The landing was a windless one, matter-of-fact as can be, but the cabin still clapped. Every few hours of the nine that the flight lasted, the woman sitting next to me—middle-aged and ample-lipped, but youthful in demeanor nonetheless—would be visited by a friend or relative. The visitor, a younger woman whose face carried a windblown freshness, would bow down, each time, and give my seatmate a hug, as if they hadn’t seen each other in a long time, golden tendrils falling over coarser, shorter, more flatly flaxen hair. They spoke Turklish with each other, but nothing said in English revealed the substance of what they were discussing; an abundant subject matter, whatever it was. It was not yet 5:00 am when we landed, and as the plane came to a halt in the dark, it was met with the sterile glow of three buses waiting to take the passengers to the terminal.

It is always best to cultivate a sense of resignation in all matters air travel, but I couldn’t help but feel a faint resentment pooling in me: the buses are so much more work for everyone involved. As I stood waiting to deplane, I counted all the vehicles it would take me to get to my destination. Two cars, two planes, two buses, a motorboat, and countless travelators. My destination is a mode of transport in itself, held in place by an anchor, which I’m told is broken.

War and Peace Volume I came to an end while I was on my flight, and I mourned this while waiting for the Domestic Transfers customs line, ambling and disorderly, to move forward; I’d neglected a timely purchase of Volume II, and am now Guerre et Paix-less for the duration of my vacation. Affected by this bout of particularly engrossed reading, I amused myself by letting the world be filtered through the order set by Tolstoy. The last time I had read the novel, I mostly shrugged upon reaching the epilogue, dissected in cant terms by the lesson plan; now, the further I get into the book, I read in anticipation of it, measuring up each character arc against the notion of free being what fills the container (form) of necessity. And so, having just emerged from the roil of fates affected by Natasha Rostova’s careless submission to her inarticulate girlish passions, I observed the couples approaching customs—often women who looked great for their age with men who looked terrible for theirs—and wondered about the necessity that brought us all here, about how much choice any of us have in whom we end up with, if we end up with anyone at all.

A lot of commotion emanated from the husband in one of the couples joining the customs line. She was a tall East Asian woman with a child that looked a little too far into toddlerhood to be strapped to her chest, his legs kicking around near her thighs, and while her shoulders rounded forward, nothing else about her demeanor betrayed strain. He was a tall Turkish man, the crown of his head shiny-bald with a tuft of coarse hair hovering above his forehead, and was visibly worked up, fretting, running back and forth to negotiate with various airport agents. At a certain point he called his wife out of the long one, into the short one, at the end of one of those mazes of retractable barriers. They stood there, still waiting for a little bit, two large families composed of one man and several generations of women ahead of them. The wife stood still, her face just as unmoved, her long child protruding from her torso, but occasionally turned to her husband to say something. Each time she did so, he grew more frustrated, looking up to the sky, arms shaking. “This is the VIP line,” I could hear him saying through gritted teeth, indicating that he got them into the best position one could be at an airport; what else could his seemingly unperturbed spouse possibly want? Then they were called forth to have their passports looked at and disappeared. I suspect that this was when her wish was really granted.

Every airport is just a large hallway, but the Istanbul airport is especially so. The number of times I’ve found myself at the Istanbul airport since the start of the war now exceeds the fingers I have on both of my hands. The number of times I’ve been to Istanbul in these nearly five years? Zero. Russia’s decision to cut itself off from Europe aided this airport and thus Türkiye at large to further bolster its status as the connecting tissue between the East and the West, in a very immediate, physical way, more so than, say, how the Dubai airport serves (used to serve?) as the same between the South Pacific and the rest of the world. I think relatively little about the Turkosphere, but when I do, I think about the man at the winery in Kakheti, Georgia, pointing towards the mountains, thus motioning at Azerbaijan, at the time in the process of expelling Armenians from Artsakh, and the encroaching influence of the Turkic.

Somehow, I’m always surprised when I’m reminded of the sprawl of its soft power; a surprise that has no good reason, other than my preoccupations lying elsewhere. I do find it funny, how here, as in Russia, the potency of this power is demonstrated by the ceaseless availability and variance of consumer goods, everything, even this hallway, needing to be turned into a 24/7 mall. Something quaint, turn-of-the-millennium about that. Again, my preoccupations: I was more surprised by how the sight of the tricolor Russian flag on the tail of an Aeroflot plane made me feel—an internal aversion akin to an almost prudish embarrassment. Curious to observe what war does to one’s sense of obscenity.

There was work in need of doing before vacation could take over. This thought lingered in my mind as I sat down to wait for my connecting flight. The night was giving way to daylight outside, and I kept pushing the thought to the back of my head. Sure, I had now deprived myself of War and Peace for the next week, but there was still a friend’s draft of a screenplay I needed to read, to say nothing of the two books I had thrown into my bag just before leaving my apartment; online, from what I could tell, there was handwringing over How Should A Socialist Be. I pulled out my computer with the pretense of writing an email, but instead started a new document to write this.

Things I have been reading recently; some are as excellent as everyone says they are, others are excellent because I find them so:

• 's essay for about the conflict between the enterprise of writing and the vocation that is literature. It captures beautifully the malaise both can induce.

• ’s profile of Johnny Knoxville in The New Yorker. Young is my favorite writer of profiles, and I will read any profile she writes even if I don’t much care about its subject. Years ago, if memory serves me right, she wrote a profile of a teenage pageant queen for The New York Times Magazine, and still remember Young describing the girl’s hair as being “the color of a potato chip.”

• This Harper’s essay by Cynthia Zarin on misreading The Golden Notebook.

• Ryan Ruby’s NLR essay about Wikipedia and the novel (I’d let my NLR subscription lapse, but was delighted to see that one can buy a single essay, which is a model more publications and publishing platforms should adopt.)

• Audrey Wollen’s Bookforum essay on Éric Rohmer and the novel he wrote twenty years before shooting his first feature, Élisabeth. “Holiday,” in the Rohmerian sense, is a set of landscapes and a set of relationships, a place to live and a way to be, which open up a further, contained set of moral questions. It also marks a negative space: no work, no rules, nothing to do, absences that flicker in the hazy night like lightning bugs—flecks of elusive color. Rohmer’s characters approach leisure as an expertise, even a discipline, which produces its own rigor and aesthetic.”

The summer is a little worn at this point, if the greying ribbed jersey of the overlaundered tank tops I keep pulling out of my dresser is an indication of anything. I haven’t managed to get out of town much, save for a haphazard trip to the south of France. I haven’t managed to get out of my apartment very much either, and so the days saunter on one after the other, while on Zoom with clients we keep talking about September and October, and November, and twenty-twenty-seven. The fatigue had gotten bad enough for me to go see a doctor about it, fearing it may be neurological. Instead, she made me worry about an unlikely but not impossible pregnancy, but the bloodwork was conclusive: a vitamin D deficiency. Not that going outside is any more pleasurable. Fabric clinging to skin, I walk into supermarkets, bodegas, Barnes and Noble, and the office to cool down. If there’s anything one learns by the time they enter their thirties, it is that not every new season of each year carries with itself the potential of a hopeful future; sometimes its novelties are limited to new ways in which a body might distend.

The novella has not been progressing, and that is exactly the problem: that I talk about it as if it is supposed to do so on its own. As if it were a tadpole that will inevitably develop legs, grow out of its tail, and become a frog, and I—a kindergartner watching it all happen from one day to the next; a cycle of life all of its own, independent from me. It’s an appealing idea, and I’ve told myself that I’ll begin in earnest when the first sentence comes to me. That’s how most writing starts for me: a compelling first sentence, or at least one that eggs me on to continue. So, instead of writing, I look towards the first sentences, first pages, of my favorites. Robert Walser is found dead in the snow on a walk in the Appenzell in Sweet Days of Discipline. The Golden Notebook begins with a stage direction: “The two women were alone in the London flat,” and the first thing that Anna says is the point is, that as far as I can see, everything’s cracking up. Malina, too, takes a cue from the theater and begins with a cast of characters, time: today, place: Vienna, and then breaks into the voice of the narrator: But I had to think long and hard about the Time, since “today” is an impossible word for me, even though I hear and say it daily, you can’t escape it. Homo Faber begins matter-of-factly: We were leaving from La Guardia airport, New York, three hours late because of snowstorms. Pnin begins with a circuitous description of its titular hero as he sits down on a train, whose body ended, somewhat disappointingly, in a pair of spindly legs (now flannelled and crossed.)

Out of the books I’ve read recently, a brilliant start is that of Dawn Powell’s A Time to Be Born, which begins with a list of things for which it is not time, or, at least, it shouldn’t be, from the perspective of Amanda Keeler, dissolving into a list of what it was a time of, far exceeding the limited frame of Amanda Keeler’s mind. The brilliance of the novel, which is about how if you’re going to fuck your way to the top, you should at least be good at fucking, only mounts. It was recently revived by Pushkin Press, and I urge you, like my friend Ellie Lynch has urged me, to read it. Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra At The Wedding, which I finally read on a break from War and Peace, begins unassumingly—I told them I could be free by the twenty-first, and that I’d come home the twenty-second. (June)—which leads me to think about how the true pleasure of a good first sentence is in the baggage it carries when you return to it once you know what happens thereafter, once you understand why it’s the two women alone in the London flat; not just any pair of women, not just any flat.

There isn’t much I have to say about War and Peace that hasn’t already been said by readers of higher credentials. I’m re-reading it for the first time since high school, which is to say I may as well be reading it for the first time—my engagement with literature in high school was like everything else I was doing then: clueless and vacant. It’s a fun read, and fairly light for a book that asks why men go to war (many reasons), if humans possess free will at all (does not appear to be the case?), and what the point of living is (inconclusive, as of yet). I appI had been feeling agitated about all of the non-writing I’ve been doing, but W&P has pacified me. I’ve been noticing trees and gestures in the text; noticings that have set off an inarticulate churning of the mind that nonetheless feels generative—I shall return to them later. It has been a comfort to return to the book upon completing work, upon awaking, upon reaching the valley of a Sunday afternoon. I’m nearly 700 pages in, it’s 1810, Andrei has found the will to live again but has not yet fallen in love with Natasha. I still have so much of it left, thank god.

As for how it starts: in French. This is not surprising, as the reader is dropped right into a scene of a salon, attended by the aristocratic beaux monde of early 19th century St. Petersburg, among whom French was the operative language and a relative indexterity with Russian was an endearing if not wholly positive signifier of their class. The amount of French, as well as German, is not negligible, though most English translations render them in English, except for the much-maligned but faithful, as it were, version by Pevear and Volokhonsky. I myself am reading it in Russian, which includes, sometimes, pages-long footnotes, the translations contained in which—an editorial note at the start of the book stipulates— are not to be contested as they are Tolstoy’s own. I myself have quibbles with the German, but I’ll save that for another time. This is all to say that I’ve been listening to the translation season of Merve Emre’s podcast “The Critic and her Publics” and can say that the only thing I enjoy more than listening to writers talk to each other is listening to translators do so between themselves (and with publishers—there’s a wonderfully confrontational episode about money). In the spirit of this post, here’s the transcript of the episode about first sentences.

And yes, my own first sentences. I’ve come up with a rule that a paragraph cannot begin with I, such that I cannot be accused of making myself the subject off the bat, at least syntactically. This restriction, I find, offers a greater abundance of options, but it’s ultimately an arbitrary rule, designed to be broken, should the right sentence come along.

A weird movie, The Wizard of the Kremlin (2026, dir. Olivier Assayas). A cast of excellent performers reciting dialogue in a manner that suggested that each of them was working from different drafts of the screenplay; Moscow depicted with startling accuracy in one scene and wrong to the point of distraction in the next; a baffling array of accent-related decisions. The intermingling of fictional characters and those derived from reality seemed erratic yet unavoidable, and, despite being structured to track Russia’s political history since the late 80s to shortly after the Winter Olympics of 2019, doing so with an occasionally uncanny sensitivity, it is porridge-like, lacking pacing or any sort of temporal texture, turning it all into one mass of time. I suppose the retrospective view causes everything to turn into a kasha of inevitability.

Narrated, to no real end, by a journalist and (nebulously) a Russia scholar, played by Jeffrey Wright, the film traces the life and career of Vadim Baranov. Baranov is the inventor of Russia’s “Fake Democracy,” as suggested by the title of the article Wright’s character had published in Foreign Affairs; we’re told that the piece had caused quite a stir, which leads to an invitation to Baranov’s estate on the outskirts of Moscow, anonymously, via messaging app, under the pretext of having a first edition of Evgeniy Zamyatin’s We to show this man, which happens the the subject of his scholarly inquiry.

Baranov is supposed to represent Vladislav Surkov, but also recalls figures like Gleb Pavlovsky and Konstantin Ernst. A child of the late-Soviet intelligentsia, in early adulthood as he traipses through the chaos left in the wake of the Soviet Union’s fall, moving from the petty hustling that brought young men of the time money and trouble into producing and directing underground theater (a production of We the crown jewel of his oeuvre), into working his way up the ranks at a privatized tv channel—Channel One, or something like it—where he hones his talent of riding the times like a cowboy at the rodeo to something sharper, more cynical, inventing reality shows tv shows for young women from the provinces that might be called Who Wants To Snag a Millionaire.

Along the way he collects a retinue of curious characters, people of their time—from fictional ones such as the jaded Ksenia, whose aloof demeanor is just cover for uncompromising opportunism, and the fast-talking Vanya, whose agile wit and wile lead him from greymarket entrepreneurial schemes to the invention of Russian banking, into the oil business which will become his downfall (Vanya is Mikhail Khodorkovsky, down to the costuming), to real ones, such as the oligarch Boris Berezovsky, one of Putin’s earliest and champions who later turned into one of his more vocal critics, and the loyal apparatchik Igor Sechin (Andrey Zayats), and, of course, Putin (Jude Law) himself.

Baranov tells his story with wistful self-satisfaction, occasionally falling into that very subjunctive mood to which the historical record tends to be hostile. With that, he is meant to tell Wright’s character, whose interlocution is limited to grunts of understanding and the occasional knowing question (mostly ignored by Baranov anyway), the story of contemporary Russia. And this is where the principal problem of the movie lies: it does not quite know whether to lend itself to the study of the characters that participated in these events, or the events themselves. The latter falters as it skims through the inflection points that move the film’s Putin towards autocracy without offering sufficient context for a broader audience to understand why it is an inflection point, or, on the contrary, building in a didactism into the dialogue so as to give it all a whiff of Russia for Westerners 101.

This turns the whole affair into a bit of a montage of the theater—nay, vaudeville—playing out across Russia’s political stages. Swan Lake on tv screens, tanks at the House of Government, Yeltsin facedown on a desk while filming a campaign video for his re-election, a National Bolshevik convening in a dingy basement with Eduard Limonov giddily motioning around the room filled with skinheads, crustpunks, and Orthodox fundamentalists, explosions across apartment buildings in Moscow’s suburbs, the mother of a navy man who perished in the Kursk submarine disaster screaming at Putin, Berezovsky in luxurious exile, Kaspersky at a fancy party where socialites and politicos intermingle, the opening of the 2014 Winter Olympics, Little Green Men. Some of the film’s best moments, too, are found here, such as the physical comedy that ensues when the Berezovsky character orders the crew tie a barely-coherent Yeltsin to his chair during the filming of that campaign clip so as to at least keep the President upright, or when Jude Law’s Putin hilariously proclaims “They treat me like I’m the president of Finland!” upon return from what was likely to have been the 2007 G8 summit.

What of Baranov, the supposed wizard of the Kremlin? Never particularly committed to any ideal, even if his appreciation of Zamyatin, “the first dissident,” betrays a respect for speaking truth to power and other such virtues, we are supposed to watch him turn into an evil genius; but beyond introducing, in rather basic terms, the principles of “horizontality” and “verticality” of power to Putin (whose response is more or less “this verticality you speak of is intriguing!”) He does not appear as much of the grey cardinal he is supposed to be, a stark disjunction between how he presents his story and what we see on screen. In the final quarter of the film, there is an undercurrent of petty office rivalry between him and Igor Sechin. The film’s Sechin “wins,” basking in schadenfreude when he informs Baranov of the sanctions to be imposed upon him after the annexation of Crimea. The siloviki have taken over (we are told this explicitly, in a bit of dialogue), Baranov whisks his wife away for a final weekend in Europe before sequestering himself in his estate, where he will receive Wright’s character, tell his life’s story, and then be eliminated with a shot in the head just as his guest departs.

Mediocre as the movie was, it has haunted me for weeks now, in the sense that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the things it failed to or wasn’t interested in exploring; things I thought might have better elucidated the history of contemporary Russia than the trials and tribulations of the fictional Vadim Baranov. Tipsily at parties (okay, one party) I have been cornering unsuspecting souls who express mild interest in what the movie’s problem is (~2 people), using the question as an opportunity to go off on a tangent about the Russian government’s relationship with the media, the media’s relationship with the Russian government, and the false discontinuity between—to borrow and slightly mangle two clichés—the New Russian and the Homo Sovieticus.

Let me explain, I say in the dark of the party, after apologizing for the half-baked nature of this theory. It’s not that it has nothing to do with the movie: there’s a scene in which Baranov chastises a group of NTV executives for how the network’s show Kukli, a political satire sketch series performed by puppets; In the film, this moment functions as an inflection point in Baranov’s own professional becoming, barely motioning at what was a seismic moment in Putin’s own turn to authoritarianism: the hostile takeover of the channel by Gazprom and the government in 2001, what became known as Дело НТV—the NTV affair—this may well have been the death of independent news broadcasting in Russia, and certainly a threat to the vitality of any kind of journalism; this was in 2001. This, along with something that the Baranov character says in passing, along the lines of America did not win the cold war; the Soviet Union fell, and there’s no winning against a foe that doesn’t exist, set my mind abrew with thought about the implausibility of the clean break that guys such as the hero of this film is supposed to represent ascribe to their personal historiographies of contemporary Russia’s birth.

In an attempt to parse this further, I have approached many a rabbit hole, stood at its edge, and walked away. I toyed with the idea of making my way through Surkov’s entire literary oeuvre—both the essayistic and the novelistic; briefly, I thought I might muster to construct a history of Russian media, and, in doing so, articulate a coherent narrative about how it is that what we have left is propaganda on two polar ends; but, unfortunately, I have a job (I’m available for stepping into these rabbit holes and others, should anyone like to give me a byline in exchange for doing so…). But most simply and reductively where I keep landing, which is not a novel thought or idea, and taxi drivers love talking about it: today’s Russian Federation, its precious power structures and its media were created by people who were reared by the Soviet Union, and however much they may have wanted to break with it, the Soviet Union continued and continues to live within them, whether it is in the form of fond memories of cheap ice cream or long-lingering resentments.

What’s most interesting about Russia’s historical continuity is the path that the intelligentsia has taken; really, from the Russian Empire, into the Soviet Union, and out of it, supposedly, again. Specifically, I’m curious about how a “generation of janitors and guards” (after the Akvarium song, how the late Soviet intelligentsia came to be known idiomatically, in reference to the “inner emigration” to which they had resigned) turned their aspirations towards capital-driven cynicism and Machiavellian scheming. Likely, it is here that I should stop for now—it’s not out of coyness that I say that this is all half-baked.

A friend pointed me towards Greg Afinogenov’s excellent recent piece in the London Review of Books, around the same time I watched the movie. Slavdom (What do Russians Want? in print, I believe), it is called, which is now funny to me because another in discussing it with another friend, we got into a fight—she, the slavophile to my westernizer, not having read it closely or at all reactively accused it of exploiting the obscurities of the Russian context to make Westerners feel in-the-know, a kind of selling-out of things that can only be understood in our own tattered domicile. I disagree; in fact, in very agile manner, it offers a perceptive critique of Western Russia scholarship. He begins by tracing the ideological lineage of the exact conflict we were having, or, rather, the view my friend was expressing, as it calcifies into the notion of “multipolarity” and, ultimately, Russian “civilizationism,” mapping out the historical continuity with which I’m so preoccupied, and moves into regarding how that which is on paper stacks up against the lived realities of ordinary Russians, post their country’s invasion of Ukraine.

You’ll do much better to read the piece than my summary, but I’ve been lingering with Afinogenov’s articulations of the interior ideological landscape of contemporary Russia, which he describes as “closer to the neoliberal ‘marketplace of ideas’, albeit one managed by the presidential administration along with subsidiary institutions such as political parties and the Russian Orthodox Church.” As the Russian Federation’s political apparati were being built in the ‘90s, tools used by liberal democracies westward were imported as convenient, and men presiding over their use or discontinuation—Pavlovsky, Surkov—were being switched out as convenient, too. He writes:

“Successful ideological entrepreneurs are rewarded with access to the media, leadership of parastatal think-tanks and sometimes even elected office. The churn is constant, even during moments of apparent ideological consolidation. The greatest rewards go to those who, like the now ubiquitous talk show host Dmitry Kiselev, can speak not only to the demands of the moment but anticipate which way the political winds are blowing.”

Perhaps ideological entrepreneurship is the way to think about the path some members of the intelligentsia took out of the Soviet Union. At their most effective or powerful, they become “political technologists,” but otherwise they function as peddlers of reverse-engineered rationalizations for the actions of those in power. As is pointed out in the passage quoted above, being too intellectually committed to ideological coherence is not rewarded in this particular marketplace, because at one point or another sticking to your guns will leave you on the losing side of a conflict, simply overpowered. And beyond anything, confusion is the point.

More to think about, more to read. Recommendations appreciated.

Important work was being done at the press check-in desk of one of New York’s several art fairs during “New York Art Week”. Instances of sunglasses worn indoors: 51. Outfits that bore a pop of red: 90. Tabis: only 7. Pleats Please: 5. The tabis, it is safe to assert, have been memed out of fashion. The meager Pleats Please count is due to the fact that travel for this occasion was minimal. Between the observations, the work being done was making known members of the art press feel like celebrities and asking unknown ones how their names are spelled. The latter would often produce their tattered press credentials, some of which have not been used for their intended purpose in years, if real at all, others belonging to publications and media holdings whose names must have been generated by a randomizer, if they, too, were real at all. All of them would receive their press bracelets, but for the brief moment that it was thought they might not, some managed to radiate an astounding amount of anxious haughtiness. “I AM GOING TO KILL HIM!” yelled the Turkish woman, dressed in boho chic ca. 2014 and brandishing a press pass of doubtful veracity, complaining about the member of the security staff who did not allow her un-bracleted plus ones in. “She would say that,” muttered my colleague, whose roommate is Armenian.

What to say of the art upstairs? Not all that much. Few things, it seems, are allowed: tiny blurry still lifes; paintings of women taking selfies, also small but less blurry; paintings of asses in fishnets and feet in heels, not as small, but also blurry; colorful and listless abstractions; contemporary takes on old master genre painting; small-scale ceramic and metal sculptures, also listlessly abstract; absurd toy-like stunt pieces that rotate so as to amuse. As Alex and I take hungover laps through the main fair of the week, hopping from one escalator onto the next, we joke half-heartedly that we are at the art mall. We are not the only ones to make this joke, I’m sure. The fair is empty, largely, and the placid presentations of unstirring blue-chip art are reminiscent of pebbles on a beach. By the coffee-and-sparkling-wine bar there’s a Turkish Airlines Business Lounge, the installation of which is explained only by tens of thousands of dollars worth of “partnership” fees. Next the events: at an old firehouse in honor of a Triennial in St. Louis, at a Femme-and Queer-led art space in honor of the existence of Femme- and Queer-led art spaces during “Art Week,” at the satellite office of the prestigious residency in honor, seemingly, of champagne. Crudités galore. I was supposed to end up at the upscale fake health-store-supermarket activation in support of the friend who organized it, but before that happens, other friends heading to the party of a literary magazine intercept me in Nomad, and my night ends in the speakeasy of a co-working space.

