Carnival, where it all began. Carnival, about the origin and meaning of the Venice Carnival, Italy

Accompanied by massive public celebrations with street processions and theatrical performances.

The carnival appeared in the 9th-10th centuries. The earliest mentions of periodic city festivals in various cities of Western Europe date back to this time. The first carnivals appeared in Italy - the Venice Carnival, where large independent cities appeared first. Then carnivals appeared in France, and most recently in Germany: Mainz, Düsseldorf and Cologne.

Etymology

The origin of the word “carnival” is not clearly understood; a connection is suggested either with the Italian word “carne” (meat) or with “carrus” (cart). The first theory assumes a Christian origin, and the second - pagan.

Proponents of a derivation from "carne" point to variations of the word in Italian dialects, arguing that the source is the words carne levare“remove meat” prohibited in Lent.

There is a version of the origin from the Roman name of the festival Navigium Isidis - “carrus navalis”.

Folk etymology - the origin of the word from carne vale(farewell to meat).

Celebration

Folk holiday forms usually constituted the second, unofficial half of the holiday, while the first was associated with the performance of certain church rituals. Only in the 18th and 19th centuries. they separated, and the carnival began to exist as one of the types of mass entertainment.

The most important part of any carnival is the procession along the main streets of the city. Its leading motive is abundance, originating from ancient harvest festivals. It can be expressed in huge piles of agricultural products, flowers, and foods that are fed to everyone. Everything that happens during the procession is emphatically playful in nature. The main figure at the carnival is the jester. He sets the tone for both the procession and the performance, which then unfolds in the central square of the city.

In each city, the carnival developed according to a certain scenario that had developed over many years. The city merchant corporations were usually at the head of the carnival. For example, the organizer of the Butter Carnival in Nuremberg was traditionally a corporation of butchers, and in France - a corporation of winemakers.

Carnival in Germany and other German-speaking states

Kolyazin V.F. From mystery to carnival: Theatricality of German religious

And square scenes of the early and late Middle Ages. - M.: Nauka, 2002, p. 88-118

Carnival is an ancient and unusually multifaceted phenomenon. He has many faces, like a Hindu deity, for he combines the ethos and genre formations of pagan ritual and church performance, centuries-old traditions of buffoonery and oral literature, public spectacle and the most ancient forms of theater. Carnival is in itself a ritual theater performed by people on the street, but carnival, with its powerful field of playful and visual forms, is also an integral element of the modern theatrical worldview. The European stage from time to time experienced powerful waves of carnivalization (let us mention at least the names of Reinhardt, Vakhtangov, Evreinov, Meyerhold, Brecht, Besson, Mnouchkine). And today the carnival and various carnival forms are a powerful generator of ideas for modern theatrical thinking. Meanwhile, there are almost no works on the history of the German carnival in Russia.

Carnival in the broad sense of the word, according to M. Bakhtin’s definition, is “the totality of all the various celebrations, rituals and forms of the carnival type” 1. This interpretation implies consideration of the yuletide holidays of the church annual cycle - Christmastide (Zwö lften), Eve of Lent (Fastnacnt), Trinity Days (Pfingsten), Harvest Festival (Erntefest). If we add here the rituals and secular holidays of the Middle Ages, with their winter, spring, summer and autumn cycles (a reconstruction of the annual calendar of all these holidays was proposed by M. Reutin) 2, then we get a comprehensive, if not prohibitively expanded, concept. Carnival in the narrow sense of the word, as it is usually considered in the German-speaking tradition - fastnacht or fasching - festivities that take place during the six "fat days" preceding Ash Wednesday (Aschermittwoch), the beginning of Lent - Quadraginta. Every year in February, starting from Thursday and ending on Tuesday of the following week, a crowd of merry mummers performed many clownish rituals, trampling all the norms of Christian and social order. Jesters and buffoonery, as an expression of extreme freedom of behavior and creativity, ruled the medieval city these days.

Carnival in German-speaking countries, most often called there by regional synonyms: "Fasching" - in Munich, "Fastnacht" - in Frankfurt or Basel, "Fastelovend" - in Cologne, or "Schembartlauf" ) - in Nuremberg, differs significantly from carnival-
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La in the Italian regions, although it borrowed a lot from it, developing for a long time in parallel under the dictates of the Vatican - the capital of Catholicism. The German carnival is a highly ordered and fairly closed structure, much closer to church canons than the Italian or French carnival.

There are whole mountains of research about carnival in Germany (though not only in Germany). It has been and is being considered from historical, cultural, anthropological, theological, folkloristic, theatrical, philological, and finally, semiotic points of view. Some are interested in the religious overtones of the action, others - pure carnival forms, others - the idea of buffoonery and the clownish worldview, and fourth - the modeling of parody signs.

The folkloristic approach to carnival, firmly united with the theological, experienced a real revival in post-war Germany; centers of its study were formed in Munich, Freiburg, Constance, and Nuremberg. The Germans are proud of their school of folkloristic and theological “carnival studies”, founded by the Munich culturologist Dietz Rüdiger Moser and continued by his students - Werner Moser, Jürgen Küster and others. In the Swabian-Allemannic region they prefer to adhere to a more secular tradition; here, not far from Constanta, its own Museum of the History of Carnival was created, following the example of the Dutch one. The Swiss (and especially the Basel researchers, who have a museum in Binnigen at their disposal) take their historical and national traditions as a starting point.

Our subject is special, quite specific - the theatrical and entertainment side of the carnival, the theatrical forms nurtured by it and grown on its soil, its theatrical (or proto-theatrical) types, masks, costumes, props and forms of performance (massaging), a system of allegories, the entire rich repertoire of buffoonery , i.e. specific folk acting, its simplest and more complex spatial and decorative techniques. It goes without saying that it is impossible to distract from the history of the issue, from the various areas of “carnival studies” (since this is where the main sources of study are contained), from their polemics and contradictions.

From the very beginning, it should be said that the Russian school of carnival studies, represented primarily by Bakhtin and his followers, sharply diverges from the German one. This contradiction manifested itself with particular force in the discussion of the early 90s of the 20th century. around the ideas of the Russian philologist on the pages of the Heidelberg magazine "Euphorion" soon after translations of Bakhtin's main works on the folk laughter culture of the Renaissance and carnival appeared in Germany - with a huge delay. German researchers, and above all the head of the school D.-R. Moser, did not accept Bakhtin’s concept of grassroots laughter culture. Moser's follower Jürgen Küster wrote: “The history of the origin of the carnival is completely unknown. It was the lack of clarity of the ancient origins and the early period of development of traditional customs of the late Middle Ages that led to numerous speculations about the anthropological structures of the masquerade. It seems highly unlikely that the holiday is a Christian
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The calendar, which in its structure for about 1900 years was determined by religious thinking and action, can be measured by anthropological standards." 3 Bakhtin was reproached for starting from Lenin's idea of the presence of two cultures in a class society, that he presented a certain theory of carnival without giving its history (However, Bakhtin’s Russian opponent A.Ya. Gurevich considers Bakhtin’s concept “rather a mythology of carnival and laughter culture than their actual history,” which is not without some truth, especially in relation to the German carnival).

