It seems to me that there is not so much people in Moscow. Simply, as I cross from porch to porch, these pieces of meat roll around in secret hallways into new apartments. They take new passports there. They take another deformed spineless form and meet me with their sticky smile in the peephole. I am tired of telling them all sorts of bullshit. They are tired of being. I suddenly lost fate in humanity. How much will you pay me for it?
Today is a happy day. Roaming the city, like Diogenes, in search of a man, I found one. The door was opened by a healthy and a vigorous man who looked 50. Invited to the table where his wife served, just as lively. I told him about our Party. He put his signature and said at the end: “You should not play elections but come out on the streets with machine guns”. Leaving I promised him that time will come and we will give him a machine gun.”
The population’s degradation is seen everywhere and cannot be doubted. Particularly it is seen in the exhausted central Russia, less distributed in Siberia. Monstrous stories in the accidents section of the newspaper, such programs as “Section on Duty” or “Road Patrol”, “Man and Law” allow the viewer like a collector of signatures to for a moment enter the dwellings of people. They can watch the savage misery, alcoholism, debility, dirt and as a result – vile, everyday crimes. The personal experience of each citizen also shows that a part of our co-citizens are degenerates.
And those who consider themselves called to improve the human species or as a minimum – the Russian nation don’t look better. I recall the disgusting, lop-sided, leprous, drunken rabble on the congress of nationalists in St Petersburg in 1996. The custom of bestial drunkenness belongs to the set of undying traditions of the adat. Alcoholism has its apologues and theoretics. Apparently the wide Russian soul cannot live without the irrational dash of alcoholism. One should shot alcoholics and not encourage the squalor in them. All of our conceptions about us, the Russians, should be revised.
People tried to change Russian society and not only with paper decrees. Terrorists – narodnovoltsi and socialist-revolutionaries, for half a century attempted the lives of tsars, nobles and ministers. Lenin and comrades reasoned that the new man will appear and will become free, having received in ownership material goods: land and factories. However the new man still didn’t come.
Having destroyed the institutions of the old society the Bolsheviks could not handle the “adat”, the set of archetypes of the Russian people, stipulated by the traditions. “Adat” turned out to be stronger than the tsars and more powerful than the revolutionaries, and outlived Lenin, Stalin, Beria and the GULAG.
The Bolsheviks, in my opinion, have even reinforced the Russian “adat”. Rephrasing the Roman patrician Cato, I scream: “Adat” has to be destroyed!
Lecture 6
So, in December 1989 after 15 years of absence I arrived in the USSR. The result of my observations, of what I saw in three weeks, became the book “A stranger in Troubled Times”, written in 1990, it was published by the Omsk regional publishing company in no less than 300 thousand copies, but passed over the metropolitan reader and the critics. And that’s too bad, it contained a lot of original observations. I saw a lot with the fresh eye of someone who had just popped out, as in 15 years I completely lost the habit of the country and the population. Now I got used again to my compatriots and I don’t see a lot anymore. Then I noticed the untied high-handedness of my compatriots, the wolf-like faces in Sheremetievo, when you suddenly come out of the interior premises of the airport into the crowd. The late Ulian Semenov, it’s to him that I am indebted for this first instructive visit, lodged me in the gigantic hotel “Ukraine”. I saw “Ukraine” as an ancient crumbling German temple, and myself as the archeologist Indiana (from the movie about Indiana Jones, he was nicely played by the actor Harrison Ford)
Among other things I then managed to see how many Turk there was in Russians, how much in Russia is from Turkey. Everywhere in Russian apartments, including the apartment of my parents in Kharkov, there was an immoderate abundance of carpets. Well, ok, the carpets covered the floor, but they also hung on the walls, giving to the apartments an unmistakable Muslim touch. As for the apartments they turned out to be very dark because the population curtained its windows with thick blinds, even two ranks of blinds – light and thick ones. A good half of the apartments had former lodgings and balconies rebuilt as little rooms – pencil boxes. And on the windows of these pencil boxes there were blinds, so the sun and the sky were totally absent from the apartments. A Muslim half-light reigned in Russian apartments, like in harems. The absence of light undoubtedly negatively affects the growth of the children, the mood of the children and the parents, the quantity of life energy in the apartment.
The other indisputable Turkey’s attributes were the countless bleak lampshades with tassels. Mostly coffee, orange or even red. And also – in most part silent women who served the food and who did not participate in men’s talk. Women-shadows. A similar patriarchal society I saw later in Abkasia in 1992. One should not think that Russia went far from Abkasia, only because here are singing Alla Pugacheva, Vetlizkaia or Zemphira. The Turkishness of my compatriots manifested itself in the fact of how willingly they were all wearing sharovars [wide trousers] – sportive pants made in Turkey. Next to the “Ukraina” hotel young boys were squatting down near their cars. Later on train stations, on platforms, on bus stops I saw thousands of these very Muslim birdmen sitting around. (Actually, it is partly also a prison habit.) The compatriots turned out to be Turks.
There happened to be no less of Germany in Russia. Short, low built casern buildings, usually yellow or ochre, green roofs – recognizably German. Vladislav Hodasevich has the following lines:
“Wait: The biting wind will blow in Okarino
On the slits of the bulky Berlin
And the rough day will rise from the houses
Above the step mother of Russian cities”
I don’t guarantee the precision of the citation but I guarantee the “step mother of Russian cities”. Hodasevich had noticed right. When you go from France to southern Germany by train, then suddenly before the border the train plunges in a long tunnel and comes out in the light in a wholly different landscape. The romantic France, its round trees, its two-sided roofs of reddish tiles are left behind the mountain and here appears a flat and squared country of yellow walls, casern type buildings. Poets noticed all this with a sharp eye. Mandelshtam: “Above the yellowness of governmental buildings / the turbid storm went round and round / the lazy lawman gets in the sleigh / with a large movement having wrapped himself in his coat”. This is about St Petersburg, built by Peter and Catherine from German models.
And here is what the same Mandelshtam wrote about France:
“France, like pity and grace
I want your land and honeysuckle
The truth of your turtledoves and the lies of your dwarfish
Your vine-growers in gauze bands…”
Noting that this strophe looks like a swift look on a page of the “National Geographic” magazine I would say that in the landscape of France the abundance of details instantly catches the eye, from there the precisely employed complicated letters “J”, “round” word: turtle-doves, “dwarfish” and the realistic detail of the gauze bands. As for Germany’s landscape it is totally different, it is more general, emptier, it is lighter, the buildings – yellow, the roofs – green-salad. (When in France country-houses are redbrick. And French trees are cut roundly.) It is interesting that Bismarck, I just read a book about him in the prison library, being an ambassador in Russia, was delighted with the greenness of Russian roofs. They reminded him of his native country – Prussia, Berlin.