The Path to Gertrude Stein in Contemporary Post-Soviet Culture

I

There are at least two paths leading to Gertrude Stein. One is the physical passage from the apartment to the building where her books are stored and brought to you at your request. The daily route to the library.

Should it at all be mentioned? I think it should. Because the route itself has turned into a text, if you like, into a kind of introduction. Without reading it (and each time I realize myself as reading it—at one point or another) no further reading takes place, perhaps no further reading is possible. So, each time I start moving toward Gertrude Stein. I think she would have liked the inclination.

How do I move? I move through signs and fragments of a peculiar culture. Is it indeed post-Soviet? This I doubt. I wouldn’t know where exactly the movement begins—each time at an arbitrary point of departure. For instance, “We’ll bury you,” says a bag held by a young man in the subway. The phrase is in English. How do I place it? There is another inscription on the same bag: “Hell raisers.” It must be helpful—for the one who knows. I try to guess—rock? Horror movies? Is it the famous quotation so reminiscent of the Kruschev thaw, despite its chilling overtones? And as such does it return to where it belongs; where it belongs no more? Who is the author? Are not the mysterious “Hell raisers” and their threat more real than the man who once was so vital to Soviet history—quite a character, one would say. Indeed, no more than a character now.

I am almost completely carried away by this confusion when suddenly my attention is caught again—this time by images of hyperhealthy men with recognizable faces. Models of body-building and machismo for Russia. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, of course. Was American culture, American mass culture, so close in those days to Gertrude Stein in Paris as it is now to Russians in Moscow? I never stop wondering.

When I am again in the street I am swept by a wave of loud music, Soviet rock—I still prefer saying “Soviet.” Anyway, this game of names, does it have any meaning? Apparently it does; be careful with names, those could be the words of Gertrude Stein. What do they sing, though? The music is so overwhelmingly loud that I cannot make it out. What comes to my mind by way of association is the face and posture of a popular rap singer Bogdan Titomir, his (And I have difficulties with the translation. How would I render this line to my foreign friends, remaining faithful to the principle of translation, to the idiom, in the terminology of Jacques Derrida? But the idiom has already been transplanted; there is a clash of idioms, a hybrid idiom, you can call it post-Soviet, if you like. So I try to translate: “Hey, , take a look at me . . .,” but then, of course, I would have to explain what “ ” means. And again I wonder.)

But the street is too lively, too imposing to let you alone. Too visually aggressive. I see a line of buildings being repaired—since the time Walter Benjamin was here, no doubt. I am struck by the quality of repair work in general; which today is either perfect or hopeless. Mostly hopeless. The way it is done, it can never be recognized as finished. By this poor performance it becomes everlasting and total. Total within a given fragment of whatever is closed for repairs. When the myth of the Soviet Union was still relatively intact, it allowed for much less visible disintegration; pieces were glued together even when the whole was ostensibly falling apart. Now the cracks are much more discernable; cracks, seams, ruptures are in fact the fabric of contemporary Soviet life (I still cling to the tag “Soviet”—maybe, out of nostalgia).

Today (or better: once) I was so impatient to begin—writing and reading—that I forgot to take the right pen with me to the reading room...