The Voice Over

Intending to Live

1.

In the spring of 1909, Blok wrote to his mother from Venice.

Lyuba’s in a Parisian tailcoat, and I wear my Viennese white suit and a Canotier hat. I look at the people and houses, I play with the crabs and collect seashells. It’s all very quiet, lazy and restful. We want to go swimming in the sea. Finally, there are no Russian newspapers around, and I don’t hear or read the indecent names of the Union of the Russian People and Milyukov; instead, in all the shop windows I see the names of Dante, Petrarch, Ruskin and Bellini. Every Russian artist has the right to spend at least a few years with his ears closed off to everything Russian, and instead see his other homeland—Europe, and especially Italy.

A great temptation of our present time, one which is almost impossible to resist, is to perform the following simple operation: take Milyukov and replace him with Milonov (or Navalny, a name closer to the political sensibilities of the author), and replace the Union of the Russian People with the nashisty.¹ It’s tempting to once again find evidence that the present is a picture that has been stock-still for three hundred years, where nothing changes except last names: where Pushkin, who was not allowed to travel, is ready to go even to China, and Blok, who could travel, is happy to simply remove some headlines from view, to close off his ears, in order to return to what one so wishes were the norm, the homeland. To the sense of continuity and permanence, which feels like the only thing compatible with life—the bright suite of rooms, where people move between rest and freedom without haste. Where, in Pushkin’s words, they intend to live.²

The peculiarity of the Russian mindset might, in fact, consist of a too condensed reading of this Pushkin text—a reading that makes impossible the very hope of any continuity, even in its simplest possible form. While the intention to live is still rising to its full height, still taking a deep breath, in your head, like a taunt, “but suddenly we die” hurries on, and in this line we hear a gloating that the author did not intend—it has nothing in common with the awareness of death that is required of the living. In this reading, which has already called off its own future, there is no rest or freedom, because there is no future: there is no room for it to raise its ephemeral dome, because it is immediately squashed by the counting rhyme: but-sud-den-ly-we-die! Look at what happened to Pushkin—just when he intended to live, he died; he had just imagined his flight to a distant abode of labor and delight—and suddenly the Black River, cloudberries, death.³ Better not to intend, not to get used to anything, not to linger around. As another poet said, “Don’t get comfortable.”⁴

There is an English novel in which someone calls up old people on the phone and tells them, “Don’t forget that you will die.” Among the many terrified, enraged recipients who report this call to the police, there is one old lady who responds, “My dear, there’s nothing I remember quite as well!” It is unlikely that memento mori might be optional anywhere on Earth—but on the territory of today’s Russia, people are all too prepared for death (and much less prepared to live for a while without feeling that one’s journey to the other world has already begun). Marina Tsvetaeva wrote about this and called it a smooth-running transfer;⁵ Rilke talked about this in his “Russian” Stories of God: “ ‘So what bounds Russia?’—‘You know that!’—the crippled man exclaimed.”⁶

According to Rilke, Russia borders directly on God—a geopolitical situation that must trouble those who live in its outermost territories. The practical conclusion from this adjacency is that the usual pathway between cause and effect, crime and punishment, past and future, today and tomorrow, becomes opaque, impenetrable. Here is God, and here is the threshold; beyond it there is a terrifying unknown, the frightening Iwillrepay,⁷ a territory one was never meant to see clearly. Any prospect of homemade comfort is flattened into that of a store-bought Sofrino icon: human existence is not described nor guaranteed by anything save for a certain number of precedents. Roughly speaking, all we know about life is that Pushkin died, and so did everyone else after him (and the twentieth century did not spare us the sight of how “everyone else” dies in so-called interesting times).

There is the sense that Russia today is more eager to believe in the prospect of the terrible (familiar to us since childhood thanks to examples that were so generously provided—from the pioneer heroes⁸ to one’s own grandfathers and great-grandfathers) than in its own aptitude for change. This casts a very specific light on the present, endows it with a disquieting unity, which does not at all match its reality—an eclectic, hogwash, patchwork flow of life. This strange lighting, the unmistakable sense that each movement follows someone’s external design, is something I know very well from my experience with crafted reality: that is how a work of art is usually structured, carrying the mark of its author’s will. The rather dismal compulsion of everything that happens around us is very similar to a literary text. In a certain sense, this is exactly how things stand right now; more and more it seems that the country is not at all planning to close the book and get off at the next stop.

2.

