Mikhail Epstein
Acceptance speech for the “Liberty” prize (2000)[1]
Russian and American cultures were for a long time perceived as polar opposites, based on incompatible ideas: collectivism versus individualism, equality versus freedom, sobornost’ versus privacy. In order to understand ourselves we must be able to detect the oxymoron embedded in the very phrase “Russian-American culture”— something like “white crow” or “hot snow.” We Russian Americans find ourselves at a vanishing point, where opposites intersect, and we must confront it over and over again in our experience and in our creativity. The magnetic field that is Russian-American culture is supercharged with the very same intellectual and emotional contradictions which not so long ago made these cultures enemies and rivals.
This then, at least in latent form, is a great culture that cannot be completely contained either by the American or Russian tradition but rather belongs to some fantastic culture of the future, something like the one depicted by Nabokov in his novel Ada. Russian-American culture cannot be reduced to its separate component parts but instead outstrips them, like the crown of the Indo-European tree whose topmost branches, having separated from the trunk long ago, will entwine once more, recognizing their kinship in the same confused way as the kinship between the Russian word “sam” and the English word “same” can be discerned. United at their deepest roots, these two cultures thus have the potential to be reunited in their upper shoots and branches, and this Russian-American culture might prove to be a precursor and prototype of a future cultural unity.
When I think of a Russian-American I imagine a kind of intellectual and emotional breadth that might combine in itself the analytic subtlety and practicality of the American mind with the synthetic tendencies and mystical talent of the Russian soul — a combination of Russian culture’s dreamy melancholy, its heartfelt longings and bright sadness, with American culture’s courageous optimism, its sympathetic and active nature, and its faith in itself and others.
Dostoevsky's words come to mind in this regard: "...man is broad, even too broad, I would have narrowed him.” However, the man whom I have in mind, this Ameruss, is even broader than Dostoevsky's because here not only God and the Devil struggle within the heart, as they do in the hearts of all people, but because of differing conceptions of the very struggle between God and Devil. In the Ameruss the inherent duality of human nature is multiplied by the differing cultural components constituting this type.
From the American point of view, the source of greatest evil lies in the gap between ends and means. Here the dream itself is never doubted: the dangers arise only in the process of its realization. But if the necessary effort is made, the typical American dream becomes the all too typical American success story. As Americans see it, Russian history is marred by laziness, passivity, fatalism, and inadequate individual initiative.
From the Russian point of view, by contrast, the great danger lies in the very nature of the dream. The worst thing that can happen to a utopia is that it come true. Therefore, the true moral danger lies in the very confidence that man in his pride has in himself: his belief that whatever he wills will happen. The experience of Russian history is more ironic. Here a hidden demon perverts the realization of sacred human aims. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
Russia values generosity, breadth, openness, companionship, daring, and selflessness. The list of American virtues is different: punctuality, reliability, integrity, efficiency, friendliness, tolerance, and courage. With their two eyes, Amerussians are capable of seeing the world in relief. But nothing is without its danger: when the superpositioning of views fails, cultural “cross-eyedness” or double-vision can result, causing bicultural dizziness and nausea. The world is perceived volumetrically – but at the same time it appears doubled, swimming before the eyes. It has not one but two centers, its shape is not circular but elliptical, resulting in a double overload.
II
It is especially important to me
that this prize is named for the word “Liberty,” which in Russian is “Svoboda.”
In Russian this word ”svoboda,” is etymologically related to the
word for possession or ownership (“sobstvennost”) and is also linked to the
words for ”one’s own”(svoi),
“particular” or ”individual” (osobyi),
and “to be oneself”(byt’ soboy).
Only a crazed ideology could have conceived of freedom as
liberation from possession, as
deprivation of the right to possess: arriving in America, we simultaneously
gained the right to private property and a taste for political freedom. Today,
however, I would like to talk about a different kind of freedom, the freedom of
language and culture, especially because the English word ”liberty” sounds very
similar to the Latin word, liber, which
means book.
Just as political freedom presupposes the right to cross the border of one’s country, so does linguistic and cultural freedom presuppose the right to cross the border of one’s language and culture. Historically speaking, the vast majority of people have remained prisoners of their native language, and the better they speak this language the higher they raise the walls of their prison, reproducing those linguistic and lexical conventions, structural limits and prejudices which their native language and surrounding culture have forced upon them.