We will constantly keep this contradiction in mind when talking about carnival forms. Two different approaches to an ancient phenomenon, the origin of which remains unclear - can they be compatible or reconciled? Carnival, according to the German school, is a church-established holiday, a direct continuation of Catholicism; the whole essence of carnival in Bakhtin’s understanding is in the opposition of the square spirit to the church-state officialdom, in the free flight of the l "anima allegra (cheerful soul) of the jester. Description and analysis of carnival for the German school is, first of all, identifying the Christian meaning and subtext of the main carnival forms and symbols, for Bakhtin - identifying the main motives of folk culture, trampling on church dogma.One gets the feeling that we are talking about two completely different carnivals.

Carnival has survived all times. Regarding the medieval carnival we are studying (since it is obvious that there is a new carnival of the 18th-19th centuries and a new, highly commercialized carnival of the 20th century), we will accept the periodization proposed by the “Bakhtinist” M. Reutin:

Early Middle Ages - beginning of the 13th century. Carnival before carnival - agricultural cults with their inherent sequence of fasting, execution-consumption and festive plenitude;
- beginning of the 13th century - mid-16th century The carnival itself is the ritual basis of the folklore culture of the medieval city. General loosening of the ritual structure and the emergence of a parody series;
- mid-16th century - new time. Carnival after carnival;
- the result of a consistent rethinking of area forms in terms of the Christian tradition 4.
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Any periodization is, of course, conditional. Thus, in the 16th-17th centuries, and even later, “carnival proper” coexisted with “carnival after carnival”, and sometimes successfully supplanted it. The classification of carnival characters given by Dietz Rüdiger Moser is equally conventional: tempters, rulers, laymen, jesters, sinners.

Origin of carnival

The school of folkloristics, headed by Moser, seeks to universally establish in Germany the view of the origin of carnival from the liturgy. Representatives of this school reject the presence of all sorts of pagan and pre-Christian-Germanic roots in the carnival, stating that this point of view is derived not from tradition, but from the historical mythology of the 19th century. and then supported by the Nazis for their propaganda purposes.

In general, the history of carnival can be viewed as the history of its continuous prohibitions by the church, its secularization and gradual desecularization, the result of which was the semi-secular carnivals and masquerades of the 19th century, organized by various guilds and the semi-commercialized carnival of the 20th century. The medieval carnival thus combines sometimes competing ecclesiastical and secular traditions.

Since ancient times, carnival has been associated with clerical holidays, with the amusements of the liturgical cycle - it either imitated them or competed with them.

But in the same way, he is a product of the playful creativity of the urban masses, who ridiculed certain disorders and sought entertainment in masquerade and satire. In later times, especially in the 20th century, carnivals acquired the character of commercial and entertainment enterprises of enormous scope, often with political overtones. Today, in many cities in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, there is a whole carnival industry. But at first it was primarily a procession, a procession not associated with any community, an organization dating back to pagan customs, to the cult of spring festivals, pleasing the gods of fertility and natural forces.

Etymologists often derive the word "carnival" directly from Latin, from "char" - a festively decorated ship-shaped cart, an indispensable feature of any procession of antiquity. Many historians, including Sorbonne professor Jacques Heers, consider such interpretations to be superficial. Ancient, often uncontrollable meanings in the Middle Ages are erased from memory, giving way to “Christian influences, new symbols of a gradually maturing ritual, developing according to its own rhythm” 5. Much more accurate and justified is the interpretation of carnival as the last days on the eve of Lent, days of unlimited freedom, when you can still eat meat: carne vale. Thus, carnival is also a ceremony of transition from “Fat Tuesday” (Fetter Dienstag) to “Ash Wednesday” (Wednesday in the first week of Lent - Aschermittwoch), a holiday of abundance, gratification of the flesh, but also of the fight against the coming fast.
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Many folklorists (in particular, Uwe Schulz, author of the famous study “The Festival. Its history in the cultural aspect from antiquity to the present day”, Munich, 1988) 6 consider the ancient Roman Saturnalia to be the origin of the carnival in Germany. Excavations by Cologne archaeologists indicate that Hellenistic-Orientalist mystery cults penetrated the Rhine at the latest in the 2nd millennium AD. The Roman pantheon in its entirety moved here, as did the veneration of those gods who were the forerunners of carnival amusements and clownish mischief.

The Roman conquerors and merchants brought the festival of Saturnalia with them wherever fate, or more precisely, the will of the emperor, took them. Even during campaigns, Roman soldiers did not forget about their holidays - they dressed in women's clothing, wore wigs with braids, took a spindle in their hand, and spoke in falsetto. Certain rituals of the Romans associated with the seasonal alternation of death and formation, light and darkness, the veneration of fertility magic and the taming of evil demons later merged with Germanic cults and subsequently merged with Christianity. Many features of the Roman Saturnalia have been preserved in modified form in carnival to this day.

The Romans held a seven-day festival in mid-December in honor of Saturn, during which slaves were set free and a clownish king was elected from among the lower class, surrounded by dignitaries chosen by playing dice. By giving stupid orders and calling on his retinue to drink, dance, go wild and indulge in revelry, he thereby gave the signal for the reign of a crazy world. During Saturnalia, city councils and courts stopped working, and schools were closed. Everyone put on fancy dress, sat down at the tables and began to feast and give each other all kinds of gifts, and above all wax candles. The main formative principles of the Saturnalia were closely intertwined universal equality and turning the normal “upside down” - the “inverted world” (“the world inside out” - to use the idiom invented by Tick). Everyone put on a hat, which was considered a symbol of freedom. Slaves behaved like masters, allowing themselves to be served at feasts. The slaves were given four liters of wine in excess of the norm (which is why Cato dubbed the Roman carnival “the wet days of Saturn”). Saturnalia ended with a cruel action: the buffoon king was publicly executed.

