October marked the 170th anniversary of the birth of D.D. Minaev, the poet of Iskra, a parodist, a chanter who did not disregard a single great creation of the previous "aristocratic" era and rewrote them in the spirit of liberalism - "nothing is sacred." I think that "Farewell, unwashed Russia" is time to return it to the real author.

Modernity is always looking for support in the past and seeks to interpret it in its own interests. On this basis, there is a lot of conjuncture and falsehood, when the past turns into a hostage of the present. The struggle with the past and for the past goes on in the social and symbolic universe. In the symbolic universe, one of its main trends is fiction, which, more than any other writing (text), is closer to the masses, to practical consciousness. The main reason for the hoaxes and disguise-deceptions undertaken at different times is (although this sounds unfashionable now) social struggle. Many hoaxes are based on the ideological reworking of literary masterpieces in order to adapt to the demands of the new reality. Thus, "Eugene Onegin", "Woe from Wit", "Dead Souls", "Demon" and other great and popular works were "corrected".

The poem "Farewell, unwashed Russia" is attributed to M.Yu. Lermontov. It was first mentioned in a letter by P.I. Bartenev in 1873, 32 years after the death of the poet. The strange thing is that the poet's contemporaries almost did not react to this discovery. Their reaction did not follow after the first publication in 1887. No joy was expressed, no controversy arose in the press. Perhaps the reading public knew to whom these lines belonged?

Literary critics, who value their reputation, usually stipulate the absence of an autograph and never attribute a work to the author, without at least lifetime lists. But not in this case! Both publications - by P.A. Viskovatov, and then by P.I. Bartenev, although they were convicted of dishonesty more than once, were accepted without doubt, and in the future, disputes were only about discrepancies. And here a controversy unfolded, which has not subsided so far. However, the arguments of the opponents of Lermontov's authorship were not taken seriously in this dispute. The poem became canonical and is included in school textbooks as a masterpiece of the political lyrics of the great poet.

Here is an octet, which really casts doubt on the patriotism of M.Yu. Lermontov:

Farewell, unwashed Russia,

Country of slaves, country of masters.

And you, blue uniforms,

And you, their devoted people.

Perhaps behind the wall of the Caucasus

I will hide from your pashas,

From their all-seeing eye

From their all-hearing ears.

It is because of the first line that the poem became popular, and for some it is now super-relevant. Today, everyone who speaks and writes about Russia with contempt, with mockery, with complete rejection of her social, both pre-revolutionary and revolutionary system, will without fail quote the famous line, taking it as an ally and referring to the authority of the great national poet. This is symptomatic. A stronger literary argument for discrediting Russia than a reference to its national poetic genius is hard to come up with.

But here is how the Bulletin of Literature for 1914 assessed the significance of the poet for Russia in the year of the centenary: “Lermontov is the pride and glory of Russian poetry, to whom, along with other “heroes of the pen,” we owe the strength of our national feelings, which manifested themselves especially vividly in the experiences we experience. significant days. After all, Lermontov, no doubt, was one of those poets who taught us to love our homeland and made us proud of it..." V.O. -the impression has already been expressed that the Russian brush on these canvases only illustrated and reproduced in detail some general picture of Russian nature and life familiar to you, which made the same impression on you, a little cheerful and a little sad, - and remember your MOTHERLAND Lermontov... Poetry, warmed by the personal feeling of the poet, becomes a phenomenon of folk life, a historical fact. indulge in popular feeling and give it artistic expression, like Lermontov. And even earlier, N.A. Dobrolyubov noted that "Lermontov understands love for the fatherland truly, holy and reasonable ... The fullest expression of pure love for the people, the most humane view of their life cannot be demanded from a Russian poet."

In the last decades of the 20th century, convincing, well-reasoned evidence appeared that Lermontov could not have written these lines. But, as you know, there is nothing more durable than a century-old delusion. On the anniversary of the 190th anniversary of the birth of the poet, the director of the Pushkin House, the respected scientist N.N. Skatov, made undeniable arguments that M.Yu. Lermontov could not share such views. However, fair doubts about the ownership of the controversial poem by M.Yu. Lermontov are not supported by attempts to find its true author. One critical rejection is not enough. Positive proposals and solutions are needed.

