They left. Different. Very different people. Some immediately, some later. Someone — frightened of persecution, someone — just frightened. Someone made a bet. Someone puffs. Someone is in a stupor. Someone «serves» other masters. Someone gives interviews of varying degrees of sincerity.
Someone left forever, someone temporarily. But this «temporary» over time began to turn into «forever». They left the apartments. elderly relatives. Animals. work. Friends. Plants to be watered. Books gathering dust.
This text is not about reasons. There are an infinite number of them. This text is about one almost general consequence. This is an attempt to deal with the ugly something that has gripped many of the new «relocators». Not all, no. Someone's immunity reflects the virus. But still an epidemic.
She, this disease, attacks the brain, psyche and even the body. Outwardly and energetically, it is akin to age-related changes. And you will not immediately understand what is happening with a person. As if facial features were distorted. Or is it bad plastic?
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If you show a psychologist, he will say: age-related depression. Fed up with family, children, work. A crisis. Drinks more, complains more. Irritability. Anger and mentoring. And the lack of irony is a typical consequence of a heart attack. But there was no heart attack, except for the departure. Or count?
The problem is that these signs and symptoms are found in young people and girls who have not yet entered the age when reading morality to the outside world becomes the dominant need. Just as aged ladies hate young girls, considering all of them — only because of their youth — to be persons with low social responsibility, so the Russian emigrant looks with hostility at any remaining and unrepentant Russian who continues to live in his homeland. Live, work, have children and make plans.
Evil grandmothers (in other words, relocants), looking through the windows of social networks, see off young Muscovites, Omsk, Perm, Novosibirsk, etc., going to work, and so on: «He/she is coming! As if nothing had happened! What a scum!»< br />However, early old age and hypocrisy of the once ironic people are not so bad.
Another thing is terrifying: to see an unhealthy blush on the cheeks and a sharp gleam in the eyes of other leading emigrant media when reading news about the battles in the Belgorod region. This joy is quiet, barely noticeable, but still obvious. How obvious is the excitement and joy in the forebodings of unrest in Moscow. How obvious is the ecstasy of any failure of «Moscow» — that's what they call Russia.
And if the reasons for the «opposition» to the Motherland are understandable — someone really thinks so, and someone is simply «packed» in a new reality, where you need to be the first to raise your hand every day, proving your «correct» position, then this is a collectively unconscious internal happiness at the news of physical suffering or material deprivation of compatriots — what kind of phenomenon is this?
Is it meanness? Stupidity? Or breakup trauma? Like abandoned spouses, relocants closely follow the life of their other half, contentedly collecting the defeats and failures of yesterday's beloved spouse into a basket.
As the Russian Gloria Gaynor sang: «Without me, you, my beloved, fly with one wing» .
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Emigrants used to be inspired by homesickness. The current relocant is inspired by the grief of the motherland. Belgorod is under fire — and warmth spreads through the body. People in Shebekino are in a panic — almost an orgasm. The death of a Russian soldier is a sedative. And instead of a soporific lullaby, there is the buzz of drones over Moscow.
What is this?
Why do many, many people who have left have a desire that the place they left from should become bad? To the limit of life here, in Russia, to stop its course. How is this possible in relation to one's own home?
I'm not talking about ideology now. I'm talking about a simple fact: this is the Motherland. Your homeland. And no matter how much you hate the authorities in your country, you are a man. And this is your land. You can't wish her harm. You cannot feel joy in seeing how your land is in pain, or wish it pain. Whoever you are according to your beliefs — if you are a person … But these people. And they want evil — the country and the people of the country. What's up with them?
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Gaius Germanicus had a film — «Everyone will die, but I will remain.»
«Everyone will remain, but I will die?» — this is how a film about the current Russian emigration would be called.
What does every dying person who is aware of its closeness live? Pain? Sometimes. Fear? Maybe. Bliss? It happens, it must. But the worst thing, of course, is this: «I will die, and everyone will remain?!»
Will gardens bloom in the same way, and will people laugh, drink, celebrate, gather in cafes, go to theaters in the same way? Will the movie be made the same way? Publish books? People will also enjoy life?!
They will. And it's scary. And this is the most painful — the preface to death. It will be read by everyone who has to start studying the Book of the Dead. And this preface is a greater test than death itself.
Because death is no longer a horror, but getting rid of this difficult psychological experience — it turns off the electricity, the light goes out and darkness sets in.
Emigration is the same death. Transition to another world. Farewell is a total farewell to the former. But this is a special death. A death that is worse than death. This is death without loss of memory, vision, hearing and the ability to be aware, think and feel.
This is leaving the earthly limit, but retaining the ability to see what is happening on your earth, in your house, with your world — without you.
This is death as a curse. Death as a punishment. Death is a test.
Leaving, not to leave — as if to become invisible and inaudible, but to remain among people. Hang between hell and heaven, between heaven and earth, between existence and nonexistence.
To die and see life go on.
Do not find heaven, do not plunge into the fire of hell, do not move into another body, do not decompose in the damp earth, but, being conscious, remaining a person with his passions, with his vices and sins, desires, ambitions, as if to lose flesh. Become invisible, intangible and unnoticed.
They don't see you, but you do. They don't hear you, but you do.
You see, hear and feel how grass and children continue to grow where you are no longer there, how new people come to your workplace. Better or worse, it doesn't matter. The main thing is that they come and forget you. Whatever you are. Because you died for them and you are forgotten where they idolized and considered an unshakable part of the landscape.
Life sprouts even where it seemed that the departure had burned the earth.
