The Sixties as a Special Phenomenon. Poets of the Sixties and Dementiev, who joined them. What contributed to the extinction of the movement

There is no art of the sixties, and there is no certain sign that would unite it, - says director Marlen Khutsiev, the author of one of the main sixties films “Zastava Ilyich” (“I am twenty years old”). - If you take Voznesensky, does he look like Yevtushenko or Akhmadulina? They are all very different, they cannot be combined into one direction. Another thing is that then there were conditions favorable for the existence of different artists. The fact that they were different, and was common - such a paradox.

However, from the present day of the sixties, at first glance, it seems to be an era of integrity. It even has clear chronological boundaries: on February 25, 1956, at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, Nikita Khrushchev read out a report exposing Stalin's personality cult - for many this was a promise of freedom and the beginning of the era of "socialism with a human face", and on August 20-21, 1968 Soviet tanks entered Prague, crushing democratic reforms in Czechoslovakia.

In fact, the 60s were an era full of internal contradictions. And its uniqueness just consisted in this “unity of opposites”: communism and individualism, fine taste and frank philistinism, natural science and humanitarian pictures of the world, urbanization and striving for nature, democracy and technocracy - these oppositions, forming dialectical unities, consisted of the sixties Utopia.

Later, when this utopia collapsed, oppositions also crumbled, turning into conflict zones of the 70s, 80s, 90s and zero, becoming pain points and neuroses modern society. It was the sixties that gave us today's life - with all its difficulties, contradictions, wars and hopes.

Communism - individualism

The unity of public and personal, characteristic of the 60s, was replaced by confrontation and even conflict. Beginningsince the 70s, the personal has come into conflict with the state

For us, communism is a world of freedom and creativity,” said Boris Strugatsky in the second half of the 1990s. In 1961, when the CPSU adopted the Program for the Construction of Communism, most Soviet intellectuals saw no contradiction between communism and individualism. And even in 1972, after the defeat of the Prague Spring and the loss of the sixties illusions, Andrey Voznesensky wrote: “Even if - as an exception // you are trampled by the crowd, // in human // purpose // ninety percent of the good."

In fact, in its program, the party promised the Soviet people another utopia: "The current generation of Soviet people will live under communism."

The party program was discussed in the kitchens, - says Lev Ernst, vice-president of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences. - But no one around me believed that communism would exist in twenty years. And then I thought that it was impossible to set a time frame for the onset of communism.

The ideology of the 1960s stands in stark contrast to the ideology of self-sacrifice and state over-centralization characteristic of Stalinism. The idea of ​​peaceful communist construction appeals to self-interest: "everything in the name of man, for the good of man."

As a result of new approaches to economic policy in 1965-1970, there was the most powerful economic growth in 30 years: an average growth rate of 8.5% per year. The population formed colossal savings - more than $ 100 billion at the official rate. The then Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin in 1966 argued to Brezhnev at a meeting of the Politburo the need to build an automobile plant: “Someday this money supply will collapse in an avalanche and crush everyone ... First of all, us! In order to withdraw these billions from the capsules, it is necessary to throw into the domestic market not jewelry and imported consumer goods, as today, but something more significant. This “more weighty” will be our new domestic car, created on the basis of Western technologies!”

“Well, Alexey Nikolaevich, I convinced you! Brezhnev answered then. “Instruct your subordinates, the chairman of the KGB and the Minister of Foreign Trade, so that they find out in which country it is possible to buy a factory cheaper ... We give you six months.”

Thus, it was precisely economic considerations, that is, the threat of inflation, that created the basis for the consumer boom, which inevitably led to the individualization of the life of a Soviet person.

The key thesis of the Program of the CPSU: "Communism is a highly organized society of free and conscious workers." This allowed advanced Marxists like Merab Mamardashvili to rethink orthodox Marxism-Leninism: “In philosophy, freedom is an internal necessity. The necessity of oneself.

The population began to move from communal apartments to separate apartments with kitchens and kitchen conversations: here you could safely call friends, forming a circle of friends with your own hands. And on March 14, 1967, a five-day work week with two days off is introduced, and the Soviet person finally has personal leisure.

But paradoxically, state concern for the autonomous life of a person leads to the growth of collectivism, in fact, to spontaneous communism.

The Sixties was remembered for its high intensity friendly relations, - recalls human rights activist, member of the dissident movement Boris Zolotukhin. - It was the apotheosis of friendship. We had no other way to get information - only by communicating with each other, we could learn something.

After the Stalinist repressions, when only a few people could be considered close friends without danger to their lives and freedom, the friendly companies of the thaw times were truly huge - 40-50 people each. With all the internal disagreements and contradictions, the society was very consolidated: everyone communicated with everyone, and even Khrushchev argued with cultural figures, and they answered him.

The most powerful blow to this lifestyle and to the regime itself was the defeat of the Prague Spring. The Soviet intelligentsia was forced to somehow relate to this event, to take some position in relation to it. And then it turned out that she did not have a single position.

The entry of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia, which then ranked first in the world in terms of the number of communists per thousand inhabitants, consolidated the ranks of Western dissidents like Andrei Amalrik, Natalya Gorbanevskaya or Larisa Bogoraz. Romantic Marxists like Alexander Zinoviev and Roy Medvedev argued that the leadership of the party had deviated from the "authentic" Marx and Lenin. Soil nationalists like Igor Shafarevich and Alexander Solzhenitsyn opposed not only Marxism, but in general the entire Western modernization project.

Utopia decomposed into semi-official collectivism and various forms of illegal individualism, more or less radical. Already in the early 1980s, in all universities of the country, a special lecture was given in classes on the history of the CPSU, which explained why, for what “subjective and objective” reasons, communism was never built on schedule. An acute, almost allergic reaction to this unfinished communism was the total individualism of the 90s, which did not take on the utopian forms of creative freedom that the sixties dreamed of.

Taste - philistinism

The consumer boom in the 60s gave rise to a utopia of personal taste: the thing was supposed to serve the aesthetics and practice of communism, and not unbridled “thingism”. In the stagnant 70s, consumption was limited only by scarcity, not taste.

It was the beginning of the era of consumption, - recalls the writer Sergei Khrushchev, son of Nikita Khrushchev. - There was some confidence in the future. There was an increase in the birth rate: from three to five million people a year. But there was no global consumption - each new type of sausage was a discovery. The appearance of Czech meatballs in stores, the opportunity to buy meat and cook barbecue - that was the consumption of those years. When suddenly you discover that you can get to the Crimea by car, and before that there were only country roads.

The turn of the 50s and 60s was a unique era of cheerful consumption, a kind of consumer drive. In this short era, the thing was both utilitarian and symbolic. It was a sign of the communist utopia, and was hunted down as if it were a thing from Tommaso Campanella's own City of the Sun.

That is why the sixties combined the struggle against philistinism and "materialism" and the consumer boom of the early 60s, the desire for simplicity and functionality and the rise of industrial design, unprecedented for the Soviet era.

At the turn of the 50s and 60s, the concept of Soviet “taste” appeared as a reflection of socialist culture and the concept of “beauty”, which was emphasized by man-made: one could not be born beautiful, but become thanks to clothes, hairstyle and makeup.

Taste is simplicity and proportion. It is characteristic that the first stars of the Soviet podium - Regina Zbarskaya, Mila Romanovskaya, Galina Milovskaya - were ordinary women over 30, and fashion models with a variety of figures, up to size 60, were accepted into model houses.

The 60s is the era of love for everything new. The consumer of that time, in a sense, felt the drive of a pioneer. New things were “mined” with the same enthusiasm as minerals: it was important to be the first. This drive, as it were, removed the petty-bourgeois, “thingish” touch from the object and endowed it with symbolic value.

Many say that the first jeans appeared in someone there ... It's all lies. I had the first jeans in Leningrad, at least white ones! - says the poet Anatoly Naiman. - In 1964. Real. American.

Things were measured as records.

Vysotsky then already had a blue Mercedes, the first in Moscow, - says director Alexander Mitta. - Then the same appeared at Nikita Mikhalkov, even more blue.

There was a split in the aesthetic system of the 60s, which later, with the collapse of the sixties utopia, became a conflict that neuroticized the society of the 90s and zero. The objects evoked ambivalent feelings: they were proud of them and at the same time they were ashamed of them.

I had a stunning sandy jacket of small velveteen from Nabokov's sister - they brought it to someone, it turned out to be small, - Anatoly Naiman recalls. And he also says: - Yevtushenko was a dandy. We are walking along a somehow terrible winter Moscow street, and he is coming from a restaurant, in some kind of fur coat that is not ours, chic, unbuttoned. To meet him dad in a wadded coat and a boy. Yevtushenko spread his hands and said loudly: "Here are my people!" And suddenly this dad in a padded jacket stopped him and asked: “What circus are you, guy?”

In many ways, the philistinism of the 60s was synonymous with comfort: faith in utopia fought with it as with what keeps it in the present, preventing it from rushing into a brighter future. But the paradox is that the clothes and furniture of the 60s, which were hunted for and which, as in Viktor Rozov’s play “In Search of Joy”, were chopped with a saber in a fit of proletarian anger, were just not comfortable. They were futuristic.

The 60s was a time of obsession with everything artificial, from fabrics to fur and hair: wigs and hairpieces came into fashion, hair was dyed in all colors of the spectrum, both with the help of special paints and improvised means like hydrogen peroxide or ink diluted in water.

At the same time, geometric silhouettes, silver suit-like dresses, short trapezoidal coats of cheerful colors and abstract patterns a la Picasso came into fashion - visual futurism copied by Soviet everyday culture of the 60s from Christian Dior and other Western designers.

At the same time, fashionable synthetic fabrics pricked, stuck to the body and made their owner sweat in any weather; fashionable pointed stilettos deformed a woman's foot, got stuck in the ribbed steps of escalators and punched holes in the asphalt; it was uncomfortable to sit at the trendy low coffee tables. But all these things had not a utilitarian, but a symbolic value - as material signs of a utopia that is about to become a reality.

But already in the middle and especially at the end of the 60s, when this utopia began to crumble and ceased to provide the sphere of Soviet consumption with symbolic capital, the bourgeoisie gained unprecedented strength, because the futuristic things accumulated by Soviet citizens in an effort to bring the future closer became just things. In the early 1990s, when the West became a kind of geographical utopia for us for a short time, the "materialism" of the new Russian man again became symbolic and pioneering, but even faster - with the collapse of faith in another utopia - it turned into an ordinary shuttle.

