“That is why “Capital” had such a gigantic success that this book of the “German economist” showed the reader the entire capitalist social formation as living - with its everyday aspects, with the actual social manifestation of the antagonism of classes inherent in production relations,” writes Lenin in the book “ What are friends of the people?
How alive! Anyone who reread the works of Marx could not help but be struck by their artistic integrity, their imagery, their structure, which does credit to any work of so-called fiction. The architectonics of Capital are grandiose, where in the first volume we are in a factory, in the second in the office of capitalism, and in the third we cover the entire process of capitalist production. The dramatization of events is extremely dramatic, expressed in vivid, figurative language: “In place of an individual machine, a mechanical monster appears here, whose body occupies entire factory buildings and whose demonic power, at first almost disguised, breaks through the solemnly measured movement of its gigantic members in the feverishly frenzied dance of its countless workers organs in the proper sense of the word” (Vol. I, Chapter XIII). The irony is deadly: “the market is the true Eden of innate human rights. Here only freedom, equality, property and Bentham reign!”
“...Newborn capital exudes blood and dirt from all its pores, from head to toe” (Vol. I, Chapter 24). These are quotes from the first volume of Capital.
Let's open at random "The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" - brilliant historical research and a revolutionary pamphlet, designed extremely artistically. “The evil spell of Tsiruen was not needed to turn the artistically beautiful bourgeois republic into an ugly monster. This republic has lost nothing but decent visibility. Modern France was a ready-made parliamentary republic. One prick with a bayonet was enough for the bubble to burst, and the monster appeared before the eyes” (chap. 7). Or a phrase about the Napoleonic idea of Louis Bonaparte - the dominance of priests as an instrument of government and the anti-religion of impoverished peasants: “The sky was not a bad addition to the newly acquired piece of land, especially since it makes the weather; but heaven becomes an outrage as soon as it is imposed like a gamen for a parcel,” etc.
Marx always resolved scientific ideas with the help of artistic influence. A great connoisseur and lover of the best examples of fiction, Marx mobilized his artistic skill for better presentation of their economic, philosophical and historical works. The same applies to other great scientists. Engels's language is simple and artistic. What is Darwin's Voyage Around the World on the Beagle - a series of artistic essays or a scientific work? Everything, starting from the first phrase, represents artistic fabric and at the same time is an example of scientific creativity. Works of Timiryazev, acad. I. Pavlova - these are our contemporaries - testify that the combination of artistry with a truly scientific presentation is not only quite possible, but gives scientific work a special power, which lies in the emotional increase in the effectiveness of the work.
The matter is not limited to the simple use of artistic means by the greatest scientists. History knows examples of the development of scientific problems through art.
The Roman horseman Lucretius Carus, who died in 51 BC, in his poem “On the Nature of Things” sets out the teachings of Epicurus, as Marx put it, “the radical enlightener of ancient times.” The poem interprets the physics of Epicurus, develops the theory of atoms, the theory of the structure of the world. To develop philosophical questions, purely scientific questions, the form of a work of art was chosen and the means of art were used. And this is not just the popularization of science through poetry. The rhythm and imagery of the poem do not hinder, but promote the development of thought. Art and poetic creativity here are inseparable from scientific thinking. Lomonosov wrote the poem “On the Benefits of Glass,” which had great educational value for its time.
The circle of readers of so-called fiction is always much wider than the circle of readers of special technical issues. Cooperation artistic word and sciences mutually enrich each other, not to mention the enormous cultural and educational significance of the works born from this unity. Attempts to create this union have been made at all times. The poets of the first class society (slave-owning) Geznod, Empedocles, Ovid, Virgil and /84/ poets of the feudal formation of the Middle Ages - Dante, Jean de Maeng - interpreted the scientific issues of their era in artistic creativity. Growing capitalism, whose youth went into battle with feudalism under the banner of science, gave birth to Swift, Goethe, later Lecomte de Lisle, Victor Hugo, then Jules Verne, Rene Gil, Verhaeren, Flammarion. Wells in England, Valery Bryusov in Russia complete this list. But the “junction” between science and artistic and literary creativity is also achieved in other ways. It can be said without exaggeration that every great writer is also a scientific researcher.
Pushkin had a library of 3,000 volumes (the largest at that time) with a significant percentage of books of scientific content. There is a well-known note by Pushkin that “one must be on par with the century” - to stand at the heights of scientific knowledge of our time.
Dostoevsky's works are of unconditional interest for a psychiatrist. Tolstoy's "War and Peace" is a unique theory of the art of war.
The influence of the work of Goethe - a great naturalist, a great scientist of his time - on the scientific work of his contemporaries is well known. Engels writes in his famous letter to Margaret Harknes that from Balzac’s “Human Comedy” he, Engels, “even learned more about the meaning of economic details... than from the books of all professional historians, economists, and statisticians of this period taken together.” .
The history of literature knows examples of absolutely exceptional scientific conjectures of people of great artistic emotion. Oridius and Virgil also spoke about liquid air, the reality of our days. Examples are closer: the same Honoré Balzac in one of his novels predicted the discovery of the endocrine glands several decades in advance. Strindberg, in his novel Captain Kohl, pointed out the possibility of extracting nitrogen from the air. Here I am deliberately not talking about scientific foresight in the works of Jules Verne - we will talk about it below. But I would like to mention the greatest genius of science and art, the greatest scientist, the first engineer of his time, musician, brilliant artist - Leonardo da Vinci. The huge clot of artistic emotion embedded in this man made it possible to obtain a number of profound predictions Sciences.
The so-called inspiration is present in all creative work. M. Gorky in his article “Conversations on Craft” quotes Laplace as saying: “Impatiently striving to know the cause of phenomena, a scientist, gifted with a vivid imagination, often finds this cause before observations give him reason to see it.” “The work of a writer is similar to the work of a scientist,” adds Gorky. Artistic emotion and its role in scientific work - the specifics of “inspiration” here and there - this issue has not yet been developed by psychologists.
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If you imagine the types of scientific novel (story, short story, poem) - a work of art that develops problems science as topics, and not the background (scientific and technical), for the social biography of the hero, then the following types can be outlined: historical, geographical, industrial and fantasy novel.
Authors of historical novels - much more than authors of any other genre - are connected with the scientific basis of the subject of their work. Each author has his own historical concept of the events depicted. In this sense, Alexei Tolstoy’s work on the theme of Peter I, a theme to which he is known to return for many years, is extremely characteristic. And if in the first story, published before the revolution, “The Day of Peter I,” Peter is interpreted in terms of an individual moving history in isolation from the masses, then in the romance that Tolstoy wrote in our days, the historical pattern and driving class forces of that era are artistically shown. There is no need to talk about the unconditional educational value of historical novels.
In general, the writer always willingly took on historical topics (Shakespeare’s chronicles alone are worth it) - just as the chronicler contributed fiction in the event record. This is explained by the contiguity of two types of ideologies - literature and history. The specificity of history as a science is that it is an ideology, just like literature. That's why, recognizing the great positive value works of Jules Verne, we resolutely reject historical novels such as Mordovtsev, Solovyov, etc. On the other hand, it should be noted the negativity of “artistic” works of this type, such as the “historical” novels of Anatoly Vinogradov - clear proof of what happens when the author he treats too freely with the concept of a thing, and with facts, and with the calendar.
A significant portion of what has been said can also be attributed to geographical novels. Some of the novels by Mine Reid and the same Jules Verne certainly required a lot of special preparation by the author, and their educational value is undoubted. On the other hand, such a geographical study as “Man and Earth” by the famous French scientist Elisée Reclus contains many elements of artistic emotion. There is no need to talk /85/ about the artistic entertainment and educational benefits of descriptions of all kinds of travel.
The mentioned types of scientific novels, of course, do not exhaust all the possibilities for artistic interpretation of the ideas of science and technology. Any scientific discipline and any scientific problem can be a topic for a writer's development.
A special place belongs science fiction. Not only young people were captivated by the book “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” Military specialists and naval engineers were engrossed in the exploits of Captain Nemo, and after several decades the Nautiluses became a reality. An aerostat or an airplane is the theme of “Airship.” The scientific foresight of victory and the possibilities of developing heavier-than-air vehicles is the merit of Jules Verne, not only the merit of a historical and literary order. Jules Verne, an expert on all scientific and technical achievements of his time, a talented visionary, organized young people to study technical issues. Books by Jules Verne - still big driving force, directing readers' interests to effective work in science and technology.
The science fiction novel is the most established and widespread type of science novel. The poet Cyrano de Bergerac, a scientist and explorer, one of the most educated people of the 17th century, wrote about flying to the moon using rockets. The artistic works of the scientist Flammarion are well known. The science fiction novel also includes novels, so to speak, social fiction such as Thomas More's "Utopia", which inspired many revolutionaries, and Bellamy's "In a Hundred Years' Time".
