The Reality of "Nothing" as the Basis of Yu.M. Lermontov's Artistic Thinking (Response to S.S. Neretina's Novella "Lermontov: the Semantics of Repetitions")

Rozin Vadim Markovich Doctor of Philosophy Chief Scientific Associate, Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences  109240, Russia, Moskovskaya oblast', g. Moscow, ul. Goncharnaya, 12 str.1, kab. 310 rozinvm@gmail.com Other publications by this author

I always read with interest the research of Svetlana Sergeevna Neretina, a medievalist and cultural critic, one of the Russian philosophers who, in my opinion, constitute the national state of our country. In the new book ""The Earth is buzzing with metaphor." Philosophy and Literature" Neretina analyzes Lermontov's early drama "The Strange Man". At the same time, she argues that the semantic basis of this work, shedding light on its understanding, is "nothing". At the same time, he emphasizes that nothing is not an ontology, but a paradoxical semantic construction, the status of which is not easy to understand.

"Attention is directed specifically at nothing. All the spirits of exile are a kind of "last spirits" before nothingness, before complete annihilation, or the first witnesses of nothingness, emerging from it and handing over a pen so that something can be said about it.

The first sign of creation is stuffiness, connectedness. The first sign of nothing is freedom. Nothing is negative, the world is positive. As a negative, it is the first of the world ... <...>

After all, it is easy to understand nothing through the idea of evil ("evil is a lack of good")... Lermontov's nothing can be understood with the help of ethical standards, it is freedom itself and is the source of freedom, which is understood as separation, decoupling, the absence of any connection with anyone or anything. "I'm free now! — Arbenin laughs wildly (this is Lermontov's remark. – S.N.)" ^{[4, p. 362]}. "Nobody... nobody... exactly, positively no one values me on earth" (mother died, father cursed, friend betrayed, beloved forgot). <…>

According to Lermontov, nothing arises where there is no detachment from life, “people who have looked at life too closely cannot make out anything else in it” ^{[4, p. 366]}. Madness and strangeness are born here. The result of such closeness with nothing is purely ethical in nature: it excites remorse, because by virtue of its complete freedom, nothing (chaos, unknown force) devalues all human values: love, devotion, loyalty, mercy, etc., since these values, having become the property of the light, i.e., being visible in the light, have turned into the visibility of values with the active ability of their bearers to destroy their inner dignity…We can say this: what Lermontov described is falling into nothingness, not falling out of it… Moreover, in total nothingness, here, if one can remember about God, it is rather about One Who completely abandoned his creation. <...>

However, his nothing, as we have noticed, is strange. This, on the one hand, is the fullness of nothing ("we will never see each other... there is no heaven – there is no hell"), on the other hand, nothing is otherness ("you will be an angel, I will become a demon ..."). This strangeness expressed the initial difficulty of philosophical-religious thinking, which consists in the fact that, again, on the one hand, nothing belongs not to ontological categories, but to the discourse of will, energy ("the desire for destruction"), and on the other – it is introduced into the sphere of judgment, but not formally logical, and poetic. If this apparent contradiction is not removed, then it is interpreted in two ways, since we are talking about different nothings. If in one case we are dealing with nothing as energy-will (following from the Christian idea of creating the world out of nothing), then in the other – with the energy of the sensory world (following from the Aristotelian idea of the sensory world, which is actually "reality", energy). It is difficult for a poet to abandon this energy of the world, just as it is philosophically difficult for a person brought up in the Christian faith, even if he questions it ("Do I believe? Do I believe?" – looking at the sky, Vladimir Arbenin asks himself, ^{[4, p. 330]}), to give up the possibility of an energetic will to nothing or awareness of the power of nothing, which Augustine once wrote about when reflecting on freedom of will....Perhaps it would not be worth remembering Augustine, because no, no, and he has a glimpse of the very Manichaeism with which he fought. "There is," he says, "God and nothing." That is, nothing seems to be substantiated, as if it is an abyss, an emptiness, a gaping height or a shining hole, where, of course, the will can attract. It seems to be balancing on the edge of being and non-being." ^{[2, pp. 107, 109-110, 112, 113-115]}

After reading these statements, I realized that I was confused by two circumstances. Firstly, why does nothing come closer to freedom, here is emptiness or denial of everything, including the denial of denial of everything – it seems to be understandable, it correlates with nothing, but freedom, even understood as "diversity" (isn't it arbitrariness, permissiveness?), with nothing I don't contacts. Secondly, I caught myself that nothing in Neretina's explanation is empty for me, is not filled with content, does not explain the meaning of Lermontov's dramas. However, I asked myself when I read this drama and whether I read it at all, I reveled in Lermontov's poems in my distant youth, so naturally I don't remember anything. I had to take the book and reread it, or rather, read it for the first time. I received not only, to my surprise, a strong impression (after all, "Strange Man" was written by Lermontov at the age of 17), but also the first characteristics that seem to have nothing to do with my intuitive understanding of nothing. I had to re-read and think over Svetlana Sergeevna again to understand what she means by "nothing" and what is meant by freedom.

