The Writer in Russia
By Kirill Medvedev
Kirill Medvedev is a new and very attractive figure on the Russian cultural landscape. A poet first, he published two books of confessional free verse early in this decade to much acclaim as well as controversy. Soon after, spurred in part by some of the violent reaction elicited by his poetry, he experienced a sharp leftward turn. In 2003, he announced that, given the conditions of the Putin regime (which he read as a mutant continuation of 1990s neoliberalism rather than as a backward step toward Soviet-style statism), he would no longer participate in literary life—he would neither publish nor give readings nor participate in round tables. In the years since, Medvedev has continued to develop his stubbornly independent position, more recently joining the nascent socialist movement Forward as a contributor to its Web site and as an activist. In all his writings, he has questioned the orthodoxy of the previous generation of Russian thinkers, the vast majority of whom were programmatic free market liberals. Medvedev is at the forefront of a new generation of Russians who are beginning, very gingerly, warily, and humbly, to apply the European left’s critique of postwar capitalism to their native situation.
In this essay, Medvedev attempts to connect some tendencies he sees in current Russian art, poetry, and politics. What he finds there is “the new emotionalism,” an appeal on the part of poets and politicians alike to personal experience and authenticity. In part this apparently inward turn is a natural reaction to a situation in which all public debate (about capitalism, about Putin) has been eliminated; but it is also a necessary condition for the current regime to remain in power. Followers of the American literary scene—with its rash of memoirs (including fake ones), continued but debased identity politics, and frequent appeals by even the least memoiristic writers to their “sincerity”—as well as followers of the American blogosphere, with its shrill self-assertions and self-promotion, will find much that is familiar in the world Medvedev describes.
The essay was originally published as “Literatura Budet Proverena: Individualny proekt i ‘novaia emotsionalnost’” or “The Situation of the Writer in Russia: The Individual Project and the ‘New Emotionalism,’ ” in Medvedev’s self-published volume of essays Reaktsiya Voobshe, Moscow, 2007.
—Keith Gessen
The intelligentsia’s will, and their desire, was directed, intentionally, at isolation. This is how they thought about the government: “You are cretins, leave us alone—we will study higher math, theoretical physics, and semiotics. And everything will be fine.” They failed to understand that in fact they were violating their own political conscience. They lacked the audacity and the will to recognize themselves as a political force. And when perestroika began, they were completely disorganized, intellectually, because they could not help but feel—instead of “they” I could say “we,” it’s merely a question of style—we could not help but feel that this very isolation, this very “leave us alone”—it was the same old “intelligentsia garbage.” We need to formulate at least an approximate political ideal.
—Alexander Pyatigorsky
THE FEATURES ascribed to the liberal intelligentsia by the philosopher Alexander Pyatigorsky surfaced in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was then that all discussion of “socialism with a human face” was thrown overboard and a resurgent labor movement found itself under the heel of “democratic” reformists. This was the intelligentsia’s first capitulation. The second began in October 1993, with their almost total acquiescence to the shelling of the Duma, and it ended in 1999 with Vladimir Putin’s rise to power. During this time, in the context of a politics of complete capitalist restoration, a renunciation took place: not just of any oppositional attitude to the neoliberal model, but even of a more or less critical approach to it. (There were individual voices opposing this; they were drowned in the general chorus of loyalty.) The political opposition to Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s consisted largely of the Communist Party, a decrepit left-patriotic monster incapable of doing anything on its own, which nonetheless managed to become, for many years, a conduit for various moods of protest, even as it always performed the same exact ideological function: to be a scarecrow to the liberally minded elite. In this capacity it won Yeltsin a second term in office in 1996. A few years later, Putin was anointed king. At this point the liberal intelligentsia split psychologically and socially in two: one half became directly engaged in servicing the structures of capital—banks, publishing houses, corporations, and so on—while the other decided that regardless of all the hardships—the impossibility of working in one’s field, the cultural degradation, the vulgarity and pettiness of the new overlords—it would be wrong to grumble, to express discontent, to make demands. It was futile and unattractive to go against the time. And then, early in this decade, came the rise of the national-patriotic “red-browns,” who would be “even worse” than the current rulers, just as the Communists would have been “worse” than Yeltsin. As a result, the two halves of the intelligentsia formed an ideal consensus. At that moment, any possibility for real opposition, real discussion, and real political life in Russia disappeared.