When studying a literary work whose authorship has not been identified, the biography of the alleged author, the historical and literary environment of that time, the language and character of the era are taken into account. It is known that outstanding writers develop their own original style, original vocabulary, live and create in a historically defined cultural everyday life. In the poem under consideration, the spirit of a completely different time is manifested, which is not inherent in the poetic country called Lermontov. It has a different cultural context. Let's ask ourselves what is the first thing that puzzles us here and what does not agree with all the other lines. Let's ask and confess: the first line is "unwashed Russia". Brought up in a noble environment, a boarding house of Moscow University, revolving in the highest aristocratic circles, Lermontov could hardly write and speak "unwashed" in relation to the Motherland, to which he had just dedicated a line of love to the amazing power. It can be assumed that he did not use it in everyday life either. It was not in the lexicon of the nobility, and it has nothing to do with poetry at all. Is that a parody, an epigram, a rehash. And this is another era. Let's talk about her.

This is how the Den newspaper of 1889 characterized the theoretical beginnings of post-reform Russia: “Everything elegant, aristocratic, bearing the imprint of the nobility, seemed incompatible with the feeling of a citizen. The emancipated “muzhik” became a favorite cult, which was worshiped and imitated. shirts and greased boots..."

The most prominent representative of the satirical and social poetry of the 60s, who opposed the culture of the nobility, the opponent of the crowd of "renegades, hysterics, temporary workers and Neva Cleopatras" was D.D. Minaev - a virtuoso of verse, who had the richest, unsurpassed supply of rhymes. In his satires and rehashes, not a single noble poet is ignored: Pushkin, Lermontov, Maikov, Nekrasov, Ostrovsky, Pleshcheev, Fet, Tyutchev, Turgenev, Benediktov. Everyone fell for his sharp tongue. He was a bright and ardent destroyer of noble aesthetics, as, indeed, D. Pisarev. It is no coincidence that D. Minaev's parody of "Eugene Onegin" coincides in a number of his attacks against A.S. Pushkin with D. Pisarev's criticism of this novel. Poetic parody was the leading genre of D. Minaev in the field of satire: mockery, ridicule, magazine polemics - his favorite style. “Not sparing his own father for the sake of a red word, Minaev snapped his satirical scourge at both enemies and friends, and it was this illegibility that made his figure very vague in terms of convictions.” All the reading public of that time knew him, and the writing public was afraid. His impromptu and epigrams spread all over Russia. The success was explained not only by the exceptional wit and indisputable poetic talent of the "king of rhymes", but also by the ideological orientation of his literary work, as well as the social struggle of the 1860s and 1870s.

The peculiarity of parody as a type of literary satire is that it is usually used and is used to attack a hostile ideology. For D. Minaev, this is a noble ideology. The vulgar democratic jargon of parody reduced high aristocratic literature. Exposure was achieved by ridiculing sophistication, by contrasting themes, characters, and language. M.Yu. Lermontov Minaev constantly parodied. He did not ignore even such prophetically tragic verses as "Dream" (1841).

M.Yu. Lermontov:

In the afternoon heat, in the valley of Dagestan,

With lead in my chest, I lay motionless.

A deep wound still smoking,

My blood dripped drop by drop...

D.D. Minaev:

In the midday heat at the Bezborodko dacha

With "Russian Conversation" I lay motionless.

It was hot afternoon

the air flowed softly,

Rocking me...

In another epigram:

When sickening day by day,

I went to the Caucasus

Lermontov met me there,

Splashed with mud...

In the poem "Moonlight Night" the motives of Lermontov's poem "Mtsyri" are sung, and each stanza ends with a refrain: "... From the blue sky ... The moon looked at me." All this to the motive "All is well, beautiful marquise ..."

As they say, nothing is sacred. Minaev himself admits:

"I understood the secret perfectly,

How to write original

I'll start the verse pompously

And I will end trivially.

.......................

Unexpectedly bringing together

All kinds of items

I am sure - O reader! -

What talent you will find in me.

It is no coincidence that the parody "Farewell, unwashed Russia" surfaced in 1873. Most likely, it was then that it was written by D. Minaev. As Klechenov convincingly showed in "Literary Russia", this is rather a parody of Pushkin's "To the Sea":

Farewell, free element!

For the last time in front of me

You roll blue waves

And you shine with proud beauty ...

