The Russian Century

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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Introduction

“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.

George Pahomov

NOTE

1. A.L. Kroeber, An Anthropologist Looks at History, University of California Press, 1963, p. v.

Glossary of Russian Terms

artel—a cooperative association of workers, craftsmen, or traders within a particular profession

borshch—a kind of vegetable soup usually made with a beef stock and with beets, cabbage, potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, and occasionally other vegetables

brichka—a carriage, heavier than a drozhki, with a collapsible leather or canvas top

dacha—a summer home, frequently having a glass enclosed veranda

desiatina—a square measure equivalent to 2.7 acres or 1.09 hectares

drozhki—a light, open carriage usually drawn by one horse

gimnazium—a classical high school, featuring the classical and foreign languages and a liberal arts curriculum as opposed to real’noe uchilishche, a vocational high school; pronounced with a “hard” g as in gimlet

Gulag—the system of prison camps throughout the Soviet Union; the administrative body of those camps

izba—a rural, peasant house in central and northern Russia constructed of logs either round or square in cross-section

kolkhoz—collective farm; largely the product of forced collectivization in Soviet times

kolkhoznik—collective farm worker

kulebiaka—fish baked en croute; an open-face Beef Wellington filled with filet of sturgeon instead of beef tenderloin

kvas—a kind of beer made by fermenting rye bread or rye flour, yeast, malt and, sometimes, sugar; served chilled

muzhik—an adult male peasant; also a term of derision

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Glossary of Russian Terms