Blind stories

The full -scale war of Russia with Ukraine seriously changed the Russian cultural landscape: the intellectual and art communities were confronted with a choice - to continue to work in the conditions of actually military censorship in the Russian Federation or go on exile. It is already obvious that the departure of cultural figures from Russia after February 24, 2022 became the most significant in scale after the emigration of the civil war, exceeding the volume of the second and third waves of the “cultural” emigration. Under these conditions, the editorial office of Kolita considered it necessary to give the floor to those who continued the work within the country. Today we publish the texts of authors living outside the Russian Federation and reflecting their experience.

I will immediately make a reservation that I’m not at all sure that I have the right to participate in some kind of “Russian dialogue”-about life and culture during the war. For more than thirty years I live in Israel, my contact with the Russian reality is mainly Internet, professional and book, and I do not express the position of a fresh emigrant who left Russia in connection with the events. Therefore, I can only offer a few considerations of an external observer, nothing more. In the outer look, the elements of removal will inevitably be - but only by this he can be useful. The conversation between “their own”, no matter how its participants differ and wherever they are, always stands at the same support points.

The dialogs of colleagues in Russia made an emotionally difficult impression on me: it is woven out of sympathy, on the one hand, out of rejection - on the other, out of attempts to imagine itself in this place and, on the contrary, an attempt to understand itself in its place. The war in Ukraine in this conversation, as it were, does not happen. Its reality and tragedy are almost not indicated anywhere (as a “direct inclusion” of reality, only the tough story of Elena Kovalskaya about the cultural situation of the Ukrainian in Moscow sounded for me). That something is wrong at home, of course, everyone understands. Speaking about the situation “this is our mother fucking”, Alexander Ivanov expresses his willingness to go with the fucked to the end: here he-albeit in slang and, possibly, unconsciously-appeals to the military-mobilization myth of the motherland-mother. My idea of ​​the state as an instrument subject to repair and change is completely opposite to such metaphors, the meaning of which even irony cannot change for me. But perhaps more words I was impressed by a feeling of time. Maybe because I had to read the case now, I especially feel that time is not an external factor, but something deeply essential in a person, in a sense, his “I” itself. The conversation that time has ended, it is necessary to go to the depths and engage in theology or mysticism, to stretch the time of conversation, as in the east, it does not work on me (it, of course, can be just chatter, which I heard a lot in my youth in Moscow cuisines, but it all has changed, and now it reads as “the situation of the hostage”). There is really a lot of these relations there over time. Some suggest merging with a natural circular cycle of seasons. Someone (Nadia Plungan) “stopped time” is expressed in the reluctance to see his new quality and in an effort to continue what was “before”, to do their pre-war projects, no matter what happened. In this understanding, it happened "for others." I love and appreciate Nadina’s books and wish her to write them more, and in general, so that everyone succeeds, and so that everyone retains themselves in this situation. But what is she doing with people?

Of course, the statements of this group will not represent time for time for everyone else. Of course, I know that there are those who, before complete death, are seriously included in this day, in what is happening, protests against him and is not afraid of the consequences. There are people of the older generation, as if recalling the times of their parents, the Soviet underground, who see their mission in “keeping fire” once passed on to them-this mission will not die. Both of them have established living relationships with their time.

Not that in a conversation on the sling. How is it better to determine? This is not the frozion of Menshikov-in-Berezov (say, the circle of Kuzmin in Leningrad in the 1920s-1930s). Not that the authorities attacked artists and poets who went with their faith in the monastery. As Kovalskaya definitely said: the business that they did can not live alone, away from the public, and this applies not only to the theater. As I understand it, the participants in the “meetings” (most of whom are associated with Kolta), each of their work, their own project, together were participants in the “large” project - to build the best society, starting from the upper layer of public consciousness - culture. Educational magazines and sites, book publishing and book trade, theaters, contemporary art and curatorial activities, network publications, podcasts have significantly succeeded in creating a layer of informed cultural consumers, bring the most progressive cultural and artistic practices to Russia. This project was closed at the current stage. Efforts, of course, will not be in vain, they have already brought it and will still bear fruit at the next round of the historical spiral. But so far, other people took up social engineering with the opposite goal. The only hope that they copy the mistakes of the project without inheriting its virtues, and crash.

