The Voice Over

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.