State's Envy
Mikhail Epstein
A foreigner in Russia is a figure equally as respected as he is mistrusted. People make way before him and begin to look themselves over busily and preen themselves. As if he had come to Russia to make an inspection. A visit by a member of the Central Committee did not shake up life in a Russian backwater like a visit by a member of a foreign delegation. Because when they stood next to each other, the member of the Central Committee looked like he had to report back to the foreigner. It appeared that the foreigner came to make an inspection of universal values and the member of the Central Committee could only show class values, and was ashamed of his limited stock.
This attitude towards foreigners as towards the boss’s boss was supported by their mythological ability to appear and disappear to God-knows-where. The member of the Central Committee, and even the Politburo, still remained in a visible place, albeit a central one. He was among us while at the same time he was right in the middle. But the foreigner in general was on the other side: he could get to us while we could not get to him. Between us was a magically curved space, such that he could see us but we could not see him. We crawled about a two-dimensional plane, body and sight pressed up against it – and suddenly a three-dimensional being crossed this plane. His two-dimensional projection flashed by: a broad smile, a direct glance, a strong handshake, and then everything disappeared. It was unthinkable to watch him behind the lines, in his domestic circumstances, his everyday relations – we could only imagine him in the capacity of a stranger, an emissary of other worlds. This is how gods differed from heroes in antiquity: gods came and left while heroes remained with the people. In our country there were many heroes, but gods only appeared from abroad.
“I love and I hate” – such an ancient lyrical formula[1] can define Russians’ attitude towards foreigners. Before them we abashedly shut doors that were flung open for us – yet we generously flung open doors which were shut for us. They could not take a trip the Podolsk refectory or to dusty Petushki, Venichka’s poor homeland, they could not sully their feet with village mud, but yet before them the doors of hard-currency bars and Kremlin palaces were flung open. They gravitated to foreigners, were delighted and broke into defenseless smiles – and suddenly, just as if catching themselves in something just a tad shameful, they grew stern, shut themselves up and retreated into themselves. All signs of a diseased infatuation which easily turned into contempt. A wee bit phony, but earnest as well. I don’t want you if you’re going to be like that! How? Well, simply well-mannered, smooth, well-put together and in general…What do you want from me? I know your kind: you have your fun, then toss it aside. Get out of here, I don’t want to look at you.
Such a paradigmatically heated monologue twists around in the heart of a great power. A million torments within its breast. Let’s remember the famous episode in “Woe from Wit” when Chatsky espies the stage: a crowd of his distinguished fellow countrymen have surrounded a bourgeois Frenchman from Bordeaux. They cajole him and shower him with compliments, and what for? Just because he is a Frenchman. There it is, Russia, forgetful fool, tempted by a visiting windbag. But after all, the Russian mind relies on all sorts of Russian idiocies. And then Chatsky steps aside and reads his monologue on the perniciousness of the Frenchman and how good it would be for Russians, even if by imitating the Chinese, to learn a wise ignorance of foreigners.
Who is more Russian in this scene? The crowd, which enthusiastically showers attention on the Frenchman, or Chatsky, who pours out contempt on him? This is the rub: both of these are equally Russian and there cannot be the one without the other. If there were no enthusiasm, then where would the contempt come from? And if there were no contempt, who would portray enthusiasm for us with such animation? Indeed, we only find out about this “bowing low [nizkopoklonstvo]” from Chatsky himself, who needs to vent his civic pain on something, and so he takes it out on the Frenchman. As soon as he sees the foreigner immediately his “heart began to ache”. The secret of this strange combination of love and hate is called “envy”. When we love something strongly, it seems to us that we are unworthy of the object of our affection – and so we begin to reduce and denigrate [snizhat’-unizhat’] it in order to preserve our own self-respect. In order to preserve our “ego” we throw in contempt with our love.
A strange feeling – envy. If not it, then what moves the earth? No, not love, as Dante magnanimously supposed: “love, which moves the sun and the other stars.”[2] If there were just love in the world, all the stars would gravitate towards each other and burn with a unified flame. Even worse, if only hate, only repulsion, moved the world, every particle would fly apart to different corners of the universe and all that would remain between them would be emptiness and unbelievable cold.
