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Russian scene, Video, 500k
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| Title | Russian scene, Iowa City Public Library, September 1, 2006 |
| Creator |
Lev (Lev Usyskin) Butov, Mikhail, 1964- Kopylova, Polina 1976- Golubovich, Ksenii︠a︡ |
| Creator - Nationality | Russian |
| Contributor | Merrill, Christopher |
| Date Original | 2006-09-01 |
| Description | Lev Usyskin conceives the "Russian scene" in terms of colonization and purposes a re-colonization to fight the population loss in Russian territories. Michail Butov considers Russian politics, culture, talent, and collective identity when describing the current state of the "scene" there. Polina Kopylova discusses the literary union groups, or LITO, as key constituents forming a steady institution for literary life in Russia. Ksenia Golubovich's talk, "Silencium" ponders the current tendency for Russian politics to remain off scene. |
| Venue | Iowa City Public Library |
| Geographic Subject | United States -- Iowa -- Iowa City |
| Chronological Subject | 2000-2010 |
| Transcription | Lev Usyskin (Russia) I would like to address an issue that deals with my country and which can give a more clear-cut understanding of processes that are unfolding in present-day Russia. For the last few decades, the most salient feature of Russia has been uncertainty. What can this uncertainty evolve into; is it dangerous, or will it bring about new perspectives? Will Russia prosper, or will it sink into chaos? In fact, Russia has proven to be very controversial in the past five years, especially in its foreign policy. Nobody knows what to expect of it. The uncertainty is still there: political processes are barely transparent, dialogue with public opinion is scarce, and is different from what the "old" democracies have to offer. I’ll attempt to look for a clue to this situation in Russia’s history. Vassily Klyuchevsky, a well-known Russian historian, has said, “The history of Russia is the history of colonization.” I would like to show the reasons for, and the extent of, the spread of this colonization. 1. Map of Russian territories in the 12th century. It’s only in the south-west that Russia bordered on other countries. Its remaining borders were open, with nomadic tribes and uninhabited areas behind them. By then, the state of Kievan Rus was over 300 years old. It began as a vast territory stretching from the Black to the Baltic seas. People felt unified due to the fact that they spoke one and the same language, and because one dynasty ruled both the Novgorod Republic and the Duchy of Kiev. Two colonization processes started as early as the 10th century. The first one was undertaken by the Novgorod Republic which was exploring the territories to its north and north-east. The second was a massive migration process from the steppes belonging to the Kievan state to the heavily forested regions of northeastern Russia. Both of those processes were a result of personal initiative of common people who were fleeing nomadic tribes. Others were driven eastward in search of fur of sables, foxes, and ermines. When an area became inhabited, authority was established. As a result, the original territories decayed. The decline of Kievan Rus started in the middle of the 12th century. After the Mongol invasion many south-western towns were deserted for good, while most of the northeastern towns were quickly revived. Map 2. A century later, Russian lands were bordered on the empire of Genghis Khan and his successors. The only direction the colonization could take was north-east, to the Urals. 150 years later when the Mongolian Golden Horde disintegrated, these territories were explored by Russians. This triggered the so-called Wild Field colonization which lasted from the 16th to the 18th century. Because of its fertile soil, this is now Russia's main agricultural region. Initially, the process was started by individuals, too. People fled from the authorities, from serfdom and settled new territories. Those people were called Cossacks. Only then did the state gain foothold in those lands. Map3 This is the modern map of the south of Russia. Voronezh was founded in 1585, Livny in 1586, Valuyki in 1590 and Stary Oskol in 1593. These cities were frontier fortresses. It was a difficult time for Russia which had been defeated in the Livonian war. The country was devastated, and the population reduced by at least one third. The Wild Field colonization continued, and the following cities were founded: Tambov in 1636, Borisoglebsk in 1646, Novy Oskol in 1647. Meanwhile, the colonization of Western Siberia was going on even though it, at first sight, looks only like its exploration. Yermak seized the capital of the Siberian Khanate. But again it was an individual initiative. His expedition was sponsored by the Stroganovs, a family of highly successful Russian 1 merchants, industrialists, landowners, and statesmen of the 16th-20th centuries who were eventually granted the status of nobility. Ivan the Terrible only learned about that war after it had been over. A short period—less than a century—of the Siberian conquest followed. The fortress in Okhotsk was built in 1647. It was when the Russians made it to the Pacific Ocean where they confronted the colonization of Qing Empire of the Chinese. Russians were driving the Chinese eastwards all the way until 1917. Before the 1917 revolution, Russia colonized northern Manchuria. And there were other areas subject to Russian colonization in the Caucuses and Middle Asia. To recap: The colonization process started as