With the kind permission of Strelka Press, we publish the article “12 Muscovites Who Don't Get Wet in the Rain. The ideal city dweller in the XX century "by Grigory Revzin from the collection "Citizen: what do we know about a resident of a big city?" (Moscow: Strelka Press, 2017).
There are doubts about the possibility of defining a certain image of a city dweller in the 2010s, 1980s, 1960s, 1930s and other years - any synchronic section. It seems to me that it is not quite possible to do this either by the methods of sociology, or anthropology, or cultural studies, because the image of a city dweller of his time, perhaps, does not exist. The “image of the city dweller” is rather a certain market where masks of social identification are sold, and these masks are more inconsistent with each other than represent different facets of the same phenomenon. The city, as Blessed Augustine taught us using the example of Heavenly Jerusalem, is the unity of urbs (assemblies of buildings) and civitas (assemblies of citizens). It seems that Roman Ingarden, in his Studies in Aesthetics, was the first to say that architecture is something that “does not get wet in the rain” (Notre Dame, like a physical body, gets wet, but the architecture of a cathedral is not). But if there is a waterproof urbs, it makes sense to think about a waterproof civitas as well. I would like to talk about those townspeople who do not live anywhere, do not work, do not belong to any communities, do not get wet in the rain, but nevertheless exist in some way.
In 2012, when Sergey Kapkov was leading the culture of Moscow from the point of view of the city government, one influential lady told me: "The problem is that everything we do is done for a person with Bolotnaya, and our voter is on Poklonnaya." The political mood of 2012, when supporters of the authorities gathered on Poklonnaya, and on Bolotnaya, on the contrary, made those who are called decision makers realize that there are two dissimilar images of townspeople and raise the question of whether the program of Moscow's Sobyanin transformations corresponds to any of them. As a result, Sergei Kapkov went to the area of political oblivion, but his image of a city dweller, oddly enough, did not suffer from this. On the contrary, the grandiose reconstruction of Moscow in 2014–2015 was based precisely on this image of the ideal Muscovite.
With the light hand of Yuri Saprykin, this image is designated as "hipster". This is the first of the townspeople who do not get wet in the rain. The hipster subculture has been discussed many times, this is a separate topic, I would like to draw your attention to one aspect. The request for public spaces in which one can simply spend time ("hang out") without showing any business or consumer activity, de-commercialization (fighting kiosks, squeezing out luxury stores), democratic city cafes (instead of restaurants) and parks, special attention to urban communities, social media (free Wi-Fi is ubiquitous), greening, anti-motorists, and an inexplicable love of bike lanes - all of this is a coherent value system. Of course, each of the measures to introduce these values into the Moscow environment can be separately explained without resorting to the word "hipster", but their combination creates a clear impression that a student with left-wing green convictions won the elections in Moscow.
There are not many people in Moscow who share such a program. Firstly, these are only young people, and there are not many of them in Moscow at all, and secondly, young people are educated and included in the European context - here one can hardly rely on even 1% of the population. The features of a program, that is, a linked system of measures, it acquired not from us, but from America and Europe. It was there that "urbanism" as a social movement absorbed many of the hippie values - the value of communities, doubts about the values of business and the state, the need for public spaces to spend time, anti-commercial behavior, alternative transportation, an inordinate craving for landscaping, etc. We received this as a finished product, a set of solutions that have already been tested in New York, London, Paris, Barcelona, and reproduced without reflections.
By no means was the hipster a city dweller for power. If you try to define her ideal in a journalistic way, then, paraphrasing the title of Ayn Rand's novel, it could be designated by the formula "Komsomol organizer straightened his shoulders." The Komsomol members of the late Soviet era were the most radical result of the Soviet experience in fostering "doublethink." On the one hand, they freely felt themselves in the coordinates of a pro-Western youth culture, on the other hand, they believed that active public support of the state ideology could ensure their career and material growth. They competed with each other to be seen in this support, and like any competition, this one threw up the most complete, perfect examples of this human type. This position did not provide any advantages in the 1990s and early 2000s, so this type seemed to be a thing of the past. But in the 2010s, on the contrary, it turned out to be in great demand and immediately revived. Public patriotic and xenophobic actions, pogroms of exhibitions, attacks on "enemies of the state" have created a stable news agenda for the life of the city after the conquest of Crimea.
