The Voice Over

Because it’s time now to make the present suitable for living. What I mean is not the practice of small deeds (whoever said that would be enough?) and certainly not the justification of compromise and collaboration of any kind, but something more like reminding ourselves that the New Testament tells us to “rejoice always.” To me it seems of utmost importance to follow this order now; more important than ever, as important as ever.

5.

Because circumstances will never be good enough to start over, on a blank sheet, turning a new leaf on the calendar. The warped, stale, bruised life that we experience is the very same present where we need to make ourselves at home, without waiting for a “game over” and the option to reset all defaults, or Russia without Putin, or a clean Monday. It’s most likely that things will go on as they have been, and there won’t be miracles to make our task easier.

I want to stake out a claim on at least this segment of the present. The present is politics (and the past is a magic that affirms that everything equals everything else), and, it seems, it’s the time to give up magic in the name of politics—at least the crude magic of summoning the dead and using sacrificial blood. I think of this also in connection to my own text, where the past and the future, like giant figures on stilts, possess a kind of spare, borrowed life—as if they have the power to take, give, and punish according to their own will. It is time to allow the past to become the past, to stop counting on its arsenal, to drown the magic books—and begin to expand, shake up, cultivate the territory of today, thinking of it as a place to live, and not the anteroom before the gas chamber. The main thing is to move aside, like a curtain, the shade of irrevocability, hanging as the verdict over today. Then we may also see another past made possible—like an unrealized, yet to be fulfilled, promise.

Blok wrote about this in 1909: “Italian antiques clearly show that art is still quite young, that almost nothing has been done yet, and of the truly perfect—nothing at all: so every kind of art (including great literature) is still ahead of us.” As is everything else.

 

March 2015

Translated by Maria Vassileva

At the Door of a Notnew Age

In the Soviet cultural nomenclature, Evgeny Shvarts was labeled a writer of fairy tales, and that is how he, a friend and contemporary of prisoners and exiles, managed to survive—and not have his death assigned to him by someone else. Shvarts wrote plays about dragons and bears, and naked kings; they were popular and could make for light reading. But, in the cracks and openings of the text, you could catch not only subtle and sharp glimpses of the (ever-darkening) political reality of the time but the very darkness itself, still-hidden, lying in wait for the spectator. In 1940, he wrote a story that would later appear on every child’s bookshelf; it has a surprisingly Proustian title—“A Tale of Lost Time”—and a very simple plot. Evil sorcerers steal time from a group of children: the children turn into decrepit old men, while the sorcerers become kids again, a carefree life of ice-skating and skipping homework regained. In order to recover what was taken from them, our heroes have to turn back the hands of a clock seventy-seven cycles, back to a time when they were still children and the villains were old men.

The recent conservative turn has many different features, but if we had to choose a single face to represent it, it would be that of a sorcerer: preternaturally young, with dimples and golden curls, the face from a poster, the effigy of someone else’s fantasy about the future—as it once was, back when Shvarts was writing his tale, and Auden was looking from across the ocean at Europe, which had become one of the darkened lands of the Earth.

For a long time, it felt like we would not see that face again. The postwar world—and here there wasn’t much of a difference between the West and the Soviet Union, between Europe and America—set itself the task of working out its errors and putting in place a system that would safeguard it from the repetition of what had taken place. Generations of intellectuals, academic departments, and school classrooms, a powerful and intelligent machine of culture, all worked for decades on an effective strategy to “remember, know, beware.”