But even more important is the near-absolute immersion in the past. It won’t let us think about the future without imagining it as Stalingrad or Potsdam, Tsushima or Hiroshima; nor will it let us feel the present as our own, without any precedent, analogy, or model. This obsession with the past is unlike any other illness I know of, and it needs to be analyzed and treated. The inability to allow even a sliver of air to come between oneself and the past, the absence of any distance, or even the desire to create distance, between oneself and everything that has already happened—lead to strange transmutations. When the past and the present coexist with such intensity, the future is rendered useless—and it comes to resemble a descent into Hades.
All the flashpoints of Russian history, no matter how far back you look, from 1991 to 1917, from Stalin to Peter the Great, from the Decembrists to the Vlasovites—no longer appeared, at the turn of the millennium, like points along a common line or paragraphs of a shared narrative, but like episodes in an unceasing war, clusters of conflicting versions. There is no period in the last three centuries that we could consider free of such conflict—and that wouldn’t belong to the territory of the artistic. That is—of restless, unfinished, effervescent uncertainty rather than reconciled knowledge.
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.
This inability to distinguish oneself from one’s grandfathers, the past from the future, is of course also a kind of unspoken convention, a common agreement with a higher power that is hardly innocent—and sometimes it looks like a game of children playing soldiers. The sudden ability to walk through the mirror and see, instead of the quiet, boring, commonplace life, a red and black reality of some kind of Elusive Avengers,11 where one can freely shoot at the enemy and protect one’s friends, and then return to a life in which trains run on time, has already been worked out in hundreds of books and movies. The difference, perhaps, lies in its scale. And also in the fact that the movement from a zone of comfort to a zone of bloody adventures happens not in secret but in front of the whole world, setting a new example. The simplest and roughest summary would be to call this a form of extreme tourism; but it is, in fact, deeper and scarier than that. More than anything these jokes with serious matters, these children’s games with elemental magic remind me of the old story of the sorcerer’s apprentice, who brought to life forces he could not control.
It seems that the difference with the secret war in Afghanistan or the covert war in Chechnya, the truth about which was squeezed into the periphery of public consciousness for years, is that the number of victims of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is not limited to the list of those dead or wounded. All you need to do to meet the victims of the information war is go to any social media website. It’s as if this war had no mere witnesses (“a war is waged somewhere, but we still see it”) or even a home front (“we are in a peaceful city, while people get killed over there”): everyone participates in it to some extent. There is no difference between the sides of the conflict: the totality of the experience engulfs actors, survivors, the people who are living through the unimaginable. And the fact that the conversation takes place hundreds of kilometers away from the events themselves does not change anything. This is a conversation of the wounded—and its intonation is a result of a trauma that is shared, collective, the same for everyone.