The Appropriation of Space

On Elements: The Appropriation of Space

Mikhail Epstein

In Russia, the four elements are joined in pairs: air with fire, earth with water. Masculine friendship/feminine friendship, but a familial union between them for some reason fails to take shape.[i]

That air gets on well with fire is attested to by the smoke which freely ambles across the Russian heavens: from fires, radiation, friendly skirmishes, smoking breaks, oil spills and intimate alcoholic exhalations. As far back as Griboedov the smoke of the fatherland was called "sweet" and "pleasant."[ii] "And you, fiery element, go mad, igniting me"--thus Andrei Bely prophetically addressed the motherland as long ago as 1917 ("To The Motherland"[iii]), as if foreseeing Lenin's formula of fiery political magic: "Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country."[iv] When the Soviet government, in accordance with Lenin's plan, GOELRO,[v] had rapidly united with electricity, the air came to smell even more of smoke, which was moreover bitter and acrid, as if from things and bodies burned alive. The plan for electrification is considered to have been fulfilled by the beginning of the 1930s, as the poet Pavel Antokol'skii, in his collection Great Distances (1936), already observes: "the entire country lies, growing beautiful from smoke."[vi]

The other romantic couple, this time tenderly girlish, is earth and water, which cling to each other in the curves and sobbing of softened matter, of the permanent and omnipresent quagmire. In Russia, earth always and everywhere strives to take in more water and to dampen into a marsh. Rural streets long ago turned into deep channels connecting seas of universal mud. And urban sidewalks have already sucked in the native land and mixed it thickly with heavenly moisture in a marshy layer that stretches like a new geological period over the entire Russian noosphere.

Smoke and mud are two peculiarities of Russian space which warm and soften it. Of course, basic human needs--breathing and walking--are made much more difficult by smoke and mud. The chest burns, knees ache. However, space as a whole becomes as if humanized, or, more precisely, corporealized. Air is warmed by smoke, approaching the temperature of breath. Earth softens from mud, approaching the consistency of the body. Everything around becomes so odorous, acrid, sticky, damp--just as I am. As are my flesh and my soul.

"Let me, o motherland, into your damp, empty expanse, to sob in your expanse," wrote Bely in his poem "Desperation".[vii] Could this be the Russian means of mastering space? To sob, to warm with one's breath, to emit smoke, leave dirty traces, leave footprints, in order to inspire in the empty indifferent boundlessness something kindred to oneself. Damply sloshing, hotly breathing. To wrap oneself in space as in the mother's womb, where gases, fluids, and bubbles are all the steady seething and burbling of the gestating bog.

This is what is meant by the smoky air and the dampened earth--this is the effort people make to alter the substance of an enormous nation when the will to give it a partitioned form is absent. To build over, to pave such an enormous space is impossible. Thus one can only somehow warm it up and dilute it. To let in mud and smoke. One cannot cultivate it--so corporealize it. In order to fall not onto hard earth, but onto a muttering, chomping mash. In order to choke not on icy wind, but on the stifling exhalations of kindred hangovers and glowing embers. Let water and fire propitiate this hard earth, this enormous, cold expanse.

The volitional intuition of space as wide-open and faceless corporeality, as maternal womb or outhouse, grandiose cosmic piss pot... To remove the barriers between oneself and nature, to dissolve in it through all the flows and secretions of human manufacture. What from an ecological point of view is the pollution of space is, from the mythological point of view, its softening and warming. The child loves to play in its own slobber and other secretions, loves to stomp through mud, to wade in it, just as if delighting in the maternal pliancy of the inorganic body of the earth. Is this not the nature of that initial mythological impulse of corporealization, of the personification of uncontrollable nature, which has determined all of Russia's ecological disasters and monstrosities?

America is entirely different. It doesn’t have this washing away of the elements with which it is easy to the point of selflessness for the lonely body of the religious wanderer to get mixed up in. The expanse of America is huge, but too distinctly fashioned. Each element stands on its own. Air is firmly linked with air and earth with earth, it is not mixed with fire or moisture, it does not smell of smoke or dampness. And if by change the scent of leafy moldiness or “the smoke of burnt stubbles”[8] should suddenly arise, there would immediately fill the air the scent of Russia, where everything for some reason rots, decays, rusts…

America doesn’t smell nearly as bad. Here you won’t inhale the thick

infusions, the savagery of smells you do in Russia. Even in a summer wood it does not smell of anything in particular—grass, leaves, flowers, berries—but of a light freshness as if even the thick armpits of the country are rubbed thoroughly with deodorant. Smells are nothing more than molecules that wander far from their initial substance. In America, however, it’s as if they don’t wander at all and substances don’t decay and don’t disassemble by scattering their particles far and wide. They keep within their boundaries as if obedient to the laws of private property and don’t dissipate their smells.

To the point, the use of perfumes and eau-de-colognes in America is not at all encouraged, and recently has been approaching zero since it is considered a form of aggression of one body against another. Why is this odiferous subject encroaching upon my nostrils? What right does it have to expand out into space and bombard me with its molecules? There has even appeared a specific, politically threatening term “smellism,” which stands along with racism, sexism and other crimes against human worth. I do not have the right to thrust upon blacks, or women, or gays the values of my white, male, heterosexual civilization. For the same reason I don’t have the

right to thrust the emanations of my own body on anyone. Use deodorant, which dispels odors, but not eau-de-cologne, which litters the communal air with them.

Thus in America, each element is independent, and for this reason is not so elemental or uncontrolled. Water is not so earthy, earth is not so watery; and even fire is not so strong-smelling when something burns too strongly, when fire rapes the earthy or moist component within it, vomiting out the unconsumed particles as black stinking smoke. In America the elements are occupied with their own business and don’t meddle in others’ affairs, thus the language doesn’t contort itself into referring to them as elements [stikhii] [9], but rather “forms of matter” or “components of nature.” So their

native language conceived of calling them “elements.” An element is a component part, which knows its place and does not rush off anywhere so long as it is already part of a distinct whole. So different from Russian stikhiia, an element that whips through the country pell-mell and higgledy-piggledy with other elements: fire’s criminal activity and the “wet business” [mokroe delo, murder] of the Russian land.

Transl. by Jeffrey Karlsen and Thomas Dolack