The Voice Over

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

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.