Why did Khrushchev smash the exhibition at the Manege? Khrushchev at the exhibition of avant-garde artists Exhibition in the arena of 1962 paintings

ZIGZAGS OF KHRUSHCHEV'S CULTURAL POLICY

The party leadership took a number of steps aimed at canceling individual decisions taken in the second half of the 40s. and related to national culture. So, on May 28, 1958, the Central Committee of the CPSU approved a resolution "On Correcting Mistakes in Evaluating the Operas The Great Friendship", "Bogdan Khmelnitsky" and "From the Heart"". The document noted that the talented composers D. Shostakovich, S. Prokofiev, A. Khachaturian, V. Shebalin, G. Popov, N. Myaskovsky and others were indiscriminately called representatives of the "anti-people formalist trend." The assessment of the editorial articles of the Pravda newspaper, aimed at the time to criticize these composers, was recognized as incorrect.

Simultaneously with the correction of the mistakes of past years, a real campaign of persecution of the famous writer B. L. Pasternak unfolded at that time. In 1955 he finished the long novel Doctor Zhivago. A year later, the novel was submitted for publication in the journals "New World", "Znamya", in the almanac "Literary Moscow", and also in Goslitizdat. However, the publication of the work was postponed under pious pretexts. In 1956, Pasternak's novel ended up in Italy and was soon published there. This was followed by its publication in the Netherlands and a number of other countries. In 1958, the author of the novel "Doctor Zhi-vago" was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The situation in which Pasternak found himself was, in his words, "tragically difficult." He was forced to refuse the Nobel Prize. On October 31, 1958, Pasternak sent a letter addressed to Khrushchev, in which he spoke of his connection with Russia, emphasizing the impossibility for himself to stay outside the country. On November 2, the writer's note was published in Pravda. The TASS statement was also placed there. It stated that “in the event that B. L. Pasternak wishes to completely leave the Soviet Union, the social system and people of which he slandered in his anti-Soviet essay Doctor Zhivago, then official bodies will not put any obstacles in this. He will be given the opportunity to travel outside the Soviet Union and personally experience all the "charms of the capitalist paradise." By this time, the novel had already been published abroad in 18 languages. Pasternak preferred to stay in the country and not leave it even for a short time. A year and a half later, in May 1960, he died of lung cancer. The "Pasternak case" thus showed the limits of de-Stalinization. The intelligentsia was required to adapt to the existing order and serve them. Those who could not "rebuild" were eventually forced to leave the country. This fate did not bypass the future Nobel laureate poet I. Brodsky, who began writing poetry in 1958, but soon fell out of favor for his independent views on art and emigrated.

Despite the rigid framework in which the authors were allowed to create, in the early 60s. several brilliant works were published in the country, which already then caused a mixed assessment. Among them - the story of A. I. Solzhenitsyn "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich". The work was conceived by the author in the winter of 1950/1951 while at work in the Ekibastuz Special Camp. The decision to publish a story about the life of prisoners was made at a meeting of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU in October 1962 under personal pressure from Khrushchev. At the end of the same year, it was published in Novy Mir, and then in the Soviet Writer publishing house and in Roman-gazeta. Ten years later, all these publications will be destroyed in libraries under secret instructions.

At the end of the 50s. in the Soviet Union, the beginnings of a phenomenon appeared, which a few years later would turn into dissidence. In 1960, the poet A. Ginzburg founded the first "samizdat" magazine called "Syntax", in which he began to publish previously banned works by B. Okudzhava, V. Shalamov, B. Akhmadullina, V. Nekrasov. For agitation aimed at undermining the Soviet system, Ginzburg was sentenced to prison.

Thus, Khrushchev's "cultural revolution" had several facets: from the publication of the works of former prisoners and the appointment in 1960 of the seemingly very liberal E. A. Furtseva as Minister of Culture to the pogrom speeches of the very first secretary of the Central Committee. Indicative in this regard was the meeting of the leaders of the party and government with figures of literature and art, which took place on March 8, 1963. During the discussion of issues of artistic skill, Khrushchev allowed himself rude and unprofessional statements, many of which were simply offensive to creative workers. So, characterizing the self-portrait of the artist B. Zhutovsky, the leader of the party and the head of government directly stated that his work is "an abomination", "horror", "dirty daub", which is "disgusting to look at". The works of the sculptor E. Neizvestny were called by Khrushchev "nauseous cooking". The authors of the film "Ilyich's Outpost" (M. Khutsiev, G. Shpalikov) were accused of depicting "not fighters and not reformers of the world", but "loafers", "half-decayed types", "parasites", "geeks" and " scum." With his ill-conceived statements, Khrushchev only alienated a significant part of society and deprived himself of the credit of trust that he received at the 20th Party Congress.

I.S. Ratkovsky, M.V. Khodyakov. History of Soviet Russia

“NEW REALITY”

On December 1, 1962, an exhibition dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the Moscow branch of the Union of Artists of the USSR (MOSH) was to open in the Moscow Manezh. Part of the exhibition's works was presented by the "New Reality" exposition, a movement of artists organized in the late 1940s by the painter Eliy Belyutin, who continues the traditions of the Russian avant-garde of the early 20th century. Belyutin studied under Aristarkh Lentulov, Pavel Kuznetsov and Lev Bruni.

The art of "New Reality" was based on the "contact theory" - the desire of a person through art to restore a sense of inner balance, disturbed by the influence of the surrounding world with the help of the ability to generalize natural forms, keeping them in abstraction. In the early 1960s, the studio united about 600 Belyutins.

In November 1962, the first exhibition of the studio was organized on Bolshaya Kommunisticheskaya Street. The exhibition was attended by 63 artists of the "New Reality" together with Ernst Neizvestny. The head of the Union of Polish Artists, Professor Raymond Zemsky, and a group of critics managed to specially come to its opening from Warsaw. The Ministry of Culture gave permission for the presence of foreign correspondents, and the next day for a press conference. The TV report about the opening day was held at Eurovision. At the end of the press conference, the artists, without explanation, were asked to take their work home.

On November 30, Dmitry Polikarpov, head of the Department of Culture of the Central Committee, addressed Professor Eliy Belyutin and, on behalf of the newly created Ideological Commission, asked to restore the Taganskaya exhibition in its entirety in a specially prepared room on the second floor of the Manege.

The exposition, made overnight, was approved by Furtseva along with the kindest parting words, the works were taken from the authors' apartments by the Manezh employees and delivered by transport of the Ministry of Culture.

On the morning of December 1, Khrushchev appeared on the threshold of the Manege. At first, Khrushchev began to consider the exposition rather calmly. Over the long years of being in power, he got used to attending exhibitions, got used to how works were arranged according to a once worked out scheme. This time the exposure was different. It was about the history of Moscow painting, and among the old paintings were the very ones that Khrushchev himself banned back in the 1930s. He might not have paid any attention to them if the secretary of the Union of Soviet Artists Vladimir Serov, known for his series of paintings about Lenin, did not talk about the paintings of Robert Falk, Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Drevin, calling them daubs for which museums pay a lot of money workers. At the same time, Serov operated with astronomical prices at the old rate (a currency reform was recently passed).

Khrushchev began to lose control of himself. Mikhail Suslov, a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU on ideological issues, who was present at the exhibition, immediately began to develop the theme of daub, "freaks that artists purposely draw", what the Soviet people need and do not need.

