The Voice Over

It feels like our working vocabulary does not have the words or constructions that would allow us to speak of what is happening today without using a complex past tense and a portable quote book. The public space—from official statements to social media—is full of exclusively borrowed speech, with gaps and scuff marks, its expiration date long-discolored on the packaging. Whenever the need for speech arises, whenever a mouth opens to agree or dissent, to appraise or name, a quotation lies at the ready (often intonational, more often yet forgetful of where it comes from), and the event is no longer novel or singular. What is said aloud comes not from me and not even from “us”; when the president of the country recites “Hey, men! Is Moscow not behind us?”³ he is not pointing the audience to the text, to this or that set of meanings—he is merely leaning on a powerful layer of common knowledge, like an athlete leaning against a column. When a pop star says that St. Petersburg should be renamed Petrograd, he is following an invisible blueprint, serving a god unbeknown to him. When a warlord posing as a White Guard incarnate⁴ reenacts Stalin’s orders in eastern Ukraine, he is merely taking what is already at hand. In this realm of borrowed speech, the only things that can be known—that can exist—are those that we have never not known.

The inhabitants of this realm are, naturally, forced to speak in quotations (worn smooth into proverbs, ready at the tip of the tongue); everything written in Russian should be seen as a giant phrase book that can illustrate any statement with a randomly chosen quotation, whatever its original meaning. The working of this mechanism of appropriation is visible on Facebook where on any given day someone is busy explaining which side Pushkin, Nabokov, or Brodsky would have taken in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict or in some smaller dispute—and it turns out you can use the very same lines to beat both sides over the head.

In these exchanges (not of thoughts but of diffuse wisps of intents and judgments), everything is deliberately approximate, language is used not to diagnose but to mask the diagnosis. A system of labels has been developed for just this purpose, as limber as it is flimsy: it is enough to note the most crucial thing about a person or a thing—is he one of us or one of them (that is, good or bad)—and not a word more. National traitors, Chekists, Banderites,⁵ fascist goons—this lexical collage is glued together from elements that the last century had already discarded. The result is quite patchy, and this could be cause for concern: we see the absence of a unified style, of the will to blend this patchwork of borrowings into a grander speech installation. The closest anyone has gotten to this is the masticating collective machinery of the State Duma.

The ability of certain words to emerge out of thin air and fill up with fresh blood would be terrifying all on its own, but what stands behind them is a new kind of doctrine, unnamed and unrecognized, which tells us about the a priori approximate nature of any utterance. Anyone can become a top student at the school of inaccuracy, where all words mean the same thing, which is always very far from their original dictionary definition. For example, a fascist or a liberal, in this language, is anyone who the speaker disagrees with. Hate speech is still new to us, so in order to curse someone, we look for words from nottoday. Those readymade forms are back in demand after a long absence, and society seems to have come to an agreement that any meaning is approximate, and any choice is random. When there isn’t anything to borrow, one grasps at whatever’s at hand, and the result is like a playground taunt—ukropy, vatniki, kolorady (dillweeds, padded jackets, Colorado beetles)⁶ are words empty and weightless like balloons. Here you find yourself, oddly enough, with a kind of consensus—not stipulated by anyone but simply embraced by all. It comes down to forsaking meaning in service of the very process of speaking—as if there were no other way to patch up the frayed fabric of reality.

When any conversation about the here and now is made impossible, the conversation about the past becomes but a euphemism, a means of clarifying our relationship to the ousted present, a way to take a stand, to feel out and mark yourself and what’s yours: the surrender and death of the Russian intelligentsia,⁷ the victory stolen by some unnamed entity, the global conspiracy, musica mundana,⁸ whatever. All of this is lying at the ready, closer than the day before yesterday.