Local meaning. Universal parochialism - a generic disease of Western civilization

The tragic events that began in Ukraine at the end of last year, 2013, and, unfortunately, continue to this day, have some very striking features worthy of careful consideration.

On the one hand, the bloody events in Ukraine are what can be called a rebellion against culture as such. On the other hand, this is another attack, an attack by the Western world on the Russian world. How did the European elites considered cultured and the crowds of primitive “raguli” come together in a single impulse against the Russian world, ecstatically dancing in a ritual dance called “Khtoneskache - that Muscovite?”.

On the one hand, they are connected by the old and strong “pan-slave” relationship. This was rightly pointed out in his speech on the “Direct Line” on April 17, 2014 (1h 26 meeting), our President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin: “The western parts of Ukraine were partially located in Czechoslovakia (within modern borders), partly in Hungary (Austria-Hungary), partly in Poland. And nowhere and never residents of these areas were not full citizens of these countries.... The fact that they were second-class people in these countries was somehow forgotten. But somewhere there, in the soul, it is buried deep in them. This is the roots of this nationalism". Well, a faithful serf - like a faithful dog, cannot but fulfill the command of his master. And the teams, as everyone knows, have been received more than once. What kind of "lords" from Western Europe and America did not stay on the Kiev Maidan Nezalezhnosti! Here and Victoria Nuland with the famous cookies was an allegory of the sweet Western life. Here, too, Catherine Ashton, again no more than allegorically, showed the beauty of this same life. Here, the phantom Senator from the United States, John McCain, allegorically depicted the mental power of the entire North American continent. And the German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, without any allegorism, showed himself to be an official pederast, clearly indicating the path that the young Ukrainian democracy should take.

Yes, the “pan-slave” relationship is evident. But what can explain the persistence of these relations, the voluntary readiness for suicide on the part of the "serfs" and their amazing gullibility towards their Western "lords"? It seems that the fact is that both the “serfs” and their “lords”, for all the difference in external brilliance, are quite similar internally in terms of one deep quality, the name of which is “parochiality”. What it is?

Synonyms for the word "parochial" are the following words: deafness, denseness, provinciality, provinciality, naivety, backwardness, peripherality, rusticity etc .

We will not be mistaken if we say that shtetlness is due to the limited consciousness caused by the isolation of the individual to what he already knows, with a complete denial of the existence of what goes beyond the circle of concepts he has mastered.

Such an individual is proud of what he has learned, or rather, appropriated. That is, only by what exists in his "town" - a closed area of ​​​​space, knowledge, interests, information, ideas, etc. In other words, he is proud of what is intended for exclusive use “only for himself”, only that which seems to him beneficial and serves to exalt this individual in his own eyes. This is all that, as it seems to him, confirms the correctness, righteousness, holiness, the immutability of his own opinions, views, habits. The opposite, which at least undoubtedly points to the opposite qualities of this subject, is declared by him as if not existing, false, invented, not worthy of the attention of a sane person who, by definition, must agree with the bearer of small-town consciousness. All those who disagree - get out of the way and out of life, because they are obviously "not worthy of life on earth," as the Afghan ulema theologians, close to Osama bin Laden, deigned to put it around 2000. It seems to the small-town individual that God only listens to him. Statements by American politicians that "the declaration of independence of Crimea and the declaration of independence of Kosovo are completely different things" fit into the classical framework of parochialism. Or statements that "the events on the Kiev Maidan and the events in the American Ferguson are not the same thing." The subject, struck by parochialism, is ready without hesitation to allow himself what for others he considers a terrible crime.

In the intellectual field, shtetlness manifests itself as doctrinairism, which, according to the definition of an old dictionary, is “narrowness of thought, a stubborn unwillingness to reckon with the facts of reality; reasoning based on abstract propositions and not verified by facts.

It was the West that became the main supplier of religious sects. No wonder - after all, in the spiritual life shtetl manifests itself as sectarianism or heresy. “Sectarianism - 1. The general name of religious associations (sects) that broke away from the dominant church. // trans. unfold The narrowness and isolation of the views of people who are limited to their petty group interests» . The relationship between sectarianism and doctrinairism is obvious. We can say that sectarianism is doctrinairism in the field of dogma. The word "heresy", which comes from the Greek αἵρεσις - " choice, direction, school, teaching, sect," speaks for itself, since it explains that all these directions, schools, teachings, sects appear as a result of the fact that someone makes a choice of what is desirable from all the existing diversity. An indispensable element in the technology of creating heresy is the selection of some finite part of the infinite variety of all that exists and ignoring everything else, which is essentially infinite. Small-townness makes us renounce the infinite diversity of the world in favor of our own limitations and narrowness. Small-townness is expressed in the desire to “bend” the God-created world, changeable in its infinite diversity, under its unchanging rigidity and limitations.

If you look deep into this phenomenon, then it is necessary to recognize the fight against God as its root, an attempt to isolate yourself from God, who tires a limited and selfish created being with His infinite diversity. In the religious field, that is, in the field of man's relationship to God, parochialism was expressed in idolatry. Instead of a relationship with the eternal, immense, unknown God, the idolater chooses a relationship with a self-made, and therefore vulgarly understandable idol. It is tiresome for an individual who is struck by the parochialism of religious consciousness to deal with God, Whom one must obey. The small-town individual wishes to have a god who would obey the small-town individual. Such a "god" becomes a work of small-town consciousness, replacing the true, Living God for the small-town individual. This product is an idol, an idol, an idol.

Idolatry did not stand still. Starting with the manufacture of primitive idols, it subsequently developed to the creation of mental idols, the most dangerous of which are false teachings about the true God, false interpretations of the true Divine revelation. Examples of such idols are the perverted understanding of the Law of Moses by the modern Pharisees of Christ, which served as the basis for the current Talmudism. Roman Catholicism, who wished to replace God, who became a man, with a deified man, who holds the office of bishop of the city of Rome. Wisdom of Protestant "theologians" who continue the tradition of Roman scholastic theology. Human philosophies are “understandable” by the sinful human mind, since it recognizes in them “its own” and “loves its own” (John 15:19), sinful understanding. These sophistications are the “god” who obeys his creator in everything. The world, which has fallen away from its Creator and “lies in sin,” is afflicted with the disease of parochialism, and therefore it hates both its Creator and all who follow Him. Christ Himself says to His disciples: “If the world hates you, know that it hated me before you” (John 15:18).

