The Voice Over

After the Dead Water

1.

Some months ago, I was asked to write an article about the centennial of the First World War,¹ and while working on it, I realized that the text was turning toward the present, toward its complex, warped distinctness, and there was no way to prevent that turn. As hard as you try to avoid historical analogies, they have become impossible to escape, and each new comparison seems to nudge the country ever closer to an actual catastrophe, sewn from that same twentieth-century pattern. The rhetoric of the last few months, all the speech bubbles that swell around our dismal situation, is marked by a strange pragmatics: their task is not to explain what is happening using a recent example, but to fortify it, to scale it up. Comparing Putin to Stalin or Hitler, calling Kyiv’s Maidan fascist or Banderite,² is not an attempt to get the formula right; it is just meant to inspire fear: as if, having summoned the ghost of past catastrophe, we can halt or repel its pale resemblance.

Everyday existence, no matter how mundane, is always guilty before something or someone—by the mere fact of its coexistence with someone else’s misfortune. You can never know the full measure of the things that cast a shadow on your own prosperity, how your luck breathes the same air as so much suffering. Sometimes—when what’s happening is so conspicuous that it can no longer be ignored—the mundane existence becomes not just blind but criminal. And so it does not know how to respond: abolish itself, change, squint harder?

Nowadays, it’s hard not to think about how our daily life (over the past few years, Moscow has adopted the generic look of a peaceful European capital with bike lanes, small cafés, and a complete lack of preparedness for any kind of danger) has a flip side, and how the curious apathy, which now accompanies any statement that can fit into our shrunken public sphere, is backed by the fact that for half a year, not very far from the bike lanes and cafés, there’s been a war going on, and it looks like everything we had to read about as children. And that there are people, some of them sitting at the next table, to whom this double edifice seems natural and understandable.

I recently read an article by a psychotherapist whose clientele is made up of people my age, Muscovites in their thirties and forties, all burdened by a Soviet childhood and softened by years of relative prosperity. Somewhere in the text a dream is retold; here is what I remember from it. A new law has been passed, the dreamer says, and now those who lose their documents are sentenced to death by firing squad, and I’ve lost my passport, so they’ve come for me. Everyone is really upset at home, but there’s nothing to be done, I collect my things, mom tells me, “Well, no, of course they won’t shoot you, they’ll just exile you.” And indeed they don’t shoot me, and I’m sitting in the cold train car, and the train is going somewhere. And I’m thinking, I always knew this would happen. That my home, my childhood, my daily life with its small troubles—that none of it would last, that it would all end this way, that there’s nothing else besides this train car. That I was born to be here.

At this point the psychotherapist explains that this is a typical dream, that nearly everyone living in Russia today has had a version of this dream. And all of these dreams are about a profound disbelief in the soft surface of this world—that shaking it will bring you back to its icy foundation, the cold-hearted “us-them,” and to the simple realization that anything could happen.

2.

The events of the last two years, which still seem unbelievable, comic, macabre, illustrate this point. It seems that there is no law too absurd to pass—and our bewilderment and public outrage merely spur on our lawmakers. There is also no situation you could consider unthinkable. The war with Ukraine, Khodorkovsky’s release,³ banning Parmesan⁴—none of this seems surprising anymore: in the dark, all swans are black. The borders of what is possible have stretched to the horizon, logical arguments do not work, everyday pragmatism does not save us: it’s like falling into a zone of turbulence that shifts all proportions, moves all the accents—and removes the very possibility of a corridor, a clear perspective, a view of the future. Which might be the hidden meaning of what is happening, its actual purpose.

In a recent interview, Boris Groys talks about the fear of the future as one of the hallmarks of the present, and of the idea of saving oneself from the future as an urgent problem. “There is the sense that the future, whatever shape it takes, will bring about some kind of unpleasantness and a worsening of what is. There is a tendency to hold one’s ground and preserve what is. In other words, what’s current today is how to save oneself from the future and maintain the status quo.”

Nowhere is this fear stronger than in Russia. We habitually express horror at the fact that (according to sociologists) 84 or 86 percent of the population supports Putin. But, in reality, the consolidation is almost 100 percent, and it all boils down to the fear of tomorrow, which brings us all together: Putin, cabbies in Moscow, teachers in the provinces, social media users, and those active in the protest movement. The mere thought of the fact that the unsightly and uncomfortable today is not the final point, that tomorrow will be worse, is the source of a heavy, secret, communal anxiety. Tomorrow promises myriad unknown dangers—war, crisis, revolution, mass repression—and our neurotic logic fails to accept that those things are not likely to happen all at once.

Putin’s rule over the last years (with his conservation projects à la “linger a while—thou art so fair!”) was the first symptom of this turn in our worldview. The commonplace thing to say about Putin is that his main political goal is to preserve this very same status quo, to strengthen his position at the gambling table. This is, broadly speaking, what the conflict between Putin and the protesters on Bolotnaya⁵ was about: he reminded us of the social contract of the aughts (offering the private joys of travels, consumption, and the unsubtle ploy of oil bonuses in exchange for our non-participation in political life), the opposition demanded a future, a return to the historical process, a life that was dynamic instead of static. But when things were set into motion, the ensuing dynamic turned out to be worse than any stasis—and as early as the winter of 2013 we were talking and thinking about how nice it would be to go back at least a couple of steps. Back to the previous summer, to the protest spring of 2012, to the peaceful autumn of 2011—before the Bolotnaya Square case,⁶ before the cannibalistic laws were passed, before people were banned from their jobs, etc. Back to the warm stasis when life was, it turns out, much more bearable.

