Apologia pro vita mea

The theoretical physicist and expert in the field of quantum chromodynamics Andrei Zayakin, better known as "Doctor Z"**, has agreed to become a columnist for The New Times. His first column is about why he needs all this

After the events of the past two weeks, I feel an urgent need to explain to many of my friends what prompted me to partly change from a fine European academic vita contemplativa*** to a sewer job with false dissertations and a hunt for the Florida residences of Russian deputies. During this time, I did not receive a single condemning response, but there were still a certain number of perplexed ones, and they came mainly from my brothers in the Church. The essence of perplexity can be reduced to two points. Firstly, why are you doing all this - isn't it more correct to hope for the voluntary repentance of those who stole the elections in 2011? Secondly, how can you stand next to these people (the following is a list of people who identify themselves with the protest movement). Let me answer these perplexities.

Is. 2:9 says, “And the man bowed, and the man humbled himself, and You will not forgive them.” If we look at the original text of Isaiah, we see a syntactic oddity in it: literally, the passage would be: "and You will not lift them up." Don't give them what? The verb used here - quite frequent in the text of the Old Testament - has a wide range of meanings, and in particular, the phraseological unit "to exalt to smb. chapter" means "forgive". The translation "You will not forgive" is repelled by just such an idiom. Moreover, in those places of the Old Testament where this idiom occurs in a clear context (forgiveness of the cupbearer by Pharaoh Gen. 40:13, forgiveness of King Joachim 2 Kings 25:27), it has a distinctly legalistic connotation: to release a prisoner or captive.

Why is Isaiah so disgusted by those who bowed (it would even be more accurate to say “hunched over”) and humiliated? Even to such an extent that a special emphatic construction “you won’t forgive” is used, which can be translated as “don’t forgive them”? Here we note that the “admiration” and “humiliation” referred to by Isaiah is also a literal admiration for a wooden blockhead. Admiration for that which, by definition, does not speak, does not think, does not act - that is, in the hierarchy of being, it is obviously lower than not only the God of the Bible, but also man himself.

I think that we have the right to understand such a fierce denunciation of the “bowed down” as follows: a person has a religiously motivated duty to protect his human dignity. The idea, obvious to secular humanists, for some reason in the worldview of some sincerely believing people does not manifest itself in any way - or does not go beyond the historical aspect of the polemic with paganism. But if we assume the existence of a universal meaning in the words of Scripture, the interpretation I propose is quite legitimate: not only to bow before an idol, but also to allow oneself to be enslaved and humiliated is unacceptable for religious consciousness due to the high ontological status that a person is endowed with in the Bible.

It is humiliating to allow impostors to twist their arms and break their legs. Especially if the impostor does it with the aim of becoming your boss and dictating laws to you. It is humiliating to silently allow spies to watch how you vote "correctly" - and I do not know from the Internet a case when daredevils from one enterprise who informed activists that the management was planning to bring employees to the "correct" polling station had to be hidden abroad later due to with the threat of their physical destruction. It is humiliating for me, the great-great-grandson of serfs and the great-grandson of dispossessed Russian peasants, to allow the hunters to subject us to a third serfdom and a second dispossession. This humiliation is of the same sort as forced worship in front of a wooden idol - even though the deputies, the beneficiaries of the December elections, worship a very specific character made of flesh and blood.

It was the impossibility of enduring this idolatrous shame on Okhotny Ryad that compelled me to find ways to expel, one by one, the priests of this pagan cult from the former Gosplan building. And I will answer the second puzzled question of my friends in the next issue.

photo: Olga Osipova/The New Times