From the Russian Soul to Post-Communist Nostalgia

Abstract

A CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN satirist once wrote that his fellow countrymen identified too much with fairy-tale hero Ivan Fool, who always gets same mysterious assignment: go nobody knows where to find nobody knows what. But he knows exactly where it is and always comes home with a firebird (or at least with a princess) and becomes people's hero. The problem is that Ivan Fool does not know how to survive his everyday life between heroic deeds. He is often described as a lazy mama's boy who does nothing but nap and daydream on heated furnace, waiting for a new feat. The everyday, is a more dangerous enemy for him than multiheaded dragon with flaming tongues. Two key words in this contemporary retelling of Ivan Fool's story are feat and everyday: both were claimed to be untranslatable by various scholars and writers. Roman Jakobson, in his formalist fairy tale about avantgarde hero Vladimir Mayakovsky, perpetual fighter against the fortresses of byt, writes that word byt is untranslatable into Western languages because of strong opposition to everyday routine known onfy in Russia.' Dmitrii Likhachev insists that word for feat, podvig, is also untranslatable for cultural reasons: it does not refer to a specific achievement but rather to spiritual drive itself.2 These diverse representations of national character-satirical, formalist, and elegiac-are remarkably similar in their key structures: opposition between byt (everyday existence) and bytie (spiritual or poetic existence), and valorization of heroic sacrifice over both private life and practical accomplishment. The border between bytie and byt seems to parallel mythical border between Russia and West. There are radical differences between representations of -the dream of private pursuit of happiness in family home-and dream that, according to philosophers of the idea, consisted of heroic spiritual homelessness and messianic nomadism. Unpractical daydreaming is not part of American myth of individual self-sufficiency. Privacy, on other hand, is not important for Russian personality. Might this be reason why history of private life remains unwritten? In summer of 1993, passing through Red Square, I found a display of new best-sellers right by steps of Lenin Museum: they included The