Suppose the Valkyrie plot on July 20, 1944 succeeds. Colonel Stauffenberg blows up Hitler. The new military government stops the war. As a condition of peace, the Allies call denazification. The denazification of Germany is carried out by the Party and the Gestapo.

Deputinization will be carried out by the next Putin.

All my life I have felt solid ground under my feet, and that was Russian culture. Now there is nothing under my feet.

Mme. de Stael remarked in passing: “Le silence russe est tout à fait extraordinaire: ce silence porte uniquement sur ce qui leur inspire un vif intérêt”. (“The silence of the Russians is particularly surprising: they are silent about the very things that interest them”).

In the fall of '14, I flew to a book fair in Krasnoyarsk. A huge celebration of literature. It looked like Frankfurt. This is how it should be in the 21st century: world culture is at home in Siberia.

There are only two seasons in domestic political life: order and turmoil

That year, at my speeches in Europe, all the questions and conversations were about the war. At the book fair in Russia, they talked about anything but war. Everyone was terribly interested in the new guide to ancient Rome. It seems I was the only one who spoke from the stage about the disaster that was coming.

That silence was humiliating. Humiliating for everyone: writers and readers alike. It was the last straw. I didn't want to go back to that humiliation again.

Over the years of the war, the silence became deafening; after February 24, it became intolerable.

The avalanche of words doesn't stop: “apple-book festivals”, presentations of new guidebooks to ancient Rome, issues of thick literary magazines pretending that everything is OK, courses in ‘Theory and Practice of Literary Mastery’, workshops for young writers on topical subjects: ‘How to build a plot’, ‘Conflict, Characters, Style’. Avalanche of silence. Silence with glee. All this is one big master class for Russian culture on silence.

Talking loudly about the wrong thing is silence on the beat.

Silence for salvation? Russian literature did not save from the Gulag, but it helped to survive in the Gulag country. And here it is again rushing to the rescue.

A quote from the Facebook of a famous author speaking at meetings with readers in Russia:

“The audience at the meetings is grateful, affectionate, attentive (from the word “pay attention”). And here's another thing: a year ago, any word or even a sound about what was going on around us evoked an outpouring of gratitude. Thank you, thank you for speaking! Lately it's the other way around: thank you for not saying anything! Everyone already knows everything. They understand. And tired. The farther away from what's around you, the better. A distraction and an exhale, if only for a little while.

Silence as a way of survival, silence as air to breathe.

Time and historical circumstances change taste buds. Once upon a time in my youth, Russian classics kept me from drowning in soviet lies. The books on the shelves are the same, the rhymes do not spread their arms, the letters are not scattered, but the words mean something completely different, have a different flavor. I try to reread my favorite poets of the golden age, but they are all stuffed with patriotic vomit.

See also Vadim Zakharov: “Russian culture must learn to be silent”

Russia is ready for a new tsar, but the new tsar is not yet ready for Russia

We cannot but bear the traces of the power in which we grew up. We all, who were born from Moscow to the outskirts, were born and raised in a millennia-old empire, and even if we hate it, we breathed its air. And when we talk about Russian “imperialism”, “colonialism”, it sounds complimentary for this endless bloody swamp, because it puts us on a par with the British Empire. It is necessary to realize that even in the 21st century the country lives according to the law of the Golden Horde: khan at the top of the pyramid, his slaves at the bottom, without the right to vote and property. And the only meaning and ideology of this social structure is power itself and the struggle for power, and the necessary and sufficient condition for its existence is violence.

This way of life of a vast country cannot be abolished by any decree, just as language cannot be abolished.

For generations, prison reality has produced prison behavior. To live with the wolves is to howl like a wolf. This was expressed in language, which was meant to serve Russian life, keeping it in a state of constant, endless war with the world and with ourselves. When everyone lives according to the laws of the camp, the task of language is the war of each with each. If the strong must beat the weak, the task of language is to do it verbally. To humiliate, to insult, to take away rations, to put down. Language as a form of disrespect for the individual. Language as a means of destroying human dignity. No other “empire” has such a verbal weapon as the checkmate. In this language, expressing the essence of Russian life, speaks a thousand years and the authorities and the population. And the language of Russian literature is a foreign patch on the body of the language of the slave pyramid, which appeared in the 18th century, when colonists from the West brought with them foreign concepts: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.