In a sense, this was the same voter from Poklonnaya. But what is interesting is that he does not have his own plastic expression. In 2014, at the opening of the Sochi Olympics, Konstantin Ernst tried to offer this ideal his own language - a parade of the Russian state avant-garde along the route from Stravinsky to Gagarin. This ritual procession seemed to consolidate the split consciousness of the Komsomol organizer - here both the glorification of the state and the avant-garde values of world modernity. However, despite the propaganda potential of Channel One, the spiritual bond did not rivet. Nobody began to reconstruct the metropolitan area in the style of “bathing the Red Tractor”.
Instead, the authorities preferred to over-adjust the European image of Moscow's public spaces by means of “secondary improvement”. Folk ornaments from the Central Park of Culture and Leisure and VDNKh were installed in the hipster paradigm during the five-year struggle against cosmopolitanism (1948-1953). Since light structures are ornamented first of all, a somewhat eclectic image of a night hipster in a blouse appears.
It is difficult to say to what extent the images of a hipster and a Komsomol organizer correspond to the actual image of today's city dweller, in the absence of such. We do not have an expressed cultural hero, or rather, this figure is little heroized. But if we talk about the most common type of cultural behavior, then it seems to me, the person of the network. It was in social networks that a relatively intense social life, search for values and lively discussions took place.
Network Man (he is also a representative of the creative class) can be considered the ideal city dweller of the 2010s. Both the hipster and the Komsomol organizer are disgusting to him. However, his physical existence is quite problematic - here it is worth recalling the main character of Pelevin's "Snuff" Danila Karpov, an unsuccessful being in the physical world who transferred any kind of activity and striving for self-affirmation into the network. It is difficult to imagine what kind of urban environment such a character needs - none other than virtual.
How schizophrenic is this situation specific to our time?
Let's take late Soviet times. The professional ideal is easily determined, the value of the urban environment at this moment was declared for the first time by the program and the program was implemented - the old Arbat was reconstructed. This was a very poignant statement. Firstly, a pedestrian, and secondly, a street. A pedestrian, not a car, symbolizing the spirit of progress and technology. A street with a red line, with facades of houses, with benches, lanterns, tiles is the complete opposite of the modernist quarters of Le Corbusier and their ideal expression - Novy Arbat. The street is not the main one, not the state one, not intended for parades and demonstrations, but an ordinary one. Where a historical building is valuable not as a monument, not as an outstanding piece of architecture or an outstanding historical place, but precisely in its ordinary, non-outstanding quality.
The source of this professional ideal is also easily identifiable. Albert Gutnov, who invented the reconstruction of the Arbat, relied on the trend of anti-modernist reaction in the architecture of the 1970s, on Louis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander, Kevin Lynch, who were actively promoted by his friend Vyacheslav Glazychev, on the circle of ideas that later led to the doctrine “new urbanism . Pedestrian streets, which today are commonplace in any European historic city, were not yet so widespread and truly fashionable. We were not even too late in this trend - many European cities acquired them after Moscow.