Another holiday of the ancient Romans - Lupercalia, held in February in honor of the god Faun (aka Lupercus) and associated with ancient fertility magic, also left its mark on the rituals of the Germans. Roman priests flogged passersby, mostly women, with magic belts cut from the skins of sacrificial animals (according to legend, this stimulated fertility). In the rituals of the Germans, belts were replaced by rods, the blows of which were supposed to promote the fertility of the earth, people and animals. This custom was preserved for a very long time in the rural carnival, but in the city carnival the rods were transformed into beaters or rattles. In the Allemantic carnival, flesh until the beginning of the 20th century. The custom of cutting with an inflated pig bladder was preserved.
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The ancient Germans borrowed from the Romans many other pre-Christian cults and customs, which in turn were also borrowed by them from other peoples, for example, various comic semantic inversions, equalization of the higher and lower social strata, the custom of transporting a luxurious ship on wheels during a procession ( known in ancient Babylon as an element of the procession in honor of the god Marduk, and in ancient Egypt as the “ship of Osiris” in the procession in honor of his wife, the goddess Isis, who went on a ship to search for the body of her murdered husband)

One of the finds of Cologne archaeologists is noteworthy: an image (stone plaque) of a Roman ship of fools, which art historians interpret as the personification of an orgy of drunken eros 7 . The find clearly confirms the significance of the jester's ship (long before the literary image of Sebastian Brant's poem) as one of the most ancient pan-European carnival rituals. The lavishly decorated ship-shaped carriage passes through all the cultures of the ancient world and is firmly established in the carnival, where it is theatricalized in various ways, as seen in the example of the Cologne Fastnacht or the Nuremberg Schembartlauf.

All these ancient rituals, with their mockery of the earthly bonds that bind a person, their short-term triumph over injustice, expressed a whole complex of ethical and aesthetic aspirations of man in the pre-Christian era, the era of pagan myths: longing for the happy state of humanity before the emergence of the state with its forms of oppression, the desire to intervene in the cycle of nature and overcome death - and at the same time represented the philosophy of the carnival.

Frankfurt Carnival

Pagan traditions were especially long held in Frankfurt. Frankfurt carnivals until the beginning of the 17th century. were associated with light, fire and noise. The ancient Germans believed in nature spirits and demons. They considered ice and snow to be the creation of winter demons, who, fearing daylight and noise, did their business in the dark nights. Therefore, light and noise were the first means of combating these evil spirits. The magic of fire in German folk beliefs is associated with the veneration of the sun. In rural carnivals, carrying and throwing torches and lowering flaming wheels and rings from the mountain is common entertainment. The audience felt as if “the sun was falling from the sky” 8.

Burning torches in early spring festivities have been known since the early Middle Ages. The devastating fire in the Lorsch monastery in 1090, according to the chronicles, happened precisely because of the carnival. Since ancient times, they burned an effigy of winter in fire, hoping to get rid of evil in this way. This custom acquired its interpretation in medieval Frankfurt, where symbolic images of winter were thrown into the icy water of the Main and a magnificent Maslenitsa funeral was held.

The traditional Frankfurt carnival is older and more mischievous than Mainz and even Cologne. Fearing the unbridled behavior of masked jesters, the city council already in 1355 banned cross-dressing and wearing masks (Vermummungsverbot). In the margins of the historical document there is a laconic note from a later scribe: “not observed during the carnival.”
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Despite such council decisions, Frankfurt residents did not abandon the carnival. Magnificent holidays of the patricians of the 15th century. described in the diaries of Bernard Rohrbach and his son Job, who belonged to the Alten-Limpurg patrician society.

The carnival of 1466 turned out to be unusually magnificent. On Sunday and Monday, apprentices and women had dinner in one of the houses, after which they started dancing. On Wednesday afternoon, the same company went in procession to the Sachsenhausen area, where dancing took place in three sessions, after which the procession headed to the Church of St. John, whose abbots arranged a whole feast (fish, meat, sweets, old and new wine). The procession then headed to the Church of St. Anthony, where a dance was also held. After the third dance the procession returned. On Wednesday, the carnival society indulged in games, and a competition, a kind of tournament, was held at the Old Town Hall. On Thursday, in Becker's garden, the feast was repeated at the expense of the women, and in the evening the procession returned to the house straight for dinner. On Sunday we ate almond pie. The women who baked it were supposed to be kissed by the whole community. This time the feast lasted all night. Monday began with a feast and ended with the apprentices bathing in the “white bath”.

Young apprentices, not allowed into the house, organized their own carnival on the street, enriching it with various undertakings. A young man, decorated with gingerbread cookies (a version of the carnival king), was carried on a stretcher across the city, while flaming bunches of straw were thrown into the sky. The procession ended with a visit to the monastery. In 1497, Jobe reported that on Shrove Tuesday, after a general lunch, the usual round of the Frankfurt monasteries was made to revel with the monks and dance with the nuns 9 .

The day after Ash Wednesday (Aschermittwoch; Wednesday in the first week of Lent) the revelry ended. It ended before Ash Wednesday because the penitential service and the strictest fast began on Wednesday. Traditionally, at the end of the carnival, women served fresh green soup. In the evening/on the first Monday of Lent we ate only cheese and almonds, milk pudding, eggs and nuts - typical meager dishes.

While the Frankfurt patricians celebrated in their homes, artisans, through their guilds, from the 15th century. They began to organize mischievous carnival processions throughout the city. A particularly striking event was when the coopers joined the procession with a festive cooperage right on the frozen Main. Early on Tuesday morning, the apprentices went out onto the ice and made two huge barrels in front of the public. At the same time, they were watched by four experienced coopers, feasting in a tent along with the caretakers, the jurors of the guild. At dusk, dancing began around the finished barrels. Then they were solemnly carried to the wine market, located at the very embankment between the entrance gate and the Leonard gate. At the end of the holiday on the following Saturday, both barrels were handed over to the city council. City chronicles record seven such cooper carnivals between 1608 and 1838.
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Another carnival custom that persisted until the middle of the last century (Goethe describes it) is the children's singing "Hawele lone". On Tuesday, when the carnival reached its peak, children went from house to house singing the following Heischeverse rhymes (a kind of carol):

Favorite Maslenitsa dishes from Epiphany to Maslenitsa in Frankfurt were krebbels (filled donuts) and sandwiches with fried lard. (In the 19th century, there was even a satirical carnival newspaper called the Frankfurt Krebbel-Zeitung.)

On February 1, 1519, after the death of Emperor Maximilian I, popularly nicknamed the “last knight” of the Habsburg family, the Frankfurt city council issued a decree completely banning carnivals and street processions: “no one has the right to walk the streets, day or night, indulging in laughter" 11.

The first carnival fraternities in Frankfurt arose in the 1850s, but they were fond of masquerade balls, and only in 1862 did the jester fraternity take to the streets again, with the coronation of the “king of jesters” in the square near the Old Town Hall. In the old days, wine would flow from the Fountain of Justice, a bull would be roasted, and the king would shower his subordinates with coins 12 .