I did not have a shock from the end of the 60s, - says Alexander Mitta. - The real shock came later, when it turned out that for many, the late stagnation of the 80s with its stupid consumerist philistinism - saving up for a car, buying a summer house, etc. - turned out to be more attractive than drive, inner freedom, creative searches and, yes, everyday disorder 60s.

Physicists - lyrics

In the 1960s, there were no conflicts between the natural-scientific and humanitarian pictures of the world: both of them were elements of a single utopia of the new man. Having gone into a profession or into dissidence, both physicists and lyricists lost their influence on society.

The image of a harmonious personality, which the sixties utopia demanded, was determined by two poems by Boris Slutsky: "Physics and Lyrics" and "Lyrics and Physics". In them, a man-physicist with logarithms and formulas was opposed to a man-lyricist with rhyme and a line, but it was clear to everyone that there really was no opposition.

A resident of Utopia is smart, cheerful, positive, working for the benefit of civilization, for its future. A party worker (officialdom, Stalinism), a collective farmer (uneducated, earthly), a proletarian (the same as a collective farmer), an employee (a person from the present) could not become such a hero. Only the intelligentsia - engineering, scientific and creative - claimed the title of a new man.

There was no opposition, - recalls Mikhail Marov, an engineer and astronomer who launched the first devices to Venus in the early 60s. - If they were reasonable physicists, then they respected the lyricists. And considered initiation to the lyrics integral part his worldview. I absolutely associate myself with the sixties. And so I am very worried about the death of Andrei Voznesensky. I was close to his poetry, and Rozhdestvensky, and Yevtushenko. I ran to the Polytechnic University ... This was part of the concept of "intelligence".

And Voznesensky wrote in the 60s: “A woman stands at the cyclotron - // slender, // listens with magnetism, // light streams through her, // red, like a strawberry, // in the tip of her little finger ... "

Physicists were interested in humanitarian problems, and not only in poetry, but also in social ideas, lyricists were inspired by scientific and technical utopia. The philosophers and sociologists who appeared after 1953 largely adopted the scientific and engineering worldview: the world can and should be changed, moreover, according to science, according to the project.

The films “Nine Days of One Year” and the book by the Strugatskys “Monday begins on Saturday” became symbols of the time: “What do you do?” I asked. “Like all science,” said the hawk-nosed one. - Human happiness.

It must be said that the “free physicist” did so much in the 50s and 60s that it’s hard to believe even now. Of the 19 Russian Nobel laureates, ten received their prizes in 1956-1965: two of them are writers (Mikhail Sholokhov and Boris Pasternak), and the rest are physicists and chemists. In 1954, the world's first nuclear power plant was built in Obninsk. In 1957 - a synchrophasotron at the newly created international Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, which is still the largest scientific center today.

In 1957, the USSR launched a satellite into space, and already in 1961, Gagarin with his "Let's go!" In 1955, after the "letter of three hundred", the creation of genetic and biochemical laboratories began, and although Academician Lysenko returned in 1961, the work of our geneticists has already appeared in international journals.

Harmonious man of the future worked in the laboratory, played the guitar, debated about the habitability of the universe in the cafe "Integral" of the Novosibirsk Academgorodok, attended performances of the Taganka Theater and "Sovremennik" in Moscow, poetry evenings at the Polytechnic Museum. The latter, by the way, shows well how the myth was created. Here is what Marlen Khutsiev says:

As for the poetry evenings at the Polytechnic, it was I who accidentally revived the tradition. And such evenings acquired a mass character precisely after that scene in Ilyich's Outpost. Prior to this, the poets of the sixties performed separately at different venues. I just put them together. And after they began their performances at the stadiums.

The logical continuation of the symbiosis of physicists with lyricists was the social activity of prominent scientists, primarily Andrei Sakharov, who in 1966 signed a collective letter about the danger of the revival of the Stalin cult. Along with scientists - Kapitsa, Artsimovich, Tamm - among the "signatories" were writers: Kataev, Nekrasov, Paustovsky.

I had no intention to radically change something in the country, - says Mikhail Marov. - Many of the principles on which socialism was built satisfied me. And I thought that we need to move away from conservative concepts a little. And the champion of this trend was Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, who was very respected not only by me, but by many people, and who was just talking about socialism with a human face.

“The scientific method of guiding politics, economics, art, education, and military affairs has not yet become a reality,” Andrei Sakharov wrote in his first socio-political article, Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom. It was in 1968, at the height of the Prague Spring, when Soviet tanks had not yet entered Czechoslovakia. In April, Sakharov still counted on discussing his ideas with the country's leadership and society, but by August the capital's intelligentsia no longer hoped for equal participation in the life of the country. Communism with a human face failed.

Here is what one of the main dissidents of the country Sergey Kovalev says:

I had to hear from my colleagues more than once: “You understand that you are an accomplished scientist, and you understand what professionalism is. Why are you getting into politics, where are you an amateur? You despise dilettantism." It seems to me that this is an insincere judgment. There was a desire to earn the right to self-respect. That's all. The most intelligent of us understood perfectly well that all our actions and statements are not at all political in nature. This is the nature of moral incompatibility... I was put in the midst of work. Ten years of camp and exile. Then I was evicted from Moscow. And what is a break of 13 years in science?

Having gone into dissidence or purely professionalism, the sixties actually lost the opportunity to defend their ideals in discussions with the authorities. The temporary surge in the activity of scientists and writers during perestroika was exclusively dissident, anti-Soviet. The Sixties only helped the nomenclature to destroy the USSR, but there was no longer a positive progressive communist utopia. Physicists and lyricists - two hemispheres of a harmonious personality - went in different directions, and an ideological void of the 90s formed in the space between them.

City - virgin land

In the 60s, urbanization and unity with nature were part of the same social reality. Today, on the site of utopia, there are concrete jungles, spontaneous summer cottages, tourism and downshifting.

For centuries, man has fled from wilderness to comfort. From the cave - to the hut, from the hut - to an apartment with gas, electricity, running water and a toilet bowl. The Sixties turned out to be the first generation in which the reverse movement also took place en masse.

40.3% of Soviet cities were built after 1945. At the same time, the peak of construction fell precisely on the 60s. The rapid growth of the urban environment created a new image of Soviet culture: its peasant-settlement appearance began to fade and acquire urban features. Even the village began to urbanize thanks to the economic fashion for large agro-industrial complexes.

In the spring of 1959, three hundred physics students from Moscow State University went to Northern Kazakhstan to build houses, calves and chicken coops. Thus began the movement of construction teams, which captured almost all the universities of the country. Virgin soil (unplowed land) has become another word - a symbol of the era.

On the wave of the patriotic movement for the development of virgin lands, Komsomol trains went eastward with songs and dances. The main slogan is "Everything to the virgin lands!" - recalls the actor Igor Kvasha. - And we thought: why not create your own Komsomol theater there?

The state task was being solved - to develop new lands, to increase productivity. Youth Drive was part of a government project. Many were put off by this. Then, among scientists, a fashion was born for another form of escape to nature - tourism and expeditions.

Everyone got under the backpacks: both those who had to do this on duty (for example, geologists), and those whose work did not require this at all. For example, the physicist, Nobel laureate Igor Tamm was an avid mountaineer (they say he owns the aphorism: “Mountaineering is not the best way to spend the winter over the summer”, which then became widely used with the “not” particle cut out).

The expeditionary movement swept the country. In every carriage of a train or electric train one could meet peppy guys with girlfriends in cowboy shirts and sneakers. It was a tarpaulin subculture: windbreakers, backpacks, tents. Unlike modern synthetics, all this shamelessly got wet even with an average rain. But all the same, the tarpaulin seemed more attractive than the reinforced concrete of the "petty-bourgeois" apartments.

Now they are leaving for Thailand or the south of India, but then you could take a tent and a guitar and rush like a savage to the sea, to the forest or somewhere else. For scientists, it was a natural way of life,” recalls Alexander Mitta.

In the 1960s, there were no obvious contradictions between the city and nature. The hero with a backpack stormed mountain passes, crossed rivers and opened a can of stew with a cleaver. Then he returned home, washed, shaved, put on a sweater and went to his laboratory to storm the atomic nucleus or living cell. "Leaving for the field" was devoid of pathos, since it implied a return.

But gradually this image ceased to be conflict-free. In the film by Kira Muratova "Short Encounters" main character, played by Vysotsky, the same wanderer with a guitar, dangling back and forth, free, independent, despising career and material wealth, finds himself between two heroines: one is a simple village girl who goes to the city on foot for some unknown to herself " different life, the second is a city district committee official who controls the commissioning of new Khrushchevs and who is sick of all this. And it turns out that a truly spiritual, full-fledged person (Vysotsky's hero) can be himself only in uncultured places, far from society, not inscribed in society. Everything else breaks it.

By the beginning of the 70s, domestic tourism began to acquire the features of internal emigration. The author's song constantly teetered on the verge of underground and approval: bard gatherings were either supported or banned.

My friends and I went hiking, - says lawyer Boris Zolotukhin. - It was an opportunity to get away from propaganda. The illusion of complete freedom is to hide in an airtight circle of friends. And then, in Moscow, Western radio stations were jammed, and in the forest "Speedola" took everything perfectly ...

Now attempts to escape from a well-maintained, but also conflicting urban environment are called differently. And if in the 60s someone had told a construction team, a geologist or a water tourist that he was engaged in downshifting, then in response, most likely, he would have received in the face. But in vain.

Democracy - technocracy

Rule in the utopia of the 60s was based on the people, but culturally and scientifically equipped progressives should rule. With the death of the idea of ​​progress, a false choice arose between the power of the crowd and a strong hand.

“Under democratic management, according to the desires of the majority, progress would be stopped, since the progressive principle is concentrated in a small number of people ... Therefore, the democratic principle of governing people only works when it is associated with the deception of some by others.” This aphorism of the Nobel laureate Pyotr Kapitsa of the 1960s perfectly illustrates the democratic utopia of the 60s - its logical equipment, irony, as well as the need for a consistent combination of "the power of the people" and "the power of those who know."

In certain areas, progress, right according to Kapitsa, was stopped democratically - in perestroika. Why?

Nikita [Khrushchev], having drunk, began in a very sharp form to accuse the writers of not helping the Party in the building of communism. And when Margarita Aliger tried to disagree with him, he, having lost all control over himself, yelled like a cut: “You don’t understand at all what the state of the country is. We buy herring for gold, and you write here. What you write?" - Igor Kvasha recalls.

