I write for people who are like me

Photo courtesy of Krakow Festival Office.

ELŻBIETA ŻAK: I see that in many countries the sphere of poetic expression has become narrower and tends to reflect people’s daily life. It has thus become more realistic, while the abstract and more avant-garde poetry tends to be seen as more elitist, although it too, of course, has its admirers. Correct me if I am wrong, but I would call your poetry versed prose. It is not very abstract and unlike the Russian literary tradition which is so attached to “high culture” and less interested in such genres as the reportage…

ELENA FANAILOVA:But in Russia we have no school of reportage, like you have in Poland.

However, this “observation of everyday life” through literature, which has visibly shrank in Russia, is clearly something we can say about your poetry. How do your readers perceive your work? Do they see it as a poetry of different “voices”? Do they want to hear these voices? Do they associate themselves with them? Or would they rather escape from it as they are so tired with their own lives, and for that reason expect something else from poetry?

Actually I have a few answers to these questions. Two days ago a young man messaged me on Facebook saying: “I want to kiss your hands for all that you are doing”. He is in his early 20s and interested in literature. So that is one thing. The next thing is that, of course, in their great mass Russians associate poetry with such names as Pushkin. Our classical literature is that of the 19th century, which we call the golden age of Russian poetry. But what about Vladimir Mayakovsky or the futurists? They did not exist? There was no silver age? For those who think like that even Anna Akhmatova was very extravagant. I am saying this to show that there is a very large chasm between people who glorify the golden age and those who are creating contemporary Russian culture. In other words, a relatively small number of people is interested in modern culture and the challenges of our modern times. You can compare it to the support for Putin and the annexation of Crimea, which is estimated at around 76-82 per cent. My question is: where are the remaining 18 or 16 per cent?

They do not mark their presence?

They exist. Sociologically speaking, our situation has not changed for the last 20 years. I remember how many people voted for the liberal party 20 years ago and this is the same 18 per cent that is anti-Putin today. Lithuanian philosopher, Tomas Venclova, once explained it in an interview I had with him saying that the problem with Russia, just like Poland and Lithuania, is that in one state there are two countries. In the case of Poland, we have a country of the “borderlands” (kresy) and a country of large urban centres, namely, Warsaw, Kraków, Gdańsk, etc. I can say the same about Russia. We have a country of the intelligentsia who live in St Petersburg, Moscow, Yekaterinburg and Novosibirsk (I do not want to say that there is nothing in Siberia and everything is bad there, as there are many people there who are very smart and life is slower than in central Russia); and then there is a country of the so-called “ordinary people” – who support the annexation of Crimea. The same is true about poetry readers. There are those who are interested in modernity, see the challenges of modern times. By modernity I mean our contemporary time which requires constant reactions and brings about constant challenges. And here lies the problem: are people ready to accept that fact and thus read poetry like mine? Are they ready for the avant-garde?

Overall, Russians do not understand what contemporary art is in its essence. Only recently the Russian state has undertaken some activities in this regards. The Museum of Contemporary Art was opened in St Petersburg and Moscow, and later in Yekaterinburg, Kaliningrad and other large urban areas. Contemporary art is not something that many Russians reflect on that much. The educated youth and university students visit the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, which is the largest museum of modern art, and supported by Roman Abramovich. And the contact the youth has with art is through entertainment. It is through fun. And that is good, at least they are learning the language of modern art. This is the language of reflection, but above all, the language of reason and not animal instinct, which is more the characteristic of the classical forms of art. These are the emotions which always have a specific form. Documenting reality through different series is indeed the characteristic of contemporary art, but also literature. And it is true that the problem we are discussing now is partially related to the lack of good school of reportage in Russia, unlike Poland where the school of reportage was always setting up the trends.

Not that long ago I was asked who my readers were. It is a bit uncomfortable for me to admit but I am not very interested in that. I write for people who are like me. Some time ago I was teaching marketing and explaining the concept of a target group. This works in cases where you know the group very well and where you have a very precise understanding of its needs. These people will also recommend your stuff to others. Please excuse me for being cynical when I compare poetry to goods, but I am doing this to show the mechanisms of spreading information. I am writing my poems for somebody like me – a person driven by reason, somebody who is educated and open to new information. Somebody who is free from xenophobia and other forms of injustice and supports democracy. I imagine that this person or reader is a woman who holds feministic views. This is my imagined reader. I can picture her.

I am very interested in the issue of social conscience. The conscience of those who are affected by everything that is around them. You once said that Russia has a problem of provincial demonism. Is this your answer to the fact that the project of modernity never fully took off? Why did people not want to, or could not, develop it?

