On the other hand, there are people who seem to derive pleasure from the way our wheels have spun out of control, from the sense of finding oneself in the midst of history. Interviews with warlords of the Donetsk and Lugansk “People’s Republics” bubble with the excitement of people who have finally found themselves in the right place, feeling useful and important, taking their position, attacking, rising up off their knees—in a new kind of sense, for which a mere year ago they would have had to reach back to the ’20s, to Babel’s Red Cavalry with its splendid murderers. This sense of history as laughing gas, a wild carousel of possibilities, where any volunteer will receive an automatic weapon and a live target as part of the bargain, was until recently untranslatable to the language of the present.
It’s interesting, however, that this project of redoing the present is entirely blind to the future, that its entire pathos is retrospective. There’s a reason why one of the main figures of the summer of 2014 was Girkin-Strelkov,7 an intellectual turned reenactor, who easily moves from historical fantasy to actual death. In this zone of turbulence, everyone is restoring something of their own, gluing it together from whatever’s at hand: for some it’s Makhno’s huliaipole,8 camouflage costumes, pictures with severed heads (“We used to join the Cossacks / And now we join the bandits”9); for some it’s the Soviet Union with the gilded Friendship of Nations Fountain and an exhibit of its accomplishments; for some it’s tsarist Russia with its 1913 borders—and all of this is reconstruction, а replica, a costumed game of survival. The versions of the future that are being offered here are all a kind of revanchist ready-made object; none of them contain new elements. Meanwhile, the great distances that separate all these versions give us a sense of the size of the crater into which our present is ready to crash.
The weird optical phenomenon of our strange time resembles a sudden onset of nearsightedness: 2034 is not merely indiscernible, it’s of no interest to anyone—especially compared to 1914. In our everyday life there is no room for futurology, either optimistic (which would be hard to come by) or pessimistic (which scares us with its realistic forecast); nothing induces more anguish and anxiety than the fantasy of what will be. The future is something like yet another version of the iPhone, which is being met with obvious reluctance and distrust: “It was much better when Jobs was still in charge.” And that might be the main issue—the thing that prevents any perspective from becoming a way forward and won’t let analogies get back on their own feet. The twentieth century—by which we measure ourselves, to which we set our watches—was built in the name of tomorrow, using modernist utopia as its template, and in spite of the dark forebodings and bloody sunsets, the expectation of the new, unseen, and of the complete redoing of everything, was the motor that kept the century moving forward. The new—a multifaceted, multiocular utopia, progressive, technocratic, this and that, “we will build a new world,”10 “our country will be great,” “don’t turn the pages—resurrect,”11 was a kind of slope along which time hurtled along, changing and spurring itself to go faster. The absence of a yearning for the future or a will toward it is almost more frightening to me than the collages of antique mustaches and slogans with which the present is preoccupied.
3.
They say that if you file down the very tip of a crow’s bill, the bird will start crashing into things: the fine-tuned sense of direction, the organ of long-range connection to the future, will cease to work, all distances will collapse into one, all sense of proportion will be lost, there will be no exit. I believe that this is how we orient ourselves in time: if we file down our sense of tomorrow, we will always crash into the corners and cornices of the past—which is all there is to it, anyway. It’s interesting to think about the distortions that happen in a mind that makes no provisions for the future (which has been disinfected, anesthetized—carefully masked under the guise of the present or excluded and ignored like a faux pas). In a world that contains just the present and past, any personal choice loses its substance: events happen as though of their own accord, following the will of things, without any desire on the part of participants (who are barely even participating—just using the circumstances that befell them). Everything that happens has a whole nomenclature of prototypes, which makes it easy to relieve oneself of responsibility, to spread it across a dozen convenient generalizations. Some of them you hear very often: “we have to compromise in difficult times,” “artists have always collaborated with those in power,” “there has always been censorship”; “always” is a key word here, it allows us to not be the exception. The future as a paradigm shift, an opportunity to act not-as-always evokes great distress. But there’s no place to hide anymore; history has caught up with us, and it won’t be easy to work ourselves free from it. We could, of course, wind back what can be rewound, “erase accidental features,”12 the feverish florescence of movies and books, exhibitions and shows, falafel and meatball shacks—and prepare for a long siege. This is already happening a little bit: state television is mimicking the Soviet ’70s and ’80s, the press is eager to catch up with it; things that until recently seemed like a collection of artefacts, souvenirs of lost times, have suddenly acquired an unexpected terrifying cohesion. As if everything that spent decades locked up in attics, crypts, and other far corners of the mind has suddenly joined a parade of dead things. It’s like the old fairy tale: they put together the rotting pieces of the dead man, splashed some black water on him, and he shuddered—and now his unseeing eyes are about to open.
But this very water is unalive. It pulls together the mishmash of the late Putin years into a kind of system; it holds together layers of language that have burnt down to ashes, lets them rise to the surface once more. Before it disappears, the dead should become solid: whole and visible—and one can’t turn away from it or hide from it. Vladimir Propp writes about this: “The hero is first splashed with dead water, and then with living water. The dead water finishes him off, turns him into someone definitively dead. It is a kind of funeral rite, corresponding to the covering with earth. Only now is he an actual dead person, and not a creature caught between the two worlds, which can come back as a vampire. Only now, after the sprinkling with dead water, can the living water act.”
The dead water has been poured; now we live to see the water of life.
November 2014
Translated by Maria Vassileva
Intending to Live
1.
In the spring of 1909, Blok wrote to his mother from Venice.
Lyuba’s in a Parisian tailcoat, and I wear my Viennese white suit and a Canotier hat. I look at the people and houses, I play with the crabs and collect seashells. It’s all very quiet, lazy and restful. We want to go swimming in the sea. Finally, there are no Russian newspapers around, and I don’t hear or read the indecent names of the Union of the Russian People and Milyukov; instead, in all the shop windows I see the names of Dante, Petrarch, Ruskin and Bellini. Every Russian artist has the right to spend at least a few years with his ears closed off to everything Russian, and instead see his other homeland—Europe, and especially Italy.