We’ve now reached another turning point, because the red-brown scare is finally fading into the past. And a task that was wholly bungled at the beginning of the nineties is once again taking center stage: the creation of a real left-wing movement, based on workers’ autonomy, on independent labor unions, on the cooperation of grassroots movements and organizations.
And how does the Russian intelligentsia confront this challenge? With another capitulation, its third in the last twenty years. Any discussion of capitalism is off limits. Capitalism is irrevocable and self-evident. The younger generation, even in its best, most artistic, intellectual manifestation, already fights tenaciously for its right to a private life, to freedom from any talk of “politics,” “ideology,” or, even worse, the “proletariat.” These words are associated with the beginning of the Nineties; today they seem hopelessly archaic, although in truth the political paralysis that destroyed Russia in the 1990s continues.
AN OLD liberal maxim still haunts the minds of the intelligentsia: it states that “everyone should mind his own business,” in a conception of the artist as a private person most lucidly articulated by Joseph Brodsky in his Nobel Prize address. Yet it is obvious that Brodsky himself, as a poet chosen and put forward by his own social circle, participated in certain bargains, had certain privileges, was published by certain houses, thus directly or indirectly supporting certain powers and ideologies. But poets like the idea of “purity,” and one is supposed to acquiesce to the fiction that the poet is alone and that his texts, his political position (or its absence), and his personal qualities are in no way interrelated. And everyone should mind his or her own business—why meddle in someone else’s private life? The person of letters should write, the politician should politic, the engineer should engineer, and so forth.
The idea that follows is that in a “normal” society, various strata would get along independently of one another: large corporations would be fine independent of the proletariat working in its mines and oil fields, bohemia would be fine independent of the large corporations whom it serves, and so forth. At the same time, nearly every person (especially every artist) wants to be considered unique, separate, independent of general norms and perceptions, disconnected from conditions of, God forbid, “the relations of production.” And the most important idea of all: that the current situation, whatever you wish to call it—“celebrity,” “capitalism,” “the Putin regime,” and so forth—is total, that there is no escaping it. These ideas, which seem natural, but which date back to concrete historical conditions, explain the almost absolute hegemony of the “right” in Russian culture and politics today. These are a set of specific, deeply metaphysical ideas about the unshakable foundations of human nature. In their extreme-right, reactionary form, they are manifest in perceptions of the eternal characteristics of ethnic groups, races, nations; in their more or less liberal variant: of the irrevocable expansion of the market, which is impossible to wholly describe, to which one can only resign oneself, and within which the best one can do is find a tiny little niche.
It’s as if, within this system, the artist were indulged as a vessel for a particular kind of political innocence: this is his social role. For the people (or just a small group of them), the artist represents the idea of timeless, “apolitical” categories, of great masterpieces, of existential freedom. A poet is even freer than others, because unlike the artist, musician, or theater director, the poet doesn’t need any capital to create works. The conditions of production are so cheap that a poet can believe his or her work is connected directly to the fabric of life, that it prevails over its context and circumstances. On an individual level this perception is perfectly reasonable and can be productive. In truth, the belief that your work can escape the stagnant social fabric is very important—it is a major stimulus to the production of art.
But when one idea comes to be shared by all poets, it looks suspicious. Right now, not only is the idea of the “private project” shared by all poets, it is also the rallying cry of artists, critics, and other intellectuals.
Some examples of the touching innocence that characterizes our leading cultural figures illustrate this: a former star of the punk underground is honestly surprised that he should be criticized for performing at a rally for “Nashi,” the Putin youth brigade; a fashionable theater director criticizes the president in Aesopian language and is simultaneously the main guide of the Kremlin’s cultural politics: he reads lectures under the aegis of the United Russia party. [1]
The United Russia Party was formed in early 2001 as the pro-government party in the Duma. With the collapse of the liberal parties and the decline of the Communists, it has become, in essence, the lone political party in Russia, winning 64 percent of the popular vote in the Duma elections of December 2007.
The theater director Alexander Kalyagin signs a letter against the imprisoned Mikhail Khodorkovsky [2]
The chairman of the oil giant Yukos, whose support for liberal political movements led to his imprisonment in 2003, in the most publicized crackdown on an opposition figure by the Putin administration. He is serving his sentence at a labor camp.
, in exchange for which he receives a theater in the center of Moscow, where he will, of course, stage his incorruptible oeuvres, where he will even stage Brecht—ars longa, vita brevis!