Compare:

"Farewell, unwashed Russia,

Country of slaves, country of masters.

And you, blue uniforms,

And you, a people devoted to them."

In 1874-1879, D. Minaev wrote a satirical poem "Demon", which contains the following lines:

"Imp rushes. No interference

He does not see on the night air

On his blue uniform

The stars of the ranks of all are sparkling..."

It is quite logical that here the author used his own find - "blue uniforms". As you can see, it is more inherent in D. Minaev and typical of him. But M.Yu. Lermontov has nothing of the kind. Why are frequency dictionaries of great writers created, if not for the study of poetic images and vocabulary? In the famous eight lines, all the laws of parody are observed: the discrepancy between style and thematic material; reduction, discrediting the stylized object and even the entire artistic and ideological complex of the original, the poet's worldview as a whole. That is exactly what the authors of Iskra did when they parodied the poets of "pure art."

Gradually (and especially now, in our time), the hoax, which the publishers of the parody were carried away by, turned into a falsification that works for the opponents of Russia. Especially in the eyes of the younger generation, who take it on faith as a work of a great poet. It seems that the duty of all responsible-minded researchers of Russian literature is to put everything in its place.

Lermontov is one of my favorite poets. Liberals, scolding Russia, often refer to the poem "Farewell, unwashed Russia", calling Lermontov the author. The same, our literary critics, philologists, linguists, candidates of sciences and academicians say. In the Soviet years it was politics. The poet is a fighter against tsarism. Today it is fashionable to scold Russia, the intelligentsia enthusiastically doing this, taking Lermontov as an ally. I have been translating for a long time, trying to use the author's dictionary, therefore, when reading poetry, I pay attention to style and vocabulary. I was surprised by the “blue uniforms” and “unwashed Russia”, which were not used anywhere else by Lermontov, the appeal to the people to, you, to the “blue uniforms”, personifying the gendarmerie corps, to, you. Realizing that the author of the poems: “Borodino” and “Motherland” could not write like that, I began to collect evidence confirming my doubt. Such were found.
1. No one has seen the handwritten original of the poem. But this has happened before, there were witnesses confirming the authenticity of the poems. The strange thing is that until 1873 nothing was known about these verses. Not only was the text not found, but even the very existence of such verses was not known.
2. The publisher Bartenev accompanied the poems with a note: "Written down from the words of the poet by a contemporary."
"Written down from the words of the poet by a contemporary." What is the name of a contemporary? Unknown. When did he write it down? Immediately, as Lermontov recited his poem to him, Or decades later? Pyotr Ivanovich Bartenev kept silent about all this.

All evidence that this poem belongs to Lermontov's pen is based solely on this silence. There is no other evidence of Lermontov's authorship in relation to this poem. No one has ever seen Lermontov's manuscript; this was recognized by Bartenev himself with the words: "Written down from the words of the poet by a contemporary." Here is the first version of the text:
Farewell, unwashed Russia,
And you, blue uniforms,
And you, obedient people.
Perhaps beyond the ridge of the Caucasus
I'll hide from your<арей>
From their unseeing eye
From their deaf ears.
Surprised? The text is clearly not up to a brilliant poet. Why goodbye, Russia? The poet was not going abroad in 1841. Goodbye - sounds ridiculous.
In the academic 6-volume edition of Lermontov's Works of 1954-1957, the notes to this poem say:
"Farewell, unwashed Russia..." (pp. 191, 297)
Published according to the publication of the Russian Archive (1890, book 3, No. 11, p. 375), which represents the most likely edition. The text is accompanied by a note: "Written down from the words of the poet by a contemporary." There is a copy of the IRLI (op. 2, No. 52 in a letter from P. I. Bartenev to P. A. Efremov dated March 9, 1873), the text of which is given in a footnote. Sending a poem to Efremov, Bartenev wrote: "Here are some more poems by Lermontov copied from the original." However, this message cannot be considered reliable, since the poem was published by the same Bartenev in the Russian Archive in a different edition (see text)."

