I have just come across an extract from a work filled with disgusting images and incidents. As far as I know, the author of this work has made the ugly his forte; with his poisoned pen he takes comfort, perhaps, in the fact that he ‘exposes the true face of the world’. After all, I note in parentheses, it seems to many people that to see exclusively bad, frightening, disgusting things in life means to ’boldly face reality’ and all that. I don’t even want to talk seriously and in detail about this schoolboy worldview.

In order not to make it seem as if we are talking about banishing discordant themes and questions from literature, I will remind you of the relevant words of Khodasevich: ’Poetry can deal with ugly subjects, but it has no right to be ugly itself’. Why so?

To understand the reason, let us ask ourselves what poetry is. (The word ‘poetry’ can be replaced by the word ‘creative work’ — the answer will be essentially the same.) Poetry is an ordered depiction of reality. Of course, special attention to the order of sounds is a distinctive feature of poetry expressed in verse, but all creativity consists precisely in superimposing a transparent and clear network of order on the ripples of events. Transparency, clarity and peace of mind are both the conditions of creativity and its outcome. A true work of art pacifies, appeases anger, because it reveals the necessary in what seemed random. As I have already said, art differs from the ‘latest news’ in that it finds meaning in events.

I don’t mean to say that art should educate. It can educate (and inevitably does educate), but it does so, if it does, inadvertently. Writing books for the sake of educating society is wasting time. But art certainly nourishes the soul, and the qualities of that soul change according to the food received.

That’s why I don’t think persistent, deliberate ugliness is appropriate in art. It is good if the writer of books like the one mentioned above is of no interest to anyone: his words will fall into the void and leave no trace; it will be worse if he finds a reader. After all, reading books is not a simple piling of letters, from which ‘there might launch itself from the page some devil-sent word whereof he could make neither head nor tail’, as Gogol’s Petrushka thought. Reading, we offer our soul some images, habits of feeling, habits of thought. The soul itself is only a spontaneous force, something that can go in any direction and incarnate in any form. The power of upbringing (which has nothing to do with ‘education’ as it is understood in our time, i. e. with the communication of a series of facts to the mind) lies precisely in the fact that it gives the soul a direction and an inner ideal, an image to which it can aspire.

I once said, ‘The soul is innate and potential’. Does a child raised by wolves have a soul? Yes, but it has not awakened, it has not come out, it has not taken shape. It is vague and elementary, full of the simplest desires, not seeking complex forms and difficult deeds. The same, unfortunately, can be said of many of those who have been brought up not by wolves but by the streets of big cities… They have been taught the basics of human speech, but their souls are primitive and simple. Food and water, entertainment and pleasure, that’s all.

The soul needs nourishment, needs orderly images in order to achieve inner order, to ascend through order to the greatest possible complexity — and to go to the limit beyond which our eyes can no longer see. This is why it is so important to choose the right impressions, especially from among those given to us by art. There is little doubt that ‘proper nourishment’ is necessary for our flesh, but it is even more necessary for the soul.

Timofey Sherudilo.
From the book Knowledge and Creativity. Essays on Cullture.

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