But in fact, 1963, when the intelligentsia began to fear a return to Stalinism, was a time when the state was still close to the people, and the country was not yet "this country."

It was such a pink period of relations with the authorities, - Alexander Mitta recalls. - We needed to show both the people and the authorities that we are doing vital things.

Until 1964, I lived in the family of the head of state, and we had constant conversations about politics, - says Sergei Khrushchev, the son of the then General Secretary. - The reforms implied the democratization of the economy and political life. Relative freedom of expression did not appear by itself, relative, but unthinkable even in Stalin's time ... People lived their own lives, but without the reformation this surge would never have happened.

Marlen Khutsiev does not agree with him:

In fact, the thaw began earlier, immediately after Stalin's death, even before the 20th Congress. And when this congress was held, I was already filming Spring on Zarechnaya Street. It was then that the thaw began to be attributed to Khrushchev.

By the beginning of the Khrushchev thaw, the USSR had great potential, accumulated by internal energy and freedom of small groups, seminars, circles, not only in physics, engineering, literature, but even in the social sciences (the Moscow Methodological Circle had been working at the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University since 1952) . Poetry readings at the Polytechnic Museum, Landau's seminars, and discussions of advanced logic on the example of Marx's Capital were connected by a common style and a common utopia. It can be called "democratic", but the essence was not just freedom of opinion, but the freedom of justified creative expression. For stupidity and mediocrity it was possible to get, and very hard.

And can't political discussions and managerial decisions be organized as freely, scientifically and efficiently as a mathematical or philosophical seminar? Nothing seemed to stop us from moving in that direction. But…

“We are run by goons and enemies of culture. They will never be with us. They will always be against us.<…>And if for us communism is a world of freedom and creativity, then for them communism is a society where the population immediately and with pleasure fulfills all the instructions of the party and government,” Boris Strugatsky described the context of the creation of “It's hard to be a god”. In 1963, when the Strugatskys' novels were published almost without censorship, the Progressors, agents of communism on a planet ruled by the wild Middle Ages, became almost the key characters. This can also be understood as a discussion of the role of the intelligentsia in the USSR: to what extent is it possible to interfere in the affairs of savages so as not to harm, but to help them gradually move towards progress?

When, in the late 60s, it became clear that the USSR was not an experimental state building communism, but simply an empire without any lofty goals, the intelligentsia went into internal emigration. “If it fell out to be born in the Empire, / It is better to live in a remote province by the sea,” wrote Joseph Brodsky.

However, the “aggressiveness” of the empire played, perhaps, no greater role in disappointment in the USSR than another factor: the party elite passed into the stage of solidification and no longer wanted to build communism itself, and certainly did not let anyone “upstairs”. The Stalinist norms of personnel rotation were abolished - in the highest bodies of the party by 1/4 and in the regional and district by 1/3. Thus, conditions were created for the stagnation of the 70-80s and the formation of a class of party-Soviet bureaucracy - the nomenklatura. It became more and more difficult for technocrats to enter power, and rotation and movement stopped in science and culture. As in a joke about Shostakovich from a book by Mikhail Ardov: “During the war, Dmitry Dmitrievich was in Kuibyshev, where he saw and remembered such a wonderful announcement: “From October 1, the open dining room is closed here. There is a closed dining room here.” Since the 70s, the USSR began to become a "closed dining room".

Those alliances that sometimes formed between the sixties with the nomenklatura in subsequent years turned out to be tragic. Participants of the V Congress of the Union of Cinematographers, which took place on May 13, 1986, subsequently apologized for the revolutionary overthrow of the "retrogrades" and classics of Soviet cinema Lev Kulidzhanov and Sergei Bondarchuk. And the authors of the letter in support of Yeltsin in October 1993 could hardly be proud of the style and content of this message, which justified the shooting of the White House: “Thank God, the army and law enforcement agencies were with the people.” With the beginning of the first Chechen war, the meaning of dissidence again became Soviet: the Sixties broke with the authorities forever.

They were the elite of a huge country in the era of its historical chance. But it was their "technocracy" and "elitism" that first came into conflict with the authoritarianism of the party nomenklatura (and lost), and then, in 1993, with the real desires of the masses (and also lost). The dream once again did not withstand the collision with reality.

Photo: Marc Garanger/CORBIS/FOTOSA.RU; RUSSIAN LOOK; GAMMA/EYEDEA/EAT NEWS; Time & Life Pictures/GETTY IMAGES/FOTOBANK; Dean Conger/CORBIS/FOTOSA.RU; Dean Conger/CORBIS; RIA NEWS

Birth, heyday and collapse of the sixties utopia: facts and poems by Andrei Voznesensky

25/02/1956

The beginning of the thaw: at the 20th Congress of the CPSU, a report by Nikita Khrushchev "On the cult of personality and its consequences" was heard.

... Everything burned out clean.
The police are full.
Its end!
Everything is started!
Go to the cinema!

12/04/1961

A triumph for the Soviet space program: Yuri Gagarin became the first man to fly into space.

Our neighbor Bukashkin lives with us,
in blotter-colored underpants.
But like balloons
burning above him
Antiworlds!

09/1965-02/1966

The trial of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel: they were accused of publishing works abroad that “discredited the Soviet state and social system” and of anti-Soviet propaganda.

And Taras has a dark dream.
A piece of howling meat
through the crowds, the streets,
grimaces,
through life, to the drumming,
They lead him through the ranks, through the ranks!
Lead under a collective howl:
"Whoever hits badly - themselves through the ranks."

20-21/08/1968

The defeat of the Prague Spring: the troops of the Warsaw Pact countries entered the capital of Czechoslovakia; the largest contingent was allocated by the USSR. Czech "socialism with a human face" crushed by Soviet tanks.

While eyewitnesses thought:
Take it or what? —
My age, in essence, has come true
And it stands like a brick for centuries.

25/12/1979

Soviet troops entered Afghanistan.

Hunt to die, looking at the era ...
In which only a drunkard is honest,
When the earth is torn apart,
Want to die before everyone else dies.

22/01/1980

Andrei Sakharov was arrested, together with his wife Elena Bonner exiled to Gorky without trial and stripped of most of his ranks.

We are troubadours from the word "fools".
You were right to trample us.
You have populated all cubic capacity.
The space is yours. But the time is ours.

19/07-3/08/1980.

Moscow hosted the XXII Summer Olympic Games.

Everything is sharper and redder
Squirrels of my friends.
And ripens, hiding the deadlines,
National explosion.

26/04/1986

A major accident occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which resulted in a large-scale environmental disaster.

Nuclear winter, nuclear winter...
Science this phenomenon only a year as she found out herself.
Will turn into an icicle
winning side.

26/03/1989

The first parliamentary elections in history are held in the USSR, in which voters chose from several candidates for deputies.

Our Marias are pregnant by Beria.
The whole nation became like the collective Christ.
We, the unbaptized children of the Empire,
We grope for faith from the contrary.

19/08/1991

August putsch: in order to prevent the collapse of the USSR, a group of conspirators from the leadership of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the government formed the State Committee for the State of Emergency, removed Mikhail Gorbachev from power and sent troops to Moscow.

Punka spotted, bunnies heels.
Where are you spinning? Did you get a visa?
What countries do you put in order,
OMONA Lisa?

11/12/1994

The beginning of the first Chechen war: in order to "ensure law, order and public safety" units of the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Internal Affairs were introduced into the territory of the Chechen Republic.

sun black and red
nega nega negative
river brown-eyed river
snow snow inextinguishable

02/2001

The birth of the Russian blogosphere: the first Russian-speaking users of the LiveJournal.com blog service appeared on the Internet.

You weren't saved.
I will collect in my soul
seventh of the earth
With a short name - ru ...

25/10/2003

Businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested at Novosibirsk airport on charges of tax evasion and embezzlement.

Money smells like the future
What we spend them on
For kindergarten bun
Or a terrorist attack.
…
They smell of will, Lord,
Sometimes a prisoner.
The more you accumulate -
You lose more.

09/2008

The world financial crisis came to Russia.

Will turn into a hole bagel,
I can't stand everything else.
And then I won't be.
Without me. And without you.

The Sixties is a subculture of the Soviet intelligentsia, which mainly captured the generation born approximately between 1925 and 1945. The historical context that shaped the views of the "sixties" were the years of Stalinism, the Great Patriotic War and the era of the "thaw". the term was first used in 1960 by literary critic Stanislav Rassadin in the article "The Sixties" (magazine "Youth"). He spoke about the writers of the new literary generation and their readers.

Most of the "sixties" came from the intelligentsia or the party milieu that had formed in the 1920s. Their parents, as a rule, were convinced Bolsheviks, often participants civil war. Belief in communist ideals was self-evident for the majority of the "sixties"; their parents dedicated their lives to the struggle for these ideals. However, even in childhood, they had to go through a worldview crisis, since it was this environment that suffered the most from the so-called Stalinist “purges”. Some of the "sixties" parents were imprisoned or shot. Usually this did not cause a radical revision of views - however, it forced more reflection and led to hidden opposition to the regime

Who were we
sixties?
On the crest of the foam shaft
In the twentieth century,
like paratroopers
out of twenty one.

“Without timidity” and “giving resounding slaps in the face” this generation marched boldly forward, pushing the lagging behind, the doubters and the timid. Fervently, loudly and cheerfully sound the words that

We cut through
barred
window
to Europe
and to America.

Young and brave, shocking the “respectable” public, the “sixties” fought for freedom not for themselves (in their hearts they were always free), but for everyone.

We were “fashionable” for someone,
we offended someone with glory,
but we made you free
today's offenders.
Frightened by our tastes
tendencies,
and what we forget too much
and we did not die of modesty
and we are not going to die.

These lines resonate with youthful enthusiasm, sincerity and gaiety, the intonation with which the poet entered literature in the “distant sixties”. And it pleases the thought that the past years have not cooled the soul and heart of this wonderful master.

Let them hiss: that we are mediocre,
corrupt and hypocritical,
but still we are legendary,
spat upon,
but immortal!