Actually there were two letters. The academic publishers who published their first volume in 1954 did not have time to find out about the second letter (to Putyata), found in 1955. Can you imagine how they would have to get out in order to explain the words of Bartenev from the second letter, in which he sets out another version of the poem "from the original hand of Lermontov"?
Apparently, the proud spirit of Lermontov could not come to terms with the shortcomings of the text, so he decided to edit the verse. Here is the new option:

Farewell, unwashed Russia,
Country of slaves, country of masters,
And you, blue uniforms,
And you, their devoted people.

I will hide from your pashas,
From their unseeing eye
From their all-hearing ears."
Agree, the text has become better. The rhyme of kings-ears no longer cuts the ear. The obedient people became devoted. Hearing ears became all-hearing. But this is not the end. A third option appears:

Farewell, unwashed Russia,
Country of slaves, country of masters.
And you, blue uniforms,
And you, their devoted people.
Perhaps behind the wall of the Caucasus
I will hide among the pashas,
From their all-seeing eye
From their all-hearing ears...
Agree the changes are drastic. The people became devoted. A devotee is no longer just obedient. One can be obedient, submissive because of the fear of punishment. But in this version, the people are faithful. Faithful sincerely, infinitely.
Is “unwashed Russia” also striking? Lermontov knew perfectly well that a Russian peasant washes in a bathhouse more often than a French count, who hides his stench with perfume. How could the poet who wrote:
With joy, unknown to many,
I see a complete mess.
Thatched hut,
Carved shuttered window;
And on a holiday, dewy evening,
Ready to watch until midnight
To the dance with stomping and whistling
To the sound of drunken men.
so contemptuously to say about Russia?

The lines are permeated with warmth, love for the people and their lives. I do not believe that after this you can write contemptuously - "unwashed Russia." To do this, you need to be a hardened cynic and hypocrite. Even the enemies did not say such things about Lermontov. In the Caucasus, according to Baron L, V, Rossillon:
“He gathered a gang of dirty thugs… He wore a red kanaus shirt that never seemed to be washed.” He ate with a team from one boiler, slept on bare ground. Going to such a life to say “unwashed Russia? It is not logical, it does not climb into any gates.

No one heard of poetry, and suddenly, in 1873 and later, not just one list appears at once, but successively several options. These variants undergo changes ("kings - leaders - pashas" - in search of a rhyme to "ears"). That is, new, more successful words appear, replacing "kings" with a more coherent rhyme. The meaning of the last two lines changes radically by replacing the words "not seeing - not hearing" with their opposite. Moreover, the new version gives the poems a new meaning, emotionally and logically much more successful.
It turns out that in the seventies the poems "Farewell, unwashed Russia" are not just modified. They are changing towards clear improvement. There are all signs that these poems were not found at all in the seventies, but that they were created at that time.
There is a process of creating a poem. The process that left evidence of the author's search for a more successful form of his work. In the form of different versions of this verse.

The people in those years - in the first place about the serfs. Blue uniforms - corps of gendarmes. The assertion that the people are "obedient", "submissive" or, moreover, "betrayed" by a separate corps of gendarmes is nonsense. Absurdity, due to the elementary lack of common points of contact between the people and the gendarmes.
Yes. The people could be obedient, could be subdued. But to whom?
Of course, to his master - the master. This means that all contacts of the serf with the outside world were closed only on its owner. But it's at the very top. Everyday, these were people chosen by the master. Managers, stewards, elders. However, these ties closed with the peasant, I repeat, all the same, with his master. "Here comes the master, the master will judge us ..."
A serf peasant could not only never see a single "blue uniform" in his whole life. He might not even be aware of its existence.
No gendarme could punish or pardon him. Only his own master could punish or pardon. Unlike any gendarme rank, which had no such rights. Any claims of the gendarmes against any peasant could only be addressed to his owner, since the serf was not a legally independent person. Its owner was responsible for its behavior. That is why he was given the right and the power to punish or pardon. With blue uniforms, in my opinion, it's clear. The people not only were not devoted to them, but for the most part did not know about them.

It is logical, finally, to raise the question: Prove that the author of the poem "Farewell, unwashed Russia" is Lermontov. Give at least one piece of evidence. Even the weakest.