The current revolutionary hatred in Ukraine, as well as the entire Western European civilization, is boiled down in the Vatican cauldron, which is thoroughly saturated with parochialism, which F. M. Dostoevsky beautifully described in The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor: “Oh, we will allow them to sin, they are weak and powerless, and they will love us like children because we allow them to sin. We will tell them that every sin will be expiated if it is done with our permission; we allow them to sin because we love them, and we will take the punishment for these sins, so be it. And we will take it upon ourselves, and they will adore us as benefactors who bear their sins before God.” Permission to sin pleases both the current Ukrainian Svidomites and the Western-oriented "elite". It is not for nothing that one of these “elites”, who is especially distinguished by his craving for “permitted” sin, said: “... if you are not Ukrainians, then get out! .. If you are not Ukrainians, you do not hear God!" . Therefore, it is not surprising that both the Western European "elite" and the Western European "raguli" are so unanimous in their anti-Russian hysteria. Russia, despite all the sins of its citizens, does not recognize the doctrine of “permitted sin” and in the Ukrainian tragedy fulfills the words of God: “Save those taken to death, and will you really refuse those condemned to death?” (Prov. 24, 11). The West, on the contrary, gave the evil shtetlism of the Svidomites its “permission” to kill with impunity all those who did not accept the values ​​of the Kyiv junta. At the same time, she is deeply indignant at the fact that Russia opposes the desire of the executioners. The local doctrinaire is absolutely not ready for this, it sincerely revolts him.

The small-town doctrinaire is not ready for the fact that tomorrow God can offer him something that is not in his small town, and even more so - to leave this familiar place. In this regard, he is the complete opposite of the father of all believers, Abraham, who, at the command of God, left his country, his people and set off towards the unknown, strengthened only by hope in God. The local doctrinaire does not want to hear from God: "go out of your land, from your kindred, and from your father's house [and go] to the land that I will show you" (Genesis 12:1). In the inner life, this is expressed in the rejection of repentance, which means the rejection of habitual but destructive sin, in the rejection of self-condemnation, which means the recognition of one's own imperfection and calls for efforts to change oneself. In a word, spiritual parochialism is disobedience to our Creator, Who calls us from the familiar swamp of our own sinfulness to the Heavenly Fatherland we have left for the sake of sin - our true home, unknown to the inveterate sinner.

Diverse parochialism permeates the entire Western culture, which grew up on the juices of Roman Catholicism, which most ambitiously declared the manifesto of universal parochialism, declaring the bishop of the city of Rome none other than the "head of the Church of Christ" and "vicar of God on earth", ignoring the absolutely clear evidence that "Christ is the head of the church" (Eph. 5:23). The Western part of the Church has refused to deal with the Living God, Who cannot be enclosed in a rigid, immovable frame of one’s own mental constructions, Who “does not listen to sinners” (John 9, 31), but Whom a sinner must obey in order to be saved. And such a framework is a necessary requirement of mental shtetlness, which requires that everything everywhere be “like our little place”, that instead of the Living, Unknown God, there would be self-made, understandable and obedient to their creators idols everywhere. Small-townness declares its place "above all." In Nazi Germany, it sounded like "Deutschlandüberalles", in today's unfortunate Ukraine it was expressed in the parodic-small-town "Ukraina naponad mustache".

Small-townness is not ready to meet life, because life is not going to fit into the prepared coffin of the framework of small-town thinking. Only the corpse of life can be placed in this coffin, which for this must be killed, forbidding it to contradict the clumsy schemes of small-town thinking. And if life cannot be killed, then it is expelled, and instead of it an idol is placed in the prepared coffin - an artificial creation, somewhat reminiscent of life and, unlike it, in everything in agreement with any wishes of a small-town doctrinaire, heretic, sectarian.

This, obviously, is similar to representatives of the Western European “elite” and Ukrainian “raguli”, merging in a single ecstasy of hatred for Russia, which, unlike them, is always ready for changes offered by life, and has not become bogged down in the dead schemes that are so characteristic of Western doctrinaire thinking. “All countries border on each other, and Russia borders on Heaven” - these words of a Western poet probably mean that life in Russia largely depends not on human opinions and desires, not on human agreements with its neighboring countries, but from the will of God, from the eternal covenant with Christ. In Russia, more than in other countries, it is obvious that "man proposes, but God disposes," that everything happens "not as you want, but as God wills." This proximity, sometimes involuntary, unexpected, of Russia to God, greatly irritates the shtetl doctrinaires. Probably, this is precisely the root of the eternal Western Russophobia, or rather, Russophagy - the desire to “devour”, destroy, exclude Russia from the conditions that determine the conditions of reality, which the shtetl doctrinaire wants to build according to his will, according to his own understanding.

Western doctrinaires were not the first to proclaim parochialism as the norm. They only gave parochialism the paradoxical status of an ecumenical phenomenon, declaring the bishop of the city of Rome the Ecumenical High Priest, and after that, the ecumenical obligation to submit to the so-called Western. "Christian world" headed by this "universal high priest". They had predecessors who, blinded by the idea of ​​their spiritual parochialism, refused to accept their own Savior, proclaimed by the prophets, whom they honored in words. Not only refused to accept. But they also achieved a shameful, painful execution in order to convince themselves that they had allegedly achieved the death of a criminal and a villain. They achieved His execution not because they were convinced of His guilt, but, on the contrary, because they were confident in His righteousness, which infinitely surpassed their own self-made, small-town, imaginary righteousness. According to their own picture of the world, they were supposed to occupy the top of the pedestal of "champions of holiness." But contrary to their doctrine, there appeared one whose mere presence destroyed all their constructions and philosophies. Small-town doctrinairism cannot endure such an insult and always requires the physical, real, actual destruction of an opponent who does not agree with it.

The root of Western hatred for Russia is an outgrowth of the root from which the Pharisees' hatred of Christ grew, prompting them to commit the most terrible crime in the entire history of mankind - Deicide. But even those who have committed it, God does not close the path to salvation. True, the condition for accepting it turns out to be unbearably difficult for many - you need to give up what is lovingly accumulated “for sebe”, that is, give up your spiritual shtetlness, from your sinful self for the sake of finding yourself godly, in other words - to repent of your unrighteousness before God, which had previously been falsely accepted as righteousness.

Western culture fostered by the Vatican is too deeply imbued with spiritual and intellectual parochialism. This is also expressed in those areas that directly relate to Western religious life, both Catholic and Protestant, that is, in the relationship of Western man to God. This is also expressed in relation to Western man and the entire Western civilization, both to man and to the world. What exactly does this mean? Here are some of the most striking examples.