From Neretina's novel, I was able to identify five main characteristics of nothing. The first, mentioned above, is "nothing is freedom," and freedom is understood by Neretina as "as peace, silence, silence, love, and as the "I" participating in this life of thought, looking, seeing precisely because he thinks. This is how all philosophers defined freedom, especially the first wise men who saw the source of philosophy in poetry" ^{[2, p. 100]}. If we agree with this interpretation of freedom (there are very different and non-strict characteristics here), then, the question is, what is nothing? The ability to think anything, or like Pushkin: "It's time, my friend, it's time! The heart asks for peace – / Days fly by for days, and every hour takes away / A piece of being, and you and I together / Assume to live…And lo and behold – just – die. / There is no happiness in the world, but there is peace and will..."? ^[6]

The second characteristic is "balancing on the edge of being and non–being." Here, nothing is a bit like the reality that the Buddha is discussing: on the one hand, one who is striving to save and overcome suffering (the circle of samsara) goes to Nirvana, where no distinctions are possible and therefore there are no forms, "all forms pass," the Buddha said (is it possible to understand Nirvana as the equivalent of Augustinian nothingness?), on the other – the ascetic is still here in this world of suffering. "Mikhail Yurievich," writes Svetlana Sergeevna, "however, did the seemingly impossible: he put himself not in the position of the world, not in the position of a created being, but in nothing itself and realized that "there is no other light", there is no question of any substantiation,"there is no heaven, there is no hell”, this is not a “place”, there is no causality and purposefulness here, this is a kind of initial act where there is no being, there is isolation from being, initial silence (“and the young man was not looking at her... I didn't dare to move, so as not to end the silence”). At this point, man himself is out of reach, here he is free from good and evil, from all the tools that form human reality, there is no resurrection and there can be no resurrection. At the point of nothing, everything is neutralized, there is no shadow, no passion, no shadow of passion in it (“I am the same everywhere ...” ^{[4, p. 312]}). ^{[2, p. 115]}

The third characteristic of nothing is the ability to express this reality in poetry, while philosophy blocks the possibility of thinking about nothing. "Lermontov," Neretina notes, "captures this state of indecision, which can be resolved – in poetry. If philosophy has the ability to direct the will to nothing, then it is difficult for poetry to give up the energy of the world. The poet, if not by deed, then by word, loses the possibilities of being and creates a possible being (this becomes especially clear when reading "Masquerade" and "Arbenin" together), and what, as they say, is written with a pen, cannot be cut down. Poetry (and art in general) embodies, is obliged to embody even a personal desire for nothing in the body of the work. And if philosophy goes beyond any imagination into the beyond world, freeing itself from the slightest hint of imagination, annihilating it, then poetry, on the contrary, brings it out of nothing into sound flesh. Poetry seems to be trying to keep philosophy afloat if it wants to stay afloat. It is obvious that Lermontov wants to hold on, because he is a poet and sees the world poetically, but his poetry is undermined by philosophy calling to nothing" ^{[2, pp. 117-118]}.

The fourth characteristic relates to the daily routine of ordinary life: Arbenin denies everything, absolutely everything (and thereby destroys life); in this regard, his views can be considered nihilistic. "The presence of numerous denials is a witness to the fact that there are no opportunities that should deflect the danger of destruction. The continuous fixation of the absence of such opportunities is a witness to the lack of sources of existence for himself ("do I believe!" and, after a pause, Vladimir changed the conversation: "Let's go to the bulevar?").   <…>

The nihilistic craving itself has a dual expression here. One thing is a pure desire for material destruction, which is what Russian nihilism became known for in the first place. “– Gentlemen! Russian russians will be Russian someday?... – And didn't we prove in the twelfth year that we are Russians? There has not been such an example since the beginning of the world! We are contemporaries and do not fully understand the great fire of Moscow; we cannot be surprised at this act; this thought, this feeling was born together with the Russians; we should be proud, but leave the surprise to descendants and strangers! Hurray! gentlemen! health of the Moscow fire!" ^{[4, p. 324]}... secondly, this material nihilism, without which it seems difficult to imagine Russia in the XIX century, is a gross manifestation of ideal nihilism, questioning the very existence" ^{[2, p. 116, 117]}.

