Interestingly, the novel "Aelita" was filmed already in 1924, although in a very free way. Here is such Aelita, dressed in the style of constructivism, then they showed it ... A frame from the film
"The golden age was degenerating,
satiety set in in the cities of Atlantis.
Nothing held back a more unbridled fantasy,
thirst for perversions, the madness of a devastated mind.
The power that man had mastered turned against him.
The inevitability of death made people gloomy,
ferocious, merciless."
A. Tolstoy "Aelita"
satiety set in in the cities of Atlantis.
Nothing held back a more unbridled fantasy,
thirst for perversions, the madness of a devastated mind.
The power that man had mastered turned against him.
The inevitability of death made people gloomy,
ferocious, merciless."
A. Tolstoy "Aelita"
Paradoxes stories. I read the book of the Strugatsky brothers "Predatory things of the century" immediately after its publication in print. And… it’s not that I didn’t understand her from her childhood, no. Understood. But I didn’t like the communism described in it, because I didn’t imagine it like that, although I understood that its very beginning was described here. Then, after 1965, I read Georgy Gurevich’s novel “We are from the Solar System”, and the local “communism” seemed to me more understandable and realistically possible, except perhaps for this place:
“After all, he grew up in the Republic of Central Asia, in the reserve of traditions, in a country where the past was immensely respected, old customs and even prejudices were cherished. Once this republic was a prison for blacks: they were kept behind barbed wire, bullied, beaten, killed. Of course, the pogroms were forgotten a long time ago, but the color of the skin was remembered here. They remembered and tried to maintain a certain balance. So it was established here: a visitor could be the president, but then a native citadel was always elected vice president. And if the chairman was a woman, then the secretary must be a man. And if a black boy was given an award at school, they would definitely pull an award for a white boy, even if he didn’t deserve it (otherwise they will be accused of addiction!) ”
What can you not find in novels!
There are many funny things in the description of the republic CC - short for "Citadel of Civilization", Gurevich came up with in the description of this country. And that people there, especially the elderly, still worshiped a mythical creature called "god", and that they had a strange habit of drinking water with ethyl alcohol on holidays, in a word, "good" he laughed there at the realities of our life and the traditional character of our thinking:
“Man is a selfish being. He tends to be proud even of his shortcomings. Being the last to join the Union of Peoples, the inhabitants of the Central Center were not ashamed that they were the last, they even boasted of their perseverance and cherished the remnants, calling them, however, traditions. Like all people of the United Earth, the inhabitants of the Citadel received according to their needs, but for some reason they did not want to call such an order communist, they called themselves a “free civilized republic”.
Russian peasants of the 20s. Red Army soldier Gusev - Nikolai Batalov. Frame from the movie "Aelita"
And although in some places the book seemed simply boring to me, its characters, in my opinion, looked more alive than the extremely sketchy characters of the same "Andromeda Nebula" by Ivan Efremov. Well, there are no such correct and some very “flat” people, all of whose spiritual struggles concern only their profession and concern for their neighbor. And if your neighbor for some reason is antipathetic?
But again, I didn’t like about the CC. So why are they so backward? Why didn't people from neighboring countries re-educate them?
Here are the types, so the types. All the vices on the faces! Frame from the movie "Aelita"
And then in 1968, as a tourist, together with my mother, I ended up in Bulgaria and, looking at the local foreign cars, shops and all that, I realized that - yes, countries with different standards of living are not an invention, and that others live much better than us rather than we are better than others. Although, of course, in China, the same "Hungweibins" are outraged, and in the USA, "Negroes are still being hanged."
However, very soon the reasons for our backwardness from the West became clear to me. Firstly, there was a brutal war, and not so many years passed after that, and secondly, the reason for this was, of course, geographical. Our ancestors lived during the time of the Slavs in dense forests, communicated with each other mainly along rivers, were separated from the centers of Mediterranean civilization by the “steppe corridor”, and from medieval Europe by dense forest and swamps, so our information exchange has stalled.
And isn't that obvious? According to the "History of the Franks", Clovis, the king of the Franks, was baptized himself and baptized his squad in 496, while the official Baptism of Rus' by Prince Vladimir Svyatoslavich took place only in 988, that is, as much as 500 years later. At the same time, we did not observe any backwardness either in spears, or in swords, or in shields, but spiritual development went very slowly.
Two competing types of culture
Yes, and we belonged, as it turned out, to the type of continental culture, while abroad, many peoples belonged to the culture of the Atlantic. The difference between them is easiest to explain by referring to the cult film Alexander Nevsky (1938). It was said there:
“From your native land, even die, but don’t go!”
And so:
“Where you lay down to sleep, there is your homeland!”
(Atlantic culture).
And it is clear that the contact of the second type of culture seemed to be more significant in historical terms than the greater rigidity and traditionalism of the first. Well, and then also the Mongol-Tatar invasion, confirmed by coals and broken skulls found on the sites of ancient Russian cities, and in the annals everything about this was described in detail, and not only in ours, but also in the chronicles and correspondence of the sovereigns of neighboring Western countries.