In church life:

The ancient desire to ascribe unique properties to the bishop of the city of Rome, allegedly elevating him not only above any other archpastor, but also above the entirety of the Church of Christ, which later was expressed in the adoption of dogmas on the primacy and infallibility of the bishop of the city of Rome;

The unauthorized inclusion in the text of the Creed of an additive about the descent of the Holy Spirit not only from God the Father, but “also from the Son” (filioque), which later, despite the legal resistance of the prudent part of the Western Church, was imposed from political motives as an official dogma and put the beginning of Western uninspired theology, based on human momentary reasoning;

Scholastic theology, based on considerations of the human mind rather than on Divine Revelation. In addition to the well-known hobbies for Aristotle and other ancient learning, Thomas Aquinas, for example, in his “works refers to the “rabbi Moses”, revealing his deep acquaintance with the “Mentor” . We are talking about the famous 12th-century Talmudic scholar Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (1135-1204), also known as Maimonides or Rambam, and his famous work, “the wonderful philosophical manifesto of Judaism“ Morenevuchim ”(“ Nastanik of the Lost ) ”;

Protestant theology, which chose as its main principle the assertion that in order to know the truth, it is enough to read Scripture alone (solascriptura) and “sound mind” (!) For a correct (!) understanding of it. What actually proclaimed the sufficiency of human sinful forces for the knowledge of God. In fact, this was expressed in the creation of a huge number of different opinions about God, that is, mental idols - "God substitutes" adapted to one or another theological mind;

In secular life, these distortions of Western church life have consistently led to the following phenomena, the root of which is the same as in Western church deviations - the exaltation of a person and his mental abilities and forgetting that both a person and his abilities lose all meaning in isolation from Source of Life, Reason, Truth - God:

Humanism, which gave rise to the Renaissance and Enlightenment. In fact, it is man-godism, the soil of which was the scholastic way of reasoning with admixtures of teachings frankly alien to Christianity, from which even the scholastics did not disdain to draw muddy worldly wisdom;

Western European philosophy, the largest representative of which Immanuel Kant expressed the manifesto of religious parochialism with the famous phrase: "God is not a being outside of me, but only my thought";

Evolutionary philosophy, which was accepted as a supposedly "scientific" theory, which, as a supra-scientific philosophical paradigm, subjugated Western European science, which became the "servant of evolutionism";

The current concept of the so-called. "universal values", which proclaimed the totality of the theomachic perversions of human nature as the most important "values".

And the last stroke that paints a picture of the universal shtetlness is the ugly staged action now being performed on the long-suffering Ukrainian land, around which the entire godless universal shtetl performs the vile ritual dance of death, declaring its autonomy from God and unwillingness to live according to His laws, calling for the kingdom antichrist - the universal shtetl god, to whom these shtetl doctrinaires are ready to joyfully give all honor and worship, thanks for the fact that he "allowed them to sin", without thinking that this "permission" is nothing more than a bait that captivates not wishing to renounce the sin of man into the terrible abyss of eternal perdition.

Archpriest Alexy Kasatikov , rector of the temple in the name of the icon of the Mother of God "Joy of All Who Sorrow" in Krasnodar, confessor of the Scientific and Methodological Missionary Center under the Yekaterinodar and Kuban diocese

Ragul, rogul(pl. raguli, roguli, female ragulikha, rogulikha) - a slang word, a derogatory nickname with the meaning "a primitive person, an uncultured peasant." (Wikipedia).

ASIS Synonym Dictionary. V.N. Trishin. 2013.

A complete dictionary of foreign words that have come into use in the Russian language. - Popov M., 1907.

Explanatory dictionary of the Russian language, edited by T. F. Efremova

“An outstanding master of abuse of the classics and obscenities on stage, Honored Art Worker of the Russian Federation Roman Viktyuk, who feeds on mold in Moscow - or represents this mold himself, demands from the citizens of the DPR and LPR, due to his own high reputation as a native of Lvov: “.. .if you are not Ukrainians, then get out!.. If you are not Ukrainians, you do not hear God!”. (Yuri Serb. To the question of the curability of the Ukrainian brain. Russian folk line)

“Vasily Nikolaevich Muravyov, a successful businessman, millionaire, traveled abroad on business. After one of the trips, he was met in St. Petersburg by a personal coachman and took him to an apartment. On the street, Vasily Nikolaevich saw a peasant sitting on the pavement, who loudly repeated: - Not as you want, but as God wills! Vasily Nikolaevich found out that he had sold the last horse in the city, but the money was taken from him, as he was weak from hunger and could not resist the offenders. Seven children, a wife and a father, were left in the village, sick with typhus. Deciding to die, the peasant sat down on the pavement and repeated as if to himself: - Not as you want, but as God wills! Vasily Nikolaevich went with him to the market, bought a pair of horses, a cart, loaded it with food, tied a cow to it and handed everything over to the peasant. He began to refuse, not believing his luck, to which he received an answer: - Not as you want, but as God wills! Vasily Nikolaevich came home. Before going to his wife, he called a hairdresser. He invited him to sit in an armchair, but Vasily Nikolaevich excitedly walked around the room, saying aloud: "Not the way you want, but the way God wills." Suddenly the hairdresser fell on his knees and confessed that he wanted to kill him and rob him. After that, Vasily Muravyov, in the future Elder Seraphim, distributed most of his fortune and made a contribution to the Alexander Nevsky Lavra ”- this is how St. Seraphim of Vyritsky converted to the monastic path.

Rabbi Yosef Telushkin. Jewish World / Per. from English. N. Ivanova and Vl. Vladimirova - M.: Jerusalem: Bridges of Culture, Gesharim, 2012 - 624 p., ill., p. 144.

Ibid, p. 142.

Kant I. Religion within the limits of only reason (translated by N. M. Sokolov, A. A. Stolyarov) // Kant I. Treatises. SPb., 1996., S. 216.

ABOUT LOCAL THINKING

In Chapter 4, looking back on the disappearance of previous civilizations, I easily became disillusioned with what I have been doing, what I have been doing all my life.

How can one not come to disappointment and not become a pessimist, when all 4 races of humanoid creatures have disappeared before us and, logically, our 5th race should someday disappear, and we are already 7 billion people.

LIFE IS IN VAIN, WORK IS IN vain,

WE DISAPPEAR EVERYTHING AND SO EVERYTHING IS CLEAR.

It's amazing how easily and simply the tricky time manipulates and speculates on the feelings and emotions of a person.

As soon as a person lives in the past and the past, he immediately becomes a pessimist and is disappointed with himself in the present and the present.