The fifth characteristic, so to speak, is culturological: nothing is set as a reality opposed to culture. "When Lermontov," explains Neretina, "writes about the collapse of humanitarian foundations and at the same time speaks of it as one of the possible forms of being (even – using the example of Arbenin's absolutized consciousness – elevating this form into universality), he does not mean being a culture. He draws attention to such aspects of being that are possible without it, in addition to and in spite of it, which are opposed to it, especially if we are talking about the existence of violated rights or without rights, without ethics, without responsibility, and where responsibility arises, if circumstances so develop, then I can answer only to my stranger. <...>

This going nowhere, declared by Lermontov, is a way out of any form of totality. And the pathos here is not in the idea of culture, with which we already habitually approach the analysis of any work, but in the ultimate self-withdrawing loneliness. Lermontov, of course, did not know that he was annihilating culture" ^{[2, p. 130, 139]}.

What is nothing if we follow these characteristics? First of all, Neretina's concept, which makes it possible to comprehend Lermontov's dramas. Can it be correlated with any well-known philosophical reality? At first glance, no, this is the original construction of Svetlana Sergeevna herself. Nothing in this interpretation is a rather complex semantic formation, but after thinking about it, I decided that it is generally understandable, if we keep in mind the task that Neretina solves - on the one hand, she finds out the relationship between literature and philosophy, on the other hand, she thinks through Lermontov's dramas. However, Lermontov does not use the expression "nothing" anywhere in his dramas, and, as you know, he was a poet, not a philosopher. Has Svetlana Sergeyevna attributed to Lermontov uncharacteristic philosophical ideas and work? Let's try to figure it out.   

Neretina claims that Lermontov, like Goethe, was a special poet – poet-philosopher, he, as a thinking person, after Chaadaev and Pushkin, tried to understand why an honest, educated person in Russia "woe from wit", why he often ends his life badly. But Lermontov reflects on this as a poet – on the example of an individual (the hero of the drama), forcing him to go through all the circles and to the end within the framework of artistic reality in order to see what comes out of it, what leads to. Lermontov turned out that the denial of everything comes out (in this sense, he is the forerunner of nihilism) and, in fact, death overtakes (the hero goes crazy). As a consequence, one has to doubt the Creator: either God allowed Evil, then he is not all–good and not omnipotent, or He does not exist at all ("there is neither heaven nor hell," says Arbenin). "It is not by chance," Neretina notes, "that we said above that Lermontov was infected by Goethe. And although there is not a word about philosophy here, it is obvious that by invisible ways she got into the soul of the young poet. By the way, Goethe also says in his Notes that "we had neither the desire nor the desire to study the subjects of theology or philosophy" ^{[2, p. 137]}.  "The philosophical revolution, according to the spirit of the German people, had to precede any further development of social life in Germany – and in this very era of "storm and aspiration", in a remote city in the north, Professor Kant quietly and tirelessly created a critical philosophy, the very philosophy that little by little penetrated all our reality and which he will say his last word not even to our generation" ^[9]. That's what Turgenev said about the translation of Faust. <…>

Of course, he was philosophizing. What is the dictionary worth with its, we wrote, "cold materiality" or "natural order"!  <…>   

Demonizing poetry in anticipation of nihilism, he conceived one of Pushkin's lines (the line of “Anchara”, the poem “A gift in vain, an accidental gift, / Life, why are you given to me"). Lermontov's poetry can be considered as a response to the poetry of Pushkin, whose death for him was the death of a Poet who personified Poetry itself <...>

Pogodin, the author of "Marfa Posadnitsa" just completely fulfilled the way Pushkin defined the drama. Having made the center of the dramatic work the confrontation of Novgorod with the one-power aspirations of Ivan the Terrible, he was "impartial as fate" when creating the work, describing "the rebuff of the dying liberty as a deeply considered blow" and "resurrecting the past century in all its truth"" ^{[7, p. 365]}. This is the prerogative of the poet as “a person striving to think initially”, as “a person mentally communicating with philosophers”, “whose mind is individual (unique, inimitable)"prefers to "be free", personally allowing a non-personal event to happen." ^{[2, pp. 87-88, 110, 138]}

I must say that Lermontov is no exception, many real writers are also latent philosophers in the sense that they are trying to understand the essence of phenomena. But they do it as writers, creating an artistic reality in which it is possible to look at and live these phenomena on concrete examples, on "individuals" (i.e. unique single phenomena). For example, the famous Israeli writer Meir Shalev in one of his last novels "Two Bears Came out of the Forest" created a reality that allows you to see and experience the phenomenon of revenge and at the same time raise the question of the ethical nature of the Creator ^{[8, pp. 58-69]}.