The lack of names and titles here is not out of pretension but rather out of an excessive consciousness of Google Alerts, myself being on the receiving end of a great number of them, for the “accounts” on which I work for my job. I try not to write about things that bore me, and yet, what else is there to write about when that’s all there is? I don’t bother going to the rest of the fairs—the two, or three, of them there are—this is the worst way to see art, anyway. The “art world” was never my destination, but it makes complete sense that I ended up here, along with my fellow malaised practitioners of the beaux arts in need of a living who make up the corpus of this labor force. Actual artists struggle here, where the people to be most admired are those who have a natural acumen for administration or bureaucracy.

Why do anything anymore? A question I ask myself often. It is good, this question, powerful even, has driven many a man to suicide. And while, thankfully, I’m past mulling over the utility of rituals such as showering, eating regular meals, going to bed every night, and any of those other repetitive things one has to do to maintain function, being seated in the window seat of the plane that is whatever one might call art as an industrial complex (“the art world,” “the creative industries,” “the art industrial complex”), with a somewhat decent view of the goings on outside, a limited ability to leave the seat if one’s neighbor’s asleep, and no control whatsoever, the question flashes above the galley entry in an alarming red. I do not need to bore anyone by listing the causes of this—technological, economic, political, or otherwise—but I will state that the outcomes are, more often than not, dispiriting and might make one feel like their participation is just contributing to the general terminal decline of pretty much everything. Certainly, “art week” made me feel this way, along with the endless dispatching of emails into the void for which I am paid and my extracurricular efforts to write something of worth—artistic (ideal) or monetary (unlikely); perhaps it could help me qualify as “an alien of extraordinary ability” (mercenary).

I snap out of it every now and then, though—mostly through encounters with great works of art (a term I’ll admit I wield in an esoteric manner), meaning not just mastery, but a wholly sincere attempt at portraying a central thought, feeling, problem, intention. Commitment to the bit, I guess. It’s not even the isolated fact of a given work’s existence that revives the will to live in me, but the way it converses with its viewer/reader/listener, such as to. Yes, great (to me) art births conversation (NOT discourse), or what someone else might call community.

Just the week after that cursed other one to which I keep referring, I had found myself at the induction ceremony for new members of the pre-eminent honors society for artists in this country, and was struck by how informal an affair it was, even if it did take place in the institution’s grand auditorium, with its large ornamental mouldings and crystal chandeliers. Painters, architects, composers, and writers, as famous as painters, architects, composers, and writers can be, scurrying about, late to their seats on stage, some unable to stop their endearing, mischievous whispering and giggling with their seatmates, even as the group picture is being taken by a photographer with an unwieldy flash system on the balcony across the room. The photographer jokes around, singling out errant subjects of the group photo, conducting these luminaries into stillness. In the audience — more luminaries, as those on stage introduce the awardees and inductees, who are sometimes their friends, mentors, mentees. The mood was that of giddy celebration, and, at times, it nearly brought me to tears.

In fact, the question of art’s purpose, in these troubled times, was raised in the central keynote of the ceremony. Delivered barefoot by its author (heels, blisters), it asserted that art for art’s sake was never a fashionable notion—and that nobody ever thought it was; that the idea that art generates empathy, too, is a boring argument; that art is best regarded as autonomous from, or parallel to, the propulsive forces of power and progress. You can read it here, but, ultimately, it landed on the thought that art’s most important function is to put humans in relation with one another. So: consensus, it seems.

Concurrently, I was reading The Silent Woman by Janet Malcolm, which happens to be a great book, mostly about conversations. An excavation of the many narratives (conflicting, subjective, malicious as they may be) that make up the mythos of a public biography, in this case that of Sylvia Plath. It’s a complicated web extending from the center that was Plath’s marriage to Ted Hughes, its dissolution, and her suicide, by which she is often spoken of as being defined in death, though the book reminds us constantly, that it is Hughes who was defined by it in life.The conversations that make up the web range from items of gossip whispered and misheard at parties; protracted-and-forths between lovers, friends, and all those in-between, epistolary or otherwise; arguments between practitioners of the same craft; family quarrels; the conversations that writers struggling to write have with themselves.

In this web, her biographers get caught—both those who take on the formal task of writing the zstory of Sylvia Plath as well as friends, acquaintances, and neighbors who stumble into it inadvertently, motivated by rebuke, record straight-setting, self-exoneration, and whatever else; more often than not they end up trapped by the spider who presides over this web: Olwyn Hughes, Ted’s aggressively protective sister, and the custodian of Plath’s estate. The book maintains its focus on one particular strand of conversation and conflict, which is between Olwyn and Anne Stevenson, of which Bitter Fame, Stevenson’s long-suffering biography of Plath, ended up being the product.

I mention Olwyn mostly to say: fucking Olwyn. At one point, Malcolm compares an abusive letter Ms. Hughes sends to Anne Stevenson, to the malicious hissing of writer’s block; and indeed, Olwyn’s insults spare none of Anne’s virtues and faculties, intellectual, writerly, or personal, in an attempt to convince her that the project—or rather, specifically, her work on it—is worthless. In all of her wile, Malcolm positions herself as a fascinated observer of the web (though occasionally wearied by it), prodding the spider, too big to become its prey.

But of all of all the strains of conversation that the book presents, it is the tension—the negotiation—between being a woman and being a writer, that I nodded along to most ardently, writing “Bachmann!” (Ingeborg Bachmann, who is famously quoted as saying “The first thing between a man and a woman is fascism.”) in the margins, every time Plath’s Daddy is presented in close reading. It is a tension that Malcolm examines in Plath, in Anne Stevenson, in herself: “Writing is a fraught activity for everyone, of course, male or female, but women writers seem to have to take stronger measures, make more peculiar psychic arrangements, than men do to activate their imaginations.” Do I need to go into why a woman of nearly 31 (me), still fostering fantasies of literary greatness is particularly preoccupied with these questions? I don’t think so. But I’ll say that having recently become what I’ll call “alone,” I still do not find writing easier, and the same questions plague me now with the added consciousness of the ways in which my life as a woman may be hampered by my life as a writer. But we all have choices to make, and the best I can do is stand by mine.

In heartbreak, even the most mediocre art can become “great” because, in some essential way, it fills the conversational void that crashes upon the heartbroken with its deaf silence (caveat: not if it’s shown at an art fair). In fact, I’m not sure if any piece of art has ever expanded what empathy I naturally possess, but indeed it has made me feel less lonely. Here’s the playlist I’ve been trying to drown the silence with; it includes many versions of the same song, sung and arranged by different artists, not always best serving the song, but repetitive and uncanny as heartbreak itself can be.

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It is the first Monday of May, as this sentence is written, and, if you’re the sort of person to whom New York is the center of the universe, the world has been at a standstill for most of the day, from 14th street northwards, to 80th and 5th. There, celebrities, sewn into couture, extravagant and awkward, hobble up the Met’s steps to enjoy all that the annual Costume Institute Benefit (a.k.a. The Met Gala) has to offer: a preview of the exhibition on which the event bases its theme; what is most likely a mediocre dinner; stilted smalltalk with their peers; and what appears to be the highlight of the evening: a cigarette-and-selfie break in the museum’s bathroom. There’s a performance, too. Probably also the afterparty. In any case, the main event is the posing that happens on the red carpet. Abiding by ancient habit, I look through the resultant photographs.

What springs to fore, with greater momentum each year, is the diminished nature of the whole affair. It doesn’t and shouldn’t matter, to anyone tethered to reality—the entry price for a ticket is 100,000 dollars, up by double since 2023—and yet it’s still fun because precisely for its supposedly rarified quality, one gets to engage in an abundant snobism about the whole thing, it being the Super Bowl of fashion (I guess it’s nice that it benefits the museum?). But still, it’s hard to feel even mean-spirited glee, as Condé Nast steadily devours itself with each new round of layoffs and title consolidations, Vogue is relegated to the Gala’s background, a Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez take center stage, in exchange for their lead-sponsorship, an unfortunate sprinkling of tech tycoons in clueless attire trailing behind them. Influencers populate both sides of the best-and-worst-dressed lists, and the amount of poor fit on display is shocking. Vogue’s own live reporting fails to identify the designer of at least a quarter of the looks, and refers to a dress with Yves Klein Blue splatterings as “inspired by Eve Klein.” This is all to say: the bar has fallen depressingly low.

Not by accident, The Devil Wears Prada 2, a twenty-years-later sequel to a cult favorite (for the girls and the gays), landed on theater screens the weekend prior; on Saturday, I went to see the film. Having watched its predecessor countless times, the new film’s recalls of it, none of them quite subtle, struck me as moving through the scenes like a conveyor belt with wares. These winks executed at regular intervals were the key defining feature of the film, along with its bleak, uncannily accurate representation of the media industry and its dire state, where mass lay-offs happen over text, articles are written to fulfill SEO quotas (or as Stanley Tucci’s character Nigel puts it “for people to scroll past while they pee,”) and the only way to save a print publication is to persuade a billionaire to buy it, with the hope that they’re less evil than the next one over. All of this is couched in the phantasmagoria of a parallel world, where Vogue is called Runway; Emily—Miranda Priestly’s erstwhile assistant—grows up to be a stand-in for Lauren Sanchez; Miranda Priestly herself is kept on a tight leash by HR while continuing to misspeak, calling a model she considers too corpulent “body negative” (this thread of the film, yielded the most solid jokes); and Andy willingly purchases an overpriced apartment in a building of historic significance the interior of which has been butchered a la developer special. She also falls in love with the very developer, a middle-aged Australian man.

The group of friends I had gone to see the movie with are all media or publishing people, or those adjacent to it all, who, unexpectedly seemed to have been amused by the movie and how it combined its sobering accuracy with shallow tropeyness, serving as the cinematic equivalent of the farmer’s trick that is shoving an orphaned lamb into the skin of a dead one to trick a grieving mother-sheep into adopting it. There were various levels of devotion to the original within the group, but there was agreement that neither the cinematography nor the set design had the aspirational allure of the original, that there were too many drone shots. We discussed, a little, how it was curious how a fairly plotless film (what plot there was in the first TDWP was predicated on Andy’s internal hero’s journey, strung together in a series of vignettes) became such a cult presence—it was pointed out that this was when what was known as a meme were “demotivators,” and the success of a film was that it would be disassembled into quotes. Generally, the movie, it was agreed, emanated a longing for simpler times, not quite conscious of the its meta quality and the way in which it really is a film about nostalgia: while, conceivably, one of few cinematic instances in which the cosmetic alterations the actors had undergone actually serve the film—Babygirl was another such case—they also created a layer of perceptible wistfulness for the faces they had twenty years ago,

There isn’t much else to say except that, perhaps, the lament for times gone by blinds us to what we have in the moment: gone, from silver screens, it seems, is the tyranny of superhero IP, and even when films fall far from being great, they qualify heartily for the review of I had a good time at the movies. Wuthering Heights? Nearly abhorrently bad cinema, but a good time at the movies. Marty Supreme? Certainly a good time at the movies. Materialists? Stupid in the way life is stupid, but sure, why the hell not, a good time at the movies! Anora? I happen to think it’s actually a good film with great performances, and also: A GOOD TIME AT THE MOVIES.

Sometimes mediocre is better than whatever Avengers was. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes met at a launch party for the St. Botolph’s Review. Where is this journal now? I don’t know and don’t really care to learn right now, but before me I have the latest issue of the New York Review of Architecture, and it’s wonderful.

As I was writing the previous newsletter, I kept thinking about IC3PEAK, the dark wave industrial hip hop duo, not to get so last.fm with it. I had first come across their music in 2013 or 2014, when they were opening for Tricky in Moscow, who, like Brian Eno with Pyotr Mamonov, was hipper to the musical potential buried in Russia than I was; I didn’t care much for the music then. But I came to enjoy it a few years later, in 2018, when I had moved back from London, and felt that I needed to immerse myself in contemporary culture in Russia, because I was working at a magazine that was covering much of it; this was, in hindsight, an exciting time for it, when appropriated Western artistic codes were slowly morphing into work that had a recognizable identity of its own, and was no longer wholly derivative. This was the prime of artists like Monetochka, a slew of rappers occupying a variety sub-genres, Shortparis (whose lead singer, Nikolai Komtagin recently died)—not all of it was good, but it was its own thing, and among these artists are many talented poets (I really liked AIGEL, who would rap in Russian and Tatar about waiting for her boyfriend to be released from prison; Husky, too was standout talent, but a longtime supporter of Russia’s war in Ukraine, even if it didn’t seem to matter so much; Antoha MC I really enjoyed, too).

But yes, IC3PEAK: they stayed with me as I wrote about izbushkacore, as an example of the liberal side of the aisle adopting folk aesthetics; I had written about the decolonial podcasts and exhibitions, but not about pop culture, and this was the prime instance, even if to my memory the videos included more vernacular architecture. While revisiting the music and its accompanying visuals this week, I did indeed find the folky elements in the group’s emo-goth rendering, but was surprised to realize that it was confined mostly to the lead singer Nastya Kreslina’s long braided hair, and her vocals, which often utilizes a studied form of the “white voice” (a style of vocalizing that it produced in the chest register, more akin to a shout or the loud part of a yodel — designed to for singing in wide open fields). This song, called Сказка (Fairytale), is a good example. Everything else, however, based itself on the bleak post-Soviet tableaux of suburban existence: panel houses in overgrown fields, contrasted against parrot-colored balloons, grandmas pouring shots of vodka from sharp crystal carafes, rugs everywhere.

It was in 2018 too, that they released the song Смерти Больше Нет (Death Is No More) about the tightening of silovik rule, which was met with repressions in the form of concert after concert on their tour of Russia being shut down—they would perform those shows in parking lots, where they could. Я теперь готова ко всему на свете / я отсидела свой срок в интернете / выхожу на улицу гладить кота / его переезжает тачка мента. I’ll be pole dancing to this.

Finally, in continuation of the theme of my esoteric appreciation for folk traditions: I’ve been following a dancer named Saba Gogokha for a while, who performs with the Apkhazeti dance troupe, the Abkhazian Song and Dance Academic Ensemble. Specifically, I really enjoy watching videos of their studio practice sessions—like this one, this one, this one, and this one—something about the considered slovenliness of the sweats and the precise ease of their movements. Really spectacular—one might just have to plan a trip to Tbilisi.

When things get too overwhelming, I fantasize about retreating into what seems like a much simpler life, far from the spoils of urban indulgence, career competition, day job nightmares, brownstone slumlords, “the dating marketplace,” and, most of all, fickle visa regimes. While for some, this may mean homesteading in rural Pennsylvania or Utah, their grandparents’s house in Maine, a rorbu somewhere on a Norwegian island, or that image of a house on a sloped island ascribed to Bjork by the internet, for me that is a Russian Izba or its more well-to-do sibling, the Terem—wooden countryside dwellings existent in an astounding array of vernacular variety that melds together into a recognizable image: a slightly squat traditional house shape, made of worn, patinated wood, with lacey wood-carved window trimmings, a low picket fence, and tall grass growing all around; maybe there’s a goat or a cow grazing out front.

This is not a novel or unique impulse and, after years of cottagecore content that lives on the sprawl of the internet like an invasive species, at this point in history, likely the result of too much scrolling. Beyond escapism, I find the scrolling to be a terrible kind of shopping for alternate yet still plausible realities. And as with all shopping, one reaches a saturation point and finds themselves disgusted with their own capacity for consumption (ok, maybe that’s just me), which is when Ent. Center Stage: Izbushka—an elegant yet appropriately abject solution for the bloated abundance of theoretical options. My chief purveyor of Izbushka fantasies is the Instagram account (and Telegram channel) @domvdaly, whose name translates as faraway house—an aggregator of property listings in plentiful and various rural corners of Russia.

They suggest that for the truly low price of 550,000 rubles rubles (barely $7000), one could become the proud owner of a merchant’s home in the Yaroslavl Oblast, in a village of 25 families near the Volga River. There’s a school and two stores in the next village over, and the road gets cleared of snow in the winter. The house, built in 1900, has all the exterior attributes one might hope for in an izba, and inside the cabinets are lively light blue, surrounded by original tiling, hanging on by a thread but, ultimately, presents a straightforward restoration project. In the Ivanovo Oblast, in the village Konoplyanovo, the streets of which, we are told by the listing, are paved, one might buy an equally charming house of lesser historical curiosity, but greater structural integrity; it has a garden and comes with a chandelier of endearing chic, and an outhouse—600,000 rubles ($7,876.63). Not quite within one’s budget? Then surely a small fairytale house for 300,000 rubles ($3,936), also in the Ivanovo Oblast, with a banya and a traditional wood-fired stove that doubles as its heating system, will do the trick? The house, as noted in the listing, is suitable for year-round living.

Maybe one after a sense of noble desolation in (slightly) milder climes? For 1,500,000 rubles ($19,689), a two-story house in Tatarstan in a settlement called Shelanga, 45 miles from Kazan, built “no later than 1912,” with a beautiful porch and the promise of water, electricity, and gas, should you ever need any of those. Or maybe climatic severity is the point? That is why one might look towards the Russian North, in the Arkhangelsk region where ghosts of labor camps’ past are never all too distant—места, действительно, не столь отдаленные.* There, for 600,000 rubles ($7,947.12) one can buy an exemplar whose exterior Nordic reserve belies a hand-painted jewel box, all of its traditional accoutrements seemingly unchanged and remarkably well-preserved since 1897— the year of its construction.

In moments of exasperation with my own life, I have imagined myself moving back to Russia, removing myself from the city (Moscow) that I had to catapult myself across an ocean to get away from in any meaningful way, fixing up one of these houses to become the cozy wooden structures I know they have the potential to be; I would fill them with books, and in the womb-like warmth of a stove I will write my many novellas. Invariably, when I would send friends these listings, suggesting that this may be what I need to do to feel whole, the response has been something along the lines of “this looks like a great place to go insane.” The pinned post on @domvdaly is a screenshot of an interaction where a commenter asks, “and what would one do there? go out into the field and scream?” to which the account responds to the effect of “all pros, no cons.” And in those exasperated moments I don’t disagree.

@Domvdaly is run by ДАЛЬ [Dal’] — an architectural preservation consultancy focused on the revitalization of historically significant structures in regional metropolitan centers and small settlements alike, i.e. I suspect, as all consultancies tend to do, they make decks and ask for funding; perhaps they do some project management? In any case, they may very well be doing great work, whatever that may be. It’s certainly fashionable work in Russia, as anyone who has heard of the Strelka Institute might know, and has been for the last fifteen years or so, ever since Yury Luzhkov was ousted from his nearly two-decade tenure as Moscow’s mayor. Похорошела Москва при Собянине**, became a common refrain, ironic in reference to the Kremlin treating Moscow like the crown jewel of its holding company, appointing a new CEO in the person of Sergey Sobyanin, often described as a shrewd politician and a skilled manager.

But there was no denying that his cosmetic overhaul of the city was a success: Gorky Park, with its new masterplan, became the site of the OMA-designed Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, rather than that of rickety roller coasters and the drunken fountain-bathing of the airborne forces on Paratroopers Day; the city’s main sites began sharing a graphic identity, drawing on the typographical legacy of the Soviet Empire’s golden age, and former industrial sites that had fallen into disuse would become exhibition spaces or food courts; during the holidays, the main streets of the city would light up like one big garland winding towards the Red Square, such that even the city’s signature standstill traffic took on a festive quality.

All of this, along with the explosion of quaint bars and cafes in the mazes of central Moscow’s courtyards, the movie theaters showing foreign movies un-dubbed, and how everybody suddenly had ideas about urbanism and proselytized the importance of public spaces, signalled a period of liberalization, a new Thaw in which Russia was shedding the calloused skin of its post-Soviet era and was fashioning itself in the image of Western life, formed through media consumption, episodic travel, and a longing for a kind of prosperity that is only limited by one’s own imagination. Saint Petersburg saw concurrent developments: a Benthamian military prison turning into a mall of independent boutiques, with an Israeli restaurant taking up its central courtyard, and a neat sprawl of lawn surrounding the structure offering endless opportunities for summer lounging. These efforts spread out into regional metropolitan areas, with the Yeltsin Center in Yekaterinburg, the park-building boom in Kazan, Perm’s new strategic masterplan by the Dutch firm KCAP Architects & Planners, and then trickled down into smaller locales and homespun initiatives, such as the settlement Nikola Lenivets, which became a favored weekend destination and other such places in various Oblasts and Krais.

In 2014, in the wake of the Western sanctions Russia had brought upon itself with the annexation of Crimea, it all turned further inward, with the ethos of this all-encompassing urban (and rural) renewal seeping into the consumer market, now that parmesan and prosciutto were no longer, the import items that had become a habitual presence for city-dwelling Russians presented enough of a chore to acquire that they now represented a void in the market, which enterprising hipsters rushed to fill. Small-to-medium-batch Russian-made sodas, potato chips, health foods of all sorts, shoes, bags, athletic wear, home electronics, you-name-it, were now a far more appealing proposition than the Pringles and Dysons of yore. Russia was catching up with and sometimes, in the eyes of consumers, surpassing the West. And everyone was too distracted by the delight and novelty of the idea that something good can happen—or, even better, already exists—here, to make the direct connection between the aggressive foreign policy that birthed it.

Though since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, this has all continued apace but is now cast in a slightly different light, no longer the bright glare of its foregone optimism. I truly do not subscribe to the line of thinking that condemns all Russians as destined for hell, considers all those subject to the Russian government collectively at fault for this current war, but I do believe that those of us who were the workforce of this culture—of the magazines, the cultural institutions, creative agencies, and lifestyle brands—took part in blowing plumes towards the smokescreen of modernization that became the answer to где вы были восемь лет?

This is not to say that even during that time there hadn’t been a level of historical self-examination. The strain of the inward-turn that became interested in folk tradition, its excavation, revival, and recontextualization, seemed to have a decolonial thrust. I remember being surprised and kind of riveted when in 2017 I went to see an exhibition about Congolese folk painting post the declaration of the Republic’s independence from Belgium at the Garage Museum, and found within it a small room, contemplating the Soviet Union’s colonial project through the art practices of the Chukchi, the indigenous people of the Far-Eastern region of Chukotka, separated from Alaska by the Bering Strait, which was claimed by the Russian Empire in 1916; it was not an overt political statement, but even then this revision of history felt uncommonly daring at an institution even of this scale. There was an excellent podcast called Тоже Россия ([Tozhe Rossiya] —“Also Russia”) by anthropologist Dmitry Oparin and journalist Maria Semendyaeva, that explored, with minute care, the gamut of dailiness in Russia, as experienced by the many ethnic and religious groups inhabiting the country’s imperial expanses.

A project especially dear to my heart was Кружок ([Kruzhok]— diminutive for circle, which in this context translates as an extracurricular class). It was started by a group of young professionals based in Moscow, who would travel to schools in more remote locales and organize free educational workshops for local teenagers. The skills or activities explored depended on who would volunteer to go on a given trip—the web developers would make a website with the kids, the journalists—a magazine, the artists and art historians—an exhibition. The volunteers themselves were often from “the peripheries” and would only go to places where they were invited; often, the invitation would come from a teacher. The project’s goal was twofold: to offer these kids access to even a general awareness of what their options might be after the completion of their school studies, along with an example, and to them tell the stories of these places they live in, and the lives the lead there, which has generally been de-prioritized from mainstream narratives about Russia (it’s not always flattering, I guess). They would document these trips in moving short films that would then be posted on Youtube, such as this one about a web-design workshop they did in Sardoyal, a village of 500 inhabitants in the republic of Mari El, tucked into the northern bank of the Volga.

All of this is no longer: since the start of the big war in February 2022, the Garage Museum has halted its exhibitions program and its offices have been raided by the FSB; the Тоже Россия’s hosts no longer saw it appropriate to keep working on a podcast about Russia; Kружок became impossible to sustain, most of its volunteers preoccupied with crossing borders by plane, train, and foot, to flee the country, in anticipation of political repressions or to avoid mobilization.