I repeat - I judge from the outside, I was not the consumer of the IPhone of Russia, which Nadia Plungan spoke of, although I heard a lot of enthusiastic reviews about her from friends - recent emigrants. What they describe: a growing standard of living, service, children's education, the opportunity to implement different interesting projects, books, exhibitions, performances, not spending time on everyday life - everything is wonderful. But this is the surface. The main thing is how and who controls all this - with rare exceptions, no one praised. In general, from the side it seems that the concept of building a cultural environment for itself or around itself, so to speak, “under a lantern”, the idea that we can help improve the situation, doing their own business and raising highly educated children, did not lead to the immediate creation of another society. Although I also know the assessments of what was achieved as a society of humane softened customs. The war, which is not a manifestation of either one or the other, opened the eyes that the country is more than Moscow and Peter, and that social and political processes are greater than culture. Yes, thanks to the efforts of the cultural workers, it seemed that the culture penetrated the high political and financial layers (there were writers and sponsors), and the so -called peripheral (far from Moscow was artistic and literary life, arranged according to the same principle), but the immediate result of all this turned out to be not what was expected. A part of the public, brought up by intellectuals, simply felt a stranger in a reality that changed with the beginning of the war and emigrated to a large extent. The bitter paradox is that the “creators” of the culture of the possibilities of maneuver themselves had less, as Plungian explained exhaustively.

“Culturocentrism” of all this device was, as it seems to me from here, both voluntary and forced. The educated population was supplanted from real political activity, he did not have any political instruments left except criticism and protest, which began to be considered politics. And to the country that the intellectual could truly “rule”, and the sphere in which one could act remained a culture. That is why, it seems to me, when a cruel war began, and when it became clear that this is the end of the past life, that everything collapsed, the thought of the fate of Russian culture was almost the first to be discussed (which I noted for myself as a phenomenon). At first, these were bitter personal thoughts on social networks, then the collective fear of Kanseling began and the period of zoom conferences on this subject. Many said that, in spite of everything, nothing would happen to Russian culture, she did not survive that, and everything would remain in its place. The argument “We continue to read Schiller and Goethe” became a meme. However, these conversations themselves express understandable concern. Schiller and Goethe, Pushkin and Dostoevsky are beautiful, but symbolic capital, which is not directly connected with the artistic virtues of poetry and prose, can really suffer. How good the culture and literature of German romantics was, but in the public consciousness of European and American intellectuals after the Second World War, it went into absolute shadow. And, by the way, the fact that one of the last important Moscow art projects, the exhibition “Dreams of Freedom”, was dedicated to her, for me personally was filled with an ominous meaning. Sharply negative and as if today's incomprehensible reactions against the emergence of Russian names in international cultural forums, I think, will be meaningful in the historical perspective. But what seems to me absolutely grotesque and unacceptable is necessarily from some subconscious, talking about “Nazism”, which jump out in this regard. Here I will already move a little from the direct content of what was mentioned on the sling in order to try to convey my attitude towards time, and especially to parallels with the people of Schiller and Goethe.

It was already a banal consideration that the authorities in Russia, whose ideology was formed under the influence of neo -Nazism, is characterized by a “schizoid” connection with the history of German fascism. But in the opposition Russian discourse, the attitude towards it is also not without unresolved contradictions. The desire to blame those who perform from the victims of “Nazism” from this area. And one more thing: no one, as a rule, causes no objection to the conversation that Germany as a result somehow came out and cleared of its crimes. But the thoughts of German intellectuals, which contributed to this process - about the responsibility of the culture and responsibility of the layman for what happened - are perceived poorly: either neatly selected and sometimes tendenciously interpreted places from the books of Jasper, Hannah Arendt or Adorno, or on such conversations and parallels generally want to impose a taboo. There is a fear behind this that such a discourse puts on all Russian citizens, even the most politically active, idle days and nights in protests, a kind of seal of responsibility for Putin’s war crimes, in which he is alone and is to blame. (But I rather retold emigrant disputes. But in the “Conversation on Lenovka”, Alexander Ivanov admires the position of Ernst Junger, who was already as much as they said, “post -humanist” that he did not emigrate, but crossed the “conceivable” borders and was in the Wehrmacht during the war.)

