FRIENDS AND FAMILY
Mikhail Epstein
From out of the dim past of our school years many of us can still recall the tenders tears shed by a troop of Cossacks as they listened to Taras Bulba's ringing speech on the subject of comradeship. No, he told them, there is no bond more sacred than that of friendship; and nowhere are the bonds of male friendship stronger than in Russia, where they are capable of rudely bursting the bonds of maternal and conjugal love.
In America this kind of emotional statement could only be understand in one way: as an expression of either the author's or his protagonist's latent homosexuality. In proof of this thesis, they would offer up the following picturesque scene of Gogolian comradeship: "And here and there it could be seen that a Cossack had fallen to the ground. One of them, embracing a fellow, would be overcome with emotion and even tears, and together they would fall. There was a whole pile of them, lying this way . . ." Friendship of this kind, whether among men or women, is a manifestation of homosexuality, and is always to be interpreted as such.
As a general rule, there is a greater difference between bachelorhood and married life in America than in Russia. In youth, monosexual grouping is more prevalent in America than in Russia; in adulthood, there is comparatively less of it in America than in Russia. For instance, while American children are grouped into troops of Boy and Girl Scouts, in Russia both genders are included in a single organization. At the universities men and women are divided into fraternities and sororities, for which there is no analogy in Russia. Often these fraternity and sorority members live together and organize their social and recreational activity within the context of the sorority or fraternity. There are even male and female only colleges and universities, as well as single-sex schools, clubs. etc.
In America, after marriage, the customs associated with bachelorhood give way to the more stable regimen of family life. At this stage, friendships between men alone or women alone are often interpreted as an expression of sexual preference. Instead, as a general rule, spouses are supposed to socialize as a household. As a result, family friendships are formed, in which the value of the family is given priority over the value of friendship alone. If husband and wife really constitute a single flesh, then this two-sexed being should make friends with similar beings: couple to couple.
These relationships are the source of those well-documented excesses when a bond of friendship between couples becomes a bond of love. Instead of deceiving one's spouse, instead of lying and equivocating, isn't it better to go to the rendezvous as a couple, sharing the sin of adultery with each other and the other couple in an amicable, even family way? The clearest sign of an unhappy family is when the husband sets out after dinner to lift a few cold ones with his friends, while the wife stays home to unburden her soul to her dearest girlfriend.
It makes one stop and think: where does this Russian tradition of friendship really come from? Why do the men huddle together in packs, with their drinks, noise, and high spirits; and why do the women gather in intimate sisterhoods, chirping affectionately and mournfully cooing? Why do both sides seem to prefer a monosexual milieu to the comforts of marriage? Is there perhaps a secret homosexual component to Russian civilization? Clearly Russians have greater attachment to principles associated with the army than with family. How fruitful can a civilization be that produces men and women who prefer to spend their time apart, creating close ties only within "their own circle"?
This is not to say that homosexuality is depraved — God forbid that homosexual love be ill spoken of in American society, which is so exceptionally tolerant of the rights of minorities and intolerant of the violent claims of the majority. Indeed in America, homosexuals and lesbians, although a minority group, benefit from a general societal acknowledgment of their special spiritual needs.
The opposite obtains in Russia. As a physiological phenomenon, homosexuality, when not prosecuted with all the severity of the criminal law, benefits from no societal sympathy. For example, homosexual marriages are not recognized by law, homosexuals can not adopt children, etc. Yet at the same time Russian society, so suspicious of physical homosexuality, is itself under the sway of social homosexuality, which rather successfully breaks up the very marriages whose moral uprightness is a powerful protection against any and all kinds of sexual heresies and experimentation.
Women, holding each other at the waist, whispering secrets to each other that they would never have revealed to their husbands . . . Men, abandoning the family hearth in order to join up with drinking buddies, happily inhaling the strong odors from their comrades' libations . . . As opposed to physiological homosexuality, social homosexuality is not confined to a minority group — it is inherent in Soviet society as such, which is like an enormous army marching under the banner of great ideas: men concentrating on field organization, women on transport. It could also be compared to life in a concentration camp, where the men's barracks are separated from the women's by a wall and a watch tower. Naturally, in a concentration camp, as in the army, brief meetings of the sexes are allowed; but the essential aspects of men's and women's lives take place separately; for men in the trenches with the boys, for women in the kitchen with the girls.