It has long been noted that the Russian government is like King Midas: just as the ancient king turned everything he touched into gold, so everything it touches turns to shit and blood. They reach out their fingers to everything. They want to use Tolstoy, Rachmaninoff, Brodsky. They organize worship of the dead, knowing that they can't answer, and it seems to them that the shade of the classics falls in this case on them, on Putin's regime, on their “SWO”.

I have no doubt that Tolstoy would have sent the bandit false state to ... and demanded that all over the country in every school in the literature room the words: “Patriotism is slavery!” should hang above the blackboard instead of his portrait. Rachmaninoff would now give charity concerts for the benefit of wounded Ukrainian children. Brodsky would repent for his shameful “Taras's bullshit” and lecture to raise money for the Ukrainian armed forces around the world.

But Dostoevsky, with his Orthodox omnihumanity, I'm afraid, would have been an anchor on the Tsargrad channel.

After February 24, only loners came out to protest. Where are these desperate, beautiful people who came out to defend the dignity of their people and their country? In prison or on the run. The people were silent. The survival strategy of generations is silence. Western experts on Russia attributed this to fear.

Then mobilization was announced, and the world was perplexed to see hundreds of thousands of Russians obediently going to war to kill Ukrainians and be killed. This has nothing to do with a survival strategy. It is deeper, scarier.

Do Russians want war? Ask the mobiks who are rioting because of shell starvation - “there's nothing to fuck with the Khokhls”.

The population of Russia is infected with tribal consciousness. This childhood disease of mankind can be cured by enlightenment. In modern civilization, the tribe has been replaced by the individual, and society is based on the individual. I myself am responsible for the main decision in life, what is good and what is evil. And if my country, my people do evil, then I will be against my country and my people.

The very notion of personal responsibility for choosing good and evil is absent in tribal consciousness. The motherland is calling! The consciousness of the tribe, surrounded by enemies, has always tried to strengthen any Russian regime - from “autocracy, Orthodoxy, nationality” to “Glory to the CPSU!” and “Krymnash”.

In domestic political life there are only two seasons: order and turmoil. People's wisdom of generations: if there is order, then the tsar is real; if there is turmoil, then he is not.

The winner is not chosen. Strength is the only Russian legitimacy. If you lost the Chechen war, it was Bor'ka the alcoholic. He won, there's a czar in the Kremlin. He annexed Crimea - there is Putin, there is Russia. Did not defeat the Kiev Nazis - a dwarf in a bunker behind a kilometer-long table.

Russia occupies a territory where historical time has stopped. The country cannot get out of the past into the present - changing the calendar has not helped.

The failure to capture Kiev and the lack of victory in the Ukrainian war is a clear sign: the tsar is not real.

The country froze when Prigozhin's tanks were 400 kilometers from Moscow, 300, 200... Wagner's men were greeted in “liberated” Rostov with flowers and ice cream. He had everything to declare himself the new tsar: a power that no one even tried to resist. He was his own flesh from flesh: he exuded the prison odor familiar to the Russian nose, his native speech poured out of him. And most importantly, he was the only one of Putin's “generals” with a victory in his pocket, albeit a small one.

Russia is ready for a new tsar, but the new tsar is not yet ready for Russia.

Alas, no one is coming to Moscow in an Abrams.

In a historical sense, Germany was lucky that Colonel Stauffenberg did not blow up Hitler. Denazification was carried out not by the Gestapo, but by the occupation authorities.