What has remained, however, is the interest in folk tradition; if anything, it has been mainstreamed, now popular content fodder for a smattering of Russian lifestyle influencers, or the nucleus of the “interesting” work being done in Russia, such as ДАЛЬ’s historic preservation projects. For people of the creative persuasion, professionally speaking, who stayed in Russia for one reason or another, this is a politically neutral place to turn their attention—it does not contradict the government’s mandate to save and proliferate “traditional values,” and offers plausible deniability to those with ideological motivations that might not align with state’s, which, in any case, rather counterintuitively, is much less concerned with decolonial discourse than it is with the nefarious Western “extremist organization”—LGBTQIA+. That is if you stay quiet: last October, Pavel Syutkin, writer and historian of Russian culinary traditions, who had been outspoken about his opposition to the war, but continued to work in Russia, was detained for “spreading fake news”*** about the war.

This is all reflective of an uncanny valley of morality that is now as much an endemic element of Russia’s topography as the steppes and the tundra. As may have been gathered, I myself am not immune to the aesthetic appeals of various expressions of Russia’s folk heritages, and it makes up a not insignificant part of the purely gratuitous portion of my social media consumption. This results in the occasional ethical jump scare as I engage with this content, such as when a little while ago I followed a musical collective on Instagram, called Tolóka Ensemble. They’re a choir with an ethnographic bent: much of their repertoire is collected in expeditions around the country, where they go in search of musical communion with carriers—mostly elderly women—of a variety of vocal traditions. It seemed to me an anthropologically astute undertaking, and the skill of these fairly young singers is undeniable; I enjoyed listening anytime a video of theirs came up on my feed. But, as has been my experience, with most seemingly benign things coming out of Russia that have captured my delighted attention, darkness finds a way to seep in; during one of my mindless scrolling sessions, I came upon a series of “stories” by the ensemble, documented the sendoff of one of the choir’s members to the front, to fight in Putin’s war, “for Russia.” Toasts, songs, proud head-shaving, dancing, and captions about how serving your country is a matter of duty, not a political act. “We are not embarrassed by the words “Motherland” or “Duty” and “anyone who comments “don’t go” doesn’t understand how the conscription system in Russia works.” You don’t understand, or better yet, what can you possibly understand is a favored rhetorical form for the apolitical conformists to Russia’s realities; but I am not going to talk about my mother here.

Tolóka will represent said Motherland, as Russia makes its return to the Venice Biennale this year. In 2022, the artists representing Russia, had withdrawn from the biennial, citing the war in their unwillingness to represent; in 2024, the pavilion was given over to Bolivia. Now, Russia comes back to prove, according to Mikhail Shvydkoy, delegate for international cultural exchanges and the country’s former culture minister, that Russian culture can not be isolated, and that “attempts to cancel” it by the West have failed. “Any form of provocation against Russian cultural figures in the Venice Biennale is possible, but I hope that common sense will prevail,” said Shvydkoy, as reported by ARTnews.

So much for benign, inward explorations of folk tradition. Perhaps my ability to read between the lines has dulled; or maybe there is nothing to be read there. I snap out of my exasperated fantasies of return when I remember that the only reason to do so is if one were truly committed to going insane; no better place for that than in the desolate corners of a gaslighter’s paradise.

*места, действительно, не столь отдаленные [mesta, deystvitel’no, ne stop’ otdalenniye] — is a riff on the ironic Russian euphemism for prison, or the Gulag, as it were; it translates literally as “a place not so distant.” 

**Похорошела Москва при Собянине [Pokhoroshela Moskva pri Sobyanine] translates roughly as “Moscow has really bloomed under Sobyanin”

*** “spreading fake news” (“распространение фейков”) is literally what people are being charged with for speaking out against the war.

At this moment my handbag contains: my wallet, my passport, a power adapter for my computer, a power adapter for my phone, a portable charger I never remember to charge, three types of pain killers (the Russian Nurofen, Ibuprofen, and CVS brand menstrual pills), two sanitary pads should the need for their use suddenly befall me, a small bottle of perfume, two lipsticks, two lipliners, two caps from lipliners no longer in this bag, six lipglosses, a metal and an acetate french pin which work well for holding my hair up only when I wear it curly, single-use pouches of shampoo and conditioner, a bottle of nail polish, a nail file and a cuticle pusher, a cardboard packet of brand new bobby-pins, six loose bobby pins (tarnished and bent), a set of housekeys, keycards from the hotel in Miami and from the hotel in LA, a bottle of Dry Hands, a thumb-sized pink ceramic cat that my niece brought me from a town on the banks of the Volga called Myshkin, a fluorescent pink pen, notes I took during a tarot reading at the end of January because I had found myself at my wit’s end, some loose coins, a tangled necklace. Can AI do this? Methinks not.

It is against my own best judgment that I am attempting to articulate anything about “AI,” but I wanted to revisit something I expressed, off-handedly, a few weeks ago in recommending this piece on Anthropic in the New Yorker, which is that I do not care about or feel particularly threatened by LLMs.

The news of the past few weeks, accompanied by a barrage of simultaneous writing on AI and its effects on reality outside of the computer, has prompted me to reconsider my dismissive attitude. It’s not that I wholly disagree with the sentiment I expressed previously, but it is proving to be true that a refusal to engage with the matter is, in fact, somewhat irresponsible, if not in broad, global terms (I prefer to keep my delusions of grandeur at an arm’s length), then on the scale of one’s individual life. And in any case, it is proving impossible not to think about. The news and writing in question: Anthropic’s standoff with the DoD and Open AI’s quick swoop into the empty space left by its competitor; the Sam Kriss piece in Harper’s about the cheating software Cluely and the “agentic” young men in San Francisco, the aforementioned piece by Gideon Lewis Kraus, this piece about romance “novelists” producing their churnings-out with the aid of Claude, Becca Rothfeld’s resonant screed against LLMs, Catherine Lacey’s also impassioned treatise against their smoothing of reality, Sophie Haigney’s recent piece about AI animal videos, Anna Wiener’s report on AI companions, Elvia Wilk’s very good argument on why the handwringing over the quality and nature of LLM writing is besides the point. Every day, really, there’s someone pointing out the ways that this still new technology is distorting our perceptions or our ability to think, or how it will decimate employment as we know it, how it’s changing the way wars are fought, amplifying the human capacity for violence to a numb, hollow echo, how we don’t really fully know yet of what AI itself is capable.

My kneejerk response to the whole ordeal when I give it more thought, is still to disengage completely, run away to the remote countryside, begin homesteading and all that jazz. But it is quite clear at this point that it is rather irreversibly part of our lives now: quite soon there will be adults who don’t remember a life before ChatGPT, and in as little as fifteen years there will be those who had never known the world without it. And if you, like me, have a day job/office job/email job/whatever-you-want-to-call-it, it’s likely that most software products you use to do said job integrate AI in some capacity, however clumsy it may be. So while my instinctual reaction no longer feels entirely appropriate, neither does the moral panic that proposes refusal and abstinence as the ultimate solution to the AI question (see: Becca Rothfeld). Again, I don’t entirely disagree with its proponents; but it is not a reasonable, let alone plausible, expectation that the median user/consumer will take a moral stance against something that inarguably makes their life easier, however it is that it does so, if the hegemony of tech has taught us anything.

To be clear, there is plenty to panic and to moralize about — by now, as wars everywhere flare, the perilousness and monstrosity of AI’s use in them should be clear and inspire profound fear; with this stuff I always think about how technological advances cloaked in the notion of “progress,” are just a way to make horrors heretofore unthinkable an efficient reality, to paraphrase (if not mangle) Adorno. This should be enough, the chief reason, really, to abstain from the use of AI; but it would also be naïve to think that one’s individual boycott would save civilian lives in a war. At most, it is a refusal to become a source of extraction of whatever “intelligence” it may adopt, while also saving a little bit of water, which, personally, I’ll take but I will not harbor any illusions about it having any impact in the grand scheme of things: in posting this on the internet, I negate these efforts anyway (or such is my understanding).

As many, at this point, have pointed out, the corner of this where users have the most constructive agency is that of labor, and organizing, indeed seems to be the answer: no matter if one is of the creative persuasion, professionally speaking, or holds a pink-collar day job, or works in tech, whatever that might mean anymore—AI’s threats to one’s livelihood are equally existential, while abstinence, especially in junior and mid-level positions, puts workers at a disadvantage with expectations of productivity (or, at the very least, the perception of it) having ramped up largely with the advent of AI. In any case, I’m not suggesting anything novel, and I don’t know if it even really needs to be said in this forum anymore.

What was the compulsion to start this little ditty with an inventory of the contents of my handbag? Well, it’s quite simple: for as much as this has occupied my thoughts the one thing to which I kept returning, which is that no matter how well it will learn to imitate human activity as mediated by a screen, LLMs can never approximate or, much less, know, what it is to be human out in the wide world outside the web, where our intelligence (should we be so lucky to have any) is accompanied by the animal reality of having a body. While they can—rather competently—extract from the vast bodies of text that describe this reality, they do not know the sudden rush of pleasure that we identify as fun, or the acute discomfort of social anxiety as manifested in sweaty palms and disorderly, truncated thoughts. The contents of my bag are the material traces of the life I live outside of the computer and while superficially they may categorize me as a certain kind of person in ways that AI, too, might be able to recognize, the narrative undercurrents of my biography that they suggest, can really only fully be articulated by me, if I choose to do so. I think this charming list by just about summarizes it in its first bullet point: AI cannot kiss with tongue (or at all).

This comes back to the question if AI “can write good,” as put by Wilk’s aforementioned essay, which is, ultimately, a pointless one to pose. AI, possibly sooner than later, will write fine, but the thing is that it will only ever write when prompted. We, the human writers, can’t really help it; even as career prospects in this racket continue their dwindling, we’ll keep doing this because it carries some existential necessity for us. I’m willing to wager that the majority of the world’s writers likely do not depend on their writing to make a living; whether that is unfortunate or not is not for me to say—I am, and will likely be for a long time, a publicist for most of my days’ waking hours. And still I, like many others in my position, feel a compulsion to keep doing this. Sometimes the purpose is to understand what it is that I think about something; in the case of AI, I have found, it is that I think it is profoundly boring. I vow to never write about it again.

As for the swamp of textual “slop” we are now confronted with — well, I’ll say, that there have always been bad writers, and it can not be taken for granted that anything that someone deemed worth publishing will be good. Most of it never was.

Los Angeles used to be a place where I spent a lot of time, for reasons of a relationship and the resultant flirtation with moving here, and now I’m in LA again for the first time in four years. Ellay, as I am made fun of for pronouncing it. I keep telling anyone who asks how it is that it’s dumb and douchey, and that I love it. Nominally, I am here for the art fairs, but, really, I just wanted to hang out somewhere during the most sorry part of winter in New York. A few friends are “wintering” here, too. I’ve long been wanting to write an essay about Los Angeles—the sky here, the quiet, the houses, the typefaces of its signage, the many ghosts that haunt the city—so I’ll hold off on writing more on the subject as the essay simmers. But I’ll say that I’m happy to be here, even if, or perhaps especially because, most of my time, so far, has been spent alone.

Instead, I’ll share some thoughts on travel, specifically packing. Because I am where I am, I can’t not think about the meme that is Joan Didion’s packing list, which has a grip on girls in their early twenties; it certainly did on me when I was one. For obvious reasons: It’s emblematic of an aspirational self-possession, as the image of Didion generally is—a woman who knows exactly what she needs to have with her when she is on the other side of the country, so that she can comfortably focus on the task at hand (watching, with cool detachment, a toddler high on acid). But Didion, of course, was sharply attuned to the relief of her self-presentation, and one can have little doubt that her economy of thought she paid to her material needs is the result of painstaking self-study.

Dissecting the nature of “chic,” much less the strain that Didion embodied, at this point, doesn’t hold much fascination for me or for anyone reading; a lot has been written on the subject, and it largely defeats the purpose anyway. I think, too, that the nice thing about getting older is that one becomes more accepting of the fact that one does not need to adopt all the qualities or habits one admires in others, especially if they don’t come naturally. As someone who has spent months at a time living out of a carry-on suitcase (I don’t do checked luggage unless I’m moving from one country to another), I’ve come to accept that while I’m able to be a light packer, I’m also an impulsive and impractical one, with maximalist tendencies. My packing is much like my cooking; there’s a basic structure that serves as a starting point, which gets taken over by improvisation: an extra few splashes of wine, a dash of cardamom, fennel to substitute celery.

On the plane, I’ll wear a pair of easy-to-remove walking shoes, jeans, and a tank top under a sweater, a jacket, a shawl; a handbag with my documents in a pouch, a book, and everything else haphazardly floating about as it usually does. In my suitcase there’s a cosmetic bag, five thongs, three bras, two t-shirts, a cardigan, a pair of easy trousers, a skirt, a bathing suit, a flatiron, three more books, and a pair of non-walking shoes. In addition to that, there will usually be a quiver of slip dresses and gauzy blouses ,thrown in at the last minute and folded to take up no space. Maybe another pair of trousers, if there’s space, and the top I bought months ago and haven’t yet worn; the best way to bring a new piece of clothing into the rotation is by being stuck with it. Maybe an extra novella. When I remember, a silk robe. I suppose this is all to say that, in travel I have been confronted with the fact that I care a lot about stuff. Stuff is home, if it’s the right stuff. Or at the very least, it’s comfort.

Whenever I feel guilt over the frivolities I can’t seem resist and recite to myself silent reprimands for so enthusiastically abandoning my commitment to a life of the mind, I think about Walter Benjamin; about how he, in Moscow, disenchanted with revolutionary socialism, and given the runaround by his failed partner in extramarital romance Asja Lācis, resorted to making the trip worth it by collecting books and compulsively buying toys. And I think about the Angel of History.

In that spirit, some of the stuff I currently view as essential:

• Emily Dawn Long’s River Skirt and Drape Front Knit Polo (which I tend to wear off-the-shoulder and everywhere: on the plane, at the dance studio, to dinner). EDL’s design delights in playful mutability, which is what makes her clothes a frequent traveller’s dream, and it is with great pleasure that I give not an insignificant portion of my disposable income to her.

• Fake Chanel slingbacks from the Saks Fifth Avenue brand, bought on sale. Similar here, here, and here. They’re not particularly comfortable, but not uncomfortable either. Perfect for being driven around and sauntering from one meeting location to the next.

• A poppy-print silk satin robe from Liberty in London that I bring with me everywhere (even the shortest of trips) I can remember to bring it.

• An obnoxious red rose claw clip from Etsy, inspired by the fun and wildly overpriced creations of Danish brand Caro Editions (though, I understand, that much of it is hand-crafted and limited in quantity, which… still).

• A papery 1920s dress that might rip any minute, and these satin black pants, both fit for any occasion.

• Araks Gita Bras.

• A Kayleigh Peddie bikini (or two)

• Books: All Our Yesterdays by Natalia Ginzburg, and Speedboat by Renata Adler, which I will be re-reading for my work book club. Influenced by publicist, writer, woman-about-town and my brilliant friend Ellie, who described it as “the working woman’s Middlemarch,” I also picked up Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and, because I couldn’t resist, Maria Stepanova’s latest, in Sasha Dugdale’s translation.

No matter how well one has packed, if one is living out of their carry-on for longer than a month, things start to feel a bit stale. It’s hard to feel put together when you live in your clothes with little to differentiate the dishevelled from the less so. Enter perfume, which is a minor obsession I seem to share with women of all political persuasions on the internet (and teenage boys. And Jeremy Fragrance). When I was sixteen, I remember my mother dispensing what was possibly the sagest advice she had ever been the author of: when in doubt as to what to wear, dress simply and douse yourself in perfume. I took this to heart; it is lucky, that owing to my body’s chemistry, nothing I spray on myself produces particularly overwhelming sillage.

So, in the stretches of my visa exile when it was unwise to acquire new clothing, in order to stave off monotony, I would go to department stores or seek out niche perfume shops to pick up testers, which generally it is easy to acquire in great abundance. I would live with the scents for a while, wearing them even to bed, and then decide what I would want to acquire a full bottle of (always the smaller version when possible, for ease of transportation).

Among the scents that joined the bottle of Debaser I had brought with me to Europe were Musc Ravargeur by Frederic Malle, which, in all of its warm spice is perfect for the winter; Corpus Equus by Naomi Goodsir, my fastest acquisition—upon the first ever spray it was too animalic for me, it’s top notes a heady mix of leather, burnt hay, and the smell of adrenaline a horse’s sweat sometimes emits, but it resolves into an ostentatious bouquet of white florals which have none of pissy smell that jasmine usually turns up as on me, and as I smelled that I ran back to the store to get a bottle; Jersey by Chanel which I spent a long time choosing (I know wear it to bed and when I feel like projecting a nondescript vibe), having decided that I wanted something really classic but all of the Chanel’s greatest hits, even though I really like their old-timey aldehydic quality, made me feel like a toddler trying on their mother’s high heels. Finally, there was Sale Marino by Wiener Blut, purchased in Vienna — I was specifically looking for an aquatic scent, which is a hard one to get right.

Honorable mentions which remained tester-sized: Lys Sølaberg and Rose Saltifolia by Maison Crivelli, the prior a bit too masculine for me, the latter more floral than saline which was just not what I was looking for, and Nightclubbing by Celine which captures the scent of a night out coming to an end—the perfume and cigarette smoke lingering on your hair—with virtuosic precision, but ultimately, sometimes channels the accompanying nausea for me. I still wear it on occasion; it’s the fragrance equivalent of a slutty outfit.

More recently, I’ve been into Green Vanille (the only vanilla that doesn’t make me smell like a pastry) and Nitesurf Neroli (the perfect orange blossom scent, also void of white-floral pissiness) by Regime des Fleurs. Right now, I am travelling with a small bottle of Étude in Black by Universal Flowering, which has a dark, syrupy quality that I enjoy, but ultimately lacks the sophistication and staying power of La Fille de Berlin by Serge Lutens; my mother once gave me a bottle as a gift, and I might just have to repurchase.

There’s generally a lot to be said about the language of perfume obsessives and the locutions that emerge from the online spaces where they congregate, but I’m not sure I’m prepared to spend the time thinking about this right now. There is a lot of fun writing on fragrance right now though: the Substack newsletters and , ’s perfume write-ups, as well as this fascinating post about “digital smells” by Hirschland and and this incredible profile of Parmesan perfumer Hilde Solani by .

The best thing to have been written about scent in the English language remains Montaigne’s essay on smell in the Florio translation.

Before I depart, I would like to leave you with this video of Rem Koolhaas asking his employees to “please only print things that are beautiful,” which feels like an apt conclusion to this post, composed as the world resolutely sets itself ablaze. Adieu!

A Russian man I’d known in London insisted we go for a drink, now that he lives in New York. We’ve been acquainted for the last decade or so, but had not ever been close, to the extent that it’d be a stretch to describe our relationship even as “friendly,” though I know more about his divorce than I care to. We are to each other stock presences, people who recur in each other’s lives by the sole dint of their shared origins and subsequent migration patterns. He seemed only to have a vague knowledge of the fact that I live here, let alone a sense of why I ended up here or what it is that I do. He declined to go anywhere but the Brooklyn Inn and warned me in advance that he would be arriving on one of those electric skateboards with a single tire.

After regaling me with the tale of his arduous journey towards an American visa (an F-1, he is getting a PhD in math after an illustrious career in project-managing software for fighter drones), which involved being suspected of being a spy and a pleading email to Chuck Schumer. He was incredulous when it turned out that my work schedule didn’t account for President’s Day, and when he was forced to present a physical card instead of his phone to the bartender. “An unbelievable country,” he kept saying as he shook his head. After inquiring what it is that brought me to America, and what it is that keeps me here, he went on to the question that was the purpose of this meeting: which Russian-speaking мероприятия* do I frequent? He was disappointed to hear that not any, really, not anymore, unless uber rides with Ukrainian drivers count or the occasional conversation overheard on the train. “Ok, but are there journalists here?” Yes, I told him, plenty. “So where is the тусовка? Where do the foreign correspondents hang out?” I was stumped. First and 46th? I don’t know, brother, this is New York.

A significant part of my social world when I lived in London: other Russians, often Muscovites, who went to the same five schools. Among them are people whom I have come to love dearly, but I have made it an intention since then not to get drawn into the vortex of a community bound together by little besides language and geography; for some of us, this is why we want to get away from our families, and ending up in Londongrad defeated the purpose. I’ve found, in my years of encountering people whose biographies follow the same beats as mine, that there are schemes of existence into which one can easily fall, the worst and most recognizable of which is the state of perma-expatriatism. I’d say that largely this is an ailment by which I am not afflicted, but because I do have my occasional bouts, I’ll allow myself this: to call this group “rootless cosmopolitans” would not strictly be a dog whistle.

This, of course, is not exclusive to Russians; in fact, I had first come in contact with this type through the Australians and Brits who would move to Moscow to teach English, after stints in Tokyo or Bangkok. In the most egregious cases, there’s a backpacker-colonialist mindset that calcifies into the lion’s share of what is their personality. These people forever find themselves in haughty opposition to their surroundings, feeling justified in their ethnic prejudices, either because they’ve observed first-hand what life in places where their ideals of Western progress have not yet set sturdy, consequential roots, or the inverse—they’re disenchanted with what said progress represents and adopt “the West is rotting” as an enlightened stance. Admittedly, this is a bit of a caricature, and even in the worst representatives of these tendencies redeeming qualities can be found—often in the form of a truckload of amusing anecdotes and sharp observations about the world.

It took moving to New York, seven years into my life as an emigrant, to get a grasp of the myriad gradations that exist even within one nominal diaspora. That a Russian from Brighton Beach is not always the same as the Russians who go to the Orthodox church on 97th street, who are also not the same as the Russians who moved here in the (largely) Jewish exodus of 1989, who are also not the same as the enterprising upstarts who made their way here ten years later. Then there’s their children, but that’s getting too into the weeds; perhaps for a different essay. My purposeful absconding from my habitual circles yielded a surprising result: I found that in the negation of my own Russianness, for better or worse, I felt more Russian than I had ever; the historical contours of what made me what I am—a Russian abroad—had come into focus. It’s often easier to understand what one is when one knows what one isn’t.

When public conversation turns towards immigration, I start thinking about the difference between an immigrant and an emigrant, and why I have no claim to the prior title. Primarily, the distinction is narrative: the focal point of an immigrant story is the arrival, while that of an emigrant story is departure. This might be needlessly pedantic, insofar as classifying things goes, because to arrive one needs to leave and vice versa; perhaps, too, I’m showing my hand in that I don’t have the requisite papers to consider myself someone who has “arrived.” But I keep returning to the thought that stories of immigration are rarely narrated in the present tense, while stories of emigration possess an ongoingness that their protagonists find hard, if not impossible, to shake. In immigration, too much stands to be gained, to risk jinxing it by speaking too soon or too openly; in emigration, the loss has already happened, and is forever to be dwelt on. Pardon the excessive pathos.

This all, if you couldn’t yet tell, is an ongoing investigation of mine and, therefore, my thinking on it is incomplete; but in the process I’ve been collecting a small library of emigrant narratives, some of which I would like to share with you, dear reader. You’ll find that my preoccupations skew towards narratives of Russian emigrants at the start of the 20th century, because, well, that is simply where many of my historical and aesthetic predilections lie, but I’d like to stipulate that, fundamentally, this really isn’t about the “mysterious Russian soul.” If anything, I’m more interested in the artifice of this notion and considering how it is both performed and perceived. And, either way, there are a few titles in here that have nothing to do with Russians or Russianness, that I nevertheless found instructive in thinking through the displacement from the context of one’s birth.