The wild, tattered process of archaization that everyone is talking about, which we observe and describe right as the ground is crumbling underneath our feet, has a peculiar backstory in Russia. Some years ago, I was asked a question that is worth revisiting today. It came from an English scholar of Russian literature who couldn’t understand why all Russian prose could fit under the umbrella of the fantastic (sci-fi, fantasy, fairy tales). Take Pelevin, Sorokin, Petrushevskaya, he said—any work of realism will inevitably include some kind of apparition, a miraculous rescue, an oprichnik with claws, a war between mice and monkeys. I’ve nothing against it, but why is it everywhere, why does everyone do it?

Even if it’s not quite everywhere, a significant portion of the texts that a broad audience (here we move away from literature per se, and toward ethnography and anthropology, where the laws of large numbers are at play) would consider as written to the point, as having to do with reality, are really about the lives of vampires, foxes, and saints. Moreover, some of them seem to have an extended shelf life—like the old Pelevin story, in which a German pilot from WWII is resurrected in the forest outside of Moscow, so that a girl can marry a foreigner. Somehow, even thirty years later, this text still provides a glimpse of reality as we know it today: it remains an accurate “physiological sketch” of Russian life, drawn from nature.

This departure from reality is the most homespun kind of realism—the realism of the front page, a sideshow of authorial bravery. This is also how it is received by its local audience (and as a rule it does not really appeal to outside readers—unlike the lush wonders of Latin American magical realism). That is, the Russian unbelievable, which is the same as the Russian believable, is a product not meant for export, one you couldn’t easily dress up in a frock appropriate for the outside world. All of this has little to do with the books themselves—but it says a lot about what the Cyrillic alphabet and those who use it have to contend with.

There is the sense that the reality here follows the provisions of an unwritten convention, often invisible and incomprehensible to the outside observer, but clear to those who live within this conceptual realm. Until quite recently, it looked like the country was taking part in the political, economic, and cultural affairs of the present, and was trying, if not to catch up and overtake, then at least to join in and match its advances, excitedly rolling out bike lanes, joining the WTO and whatnot, signing agreements and participating in summits. At the same time—more precisely, underneath all that—there was always another, more intimate, logic, which the conventional Bolotnaya Square easily shares with the conventional Poklonnaya Hill:⁹ one for all.

According to this logic, any movement in history—in its syntactical design—is perceived as coming from the outside, as an imitation, almost like a child’s play whose purpose is to merely pass the time. What’s actually important is another, internal order. There is the common belief that any, even the wildest possible, plot twist in one’s life is both possible and inevitable. As well as the common fear that one will get too comfortable on the warm side of this world, and then crash into the freezing unknown.

But even more important is the near-absolute immersion in the past. It won’t let us think about the future without imagining it as Stalingrad or Potsdam, Tsushima or Hiroshima; nor will it let us feel the present as our own, without any precedent, analogy, or model. This obsession with the past is unlike any other illness I know of, and it needs to be analyzed and treated. The inability to allow even a sliver of air to come between oneself and the past, the absence of any distance, or even the desire to create distance, between oneself and everything that has already happened—lead to strange transmutations. When the past and the present coexist with such intensity, the future is rendered useless—and it comes to resemble a descent into Hades.

All the flashpoints of Russian history, no matter how far back you look, from 1991 to 1917, from Stalin to Peter the Great, from the Decembrists to the Vlasovites—no longer appeared, at the turn of the millennium, like points along a common line or paragraphs of a shared narrative, but like episodes in an unceasing war, clusters of conflicting versions. There is no period in the last three centuries that we could consider free of such conflict—and that wouldn’t belong to the territory of the artistic. That is—of restless, unfinished, effervescent uncertainty rather than reconciled knowledge.

This special way of handling the past has its own vocabulary, which can hardly be translated into the language of comparable cases. These relations with the past neither conform to the model of suppression or forgetting nor to that of admitting and working with guilt. The way it works in Russia can only be described as an enchantment, a deep and personal involvement with the past of every one of us, people of today. The redrawing of the past moves along without pause—and not just with the help of state-controlled TV channels and semiofficial publications or in the uncensored writings of political bloggers. You can simply go on YouTube and look up the hundreds of comments underneath the song “We’ll Bravely Go into Battle,” where users tear each other to shreds over the “right cause” of a century ago, where there is no difference between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and no desire to lead a discussion in an academic manner. Similar discussions (of the First and Second World Wars, the Afghan war, the Chechen war, the Stalinist repressions and the dissolution of the USSR) happen spontaneously in taxis, trains, or doctors’ waiting rooms—wherever the possibility of a conversation presents itself. It’s almost like a family fight—but it takes place in a kitchen the size of an enormous country, and the cast includes not just the living but also the dead. Which, as it turns out, are more alive than all the living.

3.

