The Voice Over

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.