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,
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
I like to think back on the late eighties, when perestroika brought an immense amount of unread works into circulation, and for several years