There was, however, one significant difference between the old Arbat and European pedestrian streets. They were functional, they were made primarily as trade areas. It was a program for the rehabilitation of historical centers, which (everyone had forgotten) greatly degraded in the post-war period, and the program is successful - all today's centers of European capitals, which are a shopping mall stretched along the streets, were born out of these programs. But on the old Arbat there was nothing to sell, it was a Soviet street, and, apart from an antique store and nesting dolls for tourists, she had nothing to offer. When you consider the project prospects of the Gutnovsky Arbat, people walk and sing there, but they do not buy anything, because there is nothing to buy. The professional ideal of a city dweller at this moment is the "nobleman of the Arbat court" who lives a spiritual city life, consuming city views and poetic lines. The new urbanism was unknown to the citizens of Moscow; to a certain extent, it remained a professional exoticism up to the present time. However, the professional paradigm was sold to Muscovites as an implementation of the local trend - the old Arbat guys, developed by Bulat Okudzhava and some other sixties. Actually, the poetry of Bulat Okudzhava led to the fact that it was the Arbat that was chosen to be turned into a ceremonial portrait of Moscow everyday life. It was a majestic mythological structure, created with great love and skill, but one cannot fail to notice that by 1980, when Gutnov realized his plan, it had already been built long ago. This hero was no longer a “general cultural ideal” of a city dweller in the 1980s. By this time, the “old Arbat guys” had left the center, Ostankino and Kuzminki, Khimki-Khovrino and Belyaevo became the habitat of the Moscow intelligentsia, and the mythology was already different. Again, for simplicity and economy of effort, I will try to define this cultural hero through literature - this is "Violinist Danilov" by Vladimir Orlov, which appeared in the same 1980, when the Arbat was opened. Let me remind you that the main character of this novel - a demonic creature, some otherworldly form of life - lives in human form in a typical house in Ostankino, works as a viola player and at the same time regularly soars into other dimensions, into heaven and into space, swimming in lightning and landing in Spain, then at the very foundation of the universe, where there is a large blue bull. This image of an intellectual from a panel apartment, whose spirit rushes around the world, takes off into the skies and penetrates into the depths, not quite legally, but quite freely, and was a "general cultural type" of the late Soviet time with its incredible interest in history, philosophy, occult practices and spiritual pursuits. He, of course, endlessly lacks the Internet - then his wanderings in virtuality could rely on the solid architecture of the virtual world. The Arbat seemed to him provincial, Soviet and miserable, the townspeople did not accept this first example of Moscow landscaping in the same way as the current Sobyanin experiments. It is already hopelessly outdated for them.
The authorities, both the Arbat guys and the demonic creatures, were equally alien. However, the hero of power at this moment is characterized by a certain soulfulness, far from the radical cynicism that later Komsomol members demonstrate. Young in the gerontophilic era of Brezhnev are considered to be forty years old, and the ideal hero can be called Stirlitz from "Seventeen Moments of Spring". He is a "tragic conformist" who deeply and effectively mimics official state life (how good he is in form!) And at the same time carries deep in his soul the imperishable image of native birches, and through them - the authenticity of life's truth. This image was presented in the same 1980, at the opening of the 1980 Olympics, which synthesized a grandiose "parade of peoples" with the sentimentality of "affectionate Misha", the Olympics mascot, who even allowed himself a tear to say goodbye. Although, probably, no one had any doubts that in ordinary times the affectionate Misha is a member of the party and knows how to control himself, but with friends he allows himself to relax and cry.
The environmental complexity of this character is that he, in his spiritual hypostasis, is not a city dweller, his ideal space is nature, the village, fishing, hunting. Therefore, samples of the environment created for him are easier to find in party sanatoriums built under the influence of the work of Alvar Aalto - rectangles with rounded edges. The architecture of "radiant social modernism" - the regional and district committees of the late Soviet era - to a lesser extent conveys the inner life of this city dweller, unless one takes stone tiles as its embodiment, to which Mayakovsky's definition of "marble slime" is surprisingly suitable. Agree, there is something sentimental about slime.
A definite expression of the duality of this character is the desire to build a kind of modernist castles - the Lebed microdistrict, the APN building, the "cancer building" on Kashirka - the ceremonial uniform outside and the uncomplicated complexity of the courtyards inside.
Old Arbat guys, demons and Stirlitz are no less motley company. Let's go another 20 years ago.
The professional ideal of the 1960s era is simple and clear, like a rectangle - this is Cheryomushki, the very environment from which the future violist Danilov escapes into virtuality. The architecture of this time has its adherents, with some professional stress one can find the deepest differences between Zelenograd and Severny Chertanovo, and, probably, this search makes sense. However, in terms of environment, the diversity is not too noticeable - this is a city of large vacant lots with rare rectangular volumes of varying degrees of standardization. The source of this fashion is also simple and obvious - great post-war modernism, the victorious march of Corbusier with a slight accent of Niemeyer.
Today it is rather difficult to imagine a city dweller, and in general a person who would correspond to this professional ideal. Corbusier himself did not consider city life possible without a car, so for him a motorist was a city dweller, a house was a “car for living”, and a city was a parking lot. In this sense, a man on foot in such a space is environmental nonsense. However, most Muscovites spent the twentieth century in a non-motorized state, so some city dweller was still meant.