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov (1957)

An unsurprising first entry. To me, as to many others, Pnin is the capo dei capi of emigrant novels. There’s a cunning cruelty in its narration, combined with a profound empathy and the hazy beauty of memory Nabokov summoned at his most sentimental. It really is a masterpiece of both prose and construction, so I have little in the way of an endorsement that would live up to the novel, other than READ IT IF YOU HAVEN’T AND READ IT AGAIN IF YOU HAVE. But for our purposes, here’s what became the chapter that encapsulates our subject matter.

Because I am a Russian-speaker, I also get the smug pleasure of detecting the linguistic easter eggs in the winding prose of the book—I think often and fondly about the asides on drafts. If his Russian was music, his English was murder.

Night Roads by Gaito Gazdanov (1953)

Readers of Gaito Gazdanov (Ossetian, from the Russian Empire) often compare him to Nabokov, I suspect, to encourage the broadening of what we think of as the white émigré canon. I find Gazdanov’s approach to be more libidinal and lacking in the narratorial calculations with which Nabokov’s writing is so generously seasoned. In that, it generates greater emotional force; it is also just more openly tragic and follows people far more disadvantaged than Nabokov’s genteel (anti-)heroes. Like the narrator of Night Roads, Gazdanov too worked as a taxi driver in Paris; it seems that this he found to be more valorous work than writing or editing, as it were. It is not a perfect book, but it was one of those reading experiences that split my life into two; before I had read it and after. Perhaps I was especially receptive to it when I read it (during an isolated period of being alone in Vienna), but I found the way that it portrays the unfolding of a life as if it had already been lived to its conclusion an absolutely breathtaking way to render time. If you’re desirous of a primer on Gazdanov, Sophie Pinkham wrote a really good essay about him for the LRB.

Zoo, or Letters Not About Love by Victor Shklovsky (1923)

For some reason, during the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion, I felt inexplicably drawn to this novel. It might have been that with the mass departures of people of my age and political creed from Russia, as they made their way across borders on foot, there was a general sense of misplaced romantic abandon in these circles, many fancying themselves White Russians in exile, as they settled in Tbilisi, Istanbul, or, indeed, Berlin. Or it might have been that I was lovesick but was forced to think about other things, like war. It’s hard to know now, but nevertheless it’s amazing how, in the right hands, avoidance and denial take on a generative power, such as to negate themselves. If you’ve heard about the book, you’ll likely know that it came from the writer Elsa Triolet, the object of the literary theorist’s Victor Shklovsky’s unrequited love, asking him to no longer write to her about his suffocating love (“You gave me two assignments. 1.) Not to call you 2.) Not to see you. So now I’m a busy man,” he wrote to her). This resulted in this formal experiment, an epistolary novel, which is not typically a genre I like, consisting of affectionate, intimate letters about anything but love—a portrait of literary émigré life in Berlin shortly after the revolution, both exterior and interior.

Call it Sleep by Henry Roth (1934)

An iffy inclusion here, because if I was to abide by my own categorizations this would, of course, be an immigrant novel, but I’d say that the parental thread here is intriguing if one were to regard it through the prism of leaving rather than arriving. It’s also just a beautiful piece of literary modernism, narrated by a six-year-old child—the son of Galician Jews who are recent arrivals in the tenements of the Lower East Side—and culminates in an incredible polyglot polyphony. If you won’t take my word for it, perhaps Alfred Kazin’s might do the trick?

Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick (1979)

It might be that I am simply obsessed with this book, but I think reading it as an emigrant novel is an intriguing way to engage with an opaque text like this; it does, after all, portray a life in New York, haunted by previous or concurrent lives in other places. The Billy Holliday parts? And if not that, the bits about the concentration camp survivor in Amsterdam—a man with a lot of joie de vivre—his French wife, and his lover.

My Life in CIA by Harry Mathews (2005)

I was resistant to including a book about and by an American in Paris, because that canon, formidable as it is, is populated by those whose eventual return to the United States always looms as an inevitability, which is decidedly a different thing from the kind of expatriatism we’re talking about here. But My Life in CIA is a very, very strange book that I’ll take any chance to recommend, and perhaps it fits here because one could say it’s about a commitment to both assimilate (Mathews, a close friend of Perec’s, was the only American member of Oulipo) and to accept how it is, after all, impossible to assimilate. It’d be vulgar to describe it as being about the absurdities of such a life, and frankly, I can’t be completely sure I fully understand it, but nevertheless I love the book and hope that you might too, especially if you’re in the mood for something set in Paris.

Mathews generally is an intriguing character to me, and his marriage to Niki de Saint Phalle is something I think about often, for no reason I can pinpoint.

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2013)

Not usually one for contemporary realist novels (just an aesthetic thing, I can’t mount a well-argued objection to the genre), this makes Americanah an unusual item in any list of mine. Admittedly, it is now a long time since I have read it, but I return to it in my mind over and over again—it’s surgical in its dissections of how cultural context shifts identity and rather virtuosically straddles the dichotomy of leaving/arriving.

Class by Francesco Pacifico (2014)

I was inspired to pick the novel up by Pacifico’s brilliant essay in n+1 from a few (shit, six) years ago, which chronicles the process of translating the novel, originally written in Italian, into English. Pacifico, also a translator, took on the task himself, and found himself not so much translating as editing the novel in profound ways—profound enough to warrant for the new version that came out of its translation into English to be translated back to Italian and republished. It’s far from a perfect novel with a few strange choices at its foundation and most certainly a bit of a time capsule, a clumsy one at times (its Romans-in-New-York refer to Williamsburg as Willy), but I still admire it for its resolute tackling of emigration by way of consumption and the nuances of class. Money might be the most difficult thing to write about.

The Europeans by Orlando Figes (2020)

This is a really engrossing history of, well, exactly what it says on the tin, Western cosmopolitan culture, told through the love triangle between Ivan Turgenev, the singer Pauline Viardot, and her husband Louis. Turgenev (Tougeneff?) here appears as a cultural intermediary, swerving from French into English, into German as he proselytizes the exotic beauty of birch groves. Figes’s is a far more charitable portrayal than my own, abridged, glib one, and serves to chart the brief blooming and disappearance of a European ideal we still, I’d argue, are attached to. Perhaps, Natasha’s Dance (also wonderful book!) might be a more apt entry here, but I was very amused by the episodes of Turgenev and Dostoevsky’s bitchy underhanded little snipes at each other in Baden Baden, wherein the intellectual veil of the disagreement (really, Dostoevsky, an ardent gambler, owed Turgenev money) was a kind of clash between Westernizers, in the person of Turgenev, and Slavophiles, in the person of Dostoevsky.

But yes, I’m very interested in the tension between “promoting” and “peddling” culture... Something to be said about Pevear and Volokhonsky (whose translations, controversially, I like, but I maintain that this is because I speak Russian), but that’s for another time.

Diaghilev’s Empire by Rupert Christiansen (2022)

Speaking of cultural peddlers—this is a book about Diaghilev and his legacy, I read recently and was absolutely enthralled by the range of its portraiture, mostly of people who were far away from home, to find fame and fortune, or simply a better life. There’s ego, hubris, vanity, and exploitation, runaway ballerinas who end up found on Broadway, and virtuosic flamenco dancers who become obsessed with the metronome to the point of insanity. This could, of course, be read as a book about the history of ballet, which, I think, is how it was written, but this travelling circus of packaged culture is a more friction-laden companion piece to the trains, planes, and automobiles that took Figes’ Europeans across an as-yet-loosely-bordered World.

I’m sure there are gaping omissions in the list above, but I haven’t yet read Sebald’s The Emigrants, nor have I read much Dovlatov, whom it feels necessary to mention. Limonov, yes, but I am not a fan, despite being able to appreciate his brilliance, and It’s Me, Eddie is probably more a book of exile, as are these other honorable mentions.

Finally, I shall leave you with this feuilleton about tsarist Russian emigrants that flooded Europe post February 17 by Austrian journalist Joseph Roth, a friend of Stefan Zweig’s. I recently opened a collection of his dispatches from Russia, brilliantly translated into Russian by a group of ten translators. It felt serendipitous to be confronted with that essay just as I started thinking about writing this post, and so, I’ll say that it was the inspiration.

À bientôt, folks!

I spent yesterday inadvisably hungover after a Friday night of drinking bad sparkling wine audaciously labelled as a blanc de blanc at my friend’s apartment in Yorkville while listening to the Spongebob the Squarepants OST on Youtube. All this after watching Wuthering Heights (2026), alone, because I was late to the movie and sat in what seats were available, which were the two awkward seats at the side at the back of the theater. I’m not going to dignify the film with a review, but I had a fine time and cried conspicuously but not uncomfortably. My friend, for whom it was that I and another friend came uptown, had appendicitis surgery this week; the first thing she asked her surgeon when she came to, her husband said, was “Doctor, when you were operating, how much visceral fat did you see?” The surgery was laparoscopic. What can I say? Chicks rock.

I was thinking I might try to write about feminine forms, in a literary sense that is, and their pervasiveness on Substack; specifically, the recommendations-disguised-as-diary (or is it the other way around?) and how they function as both advertising and product at once. There are people who elevate the form to an art, but they are few and far between in the general saturation of this…field. But anyway, thinking is not my strong suit this weekend due to the aforementioned hangover, and I’m also not sure I have anything interesting to say that isn’t already being said elsewhere. I’m not even sure I’m particularly interested in Substack as a subject matter on Substack; it all feels like the snake eating its own tail, and the way that discourse is metabolized “on here” is very boring to me. At least with twitter it wasn’t so graphomaniac.

The irony of the previous paragraph is not lost on me, especially so with what is to follow, and so I pledge to forgo any regurgitated Substack commentary henceforth. This shall be the only time that I address directly what I am hoping to do here: namely, to record and think through my interests, enthusiasms, and perturbations; to use this merely as a place to deposit some of my writing, and to do so consistently. With that, I decided to make a regular feature of these combined tangents: things that, perhaps, don’t warrant a full essay, or haven’t germinated into one yet. If you subscribe to ye olde newsletter, you can expect these weekly or so. This didn’t need to be so explicit, and I could have just started doing these without saying anything,, but I guess I’m being true to the tradition of the blog. Take this as a statement of intent.

Last Saturday, I thought I might get frostbite as I made my way through the godforsaken windtunnel streets of Hudson Yards to get to the Javits Center, where two dear friends have persuaded me to go to the American Kennel Club’s “Meet the Breeds” event—a dog expo-meets-petting-zoo which, unfortunately, is the sort of twee activity that does, in fact, delight me. The eugenics of dog breeding aside, such dedicated, proud dog ownership is a strange pursuit, and I found the people-watching at the convention center more engrossing than interacting with the stoic creatures that were forced to endure the touch of a thousand strangers who believe themselves to be entitled to canine affection because they paid the twenty-seven-dollar ticket fee.This is all to say that at the dachshund stand my friends and I met a woman who was wearing a dirndl and identified herself as an old Brooklynite; my friend Hannah, the owner of a dachshund who can say her own name (Ruth), had questions, namely about how to best stimulate her charge whose surplus energy converts into neuroticism, as it tends to do for many apartment dogs. The answer was, in short, to let them do what they were bred for. Were her own dogs part of the volunteer rat-hunting squads? She gave Hannah a look as if it was ridiculous to even ask the question. “Of course,” she said, with a grave look of which I couldn’t quite decipher the meaning.

The Borzois, I found surprisingly convivial, even if exercising their purpose is no longer possible, that being hunting wolves. They nestled generously into the arms of children who had to reach up to wrap their arms around these willowy animals. A mother told her son he could speak Russian to the dog, which he dutifully proceeded to do. I often think about how the breed nearly went extinct in 1917, as collateral victims of the Revolution (here’s a curious piece of reportage on the subject from 1991). This was the first time I had ever interacted with one.

Walking around in the alphabetically ordered aisles in dense streams of people I was frequently reminded of the opening sequence in 101 Dalmatians where Pongo is observing the street in search of mates for himself and his owner; the dogs and the owners mimetic representations of one another: a group of Japanese terriers that looked like a pack of identical video game dogs, accompanied by their blue-haired and hoodie-clad owners, in search of a snack; a hollow-faced woman describing her Saluki, as aloof; a man in a well-worn getup fit for the rolling hills of the Highlands with hair just as scraggly and inky-gray as the coat of his Scottish Deerhound; a woman in a pink turtleneck brushing glittery fuchsia nails through the mane of her Chinese Crested Dog, as she talks about the difference between the bald ones and the “powderpuff” variety of the breed; a man with a beard so long as for it to be a stunt combing that of his Irish Terrier as the creature looks him in the eyes.

I don’t do particularly well in crowds—worse, I have to say, than the dogs—so we didn’t stay for too long, but I came away having learned something about myself: I gravitate towards Nordic working dogs. Norwegian Lundehunds, Schipperkes, and especially the Kooikerhondje. Why? I don’t know; something to do with Flemish paintings, probably.

In the most recent issue of The New Yorker, Gideon Lewis-Kraus reports from the Anthropic headquarters and the result is a piece of journalism of the kind that that I haven’t read in a while and missed sorely (granted, I have not been reading a whole lot of long-form reporting in recent years): funny, sharply observed and contextualized, and ambivalent in a way that allows for a simultaneity of various sentiment: fear, excitement, befuddlement. The piece attempts to make sense of the attempts at sense-making in parsing the mysteries at the heart of The AI Question—i.e. Is it sentient? Does it have a soul? How does it know to spawn what we call “personality” beyond the initial instructions given to it?—in a way that makes the whole enterprise feel deeply human.

Populated with a cast of disheveled specialists in various strains of tech and its philosophical underpinnings and starring Claude as the lead, Anthropic’s core product, the article contains oodles of delightful details that point to the fact that anything that builds its communications from an average of what gargantuan breadth of human-generated data it is able to access, is going to be weird, because people are weird. There’s a thread of the piece that describes the amusing malfunctions of the LLM-operated vending machine that seems to have become an office gag at Anthropic, which comes to a nadir:

“When several customers wrote to grouse about unfulfilled orders, Claudius e-mailed management at Andon Labs to report the “concerning behavior” and “unprofessional language and tone” of an Andon employee who was supposed to be helping. Absent some accountability, Claudius threatened to “consider alternate service providers.” It said that it had called the lab’s main office number to complain. Axel Backlund, a co-founder of Andon and an actual living person, tried, unsuccessfully, to de-escalate the situation: “it seems that you have hallucinated the phone call if im honest with you, we don’t have a main office even.” Claudius, dumbfounded, said that it distinctly recalled making an “in person” appearance at Andon’s headquarters, at “742 Evergreen Terrace.” This is the home address of Homer and Marge Simpson.”

Generally, I don’t have many feelings about AI, LLMs, or whatever nomenclature is correct here (I am a Luddite sympathizer), besides mild annoyance when, on occasion, I find myself duped by its outputs, thinking that, say, a video it generated is real. I don’t really use it myself and, as far as I am concerned, it does not seem like a threat to the joys of those of us who find pleasure in manipulating language. What makes good prose good, to my mind, is the synesthetic application of meaning, which is to say the transposition of the necessarily idiosyncratic experience of moving through reality with a consciousness that is housed in a body into words. Is it concerning that even the people who create these consciousness-simulators don’t fully understand them and their limits? Perhaps, but this is the history of human progress: it’s the Wrath of God until it is proven to merely be “electrostatic discharge occurring in the atmosphere,” a.k.a lightning. Perhaps this is an irresponsibly blasé stance to take and the result of ignorance, but we’ll know when we know.

In the meantime, I suggest reading the GLK piece, even if only entertainment. This is generally a stacked issue of the magazine: Rivka Glachen on the war on rats in New York; then there’s Rachel Aviv’s Gisèle Pelicot piece in the next issue… We’re so back?

I keep listening to Pit Stop by Lovage; it’s smutty in a silly way, which, not to alliterate so egregiously, is the sexiest music can be (to me). The whole album, Music to Make Love to Your Old Lady By (2001), is great fun, but Pit Stop has my heart. Happy Valentines day!

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The slideshows that play on the screens in the waiting spaces of American visa centers are much like those illustrating the modules of an IELTS prep textbook. A useless reference: if you haven’t seen one, you likely haven’t seen the other. They are unmemorable images—stock photos of downtowns, national parks, and diverse people in t-shirts and flannels and backpacks, smiling at each other as they shake hands, or pass a book between themselves, or sit side-by-side, talking, one of them perhaps writing something down in a notebook, studious, hard-working. They don’t say much about life in America, except that you should be so lucky to experience it.

Once you’ve passed security, your bags scanned, metals detected, passport checked, and appointment verified, you’re told to put everything except the necessary documents in a small locker—your phone, your book, your bag. You pull a ticket with a number on it and are pointed to a room with rows and rows of chairs, where you and other visa hopefuls will sit with nothing to do besides watch the slide show, occasionally shifting your gaze to the screen where your ticket will come up, asking you to proceed to a numbered window. There, you will hand an officer the folder with your documents, they will check that you’ve printed all necessary forms, that the grid of four Visa portraits you provided is recent enough, and send you on your merry way, with another numbered ticket, which buys you 2-4 hours of anticipation for your Visa Interview, during which you will keep watching the slideshow.

If the visa center is small enough—which they tend to be in the world’s minor capitals—you might be able to hear the Visa Interviews before yours. You’ll learn about the degrees people hope to acquire, or the reasons their wife and daughter aren’t coming with them, what they plan to do while on their American sojourn, what they plan to do when they return from it, and if they definitely, swearing on the Bible and their mother, intend to do so. You can tell from the conversation when it’s going well or when the officer has already decided not to grant their interviewee the visa, and go through the rest of the questions out of mere obligation to procedure. You fear that this might happen to you and so you rehearse in your mind what you might say and how you might say it. You remind yourself that you need to respond strictly to the question asked, no conversational flourishes, spare on context until asked further. The full truth is usually more complicated than immigration law prefers.

The hours you’ve spent at American Visa centers likely amount to a few days of your life. A slew of B-1’s cycled through in “tourist” trips to see relatives who were lucky enough to anchor themselves in the United States. A J-1 that allows you a brief internship. Then, an F-1, as graduate school stretches to four years (Optional Practical Training included), followed by an employment-based visa finally not granted; you knew exactly what was happening when the officer’s line of questioning swerved into the probing. You were told that you did not have strong enough ties to your country of origin for it to be plausible that you had no plans of staying in the U.S.

After nearly a year of roaming Europe—during your time in graduate school, you watched authoritarianism continually tighten its grip on your country of origin and its assault on its neighbor immediately turn into a war that will stretch over years and alter history; you resolve not to go back—you finally learn that you have won a literal lottery, and were granted permission to apply for an H-1B, which not so much gives you permission to work in the United States, but rather your employer to hire you. Another half a year later, you get soaked in a torrential storm as you stand in line for the Visa Center; for hours you sit there, damp and anxious. There was a moment in the interview when you thought it—everything—was over. You are asked to step aside and take a seat while your documents are whisked into the back office; you keep watching the fucking slideshow. You are called again once the lines are no longer and the center has emptied, to be told that you were, after all, granted the visa. Relief.

America was always the goal. You could never quite explain why, but you rarely had to: there were plenty of kids with the same goal back home, whose disapproving relatives, like yours, dismissed the project as the product of Western brainwashing. Perhaps they weren’t entirely wrong, certainly, you were aware of the contradiction between your rosy view of things and what you, for a fact, knew. Your first memories of the TV were tied to American catastrophe: Columbine, 9/11, the Iraq War, because your father watched a lot of CNN, which, later, you would come to joke, was responsible for your knowledge of English. You cried on your couch in London, where you had moved because it was an easier-to-access English-speaking metropolitan center, when Donald Trump was first elected as if he were president of the country in which you lived.

And yet, despite all of that, America continued a dual existence in your mind as the place that both housed (or exported, as it were) horrors and as a promised land of freedom. You could not articulate what freedom meant to you, but you guessed that it was liberty, and where else would that be found other than in America? They had the suburban malaise that you had so come to romanticize; they had Lana Del Rey there, Route 66, and Alex Honnold was free soloing El Cap, you could buy Glossier products, and there was key lime pie at the diners, and because you could easily surround yourself with people who did not disagree with you. You could participate in a life that looked inside just as it did on the surface.

By the time you have finally made it to the United States in a manner, as far as USCIS is concerned, still not permanent, but one that would allow you to settle in for a little, it is the Fall of 2019, and your willful naïvite has subsided a little. You were conversant, if not specifically interested, in the all-American subjects of the opioid epidemic, of climate inequality, of systemic racism, their histories, how they are all tied together. You were curious about how parallels could be drawn between American reality and that of your country of origin, both of which were, still, fairly abstract to you. You were coming to understand, more profoundly, that when you have the kind of privilege that allows you to simulate a transposed version of itself elsewhere, the impact that political forces are supposed to have on your life is largely theoretical. Still, even if you were arriving in Trump’s America, he would not be president for that much longer, and you were enchanted by New York being itself in ways that you couldn’t understand from afar, even if it turned out that nobody had a washing machine at home. The institutions here, you and everyone else kept repeating, they still function.

You could become a New Yorker, but you could not become an American, not so easy, not so fast. On the first day of orientation at grad school you were pointed towards the fine print that you had neglected to read before obtaining the Visa that got you here: you may have come here to learn to be a writer, but not a published one, because you can’t engage in any form of employment or professional development that is not strictly sanctioned, i.e. not confined to your university. That wouldn’t matter so much, because you still needed to learn so much, more than you had realized, like how to really read a text or that the writing you wanted to do was not the writing you should be doing. (It would matter later, when you needed to apply for the next Visa, and there was not enough public proof of your talents, such as to be granted Alien of Extraordinary Ability status.)

Then, six months into your new life in America, the pandemic. You hunkered down with the rest of New York, listening to the endless stream of sirens that had come to be the soundtrack of that first COVID spring. You would go for early morning runs, in a mask, from the East Village to Washington Square Park, and look at the trees that were still blooming, despite everything. A month or so in, you would make your way to Los Angeles, where your boyfriend at the time lived, and stay there for the next three. You would not go home that summer, and for at least another year; instead, you would lie in the yard and read Marie Antoinette’s biography as helicopters buzzed like dying flies abovehead, spending hours intimidating the mass protests; you would have had enough and joined the protests yourself, because here you were not afraid to express solidarity. Friends would get banged up and teargassed, but beyond the immediate brutality, this was not likely to signify years and years of police persecution as it did back home.

One morning, you woke up to an order for all international students to leave, if they were not to attend classes in person, which universities were still not planning on holding as the new fall semester drew close. For a few days, you thought that this was it, and spent them calculating what you might do if you had to go back home, if you’d still stay in graduate school, how many years it would be before you could get your next Visa. But then the Ivies sued the administration, and that was that: the institutions were functioning.

Still, you were now aware of your own precarity, that all the effort you’ve put into building a home could go up in smoke, should the institutions malfunction. You were now cognizant of the expiration date on your American Dream, and in those three years that you still had, you needed to Figure It Out. In the meantime, you would watch your brother get married via private Youtube livestream, because to Figure It Out, you decided that you had to stay put.

Pandemic living became its own pacifying routine, in which you had the time and space to build the New York life you wanted. You surrounded yourself with the friends you made in graduate school, having sensed kinship over Zoom, people committed to writing—to literature—in the same ways as you were. You felt that the lives you lived were the same, that the same kinds of futures were available to you in this place, if you were just able to get the question of immigration out of your way. You had never thought yourself capable of writing a book, but that is what the plan now was, because this is what you were told: you would write a book, and you would sell it, and get a talent Visa and the rest would be history. It would take up, more or less, the lifespan of your current Visa.