As soon as I looked into the past for a moment and saw the disappearance of previous civilizations, I immediately came to the hopeless conclusion that our civilization would soon disappear. Disappointment began to appear and the pessimistic syndrome of speculations of my uncontrolled mind began and logical conclusions in this direction instantly turned me into a weak, helpless, insignificant, pessimistic creature, a bore and a whiner.

Each time moment has its own space, i.e. a specific place of manifestation, therefore, each time moment is specifically local, and thinking about a specific time moment becomes local. A person who thinks in a small town has a small-town thinking, at least about time, at least about the place of manifestation of a specific time moment.

An ordinary person has small-town thinking, and in order to have a global, transcendental thinking, one must become unusual.

In order to think globally, I need to clearly see myself in all moments of the past, present and future time and not only talk separately about the past and see only the hopeless past, which makes me an insignificant, weak, pitiful pessimist, whiner and bore.

In order for me to become an absolute optimist again, I must clearly see all the pictures of my optimistic future, pure, spiritual, immortal, which fills me with the novelty of a new spiritual immortal life.

Only and everything?

Yes, that's all!

Everything that I do in the present, I do for the past and for the future, but it will no longer be useful for the past, and therefore it is meaningless, but it will be useful for the future, therefore my work has great meaning.

For the present in the past, all 4 races have disappeared and from the past there is a strong pull of hopelessness, but for the future in the present they have not disappeared, but have changed and continue to live in our fifth race. Our fifth race will not disappear anywhere either, it will simply change and continue its existence in the sixth race. All my information is needed not by the people of the past, but by the people of the future. what I write and upload to the Internet is necessary for the people of the future, i.e. the same earthlings, but only younger, very young, specifically the first newly born generation.

People of my generation do not need my information, because they have their own rigid opinion on everything, based on personal experience of trial and error, and it is quite difficult to convince such people of the opposite and, in fact, it is not necessary to do this. So, I upload information to the Internet for the people of the future, and not for the people of the present.

Thinking about the people of the future, and these are still only children, I become infected with optimism and the desire to live and create for them, to help them, although they still don’t know about it, they are still very small.

It is easier for people of my generation NOT to UNDERSTAND me than to UNDERSTAND what, in fact, is happening, for this reason I do not communicate with them. Children, due to their immaturity, cannot understand me either, so for now I find myself in a deaf isolation, which is a great blessing for me, because it helps me to calmly write, print, upload to the Internet and completely take care of myself, live for myself, but for the sake of the people.

It turns out that in order to be a pessimist or an optimist, you need reasons that make a person such - this is the past and future time from the position of a present person.

What to do with present tense?

The present time is the essence of the causelessness of the manifestation of oneself for the causes of the past and future time. In the present, you can live JUST SO, without bothering with the causes of past and future time, but first you need to understand these reasons.

I'll tell you a secret: all people in the present moment live JUST SO, for no reason, and the reasons appear only for the past and future time, if the look comes from the present.

What if it's from the past?

What if it's from the future?

A person can feed himself with memories from the past and, thinking about the future, feed himself with dreams, plans, goals for the future and for the future, thus. live like a pessimist or an optimist, i.e. constantly be on the emotional supply of a negative or positive plan.

A person can know the essence of pessimism and optimism, and this knowledge is enough for him to be neither one nor the other for himself and for his environment. He will simply create, do something, knowing why and for whom he does everything, being significant, not being significant for his future.

It becomes only a point of NOTHING HERE AND NOW for EVERYTHING, as for NOTHING.

At this point, he finds for himself a convenient, comfortable, cozy place of stay, where nothing and no one bothers him, where it is always quiet, calm. Everything is harmonized, balanced, balanced.

Tell yourself and understand how your feelings and emotions are affected by past, present and future time? How affected are you by these temporary moments?

What effect do they have on your mood and well-being?

What moment in time makes you a pessimist or an optimist? I think it does not interfere with understanding this in order to become the master of time, its master and not succumb to the provocations of the cunning time.