Apparently, 1958 should be considered the beginning of a short but victorious march of a geologist in the minds of his contemporaries - this year Nikolai Kalatozov's cult film "Unsent Letter" is released, where the heroes wander through the taiga, sorting out their personal relationships. In 1962 Pavel Nikonov exhibited the first painting of the "severe style" - the same "Geologists", imbued with the lyrical mysticism of Pavel Kuznetsov. In 1964, the Bolshoi Theater even staged the ballet "Geologists" by Vladimir Vasiliev and Natalia Kasatkina, the libretto is based on the same essay by Valery Osipov about the discoverer of diamonds in Yakutia Larisa Popugaeva, which served as the basis for Nikolai Kalatozov's script. This is the time when the geologist was somehow singled out as a separate important cultural figure.
It seems to me that the main thing for the professional ideal of the architects of this time was the pathos of conquering space as such, the pathos of the colonization of nature by geometry, and the ideal figure of a city dweller for them was a colonizer. Geologist. This is not quite an urban person, and he spends little time in an urban environment, mostly in a state of isolation from home. But when he returns, he is delighted with the endless areas of five-story buildings, the wide expanses of forest parks, the snow-covered paths of the Festival streets - the contrast of this urban environment with the taiga is not too great.
It is difficult to say, however, to what extent this hero was a widespread cultural type. At the very least, it is ambivalent - in the bardic song, the most democratic way of familiarizing with the cultural content of the era, it is constantly supplemented by just “the guys of our yard” who will become a professional ideal 20 years later. Moreover, the colonial pathos for them becomes a kind of dream, a confusion - like Okudzhava in "Forgive the infantry …":
Time has taught us: live on the freehold, opening the door.
Comrade man, how tempting is your position, You are always on a hike, and only one thing keeps you awake -
Where do we go when spring is raging behind our backs?
The specificity of the Stalinist reconstruction of Moscow was that the main thoroughfares - the Garden Ring and the solemn radii - cut through the old provincial city, leaving the lanes almost untouched. The nomenklatura settled on Stalin's highways, and the alleys turned out to be a kind of ghetto for people who, as it were, by mistake, lived out their days - an old engineer, a former German teacher, a retired Red Army officer, a party member from the "deviators", an antique dealer. These people, or rather their children, who survived the Stalinist torment, came out of the lanes in the 1960s, and the whole mythology of Moscow lanes is connected with them. If they work as geologists, they prefer to return from the expedition to their own lane, and not to Profsoyuznaya.
The ideal of power is closer to the colonialist, it is a "Komsomolets-virgin". He is very different from subsequent Komsomol members, he is not characterized by any duality, there is no doublethink in him, he blindly believes in communism. Communist ideology is undergoing a castrated renaissance. Its ideal environment is the same as that of the colonialist, but with elements of state grandeur - like on Novy Arbat with its references to the Havana embankment (Fidel Castro is the main figure of this renaissance). And, of course, on the virgin soil, he does not indulge in complex existential experiences that happen in the taiga with geologists. He is always there in a team, always at work or a collective holiday.
A guy from our yard, a virgin Komsomol member and a geologist - this trinity is not as schizophrenic as the heroes of the next generations, they can agree and, say, go together to conquer new lands. But in the city it is difficult for them together, the ideals of some completely destroy the environment of others.
The post-war period is too diffuse to form equally definite “masks”. There are too many multidirectional experiments here, and it seems to me that if we can talk about some types, then they are a continuation of the trends of the 1930s.
Where did this geologist, the virgin Komsomol member come from? This is not the ideal of 1930s power. Her ideal is extremely clear and outlined, he looks at us from all posters, from any cinema, from the pages of the main Soviet novels. This is a "new man". This new man synthesizes the heroic dreams of Russian culture from Chernyshevsky to the avant-garde, Nietzschean and Gorky's "god-building" notes are strong in him, but at the same time he is reduced to the level of practical application and in this sense is quite simple. He is a person of the collective, of the masses, and this is his main difference from previous generations of individualists. Its principle is “all as one”. He does not know spiritual doubts and does not ask questions, since all questions have been solved or will be solved by science - humanity will inevitably come to communism, it remains only to defeat the enemies. The goal of his life is to build communism, for this goal he is ready to sacrifice himself. The ideal environment for him is the Moscow of the general plan of 1935, the Moscow of wide highways for victorious processions leading to the Palace of Soviets.
