|
|
|
|
|
|
16.07.07
|
Who Owned Frou-Frou?
|
|
|
Comment by Alexander Arkhangelsky
|
Russian Literature as the Final Frontier
With politicians elbowing each other aside and clambering aboard departing party band wagons in preparation for the meaningless elections, political analysts are seeking to answer one key question – what does the departure of Igor Ivanov from the top post at the Security Council mean and how is it connected with Putin’s third term? Businessmen are guessing at what lies behind Igor Sechin’s first public appearance at the Rosneft annual general meeting and wondering whether Sechin could replace Naryshkin as heir to the throne, particularly in view of his surname being more suitable – it also ends in ‘in’, but it’s shorter, with just two syllables (Lenin, Stalin, Yeltsin, Putin, Sechin). Meanwhile, the intelligence services, together with the prosecutors, have begun a trial in absentia of Boris Berezovsky. The mortally offended English simply don’t want to understand that they’ll have to try Andrei Lugovoi in the same manner.
And as all this is going on, at a press conference at the RIA Novosti offices in Moscow, Viktor Bolotov appears with a tedious report on the implementation of the Unified State Exam (EGE). Bolotov heads the agency overseeing the process. No worldwide impact. No secret agents, no members of the Other Russia opposition movement, no speculations about the third term. And yet our very future could be dependent upon how the issues discussed in the report are resolved. This is far more crucial than the surname of the heir and the number of years Berezovsky is sentenced to.
In the school curriculum there are subjects that mean almost nothing and those that instill basic skills, such as mathematics and chemistry. But there are also subjects upon which life itself depends: history and literature. The history course forms the image of the past which created the present and from which the future will at some point break free. To some extent, it’s always factual, to some extent ideological and even unavoidably mythological. It outlines the framework for how the historic nation, its traditions and its roots, is conceptualized.
The literature course creates a picture of the world and develops a system of general lines of thought; of woes to wit, dead souls, war and peace, known by professors and workers, the president and his voters, secret service agents and dissidents. Is their knowledge of all this poor? Yes, probably, but at least it’s something. The key words, the key names – Onegin, Tatyana, Pechorin, Raskolnikov, Prince Andrei and Pierre Bezukhov – resonate not only in the conscious mind but even in the subconsciousness of anyone who has studied at a Russian school. Concepts of Russia and of life in general are encoded in these names.
History and literature are more than just subjects. They study the Human Law just as the church teaches the Divine Law. A problem always emerged in church schools surrounding the knowing of faith and the controlling of that knowledge. In secular schools another question always arises, which is far more difficult to resolve: what does knowing your country, its history and its literature really mean? How can this knowledge be evaluated? We wrote about history in schools quite recently; now we must turn to the school course on literature.
Once upon a time a compromise between the extreme importance of a subject and the extreme difficulty in testing its knowledge was found: children were told to write essays. Yes, in those essays one would often find stupid topics, and today collections of readymade essays are for sale all over the place. But even an idiotic topic required certain useful thought processes; you can’t copy out grade A essays the whole time, so sometimes you have to actually read a book, put your thoughts together and assemble them in awkward phrases. But not any more. Now we have the EGE.
The legislation that decreed the Unified State Exam has been put together in such an unclear manner that the graduation essay as a genre has lost all meaning. The tests on literature are a complete profanity in the context of the subject. And it couldn’t have happened any other way. Remembering who owned the horse Frou-Frou in Anna Karenina (Count Vronsky, as Bolotov reminded everyone during the press conference) is laudable but in no way obligatory. Understanding artistic concepts, however, is obligatory, but the EGE has absolutely nothing to do with this. Reading is also superfluous; you just have to pick out the tested passages, like taking currants from a bun, and that will suffice.
It’s not that the school management isn’t aware of this. But its position is the following: yes, the literature part of the EGE is bad, but essays are even worse. Those literary figures who write letters against the exam and in defense of essays are, in reality, afraid they’ll be asked to take the tests and won’t pass them. Essays can be flung together from pretty words, but just try and answer the question about Vronsky and Frou-Frou. We’ll invite them in during the fall and publicly test them. In other words, we’ll shame them. If they agree to be tested, they’ll undoubtedly fail, and if they refuse, their mortal fear of failure will be proven, because they know nothing and remember nothing. And slowly a proposal begins to take shape: Let’s not monitor the knowledge of literature at all, either through compositions or through the EGE. We’ll just shift it from being a federal component in education to being a regional one. That means lowering its status, but it also means ridding ourselves of the responsibility to solve an irresolvable problem.
If this happens, the situation will be hopeless. Making a school subject a regional component is akin to reappointing a party leader as the head of a rural farm or exiling him to the position of the head of the Security Council. Literature will cease to be a serious matter, becoming an unnecessary addendum to the main curriculum. And the only thing that still unites us – the Russian language dispersed and embodied in Russian literature – will be left on the hard shoulder.
Of course, “the Russian language” as a subject focused on grammar, rules, conjugations, declinations and syntax, will remain taught in the main course, especially as the president has ordered that we all love the (a) great (b) mighty (c) immortal Russian language. Knowledge of grammar can be accurately controlled with the aid of the EGE, although the fact that grammar is formed from literature, which is in turn formed by language, remains immaterial. The motivation here is totally different: we can’t get around literature through a system for formal control, so we’ll just get rid of it. It’s as if the church had abandoned religious teaching just because the catechism is too primitive.
There is, of course, a certain logic in all this. Literature can’t be controlled by formal methods, just as formal means can’t be used to control society through a rigidly hierarchical administration. But society has been decisively put to sleep to ensure that it won’t interfere with the convenient bureaucratic apparatus. So why not do away with literature? The main source of headaches is the head itself, so the best form of treatment is the guillotine. |
| The source |
|
|
|
|
|
|
The virtual community for English-speaking expats and Russians