The greatest exponent of the science fiction novel is our recent guest H.G. Wells. Someone estimated that Wells touched on over 1,600 scientific problems in his artistic works. And he, like Jules Verne, is a man of great culture and deep knowledge of scientific issues. In the story “In the Deep Sea,” Wells describes a diving device for diving into the ocean to a depth of 5 miles. Modern technology is similar to Wells's vision. The moving sidewalks in the novel “When the Sleeper Awake” (this novel, by the way, is an experiment in combining social and scientific-technical fiction) are known to many.
It should be noted, however, that the works of Jules Verne are closer to us than the works of Wells. Jules Verne is a representative of the still healthy bourgeois class; the word “science” is still written in large letters on its banners. By the time of Wells, the time of decaying capitalism, when thousands of inventions cannot achieve patents due to sales crises, when killing machines are invented, when the terrible slogan is in use - “a moratorium on inventions!”, by this time the science fiction novel of the capitalist world is losing its scientific clarity. Already in “The Struggle of the Worlds”, the Martians conquering the earth fight with a heat ray - a device of a very vague design.
Modern Western science fiction novels are very characteristic of the era dominated by the philosophy of Spengler, who agitates against technology (“Man and Technology”). Pierre MacOrlan in 2000 divides humanity into two groups: scientists and robots - mechanical people. The new world is beautiful, but six-armed iron robots disperse gatherings of scientists. In Jean Painlevé, the author of Cupsill Courant, robots destroy people.
In Aldous Huxley's novel The Magnificent new world“The idea of “science for the few” is preached. The world is ruled by scientists (compare with the ideas of technocracy in the USA), and the golden age, dating back to the “Ford era,” is created at the cost of people losing their ability to have emotional life and abandoning art. Huxley, a scientist (nephew of the famous Julian Huxley), artistically developed in the novel a number of scientific problems in terms of the latest achievements of science. But the picture of the world is given in such a way that a person of our era, finding himself in a “magnificent new world,” commits suicide. The artist of the West is afraid of the triumph of science, he imagines science only in the hands of the bourgeois, and gloomy pictures of the future are drawn to the science fiction writer. New social order, who will take science and develop it in a way that the best science fiction novelists of the bourgeoisie never dreamed of, will force technology to serve man - something some Western artists do not see or do not want to see. Such a science fiction novel may scare the reader away from science rather than bring it closer to it.
But if the scientific imagination of Western artists is constrained by their social blindness, then what immense prospects for scientific foresight open up in the country of victorious young science - in the USSR! Let us recall the words of Engels that with the victory of the proletariat the true history of mankind begins, in contrast to the prehistory of time associated with the class struggle. Our greatest scientific future waiting for his descriptions. The country greedily absorbs all the scientific discoveries of the world and implements them. Splitting of the atom, blood transfusion of corpses, work on determining the sex of the embryo, the work of Michurin, Ioffe, Pavlov - hundreds and thousands of interesting problems are waiting for their artistic embodiment.
But the engineers of the Sevkabel plant write to our writers (Lit. Len-d, 26/VII 1934): “We have /86/ k Soviet writers a request directly related to our specialty. IN Soviet literature not a science fiction novel at all. Bogdanov's novels, Belyaev's very boring and gray novels - that's all. There was, however, also “The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin” (A. Tolstoy), but it cannot be called a science fiction novel. Rather simply fantastic. The trouble with Belyaev’s novels, for example, is that he proceeds not from real achievements modern technology , continuing its possibilities into the future, but from some completely fictitious concepts. Meanwhile we It’s not just technical fiction that’s needed, but, so to speak, a promising novel that would reveal the possibilities of technology development under the conditions of a planned socialist economy. We need a Soviet Jules Verne or Wells.”
However, Belyaev’s novels, with all their technical and scientific imperfections, were read to the gills by our youth. There is such a great need for this genre. The demand for science fiction novels is huge. This was persistently emphasized by the Congress of Writers in the speeches of pioneers and adult readers and, finally, the writers themselves. Unfortunately, Alexei Tolstoy’s novels “Engineer Garin’s Hyperboloid” and “Aelita” gained wide readership. Both novels are anti-scientific. A. Tolstoy's education (he is a process engineer) did not serve the writer as well as one might have hoped for. Much has been written about the helplessness of these novels in terms of science fiction. I will only note the confession of A. Tolstoy himself (“Struggle for Technology”, No. 17-18): “In “The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin” I wrote about a cannonball launched into the ground to a depth of 25 km. And only now, reworking my Garin, I found this error. After all, the core, falling 25 km, will be completely flattened.” The engineer Los' description of the apparatus for the flight to Mars was more than vague. Such negligence is unacceptable for the author of a science fiction novel. But if the education of an engineer did not benefit A. Tolstoy in his work on science fiction, then the novel by engineer V. Nikolsky “After a Thousand Years” is of unconditional interest: hydrogen smelting, transparent iron, a metallurgical plant without blast furnaces - a number of valuable technical problems. Let us also mention A. A. Bogdanov - mathematician, political economist, philosopher, director of the Institute of Blood Transfusion, a man who dreamed of creating a “unified science”, and the author of everything famous novels"Engineer Manny" and "Red Star". And here, the combination of deep scientific knowledge and renowned artistic talent brought positive results.
Science fiction certainly deserves the utmost attention from writers, engineers, and scientists. The prospects for this genre are enormous. Eng. M. Ilyin, a writer who gained worldwide fame with his “Tale of a Great Plan,” writes: “We are bad with science fiction books. What do the authors of such a book do? They are already combining arbitrarily, in all sorts of ways known facts... Earth 2000 is like an exhibition of the latest inventions. This is not how a science fiction book should be! True science fiction should not be based on arbitrary combinations of the known, but on deducing the necessary consequences from new conditions.”
"The true science fiction novel is an outpost of science into the unknown."
Let's return to Lucretius Carus and Lomonosov. Both “On the Nature of Things” and “On the Use of Glass” are formally poems, that is, poetic works. Therefore, there is an opportunity to develop scientific questions in the most constrained form of poetic creativity - in verse. Poetry, the form of the purest artistic emotion in the realm of words, can carry a cognitive load. The very specificity of verse - rhythm, sound organization - has, in comparison with artistic prose greater power of direct emotional impact on the reader. The use of scientific themes in this form promises, on the one hand, a great channel for promoting the ideas of science and technology, and on the other hand, it represents a very interesting field of activity for the poet.
In the preface to the collection of poems “Dali” (M., 1922), Bryusov wrote: “The poems collected in this collection can be reproached that they too often contain words that are not known to everyone: terms from mathematics, astronomy, biology, history and other sciences, as well as hints at various scientific theories and historical events.
The author, of course, must acknowledge this fact, but cannot agree that all this should be forbidden for poetry. He thinks that a poet should, if possible, stand at the level of modern scientific knowledge and have the right to dream of a reader with the same worldview. It would be unfair if poetry had to forever be limited, on the one hand, to motifs about love and nature, and on the other, to civic themes. Everything that interests and excites modern man, has the right to be reflected in poetry."
The meaning is where the integral snakes
Between numbers and letters, between d and f. /87/
In the next collection “Mea” (1924), Bryusov places among the scientific poems the famous poem “The World of the Electron”:
Perhaps these electrons -
Worlds with five continents.
Arts, knowledge, wars, thrones
And the memory of forty centuries.
Every atom can still be
A universe with a hundred planets.
Everything that is here, in a compressed volume, is there
But also what is not here.
Bryusov composes a special note for the collection “Mea”, which has cultural and educational significance. Bryusov will forever remain the merit of the man who paved the way for a new theme of poetry.
From Soviet poets Vl. has been working hard and hard in the field of scientific poetry for a long time. Narbut and Zenkevich. Narbut’s poems “Malaria”, “Ball Train” and even “Microscope” are interesting both educationally and genre-wise, although they suffer from some mechanism. The poets Selvinsky and Antokolsky in a number of poems approach scientific poetry. The experience of Selvinsky’s poem “How a Light Bulb is Made” - a poem undeservedly little appreciated by our critics - is very interesting. Nowhere does poetry lag so far behind as on one of the main fronts of our reality - on the front of science and technology. More than 100 years ago, the poet Oznobishin wrote a poem about his contemporary, the famous naturalist Cuvier. Has the life and work of such world-famous scientists as Joffe, Bach, Michurin become the property of poetry? No.