E. Evtushenko

Marietta Chudakova: “Frames and Signs of a Generation”

I would still like to give this phenomenon a stricter framework, at least quasi-scientific. Once I even deduced the age limits of the sixties. In terms of persons, this formation basically fits, according to my calculations, into the age of people from 1918 (G. Pomerants) to 1935 (S. Rassadin, who gave the name of the phenomenon in his 1960 article) years of birth. These are those who by the mid-50s were already someone who had a status (literary or scientific) and a public reputation (although the very problem of such a reputation in the absence of a public life is quite complicated), that is, there was a name.

In some cases, the name replaced the front-line or camp experience - this was a feature of the era. Those who did not yet have a significant status or name by that moment, but were already at the start and in the coming years received both, were also recruited into this formation. The formation also included people far from art, with economic, "philosophical" (which, when we are talking about the Soviet era in general, and Stalin's in particular, it is difficult to write without quotes) or historical education, party or Komsomol workers, including party journalists (Len Karpinsky, Yegor Yakovlev). It included directors, screenwriters, and writers, including such “pure” lyricists as B. Akhmadullina and N. Matveeva, the revival of lyrics was one of the results and will take a “thaw”. Two most important, it seems to us, personal properties paved the way for this person in the sixties: one is biological, the second is ideological.

The first is the activity of nature, which is given by biology, the desire to act. In a book about the literary era of the 30s, I wrote in ancient times, using the example of one literary biography, that active people have a bad time in a bad time - they do not manage to sit it out. People with a thirst for action were brought to the surface of the then so-called social life, and nothing good was expected there: it was impossible to become positive figures in this “bad” frame. And they, including talented people, became Soviet functionaries with all the ensuing consequences. Passive ones could somehow sit out the bad time and not get dirty. During the years of the “thaw”, the situation became different, but the psychological conflict itself must be kept in mind here as well.

The second, ideological quality is the attraction to that great - not low, but great temptation in the full sense of the word, the essence of which is expressed by Pasternak: “To want, unlike the dude / In his short existence, / To work together with everyone / And at the same time with the rule of law.”“Together with the rule of law” is not always part of the temptation. To want “to work together with everyone” is, in general, natural for a person. But some eras favor this, others do not leave such an opportunity. And it is worthy of regret that, in the Soviet era, tragedies were obtained from this at best. The 1960s were exactly the kind of work they wanted. Their actions, firstly, are aimed at the interests of the whole society, the country, and secondly, they must be carried out in a team, collectively, “together”.

They were not individualists by nature. Where could one find the conditions for such work? Only in the party - the one that was the only and ruling one. In the underground, as you know, there was no possibility of action "with everyone in common", only in a very narrow group. But “together with everyone”, as it soon became clear, did not work out in the party, which many sixties joined (those who did not join at the front) in order to correct it from the inside. It was not possible to correct, but then this membership became a brake on the liberation of one's own thought. I saw this in the most striking examples, in the example life path well known to me remarkable scientists, and it is impossible, alas, to convince me that this circumstance - membership or non-membership - was generally irrelevant. The explanation of the world involuntarily adapted to its position - after all, a person knew to himself that he was a decent person! More decent, more self-sacrificing, more disinterested than the multitude of non-Party people! In the second half of the 50s, the outlines of a certain layer began to become clearer - it began to form. We emphasize that these were not later parties, it was a layer united not only by a common style, aesthetics, speech, but also by common values ​​and goals. They could be reflected aloud, but they could also be implied by themselves.

Disagreement with the generally accepted in this rapidly formed environment would sound like a sharp dissonance - and this was also a formative feature. 2. Features of the biography. "Thaw". Khrushchev's report. Faith, hope and struggle. Values. They had one more common biographical feature - for all of them, as has been said more than once different people, the 20th Congress and Khrushchev's report was the boundary of his biography. In the biographies of many of them there was something else in common - the report touched on them personally, the names and fates of their loved ones; these were the children of those who had been shot or served time in the camps and were returning from there by the time of the report, but without much publicity, moreover, they were often people from the party nomenclature (parents of B. Okudzhava, V. Aksenov, L. Karpinsky).

And it was precisely this - martyrdom or long-term camp survival, recognized in the report as unfair and, as it were, atoning for the personal participation of these people in the destruction of the country (in the destruction of its peasantry, its educated stratum, etc.) - this was the most important ideologeme. It was she who kept their children near the values ​​​​of their fathers - "commissars in dusty helmets." Looking ahead, we note that at the end of perestroika and especially in the post-Soviet period, this played against them with such force, knocking out the sixties from the layer of active actors by reducing their public authority. In addition to hooligan journalistic attacks, they themselves contributed to this to some extent, content with a chaotic, emotional, largely infantile perception of the events of perestroika, rather thoughtlessly picking up MS Gorbachev’s slogan: “More socialism!”.

They never rose to the level of a public explication of their complex path - and by this they increased the distrust of the young in their stratum, in many ways strengthened its unjustified depreciation. Let's go back to the mid-50s. This generation could not live and function without the idea of ​​an ideal. Yevtushenko at that time writes: “... But in our just cause / we have not lost faith” (“On the Road”, 1955). Faith was their foundation for a while - faith in something. Many people get along just fine without it - as B. Eikhenbaum wrote in his diary that many people get along just fine without self-respect (remarkably said) - also many get along just fine without faith. For those who cannot do without it, it was harder for them, because they could not imagine any other faith, except for the faith of the fathers, in those years. Faith was naturally followed by hope. The time of the “thaw”, the time of the sixties, is the time of hope. Literature seemed to repeat the joyous, optimistic, youthful impulse that once swept in short waves through the poetry of the 1920s and early 1930s:

“Everything is good in the world,
What's the matter - you won't understand right away,
And just the summer rain has passed,
Normal summer rain.
(G. Shpalikov, early 60s, song for the film).

The Sixties were united by common values. These values ​​of the emerging stratum, firstly, coincided with those proclaimed by the early communists. It was their values ​​betrayed by Stalin that were supposed to be presented anew in their original form, freed from the false sound given to them in Stalin's time, giving them the former, temporarily lost incendiary: “What passion should we put, raising ourselves and others, into the words “communism”, “ Soviet power”, “revolution”, “First of May!”.<…>

Comrades, it is necessary to return to words their original sound! (E. Yevtushenko, “Celebrate the First of May!”, 1955).

They considered their task to raise from the earth, to return to use revolutionary, communist values, defiled - in particular, by the “struggle against cosmopolitans” - but imperishable: ...

Let the "International" thunder,
when forever buried
the last anti-Semite on earth."
(E. Yevtushenko, "Babi Yar", 1961).

The idea of ​​the imperishability of revolutionary values ​​was carried by some of the sixties through decades and even through the years of perestroika. At the end of February 1988, the head of APN Falin, in the absence of the editor of Moskovskiye Novosti, E. Yakovlev, threw out from the layout of the finished issue an article (already translated for foreign versions of the newspaper) about Doctor Zhivago (which began in January of the same year by printing in Novy world"). Appearing at the editorial office, Yegor Yakovlev studied the article, trying to keep it in the issue, and calling the editor of the department, asked her a question, deep in her work with E. Yakovlev for many years, which struck: “What is it, your author is against the October Revolution?”. Secondly, these values ​​coincided with the theses of Khrushchev's report and the decisions of two congresses: the 20th - on the recognition of Stalin as having changed Lenin's ideas, and the 22nd - on the removal of Stalin's body from the mausoleum. Soon, in addition to faith and hope, the motive of struggle, necessary for the self-consciousness of this layer, appeared. It became clear that there would be a struggle for these decisions - with those who (still secretly) disagree with them:

“And the coffin was smoking a little.
The breath from the coffin flowed
When they took him out of the doors of the mausoleum.
... And I appeal to our government with a request:
double, triple the guard at this wall,
so that Stalin does not get up and with Stalin - the past.
(E. Yevtushenko, "Stalin's Heirs", 1962).

I just re-read these lines, which we actually laughed at for their tongue-tied tongue in those years, and I saw that now it’s time to reprint it - about the request to the government to “double-triple the guard at this wall so that Stalin does not get up and with Stalin - past". Now, Mr. Petukhov, who has replaced Yu.A. Levada at the All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center, bravura tells us from the newspaper pages that according to the latest sociological surveys from the generation from 18 to 34 years old, 46% consider Stalin a positive figure. The most important thing is how he presents it wonderfully, in what form: “... Among the youth, calm, sober assessments of Stalin prevail, primarily as a historical figure. They are equally not close to both his demonization as the main villain of all times and peoples ... and the unbridled apologetics that was characteristic of Soviet times. Thank you, reassured. They don’t sing, which means that today’s young men “about Stalin, the wise, dear and beloved,” thanks for that. Apparently, Mr. Petukhov no longer realizes that it is precisely on a sober head that Stalin cannot be called anything other than a villain, and one can only see “demonization” in this only when he is drunk. But let us return to the era of the “thaw”. The so-called national awakening of the beginning and especially the middle of the 60s (the magazines Our Contemporary and partly The Young Guard) was undoubtedly connected precisely with it, with the fact that society thawed and thoughts awakened. But the people who have designated this particular ideological trend, in no way enter, contrary to the opinion expressed by I. Vinogradov, into the formation of the sixties. On the contrary, they soon became their opponents, and later, during the years of perestroika, and even more so in the post-Soviet era, direct enemies. Those and others could coincide in age and biographies, but their paths diverged ideologically - first in relation to the above-mentioned values ​​(these people no longer accepted them), then - in relation to Stalin. Those concerned about national revival, on the contrary, accepted it and managed to pass the baton to today. That is why the phenomenon of the "Sixties" is senseless to expand in this direction. Loyalty to these clearly defined returnable values ​​was the spirit of the time, imprinted in poetry. In August 1956, Novy Mir published a poem by Olga Berggolts (who became the widow of the executed, then went to prison and lost her newborn child from beatings) the poem “That Year” (with the date “1955”), in a collection under the general heading , emphasizing the boundary of time, the moment of the final exit of the texts from the handwritten state to the printed one - "Poems from diaries" (1938-1956):

“... In that year, when from the bottom of the seas, canals
suddenly friends began to return.
Why hide - they returned a little.
Seventeen years is always seventeen years.
But those that came back went first,
to get your old membership card."

However, already in the mid-1950s (even before Khrushchev's report!) - and also in verse - a certain distance appeared from those who were treated with unquestioned respect, but - still unconsciously - as some kind of completed past. Their values ​​have not yet been replaced by anything. But already put under an invisible question mark:

“... We believed in the commune with all the flour,
Because it is impossible without it.
... They didn’t make lighters for the market,
they didn’t carry bags on the roofs ... "
(E. Yevtushenko, “Communists”, 1955, published at the beginning of 1956).

