Panegyric to Bohemia of the 21st CENTURY

In one of his recent interviews, the writer Daniil Alexandrovich Granin said that today Russia is in great need of Bohemia. People who don't care about money at all. Who would have other values ​​- except for the glorified and vaunted money-grubbing.

This idea, expressed by the great writer of our time, seemed to me very deep. But when I thought about its content, it suddenly became clear who the bohemia is in today's Russia, which, according to the law of Dostoevsky's pendulum, swung from one extreme to another, from abyss to abyss: from supposedly complete disinterestedness, non-acquisitiveness and even anti-acquisitiveness under the communists - to total and universal greed and gain. The tuning fork of the era, as at all times, is women, one of whom (21 years old) formulated this supernova reality of Russia very accurately and very recently: “People are divided into those who fool and those who are fooled. Girls love those who fool, because if you love the one who is fooled, you yourself turn into a fool and turn out to be fools .And yet: there are people in Rus' for whom happiness is not in money, and moreover: happiness is not in money. For whom contempt for money compared to the work they do is a life creed. Which, so to speak, are anti-selfish in a world that has suddenly become universally acquisitive.

And who - you ask - bohemia in the Russian Federation , which, according to Daniil Granin, is urgently needed by Russia and which, in his opinion, is not in the country, died out like dinosaurs throughout the life of the living generation - and I say THERE ARE PEOPLE like Lenin, who shouted “there is such a party” (and everyone remembers what this exclamation led to!)? Who are these asocial eccentrics, living in their native country as if on another planet, who are the bohemians of Russia in the 21st century?

Answer: scientists.

Today, a scientist in Russia has all the signs of bohemia, as it was understood by France in the 19th century and the USSR in the second half of the 20th. Scientist in Russia today:

• He is engaged in cases that do not have any material way out and do not bring him personally any profit.
• Impractical cut off from reality by a commitment to truth and the knowledge of eccentrics.
• Dragging out a beggarly or quasi-beggarly existence (with the exception of earnings in the West, which are not the norm and not everyone has; and the artists of the sixties, after all, sold paintings to the West while remaining bohemian).
• The word scientist - just like a doctor, teacher or university professor - in today's environment of decision makers and the powerful of this world causes reflex compassion bordering on disgust: again with an outstretched hand? Again, give them money for some kind of research and development? Bad people.

And finally:

• a scientist in Russia, just as the authorities do not need today (despite all the assurances and incantations of the need to revive science and technology, and moreover: that there is no alternative to the scientific and technological path) as under Brezhnev, anti-social realist artists were not needed by the authorities despite constant assurances in that culture in the USSR is the most expensive.

TODAY SCIENTIST IN RUSSIA BOHEMIA. A stratum independent of the authorities and not supported by the authorities. Living by its own laws and rules, values ​​and priorities. Dragging out a semi-miserable - in comparison not only with the inhabitants of the Garden Ring, not only with any businessman, but also with any crook and thief - existence. This is an indisputable fact and a great topic for discussion. And here is how the country, which until recently was (and in many ways remains, for it always soars in spirit into the intellectual skies) Athens of the New Age, has come to complete disregard for people who in the rest of the civilized world are on a pedestal because they are more than any other " layer”, ensure the material progress of developed countries, and what such neglect promises the Russian Federation in the future is the subject of a special discussion.