On the other hand, there are people who seem to derive pleasure from the way our wheels have spun out of control, from the sense of finding oneself in the midst of history. Interviews with warlords of the Donetsk and Lugansk “People’s Republics” bubble with the excitement of people who have finally found themselves in the right place, feeling useful and important, taking their position, attacking, rising up off their knees—in a new kind of sense, for which a mere year ago they would have had to reach back to the ’20s, to Babel’s Red Cavalry with its splendid murderers. This sense of history as laughing gas, a wild carousel of possibilities, where any volunteer will receive an automatic weapon and a live target as part of the bargain, was until recently untranslatable to the language of the present.

It’s interesting, however, that this project of redoing the present is entirely blind to the future, that its entire pathos is retrospective. There’s a reason why one of the main figures of the summer of 2014 was Girkin-Strelkov,⁷ an intellectual turned reenactor, who easily moves from historical fantasy to actual death. In this zone of turbulence, everyone is restoring something of their own, gluing it together from whatever’s at hand: for some it’s Makhno’s huliaipole,⁸ camouflage costumes, pictures with severed heads (“We used to join the Cossacks / And now we join the bandits”⁹); for some it’s the Soviet Union with the gilded Friendship of Nations Fountain and an exhibit of its accomplishments; for some it’s tsarist Russia with its 1913 borders—and all of this is reconstruction, а replica, a costumed game of survival. The versions of the future that are being offered here are all a kind of revanchist ready-made object; none of them contain new elements. Meanwhile, the great distances that separate all these versions give us a sense of the size of the crater into which our present is ready to crash.

The weird optical phenomenon of our strange time resembles a sudden onset of nearsightedness: 2034 is not merely indiscernible, it’s of no interest to anyone—especially compared to 1914. In our everyday life there is no room for futurology, either optimistic (which would be hard to come by) or pessimistic (which scares us with its realistic forecast); nothing induces more anguish and anxiety than the fantasy of what will be. The future is something like yet another version of the iPhone, which is being met with obvious reluctance and distrust: “It was much better when Jobs was still in charge.” And that might be the main issue—the thing that prevents any perspective from becoming a way forward and won’t let analogies get back on their own feet. The twentieth century—by which we measure ourselves, to which we set our watches—was built in the name of tomorrow, using modernist utopia as its template, and in spite of the dark forebodings and bloody sunsets, the expectation of the new, unseen, and of the complete redoing of everything, was the motor that kept the century moving forward. The new—a multifaceted, multiocular utopia, progressive, technocratic, this and that, “we will build a new world,”¹⁰ “our country will be great,” “don’t turn the pages—resurrect,”¹¹ was a kind of slope along which time hurtled along, changing and spurring itself to go faster. The absence of a yearning for the future or a will toward it is almost more frightening to me than the collages of antique mustaches and slogans with which the present is preoccupied.

3.

They say that if you file down the very tip of a crow’s bill, the bird will start crashing into things: the fine-tuned sense of direction, the organ of long-range connection to the future, will cease to work, all distances will collapse into one, all sense of proportion will be lost, there will be no exit. I believe that this is how we orient ourselves in time: if we file down our sense of tomorrow, we will always crash into the corners and cornices of the past—which is all there is to it, anyway. It’s interesting to think about the distortions that happen in a mind that makes no provisions for the future (which has been disinfected, anesthetized—carefully masked under the guise of the present or excluded and ignored like a faux pas). In a world that contains just the present and past, any personal choice loses its substance: events happen as though of their own accord, following the will of things, without any desire on the part of participants (who are barely even participating—just using the circumstances that befell them). Everything that happens has a whole nomenclature of prototypes, which makes it easy to relieve oneself of responsibility, to spread it across a dozen convenient generalizations. Some of them you hear very often: “we have to compromise in difficult times,” “artists have always collaborated with those in power,” “there has always been censorship”; “always” is a key word here, it allows us to not be the exception. The future as a paradigm shift, an opportunity to act not-as-always evokes great distress. But there’s no place to hide anymore; history has caught up with us, and it won’t be easy to work ourselves free from it. We could, of course, wind back what can be rewound, “erase accidental features,”¹² the feverish florescence of movies and books, exhibitions and shows, falafel and meatball shacks—and prepare for a long siege. This is already happening a little bit: state television is mimicking the Soviet ’70s and ’80s, the press is eager to catch up with it; things that until recently seemed like a collection of artefacts, souvenirs of lost times, have suddenly acquired an unexpected terrifying cohesion. As if everything that spent decades locked up in attics, crypts, and other far corners of the mind has suddenly joined a parade of dead things. It’s like the old fairy tale: they put together the rotting pieces of the dead man, splashed some black water on him, and he shuddered—and now his unseeing eyes are about to open.

But this very water is unalive. It pulls together the mishmash of the late Putin years into a kind of system; it holds together layers of language that have burnt down to ashes, lets them rise to the surface once more. Before it disappears, the dead should become solid: whole and visible—and one can’t turn away from it or hide from it. Vladimir Propp writes about this: “The hero is first splashed with dead water, and then with living water. The dead water finishes him off, turns him into someone definitively dead. It is a kind of funeral rite, corresponding to the covering with earth. Only now is he an actual dead person, and not a creature caught between the two worlds, which can come back as a vampire. Only now, after the sprinkling with dead water, can the living water act.”

The dead water has been poured; now we live to see the water of life.

November 2014

Translated by Maria Vassileva