Life outside of "we"

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 would like to start with a call, first of all, to myself, about the moratorium on metaphors in the spirit of "Our mother fucks, but this is not a reason to refuse it." Nevertheless, as a professional metaphorist, it seems to me that it would be more precise to talk about how a person who has found himself in a kinship with a killer maniac and a siblier: in this situation, as I can judge, is much less sacramental, and here the only clear path is to stop allegorical work on the sentimentization of the collective body and experience. It is much more accurate, more transparent and more effective to talk about a specific to yourself, about specific people, specific situations.

I do not feel quite specific in the power of seeing the letter Z on the buildings of St. Petersburg: this impossibility has the reverse side - I can not go there. I can and choose to live a person’s life outside myself: outside my language, gabitus, the most developed identity. For the opportunity not to see the letter Z, I cry very sharply accommodation - in particular, separately, separation and remoteness from where, unfortunately, I once again discovered my people - but since I chose to start separating at 22 years old, then these last 25 years in the limb, while I wrote my address “Petersburg - Berkley”, can be considered a marvelous, incredible gift of gods. All this time I had the opportunity to engage in the archives of St. Petersburg by the work of the art of people destroyed by this state in a complex interaction with this people. We are talking about very separate people, I would say, others - for example, about Daniil Harms or Sergey Rudakov.

The last decade of Harms’s life was all about the separation of himself from the stream, process, crowds on the Avenue of the Reds and the concentration of art on art again - here it is not too different from, say, Poplavsky or a mage. I - separate - is very uncomfortable not to be in my favorite city, but I do not see his face distorted and desecrated. This is a significant privilege of care, self -separation.

At the same time, I cherish the connections with people within this city - the connections are fragile and even painful. These are individuals - people, and no imaginary and incomprehensible people for me is the subject of constant care and longing, separation from them - this is also a payment for luxury not to see the letter Z in the flesh. That is, we are talking about the constant conflict work of the department and maintaining communication at the same time.

In my case, there is also a reactionization of the experience of previous generations and cases of “running” - not by waves, but by much less romantic institutions and emigration situations. Starting, for example, from Herzen and his associates, you can track their attempts to answer the question: "What can be done outside, outside yourself?" You can clarify the understanding of yourself, for example, as a social creature who has a choice: the choice is not to be where you can be in a censorship situation, that is, a perversion of your right to a statement that suits you. Having experienced several moments from the vile February, where I was invited to hold the language for the sake of publication in Russian media, I was surprised at what a huge event, the test for my entire device is an attempt to play by someone else's rules, “yes” and “no” not to speak-that is, of course, the word “war” is not to speak. The very idea that you may be offered not to say the word you have chosen, the word you need now, very sharply woke up in me that the era of a very unpleasant choice has come.

Here I think if I want to say something touching about the exile-kak-invocation, about a special function and the purpose of renegades, about special group or party capabilities and responsibilities-it seems that you can still not say anything. Probably, if today I chose a totem beast among the workers-creators-he would be Ilya Zdanevich, a person who was tense to listen to the circumstances, new cities and languages, but continued to bend his incredibly bizarre, special line. Today, emigration for me is largely resistance to the temptation of collective or collective lamentations. All the more unacceptable attempts of the world seem to determine me by a national ghost: for me, emigration is an opportunity to choose with whom you want to have a fragmentary, point community (if you want): with Tuffy or Georgadze, or Gnedich, I want, with Inber or Ketlinskaya-not especially. When they ask me now at festivals: “How does the Russian poet feel today? What should the Russian poet do today? " - It discourages me. He feels bad, but he certainly does not owe anything - I am generally against mobilization, rather for desertion as an idea. My favorite film is Fanfan-Tulip. I want to run already from this function - to represent a nation, nationalism is heavy and creepy for me, like everything that happens in chorus.

I understand my work somewhere, ever as a detonation of the illusion of community-I am an emigrant, here a foreigner, with a cat and an accent, confusing the rules and norms of behavior, offending decency, and with a tendency to Pushkin and Oberiu. I also love, say, the poets of Verlaine, Katulla, Akhmatov, Semenko and Andrukhovich - of those whom I can read in the original. These individual authors, texts, plots are my house, I carry it with me in my backpack, and on my hand I have a turtle engraved.

As I can judge, some of my companions in language now have a crisis of sensation of themselves on the right, good side of history, a crisis of the opportunity to say “I am right”. But can you be right or wrong together? It seems to me that it is much healthier to live in a feeling of my unique private wrong - and answer for it: I still can’t answer, for example, for the spiritual search for Prilepin or, on the contrary, to be attached to Jeanne d'Arc our era - Lena Kostyuchenko. I want to be separately wrong. In the city of Berkeley, I manage to practice this.

This circumstance only showed, emphasized my youthful choice of movement here - in a situation where we do not have “we”: since I understand myself as a poet, life outside of “we” seems to me one of the most useful, sobering, although not the most consolation, exercises for people of this profession.