, reduced to a cause-and-effect minimum, to a crude formula, Russian tragedy is precisely the tragedy of a society in which literature turned out to be the prerogative of a minority: the famous Russian intelligentsia.
I don’t want to dwell on this topic, I don’t want to darken this evening with thoughts about tens of millions human lives, ruined by millions - because what happened in Russia in the first half of the 20th century happened before the introduction of automatic small arms - in the name of the triumph of a political doctrine, the inconsistency of which lies in the fact that it requires human sacrifices for its implementation. I will only say that - not from experience, alas, but only theoretically - I believe that for a person who has read Dickens, it is more difficult to shoot something like that in himself in the name of any idea than for a person who has not read Dickens. And I'm talking specifically about reading Dickens, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Balzac, Melville, etc., i.e. literature, not about literacy, not about education. A literate, educated person may well, after reading this or that political treatise, kill his own kind and even experience the delight of conviction. Lenin was literate, Stalin was literate, Hitler too; Mao Zedong, he even wrote poetry. The list of their victims, however, far exceeds the list of what they have read.
However, before turning to poetry, I would like to add that it would be reasonable to view the Russian experience as a cautionary tale, if only because the social structure of the West is still generally similar to what existed in Russia before 1917. (This, by the way, explains the popularity of Russian psychological novel XIX century in the West and the comparative failure of modern Russian prose. The social relations that have developed in Russia in the 20th century seem, apparently, to the reader no less outlandish than the names of the characters, preventing him from identifying himself with them.) Only political parties, for example, on the eve of the October Revolution of 1917, there was no less existence in Russia than there is today in the USA or Great Britain. In other words, a dispassionate person might notice that in in a certain sense The 19th century in the West is still ongoing. In Russia it ended; and if I say that it ended in tragedy, then this is primarily because of the number of human casualties that the ensuing social and chronological change entailed. In a real tragedy, it is not the hero who dies - the choir dies.
“If art teaches something (and the artist first and foremost), it is precisely the particulars of human existence. Being the most ancient - and most literal - form of private enterprise, it, wittingly or unwittingly, encourages in a person precisely his sense of individuality, uniqueness, and separateness - transforming him from a social animal into a personality. Much can be divided: bread, bed, beliefs, beloved - but not a poem, say, by Rainer Maria Rilke. Works of art, literature in particular, and a poem in particular address a person one-on-one, entering into direct relations with him, without intermediaries. This is why art in general, literature in particular, and poetry in particular, are disliked by the zealots of the common good, the rulers of the masses, the heralds of historical necessity. For where art has passed, where the poem has been read, they are. In place of expected agreement and unanimity they find indifference and discord; in place of determination to action - inattention and disgust. In other words, in the zeros with which the zealots of the common good and the rulers of the masses strive to operate, art inscribes a “period, dot, comma with a minus,” turning each zero into a not always attractive, but human face.” Joseph Brodsky, “Nobel Lecture” ( 1987)
Russian language
5 - 9 grades
Read the text carefully, write an essay according to the given compositional scheme (problem, comment, author’s position, reasoned agreement or disagreement with the author’s position).
If art teaches something (and artists primarily), it is precisely the particulars of human existence. ..It, wittingly or unwittingly, encourages in a person precisely his sense of individuality, uniqueness, separateness - turning him from a social animal into a person. Much can be shared: bread, bed, belief - but not a poem, say, by Rainer Maria Rilke. A work of art, literature in particular and a poem in particular, addresses a person te^te-"a-te^te, entering into a direct relationship with him, without intermediaries.
The great Baratynsky, speaking about his Muse, described her as having “an unusual expression on her face.” In purchase-
It is this non-general expression that apparently constitutes the meaning of individual existence; Regardless of whether a person is a writer or a reader, his task is, first of all, to live his own life, and not one imposed or prescribed from the outside, even in the most noble-looking way. ..It would be a shame to waste this only chance on repeating someone else’s appearance, someone else’s experience, on tautology
giyu. ..Arose in order to give us an idea not so much of our origins as of what “sapiens” are capable of, the book is a means of moving through the space of experience at the speed of turning a page. This movement, in turn, turns into a flight from the common denominator towards a non-common facial expression, towards the personality,
aside in particular. ..
I have no doubt that if we chose our rulers on the basis of their reading experience, and not on the basis of their political programs, there would be less grief on earth. If only for the fact that the daily bread of literature is precisely human diversity and ugliness, it, literature, turns out to be a reliable antidote to any - known and future - attempts at a total, mass approach to solving the problems of human existence. As a system of moral insurance, at least, it is much more effective than this or that belief system or philosophical doctrine. ..