It is said that the constraints of monolingualism did not prevent the writing of any of the great works of Russian literature. But is this really the case? Is it by mere accident that the greatest works of Russian literature were authored by people who spoke at least two languages? Bilingualism is without doubt a factor in intellectual liberation; without knowing another language it is impossible really to know one’s own, just as it is impossible to think adequately from one side of the brain, to hear the sounds of the world with only one ear, to see all the colors of the world with only one eye. As long as Muscovy was strictly monolingual, locked in Russian, there was no great Russian literature. This literature arose only with the reforms of Peter the Great, which brought with it the study of foreign languages, and through which the Russian language itself achieved clarity, self-consciousness, and greater breadth. Pushkin, Tiutchev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky made use of all the advantages of their Franco-Russian bilingualism, just as Nabokov and Brodsky exploited their Anglo-Russian bilingualism. As long as we do not know another language, we are under the exclusive power of our native tongue and can neither master it nor really speak it — rather it speaks us, unconsciously imposing its rules and rituals on us. Linguistic freedom is the freedom to pick the language appropriate to the expression of the thought; it is above all the freedom to think the same things in two languages, that is to say to think stereometrically.
When we stand on the border between two cultures it is like going from monaural to stereo: it is seeing one culture with the eyes of another, it is seeing all things with two eyes. The effect of bilingualism is akin to that of stereo music or stereoscopic film: sound and image suddenly acquire a kind of wondrous intensity. This is because each organ of perception has its own projection of the object which, when combined, produces multi-dimensionality. Just as we are endowed with paired sense organs in order to receive full physical perception of an object, so each of us has the ability to master at least two languages in order to allow a full, “binocular” perception of thought.
Perhaps the future of human communication lies in stereo-textuality — that is, when languages will not be expected to replace but to supplement each other. Instead of mere trans-lation, instead of the search for equivalents, there will be the activity of connecting and differentiating languages to express a single thought, a transformative linguistic process that will reveal new meanings. This super-posing of texts of different languages, this stereo-text will produce a more striking, stratified, and deeper image of a single complex of ideas.
Thus, as we stand at the verge of a new century, freedom seems inseparable from bilingualism and biculturalism. I will remind you that the Statue of Liberty is not located in the interior of the United States: neither in the forests of New England nor the plains of the Mid-West. She is located on a border, on a small island in New York harbor, facing those arriving from the ocean. It is indeed not the local inhabitants but the newcomers, the wanderers, foreigners and voyagers who are given the right to look Lady Liberty in the eyes.
3
We should all be grateful to America for making us bilingual — or at least for giving us one and a half languages. At the same time, we cannot help but be concerned about the linguistic fate of America itself: thanks to the very worldwide triumph of English, Americans are showing a marked decrease in their own interest in foreign languages. As a university professor, I have had the unhappy experience of observing a marked decline in interest in the Russian language. Why bother wasting enormous amounts of time only to speak bad Russian when you can go to Russia and communicate with everyone you need to — businessmen, scientists, politicians — in good English? Indeed, thanks to the global spread of English, not only Slavic but all departments of foreign language and culture —with the exception of Spanish — have seen a decline in their significance to the university.
When students ask me why they should study foreign languages, I answer: in order to know English. Why study Russian literature? To better understand American literature. Without an understanding of what is alien it is impossible to know what is one’s own — there is no feeling for the borders, no ability to look at oneself from another point of view. As a rule, it is only when our students begin to study a foreign language that they begin really to think about sentence structure and parts of speech. When I started teaching Pushkin I thought the students would have an easier time understanding him through a comparison with Byron; but then I found out that they didn’t know who Byron was and was forced in the end to explain Byron through a comparison with Pushkin.
No matter where one enters the sea of knowledge, one must go all the way, swim to the other shore, that is to say to think comparatively, in the play of contrast and chiaroscuro. We cannot know ourselves if we do not know others. In the ten years since my emigration to the United States I have learned almost as much about Russia as I learned during my forty years of life in Russia. And this has nothing do with having more possibilities here to study Russia — rather, it is because everything I previously experienced in Russia was transformed into a knowledge of Russia via a comparison with another culture. It was as if before then, I only had half the pieces of the puzzle.
But America, while presenting us with the possibilities of bilingualism, is herself less and less inclined to study foreign languages. This is because for Americans there no longer seems any need to: the whole world speaks English. On the surface it would seem that we others have good reason to envy native English-speakers: almost anywhere they go in the civilized world, they can feel at home. And yet, since the English language seems now to belong equally to everyone, the native speaker finds him or herself deprived of it. Everyone has English — and they also have something that is their own, able to provide deeper, more sacred, and perhaps even conspiratorial communication. For native English speakers there’s only English. They speak contemporary esperanto— but they are without a more intimate, so to speak private language. Native English speakers gave away their language without receiving one in exchange. Germans, Swedes, Japanese, Indians, all have two languages: the English speakers have only one.
