The Voice Over

Today Before Yesterday

(excerpt)

We often want to return to any day before yesterday, to turn it over like a reversible coat and put it on again. In foul times, this is like scratching away at a scab, or a kind of nervous tic: the search for analogies appropriate to one’s situation spins out of control. You can compare any situation to what is going on today and draw immediate and terrifying conclusions. This is especially visible in the overlay of different blueprints—in the conversations about a Third World War, which is to begin in yet another August ’14. This somehow reminds me of the fretting over the arrival of the new millennium, the fear and trembling before the round date—as if fate shared mankind’s predilection for exact dates and historical reenactment.

The feverish turn to the past, the obsession with what has already been, can signify a turn away from the future, а lack of belief in it. Benjamin’s angel of history is moved by the winds that carry him forward, into the unknown; his sorrowful face is turned back, toward the ruins and wreckage that emerge along the way and separate him from what has been lost (paradise, the past). But, in a sense, the constant need to look back, the attempt to rely on what has already taken place, speaks about something bigger—the absence of a present. Both as a kind of reality and as the sketch that would represent this reality.

A couple of weeks ago, I read an observation that struck me as accurate and thus worrisome. It was about how the events of the last few months (fill in what fits, cross out what doesn’t) robbed us of the present. Let me expand on how I understood this: the situation has changed so much that X or Z are no longer at fault for comparing contemporary Russia to Munich back in the day, or Petersburg the day before yesterday, because the very country is writing itself like a literary text, like a stuffy historical novel whose setting is explored in the artless manner of a school play. Тhe present day has been canceled in one fell swoop; it’s like during the filming of a recent movie when the actors, the crew, and their families had to spend weeks and even years in interiors from the Soviet fifties, wearing clothes from that era, and paying a fine whenever they broke character.¹ Today we, the entire country, are breaking from the present; the present, which people share with one another and the world, has been abolished—it is now one of many alternate realities, a kind of hypothesis one needs to prove. And that is what we are forced to do, now and then sinking knee-deep into either the 1930s or the 1970s, and it is exactly the fractionary, mismatched nature of the everyday that seems essential to this predicament.

This palpable unease forces the inhabitants of our not-present to crowd together in a kind of situational foam, a flighty we, which gathers for this or that reason and then dissipates within hours or days. What Alexander Blok called “the events”—roughly speaking, the language that history uses to speak to people—is addressed precisely to multitudes, sets we into motion, feeds on their transposition. We need somehow to explain to ourselves what exactly is being done to us, and it turns out that there are no new words for it. We—I—did not make them in the nineties and aughts; it seems like the only work that was done was on exhuming and reviving the past. And so it is today; we are silent while it is speaking, whatever and however it can speak.

I like to think back on the late eighties, when perestroika brought an immense amount of unread works into circulation, and for several years you could see far to all ends of the earth² and everything was at the same distance—we were at the same remove from Elena Shvarts as from Mikhail Kuzmin, and from Kuzmin to Joyce. This strange period was a kind of reversal of what we have today: back then Andrey Nikolev and Gertrude Stein were both my contemporaries, both part of the very current, newborn language of the todayest of todays. Now it’s all topsy-turvy: we are no longer our own contemporaries—if the contemporary is made possible by the language you use to talk about it. This does not contradict “the events,” but it grants them a certain comic tint. It appears that today Russia truly has history (even if it’s just a rap sheet), something that we so yearned for in the uneventful aughts, but it has no present. There wasn’t one in the aughts, either, or we wouldn’t now be forced to dig around looking for words on some old shelf, or deep in grandpa’s pocket; they’d be jumping to the surface all on their own.

