Russians write to each other, the city and the world. In Soviet times, the letter “called” the journalist “on the road”. The letters of indignant workers, built not in the factory's red corner, played the role of a starting pistol in a campaign of persecution - a person, an institution, a phenomenon. In post-Soviet times, the letter departments of newspapers and magazines lost their meaning, but collective epistles returned, in which fair and well-tempered anger seethed: the servile open messages of the masters of culture expressed solidarity with the actions of the authorities, demanded imprisonment and punishment. People of the level of Pasternak, who drove away one such messenger with a letter demanding on behalf of Soviet writers to punish another gang of bloody dogs, with the words: “Comrade! It’s not for you to sign a ticket to the theater! ”, There are no current court culture masters. The 2005 “Letter of Fifty” demanding that Khodorkovsky be held accountable rhymed with similar letters justifying the massacres in the darkest Soviet years. But another tradition was formed, also inheriting the Soviet one, only from the other, anti-government side - letters in defense of the humiliated, insulted, marked with some regular yellow star.

Society is polarizing and radicalizing. The decibels of political talk shows have already crossed the boundaries of the audible, when you can still discern grains of common sense. Society turned to shouting, hate speech became a routine and a norm. From television, the dialect of aggression moved to social networks - and the correspondence of Russians with each other in the genre of "hit-shit-in-the-fan" started. Netizens complain to the few with whom they still maintain not virtual, but human contact: whatever you write, they will throw mud at everyone.

Everyone swears at everyone.

In the community of those who could be considered democrats, the narcissism of small differences dispersed the degree of mutual hatred to the extreme - even the authorities are not hated as much as their fellow liberal community. They start up on social networks with half a turn, like in a TV show, on any topic. Especially if the topic is at least to some extent meaningful. How much poison was poured over the "Smart Vote", whose opponents were declared at least idiots, how many tons of intolerance and sarcasm were poured out in connection with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Dmitry Muratov and his Nobel speech. Aggression and lightness are two faithful friends ...

These are the modern features of the epistolary genre. But, perhaps, only the means of transmission and delivery to a third-party consumer of what would have previously been called an "open letter" have changed. Now all the letters are just open, even our Foreign Ministry managed to act as Wikileaks and publish correspondence with colleagues from the relevant ministries of France and Germany, let alone ordinary citizens - nowadays a person feels himself standing in an open space and completely naked, “in shame”. When open letters with mutual obscenities rush about the information field dozens of times a day, the eye gets blurry, and the institution of reputation is destroyed. A society split into many small and micro-communities does not even have time to concentrate and think: what is happening in general? Earlier, due to the lesser clutter of the informational samizdat space, they thought about it, and there was at least time to discover the problem and fix it. As, for example, 35 years ago, when the correspondence between the historian Nathan Eidelman and the writer Viktor Astafiev became an event.

In modern times, this correspondence would have been news of one day, but then it entered, one might say, the history of social thought and recorded the fact of the latent, unhealthy state and society that did not break out officially. Letters circulating in samizdat were even mentioned in a poem by Andrei Voznesensky, which denoted the signs of the times:

Hatha Yoga. Seduxen.

There are no letters at all in the world.

Only "Goethe-Eckermann"

and "Astafiev-Eidelman" ".

This correspondence, which was quickly cut short, on its subject would not have surprised even in the 19th century - the problems are eternal and typical for Russian society, tossing between its conventional "Westernism" and "Slavophilism." And I would not surprise at all even now - in terms of the tough tone, rather, characteristic of our social network time.Astafyev was the idol of the Soviet intelligentsia, and not rural, but urban, that part of it, which was not very accessible to samizdat and tamizdat. Paradoxically, village prose was read in the cities - as an example of truthful literature, but at the same time it passed the censorship barriers. But it was the educated class, which from the late 1960s began to dominate the large Soviet urban agglomerations, that aroused the irritation and even poorly concealed hatred of the great writer. As soon as he began to write about urban things, he got lost in the "crocodile" feuilleton. The unique.jpgt seemed to betray him, and instead of prose, a manifesto was obtained, instead of depth - a superficial caricature. Which, perhaps, made it possible not only to overcome censorship, but also to receive prizes, including the State one in 1978, by decision of the Central Committee and the government - the city characters were strangers for the same Central Committee and the government, the bosses intuitively felt in them an enemy force that could shake the foundations ... Which, in fact, happened as a result.

