literary matrix. Formatting the "Literature Matrix" (4) School Literature Curriculum: User's Guide

Literary game The most important manifestation creative activity A. M. Remizov and a significant component of the history of Russian culture and literature of the XX century was the “Monkey Great and Free Chamber”. "Obezvelvolpal" took place as an original development of the symbolist idea

2.1. Literary stylistics Normative stylistics embraces language proficiency from the position of “right or wrong”. Exemplary language style represents precisely the “correct”, as it were, “sterile” type of utterance, free from emotional expressiveness that betrays

Fiction and literary criticism 1. Aksakov K. S. A few words about Gogol's poem "The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls» // Gogol in Russian criticism: an anthology / comp. S. G. Bocharov. – M.: Fortuna EL, 2008. 720 p.2. Belinsky V. G. Full. coll. cit.: in 13 vols. Vol. 1: Articles and

LITERARY MATRIX

LITERARY MATRIX

A TEXTBOOK WRITTEN BY WRITERS

In two volumes

LIMBUS PRESS

Saint Petersburg - Moscow

With the participation of the Faculty of Philology of St. Petersburg State University

SCHOOL LITERATURE PROGRAM: USER MANUAL

A post appeared in the Anglo-American LJ bookish community bookish this year: someone - apparently quite old - wrote that he decided to get acquainted with these "The Russians" that everyone is talking about, and finally read "Crime and Punishment", "War and Peace" and "Lolita". According to the results of reading, Dostoevsky was given five stars, and Tolstoy and Nabokov - four and a half. The author of the post asked me to tell him what else to read from the same writers. This, however, is not about the export of Russian spirituality, but about what one of the community members answered the author of the post: rejoice, they say, that you were born in the States - if you were born in Russia, you would have been tortured by these books at school and then you would have hated them all your life.

It must be assumed that it was these “tormented by books at school” who made sure that the compulsory final exam in literature was canceled. Nevertheless, Russian classics remained in the school curriculum. So should you read them or not? And if necessary, then why? In our pragmatic times, when in some countries passports are issued to babies barely born, any advanced student, coming to the first literature lesson in his life, is first of all obliged to twist his face and tell Marivanna that literature will not be useful to him in any way. real life, which means that you don’t need to learn it: they say, tell me better how to write a resume. To the second part of this question, the competent Marivanna should answer that writing a resume is the lot of losers: tough guys do not write resumes, but read and reject other people's. WITH real life more difficult. Honest Marivanna must admit that neither literature, nor, say, astronomy or botany, has ever been of any use to anyone in real life. We confine ourselves, however, to literature. Once again: knowledge of the history of Russian literature is really no practical application does not have.

There is no relationship between the cultural level of a person and his social position. The Canadian Prime Minister once admitted that he only loves hockey and never reads books at all. Whereas the Kremlin eminence grise» Vladislav Surkov, on the contrary, is known as a connoisseur of literature. The same, in general, can be said about the losers: in the intellectual baggage of one, only vague memories of the fairy tale "Turnip" are stored, and the other considers "fat and matches - and eight volumes of Turgenev" to be the main asset.

Moreover, contrary to a common misconception, reading fiction (the plots of which, as it happened historically, are most often built on love polygons) does not help to equip your personal life. On the contrary, book ideas about love scare away the objects of this love (here it is supposed to recall Pushkin's Tatyana, who was brought up on novels and deceptions of "both Richardson and Rousseau"), and then they also turn out to be a source of disappointment ("I thought: he will read poetry to me ...").

Finally, it is necessary to destroy the most persistent prejudice: that reading good literature is such an unconditional pleasure. It is worth admitting that even a small portion of ice cream is clearly capable of delivering much more obvious pleasure than many hours of immersion in some Dead Souls. After all, reading is much more difficult than innocently licking an ice-cream ball. And yet: there is an opinion that it is necessary to read. Why and why?

The first noble truth of Buddhism is: life is suffering. Worldly experience, as it seems, does not give grounds to argue with this statement. Moments of happiness are always short-lived: according to this logic, happiness is nothing more than delayed suffering. Fiction cannot fix this - no book will make a person happy. But it just so happened (ask a historian why), what exactly fiction has become for a reasonable population the globe an accumulator of meaning - what people have understood about life and about themselves over the past couple of millennia. Hundreds of years will pass before cinema or any other hypothetical art of the future will be able to equal the battery of world literature in terms of meaning.

You need to read “War and Peace” not in order to, participating in a TV quiz, smartly answer the question of what color Platon Karataev’s dog was (by the way: you won’t believe it! - It was purple), and not in order to flash an appropriate quote in a smart conversation. And in order to tune your mind to such a wave, on which questions like “who am I?” and "why am I here?" lose their anecdotal coloring. Those who plan to live happily without asking such questions at all are invited to a lesson on writing a resume.

By the way, there are no answers to these questions in any good book. Answers under favorable conditions appear in the reader's head by themselves. Can they, the answers, appear in the head by themselves and without any books? They can. But as we read, the likelihood of their occurrence increases significantly. Thus, one who has studied "War and Peace" or "The History of a City" gets a serious chance not only to live a life full of suffering, but to understand something about the structure of this life. But meaningful suffering is much better than meaningless suffering - everyone knows that mom put in a corner for a fight with her brother, who, by the way, started it first.

