Spaciousness and Crowding

De-. Spaciousness and Crowding[i]

Mikhail Epstein

The German writer Ernst Junger, who visited Russia with divisions of Hitler's army, noted: "Just as the earth contains nations filled with wonders, so does it hold a nation that has contrived to avoid even the smallest wonder: Russia." He was unjust; Russia is perhaps not as wondrous as India or Italy, but it has one wonder that is worth all the rest, that incorporates [vmeshchaet] them into itself. This wonder is space, capacity [vmestimost'] in its pure form. It is precisely the absence of smaller, more particular wonders within this space that allowed the wondrous to extend to the point of coinciding with the boundaries of space itself, which is in its true nature boundless.

Many inspired lines and exalted images are dedicated to this main wonder... "What does this boundless space [neob''iatnyi prostor] presage?" wrote Gogol. "Will a doughty champion or bogatyr spring up [rodit'sia] here, where there is room for him to spread himself and stride about?"[ii] Answering and repeating the Russian prophet nearly word for word, a Soviet song sings of the powerful master of the boundless expanse:

O, my homeland is a spacious country:

Streams and fields and forests full and fair. . . .

You can't see the end to all our fields,

Or recall the names of all the towns you've heard. . . .

Man can walk and feel that he's the owner

Of his own unbounded Motherland [neob''iatnaia Rodina].[iii]

This wonder, however, consists not only in spaciousness per se, but also in the fact that people within it lead their lives, strange as it may seem, in incredibly close conditions. It is well-known that the Soviet norm for per capita living space is five square meters, a figure that is considered "sanitary," sufficient for comfort and health. It would be improper to assume any particular malice here; such a modest living norm is by no means an historical peculiarity of the Soviet period, but rather a long-standing, age-old predisposition of the inhabitants of the great plain. People lived thus in Russian villages in the nineteenth century, and even in the epoch of Kievan Rus'. Peasants huddled together in their one-room huts, sleeping back-to-back: husband, wife, elders, children, maybe even a heifer and a piglet. The surrounding space is boundless: go ahead, build yourself a forty-room house--material is cheap, the forest is nearby. Yet people stubbornly press closer to each other, as if they are afraid of getting lost in the boundless expanse.

In China, with its giant population, and in Japan, with its small territory, closeness is explainable as a material fact, geographically and demographically conditioned. Closeness in Russia is a metaphysical fact, standing in direct contradiction to the nation's physical properties. Russian closeness is born of a desperate, heroic resistance to an equally Russian spaciousness.

The void is terrifying. Nature, the proverb notwithstanding, does not in fact abhor a vacuum, but man does. In Russia, we all seem to suffer from a love-hate complex toward space. What is that celebrated "fast driving" which "what Russian does not love"?[iv] Is it a flight into space or from space? It is both. Having rushed into the void, man tries as quickly as possible to hurl himself out of its invisible surroundings, to prevail, to reach a firm boundary, a crowded refuge. This is why he gathers furious [beshenaia], truly furious speed, as if he were being chased by demons [besy].

A Pushkin poem of the same name (“Besy”) depicts not an abstract, fantastic diabolism [besovstvo], but the diabolism of a boundless plain, one that moreover has been blanketed by a blizzard, thus having been leveled in both length and height. Here the very same plain arises upright: sky merges with earth in an unbroken, indistinguishable, smooth surface. Diabolism is the game played with man by this boundless [bes-predel'noe], homeless [bes-priiutnoe], aimless [bes-predmetnoe] space, i.e. by all these innumerable negations, "demons" in the form of the spirits of emptiness and futility, that circulate through the great plain.[v]

Terrifying, inexorably terrifying it is

Within the unknown plains! . . .

A demon is leading us to the field,

One can see him whirling on the sides. . . .

There he flared up

And vanished in the empty gloom. . . .

Swarm after swarm of demons rush past

At a boundless height,

Their plaintive screeching and howling

Rending my heart.[vi]

Pushkin's poem goes beyond mysticism; it is a grammar of diabolism, which through its numerous negative prefixes and particles--"un" [bes], "not" [ne], "no" [net]--disembodies the entire substance of objects and actions. "In-visible the moon," "in-exorably terrifying," "within the un-known plains," "I have no strength," "the trail is not visible," "an un-imagined verst," "we have not the strength to go further," "un-ending, form-less," "at a bound-less height." Perhaps the essence of space qua pure capacity is itself diabolism: it is nowhere, and it is everywhere; it just as easily comes apart as seals itself together; it is not segmented by material boundaries, it cannot be contained in any concrete place or volume, rather it itself always contains. It is bare totality, encompassing all, itself remaining unencompassed.

Virgin field, unknown plain, empty gloom, boundless heights... Such an expanse is the void, total Nothingness, the proximity of which is unbearable. Like a whirlwind within a blizzard, the troika chased by demons has reached some coaching inn, and the traveller has blissfully taken refuge in this jumble of exhalations and heap of bodies, feeling like the prodigal son returned to the bosom of his mother, of the crowded peasant-hut, with his half-brothers and fellow lodgers.

Especially on the Volga, in the steppe region, we sense that desperate expanse which surges in waves into forested, central and northern Rus'--the expanse that bore the Razins, the Pugachevs, the Chernyshevskys, the Lenins, all those émigrés from Saratov, Astrakhan, Simbirsk, that whole mobile army, chased by demons, which Nothingness pursued and before which Nothingness gaped. And where did this furious chase lead? Of course, into the peasant commune, the smoky peasant hut, the closeness of the party cell, the collective farm, and, in the most compressed version, into the Stolypin car, into a couchette meant for four people, but now wondrously holding 30. In order, using this closeness--one cannot turn around or breath freely--to rush back through the powerful and free Volga and Siberian expanses. Here, in this rarefied periphery, the art of the greatest concentration was achieved: that of the labor camp, which crams bodies into plank-beds and graves.

Is it not this very combination of spaciousness and closeness--perhaps in less vivid contrast than that of the steppe vs. the Stolypin car, but all the same evoking aching feet and chafing sides--that we find in our contemporary cities? How spacious Soviet streets and squares are, sprawling even onto a nomad Cossack encampment and a dashing whistling, onto the wanderer's doleful thoughts about his long path and his ever-retreating destination--nowhere in the entire world are there such intra-urban voids! And how people press close on public transportation and in their living quarters, pressing in until bodies double up and hearts break, to the point of sweet agitation and mortal languor!

Did this "commonism" [obshchevizm] come to Russia from Europe, where it remained a pathetic specter? Or did it originate in Russia's own diffused spaces, in the demons who inhabit the rushing plain, herding us into crowded social cells, soldered joints, into the heated breathing of communal apartments and dormitories? This is the true polarity of a national soul that seeks deliverance from the greatest geographical void on the entire earth--in the greatest social conglutination in all world history.

Trans. Jeffrey Karlsen