In these days when there wafts from over there the cadaver stench of an anniversary, why not celebrate our anniversary, too? Ten years of contempt, ten years of loyalty, ten years of freedom—does this not deserve at least one anniversary speech?
You have to know how to be contemptuous. We have learned the science of contempt to perfection. We are so sated with it that at times we’re too lazy even to mock its cause. A slight trembling of the nostrils, a momentary squint of the eyes—and silence. But, today, let us speak.
Ten years of contempt…I feel contempt not toward a person, not toward the worker Sidorov, an honest member of some kind of Kom-pom-pom, but toward that ugly, obtuse little idea that turns Russian simpletons into communist nincompoops, which turns people into a new species of ant: Formica marxi var. lenini.1 I cannot bear the saccharine taste of philistinism that I sense in everything Bolshevik. A philistine boredom wafts from the gray pages of Pravda, a philistine anger sounds in the Bolshevik’s political outcries, philistine nonsense has swelled his poor head. They say Russia has grown more stupid, which is hardly surprising….It has grown thick with backwoods backwardness: with its rapacious provincial accountants, its young ladies who read Verbitskaya2 and Seifullina, its wretchedly whimsical theater, and its placid drunkard, sprawled in the middle of the dusty street.
I despise the communist faith as the idea of the basest equality, as a dull page in the festive history of humanity, as a denial of earthly and unearthly beauty, as something idiotically encroaching on my free “I,” as a promoter of ignorance, obtuseness, and complacency. The strength of my contempt lies in the fact that I, in feeling contemptuous, do not let myself think about the blood that has been spilled. Its strength lies also in the fact that I do not regret, in bourgeois despair, the loss of my estate, my house, the gold bullion not hidden skillfully enough in the depths of a toilet. An idea doesn’t commit murder, a person does—and will face a special reckoning—but whether I forgive or not, that is a question of a different order. Thirst for revenge should not get in the way of the purity of the contempt. Indignation is always helpless.
And not only ten years of contempt…We’re celebrating ten years of loyalty. We’re loyal to Russia not just in the way you remain faithful to a memory, we don’t only love it, as you love your fleeting childhood, your fugitive youth—no, we’re loyal to that Russia we could be proud of, a Russia created slowly and measuredly and a vast state among other vast states. But what is it now, where is she to go now, this Soviet widow, this poor relation of Europe?…We are faithful to her past, we are happy with it, and a wonderful feeling grips us when, in a faraway country, we hear how admiring talk repeats names we have loved from childhood. We are a wave of Russia that has overflowed its shores, we have flooded the whole world, but our wanderings are not always cheerless, and our valiant yearning for our homeland does not always prevent our enjoying an alien country, a refined solitude in the alien electric night on a bridge, in a square, in a station. And even though it is now clear to us how different we are, and though it sometimes seems that there is not one, but a thousand thousand Russias wandering the earth, at times wretched and spiteful, at times warring among themselves, there is nonetheless something linking us all, some kind of common drive, a common spirit, which the future historian will understand and appreciate.
And at the same time we are celebrating ten years of freedom. Such freedom as we know perhaps no other nation has known. In that peculiar Russia, which invisibly surrounds us, which animates and holds us, which saturates our souls and colors our dreams, there isn’t a single law other than the law of the love we feel toward it, and there is no ruler apart from our own conscience. We can say anything about it, write anything about it, we have nothing to hide, and there is no censorship to place obstacles before us, we are the free citizens of our dream. Our scattered nation, our nomadic state, is fortified by this freedom, and someday we will be grateful to blind Clio for giving us the chance to partake of this freedom and to understand deeply and to feel our homeland acutely in exile.
In these days when the gray anniversary of the USSR3 is being celebrated, we celebrate ten years of contempt, loyalty, and freedom. Let’s not take to reproving exile. Over these days, let us repeat the words of that ancient warrior of whom Plutarch writes, “At night, in deserted fields far from Rome, I pitched my tent, and my tent was Rome to me.”
* V. Sirin, “Yubiley,” Rul’, Nov. 18, 1927, 2. Holograph, VNA Berg.