an individual endeavor. The state followed individuals, and not the other way around. Because of the permanent colonization processes, the country was poor in human resources. The most common Russian myth is about the country’s huge population. But it has always been underpopulated. In the middle of the 18th century, the territory stretching from the Urals to the Pacific Ocean was managed by 140 people. When Peter I. in the western city of St. Petersburg asked for carpenters, each carpenter was bargained for individually. Napoleon’s army was defeated in 1812 because its logistics didn’t work for a sporadically populated and poor country as Russia was at that time. As a result of Russia’s lack of human resources, economical, political and cultural institutions were underdeveloped. The government didn’t realize that the human resources were scarce and exploited them irrationally. This was, for example, the case for the Livonian war led by Ivan the Terrible, the demographic catastrophes during the rule of Joseph Stalin, and especially WWII in which the USSR lost about 30,000,000 people. We can thus observe a profound contradiction in Russian history. It’s a clash between its colonization tendencies and its lack of human resources that would allow it to carry out its colonization plans. On the one hand, the government tied people down to the land and, on the other hand, it encouraged them to invade new territories. It’s obvious that no legislature can harmonize both processes. What is going on now? I think we face the necessity of a new colonization, or re-colonization; i.e. we need to colonize the once-colonized territories. I mean Eastern Siberia and the Far East. These are rich regions with a very under-developed infrastructure. Even in the central parts of Russia, the infrastructure is very poorly developed in comparison to Moscow. People are dissatisfied with Siberia and move to different regions with a better infrastructure. As a result, vast territories become depopulated. In many rural areas, population density is 10 times lower than it was in 1913. If this process is not stopped, Russia runs the risk of losing some of its territories. President Putin has accentuated the demographic crisis. Human resources in Russia are the least they have ever been. No considerable improvement is to be expected in the near future. The only way out for the nation would be to invest in its infrastructure, to facilitate migration, and to improve life standards in all parts of the country. This is a new and yet a traditional task for Russians. It’s a challenge for ambitious people. I see no other solution. A different deployment of its energy will be synonymous with the country's destitution, death, and removal from history altogether. 2 It’s easy to realize what is going on in Russia. No matter who Russia’s president is and what he says, the most important thing is to see whether there are investments in infrastructure or not. When analyzing the rhetoric of Russian politicians, this is the only thing to which to pay attention. 3 Michail Butov (Russia) In Russia today writers’ statements about politics resonate only when they are colored by extremism. Since I don’t consider myself an extremist in any area, with the exception, perhaps, of musical passions, the public podium for the presentation of my thoughts is inaccessible to me and I must content myself with Internet blogs. And that the opportunity to express myself presents itself in America, not at home, seems somewhat/quite strange. I suppose that today’s Russia doesn’t have any kind of individual problems of a completely specific type. Russia is a part of the globalized world, and all the unfolding processes and the existing tensions do not leave Russia on the side. These are the questions of the relationships between the state and the transnational corporations, the national problems of multinational countries, the economic problems of “raw material” based countries, and, finally, the relationship with the projected future, determining one’s place in the future world—the chances to get into the “golden billion” or be torn away and separated from the significant processes of the future, relegated to the “zone of death.” Russia is troubled by the same concerns as everyone else in the world. But there are peculiarities, individual shadings of these problems. And this shading is infused by a problem of a different nature, also common for the majority of developed countries and even entire continents—the problem of selfidentification. None of the major countries or the international country coalitions is today what they would like to appear to be. Europe, for instance, is having a harder and harder time holding on to the image of preserver of cultural traditions, the cradle of tolerance, the zone of absolute humanism, careful attention to human rights. The world is changing rapidly; new economic and political realities apply terrific pressure on all the existing and not so long ago seemingly unshakable social institutions. Those who want (and have the opportunity) to assure for themselves a promising future, are decisively rejecting the former models of social, economic, and simply inter-human relationships. This, for instance, is disintegrating and is threatening to make disappear altogether the very concept of the social. The problem of Russia lies in the fact that it doesn’t even know what it wants to look like: a modern, open country? a communist state with labor camps? an archaic monarchy with a tsar and nobility? or a bit of everything at the same time? Most importantly, there are many