For people we know in Russia, the most common reaction to the war and this persistent violence is shock. You find no words to say; you see no source of strength to build up your inner resistance from. And when you get out, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, you don’t know where you get to, except you cannot go back to the pre-war state.
When we were packing our bags in a hurry, one of the few books we took with us, besides a short history of migration in Europe and Asia, was Theodor Dissenting [«Несогласный Теодор»], Teodor Shanin's memoirs transcripted from a documentary about him made by Alexander Arkhangelsky in 2019. Being where we are now, reading the book, and thinking about the film, we now perceive Shanin differently and in his biography find something to “rhyme” with our life stories—his loss of home, his living against the background of total destruction of everything he was used to or considered his own, his wanderings, and his efforts to settle down in other countries. For us, he became not just a prominent scientist but a companion who could and should be asked questions in the situation we found ourselves in.
Talking with Arkhangelsky, Shanin recalled that, having returned to Poland from Samarkand in 1945 as a 15-year-old teenager, he was shocked by how people in Łódź were pretending nothing had happened, as if there had been no Shoah, and the old life hadn‘t totally collapsed. According to Shanin, the rage he experienced at the time had been helping him for many years since, both when he participated in Israel’s War of Independence (1948) and later.
Can we, looking at today's life in Russia, demand such rage from ourselves? Probably not. And not only because Shanin was a teenager at the time and perceived the world especially sharply, but also because that war, with all its follow-ups, such as anti-Jewish pogroms in Kielce, definitely was already over by then, and apparently, he semi-consciously realized that he would be able to use this rage of his for constructive purposes. But those Russian intellectuals who are now shocked and distracted live not after the war, but inside it and, obviously, far from its finale, similar to those who lived in 1942 and had no idea how the world catastrophe would end.
Today, you can consider yourself lucky (as lucky as anyone can be today), if the ongoing horror mobilizes you and makes you concentrate, like it happened to Shanin. But this is rare luck, and it shouldn’t be counted on.
When your country’s army is destroying residential buildings, schools, hospitals, and shopping malls, and driving millions of people out of their homes, when propagandists are lying with no concern for any plausibility of their lies, the toughest thing is being alone. For instance, at night. Many people find it difficult to fall asleep nowadays. In the daytime, you have things to take care of that help make life more meaningful: to feed a family (if you have one), to transfer money for Ukrainian refugees, to do the dishes, to give support to your friends. But all this thinly veils the dark core of your inner life that you have no clue how to deal with, and neither words nor rage to summon it up. People engaged in intellectual labors are used to thinking; for them, the inward flow of thought is a habitual background of everyday life, but what do you do if you aren‘t sure if anyone, including yourself, needs your thinking, if it seems to be making no difference? “Keep your mind in hell and do not despair”—what are these words about?
You can tell yourself that everything will pass, and so will the war, and even though it is probably true, such a position suspiciously borders on escapism, on tendency to fence yourself off from the catastrophe that’s happening before your very eyes.
Awakened at night, a man or a woman peers into the dark core of their inner life and says to no one in particular, “I left my home and my old world behind. They no longer exist, or at least they will not be the same ever again. But the future of my soul depends on my ability to think of this disintegrated world as a meaningful and open one. Evil is at work around me, and its waves are rolling over my head. There might be echoes of this evil inside me, too. My salvation depends on my ability to discern, in my own self and in the world around me, those thin threads of sense interwoven into a black blanket of fog we are now going through. They do exist. All I need to do is to discern them, and then I’ll be able to help people around me to reclaim their agency again and stop being just objects dragged and scattered apart by the course of events.”
These threads of sense will be different for everyone. But in any case, today, we can try and search for them.
Then the person continues, “I have no rage, but I do have hope of making this world meaningful—over blood and pain, but from the inside, marked by pain, mindful of it. First, I can do it in my mind. But it's just the beginning.”
My soul, o my soul, rise up!* Rise and take your trunk filled with guilt, despair, anger at yourself, anger at others. This heaviest trunk is now your home.
So go now. Take a step. Another one. The third one. The fourth. The most important thing is to believe you shall overcome.
Now look around. Can you see many other souls, all of them trying to carry their trunks? They don’t believe they shall overcome. Say something to them.
The person in the darkness opens their eyes and says quietly, “We shall overcome.”
Translated by Galina Raguzina-Andreevskaya