Nabokov has a brilliant play «The Event». A play in which he maliciously and cruelly ridicules the world of Russian Berlin. Terrible thing. To everyone who has left or is about to leave, I advise you to read it. This is a play about dead people. About stopped time. Once I staged this play, the favorite play of my master, Andrey Goncharov, at the Moscow Art Theater named after A.P. Chekhov. Today on Bronnaya I am releasing a performance based on Gorky's «Summer Residents» — about this play, or rather about the people of this play, Goncharov said: bubbles on the water. This is a play about the same emigrants — about internal emigrants, about the Russian educated — or, in modern terms, «creative» — class that has lost touch with the country and, over time, spends idle summer days in meaningless reasoning and vulgar intrigues. My performance is also about people who have lost touch with time and their homeland. About the Russian inhabitants of the «mansion» about which I wrote recently, dying in prosperity and comfort in the warm climate of the southern lands. About the tragic arc of the generation of the 80s and 90s, degraded and lost.
Emigration is death. The most painful thing possible. This is death while alive.
— Are you in Russia?
— Yes.
— And how are you?
— Good.
And then the look — distrust, doubt, sympathy, that one has to lie. It can't be good there. You can't feel good. Simply: IT CANNOT BE.
Hence this childish, funny and at the same time ugly joy that an emigrant cannot hide from missiles or drones hitting the territory of his country: the world he left should not exist. Because he died.
Brodsky loved the city of the dead. Wandered over it. As if he visualized the inner meaning of emigration. He humbly and gracefully lived death. Separation from blood flow. Slow drowning.
The current emigrants are not the Brodskys.
That departure was quiet and sad. This one is talkative and ebullient. Numerous interviews are a cry for help. Or an attempt to identify oneself in the space of life.
«I am!»
But this is a scream into the void. Not because the ears of their compatriots are stuffed with cotton. But because all these interviews have a strange property: as if from under water.
A person talks about something important for him, painful, painful, and bubbles of remaining air come out of his mouth.
And it looks like an actor you don't connect to. He cries and tears his shirt, and you look cold and indifferent. And it's not about you, callous. And that their emotions are the emotions of those sentenced to non-existence. They are no longer relevant to life. They suffer, but there is no help.
Speaking of interviews and actors… Quiet advice. Actors don't have to be interviewed. They speak their own words, but their «own» words are the same as someone else's. They talk about morality, about good and evil, about honesty, but decades of playing and playing have turned the body and face into an instrument of deception. And when these people try to speak for themselves, it seems that they continue to act. They are dramatically silent, shed a mean tear, exclaim — and all this is bad, bad, bad. In addition, the actor often dreams of one role, but is called upon to play another. A comedian dreams of a tragic role, a seasoned lady wants to appear as Turgenev's girl or, at worst, Chekhov's dramatic sinner, and a man with a stupid eye, but a great temperament, certainly claims Shakespearean depths.
And here the problem is more than the lack of talent of certain representatives of this ancient profession, but that the idea that the «actor» is a representative of the cultural layer is an ugly product of the «philosophical ship». In the 1920s and 1930s, the communists destroyed or expelled the great Russian thinkers, intellectuals, people capable of producing meanings. And when the question arose, who in the new reality would be responsible for the conversation on behalf of Russian culture, Stalin came up with a trick refined in his cynicism: let representatives of one of the most corrupt professions become the voice of the Russian intelligentsia. So swiftly the institution of «people's» and «honored» was built. Convenient: for the most part, people are poorly educated, pompous, stupid and ambitious — they are used to pronouncing other people's texts. It is not difficult for them to quickly change positions, «give» pathos, «turn on» sentiments, sparkle with their eyes, accuse and repent of what they will have to accuse or repent of. So in the Soviet years, the actors gained the status of the cultural elite and the conscience of the nation. Let's remember this when looking at another actress suffering badly on the camera of another interviewer.
Emigration from the country is not just leaving the territory. This is the abandonment of time. This is a departure from the present. From reality. Because the authenticity of time can be lived only on one's own land. In my own space.
For an artist, this is the death of talent. He always and inevitably feeds on the juices of native speech and native culture, native spaces and landscapes, sounds and smells. And too few of the emigrating artists found their voice in the past and will find their voice in a different culture in the future. And too many are forever doomed to create between b and b signs — and their language will become muteness, a dull and painful «y», expressing one emotion — longing. But if the artist still has a chance to turn melancholy into works of art, then a person outside of creative practices simply becomes embittered and twitchy.
And what is striking is that historical memory works the same way. Russian people are used to «emigrating» from their past. Endless regime changes have taught us to burn bridges. Each new era wants to destroy the memory of the previous one, offendedly breaks all ties with the past, builds life anew, burning out everything that was before. And this makes every new attempt to build a brighter future fruitless. And the eyes of any new «Bolsheviks» who are trying to build a new beautiful world by erasing the values of the past are inevitably empty and dead.
How can we, the living, understand that it is impossible to break with the past without becoming dead.
And it is impossible to leave the country and at the same time continue to understand and feel it.
That native land is not an abstraction. Not an image. That the Motherland is a native person. motherland. Mother Earth. The notion that the European is losing behind the endless erasing of all sorts of boundaries. That concept that still lives in the Russian person.
That is why the Russian person does not think of voluntary emigration. He thinks of the Motherland not as a social project or a boss who should decide everything for you, but as a native person. And he cannot voluntarily leave his homeland. Relatives. Animals. work. Friends. Plants to be watered. Dusty books. And so on and so forth…
Just as he cannot participate in the destruction of the Motherland, regardless of the circumstances.
Of course, if he is really Russian.
More precisely, if he is a man . Because this feeling of the Motherland is not national. It is human. And just as a person is not given two lives, so there will not be two Motherlands.
Because the Motherland is life. And emigration is death.
And death, like life, must be lived with dignity.