Grigory Pomerants: a man who looks like himself

Grigory Pomerants* died. The federal channels spread this sad news as having national significance, although Pomeranets’ philosophical and cultural books hardly have a large audience. It seems to me that this is some sign of the recovery of our media. Sergey Averintsev, Mikhail Gasparov, Vladimir Toporov passed away unnoticed by the TV and radio audience.

I was not closely acquainted with Grigory Solomonovich. Several short meetings, telephone conversations and one five-hour conversation. From the very first minutes of communication with him, I was struck by a trait that was difficult to immediately identify and formulate. Most likely, it was not even a feature, namely, the absence of any special features. He did not emphasize his importance, even with a fleeting, cunning invisibility, which is characteristic of many old (and not only old) people. He spoke simply about complex things, wanting to be understood and never — to show off his erudition. He did not hide his annoyance and confusion when he did not know the answer to a question or did not know how to explain something. However, he said at the same time very important: “I could not now give a short description of our troubled times, let alone say how to survive and survive in it … Intuitively, the phrase stirs in me: be true to yourself. Go so that your searches are visible, your torments in search of an answer to a question. Do not be afraid to show that you live in a world of open questions and that you believe that you can find answers, maybe not definitive, but those that will make it possible not to drown in chaos and not lose faith in yourself and in people. Carrying this sincerity is a great thing in itself … After all, the greatest questions all have no answer.

For some reason, these words made it unusually easy. Though what? The man said that he did not know the answer, that perhaps there were no answers to the main questions at all. But this was not a harsh sentence, but a promise. Because sincerity is with you, it certainly depends only on you. And this, it turns out, is a «great thing.» And that means that if, according to the testament of Zabolotsky, you work with your soul, then there will be answers. Let not the final ones, but those that help to survive and not lose yourself.

Here, however, a new question arises: what does it mean not to lose oneself? What does it mean to be true to yourself? Good teachers and parents have always talked about this (bad ones — about loyalty to ideals, for example). But how can you not lose what is not there? Do you really know who you are, what you are? So, first you need to find yourself. And again: how? If this is not clarified, what remains is bare rhetoric.

Pomerants does not broadcast, does not give theoretical advice, he talks about his own experience, along the way answering one of the unanswered questions: why is art needed? “The first thing I had was an inferiority complex: I’m not the right one. And then, at the age of sixteen, I came across a book by Stendhal, in which I saw a hero who was close to me in character and at the same time not negative, as an intellectual usually was in Soviet literature … For the first time I saw a type of positive hero related to me and realized that in me, unformed, a different type of personality. Already at the age of sixteen, reading other books, I began to find the history of how this type of personality developed … In a word, in this way I gradually collected myself. Reading books, peering at pictures, listening to music, I found the personality that gradually took shape in me.

It’s scary when a person doesn’t know himself. He always feels his abandonment and worthlessness, resentment or anger overcome him. When a person finds himself, even in the world of open, unanswered questions, life becomes not so scary. He knows how to act. So Grigory Pomerants went through the war. So in the 45th he was expelled from the party for «anti-Soviet conversations», in the 49th he was arrested, and his candidate’s dissertation was liquidated. The second Ph.D. thesis was written in 1968. On the eve of her defense, Pomerants put his signature in defense of the demonstrators on August 25, 1968, against the introduction of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia. So he remained for the rest of his life without scientific degrees. Already in recent times, Pomerants, an opponent of any ideology, enters into polemics with the untouchable Solzhenitsyn.

Freedom emanated from this puny man with a quiet voice. He was equal to himself, no more and no less than himself, he was what he put himself together.

• The work of love
• Circle of tenderness
• Feasible loneliness
• Pause for contemplation

* An outstanding philosopher, culturologist Grigory Pomerants passed away on February 16, 2013.