Personal matters—privations, suffering, joys, achievements—are recounted with candor and insight.
This book is not an examination of Russian reality in terms of Western ideas, concepts, or norms but an evocation of twentieth century life through the personal voice. The English-speaking reader will elicit for her or himself the values in Russian culture, both latent and manifest, which shape the attitudes and guide the behavior of Russians.
All too often the Russian experience has been presented as either horrific or heroic, absorbed in persecution and “victimology.” The field is replete with Gulag accounts. This volume goes beyond that approach and deals with the personal and intimate—love, sexuality, courtship, marriage, family life, work, faith, and education. In choosing these selections, we were not guided by “historical objectivity” but rather by subjectivity, by an emphasis on the subject or the unique self. This approach intentionally counters and supplements the vast majority of existing works devoted to Russian history and culture. We offer the reader no great individuals, no overarching story lines, no plots conceived by an omniscient author. The private selves who wrote their own life stories did so in a language of common experience and common values without awareness of a greater meaning beyond the intimate particulars of their lives. In this sense the naive and unaffected recorder of history is its authentic witness.
It is a given in anthropology that a culture’s collective self-view tends to be idealized and that such an idealization becomes a lens through which history and experience are viewed and understood. It is also true that a member of a given culture presents himself to outsiders in terms of that idealization. Many observers, both non-Russian and Russian, see only the idealization, the defining myths, and respond to them according to their own pre-existing needs and desires. Such needs and desires may be positively or negatively charged, but in either case they promote linear, monocausal interpretations of what has been observed, at the expense of the complex, contradictory, and even paradoxical realities of life. In 1943 in Amsterdam, confined to a secluded space, Anne Frank lived simultaneously in fear of the Nazis and in love with Pieter van Daan. To assume that she lived only in terror, that terror was the singular emotion of her life, would be to deny her full breadth of being and her full human dignity. Anne’s case cautions us to be wary of simple explanations of human behavior and sensibility.
In its rich complexity human character is a source of numerous eventualities. So is a culture. When we try to understand a culture different than ours it is a mistake to assume that what is observed in a particular context or at a particular moment represents the totality of that culture. In fact, at any given moment most of a culture’s characteristics and make-up lie latent, waiting to manifest themselves at a particular juncture or in a particular context.
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In this volume we have let the writers decide what is to be revealed. They speak of events which endure in their memory. Often it is of universal human experience, the consciousness of self in the face of inevitable death. It is at such times that anguish, transformed by intelligence into recollection, loses its power to injure their hearts. Whether in its religious sense or removed from it, “bearing witness” stimulates a desire in every writer to open her or himself to other eyes, to testify and thus transform the sting of memory into some greater tempering idea which frees the rest of their lives from the burden of secrecy. In the process, their liberation becomes our gift.
All too often Russians, as well as other observers, assume Russia to be a homogeneous and corporate cultural entity. Such a view was doubtlessly influenced by the monolithic political structure of the Soviet Union as it drove to homogenize its subjects. Communist ideology tended to see human beings as a commodity and an instrument. Coercion and violence were used against those with contrary views. The result, to some degree, was an actual but also a presumed uniformity.
In cultures which tend toward uniformity and homogeneity the collective self-view and the self-image of the individual largely coincide. Such coincidence becomes especially apparent as one recalls descriptions of small and isolated cultures such as those of insular tribes and contemporary “cults” in which the individual is submerged within a corporate sensibility. In contrast, American experience is very heterogeneous and broad in spectrum. In a monolithic realm a people’s culture is not only the sole source of self-identity but also the primary means of knowing the external world. This is not the case for Russia. It does not have a monoculture. If anything, its culture is far more heterogeneous than the cultures of its neighboring nations. Language, especially its lexicon, is an objective indicator of the openness and permeability of a culture. Russian, by borrowing from languages as diverse as Iranian, the Turkic group, the Scandinavian group, Greek, Bulgarian, Tatar and Mongolian, Polish, Ukrainian, Yiddish, German, French, and English, demonstrates its rich and productive variety.
In some minds such variety raises the question of whether a coherent, cognizable, and explicable Russian culture exists at all. This book does not attempt to answer that question nor define the culture but rather suggests the shape of its dynamic. In a classic formulation A.L. Kroeber affirms that every culture “derives most of its component elements from its own past” but also “tends to absorb new elements . . . and reshape them in accord with its own patterns.”1 In a thriving culture both processes are at work simultaneously. It has always been a debate among Russians what the proportions of the old and the new elements should be. This was the argument between the so-called “Slavophiles” and the
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“Westernizers” in the nineteenth century and is currently the debate between the isolationists and the integrationists. The debate seems largely political but is driven by inchoate, deeply rooted attitudes and values.
The would-be fusion of the old and new elements always creates tension. And it is a tension which permeates the life of most Russians. Even though there is a saying in the language which proclaims that “The destiny of one person is the destiny of a whole generation,” the epic and the private do not run an identical course. The line between collective and personal destiny may be difficult to locate, but it does exist.
This volume looks at private life, its satisfactions and discontents, its joys and sorrows. Yet, while looking at such life we do not presume that the mundane and the routine determine all. Russian life in the hundred years before 1991 did include much violent change and great hardship. We want to dispel the notion, however, that Russian life was one disaster after another, an endemic and unrelieved tragedy. Life, after all, is not lived in disaster. It may be lived through a disaster, but even then life assumes a routine, though perhaps an altered one.
We have spoken of Russians and Russian culture without any attempt at academic definition of the terms. We intentionally leave that to the reader. However, several points should be made. The English language, unfortunately, has only one word to designate people who are ethnically Russian and those who live in Russia, or more properly, the Russian Federation. This insufficiency makes for misapprehension and an awkward ambiguity. Rossiia (Russia) is the name of the state; the adjectival form is rossiiskii (of the Russian state). A citizen of Rossiia is called a rossiianin. A person who is ethnically Russian is called russkii, likely derived from Rus, the medieval Slavic principality and its people. As an entity Rossiia is analogous to Great Britain. Not everyone living in Great Britain is ethnically English and not everyone living in Rossiia is ethnically Russian. Yet in both nations a language is shared: English in Great Britain, Russian in Rossiia. The pieces chosen for this anthology were written by men and women who saw themselves as largely belonging to Russian culture and for whom the Russian language was the primary means of expression. These are the people of the Russian Century.