The Voice Over

The wild, tattered process of archaization that everyone is talking about, which we observe and describe right as the ground is crumbling underneath our feet, has a peculiar backstory in Russia. Some years ago, I was asked a question that is worth revisiting today. It came from an English scholar of Russian literature who couldn’t understand why all Russian prose could fit under the umbrella of the fantastic (sci-fi, fantasy, fairy tales). Take Pelevin, Sorokin, Petrushevskaya, he said—any work of realism will inevitably include some kind of apparition, a miraculous rescue, an oprichnik with claws, a war between mice and monkeys. I’ve nothing against it, but why is it everywhere, why does everyone do it?

Even if it’s not quite everywhere, a significant portion of the texts that a broad audience (here we move away from literature per se, and toward ethnography and anthropology, where the laws of large numbers are at play) would consider as written to the point, as having to do with reality, are really about the lives of vampires, foxes, and saints. Moreover, some of them seem to have an extended shelf life—like the old Pelevin story, in which a German pilot from WWII is resurrected in the forest outside of Moscow, so that a girl can marry a foreigner. Somehow, even thirty years later, this text still provides a glimpse of reality as we know it today: it remains an accurate “physiological sketch” of Russian life, drawn from nature.

This departure from reality is the most homespun kind of realism—the realism of the front page, a sideshow of authorial bravery. This is also how it is received by its local audience (and as a rule it does not really appeal to outside readers—unlike the lush wonders of Latin American magical realism). That is, the Russian unbelievable, which is the same as the Russian believable, is a product not meant for export, one you couldn’t easily dress up in a frock appropriate for the outside world. All of this has little to do with the books themselves—but it says a lot about what the Cyrillic alphabet and those who use it have to contend with.

There is the sense that the reality here follows the provisions of an unwritten convention, often invisible and incomprehensible to the outside observer, but clear to those who live within this conceptual realm. Until quite recently, it looked like the country was taking part in the political, economic, and cultural affairs of the present, and was trying, if not to catch up and overtake, then at least to join in and match its advances, excitedly rolling out bike lanes, joining the WTO and whatnot, signing agreements and participating in summits. At the same time—more precisely, underneath all that—there was always another, more intimate, logic, which the conventional Bolotnaya Square easily shares with the conventional Poklonnaya Hill:

⁹ one for all.

According to this logic, any movement in history—in its syntactical design—is perceived as coming from the outside, as an imitation, almost like a child’s play whose purpose is to merely pass the time. What’s actually important is another, internal order. There is the common belief that any, even the wildest possible, plot twist in one’s life is both possible and inevitable. As well as the common fear that one will get too comfortable on the warm side of this world, and then crash into the freezing unknown.

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.