The technical and scientific illiteracy of our poets is even greater than that of prose writers. Take any work of our poets - their educational value in terms of scientific and technical issues is negligible, if not completely absent. Poets write about the plant in the most general terms. They write about the earth as they wrote hundreds of years ago. I take this opportunity to recall the correct idea of Marietta Shaginyan that “the writer (and poet), when describing nature, does not take into account the development of agriculture, and the “popularization” of, for example, virgin forests is a reactionary display of the thing. It’s simply amazing that not a single poet (or writer) has been artistically ignited by such a question as the collision of classical physics with new discoveries, the collision of Newton and Einstein.” Both the poet and the writer, at best, think like Zinger and Kraevich. And for poets, like thousands of years ago, the sun continues to rise in the east and set in the west. Here Copernicus still has not broken Ptolemy.
In the article “On the Poet’s Library,” M. Gorky quotes the following poems:
According to Capital
(In the first volume, in the fifth chapter)
A new home appears first
In the human head
Although of dwarf size,
But in finished form already
It will be born in the brains of engineers
And on a tracing paper drawing of them.
And then the author poetically develops Marx’s thought about the preliminary, perfect performance the result of labor in a person who changes the form of what is given by nature, fulfilling a conscious goal - about labor as a purposeful activity (the famous example of an architect and a bee is taken by the author in the epigraph of the poem):
Well, and you, to the tunes of harmonics
He came from the village with a saw,
Who will you be, comrade seasonal worker,
Architect or bee?
The poem is large in size. Gorky writes: “I read these poems several times to various people, the listeners greeted the poems with indifferent silence or superficial criticism of their technical weakness... But no one noted the fact that one of the most valuable ideas of the founder of true revolutionary philosophy became the property of poetry.” By the way, the question about the architect and the bee also applies to our writers and poets. “Science, its discoveries and conquests, its workers and heroes - all this should be the property of poetry. This scientific area of human activity may be more worthy of admiration, amazement, and pathos than any other.” - These words of Maxim Gorky have not yet found a sufficient creative response.
The development of scientific themes in poetry promises an undoubted formal renewal of verse, and brings with it a change in the methods of verbal transmission of verse. It is difficult now to discern the type of reader of scientific poetry. In any case, this is not a reader of the “Mkhatovsky” type and not a chanting reciter-poet.
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The question of the union of artistic expression and science, the union of art and science, is not limited to science as the theme of the work.
The question is that every piece of art socialist realism must carry a cognitive load. And if science and technology are taken as the background for the social biography of the heroes, then in this case, the accuracy of the description of production, place and working conditions should be included in the artistic minimum required of the writer. /88/
Growing technology leads to the growth of scientific, engineering and technical workers, who are becoming the main group of the intelligentsia of our country. This, firstly, creates a particularly demanding cadre of readers of fiction in certain matters, and secondly, obliges writers to show heroes of production, technology and science. Meanwhile, technical illiteracy of writers is so widespread that it is not even considered a sin. For the most part, the writer simply avoids touching on issues of science and technology.
It is interesting that if we were to conduct a questionnaire on the value famous book All in. Ivanov’s “Armored Train 14-69”, grouping reviewers by profession, then “Armored Train” would probably be least popular among railway workers. Writer D. Sverchkov informed the author of the article that when he worked as director of the House of Equipment of the NKPS, the feedback from railway workers about Ivanov’s book was almost standard - “The book is good, but only... the author does not know the railway at all.” In conditions civil war, battle lines - a combat unit - an armored train would never stop in front of a corpse on the rails. But this is the climax of the story. In addition, the locomotive of an armored train is placed not at the beginning, but in the middle of the train, and the driver could not see the corpse.
An oversight or negligence of the author regarding the material reduces artistic value things. Reader Volkov formulated this correctly (Literaturnaya Gazeta, October 5, 1933), pointing out that “the plot is the property of the author, but natural, historical and everyday features must be presented truthfully, otherwise the work loses its value.”
Another type of “approach”, or rather, bypassing the technical and scientific side of the issue, extremely widespread, is demonstrated by Leonid Leonov in the novel “Skutarevsky”. Its shortcomings were well formulated by Katanyan (“Literaturnaya Gazeta” dated September 5, 1934): “The science, methodology and technology of Soviet scientific work are “classified” by our authors to such an extent that Soviet scientists appear before readers almost like medieval alchemists: somewhere like this They boil something like this, pump it up, mix it, use some capacitors and rectifiers, suffer, worry, and then suddenly it turns out that the trick was brilliant “failure” or “success”.
As an example of an extremely conscientious attitude to the material, I will cite Gladkov’s “Energy”, about which Chief Engineer GUMPa Tochinsky (“Literaturnaya Gazeta” dated July 14, 1934) says: “The technical material that the writer introduced into the novel is presented basically correctly and vividly, and this is a significant and rare success. But “Energy” was the result of Gladkov’s five years at Dneprostroy and careful study of technological processes on site. “I systematically took advantage,” Gladkov reports, “of the consultation of the most prominent and talented engineers and studied the literature on metallurgy, hydraulic engineering, etc.”
Complaints about amateurism in matters of science and technology are heard from most writers. But this is not the writers’ problem, but their fault. Reluctance to work on material that requires long and deep study, for some reason a view of the scientific and technical side of a work of art as a matter of fifth and tenth importance, and finally a view of the development of scientific topics as an unwinnable and unnoticeable matter - all this is associated with outrageous disregard for this genre (scientific topics) of our publishing organizations - leads to the strange situation when sharp demand works of art on scientific subjects are met with only a declarative, but by no means a creative response from the majority of our writers. Not a single writer will object to the fact that it is necessary, the priority is to show the hero of the second five-year plan - the five-year plan for mastering technology - the drummer, the technician, the engineer. But we must firmly understand that teaching and showing people technology without studying and mastering knowledge about the technology itself is completely impossible.
The novel, firstly, loses its educational value, and secondly, the writer is deprived of the opportunity to show the hero in the most full-blooded way. In addition, the influence of labor on the remaking of a person is itself differentiated, and metallurgy, say, introduces different features into a person’s character than mechanical engineering. The influence of profession on a person’s character and behavior is known. But to detail this question in relation to, say, an industry - who else but the writer should notice this? Here the writer could contact a psychotechnician. I don’t know whether our writers have already become familiar with the fact that the city of Vitebsk is becoming a city of continuous technical literacy. But this is a new, higher level of mass culture. What demands will these readers place on the writer?
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It is not only literature itself that lags behind life, from our reality, in its content (in the presentation of heroes, etc.). Tool for creating fiction - language, lexicon, dictionary of literature, image system- too outdated. This is especially noticeable in our poetic practice. Take a look at the arsenal of our /89/ lyrics: five-petalled lilac, the moon and stars, the image of which would do honor only to a Stone Age man. I do not want to be understood that there should be some kind of poetic “taboo” imposed on the stars. I only want to point out that poets stubbornly refuse to get acquainted with cosmography and astronomy. The moon can be compared with the face of a beloved girl, as is customary with most poets, and with the seal on a mandate, as Lugovskoy does - in both cases the benefit for the reader is very dubious.
In general, the coordination of images and metaphors is one of the most important and responsible tasks for a poet. Jean Giraudoux correctly noted that in general one can compare anything with anything. There will always be moments for comparison. This means that the point is not in a vivid comparison, but in making the whole complex of comparisons most responsive to the needs of the reader of today and tomorrow. This need is connected with cultural issues, issues of promoting the ideas of science and technology. The literary vocabulary used is such that it can only serve as a brake on the development of human consciousness.
The most important task of the second five-year plan is to destroy the roots of capitalism in the economy and consciousness people - requires from workers of fiction such attention to issues of words, to issues of metaphor, which no era has ever required from a writer. The image system of many of us is reactionary. modern poets. Here we are faced with the issue of ideological survivals in the language of modern poets and writers - with the phenomenon of so-called animism and anthropomorphism. The “sobbing” wind, the “crying” sea - all this is still viewed as a sign of the artistry of the work, although it is rather anti-artistic and anti-scientific. The struggle for the purity of language, raised by M. Gorky, must be connected with the struggle for the accuracy of language. Communication with science will undoubtedly play a huge role in this regard. Science will enrich the language.
From what has been said it is quite clear what paths, what prospects in the sense of developing the culture of the masses and in the sense of mutual benefit are promised by the union of artistic expression and science. First of all, the cultural horizon of the reader, the cultural horizon of the masses, expands enormously. Prof. points out correctly. Lapirov-Skoblo that “a fiction book, more than any student, can infect a love of science and technology, become a conductor of the greatest scientific ideas, discoveries and inventions.” Through art, through works of art, the mass reader becomes acquainted and connected with the most important problems of science and technology. In fiction, science and technology acquire a powerful lever for preparing the broad masses to accept science. “In our literature there should not be a sharp distinction between fiction and popular science literature,” says Maxim Gorky. Cognitive value novel, story, short story, poem increases many times. And more: the writer’s imagination, his artistic emotion, based on a deep study of scientific and technical problems, can serve as a significant factor in the movement of science forward and higher. Jules Verne is evidence of this.