I recently found myself puzzled by one poet and critic who wrote a sympathetic article on “leftist poets” for a Kremlin-financed Web site. He even expressed a kind of solidarity with the leftist poets, cheerily urging them on toward direct political action(!), and he did this not only from the right (it would not be notable if this were in the pages of the liberal journal Znamya) but from a space that was created by the Kremlin expressly to strengthen its power via the smokescreen of “parliamentary polyphony.” When I wrote to say that I was surprised, he answered: “What difference does it make where the article is published; what matters is what is written in it”—again confirming my worst fears regarding the condition of the minds of even the most advanced and talented representatives of the intelligentsia.
What motivates these people is irrelevant: whether it’s really political naïveté or just ordinary cynicism and prudence. It’s impossible to separate one from the other, and I’m not posing a question of moral judgment. Russian culture as a whole has acquired (very much at the wrong time) the possibility of palpable autonomy, and now each individual artist sincerely defends his or her innocence and independence. But it is precisely through this kind of “innocence” and “sincerity” that works of art become commodities—not because the artist believes himself a spineless, prostituted insect, ready to do anything for publicity, but exactly the opposite: because he values himself and his work very highly and believes that media appearances won’t do him any harm.
Terms like “innocence” and “sincerity” frame the current mind-set to a remarkable degree. In all its dimensions—cultural, sociopolitical, and so on—the climate is determined not so much by “money” and “celebrity” (as is widely thought), but by the “new sincerity.” It is President Putin and contemporary poetry and the broadcasters on television. It is Alexander Lukashenko admitting that his party falsified the elections—lowered Lukashenko’s numbers from 93 percent to 80 percent—because, Lukashenko very sincerely confessed, “the European Union wouldn’t have accepted the results otherwise.” This is simultaneously unbelievable and symptomatic. The new sincerity is the blogosphere, with its absolutely sincere poets in one corner and its equally sincere Nazis in the other.
The “new sincerity” emerged in the culture as a reaction to the mind-bending moribundity and abstraction of postmodern theory on the one hand and to a confused and conflicted (post-)Soviet consciousness on the other. There came a moment when direct expression—an appeal to biographical experience as a zone of authenticity—was the tool that could force open at least two discourses: the rough, ideologized Soviet one and the ascetic, bodiless, nonconformist underground one. Today, the trend toward “sincerity,” “emotionalism,” and “direct expression,” with its appeal to biography, has become more and more reactionary.
The new sincerity or, more precisely, the new emotionalism, has rejected the worst aspects of postmodernism: its unintelligible, elitist jargon and its opposition to grand narratives and global concepts. But it has also rejected its undeniably positive qualities: its irrepressible critical outlook and its intellectual sophistication. And if, in spite of its initial critical power, postmodernism in the end only gave cover to an idealized consensus between the goals of “diversity” and the interests of the global marketplace, then the new emotionalism reconciles those same market interests with the resurrected figure of the author, bringing forth today’s endless stream of ventriloquism (lyrical, essayistic, “political,” whatever), in which any effort at analysis, any possibility of differentiating positions and actions simply drowns. It’s a stream in which it’s impossible to separate sincerity from hack work, because one is in the employ of the other: emotions cover up ideological bankruptcy (and the death of rational argument), and ideology in turn excites emotions and captivates the masses. It’s not hard to influence a person filled with emotions. The authorities are afraid of this sincerity, but they feed off and take advantage of it. Let young neo-Nazis scare the peasants with their sincere hatred, simultaneously keeping them in line. Let young poets and actors scream and curse from the stage of the Polytechnic: “Do whatever you want,” the new commissars tell them. “You are free, independent artists. Just don’t worry your pretty little heads about politics; after all, you’re smart, you know yourselves that it’s a dirty business. Your art will obviously outlive us all. Just leave the politics to us.”
The new emotionalism never fully grasped the ambivalence of postmodern theory; now it rejects the idea of the death of the author and replaces the dead author with the uniquely living, all-consuming “I,” granting it the right to say anything at all, whatever strikes one’s fancy. After all, if Marx is dead, everything is permitted. If “during postmodernism” language itself (as a system) spoke through the (dead) author, and embedded within this language were “schizophrenic” (liberating) possibilities, then in the new situation, when a long-repressed freedom of expression mingles with neoliberalism, it is God again who starts to speak through the poet. And this God is nothing but the rumblings, the convulsions, the subterfuges of capitalism itself, similar to ancient Fate, which all must inevitably confront, regardless of where they try to run.