So thought tends toward a system based on two principles [dvunachalie], toward the famous Empedoclian model[3], according to which love and hate take turns operating in the world, which is why the world came together and once again split apart. This is not too far from the truth; in particular, the Empedoclian cosmic system explains the fall of the Soviet Union no worse than any historical system. Gravitational force at one time collected it into a gigantic empire, but when everything was contracted and united to the utmost limit, it then began to act as a repulsive force – and so the empire fell, breaking apart into larger or smaller parts from Moscow to the farthest border. Hence the Empedoclian prediction for the future is not any worse than Yeltsin’s of Solzhenitsyn’s: When these parts finish breaking up, gravitational forces will again attract them to each other and unite them in some sort of new love, perhaps even a mutual and voluntary love. And not just a simple friendship of the peoples, but a love of the peoples will rule on this earth, at least until it switches to hate again.
My amendment to the Empedoclian model is simple: love and hate are two components of a single feeling of envy. Envy turns love into hate at the same time that it prevents the successful outcome of history, when nations, having forgot their arguments, would unite into one happy family. There is no happiness on this earth, and especially not in that one-sixth of it, which has been deeply worn out by its insatiably envious character. As soon as it starts to love someone, it immediately begins to be envious. Dostoevsky pronounced in his “Pushkin Speech” that a Russian is prepared to love other nations as no one else has the strength to. “We…took the geniuses of foreign nations into our soul with complete love…I am merely (!) speaking of the fraternity of peoples and the Russian heart which is, perhaps, of all nations, the most destined for world-wide and universally fraternal unity…”[4] And so love is from the very beginning presented in the coordinates of envy, and a very refined envy at that, such that whom we love (all nations) is whom we envy (them as well). Lest, say, the English, who we love, decide that the French are capable of loving them more then we, the Russians, can. We envy the English for the sake of the French, and of course, the French for the sake of the English, and everyone for the sake of a world-wide fraternal unity with other nations, of which unity we are more capable than other nations. And Gogol, praising the Russians’ proclivity to fellowship, strictly noted that such comrades don’t exist in any other land (“Taras Bulba”). And woe to other peoples’ love, others’ friendship, if it dare compete with ours.
Is it not for this reason that there is such a strange, distorted picture in Russian history, that envy is its ruling passion? Envy built this country up, and made it fall as well. Envy brought this country to the point where, being ready to love and embrace the entire world, it was ready to tear it to pieces in order that it not become anyone else’s favorite.
For who else loves the world and graces it so, who had such an encompassing embrace, such a plentiful breast, such a tender bosom, from ocean to ocean – come beloved! Come to its peaceful embrace. And if not – you have only yourself to blame. And we are capable of perfidy. I’m not the one who will put out your eyes, so others will be found, they will have their revenge, each of my tears will burn like a rancorous brand on your skin. They will burn, torture, quarter, scorch your white body. Your children, your sickly, far-removed decedents, born from another, emaciated, will damn you and scatter your ashes over our broad plains. This coul be a free re-telling of Blok’s poem “The Scythians” – a shout of terrifying envy on behalf of Russia directed at the West. “Exulting and lamenting, and covered in black blood, it looks, looks, looks at you with both hatred and love!..” Can you convey more accurately the torture of envy which extends throughout Russia’s relationship with the West! It “looks, looks, looks” unflinchingly and with fascination at the West, as if trying to bewitch it, convey its thirst for love – and covers itself with black blood which does not know if it will burn with passion or enmity, if it will sweetly fill its beloved, or open up its veins to him. “Yes, none of you have long loved as our blood can love! You have forgotten that there is a love in the world which both burns and destroys!” A love which burns and destroys – one more poetic definition of envy.
For foreigners, incapable of understanding the enigma of this soul, split between love and hate, it is sufficient to understand one thing: it is a soul that envies. This souls is envy itself. And not only does Russia envy the West for God-knows-who, but it also envies itself for the sake of the West. It is in vain, is it not, that Chatsky seethes with hatred for the Frenchman – he envies the very society mob which he so wittily despises. Why do these important people stick to the Frenchman, and not to him, a witty and wise man? Why does this nation bury itself in television, listen to rock music and watch revues, all on the western model, and not read their home-grown prophets with avidity [vsapoi]? Is this not envious vexation and a heavy sigh from our Volgda and Siberian wise men who preach a wise ignorance of foreigners to their nation?