Khrushchev walked around the large hall three times, where the works of 60 artists of the New Reality group were presented. He then rapidly moved from one picture to another, then returned back. He lingered on the portrait of the girl Alexei Rossal: "What is this? Why is there no one eye? This is some kind of morphine drinker!"

Then Khrushchev quickly went to the large composition of Lucian Gribkov "1917". "What is this disgrace, what kind of freaks? Where is the author?" "How could you imagine a revolution like that? What kind of thing is this? Don't you know how to draw? My grandson draws even better." He swore at almost all the paintings, poking his finger and uttering the already familiar, endlessly repeated set of curses.

The next day, December 2, 1962, immediately after the release of the Pravda newspaper with a damning government communiqué, crowds of Muscovites rushed to the Manege to see the reason for the "highest fury", but did not find a trace of the exposition located on the second floor. The paintings by Falk, Drevin, Tatlin and others, cursed by Khrushchev, were removed from the exposition on the first floor.

Khrushchev himself was not pleased with his actions. The handshake of reconciliation took place in the Kremlin on December 31, 1963, where Eliy Belyutin was invited to celebrate the New Year. A short conversation took place between the artist and Khrushchev, who wished him and "his comrades" successful work for the future and "more understandable" painting.

In 1964, "New Reality" began to work in Abramtsevo, through which about 600 artists passed, including from the original artistic centers of Russia: Palekh, Kholuy, Gus-Khrustalny, Dulev, Dmitrov, Sergiev Posad, Yegorievsk.

The "ban on Belyutin" lasted almost 30 years - until December 1990, when, after the appropriate apologies from the government, a grandiose exhibition of "Belyutins" was opened in the party press, which occupied the entire Manege (400 participants, more than 1 thousand works). Until the end of 1990, Belyutin remained "restricted to travel abroad", although his solo exhibitions went on all the years abroad, replacing one another.

“WE” AND “THEY”

Khrushchev's visit with his entourage to the exhibition at the Manezh became a counterpoint to the "fugue" played by Soviet life. The four voices were skillfully combined in the climax by the Academy of Arts of the USSR. Here are the four voices. The first is the general atmosphere of Soviet life, the “thaw” process of political de-Stalinization, which began after the 20th Congress of the CPSU, intensifying the struggle for power and influence between the heirs and the young generation in all strata of Soviet society.

The second is the official artistic life, fully controlled by the USSR Ministry of Culture and the Academy of Arts, a stronghold of socialist realism and the main consumer of budget money allocated for fine arts. The third voice is new trends among the young members of the Union of Artists and their growing influence in the struggle for power in the infrastructure of the Academy. The younger generation, under the influence of a changed moral climate, began to look for ways to depict the “truth of life” (later this trend was called “severe style”). Being inside the official structure of Soviet art and being built into its hierarchy, young artists already held positions in various commissions and exhibition committees, getting used to the state support system. It was in them, as in their successors, that the academicians saw a threat to their weakening power.

And, finally, the fourth voice of the "fugue" - independent and unbiased young artists who earned their living as best they could and made art that they could neither officially show nor officially sell. They could not even buy paints and materials for work, as they were sold only with membership cards of the Union of Artists. In essence, these artists were tacitly declared “outlaws” and were the most persecuted and disenfranchised part of the artistic environment. The apologists for the "severe style" were supercritical towards them (that is, towards us). Characteristically, the angry and indignant indignation of the “severe style” Pavel Nikonov, expressed by him in his speech at the Ideological Conference in the Central Committee of the CPSU at the end of December 1962 (after the exhibition in the Manezh) in relation to “these dudes”: “I was not so much surprised by the fact that, for example, the works of Vasnetsov and Andronov were exhibited in the same room together with the “Belyutins”. I was surprised that my work is there as well. This is not why we went to Siberia. It was not for this that I went with the geologists in the detachment, it was not for this that I was hired there as a worker ... "

The trend, despite the ignorance of the style and the complete mess in the head, is obvious: we (“severe style”) are good real Soviet artists, and they ... are bad, fake and anti-Soviet. And please, dear Ideological Commission, do not confuse us with them. It is necessary to beat "them", not "us".

Whom to beat and why? For example, I was 24 years old in 1962, I had just graduated from the Moscow Polygraphic Institute. I didn't have a workshop, I rented a room in a communal apartment. There was no money for materials either, and at night I stole packing boxes from a furniture store in the yard to make stretchers out of them. During the day he worked for himself, and at night he made book covers to earn some money.

One of the leaders of Soviet unofficial art, the artist Eliy Belyutin, whose works were criticized by Nikita Khrushchev at the 1962 exhibition at the Manege, died at the age of 87 in Moscow.

On December 1, 1962, an exhibition dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the Moscow branch of the Union of Artists of the USSR (MOSH) was to open in the Moscow Manege. Part of the exhibition's works was presented by the "New Reality" exposition, a movement of artists organized in the late 1940s by the painter Eliy Belyutin, who continues the traditions of the Russian avant-garde of the early 20th century. Belyutin studied under Aristarkh Lentulov, Pavel Kuznetsov and Lev Bruni.

On the morning of December 1, Khrushchev appeared on the threshold of the Manezh. At first, Khrushchev began to consider the exposition rather calmly. Over the long years of being in power, he got used to attending exhibitions, got used to how works were arranged according to a once worked out scheme. This time the exposure was different. It was about the history of Moscow painting, and among the old paintings were the very ones that Khrushchev himself banned back in the 1930s. He might not have paid any attention to them if the secretary of the Union of Soviet Artists Vladimir Serov, known for his series of paintings about Lenin, did not talk about the paintings of Robert Falk, Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Drevin, calling them daubs for which museums pay a lot of money workers. At the same time, Serov operated with astronomical prices at the old rate (a currency reform was recently passed).

Then Khrushchev quickly went to the large composition of Lucian Gribkov "1917". "What is this disgrace, what kind of freaks? Where is the author?" "How could you imagine a revolution like that? What kind of thing is this? Don't you know how to draw? My grandson draws even better." He swore at almost all the pictures, poking his finger and uttering the already familiar, endlessly repeated set of curses.

Khrushchev's visit with his entourage to the exhibition at the Manege on December 1, 1962 was the culmination of the "four-part fugue" played by Soviet life, skillfully prepared by the USSR Academy of Arts. These four voices are:

First: The general atmosphere of Soviet life, the process of political de-Stalinization that began after the 20th Congress of the CPSU, which gave a moral impetus to the liberalization of society, the "thaw", according to Ehrenburg, and at the same time intensified the struggle for power and influence between Stalin's heirs and the young generation in all sectors of Soviet society, the entire infrastructure of which has changed little and no longer corresponded to the new trends of real life. Big bosses and local officials were in some confusion and confusion before new trends and did not know how to react to previously unthinkable publications of books and articles, to exhibitions of contemporary Western art (at the World Youth Festival in 1957 in Moscow, to the American Industrial Exhibition, Picasso in the Pushkin Museum). What one hand forbade, the other permitted.

Second: it is the official artistic life, fully controlled by the USSR Ministry of Culture and the Academy of Arts, a stronghold of socialist realism and the main consumer of the country's budget for fine arts. Nevertheless, the Academy became the object of ever-increasing public criticism for glorifying Stalin's personality cult, for distorting and embellishing the picture of real life. The academicians saw a particular danger for themselves from the activated young part of the Union of Artists, which openly began to demonstrate its opposition to the Academy in the spirit of the times. All this gave rise to panic among academics. They were afraid of losing their power and influence and their privileges, of course, primarily material ones.