A riot of feelings, very characteristic of the Martians! Frame from the movie "Aelita"
1908 foresight
Peter I brought Russia closer to Europe, and his other heirs wanted the same, and the same ... Nicholas II, in whose plans both the modernization of the army and the industrial potential of the country was to be completed by 1920-1930. But it didn't work out. That is why, soon after the October Revolution, it was about the introduction of a mobilization economy in the country, and it lasted for a long time, until ... 1991. It was said that the country “built developed socialism”, but let's see what Alexander Bogdanov, an ally and then an opponent of V. I. Lenin, wrote about this “socialism” back in 1908 in his utopian novel “Red Star”:
“Not one, but many social revolutions are foreseen, in different countries, at different times, and even in many respects, probably of a different nature, and most importantly, with a doubtful and unstable outcome. The ruling classes, relying on the army and high military equipment, can in some cases inflict on the insurgent proletariat such a crushing defeat that in entire vast states will set back the cause of the struggle for socialism for decades; and examples of this kind have already been in the annals of the Earth. Then the individual advanced countries in which socialism triumphs will be like islands in the midst of a hostile capitalist, and even part of the pre-capitalist world.
Fighting for their own domination, the upper classes of the non-socialist countries will direct all their efforts to destroy these islands, will constantly organize military attacks on them and will find enough allies among the socialist nations, ready for any government, from among the former owners, large and small. The outcome of these collisions is difficult to predict. But even where socialism holds out and emerges victorious, its character will be profoundly and permanently distorted by many years of a state of siege, necessary terror and militarism, with the inevitable consequence of barbaric patriotism.
Fighting for their own domination, the upper classes of the non-socialist countries will direct all their efforts to destroy these islands, will constantly organize military attacks on them and will find enough allies among the socialist nations, ready for any government, from among the former owners, large and small. The outcome of these collisions is difficult to predict. But even where socialism holds out and emerges victorious, its character will be profoundly and permanently distorted by many years of a state of siege, necessary terror and militarism, with the inevitable consequence of barbaric patriotism.
And that's how it all turned out.
There was also a state of siege:
“From all sides of the blockade, the ring and cannons are staring us in the face!”
(V. Mayakovsky), and there was terror, and the military, coupled with "barbaric patriotism", the eructation of which is still noticeable today, not to mention the fight against cosmopolitanism, which began with the decision of the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks "On the Zvezda magazines" and "Leningrad" of August 14, 1946.
"New Hope"
But then the USSR collapsed, the doctrine did not hold up, only one (!) Officer turned out to be faithful to the oath to the end, a new era began, and little by little we began to notice that the Western countries, which had ceased to be afraid of us, again, adopted a lot from us , overtook us even more, both spiritually and socially, although Tanks and our missiles were no worse, and in many ways better than many. As, however, earlier and swords, and shields.
Protazanov's Martian soldiers most of all looked like Roman soldiers for some reason! Frame from the movie "Aelita"
But here is a paradox that we have only just begun to realize today: what kind of world has turned out there, in the countries of the Atlantic culture, named after the Atlantic Ocean and the legendary Atlantis?
By the way, the writer Alexei Tolstoy, known, among other things, for his novel Aelita, was also interested in the latter, which, as they say, he wrote only for the sake of Aelita's Second Story. And by the way, he wrote there things more topical today than in his time. Reading:
“The basis of the new knowledge was as follows: “In man, the most powerful of the world forces is dormant - the matter of pure reason. Just as an arrow, stretched with a bowstring, directed by a faithful hand, strikes the target, so the matter of the dormant mind can be strained by the bowstring of the will, directed by the hand of knowledge. The power of aspiring knowledge is boundless.”
Up to this point, everything seems to sound great. But further, further, it’s not good at all:
“Mind was the only reality, the world its representation, its dream. Such an understanding of being should have led to the fact that each person would begin to assert that he alone is the only thing that exists, everything else - the whole world - is only a figment of his imagination.
"Hurry up slowly"
That is, the Western world, as a result, as well as the culture of the Atlanteans-Mahacitls, was captured by the most terry individualism, along with which its society came to rampant eroticism in its most perverted forms, and completely sublimated mass culture, and much more, about which we all know well and what to describe here does not make sense at all. That is, we can say that material well-being and the constant desire for the freedom of one's "I" did not bring anything good to the "new Atlanteans".
But ... as a result of a somewhat slow development from what happened, we only won! Surprisingly, it turns out that the natural factor, which dominates the development of civilizations, has been working for us all this time, preparing for a sharp turn in the historical spiral, when, just like in Tolstoy's Atlantis, a bloody feud of ideologies began between people.
After all, what are they telling us?
“Russia must be destroyed, because by the very fact of its existence it contradicts the established order in the West!”
But where, by whom and on what tablets is it written that this order, overshadowed by multi-colored striped banners, the demolition of monuments and the repentance of people forced to repent for the sins of others, is absolute? That this is the truth, and not the delirium of the mind, which has fallen into extremes? What does everyone like about him?
And it is very strange and surprising that Europe and America, which is rapidly rolling towards cultural decline, still lay claim to something there. Now is the time for them to understand that it is precisely because of “its backwardness” that Russia has long turned into a “Citadel of Civilization”, primarily because, based on the experience of the extremes of Western individualism and mystical Eastern collectivism, it has managed to find a more or less “golden mean” on the way spiritual development. It is time for everyone who recognizes the traditional spiritual values of human society to drop everything and go to us, because it may well happen that tomorrow it will be too late for them to do it.
And what would happen if we were spiritually aligned with the West today, so to speak, “head to head”? It's scary to even think about it. And so we have enough of all sorts of "shit", but then there would be much more. Much!
I didn’t think about this before, but it turned out that time has passed, and a lot, since the time spiral turned out to be large, more than two millennia, and all our minuses turned into pluses, as if it was a real one, albeit stretched in time ... " a gift of fate". What will it lead to in the future? Who knows...