“A ghost is a custom in the Middle Ages to walk outside one's body. Nowadays it does not exist, except for individual bourgeois countries. " So the satirist A. Bukhov in the 30s ridiculed the author's manner of compilers of comments and notes to translations of works of foreign writers. However, this deliberately exaggerated interpretation differs little from those that served as the object of parody. When it came to God, souls or ghosts, the key word was always "no": there is no God, there is no soul, and there are different visions there - even more so …
When something similar was encountered in the work of a Soviet writer, the publishers were gripped by downright horror, and all measures were taken to obscure allusions to the other world. And if the matter was not limited to individual strokes and mentions of forbidden words - well, say, visions and shadows were a crowd - whole battles were played out in order to remove a seditious poem or poem from the book.
Thus, Aleksey Surkov once stood in the way of publishing Anna Akhmatova's Poem Without a Hero. "The world of mysticism and phantasmagoria", "decadent relapse" - these and other words befitting the occasion we meet in his letter to the editor-in-chief of the publishing house "Soviet Writer".
Akhmatova's literary guardian was extremely concerned about the appearance of ghosts in the first part of the poem. But they simply could not be there. Firstly, because the author recalls people who died long ago (this part is called "Nine hundred and thirteenth year"). Secondly, the place where shadows from 1913 come is the White Hall by the architect Quarenghi, the “hall of mysterious mirrors” in the Fountain House, the former St. Petersburg palace of Count Sheremetev. The combination of such circumstances not only excludes any phantasmagoria, but literally forces the poetess to physically accurately write off the ghosts.
Do not be surprised at what has been said - a modern researcher of parapsychological phenomena can be attracted to Poem Without a Hero by the peculiar realism of the scene with ghosts. The reader will be convinced of the validity of such a paradoxical statement a little later. First, it is necessary to understand why the artistic consciousness ties together the symbolism of ghosts and mirrors.
The most ancient of these beliefs are based on the idea of a mirror as a kind of window into the other world inhabited by spirits. Historians of material culture have found convincing evidence of this.
Archaeologists, for example, were puzzled by the almost complete absence of metal mirrors in the composition of Slavic-Russian antiquities. At the same time, they are widespread among the Turkic-speaking peoples of the Volga region and the southern Russian steppes, neighboring with ancient Russia. Scientists see the explanation in a special - on the verge of panic horror - the attitude of the Slavs to the souls of the dead. Only sorcerers and sorcerers could afford the luxury of having mirrors and using them for their own purposes. But after the establishment of Christianity in Russia, all adherents of pagan rituals were subjected to severe persecution. Not only sorcerers, wizards and healers were executed, but even buffoons, and the things that belonged to them were anathematized and destroyed. That is why archaeologists almost never find mirrors during excavations of ancient Slavic settlements. The attitude towards these household items changed only many centuries later, not without the influence of Western culture. Under Peter I, mirrors were already popular among the general population. There are two reasons for this: a new technology has appeared that replaced the ancient metal mirrors with glass ones, and most importantly, the idea of their connection with otherworldly spirits has almost disappeared from the people's memory.
The logic that secured such a connection is indeed peculiar, but it also admits of a simple explanation. Here is the opinion of E. Shavkunov, Doctor of Historical Sciences:
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“Looking into the stagnant water, primitive man could not help but notice that his reflection appears before him in an inverted position, when the left hand in some incomprehensible way is in the place of the right, and the right is in the place of the left. Since the reflection in the water is like a shadow, it remained not tangible, it did not seem to have a material essence. From this, a logical conclusion for that time was made that in the water, where a person could not live, he sees the reflection not of his flesh, but of his spirit, who took it, a person, in guise”.