But if you look at the general cultural ideal, then it is not that much different from the ideal of power, but as if translates it into another geographic space. Everyone seems to be going on an expedition. The 1930s saw an extraordinary heyday in the popularity of completely Jules Verne's literature, like Sannikov's Land by Vladimir Obruchev, Secrets of Two Oceans by Grigory Adamov. There are also higher examples of the same theme - "Two Captains" by Veniamin Kaverin, poetry by Vladimir Lugovsky, Nikolai Tikhonov. The people are saving the Chelyuskinites and the Papaninites, the pilot is just as much a cult figure as the geologist is later. This is the romance of the colonialists, and for them the urban space is to a certain extent as indifferent as for the geologists who stand behind the professional ideal of the urban dweller of the 1960s.
It is difficult to understand how the program of Stalinist neoclassicism of the 1930s could correspond to these two images. If we are talking specifically about professional ideals, then this is the time when the Russian classical tradition, so to speak, enters graduate school. Classical architectural treatises from Vitruvius to Palladio and Vignola are translated and published in Russian, an academic school for the study of classics is being created. You can treat the academic attitudes of the 1930s whatever you like, but it must be admitted that, in comparison with Alexander Gabrichevsky, Nikolai Brunov, Andrei Bunin, the architectural essays of Alexander Benois, Georgy Lukomsky and Pavel Muratov are charming essayistic amateurism alongside the scientific tradition. It is customary to sometimes compare Stalin's architecture of the 1930s with European Art Deco, for this there are grounds, but the fundamental difference from Art Deco lies precisely in this incredible level of study and mastery of the classical tradition in the 20th century - such a learned classics is more characteristic of Gottfried Semper's program. And this line, associated primarily with the name of Ivan Zholtovsky, significantly influenced the experiments of other, more avant-garde masters - from Fomin to the Golosov brothers.
To perceive this environment, one needs substantial knowledge, a taste for old European culture, acquaintance with architectural treatises, with an art history tradition. At the same time, it would hardly be meaningful to assume that Zholtovsky, Shchusev, Fomin, Kuznetsov designed and built, counting on a non-existent pre-revolutionary public with a level of education not lower than a classical gymnasium. Obviously, this meant a certain layer of Soviet people, but who they are, at first glance, is not even clear.
In the memoirs of Grigory Isaevich Grigorov, a philosopher and thinker who spent decades in Stalin's camps, there are remarkably complete sections about the Institute of Red Professors, the IKP, where he studied from 1922 to 1927. This is a special educational institution, about half of the graduates of which became the Stalinist nomenklatura (not chiefs, but advisers), and half went to the camps as "deviators." The atmosphere there is striking in its own way - it is the violent absorption of the academic tradition of the 19th century by yesterday's Bolshevik activists. Reading Marx in the original is generally accepted, which is natural, since it has not been translated for the most part, as well as knowledge of German classical philosophy in general. It seems to me that it is the “red professorship” - according to Lenin's definition, “the proletarian who has mastered all the knowledge of mankind” - and is the ideal city dweller whom Zholtovsky's school had in mind.
"New man", "colonizer" and "red professor" - these are the trinity of the townspeople of the 1930s. Turning to an earlier stage, to the 1920s, in my opinion, is unproductive for the same reasons as in the post-war period - everything is too agitated, and clear cultural masks have not yet been developed. It is clear that the “new man” of power emerges from the “new man” of the culture of the 1920s, the ideal of a man of Russian futurism and avant-garde. The “Red Professor” is, on the contrary, a certain ideal of the Bolsheviks of the older generation, the founders of the Capri and Longjumeau schools, where the future militants of the revolution were taught both the tactics of organizing street riots and the “Communist Manifesto” and “Capital”. However, in the 1920s, these are just a couple of many competing models, and its competitive advantages are not yet clear. Let's try to draw some conclusions based on the material that we have analyzed.