The third voice is the new trends among the young members of the Union of Artists and their growing influence in the struggle for power in the infrastructure of the Union of Artists and the Academy. This young generation, under the influence of the changed moral climate, began to look for ways to depict the "truth of life", which later became known as the "severe style". This manifested itself in greater thematic freedom, but with dead-end problems in the field of pictorial language. Grown in the nurseries of conservative academic universities, in the traditions of the realistic school of the late 19th century, completely cut off from the real contemporary artistic life of the West, they aesthetically and intellectually could not tear themselves away from this school and made timid attempts to embellish the “corpse”, somehow aestheticize their miserable and a dead language with examples of poorly assimilated post-Cézannism or some kind of homegrown pseudo-Russian decorativism or bad taste in stylization of ancient Russian art. It all looked very provincial.

Being within the official structure of Soviet art and being built into its hierarchy, they already held positions in various commissions and exhibition committees with a habit of the state support system (free creative dachas, regular state purchases of works from exhibitions and workshops, creative business trips, publications and monographs for state account and many other advantages and benefits that ordinary Soviet hard workers never dreamed of, with whom these artists constantly emphasized the blood connection). It was in them, as in their heirs, that the academicians saw a threat to their weakening power.

And finally, the fourth “voice of the fugue” is the independent and unbiased art of young artists who earned their living as best they could and made art that they could neither officially show, since all the exposition sites were under the control of the Union of Artists and the Academy, nor officially sell for the same reasons. They could not even buy paints and materials for work, as they were sold only with membership cards of the Union of Artists. In essence, these artists were tacitly declared “outlaws” and were the most persecuted and disenfranchised part of the artistic environment, or rather, simply thrown out of it. Typical is the angry and indignant indignation of one of the apologists for the “severe style” of the Moscow Union of Artists, P. Nikonov, expressed by him in his speech at the Ideological Conference in the Central Committee of the CPSU at the end of December 1962 (after the exhibition in the Manezh) in relation to, as he put it, “these dudes ”: “I was not so much surprised by the fact that, for example, together with the Belyutins, the works of Vasnetsov and Andronov were exhibited in the same room. I was surprised that my work is there as well. This is not why we went to Siberia. This is not why I went with the geologists in the detachment, not for this I was hired there as a worker. Not for this, Vasnetsov is very seriously and consistently working on questions of form that are necessary for him in his further growth. This is not why we brought our works to be hung along with works that, in my opinion, have nothing to do with painting.” Looking ahead 40 years, I note that in the permanent exhibition "The Art of the 20th Century" in the State Tretyakov Gallery, my work "Dialogue" of 1961 and his "Geologists" are now hanging in the same room (which, probably, he is very dissatisfied with).

Another quote from this speech: “This is false sensational art, it does not follow a direct path, but looks for loopholes and tries to address its works not to that professional public, where they should have received a worthy meeting and condemnation, but are addressed to those aspects of life that have nothing to do with the serious issues of painting.

P. Nikonov, already a member of the exhibition committee and the “chief” in the Moscow Union of Artists, knew perfectly well that all paths to the professional public through the exhibition halls were cut off for us, but nevertheless, not knowing our works, the “professional public” was ready for “ worthy meeting” and “condemnation”.

The trend, despite the illiteracy of style and complete mess in the head, is obvious: we ("severe style") are good, real Soviet artists, and they ("Belyutins", as he called all the others, without making a difference between Belyutin's studios and independent artists ) - bad, fake and anti-Soviet; and please, dear Ideological Commission, do not confuse us with them. It is necessary to beat "them", not "us". Whom to beat and why? At that time I was 24 years old, I had just graduated from the Moscow Polygraphic Institute. I didn't have a workshop, I rented a room in a communal apartment. I had no money for materials, and at night I stole packing boxes from a furniture store in the yard to make stretchers out of them. I worked on my stuff during the day and made book covers at night to earn some money. The things that I did at that time, I showed in the Manege. These are the six-meter pentaptych No. 1 "Nuclear Plant" (now in the Ludwig Museum in Cologne), the three-meter triptych No. 2 "Two Principles" (now in the Zimmerli Museum in the USA) and a series of oils "Theme and Improvisation".

There were only two or three dozen "them" - independent artists in Moscow, and they were of various directions depending on their culture and outlook on life, philosophy and aesthetic preferences. From the continuation of the traditions of the Russian avant-garde of the beginning of the century, surrealism, Dadaism, abstract and social expressionism, and up to the development of original forms of artistic language.

I repeat, for all the differences in aesthetic and philosophical preferences, the level of talent and lifestyle of these artists, they had one thing in common: they were thrown out of the official artistic life of the USSR, or rather, they were not “let in” there. Naturally, they were looking for ways to show their works, they were ready for discussions, but not at the level of political investigation. Their names are now well known, and many have already become classics of contemporary Russian art. I will name just a few: Oscar Rabin, Vladimir Weisberg, Vladimir Yakovlev, Dmitry Krasnopevtsev, Eduard Steinberg, Ilya Kabakov, Oleg Tselkov, Mikhail Shvartsman, Dmitry Plavinsky, Vladimir Nemukhin and others.

In the early 1960s, under the influence of a changing social atmosphere, individual semi-legal displays of their works became possible in apartments, research institutes, but always in places not covered by the control of the Academy of Arts and the Union of Artists. Some of the works through Polish and Czech art critics who came to Moscow began to get to exhibitions in Poland, Czechoslovakia and further to Germany and Italy. Unexpectedly, the Moscow city committee of the Komsomol organized the "Club of creative universities", either to give students the opportunity to demonstrate their creativity, or to control and manage them.

In any case, the first exhibition of this club in the lobby of the Yunost Hotel in the spring of 1962 aroused great interest and resonance. I exhibited there the triptych No. 1 "Classic", 1961 (now it is in the Ludwig Museum in Budapest). The authorities were somewhat confused. In an environment of de-Stalinization, they did not know what exactly should be banned and what should not, and how to react in general. At the same time, at the invitation of the Faculty of Chemistry of Moscow State University, Ernst Neizvestny and I made an exhibition in the recreation area of the faculty in the building of Moscow State University on the Lenin Hills. There were other similar exhibitions with the participation of independent artists.

The semi-official activities of the studio of Eliy Belyutin, a former teacher at the Moscow Polygraphic Institute, whose student I was in my first year (57/58), can also be attributed to this unbiased part of Soviet artistic life. Belyutin was expelled from the institute by professors, the former "formalists" of the 1920s and 30s, headed by Andrei Goncharov, who were afraid of his growing influence. They themselves were persecuted at one time, they staged a shameful and cynical judgment over Belyutin in the presence of students in the best traditions of that era and forced him to resign due to professional incompetence. Then Belyutin organized a studio, as he himself said, “upgrading qualifications”: “I worked with graphic artists, applied artists and wanted these classes to help them in their work. I was happy when I saw that new fabrics with patterns of my students appeared, beautiful advertising posters made by them, or new models of clothes appeared on the streets of Moscow. I was pleased to see books with their illustrations in stores. In fact, of course, he was cunning: it was an officially acceptable version of the activities of his studio and it was said in self-defense. His activities as a teacher were much wider. He was an outstanding teacher and tried to realize his potential by teaching the ABCs of contemporary art to the students, which no one did and could not do in any official art school in the country. The studio was very popular, several hundred studio members visited it at different times, but, unfortunately, most of them learned only the techniques and cliches of modern art that could be used in practical work, without understanding anything in essence in the Belyutin method, about which he spoke to me bitterly.

