Soilism is a literary school and philosophical worldview that took shape in the sixties of the 19th century. The fundamentals of the exercise were based on the ideas of the Moskvityan magazine, which was led by A. Grigoriev. In literature, soil cultivation is primarily F.M. Dostoevsky. His great authority, he drew special attention to one of the many directions in culture. Among the writers of the XX century, Valentin Rasputin, Vasily Shukshin, Solzhenitsyn were classified as soil workers.
Definition
It is rather difficult to give an exact definition of a literary trend, the founding fathers of which did not particularly care about developing a clear program and declaring their principles. Many rightly note the similarity of the soil workers with the Slavophiles, who saw for Russia their own path of civilizational development, different from Western European. However, the soil workers themselves rejected their belonging to this camp, putting forward their own concepts in philosophy and literature.
Soilism is, first and foremost, the desire of reflecting intellectuals to turn to their roots, to feel ownership of their own people, which in the 19th century seemed a mystical secret. The main goal of the soil workers was to merge all walks of life on the basis of common ideas supposedly peculiar to the Russian people.
The union of the "enlightened classes" with the "popular soil" was seen on the foundation of traditional values and Orthodoxy.
At the same time, European culture was not rejected by the soil workers, whose achievements were not questioned, which was their main discrepancy with the Slavophiles.
Background
The period of Alexander II’s reign became a time of deep socio-political reforms in the country, which, however, were not brought to its logical conclusion. The constitution, democratic reconstruction - all this remained in the field of hopes. Nevertheless, the authorities weakened the nuts, it became possible to express on the pages of periodicals the most diverse views, which fundamentally differed from the generally accepted.
The sixties, which began with the liberation of the peasants from serfdom, became a time of heated and irreconcilable discussions that erupted between Westerners, Slavophiles and soil workers. The former looked towards Europe, the latter advocated a special path for Russia. Everything was much more complicated with the soil workers.
Quite reasonably, they pointed out that in Russia by the nineteenth century there was a situation when representatives of almost two completely different peoples lived in one country in parallel, despite the common name “Russians”. Peter's reforms transformed high society into a European manner, but the peasant masses, who made up the country's main population, remained faithful to the traditional way of life. Yesterday's serfs, almost slaves, they lived just like their ancestors five hundred years before.
Dostoevsky and his followers quite justifiably saw in this situation a serious threat to national unity and put forward their own recipes for salvation. Soilism is the search for some kind of connecting element that can reunite a divided, in fact, people.
How it all began
One of the founding fathers of the new ideological doctrine was A. Grigoriev, a leading critic of the Moskvityan magazine in 1850-56. Agreeing with the Slavophiles in the opinion about the special path of Russia, he, nevertheless, objected to the absolutization of the peasant community put forward by them. The dissolution of the creative personality in the general mass was unacceptable, according to a respected critic, and he offered his own alternative vision of an ideal society.
At the same time, Grigoriev and his comrades did not yet call themselves soil workers, this name came later.
Back in 1847, K.S. Aksakov, one of the many reflective intellectuals, lamented that he and his contemporaries were completely separate from the people, like a plant torn from the ground. This peculiar meme very much liked F.M. Dostoevsky, who gladly used the image of the intelligentsia, torn from the popular soil.
Classic ideological weapon
Fedor Mikhailovich was distinguished by peculiar views that did not fit into any ideological concept, so he decided with his brother to establish his own publications, where he could preach his vision of the world. Soil cultivation is a cultural doctrine developed on the pages of the magazines Vremya, Epoch, which became the mouthpiece of the ideas of soil cultivation by Dostoevsky and other fans of the “special way”.
Actually, the classic of world literature has not brought his views on society and culture into a single harmonious system, a peculiar “Gospel of Dostoevsky” can be composed of his separate statements on certain topics.
Accepting the Slavophiles' program as a whole, he sharply diverged with them on the question of relations between the individual and society.
The great artist was disgusted by the very idea of the complete dissolution of a living, creative individuality in an amorphous peasant community. Here he was already close to the Westerners, paying tribute to European culture and the positive influence of art on man. He urged intellectuals to pay attention to people far from them, to describe their way of life, mores, to study needs. The key here was the idea of humility before old Russia.
Views on society
Dostoevsky rejected the ideas of socialism, in addition, his followers were similar in their attempt to expose the “rotten West”, which became the most popular doctrine in Russia with inexorable periodicity. Traditional lack of spirituality and immorality, dangerous socialist ideas on the one hand, and bourgeoisness on the other - all this was cited as arguments for the rejection of the Western path. At the same time, the value of European culture and its influence on Russia were not disputed.
The basic principles of soil science in relation to society consisted in a return to traditional forms - the community and the zemstvo. Conciliarity and Orthodoxy is the way that should unite men and nobles according to Fedor Mikhailovich. Nightmare survivals such as serfdom and other forms of enslavement should be abolished.
Criticism
Representatives of soil science often became objects of criticism from liberal and radical democratic circles. The idyll portrayed by the soil workers seemed very doubtful to the nihilists, they demanded that ideological opponents present a concrete program of action to correct the situation of the people, and not a miserable handout in the form of the concept of "small affairs".
Nevertheless, in those noble times, “liberals” and “patriots” respected each other, highly appreciating each other’s personal qualities. Commenting on the departure from the life of Grigoriev, the revolutionary democrat Pisarev ranked him among the last giants of Russian idealism.
Antonovich’s remarks were especially caustic. He rightly pointed out to the soil workers that they unconstrainedly substantiate their patriotism, the idea of a special path and the rejection of the “rotten West” with the language of German philosophy. From this he concludes that the ideas of the soil workers are full of mutually exclusive paragraphs and contradict each other.
In general, the soil workers got it from everyone: the democrats criticized them for obscurantism and naive idealism, the Slavophiles for their passion for European culture, the conservatives for calls for a revision of the existing structure of society.
Silver Age and Soil Science
After the death of Grigoriev and Dostoevsky, interest in the theoretical research of soil cultivation subsided, the main directions of social thought — Marxism and Tolstoyism — came to the fore. Only in 1902 did A. Blok turn to the forgotten ideas of the soil workers. In 1916, he published the article “The Fate of Apollo Grigoriev, ” where he calls him the only bridge from Pushkin and Griboedov to himself and his contemporaries.
Most thinkers of the Silver Age attributed soil science to a religious phenomenon, a continuation of the ideas of Russian collegiality.
