There is nothing more remote from these planks than
nature, whose green color their paint idiotically suggests. These planks, the governmental iron of railings, the inevitable khaki of the military uniform in every passing crowd on every street in every city, the eternal photographs of steel foundries in every morning paper and the continuous Tchaikovsky on the radio—these things would drive you crazy unless you learned to switch yourself off. There are no commercials on Soviet TV; there are pictures of Lenin, or so-called photo-etudes of "spring," "autumn," etc., in the intervals between the programs. Plus "light" bubbling music which never had a composer and is a product of the amplifier itself.
At that time I didn't know yet that all this was a result of the age of reason and progress, of the age of mass production; I ascribed it to the state and partly to the nation itself, which would go for anything that does not require imagination. Still, I think I wasn't completely wrong. Should it not be easier to exercise and distribute enlightenment and culture in a centralized state? A ruler, theoretically, has better access to perfection (which he claims anyhow) than a representative. Rousseau argued this. Too bad it never worked in Russia. This country, with its magnificently inflected language capable of expressing the subtlest nuances of the human psyche, with an incredible ethical sensitivity (a good result of its otherwise tragic history), had all the makings of a cultural, spiritual paradise, a real vessel of civilization. Instead, it became a drab hell, with a shabby materialist dogma and pathetic consumerist gropings.
My generation, however, was somewhat spared. We emerged from under the postwar rubble when the state was too busy patching its o^ skin and couldn't look after us very well. We entered schools, and whatever elevated rubbish we were taught there, the suffering and poverty were visible all around. You cannot cover a ruin with a page of Pravda. The empty windows gaped at us like skulls' orbits, and as little as we were, we sensed tragedy. True, we couldn't connect ourselves to the ruins, but that wasn't necessary: they emanated enough to interrupt laughter. Then we would resume laughing, quite mindlessly—and yet it would be a resumption. In those postwar years we sensed a strange intensity in the air; something immaterial, almost ghostly. And we were young, we were kids. The amount of goods was very limited, but not having kno^ otherwise, we didn't mind it. Bikes were old, of prewar make, and the o^er of a soccer ball was considered a bourgeois. The coats and underwear that we wore were cut out by our mothers from our fathers' uniforms and patched drawers: exit Sigmund Freud. So we didn't develop a taste for possessions. Things that we could possess later were badly made and looked ugly. Somehow, we preferred ideas of things to the things themselves, though when we looked in mirrors we didn't much like what we saw there.
We never had a room of our own to lure our girls into, nor did our girls have rooms. Our love affairs were mostly walking and talking affairs; it would make an astronomical sum if we were charged for mileage. Old warehouses, embankments of the river in industrial quarters, stiff benches in wet public gardens, and cold entrances of public buildings—these were the standard backdrops of our first pneumatic blisses. We never had what are called "material stimuli.'" Ideological ones were a laughable matter even for kindergarten kids. If somebody sold himself out, it wasn't for the sake of goods or comfort: there were none. He was selling out because of inner want and he knew that himself. There were no supplies, there was sheer demand.
If we made ethical choices, they were based not so much on immediate reality as on moral standards derived from fiction. We were avid readers and we fell into a dependence on what we read. Books, perhaps because of their formal element of finality, held us in their absolute power. Dickens was more real than Stalin or Beria. More than anything else, novels would affect our modes of behavior and conversations, and 90 percent of our conversations were about novels. It tended to become a vicious circle, but we didn't want to break it.
In its ethics, this generation was among the most bookish in the history of Russia, and thank God for that. A relationship could have been broken for good over a preference for Hemingway over Faulkner; the hierarchy in that pantheon was our real Central Committee. It started as an ordinary accumulation of knowledge but soon became our most important occupation, to which everything could be sacrificed. Books became the first and only reality, whereas reality itself was regarded as either nonsense or nuisance. Compared to others, we were ostensibly flunking or faking our lives. But come to think of it, existence which ignores the standards professed in literature is inferior and unworthy of effort. So we thought, and I think we were right.
The instinctive preference was to read rather than to act. No wonder our actual lives were more or less a shambles. Even those of us who managed to make it through the very thick woods of "higher education," with all its unavoidable lip—and other members'—service to the system, finally fell victim to literature-imposed scruples and couldn't manage any longer. We ended up doing odd jobs, menial or editorial—or something mindless, like carving tombstone inscriptions, drafting blueprints, translating technical texts, accounting, bookbinding, developing X-rays. From time to time we would pop up on the threshold of one another's apartment, with a bottle in one hand, sweets or flowers or snacks in the other, and spend the evening talking, gossiping, bitching about the idiocy of the officials upstairs, guessing which one of us would be the first to die. And now I must drop the pronoun "we."
Nobody knew literature and history better than these people, nobody could write in Russian better than they, nobody despised our times more profoundly. For these characters civilization meant more than daily bread and a nightly hug. This wasn't, as it might seem, another lost generation. This was the only generation of Russians that had found itself, for whom Giotto and Mandelstam were more imperative than their o^ personal destinies. Poorly dressed but somehow still elegant, shuffled by the dumb hands of their immediate masters, running like rabbits from the ubiquitous state hounds and the even more ubiquitous foxes, broken, growing old, they still retained their love for the nonexistent (or existing only in their balding heads) thing called "civilization." Hopelessly cut off from the rest of the world, they thought that at least that world was like themselves; now they know that it is like others, only better dressed. As I write this, I close my eyes and almost see them standing in their dilapidated kitchens, holding glasses in their hands, with ironic grimaces across their faces. "There, there . . ." They grin. "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite . . . Why does nobody add Culture?"
Memory, I think, is a substitute for the tail that we lost for good in the happy process of evolution. It directs our movements, including migration. Apart from that there is something clearly atavistic in the very process of recollection, if only because such a process never is linear. Also, the more one remembers, the closer perhaps one is to dying.
If this is so, it is a good thing when your memory stumbles. More often, however, it coils, recoils, digresses to all sides, just as a tail does; so should one's narrative, even at the risk of sounding inconsequential and boring. Boredom, after all, is the most frequent feature of existence, and one wonders why it fared so poorly in the nineteenth-century prose that strived so much for realism.