Nevertheless, the very atmosphere of the studio and the aura of its teacher, the exercises that he gave, were a window into contemporary art, in contrast to the wretched and obscurantist atmosphere of the official Soviet artistic life, the tastes of the Academy and the Moscow Union of Artists. The whole tragedy of the position of Eliy Belyutin, who was forced to constantly mimic in order to be able to continue his work and not be destroyed, can be understood by reading the nonsense that he was forced to speak in the hope of saving the studio after the exhibition in the Manege: “... I am firmly convinced of that there are no and cannot be abstractionists among Soviet artists ... ”, etc. in the same vein.

In an atmosphere of uncertainty in maintaining their dominant positions, the academicians were looking for a way to discredit the forces that really threatened their position. And the opportunity presented itself. The case, which they considered almost as the last bastion on which they could fight their competitors. They decided to use this bastion as a jubilee exhibition in the Manezh dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the Moscow Union of Artists. At this exhibition, among others, the work of the “formalists” of the 1930s, and the work of the new and dangerous youth from the “left” MOSH, were to be presented. The visit of the exhibition by the leadership of the country was expected. It is not entirely clear here whether this was a planned visit or whether the academicians were able to organize it somehow. In any case, they decided to make the most of this visit and incite their competitors, far from the problems of art and having a primitive idea of it, the leaders of the party and government, using the methods of Soviet party demagoguery that were well known to them.

Quite unexpectedly, fate played along with them, throwing a gift. We are talking about a semi-official exhibition of Belyutin's studio, which took place in the second half of November 1962 in the Teacher's House (I don't remember exactly the name of this institution) on Bolshaya Kommunisticheskaya Street. In order to give this exhibition more weight and the character of an artistic event, Belyutin invited four artists who were not his studio members to participate in it. He asked me to introduce him to Ernst Neizvestny, with whom we met and agreed to participate in this exhibition in his workshop on Sretenka. First, he invited Neizvestny and me, and then, on our recommendation, Hulot Sooster and Yuri Sobolev.

In this square hall on Bolshaya Kommunisticheskaya on Taganka, approximately 12 x 12 meters in size and six meters high, there was a trellis hanging of the studio's works in many rows, from floor to ceiling. The works of the three guests stood out: the sculptures of the Unknown stood throughout the hall, the paintings of Sooster, each of which was small in size (50 x 70 cm), in total occupied a prominent place and were very different from the works of the studios. My pentaptych "Nuclear Plant", six meters long, occupied most of the wall and also did not look like studio work. The works of the fourth guest, Yuri Sobolev, were lost, as he exhibited several small drawings on paper, which were not noticeable against the general background of the painting. The exhibition ran for three days and became a sensation. She was visited by the entire color of the Soviet intelligentsia - composers, writers, filmmakers, scientists. I remember a conversation with Mikhail Romm, who became interested in my "Nuclear Plant" (I think because of the thematic connection with his film "Nine Days of One Year") and asked to come to the studio, but never called.

Foreign journalists made a film, which was shown in America the very next day. Local chiefs did not know how to react, since there were no direct orders, and the police, just in case, out of inertia, “pressed” on journalists - they punctured tires in their cars, made holes in their rights, allegedly for some kind of violations. The excitement around the exhibition of "amateur art", and even with the great attention of foreign journalists, was a complete surprise for the authorities, and while they were choking and sorting it out, it ended successfully. On the third day, we took the work home. In the last days of November, four of us - Neizvestny, Sooster, Sobolev and me - were invited to make an exhibition in the lobby of the Yunost Hotel. Invitation cards were printed and sent out, the works were hung up, and when the first guests began to arrive, some people from the Komsomol city committee, under whose auspices this exhibition was organized, appeared and began to babble something in confusion about the fact that, they say, the exhibition is a discussion one, there is no need to open it to the public, let's discuss tomorrow how to make a discussion, etc., etc. We understood that something had happened that changed the situation, but we didn’t know what exactly.

The next day, a whole delegation appeared, which, after long and meaningless conversations, suddenly offered us a hall where we could hang our exhibition and then hold a discussion, inviting everyone we wished to it, and they were “ours”. They immediately gave us a truck with loaders, loaded the work and brought, to our amazement ... to the Manege, where we met Belyutin with his students hanging their work in the next room. It was November 30th.

This was the gift that the academicians received from fate, or rather, as we later understood, they organized it for themselves. It was they who decided to lure the participants of the exhibition on Bolshaya Kommunisticheskaya to the Manege, giving them three separate rooms on the second floor, in order to introduce them to the country's leadership, allegedly as members of the Union of Artists and participants in the exhibition "30 Years of the Moscow Union of Artists", who treacherously undermined the foundations of the Soviet state system. This, of course, was a blatant falsification, since only one student of Belyutin was a member of the Moscow Union of Artists, and of the four of us, only Ernst Neizvestny, who, by the way, was also represented at the anniversary exhibition.

We ourselves hung the work all day and all night. The workers immediately got drunk, and we drove them away. I still managed to paint with gouache the podiums under the sculptures of the Unknown. No one understood what was happening and why there was such a rush. At night, members of the Politburo, Minister of Culture Furtseva, came, silently and preoccupiedly walked around our halls, of course, they did not greet us or speak to us. When at night we were given questionnaires to fill out and told to come by 9 am with our passports, we found out that a party and government delegation would come.

At 5 am we went home. Ernst asked me to lend him a tie (I had one) because he wanted to be in a suit. We agreed to meet at the Universitet metro station at 8 am. I overslept, he woke me up with a phone call. He came up to me for a tie, was clean-shaven, powdered, eyes excited: "I did not sleep all night, sat in a hot bath, played the situation," he told me. We went to the Manege.

The plan of the academicians was as follows: first, to lead Khrushchev and the whole company along the first floor and, using his incompetence and well-known taste preferences, provoke his negative reaction to the already dead "formalists" of the 1930s in the historical part of the exhibition, then smoothly transfer this reaction to their own young opponents from the "left" Moscow Union of Artists, focusing Khrushchev's discontent on them, and then bring him to the second floor to consolidate the defeat of the "opposition", presenting the artists exhibited there as an extremely reactionary and dangerous for the state prospect of liberalization in the field of ideology.

So, the drama developed exactly according to the script prepared by the academics. The passage through the first floor was accompanied by admiration for the achievements of the academicians, an ironic reaction accompanied by collective loyal laughter at Khrushchev’s “witty” jokes and his statements about Falk and other dead, a very negative reaction to the “severe style” of the young leftist MOSKh and a prepared outburst of indignation towards “ traitors to the motherland”, as they were presented by the academicians, exhibited on the second floor.

When the whole procession led by Khrushchev began to climb the stairs to the second floor, we, who were standing on the upper platform and did not understand anything about what was happening, naively assuming that Khrushchev’s visit would open a new page in cultural life and we would be “recognized”, according to Belyutin’s idea (“We must greet them, after all, the Prime Minister”), they began to applaud politely, to which Khrushchev cut us off rudely: “Stop clapping, go, show your daub!”, went to the first hall, where the students of the studio were presented Belyutin.

Entering the hall, Khrushchev immediately began to yell and look for the "instigators" of the exhibition on Bolshaya Kommunisticheskaya. There were two epicenters of the conversation: with Belyutin and with Unknown. In addition, there were curses and threats addressed to everyone, and, on the periphery of the event, a few point questions to the students of the studio, on whose work, standing in the middle of the hall, Khrushchev's finger accidentally pointed. It is strange that this drama is so frivolously, in the style of a soap opera, focusing on the endless repetitions of the word "faggots", described by several peripheral participants who accidentally fell into the "focus" of Khrushchev's attention, or rather, his finger.