As we know, the Soviet Union, which managed to cover nearly half the globe, perished because of its own enclosedness: it knew nothing but itself, it did not allow entry to any outside views, and this led to stagnation and death. Let us hope that it not be America’s fate to become such a boundlessly one-dimensional, self-satisfied civilization. In a world that is quickly becoming bilingual, the great danger for the United States and other English-speaking countries is that they will remain monolingual. One-eyed in a world of double vision. If the world’s remaining superpower can still produce some good for the world’s political order, then the world’s only superlanguage may perhaps be good for everyone except its native speakers, since it is weakening the coding, interpretive powers of reason. In order to avoid this danger, the United Sates needs to study foreign languages at the same rate as English is spreading around the world. If the reaction is not equal to the action, America will become — in terms of its language and thus in its ability to think — one of the 21st century’s backward nations. At present America is saved by its willingness to assimilate the bearers of other languages into itself, allowing them to become part of American culture without requiring that they give up the language and culture they brought with them.
During the cold war, interest in Russia revolved around ideas of political competition. Now, however, Russia no longer enjoys the status of a military superpower; consequently, there has been an inevitable reduction in the armies of Slavists and Sovietologists — to the point at which the inherent elasticity of Russian culture has begun to resist this reduction. A language that produces nothing worth reading will not be read. The only way to attract readers, and the only hope for glory of the Russian language in the 21st century, is via products of culture and science. The Russian mind likes to go against the grain, to occupy a space between established disciplines. And indeed contemporary science — where discoveries are made at the crossroads of specializations, and where there is a growing demand for integral knowledge, a “theory of everything” — needs just such an approach. Contemporary science needs a way of thinking that includes self-irony, that acknowledges the limits of rationality and is willing to try to introduce more intuitive, supple models into the system of knowledge. Russians play a leading role in two of the most important areas of contemporary science: chaos and complexity theory. Thus it is not only in Russia — but in world economics, politics, culture, and language — that there exists a vacuum greedily sucking up everything American. And in America, one could say, there is a ‘vacancy’ for those aspects of Russian scientific-cultural activity that require the three “i”s: intuition, irony, improvisation.
The Russian language in America need not be seen as an island, lapped on all sides by waves of foreign speech. Rather it might be conceived as a bridge between two cultures, and moreover one of the mirrors in which America can see herself. It is this modest but irreplaceable role — that of mirror bearer — that I would like to see us play in America. Let this mirror be made of the shards of another great cultural world, still reflecting another earth and another heaven.
4
At the same historic moment that the “iron curtain” fell, and the Soviet Union disintegrated, another remarkable event occurred: we ceased being fugitives. Suddenly we were settled, no longer nomads with our suitcases always packed and at the ready — and this was precisely because now we could return. Suddenly it became clear that we weren’t from here or there; we were a completely different kind of Russian, and a different kind of American, not like the one or the other. We were not a country within a country but a fresh and alien way of seeing the world, we were like newborns — a personified metaphor, a transfer of meaning, “Amerussia”: a unique cultural community that may grow or may disappear in the next two or three generations.
The
encounter of Russia and America might possibly create one of the brightest
spots on earth, one of the sharpest and most distinct cultural outcroppings.
Never had I seen such bright colors as during my first years in America.
America seemed to play, to froth and gleam against the backdrop of that faded,
dreary color to which my eyes had grown accustomed after forty years in the
Soviet Union. No native-born American can see the radiant, laved, crystal-clear
rainbow of colors that America presents to a visitor from the East. Yet after a few years had passed Russia herself
began to appear in my memory and imagination in marvelous colors that I had
never noticed when I lived there.
Never did life seem so bright to me as during this period of the visual
play between the two cultures, when one layer of experience — the Russian — was
superimposed in all its contrast on the other, the American. Only outside of
Russia, only far from Russia could it be seen as Gogol saw it:” Ohh! What a shining, wondrous yonder, unknown to the
world. Rus!” What would our souls be if Russia were without Gogol’s swirling
colors, his whirlwind of lines, his modulated sounds — and to think that they
came to him on the other side of Europe, in Rome, where he described his
“bird-troika” Russia.
The words “emigration” and “diaspora” are simply to dull to express what a person experiences at the border of two cultures. Better to recall Tiutchev’s lines:
O, my prophetic soul!
O, heart filled with disquiet
O, how you beat on the threshold
Of two realities!
It is this “threshold of two realities” that best describes our condition of being between two worlds.