Many, including officials of the highest rank, sin with small-town thinking. Education, science, politics, economics suffer from it. Small-townism takes care of its own, selfish interests, hiding under the guise of concern for the interests of the public. Some companies are organized all the time, without understanding the essence of the problem. They begin to fight against smoking - the number of alcoholics increases, the fight against alcoholism leads to an increase in drug addicts, the fight against drug addiction leads to an increase in Internet addicts, gamers, selfie lovers. The fight is against the effect, not the cause. And the reason is the fear that a person cannot cope with and from which he tries to escape. It is necessary to make society normal so that a person feels protected in it and his future is predictable, then there will be no reason to run away from the “terrible” reality. There are very few people who think holistically, strategically, and no one teaches this, because there is no knowledge of the topic. Internet addiction is becoming the problem of the century all over the world. People, plunging into the virtual world, stop developing and become dumb. This also applies to politicians who sit in social networks for a long time. There is a detachment from reality and its misunderstanding. This is even worse than small-town thinking, because it does not exist at all. Small-town thinking is useful when it solves problems at the everyday level, and when it comes to solving global problems, it causes irreparable damage to their solution. Development occurs, but very slowly and with drops from one extreme to another. With the help of small-town thinking, it is easy to lead the country away from the right path of development, directing it along the wrong path, by giving some small-town idea an increased significance. And it is difficult to resist this, because most people do not think in holistic categories. They prefer to be thought for by others…. Chaos reigns in the economy, because every "parochial" figure drags the blanket over himself, trying to snatch his interest and caring little about the interests of the state. Even if he wanted to take care of the interests of the state, due to his small-town thinking, he could not do this. Each economist has his own truth, which he seeks not to prove by persuasion, but to overwhelm his opponent with his "iron" arguments. The same applies to medicine and education. Everyone, it seems, is trying to introduce some kind of innovation, but there is little sense from them, and therefore development is stalling .... Politicians, entrepreneurs, managers, scientists, diplomats, ministers from the healthcare and education sectors need to learn to master balanced thinking, which allows them not only to think holistically, but also to be highly spiritual in order to work for the good of the country. Spirituality is inherent in the most balanced thinking, which is really beneficial for a person, so there is no need to agitate for it .... Stabilizes the balance of vision, which includes the concentration of attention and its dispersal (two in one). Vision forces you to see and recognize the truth and follow it. Not because “it’s necessary”, but because the truth allows you to perceive reality directly, without distortion and avoid mistakes. Recognition of the truth allows you to correct the mistakes of the past and, when comprehending reality, not to do a huge unproductive work that is done when self-deception is used. Equilibrium thinking allows you to think in essence and it makes time one, which at times increases the brain's ability to comprehend reality (the mechanism for increasing the efficiency of the brain is described in many articles). Holistic thinking allows you to cover everything at once, to feel the relationship of everything with everything and at the same time to be at any particular point, penetrating consciousness to its essence and at the same time, without losing touch with reality. This is a completely different way of thinking, the potential of which is inherent in man by nature. With holistic thinking, the interests of ego and altruism are not separated, but intertwined and complement each other .... A person who has balanced thinking will see a holistic picture of the economy, politics, healthcare, science, the army, sports, education, and build everything in such a way that everything brings maximum benefit both for the whole and for the particular. Sustained attention (vision) allows you to stop the emotional movement in the head and then the phenomenon of "over-conductivity" occurs, in which a thought can instantly move in space - memory. Information becomes neutral and it can fit in the head in any quantity and shuffle in any combination, and instantly. Completely liberated emotions, adapting to the situation, with a pure, not clouded by emotional chaos, consciousness. Let the world spin, spin, explode, for consciousness it will always remain motionless and be perceived without distortion. Such a perception excludes shyness from one extreme to another. Vision allows you to constantly disperse emotional fixations (destroy emotional puzzles), so that emotions are always in a state of “emotional broth”, from which they will be extracted according to the situation. This can be visualized using the example of a lion, a tiger, and predators that do not have a dominant fear. They are completely relaxed and at the same time clearly control the situation and act where necessary and exactly as much as necessary. No extra movement. They operate on meaningful intuition, which reads information directly, without preliminary calculations. People, for the most part, have forgotten how to think like that .... Schoolchildren are accused of not reading enough and that the level of education is falling. One of the reasons is uncertainty about the future, fear of the future and the present, and running away from fear in social networks, where you can realize your desires and increase self-esteem. As a result, the connection with reality is reduced, attention becomes unstable, and therefore, school material is poorly absorbed. Persistently disturbed balance weakens the immune system, which worsens health and reduces stress resistance. Pay attention to teenagers, how many of them are addicted to selfies, gadgets, phones. You constantly need to call someone to say something “about nothing” and take pictures of yourself all the time to amuse your pride. And if you still take a good picture, put it on the Internet and get a lot of likes for it, then this is the limit of happiness. “I was seen, I became famous, I got fame…. And if you try and become popular, you can earn a lot of money. Why try to learn when you can earn without any knowledge? Young people are not convinced by talking about the harm caused by excessive interest in social networks. She needs to be in a trend, in a rut, in a common bunch, otherwise you will become uninteresting and you will be an outcast. You have to be on the crest of the wave. Why think about the bad, you need to live here and now, and enjoy it now, too, and not sometime. In reality, everything is bad, disgusting, terrible, but in the virtual world you can be a god, therefore, do not care about the exhortations of adults and live the way you want .... To save a teenager from Internet addiction (or some other), it is necessary to offer an alternative. Moreover, it is necessary to act ahead of the curve, and not wait until he becomes addicted. And the alternative is a balanced, holistic thinking that allows you to live a real, full life. It makes a person strong, humane, with high self-esteem, strong will, benevolent, highly spiritual, emotionally rich, stress-resistant, healthy in mind and body, reasonable. To do this, it is enough to redirect attention from your invented world - shells, to reality and learn to see it, and not imagine it, dragging it through the world of fear. The more relaxed you are, the more focused and vice versa. Steady attention does not strain, but relaxes, since reality becomes understandable, predictable and manageable, and therefore not scary. You can truly relax, only in a state of security .... Mestechkovo, by and large, is not profitable to think. Thinking holistically, you will quickly achieve what you want and will not be in a state of constant war with yourself and the world around you, as opposition will give way to cooperation. May 30, 2016

In the story with A.E. Yunitsky, two points are most remarkable for me: faith in the correctness of their own ideas and, at the same time, the impossibility of realizing these ideas in their homeland for decades.

We are talking about the scientist and inventor Anatoly Eduardovich Yunitskiy (born 1949). At one time, by the nature of journalistic activity, I had to meet with him. In pre-perestroika times, his idea of ​​creating a kind of “ring” around the Earth in near space, on which all the main industrial production could be located, caused most people, to put it mildly, to smirk and bewilderment. True, then not only the regional press wrote about Yunitskiy’s bold project, but also such authoritative popularizers of science as “Technology-Youth” or “Inventor and Rationalizer”. In the same place, a special type of transport was also mentioned in general terms, which today is called STU - Yunitskiy's String Transport.

I will not go into details of the content of the idea itself - anyone who is interested can easily find information about this on the Internet. The main thing here, in my opinion, is that this is not a fantastic project of a crazy inventor in the style of Jules Verne, but, judging by the assessments of expert advice, a scientific development that is quite calculated and worthy of implementation with a huge economic effect. Yes, and Anatoly Eduardovich himself has two higher educations, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the author of 150 patented inventions. That is, a completely seasoned fighter for his intellectual property rights back in those pre-perestroika times.

But drawings and calculations are one thing, and a real pilot project is quite another. As soon as the opportunity arose, Yunitskiy created a self-supporting scientific and technical enterprise in the second half of the 1980s to promote his idea. Even running for deputies of local authorities. Then, over the decades, there will be many such commercial and semi-commercial structures with their own money or targeted grants.

But Anatoly Eduardovich never succeeded in building a testing ground for practical testing of his string transport in order to prove all its advantages in practice - neither in the 1990s in Belarus on a personal farm plot near Mozyr in the Gomel region, nor already in this century in Russia in Ozyory, Moscow region. Yes, projects have appeared for Sochi, and Khabarovsk, and for Stavropol, and for the Khanty-Mansiysk Okrug, and, finally, for Moscow and St. Petersburg. But these were only projects - "contracts of intent."

And in parallel, as stated in one of the STU press releases, “for the period 2005-2009. such countries as Australia, UAE, Canada, South Korea, Libya, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, China, Finland, Germany, Indonesia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, etc. have shown interest in STU developments.”

But why not Russia? Don't "homes" need "fast" and cheap roads? Aren't billions of rubles spent on transporting goods from one end of the country to the other? Or are there simply too many people who are interested in preventing really effective development from being implemented - from local "budget-sawers" to real monsters - multinational corporations? ..

In general, the sixty-year-old scientist, by and large, “gives up”: the company that owns all the author’s developments of the inventor Yunitskiy finally appears in 2011 in Cyprus in order to manage the implementation of the efficient Transnet transport project around the world from there. "Daughters" immediately begin to "grow up" in Australia, in Tver, somewhere else.

The story with Yunitskiy, it seems, is approaching a logical and not very joyful one - from the standpoint of the public and state good! - final.