Changes in the air of the era (Lyudmila Mikhailovna Alekseeva quite rightly said about this) began before 1956. It can be said that in the very first days after Stalin's death, especially - after the April report about the falsification of the "doctors' case" - they sharply intensified after the announcement of Beria's arrest. When in the Communist auditorium in March 1956 they gathered (in several portions) the “party and Komsomol activists” of the philological faculty to listen to Khrushchev’s report, and the then secretary of the faculty’s party committee, the one-legged front-line soldier Volkov, announced that an important document of the Central Committee of the CPSU would now be read, adding with meaning - “discussion is not subject to”, then throughout the huge, amphitheater-like auditorium (now again - Theological, but flat - the amphitheater is boorishly destroyed, without any right to do so) a distinct noise swept, a disgruntled student rumble - “oooo!” - which, before the death of Stalin, although I had not yet studied at the university, I can confidently say - of course, could not be. The youth audience was already offended by the words of the party secretary and expressed this offendedness - this is an objective sign of changes in the social atmosphere. As for how the report was perceived, the example of L.M. Alekseeva with her seemingly stupid and not particularly promising fellow provincial is very true - it suddenly turned out that this was not an innovation for him. Yes, the provincials were ready for this. And once again I can give a biographical example. For me, a Muscovite, it was truly a turning point. I always tell my students that I entered this classroom in my 2nd year as one person, and after more than three hours I left with another. And for my classmate and future husband Alexander Pavlovich Chudakov, this was not a turning point, because he came from the Kokchetav region in Siberia, at school he was taught by associate professors of Leningrad universities exiled there (therefore, three classmates who were medalists, having arrived in Moscow from a Siberian town with a population, entered the university with its huge competition and other Moscow universities from the first call, without any blasphemy), the camps were not too far away, and collective farmers swollen with hunger asked for alms from the townspeople. War

The Great Patriotic War had a huge impact on the worldview of the sixties. In 1941, the older part of the generation was 16 years old - and many volunteered for the front. Most of them, in particular, almost the entire Moscow militia, died in the same year. But for those who survived, the war became the main experience in life. A collision with life and death, with a mass of real people and the real life of the country, not camouflaged by propaganda, required the formation of one's own opinion. In addition, the atmosphere on the front line, in a situation of real danger, was incomparably freer than in civilian life. Finally, the existential front-line experience forced a generally different attitude to social conventions. Former tenth-graders and first-year students returned from the front as completely different, critical and self-confident people.

XX congress

Contrary to the mass expectations of the intelligentsia that after the war liberalization and humanization of the system would come, the Stalinist regime became even tougher and more uncompromising. A wave of obscurantism in the spirit of the Middle Ages swept across the country: the fight against "formalism", cybernetics, genetics, killer doctors, cosmopolitanism, etc. Anti-Western propaganda intensified. In the meantime, most of the sixties front-line soldiers returned to the student benches, strongly influencing their younger comrades. The decisive events in the life of a generation were Stalin's death and N. S. Khrushchev's report at the 20th Congress of the CPSU (1956), which exposed Stalin's crimes. For most of the “sixties” the 20th Congress was a catharsis that resolved a long-term ideological crisis that reconciled them with the life of the country. The liberalization of public life that followed the 20th Congress, known as the era of the "thaw", became the context for the vigorous activity of the "sixties". The Sixties actively supported the “return to Leninist norms”, hence the apology of V. Lenin (poems by A. Voznesensky and E. Yevtushenko, plays by M. Shatrov, prose by E. Yakovlev) as an opponent of Stalin and the romanticization of the Civil War (B. Okudzhava, Yu. Trifonov , A. Mitta). The Sixties are staunch internationalists and supporters of a world without borders. It is no coincidence that revolutionaries in politics and art were cult figures for the sixties - V. Mayakovsky, Vs. Meyerhold, B. Brecht, E. Che Guevara, F. Castro, as well as writers E. Hemingway and E. M. Remarque.

Prose

The "sixties" expressed themselves most noticeably in literature. A huge role in this was played by the Novy Mir magazine, which was edited by Alexander Tvardovsky from 1958 to 1970. The magazine, staunchly professing liberal views, became the main mouthpiece of the "sixties" and was incredibly popular among them. It is difficult to name a printed publication that had a comparable influence on the minds of any generation. Tvardovsky, using his authority, consistently published literature and criticism, free from socialist realist attitudes.

First of all, these were honest, "trench" works about the war, mostly by young authors - the so-called "lieutenant prose": "In the trenches of Stalingrad" by Viktor Nekrasov, "Span of the earth" by Grigory Baklanov, "Battalions ask for fire" by Yuri Bondarev, " The dead don't hurt" Vasily Bykov and others.

But, obviously, the main event was the publication in 1962 of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" - the first work about Stalin's camps. This publication was almost as critical and cathartic as the 20th Congress itself. The organizers of the readings "at Mayak" were future dissidents Vladimir Bukovsky, Yuri Galanskov and Eduard Kuznetsov.

But the tradition of oral poetry did not end there. It was continued by evenings at the Polytechnic Museum. Mostly young poets also performed there: Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrey Voznesensky, Bella Akhmadulina, Robert Rozhdestvensky, Bulat Okudzhava.

Author's song

Filming from the famous readings at the Polytech was included in one of the main "sixties" films - "Ilyich's Outpost" by Marlen Khutsiev, and the listed poets became incredibly popular for several years. Later love the public switched to the poets of a new genre, generated by the culture of the "sixties": the author's song. His father was Bulat Okudzhava, who began to perform songs of his own composition with the guitar in the late 50s. Other authors soon appeared - Alexander Galich, Julius Kim, Novella Matveeva, Yuri Vizbor, who became classics of the genre. Audio-samizdat appeared, spreading the voices of bards throughout the country - radio, television and recording were then closed to them.

"Physicists" and "lyricists"

The "Sixties" consisted of two interconnected, but different subcultures, jokingly called "physicists" and "lyricists" - representatives of the scientific, technical and humanitarian intelligentsia. In particular, A. Einstein and L. Landau were cult figures whose photos decorated the apartments of people far from physics. Naturally, the “physicists” showed themselves less in art, but the worldview system that arose among them was no less (or maybe more) important in Soviet culture of the 60s and 70s. The romanticization of scientific knowledge and scientific and technological progress inherent in the culture of "physicists" had a huge impact on the development of science and the entire Soviet life. In art, the views of "physicists" were not often manifested - the most striking example is the prose of the Strugatsky brothers. "Physicists" (although their personal views could be quite independent) were much more beloved by the state than "lyricists" - because the defense industry needed them. This is reflected in the well-known line of Slutsky: "Something of physics is held in high esteem, something of lyrics is in the pen." Apparently, this is partly due to the fact that by the 70s the aesthetics of the "physicists" was perceived by the Soviet officialdom - the "science fiction" style became the architectural and design norm of the late USSR.

hikers

In the late 60s, when public life in the country was strangled, a new subculture arose among the "physicists" - hikers. It was based on the romanticization of the taiga (northern, alpine) life of geologists and other field workers. The simplicity, rudeness and freedom of their life were the antithesis of the boring nonsense of the "correct" existence of the urban intellectual. The expression of these sentiments was the film by Kira Muratova "Short Encounters" (1967) with Vladimir Vysotsky in leading role. Millions of intellectuals began to spend their holidays on long hikes, windbreakers became common intellectual clothing, the central practice of this subculture was collective singing by the fire with a guitar - as a result, the author's song turned into a mass genre. The personification and favorite author of this subculture was the bard Yuri Vizbor. However, its heyday did not fall on the "sixties", but on the next generation.

Cinema and theater

In the cinema, the "sixties" proved to be exceptionally bright, despite the fact that this art form was tightly controlled by the authorities. The most famous films expressing moods after the 20th Congress were The Cranes Are Flying by Mikhail Kalatozov, Zastava Ilyich by Marlen Khutsiev, I Walk Through Moscow by Georgy Danelia, Nine Days of One Year by Mikhail Romm, Welcome, or No Trespassing » Elema Klimov. At the same time, most of the actors of the "golden clip" of Soviet cinema - Evgeny Leonov, Innokenty Smoktunovsky, Oleg Tabakov, Evgeny Evstigneev, Yuri Nikulin, Leonid Bronevoy, Evgeny Lebedev, Mikhail Ulyanov, Zinovy ​​Gerdt, Oleg Basilashvili, Alexei Smirnov, Valentin Gaft and many others , - were "sixties" both in age and in their way of thinking. But the cinematographers of the "sixties" showed themselves much more in the 1970s - 1980s - mainly in the comedy genre, since only it was allowed to criticize the negative aspects of life, as a rule, at the everyday level. It was then that such typical "sixties" as Eldar Ryazanov, Georgy Daneliya, Mark Zakharov shot their best films. The most characteristic example of the "sixties" in the theater were Oleg Efremov's Sovremennik and Yury Lyubimov's Taganka.

Painting

In painting, the struggle against neoacademism intensified. The exhibition of young artists in the Manezh (1962) was subjected to devastating criticism from N. S. Khrushchev and other leaders of the country.

Stagnation

The removal of Khrushchev at first did not cause much concern, since the triumvirate that came to power - Podgorny, Kosygin and Brezhnev - looked respectable against the background of the not always balanced Khrushchev. However, soon, instead of liberalization, there was a tightening of the regime inside the country and an aggravation cold war, which was a tragedy for the "sixties". The following events became symbolically gloomy for them. Firstly, the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial (1966) is a show trial of writers who were convicted not for anti-Soviet activities, but for their works. Secondly, the Six Day War and the subsequent growth of the Jewish national movement in the USSR, the struggle for emigration; thirdly - the entry of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia (1968) - the "sixties" were very sympathetic to the Prague Spring, seeing in it a logical continuation of the "thaw". And finally, the defeat of the "New World" (1970), which marked the establishment of a deaf "stagnation", the end of the possibility of legal self-expression. Many "sixties" took a direct part in the dissident movement - and the vast majority of them sympathized with him. At the same time, although the idol of the generation, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, gradually came to radically anti-Soviet views, most of the "sixties" still retained faith in socialism. As Okudzhava sang in the song "Sentimental March":

I will still fall on that one, on that one and only Civilian.
And the commissars in dusty helmets will bow silently over me.