Culture is a form of existence of human dignity

The NATO commandant's offices will not hang posters of murdered Ukrainian children in the towns of the Russian countryside: “It's your fault, it's the fault of your town”, as the Americans did in post-war Germany. There will be no Nuremberg on the Russian map. There will be no Russian national repentance. Post-Putins will not kneel in Bucha, Mariupol, Prague, Budapest, Vilnius, Tbilisi. It is not tsar's business.

Accordingly, there will be no Marshall Plan. But there will be a handshake with the first Kremlin ruler who promises the West control over the rusty nuclear arsenal.

After one of Navalny's election speeches, someone came up to him and said: “Alexei, I like what you say, and I like you myself. But first become president, and then I will vote for you.

To introduce democracy in Russia, one must first become a tsar. But to become a tsar means to become a tsar. An actor plays a role, but cannot change it.

For culture for the foreseeable future, the RF has become a radioactive contamination zone.

University rectors, directors of museums and libraries, theater and film directors, by openly supporting the SWO, have made themselves war criminals. But they need not worry. There will be no lustration, and they do not believe in punishment at the Last Judgment. Of course, by supporting the war, they were saving their museums, libraries, theaters. “Kiss the villain's hand and spit.” Betraying himself to save the theater, the director will not be able to do in the theater what he is called to do. Betrayal can save neither himself nor the theater.

Culture is a form of existence of human dignity.

You can wash away the dirt and sweat, but how do you wash away the silence? Where is the line between saving silence and meanness?

Strontium half-life lasts 28 years, cesium half-life lasts 30 years. How long does the half-life of mean last?

Putin's war is against both Ukraine and Russia. Culture is being destroyed. The country is being destroyed. The people are silent and habitually put their heads on the scaffold with a sigh that the tsar knows better. Silence can only be opposed to the word. Free word is already an act of resistance. In Russia, one can either sing patriotic songs or remain silent. Or emigrate. Emigration is an act of resistance.

But also the free Russian word, which opposes the prison power - breathed its air. It is necessary to exhale from the lungs the air impregnated with the vapors of slave generations. It is necessary to free oneself from the afterbirths of the empire in oneself. Words are a fail-safe system of recognizing “friend or foe”. “In Ukraine”, ‘great Russian literature’, ‘Baltic’, ‘Moscow ulus’. It is necessary to cough the empire out of ourselves like verbal slime.

Can Russian culture exist outside the territory? What distinguishes us from the emigration of a century ago is our ability to use high technology. I always think about how lost, how cut off from the centers of Russian emigration - from Berlin, from Paris - some literary circle in Harbin felt. And now you're on a train in Africa, and with Wi-Fi you're in the center of Russian culture. Maybe this is a chance for a “beautiful Russia of the future” to emerge, where there is Chekhov and Rachmaninoff, but no Putin or Prigozhin. This country is in the virtual world. And it is possible that offline it cannot exist in principle.

My Russia is a country that has declared independence from the power boot.

This country does not need legalization, it does not need passports. It is legitimized by the breath of a person who lives Russian culture. The capital of Russian culture is everywhere - where we, its bearers, consumers, creators, are. All over the world.

But how long can a language live in emigration? We have the experience of the post-revolutionary exodus: our children still spoke Russian, our grandchildren did not. We have our own experience: our children still speak Russian with us, but will our grandchildren? There are not enough Russians even for the third generation.

Russian emigration has no basis that has allowed Jews to preserve themselves for millennia. Jews have language and God. Russians have only language.

So Slavists will study literature in a dead language like Latinists?

The population of our historical homeland will always produce native speech like porridge from a magic pot, and no one will shout to it, “Don't boil it!” The inflow of fresh verbal blood from Russia will not stop. Brodsky, Sasha Sokolov, and Volodya Sharov found themselves in the Soviet sludge. As a river finds its own channel, so a language will always find a poet.

Russian culture - for what?

Only a text can restore dignity to Russian literature. A text of redemption. And it should be written not by an emigrant, but by someone who sat in a trench in Ukraine and asked himself the questions: who am I? What am I doing here? Why this war? Why are we Russians fascists?

Will this text be written? God knows.