The episodes I remember were:

Khrushchev, after an angry tirade addressed to all artists, sternly asks Belyutin: “Who allowed you to arrange an exhibition on Bolshaya Kommunisticheskaya Street and invite foreign journalists?” Belyutin, justifying himself: "They were correspondents of communist and progressive press organs." Khrushchev exclaims: "All foreigners are our enemies!" One of the Belyutinites asks why Khrushchev is so negative about their work, while he himself opened the process of de-Stalinization in the country. To which Khrushchev is very firm: "As for art, I am a Stalinist."

Unknown is trying to prove something. Minister of State Security Shelepin wants to shut his mouth: “Where do you get bronze?” Unknown: "In the garbage dumps I find water taps." Shelepin: "Well, we'll check that." Unknown: "Why are you scaring me, I can come home and shoot myself." Shelepin: "Don't scare us." Unknown: "Don't scare me." Khrushchev to everyone: “You are deceiving the people, traitors to the Motherland! Everyone to logging! Then, having changed his mind: "Write applications to the government - all foreign passports, we will take you to the border, and - on all four sides!"

He stands in the center of the hall, surrounded by members of the Politburo, ministers, academicians. The white face of Furtseva attentively listening to dirty swearing, the green angry face of Suslov sprinkled with dandruff, the satisfied faces of academicians.

Khrushchev randomly points his finger at one, another work: “Who is the author?” He asks for a surname, says a few words, but this already refers more to the biography of those randomly selected than to the drama of the event itself. I repeat, the main attackers were the head of the studio E. Belyutin and E. Neizvestny.

Then everyone, following Khrushchev, smoothly flowed into the second hall, where the works of Hulo Sooster (one wall), Yuri Sobolev (several drawings) and my three walls were exhibited - the pentaptych "Nuclear Plant" of 1962, triptych No. 2 "Two Principles" 1962 and twelve oils from the Theme and Improvisation cycle, also 1962. First, Khrushchev saw the work of Sooster:

Hulot out.

What's the last name? What are you drawing?

Yulo began, from excitement with a very strong Estonian accent, to explain something. Khrushchev tensed: what kind of foreigner is this? In his ear: "Estonian, was in the camp, released in 1956." Khrushchev lagged behind Sooster and turned to my work. Pointed his finger at triptych number 2:

I went.

What's the last name?

Yankilevsky.

Obviously didn't like it.

What is this?

Triptych No. 2 "Two Beginnings".

No, it's a daub.

No, this is triptych No. 2 "Two Beginnings".

No, this is a daub - but not so sure, because I saw two quotes from Piero della Francesca - a portrait of Senor de Montefeltro and his wife, collaged into a triptych. Khrushchev did not understand whether I painted it or not. In general, he was a little confused and, having received no support from the academicians, he moved to another room.

I was so shocked by all the absurdity and inexplicable injustice of what was happening to me that, out of naivety, I was ready to enter into a discussion with Khrushchev about art, but I knew that in the next room Ernst was preparing very seriously for a conversation with Khrushchev, and for compositional reasons I decided not to start discussion, leaving it to the director Neizvestny. (When I later told Ernst about this, he was very surprised: “Have you thought about this?”) I could not understand what my fault was before the state. Khrushchev spoke to us as if we were caught red-handed by enemy saboteurs. I was 24 years old (I was the youngest exhibited in the Manezh) and, living in poverty, did these things, which, frankly, I was very pleased with and which now, after forty years, I consider one of the best of what I did, and why does it cause such an embittered, unmotivated reaction?

So, everyone moved to the third hall, where the sculptures of the Unknown were exhibited. Lebedev, Khrushchev's adviser, through whom Tvardovsky lobbied (punched?) permission to print Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Day of Ivan Denisovich, lingered near the Nuclear Power Plant and began to reassure Hulot and me that, they say, the work is talented and everything will work out. In the hall of the Unknown, academicians began to attack him over Khrushchev's head, feeling that the decisive moment had come. Ernst interrupted them, saying rather sharply: “And you shut up, I’ll talk to you later. Here Nikita Sergeevich listens to me and does not swear. Khrushchev smiled and said, "Well, I don't always swear." Then Khrushchev cited many examples of good, as he understood, art, recalling Solzhenitsyn, and Sholokhov, and the song "Rushnichok", and trees painted by someone, where the leaves were as if alive. The nature of the dialogue with the Unknown changed: at first Khrushchev spoke more, then Ernst mastered the situation and himself began to lead Khrushchev around the hall, giving, for example, such explanations: "These are wings symbolizing flight." He showed several official projects and a monument to Gagarin, and Khrushchev began to listen with interest. The academics were very nervous, they obviously missed the initiative. Having finished the tour, Khrushchev said goodbye to Ernst by the hand and said quite kindly: “There is an angel and a devil in you. We like the angel, but we will eradicate the devil from you. This ended the meeting.

We didn't know what to expect. Just in case, I collected my notebooks and took them to my friend Vita Pivovarov. Then he went to his parents to warn them about possible repressions. When I said that “we will take you to the border and - on all four sides,” my mother suddenly exclaimed: “Will they really let me out ?!”

A few days later, I learned that the Belyutins wrote a letter to the Central Committee, where they explained that they wanted to sing the "beauty of the Russian woman." This was quoted indignantly in the Pravda newspaper. How events developed further is fairly well known. Meeting with artists at the government dacha, where I, having already understood everything, refused to give my works, then a meeting of the Ideological Commission of the Central Committee with young cultural workers, where I was and with surprise and curiosity watched the farce of "benevolent" criticism of alien trends in Soviet art and loyal and justifying speeches of many cultural figures. Here is a quote from a speech by B. Zhutovsky, one of Belyutin's studio students, pointed out by Khrushchev's finger: "I believe that my works exhibited at the exhibition in the Manezh are formalistic and deserve the fair party criticism that they received." And further: “I am grateful to the party and the government for the fact that, despite all our serious mistakes, we have been given the opportunity in a healthy creative environment to discuss the most important issues in the development of our art and help us find the right path in it.” Then the triumph of the Stalinist academicians and their victory over the "left" Moscow Union of Artists. We, the "independents", were recognized as existing for the first time, having brought down on us a flurry of newspaper and magazine abuse. It became difficult to get orders from publishing houses, I had to work under a pseudonym. But this victory was decorative, it no longer corresponded to the dynamics of the liberalization of society.

After two or three years, interesting books and translations began to appear, exhibitions continued at research institutes, and concerts of contemporary music continued. It was already impossible to stop, despite any prohibitions.

Vladimir Yankilevsky,
Paris, February 2003

Arena. Weekly Journal, 2003, No. 45. Memoirs of the Manezh Exhibition, 1962. In: Zimmerli Journal, Fall 2003, No.1. Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. P. 67-78.

The birthday number 4 symbolizes a balanced, hardworking nature, cautious, avoiding risky ventures. A capable person, with your own ideas, plans, you try to figure everything out on your own, without outside help.

Your motto is reliability, firmness, honesty. You must not be deceived, but you yourself must avoid self-deception.

4 - the number of seasons, the number of elements, the number of cardinal directions. Number 4 people often look at things from their own special point of view, which allows them to find details hidden from the rest. At the same time, this often causes them to disagree with the majority and clash with others. They rarely strive for material success, being not too friendly, they are often lonely. They have the best relations with people of numbers 1, 2, 7 and 8.