in Russia who cannot let go of the memory of the times when everyone was afraid of us— and in this is seen the most important sign of the state’s power. But today’s political and economic condition of Russia does not allow it to return to the former state of affairs. And even if, let’s say, a new communist regime is forcibly established in the country, it will still end up being powerless from the economic standpoint, and, consequently, from the military. There exists only one realistic way—to develop, to gain access, to learn to compete as equals with all the world powers. But how is this possible with monstrous lagging behind in the area of high technologies, and taking into account that the strong powers are not at all interested in a new competitor? I used to think that when the generation that experienced the Soviet power disappears completely from the scene, everything will change in Russia. Today I don’t think that way. 4 And I suppose Russia will never fully accept the liberal market ideology and, consequently, the western economic system—at least in it’s present form, although one cannot exclude the integration in the future with new economic models. And it has nothing to do with the still attractive and nationally popular slogan ��Expropriate and divide!” Russia is a very traditional country and does not lose its traditional nature with the arrival of new generations, and sharp contradictions with many points of liberalism appear here literally on every step. I speak not of some sort of specific inflexibility—mental or political. It’s something different. I, personally, know young doctors who feel uncomfortable, ashamed of taking money from their patients—even though they get beggar’s wages—one can’t even live on them. They feel that such basic things like human health and human compassion cannot, must not, depend on the level of economic status of the patient, and must be accessible to all in equal degree. They think that it’s the state’s task to guarantee this equality, as well as the pay worthy of their work; otherwise it’s unclear why the state is needed at all. This, clearly, is socialism, but I don’t necessarily find these ideas repulsive. In other words, Russia presupposes for itself the presence of some kind of special, unique road, perhaps having a precedent in history, perhaps completely different from the ones already laid out. Only in reality, no such clear concept exists— with the exception of the broadly circulating idea that it wouldn’t be all that bad if everyone would start fearing us again. It doesn’t exist—and, most likely, will not appear any time soon, first and foremost because we have oil. The gigantic stream of oil dollars, the oil “needle” does not boost the economy or political thought, but, on the contrary, paralyses them. The power is endlessly perverted, used to the constant and practically free monetary injection. The population of the country hardly plays any economic role at all, 99 percent of what is called in Russia “economic life” is the process of redistribution of money, gained from the sale of oil and other natural resources. And instead of well thought out strategies about the future, at this point we have mostly a radically mythologized notion about the past, which, Soviet to some, pre-Revolutionary to others, seems a golden age to which we should return at any cost. Now a few words about culture. In my opinion, neither the years of Perestroika, nor the fifteen years of “new Russia” that followed, managed to create some kind of radically new cultural material, except on the level of pop culture and cultural trash. The new reality did not end up speaking its own language. Yes, some of the previously underground currents surfaced and emerged to leading positions. But, first of all, now even their time is passing, and, secondly, to my taste they still smell of the Soviet epoch, if only as it’s flip-side. In essence, today’s Russian culture does not appear as something united. Let’s say that a unified Russian contemporary literature does not exist. There are several of them and their representatives often don’t even want to know about the existence of others. There is, for instance, quite popular, especially in the provinces, the very traditional, “soil” literature, continuing the line, to a large extent of the official Soviet literature, to a lesser extent—of talented village writers of the 70s. There is modernism, avant-garde, post modernism (also Russian-style), and there is a trend of moderate literature of the ‘intelligentsia’ to which yours truly subscribes. There is—appearing most recently—extremist literature, connected to nationalist movements, with ‘new bolshevism’ among them. All these are different worlds, and they are not necessarily at war with each other, or despising each other—they simply are of no interest to one another. 