In Crimea they are trying to save the park and the grave of the thinker Danilevsky
On the southern coast of Crimea, it is necessary to save from destruction the remains of a park on the site of the former estate of the philosopher Nikolai Danilevsky, where the grave of the thinker is located. Read about this in the material of political scientist Boris Mezhuev.
...Literary connoisseurs, of course, remember the wonderful short story by the great Argentine writer about a mysterious labyrinth garden with branching paths, each of which represented some kind of alternative flow of time. This garden in Borges's novel had a literary counterpart - a novel by the former governor of one of the Chinese provinces, Qu Peng, who retired from all affairs for thirteen years. In the novel he wrote, the text simultaneously contained several possible but opposite lines of plot development: “as soon as the hero of any novel finds himself faced with several possibilities, he chooses one of them, rejecting the rest; in Qu Peng's unresolved novel, he chooses everything at once. Thus, he creates various future times, which in turn multiply and branch. <…> in Qu Peng’s book all these outcomes are realized, and each of them gives rise to new forks. Sometimes the paths of this labyrinth intersect: you, for example, came to me, but in some of the possible versions of the past you are my enemy, and in another you are my friend. If you'll excuse my incorrigible pronunciation, we could read a few pages."
Eighty years have passed since the birth of Borges's garden, and a work of art of this kind, with many alternative plot trends, will no longer surprise anyone. Even a whole genre has already appeared under the name “alternative history”; every year dozens of TV series are released, in a couple of which a similar technique will definitely appear - in one reality the hero dies, in another he survives, in the third he simply sleeps and dreams. “The Garden of Forking Paths” has become a common metaphor for history and culture, and, probably, there would be no need to remember this work if not for the amazing fact - this kind of garden really existed, and this garden had its own literary analogue.
The story of the gardener and philosopher Qu Peng really took place, only not in England or China, but in Crimea. Borges probably knew nothing about this, unless, of course, in Argentina, far from Crimea, he met one of the Russian emigrants who could tell him about the mysterious Russian thinker and philosopher Nikolai Danilevsky, who grew up on the Crimean coast, on the Mshatka estate, your garden of cultural and historical types. Danilevsky, as you know, published a treatise in 1869 “Russia and Europe. A look at the cultural and political relations of the Slavic world to the Germanic-Roman". In this work, he called for abandoning the view of world history as something unified and proposed viewing it as a constellation of civilizational worlds, a set of cultural and political alternatives. Instead of a single humanity with a single destiny, in his opinion, several “cultural-historical types” existed and coexisted, of which there were ten throughout history or, according to another account, twelve, if we count two untimely deaths among the established civilizations - Mexican and Peruvian. In addition to these twelve, Danilevsky also believed in a thirteenth civilization - the future Slavic. Danilevsky was a biologist, and at the end of his life primarily a botanist (even for a short time the director of the Nikitsky Botanical Garden), and for him these “cultural-historical types” were thought of as a kind of plant organisms, peculiar kingdoms of original and distinctive flora.
And so, having acquired the territory of land with the Greek name “Mshatka” in 1867, Danilevsky created here his own park of cultural and historical types, in which he tried to grow a living illustration of his philosophy of alternative paths of history. Each cultural and historical type had to have its own section of the park with specially planted plants characteristic of the landscape of a particular civilization. The pomegranate trees were of the Iranian type, the rare Geoffrey and Bunge pines were of the Romano-Germanic type. The Gethsemane garden of olive trees symbolized the Jewish world. Cacti (prickly pear) and agaves served as expressions of lost American civilizations.
The Japanese persimmon, brought by Danilevsky from China, was supposed to immerse the park visitor into the space of the Chinese cultural and historical type. Both the Arab and Egyptian civilizations had their plant representation in Mshatka. The emerging Slavic cultural and historical type was symbolized by the Chokrak spring, which fed gardens and parks with clean mountain water. The central part of the park was the Cypress Hall, representing the Greek type, with fifty cypress trees planted along its perimeter like ancient columns. It was here in this hall that the philosopher himself and eight members of his family subsequently found their final rest.
Our analogy of Danilevsky's garden with the garden from Borges's story will be even more complete if we remember that in the short story by the Argentine writer, written at the height of the Second World War, we are talking about the events of the First World War. In creating his “garden,” Borges, of course, thought about whether there was another version of history in which two historical cataclysms did not occur that devastated Europe and reduced the human population by approximately 80 million people. But Danilevsky, creating his garden of civilizations, of course, could not help but think about whether it was possible to avoid a bloody collision between Russia and Europe. His park gave a visible answer to this question - collision can be avoided only if people look at their communities the way a gardener looks at plants, without trying to impose on anyone a different principle of life, a different principle, a different way of existence. Anyone who could look at this garden should have come to a deep understanding of the meaning of Danilevsky’s philosophy of history, to an awareness of the cultural and historical pluralism that underlies his system.
It is curious that fragments of Danilevsky’s garden exist on this territory now, but in an unkempt state, not assembled into anything unified, not combined into a coherent cultural and memorial complex. Only specialists know where to look for what in an area of approximately 40 hectares.