No criminal code provides punishment for crimes against literature. And among these crimes, the most serious is not the persecution of authors, not censorship restrictions, etc., not the burning of books. There is a more serious crime - neglecting books, not reading them. For this crime a person pays with his whole life; if a nation commits this crime, it pays for it with its history.
(From Nobel lecture,
read by I. A. Brodsky in 1987 in the USA).
).
Wow, that was interesting and challenging. The most difficult task was to treat this speech with restraint and impartiality. I remember that I analyzed it piece by piece so that I would not be overwhelmed by a wave of experiences and emotions.
But now I can relax, be fully biased and post my favorite quotes from this speech, marveling at both the thoughts themselves and how vividly and emotionally it was said.
Joseph Brodsky
Nobel lecture
If art teaches something (and the artist first and foremost), it is precisely the particulars of human existence.
Being the most ancient - and most literal - form of private enterprise, it, wittingly or unwittingly, encourages in a person precisely his sense of individuality, uniqueness, separateness - turning him from a social animal into a person.
…[…] Works of art, literature in particular, and poetry in particular, address a person one-on-one, entering into a direct relationship with him, without intermediaries. This is why art in general, literature in particular, and poetry in particular are disliked by the zealots of the common good, the rulers of the masses, the heralds of historical necessity. For where art has passed, where a poem has been read, they discover in the place of expected agreement and unanimity - indifference and discord, in the place of determination to action - inattention and disgust. In other words, in the zeros with which the zealots of the common good and the rulers of the masses strive to operate, art enters a “dot, dot, comma with a minus,” turning each zero into a human face, if not always attractive. No matter, Whether a person is a writer or a reader, his task is to to live your own, and not imposed or prescribed from the outside, even by the most a noble looking life. […]It would be a shame to waste this is the only chance to repeat someone else's appearance, someone else's experience,
tautology... Language and, I think, literature are things more ancient, inevitable, and durable than any form of social organization. Indignation, irony or the indifference expressed by literature towards the state is, according to essentially, the reaction of a constant, better said - infinite, in relation to temporary, limited. At least until the state allows itself to interfere in the affairs of literature, literature has the right interfere in the affairs of the state. A political system, a form of social structure, like any system in general, is, by definition, a form past tense, trying to impose itself on the present (and often future), and a person whose profession is language is the last one who can afford
...Art in general and literature in particular is remarkable in that it differs from life in that it always runs into repetition.
In everyday life, you can tell the same joke three times and three times, causing laughter, you can be the soul of the party. In art, this form of behavior is called “cliché.” Art is a recoilless weapon, and its development is determined not by the individuality of the artist, but by the dynamics and logic of the material itself, the previous history of means that require finding (or prompting) each time a qualitatively new aesthetic solution. Possessing its own genealogy, dynamics, logic and future, art is not synonymous, but, at best, parallel to history, and the way of its existence is to create each time a new aesthetic reality.
That is why it often turns out to be “ahead of progress,” ahead of history, the main instrument of which is - should we clarify Marx? - exactly a cliché. Today it is extremely common to assert that a writer, a poet in particular, must use the language of the street, the language of the crowd, in his works. For all its apparent democracy and tangible practical benefits for the writer, this statement is nonsense and represents an attempt to subordinate art, in this case literature, to history. Only if we have decided that it is time for “sapiens” to stop in its development, literature should speak the language of the people. Otherwise, the people should speak the language of literature. […]Aesthetic choice is always individual, and aesthetic experience is always a private experience. Any new aesthetic reality makes the person who experiences it an even more private person, and this particularity, which sometimes takes the form of literary (or some other) taste, can in itself turn out to be, if not a guarantee, then at least a form of protection from enslavement. For a person with taste, particularly literary taste, is less susceptible to repetition and rhythmic spells inherent in any form political demagoguery. The point is not so much that virtue is not guarantee of a masterpiece, as much as the fact that evil, especially political, is always bad stylist. The richer the aesthetic experience of an individual, the firmer his the taste, the clearer it is
moral choice The world may not be able to be saved, but an individual can always be saved.
