Creative dialogue is the main remedy against the dictate of fanaticism
Alexander Pushkin was born into one of the most traditional families of the early nineteenth century and grew up with a view to studying at the most loyalist lyceum of his time. The Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum was founded not so much with the aim of forming a new elite of Russia according to liberal ideals, as to designate the continuity of values from Catherine the Great to Alexander I of Russia. In an atmosphere of such expectations, Pushkin entered the lyceum.
In this institution, Pushkin began his path into creativity through antagonism. Where most saw quiet solitude as the proper condition for learning and writing, Pushkin found this boring. At sixteen, he wrote to Vyazemsky: “I assure you that solitude, in fact, is a very foolish thing, in defiance of all philosophers and poets who pretend as if they have lived in villages and are in love with silence and quiet.”
Pushkin was not simply voicing his idiosyncratic dissatisfaction with village life. He comes to understand historical figures as rising in opposition to their epochs. On this view, conflict proves essential to a person’s development.
In the lyceum, Alexander Pushkin began to write little witticisms. These helped him to endure conflicts and misunderstandings more easily by giving the conflict a form, by embedding it in a literary tradition going back to Voltaire. In this way, Pushkin mastered a centuries-old instrument of understanding others. Conflict, with such an approach, is felt not as a problem that implies losses but as a natural dynamic of life. However, in the modern world, a person endures conflicts more sharply. Without form, anger and aggression penetrate into all areas of human life, including the family.
The development of information technologies leads people to be less and less connected with their families and those nearby. Earlier the family could provide a place in the world, and together with the family a person felt a spiritual connection with ancestors, but in the modern world it is easy to solve practical problems, such as finding a job, without the family. And in the spiritual sense, modern society places individual freedom higher than the often ambiguous past of ancestors.
In the modern world, people prefer to break family ties at the very first irresolvable ideological conflict. This feature is strengthened by the digital mediation of the world. When a person subconsciously seeks, interprets, and remembers information that confirms his already existing beliefs, and neglects contradictory facts, the confirmation bias that results holds him hostage in his informational bubble. This is exacerbated by the ever greater psychological instability that afflicts the person of the twenty-first century.
The intense emotional intensity of politics strikes the individual in particular. In public life in Putin’s unfree Russia, those who disagree with the situation cannot change anything, and from hopelessness they begin to seek an emotional outlet. All this reduces the probability of a respectful discussion and increases the risk of rudeness. The lack of mutual understanding, against the background of the devaluation of family values, erodes traditionally close ties.
But one should not forget about the real repressive risk of Putin’s Russia, which makes the presence of people with a liberal and creative consciousness physically dangerous. As a result, the question arises about the preservation of the tradition of creativity in Russia. For creativity presupposes dissent. However, even if we discard the authoritarian factor, the problem of the “easy possibility of breaking family ties” will remain. Because of this, creative traditions will not be passed from generation to generation.
The main solution to this paradox that Alexander Pushkin can offer us is to look at creativity as a tradition of dialogue. Such dialgoue presupposes personal readiness and precision before interaction with others. And in contrast to the subjective confirmation bias, which is formed on the basis of someone else’s opinion, Pushkin offers us the sovereignty of the personality through work on oneself. This unites in itself both the defense of personal boundaries and self-realization.
The path of solution through the tradition of creativity must presuppose going beyond boundaries and carrying dialogue. For Pushkin’s creative work matured in antagonism but nevertheless in dialogue with his intellectual tradition. Composing his small epigrams in the lyceum, Pushkin showed them to his friends and classmates, imitating the literary salons of the gallant age. Tradition cannot exist without communication, just as cultural communication does not exist without tradition.
The opposite path to this is the creative aestheticization of conflict outside of tradition. Such a path presupposes the fixation of conflict for a narrow group, thereby producing the same informational bubble as confirmation bias does. Alas, we can see it by looking at the actions of opposition Russians who have emigrated. They desire to unite in circles, journals, and channels, pushing away everything that is disagreeable. This repels creativity instead of fostering dialogue between one camp and another under the aegis of respect. And this problem is fatal for the Russian opposition everywhere: in emigration or within Russian dissidence. And it will be bitter when their dream comes true, Vladimir Putin falls, and today’s dissidents return to politics: then they will not be able to give guarantees of the impossibility of tyranny from their own side: “Nobly one can make a revolution. But to take power into one’s hands nobly is already impossible” (attributed to Friedrich Schiller).