5 Despite everything I said, of course, this does not mean that in Russia there aren’t all that many talented, smart and capable people. There is a multitude. There are a lot of really good, meaningful books, large scale scientific discoveries happen. But all this exists in a disjointed state. People with a constructive outlook do not have the possibility of establishing communications, of presenting themselves as a social force. Not that the authorities disrupt such processes; rather they purposefully create conditions where such processes cannot materialize. Russian society fell apart into a number of ideological enclaves even before it had a chance to be formed, showing signs of life mainly on the Internet. Against such a mixed but otherwise anemic background the more radical trends stand out most prominently, of course—and today they actually occupy a more and more visible space on the ideological map of Russia; their influence grows. Official ideology, which in reality doesn’t exist, cannot offer any alternatives, which is why the authorities try to utilize these trends. But, I have to admit, they are playing with fire. 6 Polina Kopylova (Russia) LITO: A Lift to Parnassus Why does the poet need to be heard and accepted, or on the other hand, rejected by the other poets? What makes it necessary to search for poetry circles, to join them, to gain—or, more aptly, win the recognition from colleagues? Isn’t it a reader who determines popularity? Isn’t it a critic who tells the reader about the hidden meanings of the literal words? Isn’t it an academic, an expert in literature, who at last places the poet and his poetry into a national and global hierarchy? Why should you care about another poet’s opinion, and even desire it to be expressed publicly? Once I heard Victor Krivulin, the renowned Russian poet, who belonged to the circle of “Ahmatova’s orphans” along with Brodsky and Naiman, and Rein, say in an interview that a poet needs a special “acoustic space” for developing his talent. In other words, he needs his texts to be understood and echoed by people with a similar conception of language as the poet’s. The poets are united by having a common feeling of a certain weirdness which is essential to the art of poetry. This often leads to the feeling of exclusion or inclusion in a special community; and consequently, the differences in style and artistic aim split and segment the larger literary community. In Russia, literature has always been socially important, though now it is loosing its social position and relevance due to the attack of mass media. In Soviet times poetry was a kind of substitute for religion—the last resort of the intelligentsia, and paradoxically, a powerful instrument for propaganda. Starting to write often in the early school age of 8-9, a young author of poetry always knew he would be making his first step to Parnassus, where perished classics reside along with the living—even if he didn’t show his opuses to anyone. But rarely could one resist the desire to be heard. So the next step for a new-born poet was often a literary club, a studio or a seminar, which most often takes the name LITO, as an abbreviation coming from the Russian words “literaturnoye ob’edinenie” (literary union). The LITO’s main function is in fact tutoring—or giving the opportunity to improve and develop poetical skills within a group. Here I have to mention specially that what is awarded for this study is not a diploma, but is, sometimes, a reputation. The first one uniting young poets for study was, I guess, founded by Nikolai Gumilev in 1910s, and is remembered by the name “Sounding Shell”. LITO’s should be distinguished from the volunteer artistic unions and also movements such as the Futurists, the Dadaists and other groups based on a common artistic ideology or goal. Different LITO’s had clearly different styles and maintain different trends of poetry. They were still more like schools, dealing with differently writing young people. 7 I surely could put out heaps of names and characteristic poetry, but in fact I think it’s better to limit the story to general features. LITO’s are different by their ideology, initiation (entering procedure), style, a choice of trends, and atmosphere. It’s also worth mentioning the age of the participants, because some LITO’s, being formed decades ago, are still existing almost like closed clubs, whose members are adults, where the membership is obtained by years of patient presence and participation. The most usual form of LITO is a permanently working seminar, voluntarily lead by a respected poet, taking a group of 10-20 youngsters, sharing the latest verses and relying on the Teacher-poet to help them with promotion and publication because of his vast contacts in the literary community. They are often known by the leader’s name: like Alexander Kushner’s, Aleksei Mashevsky��s, Vyacheslav Leikin’s seminars. Their work is mostly reading and discussing one another’s verses, thus helping the individual with the development of his talent. To enter, or, it is better to say to be invited to a LITO you’re supposed to give a representative sample of your verse to a leader, who then decides whether your ability level corresponds to the LITO’s. The leader’s poetry is usually not to be discussed by the younger members. He is performing the last judgment and announcing the sentence. To make the procedure of discussion more serious, “the critic” and “the defender” are to be specially picked among the participants for a thorough and detailed analysis of the poems presented for the discussion. Their task is to stress the poetry’s both strong and week points; thus ideally showing the author his limits and potentials. The others may add their own impressions and observations. This method can seem quite organized, but the reality often turns out to be different. What happens is that the leader of the LITO, the poet, more or less openly feeds his personal tastes and preferences to the others. For example, in A. Kushner’s LITO, which has existed already for more then 20 years, the dominating tradition is classical and melancholic, with no taboo vocabulary or formal experiments allowed. The young poet bringing expressive texts may face a suggestion to write on some other subject, or to read more classics, or even to be asked why he’s mentioning God’s name in his