Summarize. During the seventies, the poems "Farewell, unwashed Russia" appeared in several versions. Editing took place before the eyes of contemporaries.
The change also affected the clarification of the degree of servility of the peasants in relation to the gendarmes. Note:
In Bartenev's letter to Efremov, "people obedient to them" appears in the verses. In Bartenev's letter to Putyata, we already see "the people obedient to them." These are the seventies. And then, suddenly, an option appears that sharply increases the degree of groveling - "they are devoted to the people."
Why? Let's remember history. In the spring of 1874, among the progressive youth, a mass movement began - "going to the people." This movement continued until 1877. The greatest scope falls on the spring-autumn of 1874. Soon mass arrests of participants in this action began.

In October 1874, P.A. Kropotkin wrote to P.L. Lavrov: “Listening to the names of cities and towns where they are being arrested, I am simply amazed. Literally: you need to know the geography of Russia in order to understand how great the mass of arrests is.”
The reason for such an effective work of the Separate Corps of Gendarmes was simple. It was the peasants who played the main role in exposing the activities of revolutionary agitators in the countryside. The gendarmes joined in when the peasants brought in a propagandist they had bound. Such a reaction of the countryside to the attempts of its political enlightenment offended the progressive circles of Russian society. Then in the first publication of the said poem in 1887, instead of "obedient (submissive) people", the line appears:
And you, their devoted people.

Here you can feel the indignation of some revolutionary who went to the people, to enlighten and call. To his surprise and indignation, it was not blue uniforms that tied him up, but ungrateful peasants. Perhaps editing is the reaction of one of the writers who sympathize with him.
The speech in the poem is about the desire to hide behind the "wall of the Caucasus" while Lermontov was going to serve in the North Caucasus, that is, strictly speaking, not reaching its wall. Finally, and most importantly, this contradicts the whole system of views of Lermontov, who was becoming more and more firmly established in his Russophilia, who writes (the autograph in the album of Vl. F. Odoevsky has been preserved):
“Russia has no past: it is all in the present and the future. A fairy tale tells: Yeruslan Lazarevich sat in bed for 20 years and slept soundly, but in the 21st year he woke up from a heavy sleep - got up and went ... and he met 37 kings and 70 heroes and beat them and sat down to reign over them ... Such is Russia ... "Now, I hope everyone agrees that the author of these poems is not Lermontov?
In 2005, an article by the candidate of philosophical sciences from Nizhny Novgorod A. A. Kutyreva was published, which convincingly proved the real authorship. Kutyreva writes: “Literary critics who value their reputation usually stipulate the absence of an autograph and never attribute a work to the author, without at least lifetime copies. But not in this case! Both publications - P.A. Viskovatova, and then P.I. Bartenev, although they were convicted of dishonesty more than once, were accepted without a doubt and in the future the disputes were only about discrepancies. And here a controversy unfolded, which has not subsided so far. However, the arguments of opponents of Lermontov's authorship in this dispute were not taken seriously into account. The poem became canonical and is included in school textbooks as a masterpiece of the political lyrics of the great poet.
It is because of the first line that the poem became popular, and for some it is now super-relevant.

Today, everyone who speaks and writes about Russia with contempt, with mockery, with complete rejection of her social, both pre-revolutionary and revolutionary system, will without fail quote the famous line, taking it as an ally and referring to the authority of the great national poet. This is symptomatic. A stronger literary argument for discrediting Russia than a reference to her national poetic genius is hard to come up with."
“Before giving the name of the author, let us pay attention to several features of the mentioned poem. First of all, the adjective "unwashed". Let's turn to Lermontov's elder brother. In his essay "Journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg" (the title was given in a polemic with the work of the liberal Alexander Radishchev "Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow"), Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin cites the following dialogue between the author and an Englishman:
"I. What struck you most of all in the Russian peasant?
He. His neatness, intelligence and freedom.
I. How is it?
He. Your peasant goes to the bathhouse every Saturday; he washes his face every morning, moreover, he washes his hands several times a day. There is nothing to say about his intelligence. Travelers travel from region to region throughout Russia, not knowing a single word of your language, and everywhere they are understood, fulfill their demands, conclude conditions; I never met between them what our neighbors call un badoud, I never noticed in them either rude surprise or ignorant contempt for a stranger. Everyone knows their receptivity; agility and dexterity are amazing...
I. Fair; but freedom? Do you really consider the Russian peasant free?
He. Look at him: what could be freer than his circulation! Is there even a shadow of slavish humiliation in his steps and speech? Have you been to England?" For Lermontov, Pushkin was an authority. In addition, he is the author of the poem "The Death of a Poet" and "Motherland", a man of his time, a Russian nobleman and officer, therefore he could not express himself like that about Russia.