"Anna Solovey. In your novel," the interviewer asks Shaleva, "there is another plot that remains behind the scenes, but is invisibly present all the time. It is indicated in the title: “Two bears came out of the forest.” This is a direct quote from the biblical story of the prophet Elisha, who cursed the children who mocked him. After his curse, “two bears came out of the forest and tore forty-two children from them.” This, as I understand it, is the key to the whole book.

Meir Shalev. In the story of Elisha and the bears, G?d behaves the same way as the inhabitants of this village. He sits on the sidelines, watches and even supports the murder. If you, say, curse someone, then no bears will come out of the forest. When the prophet Elisha curses, bears come out and tear the children apart. G?d stands aside at the same time. You could even say he supports the killing of children, releases bears from the forest. In both cases, we are talking about completely arbitrary cruelty that could have been prevented, but it did not happen.…

Yes. I am not a religious person. I don't believe in the most important religious principle, which is called “ashgaha”, providence, meaning that G?d is watching you and He cares what you do. When people ask me whether there is a G?d or not, I answer: “Which G?d are you asking about: the one who created the world and created flowers, herbs and animals, or the one who cares what I eat. If it's about the one who is worried about what I eat, in my opinion, It was invented by the people themselves. And if I don't know about the one who created the world... I don't have an answer”…

"I am very interested in revenge as a literary idea," explains Shalev. It turns you on. The desire for revenge, in my eyes, is much stronger than jealousy or some religious feelings. Its consequences are tragic. In the novel there are three murders... this angered some of my Israeli readers, they said: it is immoral to write that murder has a therapeutic effect, murder cannot cure! Well, you say, “impossible.” But the fact is that it is possible for certain people, as happened in my novel." ^[10]            But how to separate "revenge as a literary idea" and the clarification of the essence of revenge (revenge as a philosophical idea), nothing as a denial of everything and the impossibility of existence for a thinking person and nothing as the otherness of God and the world of Russian culture? Let us recall, "according to Lermontov, nothing arises where there is no detachment from life, "people who have looked at life too closely can no longer make out anything in it." Madness and strangeness are born here."

So, Lermontov philosophizes as a poet, and Neretina? Naturally, as a philosopher, following the philosophical tradition, discussing the possibility of the existence of nothing and the personality of Arbenin, arguing, referring to the methodology, which, in part, is immediately established. As a result, it sets the characteristics of nothing (we have specified five, but there may be more of them). At the same time, which is already problematic, Svetlana Sergeevna talks about nothing all the time, as if it is something one, something one. But she herself points out that St. Augustine sometimes slips ("flash") into Manichaeism, into nothing as a single reality, on a par with God. It is unlikely that the five characteristics of nothingness that we have identified form one reality, and if they do, then, the question is, which one?   

Another problem for me is that although sometimes we feel that the characteristics of nothing are revealed and set by Neretina, much more often they are formulated in such a way that they seem to belong to Lermontov. And how else can one understand the expressions: "attention is directed precisely at nothing", "Lermontov's nothing", "according to Lermontov, nothing arises there...", "what Lermontov described is falling into nothing", "all the forces of Lermontov's talent are thrown to create the reality of nothing in order to collapse into nothing different logos"? Of course, if Lermontov is not only a brilliant poet, but also a latent philosopher, he can discuss "ultimate reality" and why not nothing. At the same time, in order to see this nothing in Lermontov, one probably needs a historical distance and the philosophical discourse of Neretina. However, if we build such a series of formation and development – Goethe's Faust, Lermontov's dramas, nihilism, existentialism and postmodernism, then in this case we can say that Lermontov is the forerunner of nihilism and one of the first thinkers of existential reality is nothing. The latter, for example, can be seen in such a text: "Listen, maybe when we leave / Forever this world, where we are so ashamed of our soul, / Maybe in a country where they do not know deception, / You will become an angel, I will become a demon! / Swear then to forget, dear, / For a former friend all the happiness of paradise! /Let the gloomy exile, condemned by fate, / Be paradise to you, and you to me — the universe," Lermontov wrote to Varenka Lopukhina" ^[5].

