Alina Vitukhnovskaya, writer
The writer, though nominally liberal, has this to say about Annie Ernault, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022:
“Western women are mostly concerned with moral problems, while Russian women dream of being given pain relief. In a word, for some reason I did not want to read this essay with an abortion in the center.
That is, in fact, she declares that she wants others to suffer like her. Neglecting tragedy in the name of physiology. Soviet-post-Soviet man reduces life to one denominator - pain and suffering. And he puts himself as an object in its core. Above all this, heaps a pseudo-subject - "God" or abstract justice, which he also sees in a specific way.
The poet, also of “liberal” views, tells in an interview that she talked with a Buddhist about the mass death of people that began in connection with the February events. The Buddhist said that "everything is predestined, all destinies and all deaths, otherwise there would be no meaning in being".
Of course, these are not liberals. Under the guise of humanism and liberalism, Russian culture comes to some stupid and ominous, archaic, animal conclusions, with which it anesthetizes its own sensitivity and lubricates optical settings with a thick layer of sticky patience, already mixed with the bloody mucus of the “Russian” world.
One writer says:
“I saw a close friend who had just spent two months in Russia. Smiling, she told how wonderful it was in Moscow. Restaurants are not like Manhattan ones, European rags are sold everywhere for pennies. Clean, fun, comfortable. No one even notices the sanctions. Why don't you come back, I ask. Oh, he says, I'm already too used to living in a warm climate, and it's cold there in winter.
There is also a symptomatic comment from one politicized author:
“Is it okay that all educational events and almost all (though not all) literary evenings have disappeared? Half concerts? Movie? You still have to be some kind of ciliate, interested only in food and warmth, in order to pay attention to food and temperature.
This is not a conversation about morality or even immorality. Rather, about stupid tactlessness and misunderstanding of the inappropriateness of their statements. It's not about the writer, he gave an excellent sketch. About the commentator Any culture is repressive, but the imperial-Soviet is doubly repressive. Inside this suffocating atmosphere, the Soviet intelligentsia raised their children, literally exhausted by cultural leisure. It is customary for them to believe that culture is when you are bored. Here they are bored. But they never admit it.
Authoritarianism and imperialism also stem from boredom and a lack of understanding of their own irrelevance. Cultural "Russians" (conditionally) seem to have occupied the entire space of being. They increase, grow disproportionately, like the heroes of "Alice in Wonderland" and merge with the bust of Pushkin, fall with him, but do not break, because they are pathologically stable. It's pathological. Their stability is ethical impenetrability, political deafness. Therefore, a liberal writer sheds tears over the monument to Alexander Sergeevich, and a “liberal” political analyst scolds a compatriot for her indifference to the cultural life of the capital. Well, the infusoria here is not she, but he, just a double ciliate. What the hell is cultural life? Against the backdrop of bombing and constant extreme. Yes, she, to be honest, had been forced and redundant before. Everything has been online for a long time and your visits to cultural places are nothing more than snobbish rituals.
When I talk about stupid tactlessness and not understanding the inappropriateness of my statements and about the pathological stability of certain types, I also mean this:
“Strictly speaking, the moral to be drawn from this is not that all people over 60 should be somehow humanely euthanized or withdrawn from social circulation in other ways. No, this is not the solution. The solution is to never allow any one group—not women, not minorities, not majorities, not young, not old, not disabled—to monopolize power!” - says political scientist Ekaterina Shulman.
Everything was here. And latent totalitarianism and sadism - “I don’t say it, but I really want to say it. But as a cultured person, I don’t say.” And impenetrable uncriticality in self-perception. So you are the group! Her name is "party". And it is very noticeable from the outside. How they pull and pull you, with all the absurdities, with all the failed forecasts, with all the reservations and slips. You are the group that, according to your own logic, should not be allowed to monopolize power.
Why did it happen that such CROPs are imposed on society as unshakable authorities, and the society itself digests all this pseudo-intellectual nonsense without any criticism? First of all, because all of it has been historically distorted by socialism.
Socialism is a monstrous anthropological experiment that was carried out on Russians. But his result was unsatisfactory not only for the Russians, but for the whole of mankind. We have come to the crisis of the concept of "human" at least in its traditionalist and modernist understanding. Since no one took responsibility for this experiment, and, in fact, no one tried to call for it, the historical awkwardness was smeared over, hidden in pseudo-modernity and a little glamorized. But then a dangerous mutant broke out of it - the putrid spirit of totalitarianism. And this will always happen until the historical lessons are learned and the correct political conclusions are drawn from them.
Over the past 20 years in Russia, people have completely paralyzed their will and self-respect. They were simply permanently humiliated. They see themselves as worthless. They seem to have no one to save in themselves, except for the human shell. What follows is not at all clear. Why does the animal instinct of self-preservation not work? Why prisons are more afraid than dying in battle is also not clear. And in general - Russian hostages. And they act like hostages. Only the hostages are rescued, but they are not. And they know it. They believe that they are deprived of the right to salvation. And not because they are bad. Because that is the nature of things. And they wander into their own destruction, grow together with non-existence.
When people live for years, decades in an atmosphere of lies and betrayal, when babies are born and already in some womb feel dismembered for the superficial benefits of their closest relatives - from square meters to cars, when everyone uses everyone and utilizes everyone, but at the same time, many are scared and it is strange to be betrayed - the latent passion for non-existence becomes quite understandable - if only "not to see all this"! Then salvation for them is only a form of the infernal "MMM", some kind of global set-up, which, not only "did not deserve", but also devoutly does not want.