Our strange relationship to the past and its objects could be explained by the fact that no one has ever come into their inheritance here. And that is not surprising: in a way we are all successors of people who, in the twenties and thirties, moved into the apartments of previous people—people who had been arrested, exiled, erased—and spent decades sitting in someone else’s chair under someone else’s portrait, getting used to them, but never forgetting the incompleteness of their rights and their shared history. As a result, our ideas about the past, about family history, about the country’s history, can be entirely fantastical, riddled with guesswork, we are not shy about blind spots (and even consider them natural)—the past is never truly gone, finished, complete. Each time it pays a visit to the territory of the present, it grows stronger.

It’s important, too, how readily the past accepts all advances toward it and how generously it repays them. The feeling that the entire twentieth century has become contemporaneous to us, which I remember from the early nineties, hasn’t gone away or settled down. Neither has the ability to discuss this or that Osip Mandelstam idea as urgent, fresh out of the oven, and directly related to our everyday. It hasn’t always been this way: a century ago, from a similar remove, Blok writes about Apollon Grigoryev, and he looks at him as if through binoculars, across hundreds of years, with a cold retrospective gaze. It’s hard not to think that the amplified life of the poetic field, which has been the good fortune of the last few decades, is also indebted to this immersion into the past, to this peculiar magnetic—magic—intensity of grand exemplars, magna imago, which sets the scale for us, boosts the speed, and calls us to task.

Here we could introduce a fashionable term and talk about colonization—thinking about how the present and future become a dominion of the past, adopt its language, are arranged in its image. Because the odd barter between the past and present in Russia does not just affect the sphere of culture: everyone, it seems, has been a victim or beneficiary of this dynamic. The past supplies the optical devices that allow us to feel real, like we are actors and makers of current events. This feeling has been completely taken away from those living in Russia in its political sense, but the generous consolation prize is the ability to settle accounts with the past-in-the-present. When a car owner in Moscow writes “to Berlin!” on his car, he effectively erases the border between himself and his victorious grandfather; his daily travel around the city—to work, to the store, to his dacha—becomes the victorious movement across a conquered Europe, and he becomes his own grandfather, a liberating soldier, a bronze monument, though he has invested no more than a can of paint in this venture. A kind of reversal of Lermontov’s “bogatyrs—not you”¹⁰ takes place: “we” are doubly the bogatyrs—both because we stand on the shoulders of monuments and because we think that we grew this tall ourselves.

I recently read an interview with a volunteer fighter who joined the rebels in Donbass. There are many such stories; this one is a little different. The subject in question was a Frenchman of Russian descent, a second-generation immigrant. But when they asked him, “Why did you come here?” he said he was planning on finishing what his grandfathers had started.

This inability to distinguish oneself from one’s grandfathers, the past from the future, is of course also a kind of unspoken convention, a common agreement with a higher power that is hardly innocent—and sometimes it looks like a game of children playing soldiers. The sudden ability to walk through the mirror and see, instead of the quiet, boring, commonplace life, a red and black reality of some kind of Elusive Avengers,¹¹ where one can freely shoot at the enemy and protect one’s friends, and then return to a life in which trains run on time, has already been worked out in hundreds of books and movies. The difference, perhaps, lies in its scale. And also in the fact that the movement from a zone of comfort to a zone of bloody adventures happens not in secret but in front of the whole world, setting a new example. The simplest and roughest summary would be to call this a form of extreme tourism; but it is, in fact, deeper and scarier than that. More than anything these jokes with serious matters, these children’s games with elemental magic remind me of the old story of the sorcerer’s apprentice, who brought to life forces he could not control.

It seems that the difference with the secret war in Afghanistan or the covert war in Chechnya, the truth about which was squeezed into the periphery of public consciousness for years, is that the number of victims of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is not limited to the list of those dead or wounded. All you need to do to meet the victims of the information war is go to any social media website. It’s as if this war had no mere witnesses (“a war is waged somewhere, but we still see it”) or even a home front (“we are in a peaceful city, while people get killed over there”): everyone participates in it to some extent. There is no difference between the sides of the conflict: the totality of the experience engulfs actors, survivors, the people who are living through the unimaginable. And the fact that the conversation takes place hundreds of kilometers away from the events themselves does not change anything. This is a conversation of the wounded—and its intonation is a result of a trauma that is shared, collective, the same for everyone.

I want to say, very carefully, one more thing: it’s possible that the nature of that trauma is different for those who were in the battle zone and were forced not just to suffer the effects of what happened but to endure the hardships of war: to worry about themselves and their close ones, about food, heat, shelter, survival. Working to preserve your life can, in a strange way, help preserve your mind.Whereas the illusion of being there, cobbled together from a fickle understanding of the past and an incomplete knowledge of what is currently happening, can be fatal to those who experience the present entirely online.

