I write this having received hopeful news of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, while cities in Russia are being hit by drones, just a few days after a famous Russian warlord was killed by his own government. The screens wobble and black smoke reaches the sky.
One of the things that haunts me about the modern Russian Federation is that this country had a chance to be different, once upon a time. In fact, when I first started working there in 2010, I was under the illusion that the chance had not been lost (I was young and far too naïve), when in fact it had been squandered in the 1990s. It wasn’t just the social dislocation that occurred back then, it was the rejection of democratic institutions and an embrace of cynicism. The resulting catastrophe is perfectly natural, in hindsight.
Slain opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was a polarizing figure but, just a few years before he was killed, he asked, “Why are we cursed?” I’ve had many thoughts on the curse since then, and none are particularly helpful — let someone else deal with Russian fascism when the dust settles — but in the nightmares I’ve had since I left Russia with one suitcase and a child on my arm in 2017, I sense a profound, echoing emptiness, an absence I have struggled to define.
The definition came to me when I was speaking to a Russian in exile. She said something that I haven’t been able to get out of my head: “Ukrainians describe their country as a kind mother. Russians describe their country as a steely-eyed, fanatical mother.”
It’s such a simple, off-the-cuff comparison, but it’s true. It’s always been true. There were times in my life when I did not want to see it, even as the truth burned like a fever in my brain and snuck out onto the page.
Going through old paperwork, I stumbled onto the first major play I wrote in Russian, when I still cared to make art in that language. In the play, the Russian government attempts to harness zombies — and turns into a zombie itself. When a society is unable to create anything new, it begins to cannibalize itself. Then, the contagion spreads. The undead, on some fundamental level, want to eat the living, because the living have what they can’t have, which is a future.
I wrote that play mostly in cafes in the Zamoskvorechye neighborhood of Moscow, a place I now see in my nightmares, working furiously, not sure what it was that I was producing, except that I couldn’t stop. A Ukrainian friend who knew me then, back when both of us had illusions about Moscow, told me he recently re-read the play and called me “Cassandra.” Then we laughed. Then we cried. His cousin died fighting back against Russian barbarism, that which had triumphed in my play, earlier this year.
When I dream about Ukraine, my dreams have substance. They do not drag me into a void. I dream about my father. Riding a horse through a field. The curves of the Dnipro. Dancing in an underpass.
I know Ukraine will prevail, and not just because Ukrainians have no choice; Ukrainians actually love what they are fighting for. “Realist” international relations scholars scoff at love, but it always finds ways, like grass finds a way through gray Soviet concrete.
The new world that emerges from that concrete is not likely to have a place for people like me in it, and I’ve decided I am OK with that. People won’t speak much Russian in post-war Ukraine, for example — like I was encouraged to do by my relatives, lest I appear as a “peasant” — and that’s fine. Let the dead bury the dead. The hero of Mikhail Bulgakov’s most famous novel said that “manuscripts don’t burn,” but I’m OK with torching mine, as long as I can warm some people up by the fire. I still hope the zombie genre remains useful, though. It serves as such a good warning.
Among the people I miss today, some are dead, and others are changed. What I realized recently is that I’ve changed too. Pieces of me have been lost in the flames — fanned by hatred, yes, but also, hope. This is, I believe, how dawn happens.
Image: Hilthart Pedersen