Given this context, poets’ lamentations about their condition sound touchingly naïve. Why, they ask, don’t we have normal literary criticism? I have a simple, vulgar answer to this question: because all the major critical theories of the West in the twentieth century passed, in one way or another, through Marxism. All took something from it, altered other things in it, invalidated something else. Until the same happens in Russia, there won’t be any criticism at all—not of poetry, not of the authorities.
THE AUTHOR of the most brilliant individual project of the last few decades is named Eduard Limonov. [3]
Limonov was a scandalous and talented émigré poet and memoirist who returned to Russia in the early 1990s and founded a strange political party called the National Bolsheviks (NBP). They opposed globalization, the breakup of the USSR, and the Yeltsin regime. More recently, in opposition to Putin, they have become more focused on human rights and have allied themselves with chess champion Garry Kasparov to form “Other Russia,” the only opposition group to gain any traction in the Western media. See: Andrew Meier, “Putin’s Pariah,” www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/magazine/02limonov-t.html. And: Keith Gessen, “Monumental Foolishness,” www.slate.com/id/2078955/.
Throughout the 1990s and until quite recently, it was almost impossible to find a position from which a critique of Limonov would sound convincing. To take moral issue with him for excessive “sincerity” made you a hypocrite. To incriminate him as a “fascist” meant pretending that Yeltsin was a “democrat.” Those who tried to belittle him or confront him with overt hostility were doomed to find themselves immediately in a system of coordinates created by the self-same Limonov, in which the critic invariably (by an aggregate of data: as a writer, as a politician, as a man) was found to be beneath the great poet. Limonov had charm and a heroic persona and a remarkable biography, but there was also something else in play—under conditions of the “individual project,” any criticism is automatically followed with an answer from a position of experience: live my life (that is, visit as many cities and countries, write as many books, love as many women, create an equally independent and passionate political party), and then we’ll talk. All of Limonov’s heroes, even those more famous than he (Salvador Dali, for instance), eventually become just sad and transitory characters in the brilliant, vivid novel of Limonov’s life.
Yet I think the era of Limonov’s cultural hegemony (in which, undoubtedly, together with National Bolshevism and brown-red quasi-fascism, there were also progressive elements) is coming to an end. Today his political activity plays the reactionary role of subordinating all oppositional (and leftist) politics to Limonov’s life project—his cult of personality, strategies of media-scandal, and so on. Leftist groups in Russia today work in the shadow of Limonov’s NBP and its spectacular media events. With a cocktail made up of Nietzscheanism, nationalism, and “leftism,” mixed in with autobiographical authenticity, Limonov has managed to subsume an important segment of the youth protest movement under his own banner.
Baudrillard believed that the revolution of ’68 was defeated by overexposure in the media. The narrative of art-activism, the direct action of the nineties, has either led to the spectacular, partly fascistic activism of the NBP or to today’s crossroads, where left artists choose between a job in the art market or a search for alternative strategies attempting to answer a question also faced by leftist political groups: how does one clothe the message in an adequate and legitimate form, simultaneously avoiding vulgar, spectacular excesses?
Today an artist who wishes to consider himself a leftist ends up trapped between these two positions. He wants to influence society, a fact he does not conceal, which is why he is skeptical in his approach to the concept of “pure art.” On the other hand, he does not want to transmit himself directly through the media’s mechanisms and needs to approach them carefully and critically.
For me, an important experience was a protest I staged against the Kalyagin theater during the premiere of Brecht’s Drums in the Night. [4]
Medvedev’s picket of Alexander Kalyagin’s play—prompted in part by Kalyagin’s letter in favor of Khodorkovsky’s imprisonment, and in part by Medvedev’s love of Brecht—led to the theater’s security guard’s punching him in the face.
It was conceived as a picket (that is, a maximally democratic means of expression, accessible to all and with no pretense to artistic value or novelty) in a series of other pickets organized by the socialist movement “Forward.” It was interpreted, however, as an art action, partly because of the skirmish with the guard, partly because the reaction from right-liberal critics involved almost exclusively biographical realities—facts of Brecht’s biography, facts of my biography, and facts of the critic’s biography. What one witnessed was a characteristically nonreflexive impulse: instead of a conversation about the enterprise as an effective or ineffective civil/political gesture, truthful or half-truthful or openly false facts from one’s own or someone else’s biography were pulled in. The critic would write, for example, that, in fact, “Brecht skillfully utilized capitalist mechanisms” or, in fact, “the picketer has rich parents” or “in my youth, I myself lived in a proletarian area, and I know what the proletariat is.” OK.
