Borders, distance, and air do wonders for words. A combination of Russian sounds that was so obvious and natural on Malaya Dmitrovka, with the Chekhov Casino raging outside, can’t get through customs here. Words stripped of any independent existence there seem to take up residency here and become not a means but a subject of verbal law. Here, any Russian word sounds all wrong and means something completely different. There, in the theater, the meaning of any spoken phrase changes with the sets.
On the banks of the Limmat, it’s as if there’s a different center of gravity, and any word out of a Russian inkwell weighs much more than in Russian’s country of origin. What in Russia suffuses, litters the atmosphere, the sediments and snouts, Grushnitsky the cadet, the war in Chechnya, and “Christ has risen from the dead,” here is all concentrated in every word written in Cyrillic—crammed, rammed into every last ы.
With each passing day, as it slips from reality, the fatherland seeks out new bearers and finds them in the squiggles of an exotic alphabet. Russia has gathered all its goods and chattel and taken up residence in a font. Letters have been consolidated just as apartments once were to accommodate new residents.
My departure from the language, my loss of Russian murmuring in my ears, forced me to stop, to be silent. On the rare occasions we meet, writers from Russia are amazed. “How can you write in this boring Switzerland? Without the language, without the tension?”
They’re right. Russian letters do have high pressure. And the language there is changing quickly.
My departure from Russian speech forced me to turn around and face it. Work on my text came to a halt. Just as the pause is a part of music, so silence is a part of the text. The most important part, maybe.
What language did I leave behind? What did I take with me? Where can words go from here? The work of silence.
If I was to go further, I had to understand where the essence of writing in Russian actually lay.
Being at once creator and creature of the nation’s reality, the Russian language is the form of existence, the body, of the totalitarian consciousness.
Daily life has always muddled through without words: with bellowing, interjections, jokes, and quotes from film comedies. It’s the state and literature that require coherent words.
Russian literature is not the language’s form of existence but the non-totalitarian consciousness’s form of existence in Russia. The totalitarian consciousness is amply served by decrees and prayers. Decrees from above, prayers from below. The latter are usually more original than the former. Swearing is the vital prayer of a prison country.
Edicts and cursing are the nation’s yin and yang, rain and field, phallus and vagina; they conceive Russian civilization verbally.
Over the generations, the prison reality developed a prison consciousness whose main principle was “the strongest get the best bunks.” This consciousness was expressed in a language called up to serve Russian life, maintaining it in a state of continuous, unending civil war. When everyone lives by prison camp laws, language’s mission is everyone’s cold war with everyone else. If the strong must inevitably beat the feeble, the language’s mission is to do this verbally. Humiliate him, insult him, and steal his ration. Language as a form of disrespect for the individual.
Russian reality developed a language of unbridled power and abasement. The language of the Kremlin and the prison camp slang of the street share one and the same nature. In a country that lives by an unwritten but distinct law—the weakest’s place is by the slop bucket—the dialect suits the reality. Words rape. Words abuse.
Had the borders been under lock and key, there wouldn’t be any Russian literature.
Literary language arrived in the eighteenth century along with the idea of human dignity. We had no words for that language. The first century of the nation’s literature was essentially translations and imitations. We had no verbal instrument to express the individual consciousness. It first had to be created. Russian was taught like a foreign language, and the missing concepts were introduced: “the public,” “being in love,” “being humane,” “literature.”
The Russian literary language, which in Russia is human dignity’s form of existence, its body, squeezed through the crack between the shout and the moan. Russian literature wedged into an alien embrace. It used words to construct the great Russian wall between the state and the people.
It was a foreign body, a colony of European culture on the Russian plain, if by European colonization we mean the mitigation of mores and the defense of the rights of the weak before the mighty and not the importation of German gunners.
As has happened on other continents as well, the colony outstripped the mother country in its development. Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky—these are all colonists whose texts moved literature’s capital from the Old World to Russia. They took all the best from the thousand-year legacy and said, Go east!
But something is rotten in the Russian realm, and periodically, the state and the people make a rush toward each other, and then foreigners need to watch out. Writers’ bones crack in these embraces as well; they either die or slip away.
The twentieth century saw certain well-known events. The indigenous population returned once again to its usual “literary process:” decrees from above, prayers from below. Some “colonists” returned to their spiritual homeland; those who stayed had their tongues ripped out by the barbarians.
The invented language of the Soviet utopia was also the body of its existence. Socialism’s lifeless, invented reality existed only in the suitably dead language of the newspapers, television, and political meetings. In the 1990s, when the regime disappeared along with the language that served it, prison camp slang rose to the top and filled the vacuum.
Once again, the state and the nation are speaking the same dialect and whacking Chechens in the toilet, as Putin so famously put it.
Today the totalitarian consciousness lives on in the language of television, where the main principle of dialog is to outshout the other guy. It is the language of newspapers turned sickeningly yellow. It is the language of the street, where swearing is the norm.
The language of Russian literature is an ark. A rescue attempt. A hedgehog defense. An island of words where human dignity is supposed to be preserved.
When I left Russia, I lost the language I wanted to lose. The changes in modern Russian are a molting. The fur seems different, but the colouration is the same, and painfully recognizable at that. This language, which is meant to debase, reproduces itself with each generation of Russian boys and girls. In and of itself, the literary language does not exist; it has to be created anew each time, and in solitude.
Finding myself in Switzerland, I first had to understand who and where I was. For me, understanding something means writing a book about it. The result was Russian Switzerland. Through this book, through Switzerland, I tried to understand something about myself and my country of origin.
I wanted to read this book, not write it. Strange though it may seem, the book arose out of the very fact of its absence, born from my sense of the tremendous number of holes in the Swiss landscape. There were the mountains and banks, but something more substantive was lacking. A foreign country remains foreign until you find people near and dear to you there. I began searching for Gogol and Bunin the way a poor provincial seeks out rich relatives in the big city. I simply collected, crumb by crumb, what there was here of Tolstoy, and Scriabin, and the terrorists, and the men who fled here from Germany as Russian prisoners of war. And I ended up with the history of my country, my Russia, a country not on any map. In this country of mine, my dead parents settled between the lines, as did all my nameless Tambov ancestors, who hacked and were hacked, executed and were executed. I simply wanted to compile a “literary and historical guidebook,” but it ended up being a novel about the Russian world, except that, unlike a traditional novel, uninvented characters in it live uninvented lives, or rather, lives not invented by me.