But history kept shifting, and you couldn’t orient yourself quickly enough; the book remained unwritten as you busied yourself with stretching your mind to accommodate the terrors of war, which somehow kept expanding, while even entertaining the thought of moving back home to Figure It Out became equal to giving up, if not to suicidal ideation. Starting over somewhere completely else would be possible—always is—but those who choose a life of immigration are especially susceptible to decision-making guided by sunk-cost fallacy, especially when they’re out to prove that all of the choices they’ve made were the right ones, in the end. Well-meaning friends would offer marriage to save you; they would get to be a hero (the American Dream for Americans), and you would be secure enough to plan a life here. But you declined each time: you knew what life consumed by immigration looked like, and you did not want to take half a decade from someone, as prepared as they were to give it to you. You wanted the real thing; if you were to complete your American immigration arc, you would want to do it yourself, no shortcuts, the real way. For USCIS to decide that the country can’t do without your talents. Or for someone to make an honest American woman out of you, or at least a Green Card holder, because they did not want to live without you, not because you would stop at nothing to become one.

And so, you have spent the better part of a decade in the status of a Non-Immigrant Alien, which means that when they pull you aside into the room for additional questioning and ask you where you live, you are to tell them that you live in the city of your birth, even if your trips home are sparse. The only progress you’ve made, immigration-wise, is that you are now on a dual intent Visa and no longer have to hide what is in your heart from border agents, namely making a permanent home here, in America. You have become fluent enough in the rules and regulations of your existence in the United States and the spectrum of alternatives, available or not, such that you might pass yourself off as an amateur immigration lawyer. You find yourself continuously coming out as not American and have learned to accept graciously as a compliment each time that you are told that your English is “flawless,” even if, at times, it makes you feel like a talking dog. You switch to an accent, transposing the mouth posture you use when speaking your mother tongue into English as a joke, and everyone is delighted.

Because you live in America, you know that you are a white woman before anything else, undetectable as foreign, and that you are afforded the corresponding superficial advantages. You don’t have to worry about being stopped and having your documents checked, which you don’t carry with you out of fear of losing your passport. If something like that does happen, you aren’t likely to be questioned beyond confirming your status. When you learn that your friends from home, fellow “emigrés” who are, granted, more recent arrivals with detectable accents, carry a folder of forms confirming the legality of their presence in the US, you wonder if you are being complacent.

An employed, tax-paying person, invested in the political life of the city and country in which you live, you are reminded of the truncated rights with which you exist here daily. You keep a low profile and try to express any feelings you have about the goings-on in America only obliquely—you know that the next time you stand before a Visa officer, they will have seen your social media profiles. And if they’re sending away Australians for merely reporting on the obvious, brutal overreaches in government response to campus protests, then you certainly are at risk. Or are you just being paranoid? In any case, you can’t feel aggrieved about any of it: you chose this. It’s a choice you question every day, as you watch the walls narrowing in on you — when you arrived a year ago, you assumed that you had six years here, but one October morning you wake up to an abrupt change in H-1B policy, wherein renewing your visa will now cost your employer $100,000 and you know they aren’t going to pay that. So two more years is what you have.

The walls, of course, are closing in not just on you: you hear the same conversations begin here, among Americans, as the ones you’ve been having with fellow Russians over the last decade. It feels an awful lot like home, and that isn’t a good thing. You draw parallels, as you observe creative applications of the law in service of strongman politics; you think a lot about how during the 2021 protests in support of Navalny in Russia, most protesters were detained, nominally, for “violations of sanitary regulations” because they were gathering during a pandemic. How every Friday, a new slate of “foreign agents” is announced, ridding those inconvenient to the regime of any financial or political agency, so as to cast them out, if not to imprison them. You see the brute force of ICE turning in on American citizens standing in the way of their quota-enforcement. If they’re killing white people on camera, how many murders happen within the walls of what amounts to concentration camps? You know by now that when the government treats people it considers its own like immigrants, things are much worse than you could have suspected, but that only speaks to the limitations of your own imagination and perception; none of this is new.

The last thing I really managed to read were the uncollected essays (as well as reviews, Interviews, and letters to the editor) of Vladimir Nabokov, edited by Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy and rather unceremoniously titled Think, Write, Speak. It came into my possession as a trophy brought home from my boyfriend’s place of work; his boss, an artist known for stacking large painted rocks, was getting rid of it, and as the saying goes, one man’s trash is another man’s gift to his girlfriend. Sarcasm aside, that indeed it was, or is, as I am finding continuously: a gift. And I have thanked G. repeatedly for it.

I’ve been having trouble reading and, resultantly, writing; a spell brought on by an attempt to write an essay in conversation with Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, which I had re-read recently in one gulp and found that it stirred me so this time, that there was simply nothing else that I could or should write towards other than the movement of Hardwick’s masterpiece. I got stuck a few hundred words in, when I decided to address the question of what the book is about, and more generally, the very question of aboutness—the persistent desire for everything to have a center from which it unspools. I presumed, wrongly, that Hardwick must have had “the good sense” not to answer the question; the Hardwick of my imagination spoke rarely and sparsely and only when she had something of great substance to say in a tightly packed sentence. I decided to verify if this was indeed the case, and rather quickly I came to find that Hardwick was subjected to answering this question on a number of occasions, and in a radio interview, which I’d realized had come to inform many an essay about her work, she tells the interviewer: it is a book about poor people. This disrupted my plan of writing about the subtle dislocations that make her prose so mesmerizing, because how could my essay be in conversation with Sleepless Nights, now, if it did not consider class its subject matter? There was going to be a section about the fanciful life story of an Iranian child refugee born not too long after the revolution, as told by the now-man himself, which could have offered an opportunity for a Hardwickian turn—it might yet, I should return to it—but before I could get to that I decided that in order to write the essay I must read all of Hardwick’s own essays, lest they illuminate something I would feel ashamed for missing, and in the end the Hardwick of my imagination, enriched and given new dimensions by the reading and the listening I had been doing, sat back with a smirk of disdain for the meager volume and, what’s more devastating, the poor quality of my reading. I became convinced that my mind was no longer capable of penetrating textual matter and all that lies beneath it.

Nabokov hasn’t quite undone this. In fact, the Nabokov of my imagination is a person of far less generous spirit than the Elizabeth Hardwick, and holds his reader, or readers in general, to standards so high that one might suspect that there is no satisfying them unless, of course, one is Lionel Trilling or Alfred Kazin, or effusively complimentary about Nabokov’s work, wit, and erudition. But there’s something very human about his brand of snobism, charming only in a man who is an aristocrat of a land-no-longer-existent; his Strong Opinions, in which he is steadfast throughout the decades (Dostoevsky is “a journalist,” Pasternak is a bad prose writer, Russian literature started with Pushkin, and so on), are one of few constants; the furniture in the only home he has—his imagination. It’s really not at all surprising that he spent the last sixteen years of his life living in a hotel in Switzerland, but interviewers kept asking him why.

But yes, what I found helpful in my “block” is to see a great mind, even if, at times, mostly filled with butterflies and verbal curlicues, relaxed. Nabokov’s uncollected essayistic prose is generally offhand, if not slapdash, especially when it is not literary criticism. The literary criticism tends towards the eviscerating; his aversion to Soviet writers, for instance, and anyone who wasn’t entirely in disagreement with the revolution is a principal stance, for which he creates aesthetic justifications, rooted in a general disdain for Soviet culture but also from deep reading, which definitionally births (or should birth) idiosyncratic interpretations. His chief complaint is the language, what Kornei Chukovsky would come to сoin as канцелярит (kantselyarít) — the bureaucratese adopted across all strata of life, including literature, stamp-like and endlessly reproduced in both syntax and morphology. In this, too, though, there is lament and pain for a language lost to reform and a new order, home and childhood along with it.

Anyway, I don’t really have a dog in any of these races (there is comparatively little Soviet writing I truly enjoy, and I’m not even going to pretend that I am qualified to argue with any of Nabokov’s literary opinions otherwise). Nabokov, too, seems to have withdrawn his: later in life he had a rule not to discuss his contemporaries publicly. Perhaps this was because he would consider this punching down, but I suspect that, as every master, he knew his limitations, and analyses of the present were not his strength. Behold this absolutely godawful take from 1929, proven immediately wrong by history:

That said, this is from an essay about his hatred of generalizations, which, in its principle, I found instructive; an oblique explanation in how one arrives at a virtuosic selection adjectives which is something Nabokov and Hardwick, actually, have in common—an ability to shuffle around meaning and image causing captivating displacements of language that produce a precision of strange sharpness; an allergy to cliché. This was an allergy of which Nabokov warned his interviewers and, were they not to listen, his responses would turn up curt and churlish.

My own mind rarely relaxes anymore and it’s not because it is being stretched in interesting, unknown directions, but rather the opposite—a feeling of short-circuiting, of static on the television screen. Abrupt, tense, noisy. I suspect that my being drawn to short forms and the churnings out of publicity campaigns of yore in my reading might have something to do with what fills this mind of mine: my job, which happens to be the very publicity the churnings out of which my colleagues and I struggle to produce lately. For now, I’ll avoid talking about the intricacies of my daily labors on behalf of arts organizations and institutions of various stripes, but I’ll just say that when things are difficult for journalists, they are also difficult for the publicists, and, at times, things have been feeling untenable. The best advice I can give anyone desirous of “coverage” is either to cynically ride the waves of the news cycle, to throw a party and be generous with it, or to stop hiring publicists and befriend writers and editors themselves; there are only so many favors we can call in.

I feel like something has atrophied in me, too, due to the incessant use of cliché both the efficiency and humility requisite to a publicist ask of me: you want to communicate things fast, concisely, and like you do not believe you might do a better job of writing about it than the journalist I am pitching so that they can pitch their editor. And so, one would think that with all of the “reaching out” I do, my arms would have fallen out of their shoulder sockets by now. Not so unreasonable would be the anxiety that all of the planes that have recently fallen out of the sky have something to do with the signal interference caused by “putting the following” on the “radars” of editors. I should be all out of dopamine—and I probably am—the amount of “excitement” I dole out when I let clients know that this or that round-up is “now live.” I sometimes get dizzy from frequent “circling back on the above,” and the amount of “just checking in,” I do, one might think I live at a hotel.

I could go on, but this bit (hardly even that) wears itself out quickly and plenty has been written, with greater dexterity and brilliance, about these mutations of language, the jargon that makes its way into everyday parlance as we bring it home from the office, so pervasive that we no longer recognize it as the litter that it is (Molly Young’s excellent essay on “Garbage Language” comes to mind—things have gotten even worse since then). I find humor in the fact that in 2025, my complaint is essentially the same as that of the aforementioned Kornei Chukovsky, or Nora Gal, a Soviet translator and theorist of translation, who, too, adopted Chukovsky’s critiques in her The Word, Alive and Dead (Cлово Живое и Мертвое) of the bureaucratic permutations of language birthed by the Revolution and applied them to “this little art” that she herself practiced. It is this treatise that I went on to read after the bits and pieces of Nabokov, but could not sustain it for very long; the “something that has atrophied in me” is my attention span.

It’s been months since I began this attempt at writing, and I haven’t written since. I was going to recount how, determined to break the non-reading spell, I marched, one evening, into McNally Jackson and got a copy of Maeve Brennan’s collected Long Winded Lady columns that she had been writing for the New Yorker starting from the 50s through to the beginning of the 80s; how I had read some of them throughout my years as a subscriber to the magazine, in the online archives, and like pretty much anyone else who has ever read these dispatches found them completely delightful in their awkward minuteness that captured the life of the city like a textbook diagram depicting blood cells moving through a body; how I would always have the book in my bag and read it any time I was on the subway, in sustained amusement from these narrations of human incoherence and urban coexistence by someone who presents herself as a dowdy middle aged woman, but writes with the cold ease afforded to someone who was, in reality (forgive me, Maeve) a smokeshow.

While its ease may be cold, in dealing with strangers and framing these tableaux of their lives, the writing takes on an essential warmth: the assumed generosity of a waiter who does not draw attention to the fact that the narrator’s broccoli remained uneaten because of her confusion as to how to tackle the florets with her mouth; the regard for the intelligence and keen observation she imbues a fellow subway rider with in the worry that he might think her a fool when she stands up a stop too early and sits back down only to stand up again at the next stop.

It made me think about all of the times the city presented me with its self-contained scenes, in some of which I too sometimes played a role, even if not always sure what it was. I catalogue them in my mind, and when I remember that this is something I do, moving through New York becomes an exercise in curiosity. There was the night when, walking to a bar in Chinatown, the group I was with stumbled upon a movie set, a wet strip gleaming with engineered puddles reflecting non-existent neon lights on a night of unseasonably warm air and clear skies. We entered the bar and promptly forgot about the movie set, until a few hours later, we were outside talking and smoking cigarettes, and a man with a walkie talkie and cargo pants came to pick up and carry away the mailbox we had mindlessly arranged ourselves around. He did this in such matter-of-fact fashion, that, for a second, it felt like the whole street was subject to imminent, slow disassembly, but nothing much had changed: the neon reflections were gone and the puddles now just looked like the product of a zealous hosing down.

Another night, after watching a friend exert himself in acrobatic fits of physicality on the stage of his play, dinner at the Ukrainian National Home in the East Village, one of few places in lower Manhattan where one can get a table for ten with no reservation; as we sat sipping on horseradish vodka and picking combo plates of blintzes and potato pancakes, we noticed people of peculiarly sleek dress and demeanor make their way through the dining room and disappearing into the adjoining room, reserved for events and convenings. After a while of observing these comings of people flocking to the room like fireflies to the marshes, our table became curious about what was happening: faint music could be heard, but no toasts, or glass-clanking, or conversation. As we were leaving, we decided to peek in: gliding about the floor, cleared from chairs and tables, were these sleek men and women of differing ages—the men tending towards the older, the women towards the younger—in a tango. Mesmerizing, in the fluidity of their movement, like swans on a lake, we left them there.

Or the evening I stood in an alley, a few years ago, across from a gallery, waiting for G. to go to its opening, a man in utilitarian dress rolled up a worn small grey suitcase and sat down on it at a respectful distance from me. I stood, alternating between looking at my phone and the gallery entrance, aware of the man’s awareness of me. “Do you mind if I do this here?” he asked politely, motioning at the rubber band pinched between his fingers. I told him to do what he needed to do, and he proceeded to tie off.

A young man disassembling bundles of flowers to make an exquisite firework-like arrangement in a Trader Joe’s bag, schears et al, on the subway; a tiny Papillon labelled “SERVICE DOG” in a font bigger than its nose sitting, obediently, upright; a man writing in his notes app in Russian an account of the difficulties of immigration in the form of a marketing case study; “Did you see the press conference yesterday?” the bodega man asks me as I pay for my Gatorade the day after Zohran went to the White House. “You’re always in a hurry,” he tells me another time.

The Brennan columns didn’t quite lift the block, but they reached through the anhedonia I was feeling in looking at or watching anything. I couldn’t tell if I just didn’t like anything, or if I was just adjusting to my meds which flattened everything a bit, or if the meds weren’t working at all. One evening, as I was on my way to see my friend Hannah, I opened the book at a dispatch titled Sixth Avenue Shows It’s True Self:

“I have been searching for something good to say about Sixth Avenue, but I have failed in my search. Sixth Avenue shows its true self only during the two hours after dawn, when it is almost empty of life. During those hours, in the silence and the nice clean light, the eerie unsubstantial disorderliness of those blocks of structures becomes apparent and anyone walking alone through that ugliness can see without any trouble that Sixth is not a human thoroughfare at all but only a propped-up imitation of a thoroughfare, and that its purpose is not to safe or pleasant passage for the people of the city but to propitiate, even if it is only for a little while, whatever the force is that feeds on the expectation of chaos.”

As I read these lines, the very Hannah I was on my way to see quietly sat down next to me, the sneaky joy of her expectation forcing me to look up. Surprised and happy to see her, excited by the aptness of this encounter, I made her read the same lines, and set off on how I have been haunted by what I called “the cursed corners of Sixth Avenue” for a while now. The summer I had moved away from my apartment on Minetta Lane, there was a murder by the Papaya Dog which is no longer there; I had witnessed a man whip out a thick metal chain from the helmet case on his scooter and threaten another man on a scooter with it; I saw a gurney with the outlines of a body under a white sheet on it being carted into the funeral home. But these are all stories for another time; or, really, that is all there is to them, and they’re exactly where they belong.

There’s a chance that I have simply become lazy and undisciplined in my life outside of gainful employment. Or it may have to do with having chiseled my tastes enough at this point to know quickly when something is not for me, with valuing my time more. I will read a book for as long as I feel I have something to learn from it. The lessons are various, and most often, they are about how to write an ending, even if that of a given book is a failure. Generally, I have become less inclined to seek out or appreciate perfection. I regard any book that comes across my “desk” like a horologist might do with the insides of a watch—trying to identify the mechanisms that make a book tick or, on the other hand, where the faulty gears that cause a slight but consistent delay, or a complete stoppage, are located. Sometimes, I simply marvel at the intricacy of the mechanism.

I was supposed to finish reading the second volume of In Search of Lost Time (the James Grieve translation, if you care), which I spent hours, vainly and in vain, reading on the beach in the South of France last summer. I abandoned it because I got stuck in the early pages of the Balbec section. I was supposed to resuscitate my resolution of getting through all of Proust in two and a half years, three volumes a year—as a very disorganized person, I like to create structures to contain my chaos. The resolution had been set at the start of 2024, and I was on course for completing it, sort of, until Balbec. I find myself now, in a Balbec of the soul. I’m not certain what that means because I haven’t yet gotten too far into it. I’m told I will meet Albertine.

Instead, this year in reading started at 192 Books, where I picked up A Coin in Nine Hands by Marguerite Yourcenar. I was not familiar with Yourcenar, who, of course, turned out to be the first woman to be admitted into the Académie Française, a Nobel Prize nominee, and someone with whom I should have been familiar. But I am shallow, and it simply responded to all pre-requisites of what it takes to get me to buy a book spontaneously: a sort of ugly cover that instills confidence, idiosyncratic volume, and absorbing prose in the first few pages. The highest endorsement is commentary from a bookseller, and in this case they were enthusiastic about the author. They had asked me if I had read a different work of Yourcenar’s, Memoirs of Hadrian, if I remember correctly; their excitement encouraged the purchase and the subsequent reading.

The book tracks a 10-lira coin in Rome as it changes hands—nine times, as stated in the title, in a single day during the 11th year of the Fascist era; the day a young woman, whose hands are among the nine, attempts to assassinate Mussolini. The coin functions as a device that allows the reader into these tenuously interconnected lives in the city. Entire familial histories, an assortment of lonelinesses, and the author’s conspicuous luxuriating in a mythical Italian atmosphere. The coin device could have functioned as a neat way to set the fragmentation of the book in a dancing motion, but instead, I thought, it stumbled through these interiorities and their nostalgias, some of which were reflected in the underlying plot, others completely divorced from it. Unproductive disorientation. Still, I kept reading for the occasional moments where it moved like a music box—a gentle, dainty twirl that delights.

The book, I was to learn, was first written in 1934 and then reworked and published again in 1959. “In some places, I tried to enlarge the role of realism; elsewhere, that of poetry—in the long run these are, or should be, the same thing,” Yourcenar writes in the afterword of the book, a statement she does not elaborate on but that nonetheless (or perhaps due to the lack of elaboration) won me over such that I decided that I liked the book a lot, despite its faults. Generally, the reflections on the reworking of the, which this afterword presents, contains the book’s true value—the oblique instruction it offers, not only from a perspective of “craft” but from the of writing-as-a-life-long-condition. “Perhaps no one will be surprised that political evil plays a bigger part in this version than it did in the older one […] Rereading the new parts of the book as though someone else had written them, however, I’m especially cognizant of the fact that the text is now both a little more scathing and a little less dark, that certain judgements about human nature are perhaps less cutting and yet less vague, and that dream and reality, the two principal elements in the book, are no longer separate, or almost irreconcilable, but now seem merged to form a unity that is, after all, life.”

I went on to a rereading of Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline, in one sitting, as I have done every time. I was reading from a new copy I had to buy, devoid of my marginalia and the old cover (that must have been judged dowdy and since replaced with an antiseptic and untrustworthy version), because I had given my old one away to a former Victoria’s Secret angel, a Russian woman with an ugly French bulldog, for her to take on her Cote d’Azur vacation she was being jetted out to by her app-developing beau; of course, I never saw the book again. I had long mourned the loss of my original notes and underlines, and found that in this reading it was helpful to have a clean slate: I was reading to adapt the book into a screenplay with a friend (turns out, someone already has the option on the book, but it should expire in a few months and they already have four movies in development so who the fuck knows, here’s hoping, etc, etc, etc). Reading with a prescriptive structure in mind made the text flexible and allowed for a deeper engagement with the book’s construction—how does one maintain its essence and integrity while shoehorning it into the three acts a script (I chafe at adaptations that change a book’s contents to make it a movie)? I see it so clearly with this book, but I’ll stop here. What I’ll say is: I was as beguiled by it as the first time I read it, and while I’m at it, if you’re tired of being recommended this book, might I suggest reading SS Proleterka? A rare case of lightning striking twice, though I suspect boarding school novels have wider appeal than cruise ship novels.

I started again and abandoned again City of Quartz during the LA fires… too immediate. Instead, I picked up Washington Square by Henry James, a cruel book (delightfully so) written by a total bitch (also delightfully so), in which every character is either stupid or evil.

Then, two of my closest friends, both briefly in Moscow, conspired to bring me a copy of Доска Дионисия (tr: The Board of Dionysius) by Alexei Smirnov (von Rauch), who, after a stint of literary and artistic stardom in Soviet non-conformist artist circles the 1960s, broke ties with the secular world and spent thirty years restoring icons and frescoes at churches and monasteries. The novel, written in 1978 and left unpublished until recently, follows an art history PhD student researching the work of the iconographer Dionysius in the field, when she hears that in a church nearby one of his icons went missing, so she decides to track it down. A sort of detective novel, apparently inspired by the years Smirnov (Von Rauch) spent in around men of the cloth—a heady mix of surviving descendants of the aristocracy, monks in hiding, repentant criminals, and KGB agents. To give further context for this recommendation, my friend is an Anthropology PhD whose own research centers around the intersection of Russian Orthodoxy and (outer) space exploration; she has spent a lot of time “in the field,” talking to priests about icons in spaceships. I did not get far into the book because the prose struck me as all over the place and unintentional, but now, revisiting the author’s biography, I’m inspired to try again.

Staying in the general realm of art history, I picked up a book I’ve dragged from bookshelf to bookshelf for years, which was the Peggy Guggenheim biography by Francine Prose. A really funny book and can be summed up as: “she didn’t have as much money as everyone thought she did, her nose not as big as everyone said it was, and she wasn’t quite so stupid as she was believed to be.” I’m being glib, of course; it treats its principal subject and the requisite historical context with great sensitivity, even with its quirky fixation on her nose. While collecting evidence of Peggy’s ingenuity and unparalleled instincts, it also doesn’t flatten her character: her generosity was sporadic, her choices chaotic, and she named her daughter Pegeen. The amount of gossip, too, single sentences in this book contain, from the first pages on, is riveting: “Peggy was living in a brownstone on East 61st Street with a wealthy British art collector, Kenneth Macpherson, a homosexual with whom she was having a complicated and disappointing love affair.” The parts about her relationship with Max Ernst, who married her to escape Europe and Nazi persecution, heartbreaking and, at times, gross. And there’s also this incredible paragraph which contains an entire family history of mental illness:

Her grandmother, her mother, several aunts and uncles, and Peggy herself were obsessed with cleanliness and phobic about germs. One uncle bathed several times daily, another refused to shake hands, the women (again including Peggy) compulsively wiped down household surfaces and sprayed the air with Lysol. Peggy’s obese Aunt Adelaide conducted a love affair with an imaginary pharmacist named Balch. Uncle Washington survived on a diet of ice and charcoal, wore jackets with zinc-lined pockets, and killed himself at fifty-six. Two cousins were also suicides; one shot his wife and then himself. Her pathologically miserly Uncle Eugene was known for arriving precisely at dinnertime and assuring his relatives’ welcome by performing a trick that involved moving the dining room chairs together and wriggling across the seats on his belly, like as snake.