I was born in 1975. My father was a journalist and a bibliophile. My mother worked as an editor at Soviet Writer, a publishing house. My father blossomed during perestroika. He conducted interviews with cultural figures in the magazine Ogoniok, which was then widely read. In 1991, he and I went to “defend the White House [against the failed Communist putsch].” At the start of the nineties, he hosted a show about culture on television. To be honest, his blossoming did not last long. My father became addicted to roulette and soon lost everything: his real estate, our apartment, his library. He ran up a huge debt to the mafia. We lived in portable apartments, under constant threat. One time, I was taken as a hostage. In 1994, running from the mafia, my mother and I spent a month in Israel. Then we returned to Moscow. In Moscow I got a job as an ice cream vendor. (Once, I came to work the morning after my birthday. I had been drinking the night before and had lost my voice. All the customers thought that I had eaten too much ice cream. It was funny.) In addition to this, at the time, I also worked as a loader and a book vendor. I would describe the Moscow of that moment through the gaze of a sleepless, almost homeless young man, a stranger to anything and everything. Sometimes I spent the night at home, more often with friends, but I basically lived on the streets because it was only on the streets—immersed in a crowd—that I felt free. Around me, on the one hand, there reigned an unhealthy, entrepreneurial chaos; on the other, poverty, hunger, cynicism, disintegration, and agony. Between 1992 and 1996, I studied history at Moscow State University. Between 1996 and 2000, I studied at the Gorky Literary Institute. During this period, I worked as a journalist and critic, wrote reviews and articles in newspapers and magazines, translated. Gradually I came to see that not only as a journalist, but even as a translator, I could not fit into this new reality, a fact I announced in the first line of my first intelligible poem, at the beginning of 2001. Now, from time to time, I do editing work, which is given to me by a publisher friend. I live on money earned by my girlfriend. Until recently, this was $700 a month; now, after an exhausting battle, they raised her salary to $1,100. The three of us—with the child—live on this money. Recently I was thinking about the boundary between what I could and couldn’t afford, and I realized that if I take a pastry as an example, then the boundary is around twenty rubles. Now, this does not depend on an actual amount that I can spend during a single day, and it does not depend on how much money is lying in my pocket. But psychologically, I’m left with this twenty-ruble pastry as the border between . . . Aye-aye-aye!!! What conclusions follow from these facts? Do they have any meaning—these occasionally amusing, occasionally incredible or tearjerking facts? Do they justify or discredit my position? Do they confirm one or the other of my grievances and do they discredit the positions of others?
It’s interesting to note that the use of gossip fits perfectly well with stale declarations about the irrelevance of Marxism, and so on. And somehow these kinds of facts are always accompanied by the fake moralism that surfaces when certain media strategies are criticized from a post-underground perspective—when people inevitably start talking about “self-promotion” (the self-promotion of the picketer) in juxtaposition to “pure art.” This position made a certain amount of sense during the 1970s and early 1980s, when working for a narrow, underground audience was actually a form of political action. But today the autonomy of the artist, by which is understood his freedom from any external ideology (he’ll contemptuously call this, appealing to the old categories, “the party line”), is the central bulwark to the myth of the bourgeois artist and his “individual project.”
The artist is connected to his environment, stratum, and community through a collective experience—bodily, historical, cultural. In the artistic act, this connection manifests itself voluntarily, which is why it is a moment of freedom. An artist can think, reflect, and deduce as much as he wants outside the artistic act. But only in the act of creation, only voluntarily, having become a kind of blind, insane vessel, can one create a form—a form that connects a person with his biography, with his experience, with those unilluminated, chaotic, power-hungry clots in which his history joins up with the collective one. Only in this way can one break through to reality—to force someone to hate you or to express solidarity, to make someone think, to make someone experience collective oppression alongside you. This is why terms like “form,” “sincerity,” and “personal, biographical experience” are still, I think, significant even in politicized art, because manipulation either of one’s own or of someone else’s personal experience (as in art, so also in politics) ultimately leads to chaos, creating a deceptive unity—that is, yet another ideology or “individual project” in which even private or cultural experience only justifies powerlessness or conformism or a set of sentimental bromides. Please don’t talk to me about your “historical experience” of Soviet oppression: It’s not your experience, it’s the experience of Mayakovsky (a Bolshevik), of Shalamov (a Trotskyist), of Mandelshtam (a Socialist-Revolutionary), of others. We must live our new, actual political experience, and if the goal of the “leftist” actionists of the 1990s [5]
This is a reference to “action artists,” such as Oleg Kulik and Alexander Brenner. Kulik used to go to art exhibits and pretend to be a rabid dog. The anarchist Brenner, the more interesting of the two, is most famous in the West for spray-painting a green dollar sign onto a Malevich painting in an Amsterdam museum in 1997 (for which he served six months in prison).