They could not because they had no opportunities. This is not even a question, as much it is a desire. This is a question about power, energy and resources. This is a question about what people can do. Russia has, as we all know, travelled through a difficult path. It experienced a few modernist upsurges. But upsurges are not enough and old problems cannot be overcome by them. What I have in mind are the reforms of Peter the Great and the October Revolution, but also perestroika and the fall of the Berlin Wall, which is celebrated in Europe, but is seen as destruction in Russia. That is the case, even if it is not true. I remember in 1991 when everybody was happy that communism had collapsed. At that time, I lived in Voronezh, which compared to Moscow is a small town even though it has a million residents, and people had their windows open and you could hear radio Svoboda in each apartment and everybody was clapping; on the next day, many announced that they did not want the communists in power any more.

In Russia the sociologists are trying to find answers to these questions, and the consensus, more or less, is that people are exhausted from frustration. Regarding the 1990s trauma, there is a conviction that people are tired and disappointed. They were let down. Especially because the economic reforms were brutally implemented by Yegor Gaidar, whom people often compare to Leszek Balcerowicz in Poland. However, while Balcerowicz led Poland to success, Gaidar did not. I do not know a single person who has fond memories of these reforms. People remember this as a terrible time. And the worst thing that has happened in Russia is that now there is a return of the positive image of the Soviet times. People somehow forgot about everything that took place in 1991, and about their own enthusiasm towards the collapse of communism. Now, it is very fashionable to show nostalgia towards the Soviet Union, especially the Brezhnev period.

Is this something characteristic of the youth? It would seem plausible that such sentiments are characteristic of a specific generation?

I will share a funny story to answer that. I was recently in Bucharest where I met a young taxi driver who was working for the festival I was attending. As he was driving me and one young Czech poet we engaged in small talk about the weather, traffic jams, etc. However, as we were passing the Palace of Nations and the huge Nicolae Ceaușescu monument, that young, 25 year old man, said: “I miss him”. I was shocked. “Did you know him?” I asked. ”No, my parents told me about him”. The mechanism of memory – recollections of their youth are transplanted into a young man who has no idea what the Romanian communist system was about, and that it was one of the most repressive in the whole Eastern bloc. People who feel nostalgic towards the Soviet Union in Russia today operate with similar mental constructs. They absorb their parents’ fantasies without any understanding of the terribly oppressive machine that the Soviet Union was. Currently, there is a very popular film in Russia, directed by Yury Dud, a talented young blogger who decided to tell his peers what the price of Stalinism was; what took place in Kolyma, what the Gulag was, etc. His film had over six million viewers.

But it was also criticised…

There were some critical voices. I do not want to go too deeply into that as it is all quite funny because Dud could show young people, using their language, what it was all about. This is simply an educational film which should be showed to high school students. For those who have five different electronic devices in their hands and live in virtual reality in a borderless world, it is hard to imagine what life under communism looked like.

Paraphrasing Czesław Miłosz, we can refer to his optimistic phrase: the worse things are, the better it is for the culture. Did you notice this in the last 20 years? Are there any signs of a cultural renewal in Russia?

If we talk about theatre, then I would say that Russian theatre is among the best.

Are you talking about the new wave? Social theatre?

I am talking about both the socially-engaged theatre and the theatre of Kirill Serebrennikov, which is more metaphorical. Of course, the director himself is very distinct, he also works in Europe. I am also talking about our Russian opera and many directors. Russians are masters of artistic creation. Morality might be something we have a problem with, but we catch up in the fine arts.

And in this area, do you see signs of modernism?

Serebrennikov’s theatre is idealistic and very sensitive. Of course, my favourite’s are Meyerhold Centre, Teatr.doc, Praktika Theatre and a few other institutions where people analyse life as such. In my opinion, the biggest change that took place in Russia during the 2000s was the emergence of doc – cinema doc, theatre doc, poetry doc. We can say doc art overall. We have many interesting video artists in Russia who are engaged and, in my view, this is the most interesting phenomenon in Russia right now.

Is this a universal phenomenon? Or would things be different had there been different political conditions?

Interestingly, this whole movement started to develop a bit earlier. I remember in 2006 when Boris Khersonsky’s Family Archives, and in 2005 Marina Temkina’s Canto Immigranto were published, and we can see how these two older generation authors (of the 1950s and 60s) influenced younger generation writers. In 2005, I was at a poetry festival in New York where I heard that thematically speaking whatever is called “urban poetry” is identical, whether it is in Moscow or New York. I simply saw these parallels, aspects and motifs. The fact that Russia itself has become a serious existential challenge is understandable and it is expressed in poetry. But it all happened earlier, not in 2014, not in 2012, but in the mid-2000s. The zeitgeist created such a need that people started working with documentary art.

