Memory of Culture
The development of society and the development of culture, including art, is possible because man and mankind retain in their memory what happened in past centuries, what is open, known, became known.
Memory resists oblivion, destroying the power of time.
Memory is a necessary condition for the self-awareness of the individual. A person is only a person when he knows who he is and where he comes from, whose son he is and where his homeland is, to whom he owes his life. Knowledge of this gives rise to a sense of responsibility to other people, connects a person with the past and the future. The loss of memory leads to the loss of ideas about oneself, to the loss of one’s own self.
This understanding is important not only for people who create art, because artistic creativity is always individual, but also for all others, because the perception of art is also individual, personal. This is also creativity. However, one can not minimize the danger of historical
In the novel Chingiz Aitmatov’s “Burannyi polustanik” tells the legend of the mankurt, a man who knowingly and severely deprived of memory.
“Mankurt did not know who he was, where he was from a tribe, he did not know his name, he did not remember his childhood, his mother’s father – in short, mankurt did not realize himself as a human being. He was the equivalent of a wordless creature and therefore absolutely obedient and safe. Moncourt, like a dog, recognized only his masters. He did not enter into fellowship with others, all his thoughts were reduced to the quenching of the womb. Other concerns he did not know. He did the work diligently, sl and by steadily “(9; 106).
As can be seen from the legend, the lack of memory turns into a man’s loss of himself, turns a man into a working animal, which in itself is a tragedy. But in the novel this tragedy engenders others. Seeking mother’s mother tries to awaken his consciousness, to recall in memory some memories of childhood.
Unconsciousness turns into a crime.
The peculiarity of human memory is that it is not only natural-natural (such a memory is in all living beings), but socio-cultural. And culture, especially artistic culture, art is an experience of understanding, a person’s comprehension of himself, the history of the development of the human spirit. This involves knowing the history of your family, your country, the peoples of the world, for all these are integral elements of a person’s spiritual culture.
We almost lost the knowledge and preservation of family history and only begins to revive. But this starts to form a personality. It is no coincidence that the mother of the unhappy mankurt, awakening his memory, persistently repeats his father’s name. It is no accident that the cemetery where the dead mother rests will become sacred to her people.
Respect for the memory of ancestors is an important element of folk culture.
Two feelings are marvelously close to us, In them the heart finds food;
Love for native ashes, Love for fatherly coffins Life-giving relic! The earth would be dead without them.
Memory of the past is stored in cultural monuments. These are architectural structures of artistic value or associated with the activities of outstanding personalities, with important historical events. This is folk songs and folk art. They keep history and culture, originality and peculiarities of the country and peoples inhabiting it.
The culture of the people itself is determined by its attitude to these and other natural monuments of culture. And not only to those whose historical and artistic significance is officially recognized, but to all manifestations of cultural activity of people in the past and present.
“If a person does not even like to look at old photographs of his parents at least occasionally, he does not appreciate the memory of them left in the garden they cultivated in things that belonged to them, so he does not like them.” If a person does not like old houses, old streets, even if they are poor, it means that they have no love for their city, if a person is indifferent to the monuments of his country’s history, then he is indifferent to his country, “argues D. C in his last book Letters on the Good Likhachev (10, 150).
A person who does not know his past is forced to re-define himself and his place. Without roots, without a historical past, he can not feel the future and lives only for today.
Means of storing and transferring the experience of the past are many: writing, book printing, the books themselves, which make it possible to recreate the image written by the writer in his imagination. A language that preserves and transmits from generation to generation all knowledge, all the wisdom accumulated over the centuries. All without exception, art forms, each in its own way, preserves and transmits spiritual values, eternal, unshakable moral values of mankind. This determines the importance of such elements of artistic culture as libraries, book depositories, museums, reading, concert and exhibition halls, art galleries and other cultural institutions where art is not only stored or collected, but also provides the opportunity, creates conditions for readers’ perception, listeners, spectators.
In the quiet halls of museums and art galleries, the everyday and artistic culture of the past opens to us; objects and things created by the hands of a person, a visible image of the person himself, his face, “souls invisible signs” (N. Zabolotsky), transferred to the canvas, images of heroes and outstanding figures of different eras. Visiting the museum is always a holiday for the soul, food for reflection, comparison, the discovery of the richness of life, the commonality of the past with the present.
Music – an art that does not know linguistic and state borders, unites all people, no matter at what time they lived. “It gives us a pure expression of the soul, the secrets of the inner life of man, who accumulate and roam in the heart for a long time before coming out,” said Romain Rolland, a concert hall in which many people listen to music at the same time, Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and other great composers, as it were, erase the boundaries of time, they are written for a long time and at different times, just as people need them, as well as the moment of their creation. Listening to them, we involuntarily find ourselves close to that old time, people who lived then.
Such a sense of community by its own means gives the theater. Plays written in different epochs, sound modern. So today people are worried about the same problems as before. Read again, they are necessary.
So, each generation takes from the previous accumulated spiritual values, preserves them in its memory and, enriching, transmits the following.
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