Therefore, for me personally, two characteristic moments are noteworthy in this “eternal” theme of “unrecognized genius”. The first is the purposefulness of Anatoly Eduardovich and his belief that "the good (and, most importantly, economically profitable) work of his whole life" will come true sooner or later. And the second is a kind of “parochial” thinking of the “environment”, aimed at satisfying almost momentary needs. Moreover, sometimes it seems that this “parochialism” is simply imposed from the outside. Maybe by the same transnational corporations in order to get more brains out of this territory?

Р.S.: But, if you think about it, the situation with domestic creative pedagogy (the same TRIZ by G. Altshuller) is similar...

Where from the 15th-16th centuries. representatives of the local nobility invited Jews to settle in their villages and towns on relatively favorable terms. Most of these towns were in the developed eastern territories - in present-day Ukraine and Belarus.

Many of these settlements gradually turned into a kind of Jewish towns, the majority of whose inhabitants, by the nature of their activities (renting landlord estates and subleasing individual objects in them - taverns, mills, workshops, buying up agricultural products, peddling, various crafts), as well as way of life were closely connected with the countryside.

The peak of the development of the town is the time after the 1650s, after the end of Khmelnychyna and the Swedish invasion. The nobility made a concerted effort to restore their economic position by creating new market towns. The development of these shtetls coincided with the huge demographic growth of Polish Jewry. In 1500 the Polish-Lithuanian Jewish population was probably 30,000, and by 1765 it had grown to 750,000.

The hallmark of this Jewish population was its strong dispersion. In the 1770s, more than half of Polish Jews lived in hundreds of private towns owned by the nobility; about one third lived in villages. In many Polish cities, Christian guilds and the Catholic Church fought to reduce the right of residence for Jews.

After the partitions of Poland

This unity was broken with the partitions of Poland (after 1772) under the influence of the socio-economic and cultural characteristics of the states to which the Polish lands were assigned. In Prussia, the lifestyle characteristic of the town gradually disappeared, and in Austria, later Austria-Hungary (Galicia, Transcarpathia, Bukovina, Slovakia, to a lesser extent - Hungary proper and Bohemia, acquired specific features for each of the regions.

The construction of railroads and the growth of large urban centers helped create new regional and national markets that competed with the economic base of many townships. New peasant movements questioned the Jewish role in agriculture; there were cooperatives that competed with the townships. In addition, the growing urbanization of the peasants and the movement of Jews to the big cities that began in the second half of the 19th century led to the fact that the Jews became a minority in many cities where they previously dominated.

On the territory of the Russian Empire, the original way of the shtetl developed within the Pale of Settlement, including the Kingdom of Poland (since 1815), as well as Bessarabia (annexed to Russia in 1812), while in the rest of the Moldavian Principality (Moldova), shtetls developed from 1862 city ​​within Romania. Gradually, not only the former private towns of the Polish gentry, but also all small settlements of this type in Eastern Europe began to be called shtetl.

In Russia itself, small towns were primarily administrative centers rather than market towns, which many Russian officials saw as sinister springboards for Jewish corruption in the countryside. Russian policy toward the Jews often veered between a desire to change the Jews through assimilation and a determination to limit their contact with the indigenous population of Russia.

In 1791, Catherine II established the Jewish Pale of Settlement (formalized in 1835 by decree), limiting the Jewish population of Russia mainly to the former Polish provinces. The Congress of Poland had a separate legal status. While certain categories of Jews did eventually receive permission to leave the Pale of Settlement, the boundaries of which were somewhat expanded in Ukraine, these stay restrictions remained in place until 1917. On the eve of the First World War, about 94% of Russian Jewry (about 5 million people) still lived within the Pale of Settlement.

In Tsarist Russia in the late 19th - early 20th century

The Polish uprisings of 1830-1831 and 1863 severely weakened the Polish gentry, and thus their Jewish partners. The nobles also suffered from the abolition of serfdom. The economic basis of the towns received a serious blow.

Legally and politically, there was no such thing as a small town. What the Jews called a shtetl could be a city, town, settlement, village according to Polish, Russian or Austrian law. In 1875, the Russian Senate established the legal category "Mestochko" (small town), which, unlike the village, had a legal organization of townspeople known as philistine society. The status of a shtetl was determined by the Russian authorities at the provincial level. In a number of places, city self-government operated, others were subordinate to the administration of the nearest city.

The issue of recognizing the status of a township for a settlement acquired great importance for the Jews of Russia after the publication of the “Temporary Rules" (May 1882; did not apply to the Kingdom of Poland), which forbade Jews to settle, as well as to acquire and rent real estate in rural areas, that is, outside urban settlements, which included the places.

The local administration (mainly provincial governments), in an effort to further restrict the places of residence of Jews, began to arbitrarily rename shtetls into rural settlements. There was a flood of complaints to the Senate. The Senate, in a number of resolutions, opposed the arbitrariness of local authorities and established criteria for distinguishing shtetls from villages. The Senate also recognized that the natural growth of small-town settlements, at the same time, expands the territory available for Jewish settlement (Decree of June 14, 1896 in the case of Livshits).

But many settlements (officially considered even villages) that sometimes existed for centuries and were known as shtetls among the local population, as well as new ones that arose in the Pale of Settlement in places of lively trade, did not fall under these decrees. These villages, inhabited almost exclusively by Jews, were outlawed, and their fate depended entirely on the arbitrariness of the lower police authorities.

In order to legitimize these settlements, the government decided to withdraw them from the effect of the "Provisional Rules" and allow Jews to live freely in them. According to the Russian census of 1897, 33.5% of the Jewish population lived in "small towns", but the population of shtetls was probably much higher, since many cities were formally shtetls.

Opening of a Jewish hospital in Balta in 1899.

On May 10, 1903, the government allowed Jews to live in 101 villages, which actually became shtetls. The list of such settlements was supplemented several times, and in 1911 their number reached 299. But many settlements remained outside the list, which acquired the character of commercial and industrial towns.

In the 19th century, the center of gravity of Jewish life began to shift to the cities. But legal barriers to free movement in Russia, along with the rapid demographic growth of Eastern European Jewry, meant that shtetl populations continued to grow at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, despite massive migrations to new urban centers (Odessa, Warsaw, Lodz, Vienna) and emigration to the US and other countries. Many towns have adapted to changing circumstances, becoming centers of specialized production. In the shtetls, social and property inequality sharply increased, one of the reasons for which was the heavy competitive struggle caused by the overcrowding of the sharply increased population.

At the end of the 19th century - early 20th century the emancipation of the Jews, as well as the processes of industrialization and urbanization, shook the socio-economic foundations of life in the towns. In Russia, where restrictive laws against Jews continued to operate, the disintegration of the shtetl was hastened by anti-Jewish repressions, economic oppression, and pogroms.