Joint work will enrich the language of scientific works, give them emotional charge, expand the contingent of consumers of scientific creativity, and make the latter accessible to the public. Until now, with regard to the language of scientific works, there has been observed (with a few exceptions) a certain disregard for issues of verbal dress, a neglect that makes us recall the Laputans from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels or the theologians of Erasmus of Rotterdam: “They consider their inarticulate muttering a sign of profundity, inaccessible to the understanding of the crowd. The laws of grammar seem to them incompatible with the virtues of sacred science" (Praise of Stupidity). Thought will be dressed in beautiful clothes, and the perception of scientific work will be much stronger than when “the sonorous titles of majestic doctors, sophisticated doctors, most sophisticated doctors, seraphic doctors, saint doctors and indisputable doctors are heard in the ears of the listeners. Then follow large and small syllogisms, conclusions, corollaries, suppositions and other scholastic rubbish.” And Abbe Jerome Coignard in Anatole France will not say that “the most learned among us differ from the ignorant only by the ability they have acquired to amuse themselves with complex and intricate reasoning.”
Writers must help scientists get into fiction. Literature will be enriched by the creation of popular science books, which are so necessary for the mass reader. This is exactly what Gorky dreams of when he writes that “not everyone in our country still understands why a small stone or a piece of wood thrown into the air falls to the ground, and huge airplanes can fly like a bird... We need to organize close and friendly cooperation between literature and science."
Science, in turn, enriches the language, brings new forms of works, new heroes. Finally, communication with science and technology expands the cultural horizon of the writer himself. Communication is not a simple acquaintance with the achievements of various branches of science. Communication - in the study of methodology, ways of development, prospects of science, inclusion in its life. In addition, the very approach of people of science to the study of material, the very /90/ principles of scientific work, so to speak, are a great school for a writer. It is enough to remember how Balzac worked.
As a writer, you have to read everything. But in the development of scientific topics it is necessary to limit, deepen due to width, universality, which brings with it amateurism. The writer must remember that there is no “just a scientific researcher, but there are mathematicians, mechanics, physicists, chemists, biologists, physicians, sociologists, historians, linguists, etc.” (Academician V. Komarov). And in this regard and in the promotion of science and technology, close cooperation between scientists and writers is necessary. The “coupled ride” between the writer and the scientist, which Gorky spoke about at the writers’ congress, is the most important form of cooperation. A writer working on a scientific topic follows the progress of the work, he makes guesses, he submits his work to the scientists for judgment. A scientist argues with a writer - what other compliment does a writer need? Imagine the job team writers and scientists (with specialization and “attachment” of a writer to a certain branch of science) over big book about the future of our country, about the future of the world. Each writer and scientist brings his own imagination and knowledge, building his part of the overall monumental building. What grandiose architecture! What a fascinating and cultural work of art. What planning in the creation of scientific and artistic works designed to shape the scientific worldview of the reader! The writer must be given wide access to laboratories, museums, and archives, providing him with constant instruction from specialists. This is especially important for young writer, who does not yet have a name that could open the door for him to collaborate with scientists and technicians.
Importance organizational moment it's clear here. Organization of ongoing consultation of scientific workers for the writer. Organization of public readings of scientific and artistic works. A valuable proposal was put forward at a meeting of scientists and writers in the editorial office of the magazine “October” by prof. Levin and Associate Professor Apirin about creating a team of writers and scientists to review the last years fiction on scientific topics. The results of this survey will undoubtedly be very instructive. This work should also be connected with watching how writers show our scientists and technicians. I remember the writer Lidin’s essay about Acad. I. P. Pavlov. Lidin began with a message about Pavlov's repeatedly expressed skepticism regarding the ability of a writer - an emotional nature par excellence - to understand the work of a scientist - par excellence a thinker. Unfortunately, neither Lidin himself nor other writers did anything to deprive this skepticism of its foundations.
The organization of reading conferences on scientific and fiction literature, convened jointly by writers and scientists, is also one of the forms collaboration. We have never organized reader response to issues of science and technology in works of fiction. Organization of meetings, conversations between scientists and artists, and finally public performances - evenings of scientific and artistic literature carried out by writers and scientists. Evenings of scientific and artistic literature in scientific and technical institutions, universities, universities of culture.
Science and art in our country are not an end in themselves and not only a means of knowledge, but a means of changing, remaking the world. The task of Soviet fiction is to remake man, i.e. reader remake. This is achieved by showing the transformation of people, people who carry within themselves a new, socialist quality of personality - and by reflecting the disgustingness of the capitalist system, this is also achieved by showing the achievements of science and technology in their dynamics, in their prospects in the conditions of a socialist economy. Here is the writer’s right to develop scientific topics. The focus remains on the person. A person who masters the heights of science and technology, the study and demonstration of his psyche, the search for plot springs in the very solution of a scientific and technical problem - such a person has not yet been shown in our literature. All this work can be carried out only with a close union of artistic expression, science and technology.
***
The rapprochement of science and art is not limited to one area of artistic expression. Already now the question of the relationship between science and cinema can practically be raised. There are historical, geographical, and production-technical films here.
Science fiction about cinema is also not new. Now the film “Space Flight” is being prepared - the basis of this film is the work of Tsiolkovsky. The potential of cinema is extremely great both in promoting the ideas of science and technology, and in the interaction of the specifics of science and cinema. The issue of creating a scientific and artistic theater can be resolved in a very interesting way. /91/
All rights to distribute and use the works of Varlam Shalamov belong to A.L.. Use of materials is possible only with the consent of the editors of ed@site. The site was created in 2008-2009. funded by the Russian Humanitarian Foundation grant No. 08-03-12112v.
The views on science of three great Russian writers are analyzed - A.P. Chekhova, F.M. Dostoevsky and L.N. Tolstoy. Studying science in this context produces unexpected and interesting results. Keywords: science, art, fiction.
Key word: science, art, fiction literature
The problem of the relationship between science and art has a long history and is solved from different or directly opposite positions. The idea that scientific, discursive thinking was crowding out intuitive thinking and transforming the emotional sphere was popular. The phrase “The Death of Art” has become fashionable. The threat to art was directly linked to science and technology. A machine, unlike a person, has perfection and enormous productivity. She challenges artists. Therefore, art faces a choice: either it submits to the principles of machine technology and becomes widespread, or it finds itself in isolation. The apostles of this idea were the French mathematician and esthetician Mol and the Canadian mass communications specialist McLuhan. Mohl argued that art is losing its privileged position, becoming a variety practical activities, adapted by scientific and technological progress. The artist turns into a programmer or communicator. And only if he masters the strict and universal language of the machine can he retain the role of pioneer. His role is changing: he no longer creates new works, but ideas about new forms of influence on the sensory sphere of man. These ideas are realized by technology, which plays no less a role in art than in the creation of the lunar rover. In essence, this was only the first preventive war against the idea of sacredness artistic creativity and the very value of the author. Nowadays, the Internet has taken these ideas to the extreme and, as is usually the case, to caricature.
But there is also a directly opposite concept of the relationship between science and aesthetic values. For example, the French esthetician Dufresne believed that art in its traditional sense was really dying. But this does not mean that art in general is dying or should die under the aggressive pressure of science. If art wants to survive, it must stand in opposition to the social and technical environment with their ossified structures hostile to man. Breaking with traditional practice, art does not ignore reality at all, but, on the contrary, penetrates into its deeper layers, where object and subject are no longer distinguishable. In a sense, this is a version of the German philosopher Schelling. Art, therefore, saves man. But the price of such salvation is a complete break between art and science.
Of all the arts, the most tense relationship has developed between science and fiction. This is explained, first of all, by the fact that both science and literature use the same way of expressing their content - the discursive method. And although in science there is a huge layer of symbolic specific language, the main one remains the spoken language. One of the famous representatives of analytical philosophy, Peter Strawson, believed that science needs natural language for its comprehension. Another analyst, Henry N. Goodman, believes that versions of the world consist of scientific theories, pictorial images, literary opuses and the like, it is only important that they comply with the standard and proven categories. Language is a living reality; it does not recognize boundaries and flows from one subject field to another. That's why writers follow science so closely and jealously. How do they feel about her? To answer this question, it is necessary to examine all the literature separately, because there is no one answer. It is different for different writers.
The above primarily applies to Russian literature. It's clear. A poet in Russia is more than a poet. And literature has always served us more features than it should be for art. If, according to Kant, the only function of art is aesthetic, then in Russia literature taught, educated, was part of politics and religion, and preached moral maxims. It is clear that she followed the science with jealous interest - was it taking over part of her plot? Moreover, every year and century more and more objects fell into the sphere of interests of science, and its subject matter steadily expanded.
Part 1. A.P. Chekhov.