Nina Berberova once wrote: “I am not in exile — I am on a mission.” What she meant by this was that emigration ought not to be a condition in which the past is looked upon in bitterness but the future in hope: the emigrant brings to the new world an important message from the old, one of anticipation and instruction. It seems to me, however, that the word ”mission” no longer completely corresponds to the condition of the contemporary “Ameruss,” the Russian-American. The terms “exile” and “mission” correlate us— both positively and negatively — with our former homeland, but for us our new homeland is equally significant, and doubly significant is that we belong to both countries, to the very strangeness of our position between the two.
Exile and mission imply a unidirectional movement from one point to another. Now, when both directions are open to us, when we can move back and forth freely between here and there, what becomes essential is the intensity of our experience on the threshold between two cultures, casting shadows on each other and providing a double rhythm, a double coloration and contrast to our existence. This might be called a doubled life: on the threshold of two realities that doubly sharpen all our experiences of color, sound, smell, voice, and language. Life, as the poet Alexandr Blok wrote, seems “strange and wrapped in a colored haze.” In his essay “Art as Device,” Viktor Shklovsky wrote that the aim of art is to shake our perceptions out of their habitual automatism, to interrupt the inertia of existence, to reveal the strangeness of what is considered normal. “Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife and the fear of war. ‘If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been’ (L. Tolstoy). Art exists in order to return a feeling for life: it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.”[2]
This is exactly the purpose of our strange double life , and in this it is similar to art: it defamiliarizes things and forces us to see them again as if for the first time. Our foreignness is a form of defamiliarization, it is life abroad itself as device. Our foreignness is potentially a means of renovating both languages, to think into them things that have never been before—just as Nabokov thought Russian into the English language, and as Brodsky thought English into Russian. This partial belonging to another culture can free us from those ideés fixes, mythological complexes, psychological manias and phobias, which we inevitably assimilate from our native culture and which inhibits its further development. Biculturalism is a way of freeing us from both cultures in order to enter more deeply into each of them. As Mikhail Bakhtin wrote: “ In the realm of culture, outsidedness is a most powerful factor in understanding. It is only in the eyes of another culture that foreign culture reveals itself.... We raise new questions for a foreign culture, ones that it did not raise itself..." [3]
America’s strength, the
source of its marvelous growth, has been its ability to assimilate all kinds of
foreignness; and we, as part of America’s inner foreignness, are a linchpin of
America’s self-knowledge. It is
because we are neither from here or there that we are given the ability to see,
so to speak, for the first time: we see America with Russian eyes, Russia with
American eyes. Automatism is less
of a danger for us than it is for the aborigines of both these cultures because
the habits of one structure are overturned by the unusualness, the strangeness,
of the other. One component of Amerussia drives out the automatism of the
other. Indeed it is not automatism that threatens us so much as does stress, an
over-saturation of contrasts that produces a kind of spiritual hypertension.
Of course such a doubled life brings with it a great risk, because wherever there is multiplication there is also division. The possibility of bilingualism, which we receive at the border of cultures, can easily become half-knowledge of the foreign language coupled with half-oblivion of the native language. We have all seen models of both types: speech whose expressive power is doubled by the crossing of languages, and speech that is halved by jargon and cant, in which both languages are reduced to mere shards as a result of their catastrophic collision. When crossing the border between cultures there is always the danger of getting stuck in a no man’s land where nothing remains from either culture except garbage and detritus.
Division and multiplication are mathematical operations that are both similar and totally different. For us there is always the question of whether we are doubling or halving our cultural property. Is the sum of our belonging to two cultures more or less than one?
No matter how we answer this question we still find ourselves in a zone of great cultural risk: since the stakes are doubled, both potential losses and gains grow. Here the gamut of choices is the widest, the intensity of existence the greatest. The soul, this “inhabitant of two worlds,” has the ability of experiencing both the torment of division in half and the joy of multiplication by two. We are transcendent (inomerny) and excessive (chrezmerny) for both cultures. We are neither in exile nor on a mission — we are searching. We exist in the play and flicker of meanings, we are quotes from one culture embedded in another, we are the bearers of invisible quotation marks. We stand on the threshold of two realities. We are on both sides, we are twice other . . . .
5
At the same time, we are twice ourselves, inhabitants of the most delicate, intimate point of contact between two cultures, where they are full of charm and fascination for each other. In all organisms, not only biological but also cultural, there are two kinds of cells: somatic (nerve, bone, muscle, and other) and sexual. What we traditionally call emigration is in essence a kind of ejaculation, the ejection of cells of one culture into the lap of another, where new organisms are conceived.