poems, or being too abstract, because the real poetry should deal with the visible and concrete, making it poetical for the reader. The real poetry should be clear, preferably a bit sad and minimalist—and rhymed. This is what I call “the subjective authoritarianism”—the full confidence in one’s own experience, taste and importance being transferred to another’s creative evolution. The other LITO’s, left over from Soviet times in former pioneer houses, now renamed as “The Childen’s Creative Centers”, are led by minor verse-makers on a pitiful public wage, being hardly ever noticed—but bearing the poet’s name. What happens there is that teenagers, not actually being taught to analyze and criticize, start discussing the author’s personality instead of the texts, often throwing into the air psychiatric diagnoses, which hurt the author being discussed. One gets angry, another scared, some suffer, thinking this to be the only way to join the herd. Moreover, many say that for grown-up poets this kind of traumatic initiation is useful; for it sweeps away pointless pride. Both described types of LITO’s are characterized as being damn serious about what they do. Their activities are seen from inside as a certain cultural mission. 8 The other type of LITO is represented, for example, by Vyacheslav Leikin’s group, being developed from a literary club at a youth weekly-newspaper. There teaching and studying are done through endless games, developing formal skills and abilities to play with the word and sense. There seemed to be no clear preference for style; neither were discussions organized. The usual practice is to make positive remarks so that the silence of being ignored is the only kind of criticism. This seems psychologically much milder than the method mentioned above; but the bad side of that practice is that it makes the young writer dependant on pleasant company where no one speaks nasty things to each other. This clearly leads to somewhat of a literary isolation when one develops a disability to coexist with others. All three listed LITO types have a certain inner hierarchy. Besides the leaders’ favorites, the most promising poets, there is always a “manager”, who handles information, preparation for the readings, and is connected with the leader, etc. The “manager” is often less talented, by the way. But recently there appeared a new trend: a company of young poets, desiring a kind of spiritual leader, will choose and invite a Teacher-poet, sometimes even paying him for his time spent in the session. I know at least one such case. The group of poets, previously belonging to a LITO, whose leader left the position for private reasons, stayed together looking for someone capable of advising them on their creative practice. They visited several different LITO’s before “hiring” a leader, trying to find a match. And when the first leader “hired” didn’t satisfy, they called for the second one, who finally turned to be the perfect choice. This seminar, led by Valery Shubinsky, fruitfully working now for more than four years and gaining more and more attendants, is based on different principles and attitudes. When verses are discussed, the first things to be picked out from the author’s poetics are the specific features that distinguish these poems from the others—in other words, what makes the poet original. Secondly the students are to assist the author in identifying himself with one or several existing traditions in order to let him know that he’s not alone, but shares in the classical heritage and contemporary achievements of others—while still being himself. The LITO, as a steady institution of literary life, is an important part of one’s identity—for the teacher-poets and the attendants the same—and a helpful instrument for promoting yourself at an early stage. This explains why many of them still exist on completely voluntary grounds: they fulfill a need for the romantic and ambitious idea of having one’s own “school” in almost a medieval meaning, and the feeling of belonging to the “school” warms the heart. It’s honorable and flattering to have pupils following you— no one can deny that. And the phenomenon of volunteering there without any official warranties or benefits tells something of poetry’s role in Russian society, where it seems still to be more a thing of worship than of self-expression, more for the others, than for yourself. The name of a LITO works as a brand and a clear reference to a certain tradition; it places one in the literary system of coordinates, telling something of him that is more than he can imagine himself. 9 Ksenia Golubovich (Russia) Silencium After our panel on Monday Natasha approached me and said: you know, I liked everything a lot but for some reason you guys stay out of political matters. A few years ago it would have been all just about politics. I thought about this, and here is what I would like to say. It is true that talking about Russia seems at present to be avoiding any political matters whatsoever. And that is for a good reason. There is no politics. Things seem to have been shut down, shoveled away. What remains is a blank space of silence, simply decorated by a few ornaments on the left and on the right of what once used to be a promising political spectrum. There are many reasons for this. Some say economical change always makes things worse at first. What do you expect, say the others, a society like this was bound to have had all those horrible things surface and come in the open– after all, all relationships (to work, to property, to money, to human dignity) were so distorted that