There are countless variations of the "mirror" theme in legends and fairy tales. Such, for example, the plot is often repeated - the hero hides from the princess, but she finds him every time, looking in a magic mirror. This happens until the wanted person guesses to hide behind a mirror, where he immediately becomes invisible. And here the fabulous logic is not complete without reference to the intervention of the forces of the other world. After all, they have unlimited power and easily find a mere mortal while he is in their field of vision, that is, within the view that opens from the "inside" of the mirror. Having found him, they show the princess. In this situation, there is only one way to hide from the spirits - by being behind the mirror.
Another example is the still observed custom of covering the mirrors in the room with towels while the deceased is there. The basis of the custom is the same: the ancient belief that the soul of the deceased reflected in them will not be able to see the souls of the people in the house and take them with him to the afterlife.
But back to the poets. It is now clear that their fantasies about ghosts have a deep socio-cultural basis and a variety of folklore clichés. That is why in the XX century, mirrors continue to exist inseparably with ghosts. So the mention of the White Hall of the Fountain House in Poem Without a Hero is not accidental. There are 26 mirrors in the two tiers of the hall - upper and lower. Many of them confront each other, which prompted Akhmatova these lines: "Only a mirror to a mirror of snits?, Silence guards silence." In accordance with a tradition dating back to hoary antiquity, I am playing "midnight Hoffmaniana" there, "instead of the one who was expected, shadows from the thirteenth year come to the author." But among the ghosts and shadows, another character appears - a guest from the Future. He is not a ghost, from him, we read in "Poem Without a Hero", "does not blow with the summer cold, and in his hand his warmth."
This indication of the difference between an otherworldly spirit and a living person also comes from ancient times. The underworld, the place where the departed, according to the ideas of the ancient Greeks and Romans, is primarily the world of cold. "In the dark abode of cold Hades" - said about him in the ancient Greek poet Hesiod. But many later ghost stories mention the same feature.
Historians know an interesting piece of evidence - the story of Emperor Paul. Once he, then still the Grand Duke, together with Alexander Kurakin undertook a "walk incognito in the moonlight." When turning to one of the streets at the back of the entrance, Pavel saw a tall, thin figure wrapped in a cloak. An unknown person let him in when he passed by, and then left the entrance and settled down on the left, between the wall of the house and the Grand Duke. Here is an excerpt from Paul's story:
“I couldn't make out a single feature of his face. It seemed to me that his feet, stepping on the slabs of the sidewalk, made a strange sound, as if a stone was hitting a stone. I was amazed, and the feeling that gripped me became even stronger when I felt an icy cold in my left side, from the stranger's side.
Kurakin did not see the ghost and did not hear the sound of his steps. Later he assured his companion that all this was nothing more than a dream during a night walk. But Paul did not agree: “The smallest detail of this vision is remembered to me, and I still maintain that it was a vision, and everything connected with it seems to me as clear as it would have happened yesterday. Arriving home, I found that my left side was positively petrified from the cold, and I felt some warmth only a few hours later, although I immediately went into a warm bed …"
Now we can learn something about the phantoms of the other world from scientists. The authorities in the field of parapsychology A. Dubrov and V. Pushkin included ghosts in a summary table containing a list of 19 anomalous phenomena to be studied (the table is given in the book "Parapsychology and Contemporary Natural Science", published by the authors in 1990). Ghosts thus become the subject of serious research interest. A physicist fascinated by such "mysticism" could have caught on to the detail noted above - an indication that the ghost has something to do with the refrigerator.
An attempt to “connect the measuring equipment to the otherworldly phenomenon was made by British parapsychologists. They installed thermometric sensors in an old castle, where the ghost had the custom to appear on strictly defined days and hours. And what - when the ghost followed its traditional route, on the remote control, where the signals from the sensors were output, scientists registered the movement of a cold wave. Moreover, the temperature dropped was eight to nine degrees! It turns out that the metaphorical expression "blew the cold of the grave" has some kind of rational basis.
If these measurements are correlated with Paul's story about an incident during a night walk, then his statement - “the left side is positively petrified from the cold” - would have to be considered quite plausible. Indeed, according to him, the ghost walked to his left for about an hour, there was even a dialogue between them, but most of the way the mysterious companion proceeded in silence.