Lucky day of the week for number 4 - Wednesday

European zodiac sign Sagittarius

Dates: 2013-11-23 -2013-12-21

The Four Elements and their Signs are distributed as follows: Fire(Aries, Leo and Sagittarius) Earth(Taurus, Virgo and Capricorn) Air(Gemini, Libra and Aquarius) and Water(Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces). Since the elements help to describe the main character traits of a person, by including them in our horoscope, they help to get a more complete picture of a particular person.

The features of this element are warmth and dryness, which are accompanied by metaphysical energy, life and its strength. There are 3 signs in the Zodiac that have these qualities, the so-called. fire trine (triangle): Aries, Leo, Sagittarius. The fire trine is considered a creative trine. Principle: action, activity, energy.
Fire is the main governing force of instinct, spirit, thought and mind, forcing you to go forward, to believe, to hope, to defend your convictions. The main driving force of Fire is ambition. Fire gives zeal, impatience, carelessness, self-confidence, irascibility, impetuosity, arrogance, courage, courage, militancy. In the human body, it maintains life, is responsible for the temperature regime and stimulates the metabolism.
People whose horoscopes highlight the trine of the element of Fire have a choleric temperament. These people will never go unnoticed, they will achieve the recognition of others, especially in the environment that is close to them in spirit and ideologically connected with them. These people have a creative spirit and unshakable will, inexhaustible "Martian energy" and outstanding penetrating power. The element of Fire gives organizational talent, a thirst for activity and enterprise.
The peculiarity of the people of this trigon is the ability to be inspired and be devoted to an idea, cause, partner, up to self-sacrifice. They are brave, courageous and courageous. The rise of their soul and their inherent business activity help them reach the heights both in the spiritual and material spheres. They get real pleasure from their activities, are proud of the results of their work and expect universal recognition.
Fire people are innate leaders who love and know how to lead and order. They are, as it were, charged with a cosmic electrical voltage of a certain polarity, which they transmit to others in the form of attraction or repulsion, which keeps the people around them in constant tension and excitement. They try to win personal freedom, independence and independence, which is dearest to them, already at an early age. But there is one paradox: they do not like to obey and do not want to, but their ability to adapt to various circumstances is excellently developed.
They have strongly expressed such character traits as perseverance, perseverance, self-affirmation, waywardness, intransigence. Anyone who is associated with a person of the trine of Fire in partnerships knows well that these people always stick to their line. They can be chief conductors, performers of the main roles, but never extras. It is simply impossible to subordinate them to someone else's will, only they will command the parade and lead, although often from behind the scenes. They recognize only wise and just autocracy and most of all hate despotism and tyranny in any of their forms.
The people of the trine of Fire at first quickly “light up”, are inspired by new ideas and people, without much hesitation, immediately get involved in the matter, involving their entire environment in it to achieve the goal they set, which comes to them from outside, or is born in them. But they also quickly cool off to an already begun, old business, if they are inspired by a new, more significant idea for them, or if the business takes on a protracted nature and requires constant effort. These are people of a jerk, an impulse, waiting for them is like death. Fire is that creative force that can lift them up to the "seventh heaven" or "throw them into the abyss."
People belonging to the elements of Fire must restrain their negative character traits, especially ardor and impetuosity, militancy and aggressiveness. They must avoid conflict situations and confrontation with the outside world, so as not to harm their idea, for which they are fighting, not their cause, the implementation of which they dream.
The children of this trine are difficult to educate, often not amenable to education at all, and in order to have at least the slightest result in working with them, specific methods of education have to be applied. Violence and coercion are categorically excluded, as this causes stubbornness, obstinacy and resistance in them. They can only be approached with love and affection, with warmth and gentleness of the heart, it is very important to be fair with them, never deceive them, never belittle their self-esteem.

Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces. The mutable cross is the cross of reason, connection, adaptation, distribution. The main quality is the transformation of the idea. He is always here and now, that is, in the present. It gives mobility, flexibility, adaptability, complaisance, duality. People in whose horoscopes the Sun, Moon or most of the personal planets are in mutable signs have diplomatic abilities. They have a flexible mind, subtle intuition. They tend to be very cautious, prudent, alert and constantly in a state of expectation, which helps them adapt to any situation. The main thing for them is to have information. When they feel not very competent or informed in any matter, they are excellent at dodging and dodging everyone and everything, although they are considered the most knowledgeable of the entire Zodiac. They are sociable, courteous, talkative, are interesting interlocutors. They easily and skillfully lose ground, confess their mistakes and mistakes, agree with their opponents, interlocutors. People of the mutable cross strive for inner harmony, concord, mediation and cooperation, but are subject to strong internal unrest and outside influence. Their biggest passion is curiosity, which keeps them in constant motion. Their views and worldview are rather unstable and depend on the environment. Often they do not have their own point of view. This partly explains the reasons for their imbalance and inconstancy, changes in their lives. The true goals and plans of these people are difficult to predict, but they almost unmistakably guess the plans of others. They use any opportunity that can bring them benefit or profit, skillfully manage to bypass the blows of fate. People of the mutable cross are born realists. To achieve their goal, they use numerous friends, buddies, neighbors, relatives, colleagues, even unfamiliar people. Life crises are easily experienced and quickly forgotten. If there is no direct path to a life goal, then they will take a circuitous path, considering each step, bypassing all visible sharp corners, bypassing all pitfalls. What helps them with their natural cunning and cunning, flattery and deceit, the ability to cheat. Mutable signs will help out of any emergency, unusual situation, such a situation will not make them nervous, they will only feel their element in which they can finally act. At the same time, their psyche and nervous system are very unstable. Serious obstacles can quickly put them out of action, unsettle them and push back the achievement of the goal. In this case, they do not resist, but go with the flow.

Sagittarius is Fire in the third zone, Fire transforming, mutable, undergoing metamorphosis, in which the elements of the Earth appear. On the outer plane, Sagittarius has a lot of Fire, and on the inner plane, the element of Earth begins to sound in them. The main formative planet of Sagittarius is Jupiter. The symbol of Sagittarius is a Centaur with a bow and arrow, whose arrow is directed upwards to the new, higher, spiritual.
This is a very interesting sign, complex and, to some extent, contradictory, even in designation: the Centaur is a man-horse. At best, it's a horse man, at worst, it's a "horse man," meaning you start with hooves, legs, and somehow have "something" on top. Here there is a merger of two hypostases, two halves: the animal, human and higher, spiritual hypostasis. Earth in this sign forms conservatism, the desire to protect the old and sometimes the unwillingness to create the new.

You are very impulsive and generally generous. Even with varying degrees of openness and closeness, you can have a very open soul. You can be too frank and sociable, you are distinguished by independence, excitement and always strive for freedom. Such is the manifestation of the element of Fire and its influence on the spiritual structure. On the inner level, the element of the Earth manifests itself in you, therefore, in your actions you are often conservative, striving for what has already been accumulated and firmly established. If you enter a new field of activity or science, then only when there is already some stability there, a new platform has appeared. Headlong, in completely new circumstances, you will never go anywhere, so in extreme situations you protect everything old, everything traditional and strong - that you can rely on. You are capable even in the name of the old of destroying the new, emerging, even that which appears in your inner world.
It should be noted that you usually plan your place under the Sun, knowing in advance where you will go, what you will do, plan your field of activity in life, and the combination of Earth and Fire gives you simply inflexibility. In general, you are usually very fond of teaching, especially at the lowest, devoid of intelligence, level. In the case of a higher development, this quality is hidden and used more constructively. Therefore, among Sagittarius we find many teachers and teachers. You can easily win over those around you.