...I am far from the idea of universal teaching of versification and composition; However, the division of people into the intelligentsia and everyone else seems unacceptable to me. In moral terms, this division is similar to the division of society into rich and poor; but, if for the existence of social inequality some purely physical, material
justifications for intellectual inequality are unthinkable. In some ways, and in this sense, equality is guaranteed to us by nature. We are not talking about education, but about the formation of speech, the slightest approach to which is fraught with the invasion of a person’s life by a false choice. The existence of literature implies existence at the level of literature - and not only morally, but also lexically.
...A novel or a poem is not a monologue, but a conversation between a writer and a reader - a conversation, I repeat, extremely private, excluding everyone else, if you like - mutually misanthropic. And at the moment of this conversation, the writer is equal to the reader, as well as vice versa, regardless of whether he is a great writer or not. Equality is equality of consciousness, and it remains with a person for the rest of his life in the form of memory, vague or clear, and sooner or later, by the way or
inappropriately, determines the behavior of the individual. This is exactly what I mean when I talk about the role of the performer, all the more natural since a novel or poem is a product of the mutual loneliness of writer and reader.
[…]a book is a means of transportation to space of experience at the speed of turning a page. Move it, in turn, like any movement, turns into a flight from the common denominator, from an attempt to impose a line on the denominator of this that did not rise previously above the belt, our heart, our consciousness, our imagination. Flight is flight towards a non-general facial expression, towards numerator, towards the individual, towards the particular. In whose image and likeness we were not created, there are already five billion of us, and man has no other future than that outlined by art. Otherwise, the past awaits us - first of all, the political one, with all its mass police delights.
In any case, the situation in which art in general and literature in particular is the property (prerogative) of a minority seems to me unhealthy and threatening. I am not calling for replacing the state with a library - although this thought has visited me more than once - but I have no doubt that, we choose our rulers based on their reading experience, and not Based on their political programs, there would be less grief on earth. To me I think that the potential ruler of our destinies should be asked first of all, not about how he imagines the course of foreign policy, but about how he relates to Stendhal, Dickens, Dostoevsky. At least already only that the daily bread of literature is precisely human diversity and ugliness, it, literature, turns out to be reliable an antidote to any - known or future - attempts a total, mass approach to solving the problems of human existence. As a system of moral insurance, at least, it is much more more effective than a particular belief system or philosophical doctrine.
Because there can be no laws that protect us from ourselves, not a single criminal code provides for punishment for crimes against literature.
...Russian tragedy is precisely the tragedy of a society in which literature turned out to be the prerogative of a minority: the famous Russian intelligentsia.
…I will only say that - not from experience, alas, but only theoretically - I believe that for
It is more difficult for a person who has read Dickens to shoot something like him in the name of any idea than for a person who has not read Dickens. And I'm talking specifically about reading Dickens, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Balzac, Melville, etc., i.e. literature, not about literacy, not about education. A literate, educated person may well, after reading this or that political treatise, kill his own kind and even experience the delight of conviction. Lenin was literate, Stalin was literate, Hitler too; Mao Zedong, he even wrote poetry; the list of their victims, however, far exceeds the list of what they have read.
Joseph Brodsky
Nobel lecture
For a private person who has preferred this particularity all his life to some public role, for a person who has gone quite far in this preference - and in particular from his homeland, for it is better to be the last loser in a democracy than a martyr or the ruler of thoughts in a despotism - to suddenly appear on this podium is a great embarrassment and test.
This feeling is aggravated not so much by the thought of those who stood here before me, but by the memory of those whom this honor passed by, who could not address, as they say, “urbi et orbi” from this rostrum and whose general silence seems to be seeking and not finds a way out in you.
The only thing that can reconcile you with such a situation is the simple consideration that - for reasons primarily stylistic - a writer cannot speak for a writer, especially a poet for a poet; that if Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, Robert Frost, Anna Akhmatova, Winston Auden were on this podium, they would involuntarily speak for themselves, and perhaps they would also experience some awkwardness.
These shadows constantly confuse me, and they still confuse me today. In any case, they do not encourage me to be eloquent. In my best moments, I seem to myself as if they were the sum of them - but always less than any of them separately. For it is impossible to be better than them on paper; It is impossible to be better than them in life, and it is their lives, no matter how tragic and bitter they are, that make me often - apparently more often than I should - regret the passage of time. If that light exists - and deny them the opportunity eternal life I am no more able than to forget about their existence in this - if that light exists, then I hope they will forgive me the quality of what I am about to expound: after all, the dignity of our profession is not measured by behavior on the podium.
