Refusing to Love. The Paths of Russian Love from Pushkin to AI. Part I – The Golden Age. Yury Tomin
much to one person as to the world as a whole.»
To generalize the American angle of the love matters, there is a desire both to import the world’s best examples and to invent original formats of love, as well as a preference for getting rid of love diseases and achieving some kind of normal state of love with the tools of some pragmatic scientific or pseudoscientific school of psychotherapy.
Irvin Yalom himself would hardly have had the opportunity to experience the joys of family longevity if his parents had not immigrated from the Russian Empire in the midst of World War I. At the same time, the Silver Age of Russian spiritual culture began to decline, completing the long cycle of the Golden Age of its heyday, the beginning of which matured in the circles of the then high-society (aristocratic) community, inspired by French fashions and customs, as well as a military victory over the ruler of the minds – Napoleon.
III
From ship to ball. Elegant pas of tender feelings. The new framework of love. The cult of striving for the ideal. Faces of beauty. Incarnations of romantic dreams. The imaginary reality of the ideal. Divine creation
If one were to imagine a time-traveling explorer setting off after meeting the Yalom couple to the origins of Russian love, he would certainly get to a large formal gathering for social dancing, where he would meet Pushkin, Lermontov, and other participants and chroniclers of the heyday of the Romantic era in Russia. The ball was the center of love – romantic fantasies matured in anticipation of the ball, during the dance signals of attraction were transmitted and sparks of lofty feelings flashed, after the ball the trajectory of romantic experiences rushed on the wings of found hope up or plunged into the chaos of mental turmoil.
It is safe to say that love ruled the ball, as well as the fact that the ball ruled love – made up its entourage, set the style, manners, patterns, and established the unspoken rules of love. To imagine the romantic atmosphere of a ball can be contrasted with the suppression of open expression of feelings and sexual desires in the Middle Ages era, famous for religious asceticism, accusing beautiful women in satanic sins, the church regulation of marriage. However, the spirit of the ball was also alien to the rigorous reasoning and cold mechanicism of the Enlightenment, which prevailed over the «dark ages.» The high society, exposing itself at balls, welcomed, within certain limits, the freedom of feelings and manners, but considered a demonstration of intelligence excessive. An exception was made only for geniuses, especially poets. But their position in high society was unenviable, since social status and, consequently, the attractiveness of the groom was still determined by wealth, nobility and government rank.
All these special features of the new environment, in which young minds and hearts were immersed in the early 19th century in Russia, formed a fairly slender and ramified model of culture, which is now called romanticism. In romanticism, everything is permeated with the cult of the ideal and awe of feelings in the pursuit of it.
The ball seemed to be the earthly embodiment of the desired ideal, where it could be encountered by chance or found after making the necessary preparations. It presented faces of beauty, models of grace and perfection, nobility and dignity – everything that the human soul sooner or later aspired to and longed for. The imaginary reality and visual proximity of the ideal made the heart beat faster, excited the blood, generated plans for the realization of the cherished dream and pushed to action to fulfill them.
Along with the expectation of meeting a romantic dream with its embodiment, the ball also set the standards of presentation in the form of the dress code, as well as in the manner of communication, the ability to dance and maintain small talk. Some of this set could be bought and some could be learned, but most of all natural beauty was appreciated, which was perceived as divine. The great poet Alexander Pushkin became a victim of the passion of possessing such an unearthly beauty.
Ball scene. Unknown artist, 1829. State Hermitage
IV
The poet and love. A genius of pure beauty. The consonances of divine harmonies. Lyrical hero. Tragedy of loneliness. The emptied heart. The science of tender passion. The fateful lot
Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799—1837)
Even before he met Natalia Goncharova, Alexander Pushkin, judging by his own" Don Juan list», repeatedly admired the manifestations of divine beauty, which he noted in the women he knew and the amazing feelings they aroused in his soul («and divinity, and inspiration, and life, and tears, and love»). At the age of 25 he wrote his famous poem:
I can recall that magic moment
When you first came into my sight
Like fleeting vision, like an omen
Of pure beauty and delight.
The poet’s soul is like a unique musical instrument tuned to the consonances of divine harmonies. The inspiration generated by contemplated beauty is united with love. All facets of love – attraction, closeness, affection, understanding, admiration, enjoyment – are blessed with inspiration as the highest thrill of the soul. (It is no coincidence that lovers write and read poetry to each other.) Take all this to a high degree of mental acuity and art talent, compare it to the poet’s surrounding reality, and you get a picture of a fate doomed to the tragedy of solitude.
«The Romantic conception of man proceeds from the notion of his oneness, isolation, wrenching from all earthly ties,» noted the famous cultural scientist Yu. Lotman in his analytical essay on the poets of the 19th century and pointed out the essence of the tragedy of their lyrical heroes, which «consists in the contradiction between the attempts to break through to another „I“, the desire for understanding, love, friendship, connection with the people, appeal to posterity and the impossibility of such contact, because it would mean the loss for „I“ of its exclusivity».
In this vein, the depth of experience arising from the desolation of the heart as a result of a series of infatuations and disappointments, expressed in Alexander Pushkin’s poem written in 1821, becomes understandable:
I have endured my desire,
I’ve ceased to love my fairy dreams,
And only fruit of hearty fire —
My sufferings have stayed, it seems.
And under storms of cruel kismet
My blooming spirit quickly died,
I waited for the end, I missed it.
I’m feeling loneliness inside.
So that enveloped by the blow
Of cold wind and stormy flaws
A leaf which is belated, sole,
Vibrates on bare branch in pause…
There is no doubt that Pushkin’s genius wrapped all facets of romantic love – divine delight, «jealous sorrow» and «yearning laziness» – in a «gilded shell» and presented it to his descendants, who are free only to admire the shiny wrapping or share the bitterness and sweetness of love experiences together with the poet. Along with the ability to respond with all his soul to the heart’s feelings with their joy of divine inspirations from «miserable foolishness» and fear of disappointment from «flaming contagion» Alexander Pushkin described in amazing detail the ability to coldly hypocritically manipulate feelings by the rules of «science of tender passion», which was typical for «young rogue» Eugene Onegin, whom he considered his friend:
How well he donned new shapes and sizes —
startling