You are most likely a charming person, and this, as a rule, is not related to appearance. You may be ugly, but charm comes from you. The smile that flashes on your face transforms you and lights up the whole environment. But, on the other hand, you are very scrupulous about your interests. When it comes to your personal interests, it is better not to have anything to do with you, because in the lowest and average case you wake up the lowest animal in yourself and can show the worst horse qualities: hit your head, croup, kick. So in critical situations it is better not to contact you.
When you work as a boss, relations with you are rather difficult, but in a high case you can always find a common human language with you. If we talk about your worst manifestations, then it can be a love of awards and honors. You love to “shoot” rewards. In our history there was such a Sagittarius - L.I. Brezhnev, and we all know and have seen what Sagittarius are, who have reached the heights of power, without having internal spiritual grounds for this. Sagittarius have problems with speech, with the word, so the well-known Sagittarius Brezhnev spoke badly. In the highest case, you are a highly spiritual person, you can be a priest who adheres to the divine, cosmic hierarchy given by God. On an even higher level, you can even be a cosmic, high spiritual Teacher, a conductor of the cosmic high spiritual Law, a person who has the moral and spiritual right to teach. You are capable of being a missionary selflessly spreading spiritual knowledge. Without Sagittarius, our world would become spiritually poor and flawed. At the intermediate level, Sagittarius is a boss, often conservative, who gives orders with ease and is very fond of creating ideological structures. At a low level, this is a bureaucrat, and on the one hand, he is characterized by servility and servility, and on the other hand, he can be an upstart and an adventurer who achieves his post by the most unseemly means. Your main spiritual problem is to work out the lower principle in yourself, to subdue “ horse” to “man”, because in the centaur “horse” sometimes manifests itself in the most terrible and obscene form. Your karmic task is to bring people a high ideology. You launch your arrow into spiritual heights, and thus gain access to spiritual knowledge and systems that you must karmically carry out in our physical manifestation.

Heading in the newspaper: TO THE ORIGINS OF THE SIXDECASS, No. 2018 / 43, 11/23/2018, author: Evgeny MILYUTIN

December 1, 1962 at the exhibition of avant-garde artists from the studio of Eliy Belyutin in the Moscow Manege, there was a huge scandal. The head of state Nikita Khrushchev did not like the pictures.

“I tell you as Chairman of the Council of Ministers: the Soviet people do not need all this. You see, I'm telling you! … Deny! Ban everything! Stop this mess! I order! I say! And follow everything! And on radio, and on television, and in the press, uproot all fans of this!

The post-war generation, which drew knowledge about the history of the USSR from textbooks, over which the censors and retouchers worked hard, should have perceived Belyutin's experiments as something strange and, possibly, alien. Studio "New Reality" preached the ideas of Suprematists and Constructivists, in the 1960s. already forgotten.

But N. Khrushchev and the leader of agitprop M. Suslov, who accompanied him, could not but know that Belyutin’s “vanguard” was in fact a breakthrough ... back to the Soviet past, when the leaders of the world revolution sought to give the workers a special “proletarian culture”.

She saw Lenin!

But Khrushchev, as a former Trotskyist, saw something else.

The views of E. Belyutin, who from 1954 taught courses at the Moscow City Committee of Graphic Artists, of course, were never a secret to the agitprop authorities. Shortly before the scandal, an American film was made about his studio. The authorities encouraged the international contacts of the New Reality, since interest in our art was seen as a way to soften the severity of the Cold War.

Then what went wrong?

Was Khrushchev's anger a spontaneous reaction of the ignoramus and fool, as he is often portrayed, or do we simply not understand the rational motives of his act?

I will offer my version of what happened at the end of the article, but now let's remember who the "sixties" are. What planet did they come from?

Among the people, the ideas of the proletarian culture have always been perceived as alien.

However, in the USSR there was a social environment imbued with nostalgia for just such a creative source.

One of the most famous members of the sixties, Bulat Shalvovich Okudzhava was born in 1924 into a family of Bolsheviks who came from Tiflis to Moscow to study at the Communist Academy.

His uncle Vladimir Okudzhava once belonged to the anarchists, and then accompanied Lenin in a sealed carriage.

In 1937, Bulat Okudzhava's father, who rose to the rank of secretary of the Tiflis city committee, was executed on charges of a Trotskyist conspiracy. Mother until 1947 was in the camp. Other relatives were also subjected to repression.

The creative start of Bulat Okudzhava came in 1956, and, as in the case of the exhibition in the Manezh, we will not see in the 32-year-old poet, a front-line soldier with a crippled childhood, in the truest sense of the word "youth".

A mature original lyricist stepped into literature, overnight becoming an icon of the style of the Soviet intelligentsia. In any case, Okudzhava gave this style "Okudzhava with a guitar."

But if suddenly, someday, I fail to save myself,

Whatever new battle would shake the globe of the earth,

I'll still fall on that one, on that one and only Civil,

And the commissars in dusty helmets will bow silently over me.

"Sentimental March" was written in 1957, when the "sixties" movement had not yet been born. “Commissars in dusty helmets” are, of course, they, the sixties.

But this does not mean that Okudzhava himself was such a commissar. His poetry is always about something deeper than the personal present, than the notorious "demands of the moment."

The children of the 20th Congress owe their ideology to another author. Vasily Aksyonov gave the Soviet intelligentsia contradictory ideas, in which the intelligentsia drowned before they had time to comprehend them.

Aksyonov's childhood was as tragic as Okudzhava's childhood. His father was the chairman of the Kazan City Council and a member of the bureau of the Tatar regional committee of the CPSU. Mother worked as a teacher at the Kazan Pedagogical Institute, then headed the culture department of the Krasnaya Tatariya newspaper.

In 1937, when Vasily Aksyonov was not yet five years old, both parents were arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison and labor camps. The "burn", as Vasily Aksyonov said about his childhood, turned out to be no less painful than Okudzhava's.

In 1961, V. Aksyonov's novel Star Ticket was published in the Yunost magazine, which caused heated controversy and became the book of a generation. As the author himself, who was in Tallinn at that moment, recalled, in the middle of summer the local beach was covered with “yellow-orange crusts of the Youth magazine - the July issue with the novel came out.” Film director Vadim Abdrashitov wrote that his young contemporaries knew the contents of Star Ticket almost by heart and "just found themselves in the space and atmosphere of his prose, among his heroes."

It was the Star Ticket that created the sixties as a cultural phenomenon. Just as the Russian nihilists of the second half
XIX century purged themselves under the heroes of the novel "What is to be done?" Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Soviet literature and film art of the 1960s. began to copy the ideological basis of the Star Ticket.

The plot of the novel is very simple: there is a right life associated with a career, and this right life is condemned as a manifestation of philistinism. There is an incorrect life, which expresses itself in leaving the clutches of philistinism, and this is correct.

"The bourgeoisie meant calmly following the majority, for leading an average moderate life, it tries to settle in the middle between extremes, in a temperate and healthy zone, without violent storms and thunderstorms." - G. Hesse.

In the center of the story is the story of the Denisov brothers. The life of the elder Victor is arranged correctly: he is a doctor working in one of the prestigious scientific institutions associated with space. At night, he writes his Ph. His younger brother Dimka is completely different: a loafer who does not recognize authorities, a rebel and a dude.