“I passionately love astronomers, poets, metaphysicians, privatdozents, chemists and other priests of science, to whom you consider yourself through your clever facts and branches of science, i.e. products and fruits... I am terribly devoted to science. This nineteenth-century sail has no value for me; science has obscured it from my eyes with its further wings. Every discovery torments me like a nail in the back....” Everyone knows these lines from Chekhov's story “Letter to a Learned Neighbor.” “This cannot happen, because this can never happen,” etc. And even people who know Chekhov’s work well think that Chekhov’s attitude towards science ends with such jokes. Meanwhile, this is the deepest delusion. None of the Russian writers took science as seriously and with such respect as Chekhov. What worried him first? First of all, Chekhov thought a lot about the problem of the connection between science and truth.
The hero of the story “On the Way” says: “You don’t know what science is. All sciences, no matter how many of them there are in the world, have the same passport, without which they consider themselves unthinkable - the desire for truth. Each of them has as its goal not benefit, not convenience in life, but truth. Amazing! When you begin to study any science, the first thing that strikes you is its beginning. I'll tell you that there is nothing more exciting and grandiose, nothing is more stunning and exciting human spirit, like the beginning of some science. From the very first five or six lectures you are inspired by the brightest hopes, you already seem to be the master of the truth. And I devoted myself to science selflessly, passionately, like a beloved woman. I was their slave, and besides them I did not want to know any other sun. Day and night, without straightening my back, I crammed, splurged on books, cried when, before my eyes, people exploited science for their own ends.” But the trouble is that this value - truth - is gradually beginning to erode.
And Chekhov continues bitterly: “But I didn’t get carried away for long. The thing is that every science has a beginning, but no end at all, just like a periodic fraction. Zoology has discovered 35,000 species of insects, chemistry has 60 simple bodies. If, over time, ten zeros are added to the right of these numbers, zoology and chemistry will be just as far from their end as they are now, and all modern scientific work consists of incrementing numbers. I realized this trick when I opened the 35001st species and did not feel satisfied” [ibid.]. In the story “The Mummers,” a young professor gives an introductory lecture. He assures that there is no greater happiness than serving science. “Science is everything! - he says. “She is life.” And they believe him. But they would have called him a mummer if they had heard what he said to his wife after the lecture. He told her: “Now, mother, I am a professor. A professor has ten times more practice than an ordinary doctor. Now I’m counting on 25 thousand a year.”
This is simply amazing. More than 60 years before the German philosopher Karl Jaspers, Chekhov tells us that truth disappears from the value horizon of science and the motives for doing science begin to become vulgar and philistine. Of course, he speaks in a specific way, as only Chekhov could say.
The next problem that worries Chekhov is the problem of value-laden science. In the story “And the Beautiful Must Have Limits,” the college registrar writes: “I also cannot remain silent about science. Science has many useful and wonderful qualities, but remember how much evil it brings if a person who indulges in it crosses the boundaries established by morality, the laws of nature, and so on? .
Chekhov was tormented by both the attitude of ordinary people towards science and its social status. “People who have completed a course in special institutions sit idle or occupy positions that have nothing to do with their specialty, and thus higher technical education is still unproductive in our country,” writes Chekhov in the story “The Wall.”
In “The Jumper,” the writer unambiguously speaks of his sympathy for the exact sciences and the hero, the physician Dymov, and his wife, the jumper Olenka, only after the death of her husband understands that she lived with an extraordinary man, a great man, although he did not understand operas and other arts. “I missed it! I missed it!” she cries.
In the story “The Thinker,” prison warden Yashkin talks to the superintendent of the district school:
“In my opinion, there are a lot of unnecessary sciences.” “That is, how is it, sir,” asks Pifov quietly. “What sciences do you find superfluous?” - “All sorts of things... The more sciences a person knows, the more he dreams of himself... There is more pride... I would outweigh all these sciences. Well, well, I’m really offended.”
Another truly visionary moment. In the story “The Duel,” the zoologist von Koren says to the deacon: “The humanities you are talking about will only satisfy human thought when in their movement they meet the exact sciences and go alongside them. Whether they will meet under a microscope or in the monologues of a new Hamlet, or in a new religion, I don’t know, but I think that the earth will be covered with an icy crust before this happens.”
But even if you are not disappointed in science, if truth, science and teaching constitute the whole meaning of your life, then is this enough for happiness? And here I want to remind you of one of Chekhov’s most poignant stories, “A Boring Story.” The story is really boring, almost nothing happens in it. But it’s about us, and I can’t ignore it in developing this plot. The hero is an outstanding, world-famous scientist - physician, professor, privy councilor and holder of almost all domestic and foreign orders. He is seriously and terminally ill, suffers from insomnia, suffers and knows that he has only a few months left to live, no more. But he cannot and does not want to give up what he loves - science and teaching. His story about how he lectures is real Toolkit for all teachers. His day starts early and at a quarter to ten he has to start giving a lecture.
On the way to the university, he thinks about the lecture and then reaches the university. “But here are the gloomy university gates that have not been repaired for a long time, a bored janitor in a sheepskin coat, a broom, a pile of snow... On fresh boy For someone who comes from the provinces and imagines that the temple of science is in fact a temple, such gates cannot make a healthy impression. In general, the dilapidation of university buildings, the gloominess of the corridors, the soot of the walls, the lack of light, the dull appearance of the steps, hangers and benches in the history of Russian pessimism occupy one of the first places along with the predisposing reasons... A student, whose mood is mostly created by the situation, at every step, where he learns, he must see in front of him only the tall, strong, graceful... God protect him from skinny trees, broken windows, gray walls and doors covered with torn oilcloth.”
His thoughts about his assistant, the dissector, who prepares drugs for him, are curious. He fanatically believes in the infallibility of science and mainly of everything that the Germans write. “He is confident in himself, in his preparations, knows the purpose of life and is completely unfamiliar with the doubts and disappointments that turn talent gray. Slavish worship of authority and lack of need to think independently.” But then the lecture begins. “I know what I will read about, but I don’t know how I will read, where I will start and where I will end. To read well, that is, not boringly and with benefit for listeners, you need, in addition to talent, to also have dexterity and experience, you need to have the clearest idea of \u200b\u200byour strengths, about those to whom you are reading, and about what constitutes the subject of your speech. In addition, you need to be a man on your own, watch vigilantly and not lose sight for a second.... In front of me are one and a half hundred faces, not similar to one another... My goal is to defeat this many-headed hydra. If every minute while I read, I have a clear idea of the degree of her attention and the power of understanding, then she is in my power... Next, I try to keep my speech literary, the definitions short and precise, the phrase as simple and beautiful as possible. Every minute I must check myself and remember that I have only an hour and forty minutes at my disposal. In a word, there is a lot of work. At the same time you have to pretend to be a scientist, a teacher, and a speaker, and it’s bad if the speaker defeats the teacher and scientist in you, or vice versa.
You read for a quarter of an hour, half an hour, and then you notice that students begin to glance at the ceiling, one will reach for a scarf, another will sit more comfortably, the third will smile at his thoughts... This means that attention is tired. We need to take action. Taking advantage of the first opportunity, I say some pun. All one and a half hundred faces are smiling broadly, their eyes are sparkling cheerfully, and the roar of the sea is briefly heard. I laugh too. My attention is refreshed and I can continue. No sport, no entertainment or games gave me such pleasure as lecturing. Only during lectures could I give myself over to passion and understand that inspiration is not an invention of poets, but actually exists.”
But then the professor falls ill and, it would seem, he needs to give up everything and take care of his health and treatment. “My conscience and mind tell me that the best thing I could do now is to give the boys a farewell lecture, give them the last word, bless them and give up my place to a man who is younger and stronger than me. But let God judge me, I don’t have the courage to act according to my conscience... Just like 20-30 years ago, now, before my death, I am only interested in science. As I breathe my last breath, I will still believe that science is the most important, most beautiful and necessary thing in a person’s life, that it has been and will be the highest manifestation love and that only through it alone will man conquer nature and himself.
This belief may be naive and unfair in its basis, but it is not my fault that I believe this way and not otherwise; I cannot overcome this faith in myself” [ibid.]. But if this is so, if science is the most beautiful thing in a person’s life, then why do you want to cry while reading this story? Probably because the hero is still unhappy. Unhappy because he is terminally ill, unhappy in his family, unhappy in his sinless love for his pupil Katya. And the last phrase “Farewell, my treasure,” as well as the phrase “Where are you, Missyus?” from another story by Chekhov - the best thing in world literature, which makes the heart clench.