According to current theory, the process of transfer and multiplication of units of cultural information, so-called “memes,” is similar to the processes associated with the diffusion of genes. The term “meme” was first proposed by the English zoologist Richard Dawkins, in his best-selling book ”The Selfish Gene”(1976), which has become a classic of contemporary evolution theory.[4] Dawkins has shown that, along with genes as bearers of biological information, there exist bearers of cultural information, which are equally inclined toward independent multiplication and which obey the laws of Darwinian evolution. Dawkins calls these units of cultural memory memes: striving for infinite self-reproduction they use books, songs, shows, political ideologies, the means of mass communication and other media to achieve it. Examples of memes include sayings, slogans, literary plots, visual images, musical motifs, clothes fashions, recipes, mathematical formulas. In effect, all human history can be described as the history of the evolution of these memes, their struggle for survival, their spread, subjugation of minds, their implantation into spiritual and material culture.
Just as human genes are spread via sexual activity, so then must the ”genetics of culture” be spread via erotic activity. This is precisely what the new science of memetics proposes to study. If memetics, which many serious biologists and culturologists are studying today, is not merely a metaphor for genetics, then no less real is the eros of cultural attraction, of memetic penetrations, of informational friction and the thrilling intensity of linguistic and intellectual experience in the zone of contact between cultures.
A so to speak sexual revolution in cultural life has taken place in the 20th century: instead of the previous enclosedness and homogeneity we have energetic encounters, crossings, blendings, impregnations. Sexual cells, called hamets, behave differently than somatic cells: they are “expelled” from one organism and are “sent” to another in order to form new life. We are like comets hurtling from one solar system to another. We are not simply “in exile” and ”on a mission” but in intercourse and conception: we are cells that one country expels from itself in order to conceive new life in the lap of another. That which we call “diaspora” is not so much an independent cultural organism as an orgasm: a function of intercognition and interpenetration of various organisms. The doubled life on whose threshold we stand is the amorous intoxication of two cultures, their joyous spasms — or, in the case of failure, it is the pain of rejection, the incompatibility of two substances.
“Amerussia” is a compound name: it is the name of a passion that unites two great cultures, and it is also the name of a genetic danger . . . It is difficult to predict who or what will be born of it: a genius or a monster, an incarnated utopia or a destructive chimera. However, even the mistakes and losses with which the union of these two cultures is fraught can become a powerful engine of evolution. Migration is the most effective means of evolutionary propagation of cultures, of the creation of new genetic material through informational friction brought about by the transfer of the chromosomes of one culture to another. The very errors that we make — whether systemic, social, professional, career, linguistic, ritual — in the crossing from one culture to another, of the translation of one language to another, can play the role of creative mutations. Migration is cultural mutation, it is the change of hereditary characteristics that results from the reconstructions and destructions in the informational code of both cultures’ senders and receivers. Mutations in nature and migrations in culture are decisive factors in evolution. They lead to the emergence of new species and are the foundation of the mutability in developing systems of life and consciousness.
Culture is like the game of telephone: as a result of the multiplication of errors a new message emerges at the other end. We can’t know whether our former or current fellow countrymen will completely understand or even hear us — perhaps they’ll just distort our message, as usual . . . . However, like a link in a chain of errors, we have the right to the vicissitudes of our doubled life as it passes through a zone of deafness and incomprehension. A great number of errors occur at the routing station of cultural communication between America and Russia: the thunder and lightning it produces is analogous to the interference produced by the jamming of “Radio Liberty” programming beyond the ”Iron Curtain.” But what filters through travels farther, produces a new sound, and the greatest charm of all is that in everything that is said there is unpredictability.
Transl.by Thomas Epstein
[1] The Liberty prize has been
awarded to two laureates yearly since 1999 for an “outstanding contribution to
russo-american culture and the development of cultural relations betwen Russia and
the USA.” The sponsor of the prize is Media Group Continent USA. Its laureates
have been the writer Vassily Aksyonov and the poet Lev Losev, the painters Oleg
Vasil’ev and Vagrich Bakhchanyan, director of the Library of Congress James
Billington, the Russian art collector Norton Dodge and director of the Solomon
Gugenheim Foundation in New York, Thomas Krens.
[2] Shklovskii, Viktor. “Iskusstvo kak priem, “ in O teorii
prozy. Moscow:
Sovietskii Pistael’, 1983, p. 15.
[3] M. M. Bakhtin. Speech
Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern
W. McGee, ed. by Caril Emerson and
Michael Holquist. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1992, p. 7
[4] Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University
Press. 1976.