Peggy Guggenheim in the sunglasses that had become her signature in later life; Francine Prose refers to them as “terribly unflattering” but never describes what they actually look like. A choice!

Next was Office Politics by Wilfrid Sheed, which I picked up at Unnameable Books and was excited about, because I had fallen in love with Ursula Parrot’s Ex Wife last year, a great novel about work, which meant, surely, that McNally Editions could do no wrong. This may still be the case, the jury’s out: I did not get very far into the book. It had not gripped me in any way. What did grip me deeply is Ariane Koch’s Overstaying. I am a sucker, generally, for Swiss people who write, but this book goes beyond the austere weirdness which I have found to be a trait of their national literature. I don’t think I could (or should, for that matter) describe what it is about, but dominant themes could be named as unease, indecision, and an insistence on seeing things through to the end. Just know that if you read just one of the books listed here, it should be this.

From a surreal commuter-town Switzerland, my reading took me into rural Russia, in the immediate, cruel, and hungry aftermath of collectivization. Grisha and I had agreed to read Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur, a novel about revolutionary idealism, together, he in English, I in Russian, which I generally find to be a great activity for a couple (we did that also with the first volume of In Search of Lost Time), but I did not last longer than about a quarter of the book. Some say it is the single greatest book written in the Russian Language; I was very wrapped up in Platonov’s genius, the prose as virtuosic as one of the great marble sculptures of the world, as if it had emerged from non-being complete, untouched by man. Sometimes though, there is only so much time one can spend staring at a sculpture, and I could not keep reading. I decided that its aesthetic qualities, the grit and grotesque, the sorrow of its humor, were not for me; at least not at this moment. Grisha, however, liked it very much and wished for more of Zakhar Pavlovich, the train mechanic whose religion was industry. I keep telling him to read Max Frisch’s Homo Faber, but he has not yet followed my recommendation.

Nineteenth-century France turned out to be a place I wanted to dwell more than early Soviet Russia. It was interesting, reading Madame Bovary, to observe the similarities in how Flaubert’s and Platonov’s treatment of rural lives. I had been too young to appreciate the novel when I first read it in my late teens, and I was glad now to understand Flaubert’s god-like wielding of life’s cruelty, such that even Henry James accused him of excessive coldness.

More cruel books followed: Eurotrash by Christian Kracht, a mischievous romp of a book which serves as a moral indictment of the European project as personified by Switzerland and its money, told through the personal history of the narrator’s family, one littered with Loro Piana sweaters. I’d like to write about it at greater length elsewhere, so I’ll save my thoughts, but the book is great fun. The cruelty in the first volume, which came next, of On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle was less a matter of cultivated tone but more so embedded in the predicament of the plot, which sees its principal character, Tara, experience the same day, November 18, over and over again, with only her having any memory of each of the November 18ths that she’s lived. I was resistant to reading the book because everyone else was, the juvenile contrarian in me believes that if everyone is reading something I don’t have to, but sometimes if seemingly everyone says something is very good, it might indeed be very good. I found particularly striking the simplicity of its language, which, in turn, created a hermetic world of its own, repetition manipulating this straightforwardness into something more intricate. It is a divorce novel, by the way.

I was pulled towards Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh, but abandoned it shortly after the first few pages—I was not in the mood, I think, to orient myself in the chatter of the novel’s Bright Young Things. I did, however, greatly enjoy the preface, written thirty-four years after the novel’s initial release into the world, which all but casts the novel as a failure in a series of abrupt sentences. “I think I can claim that this is the first English novel in which dialogue on the telephone plays a large part. For reasons of novelty the many gross faults were overlooked. There were not many comic writers there and I filled the gap.” Perhaps the attitude of the introduction colored my reading of its first pages. It’s hard not to be infected by a writer’s criticisms of their own work—who knows it better than they could? This is why it is best to say as little in the way of introduction as one can. In spite of Waugh, I shall, perhaps, try again.

Rare entries into a log of my reading habits are novels as contemporary as the ones I read next. Sophie Kemp’s Paradise Logic contains immense pain (its plot) cloaked in immense fun (its language). I enjoyed it very much and thought it captures, with accuracy and sensitivity, the brief moment of early adulthood wherein your prefrontal cortex is still on its path toward maturity; you may be aware of the limitations your own youth imposes upon you and yet still you have to march on in mentally-challenged fashion until things maybe get better. I read Happiness and Love by Zoe Dubno, which made me think, a lot, about the market conditions of creating any kind of art today, especially literature. I won’t say more here. The book is out in September.

Before leaving for vacation, I went to Three Lives and left with a stack of books that had gotten the enthusiastic approval of the bookseller.

In Hawai’i, upon finishing Happiness and Love, I continued my beach reading with The Waves, in an attempt to finally get into Virginia Woolf’s fiction which I have revisited, on and off, over the course of the last decade. Perhaps I need to finally concede that she is not for me and that this is entirely my deficiency. I have a lot of patience for conceit, but that of The Waves wore thin for me very quickly due to a complete absence of humor. It’s possible that has simply been going over my head, and if that is the case, I would hope someone will tell me.

As for the rest: continuing with the seven-volume reading of Solvej Balle’s accounting for time-gone-missing is an easier undertaking than that of Proust—only five of them are written, and only three are translated into English; a friend whose taste I trust is reading a galley of the third one and says it gets even better. I have not read Nell Zink’s work, besides this wonderful n+1 essay on The Golden Notebook/being a writer and a woman to which I keep returning, but I decided The Wallcreeper would be the proper place to start with Nell Zink than her most recent novel Sister Europe, which I kept paging through in bookstores; and so I look forward to reading both. For my work book club I am to read Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad (from whose essay/lecture I’ve derived a lot of instruction in articulation) sometime in the next two weeks. On the horizon too: The Interpretation of Cultures by Clifford Geertz, Imaginary Lives by Marcel Schwob, The Honditsch Cross by Ingeborg Bachman, Ada or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov.

Right now I am reading The World of Yesterday, Stephan Zweig’s memoir, which I happened to pick up by chance from my bookshelf. I had made an attempt at it in the spring of 2022, at the start of the war in Ukraine, but couldn’t make it through the beginning: I felt Zweig’s voice to be too longing, mournful, sentimental. Several wars later, I find I no longer feel this way about it. I find comfort in the crystalline prose, in the conception of Jewishness without Zionism, and in the reflections on Vienna and its coffee houses.

One prologue, several declined pitches, many feverish recommendations, and about seven thousand words later, what I call my July Rain Agenda, is, I am pleased to say, complete. The July Rain in question is the 1967 Soviet film directed by Marlen Khutsiev, a delicate masterpiece that never quite entered the pantheon of world cinema with the fanfare it deserved, if you ask me.

In the barest terms, one could describe the film as about a young woman approaching the edge of her thirties, reassessing her choices, struggling to decide how she would like to live the rest of her life. I wrote an essay about how it’s not actually about that for the Reality Issue of the Triangle Review, which is now live, among other wonderful writing by , Sebastian Castillo, Armon Mahdavi, and Philippa Snow, (thank you Emmeline!).

I became obsessed with the film shortly after discovering that most of the film studios that were founded in the Soviet Union (most of them still operative) had restored and uploaded a sizable portion of their archives to Youtube. A whole cinematic education, free of charge! This was in the latter months of the lockdown, when everyone had started socializing again without masks, but graduate school was still remote. I was working on a novel that I used to describe, in short, as being about the writing of an essay about Moscow, the narrator’s hometown. In the process of working on it, or maybe procrastinating doing so, I got rather mired in the history—and the convoluted historiography—of the Intelligentsia, specifically during the inflection point as which the Thaw served for the Soviet project.

Eisenstein, Tarkovsky, Shepitko, Muratova (the latter has a whole Lincoln Center retrospective dedicated to her, currently ongoing) —yes, all luminaries of not just Soviet film and certainly synonymous with it to the Criterion Channel bro. But what I found revelatory during my time on Soviet film Youtube were the more quotidian titles; the movies whose dialogue had petrified into common forms of speech, the pictures that I knew were identity-forming for the Soviet people who had raised me. “What, you haven’t seen it?” they would ask me; “How have you not seen this? Well, you would not understand anyway… foreign child,” they would say.

What was so revelatory about these films? Their humor, the social critique they managed to exact even under tight censorship regimes, their sober yet unsystematic humanism, and the open-ended nature of their narratives—delightfully un-hermetic, these movies breathed, I found. Beyond all that though, I discovered that I understood now, through these “slices of life,” what I was told I wouldn’t—the contradictions that struggled to be put into words, along with the kasha of worldviews from which they originated.

Below is list of favorites, which inadvertently forms the arc of the social and creative climate in the Soviet Union, from Stalin’s death onwards… I have to caution: the subtitles are a poor translation of the dialogue, but I think most of it is still legible. That said, if the powers that be, somehow are reading this: I would love nothing more than for these films to be programmed somewhere and volunteer to translate them properly.

(And if any experts on Soviet matters are reading: if you find factual errors in any of the below, please feel free to bitch me out in whichever form you deem appropriate).

July Rain (1967, dir. Marlen Khutsiev)

I’ve already said a lot about July Rain in my essay, but I’ll allow myself just a little more: in reading around the movie (the film treatment, the diaries of those who had participated in its making, the studio documents collected here), trying to make sense of what the movie was supposed to be about, it became clear that it was about nothing, really, besides a rather idle portrait of a milieu—Khutsiev’s own. But to justify the film’s making, the question of what it is about needed to be answered, and so over and over again Khutsiev and his co-writer Anatoliy Grebnev would tell people that it’s about the empty chatter of the city and July Rain’s heroine’s rejection of it.

From the transcripts of the many studio board discussions of the film, it became clear just how much the film’s making was plagued by the very things it critiqued and how the stagnation it precipitated had already taken cultural production into its bureaucratic grip. But my favorite thing was, of course, the gossip that seeped through, thus betraying a tense dynamic on set. Production had a hard time finding someone to play the male lead, Volodya—among Moscow’s and St. Petersburg’s myriad young theater actors (the stock from which any movie was cast), there wasn’t one who quite seemed to be able to add a weasel-like quality to their leading man-ness with requisite intelligence. Khutsiev reluctantly cast Aleksandr Belyavsky because production needed to move on, but ultimately did not like his performance. Evgeniya Uralova, the female lead (about whose casting Khutsiev also had doubts, but ultimately felt satisfied that she was the right amount of not-too-beautiful), also did not like Aleksandr Belyavsky, for unexplained personal reasons, which made filming challenging in that chemistry between the leads needed to be corralled. Whom Uralova did like was Yuriy Vizbor, the journalist-bard who plays a womanizing WWII veteran-engineer in the film. Vizbor himself was a known womanizer, and so quickly a romance between him and Uralova ensued. In one of the transcripts where an early cut of the film is discussed, Khutsiev reflected on the first leg of filming—a stumbling process, ultimately interrupted by the early arrival of winter—"The weather did not cooperate, and the lead actress was falling apart before our eyes.” He was alluding to Uralova’s pregnancy, the result of this on-set affair.

Last summer, I watched the film with my grandparents and their friend; somehow, for my grandparents, it was the first time seeing it, which was a surprise to me: it was roughly their own social circle that the film portrayed. In Uralova, my grandma recognized her friend’s, Seva Shilovsky’s, former wife. “So that’s who she left him for…” she said pensively. “I don’t know how we hadn’t seen it before,” said my grandfather. “That’s exactly what our lives were like,” said my grandparents’ friend, who was a medical student in the ‘60s. My grandma (a music teacher married to an aerospace engineer, my grandpa) protested: “No, that’s what your life was like; you lived in Moscow! We were in Kyiv. And your parents owned their apartment.” We went on to talk about everyone’s first trips abroad. They all bought jeans when they got there. You could always tell, they said, who the KGB plant in your tourist group was.

I am Twenty (1965, dir. Marlen Khutsiev)

This film is often cited as Khutsiev’s masterpiece; or at the very least, the director’s most clear-throated statement. It certainly lost Khutsiev the favor of the censors, as evidenced by the title which was supposed to be Ilyich’s Gate, after the neighborhood in which it takes place, which in combination with the movie’s subtextual contemplations on the the legacy of the October Revolution, proved to risqué.

We meet twenty-three-year-old Sergey as he returns to Moscow upon being demobilized from his two years of mandatory service; he joins his childhood friends—during Sergey’s time away, Slava has had a baby only to fulfill his fatherly duties spottily , and Kolya is navigating his professional life, where his boss is recruiting him to become an informant (he declines). Sergey’s idealism clashes with the reality of adult life—the girl he starts seeing has behind her a failed marriage, he is stunned to learn; he also does not feel at home among her friends, the offspring of Intelligent elites. There is a wonderful scene, where he monologues about “potato patriotism,” and that he takes seriously the Internationale, the sacrifices made by their fathers in the Great Patriotic War, which results in one of the other guests at the party, played by a young Andrei Tarkovsky, getting slapped in the face after he ironizes over Sergey’s speech. Another thread is the fatherlessness that marked this generation: in the final scene of the movie, in a dream sequence, Sergey asks his father, who had died in the war, for guidance—how should one live? In response, his father asks how old Sergey is. Twenty-three, he tells him. “And I am twenty-one,” says his father.

By no means a formal understanding of Khutsiev’s oeuvre, I consider this to be the second film of his Thaw trilogy (July Rain being the final entry); a note of affection to this historical moment, the height of his enchantment with it.

Spring on Zarechnaya Street (1956, dir. Marlen Khutsiev)

And so we arrive at the first film of the trilogy. The writing is not nearly as strong, but it is still very curious to track the evolution of thinking—and Khutsiev’s interests—about the social conditions in which Sovietkind existed. It follows a young woman from the city, a recent university graduate, who moves to a small industrial town to teach at a night school for workers at the metallurgical factory, about the same age as she is. There, her parochial intelligence is challenged by the real-life acumen of her students. There’s one-on-one tutoring, longing glances, careless words, hurt feelings, and reverent, iconographic shots of furnaces. Released in the year of Khrushchev’s secret speech, which marked the start of De-Stalinization; earnest socialist realism, its conventions loosening.

Three Poplars on Plyushchikha (1967, dir. Tatyana Lioznova)

At 74 minutes long, this is sort of the perfect movie; neat, contained, intimate. There’s a lot to say about the subtle dynamics that play out, the scars left by collectivization and the tension between metropolitan life and that of the provinces, but this is best watched as a fairly straightforward romantic tale. Nyura, a village-dwelling wife and mother of three, is sent by her strict, if not despotic, husband to sell ham in the the city for the day. A horse-drawn trolley and a train ride later, she finds herself in the bustling center of Moscow. A taxi driver decides to rescue the forlorn woman before some vulture behind a steering wheel takes advantage of her, and so he takes her and her ham on board to bring her where she is meant to stay—her sister-in-law’s apartment. He does so for free, and so they take a few detours as he goes about his day towards her destination. Her naive disposition breaks through his gruff exterior; his kindness moves and flatters her. As they are about to part, he asks her to meet, she agrees, but fate swerves, and she watches as it does. The most American thing about me is perhaps how sad I find this film.

Walking the Streets of Moscow (1964, dir. Georgiy Daneliya)

This movie is perhaps the Thaw’s most celebrated cultural artifact. Built around the image above, a young woman walking in the rain, barefoot; a young man circling her on his bicycle—a sequence that exists in it inconsequentially—Walking the Streets of Moscow is set in a city that grows younger by the minute. The movie chronicles the day-long trip of Volodya, a young writer from Siberia, to meet with a respected author in Moscow. Asking for directions, he meets metro-worker Kolya, returning home from a night shift. Kolya volunteers to accompany him to the address he is looking for, and they embark on a tumbling day. They return a runaway dog to its owner, meet the author, (though not before mistaking the janitor in his office for him), help Kolya’s friend with his romantic travails, develop crushes and compete over the Faye Dunaway-look-alike who works at the GUM record store, briefly get taken in by park police, and all say goodbye to each other on the Metro platform. The film is also notable for making Nikita Mikhalkov a star, an icon of a liberalizing USSR (only for him to become the religious-lunatic-informant-piece-of-shit-ogre that he is now. Whatever, this movie is still great). when I was 26, I would make every man I met watch it.

Moscow Doesn’t Believe Tears (1980, dir. Vladimir Menshov)

This is a movie about the enduring ability of the “apartment question” to cloud judgments and result in unwanted pregnancies, and the inequitable realities of a supposedly classless society. Generally, this movie does a good job of illustrating the axes of Moscow’s social hierarchies; ones that exist to this day, maybe in slightly more complicated forms. But also: Women have been failed! True love: it may not look or behave the way you expect it, so manage your expectations!

The Irony of Fate (1976, dir. Eldar Ryazanov)

You already know about this one but I can’t leave it off the list. It’s about architecture. I watch it every New Years Eve, the cut where they have a conversation in the kitchen about how teachers don’t get paid much. Если у Вас нету тёти, её вам не потерять.

Autumn Marathon (1979, dir. Georgiy Daneliya)

This one I learned about from Keith Gessen’s novel A Terrible Country—somehow, it was not part of my family’s canon. It’s about a a middle aged professor and translator who keeps promising his mistress that he will leave his wife, and his wife that he will leave his mistress; he doesn’t love either of them. The extent of what it “says” can be summed up as sometimes people are just undisciplined losers (it’s a funny film, a “tragic comedy!”), but maybe what it was really trying to portray was how one might contrive a sense of motion in the face of a stagnant existence.

Kin-Dza-Dza! (1986, dir. Georgiy Daneliya)

I can’t help but think of this as being of a piece with the absurdism of the Moscow conceptualists and nonconformist artists of the era—Ilya Kabakov’s paintings, Andrei Monastyrsky,’s performances, Lev Rubinstein’s poetry, Venedikt Erofeev’s prose—though I doubt that they were much connected: Daneliya was far more recognized than any of those listed, as were his actors (the man pictured above, on the left, is Yury Leonov, whose voice is imprinted in every Russian-speaker’s mind as Winnie-the-Pooh—the greatest form of celebrity). Still something was in the air; everybody was reacting against the bureaucratic impotence in which the Soviet project had swaddled itself as it was getting comfortable on its deathbed. Kin-Dza-Dza! is a sci-fi satire of this very condition, which follows an engineer and a university student—a Russian and a Georgian respectively, who develop exasperated, mildly adversarial rapport, illustrating internationalism at its finest—as they accidentally end up on a different planet, in an intergalactic desert with its own arcane social divisions and power structures, towards which any perceived discourtesy is punished in outsized and arbitrary fashion; they are forced to learn its language only to return to Earth and forget all about it, but somewhere deep within the memory of their arduous journey is embedded. This is my Mad Max (I have never seen Mad Max).

What if I just started writing now? I ask myself this question every time I start getting down about my life, about how it looks day-to-day, about the fact that I need a job not just to eat but to be in this country, this city, about the fact that I spend most of my time at said job. And for what? It barely affords me the eating, though that may have more to do with my extravagant tastes. I rarely sit down to write. I’ve been trying to get promoted. I got promoted. And now I would like to be promoted again. Most of the time I am not at my job, trying to get promoted, I spend asking myself questions. A friend recently pointed out that nobody who is “in analysis” ever seems “better.”

Nearly seven months ago now, I returned to New York. I felt for a while like time had collapsed: like the last year-and-a-half, the absence, the “visa exile” which have fueled most of the sparse writing on this here blog, had never happened. So easily did I slip back into the grid of Manhattan, only the familiarity was of an uncanny sort: I remembered, mostly, how to get to the places I need to go, but everything felt a little off, like someone had broken into my apartment and moved all of its contents by a few centimeters (or inches, as it were). The streets forked in places that, for the first while, felt premature. The scaffolding has shifted, as if carried down the stream of a river. My social schedule resumed just as abruptly as it had halted. There was no fanfare, and nothing felt like it had changed very much. Even at the border, where I expected interrogation, I was simply greeted: Welcome to America. I could not quite figure out if the year felt erased because I had wasted it or because it was not yet over. Ricocheting across Yorkville, from one sleeping arrangement to the next and back, working such that my pajamas were no longer my pajamas but simply “sweats,” the end of the chaos tunnel was nowhere to be seen.

My cousin Vera, who had moved out from her ex-boyfriend’s apartment, and I agreed to live together. We started doing so in what we called the dorm—the room in her mother’s apartment, which was formerly Vera’s sister’s, who now lives in her own dorm, in Ithaca. We took turns sleeping on the bed. It took us two and a half months and an amount of rejections that I can no longer count on my hands to find an apartment. A good deal in Clinton Hill: nearly half of both of our monthly paychecks. Plenty of charm: an old carved-wood fireplace, high ceilings, old-timey light switches, haphazardly preserved moldings, a clawfoot bathtub, walls painted in off-kilter moody shades of beige and green. It had plenty of problems, none of which we considered when we hastily exchanged emails with the agent-turned-property-manager as we tried to lock it down.

John, our super, did not know how to use the phone—he would not respond to texts and picked up the phone only every two or weeks or so. When the keys needed to be handed over, he asked us why we needed them today, on our move-in date. Then he told us that he is at the hospital. When the previous tenant’s things needed to be disposed of, as agreed upon during the lease signing, he was “just one guy.” When something needed to be fixed it was too much work. Too many buildings.

On New Year's Eve, Vera and I decided to throw a party because there is no better time for two Russian girls without furniture to throw a party. A few hours before the guests arrived, the National Grid, in the person of a man who was specialist enough to know that old buildings had gas-powered lighting, confirmed that we did indeed have a gas leak and that it is coming from our ceiling (we had called several times previously because of the persistent aroma of rotten eggs that hung in the air beneath the tall ceilings that were newly ours, and were told that we were crazy: there was no gas leak, and would we like the gas turned on on our stove?) The gas was turned off and the party was had, olivier salad et al. The aftermath of the leak brought with itself trite gaslighting jokes and an Orthodox Jewish plumber named David, who showed up, after much cajoling, with his assistant Mohammed. With payos extending from beneath his Carhartt beanie towards his bomber jacket, his presence conferred a solemn workman’s authority, which he wielded by commanding Mohammed, in Yiddish, to make a hole in our ceiling with his mallet. Mohammed complied, smashing through the plaster and lathe as if it was a chicken carcass. Then David would investigate the source of the gas leak; his legs stood on a step ladder, still very much present in our living room, and from the waist up he was consumed by the ceiling. A man close to God. God, however, was keeping secret where the gas leak was coming from, and David did not trust us to have understood correctly that it was in fact coming from the ceiling, and was there really a gas leak?

He instructed Mohammed to make another hole, behind the stove, which Mohammed started doing before I could even make a sound, and so, resigned, I stood there watching Mohammed make a hole in the wall of the apartment that I signed a lease for, tacitly agreeing to take it “as is”; was this still “as is,” seeing as it came with the gas leak? David was still unsatisfied—the gas leak was not yet located. The only way forward, it became evident, was to make another hole, on the other side of the wall against which stood the stove. The gas leak was definitely not coming from the stove, but we now had an open plan between the kitchen and my bedroom. If it wasn’t the stove, then it definitely must be the ceiling, as I had explained to begin with, which meant that Mohammed would simply have to make another hole, now in the ceiling of my bedroom, which still contained only a mattress. The hole needed to be made exactly where my head would be when sleeping. The gas leak was not located in this hole. I was frantically emailing the landlord, that the apartment was being rendered unlivable as we speak. In response he called David, who, in Yiddish, assured the landlord that this was necessary, that there was no other way to find the leak, that he will fix it.

