Luisa Savinskaya, President of the Women of Moscow Association
Every person should certainly use the abilities God bestowed on them. Luisa Savinskaya, a poet and President of the Women of Moscow Association, chose to serve people, so the abilities God gave her went to make people around her happier. Since Luisa is a very gifted person, those around her get the benefits of her attitude in profusion. A highly knowledgeable lady with years of experience in literary work behind her, Luisa is a glamorous model to illustrate feminine psychology and the ideal behaviour associated with it.
“Any human being must think of what or who surrounds him in the first place”, Luisa said. “Of people, of the natural environment, of other beings. Only then, will he be happy. He who cannot make others happy will never be happy himself. People come into this world to adorn it with beauty and harmony. I would formulate my life credo along the following lines. Do not seek vain honours, and never bask in praise. I am a candle burning, but, it lights the way for others. A silly person would think that if he is rich and revels in wealth, he would be truly happy for the rest of his days. However, the riches he stole from other people will run out one day, to leave him with nothing. There will be nobody left to support him in this kingdom of wealth he created.
I am a woman and, as such, I am different from a man. As a woman, I perceive the world around me from a different perspective. Making happy those who have become dear to me and spinning a cobweb of affection from heart to heart is what gives meaning to my life. I would hate to bury what I got from God, and I would love to see the grains of my love for my close ones sprout like wheat in them. I would love my close ones to remember me happy. When I go, I will go as one goes after a work-weary day, after breathing its last good-bye to the Earth. I want to be a healer to people. This is, in fact, a woman’s mission in life. To be ready to help, to be needed. Now”.
Luisa started to contemplate on life’s meaning when she was still very young, a student at the French language department at the Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages. Those were the years during and after the war and Louisa thought it unworthy to study a foreign language when the country desperately needed experts in other, more down-to-earth areas of knowledge, such as production and agriculture. Therefore, she quit the Institute to enrol in the Timiryazev Agriculture Academy, from which she graduated. For years afterward, Louisa worked in agriculture and successfully participated in many innovative harvest-boosting projects. She prides herself on having done and continuing to do so much good to her country. Nevertheless, what has always seen her through and saved her at times of crisis is her unfading faith in God and in harmony, which is what makes life possible.
“Believers or non-believers, they all cannot but seek answers to the eternal question of how we came to live on this planet and where life itself came from”, Luisa said. “Of course, what we are here for. As an Orthodox believer, I look at a woman’s mission on Earth from the Orthodox point of view. This viewpoint never clashes with what other religions have to say on the matter. I believe that a woman is part of a human being in the broadest sense of the word. The Bible teaches us that God created us human and then He created us men and women. That means that a human being consists of two inseparable halves. When we say a human being, we never mean a man or a woman; we mean one undivided whole. That is why, what is lacking in men is made up for by women, and what women have is lacking in men. We can achieve harmony only if men and women walk through life hand in hand and build the world around them together.
It does not matter whether you are a believer or non-believer when it comes to the simple truth that the world and everything in it was designed to give new life. Then, men and women came into this world for the sole purpose of giving new life. This justifies our existence. The life we were created for is supposed to be free from discord or catastrophe, and no one has the right to intrude on another’s private world. No one has the right to take another’s life. No one has the right to say that he alone knows what happiness is and where to find it. That is because happiness means different things to different people. That is why your vision of happiness is all right as long as it does not interfere with other people’s lives. We have one globe to live on and we can escape nowhere from it. Whether we want it or not, we are destined to live on this planet in peace and accord”.
Luisa went on to say, “Woman was born to smooth out the belligerent nature of men. A woman is supposed to carry harmony. As a poet, I can understand in full the meaning that lies behind Dostoyevsky’s well-known saying that beauty will save the world. Sometimes, when I write poetry, I feel that something is wrong in it, some word probably. I try to find the defect, and after I have found it, I involuntarily re-write the whole passage to a degree where it acquires a more profound meaning. The true means the beautiful. I once mentioned this small discovery of mine to a mathematician. No wonder, he said. For us, it has long been as clear as day, he added. In mathematics, a formula is correct only if it looks nice. A composer I know told me that he had put a Mussorgsky score in a frame to hang on the wall because the notes on it were arranged so beautifully that they made a real work of art. Harmony, beauty, and truth make up one whole; they are inseparable. Chaos carries decay and has to be kept out of the human world to save it from self-destruction.
The battlefield of evil and virtue has always been the human heart. A woman can make a ruin into a home. I saw many destroyed houses during the war. Nevertheless, even when a house was reduced to no more than a big crater, life inevitably came back to it fairly soon. A woman’s mission to this world is to give new life in harmony and accord. She is destined to cultivate unity through being kind and merciful to people”. It is entirely to serve these high purposes that Luisa set up the Women of Moscow Association thirteen years ago. Her service to people should materialise in concrete deeds. Moreover, it has. The association unites women of art in every imaginable field. Since Luisa developed into a prolific poetess in her years of editing a newspaper at the Agriculture Academy, she is the mastermind of the organisation and its activities. “The Women of Moscow Association has nothing to do with feminist slogans and its members are far from being mysandrists”, Louisa said. “Men are as beautiful as women and they play an equally important role in maintaining life. Our association unites women only because it appeals to the best of best in a human heart. The idea that underlies our organisation is ‘The Ecology of a Woman’s Soul’. Our purpose for now is to reinstate the originally feminine principles of kindness, mercy, love, and compassion to their proper positions. People give their lives for others.
We Russians are known to be able to sacrifice our lives for those we love, but, we are totally incapable of living for those we love. No matter how bitter, the observation is true for now. If men would follow us in our striving to bring different people together, so that they could become good neighbours, we would consider our mission fulfilled. Women who reveal no kindness, mercy, love, and compassion are mutants of the feminine gender, if you will excuse my saying so. A woman driving tractors or trains is welcome, but, only on the condition that driving tractors or trains meets their natural propensities. There is nothing wrong about women flying a plane or even walking into outer space as long as this does not clash with their first and foremost mission of giving life, love, and harmony. Harmony is crucial in all aspects of life.
From my point of view, all people are believers to a certain extent, even atheists. We believe in God, the atheists do not believe in God, but non-believing is still a belief, isn’t it? What makes a belief a belief is that you cannot prove it intellectually. Your intellect is too limited for that. What guides you to a belief is your intuition. A person comes into this world naked, and he leaves it naked. However, he leaves behind the fruits of his work, and these fruits can be malignant or benign. Depending on which will outweigh, evil or virtue, humanity will follow the path of darkness or the path of light. Therefore, we women must serve to the best of our abilities to disseminate harmony and accord. To the man, the woman is the necessary supplement of harmony and a deterring force to rein in his innate aggressiveness, a supplement without which life will be just impossible”.
The Women of Moscow Association, of which Luisa is the leader, is an original answer to the mind-boggling problem of how to make people see the beautiful, come to love it, and through this to re-discover their God-given abilities and talents. The Association holds concerts and all kinds of literary events to introduce young or unknown talents to the public. In addition, the people attending the concerts feel refreshed and slightly bemused afterwards, which invariably sets them thinking along the lines of harmony. Moreover, this is exactly why Luisa organised this association. This is her service to humanity, and she happily continues to pursue it.
2004
Tamara Murzina
Ladies of Character
Voice of Russia World Service
Voices from Russia 
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