There are doubts about the possibility of defining a certain image of a city dweller in the 2010s, 1980s, 1960s, 1930s, etc. years - any synchronous slice. It seems to me that it is not quite possible to do this either by the methods of sociology, or anthropology, or cultural studies, because the image of a city dweller of his time, perhaps, does not exist. The “image of the city dweller” is rather a certain market where masks of social identification are sold, and these masks are more inconsistent with each other than represent different facets of the same phenomenon.
This is a market in which supply prevails over demand. The images of a city dweller of the 2010s - you can be a hipster, a new Komsomol organizer or a person of the network - are not needed, I think, by any of the 14 million Muscovites who make up the city's population today - neither in general, nor in individual social groups. Their producers need them.
In two cases, these producers are easy to identify - they are professionals and the authorities. The most difficult, escaping definition, is the third manufacturer. We designated its product as a "widespread cultural type", which is more or less normal for a culturological paradigm, but, of course, is completely unacceptable impressionism from the point of view of both sociology and cultural economics.
However, the manufacturer of this type of social mask can be described indirectly. A person feels a need for society, sociality as such (involvement in the agenda, knowledge of the common language of society) and is one of the main products in the cultural markets. This brings to life the institutions of consumption of sociality. Literature, theater, cinema, press, propaganda, urban environment - all these are such institutions in one way or another, moreover, they actively compete with each other for the consumer. The institution that presents the least barriers to entry into the social exchange market turns out to be the most successful. Let's say, in today's situation, this is network communication. This institution is the producer of the "widespread cultural type".
Based on the foregoing, it can be assumed that the discrepancy between the product designed by professionals and the needs of the townspeople is more the rule than the exception. The images of "hipsters", "Arbat guys", "geologists", "colonizers", "red professors" did not correspond to anyone and were entirely a professional construct, a myth. At the same time, I will allow myself to doubt that this is a project of the “future citizen”, although it is so pleasant to think for professional dignity. Rather, it has nothing to do with the future.
The genesis of all professional images is quite obvious. The professional ideal is the image of a city dweller, which was a widespread cultural type in the previous era. The myth of the Arbat of the architects of the 1980s grew out of the "old Arbat guys" of the sixties, the "geologists" of the 1960s turned out to be the reincarnation of the "colonizers" of the 1930s, the "red professors" of the 1930s grew out of the Bolshevik utopia of the proletarian who had mastered world culture. It is easy to guess that the hipsters of the modern Sobyanin modernization of Moscow are the realization of the utopia of the 1990s, Russia, which abandoned Soviet power and instantly turned as a result into a normal European country, like Portugal, which President Putin promised us in the early 2000s to catch up with. The professional ideal in these cases is directed not at all to the future, but to the past and appeals to the moods of the townspeople, which no longer exist.
True, for all these common cultural types, professionals adjust plastic fashions that are indirectly related to them and are born from other sources, from the architectural trends of European countries. It so happens that the red professors have the architecture of the neo-Renaissance and neoclassicism as a plastic presentation, the geologists of the 1960s - the architecture of Le Corbusier, the "old Arbat guys" become the bearers of the "new urbanism" in the spirit of Leon Criet, and the hipsters - the preachers of the Barcelona beautification. For each of these groups, this identification, carried out by professionals, turns out to be a surprise, and often a painful surprise: red professors love constructivism, not neoclassicism, Okudzhava does not accept the reconstruction of the Arbat, inspired by his songs, and hipsters curse Strelka on Facebook.
As for the authorities, it seems to me that they more or less do not care what the ideal city dweller will be. It is important for her to grab the one that is "in reality" and adjust it to fit her agenda. But the one that is "in reality" defies grasping. And in a number of cases, she buys his substitute in the form of a professional image of a city dweller and generates hybrids with his help. In today's situation, for example, she buys the image of a hipster in order to disguise a Komsomol organizer, who should become a role model for a city dweller who has escaped from reality to the network.
Based on the foregoing, one can even predict which two types of city dwellers await us in the near future. The professional ideal will be a man of the network on the street, his design code is an apple environment, a city of virtual apple trees. It may be necessary to plant Pokémon in the form of two-headed eagles on the branches.