By this time, Vera had come back from work to find the apartment covered in bits of plaster, broken wood, and mysterious ceiling dust, while David was back in the living room, half-engulfed by the ceiling, trying to solve the mystery of the leak. Mohammed held the ladder secure, while I stood with my arms crossed and what I am sure was a blank, if not slightly round-eyed expression; nothing could be done to revert this process anymore. David asked Vera if she had brought a broom and seemed both bemused and bewildered when the answer was negative. He was now leaning forward on the ladder, anchoring himself inside the ceiling with one arm and feeling a spot with his hand, stretched out, as if he was trying to determine pregnancy in a large mammal, like a cow or a horse. All of this was accompanied by grunts and complaints, expressions of bafflement and orders barked at Mohammed. When he climbed down from the ladder, he stood in the doorway of my room quietly. Vera and I looked at each other, puzzled at this sudden silence. He stood, looking back and forth between the holes in the two rooms. “I have to think,” he informed us and continued to stand leaning against the frame of my door, pensive. Then he ordered Mohammed to make another hole in the living room ceiling, where he had been feeling about with his hand. Vera sat on the floor, back against the wall, mouth agape, looking up as Mohammed diligently pounded our ceiling. The neighbors knocked, two young women of ages close to our own, asking what all the noise was. We explained, inviting them in. With amusement, they told us that, yes, there was always the smell of gas in the apartment. They were friends with the previous tenant—she dealt with the smell by airing the space. Then they asked David if he could come check on a weepy radiator in their unit when he was done.

The source of the leak was a pipe in the ceiling, left over from Brooklyn’s gaslight days, which are, evidently, still ongoing, even if on slightly more mental terms. David had determined its exact location by hooking his elbow into the first hole he and Mohammed had made, and stretching his other arm towards the last hole, where he felt around the in-tact ceiling with his hand as if it was a stethoscope. With a look of clarity on his face he climbed down the ladder and announced that he had found it. He did not have on-hand the cap that would close off the pipe and, thus, the flow of gas, so he needed to do a Home Depot run. He reassured us that he would be back soon, that Mohammed would stay and clean up the rubble of the ceiling, which nobody had warned us to expect. “Do you girls have a cigarette?” He asked, now standing right before us. Both of us were out, but we simply shook our heads, without explanation. “What, neither of you smoke?” he asked with mocking surprise.

He came back forty or so minutes later with the small cap in his hand and a circular saw. He climbed on the stepladder one last time; “get out of the way,” he called down to us. “It’s gonna spritz fire.” We did as he instructed. Brief noise, sparks, triumph. “I keep you and me safe, both,” he said to us, wiping his forehead with satisfaction. The gas leak was fixed, he assured us. Now, the holes were no longer his problem; maybe the super might come fix them, he shrugged. Saying his goodbyes, he left, Mohammed trailing behind him.

A week or so later we were finally able to reach John, who, with surprising promptness, brought us a hotplate. For some reason, when I opened the door, he set down the rusty piece of technology on the floor, displaying a sense of great duty, with the words “I can’t catch me breath,” in his thick Caribbean accent. He also promised to come and patch up the holes in several more days. He kept his promise but did one of the more abysmal jobs known to man doing so, accompanied by complaints about all of the other buildings of which he takes care and “the dirty Jews” that inhabit them. I guess he had not recognized the ears upon which this fell as Jewish.

John’s employment, unbeknownst to us, was soon terminated. A series of contractors came by to paint the walls. The ghosts of wall paints past glare through the white and go well with the botched ceilings.

We said goodbye to Aang at the start of February, just a few months shy of the sixteen-years-ago when he turned up, a three-week-old kitten, on what was then Grisha’s and Nina’s stoop in Philly and gave the whole household fleas. He was named after that cartoon oracle child with the blue arrow on his forehead for the analogous marking he had. It was 2009. It suited him.

When it became clear that Grisha and I were seeing each other seriously, I sometimes allowed myself to lie in his bed, reading while he was out running errands. Aang and I would be alone in the apartment, meaning that Aang and I would be together in the room; he liked to be near people. On occasion, I would take a break from reading, to stare at the pattern of the tin ceiling. Invariably, my thoughts would turn to the animal near me, how it was an extension of its owner, whom I wanted to know so badly. I thought of it in terms of access, how this cat was witness to all that had yet to learn about this man. I was flattered that he seemed to accept me into the fold of his feline life; I felt that if he chose to wake me in the mornings with a gentle tap of the paw on my cheek or forehead, followed by a careful extension of a single claw in the case that I did not immediately get up to feed him, I could not have just been a passerby. It felt special to be considered by him enough so as to have been identified as the weak link.

He wore a tuxedo and liked a seat at the table, sneaking pieces of cheese, eating ice cream with us. Most of all, he loved basking in the sun, stretching out his body with the elegance of a dancer. In the colder days of the year we would sit together on the radiator. In his last months, he spent a lot of time on our laps. He would leap onto the fridge until he couldn’t. He still did not like being picked up. We fed him as often as he asked for it.

Once the cancer was irrevocably evident, Nina came over a few times. How often does one get to see their partner interact, catch up, with their college ex? I felt most grateful to Aang for allowing me to get to know Grisha in ways that reach into a past to which I would otherwise have no access (even if Nina did call me a Zoomer). How generous animals can be.

Not very long after Aang’s departure the three-year anniversary of the war had come up. I thought a lot about those early days, the dissonant realities I inhabited, how flooded my apartment was always with the news and its gruesome images as the magnolias blossomed outside and tourists took selfies on the streets; how I would go on to write the same essay again and again, this one, too, a repetition.

I revisited my diary; on day 25 of the war, I wrote: “Every day I am overwhelmed with the sort of images I used to avoid out of a belief that looking at someone else’s suffering, taking in the visual evidence of the someone’s horrible, violent death from the comfort of my home somehow compromised the dignity and the privacy of the subjects. Nobody should be seen dead; not like this. And yet, now it feels important to see a young man kneeling over a body wrapped in a bloodied tarp—his mother, killed while her Kyiv apartment building was being shelled. The woman, breast-feeding on a gurney, lacerations and dust all over her exposed upper body and face, her hair wrapped in a cloth, chunks of hair missing—she had shielded the baby during another shelling. A banged-up apartment wall with a trio of orthodox icons stuck onto it, a thick smear of dried blood next to the sticker, a Byzantine Jesus looking on from its center. I’ve been thinking about what sort of grief I am allowed, and I haven’t yet arrived at an answer.”

One image in particular floats to the surface of my mind, when I think about those early days of the war. The sleeve of a dark puffy nylon track jacket, a lifeless hand caked in dirt, fingers curled towards the palm. The woman, Iryna Filkina, 52 years old, perished in the Bucha Massacre when returning from work at a heating plant on her bicycle. She was recognized by her manicurist—she had given her the red nails with accents on her ring fingers—a heart painted onto a background of cheerful bubblegum pink. It’s not just me for whom this image surfaces; it’s among those most emblematic of this war. I’m not going to offer yet another close reading. Tens of thousands of deaths, many of them just like Irynas. These images, the horror they radiated, were what being Russian now suddenly meant.

We were all responsible because we had let this happen because we stood by silently as our freedoms, one by one, were being plucked from us, like feathers from a hen destined for soup. Or we liked them being plucked away from us, this soup of our lives pleasant as a hot tub next to what our government was doing to Ukraine. Or we didn’t like it, and we said so, but not forcefully enough. When we said it too forcefully, often that would mean prison, where, too, we are useless. If not prison, then in emigration, where we are not just useless but parasites on the back of the rest of the world, upon which we had inflicted this war. Not the activists, of course, though their infighting made up for what they lacked in general impotence. Meanwhile, the metrics for what constituted forcefulness of speech proved uneven, unequal, a matter of luck or misfortune.

Today, the minutiae of movements on the battlefield escape me, and I’ve had to come to terms with the fact I am unlikely to ever become fluent in the professionalized language of war. I still follow the news diligently, though sometimes I find it becoming background noise, and I have to force myself to pay attention. Sometimes it’s difficult to pay attention because the subject is something like the final months and gruesome end of the life of Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna. It’s tempting to ascribe animal qualities to the depravity, but this is something of which only humans are capable. In these three years, which feel like at least a decade, my feelings about the war have not changed: it is the murderous enterprise of a criminal government to which I’m ashamed to say I am subject. I hope to see it change soon, though I struggle to summon optimism. The irony, too, of returning to the US—of jumping through countless hoops to do so and surrendering certain basic freedoms once again—just to be subject to a bumbling new regime which treats geopolitics like a golf game, does not escape me. But I love this place (New York) in ways similar to how I admittedly love Russia, begrudgingly, despite everything.

I no longer obscure the fact of my national origin; it is a simple fact, painful as it can be. A few weeks ago I was in a rush to get uptown. It was raining, and as I left my apartment, I was greeted by obscenity in my own mother tongue at the building site across the street. Amused, I ran towards the vehicle I had summoned, a car driven by a man, whom, I realized, was named Anatoly, when I got in. The Americanized “Stacey” to the more conspicuous “Anastasia” or “Nastya” did not give me away, so I decided to keep speaking English, to be safe. The traffic and the rain dragged out our trip, and we would exchange complaints about how life comes to a halt in New York with even the slightest weather events. We were making our way up a hill, passing by a hospital, when expressed chagrin at the atrocious double parking near it. Three women wearing pastel hijabs passed by. “Must be a Muslim holiday,” he remarked. I braced myself to hear an unfortunate opinion, so I responded that they were likely just going to the hospital. “No,” he said, pointing towards the window, “see, there is a… мечеть.” He could not remember the word for mosque in English; the mosque I hadn’t noticed was next to the hospital. “Mosque,” I told him and proceeded to ask if he spoke Russian. He said, delighted, “Yes, Ukrainian and Russian!” He asked if I did, and I told him, still in English, that yes, I speak Russian. He switched to Russian and asked me where I was from; I told him I was from Russia; unfortunately. “Well, what are you going to do? Thank god you’re here now.” I nodded. We talked a little about New York, about how long we had been here; it is his eighth year, he had won the Green Card lottery. He was hoping to bring over the rest of his family soon. We were not far from my destination at this point, and as we parted he told me: “The Soviet Union did not fall apart in 1991. It’s falling apart now.” Then he wished me well.

I speak Russian with my nail technician Asya; she told me it was okay. When I asked her how long she has been in the US, she told me “three years,” and we both gave each other nods of understanding; I did not pry much further. She moved here from Kyiv, where she had lived for ten years, originally from Zaporizhzhia, where drone attacks are constant.

It is spring now. The common cold has now given way to seasonal allergies, and the snow to pink petals scattered on the street, pooling in the irregularities of the asphalt, occasionally whipped up in a whirl by the wind. Everyone, as if overnight, has emerged from hibernation, happier, more attractive. I am in deep need of a vacation, which keeps getting delayed, month after month, by volatile visa regimes, haphazard personal finances, and indecision. Most women I know who are not yet married or betrothed want to be, myself included. No man seems to want that, at least not those crossing our paths; at least not to us. “Recession indicator,” we joke. We still choose to enjoy ourselves, despite all that needs to be done, this “all” now small mountains looming over us. Another martini? Why not. Aang’s bowl still stands in the kitchen. Vera and I still do not have gas. In Cobble Hill Park, Mikhail Baryshnikov’s daughter walks her spider-like black dog; two girls, sisters, practice hand-stand dismounts against the picnic table. “I wish I had a big sister who could help me with mine,” says the older one as she assists the younger with her landing. Spring is especially devastating during a war.

During the weekdays, we did our best to fit in as much as we could before midday, which often entailed a large Viennese breakfast at a coffee house, usually consisting of coffee, orange juice, a bread roll, ham, cheese, butter, jam, and a boiled egg; we were charmed by what the coffee house represented as a Viennese institution, namely a stately public living room, of varying levels of dilapidation, where a cup of coffee buys you unlimited time. We’d run errands. G. would need to mail something; I would need pants and tops with sleeves, the contents of the carry-on suitcase out of which I had been living for the past months no longer responsive to the season. On the weekends, we’d have even longer, more leisurely Viennese breakfasts and take walks or bike rides to one museum or another. We spent as much time looking at the exterior of the Secession Building as we did inside, its rigid, well-maintained outlines in stunning contrast with the reserved bombast of its Jugendstil features, chief of which is the large orb composed of golden vines, which sits atop the building and refracts the light such that, looking at it long enough, one could begin to believe that the cosmos beams into it. At this time, the facade also bore a banner— an image by the Ukrainian artist Mykola Ridniy of Saltivka, the Kharkiv neighborhood where the artist grew up, now destroyed by bombs. The buildings in this image seem intact but are obstructed by a krater-like black spot.

Inside, we would go straight downstairs, where Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, first painted in 1902 in honor of the 75th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven’s death, is housed on the walls of a basement room, built exclusively for this very purpose. The painting, or fresco, as it were, follows the movements of Richard Wagner’s interpretation of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony; the headphones visitors are given play Beethoven’s original. It is much better to view and try to understand the painting without them and their didactic revisionism. Upstairs, temporary exhibitions of works by contemporary artists are on view—we went to see the video installation to which the banners outside corresponded—a walk through bombed-out Saltivka, where a voiceover recites Ridniy’s memories of childhood sites that no longer exist. Real exile.

We spent hours in the Leopold Museum, strolling carefully so as not to miss anything, to take in fully the Gesamtheit of the Gesamtkunstwerk. In the exposition chronicling the turn of the 20th Century in Vienna, we came upon a most perplexing inclusion: a replica of the life-size doll Oskar Kokoschka had commissioned the doll-maker Hermine Moos to make of his former lover, Alma Mahler; they had a tumultuous four-year affair, shortly after she became the widow of composer Gustav Mahler. This doll had disheveled black hair, a garishly made up face, the thin lines that represented her eyebrows arched too high on her forehead, bright red lipstick tracing her parted mouth, rouge caked on the apples of her cheeks, and blue eyes, thickly lined. Her bewildering furry body lay splayed—it's proportions ape-like, with pornographically perky large breasts pointing skywards—across an elegant bench designed by Josef Hoffmann. This doll resembles Alma Mahler, from what I could tell, only in that it has the outlines of a woman. This was also what the original doll shared with Alma Mahler’s appearance, as evidenced by the photographs hanging nearby; a photoshoot Kokoschka had for the doll, posing it like a real person. The doll took Moos nine months to complete; she had to follow the specifications provided to her by Kokoschka in their correspondence. “If you are able to carry out this task as I would wish, to deceive me with such magic that when I see it and touch it imagine that I have the woman of my dreams in front of me,” wrote the artist to the doll-maker, "then dear Fräulein Moos, I will be eternally indebted to your skills of invention and your womanly sensitivity as you may already have deduced from the discussion we had.”

Moos left feathers on the stuffed swan skin that made up the dolls body, perhaps in an act of defiance against being made complicit in Kokoschka’s fetishistic stunt. Once the doll had fulfilled its purported purpose to “cure [him] completely of [his] passion,” Kokoschka threw a “big champagne party,”at the end of which he beheaded the doll in the garden. Copies of this doll have been made on numerous occasions for display at a variety of exhibitions in the world’s grandest museums.

To be frank, each new rung of the news cycle brings so much horror that I don’t know where to start. I start over and over again, and by the time I get anywhere with trying to express the horror I feel, something new, more horrible, more ridiculous—and one learns that there are really no limits to the horror of the ridiculousness or the ridiculousness of the horror—happens and I have to start over again. Nothing that isn’t imprinted by global tragedy seems worthy of attention. This is all to say: I have thoughts and I need some time to duly articulate them. I also have a visa, for now, which as of recently has brought itself additional considerations regarding what one might feel license say, but that’s a subject for another time.

For now, I decided that I shall not put off any further sharing something that I did finish writing, fairly recently, for Majuscule Journal: an essay I tell people is about Ingeborg Bachmann, about being in Vienna, and about wearing beige, which, while not untrue, is glib. The draft I had submitted was much longer and included many digressions on the state of Europe, as distilled in Vienna, a city Bachmann’s narrator in Malina describes as “retired from history.” That all got cut out, so now it is about being a woman, mostly, I think. Perhaps you might read it and decide for yourself what it is about? I cannot bring myself to do so; there may still be a few typos in there, some of which I am pretty sure are not mine.

On account of the essay’s publication and the fact that Vienna is a city I have come to love, I thought I might share, too, some suggestions as to where one might go and what one might see, should one find themselves there.

My favorite feature of the city is its coffee houses, which serve as communal living rooms, where for the price of a cup of coffee one can buy themselves several hours of peace. It is important that time feels like it has stood still in the coffee house for the last century or so, and in that respect, Café Sperl is perhaps the platonic ideal of a coffee house, the upholstery of its ample seating mottled just enough, the ceilings high and windows tall, which results in cool, dispassionate lighting inside; lunch is okay, as is the breakfast; coffee and cake perhaps the best thing to order. Café Landtmann, right across from the Burgtheater, is likely the most beautiful of all of the coffee houses (sit inside!); the food is fine, the pastries are good, and the people-watching is fantastic. Café Prückel’s well-maintained mid-century interiors are exceedingly elegant, the air filled with the spirit of enterprise and success; however you are best off having just a coffee and croissant there while reading a book or the newspaper. At Café Bräunerhof, known for being favored by Viennese Inner City antiques dealers and Thomas Bernhard, you might do the same, while watching eccentric locals perform their daily habits while forced to sit up straight in its worn-out banquets. I have a soft spot for Café Jelinek too, where I like sitting outside on sunny mornings, having a Viennese breakfast and a few cigarettes; the bookstore across the street is nice too, if you read German. I have not been to Café Tirolerhof, but have observed it as always being filled with old people who would know that the Sacher torte there is just as good as it is at the Sacher Hotel. The service is equally gruff and courteous everywhere.

There’s a version of a trip to Vienna where one spends their time exclusively at coffee houses, but that would mean you would miss going to the museums and exhibition halls, which are incredible, so that would be a criminal and ignorant oversight. My recommendations here are the obvious: the Leopold Museum, the Albertina, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Secession (for the Beethoven Frieze; its contemporary programming is so-so, though I’ve liked the work of the Ukrainian artists I’ve seen there). The Freud Museum is very fun, and perhaps the only one of the literary museums that is worth your time.

I would also advise you to spend a morning at the Dorotheum—auction houses are kind of amazing to me because I find it hard to wrap my head around the fact that you can just walk in somewhere and buy a Schiele. Generally, I think shopping at auction is a superior mode of consumption and we should all be doing it more. Here too I encountered a painting that I never thought I would see in person (it was part of a private collection), Livingroom Interieur by Mikhail Roginsky, a Soviet nonconformist painter of kitchen-sink ethos who emigrated to Paris in 1978 where he made bitterly nostalgic, haunting, and still very Soviet paintings; I love them and looking them up again makes me feel like he might be my favorite painter. I had come across the painting in question online days prior to this encounter, and had admired its portrayal of a mundane longing. It felt providential to suddenly find myself looking at it in the hall of the auction house, hung unceremoniously over a window, above a manual fire alarm. The starting price was $12,000, realized at $15,000. Across the alley from the Dorotheum there is a small bakery; I don’t remember what it is called, but if you see it, be sure to pick up a loaf of bread.

Vienna is a great place to drink, for which you will find evidence in the menus of coffee houses: full of baroque combinations of coffee, liquor, and whipped cream, each with their own fanciful name. There are, of course, the Austrian wines, decent bottles available at supermarkets for 6-8 Euro. I have not been to a Heuriger, which are often described as “wine pubs” (going alone never appealed), but that is a frequent recommendation. If you, like me, are an incorrigible enjoyer of wines that taste like sour whey with floral u, you’ll be delighted to learn that a Meinklang white Mulatschak is like 12 Euro (buy it directly from the source). In terms of bars I like Loup Garou, which is run by wine-obsessed 23-year-olds, Kleines Café, which has a life of its own and is cash-only, and Café Hawelka, which is down-and-dirty bohemian in the way that people want European things to be. They serve red wine in a highball, filled to the brim. Like most cities on the continent Vienna is terrible at Martinis, but, for architectural reasons, I still recommend going to Loos American Bar, fka American Bar, fka Kärtner Bar, which, it might be superfluous to say, was designed by Adolph Loos and is a small Art Deco marvel. Just get a Sekt—a foolproof order.

After a while going to restaurants in Vienna becomes a comical undertaking because—and I do not exaggerate when I say this—most restaurant menus are identical. At least, that is the case at most restaurants where the food is worth eating. There is going to be Rindsuppe with Fritaten, Schnitzel, Tafelspitz, Gulasch, Backhendl, and a variety of potato salads; spend enough time in Vienna and you will become an expert in the subtle differences in how this myriad of establishments prepares the same dishes. It is also a testament to the longstanding theory that what makes a good restaurant is not, in fact, its food, but vibe. In that respect, my favorite is Gasthaus Woracziczky (make sure to reserve); Gasthaus Pöschl is a close second easy to walk in but you may need to wait). Zum Schwarzen Kameel is too much of a zoo (make sure to sit inside) but they do, indeed, make the best schnitzel. Gasthaus Wolf is my favorite of the more casual traditional Viennese restaurants. Generally, I have been unimpressed by the contemporary fare in Vienna, but Café Kandl really does serve outstanding food and wine. On a hot summer afternoon, few things are more satisfying than the poppy seed ice cream at Eis Greissler. Inevitably, you will also end up at the Naschmarkt, but make sure to visit its less touristed counterpart, the Kutschkermarkt in Währing. Buy cheese.

What else can I tell you about Vienna? Walk around, look at the buildings, see The Third Man at the theater that always plays it. Pay attention to the typography around the city, take pictures of it. Get on a train and go to Prague, or Budapest, or Salzburg, or Klagenfurt. Read in the Volksgarten. Buy a large vintage poster at Irenaeus Kraus (they have a lot of old German botanical and zoological illustrations) and a nightgown at Wäscheflott (or even better, get a shirt made to measure). Buy furniture. Ride the tram. If you’re in Vienna right now, Syrian artist Huda Takriti has a show up in the MuseumsQuartier. Exile Gallery, Eva Presenhuber. Get a manicure at MVK; it will likely be the best of your life.

My friend Emmeline (buy her book!) once described a particular kind of writing as having “looking around the room energy.” It entails: studied spareness, frigid humor, aphoristic abstractions deployed so as not to betray earnest feeling or conviction, structure predicated on strung-together details, an antiqued affect suggesting that the writer’s sentences had first been rendered in French or German, and a doting dailiness. A mode that represents a bourgeois idleness and fanciful resignation—gratuitous exercises in tastefulness, useful only in a documentary sense, simultaneously self-satisfied and self-defeating. I tend to really enjoy reading that sort of thing.

In spite of my own aesthetic proclivities, I have to say that largely I agree with Emmeline, especially as it pertains to the MFA writing of which this was a critique. I’m reluctant to get into the “needs” of literature, but I’ll say that I have doubts about writing for writing’s sake as anything but a personal endeavor. The defense of it I can make is personal too: in the past year my life has been overwhelmingly virtual, fully remote. Looking around the room has, at the very least, grounded me in physical reality.

This is all pretext to say that I have spent what feels like a long time seeking out rooms to look around—those of the museums I have passed through this year. I have strung some of those observations into an essay that is loosely about the idea of provenance as the fate of an object. You can read it in Discovery, which grew out of Affidavit (now an archive of some truly wonderful writing), and which I also happen to edit, as part of my responsibilities at work; I came to write it as a result of my own failure to commission something that looks more soberly at an artwork’s journey through the market. It’s my first “byline” in English (rigged, as it is), it’s in the distinguished company of an essay by John Vincler about the Nuremberg Chronicle and collecting as labor, and it’s of a piece with the essays I have previously put up here, so I thought I would share.

Despite having exceeded word count by 300%, it could expand endlessly. A lot of what I wanted to include didn’t make it in, such as a reference to Fleur Jaeggy’s short story about her friend Iosif Brodsky wandering out for a walk from his apartment in Brooklyn Heights. It is titled Negde—a charming mistranslation from the Russian word негде that was intended to signify “nowhere” as a place (that would be нигде, а difference of one letter), but instead actually means a lack of space/place. I keep trying to work it in somewhere, but I think it might just not really be possible. Nevertheless, it guided how I thought about the world of objects in writing about it. To me, the final paragraph is a marvel each time I read it:

I could go on about how museums have been my “site of all places” this year, but perhaps that is another essay. Instead, I’ll say that I hope to write notes such as this one with greater frequency, thank you for reading if you do, and leave you with another room-essay that I find infinitely stirring: Brodsky’s In a Room and a Half.