And who could? A person of a different historical time and origin. Kutyreva reports that this poem "rather parodies Pushkin's lines" Farewell, free elements! ", And the" blue uniforms "that are not found anywhere else in Lermontov" appear in the satirical poem "Demon", written in 1874-1879 by a former official of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Dmitry Dmitrievich Minaev, who discovered the gift of the poet-satirist in himself.

It was during the post-reform era that it became fashionable among the intelligentsia and semi-educated people to scold not only the government, but also Russia. By the end of the reign of Nicholas I, it reached the point of idiocy and savagery - educated people wanted us to be beaten in Sevastopol and the Crimean War! And when this, unfortunately, happened, the only winners were the enemies of Russia. The children of priests and officials hated not only their class, their environment, their government, but the entire Russian people. This bacillus infected the Bolsheviks, who also wanted defeat in the war with Japan and Germany. Their heirs introduced the vile rhyme, attributing it to Lermontov, into school anthologies, so that the pernicious odor would spread to the next generations. We hope that the truth will be restored not only in the works of literary critics, but also in school textbooks. It's much more important." I fully agree with Kutyreva.

Commentary on the poem:
First published (with censorship distortions) in 1887 in Russkaya Starina (No. 12, pp. 738-739). The autograph has not survived. Written, according to biographers, in April 1841, before leaving St. Petersburg for the Caucasus.
Several versions of the text of this poem have come down to us in the lists made at different times by P. I. Bartenev. In 1873, Bartenev, sending a poem to P. A. Efremov, wrote: “Here are some more poems by Lermontov copied from the original.” This included the following text:

Farewell, unwashed Russia,
Country of slaves, country of masters,
And you, blue uniforms,
And you, obedient people.
Perhaps beyond the ridge of the Caucasus
I will hide from your kings,
From their all-seeing eye
From their all-hearing ears.

In 1890, Bartenev published another version of the text (based on which the poem is printed in this edition), accompanying it with a note: "Written down from the poet's words by a contemporary."
In 1955, another version of the text was published - a list of the same Bartenev from the archive of N.V. Putyata. In this list, verse 4 reads: “And you, the people that obey them.” The rest of the text is the same as in the letter to Efremov.
That edition, where verse 6 reads “I will hide from your pashas,” there is reason to consider the most probable in meaning and in form. Lermontov's sharply accusatory poem, directed against the autocratic-bureaucratic regime of Russia, was distributed in lists and was subjected to many distortions.
"Blue uniforms" - we are talking about officers of the gendarme corps.

Farewell, unwashed Russia,
Country of slaves, country of masters,
And you, blue uniforms,
And you, their devoted people.
Perhaps behind the wall of the Caucasus
I will hide from your pashas,
From their all-seeing eye
From their all-hearing ears.

"Blue uniforms" - we are talking about officers of the gendarme corps.

The autograph has not survived.
Written, according to biographers, in April 1841, before Lermontov's departure from St. Petersburg to the Caucasus.
Several versions of the text of this poem have come down to us in the lists made at different times by P. I. Bartenev.

In 1873, Bartenev, sending a poem to P. A. Efremov, wrote: “Here are some more poems by Lermontov copied from the original.” This included the following text:
Farewell, unwashed Russia,
Country of slaves, country of masters,
And you, blue uniforms,
And you, obedient people.
Perhaps beyond the ridge of the Caucasus
I will hide from your kings,
From their all-seeing eye
From their all-hearing ears.

In 1955, another version of the text was published - a list of the same Bartenev from the archive of N.V. Putyata. In this list, verse 4 reads: “And you, the people that obey them.” The rest of the text is the same as in the letter to Efremov (for more details, see Izvestia of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Department of Literature and Language, 1955, vol. 14, issue 4, pp. 372–373).

That edition, where verse 6 reads “I will hide from your pashas,” there is reason to consider the most probable in meaning and in form. Lermontov's sharply accusatory poem, directed against the autocratic-bureaucratic regime of Russia, was distributed in lists and was subjected to many distortions.

