Sometimes life is like a Russian novel. More so, the more I read Russian novels. I love Russia, at least as it was before the Soviets. There's a sense of greatness about it. Of indelible sacrifice, as though every minute is subject to the painful weight of a world on its back. I don't think anyone is so aware of the possibilities of humanity than the Russian authors. America is content with the thaumaturgy and fantasia that come with wealth and power. Russia looks on the same and sees choices like charity or greed, duty or squander, an overwhelming responsibility to be great that crushes most humans and grinds them flat. There are highs and lows in Russia. Palaces and poverty. Drunkenness or starvation.
They say, I think, or I say anyway, that the class system exists to serve the middle class. The proletariat live difficult and unfulfilled lives, struggling with all there worth to climb out of their problems, reach elsewhere. The upper class are fulfilled to a point of excess, completely out of control in that they have nothing to live for and nowhere to go unless they go about assigning some arbitrary task to themselves, be it governance of others or personal pleasure.
And in the middle we work. We see that we are capable of worse and capable of better. The middle is the place to be if you're looking for meaning in life.
Russia has no notion of the middle class. I think that might be a part of it. Everything is desperate, everything greater and more polar by the elimination of that middle ground. I think when you're cold and starving the idea of owning something like a caftan or a horse becomes ridiculous, not even something to desire. And when you have an estate and a title and an inheritance, the idea of suffering becomes ridiculous. Princes can go about the work of the serfs effortlessly and enjoy doing so, because work and life and living are just an amusing sort of game.
So wherever you stand, it's ridiculous. Why not fall in love in a heartbeat? Why not fall out of it the very next moment? Why not engage in some trivial cruelty just to see what happens by it? Why not bet your last copek? What's one more days bread, if tomorrow you will have to go without? Let go of any prospect of salvation, save some time. If you are to be destitute, if you have to reach that point, why wait?
The material does not matter. That's what I see in all this. The rich get poorer, and the poor get poorer. People die, even. But not from hunger. From nihilism. From madness, or chance. And it is these things that are the true stage in the lives of myself and all the Natashas and Raskolnicovs and Bezuhovs. Life isn't a struggle for independence or security or peace, so why bother? It's a struggle to stay on the raft when the wind is blowing you turvy and you can't find anything to live for and everything seems stupid and cruel and falls to pieces. It's about holding on to your integrity when you're the only one who seems to have a use for it. It's about being a witness, an observer, without destroying the experiment by the act of observation.
And I'm starting to learn that it's not Russia. Russia's just a place that happened to notice these things, but they exist everywhere. Up in a tree by lonely parking lot, in crowded cafes, in small and fettered lodgings. There are endless moments when a couch or a bed takes on the qualities of that raft, at once becoming a trap and a safe haven, and I lie there contemplating everything beyond the couch, not daring to touch it because I'm not a fish and the ocean isn't made for me. So I'll sit there brooding, at once very large and very small, and wrestle with the notion of greatness, trying to reconnect with the part of me that writes... because writing is like turning that raft into a spaceship. Why swim? Why bother? You'll never reach land. You have to make your own world. That's what it's all about, really. The ability to acknowledge that though the world may be a tiamatian crazy mess, it need not be your mess. You can pick yourself up, set a world aside, do some good, love. Those who do so are the true heroes of Russian prose.