I will try to take another step in understanding nothing in Neretina's work, namely, to understand how she came to the idea of nothing itself. At the same time, I understand that I am treading on thin ice, because I am trying to reconstruct the intimate logic of individual creativity. I think, studying Lermontov's work, Neretina used two ideas about Augustine's creation: one concerning creation as a "tropical process" of creating the world according to the word, the other, also creation, but as the creation of something out of nothing.

"The idea of tropology," writes Svetlana Sergeevna, "as a conscious idea arose in the Middle Ages... reading about creation in the Bible, we discover a pure Divine act. God said and did, where “said" means the same thing that He did. The spoken Word, however, is not quite the Word that was in God and was God himself: thrown out of silence, it became a path, a turn, it had a different substance than God...". ^{[3, p. 27]} Creation, which has become a path, or rather, "in the form of a path", is characteristic not only of the Creator and the appearance of the basic reality, but also of human creativity and the world created by him. "It is easy to compare this with the fact of the Christian creation of the world according to the Word, which we discussed at the beginning of the article, with the difference that here the word and deed do not belong to the only Creator, but – I repeat the words Virno – to any speaker ..." ^{[3, p. 50]} Now the second idea.

"By what name," Augustine asks in The Confessions, "should we call this 'nothing' so that minds not even very sharp can get some idea about it? Some ordinary word, of course…You have created something out of "nothing", by the beginning that is from You, by Your Wisdom born from Your substance.... But You, Lord, created the world out of formless matter, which, almost "nothing", You created out of "nothing" in order to create great things out of it, which we, the sons of men, are amazed at." ^[1]

It is clear that the nothing ("out of nothing") that Augustine talks about, from which God created the world according to the Word, is the source of life and good, and therefore cannot be the cause of non-life, denial and death, which Lermontov writes about in his dramas. It is not by chance that Augustine overcomes the Manichean teaching, according to which there is a God – the source of light and the Prince of darkness as two equivalent principles. From God, Augustine asserts only good, and evil is not an independent beginning, but only a lack of good. From this I can conclude that Svetlana Sergeyevna, speaking of nothing, did not mean nothing, which Augustine writes about in Confessions.

"My friend! – says one of the heroes of Lermontov's tragedy “People and Passions” (Menschen und Leidenschaften). – There is no other light... there is chaos... it consumes the tribes... and we will disappear in it... all to nothing... we'll never see each other again... no heaven, no hell... people are abandoned homeless creatures" (p. 296). It's not so much the aesthetics of romanticism as existentialism. We are not talking about apostasy, but about the absence of God, because only in this case can we talk about complete insignificance. There is not a shadow of the desire, which is sometimes awarded to romantics, to persistently preserve their ideals intact, since ideals are lost, there is no religiosity, moreover, the active force of resistance to religiosity is shown (all words that can be taken for religiosity are only metaphors, since a person cannot help expressing his feelings) and rejection neither good nor evil. Attention is directed precisely at nothing. All the spirits of exile are a kind of "last spirits" before nothingness, before complete annihilation, or the first witnesses of nothingness, emerging from it and handing over a pen so that something can be said about it." ^{[2, p. 107]}

Niretina by nothing means those five (or more) characteristics that were indicated above. According to Neretina, Lermontov believes and thinks of the reality of nothingness as the beginning that determines the denial of everything, non-vitality, the opposite of culture, freedom as the opposite of tightness and stuffiness with the simultaneous loss of any landmarks and values. This is of course another nothing, not in Augustine's scheme "God and Nothing", but in Neretina's scheme. This nothing, on the one hand, is presented in Lermontov's dramas, since he is a poet, by means of artistic language, and in this existence it is rather experienced than thought, on the other hand, it is nothing since Lermontov is also a latent philosopher, the reader also thinks latently, intuitively, however, after this study Neretina will be to think and openly, having received the rights of normal knowledge. But the question will clearly arise how categorically or otherwise one can think of nothing that Neretina writes about. After all, this nothing is not only set by these five characteristics, but also relies in speech (writing) as a single reality. The question is, is it supposed to be in what categorical space or, if it is thought of as an independent beginning, then this is the beginning of what. But perhaps Svetlana Sergeevna thinks differently somehow, and for her these questions do not arise. It is necessary to keep in mind this option.