Given that the intelligentsia of the next generation treated these ideals with indifference at best. This caused a palpable generational conflict - reinforced by philosophical and aesthetic differences. The “sixties” were not enthusiastic about the “avant-gardism” that the intelligentsia of the 70s lived in - jazz, conceptualism, postmodernism. In turn, the "avant-gardists" did not care much for the lyrics of Tvardovsky and the exposure of Stalinism - everything Soviet was obvious absurdity for them. In the 1970s, many leaders of the "sixties" were forced to emigrate (writers V. Aksyonov, V. Voinovich, A. Gladilin, A. Kuznetsov, A. Galich, G. Vladimov, A. Sinyavsky, N. Korzhavin; cinematographers E. Sevela, M.Kalik, A.Bogin, pop singers E.Gorovets, L.Mondrus, A.Vedishcheva and many others) etc. During the years of stagnation, Academician Andrei Sakharov became the main idol, almost an icon of the “sixties”, who refused the comfortable life of a scientist favored by the authorities for the sake of fighting for freedom of conscience. Sakharov, with his combination of purity, naivete, intellect and moral strength, really embodied all the ideals of the generation - and besides, he was both a "physicist" and a "lyricist."

Religion

By upbringing, the "sixties" for the most part were atheists or agnostics - and remained so for life. However, with the onset of "stagnation" in the absence of any social prospects, some of them turned to a religious search - mainly within the framework of Orthodoxy and Judaism. The most notable figures of the Orthodox revival in the “Sixties” environment were Archpriests Alexander Men and Gleb Yakunin, Metropolitan Anthony of Surozh, dissident Zoya Krakhmalnikova, and philologist Sergei Averintsev. As a rule, active figures of this movement were associated with the Catacomb Church.

perestroika

The "sixties" perceived perestroika with great enthusiasm - as a continuation of the "thaw", the resumption of their long-standing dialogue with Stalinism. They - after two decades of inactivity - suddenly again found themselves in great demand. One after another, their books about the Stalin era were published, producing the effect of an exploding bomb: “Children of the Arbat” by Anatoly Rybakov, “Black Stones” by Anatoly Zhigulin, “White Clothes” by Vladimir Dudintsev, “Bison” by Daniil Granin, etc. "(Egor Yakovlev, Yuri Karyakin, Yuri Chernichenko, Yuri Burtin, etc.) found themselves at the forefront of the struggle for the "renewal" and "democratization" of socialism (since this discourse fully corresponded to their views) - for which they were called "foremen of perestroika". True, it soon became clear that they were more ardent supporters of perestroika than its authors. It is debatable whether Mikhail Gorbachev and Alexander Yakovlev themselves can be called "sixties" (after all, more formed by the nomenklatura culture). One way or another, on the whole, perestroika was the finest hour of the generation. With the same enthusiasm, most of the "sixties" perceived the coming to power of Boris Yeltsin and the reforms of Yegor Gaidar. In 1993, many members of this generation signed the Letter of the 42, calling the legally elected parliament "fascists." With the collapse of communism, the public demand for the “sixties” also ended. The new social reality brought completely different concepts and questions, making the entire discourse on which the culture of the sixties was built irrelevant. And in the 90s, most of the famous "sixties" quietly died half-forgotten.

History of the term

The term "sixties" took root after the eponymous article of the critic Stanislav Rassadin was published in the journal Yunost in 1960. The author later criticized the spread of the word:

... the very concept of "sixties" is chatty, meaningless, and from the very beginning it had no generational meaning, being an approximate pseudonym of time. (I admit quite self-critically - as the author of the article "The Sixties", published just a few days before the onset of the 60s themselves, in December 1960.)

In other Soviet republics and countries of the socialist camp, the "sixties" name their generational subcultures, partly close to Russian ones (see, for example, the Ukrainian Wikipedia article). At the same time, a number of foreign representatives of the "generation of the 60s", the era of hippies, The Beatles, rock and roll, psychedelics, the sexual revolution, the "new left", the "civil rights movement" of the student unrest of 1968 are often called "sixties". year (see the English Wikipedia article). This, of course, is a completely different historical phenomenon: for example, the Soviet sixties felt much more related to the beatniks who preceded the hippie generation. However, it is interesting that in completely different contexts, emotionally resonant phenomena with a common name arose. Some representatives of the generation over time began to treat the term ironically. So, Andrey Bitov writes: “... I am a member of the sixties only because I am over sixty; my first children were born in the sixties, and Leningrad is on the sixtieth parallel.” And Vasily Aksyonov in the story "Three Overcoats and a Nose" generally calls himself a "Pentecostal". Over time, the term has acquired a negative connotation. For example, Dmitry Bykov, speaking about a new newspaper project on the pages of the New Look publication, noted:

It could be expected that in place of the boring Obshchaya Gazeta, which expressed the position of the completely confused (or even lying) Progressives of the sixties, a polished analytical publication would appear ... but who could have imagined that the publication would turn out to be even more boring?

Marietta Chudakova: The Historical Fates of the Sixties

After Khrushchev, the “thaw” and the Sinyavsky-Daniel process.

In the new period, some of the sixties became signatories, some did not: they tried to preserve the possibility of real action. It is worth considering the biographical fact that at first it was not so easy to deal with them: either because they remained a nomenklatura - “by origin” (executed and posthumously rehabilitated parents - old party members) or according to their own track record - among them were city committee workers and district committees, staff correspondents of party publications; or, at worst, according to their personal front-line past that has not yet disappeared from public memory (B. Balter). Therefore, some of them were still transferred from one place to another for some time. (Later, in the 1970s, these trains were sharply cut off.) L. Karpinsky was, however, fired in 1967 - he spoke out against censorship. Y. Karyakin was expelled from the party in 1968 for speaking at the evening in memory of Andrey Platonov at the Central House of Writers and publicly mentioning Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky - and stayed in its ranks only by the personal decision of the Head of the Party Control Committee in Poland. During these years they were still trying to extend and develop the ideas of the “thaw”. But there was already a new self-awareness, new fears:

“... Of course, we are not in Paris,
But in the tundra we are valued more.”
……………………………………………….
But if the climate changes,
then suddenly our branches will not accept
other outlines - free?
After all, we are used to it - in freaks.
And it torments us and torments us,
and the cold hooks and hooks us"
(E. Evtushenko, “Dwarf birches”, 1966)

The appearance of samizdat and dissidence changed a lot. the sixties - already on a purely individual basis - joined the signatories, and then - the human rights activists.

Seventies, or after Prague

“Three qualities are not given in one set - intelligence, party spirit and decency” - this is an aphorism of the early 70s, this is already after Prague. At this time, there was no longer a single exception, not a single one who joined these ranks - and did not fit this rule. In the 1970s, not a single really thinking person joined the party at the behest of conscience, out of a desire to “work together with everyone”, with the hope of changing something in society - they joined only out of careerism or stupidity. Now you will not find these dates of entry in any of the current liberals in the announced biographies. But it was a completely different generation. The generation of the sixties at that time was expelled from the party - front-line soldier B. Okudzhava was expelled from the party in 1972, L. Karpinsky - in 1975. The “thaw” was long over, the line was drawn by the invasion of Prague, but cultural inertia was built up and continued to operate. And it was possible - up to the beginning of the 80s - to suddenly encounter a certain phenomenon of resistance on any specific issue, behind which the outlines of the generation of the sixties clearly stood up.

Perestroika and after August

The appearance of Gorbachev revived hopes. For many, a second “thaw” wafted through. This is where a historical trap lay in wait - seizing on a false analogy, completely content with it (“Strike the iron while Gorbachev!”), they did not feel the wind of a new historical period. And so - everything was in suit: both the slogan “More socialism!”, and Gorbachev’s confidential message that he reads Lenin every day and will never refuse the choice made by his grandfather in favor of collective farms, and - the long-awaited work in the team. “The foremen of perestroika” (the new name of the former sixties) said about themselves - “We are in Gorbachev's team”. It seemed that what Khrushchev had not completed would finally be completed, and socialism would gain human face . From the ideological boundaries they once set for themselves (no further than Lenin and October; they continued to think that the very idea of ​​justice was important, etc.), they could not break out after Gorbachev and stood in opposition to Yeltsin, which, in my opinion, was so destructive for countries (I have spoken to Yuri Nikolayevich Afanasiev, for example, more than once). And some - because he went too far, others - because he does not want to go too far. Why such difference? But because it was based on the same motive, apparently hidden from them. But this is a different story. The line between Lenin and Stalin that Khrushchev had not crossed was not taken even later. At the same time, they all seemed to be born in the 85th year. I looked at the sites of the current sixties, only on the site of Lyudmila Mikhailovna it is clearly stated: she joined the party in 52. Yu.N. Afanasiev, whom I have a good relationship with and saw him ahead of all his institute environment in liberalism back in 1984, quite ready for the new time, his biography also begins in the 80s. I wanted to find out before our Round Table where and when he was the secretary of the Komsomol, but this is not on any site. And the point, of course, is not that I did not satisfy my curiosity, but that by the end of the 80s - the beginning of the 90s, this suppression of the stages of my biography, including the spiritual one, played a very sad role, undermining the trust in a huge and important layer in our life. It is important, if only because this layer had and, I would like to believe, still have close and understandable ideas about honor, public reputation, love for the country as love for a free country. Yes - the idea of ​​the need for a public reputation, that you must be an honest person, not take bribes, your reputation must be spotless - the very thing that now many can only cause laughter. Public reputation - what?! It's just funny, that's all. So what, in fact, crushed the sixties in the social sense in subsequent years? In particular, the washing out of the above concepts as universally significant values ​​from public life. Then they began to push forward, you all remember this well, the concept of private life as prevailing over the public impulse. Yes, this impulse in Soviet times, among other things, sometimes forced us, as we also remember, to save an old tractor, risking our lives - and we especially remember how it was officially encouraged: “the public is higher than the personal.” But in the post-Soviet period, any asceticism was put under the sign of denial. Such a total change in ethical values, supported by quite liberal publicists, was, I am sure, a profound mistake. Of course, it was necessary to insist on the value of private life and, in general, “separately taken” human life, which in our country still has no price, to argue that it is not necessary to give it to the state for such a reason, not to rush to save the tractor at the cost of one’s own life, and other. But without asceticism, without thought about society, without the idea of ​​patriotism, too little will come of it. And the second thing that depreciated this layer was the pressure of the biography. A biography in its entirety, including those who became “good”, “honest communists” after the 20th Congress of the dead parents, that gave their children the opportunity to act for some time, when they were expelled from somewhere - still remain in clip, the nomenklatura of the Central Committee - now spoke against them. Because it was seen as crookedness: "Wait - you yourself were in these party, nomenklatura posts!" And they never told clearly, did not explain that there was no shame in this, on the contrary, there was a height in the complex spiritual path they had traveled. They never told, as they say, how it really happened. But still, the best that they had remains. Today, we can continue to base ourselves on this - at least on what was not completed even with regard to explaining to society the role of Stalin. The “dry residue” of their values ​​is best squeezed out in a poem by Bulat Okudzhava (dedicated to L. Karpinsky), with which I will end.