It feels like our working vocabulary does not have the words or constructions that would allow us to speak of what is happening today without using a complex past tense and a portable quote book. The public space—from official statements to social media—is full of exclusively borrowed speech, with gaps and scuff marks, its expiration date long-discolored on the packaging. Whenever the need for speech arises, whenever a mouth opens to agree or dissent, to appraise or name, a quotation lies at the ready (often intonational, more often yet forgetful of where it comes from), and the event is no longer novel or singular. What is said aloud comes not from me and not even from “us”; when the president of the country recites “Hey, men! Is Moscow not behind us?”³ he is not pointing the audience to the text, to this or that set of meanings—he is merely leaning on a powerful layer of common knowledge, like an athlete leaning against a column. When a pop star says that St. Petersburg should be renamed Petrograd, he is following an invisible blueprint, serving a god unbeknown to him. When a warlord posing as a White Guard incarnate⁴ reenacts Stalin’s orders in eastern Ukraine, he is merely taking what is already at hand. In this realm of borrowed speech, the only things that can be known—that can exist—are those that we have never not known.

The inhabitants of this realm are, naturally, forced to speak in quotations (worn smooth into proverbs, ready at the tip of the tongue); everything written in Russian should be seen as a giant phrase book that can illustrate any statement with a randomly chosen quotation, whatever its original meaning. The working of this mechanism of appropriation is visible on Facebook where on any given day someone is busy explaining which side Pushkin, Nabokov, or Brodsky would have taken in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict or in some smaller dispute—and it turns out you can use the very same lines to beat both sides over the head.

In these exchanges (not of thoughts but of diffuse wisps of intents and judgments), everything is deliberately approximate, language is used not to diagnose but to mask the diagnosis. A system of labels has been developed for just this purpose, as limber as it is flimsy: it is enough to note the most crucial thing about a person or a thing—is he one of us or one of them (that is, good or bad)—and not a word more. National traitors, Chekists, Banderites,⁵ fascist goons—this lexical collage is glued together from elements that the last century had already discarded. The result is quite patchy, and this could be cause for concern: we see the absence of a unified style, of the will to blend this patchwork of borrowings into a grander speech installation. The closest anyone has gotten to this is the masticating collective machinery of the State Duma.

The ability of certain words to emerge out of thin air and fill up with fresh blood would be terrifying all on its own, but what stands behind them is a new kind of doctrine, unnamed and unrecognized, which tells us about the a priori approximate nature of any utterance. Anyone can become a top student at the school of inaccuracy, where all words mean the same thing, which is always very far from their original dictionary definition. For example, a fascist or a liberal, in this language, is anyone who the speaker disagrees with. Hate speech is still new to us, so in order to curse someone, we look for words from nottoday. Those readymade forms are back in demand after a long absence, and society seems to have come to an agreement that any meaning is approximate, and any choice is random. When there isn’t anything to borrow, one grasps at whatever’s at hand, and the result is like a playground taunt—ukropy, vatniki, kolorady (dillweeds, padded jackets, Colorado beetles)⁶ are words empty and weightless like balloons. Here you find yourself, oddly enough, with a kind of consensus—not stipulated by anyone but simply embraced by all. It comes down to forsaking meaning in service of the very process of speaking—as if there were no other way to patch up the frayed fabric of reality.

When any conversation about the here and now is made impossible, the conversation about the past becomes but a euphemism, a means of clarifying our relationship to the ousted present, a way to take a stand, to feel out and mark yourself and what’s yours: the surrender and death of the Russian intelligentsia,⁷ the victory stolen by some unnamed entity, the global conspiracy, musica mundana,⁸ whatever. All of this is lying at the ready, closer than the day before yesterday.

Now—completely and unquestionably—a “solid order” has been installed in Russia, which consists of the hands and feet of its inhabitants being bound together tightly—separately for each person and collectively for everyone. Any active movement (in any given sphere) can only bring suffering to your neighbor, who is as tied up as you are. Such are the conditions of public, state, and private life. You should, while not forgetting your own illness, always remember that you are in a position no better and no worse than that of any other conscious person who lives in Russia. Because of that you can only feel okay in those moments when you forget your surroundings. […] All is as foul, filthy, and airless as ever in Russia: history, art, events, or any of the things that create a fundament for life, have barely ever existed here. It’s not surprising that there isn’t any life either.

(Blok, in a letter to his mother, November 1909)

August 2014

Translated by Maria Vassileva