A. Subbotin in a study of the economic state of the western and southwestern parts of the Russian Empire for 1887 (“In the Jewish Pale”, in 2 hours, St. Petersburg, 1888-90) showed the disastrous economic situation of Jewish artisans and merchants in small towns. Economic and socio-political difficulties, the conservatism and inertia of life in the town made it less and less attractive to the younger generation, among whom the fascination with revolutionary ideologies and movements grew.

It was in the shtetls that the self-consciousness of the broad Jewish masses was strengthened and the national and socialist Jewish movements were born. Young people from small towns rushed to the big cities of the Pale of Settlement, and often emigrated (most often to the United States of America). Many leaders of Zionism came from the shtetls of Eastern Europe, including D. Ben-Gurion, B. Katsnelson, I. Tabenkin, H. Weizmann, M. Dizengoff and others.

After the start of the five-year plans in 1928, the Soviet regime began to offer Jews more social mobility and educational opportunities. The new legislation changed many of the restrictions on "disenfranchised". Many Jews, especially young ones, began to leave the shtetls to work and study in big cities, including Moscow and Leningrad.

Despite persecution, many towns have retained to a large extent their Jewish character. In Ukraine and Belarus, the local communist authorities supported the Yiddish policy of promoting Yiddish in schools for Jewish children, and until the mid-1930s, Jewish children in these small towns could not only speak Yiddish at home, but also receive their primary education in Yiddish. Regardless of the shortcomings of the Communist Yiddish schools, they provided some reinforcement against assimilation, but parents realized that the path to higher education and advancement lay through Russian schools.

By the mid-1930s, many former shtetls began to adapt to the new socio-economic reality created by collectivization and five-year plans. They became centers for local handicraft production or served neighboring collective farms. Despite the fateful changes that these shtetls went through, the Jews who lived in them mostly spoke Yiddish and were much less likely to intermarry than their contemporaries in the big cities.

In interwar Eastern Europe

The town of Lakhva, Brest region, 1926.

The disintegration of the Austrian and Russian empires after World War I divided much of the shtetl Jewish population between the Soviet Union and several new states, the largest of which was the resurgent Polish Republic.

Holocaust

The Jewish inhabitants of most of the shtetls were exterminated during the Catastrophe of European Jewry. Residents of small towns found it more difficult to evacuate than residents of large cities. Their destruction changed the whole character of Soviet Jewry by eliminating its most nationally conscious and least absorbed elements of the surrounding culture.

Only minor remnants of Jewish shtetls after World War II survived for several decades in Romania, Moldavia, Transcarpathia, Lithuania and some other areas of Eastern Europe.

Life in the shtetls

For all their diversity, shtetls in Eastern Europe differ markedly from previous types of Jewish settlement in the diaspora in all countries - from Babylonia to France, Spain or Italy.

The concentration of Jews in one settlement

In other countries, Jews lived scattered among the entire population or, on the contrary, inhabited a certain part of the city or a Jewish street. Rarely do they form a majority. This was not the case in places where Jews sometimes made up 80% or more of the population. In many places, Jews occupied most of the city, especially along the streets, grouped around the central market. Poor Jews had to live farther from the center, and often non-Jewish farmers were concentrated in the peripheral streets in order to be closer to the land they cultivated.

Jewish life in compact settlements had an enormous psychological impact on the development of Eastern European Jewry, as did the language of the shtetl, Yiddish. Despite the inclusion of numerous Slavic words, the shtetl's Yiddish differs markedly from the languages ​​used primarily by the Jews' Slavic neighbors. While it would be a big mistake to see the shtetl as a completely Jewish world, without Gentiles, it is nonetheless true that Yiddish reinforced a deep sense of psychological and religious difference from non-Jews. Infused with allusions to Jewish traditions and religious texts, Yiddish has developed a rich reservoir of idioms and sayings that reflect the vibrant folk culture that is inseparable from the Jewish religion.

The Jews had their own classification of settlements. Yiddish distinguishes shtetl (שטעטל) - a town, shtetele (שטעטעלע) - a very small town, shtot (שטאָט) - a city, dorf (דאָרף) - a village, and yishev (ישעוו) - a tiny settlement in the countryside. A shtetl was a locality large enough to support the core network of institutions necessary for Jewish communal life: at least one synagogue, mikveh, cemetery, school, and a set of community associations that performed basic religious and communal functions. This was the key difference between shtetl and village, and shtetl Jews joked a lot about their village brethren.

The place was also marked by professional diversity. While other Jews in the diaspora often focused on a small set of professions, often defined by political restrictions, in shtetl Jewish professions ran the gamut from wealthy contractors and entrepreneurs to shopkeepers, carpenters, shoemakers, tailors, carters and water carriers. In some regions, Jewish farmers and villagers lived side by side. This amazing variety of professions contributed to the vitality of the small-town society and its cultural development. It also led to class conflicts and often painful social divisions.

The experience of living as a predominant culture at the local level, large numbers, its own language and professional diversity emphasized the special place of the shtetl in the form of a Jewish settlement of the diaspora. Centuries-old alienation from the surrounding non-Jewish environment, the economic and everyday way of life of the town with its limited opportunities for trade and handicraft activities, with its steady adherence to traditions and local communal authorities, in many respects shaped the peculiar image of Eastern European Jewry, its psychological make-up and features of its spiritual self-expression. The life of a Jew in the town was limited to the house, the synagogue and the market.

The city differed from the shtetl in that in the shtetl everyone knew each other, while in the city people were somewhat more anonymous. In Yisroel Askenfeld's satirical story "Dos sterntihl" (headband), the city differed from the town in that "everyone can boast that he greeted someone from a neighboring street, because he mistook him for a visitor." The new railroad could quickly turn the shtetl into a city, and the big city of Berdichev could become a "backwater town" because it was bypassed by the railroad.

Problems of everyday life

Sanitary conditions were often poor. Spring and autumn turned the dirt streets into a sea of ​​mud, and in the summer a terrible stench spread from untreated sewage, outbuildings, and hundreds of horses arriving on market day.

Often, the presence of family farms on the outskirts of the town limited the available space for expansion and led to an impossible density of buildings. Building codes did not exist. Small-town buildings were, as a rule, wooden, although the local " gvir"(rich man) could borrow and" moyer» (brick building) on ​​the market square. Fires were common and were a major theme in shtetl folklore and Yiddish literature about shtetls.

Educational facilities, especially for children from poor families, could be shockingly bad.