The essential difference between reading Russian literature and walking around the museum material culture is that books are not exhibits about which it is curious to learn a couple of fun facts. Books are collected from thoughts and fantasies, doubts and revelations, love and hate, observations and disappointments. living people.("IN literary world there is no death, and the dead also interfere in our affairs and act together with us, just like the living, ”this is not from the script of a Hollywood horror movie, but from an article by the Russian classic Gogol. And this is said about the writers of the previous era, who, according to Gogol, constantly demand "their own definition and a real, correct assessment", "the destruction of the wrong accusation, the wrong definition.") These people, as soon as humanity remembers them for decades, hundreds of years, were exceptional people. And a guarantee that everything they wrote was thought over and written at the limit of seriousness - their difficult fates and often tragic deaths. That is why their works ooze with thought, hot as blood - a thought that breaks the consciousness, not fitting in the brain, and splashes outward, into the texts. You need to take these texts in your hands not like fragments of some jug, but like an old, but formidable weapon (the person who came up with this comparison, a few days later, put a bullet in his temple - the Guess the Quote game began).

In this sense, the very phrase "the study of literature" sounds ridiculous. You can, of course, study the device of the Kalashnikov assault rifle, but it was created not to study it, but to shoot from it. Similarly the same is true of Tolstoy's volume. It takes a lifetime to study the language of War and Peace or the image of Anna Karenina - an occupation no better or worse than others - but these novels were written not so that several drawers in the library catalog were filled with cards marked "Tolstoy, about him", but so that at least one in a hundred readers would lose their peace.

A professional philologist who undertakes to read this collection will have plenty of reasons to twist his face: they say that this and that has already been written about, and this is not consistent with the theory of such and such. A professional philologist will be absolutely right. Russian literature from Griboedov to Solzhenitsyn has been dissected and decomposed into interpretations in many hundreds of volumes, the titles of which contain the words "discourse" and "narrative". A short and simplified summary of what scientists have to tell us about fiction, should, in theory, be contained in school textbook. This textbook is definitely a useful and informative book. It exists in order for its reader to at least remember that Pushkin was born a little earlier than Chekhov, and, as a maximum, what you should pay attention to when reading Turgenev. Then, in order for his reader to build a picture of the history of Russian literature as the history of - isms: classicism - romanticism - realism - symbolism ... And in this sense, the textbook must inevitably be to some extent indifferent to the texts themselves - Platonov's shamanistic, completely mind-blowing prose is just as sweet to him as Chernyshevsky's furiously boring novel.

By the way, there are no answers to these questions in any good book. Answers under favorable conditions appear in the reader's head by themselves. Can they, the answers, appear in the head by themselves and without any books? They can. But as we read, the likelihood of their occurrence increases significantly. Thus, one who has studied "War and Peace" or "The History of a City" gets a serious chance not only to live a life full of suffering, but to understand something about the structure of this life. But meaningful suffering is much better than meaningless suffering - everyone knows that mom put in a corner for a fight with her brother, who, by the way, started it first.

The essential difference between reading Russian literature and walking through a museum of material culture is that books are not exhibits about which it is curious to learn a couple of fun facts. Books are collected from thoughts and fantasies, doubts and revelations, love and hate, observations and disappointments. living people.(“There is no death in the literary world, and the dead also interfere in our affairs and act together with us, just like the living,” this is not from the script of a Hollywood horror film, but from an article by the Russian classic Gogol. And this is said about the writers of the previous era, who, according to Gogol, constantly demand “their own definition and a real, correct assessment”, “the destruction of a wrong accusation, a wrong definition.”) These people, as soon as humanity remembers them for decades, hundreds of years, were people excluded telny. And the guarantee that everything they wrote was thought over and written at the limit of seriousness is their difficult destinies and often tragic deaths. That is why their works ooze with thought, hot as blood - a thought that breaks the consciousness, not fitting in the brain, and splashes outward, into the texts. You need to take these texts in your hands not like fragments of some jug, but like an old, but formidable weapon (the person who came up with this comparison, a few days later, put a bullet in his temple - the Guess the Quote game began).

In this sense, the very phrase "the study of literature" sounds ridiculous. You can, of course, study the device of the Kalashnikov assault rifle, but it was created not to study it, but to shoot from it. The situation is similar with Tolstoy's volume. It takes a lifetime to study the language of War and Peace or the image of Anna Karenina - an occupation no better or worse than others - but these novels were written not so that several drawers in the library catalog were filled with cards marked "Tolstoy, about him", but so that at least one in a hundred readers would lose their peace.

A professional philologist who undertakes to read this collection will have plenty of reasons to twist his face: they say that this and that has already been written about, and this is not consistent with the theory of such and such. A professional philologist will be absolutely right. Russian literature from Griboedov to Solzhenitsyn has been dissected and decomposed into interpretations in many hundreds of volumes, the titles of which contain the words "discourse" and "narrative". A brief and simplified summary of what scientists have to tell us about fiction should, in theory, be contained in a school textbook. This textbook is definitely a useful and informative book. It exists in order for its reader to at least remember that Pushkin was born a little earlier than Chekhov, and, as a maximum, what you should pay attention to when reading Turgenev. Then, in order for his reader to build a picture of the history of Russian literature as the history of - isms: classicism - romanticism - realism - symbolism ... And in this sense, the textbook must inevitably be to some extent indifferent to the texts themselves - Platonov's shamanistic, completely mind-blowing prose is just as sweet to him as Chernyshevsky's furiously boring novel.

The meaning of the appearance of this collection, although the articles in it are arranged in the traditional chronological order, is completely different.

In this sense, they are the same “simple readers” as you and I, but, being writers themselves, by virtue of the structure of their minds, they are able to notice in the books of their colleagues who died in Bose something more, something deeper than the most sophisticated philologist will discover. Returning to the weapon metaphor, we can say that they are not museum workers, and the fighters are at the forefront, and therefore a thorough study of the “Lermontov sword” or the “Babel machine gun” has the most practical meaning for them: you need to be able to use all this arsenal in order to learn how to hit without a miss.