The mode of creativity, as modeled by Alexander Pushkin, raises many questions about family, misunderstanding, and the rupture of generations. Answers to them, Russians find already now in memes, articles, and threads on Pikabu (a Russian analogue of Reddit). This helps to translate conflict from the philosophical part into the practical. There one can often notice how a meme about the blocking of social networks in Russia gathers multilayered responses. Journalist Maxim Katz gives an example: children first teach their elderly parents WhatsApp, after which the government blocks it. This forces a long re-teaching of an old person to a new interface of Telegram, which was also recently slowed down in favor of the Russian analogue, the messenger Max. And here, for children burdened with responsibilities, a dilemma arises. Either to master together with their elders the new messenger Max (it probably does not need to be explained how difficult new technologies are for elderly people, especially when they are afraid to press an extra button). Or else to connect an expensive VPN, the prices of which grow because of blockings.
And if at the beginning, young people experience a slight enthusiasm from the fact that they personally managed, with the help of a VPN, to overcome the obstacles that their own state erects on the path to the internet, they may be inspired to create and spread ironic memes about the situation. Or consider what happens when the state blocks entire portions of the internet and angers the masses. Then on Pikabu one can observe an interesting phenomenon: a person writes their indignation about the ruling party; however, at the end they add that they fully support the war and the president. In response to such posts, people often ask: “why add a loyalist frame at the end of your indignation?” Other users, more bold, begin to ironize and express the idea that the loyalist form is necessary so as not to accidentally accuse one single Russian for whom an independent internet is a mortal threat.
In such moments it is especially important for leaders of the opposition movement not to close themselves within their own community but to conduct dialogue, which constitutes the foundation of creativity. A great mistake is to come to people who are not immersed in politics with an ultimatum: “are you for Vladimir Putin or against?” Such an ultimatum immediately places an ordinary person into the dictate of a position. Opposition activists need to make use of their main advantage over власть: the “absence of dictate.” And through free creativity, memes, and clubs open to all Russians, they need to create a space for dialogue and doubt.
A gloomy trio of singers there is:
Shikhmatov, Shakhovskoy, Shishkov;
For the mind there is a trio of enemies:
Shishkov, our Shakhovskoy, Shikhmatov;
But who is the most foolish of the evil trio?
Shishkov, Shikhmatov, Shakhovskoy!
On the eve of writing this epigram about the three censors, Alexander Pushkin together with his Lyceum comrades was extinguishing candles and lamps in the hall, after which he described this affair in his diary as: “a splendid occupation for a philosopher!” In the morning, while reading the life of Voltaire, Pushkin intended to write the comedy Igor and Olga, ultimately deciding only on an epigram. In the evening of that same day, he noted that today: “we did not extinguish candles, but instead sang couplets with the refrain: take yourself a poves [an old word meaning a young man of light character, a reveler, a scamp].” Or, this can also be interpreted differently as: “take for yourself by weight” (the quantity of verses that was proposed to be chosen for reading).
This reveals Pushkin as a person whose creative life was not separated from everyday life. The life of modern Russians, meanwhile, is often connected to a stream of background conflicts. The danger lies in the combination of doomscrolling and the inflation of the ideological significance of purely media-driven events. Entering Telegram today, a Russian begins reading a news feed filled with debates inside the opposition or statements by politicians. He becomes emotionally charged with tension and excitement from things that do not concern him personally. After this, he opens a chat to correspond with a friend. But instead of sharing his own, real experiences, he shares exhaustion and ideological categories. Because of this, correspondence becomes less heartfelt and less sincere.
Pushkin, in turn, reflected on conflicts whose origins he saw from within his own everyday life. Pushkin bitterly yet rationally understood that besides those people who lived together with him in Russia, he had no one else. Pushkin lived with a vision of his ideal Russia and its romantic image. But he understood that these very imperfect, old-fashioned, and at times even nasty people had created that Russia which gave birth in him to a passion for the ideal. And although in modernity we cannot forbid ourselves social networks, through Pushkin’s lesson we can deepen our understanding of genuine human value and the right to the sovereignty of feeling.
In a creative sense, his attitude toward people was also reflected in his style. One can trace the principles: to avoid labels and instead to reflect the person within one’s creative process. In his mature works, he tries to show the censor Alexander Shishkov as if surrounded by those qualities which Pushkin had received from him. And already looking at these qualities, and proceeding from expectations and the image of Pushkin, the reader forms his position on the question: “what did the author want to say?”
Without these little affectations,
Without imitative pretensions…
Everything in her was quiet, simple,
She seemed a faithful portrait
Du comme il faut… (Shishkov, forgive me:
I do not know how to translate it.)
Image Credit: Giorgio Ghisi, “Copy of the School of Athens” (1550)