"Small-town"

The place was small enough that everyone there got a nickname. Society, as it were, established for everyone his place within himself. According to the memoirs of one woman about the 1930s, in her town there were people with the nicknames Red, Icon, Lousy, Belly, Hernia, Hunchback, Stutterer, Copperbeard, Crutch (one-legged), Outhouse (man with an unpleasant smell). There was Libicke the Old Maid - a married woman with children, who could not be forgotten that she married late.

The house (that is, the family with its patriarchal-traditional foundations) was the main social unit of the town. It most fully manifested Jewish love for children and pride in their successes, family solidarity, and enjoyment in the performance of religious rites. Family events (birth, circumcision, bar mitzvah, wedding, death) became the property of the entire community, which expressed approval or condemnation of any act of its members.

This communal control became one of the main regulating factors of self-government, which for centuries maintained observance of the instructions of the Halakha and monitored public order, dispensed with its own coercive organs and without resorting to the intervention of the police. But the same control began to be perceived as oppression and suppression of the individual with a change in social conditions, with the penetration of the trends of the outside world in the 19-20 centuries.

The widespread stereotype about the place as a harmonious community is misleading. Those with low levels of education and little money were constantly reminded of their lack of status. In this regard, women from poor families were at a particular disadvantage. However, it would also be wrong to accept uncritically the accusations and wide range of criticism from the Maskilim, Zionists, Soviet Jewish scholars that shtetl was a dying society, riven by hypocrisy, stupefying tradition and bitter class conflicts. The reality is much more complex, and the historical context and regional differences must be taken into account.

The social differences that divided the shtetl Jews were felt everywhere, from the synagogue to the marketplace. At the top of the social ladder were the "shine idn" - wealthy elites who maintained the institutions of the town and controlled their policies. In the synagogue, they usually sat at the east wall. Just below the "sheine idn" were the "balebatim" - the "middle class", whose shops and businesses did not make them rich, but gave them a measure of respect from society. Further up the social ladder were skilled artisans such as watchmakers and highly skilled tailors. In the lower part there were ordinary tailors and shoemakers, and then water carriers and cab drivers. Even lower were the beggars and marginal types that were in every town.

Gender roles in the town were, at first glance, quite simple. Men held positions of power. They controlled the congregation and, of course, the synagogue, where the women sat separately. Girls from poor families faced bleak prospects, especially if they could not find a husband. Behind the scenes, women, especially from wealthy families, often played key roles in the social and economic life of the town.

Women actually had some opportunity to learn to read and write. Religious and secular literature in Yiddish for them (and for poor, less educated men) included such traditions as "Tsene-Rene" (figurative translations and legends based on the Pentateuch), private individual prayers called "thinesh" and romances. The most popular Jewish writer of the 19th century in Eastern Europe was maskil Aizik Meyer Dik, who wrote didactic stories in Yiddish, and these were largely read by women.

Socio-political situation in the towns

The numerical superiority of the Jews in the shtetls rarely led to their local political power. They never controlled local government, although there were many ways they could bargain for their interests. In the Russian Empire, laws forbade Jews from holding leadership positions in local councils.

Places and the world around them

Market in Lyubcha (Grodno region) at the beginning of the 20th century.

The presence of a market was a defining characteristic of the town, and on market day the peasants began to flock to the town early in the morning. Hundreds of carts arrived and the Jews surrounded them to buy food that the peasants had to sell. With money in their pockets, the peasants then went to Jewish shops and taverns.

The market day was filled with a noisy cacophony of shouting and negotiation and bustle. Often, after selling a horse or a cow, peasants and Jews shook hands and drank together. Sometimes a fight broke out, and everyone ran to look at it. Having hundreds of horses standing around, especially on a hot summer day, gave the place an unforgettable smell. But the market day was the lifeblood of the town.

The market (market square) in shtetls was not only a source of income for merchants, artisans and intermediaries, but also a place where a meeting took place with a non-Jewish peasant - an alien and often hostile world to the shtetl. The Jews, with their cult of learning, who were literate without exception, faced a dark, illiterate mass. The village and the town had different, sometimes incompatible ethnographic features.

In hundreds of small Jewish communities surrounded by the Slavic rural hinterland, many of the customs - cooking, clothing, sayings and the eastern dialect of Yiddish itself - reflected the influences of the non-Jewish world. This is especially noticeable in the Jewish folklore of Ukraine, Moldavia and Poland (sayings and songs are full of Ukrainianisms, Polonisms and melos of these areas).

Jews and non-Jews, belonging to different religious and cultural worlds, also had personal connections that were often lacking in big cities. While each side held many negative stereotypes about the other, these stereotypes were broken by the reality of specific good neighborly ties. It was almost common for non-Jews to speak Hebrew, and even less unusual for Jews to speak a mixed language (Yiddish plus the vernacular).

The Jews of the shtetl with inner dignity endured the insults and contempt of the non-Jewish environment, paying him the same contempt. Even when relations with neighbors were friendly, the Jews of the shtetl had a constant fear (reinforced by the memory of past disasters) of an unexpected pogrom. Typically, the pogrom began in the marketplace and then spread to houses and synagogues.

Shtetl in Jewish culture

In Jewish literature and art, the theme of the shtetl occupies a central place. Since the middle of the 19th century, the place has become a cultural and literary term. This "image of the shtetl", in contrast to the "real shtetl", is often exclusively Jewish, a face-to-face community that has lived in Jewish space and time and that has preserved traditional Jewish life. In literature, in political and cultural speech, the "image of the shtetl" evoked many different reactions that ranged from parody and contempt to praise as a supposed bastion of pure "Yiddishkait" (Jewry).

As a brief symbol, the attitude towards the "image of the shtetl" was an indicator of the Jewish encounter with the dilemmas and traumas of modernity, revolution and Holocaust. After the destruction of Eastern European Jewry, shtetls became a frequent, if not the only, designation for the entire lost world of Eastern European Jewry.

A purely negative image of the shtetl in the new Yiddish and Hebrew literature developed during the Haskala period. Aizik Meyer Dick, Yisroel Axenfeld and Yitzchok Yoel Linetsky became extremely popular for their parodies and criticism of shtetl life. I. L. Gordon, Mendele Moher Sfarim and other writers of the older generation in their (mainly satirical) works depicted the ugliness and squalor of shtetl life, lack of rights, poverty and obscurantism; ridiculed the rich, seeking to pass for "good Jews."

Single-valued adjectives in Yiddish "kleinshtetldik" (literally "small-town") and in Russian "parochial" acquired a negative connotation as symbols of provinciality and narrow-mindedness.