The Provinces

Mikhail Epstein

"The provinces" as a concept comes to us from ancient Rome, where it took shape within the framework of imperial consciousness. A province was a foreign land that had once been independent, possessing its own capital; but, conquered and annexed to the empire, it had received the stewardship of a Roman deputy, and acquired a political and cultural center outside itself, in a distant city and an alien rule. Provinces are located as if not in themselves; they are foreign not to someone or something else, but to themselves, since their own center has been extracted from them and transferred to some other space or time.

When a given epoch struggles as a distant stepping stone to another, great and self-sufficient one, it becomes possible to speak not just of geographical, but also of historical provinciality. These dislocations in provinciality become the object of artistic play in a photomontage "Play" (the late 1970s-early 1980s), by the conceptual artist Eduard Gorokhovsky.[i] The first photograph, which looks as if it has been pulled out of an old album, shows a dignified couple, a man and a woman; arms locked, they reflect a world of self-sufficient serenity, comfort, familial harmony. But in the ensuing photographs it becomes clear how counterfeit, how pitifully exacting this dignity is; it turns out to have been cast away into the provincial past against the background of a more contemporary environment: microphones, a sports pedestal, an advertisement for Aeroflot. It is surprising, however, that this very environment, contaminated by the finely chiseled faces of antiquity, is also imperceptibly displaced in time; it retreats into the distance, displays its exhaustibility, its lack of topicality, as if, having sunk behind the photograph into the solution of time, it were rapidly beginning to yellow, to warp. On the margins of the photograph, a frayed border is suddenly noticeable. Time develops the photograph in reverse; the image begins to decompose and to fade, in the end returning to the film that originally produced it, in order to undergo a series of disembodying metamorphoses, finally to discover at the end its genuine place, amongst an infinite series of holes, where the image, just as if it had been laid with landmines on the threshold of the present, reveals its ultimate provinciality: an old-fashioned remoteness and a neglect of art itself (mimesis, imitation). Before our eyes it curls up and rolls on further away...

Provinciality thus emerges as the organizational pattern of certain structures that remove their center beyond their own boundaries. This center is located in an unknown space, beyond any visible boundary, and at the same time it is somewhere here, on earth, made of the same substance from which the structure was formed. If the center were in some other world--the realm of pure spirit, or God—-then the structure would immediately cease to be provincial, because each of its elements would acquire the potential of unmediated communication with the Center, bypassing everything else from its own depths. The peculiarity of provinciality is shaped precisely by the fact that it is concentrated on the same horizontal plane as the entire surrounding world, in the same spatio-temporal, malleable and ductile continuum. This is why direct communication with this hidden point is impossible, and one must instead pass through all the intermediate links, in each of which a process of retreat from the center is occurring in almost the same measure as the process of approach toward it. Each element, however significantly it approaches the center, carries within itself its own provinciality, which surrounds it, whose borders it is impossible to cross and which undeviatingly moves with it, like the shade of the setting sun.

There exist systems with mobile centers which travel from element to element, so that almost any one of them, while behaving in some sense as a central one, is in another sense peripheral. The provinces are not the same thing as the periphery, which always represents something relative, something that is related to the positioning of a given center at a given time. The cultural periphery can simultaneously be the economic center, the religious center can simultaneously be the political periphery, etc. Provinces are the fixed, immovable, "irrelative" periphery, they correspond to the absolutist qualities of the center. In any structure there are centers and peripheries, but centers and provinces exist only in imperial structures, such as those of ancient China or ancient Rome.

In addition to the preceding, a structure can also have a special dimension: the depth of provinciality, which is determined by how distantly and irrevocably the center has been removed beyond the structure's limits. There are structures that are thoroughly provincial, since their core has been consistently removed from every cell, reigning over the structure as something fundamentally external and foreign. In Russian history, it is not uncommon for even the capital to become provincial, as when a sovereign would transfer his throne to a specially created and/or sparsely populated center. Thus, Ivan the Terrible moved his residence from Moscow to Aleksandrov; Peter the Great went even further, into the north, Petersburg; Paul, from Petersburg to Gatchina.[ii] Russian autocracy is obsessed with the desire to base itself outside its own State, in order to rule this State as if it were provinces, to deprive the centers of self-governance. As a result, even Moscow, and after it Petersburg, became provinces in relation to the eternally slippery, transcendental power of the emperor. As soon as the center would become populated and merge with the substance of national life, becoming even in the smallest degree self-governing, the governing core would withdraw from it anew and transfer itself without, dramatically provincializing those parts of the world that were now rejected, exfoliated from the capital and the throne.

Russian sovereigns preferred to govern their states not as if they had been inherited, which would have compelled them to observe laws, but as if they had been conquered, which untied their hands and increased their personal power. Having conquered the Tatar kingdom and transformed it into Russian provinces, Ivan the Terrible next conquered Moscow and the whole Russian land as zemshchina, symbolizing its foreignness by handing its nominal administration over to the Tatar prince Simeon Bekbulatovich. Russia was continually becoming a province of itself, alienating itself and conquering itself.[iii] It offered up even its own sovereigns as something subject to seizure, to be forcibly annexed. It was ruled by deputies, people not born in the regions they ruled, sent there from without, "foreigners," "usurpers." A native of one guberniia would rule in another—it had to be another. Moreover, this rule by proxy was general not only to lands that had been acquired, but also to lands that had been Russian from time immemorial, thereby presupposing a kind of provinciality that was no longer Roman or even Chinese, but new--a provincialization achieved not through the annexation of external layers, but rather one emanating from the deepest core of the culture, engendered by its own intention of development.