The great writer looked for those to blame for the country's problems - and found them in depraved urban characters and in foreigners. What, in fact, Nathan Eidelman wrote to him. And I would not have written if Astafyev had not been the idol of the intelligentsia.

By the way, Astafiev had one private correspondence four years earlier, when his signature appeared under the denunciation letter of Krasnoyarsk art workers in Komsomolskaya Pravda. The letter was directed against the "Time Machine", which completed its tour in Krasnoyarsk. Anatoly Chubais, a 26-year-old researcher at the Leningrad Engineering and Economic Institute, wrote an indignant letter to his idol - how could he sign a denunciation? And what is most interesting, the idol answered and almost apologized for what he had done, for asking him to sign the vile letter by his senior comrades. But the trouble was that, in principle, the text of the denunciation completely coincided with the interior views of the conscientious writer. Well, he was not against such, for example, words: "A foreign tree transplanted on our soil does not bear fruit"; "We are talking about an ensemble in which well-to-do artists take off their sheepskin coats and branded jeans before a concert, put on shabby rags ... and begin to grumble and whine about their own invented life."

Eidelman wrote about this to Astafyev, citing fragments from prose, including those favored by state leaders: “Astafyev does not hide the most hated, those whom he directly or indirectly considers guilty ... These are intellectuals-parasites,“ tourists ”; those who yell "in Basurmanskie", Muscovites exclaiming "that's when I was in Varna, in Baden-Baden." Finally, - foreigners ... As it comes to the "root of evil", the sinister city dweller Goga Gertsev must nevertheless appear. " A typical Astafyevsky Georgian, Eidelman quoted the story "Catching minnows in Georgia", "like ... a splinter twig on a human tree, it sticks out in all Russian bazaars ..., with disdain peeling off the gullible northern people with rotten fruit."

“So,” the historian addressed the writer, “intellectuals, Muscovites, tourists, fat Gogs, Gogi Gertsevs, cross-faced, Jewish people, and finally, ladies and gentlemen from literary fund houses: a downpour of anger, contempt, denial falls on them.” The popular writer turns into something opposite: he is "a herald of popular malice, prejudices, not raising people, but descending with them."

In 1986, Eidelman wrote about the type of xenophobic worldview that was typical and remains typical - with amendments only for some small changes in the signs of the time - today.

Astafiev's answer was monstrous - at least for those times. He called Eidelman an enemy - his own and the Russian people, heaped up many incredible historical errors in facts and surnames, dragged the royal family, shot by “Jews and Latvians, headed by the inveterate, terry Zionist Yurkovsky [so in a letter, instead of Yurovsky. - A.K.] ".

Eidelman wrote a letter in response, and the correspondence was cut short, going to the masses: “... wanting to offend, - they were dejected. In wild dreams, I could not imagine in one of the "masters of thoughts" such primitive, animal chauvinism, such elementary ignorance. "

Astafiev could hardly have expected a civil response to his letter to the man whom he accused of carrying in himself "the boiled pus of Jewish highly intellectual arrogance." People began to return his books to the writer by mail. Such an act of civil protest happened, perhaps, only once, when readers massively returned volumes of his works to Mikhail Sholokhov after a pogrom speech against Sinyavsky and Daniel. Post offices in Rostov and the village of Veshenskaya were inundated with parcels ...Both Natan Yakovlevich and Viktor Petrovich remained with their views. In 1989, Astafyev signed a letter from seven native writers against the perestroika Ogonyok, without feeling the irony of history: twenty years earlier, in 1969, it was from the pages of the then terribly conservative Ogonyok that eleven native writers collapsed with an open a letter denouncing Tvardovsky's "New World". In the same 1989, Eidelman died, having written an amazing book "Revolution from above", about the brakes that every time restrain reforms in Russia - now, among other works, it was published by the publishing house "UFO" and scattered in one day at the book fair "Non / fiction ".

Astafyev will write many more significant books about the war, on the basis of his rejection of Bolshevism and communism, he quarrels with his former associates from the soil camp, he will receive from them: "How much hatred for Stalin, the Communist Party, Fadeev and the entire Russian people!"

The problems so hotly described by the two correspondents will remain unresolved, and the overly heated tone of their discussion will only worsen over the years.

But I want to read another Viktor Astafiev: “My memory, memory, what are you doing with me?! ... I stand in the wind of a bare tree, the winds howl in me, blowing out the sounds and colors of the life that I loved so much ... And still not the war is silent in me, shaking my tired soul ... I want to calm down, at least some kind of calmness. But he is not even in a dream ... ".

The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.

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