Cologne fastnacht

The type of jester's holiday in Cologne - Fastelovend or Fasteleer - is closely connected with the historical fate of this city. In the Middle Ages, "sacred Cologne" ("hillige Coellen") was the second largest city in Germany. Its carnival tradition is based primarily on the fact that the city was intended to personify not only the power of Rome, but also the superiority of Roman culture. In ancient Cologne, Germanic cults, and above all fertility rituals, mixed with Roman customs. Chronicles indicate that there were about forty Roman, five Celtic and seven Germanic deities. The fact that Cologne was a Roman colony, the capital of the Roman province of Germania Inferior, would seem to suggest that the Cologne carnival is primarily a continuation and Christianized form of the Roman Saturnalia and Lupercalia. In the romantic Cologne carnival of modern times, contemporaries saw echoes of the Saturnalia: as in Rome, an endless row of open carts stretched across the city, crowded with revelers in masks and without masks, as in Rome, spectators gazed from all the windows at the jubilant, frantic carnival crowd... It is also believed that the custom of decorating houses and streets with garlands of flowers and leaves on holidays also dates back to Roman times.
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But the roots of the daring, intoxicating Rhine carnival are much deeper - in the pagan customs of the Franks of the Germanic tribes that inhabited this land from the end of the 4th century. 13 According to the established point of view, the origins of the Cologne carnival (from the 12th century known as Fastabend), as well as the southern German "fasnet", are in ancient rituals of banishing winter and fertility rituals, in which Roman, Celtic and Germanic customs were intertwined. Ancient customs - the cult of the deities of ancient German mythology Isis and Nerthus, dressing up as bears, deer, goats and other animals associated with fertility rituals - were preserved in Rhineland villages until the 8th-9th centuries, but in Cologne the influence of the church was much stronger, and therefore traces of ancient religious rituals are difficult to discern here. Nevertheless, the mask (ritual-lema) of the bear is still preserved in the Cologne carnival, having almost lost its original meaning as a demon of fertility.

The struggle between paganism and Christianity is evidenced by the numerous prohibitions of ancient customs by the synod and city authorities. Pope Gregory II, at the request of the Frankish king Karlmann (reigned from 768 to 771), issued a list of obscene pagan customs and superstitions back in 742. The abbot of the Benedictine monastery, Regino von Prüm, in his sermons in 900, strictly forbade monks to watch “vile entertainment scenes” with a bear and indulge in such diabolical activities as wearing demonic masks. The influence of the church strengthened significantly under Charlemagne (742-814), when the archbishop's residence was moved to Cologne, and under Archbishop Bruno (mid-10th century), under whom it became almost impossible to reveal one's sympathies for paganism. Sermons of this time prohibited the February rite of expelling winter as pagan. Ancient rituals were preserved largely thanks to the cunning of stubborn pagan converts who managed to introduce pagan customs into Maslenitsa holidays.

However, in the 10th century, during the time of Archbishop Bruno, the church's stubborn resistance to pagan devilry was replaced by the gradual integration of carnival into the church calendar year and more flexible control over ineradicable pagan addictions. From century to century, bans on carnivals by city authorities are repeated. Thus, in 1403, any “mummering during the days of fastnacht” was prohibited under the threat of a fine of five Cologne marks. However, from the second half of the 12th century. the word "vastavent", "fastabend" is perceived naturally, in close connection with the subsequent post.
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The duration of the carnival was not the same for everyone at first. The monks and clergy, under the Greek-Byzantine influence, began to fast already on the damp day - the last Sunday before Lent (Sonntag Quinquagesima), while the laymen - only on Pentecost - the first Sunday of Lent (Sonnntag Quadragesima). From the 10th century the carnival began to begin for everyone on the same day - on Ash Wednesday, but the division into master's, priest's and old carnivals remained.

Many historians consider the behavior of church dignitaries of the Middle Ages as evidence of double morality, on the one hand, anathematizing demonic games, on the other, joyfully indulging in carnival amusements at permitted times. Archbishop Ferdinand of Cologne issued a special instruction in 1644 regulating church carnival practice. Particular attention was paid there to the “feast of subdeacons,” popularly known as the “clown carnival” (Narrenfest), the birthplace of which is considered to be France.

According to the canon, a clownish pope, or a clownish bishop, was first elected. Then the lower rank, sitting on a donkey, escorted him to the church, where a song of praise was sung and worship was celebrated in the ancient manner. The jester's ceremony was accompanied by dancing and feasting. No less famous is the “donkey festival”. A luxuriously dressed young girl with a child in her arms was placed on a donkey (an allusion to Mary’s flight from Egypt). Then the procession, accompanied by the clergy, headed to the church, where a clownish liturgy took place, in which those standing around the donkey, instead of “Amen,” bleated like a donkey.

The subdeacons of the Cologne Cathedral, together with the priests of nearby cathedrals, also allowed themselves to fool around to their heart's content on Epiphany holidays. In 1645, the clownish king was even allowed to celebrate mass in the presence of the chapter prelates; the Te Deum was sung by candlelight, as well as baptismal hymns and cheerful chants. Monasteries and church shelters did not stand aside. This is how a young Cologne nun described the local carnival in her letter: “Cassocks and black capes on the side, dressing up in carnival clothes is very funny. But of course
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Of course, this only happens outside the walls of the monastery... We experienced the carnival with all passion... We danced and jumped all day long. At night, when the abbess went to bed, we drank tea, coffee and chocolate and played cards and checkers." 14 Often the nuns had fun like secular simpletons, tearing off each other's hats or jester's caps.

Masquerades and processions of religious brotherhoods were particularly inventive, burlesque and unbridled. The Cologne diocesan synod testified in 1662: “The secular frivolity of stupid people has crept very far, even entire jester performances are staged with great noise, they beat the kettledrums, as if calling for a fight, amusing spectacles are shown for the needs of the public; women dress up as men; laughter, jokes, loud conversations." The Cologne city council, wanting to support the indignant church fathers, strictly forbade clerics to wear masks.

Religious masquerades in the bosom of the church had a huge number of supporters, as evidenced by the text of the 15th century that has reached us, which can be called a kind of manifesto of buffoonery: “Our ancestors were great and worthy of respect men. They established the clownish carnival according to their wise understanding. Let us live as they did and to do what they did. We celebrate the buffoonery carnival to give ourselves pleasure, so that the buffoonery we have inherited can find an outlet at least once a year. Barrels of wine will burst if they are not emptied from time to time air. We are all old barrels, not so skilfully made, and from which the wine of wisdom would evaporate if we allowed it to continue to ferment due to unceasing attention in the service of the Lord. We must give it a little respite from time to time, so that it does not go to waste. .." 15
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In the history of the burgher Cologne carnival, they played a huge role guilds, which began to flourish in the 12th century. As in many other cities, the care of carnival rituals passed into the hands of apprentices. The first mention of the celebration of the carnival in Cologne on the pages of the city jury book is dated March 5, 1341 (a short entry prohibits the further issuance of money for the carnival from the city treasury; this ban was repeated in 1272, 1395 and 1396). Starting from the 14th century, guild premises, along with the large ceremonial houses of the patricians, became places for organizing carnivals with obligatory feasts and round dances.

