Urban Nomadism
Mikhail Epstein
Usually
the line ends in shopping, which leads to a shift in spatial orientation.
Horizontal movement gives way to gravitational verticals, to being burdened by
booty. The bag (sumka) is the most important appurtenance of Soviet
urban nomadism. We walk loaded down by our purchases, by groceries, by all that
booty which, having procured by hunters' ruses, we then lug home. Our hands are
outstretched, at attention, because they are weighed down by edible cargo. Look
at the evening throng in the city--how high and aloof the faces and shoulders
float by. Hands, which usually shroud the human figure in a haze of gestures,
are here eternally lowered and drawn out, like those of porters. They do not
gesticulate, signal, or associate--they carry. They are directed not toward the
social, horizontal plane of communication, but toward the physical, vertical
plane of gravitation.
The
bag is a sign of our historical destitution and nomadism. In olden times bags
were carried by beggars, vagrants, exiles, postmen, soldiers, hunters
(according to Dal's dictionary[i]),
i.e. people outside the normal way of life. The bag was an appurtenance of
social misfits and a few nomadic professions. Now it is general to all strata
of society. The spirit of nomadism has spread so widely throughout contemporary
life, that the bag has appeared in almost everyone's hands. We are all beggars
carrying our own property with us; hunters wandering through the city in search
of rare booty; soldiers making camp in foreign localities (lines in stalls and
shops)... Humans have become marsupials (sumchatye zhivotnye), bearing on themselves the future contents
of their own stomachs.
And
after all, how could one overcome the space between store and home if not with
the help of the bag full of groceries? We are hardly aware of how much our
Soviet cities, having extended paths of communication widely but not provided
people with private means of conveyance--automobiles--gave rise to the spirit
of nomadism within the urban environment, which would seem to exclude it
entirely. Before, workers and domestics, dressed in special clothing, went from
store to home with large sacks, or carried them by horses. Now these bags are
brought out more often, almost every day (it's impossible to get a month-long
supply of foods), and not in soiled aprons, but in the same official clothes
one wears to the office and the theater. We are not struck by this unnatural
confusion of styles in the women floating past us: a light, fluttering
raincoat, a dress with frills and lace--and a bag with a load such as a
religious wanderer would take on a distant pilgrimage. Here is a genuine
mixture of the European and the Asiatic: the appearance of a fashion-plate
weighed down by her bags—a regular St. Basil's Cathedral. In general, the
function of carrying bags in Russia is largely entrusted to women, perhaps
because they are believed to be more accustomed to "carrying" by
nature: the inflated, "pregnant" womb of the bag seems to enter into
the series of their natural duties toward the husband and society.
In
these bags circulating through the city, there is something undisguisedly
rapacious and crudely materialistic. It is as if one's internal organs have
crept out onto the surface and are now being held out with one's own hands. One
carries a bag on the street like one's own stomach turned inside out. The
internal and external strangely interrupt one another in the appearance of the
Soviet: here he is, dressed respectably, even excessively muffled and tucked in
from all sides against the attacks of frost--and suddenly this wide opening of
a womb, with bulges of milk packets and pink flashes of sausage. Compared to
the Westerner, who dresses more freely, the Soviet is doubly distinguished: he
wraps up excessively what could be exposed, and exposes excessively what ought
to be concealed. Tightly hemmed in his social coverings and bared in his
physiological needs. Unfree in one, unduly relaxed in the other.
The
very concept of "the bag," [sumka, suma] comes from the
packs with which animals used to be loaded (from the German soum, which
meant "the load of a beast of burden"). These packs and wineskins
were fashioned specifically from the capacious skins of slaughtered animals,
most often from their stomachs. Thus the bag by its origin is also a stomach,
but one that no longer devours and digests--instead, it carries that which
other stomachs will digest. The origin of the bag corresponds to its destiny.
Here is the Soviet citizen's hungry belly, which shoppers are doomed to lug
along with him, hurriedly cramming it with the offal he has stumbled upon.
Transl.
by Jeffrey Karlsen