Who played a cruel joke and attributed to the Russian genius poet Mikhail Lermontov poor rhymes about "unwashed Russia"? Not a visiting foreigner who sucked the whole story about the "Potemkin villages" out of his finger, but a raznochinets who composed a parody. But much more guilty is the Soviet school, which stubbornly imposed this cheap stuff as the lines of the great classic.

These eight lines were and are included in the Soviet collected works of M. Yu. Lermontov with a modest postscript "attributed":

Farewell, unwashed Russia,

Country of slaves, country of masters.

And you, blue uniforms,

And you, their devoted people.

Perhaps behind the wall of the Caucasus

I will hide from your pashas,

From their all-seeing eye

From their all-hearing ears.

In 1989, the Soviet writer, critic and communist Vladimir Bushin suggested that the Lermontov scholars carefully recheck their authorship. Let's give the floor to the experts.

Academician N.N. Skatov, in his article on the 190th anniversary of Mikhail Lermontov, confirmed: “All this again and again makes us return (the last time it was done by M.D. Elzon) to one of the most famous poems attributed to Lermontov. As you know, there is no autograph of this poem. Well, it happens. But for more than thirty years, no evidence of any oral information has appeared: this is about a Lermontov poem of such a degree of political radicalism. There is not a single list, except for the one to which P. I. Bartenev refers, with whose submission the poem became known in 1873, and which is also allegedly lost. By the way, the poem is about the desire to hide behind the "wall of the Caucasus" while Lermontov was going to serve in the North Caucasus, that is, strictly speaking, before reaching to its wall. Finally, and most importantly, this contradicts the whole system of Lermontov’s views, who was becoming more and more strengthened in his Russophilia, who is even called a Russoman and who writes (here is an autograph in the album Vl. F. Odoevsky just survived): "Russia has no past: it is all in the present and the future. A fairy tale tells: Yeruslan Lazarevich sat in bed for 20 years and slept soundly, but at the age of 21 he woke up from a heavy sleep - got up and went ... and he met 37 kings and 70 heroes and beat them and sat down to reign over them ... Such is Russia ... "

In 2005, an article by the candidate of philosophical sciences from Nizhny Novgorod A. A. Kutyreva was published, which convincingly proved the real authorship, but first a short preface. Kutyreva writes: “Literary scholars who value their reputation usually stipulate the absence of an autograph and never attribute a work to the author without at least lifetime copies. But not in this case! Both publications - P.A. Viskovatov, and then P.I. Bartenev, although they were convicted of dishonesty more than once, were accepted without a doubt and in the future the disputes were only about discrepancies. And here a controversy unfolded, which has not subsided so far. However, the arguments of opponents of Lermontov's authorship in this dispute were not taken seriously into account. The poem became canonical and is included in school textbooks as a masterpiece of the political lyrics of the great poet.

It is because of the first line that the poem became popular, and for some it is now super-relevant. Today, everyone who speaks and writes about Russia with contempt, with mockery, with complete rejection of her social, both pre-revolutionary and revolutionary system, will without fail quote the famous line, taking it as an ally and referring to the authority of the great national poet. This is symptomatic. A stronger literary argument for discrediting Russia than a reference to her national poetic genius is hard to come up with."

Before naming the author's name, let's pay attention to several features of the mentioned poem. First of all, the adjective "unwashed". Let's turn to Lermontov's elder brother. In his essay "Journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg" (the title was given in a polemic with the work of the liberal Alexander Radishchev "Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow"), Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin cites the following dialogue between the author and an Englishman:

"I. What struck you most of all in the Russian peasant?

He. His neatness, intelligence and freedom.

I. How is it?

He. Your peasant goes to the bathhouse every Saturday; he washes his face every morning, moreover, he washes his hands several times a day. There is nothing to say about his intelligence. Travelers travel from region to region throughout Russia, not knowing a single word of your language, and everywhere they are understood, fulfill their demands, conclude conditions; I have never met between them what our neighbors call un badoud, never noticed in them either rude surprise or ignorant contempt for someone else's. Everyone knows their receptivity; agility and dexterity are amazing...

I. Fair; but freedom? Do you really consider the Russian peasant free?

He. Look at him: what could be freer than his circulation! Is there even a shadow of slavish humiliation in his steps and speech? Have you been to England?"