I named only five - those whose work and whose destinies are dear to me, if only because, without them, I would be worth little as a person and as a writer: in any case, I would not be standing here today. They, these shadows, are better: light sources - lamps? stars? - there were, of course, more than five, and any of them could condemn you to absolute muteness. Their number is great in the life of any conscious writer; in my case, it doubles, thanks to the two cultures to which, by the will of fate, I belong. It also doesn’t make matters any easier to think about contemporaries and fellow writers in both of these cultures, about poets and prose writers, whose talents I value above my own and who, if they were on this podium, would have long since gotten down to business, because they have more, what to tell the world than I have.
Therefore, I will allow myself a series of comments - perhaps discordant, confusing and likely to puzzle you with their incoherence. However, the amount of time allotted to me to collect my thoughts and my profession itself will, I hope, protect me, at least partly, from accusations of chaos. A person in my profession rarely pretends to think systematically; at worst, he lays claim to the system. But this, as a rule, is borrowed from his environment, from the social structure, from studying philosophy at a tender age. Nothing convinces an artist more of the randomness of the means he uses to achieve one or another - even if constant - goal than the creative process itself, the process of writing. Poems, according to Akhmatova, really grow from rubbish; the roots of prose are no more noble.
If art teaches something (and the artist first and foremost), it is precisely the particulars of human existence. Being the most ancient - and most literal - form of private enterprise, it, wittingly or unwittingly, encourages in a person precisely his sense of individuality, uniqueness, separateness - turning him from a social animal into a person. Many things can be shared: bread, a bed, beliefs, a lover - but not a poem, say, by Rainer Maria Rilke. Works of art, literature in particular, and poetry in particular, address a person one-on-one, entering into a direct relationship with him, without intermediaries. This is why art in general, literature in particular, and poetry in particular are disliked by the zealots of the common good, the rulers of the masses, the heralds of historical necessity. For where art has passed, where a poem has been read, they discover in the place of the expected agreement and unanimity - indifference and discord, in the place of determination to action - inattention and disgust. In other words, in the zeros with which the zealots of the common good and the rulers of the masses strive to operate, art enters a “dot, dot, comma with a minus,” turning each zero into a human face, if not always attractive.
The great Baratynsky, speaking about his Muse, described her as having “an unusual expression on her face.” Apparently, the meaning of individual existence lies in the acquisition of this non-general expression, for we are already, as it were, genetically prepared for this non-community. Regardless of whether a person is a writer or a reader, his task is to live his own life, and not an imposed or prescribed from the outside, even the most noble-looking life. For each of us has only one, and we know well how it all ends. It would be a shame to waste this only chance on repeating someone else's appearance, someone else's experience, on a tautology - all the more insulting because the heralds of historical necessity, at whose instigation a person is ready to agree to this tautology, will not lie in the grave with him and will not say thank you.
Language and, I think, literature are things more ancient, inevitable, and durable than any form of social organization. Indignation, irony or indifference expressed by literature in relation to the state is, in essence, a reaction of the permanent, or better yet, the infinite, in relation to the temporary, limited. At least as long as the state allows itself to interfere in the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere in the affairs of the state. A political system, a form of social order, like any system in general, is, by definition, a form of the past tense, trying to impose itself on the present (and often the future), and the person whose profession is language is the last one who can afford to forget about this . The real danger for a writer is not only the possibility (often the reality) of persecution by the state, but the possibility of being hypnotized by it, the state, monstrous or undergoing changes for the better - but always temporary - outlines.
The philosophy of the state, its ethics, not to mention its aesthetics, are always “yesterday”; language, literature - always "today" and often - especially in the case of the orthodoxy of a particular system - even "tomorrow". One of the merits of literature is that it helps a person clarify the time of his existence, distinguish himself from the crowd of both his predecessors and his own kind, and avoid tautology, that is, the fate otherwise known under the honorable name “victim of history.” What is remarkable about art in general and literature in particular, is that it differs from life in that it always runs into repetition. In everyday life, you can tell the same joke three times and three times, causing laughter, you can be the soul of the party. In art, this form of behavior is called “cliché.” Art is a recoilless weapon, and its development is determined not by the individuality of the artist, but by the dynamics and logic of the material itself, the previous history of means that require finding (or prompting) each time a qualitatively new aesthetic solution. Possessing its own genealogy, dynamics, logic and future, art is not synonymous, but, at best, parallel to history, and the way of its existence is to create each time a new aesthetic reality. That is why it often turns out to be “ahead of progress,” ahead of history, the main instrument of which is—should we clarify Marx? - just a cliché.