If you want me to directly answer, or comment on this thought that the worse life is, the better the art, I would say it is not entirely like that. If we were to analyse the whole Soviet period, we will see that it included Russian avant-garde, art deco and in the 1930s Stalinist classicism suddenly emerged, and all over the world similar processes in art and architecture took place. Under Stalin at least three styles underwent change, not to mention Hitler and his fight with avant-garde artists. I do not see much discrepancy between the works of Polish artists in the early 20th century – Bruno Schultz and Witold Gombrowicz for instance – and that what is taking place today. However I can see that at the end of the 19th century there was a huge anthropological leap, one that has affected us all, and it is only now that we are in one convergent moment. All attempts to artificially break human development, which take the form of wars and political oppression, lead to nothing. Sooner or later, freedom prevails, as a desire to be free is a human characteristic. This is our will and desire to live and leave something for the next generation.

I have been listening to your programme on Radio Svoboda for years now. Once, when listening to it, I heard you say that you are interested in the transformation of social energy and emotions. What is this transformation like in today’s Russia?

After seeing the effects of all kinds of hybrid forms of information, the blurring of concepts, and relativism, which has led to an unclear distinction between the good and the bad, I have started to appreciate academic research much more. With the help of my readers, as well as myself, I can better understand what is really going on. I appreciate the younger generation of social science researchers who are affiliated with the Higher School of Economics and who organise fascinating seminars and write publications.

But aren’t these groups quite narrow? Or are they expanding now?

Right now they are actually shrinking, mainly because of the very unpleasant political and social changes that have taken place in Russia since the annexation of Crimea. Our society has become deeply divided regarding the assessment of this event. And these divisions are also seen among the artists. In my view, the assessment of Putin’s foreign policy is now less an illustration of a man’s wisdom as much as it is an illustration of his or her complexes. To put it very harshly: those who support the Kremlin’s policies want to belong to something big. Imperial phantoms and hybrid warfare make them say “Putin is great, Crimea is ours”. This is what Baudrillard called symulacras. We have a lot of simulation structures – again, to use Baudrillard’s term – which exist not only in advertisements and commercials but official propaganda. You could make movies about our television, especially the talk shows. The saddest thing is that the viewers of these programmes are not disciples of the school of objective reporting and they just absorb whatever they hear. They believe television tells them the truth and there is no need to verify any facts.

You were once talking about journalism of opinions and not facts.

This is our Russian characteristic, and is also a reflection of how the modernisation project developed here. It was the work of a few people – Vissarion Belinsky, Nikolay Chernyshevsky, etc. With this different approach, the messianic nature of Russia literature, including journalism, have led us to a situation where a communist is more respected than a reporter. I personally do not like to talk about national stereotypes and question their role, but there are some facts that are related to our national literary and language history, and they justify the statement I have made. We can say that the context and the tradition both determine the quality of our journalism. From a more medical point of view, we can understand stereotypes as a reference to something repetitive. And this kind of repetitive behaviour is our defence mechanism. That is why our Russian psychoanalysts explain that Russian society has not yet freed itself from the series of traumas it experienced in the 20th century. I do not want to say that Poland had a less tragic fate, but this martyrism is certainly a Russian feature. That is why we tend to pride ourselves as a people who had suffered more, and who are more moral, etc.

In Poland, too, we are constantly trying to determine who is moral and who is not…

And for us, that is spirituality. Russians are not the best informed when it comes to morality. This is the feature of Eastern Orthodoxy. In Catholicism, the rational aspect is a bit stronger, that is why it has this heavy emphasis on morality. For us, it is spirituality.

And how is spirituality understood in our time?

Russian spirituality points to a large amount of national egoism. And the truth is that there is no better or worse spirituality. When I am at an international airport I see a lot of people and ask myself: “why are we so different from one another at a time when we all behave the same?” Overall, I can see a biological similarity in what seems to be such highly spiritual and civilised world. And one that is much more technologically developed that I am even surprised we still speak different languages.

But the issue of spirituality is an important one these days. Do we have different narratives?

Naturally spirituality is important. I am convinced that without ethics there is no aesthetics. This is true even though we have a lot of examples of anti-ethics and anti-aesthetics. Despite that, art is always deeply ethical; it deals with suffering, death, war and aggression. Freud understood it very well and told us that art is always against aggression and war.

I really like your dismantling of the word “poetics” into “po-ethics” to stress the ethical component of art.

Yes, art is a discipline, and like any profession it has order and law. Just like the title of the American series Law and Order. This is true even though many artists say that beauty is our only obligation to the world. This is an excuse made to a larger public that always expects something from the artist.

Translated by Elżbieta Żak and Iwona Reichardt

Elena Fanailova is a Russian poet who has also worked as a journalist for Radio Svoboda.

Elżbieta Żak works at the Institute of Russian and East European Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. Her interests include contemporary Russian culture and literature, and post-Soviet society at the moment of transformation and change over the past 30 years.

Elena Fanailova, Russian poetry