Refusing to Love. The Paths of Russian Love from Pushkin to AI. Part I – The Golden Age. Yury Tomin
ing to Love
The Paths of Russian Love from Pushkin to AI. Part I – The Golden Age
Yury Tomin
© Yury Tomin, 2023
ISBN 978-5-0060-0977-6 (т. 1)
ISBN 978-5-0060-0978-3
Created with Ridero smart publishing system
About the book
In our previous book, Enjoy, Comprehend, Love: Entering the Spaces of Conscious Love, we explored the idea that love can be befriended by the mind, making it conscious and meaningful without losing the emotional intensity and vivid experience of love. The image of a journey through the spaces of love was the linking framework of the book, and spatial metaphors were used to describe the complex, paradoxical manifestations of the relationship of love.
In this new book we offer the reader a journey through time to the origins of the phenomenon of Russian love and a walk along its winding paths in the company of famous classics of Russian literature. In the course of the narrative there are references to various features of love in France and the United States, allowing the reader to get an idea of the international love triangle.
The book consists of three parts: the Golden Age, the Silver Age, and the Torn Age. The first part presents three vectors of Russian love, each illustrated with examples from the works and personal lives of the writers. The Romantic vector of Russian love is based on Pushkin, Lermontov, and Alexey Tolstoy; the aspirations of reason and freedom are in Herzen, Turgenev, and Chernyshevsky; the immersion into the depths of the human soul is characteristic of Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and Chekhov.
The first part wraps up with the concept of love of the famous contemporary Russian writer Boris Akunin, presented in the series of works «Family Album» published in 2012- 2022.
I
An obnoxious discovery. Tempest in the web. An accidental connection. Transparent hints. A voice in the digital wilderness. The past in the present. Vices and prophets. A roll call from across the ocean
Approximately three hundred years ago in the early eighteenth century, love appeared in Russia. In the time of Peter the Great, according to the famous Russian writer Boris Akunin, it was «brought to Russia by foreigners along with allonge wigs, earthen apple and coffee.» He made the discovery in 2012, finding the absence of «old-Russian love vocabulary» in the ancient sources, and boldly breaking the laws of strict logic, published the original conclusions in his blog.
In the web unfolded «not a joke, but almost a scientific discussion.» Someone did not understand the light irony of the writer and in all seriousness advised of the historical events in Russia, colored with passion. Some stood up for love, proving its inseparable existence with the human race from biblical times. Well, some took it upon themselves to accuse the writer of liberalism and historical illiteracy, while at the same time mentioning for some reason that «he walks on the boulevards against the authorities.» Significantly, and as we may also presume far from accidentally, the question of Russian love’s autochthonousness emerged from oblivion and was sharpened precisely in the midst of the Boulevard Revolution in Russia, which sparked but soon extinguished. Surprised by the activity of the netizens in defense of the Russian love’s honor, the writer considered it prudent to point straightforward ladies and perpendicular gentlemen to his literary trolling, but nevertheless he did not refrain from hinting that his tale about the Russian love has some truth, having pointed to the well-known history of the appearance, disappearance, revival, flowering and spread of the European love, also mentioning that it is actually about the «sublime love».
One sincere commentator, trying Akunin’s idea of the absence of love in ancient Russia on the contemporary reality, reported that it does not exist even now. This skeptical contribution to the spontaneous discussion was apparently made, if not implied by something purely personal, by a rather observant person who also had in mind not just the impulses of sex, but precisely true love, which can only be of one «freshness» – high. Sometimes even an indirect shift to personalities can bring a sensitive fresh breeze and turn a mass exchange of opinions in a radically different direction. But the point that sharpened the discussion was ignored: the network’s patriotic activists were frothing at the mouth to defend their romantic past, not caring in the slightest about the state of tender feelings in the observable fatherland.
And in vain. Ten years later, Russian society, lulled by the sweet-talking leaders with ideas about their own greatness, will have gone beyond the boundaries of humanity and plunged into a time of troubles, when even the most flexible minds will only be perplexed and try in vain to find the missing links in their once graceful explanatory concepts. Back then, no one ever thought that a society that omits love from its life and replaces it with surrogates in all niches – from pop bohemia, New Russians with their glamorous girlfriends, the masses hooked on beer and jerk humor, to the ambiguous marital status and sexual orientation of the top officials of the state – is doomed to a slide into its most sad and pernicious vices. And first of all, those who, due to the duty of their professional role, were charged with propagating the divine revelation that only love can truly resist sins, diligently closed their eyes and loyally erred.
In the same year, when the lines of true love and the dignity of the inhabitants of a vast country crossed in the creative life of one Russian writer, Marilyn Yalom’s book was published in another outstanding country in many respects with the echoing title: «How the French Invented Love: Nine Hundred Years of Passion and Romance.» The book told Americans that there is a kind of sublime love that in human history originated almost a thousand years ago in France, took a winding path, became an integral spiritual part of the French and still makes itself felt in one way or another, for example, in a baisemain, a kiss of the hand when meeting a woman.
Boris Akunin (Grigori Chkhartishvili)
II
Love Triangle. The American Angle of Love. The Yalom family as the prism of American society. A grafting of the world’s best patterns. The therapy of love misery. Techniques of normative love. The living connection of times and spaces
Irvin and Marilyn Yalom
Let us see where this seemingly random line of coincidence of questions about the origin of love can lead us. We are facing a peculiar international love triangle: love was invented by the French, this ancient invention excites modern Americans, the Russians deny love inoculation from outside and proclaim their own special kind of love. Perhaps these three different abodes of love can serve as quite exhaustive sources of information about what is wanted of it, how it is treated and how love survives in the modern world.
Since we have the American angle of love, let us sketch it in general terms. To get an idea of its gradations and formative vectors, we simply need to get to know Irwin and Marilyn Yalom and their areas of interest. The issues that Marilyn dealt with professionally lay in the field of gender studies and the history of the position of women in societies of different cultures. In particular, she wondered «how marriage, once considered a religious duty in medieval Europe, evolved into a sense of personal fulfillment in contemporary America.» Marilyn’s Stanford University colleagues noted her fascination with «the 18th-century French salon culture where women played a leading role in organizing events of intellectual discourse,» and her attempts to instill these traditions in her community.
Her husband is a well-known existential psychotherapist who has observed the experiences of his patients as they face the inevitability of death, as they face isolation in their own inner world, as they struggle with life choices, and as they strive for love. Summarizing his findings, Irwin Yalom reveals the tragic disconnect inherent in Americans between their trust in love and their destructive dependence on love. The cause of love’s frustrations lies in the relaxed