These brief meetings, after which men and women go their separate ways, are what Soviet family life is all about. Sitting side by side with one's wife is certainly okay — but in the words of Gogol's epic hero Taras, "a Cossack isn't in this world just to bother with dames . . . " The outward pull is irrepressible: men need their card and chess games, their sports clubs and party meetings, they need to gather in loud and drunken groups, they need to take fishing trips. And the women need to be left behind, at home: they need to be rid of their husbands so their girlfriends can come by to offer a shoulder to cry on and a sympathetic ear. In America this only happens when a family has actually broken up. In the Soviet Union, by contrast, the separation into male and female groups is a way of preserving the family: by so doing the family is not thrown upon itself, threatening it with destruction because of the different psychological make-up of the sexes.
This is why life is so difficult for Russians in America — there's no one to make friends with, everything's family family and more family. Where is one to go, where to escape to, when everyone takes refuge inside their own family? And when families do socialize, is it really possible to unburden oneself, sharing sometimes crude secrets in the presence of one's own spouse? Between families all the talk is of the weather, movies, sexless intercourse.
If you dare cross the border with an American, if you go beyond chit-chat, baring your soul even a little, in all likelihood your American interlocutor will shun you. Why are you forcing your private property, your inner world, on him? Do you want something in exchange for it? Or are you offering yourself as a sexual partner? This sharing of one's spiritual property, this collective Russian desire for a heart-to-heart talk, is not part of American life and is only acceptable between spouses.
So there, in the middle of some Michigan or Oklahoma, sits a native of Russia, with no idea of what to do with his soul. With whom can he communicate, apart from his wife (and with her everything has already been said)? The irresponsible joys of boozing, and the sweet perfume of nomadic freedom, which Russia has somehow preserved in spite of compulsory domestic passports, is simply lacking in America. It is now, for the first time, that the Russian understands what a settled civilization entails. It is no accident that in Frederich Engel's classic text, "On the Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State," these three concepts are placed side by side. The family is a form of private property; and where family feeling is lacking we find collective property, while the state becomes nothing more than a thief in judicial robes. Of course this condition has its own charm: wandering the streets with one's comrades, carousing and bumming like a remnant of the Golden Horde or the Zaporozhian Cossacks.
Of course, it was not under Soviet rule but much earlier, in the Tartar steppes and Russian countryside, that this monosexual preference first took hold. Men with men, and women with women; and God forbid that the former become effeminate or the latter demand equality. It was only a step from here to reach Bolshevik asceticism, which is not of the monastic or Christian type, but is indeed, at least in part, an expression of elemental male homosexuality. "If you spend the night with a bitch, when you wake in the morning you'll be one." And it is at this point that proud Stenka Razin rids himself of his shame, tossing his Persian princess into mother Volga, so that he can once more become part of the circle of men.[1] In the same way, the Bolshevik revolutionaries tossed their own families and "weak" men into their own kind of Volga, in order to avoid appearing effeminate and becoming the butt of their comrades' scorn. Similarly, male adolescents continue to gather in packs to snigger at passing girls. At this stage of sexual development, having passed childhood's undifferentiated sexuality but not yet reached adult sexual relations, both girls and boys travel in packs.
There are several possible explanations for this tradition: the retarded state of country life in general; the primitive division of labor, in which men's and women's work was strictly delineated; and the advance of history itself, in which revolutions and military-strategic priorities separated men from women. Nevertheless, the sad truth remains: a solid family structure, with its ties of friendship, never took shape in Soviet society. Friendship led away from family.
As is well known, the family is society's primary unit. In this light, one can ask: how in the world can a society progress when every step of its development brings the destruction of this primary unit? If it constantly separates the strong from the fair sex, sending the former to the front-line trenches, the latter providing rearguard support, then of course the one will be identified with the acrid smell of cigarette smoke, and the other with oatmeal and cabbage soup: one's comrades will become dearer than the company of a wife, and a girlfriend's confidences dearer than a husband's.
According to psychoanalysis, there is potential homosexuality in every human being. In the former Soviet Union, this potential is unleashed by society itself, which is as insatiable in its homosexual appetites as it is implacable in its will to suppress these appetites in each of its individual members.
It should thus come as no surprise that sterility has become the lot of this socially monosexual society. Material, spiritual, economic, and historical: it is a sterility that comes in all imaginable forms. Suppressing a potentially fruitful family eros, it encourages all kinds of others: class, national, military, party, sport, which are all distinguished by their monosexual character, and which in ancient times was associated with sodomy.
Indeed, isn't there a kind of sodomistic intent underlying those all too familiar heroes of Gogol and Gorky, who condemn the ignoble, Philistine way of life, sanctifying instead the wanton debauchery of a life with one's comrades? Yet where the light of the family hearth goes out, the pillar of fire that reduced Sodom and Gomorra to ashes suddenly bursts into flame.
March 1991
Trans. Thomas Epstein
[1] Razin led a revolt of Don Cossacks against the Russian government in 1670-71. The episode to which Epstein refers is not apocryphal. The quote is from a Russian folk song.