The sixties should debunk the mustachioed
and they do not need special orders for this:
they themselves are like war horses
and beat with hooves while still alive.
Well, who else can expect success in that fight?
No wonder the bloody marks are visible on them all.
They sipped these troubles firsthand.
Everything loomed over them - from expulsion to the tower.
Fate orders the sixties to fulfill this duty,
and this is their purpose, special meaning and sense.
Well, the clerks, in love with the despot,
let them snap - that's their job.
The sixties do not think that life burned in vain:
they put in their homeland, in short.
She, of course, will forget about them in the bustle,
but she is alone. There won't be another one.

This is such, I would say, an epigraph to them.

Above: Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrei Voznesensky, Bella Akhmadulina. Below: Bulat Okudzhava, Robert Rozhdestvensky. Photo from the site my.mail.ru

A.A. Voznesensky, "B. Akhmadulina"
Broken branches and sky smoke
warned us, arrogant ignoramuses,
that complete optimism is ignorance,
that without high hopes - more reliable for hopes.
E.A. Yevtushenko

The term "sixties" belongs to a literary critic Stanislav Rassadin, who published an article of the same name in the journal "Youth" in December 1960. the sixties in a broad sense, they call the layer of the Soviet intelligentsia, which was formed during the Khrushchev "thaw", after the XX Congress of the CPSU, which determined the new, more liberal compared to the Stalin period, the policy of the Soviet state, including in relation to cultural figures. At the same time, it should be noted that, despite cultural liberalism and broadmindedness, most of the sixties remained true to the ideas of communism: the excesses of the 30s seemed to them a distortion of communist ideals, the arbitrariness of the authorities.

In the formation of the ideology of the sixties played a huge role literary magazines. In particular, the magazine "Youth", which published the works of novice authors, discovered new names in literature. The most popular was magazine "New World", which was, without exaggeration, a cult publication of the Soviet intelligentsia, especially in those days when it was headed by A.T. Tvardovsky. The works of the authors of "lieutenant's prose" were published here: Viktor Nekrasov, Yuri Bondarev, Grigory Baklanov, Vasil Bykov. A special event was the publication of the story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich". At the same time, there is a flourishing Soviet science fiction associated with the names of the Strugatsky brothers, Ivan Efremov, Evgeny Veltistov and others.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko at the Polytechnic Museum. Frame from the film "Zastava Ilyich" (directed by Marlen Khutsiev)

However, a special place in the culture of the sixties took poetry . For the first time after the Silver Age, an era of unprecedented popularity of poetry has come: in the literal sense, poetry has become a large-scale social phenomenon. The poets of the sixties gathered audiences of many thousands (poetry evenings at the Polytechnic Museum in Moscow and at the monument to Mayakovsky on the current Triumphal Square were especially remembered), their lyric collections were instantly sold out, and the authors themselves for many years became not only the rulers of souls and minds, but also a kind of symbol creative upsurge, free-thinking, social change. At the forefront of poetry in the 1960s were

• Robert Ivanovich Rozhdestvensky(1932-1994), one of the most powerful, energetic Russian poets, author of more than 30 lyric collections, translator, TV presenter; many poems by R.I. Rozhdestvensky set to music ("Moments", "Song of a distant Motherland / Somewhere far away", "Nocturne", "Call me, call ...", "Echo of love", "Love has come", "My Motherland / I , you, he, she - together the whole country...", "Gravity of the Earth", etc.);
• Evgeny Alexandrovich Evtushenko(1932-2017), poet, publicist, actor, public figure; author of more than 60 lyrical collections, poems "Bratskaya HPP", "Babi Yar", "Under the skin of the Statue of Liberty", "Dove in Santiago", "Thirteen", "Full-length", novels "Berry Places" and "Don't Die Before of death"; some of the poet's poems became songs ("Do the Russians want wars?", "But it's snowing ...", "That's what's happening to me ...", "We are chatting in crowded trams ...", etc.).
• Andrei Andreevich Voznesensky(1933-2010), an avant-garde poet who wrote both syllabo-tonic verses traditional for Russian poetry, and free verse, and verses in the spirit of futuristic "abstruse" poetry, and verses in prose; author of more than 40 lyrical collections and poems "Masters" (about the builders of St. Basil's Cathedral), "Longjumeau" (about Lenin), "Oz" (about love in the age of robotics), "Avos" (a poem about the Russian diplomat and traveler Nikolai Rezanov the basis of the famous rock opera "Juno and Avos") and others.
• Bella Akhatovna Akhmadulina(1937-2010), poetess whose name is associated with the highest achievements of poetry in the 20th century; Joseph Brodsky called Akhmadulina "the undoubted heiress of the Lermontov-Pasternak line in Russian poetry", the author of more than 30 lyric collections.

In addition to these authors, other bright poets belong to the generation of the sixties, for example, Gennady Shpalikov, Boris Chichibabin, Yunna Moritz. In the era of the 60s, such a giant of Russian poetry as was formed.

A separate phenomenon in the 1960s is represented by songwriters, or "bards". This category of poets included authors who performed their own poems to their own music - among them Bulat Okudzhava, Alexander Galich, Vladimir Vysotsky, Yuri Vizbor. This unique phenomenon is called.

the sixties is a galaxy of writers who declared themselves in the late 1850s-60s: N.V. Uspensky (1837-89), N.G. Pomyalovsky (1835-63), F.M. Reshetnikov (1841-75), V.A. Sleptsov (1836-78), A.I. Levitov (1835-77) and others. Most of them belonged to the class of raznochintsy; they came from the midst of the small provincial clergy, as a rule, graduated from the seminary. The path to literature for this generation was opened by the journal strategy of N.A. Nekrasov, which he carried out in Sovremennik, as well as the literary criticism of N.A. Dobrolyubov and N.G. Chernyshevsky: the latter’s article “Is the change beginning?” (1861), which praised Uspensky's stories, served as a kind of manifesto for the literature of the sixties.

A significant role in the popularization and approval of the work of writers of the sixties was played by the criticism of D.I. Uspensky's collection Stories (1861) was followed by a number of works that cemented the reputation of a new literary phenomenon for the work of representatives of this generation. The genres of the cycle of essays and short stories dominated in their work: “Essays of the Bursa” (1862-63) by Pomyalovsky; "Steppe essays" (1865-66), "Moscow holes and slums" (1866), "Woe of villages, roads and cities" (1869) Levitov; "Vladimirka and Klyazma" (1861) and "Letters about Ostashkov" (1862-63) by Sleptsov - and a short story: "Podlipovtsy" (1864), "Miners" (1866-68) by Reshetnikov; Petty-bourgeois Happiness (1860) and Molotov (1861) by Pomyalovsky, Hard Times (1865) by Sleptsov.

The central theme of creativity of the sixties

The life of the common people, peasants, the lower classes of the urban world became the central theme of the work of the sixties. The image of the people they created shocked contemporaries with unheard-of ruthlessness and naturalism. The lower classes of society were portrayed as beings incapable of understanding the simplest laws and civil social institutions. Such a vision was due not only to the life experience of raznochintsy, who faced the cruelty of life, an unsightly life in childhood and adolescence, but also to the ideology of radical revolutionaries that they perceived and sought to reflect in their works: it was based on the idea of ​​a person as a biological being. whose life is governed primarily by physiological needs. As a result, the people of the sixties become the absolute slave of the existing social order. This pessimism made the works of the sixties not entirely acceptable not only to hostile criticism, but also to those ideologues who initially inspired and highly praised their work.

Another the most important theme in the work of the sixties was the difficult path of a person from a diverse environment to knowledge, his self-affirmation in society. Faced with an alien noble environment, which has occupied a central position in culture, the commoner feels his inferiority, lack of education and upbringing. The hero of the sixties chooses a compromise, like Molotov in Pomyalovsky's dilogy, who decides to adapt, winning at the cost of a kind of mimicry the inner space for the realization of his personal needs. Only in Sleptsov's "Hard Time" is a raznochinets depicted, self-confident, easily defeating the aristocratic landowner in the spiritual and moral duel.

The creative path of the sixties

The creative path of the sixties ended in a spiritual dead end: they created a tragic image of a man who rejected God and idols, but failed to find other spiritual supports and therefore ended his life in the emptiness of despair.

The Sixties is also the designation of the generation of Soviet people of the 1960s. In literature, this designation is both more specific and more vague: the sixties are participants in the literary struggle, especially on the pages of "thick magazines", and spokesmen for new ideas, even a new sense of life that arose during the post-Stalin "thaw". As an ironic analogue of the more stable, recurring tendencies of Russian history, the term "Sixties" contains a reference to the "sixties" of the 19th century. Despite the fact that people spoke about the Sixties rather retrospectively and distancing themselves in later decades, sometimes one-sidedly and not always fairly, the phenomenon of the Sixties, as it usually happens, is deeper and more ambiguous than what this word often denotes. First of all, the sixties are not only and even not so much a generation or some or other figures, writers, critics, but an elusive, although quite definite socio-cultural atmosphere, a “cross-cutting mentality” of the era: this is also more common between the USSR and the West - and contrary to, and thanks to the Berlin Wall erected in 1961 - a problem-atmospheric constellation (orderliness) of time and language.