consisted in bringing themselves and their bodies into the media’s field of vision, then the goal of today’s left artist must be to use one or another link to the outbursts of the oppressed and their underground movements—to discover his link to history, to those artists, philosophers, and fighters who have been cast aside or castrated in the contemporary “post-political” world.
Many of the twentieth century’s “criticisms of cultural production” were based on the notion that through his stratum, class, or community, each person is connected with every other person, and having realized that his labor is expropriated and used against him and others like him, he can stop working, leave the game, and disrupt the machine. Conscious of the historical situation and, above all, intolerant of it, he can try to change that situation.
In Russia right now, the intelligentsia’s old default position—the “unextended hand,” the supreme gesture of liberal impatience, based on the notion that any political/ideological opponent (in other words, a “Communo-fascist”) was just a scoundrel (or, at best, crazy)—is falling further and further into disrepute. The new default position is a flaccid tolerance: Why make a choice at all? Why divide people into “reds,” “whites,” or what have you, if there’s something familiar and interesting in everyone? Thus “postmodern sensitivity” lives on in the new era. In the face of private human feelings (love, loneliness, the fragility of relationships), any act of “debunking” or criticism, any pretensions toward truth, “objectivity,” and “meaning” resemble blasphemy. Don’t ask the artist what he meant to say and whom he works for—he shouldn’t think about that! What talk can there be about analysis or theory if it’s a question of feelings—love, happiness, understanding—all so hard to attain in this world? How can you blame an artist for making people feel good? How can you blame a director who entertains people who are tired after a hard day’s work? However false and deceptive the “national ideology,” regardless of whose interests are behind it, what’s wrong if it gives people at least an illusory feeling (but a feeling nonetheless) of confidence and community? Finally, can one blame “sovereign democracy” if it alone allows us to retain a fragile balance, quieting real hypocrisy and thus avoiding even more serious catastrophes?
Taken to its extreme, it comes down to a single question that today hangs over our country and our world: What does it matter that a fraud took place if everyone’s happy?!
But far from everyone is happy, and that means the final fraud hasn’t happened yet.
IN THE Woody Allen film Match Point, a kind of remake of Crime and Punishment, the main character gets away with murder: he kills his mistress and an elderly neighbor who witnessed the crime. The detective on the case sees the truth, but only in his dreams. The murderer goes on with his life, and his wife finally gives birth to their long-awaited child.
With great clarity and subtlety, Allen compares Dostoevsky’s era to our own. In Dostoevsky, madmen and grand inquisitors kill each other, but the world is ruled by a higher, divine justice that can only be deferred for so long before it reasserts itself with frightening force. However well everything goes for the criminal, sooner or later truth, verity, and justice break the chain of accidents and enter the world, restoring balance; in the Christian Dostoevsky’s version, balance takes the form of a plea for forgiveness, not a punishment. The detective becomes a mediator of this higher, God-like fairness. In Woody Allen’s postmodern world, there is no higher justice, only a game where everything depends on happenstance, on where the ball will fall (thus, “match point”). This sense of a fragile reality on the edge undoubtedly dominates today’s world and makes up what is called the “neoliberal” consciousness, with its—for the moment—almost complete political paralysis.