And the nation has its own take on the Moscow and Petersburg scribes: why do they place the fame of a small group of western professors above accessible entry to the millions and millions of the lower classes right in their own homeland? Why do they write for them and not us? Why do they scramble to go to them, and not to us? Different strata of society envy each other over the West – and envy the West over each other. Whom do they love more there? Whom do they come from there to see? With whom do they stay longer? Whom do they invite there more? Whom do they entertain more sumptuously? On whom do they shower more caresses?
Everywhere envy is such that it is not visible even to love. And indeed has there ever been love? Whether or not there was ever attraction or passion for the intelligentsia among the people is hard to say, but, most likely, all that remains of the past is just envy. The intelligentsia loves the people for its “higher truth” – and envies them. The people hate the intelligentsia for its “high standard of living” – and once again envies it. When love is difficult to distinguish from hate, this is envy.
For a long time naïve young girls have been posed the question whether real, pure, selfless love, without envy, exists. No, it does not exist. It is a good time to pose a different question: can envy exist without love? Or even without hate? Only a severe, interminable, pointless envy. When peasants, not quite done being members of the kolkhoz, set fire to the home of another peasant, who has not quite become a farmer, what do they do this out of love for? Out of hate for what? Anyone will say that they do it out of jealousy. But what is jealousy if not envy by itself, deprived of any hint of the love which at one time had inspired it?
And has this jealousy only just been born – or did this blind envy, which has forgotten about love, lead Russia for the entire course of recent history, did it storm the Winter Palace and chase out the peasants from the land they tilled? In the name of love for mankind, one must be able to hate – so taught the embodiment of the Gorky-Mayakovsky dialectic. “The heart which has tired of hate will not learn to love,” Nekrasov had even earlier preached. Here indeed is a national poet who created in his poetry a true encyclopedia of Russian envy, starting with “The Green Din [Zelenyi shum]”, where a husband sharpens a knife on his cheating wife, and ending with a question that has remained sharp and has wounded the people’s heart since time immemorial: “Who lives well and freely [vol’gotno] in Russia?”
And then there is a national thinker –Rozanov. Reading his arguments on the Jewish question - and a Jew in Russia was for the most part a foreigner, our so-called “own other [svoe inoe]” – it is not worth being surprised by the odd mix of pro- and anti-semitism in his work. So it should be: the great envy of one people, who are still only contemplating their universal mission, for another people, who have already completed their mission. What is good in Rozanov is the incandescence of his envy, behind which can be felt both true love and true hate. Now he writes “a wonderful Jewish song”, then ”a Jew on the Moika[5].” For him, the Jewish question comes to a point where his heart bleeds with black blood, and there is no people on earth more blessed and more damned than the Jews. More holy or more loathsome.
This is all good. We know that there is no escape from envy, but would that it did not turn into a meaningless and almost indifferent jealousy – that there be love in this envy, then hate would come of its own free will.
April 1992
Transl. Thomas Dolack
[1] From a poem by the Roman poet Catullus addressed to his inaccessibly accessible [dostupno-nedostupnaia] beloved Lesbia.
[2] Last line of the “Divine Comedy”.
[3] Emedocles – ancient Greek philosopher (5th century BC) who preached the alternation of “love” and “hostility” in cosmic evolution.
[4] F.M. Dostoevskii ob iskusstve [F.M. Dostoevsky on Art}. Moscow, Iskusstvo, 1973, p. 369.
[5] The names of a few of Rozanov’s essays which he intended to include in the book “Iudaizm [Judaism]”. See “Opavshie list’ia [Fallen Leaves]” in V. Rozanov, “Uedinennoe [A Lonely Thing]”, Moscow, Izdatel’stvo politicheskoj literatury, 1990, p. 314. A. Siniavskii found a precise formulation for Rozanov’s relationship with the Jews: “He bows down before them, he is jealous of them, he is envious of them.” A. Siniavskii. “”Opavshie list’ia” V.V. Rozanova [V.V. Rozanov’s “Fallen Leaves”]”. Paris, Sintaksis, 1982, pp. 94-95.