In an effort to get rid of custody, Dmitry leaves for Tallinn. In search of a job, he tries himself either as a loader, or as a newspaperman or a fisherman, or a poker player.

Meanwhile, the elder brother Victor is faced with a moral problem: the experiments he plans to perform are capable of demonstrating the fallacy of his dissertation. As a result, not only his career can be destroyed, but also the reputation of the team where he works. They will announce reprimands, deprive them of bonuses, expel them from the party - a terrible thing.

The brothers meet during Victor's vacation, he discovers Dimitri grown up, proud of his independence. Communication does not last long: Victor is urgently called to work. And after some time, news comes from Moscow that he died in a plane crash. After the funeral, Dima tries to understand what was wrong with his brother. He looks out the window with his eyes and sees a "star ticket" in the night sky.

A quiet arrangement of life does not suit us. There is nothing to pursue a career, pore over books. Ah yes everyone to Tallinn! Love, drink, make money, - Aksyonov instructs readers.

Showing the confrontation between the “wrong”-looking heroes who chose the right way to freedom, and the “right” Soviet people, saturated with the poison of philistinism, created a name for the cult film director of the “thaw” Kira Muratova. Her film Brief Encounters appeared in 1967.

The heroine Muratova Nadya works in a tea shop. She meets Maxim (performed by V. Vysotsky). He has a romantic profession, a guitar, an easy attitude to money, the ability to present himself. The girl falls in love, and he leaves.

This storyline intersects with another, in which Valentina Ivanovna lives, Maxim's wife, who sees him in fits and starts between expeditions.

Nadia shows up at their house disguised as a housekeeper to meet Maxim. Valentina Ivanovna is a district committee worker, immersed in a paper routine. (Wasting her time in vain. She shouldn't strum on the guitar!) Valentina is tormented by Maxim's unpredictability, they quarrel, but are not ready to break off relations. Realizing this, Nadia one day sets the table, puts the festive dishes - and leaves, leaving this house forever, so as not to interfere with their family "happiness".

The viewer's sympathy should be given to the nobility of Nadia. The viewer pities her and Maxim, who is forced to coexist with the district committee's mymra, saturated with philistinism.

To understand what is wrong with family hearths, you need to return from 1967 forty years ago to the burning Hamburg and read the lines of the famous writer and agent of the Comintern Larisa Reisner, with which she explained the defeat of the communist uprising in Germany:

“This cowardly, dissatisfied majority sat at home for two or three days by the fire, whiled away the time over a cup of coffee and reading Vorverts [Social Democratic newspaper], waiting for the moment when the shooting subsides, the dead and wounded are carried away, the barricades are dismantled, and the winner - Whoever it is, a Bolshevik, or Ludendorff, or Seeckt, will put the losers in jail, and the winners in positions of power.”

“The German worker is more cultured than the Russian, his life after the first years of young wanderings is much more tightly bound by family, settled life, often by furnishings acquired over decades with penny savings. Petty-bourgeois culture, petty-bourgeois culture has long since seeped into all sections of the German proletariat. She brought with her not only universal literacy, a newspaper, a toothbrush, a love of choral singing and starched collars, but also a love of a certain comfort, the necessary neatness, curtains and a cheap carpet, vases with artificial flowers, oleography and a plush sofa ... "(E Milyutin, “No name or address is needed”//Literaturnaya Rossiya No. 2018/37, 10/12/2018).

This is the ideological basis of the sixties: the desire to pull the layman off the plush sofa and send him on a hike (and the film by K. Muratova gave rise to a special culture of hiking), or to Venus (the early Strugatsky brothers) or to the Orlyonok camp (Orlyat or communard movement in pedagogy).

The meaning of all these enterprises was the battle with the bourgeoisie, which was now also associated with the falsity of official art, the Soviet bureaucracy, behind which loomed the shadow of a camp barracks, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

The theme of the camp barracks is exorbitantly inflated by the post-Soviet officialdom. But in the 1960s the intelligentsia understood camp prose only as one of the points of accusation of the universal philistinism.

But this philistinism itself always acts as an antipode to the aspirations of the positive hero, changing like a chameleon depending on the plot, but never disappearing as the side of evil.

For example, the Soviet superman Maxim in the "Inhabited Island" by the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky is constantly put in the wheels by the extremely bureaucratic Committee of Galactic Security. Maxim himself is described at the beginning of the book as a member of the "free search group", he flies wherever he wants, although his parents insist that he take up a dissertation. The plot of the "Inhabited Island" repeats Dimka's escape from the "Star Ticket".

Let's sum up the intermediate result. A man of the sixties is a romantic who flees to the taiga (an option is to another city) to live a free life, or he is a conqueror of space, a creator (this is also a constant theme) of unprecedented cars or a bright future. Sometimes such a hero does not accept the district committee bureaucracy, but so what? The bureaucracy itself, tirelessly, struggled with its bureaucratic excesses.

Why did this style not take root either in the Soviet elite, or, more importantly, in Soviet society as a whole?

Why did the sixties, having become partly nihilists, unlike the former nihilists, not become populists? Why, although many talents had a quick start due to their proximity to the nomenklatura, were they eventually rejected by the nomenklatura as well?

These questions need to be answered not in order to denigrate one of the brightest phenomena of Soviet culture, but in order to understand the limits of its contribution to our life.

To do this, it is worth going back to 1945 and seeing the Soviet Union devastated by the war. The leitmotif of people's life was not an escape from the clutches of philistinism, but the revival of at least some kind of human life and, to be honest, for the vast majority of representatives of the lower classes, this task was still relevant in the 1960s.

Running away from the big “house on the embankment” is certainly an act, although not so risky, but was it worth it to throw a reproach of philistinism to ordinary families who were just starting to settle down in “Khrushchevs”?

The leaders of the Soviet agitprop, in contrast to naive students, understood what the condemnation of philistinism could ultimately lead to, as soon as it was put on stream. Start another cultural revolution in the spirit of the 1920s. was not only stupid, but also politically dangerous. This would certainly have destroyed the successes achieved in the peaceful development of the USSR with sweat and blood.

Flirting with the children of the 20th Congress, the authorities expected a different creative result from them.

Khrushchev, like Stalin before him, and after Brezhnev, was worried about the new type of American capitalism, which had learned to be attractive to the masses, including the Soviet people.

In the early 1930s, Edward Bernays was able to convince American politicians that his methods of public relations were the best means of controlling mass consciousness, as long as they worked in the most important area - in trade.

The essence of his message: trade is more than goods and money. You are selling happiness to people.

By the 1960s The United States has become a powerful machine for the production of happiness for the common man. Perhaps this is not the highest form of happiness. There is even something idiotic about it: to be happy from buying washing powder.

Only most of us do not want to be heroes at all, but everyone wants to be happy. And if happiness is affordable at the price of hand washing - why pay twice?

Khrushchev, who once declared that “communism is pancakes with butter and sour cream”, expected from new names in art not a world revolution, but a beautiful package of Soviet achievements. How they do it in America.

Based on such expectations, we will offer another version of the scandal he set up in the Manege. Knowing that the Americans had previously liked the work of the New Reality studio, he could expect happiness from them at an affordable price. And I saw intellectual cleverness.

His fury was explained by the disappointment of an experienced politician. He saw that the "thaw" was in vain. If that was his assessment, I would agree with it.

We can put it mildly: the "thaw" in art was ahead of its time. But, in the political sense of the word, it will be the same.

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