For the last few years, prophesies of an upcoming catastrophe have lingered in the Russian ether: the collapse of the country; a possible all-out civil war; a foreign intervention; the appearance of a violent, repressive force; and so forth. Many recent novels feature some form of violent shock. A characteristic example is Sergei Dorenko’s 2008, in which, in the midst of a triumphant, stable, and governable political landscape (there are three loyal forces in parliament: United Russia, “social democrats,” and Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party), Chechen terrorists blow up a nuclear power plant outside Moscow, the capital empties, and Limonov and his cohort slide seamlessly into the Kremlin and establish a bizarre dictatorship. The consciousness of the writer reflects—fantastically and dismally—the myth of revenge that has haunted the minds of many Russian citizens since the 1990s. Translated into more or less intelligible terms, it sounds like this: For the past fifteen years, reality has been broken and stomped on; so many legal, moral, and human commandments have been violated; so many people were involved in so many hideous deeds (using their intellect, their power, their knowledge, or simply their stupidity, their uselessness, their cynicism) that NOTHING GOOD CAN COME OF IT. And the longer the day of reckoning is delayed, the harder it will hit when it arrives. That’s why even today’s relative happiness looks threatening. The authorities, the Kremlin, whoever, can of course postpone the inevitable and prolong the illusion with the help of oil money and a pliant media—but not forever. In the context of this myth (which is not all that far from the truth), the “fascists”—for example, Dorenko’s Chechens—become a unique weapon of reckoning, of the restoration of justice. They suggest that you can use the people and lie to them as much as you want—but not forever. The truth will out, and it may be a lot worse than the lie. For today’s loyal intelligentsia, these perceptions are channeled into yet another capitulation: let things remain as they are, they say, so long as we keep at bay the “red-browns,” or the “fascists” (or Muslims, Chinese, and so forth).
But today, an alternative to both “wise” capitulationism and somber, epic “retaliation” can only be a demand for “truth” in its totally concrete, everyday meaning—a fight for it, and for the formation of distinct political demands.
At the turn of the century, the mass antiglobalization protests in Seattle and Genoa, which wounded neoliberalism, as well as the attack on the World Trade Center, put an end to the cultural hegemony of the postmodern. Once again, a question was posed to capitalism, and a new era of critique began. At the same time a new reaction emerged—the conception of civilizational conflict, the axis of evil, and so forth. In this way, the opposition between metaphysics (the idea of “the eternal”—ethnic, national, confessional, civilizational values) and dialectics (the ideas of fluidity, interdependence, and the interchangeability of things) became relevant again.
THERE IS a very heavy imprint of metaphysics on Russian life and thought. The metaphysical consciousness of the artistic intelligentsia is based, as I’ve said, on the idea that any product of nonmaterial labor exists outside its context and speaks for itself. Today, such ideas unite the majority of active politicians and successful artists, who have nothing against participating in official art projects, presuming that one can and should negotiate with the authorities. Of course you can try to fool them, taking their money and promoting something oppositional. These ideas percolate in the consciousness of even very enlightened people, and, added to the authorities’ penchant for sponsoring oppositional political figures, they lead to the absence of real competition within the political field.
The opposite position argues that a civil society does not emerge from any “mutually beneficial” agreement with the authorities, even the most sympathetic authorities. It emerges only from the bottom, only as a call, a resistance, a demand. And culture—as a reflexive field—also only emerges in this way. Because action, production, and thought are determined to a large degree by circumstances, conditions, and context. You cannot critique the Putin regime without assessing your own place in it, whether as critic or artist.
It’s impossible to criticize an authoritarian Russian democracy without also assessing the role of the United States and its allies, without mentioning the worldwide division of labor, without recognizing the extent to which the situation here is a continuation of worldwide processes. It’s impossible not to understand the extent to which your own consciousness determines your social existence, forces you to accept as “obvious” one or another set of perspectives. “It’s impossible to be free from politics”: this is the banal truth that one must now grasp anew. Political passivity also participates in history; it too is responsible.
The liberal intelligentsia, which has claimed for half a century that the subject of civil society is the quiet owner of his private life, is now confronted with a situation where the private life of the conformist and apolitical middle class is blooming in a previously unimagined array of colors in Russia while political life exists in a state of total nullity. All that’s left here of the liberal-Western project are empty, wordy frills—complaints about “this country,” our “bloody regime,” and our forgotten “universal values.” In truth, the general rejection of the 1990s unites the entire loyal electorate, and those same liberal 1990s reforms (privatization, monetization of benefits, and so on) pass much more successfully under the banner of moderate patriotism and soft authoritarianism than under the slogans of inclusion in the “civilized world.” Today, part of the intelligentsia shifts to the right, leaning toward ideas of a “clash of civilizations,” trying to rely on “eternal”—national, ethnic, confessional, civilizational—values. Another part still insists that Russia has again turned from the path of civilized, Western capitalism.