Chekhov’s thoughts, both as a doctor and as a writer, on the problem of “genius and madness,” which is still relevant today, are extremely interesting. One of the best stories Chekhov's "The Black Monk". The hero Kovrin is a scientist, a very talented philosopher. He is sick with manic-depressive psychosis, which Chekhov, as a doctor, describes with scrupulous accuracy. Kovrin comes for the summer to visit his friends, with whom he practically grew up, and marries the owner’s daughter, Tanya. But soon a manic phase sets in, hallucinations begin, and a frightened Tanya and her father begin to fight for his treatment. This causes Kovrin nothing but irritation. “Why, why did you treat me? Bromide drugs, idleness, warm baths, surveillance, cowardly fear for every sip, for every step - all this will eventually drive me to idiocy. I was going crazy, I had delusions of grandeur, but I was cheerful, cheerful and even happy, I was interesting and original.
Now I have become more reasonable and respectable, but I am like everyone else: I am mediocre, I am bored with life... Oh, how cruelly you treated me. I saw hallucinations, but who cares? I ask: who did this bother?” “How happy Buddha and Mohammed or Shakespeare are that kind relatives and doctors did not treat them for ecstasy and inspiration. If Mohammed had taken potassium bromide for his nerves, worked only two hours a day and drank milk, then after that wonderful person there would be as little left as there was after his dog. Doctors and good relatives will eventually make humanity stupid, mediocrity will be considered a genius and civilization will perish” [ibid.]. In Tanya’s last letter to Kovrin, she writes: “My soul is burning with unbearable pain... Damn you. I took you for extraordinary person“For a genius, I fell in love with you, but you turned out to be crazy.” This tragic discrepancy between the inner self-perception of a brilliant person and the perception of those around him, whom he actually makes unhappy, is a depressing circumstance that science has not yet coped with.
Part 2. F. M. Dostoevsky
We see a completely different image of science in the works of F.M. Dostoevsky. Probably the most important components of this image are in “Demons” and “The Brothers Karamazov”. In "The Possessed" Dostoevsky speaks not about science in general, but more about social theories. “Demons” seems to record the moments when a social utopia with whimsical fantasies and romance acquires the status of a “textbook of life” and then becomes a dogma, the theoretical foundation of a nightmarish turmoil. Such a theoretical system is being developed by one of the heroes of “Demons” Shigalev, who is confident that there is only one path to earthly paradise - through unlimited despotism and mass terror. Everything has the same denominator, complete equality, complete impersonality.
He transfers Dostoevsky’s undisguised disgust for such theories that came from Europe to the entire European enlightenment. Science is the main driving force of European enlightenment. “But in science there is only that,” says Elder Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov, “that is subject to feelings. The spiritual world, the higher half of the human being, is completely rejected, expelled with a certain triumph, even with hatred. Following science, they want to get along without Christ.” Dostoevsky believes that Russia should receive from Europe only the external, applied side of knowledge. “But we have nothing to draw spiritual enlightenment from Western European sources, given the complete presence of Russian sources... Our people have been enlightened for a long time. Everything that they desire in Europe—all this has long been in Russia in the form of the truth of Christ, which is entirely preserved in Orthodoxy.” This did not stop Dostoevsky from sometimes speaking about the extraordinary universal love for Europe.
But, as D.S. Merezhkovsky aptly notes, this extraordinary love is more like extraordinary human hatred. “If you knew,” Dostoevsky writes in a letter to a friend from Dresden, “what a bloody disgust, to the point of hatred, Europe aroused in me during these four years. Lord, what prejudices we have about Europe! They may be scientists, but they are terrible fools... The people here are literate, but incredibly uneducated, stupid, stupid, with the most base interests” [ibid.]. How can Europe respond to such “love”? Nothing. Except hatred. “In Europe, everyone holds a stone in their bosom against us. Europe hates us, despises us. There, in Europe, they decided to put an end to Russia long ago. We cannot hide from their gnashing, and someday they will rush at us and eat us.”
As for science, it is, of course, the fruit of the intelligentsia. “But having shown this fruit to the people, we must wait for what the whole nation will say, having accepted the science from us.”
But is it still needed for something, science, since it exists? And just then N.F. turns up. Fedorov with his project for the universal salvation of ancestors.
The doctrine of universal cause arose in the fall of 1851. For almost twenty-five years Fedorov did not put it down on paper. And all these years I dreamed that Dostoevsky would appreciate the project. The wonderful work of Anastasia Gacheva is dedicated to their difficult relationship.
A. Gacheva emphasizes that in many topics the writer and the philosopher, without even knowing it, go in parallel. Their spiritual vectors move in the same direction, so that the holistic image of the world and man that Fedorov builds acquires volume and depth against the background of Dostoevsky’s ideas, and many of Dostoevsky’s intuitions and understandings respond and find their development in the works of the philosopher of universal affairs. Dostoevsky's thought moves towards the scientific and practical side of the project. “THEN LET'S NOT BE AFRAID OF SCIENCE. WE WILL EVEN SHOW NEW WAYS IN IT” – in capital letters Dostoevsky denotes the idea of a renewed, Christian science. It appears in the outlines of Zosima’s teachings, echoing other statements that outline the theme of transfiguration: “Your flesh will change. (Light of Tabor). Life is heaven, we have the keys.”
However, in the final text of the novel there is only the image of a positivist-oriented science that does not care about any higher reasons and, accordingly, leading the world away from Christ (Mitya Karamazov’s monologue about “tails” - nerve endings: only thanks to them a person contemplates and thinks, and not because he “has some kind of image and likeness there.” In the late 1890s - in the early 1900s, Fedorov began to sound in a new direction the themes that at one time united him with Dostoevsky back in the 1870s. He criticizes the secular civilization of the New Age, which idolized the vanity of vanities, serving the god of consumption and comfort, and points to clearly identified ones. To end of the 19th century V. symptoms of an anthropological crisis - it was precisely this crisis that Dostoevsky represented in his underground heroes, pointing to the dead end of godless anthropocentrism, the absolutization of man as he is.
Curious in this regard is the attempt of modern researchers of Dostoevsky’s work to present the writer’s attitude to new, in particular, nuclear science. I. Volgin, L. Saraskina, G. Pomerants, Yu Karyakin think about this.
As G. Pomerantz noted, Dostoevsky in the novel “Crime and Punishment” created a parable about the deep negative consequences of “naked” rationalism. “The point is not in a separate false idea, not in Raskolnikov’s mistake, but in the limitations of any ideology. “It’s also good that you just killed the old woman,” said Porfiry Petrovich. “And if you had come up with another theory, then, perhaps, you would have made the thing a hundred million times uglier.” Porfiry Petrovich turned out to be right. Experience last centuries showed how dangerous it is to trust logic without trusting it with your heart and spiritual experience. A mind that has become a practical force is dangerous. The scientific mind with its discoveries and inventions is dangerous. The political mind with its reforms is dangerous. We need systems of protection from the destructive forces of the mind, like at nuclear power plants—from atomic explosion” .
Yu. Karyakin writes: “There are great discoveries in science... But there are also great discoveries of absolutely suicidal and (or) self-saving... spiritual-nuclear human energy in art - INCOMPARABLY “fundamental” of all... scientific discoveries. Why...Einstein, Mahler, Bekhterev...almost exactly the same way treated Dostoevsky? Yes, because in a person, in his soul, everything converges and intersects, absolutely all lines, waves, influences of all the laws of the world... all other cosmic, physical, chemical and other forces. It took billions of years for all these forces to concentrate at just this one point...”
I. Volgin notes: “Of course... it is possible... to resist world evil exclusively with the help of aircraft carriers, nuclear bombs, tanks, special services. But if we want to understand what is happening to us, if we want to treat not the patient, but the disease, we cannot do without the participation of those who have taken upon themselves the mission of “finding the person in a person.”
In a word, we, who are in a state of deepest global crises and in connection with the nuclear threat, are obliged, in the opinion of many philosophers and scientists, to go through dangerous revelations about man and society, through the most complete knowledge of them. This means that it is impossible to ignore Dostoevsky and the study of his work.
Part 3. L. N. Tolstoy
In January 1894, the 9th All-Russian Congress of Naturalists and Doctors took place, at which topical problems of molecular biology were discussed. L.N. Tolstoy was also present at the congress, who spoke about the congress like this: “Scientists have discovered cells, and there are some little things in them, but they don’t know why.”
These “things” haunt him. In “The Kreutzer Sonata” the hero says “science has found some leukocytes that run around in the blood and all sorts of unnecessary nonsense,” but she could not understand the main thing. Tolstoy considered all doctors to be charlatans. I.I. Mechnikov, a Nobel Prize winner, was called a fool. N.F. Fedorov, who had never raised his voice against anyone in his life, could not stand it. He showed Tolstoy the treasures of the Rumyantsev Library with trepidation. Tolstoy said: “How many people write nonsense. All this should be burned." And then Fedorov shouted: “I have seen many fools in my life, but this is the first time for someone like you.”