The Cologne fastnacht of these times is inextricably linked with the carnival tribute collectors (Heischegangen) walking around the city. The custom of stopping people on the street and forcing them to pay off with money (Krongeld - money for carnival wreaths) persisted until the beginning of the 15th century, until it acquired an ugly character and was banned (the ban, however, did not last too long).

It is noteworthy that the carnival in medieval Cologne, which had a democratic constitution since 1396, did not abolish the class division; clergy, patricians and artisans celebrated it separately. During the carnival, patricians opened the doors of their houses to relatives and friends, banquets reached their climax between two and four o'clock in the morning. The Chronicle of Count von Zimmern tells of one such celebration in 1536 in the house of the Cologne burgomaster Wasserfras, giving details of costumes, food and drinks.

The diary of Hermann von Weinsberg, who was one of the members of the city council, contains information about a carnival in burgher families, where it was customary to arrange mutual visits with funny jokes in masks 16. In 1750, shops appeared in Cologne where you could rent masks.

The "coming of freedom" was publicly proclaimed by the city fathers from the balcony of the town hall. A description of what happened following this proclamation has been preserved: “And then there was a mad revival in all the streets, in all the Houses, which lasted three days. Trade of all kinds was suspended, time belonged only to one mad passion. Individuals and small processions in masks appeared among friends to indulge in buffoonery together
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For fun, or they went out into the streets and acted out funny scenes in this or that house, in a tavern or inn, open day and night, or simply on the streets crowded with joyful and jubilant citizens, and all this either in mockery or for the sake of fun, pleasant pastime and fun. All nights in a row there were balls, at which the masks continued friendly, playful, but often far from harmless fun, moving from dancing to general jokes" 17.

The organizers of the open, public, people's carnival were guilds that gathered apprentices into so-called cliques (Banden). With deafening drumming and whistling, they marched through the city, acting out skits, pronouncing “shprukhi” and whole speeches, leading round dances and starting to dance. Unfortunately, no documents have survived from which something could be gleaned about the content and political meaning of oral speeches, which certainly offended the powers that be and expressed the opinion of the street.

Rooted in antiquity, the graceful but very dangerous dance with swords was usually reserved for the guild of blacksmiths. Researchers point to the cult origin of this dance, mentioned by Tacitus and personifying the struggle between good and evil demons, between summer and winter 18 . The dancers usually wore white shirts and had bells hanging from their legs and bodies. The following description, dated 1590, was preserved in the archives of the guild: “Each dancer turned around himself, at the same time walking in a circle and defending himself from the swords of the other dancers who threatened him. Less dangerous, but perhaps even more skillful, was the hoop dance performed by the young men -coopers. There were also graceful jumps and flips through a hoop. Some dancers danced on a rolling barrel, others swung a hoop during the dance, into which others jumped" 19 .

The Cologne carnival was considered the most mischievous in Germany. To this day they say that a Cologne resident would rather pawn his bed in a pawnshop than refuse to participate in the carnival. The custom of “stopping and catching”, teasing fellow citizens on the street in every possible way, thereby encouraging them to participate in the carnival, persisted until the 19th century. Nowhere have young men from various cliques and students under the cover of masks hunted girls so wildly and so furiously. The girls' pleasure consisted in allowing themselves to be hunted and caught. The ban of 1431 picturesquely characterizes the riotous freedom of the Cologne carnival: “Even on Ash Wednesday, men and women dressed up in carnival costumes without any measure, which unusually embarrassed our fellow citizens, as happened more than once in other times. In order to prevent friction that occurred for this reason , members of the city council decided that no one from any guilds, councils or any other societies would henceforth have the right to participate in the carnival on this day, that in squares and villages only on Monday, following Sunday, Estomini, an honest community of citizens games are allowed, but with the condition that at six o'clock everyone would be sitting in their homes, and night feasts and night drinking, dancing with a sword and various disguises both in the squares and in the villages, along with food beyond all measure, libations , dancing and all other light-hearted ideas should be abolished completely and completely" 20.
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The old market also witnessed a lot of pretty rough and wild entertainment. One of these scenes from the carnival of 1498 is described by the Koelhoff Chronicle. Five blind men, absurdly dressed, in heavy armor and with heavy clubs, were thrown behind bars, in which a tied pig was rushing about, which the blind men had to finish off. The blind people most often beat each other. The audience reacted accordingly 21 .

The 15th-16th centuries in Cologne was an era of carefree carnival fun of the people, long interrupted by the Counter-Reformation of the Catholic Church, which was dominated by the Jesuits, who were exclusively hostile to the carnival, as well as by the advent of wars - the Cologne War of 1583 and the Thirty Years' War. Students of the Jesuit college were required to spend hours in prayer during the carnival. The Jesuits more than once (1600, 1645) organized penitential processions and performances, calling on the carnival audience possessed by the devil to asceticism and piety.

The Peace of Rastatt in 1714 again returned the carnival to its freedom.

The times of Baroque and Rococo, thanks to the flourishing of the court style, and partly to the powerful influence of Italy, enriched the Cologne fastnacht with new elements and forms. Cologne residents began to happily compare themselves with the Romans and Venetians. Since 1730, a new, “noble” form of carnival entertainment for the court nobility appeared - masquerade balls (Redoute), following the example of the noisy masquerades at the court of the Elector of Bonn. In city chronicles, "Fasnacht" began to be called "Carneval".
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The functions of the masquerade organizers were so significant that Cologne historians are inclined to call them directors 22. Even their names have been preserved - for example, the organizer of one of the first was a certain Mr. Ferrari, and his follower was Joseph El, who worked on Dome Square. However, can they really be considered the forerunners of directing? In order to streamline the fun and avoid sword fights, which were constant companions of Cologne carnivals and more than once led to deaths, the city council introduced at the end of 1782 the “Regulations on night masquerades”. All participants in the masquerade were required to wear masks, but swords and canes (in which swords could be hidden) were prohibited. “Whoever, under the cover of a mask, dares to say something rude to another or begins to find fault with him must be removed from the ball, regardless of personality.”

On Epiphany, the Elector's court organized its own carnival, according to the court ceremony, where canons dressed in carnival costumes, knights of various orders, and monastic nobility flocked. The masquerade continued until the morning, its magnificent costumes were the complete opposite of the rude burgher fasteler. The excited guests indulged in coffee and cocoa - rare and sometimes forbidden drinks at that time. In winter, pleasure rides of the masquerade public on sleighs were organized between Cologne and Bonn.