Crimean activists led by Sergei Kiselev and descendants of the philosopher back in Ukrainian times they fought for the restoration of Danilevsky’s grave in Mshatka, destroyed in the post-revolutionary years, and in general for perpetuating the memory of the philosopher in Crimea. They managed to do a lot - the grave of Danilevsky and his wife Olga Alexandrovna, the great-niece of Saint Brianchaninov, was restored in the Cypress Hall; the territory of this “hall” is supposed to be separated from the space of the Beregovoe health camp, which is now under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
In August 2020, the grave was given the status of a cultural heritage site of federal significance. But the matter stopped there: there is no free access to the grave, since passage through the territory of the Ministry of Internal Affairs facilities is prohibited, as well as the path through the departmental sanatorium of the Ministry of Finance “Yuzhny”. There is nothing to say about the park; it has neither the status of a specially protected natural area, nor the status of a cultural heritage site. If nothing is changed, most likely, the last remnants of what Danilevsky did will simply be eliminated.
The story of how Mshatka ended up in the hands of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs requires a special discussion. Here, one might say, Borges is resting... Since 1952, on the site where Danilevsky’s estate was located, there was a children’s pioneer camp, which was later given the name of cosmonaut V. Komarov. The camp belonged to the Sevastopol Marine Plant, and Sevastopol children went there on vacation on vouchers. Then the Russian Spring happened, Sevmorzavod changed its owner, and the Komarov camp for a couple of years went to the Republic of Crimea, on whose territory it is located. The children stopped going there, and the process began that Mikhail Bulgakov picturesquely described in his “Heart of a Dog” under the name “devastation.” And the “devastation” in general continued after the new Sevastopol governor Dmitry Ovsyannikov first took the Komarov DOL from Crimea, and then “generously” donated it to the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Moreover, as Sevastopol activists established, the order to transfer the Komarovo village center to the Ministry of Internal Affairs was adopted in 2017 at a meeting of the city government with a violation of the procedure and subsequent distortion of information about this vote. The Ministry of Internal Affairs gave the camp to orphans whose parents died in the line of duty. But Sevastopol children lost access to the camp. The decision to take away the camp from Sevastopol children caused a wave of discontent among the townspeople, who, according to activist and blogger Alexei Protsko, currently have only five children’s camps left, including only one sea camp - the one located in the Laspi tract.
The great-granddaughter of the philosopher Olga Nikolaevna Danilevskaya, in a conversation with us, noted that for her the preferable solution to the current conflict would be allocation of approximately 10 hectares from the entire territory of Mshatka into a protected memorial space, marked with the name of Danilevsky. We are talking about the Cypress Hall and the adjacent territory, where it was possible, if not to recreate the park in its original form, but at least to recreate the memory of the park. And in general, it would be useful for children - both from the mainland and from the peninsula - to get acquainted with the work of a person who is so significant not just for Crimea, but for its special cultural and historical destiny, in which many national and civilizational destinies are intertwined - destinies the Byzantine, Levantine, Muslim, Greek, European worlds, and first of all, in relation to all of them, the Russian world, which asserted its independence, its full-fledged historical subjectivity in 2014.
Director of the Tauride Museum of the Republic of Crimea Andrey Malgin informed us about the preparation of events in Crimea dedicated to the bicentenary of the birth of N.Ya. Danilevsky. Meanwhile, he does not hope for a solution to Mshatka’s problem in the near future. According to him, “due to the fact that the remains of this park are located precisely on the territory of the Komarov Children’s Children’s Park, its reconstruction seems to be an impossible dream. Another idea is to organize a Museum and educational center in memory of N.Ya. in an unfinished mansion (and the law prohibits its completion). Danilevsky is also still in the category of fantasies. According to my information, the owner, the former director of Sevmorzavod, flatly refuses to transfer the unfinished construction to the state free of charge».
According to Malgin, Danilevsky’s bicentenary “should precisely give impetus to untying/cutting this Gordian knot. I repeat, it is necessary to assign the burial site to a specific user who would be involved in constant care of it (and care is needed - the cypress trees around the grave are gradually drying out, the asphalt is removed only in the center of the site, etc.), it is necessary to provide convenient access to the grave, bypassing closed areas, finally, it is necessary to decide the fate of the unfinished buildings located below the “Cypress Hall”, disfiguring the appearance of the memorial site.” According to Malgin, “the strength and charm of this place lies precisely in its modesty and solitude - this is the real resting place of the philosopher and should remain so. The thinker should be remembered by referring to his works, discussions around his ideas, and publication of his works.”
Meanwhile, it is impossible to find a better symbol of the Crimean civilizational choice, the choice of 2014, than the cultural-historical park named after Danilevsky. In addition to all the meanings that are embedded in the very theory of the philosopher and, accordingly, in his symbolic projection on the Crimean land, in addition to the idea of the diversity of paths of history, Mshatka can also become a kind of image of the Russian paradise, Russian responsiveness, Russian aspiration and Russian ability to absorb the fullness of the world culture. Even if Mshatka itself cannot be restored, it is necessary to restore its memory before departmental interests and commercial calculations transform this land beyond recognition.
Perhaps, in another alternative history, Sevastopol would never have opposed the Kyiv Maidan, the Russian Spring would not have happened, and the question of the fate of Mshatka would have been decided by the Ukrainian owner of Sevmorzavod.
In this different plot of history, Danilevsky could probably be considered the prophet of the imaginary opposition of Russia to Europe. But in the current of history in which we find ourselves, Danilevsky is more than significant. He himself predicted this fatal choice between Russia and Europe, which in 2014 Kyiv and Sevastopol, Donetsk and Dnepropetrovsk were forced to make in different ways, and which still determines the fate of our entire country. It would be unreasonable not to try to recreate, at least in miniature, that “garden of divergent civilizations” in which the great Crimean hermit who created it unraveled the course of history and predicted its current turn.
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