Not That I Hope To Be Understood

I have a gigantic map of the united States. 5.5 x 3.5 meters. When I hang it on the wall, it takes over the large room in the Stalinist apartment. Twenty-four sheets, and on each one the lettering: “general staff.” It’s a secret how I got hold of it, but I think that originally someone serving at one of the many military academies in our city (St. Petersburg) swiped it.

The spectacle is not for the weak-nerved. It fascinates, it’s impossible to turn your eyes away from it. It terrifies. “Her rivers at the flood like seas.”^[1] On the bank of the “most important” river, in the name of which all the consonants are lustfully doubled, live my children, and this cannot not bother me, because they are not with me.

I’ve never been to this country, and it’s uncomfortable for me to imagine a ten-hour flight across an ocean. In fact, it’s difficult for me even to think about it. There’s a small area from Lisbon to Cheliabinsk and from Stockholm to Yerevan that’s psychologically inhabitable for me. More than once I’ve found myself caught up in an unpleasant sensation, facing the thought that there are such places as Siberia or the Pacific Ocean.

Nevertheless, my favorite Russian poet was born in Omsk, while of my favorite poets who are non-Russians nearly half are Americans, and except for poetry little in this life interests me. But my very favorite ones, Pound and Eliot, virtually ran away from America, and this lays bare some kind of deep trouble lurking somewhere in that land.

In Russia (even in western Europe, where my closest relatives live) it is usual now to speak about America with a certain irritation. According to an old anti-Soviet habit of refusing to share the opinions and passions of the mob (E. Onegin) I try to understand the nature of that irritation, and that nature, if I’m not mistaken, is vile. This is soothing.

Why should it be so uncomfortable for me even to think about life in that country (where, by the way, I have family living)?

I’ll begin with the racial aspect. For me it was both a big problem and a great happiness to discover and recover my Mordovian identity. I learned how to live in this illusory, spectral country (the Russian Ireland), mastered its language, walked through its oak groves and water-meadows. In principle I should have been ready (with acceptable socialization) to go back there. Its small territory^[2], 400 km x 400 km, comparable with that of Chechnya, Hungary, Serbia; and its population of three million comparable with Lithuania, Ireland, Israel; its capital with a half million people, cities of ten thousands, where at rush hour they drive cattle through the streets, are commensurable with my conception of man, they correspond to my corporeality. I would like to be living there together with hundreds of thousands of the descendants of refugees of the17th century,^[3] to give my lectures on ancient literature in the department chair established by Bakhtin, to educate those who will be the translators of Euripides and Horace into the Mordovian language^[4], and to go all the deeper into that language in my own poems^[5].

The American model of the world, “the melting pot of cultures,” as Radio Freedom proclaims in its advertisements, is diametrically opposite to mine. If I were to make any connection with America, I would be interested in the Athabaskans, Algonquins or Navajos, but, unfortunately, I have never heard of any harmonious cultural occurrences in their environs.

And then there’s the class aspect. Although I am no patrician, I’m not very fond of the bourgeoisie. I don’t like to imagine the activities of life as the manufacture of different products. In those small European countries which I know fairly well, Finland and Lithuania, their very existence stands in opposition to the marginalization of the unbourgeois cultural levels dear to me: poetry, classical music.

I am aware that America is one of the leading countries in the world in poetry and music, but this proceeds as it were against the grain, and my class solidarity does not allow any agreement with such an order of things.

And, finally, the political aspect. Yes, judging that “NATO is always right,” as was written on the wall of a men’s room in one of the St. Petersburg institutes of higher education: probably the Realpolitik of fucking over such characters as Milosevic, Hussein or Omar makes sense, but I want consistency, and therefore it’s difficult to understand a refusal to acknowledge the facts of the Armenian genocide of the Turks or negotiations with Arafat.

Arguments of pragmatism and profitability don’t work for me: when the unity of a moral standard is broken—everything flies into the rubbish pit.

I do not know whether I have succeeded in saying anything intelligible. After all, my favorite American poet once wrote that we live in a world of unspoken and unheard words^[6].

^[1] From Lermontov’s Motherland, trans. Y. Kayden.

^[2] I have in mind the historical Mordovia, and not the Mordvinian Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic in its (three times smaller) 1934 borders.

^[3] In the course of Russian fighting Mordovia lost two thirds of its population.

^[5] In my verse cycles “Homewards” (Druzhba Narodov, 2001, No. 6) and “Birchbark Writings” (Arion, 1999, No. 3) I make use of references to Mordovian epic and ritual poetry.