At the very core of Russian culture, there resided a will continually to isolate and expel its center into a certain opposition to itself, leaving itself ultimately and essentially deeply provincial. Drawn toward and aiming toward the center, longing and envying, it preferred all the same to hold the center without, and not within itself, not to appropriate the center, but to live in painful alienation from it, in a neglected, detached condition.

The same mechanism of extracting cores and forming hollow covers, emasculated provinces, worked with precision in time as well. Thus, Muscovite Rus' became a remote historical province in relation to Petrine Russia, and pre-revolutionary, "tsarist" Russia was provincialized in relation to the post-revolutionary USSR.[iv] Within these great epochs, every period also appears as an insignificant, unenlightened backwater, as soon as something new, with a quick knockout punch, comes to take its place. But the present, too, lacks its own core--it is but a prologue to the radiant future, a suburb of the future city. Where is it, that central time, in which existence coincides with essence and end?

Provinciality is a special, third condition of the world, which can be identified with neither civilization nor barbarism. Barbarism is a force of the periphery, of uncultivated nature, opposing itself to the center and bringing destruction. Civilization is the expertise, skillfulness, moderation, refinement that is propagated from the center and attaches to it. The provinces smooth over these extremes of civilization and barbarism and transform them into something average, intermediary, removing the stark potential difference.

In the provinces, all of civilization is coated with the patina of time, it has faded and yellowed, as in an old photograph. Everything has begun to rot, warp, buckle, and settle, submitting to the tendency toward disintegration; even the newest buildings will look unfinished, undifferentiated from the slime of everyday existence. Time here unfolds in the manner of the past, the world looks older than itself, things are born into the world tired and wrinkled.

But neither does nature here come forth with that primordial power and purity that is preserved only in obscure villages and nature preserves. It is shot through with civilization: oil stains, felled trees, rusted rails... In the most "untamed" places one finds discarded construction materials, lime, wire, heaps of earth and dirt where the topsoil has been stripped away. The provinces themselves have neither cities nor villages, only a "dwelling zone," tending at times more toward an urban structure, at times toward a rural one, but in principle indeterminate. Civilization here appears to have "sprouted through" and nature to have been "broken up": one necessarily bears an injury inflicted by the other. Civilization hangs with all its weight on nature, sticks to it now on one side, now on the other, and, deprived of its own internal support, keeps it from blossoming or standing up straight. Nothing is complete in itself; things are summoned to give aid to or cause injury in the adjoining sphere.

Self-alienation is the structural principle of the provinces. It is a mechanism of transference: the nucleus is extracted from every cell, as a result of which the cell gets rumpled, it settles. This mechanism acts psychologically as well. A feeling of inadequacy and deprivation forces one to reach out somewhere, to suspect something, to be weighed down by one's incomplete presence and drawn toward what every time turns out to be not here, not in its place, but over to the side, where, of course, there is nothing important either. But for all that, provinciality has its sweetness as well, a languor--an absence of tension, a suspension in a kind of half-dream, where only the debris of former things are met, where souls wander, not having managed to attach themselves to any space or time. The provinces is a world that has been shaken violently, so that everything in it has become rearranged, a test-tube of the future social and cultural homogeneity.

The current generation in Russian art more and more consciously turns to this theme, which is difficult to define and differentiate, to this unbroken cellular tissue made of half-civilization-half-barbarism. Earlier, in the 1960s and 1970s, we had "urban" and "village" writers. Now that distinction is disappearing, as both the city and the country retreat before the much more powerful and unifying reality of The Provinces. Almost all sensitive writers are becoming "provincials," i.e. they write both the city and the country as the provinces: Vladimir Makanin, Anatoly Kurchatkin, Aleksandr Eremenko, Oleg Khlebnikov... The last has a poem of two lines titled "The Holiday":

It smells of perfume and naphthalene.

A gangly boy runs with a mandarin.[v]

Here we have it, the exact formula of the provinces. The smell of naphthalene wafts out from the closet onto the street and mingles with perfume: half-disinfectant, half-perfumery. In all of it there is a nagging incongruity: the holiday is embodied in a gangly boy who runs holding a mandarin as if it were a furled flag he has pulled out of a gift bag. High semantics are not played out grotesquely within the low; rather, the two merge to the point of indistinguishibility in a pitiful and moving scene.

Today Soviet literature continues to see its moral duty and acuteness in battling against philistinism [meshchanstvo]--but where is it, this philistinism and parochialism [obyvatel'stvo], familiar, concentrated, guarding its place and customs? Provinciality is anti-parochial: nothing has its place, everything is declining, bent, fastened to something else, it is impossible to shut oneself up inside something or to lean against something for support. The philistine, with his tenacious psychology of rendering his small cubbyhole habitable, here simply has nothing to grab onto: the provinces are the most radical cancellation possible of "bourgeois existence." Those who live in these places could more precisely be called not the local inhabitants [obyvateli], but the local unhabitants [nebyvateli], the existence of whom is witnessed by nothing save yellowed photographs in gray albums.

Gorokhovsky's "Play" also reveals this anti-philistine, spectral essence of the provinces. Attaching photographs from a family album to an Aeroflot ad is the same thing as taking out a dress in mothballs and scenting it with an abstract perfume. In the final account, all the signs of the twentieth century that rudely encroach upon the serenity of the old couple display the same level of archive-ness, yellowedness--both the microphones and the airport. Objects torn from their historical context point to a rupture that distinguishes the provincial subject both from the past century and from the present, from any proper fixation in time. He or she is but a nominal successor and a nominal contemporary, conventionally plotted on the coordinates of time, in order to remove any question of genuineness.

The meaning of provincial existence, lost in these eclectic combinations, becomes an object of secret, esoteric knowledge. From this empirical material someone, having passed through all the levels of initiation, will someday construct a general theory of specters.

Transl. by Jeffrey Karlsen