Personal Sanctions. Second Reactions

On Thursday I fled Denver in the face of what was promising to be an epic snowstorm. (My AirBnB host, who grew up in Michigan, advised that Denver is quick to hit the panic button, but I didn't dare stick around to find out. I needed to be home before Monday!)

In the plane, waiting for de-icing, I checked my e-mail and learned that I had been added to a so-called "stop-list" of U.S. citizens who are being personally sanctioned for our attitudes toward the Russian government and its internal and foreign affairs. It's not often that you end up on a list with the head of Lockheed Martin--certainly nothing I ever expected. But then, I also had never thought of myself as a Russophobe, and now that's the label that has been affixed to me by the Russian Federation.

I had just been upgraded to first class--apparently not a lot of people were fleeing Denver that morning!--so I did what any Russophobe would do: I ordered a vodka from the flight attendant.

An American vodka, of course. 

But vodka couldn't help me, so I pulled out my computer to try to process what was happening. I wrote up my first reactions Thursday in a long screed, spilling my sadness and frustration and anger and incredulity onto the blank screen. But now I've had a few more days to think, so these are my second reactions.

Frankly, I'm feeling whiplashed. Just ten days ago I was doing a reading at a bookstore of my new book--you know, the one that proves how I hate Russia. It's called Why We (Still) Need Russian Literature, and it walks a general reader through the importance of literature and through the ways in which I introduce my undergraduate students to Russia and Russian culture through the medium of classical literature. In the book one of my major points is that we can return to literature throughout our lives and see something new every time we do. I read Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov for the first time as a 16 year old in a high school course called "Religious Quest in Literature." I read it again in the context of a Dostoevsky course in college, and I read it a third time with some high school students who requested I take them through this novel of patricide, drunkenness, ideological posing, love, hatred, passion, and yes, religious quest.  Every time I see something new.

In Louisville at the book talk I was in conversation with a guy who wanted to argue that literature is politics. And while I agree that we can learn about how people, societies, and governments think and act when reading literature, I felt a need to defend the pure act of joyous reading, of experiencing different characters, places, points of view, and the way in which that makes us more empathic people. Even when I don't like a piece of literature, I learn from it. And reducing it to politics is just short-sighted.

Then I went to Colorado, where I got to give another version of a book talk. Now talking not to a general public but to a group of academics--faculty and MA students mostly--I went the other direction, sharing the various opinions that have come out over the past two years about how Russian literature may be to blame for the war on Ukraine. I respect all of the people who have written in anguish to condemn Russian novels in the face of all this violence and destruction, but I think they are wrong, and I tried to explain why.

In fact, a dear friend of mine in Russia had argued with me in 2016--a year that I had a sabbatical and was working on a variety of projects, including the book that has finally come out in 2024--that it was essential to focus on literature, not to be distracted by the outside world. But almost every weekend in the autumn of 2016 I did find myself distracted. I spent hours and hours walking the streets and knocking on doors to try to keep the pussy-grabber out of the White House. (The fact that the word "pussy" is now acceptable in print for the broad public is the least of his crimes, though I do count it as one of his egregious misogynistic acts.) 

V&A photo from the January 2017 rallies in Washington DC

My friend kept repeating: Анджела, наше дело поэзия, и поэзия вечна. Не занимайся политикой. Angela, our business is poetry, and poetry is eternal. Don't get involved in politics. But all that time, the Russian government trolls were at work getting the pussy-grabber into office. So my own political efforts were apparently pointless--knocking doors cannot compete with social media trolling.

Aesthetics really are important. Beauty really can change the world. But maybe only on an individual level. I thought I was a teacher, a reader, a writer about Russian literature. But the Russian Federation has now elevated me to a whole new status: someone who actively works against Russian state interests. I know how I made the list--I have U.S. Department of Education grants to help educate students and the broader public about Russian language, history and culture. Apparently in their eyes my work, which I largely see as a love affair with the Russian language, and which more than anything teaches tolerance, curiosity, respect for others' culture, is as dangerous and aggressive as that of an arms manufacturer.

Or is it propaganda that is the real danger? My same dear friend--for nigh on thirty years--had a very pro-Putin mother. When I visited their family dacha in 2019, the cognitive dissonance on her face was almost risible. An American, her son's friend, was visiting, and her Russian hospitality genes kicked in. But she knew from Rossiya-1 that Americans are evil, that we are all anti-Russian, are trying to infect the world with our decadent and disgusting values. So how to react?! I felt genuinely sorry for her.

But now she and her husband have both died, last summer, and my own father has died as well. Which meant that my friend and I bonded at the new year about how bad 2023 had been, how sorrowful and personally difficult, and how this year could not possibly be worse given that all our parents are in the ground. What could go wrong? 

When will I learn to fully apply the Russian superstition "не сглазить," don't put the evil eye on the future? I've gone and done it again. 

 

Dinner of a Russophobe: borscht and potato pancakes

February 2022 showed the world that what had been happening in Ukraine since 2014 was only a teaser--sure, bombs, shot down aircraft, forced evacuations, civilian deaths, but over the past two years the region has really plunged into chaos and misery. "Full-scale war" wasn't even part of my vocabulary, despite my book on war and the Russian literary hero, and now in the Russian language it even has a kind of nickname, polnomashtabka. I can't even. I keep finding myself repeating: общие места, банальные слова. Generalities, banalities. It's impossible to talk about how horrible this war is. There are no words.

I was grateful to arrive on Thursday to my Ohio home, where I have been trying to process what it means that I'm on "the list." Friends and colleagues have written to congratulate me on this honor, but mostly it makes me feel sick--Russia really is irredeemable, if I of all people end up on their enemy list. So I heated up a couple of bowls of borscht and made some potato pancakes. Russian food? or Ukrainian? Russophobic? You decide.