Konchalovsky on philosophy, history and cinema

During his life Andrei Konchalovsky has written 33 scripts, has shot 25 movies, directed nine theatre plays, including 5 operas, several mass performances, has published 6 books. Yesterday he explained why “the modernization of the country is impossible without modernization of Russian mentality”:

The films or those TV-products that I make as an artist do not answer the acute question. Or maybe they do, but I do not believe that beauty will save the world. So when I am making a picture, I am trying to talk about the beauty of man. Because the pictures that I made in Russia were all devoted to very contemporary matters. But the result did not exceed expectations. But what I write about recently is difficult to analyze. Art makes people think about beauty and makes them, as I put it, better for five minutes. But when you leave the cinema and get on a trolley-bus, the reality is very different. So let's forget about the masters of culture and let's simply talk about the thinking people.

There are some hot topics like Kushyovka or the Pussy Riot girls in the church, but these events, as any events in the country, reflect a certain constant. It is like a blood test that shows one's race or whether a person is sick or healthy. Or a drop of the ocean can show you whether it is Atlantic or Indian. Similarly, any event reflects a certain constant in our state. You can call it national features, or at least this is how they called it in socialist times. The national features of Uzbekistan, the national features of Russia, although you can also call it a mentality - what a disgusting word - or the culture of the nation. I often think about it and often try to explain it. And I am often misunderstood.

The word "culture" has many meanings. Pushkin is culture, but on the other hand, dirty toilets is also culture. So what defines this culture? Pushkin or a dirty toilet? We have here an enormous dichotomy, a gap, in the understanding of culture which follows other culturologists and anthropologists. Culture is the complex of daily basic values meaning what a man believes in, how he sees himself, and his daily life is guided by these basic values. These basic values are different in each culture.

For example, let's take the basic values of a Chinese. His basic value among others is responsibility for his family. A Chinese family works to support the elderly and to bring up children. It is absolutely unavoidable. You see how many Chinese students are in all the universities in the world and how strong the family connection is. China has, according to my estimate, 1000 times fewer unattended children than in Russia, although the population is ten times bigger. This means something. I read today that in tge Rostov region since the beginning of the year seven children have been killed by their parents. Since the beginning of the year! Seven cases of child murder! I think this means something. Why do I talk about it? Because I think we do not notice it, because nobody is bothered by the statistics. But if you think about the statistics, you see a colossal crisis. And this crisis is among the Russian people.

If you take Tartar villages, they are blooming, everybody works, the men do not drink but make children. It seems that there is a certain connection between culture, religion and behaviour. Why am I so concerned? During the last three centuries, or maybe 350 years, the authorities of the Muscovite state, not Lithuania, were trying to modernize Russia by different means. It started with Peter the Great, even a little earlier, then there were some attempts by Peter III, whose image is completely perverted by history, he is represented as an idiot or mad, then there were the reforms of Alexander II, then Stolypin, then the Bolsheviks, then Khrushchev, and so on until Medvedev. He also talks about modernization. We do not see the results. We do not see them because, in my opinion, we do not see the reasons for this exceptional backwardness of Russia compared to not even Europe, but India or China.

The Russian government so far did not have enough intellectual potential. Instead of listening to the smart people - and there are many of them in Russia, in Russia and in the West, culturologists, anthropologists, sociologists - those people who deal with the problems of interaction between culture and economic prosperity.

And by culture here I don't mean Pushkin, but work well done and paid taxes. It happens because we still do not know who we are. Although many were talking about it, including Chaadayev and Herzen, Solovyov. And now there are brilliant scholars, Lyubimov, Pivovarov, real sociologists, who talk about the reasons for Russia's cultural backwardness. Why do reforms fail? There is nothing fatal in it, there is an erosion of Russian civilization that is normal, because any civilization reaches its end, and a new one is built on the ruins of the previous. The Greek and Roman civilizations collapsed, but there was no catastrophe, or it was not noticeable. Catastrophe is when there is war, nuclear bombs, but people do not notice the collapse of a civilization, because they are inside of the collapse. So Greeko-Roman civilization collapsed, giving way to the Christian European civilization. I think that Russia, as professor Yakunin put it, has a very low culture of thinking and the culture of discussion is almost absent. What does this mean? As Leskov defined it on the left-liberal wing of the Russian intelligentsia, "whoever is not with us is a scoundrel". What does this mean? It means that either you accept our point of view or I will not let you talk at all, even if I have to die for this. The absence of discussion that is always a way to the truth, that cannot be found without discussion, is connected to the arrival of Orthodoxy to Russia.