Year when friendship resolved

On the eve of the next New Year, Kolta cannot get rid of the habit of summing up, at least intermediate ones. Evgenia Vezhlyan , Anna Narinskaya, Ella Rossman and Olga Sedakova - from different countries and cities - about what is happening to us today.

My friends, editing this site, asked me to write an article about the past year, said-well, something like the result of the year.

In principle, here you can put an end and proceed to the conclusion. I (still?) Have friends - these are my results of the year, here is my unconditional and outstanding result.

I do not at all claim that this result is unique. On the contrary, I am sure that in this place the absolute majority of reading this text will stumble, remembering their personal friends and how they helped each other recently, how they retain intimacy and understanding.

But with friendship in general, unlike friends in particular, the situation is worse. I think we are losing her. Friendship - as a state, as an objective value or something. And over the past year, this process of "losing" accelerated to an impressive speed.

The dentist-free online disputes (they are quarrels) of the last time taught me, claiming something, to always designate the place from which I say. O'Kay, I do not pretend to be versatility. I am writing about my observations - observations of a woman in fifty, forced emigrant who hate Putin's regime, the former Muscovite, living today in Europe. I hope that from this self -description it’s clear what I mean when I say “we”.

And here is what this woman thinks.

Friendship today is not realized as a kind of priority state of relations between people and, most importantly, as one of the most important ways to see the world. The world as a system caused by friendly connections and a set of friendly (not necessarily completely similar, but with an eye on each other) views no longer exist. If the Gumilyovsky drunken dervish with his “world is only a ray from the face of a friend” appeared now, he would be invited first to find out whether this friend is not an “messy” for an hour and what was his opinion about the Palestinian problem (and indeed, what is drunken demand).

Of course, the status of friendship as the highest value has not been weakened in these last almost two years of final raving. The sixties -old cult of friendship, which largely formed our ideas about what in general means “friends”, began to erode in the seventies. But still the main thing was preserved - it was an independent from the formal coordinate system. “Friendship has become a source of independent public opinion. Unofficial authority was more expensive than official, and it was more difficult to achieve it. The ostracism of “its” was more formidable for official troubles. Friendship replaced the administrative hierarchy, and transformed the entire system of socio-cultural genres, among which the first place belonged to the most unequal, most familiar of all-the genre of friendly drinking. ” This fragment from the book of Peter Vail and Alexander Genis about the Soviet sixties can be attributed to subsequent decades.

Such a “work” of friendship as an independent structure was described at the very end of the nineties curator and art theorist Viktor Misiano. He considered friendship as an institution that, focusing on internal rules, can resist any directives imposed from the outside. It is important that the material for him was not Soviet or Russian, but Western reality.

Misiano wrote about the campaign of artists from Ljubljana and Russia: they drove together in America by car and gave joint public lectures. It was the friendly essence of this undertaking that made the mismatch of participants to the requirements of political correctness. The selection of artists simply reflected their friendly relations, so here the requirements of the proportionate representation of sexes, races, generations were irrelevant.

Friendship remains invulnerable in the collapse of both the normative ethics of power, Misiano wrote, and the ethics of confrontation - the ethics of comradesry and a “common cause”. It is a friendly (so conceived and designated) project that can exist outside the principles lowered not only by power, but also by society.

Ironically, the article by Misiano, published at the end of the decade, now recognized as an era, limited by the collapse of the USSR and Putin’s arrival “with us” and the end of the Cold War and September 11, “with them” turned out to be a kind of necrologue of the described phenomenon.

Friendship as an institution, as a way of self -identification, that is, as the answer to the question “who am I?”, To which it is much easier to answer in the wording “who are we?”, Began to lose positions - both in the West and in Russia. The conversation about the possibilities provided by friendship was increasingly replaced by peering into its inherent “corruption” and bias, as well as in the emerging conflict of interests, as soon as one of the “friends” becomes “important”.

This “anti -driving” trend is easily explained by the new wave of the struggle with privileges not on political and not even on a public, but on the human field that has unfolded in recent decades in the West; But if we talk specifically about Russia of Putin’s time, then there is a clear inaccuracy in the way. In a situation of new twisting of nuts and non -freedom, official reputations began to cause (more) less confidence, and here, it would seem, the friendly hierarchies and codes that were sixties could return.

But in Russia, the idea of ​​friendship as “about something more”, as the possibility of “parallel” self-organization, turned out to be compromised. I am sure that it was compromised by a phenomenon called a “party” and denoting not a party, but a company of people who know each other who are involved in something similar, often found and helping each other. Moreover, it is compromised not so much as such as such as the way it was perceived in the situation of early and then developed Putinism.

I write this text not in order to find the guilty, moreover, I am sure that the responsibility in mutual misunderstanding always lies on both incomprehensible sides. In a particular case - on the “party” itself, bought on their own interests, and on irritated observers, by default perceiving the “party” and the product it produces as something elitist and hostile.

In huge Moscow, of course, there were a lot of parties. I will give an example from life - the one to which I belonged.

In 2011, a company of friends, which then led the OpenSpace project, which preceded the COLTA COSTA, published a small book of Radio Jean-Jacques. It was made following the example of the “vocabulary of the common truths” by Flaubert and contained “general” places of conversations of the company, often gathered in a cafe on Nikitsky Boulevard (a little later, during Moscow protests, this is an institution considered opposition, was attacked by riot police).

I was one of the authors of Radio “Jean-Jacques” and considered the project a pretty and, most importantly, self-irony. I remember a painful bewilderment when my acquaintance, smart and progressive young woman, far from Jean-Jacob Company, began to angrily pronounce me that this book is arrogant, suggesting that the grimaces and jumps of this circle can generally be interesting to someone. Now, when I remember and write it down, it’s not even clear to me what I was surprised then - so today we are used to such reactions. My then affection seems to me naive.

Looking around today, I (I am sure, and many) break between the regret that that life - with all pressure, censorship and violence, but still my life is crossed out and irrevocable, and at the same time a sense of guilt for living in this comfortable thickness of friendship (or party?), Protecting from a lot.

Over the past two years, guilt for me has passed into the category of the most important. The word “your”, like many other words, and, in fact, what they denoted, turned out to be evidence of the deceitful confidence that everything would cost, evidence of weakness, loss.

The feeling of “its” blinds, they tell me today, does not allow me to look at a person soberly, forces me to forgive what, in principle, should not be forgiven.

If so, my results of the year can be considered even satisfactory. There are no “ours” left, no “we” is almost impossible. The division of recent times cut a layer into such small slices that the search for community is simply meaningless. The mutual reproaches of the “left” and “remaining”, the conflict of conditional “good Russians” with conditional “white coats”, fierce disputes about the fault of Russian culture, closely peering into other people's privileges, political (or directly civilizational ones?) Disagreements, manifested after the Hamas’s attack on Israel ... all this is divided and, as it now seems, clearses, clears it all. space.

And if you really look back at the chronology, then the last year (honestly, it is quite difficult to isolate from the sticky “sausage”, into which the time after February 24, 2022 turned) can be considered a year when all hope was resolved - to the unification, to a new post -chatstrophic “we”, for a certain friendship by default, let's call it for the complexity of the institutional.

And - this is a year when friends, “just” friends, increased in price to invaluable.

So my result of the year is like that.

I (for fifty, forced emigrant who hate Putin's regime, the former Muscovite living today in Europe) - I have friends.