Because “we”—the broad we, which includes not just me and my friends, not just the imaginary community of readers of this text, but everyone whose background includes the Soviet system of historical education with its microtraumas intentionally inflicted on everyone (en masse, like some kind of inoculation), its saintly child martyrs and suicidal heroes, its incantation that “the most important thing is that there be no war,” which makes war our only horizon of expectation—recognizes a certain vocabulary as native: well, here we go.

4.

Recently social media has become another way to pump what little air there is out of the room. Perhaps, in part, because in the absence of a free press (the few publications that have survived make the empty landscape look that much bleaker), there is a need to reconstruct its multitude of voices, this time through our own effort. But, having become our main media, like an indispensable daily newspaper, social media starts to take from us almost more than it gives. Not because it doesn’t offer criteria or filters to help us sort information. And not even because the positions and points of view to which you are trying to relate your own are entirely opposite, and yet all voices sound prescriptive. The thing that worries me has little to do with the meaning of what is being discussed; it has to do with its acoustics. Any event, large or small, runs across our timeline like a convulsing wave with a shallow or deep ripple. Every repost amplifies the weight of the initial message, grants it a broader, bell-like amplitude. The alarm bell is rung for bad news, and even more often—the foretaste of bad news, and then even more so—for someone being wrong, which is picked apart with great care, seen as a symptom, as yet another wretched headline out of many. The main thing that follows from these deliberations is that the lives of others, the choices of others (and thus life itself in its non-homogeneity) seem compromised, rotten, incompatible with a model set by someone else, and that shows not the purity of our own choices but how narrow and impassable our common path can be.

Each new calamity is not experienced on its own but acquires the traits of the final blow, the last drop. Alright, that’s it; after this one event (fill in what fits—after this or that law, after the first, third, twelfth of March, after yet another column), the life that has been spent in anticipation of the terrible will fall into its deep well. These “that’s it” moments can take place three times a week: our sense of the real caliber of events has long gotten confused, real and fake news are given the same consideration, there’s no one to look into the sources or figure them out—if you say something is fake, they’ll tell you, “That’s where we’re headed anyway.”

And so any conversation about things that are part of our everyday human affairs—situations and problems that concern the fabric of contemporary life—inevitably falls into the same pattern: “How can we talk about this trifle when we have a war going on, and Putin.” And so, again and again, a comic aberration forces us to call the raising of any issue partkom¹² or liberal censorship or something like that. And so a picture is organized with its background (thunder, lightning, the ninth wave) depicted with much greater care than the foreground. And so, little by little, our own lives are no longer seen as worthy of our sympathy.

And so anything that proves that life is still in residence, anything that, as best it can, serves to affirm and expand it—pictures of kittens and cakes, showing off a new pair of shoes, any kind of mindless domesticity, any experience of the situation as compatible with life—turns out to be subtly or sharply compromising. It becomes a betrayal: not of a common cause but of a common feeling.

That feeling is: life is impossible. You could say, as many in fact do, “Life in Russia is impossible,” but they can hardly be serious, several million people cannot just die, disappear, or emigrate all at once—no matter how appropriate that might seem to some. So a more accurate translation would sound like this: in a country that does this, in a country where this happens, life cannot resemble life. Life can only resemble unlife.

And I just don’t agree with this.

You hear this here and there, oftentimes even in your own head. Friends decide not to come to Russia for an exhibition or conference so that they don’t take part in what happens here—as if the exhibition and conference were not organized by the same people who are preventing what is happening from taking over entirely, from dragging its oilcloth over the entire country. And other friends accuse those who have stayed (another old-new word from the current glossary) of doing work that allows the Putin majority to pretend like life is still going on as usual.

It seems to me that this is another way to simplify the situation, to make it two-dimensional—here is the evil empire, there is the rest of the world. This scheme does not account for another “we,” maybe the most important one: the 14 or 16 percent of the country whose existence even official sociologists cannot deny.¹³ No matter how many million people and names fall under this category, they cannot be discounted, nor added to the monolithic majority, if that even exists. Here is a useful exercise: always remind yourself of the fractional, granular, unfinished character of any monolith—and that by discounting those who live here, you remove from the battle map the flags of cities that have not yielded. Are we (here we can focus on ourselves and remind ourselves who we are and what exactly we’re worth) so easily ignored? The attitude toward those who stayed often resembles that toward the defenders of a fortress under siege: we expect not just bravery but also asceticism from them, as if the thoughts and actions of ordinary life do not befit them.