The tradition of plying jester carts goes back to ancient times; right down to pagan customs. City chronicles have brought to us a lot of information on this matter. In 1133, Cologne weavers pulled a wagon filled with jesters around the city. In 1235, when Isabella of England, the future wife of Emperor Frederick II, arrived in Cologne, she was honored by a cart with 22 jester monks making grimaces and performing other pranks. During the carnival of 1679, famous for its snowy winter, the Cologne townspeople used sleighs instead of jester's carts 23 . The carriage of jesters on the last Monday of Maslenitsa (Rosenmontag), which became common in later times, certainly inherited this ancient tradition. This is one of the persistent rituals of the German carnival in general.

The usual street Carneval of this time was opened - after the solemn mass - by children. The subsequent procession of grotesque and satirical characters was often supplemented by the performance of skits. The main event played out over the next three days. Along the established route (called, in imitation of the Italians, corso) - from the Old Market to High Street, through the Sennaya Market, Malzmühle, Mühlenbach, High Gate - a procession moved: apprentices, all kinds of cliques, students, on foot, on horses and carts. A cheerful, not always harmless dialogue ensued between the audience, leaning out of the open windows and standing along the streets, and the comedians. As in the old days, they threw peas at each other; according to Roman custom, they threw confetti, which were tiny plaster dragees. Like the Romans, on Tuesday evenings they went out into the street with burning lamps. This procession also turned into a fun game: everyone tried to extinguish the fire in each other's hands.
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It is noteworthy that the custom of Maslenitsa funerals came to Cologne quite late - in the 17th century, being borrowed from a rural fair.

In Ancient Greece, as throughout the ancient world, there was a direct relationship between the cycle of the year and human life. Too dry - the seeds will not sprout, too rainy - the same thing. And what to eat? How to “persuade” nature to cooperate? We don’t know, and we don’t even think about it, but the people of the ancient world had a completely accurate opinion on this matter. Animating nature, they tried to appease it, to make a sacrifice to it. They organized holidays in honor of her and were sure that as a reward, higher powers would give them a good harvest.

All holidays of this kind lasted for several days. They were accompanied by dressing up, singing and dancing in honor of the gods. Dionysia (ancient Greek holidays in honor of the god of wine and fertility Dionysus) were celebrated twice a year - in spring and autumn, during sowing of seeds and during harvesting. On these days, all work was forgotten and all obligations were lifted, all that remained was truly unbridled fun with gluttony, wine and orgies. (It is interesting that a child conceived during the Great Dionysia was considered the child of God and had special honor in society).

At the same time, during the Great Dionysia, there was a large religious procession - men in goat skins and the god Dionysus himself (who was also portrayed by one of the townspeople) walked through the fields and “inseminated” them. I repeat, all this was accompanied by fun, songs, dances and dressing up. (Actually, the theater was born from the cult of the god Dionysus). So, the carnival appeared a very, very long time ago. But then, as you can see, his goal was not to entertain the population, but to maintain life.

Traditional carnival

The tradition of carnival has not gone away even with the advent of Christianity. Before Lent, that is, at the end of winter, Maslenitsa festivities took place in many European cities. The word carnival itself, according to one version, means “farewell to meat.” Fatty Maslenitsa is replaced by lean fasting. (Look at “The Battle of Lent with Maslenitsa” by P. Bruegel the Elder). Maslenitsa celebrations, that is, farewell to winter and preparation for spring, were also filled with fun, food and games. At the same time, the celebration finally took shape in a procession through the streets of the city. Then theatrical processions were added to them. For three days in a row, mummers walked the streets. People changed places, portrayed each other, lower classes, upper classes, scenes from the Old Testament, scenes from the New Testament. Then chariots also joined these processions. They were a traveling stage.

The Rise of Carnival

The heyday of carnival in Italy dates back to the Medici era. The mummers accompanied decorated chariots on foot and on horseback and sang songs inspiring sensual earthly joys. The main feature of the carnival was still the escape from everyday life. It was the world inside out, the world backwards (according to M.M. Bakhtin). Based on this idea, the jester became the main thing during the carnival, that is, the king in reverse. Nothing could trample down this ancient custom! The Catholic Church had to make a concession; the only thing they managed to do was reduce the number of days of the holiday.

Carnivals of the world

As you can see, carnival is not just a holiday, not just fun, but a whole cult, dating back to the very, very distant past. Not all ancient holidays have such durability! Of course, now carnivals look completely different, and they mean much less than before, but, nevertheless, even now they are held everywhere. What is this carnival anyway? What remains so attractive about it for us, modern inhabitants of the planet, whose existence is many, many times less dependent on the vagaries of nature?

Rio Carnival, Brazil

Carnival in Rio traditionally begins in the last week of February. Just as before, it marks the imminent beginning of Lent and begins forty days before Easter. Carnival in Rio lasts five days. People from all over the world come to watch this grandiose theatrical procession. The beginning of the carnival itself is marked by the handing over of the keys to the city to the “king of the carnival.” For the entire duration of the holiday, this king has every right to introduce his own laws. The first and most important order that he gives to his “subjects” is simple and pleasant: fun! Fun should spread throughout the city! Of course, there are no disagreements. People take a break from work all week. Half-dressed women and men walk along the streets, everyone is dancing and enjoying life.

The most exciting thing about the Brazilian Carnival is the parade of Samba schools. Schools compete with each other to be the best. Rehearsals for next year begin almost immediately after the end of the carnival.

Venice Carnival. Italy.

Just like the Rio Carnival, the Venice Carnival begins before Lent. Already in 1262, the carnival acquired the status of a real holiday. The opening of the carnival takes place on the square in front of the cathedral with a theatrical performance, where troupes act out the liberation of the Venetian women. Football is an integral part of the program. The match takes place on the fifth day of the carnival. The Venetians are sure that this sport originated with them, therefore, during the carnival, they reconstruct a medieval football match. Usually this closes the holiday, and the masks fall asleep until next year.

It is believed that this is where the tradition of wearing masks came from. The costume hid the real face and body of a person, erased social boundaries, so as not to interfere with the main guest of the carnival - fun. It’s interesting that at some point the residents of Venice were so inspired by the idea of hiding their faces that they used masks all the time. This, of course, gave rise to all sorts of crimes, which is why city authorities had to ban the permanent wearing of masks. Now the Venice Carnival attracts a huge number of tourists. Because of this, of course, the holiday loses a lot, becoming a purely entertainment event.

Cologne Carnival. Germany

On November 11 of each year at 11 o'clock and 11 minutes, future participants and organizers of the carnival open the carnival meeting. Until February (as we see, February is a common month for all carnivals) they will discuss the carnival program. They say that the Cologne Carnival is almost the only time when a German ceases to be restrained and stern. But there is still something German about the opening of the carnival. At 11.11 matriarchy begins! Women storm the city hall, and the ties of all the men they meet are cut off! Although the celebration takes place throughout the city, and especially in pubs and bars, there is also a main procession. Carnival communities walk through the streets and pull carts behind them. On the carts, as a rule, there are funny figures of politicians made of papier-mâché.

