The Voice Over

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.

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