THE REAL need now is for the emergence of a new stratum of leftist intellectuals who have mastered the history of leftist thought, leftist politics, leftist art of the twentieth century and who have, through Western Marxism and neo-Marxism, recognized their participation in the international socialist project. This is, undoubtedly, the cultural and political goal of humanity—because it is precisely a participation in self-government on as broad a scale as possible—and not the possibility of a career, pure art, or a private life—that is that next step, without which humanity is doomed to moral and physical degeneration. The old slogan “socialism or barbarism” has become unbelievably relevant. Because in order to keep open the possibility of remaining a private citizen, more victims will have to be brought forth; we will have to move further to the “right,” become more embroiled in our individual projects, private territories, and narrow specializations demanded by the market. More protections once won by the Enlightenment and civil society will have to be sold to corporations, media conglomerates, and political marketing. We will have to fear the “radical” Chinese and Muslims more intensely and further insist on the totality of capitalism, the end of the working class, the end of class warfare, the end of politics (all concepts that envelop a person in a long, dreary sleep, in which he sees himself simultaneously a hero of cultural resistance, the last item up for sale, and an independent private person). Only roused from this sleep can a person realize what the world looks like shorn of any glamour, where again and again people who did not read Marx or Benjamin answer the call to resistance, to action, to an understanding of the shared interests of the collective, of the class. Whereas capitalism’s violent reaction to every collective demand, every independent union, seems irrational, it is actually completely logical and justified—because the frontline is right here: the most narrow point where something happens that rarely occurs in poems, novels, or movies: a fight for reality. Only having realized the reality of this battle will we be able to speak of separation, of individualism, of the possibility of genuine diversity, of a civil society, of a competition of ideas, forms, poetics. Only then can we believe in “apoliticism” and “privatism” as risky and culturally productive personal demands and not as banal projections of individualism, apathy, and lunacy. Only then will we be able to use the blogosphere, which undoubtedly possesses much progressive, even socialist potential, but which for now is a mechanism emerging directly from current conditions (which, we should notice, are entering back into it), meaning that in the best case it will be a way to spend some leisure time and in the worst it will become (like “direct democracy” as a whole) a weapon in the hands of the most highly ideologically active strata—neo-Nazis, for example.
I am convinced that without understanding the aforementioned things, the Russian intelligentsia too will remain, indirectly and directly, an agent of dark reaction.
Translated from the Russian by Mark Krotov. Edited and annotated by Keith Gessen.
Kirill Medvedev is a Russian poet and author.
top | print | email
FOOTNOTES:
* [1] The United Russia Party was formed in early 2001 as the pro-government party in the Duma. With the collapse of the liberal parties and the decline of the Communists, it has become, in essence, the lone political party in Russia, winning 64 percent of the popular vote in the Duma elections of December 2007.
* [2] The chairman of the oil giant Yukos, whose support for liberal political movements led to his imprisonment in 2003, in the most publicized crackdown on an opposition figure by the Putin administration. He is serving his sentence at a labor camp.
* [3] Limonov was a scandalous and talented émigré poet and memoirist who returned to Russia in the early 1990s and founded a strange political party called the National Bolsheviks (NBP). They opposed globalization, the breakup of the USSR, and the Yeltsin regime. More recently, in opposition to Putin, they have become more focused on human rights and have allied themselves with chess champion Garry Kasparov to form “Other Russia,” the only opposition group to gain any traction in the Western media. See: Andrew Meier, “Putin’s Pariah,” www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/magazine/02limonov-t.html. And: Keith Gessen, “Monumental Foolishness,” www.slate.com/id/2078955/.
* [4] Medvedev’s picket of Alexander Kalyagin’s play—prompted in part by Kalyagin’s letter in favor of Khodorkovsky’s imprisonment, and in part by Medvedev’s love of Brecht—led to the theater’s security guard’s punching him in the face.
* [5] This is a reference to “action artists,” such as Oleg Kulik and Alexander Brenner. Kulik used to go to art exhibits and pretend to be a rabid dog. The anarchist Brenner, the more interesting of the two, is most famous in the West for spray-painting a green dollar sign onto a Malevich painting in an Amsterdam museum in 1997 (for which he served six months in prison).
© 2008 Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc.
Posts
Rebecca Hendin on Britain’s air con debate – cartoon
11 hours ago