Trinidad and Tobago are islands. We know them from the annual carnivals, which also take place in February. The appearance of this holiday on the islands dates back to 1838. Initially it looked like an elegant costume ball, but later the city fell out. The carnival starts on Friday. On this day, the queen and king of calypso (Afro-Caribbean music heard throughout the city during the entire celebration) are chosen. In general, this event is very musical - steel drums and dancing are everywhere. (Let us still remember the orgiastic origins).

Carnival in Barranquilla, Colombia

The Carnival in Barranquilla is called the folkloric and national carnival of Colombia. It also begins at the end of February, but carnival rehearsals are in full swing beforehand. The holiday begins on the Saturday closest to Lent. It begins with the coronation of the queen and a solemn speech. On Saturday you can see the parade of floats. Many folk groups take part in it. Sunday is dedicated to the big parade, and Monday to folk music popular in the region. Tuesday, the closing day of the carnival, is dedicated to Joselito's funeral. Joselito is a fictional character, the personification of the fun of the carnival. But every year in February, Joselito is resurrected and lives again for several days of fun carnival. In general, the carnival in Barranquilla is a very bright and educational spectacle, because here you can see all the shades of Colombia with all its diversity.

Carnival in Nice, France

It has existed since 1924. (Allegedly, the Duke of Anjou came here to relax and brought with him fun, which soon degenerated into a carnival). Now the carnival in Nice lasts two weeks. According to carnival tradition, on the first day, the townspeople and guests of Nice celebrate the Fun. On Massena Square, the facades of houses, previously “pasted” with plywood and painted by artists, light up with many lights. A distinctive feature of the Nice carnival is the battle of flowers. Huge platforms are completely decorated with fresh flowers, and all this beauty joyfully rolls through the streets of Nice. At the end of the carnival, according to the carnival tradition already known to us, a “scarecrow” of the carnival is burned in the streets.

Carnival in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain

Just like all other carnivals, the Spanish carnival lasts a week. Carnival is considered an international tourism festival. The carnival is formally divided into two parts. This is an official carnival and a street carnival. All the main streets of the city are filled with mummers. You can hear music from everywhere, both folk and modern, there are theatrical performances and chariots with huge dolls on them.

Mardi Gras Carnival in New Orleans, USA

MardiGras - Fat Tuesday. The holiday is somewhat similar to Maslenitsa and is its analogue. In 1872, the rules for the Mardi Gras carnival were established in New Orleans. Carnival has its own king and queen, crowned at the very beginning of the holiday.

Carnival in Goa, India

Here the main member of the carnival is the funny King Momo. He sits on a huge festive platform and is the rightful owner of the entire celebration. It is believed that carnivals were brought to India by the Portuguese. At first, local residents did not understand its essence, but later, and especially now, they themselves take part in it with great joy and interest. Costumes, chariots and scenes for the carnival begin to be prepared six months in advance, but the main part of this holiday is the food.

Basel Carnival, Switzerland

One of the oldest carnivals (from about the 16th century). Its history dates back to knightly tournaments. It is interesting that even now only privileged groups, so to speak, are allowed to participate in the carnival. These are groups of carnival-musical unions. There are about 300 of them in total. Thus, the Swiss carnival (which is unusual for other carnivals) divides participants into artists and spectators, and mixing between them is almost impossible. The carnival begins early in the morning, when the streets are still dark. The lights in the city are going out. Carnival participants illuminate the space with their fancy lanterns. A lot of amazing light changes the city beyond recognition and creates an atmosphere of something new, mysterious. At noon, another procession begins, this time more traditional - artists in costumes and with musical instruments walk through the streets. Another distinctive feature of the carnival in Switzerland is the second day. It is considered “children’s” because children dress up in costumes on this day.

in the lower mythology of European culture, an anthropomorphic embodiment of the calendar holiday of farewell to winter. Carnival expresses mythological awareness and cult actions at the level of pagan culture. The beginning of the year coincided in this calendar with the spring revival of nature. This cycle was included in the later Christian carnival, which was held 40 days before Easter. In Russian tradition it coincides with Maslenitsa. The origin of the name is associated with the ancient tradition of using the cult cart - “chariot - ship”. The essence of the carnival is to take the effigy of Winter on this cart outside the settlement and burn it. In the Italian folk tradition, carnival is associated with the celebration of life: - “Long live the flesh!” In the Middle Ages, Carnival was celebrated very widely, with the election of the King of the Jesters, discarding many cultural "strictnesses". Carnival culture is often compared to a "golden age" of equality. Currently, the carnival is celebrated most magnificently in the Catholic countries of Latin America.