only the heavy lid of communism would have been able to keep everything quiet. And there are voices in between, those lamenting the fall of the socialist state, those attacking the real implementation of the socialist idea, voices hurdling accusations against all of Russian history with its serfdom and unfair privileges, voices accusing all Russians of being incapable to stand up to their government and to fight for democracy. There are voices accusing the East, and there are voices accusing the West--all voices I know so well and which form my identity and its “hellish orchestra,” and which occupy all points of what would be called the political spectrum, had they not been so deeply, maddeningly, internal. “Kitchen talk,” they used to call it--once dangerous, now tantamount to silence. Opinion cutting across opinion, negating and being negated, as if in a game of criss-cross where noone is likely to ever win. Young people don’t want to talk about “these matters;” their policy is “to live,” “to have fun,” and to “earn money” or whatever of the other policies TV delivers to them in the form of “product-placement” and “advertising.” What they do know about those once political “opinions” comes to them through soap operas, talk-shows, movies. Depending on who the client is, who pays the bill for this or that item, a TV program can be “liberal” (plot: a well-intentioned businessman and a young smart girl try to “make their firm work”), or “nationalist” (a soldier fighting for his country and dignity and --provided the touch is liberal--falling in love with a girl on the enemy side); or else there will be a “humor” program, a comic show of cheap laughter whose audience is made up of those to have profited the least from any social changes. But rather than being political statements, all these assorted points of view finally amount to the selling of just another group of commodities, this time of the ideological kind, with their own marketing, target groups and social engineering. Each part of the social spectrum is catered to. What it all adds up to is a strange mix of consumerism, Soviet nostalgia, the newest forms of nationalism, and then, on the other hand, the love of travel, MTV and glossy luxury. All these are different ideologies which coexist on ground zero, the medicated contract of social silence, the latest pact between power and the people. Funnily enough this ground zero has now found its way into broad swaths of expression. 10 The beginning of 2006 saw a new Russian blockbuster, Night Watch, a sequel to Day Watch, which was on the screen a year earlier. A fantasy mixed with action, this Russian version of a Hollywood product aspired to surpass the American products of the same type, at least on the local scene, for it uses very much the local scene and its particularities as its subjectmatter— e.g. the Big Battle between good and evil. The characters, their motives and their appearances, are wholly borrowed from Russian soap operas or film-series. Basically the film rearranges two sets of images: the “Good” ones are the Soviet-type, state-oriented people, the “Bad” are glossy and luxurious. The two groups coexist; each side with some supernatural power surpassing the normal human scope. The most horrible thing that can ever happen--according to the ideology of this film--is if the sides enter the final battle. Then all the middle-world, the world of the people where good and bad are mixed, will come to naught. Thus the answer is always balance of forces, equilibrium, a mutually agreed-upon abstaining from final words, that really lies underneath the multiplicity of ideologies and perspectives? The interesting thing here of course is the very concept of “Good” and “Bad”����Good” is seen as the “State” which provides electricity, water, heating and, if necessary, certain “repressions” of human rights, “Bad” is the individual striving for success that can go over other people’s heads but which makes life more interesting. These concepts are very relative, and presuppose that the final Truth will never be attained. This, to my mind, can be called the core and essence of the social peace in Russia. If all words and politics are senseless, the whole world is only about that balance of power, where Communists, state officials and liberals came to a mutual agreement. The interesting thing is of course that common or “average” people, have no say in any of this, whether in life or on screen, and that those who are in power are viewed as super-beings, elite groups fighting their own surreal battles, and providing us, their audience, with the safe and agreed-upon attitudes with which to identify… All language is theirs. We remain silent. As somebody once put it to me directly: “You want me to write an article for you; which type of attitude would you like me to stylize and emulate?” He was not thinking about what he had to say; he was thinking about which kind of product I would like to order up and pay for. For it does not matter any more. As long as the “white drug container” stays the same, as long as everybody keeps quiet, it does not matter what sticker it carries. It has the attitude of Polonius. So, at this point I would like to play Hamlet. Hamlet says: Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass … Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me. 11 I would like to ask: what on earth are we so silent about? If the political rhetoric is nothing more than bad theatre, every actor---before he or she even opens his or her mouth--knows what the words are that are so hushed and so unlikely to be spoken. Should, or must, we take the risk of breaking the silence that seems to suit everyone? It is not only words such as Chechnya, the Kursk submarine, or Khodorkovky, or indeed Lenin and Che Guevara-- that break this silence, distant—though troubling— echoes of the unspoken words, and names and deeds that really lie buried underneath the surface. Who are we?