Of Asparagus and the Bourgeoisie
Mikhail Epstein
There are quite a few words in the Russian language whose meaning a Soviet citizen can not know. For instance, "asparagus," "artichoke," "oysters" . . . These words are deposited somewhere deep in memory, based on readings of Turgenev or Tolstoy, tenderly tormenting the imagination like the ghostly image of an alien and glorious life.
One of the charms of overseas travel is the discovery that these words are not merely poetic rantings but have real meaning, like "apple" and "carrot". In season, any run-of-the-mill American restaurant serves asparagus or artichokes with the same off-handedness as cucumber and cabbage are served in Russia. What's more, it turns out that there's nothing all that special about asparagus, it's just a long, thin grass the taste of which is not particularly exciting.
The charm in this experience lies elsewhere: rolling on the tongue the taste of a word that was previously as incorporeal as spirit. Learning that the word is far tastier than the product it designates. By comparing "asparagus" with asparagus, one understands the infinite fascination of language: word and reality can never be totally linked, the taste of a supernatural delight will always linger in the name. This is a taste that cannot be tested on the tongue — only in the tongue.[1] Words like "apple" or "cucumber" have, by habit, become so identified with their objects that only the language of poetry is capable of reviving them. But "asparagus," which has never before been tasted, is primordially poetic; and it will be poetic once more when, having bitten into its dull husk, you suddenly sense within it the immortal taste of the word itself.
It's a rather different matter with the Soviet lexicon. Many Soviet words are of foreign derivation and designate, or at least claim to, foreign phenomena, such as "bourgeois" and "the bourgeoisie." But when one travels to a foreign country, it is impossible to find anything that corresponds to these words. In the end one comes to the conclusion that the only place a burzhuyi[2] could exist is in the Soviet nation, socialism's homeland. Only here, where the word socialism took hold, was it able to find its precise object.
What indeed does the lewd Soviet sound of this word burzhuyi evoke? "Eat your pineapples, chew your grouse / The end is nearing, you bourgeois louse." It was not without reason that Mayakovsky affirmed that his chastushka[3] was song by the revolutionary masses. If the bourgeois turned out not to be as he was depicted, then what would have justified revolution? This burzhuyi had to be fat and overfed, and the words describing him were to be repeated like an incantation: lying on his stove, he orders around his emaciated workers, hides his money under his pillow, counting and recounting it with his spittle-covered hands. His greed is so great that it causes him to tremble.
In truth, this image expresses nothing more than Russian envy and the poor man's confused dream of unearned wealth. Has a rich man any real reason to "tremble" with greed? Is it not rather the poor person who so trembles, imagining him or herself stroking and counting a pile of money fallen to him he knows not from where? "Chew your grouse." This is the sound of hunger rumbling in an empty stomach, a hunger that conjures up an image of insatiable appetite, a belly that can't be filled.
However, it would seem that in the West there are no—and never were—the kind of people that the word burzhuyi is used to describe. Perhaps in the transition from the feudal economy some former serfs put on bourgeois airs, imagining themselves masters and filling their stomachs with surplus value. In so doing they turned monetary profit into a natural store of fats and carbohydrates. But this phenomenon only arises in a once starving person who finally finds himself rich not only in dream. In lands where there exists a tradition of satiety, people try to eat less, eating not grouses but more healthy foods, such as fruits and vegetables: they eat asparagus.
There are no bourgeois left in the West, at least not in America: there are richer and poorer people. In general, the richer ones work themselves to the bone, while the poorer ones take it a bit easier: lesser earnings means fewer worries. Through the fog of a bleary morning the American class structure was described to me by a man who lives in a wealthy suburb. According to him, the well-off get up and ride the train to work somewhere between seven and eight a.m. The rich leave for work by car at six a.m. The super-rich begin their workday around four a.m.
It thus seems to me that the classic bourgeois type, as seen through Russian eyes and first read of in the works of Balzac and Dickens, can exist today only in Russia. This incipient burzhuyi finds a way to scrape together some initial capital. He trembles with envy at the prospect of his growing wealth. Puts on airs around the poor and lords it over his hired hands. He is a plebeian turned aristocrat. Slave and master in a single person.
Nikolay Chernyshevsky once wrote scornfully: "A nation of slaves! Everywhere you look, slaves." It would seem that the twentieth century has confirmed Chernyshevsky's grim characterization. Yet in truth the Soviet people have inherited many of these social traits from pre-revolutionary Russia. Slaves by nature, we are at the same time masters. Having grown accustomed to taking orders, we also demand that our government work us over while we luxuriate in our sloth.
Have a look at the swift step—one might even call it running—of wealthy and prosperous Westerners as they move through the halls of power. This is "success," from the word "succeed," meaning to happen or terminate according to desire, to accomplish what is attempted or intended, to come next in an order or series. If a bookkeeper from Ryazan caught a glimpse of one those frantically active Wall Street traders, he would immediately think of himself as the true master, in control of his own time. If he wants, he can read; if not, he can do some book keeping; he can even, if he so desires, go out for a walk with an attractive lady. Compared to your average American employee or even proprietor of a business, he truly is a master; but at the same he's a slave, ready to swear to his union leadership that the only purpose of his bookkeeping is to serve society and the people.
Today's Russia, like the Russia of old, is a nation of landowners and serfs, except that today the landowner and serf are embodied in a single person. As a result, we have a new type of slave-master; one who grovels before the state, offering his rear end to be whipped, and yet who at the same time, with arms crossed, pompously expects this same state to present him a plate full of goodies.
And now, apparently, this type of person is at last disappearing, in accordance with the natural law which causes capitalism to rise from feudalism. However, just as our unique form of Soviet feudalism combined masters and slaves in a single person, our newborn capitalism has given rise to a unique kind of bourgeois, combining the rich man and beggar. Hands shaking in fear and greed, this new man rips off the market for millions, just as a poor man would steal a loaf of bread from the baker's shelf. This is the new lumpen-bourgeois, who accumulates more than he produces, and more often makes his living off other people's labor and as a middle man than by creating something new himself. In the West capital is the pure, everyday and combustible energy of muscular exertion: in Russia capital threatens to turn into a thirty-pound spare tire wrapped around the stomach of a criminal boss who has preserved the habits of both slave and master: he both fills his stomach and does nothing.
He is the kind of person who will consume grouses and pineapples exactly as Mayakovsky described it; and he will become an object of class hatred. He will lazily chew on an asparagus tip, completely oblivious to the Turgenevian flavor of this word.
And yet we can do nothing but love this glutton and skinflint, just as the biblical injunction requires of us: Love thy neighbor . . . For he, this primitive accumulator, is our near-term historical future.
June 1991
Transl. Thomas Epstein
[1] As in many Indo-European languages, the Russian words for tongue and language are identical: I am here trying to suggest a remnant of that synonymy in English, "in the mother tongue." (translator's note)
[2] Transliteration of the Russian word for bourgeois. It has a rather oily sound in Russian. (translator's note)
[3] A chastushka is a short, rhymed folk lyric, often sarcastic in nature. (translator's note)