This is a mechanism from the field of psychoanalysis, here affecting too vast a territory. Given: a force majeure, which hangs over one’s head like a heavy stone, only leaving enough room for the bare necessities—for fast action, for brief affect, for clambering between today and today. The elimination of “tomorrow” (of the corridor and steady ground under one’s feet), the rejection of future prospects are, strange as it may seem, not the worst results of this setup. The worst is something else: life with a discredited, half-cancelled tomorrow can make any today seem doubtful. The present becomes guilty, desecrated. It gets displaced onto the territory of the past and starts looking for mirrors and analogies, so that it is less solitary while under attack (since the attack is inevitable, it can at least lean on previous experience, know that someone else went through this, that it’s not alone). It tries to turn its horror into fuel, to use it for movement. But there is no future and there is nowhere to go—the vagrant affect moves from person to person, around the circle, like a hot potato that no one is able to or wants to hold on to.

But what if this situation, hard as it is, depends on me, and I am expected to do something different? The willingness to admit that everything is hopeless comes way too easily these days—like a scream that switches on the second the elevator lights go off. What if another kind of modality is needed—and the point is not in knowing how to die (“oh how gloriously we will die,”¹⁴ the past suggests) but in intending to live, not dropping the future like a coat into someone else’s hands?

I miss this modality in today’s air, and I wish it could be procured, distilled, dispensed in pharmacies. What is important now is to find a logic that would be compatible with life; that would work to affirm the everyday but wouldn’t turn into an improvised op-ed along the lines of “vote for N”; that would work to change who’s in power and wouldn’t want monastic self-immolation from us.

This brings to mind Theodor Adorno’s famous F-scale. This 1950 test of one’s ability to resist (or give in to) the temptations of totalitarian thought seems quite old-fashioned today. The test consists of statements like “the majority is always right” or “society should be cleansed of any kind of ill health” and asks you to agree or disagree. Now these statements would be seen as belonging to a very specific system of ideas—roughly speaking, fascist ones—before the sensors of agreement or disagreement go off. But there is another set of questions there that causes one to wonder upon first reading: Why is this here? I mean an assortment like “grit one’s teeth and keep going,” “turn away from an unbearable situation and keep living,” “find in oneself the strength to be joyful no matter what.” These might seem like the ordinary mantras of everyday courage that are offered to us for this or that reason. What’s wrong with them?

The point, it seems, is the very ability to turn away from suffering, no matter if it’s one’s own or someone else’s. The key is the voluntary refusal to see/acknowledge, the ability to turn off the mechanism of empathy at will: the thing that sets apart those who close their eyes and walk on from those who turn around to look (like Orpheus and Lot’s wife). The capacity to survive is certainly a feature of the first group. Today it is important that those who, whether they like it or not, belong to the second group, find a way to live without keeping their eyes tightly shut.

Because it’s time now to make the present suitable for living. What I mean is not the practice of small deeds (whoever said that would be enough?) and certainly not the justification of compromise and collaboration of any kind, but something more like reminding ourselves that the New Testament tells us to “rejoice always.” To me it seems of utmost importance to follow this order now; more important than ever, as important as ever.

5.

Because circumstances will never be good enough to start over, on a blank sheet, turning a new leaf on the calendar. The warped, stale, bruised life that we experience is the very same present where we need to make ourselves at home, without waiting for a “game over” and the option to reset all defaults, or Russia without Putin, or a clean Monday. It’s most likely that things will go on as they have been, and there won’t be miracles to make our task easier.

I want to stake out a claim on at least this segment of the present. The present is politics (and the past is a magic that affirms that everything equals everything else), and, it seems, it’s the time to give up magic in the name of politics—at least the crude magic of summoning the dead and using sacrificial blood. I think of this also in connection to my own text, where the past and the future, like giant figures on stilts, possess a kind of spare, borrowed life—as if they have the power to take, give, and punish according to their own will. It is time to allow the past to become the past, to stop counting on its arsenal, to drown the magic books—and begin to expand, shake up, cultivate the territory of today, thinking of it as a place to live, and not the anteroom before the gas chamber. The main thing is to move aside, like a curtain, the shade of irrevocability, hanging as the verdict over today. Then we may also see another past made possible—like an unrealized, yet to be fulfilled, promise.

Blok wrote about this in 1909: “Italian antiques clearly show that art is still quite young, that almost nothing has been done yet, and of the truly perfect—nothing at all: so every kind of art (including great literature) is still ahead of us.” As is everything else.

March 2015

Translated by Maria Vassileva