—the nation of survivors trying to forget all those millions of victims in whose stead we now live, trying to forget the way we were all those 80 years; the compromises we and our families made; the lies we uttered, the lies which formed the very identities we now so easily buy and sell; we who wrote off our “historical debt”? Why are we dragging our past on our shoulders in some desperate attempt to form a historic continuity where sharp rupture would have been much more preferable? Why, finally, do we identify with the “State,” its history, its figures rather than with the victims, whose silent voices are left unheard? Guilt does matter. If there is democracy to be had for us simple people, it can only come through the communion between the dead and the living, that ethical solidarity, that plea for forgiveness which can then form the foundation for and bring about the invention of a new politic. To break this silence is to break this wall; it is to listen to the dead and to that within the living which lies dead and buried. Not unlike in Germany which is still paying, which still hasn’t ceased to ask itself “how could we have done it?” Had all those deprived, unheard, hushed, silenced people become our core and our sense then perhaps we simple Soviet people would not have experienced the harshness of the social reforms which, necessary though they were, had neither heart nor sympathy nor any sense of social responsibility. Perhaps now we would not find ourselves ruled by an ex-KGB agent, or indeed quarrelling about the double identity of the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky—an ex-Komsomol activist turning oligarch, then turning against the ex-KGB president, jailed without trial nor any proof and sent to prison where so many people before him have found themselves. The very harshness of the ways those in power dealt with their previously much adulated “Soviet citizenry” is simply the continuation of the same old story. Why on earth should we have thought ourselves different? I head of a young priest who, on arriving to one of the northern villages and learning that there was a whole graveyard of unknown corpses—the graveyard of Stalin’s prisoners--gave a sermon. “That’s a good one”—said the “local population”—“he gave last rites to the bones!” Politics starts with ethics. Ethics demands the pain of recognition. Only then and there can a new cultural discourse be built. Russia is silent in a new kind of way, not having yet found its words, or letting them be unheard. But the tragedy is there, the voices are there, the legacy is there--and the new life trying to live up to that legacy is also there. And the message of forgiveness, and asking for forgiveness, is also there. This message is not just local--it belongs to the world. And in the end I would like to read a poem written by the Russian poet Olga Sedakova to the French philosopher François Fedie. A poem immediately translated into many European 12 languages. A poem dealing with what can be called our “European identity,” even while coming from Russia. A poem about the message, and its messenger called “Angel from Reims”. It is the figure of a smiling angel on a wall of the cathedral in Reims, France, the cathedral in which a long-suffering French people led by Joan d’Arc crowned their first king in the 15th century. The Angel of Reims Are you there?— The angel is smiling I ask, though I know That you are surely there For I talk not just to anyone But to you A man whose heart shall never bare the treason Of your earthly King, Crowned here by his people And of that other Lord The King of Heavens, Our Lamb Dying in hope That you will hear me again; Again and again As every evening My name’s being told and sung Here, in the land of the splendid wheat And of the light vine, The crop and the grapes Drink in my sound— But nevertheless In this rose and crumbling stone Raising my arm That was broken off in the war Let me remind you: Are you there? 13 For plague, for hunger, for fire, For invasions of men, for anger of Heavens? All that is important, but it isn’t the point. That’s not what I am to remind of That wasn’t the reason they’ve sent me. I say Are you There For the unbelievable happiness? --- 14 |
| Type (DCMIType) | Moving image |
| Type (AAT) | Presentations (Communicative events) |
| Language | English |
| Digital Collection | Virtual Writing University Archive |
| Contributing Institution | Iowa City Public Library |
| Subcollection | International Writing Program Collection |
| Rights Management | Educational use only, no other rights given. U.S. and international copyright laws may protect this digital object. Commercial use or distribution of the object is not permitted without prior permission of the copyright holder. |
| Contact Information | Contact the VWU Webmaster: http://www.writinguniversity.org/index.php/main/info/25/ |
| Date Digital | 2006-09-01 |
Description
| Title | Russian scene, Video, 500k |
| Type (DCMIType) |
Moving image |
| Type (IMT) |
mp4 |
| Duration | 01:30:26 |
| Digitization Specifications | Received as MPEG2 and converted to mp4 for streaming. |
| File Name | iwp-icpl_09-01-06.mp4 |
| Original File Name | iwp_09-01-06.mpg |
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