When a ghost becomes visible, makes sounds, from a physical point of view, this must inevitably be accompanied by a waste of energy. But where to get it? It is logical to assume from the surrounding air. This could explain the phenomenon of a decrease in temperature in similar, very strange circumstances.
You have to be a desperately brave researcher to make miracles an object of scientific interest. The necessary courage is possessed by the domestic experimental parapsychologist and psychic V. Safono, the author of the books "Ariadne's Thread", "Untold Reality". He also has his own point of view on the problem of ghosts.
- Without hiding my attempts to somehow rely on the well-known achievements of science of our time, - Safonov writes, - at the same time I have to admit the existence of another world - the world of the universe of information, in which the past, present and future are fused together. The world into which all the present leaves in order to continue its complication and improvement there, fulfilling the plan of the one who created this all-embracing "computer".
Of course, this is just a hypothesis, a kind of global ideological concept. But along with attempts to comprehend the strange and unusual, the independently thinking researcher has long been busy with the accumulation and classification of specific facts. Outside the framework of his books, he collected various testimonies of encounters with ghosts.
“I was less than seven years old,” said one of his correspondents, “and our family lived near the city of Istra, Moscow Region. My comrades and I played hide and seek not far from the house in a vacant lot, where there was a shock of hay. I got to "drive". The older guys fled to their homes, but I, not knowing about their deception, continued to search. It was getting dark, but it was still very light. Suddenly, at a short distance from me, I saw a group of people walking along the path from the house of the Arkhipovs' neighbors. I rushed to catch up with them, deciding that they were my peers. But when I ran up to them at a distance of several steps, I was literally dumbfounded, because I recognized them as uncle Nikita Arkhipov, his wife and a child of my age, who had recently died one after another. They did not react to me in any way. In a second, my stupor died out and I started to run, not looking back."
There are many other stories of this kind in Safonov's collection. The stories, to be honest, are somewhat eerie, but didn't the deep subconscious fear, along with fears for their reputation in the scientific-conservative environment, also averted researchers from them? Probably, the unique collection of the researcher will not be wasted, but will become in the future the basis of a body of positive knowledge, which could be conventionally called "ghostology". Its contours seem to have already emerged thanks to the activities of the Moscow Association "Ecology of the Unknown."
The association's expert Y. Fomin analyzed a solid array of information obtained during seances for more than 100 years, and came to the conclusion: only about 5 percent of it is confirmed during subsequent verification. Everything else is the result of human subconscious activity, and people, depending on their mental baggage and worldview, refer to unclean spirits, all sorts of saints, aliens, cosmic mind, etc. and those who like to “touch” with higher powers. On the other hand, the analysis of cases related to the mentioned 5 percent forced Fomin to declare: “The informational complexes of deceased people act as counterparties of the spiritualists.continue to exist after the death of a person and even retain self-consciousness."
What experiments are we talking about? This refers, for example, to the experiments of the psychologist-hypnotist V. Raikov, who received truly phenomenal results. His experimental subjects, in a state of deep hypnosis, acquired the character traits and demeanor of long-dead people, although they did not know anything about them in life, and had no similarities with their inherent personal characteristics. So the fundamental possibility to read and use some information "from the other world", apparently, exists.
At the beginning of this essay, I cited an excerpt from the parody text of the satirist: “The ghost is the custom in the Middle Ages to walk outside of your body. It does not exist now …"
But something otherworldly spirits do not want to stay in the Middle Ages. Or is the Middle Ages unwilling to part with people? Or the unknown is revealed to us by some bottomless edge, near which art, cultural history, natural sciences walk, and the eternal mystery continues to remain unsolved. It's good that we giggle less at things that are difficult to comprehend and become more tolerant, more attentive to what we used to be ready to throw out of the door in our mindlessness.
Author - Vadim Orlov