Excellent definition

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CARNIVAL

a cultural and mass behavioral phenomenon, based on the corresponding “type of imagery” (M.M. Bakhtin). He was a significant component of medieval and Renaissance folk culture. Used in modern philosophy of culture. A multidimensional analysis of culture in a cultural context was first carried out in M. M. Bakhtin’s book “The Work of François Rabelais and the Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance” (the first version of the manuscript was completed in 1940; first edition - Moscow, 1965; translated into many languages) Having abandoned traditionalist descriptions of the social background of the Renaissance and from considering the advanced views of Rabelais the humanist, Bakhtin focused on the study of the ancient and especially medieval origins of Rabelais's novel "Gargantua and Pantagruel". Bakhtin managed to understand and unravel (in the context of reconstruction, according to the academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences M.P. Alekseev, “folklore tradition of the Middle Ages”) a number of features of the work being studied that have long seemed very strange to researchers. Bakhtin explained the paradoxical combination of numerous “learned” images and common folk (and often obscene) comedy inherent in “Gargantua and Pantagruel” as significant the influence on Rabelais of the square laughter culture of the Middle Ages, which arose in a much earlier period, but reached its full flowering by the 16th century. According to Bakhtin, not only Rabelais, but also G. Boccaccio, W. Shakespeare, M. Cervantes were subject to the charm of the life-affirming and bright atmosphere characteristic of K. and other folk holidays of that time. Carnival culture had a well-developed system of ritual, entertainment and genre forms, as well as a very deep philosophy of life, the main features of which Bakhtin considered universality, ambivalence (i.e. - in this case - the perception of being in constant change, eternal movement from death to birth , from old to new, from denial to affirmation), informality, utopianism, fearlessness. Among the ritual and entertainment forms of folk medieval culture, Bakhtin named festivals of the carnival type and the accompanying laughter acts (as well as ordinary civil ceremonies and rituals): “feast of fools”, “feast of the donkey”, “temple festivals”, etc. Folk culture was also embodied in various verbal humorous works in Latin and in folk languages. These works, both oral and written, parodied and ridiculed literally all aspects of medieval life, including church rituals and religious teachings (“Cyprian’s Vespers,” numerous parody sermons, liturgies, prayers, psalms, etc. ). The cheerful freedom of the carnival celebration gave rise to various forms and genres of unofficial, and most often obscene, familiar public speech, largely consisting of curses, oaths and deifications. On the carnival square, the cries of carnival barkers were always persistently heard, which - together with other “genres” of street advertising (the “cries of Paris”, the cries of sellers of miracle cures and fair doctors) - were played out and parodied, becoming an important element of folk laughter culture. According to Bakhtin, Rabelais combined all these forms, genres and motifs in the novel “Gargantua and Pantagruel”, preserving them for posterity and thereby creating a kind of “encyclopedia” of medieval laughter. Moreover, from Bakhtin’s point of view, the reliance on humorous folk culture not only did not contradict the humanistic ideals of Rabelais, but, on the contrary, harmoniously combined with them and even helped their propaganda, since “the carnival worldview is the deep basis of Renaissance literature.” As Bakhtin notes in the book “The Work of François Rabelais and the Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,” “no matter how scattered, separated and isolated individual “private” bodies and things are, the realism of the Renaissance does not cut the umbilical cord that connects them with the generative body of the earth and the people." For example, "rehabilitation of the flesh", characteristic of humanism, is correlated and akin to the "grotesque concept of the body", with the predominance of the "material-corporeal principle of life" inherent in folk culture. Laughter folk culture, being ancient, archaic in its origins , nevertheless, anticipated some fundamental philosophical concepts that are specific to the New Age. According to L.E. Pinsky, “in the Renaissance, the unbreakable hierarchical vertical of the medieval official idea of the cosmos (the “Great Chain of Being”) was replaced by a historical horizontal: movement in time . In the grotesque concept of the body, experiencing formation in folk holiday games, the subject of which was the cheerful passage of time, a new historical sense of life and an idea of \u200b\u200bthe progress of mankind was born." Compare in the text of Bakhtin's book: "And here are the grotesque images with their essential relationship to time change and with their ambivalence become the main means of artistic and ideological expression of that powerful sense of history and historical change, which awoke with exceptional force during the Renaissance." That is why it is impossible to understand Rabelais and Renaissance literature in general without taking into account their connection with the folk culture of laughter. Medieval laughter is interpreted in Bakhtin’s book as having “a universal and world-contemplative character, as a special and, moreover, positive point of view on the world, as a special aspect of the world as a whole and any of its phenomena.” K. (Bakhtin gave this term an expanded meaning, understanding by it “not only the forms of carnival in a narrow and precise sense, but also the entire rich and varied folk-festive life of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance”) contrasted the serious, high culture of the Middle Ages with “a completely different, "emphasizes the unofficial, extra-church and extra-state aspect of the world, man and human relations."

K. was not just played out, it was “like a real... form of life itself” that people of the Middle Ages lived during holidays - and “another free (free)”, “ideal” form. If official holidays affirmed the stability, immutability and eternity of the existing world order, consecrated the triumph of the already victorious, dominant, indisputable “truth,” then K. “was, as it were, a temporary suspension of the entire official system with all its prohibitions and hierarchical barriers”: at this time life for a short time she left her usual rut and entered “the sphere of utopian freedom.” This freedom was legalized: both the state and the church tolerated it, even every official holiday had its second, folk-carnival, square side. The festive crowd perceived life through the prism of “cheerful relativity”; during the K. people changed clothes (updated their clothes and their social images), elected, and then debunked and beat (in a symbolic sense “killed”) clownish kings and popes, ridiculed, demoted , parodied everything that was worshiped on ordinary days, indulged in various physiological excesses, neglecting the norms of decency: “The theme of the birth of a new renewal was organically combined with the theme of the death of the old in a cheerful and degrading way, with images of a clownish carnival debunking.” In K.’s grotesque imagery, the moment of temporal change was emphasized in every possible way (seasons, solar and lunar phases, death and renewal of vegetation, change of agricultural cycles): “this moment acquired a wider and deeper meaning: people’s aspirations for a better future, a more just future were invested in it.” socio-economic structure, new truth." An abundance of feasting images, hyperbolic physicality, symbolism of fertility, powerful productive force, etc. emphasized the immortality of the people: “In the whole of the world and the people there is no place for fear; fear can penetrate only into a part that is separated from the whole, only into a dying link, taken in isolation from the one that is being born. The whole of the people and the world is triumphantly cheerful and fearless.” From an aesthetic point of view, carnival culture represents a special concept of being and a special type of imagery, which, according to Bakhtin, is based on “a special idea of the bodily whole and the boundaries of this whole.” Bakhtin defines this idea as a grotesque concept of the body, which is characterized by what, from the point of view of “classical” aesthetics (“the aesthetics of a ready-made, completed being”) seems monstrous and ugly. If classical images are individualized, separated from each other, as if cleansed “from all the toxins of birth and development,” then grotesque images, on the contrary, show life “in its ambivalent, internally contradictory process,” concentrated around moments denoting the connection between different bodies, dynamics, temporary change (copulation, pregnancy, birth, act of bodily growth, old age, disintegration of the body, etc.). “Unlike the canons of modern times, the grotesque body is not delimited from the rest of the world, is not closed, not completed, not ready, outgrows itself, goes beyond its limits. The emphasis lies on those parts of the body where it is either open to the outside world, that is where the world enters the body or protrudes from it, or it itself protrudes into the world, that is, on holes, on bulges, on all sorts of branches and processes: an agape mouth, a genital organ, breasts, a phallus, a fat belly, a nose" (Bakhtin). This type of imagery, characteristic of folk laughter culture, is due to the people’s belief in their immortality: “... in a grotesque body, death does not significantly end anything, for death does not concern the generic body; on the contrary, it renews it in new generations.” The concept of cosmos, put forward in Bakhtin's book on Rabelais, caused heated controversy upon its appearance and publication, and is still far from generally accepted. However, it played a major role in the development and stimulation of cultural studies and in expanding the horizons of scientific thought. Currently, the interpretation of the concept of K. continues, and it is possible that both the appearance of its original interpretations and its fruitful use for the study of various world cultures. Multidimensional studies of carnival culture carried out by Bakhtin contributed, in particular, to the legitimation of such a cultural phenomenon as “Rabelaisianism.” Rabelaisianism was interpreted as being connected not so much directly with the work of F. Rabelais, but with the tradition of his philosophical interpretation, within the framework of which cultural space is built in the context of semiotically articulated corporeality, understood as a semantically significant phenomenon (text), the reading of which gives rise to the effect of the grotesque, which and gives the cultural space the status of a carnival (see Body, Corporality, Text, Bakhtin M.M.).