It is infinitely difficult to talk about the attitude of L.N. Tolstoy to science. What is this? Disease? Obscurantism reaching the point of obscurantism? And it would be possible not to talk about it, to keep silent, just as fans and researchers of I. Newton’s work were silent for many years about his pranks with alchemy. But Tolstoy is not just brilliant writer, probably the first in a series of Russian and world literature. For Russia, he is also a prophet, an almost uncanonized saint, a seer, a teacher. Walkers come to him, thousands of people write to him, they believe in him like God, and ask for advice. Here is one of the letters - a letter from the Simbirsk peasant F.A. Abramov, which the writer received at the end of June 1909.
F. A. Abramov turned to L. N. Tolstoy with a request to provide clarification on the following questions: “1) How do you look at science? 2) What is science? 3) Visible shortcomings of our science. 4) What has science given us? 5) What should be required from science? 6) What transformation of science is needed? 7) How should scientists treat the dark mass and physical labor? 8) How to teach children younger age? 9) What is needed for youth?” . And Tolstoy answers. This is a very lengthy letter, so I will only pay attention to the main points. First of all, Tolstoy gives a definition of science. Science, he writes, as it has always been understood and is still understood by most people, is knowledge of the most necessary and important objects of knowledge for human life.
Such knowledge, as it cannot be otherwise, has always been, is and now only one thing: knowledge of what every person needs to do in order to live as best as possible in this world. short term life, which is determined for him by God, fate, the laws of nature - whatever you want. In order to know this, how to best live your life in this world, you must first of all know what is definitely good always and everywhere and for all people, and what is definitely bad always and everywhere and for all people, i.e. know what should and should not be done. In this, and only in this, has always been and continues to be true, real science. This question is common to all humanity, and we find the answer to it in Krishna and Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, Christ, Mohammed. All science comes down to loving God and neighbor, as Christ said. Loving God, i.e. to love above all else the perfection of goodness, and to love one's neighbor, i.e. love every person as you love yourself.
So true, real science, needed by all people, is short, simple, and understandable, says Tolstoy. What so-called scientists consider to be science is, by definition, no longer science. People who are now engaged in science and are considered scientists study everything in the world. They need everything equally. “With equal diligence and importance, they investigate the question of how much the Sun weighs and whether it will converge with such or such a star, and what kind of boogers live where and how they are bred, and what can happen from them, and how the Earth became the Earth, and how grasses began to grow on it, and what animals, and birds, and fish there are on Earth, and what were there before, and which king fought with whom and who was married to, and who wrote which poems and songs and fairy tales when, and what laws are needed, and why are prisons and gallows needed, and how and with what to replace them, and what composition are what stones and what metals, and how and what kind of vapors exist and how do they cool, and why only the Christian church religion is true, and how to make electric motors and airplanes, and submarines, etc., etc., etc.
And all these are sciences with the strangest pretentious names, and to all this... there is no and cannot be an end to research, because there is a beginning and an end to a matter, but there can be no end to trifles.” And these trifles are occupied by people who do not feed themselves, but who are fed by others and who, out of boredom, have nothing better to do than engage in any kind of fun.” Further, Tolstoy divides the sciences into three departments according to their goals. The first department is the natural sciences: biology in all its divisions, then astronomy, mathematics and theoretical, i.e. non-applied physics, chemistry and others with all their subdivisions. The second section will consist of applied sciences: applied physics, chemistry, mechanics, technology, agronomy, medicine and others, with the goal of mastering the forces of nature to facilitate human labor. The third department consists of all those numerous sciences, the purpose of which is to justify and establish the existing social order. These are all the so-called theological, philosophical, historical, legal, and political sciences.
The sciences of the first department: astronomy, mathematics, especially “biology and the theory of the origin of organisms, so beloved and praised by so-called educated people,” and many other sciences that have as their goal only curiosity, cannot be recognized as sciences in the exact sense of this, because they do not answer The main requirement of science is to tell people what they should and should not do in order to have a good life. Having dealt with the first section, Tolstoy takes on the second. Here it turns out that applied sciences, instead of making life easier for people, only increase the power of the rich over enslaved workers and intensify the horrors and atrocities of wars.
There remains a third category of knowledge called science - knowledge aimed at justifying the existing structure of life. This knowledge not only does not meet the main condition of what constitutes the essence of science, serving the good of people, but also pursues the opposite, quite definite goal - to keep the majority of people in the slavery of the minority, using for this purpose all kinds of sophisms, false interpretations, deceptions, frauds... I think that it is unnecessary to say that all this knowledge, which has the goal of evil and not the good of humanity, cannot be called science, Tolstoy emphasizes. It is clear that for these numerous trivial activities the so-called. scientists need helpers. They are recruited from the people.
And here the following happens to young people going into science. Firstly, they are distracted from necessary and useful work, and secondly, filling their heads with unnecessary knowledge, they lose respect for the most important moral teaching about life. “If the people of the people learn the true science, the rulers will have no helpers. And those in power know this and therefore, without ceasing, with all possible means, baits, bribes, they lure people from among the people to study false science and scare them away from the real, true science with all kinds of prohibitions and violence,” Tolstoy emphasizes. Don’t give in to deception, Lev Nikolaevich urges. “And this means - parents should not, as now, send their children to schools set up by the upper classes to corrupt them, and adult boys and girls, taking time away from honest work necessary for life, should not strive and not enter educational institutions set up to corrupt them. .
Just stop people from among the people from enrolling in government schools, and not only will the false science, useless to anyone except one class of people, be destroyed by itself, but the science that is always necessary and inherent to human nature about how to do the best for him will be established by itself. before one’s conscience, before God, to live a certain period of life for each person. This letter... And in his novels, Tolstoy colors his attitude towards science and education through artistic means.
It is known that Konstantin. Levin is Tolstoy's alter ego. Through this hero he expressed the most pressing questions for him - life, death, honor, family, love, etc.
Levin's brother Sergei Koznyshev, a scientist, discusses a fashionable topic with a famous professor: is there a boundary between mental and physiological processes in human activity and where is it? Levin gets bored. He came across articles in magazines that were discussed and read them, being interested in them as the development of the fundamentals of natural science familiar to him as a natural scientist at the university, but he never brought these scientific conclusions about the origin of man as an animal, about reflexes, about biology and sociology closer to those questions about the meaning of life and death for himself, which recently came to his mind more and more often.
Moreover, he did not consider it necessary to convey this knowledge to the people. In a dispute with his brother, Levin decisively declares that a literate man is much worse. I don’t need schools either, but they are even harmful, he assures... And when they try to prove to Levin that education is a benefit for the people, he says that he does not recognize this as a good thing.
We find such a colorful, diverse, contradictory image of science in the works of our great writers. But with all the diversity of points of view and their controversy, one thing is indisputable - they all thought primarily about the moral security of science and its responsibility to man. And this is now - main plot in philosophy of science.
There is no particular need to introduce the iconic 19th century English scientist and author of the theory of evolution. However, few people know that the work he wrote 150 years ago on natural selection is still read in one breath today.
You can agree or not with numerous Freudian ideas, but no one will argue with the statement that without the works of this Austrian scientist it is impossible to imagine modern psychology today. His “Lectures on Introduction to Psychoanalysis” are the most complete and convincing example of this.
"Radioactive substances" is translated into English language doctoral thesis of a French experimental scientist, twice Nobel laureate Marie Skłodowska-Curie. This scientific work, written in 1904, centers on the new elements “radium” and “polonium” discovered by a Polish emigrant physicist.
Double Helix is the first diary of American James Watson, published in 1968, one of the four scientists who discovered the structure of the DNA molecule. In the book, he not only describes in detail the entire research process, but also, for example, openly declares his conflict with his colleague Francis Crick, with whom Watson shared the Nobel Prize.
American Edwin Hubble is not only the same American astronomer after whom the space telescope was named, but also the scientist who first proposed dividing nebulae into extragalactic and galactic, and also discovered asteroid 1373 Cincinatti. This book is a collection of lectures by the scientist, given by him in 1935.
Start getting acquainted with literary creativity American astrophysicist Carl Sagan can be found in any of his books. But it is possible - and with a specific one: about the place of humanity in space exploration) “Pale Blue Dot” - and the title is poetic, and gives that unique feeling of miracle and discovery, which is characteristic of all Saganov’s texts.
American virologist, a native of a Russian-Jewish immigrant family, Jonas Salk made a name for himself in science in 1955 as the developer of the polio vaccine. But most of his texts are devoted to biophilosophy - a combination of a philosophical approach to biology and the theory of evolution.
Jane Goodall is a legend in the world of modern primatology. This London native spent 50 of her 77 years in... national park Gombe Stream in Tanzania, where all this time she studied the life and behavior of chimpanzees. This book is not only a scientifically based, but also a well-illustrated travelogue.
