Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [175]
Love has, of course, taken root here, and often, but we entirely lack any culture of passion. Yes, it looms large in Dostoevsky, Leontiev or Tolstoy, both love and tears, but alas, it hardly figures in the everyday lives of people like us in the twenty-first century. We have become habituated to quiet love, to understanding another person to the depths of their soul. We pity the unfortunate and the alcoholics drinking themselves to death because their souls have been defiled. We have a tradition of making do with love on a shoestring, of living in hope as the years go by, of washing his feet and drinking the dirty water. But passion as a short-lived, all-consuming fire – forget it! We are incapable of a month of passion (even just the one, but sweet, devastating, and luring us towards madness), or even of a passionate break-up to shake our whole organism to the core even though it is obvious that this is the end, so let’s end with a burst of passion. As an experiment, just try suggesting to your gentleman friend parting at the peak of your amorous relations. He will shy away in horror. For us, breaking up means divorce and walking out with all our belongings and all the ancient dust which has settled on them.
Our pro-Soviet love is nothing but rummaging around in ourselves, not a desire to take from our partner every last drop of the happiness he can give, even if these are our final hours together, and to give him in return the same, even though we know the pillow will be empty tomorrow. Passion Russian-style is a trip from A to B. At A we kiss, and at B we saw away at the bed-frame. It is great good fortune if the trip is direct, and awful if the path is tortuous, which it all too often is. But why go on? As if we don’t already know this only too well.
Perhaps the accommodation shortage has put paid to our scope for passion. There’s no doubt it can have that effect, but passion is not only about square metres of floor space, and it is vital not to be dwelling on how they might be divided if something goes wrong. Passion does undeniably require money, and our men have withered decade after decade because they have been penniless. Even when recently some of them have become rich, they have rushed away from their wives to prostitutes or other readily available women, to strip clubs and massage parlours – anywhere, just as long as they don’t have to prove themselves.
These last years have been a complete disaster for passion. Following in the footsteps of teenagers and racketeers, the rest of society has even adopted the terminology “screwing.” Anybody who has a relationship is “screwing,” and that is how they and those around them refer to it. [The poet] Sergey Yesenin claimed elegiacally “not to regret, invoke the past, or shed a tear.” Neither do modern couples in Russia – instead they screw. Bankers screw, their children screw, retired engineers screw, homeless people screw, and so do musicians and poets. Can we be bothered with the storms of passion, the paroxysms of a last farewell, our knees giving way at a chance meeting? Well, no, actually we can’t. A quick screw is all we need. If you should regrettably find yourself engulfed by passion, the put-down of the Russian male, long adept at screwing, will be like a bucket of cold water: “Don’t put me in a difficult situation. For heaven’s sake, we are grown-ups.”
In our culture you must either control or conceal your passion, and then people will find their way to you. It makes you sick! You are expected to be modest, not to have pretensions, not to give yourself airs, not to be different … and then you will be graced by happiness “just when you least expect it.” What nonsense! What garbage! What a pathetic excuse for promiscuity! You should be emotionally open only at home, and then only if