The Sixties are actually people of different generations, different views and worldviews, different cultural worlds. The sixties are the poets E.A. Yevtushenko, A.A. Voznesensky, but also a participant in the Patriotic War and the son of a repressed communist, the poet and bard B.Sh. Okudzhava, whose “commissars in dusty helmets” set the tone for romantic memory and romantic progressism of the sixties. This includes the greatest Soviet philosopher M.K. A.G. Bitov as the author of "Lessons of Armenia" (1967-69), "Pushkin House" (1971, published in 1978); the author of the memoirs "People, years, life" (1961-65) I. G. Erenburg and the new figure of A. I. Solzhenitsyn with obvious features of anti-Sovietism; this is E. Neizvestny, who tried to convince N. S. Khrushchev of the compatibility of the new art with the Soviet regime, but also Ven. Erofeev with his poem in prose "Moscow - Petushki" (1969), Rabelaisian-Kafkaesque waste to the Soviet consciousness in general. In the social and literary life of the 1960s, which was not yet completely divided, as later, into official and unofficial samizdat (although the literary fate of A. Sinyavsky and Y. Daniel, convicted in 1966, as well as Solzhenitsyn’s works that went on the lists, was the forerunner of such a division), the concept of “Sixties” is associated in particular with the activities of the “New World”, edited by A.T. but the score presented by the Soviet reality to the Soviet authorities was too great: it was incompatible not only with the "Leninist norms of party life", as it was called in the official language, but, in a certain sense, with the literary, aesthetic and socio-political convictions of the sixties , which grotesquely reproduced - in a kind of inverted Soviet situation of the 20th century - the views of the revolutionary democrats and the sixties of the previous century. The Sixties in the public consciousness, in literature, art and lifestyle historically exhausted themselves at the turn of the 1990s, along with the collapse of totalitarianism and communism.

Speaking about the historical period under the spring name "thaw", it is impossible to remain silent about the unusually romantic atmosphere of that time. It is not so much historians or new-fangled serials that help to recreate it after fifty years and feel it, but the literature of the 60s, as if absorbing the humid air of the thaw into light lines. Spiritual upsurge, inspired by hopes for imminent changes, was embodied in the poetry of the sixties: Andrei Voznesensky, Robert Rozhdestvensky, Yevgeny Yevtushenko and others.

Sixties- these are young representatives of the creative intelligentsia of the USSR of the 60s. A galaxy of poets, formed during the "thaw". Voznesensky, Rozhdestvensky and Yevtushenko, the leaders of that poetic circle, developed a vigorous creative activity, gathering entire halls and stadiums (since such an opportunity arose due to the softening of the political regime). They were united by a sincere and strong emotional impulse aimed at cleansing the vices of the past, gaining the present and approaching a brighter future.

1. Evgeny Yevtushenko(years of life: 1933-2017) - one of the most famous authors. He was nominated for a Nobel Prize for his contribution to literature, but did not receive it. His most famous work is the Bratskaya HPP, where he first mentioned the phrase that became the slogan of Soviet poetry: “A poet in Russia is more than a poet.” At home, he was active in public activities, supported perestroika, but in 1991 he emigrated to the United States with his family.
2. Andrei Voznesensky(years of life: 1933-2010) is not only a poet, but also an artist, architect and publicist. Known for writing the text of the legendary song "A Million Scarlet Roses" and the libretto of the country's first rock opera "Juno and Avos". The composition "I will never forget you" belongs to his pen. The unique ability of Voznesensky is to create works of high artistic value, and at the same time popular among the people and understandable to him. He traveled abroad many times, but he lived, created and died in his homeland.
3. Robert Rozhdestvensky(years of life: 1932-1994) - a poet who also became famous as a translator. In Soviet times, he was persecuted for independence of judgment, so he was forced to flee to Kyrgyzstan and earn his living by translating texts of poets from other republics. He wrote many pop songs, for example, the soundtracks for the film "New Adventures of the Elusive". Of the poetic works, the most famous are “A Letter from a Woman”, “Everything Begins with Love”, “Please, be weaker”, etc.
4. Bulat Okudzhava(years of life: 1924-1997) - a popular bard, singer, composer and screenwriter. He was especially famous for his author's songs, for example, "On Tverskoy Boulevard", "Song about Lyonka Korolyov", "Song about the blue ball", etc. Often wrote musical compositions for films. Traveled abroad and won honor abroad. Actively engaged social activities advocating democratic values.
5. Yuri Vizbor(years of life: 1934-1984) - the famous performer of the author's song and the creator of a new genre - "Songs-reportage". He also became famous as an actor, journalist, prose writer and artist. He wrote over 300 poems set to music. Especially famous are “Let's fill our hearts with music”, “If I get sick”, “Lady”, etc. Many of his creations have been used in films.
6. Bella Akhmadulina(years of life: 1937-2010) - a poetess who became famous in the genre of a lyric poem. Her skill is very targeted in the cinema. For example, her work “On My Street Which Year” was featured in the “Irony of Fate”. Her work is characterized by a classical sound and an appeal to the origins. Her style of painting is often compared to impressionism.
7. Yunna Moritz(years of life: 1937 - present time) - in Soviet times, the author was practically unknown, since Moritz's poems were banned due to opposition. She was also expelled from the literary institute. But her work found a reader in samizdat. She described it as "pure lyrics of resistance". Many of her poems have been set to music.
8. Alexander Galich(years of life: 1918-1977) - screenwriter, playwright, author and performer of his own songs. His creative views also did not coincide with those officially approved, so many of his works were distributed underground, but they gained genuine popular love. He was expelled from the country, died abroad from an accident. He always spoke negatively about the Soviet regime.
9. Novella Matveeva(years of life: 1934-2016) - poetess, translator, playwright and literary critic. She often performed at concerts and festivals, but most of her works were published after her death. She performed not only her works, but also songs based on her husband's poems.
10. Julius Kim- (years of life: 1936 - present) - dissident poet, bard, screenwriter and composer. Known for the oppositional and bold for its time songs “Gentlemen and Ladies”, “Lawyer Waltz”, etc. The play-composition "Moscow Kitchens" is of particular importance. Kim sarcastically criticized society and power in the USSR. After perestroika, he wrote many librettos for musicals, including Count Orlov, Notre Dame de Paris, Monte Cristo, Anna Karenina and others.

Short poems of poets of the sixties

Many poets of the thaw period have works that are not voluminous at all. For example, a lyrical poem about love by Andrei Voznesensky:

In the human body
Ninety percent water
As, probably, in Paganini,
Ninety percent love.
Even if - as an exception -
The crowd tramples you
In the human
Appointment -
Ninety percent good.
Ninety percent music
Even if she's in trouble
So in me
Despite the trash
Ninety percent of you.

Also brevity, as the sister of talent, can boast of Evgeny Yevtushenko:

Treat temporality humanely.
There is no need to cast a shadow on everything that is not eternal.
There is a temporality of the weekly deception
Potemkin hasty villages.
But they also put up makeshift dormitories,
until houses are built by others ...
You tell them after a quiet death
thanks to their honest temporality.

If you want to get to know one of the small poems of that period in more detail and feel its mood and message, then you should pay attention to.

Features of creativity

The emotional intensity of the civic lyrics of the sixties is the main feature of this cultural phenomenon. Direct, responsive and lively poems sounded like drops. The poets reacted sincerely and regardless of ideological expediency to the difficult fate of the country and the troubles of the whole world. They transformed the traditional stagnant Soviet pathos into the progressive and honest voice of a generation. If they sympathized, then hysterically and desperately, if they rejoiced, then simply and easily. Probably, Voznesensky said everything about the poets of the sixties in his poem "Goya":

I am the throat
A hanged woman whose body is like a bell
beat over the bare square ...

Creativity of the sixties is rightfully considered one of the brightest pages of Russian literary history.

Sixties as a cultural phenomenon

The poetry of the thaw period is a breath of fresh air in a country that is hard going through the moral consequences of the Stalinist terror. However, their creative path is not limited to one era, many of them still write. The poets of the 60s did not lag behind the times, although they retained the proud name "sixties" or "60s foremen" - an abbreviation of the usual phrase that has become fashionable.

Of course, what creative movement can do without confrontation? The Sixties struggled with the "powers of the night" - dark and abstract centers of evil and injustice. They stood guard over the primordial ideals of the October Revolution and communism, although they lost direct contact with them due to time. However, characteristic symbols have been resurrected in poetry: Budyonovka, the red flag, the line of a revolutionary song, and so on. It was they who denoted freedom, moral purity and selflessness, like a pectoral cross in Orthodoxy, for example. Utopian ideology really replaced religion and permeated the poetry of the thaw period.

Main theme

People painfully accepted the "crime of the cult of personality", which was made public in 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev came to power and condemned the Stalinist repressions, rehabilitating and freeing many victims of an unjust sentence. The poets expressed not only the general confusion and indignation at the "distortion" of a wonderful idea, but also the socialist pathos of the people who had returned to the true path. Many believed that the thaw was a fundamentally new stage in the development of the USSR, and the promised freedom, equality and fraternity would soon come. These sentiments coincided with the worldview of the emerging creative intelligentsia, still very young people. Youthful enthusiasm, maximalism, romantic ideals and unshakable faith in them - these are the incentives for their honest and somewhere even naive creativity. Therefore, the poems of the poets of the sixties are still loved by readers.

The 1960s gave their idyllic pictures an openly rhetorical form, decorating them with transparent allegories. Thoughts and feelings, so close to the society of that time, were often expressed in direct recitation, but the most secret dreams and beliefs only subconsciously appeared between the lines. The thirst for fresh inspiration, novelty, change was felt in the poetics of the tropes.

What contributed to the extinction of the movement?

The work of the poets of the sixties falls on the 60s of the 20th century, and this is the era of internal contradictions. Communism was somehow combined with individualism, artistic taste was intertwined with kitsch philistinism, physicists were friends with lyricists, the city - with the countryside, democracy - with technocracy, etc. Even the sixties themselves and their fates were different, and this, paradoxically, united them. Such harmony of the Garden of Eden on earth could not last long, so by the 1970s the thaw utopia began to collapse. The unity of the public and the personal naturally turned into confrontation, the personal came into conflict with the state, and romantic freethinkers lost their podium for speeches: the favor of the authorities was replaced by anger. The influence of poets on the mood in society was no longer considered beneficial, or at least permissible, if only because the creators sensitively perceived the "cooling" that replaced the thaw, and could not hide it in their poetry.

The poems of the poets of the sixties were aimed at a youth audience, and when their generation matured and realized how naive this revolutionary pathos was in the country of the victorious bureaucracy, it ceased both to create and perceive enthusiastic hopes for the final victory of heat.

It was possible to talk about the poems of the sixties with enthusiasm during the thaw period, but after, when it was clearly "colder", people needed other poetry, reflecting the decline, not the rise. The “name” of the poets also points to the dependence on the era. A cultural phenomenon, as a reflection of historical changes, could not distort and retouch these same changes.

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