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From the book How to Make a Delicious Brand? author Sirotkina Irina Vadimovna From the book Universal Foundation TISE Technology author Yakovlev R. N. From the book Operation of Electrical Substations and Switchgears author Krasnik V.V.References 1. Beletsky A.V., Leznov S.I., Filatov A.A. Maintenance of electrical substations. - M.: Energoatomizdat, 1985.2. Doroshev K.I. Operation of complete switchgears 6-220 kV. - M.: Energoatomizdat, 1987.3. Instructions for switching to
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Science describes phenomena and processes surrounding reality. It gives a person the opportunity to:
Observe and analyze processes and phenomena,
To find out at a qualitative level the mechanism of their occurrence,
Enter quantitative characteristics;
Predict the course of the process and its results
Art, which includes fiction, reflects the world in images - verbal, visual.
Both of these methods of reflection real world mutually complement and enrich each other. This is due to the fact that a person by nature has relatively independent functioning of two channels for transmitting and processing information - verbal and emotional-figurative. This is due to the properties of our brain.
Science and art reflect social consciousness in different ways. The language of science is concepts, formulas. The language of art is images. Artistic images evoke in people's minds persistent, vivid, emotionally charged ideas, which, complementing the content of concepts, form a personal attitude towards reality, towards the material being studied. Formulas, relationships, dependencies can be beautiful, but you need to be able to feel it, then studying, instead of being a harsh necessity, can become a difficult but enjoyable experience. In works of art there are often pictures of physical phenomena in nature, descriptions of various technical processes, structures, materials, and information about scientists. Science fiction reflects many scientific assumptions and hypotheses. A special vision of the world, mastery of words and the ability to generalize allow writers to achieve surprisingly accurate, easily imaginable descriptions in their works.
Descriptions of scientific knowledge appear as in classical literature, and in modern. Such descriptions are especially in demand in the genre of fiction, since in its essence it is based on the presentation of various scientific hypotheses, presented in the language of fiction.
Fantasy as a technique, as a means of expression, belongs entirely to the form of a work of art, or more precisely, to its plot. But it is possible to understand the arrangement and relationships of social characters in their individual manifestation only based on the situation of the work, which is a category of content.
Science fiction, if considered in this regard, has the same subject as art - “the ideologically conscious characteristic of the social life of people and, in one way or another, the characteristic of the life of nature,” with an emphasis primarily on the second part of this definition. Therefore, one cannot agree with the conclusions of T. A. Chernysheva, who believes that “the specificity ... (of science fiction - V. Ch.) is not that a new hero comes to literature - a scientist, and not that the content science fiction works become social, “human” consequences of scientific discoveries,” and that in “science... fiction gradually emerged new topic: man and the natural environment, and art is now interested in the physical properties of this environment, and it is perceived not only in the aesthetic aspect.”
It is quite possible that the artist as an individual may be interested in certain aspects of the physical phenomena of the environment or nature in general. Examples of such interest, when a writer, poet is not limited to purely artistic field There is a lot of activity in the historical and literary process. In this regard, it is enough to recall the names of Goethe, Voltaire, Diderot, etc.
However, the question is not so much in justifying or condemning such an interest, but rather in the nature of this interest: either the “physical properties of the environment” are of interest to the writer, primarily in their essential moments, as a manifestation of certain objective laws of nature, or they are realized through the prism features human life, thereby receiving a certain understanding and emotional and ideological assessment. In the first case, even if the artist tries to create a work of art based on a system of knowledge that has been consolidated in his theoretical thinking, it will inevitably be illustrative in nature, without achieving the degree of artistic generality and expressiveness that is inherent in works of art.
If, due to the ideological worldview of the writer, the “physical properties of the environment” acquire one or another emotional and ideological orientation, it can become the subject of art in general and science fiction in particular. The difficulty of differentiating modern fiction in its content significance lies in the fact that it can act as a reflection of the prospects for the development of science and technology or “ physical properties environment", carrying out in a figurative form the popularization of certain problems or achievements of science and technology, and the "figurative form" in such a case does not go beyond illustration. And at the same time, “science” fiction, which was born and fully formed in turn of the 19th century- XX centuries, “interested” in those issues and topics scientific achievements, which bear the imprint of the social characteristics of the lives of people and society in their national-historical conditioning. In this case, we can conditionally distinguish two “branches” in science fiction, in its content: science fiction, which understands and reflects the problems of the natural sciences in their social and ideological orientation, and science fiction, which is “interested” in the problems of the social sciences.
However, modern “science” fiction is not limited to the genre of utopia. Data from social and natural sciences, in addition to their objective cognitive value, increasingly influence the social relationships of people, expressed both in changes and revisions of moral and ethical standards, and in the need to foresee the results of scientific discoveries for the benefit or detriment of all humanity. The industrial and technological revolution, which began in the 20th century, poses a number of social, ethical, philosophical, and not just technical problems to humanity. The changes taking place in this “changing” world and caused by the development of science are what science fiction “deals with,” which since the time of Wells has been called social. The essence of this type of “science” fiction was best expressed by the Strugatsky brothers. “Literature,” they write, “should try to explore typical societies, that is, practically consider the whole variety of connections between people, groups and the second nature created by them. Modern world so complex, there are so many connections and they are so intricate that literature can solve this problem by means of certain sociological generalizations, the construction of sociological models, necessarily simplified, but preserving the most characteristic trends and patterns. Of course, the most important tendencies of these models continue to be typical people, but acting in circumstances typified not along the lines of concreteness, but along the lines of trends." An example of such fiction can be the works of the Strugatskys themselves ("It's Hard to Be a God" and others), "Return from stars" by Stanislaw Lem, etc.
A number of outdated opinions regarding science fiction, which boiled down mainly to the fact that its content should be a scientific hypothesis, its goal should be a scientific forecast, and its purpose should be the popularization and propaganda of scientific knowledge, have now been refuted not so much by the efforts of critics and literary scholars, but by literary practice itself . Most writers on science fiction now agree that it is a special branch of fiction with a specific area of creative interests and unique techniques for depicting reality. And yet, most of the works devoted to science fiction are characterized by insufficient development of the positive part of the program, in particular, such a fundamental issue as the role and significance of the “principle of science,” the solution of which could clarify a number of controversial issues related to the nature of science fiction and her artistic capabilities. For a researcher of modern science fiction, it is extremely necessary to find out the nature of its connection with science, as well as the meaning and purpose of such a commonwealth.
The first and, perhaps, the most serious consequence of the “scientificization” of science fiction was its modernity. The emergence of science fiction in the second half of the 19th century. was to a certain extent predetermined by the enormous acceleration (compared to previous centuries) of scientific and technological progress, the dissemination of scientific knowledge in society, and the formation of a scientific, materialistic vision of the world. The scientific was accepted as a plausible justification for the fantastic then, notes the writer G. Gurevich, “when technology gained strength and miracles began to be done behind the fences of factories: steam chariots without horses, ships without sails, sailing against the wind.”
However, science fiction in fiction is not just an ordinary sign of the times. The scientific principle adopted by science fiction prepared and armed it for the development of the most complex modern problems.
Most writers on science fiction agree with the idea that the criterion of scientificity is necessary for science fiction. “...The problem of the compass, the problem of the criterion cannot be removed,” notes A.F. Britikov, for whom the criterion of science in fiction is equivalent to the criterion of a person. Sun. Revich obviously reduces the criterion of scientificity to the wish of a science fiction writer to know his chosen field well and not allow elementary errors against science: “It’s funny when a person who claims to be a soothsayer makes elementary scientific mistakes.” True, the critic immediately makes a reservation that scientific awareness for a science fiction writer is not the main and not the only necessary quality, and even an elementary scientific miscalculation made by him may not affect the artistic merits of the work. To this we must also add that not every science fiction writer, as we know, claims to be a soothsayer. The question of scientific criteria in V. Mikhailov’s article “Science Fiction” is complicated. The author of the article either claims that the single “scientific” word mentioned by a science fiction writer makes his work science fiction (such as the word “rocket”) and agrees with the scientific nature of Wells’s time machine, then criticizes modern science fiction writers who use the idea in their works photon rocket and flight at sub-light speeds, since “calculations have been published” indicating the technical impracticability of both. Z. I. Fainburg pushes the boundaries of science fiction as widely as possible, arguing that “in situations and solutions of science fiction, assumptions are made, as a rule, on the basis of what is at least ideally possible, that is, at least not fundamentally inconsistent with the materiality of the world.”
In modern science fiction there are many gradations and degrees of scientificity. Some modern science fiction writers go much further than Wells along the path of transforming scientific justification into a kind of artistic technique, increasing credibility, or simply a sign of the times. Becoming more and more formal, scientific justification becomes more and more conditional.