What is the nature of this inevitable interest in Germany? We find something similar in a similar situation, but what to do with these coincidences? How much votes from the past can be authoritative for us? What can the long -dead Thomas Mann, whom many quote, explain to us in our culture? So-in my perception, the opposite is true: it is not Russian life and culture can be explained or condemned in the light of some analogies there, and the history of the German people and German Nazism suddenly becomes clear in the light of a living present. We feel: “Ah, this is how it was ... That's why, for what reasons people allowed this and that, they behaved like that and so. That is why Adorno or Benjamin wrote this and that. ” These are completely precious moments in which you hold on to the thread of events and get intuitive knowledge about what was and what will lead to what. This is a situation that makes us all historians - not in the academic, but in a completely special sense, which Benjamin wrote about: the task of the historian, as is said in his “theses about the philosophy of history”, “to fix the image of the past as he suddenly appears to the historical subject at the time of danger.” And further: “It is for nothing that only a historian is endowed with the end of hope in the last spark of hope, imbued with the thought that the enemy, if he overwhelms, will not spare the dead. And this enemy continues to win constantly. ” So, the past is the material from which hope is boiled, and it cannot be neglected. Different “cultures” are still not different planets, but one system, this is not a “own” separate, but our common story in which everything is connected, we are simply sitting on the other branch of the same tree. Restoring the thread connecting two deadly dictatorships (and by the scale of the 21st century the relative death of the Putin dictatorship may still turn out to be no less than the deadly death of the Hitler in the scale of the 20th, we just do not know the future), we gain new identity and new internal power. The so -called historical analogies are not “stamped”, but clarify the tasks.

We now understand how our own lives, why eyewitnesses to the ripening of German fascism write that the main thing is to correctly evaluate the risks, monitoring the situation in political life, and not miss the “window of opportunities” for a statement of protest-even if at that moment the opinion of the “philistine”, immersed in his private life and work, “does not need to raise panic due to nonsense”. Because at this time there is no dictatorship yet, and the protest against the ripened dictatorship is already useless. And this understanding quite clearly illuminates the dynamics of events - both that occurred in Moscow and what are happening here in Israel (for those interested in: this is precisely the protest at the last critical moment, which still has a chance to prevent the “slam of the window” and change the shape of the rule towards the dictatorship).

So, even though I am sitting aside, I feel myself an involved situation-but not because I was born and once lived in Russia and subsequently published several books there, but because all processes are interconnected. And from this position of “external involvement” I cannot help but think about Russia as the territory of an unsuccessfully completed struggle, about the terrible consequences of this for Ukraine and the world, about the forks and blind spots. It should not be assumed that emigrants who have not been living in the country of the outcome for a long time do not feel any pain and responsibility that nothing has changed for them - all the tools, work, and lifestyle have remained with them. This is not so, on the contrary: life is exactly what was filled with pain, sympathy, shame and other feelings that cover in the rhythm in which events develop in Ukraine.

I (if you involuntarily thought about it) have no desire to “teach from safe Tel Aviv”, it’s just difficult to expect me to feel like they feel in Moscow. I really don’t know, “how correctly”, and - how can I - I see my own distortions. Of course, my Focus was shifted. Today, I do not think especially valuable that shortly before the war I “left everything” and wrote critical articles about those trends in Russian art history and museum practice, which, in my opinion, were associated with a “bad” cultural policy that closed with a course for the revival of Soviet sentiment and resentification. I finally understood from my own experience a long -standing innocence of Adorno (from which I used to turn away), who believed that criticism of culture is part of this very culture. And yes, I carefully followed what was happening, moreover, there was among the few who did not doubt that Putin was going on a big war. But I was included in this precisely “like everyone else”, that is, “as a layman”. Intellectual for me the main danger of mass violence remained somewhere in the past, during the time of Hitler and Stalin.

It is amazing that the warning again was in front of my very eyes, but until the war I perceived it vaguely. Mikhail Grobman, the artist about whom I wrote a book, suddenly made a large series of works in 2009-2011 - “Katyn”, “To the war”, “Will we bury? Or?" And they are like. They are about what was already inside, but broke out later. Of course, no artist is “ahead of his time”, these are nonsense. Anyone who, as it seems to us, has this ability is an intellectual who knows how to actualize the past in Benjaminov and to reconstruct the whole perspective through it. Such an understanding of time in the political situation currently through us, I urge everyone to follow - regardless of where you live. In my opinion, in this current story, we people, even armed with information and insiders, are blind, but with a chance for temporary partial insight that we must try not to miss.