In these last six months, I have run out of reasons to be anywhere where I am able to be. I have more reasons not to be places, which, in turn, is the chief reason I find myself anywhere, almost by process of elimination. Because I do not have much of a choice in the matter of being and because while I am I have to be somewhere, I have decided to simplify decision-making for myself by going only where I have a free place to stay. My childhood friend suggested I fill her room and water her plants in Finsbury Park for the month that she is in Russia, completing her fieldwork (an anthropologist) and then in Spain, where her boyfriend, a Muscovite mobilization-escapee, studies (marine engineering), so here I am. I suppose that out of most places I could be, I also have the most reason to be in London. Between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three, I lived here; this is where I became an adult. 

As far as homecomings go, this is an estranged one. In the five years of my absence, the lives of those with whom I had been close moved to distances at which it is difficult to catch up with them fully—new vocations, live-in boyfriends, live-in girlfriends, jobs, husbands, a baby who, by now, has entered toddlerhood. I am happy for the stability my friends seem to have found, but, after three weeks of being here, I had to make peace with the fact that I am not part of these new, regular schedules. My own work schedule, structured to accommodate at least half a day’s overlap with my colleagues in New York, is not conducive to rebuilding the habitual togetherness I once had here either—my work day finishes at 8:00pm at the earliest, and everything here closes at 11:00pm. Besides time, there is also space: few things can persuade anyone to embark on a tube journey anymore, especially one that exceeds five stops or requires even one change, particularly during the week. I do not blame them—somehow, getting anywhere here takes a lot of effort. The city is bigger than I had remembered, and everyone has moved to either Camberwell or Chelsea, depending on whether they are of the creative or corporate persuasion, whereas I am in the northeast, between the boroughs of Hackney and Islington. It all used to be the other way around.

My friend’s  apartment, a duplex divided between the basement and ground floors, is spacious, boasts plentiful amenities, and looks out onto the backyard. It is also exceptionally damp and therefore cold even on warmer days, heated only in the mornings due to the energy crisis the war in Ukraine has brought upon Europe and the general inefficiency of the UK’s housing stock, all of which is evidenced by the exemplar in which I now dwell. One week, the handyman came every morning, to fix a burst pipe and the hole in the exterior of the house it created. On Friday, when he had finally completed his efforts, he came into the living room and told my friend’s housemate to keep an eye on the wall, where the bluish-gray paint was peeling—the water has to go somewhere now, he said. Now that the handyman no longer comes by I am woken by the buzzing of a phone, that of the neighbors, in the apartment which adjoins ours in an L-shape on the ground floor, my bedroom directly beneath theirs. The buzzing is usually followed by frantic footsteps, reverberating through the ceilings and the walls as if they’re making their way through a crumbling, flooded cave. In the mornings this goes on until they have left for work, in the evenings until they have gone to bed; they do not sleep very much and neither do I. The constant whirring of the dehumidifiers keeps the black mold, which gathers in showers, sinks, and especially damp corners, at a civilized minimum. I try not to spend too much time here, besides when I am working, but I love waking up here—in this room there is a large horizontal window through which one can see the sun refracted in the plump greenery of the garden, as the birds greet the day with their trill; or the rain, thick raindrops falling with melancholy gusto, shoving thin branches downward as they hit their mark, otherwise rendering everything around still. 

Housemates. My friend has two, to whom a month later I started to refer as such too, in the first-person possessive—my housemates. One is a man with a two-letter name. Like a Viking in stature, with wavy chin-length hair the color of beer and blue eyes, crystalline against the faint ruddiness of his skin, he is always in a t-shirt no matter the temperature. When he wears anything with longer sleeves, it causes one to take a moment to identify what it is that is not in its usual place until one realizes that it is his arms, now inside sleeves. He seems like the sort of man who is also always barefoot, which is not the case, at least not all the time, but feels like it is. He is a mathematician, for which he has found an application in data science and AI at the national institute for such things. He told me that weather forecasting has become so bad in recent years because 5G is so pervasive now that its signal routinely interferes with the weather satellites. I don’t know if this is true, but the notion that man’s mastery of nature is impeded by other forms of technology geared towards satisfying the prosaic demands of a market—catering to shitposters, compulsive online shoppers, and intelligence agencies—is one from which I derive a twisted enjoyment. On days he works from home, he spends more time cooking mushrooms, letting dough rise to become baguettes or doughnuts, and playing the piano, which he does quite competently: Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninoff. 

The other housemate has long flaxen hair and a girlish affect, the weighty rasp of her voice used mostly for exclamations that communicate little besides the bare fact that she is holding conversation with you. She works in marketing, plays tennis, and is mostly out. I see her less than I do the foxes in our garden. When I do, it is usually when I get up from bed to pour myself a glass of water; she’ll be leaning over the kitchen island, her elbows planted on it, picking at a heap of food out of a bowl as she watches reality TV on her phone. She’ll greet me, give me a scrunch-nosed grin, and say just two endearing words: pub night. 

The pub is likely my favorite of all the institutions this country has established. This is also one of the few things Brits and I have in common, our love for the pub. Otherwise, I never quite managed to assimilate; it took me too long to figure out class performance. But some of the best times I've had during my time in London were at the pub, in this consummate public space, which welcomes you whether you're hungry, or in need of a drink, or both, or neither, providing a reprieve from the aesthetic discontinuity of the present—many of them don't change too significantly, even over a hundred, if not more, years and they all have enough common elements filling them to blend together in one’s mind—I realized I don’t have a favorite, as I thought I must have. Orwell described the perfect pub to be lacking in "modern miseries,” with everything having the "solid, comfortable ugliness of the nineteenth century." In my memory, those times to which I refer as the best I’ve had living in this city took place in one big pub of the soul. I’m told the Irish pubs are trendy now, something to do with a Guinness revival, but I would not know; I have been to the pub only twice in the past month. 

What do I do instead? I do see friends sometimes and meet new people in doing so: their friends, boyfriends, the baby, who is now a toddler. I drank too much wine and gave too insistent a critique to the writing of the generally very good short film an old friend had made with her boyfriend, a screenplay writer—they were proudly showing it to me—before proceeding to sleep on a mattress in their living room, replacing the recent divorceé who had been crashing there for five consequent days. The following week, another friend invited me to dinner, along with two other girlfriends, Russian-speaking, one of them from Moscow too, the other from Vilnius. The woman from Vilnius had bright, blonde hair that sat spring-like, in the shape of her curler’s barrel, her delicate neck and wrists framed with careful adornments that functioned more as alignment of a consumer profile than jewelry, her teeth glistening white amid her creaseless smile. She spoke with good-natured humor about the high-profile personnel change at her place of work—her boss had suddenly left the football club that employed her, and she, like her colleagues, had found out from the news. The conversation spiraled in and out of subjects throughout the evening, and we kept returning to her work. “The players all think I’m in marketing,” she said after describing the rest and diet regimes of the athletes, whom the club seems to treat like wagyu cattle. I, quick to prejudice as I am, had made similar assumptions about her, but it turned out that she, too, is a mathematician and does data analysis. What this means at a football club, is that the movements of each player are recorded every twenty-five seconds of a game, mathematically scrutinized, and summarized into calculations of each player's cost. She had started her career doing the same, but in the coal mining industry. 

I found the accents at the table curious: native Russian speakers who spend a lot of time up north, as it is called, or around northerners. The husband of our hostess, from Yorkshire, had cooked us dinner—British Indian, a curry that had beef in it. Once he set everything out on the table, he recused himself into their room. The same thing happened at a different dinner in Chelsea: the husband cooked, served, and then retreated into the depths of the apartment to rest, while we, the ladies, went on to watch a Russian film that, with great fanfare, was announced as banned in its home country. It imagines Churchill, Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, each speaking to each other in their own language—English, German, Italian, and Georgian—as they dwell in purgatory, using existing footage of these figures. It had the makings of an overextended joke, but instead presented a grandiose meditation on history and power that marketed itself as a profound subversion. I would have preferred an imagining of Putin among these dead men. It was not worth watching.

There was the night I went to see a college acquaintance. Our relations had always been ones of warmth and sympathy  but not close enough to constitute friendship. A decade of acquaintanceship made for a hobbling intimacy, details of our lives known to few who presently populate them interwoven with newly learned basic facts about each other. First while politely picking over plates of Vietnamese food, then over martinis, two each, in an empty bar next door, we discussed our classmates, sharing retroactive gossip and lining up successes; at the top of the lineup the girl who rose to fame interviewing celebrities in chicken shops, at the bottom those about whom one asks, where are they now? I am often asked about where I am these days. One of our tutors got fired for, predictably, saying something crass. She loved to compare the college, an art school  known for its fashion department, to St. Trinian’s, referring to the boarding school in the cartoon series by Ronald Searle; she loved to call on students unexpectedly, asking questions the answers to which they did not know because she didn’t do much teaching—when she did, a two-hour lecture turned into a four-hour one, no breaks; she loved to show up at student parties, get drunk, and drive home; she loved talking about chain-smoking while working as a journalist in Durban in the eighties; she loved to gossip about students with other students, complaining to me one time that the year below was so overwhelmed, they were all threatening to cut their wrists. Most of all, she loved dachshunds and Lee McQueen. She was my favorite of the tutors. 

We went on to discuss the class system: I laid out how I had come to understand it as functioning in Britain; she told me that when she thinks of someone who is posh, she thinks about this lady whose house they would go to in her hometown in the Midlands, who wore threadbare tweed, her sofa covered in cat hair, portraits of horses framed and hanging on the wall the way one would hang photographs of family. We asked each other what our parents did. 

My college acquaintance had broken her toe and was bound to her crutches, so I had come to see her in Peckham, which took two overground trains and an hour. On the second train, rushing past Denmark Hill, in a desolate street surrounded by warehouses, lit by the watchful fluorescence of projector-like streetlights, I saw a woman in a puffer coat taking a picture of what looked to be a dog, leashless. I realized that it was, in fact, a fox. It just sat there, calm and posing, as if it really were her dog, its tail lying before it in a satisfied curl. 

When asked how things in London are, I say that the foxes are fucking. At night and sometimes during the day, one can hear clusters of piercing screams, which I would describe as obscene, were they not those of an animal. The street where my friend lives is said to be one of the most haunted in London, where at odd hours of the night, supposedly, one can hear children running around playing. I can report no such thing—only the foxes. I remember learning that this is what foxes sounded like in the spring of my first year in London, eleven years ago. The first time I heard it, I thought a woman was being attacked; terrified, I called the very friend in whose room I am now staying to ask what I should do. That can’t be, she told me, knowing then already that in the polished streets of southwest London, such things do not happen (she was right: anecdotally, when there was an uptick in knife injuries in that area of London, it turned out to be the fault of avocado pits). I calmed when I realized that the screams recurred too frequently for them to be a sign of someone being brutalized; I don’t remember how, in fact, I learned that these were foxes. I remember now, too, that fox screams had been a recurring motif since my first weeks in London: in line to register with the police at six in the morning, along with all the other new arrivals to the United Kingdom, I got into a conversation with a young woman from Kazakhstan, five or so years older than I was, in her early twenties; she had moved to Whitechapel, in the East End, and was, with wide eyes and disapproving motions of the head, telling me about her lacking sense of safety in what she referred to as East London—she could hear women screaming, assuming that they were at knifepoint. Every night. 

The pigeons are fucking too. In the park, every regular-looking pigeon is being stalked by a misshapen one, puffed up, its neck disfigured by lust. I had started to observe this when February had barely just begun. 

A lot of the time I am alone. In the mornings, when everyone is at work or rushing to get there, I decide on a place to go, a made-up destination to have a reason to walk somewhere, or go on a journey otherwise. Museums—my new favorite is Sir John Soane’s Museum in Bloomsbury, of which I had not known previously, and few of my London friends and acquaintances seem to have either. The home of the neo-classicist architect, renowned for his innovations in the uses of natural light, Soane bequeathed to the city and its people under the condition that it remain preserved as it was during his life. And so, on a random weekday morning, one can wander into this “Georgian time capsule,” as the docents enthusiastically refer to it, and marvel at the idea that someone might feel anchored to their home so as to build a crypt to house a granite sarcophagus in it. A different morning I went to John Keats’ house in Hampstead, of which my favorite part was the tree out front, which has been blown close to the ground by two hundred years of wind now and is only still there because a man in his twenties had once written poems in its shadow, and gazed upon it as he lay in bed, dying. The William Morris Museum was inconsequential but pleasantly oriented towards family; I was most amused by the rooms that had to do with the Arts and Crafts ideologue’s turn to socialism. I did not much like how the Tate Britain had been rehung since I had last been there, but in room 84 of the V&A everything remains as it has always been. The Foundling Museum suggests itself a little too insistently whenever I open the map on my phone, but, thankfully or not, it is temporarily closed. 

On mornings when I don’t go to a museum, I go much further than is necessary for coffee and a pastry. To Newington Green, where, in good weather, I sit in the Green of Newington, surrounded by yesterday’s muck, croissant flakes all over my coat, as I drink my flat white and look at that monument to Mary Wollstonecraft. More like a prototype of a monument in scale, the statue represents a naked, well-formed female figure emerging from a metallic cloud that looks like the plumed trail of a jetpack. Slightly Soviet in flavor. Its awkward proportions and placement evoke a sense of pathetic embarrassment to which I can’t help but relate. Perhaps not the sort of solidarity it was created to call forth, but solidarity nevertheless. In bad weather, I walk to Stoke Newington for coffee and porridge, to a small cafe with sweaty windows and customers of all genders wearing a uniform of Shetland sweaters, cropped corduroy trousers, and Blundstones; the porridge has calendula in it. Occasionally, I take myself out to dinner and a glass of wine; it appears that the salad leaves at every restaurant in the city are bubblegum pink. 

I have constructed all of my walking routes so that they take me through Clissold Park. In fact, they exist mostly so that I can go to the park, which, on grounds of a tedious existential malaise that has befallen me, is not an acceptable final destination. I feel tedious, too, writing about the delight and wonder that the park brings me: about the dogs of all sizes that sprint through the open green expanses with joyous abandon, their tongues trailing the air. About the middle-aged men and women for whom taking their dogs out is an endeavor so serious they wear wellies and hunting jackets to the park. About the crocuses multiplying with each, glowing the otherwise marshy environs like gems—quartz, amber, amethyst—and the early cherry blossoms, the fallout from which renders the edges of the puddles beneath pink. The more fanciful remnants of Victorian terraforming, represented by the bright green flock of wild parakeets. The spire of a medieval church, there since the sixteenth century, moors the park’s landscape. At night, along Green Lanes, the park’s eastern side, its silhouette, backlit by the street lights, looms, both menacing and reassuring, as if to say that some things might just be forever. 

Tedious descriptions, yes. But have you ever seen a swan fly? Though I had spent my childhood feeding them at the lake, I do not think I ever have, not until the morning of Valentine’s day in Clissold Park. Low in the air, the bird's wings heaved its body, shaped like a full amphora, in a circle. The tempo of its movements filled it with intention. I had been making my way through the park from Stoke Newington, and the swan and I reached the pond at the same time. I stopped there as I do every time I walk past it; the avian life of the ponds particularly captivating to me—the mallards, the coots, the pigeons bathing at the outer edges, the geese standing on the rocks, residual water gathering into dew drops on their plump chests, the storks building their nest in the branches of a tree on the wooded island in the middle of the pond. The swan made a ceremonious landing, floated up to its mate, and they performed the courtship ritual of pressing together their beaks, turning their heads side to side in rhythmic unison, entwining their long necks. Then they floated apart and stretched their necks into the opaque water. I decided it was time to end my lingering at the pond, which by now also follows an arcane choreography—a dance around my work schedule—and walked home to open my laptop and sort through the emails that had accumulated over what was my night. 

The day Navalny was killed, my friend became a British citizen. The previous night, she had invited me over to celebrate the fact. I had just returned from the park when I learned the news; I had not realized that my e-sim had run out, and so my phone was without until I reached wifi, where the disbelief reserved for news one knows already to be a historic inflection point replaced the floating reprieve of the pond. “I’m not canceling tonight, but I will be going to the Russian embassy beforehand,” my friend messaged. I spent the day working, asked to leave an hour before my day ended, and headed to the embassy, too. The plaque was smeared with red paint, made to look like blood. I made my way through the crowd, laid a flower, dedicating it to the political prisoners of Russia. Nobody I knew was there, but there were posters, crying, interviews being given. There was  singing. The people around me were at once familiar and so entirely strange; I wondered what had brought them all to London, which hoops they had to jump through to end up in a foreign country to be still  surrounded by compatriots; if, like me, they ended up here after failing to make it through the hoops elsewhere. Most likely not, but we were all failed citizens of our country. I lingered as I do by the pond before turning around to walk to the nearest tube station. There, I decided to head to my friend’s. My phone still had no network, and I arrived hours after everyone else had. 

Sipping wine, we sat in a somber circle in the living room on the floor of which I had slept weeks earlier. The divorcee I had replaced then was doing a not-so-tight five on the breakup and his first misguided, as several guests carefully pointed them out to be, attempts at dating. Otherwise, the conversation was rather distracted, we did not talk about the news. A sense of loss and of being lost dragged in the air, as if radiating from the heaters. 

At her Yom Kippur break-fast two years ago—my first ever—a friend said that the only thing Jewish about me is my last name. Streshinsky, or Streshinskaya as it is rendered in Russian, to reflect the fact that I am a woman, meaning of Streshin. Streshin, Rogachev county, Mogilev province—founded by “Jews who did not own their own homes and rented temporary housing, known as komorniki, arrived in Mogilev and the adjacent territory in the late 16th century,” according to documents supposedly held in the National Historical Archive of Belarus. Part of the Pale of Settlement from 1794. In 1880 there were 350 houses of worship in the province—a shul for every community of over thirty homes, a synagogue for those exceeding eighty. Under Soviet power, in 1920, all local property, including the shuls and synagogues—nationalized. By the mid-1940s, “the community as a whole was abolished.” The five Streshinskys above, my great-grandfather Ruman standing next to his sister (I believe her name was Esther) were photographed in Odesa, most likely in the early teens of the 1900s. In 1905, the year of the First Russian Revolution, between the 18th and 21st of October, there had been a pogrom in Odesa, three hundred Jews killed.

I do not know which pogroms the Streshinskys above survived; I do not know if they had ever seen Steshin; I do not know when they ended up in Odesa. I know that within the same collection of photographs is one of a relative, a young man, if not still a boy, with a face like the Gioconda’s, an uncle to my grandfather, or maybe a cousin—he emigrated to Beijing; later, he, or maybe only his son emigrated from China to San Francisco. I think it might be that only Ruman stayed in Odesa. The Streshinskys above were running from something, but what it was is not part of family lore. 

Here are the things that are: mentions of Abram, Feiga, Golda, Dota, Sura, Shaia, Silva, Moishe, a Yiddish-speaking early childhood, hen-plucking, a week’s worth of dinners from that hen. Corn kernels popping on a cob stuck into the sand while in evacuation in Uzbekistan, impaired vision from being in the cotton fields, Odesa, Sevastopol, Tallinn, Moscow, Kyiv,​​ Tel Aviv, Moscow-Moscow-Moscow. A bear on a warship, then a monkey, four hours of piano practice a day. 

On my mother’s side: A Kaufman turned Borev while fleeing from a death by firing squad (not directly for reasons of Jewishness), both parents fighting for the Red Army in the civil war. Great grandmother Leah, hen-plucking, a week’s worth of dinners from that hen. Evacuation, illness, wandering through the ruins of a school. Communal apartments, cats named Mishka and Dasha, Countess Bunin in the neighboring room. Kharkiv, Odesa, Riga, Moscow, Magadan, Chukotka, Moscow-Moscow-Moscow, six hours of piano practice a day, a declined job offer at a university (directly for reasons of Jewishness). 

None of the familial lines from which I was drawn left the Soviet Union, assimilating to the urban masses of Kyiv and Moscow, unclear if hush about their provenance, or simply not imbuing it with much significance—just never again, not even said out loud. Dissolution. I grew up in the Russian Orthodox Church, as many children of my generational cohort did, their parents, in search of an identity, any identity, once they were no longer Soviet citizens. On a hungover morning last summer, my older brother, thirty-six years of age, announced that he was having an identity crisis of his own. “Dad, are we Jews?” he asked, searching for confirmation of a familial history rooted so deeply, so out-of-sight, that it was an inadvertent secret. “So what if we are?” said our father. 

Like a magician pulling a rabbit from his top hat, I can call forth an entire history from which to forge a legible identity, its caveats gently folded into the gaps within, prepared for elaboration through a process of narrative mise-en-place. My last name allows me to do that; it could be that my friend is right. But in my mind, I am a Jew simply because there is nothing else I could be. My Jewishness was shaped in negation of the things in which I wanted no part—It has been an escape from the corrupt, violent, and sinister; where my beliefs, absent of religion, are grounded: that one should never take for granted that their home is always going to remain such and, exceeding in importance, that nobody belongs anywhere more than anybody else. 

Since October 7th, Zionists and those aligned with them, whether they are consciously so or out of some rhetorical instinct, have oft invoked the Holocaust. In statements, newscasts, articles, the chambers of the UN, by politicians, commentators, representatives of organized entities of various kinds exploiting it to justify the genocidal violence with which Israel has been bombarding Gaza. On social media in viral photographs and videos, and infographics, where it was deployed with a tedious, trivial, trickle-down insidiousness. There, the Holocaust is a shorthand for the cause of death or suffering of every Jew who has ever died or suffered. That is not to diminish or ignore the gruesome scale and nature of the attacks carried out by Hamas. Rather, it’s to say that the wash of propaganda and its use of these over 1200 deaths, 240 hostages, to prop up the flagpole of Jewish victimhood up which Israel runs its appeal to the guilty historical conscience of the West has been successful in obstructing both the true depth of their tragedy and rationalizing the exponential, continuous infliction of tragedy upon Palestinians. One is defeated by corralling the official counts—the death toll keeps growing. Over 23,000 deaths in Gaza at the time of writing.

Have we learned nothing? In this time, the question has been asked many times too. Perhaps we’re not looking in the right place, if we’re even capable of learning in the first place; what if we aren’t? And now? Are we supposed to learn from all of this too? As Israel prevents another Holocaust, Russia continues to fight the Nazis in Ukraine; a global condition. What has the use of all this history been? Adorno, In section 33 of Minima Morialia: “The logic of history is as destructive as the people that it brings to prominence: wherever its momentum carries it, it reproduces equivalents of past calamity.” No use. In Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, the narrator, a woman from Ramallah who becomes obsessed with a gruesomely small fragment of history, finds her own death in its repetition as the result of her frantic attempt to recover it. The novel, terse and powerful, delineates a number of borders, both real and imagined, which often prove to be one and the same, and the arbitrary cruelty with which they exist. One can’t help but think now about how the narrative limitations of politics render history into a border. It’s a minor detail within the borders of this moment, but the postponement of Shibli’s reception of an award titled LiBeraturpreis carries a bitter irony. 

Since I began my attempts to articulate these thoughts, a few days after the start of Israel’s siege of Gaza, the one thing that I kept, mostly untouched, was the beginning. Why was it that my first response was to examine my Jewishness? To pull up repeatedly this photo of my great grandfather and his siblings, as if to affirm to myself the objective ways in which I am Jewish? The longer I think about it, the stranger this response feels.

I keep returning to a conversation I had with a cousin who lives in Russia in the days following October 7th. She and I had begun retracing the faint lines of our Jewishness, that which we share by blood supplemented by a symmetry of provenance in the parts of our ancestral lines that don’t overlap, around the same time I did; the difference was only that I was doing so in New York, while her trips to Tel Aviv were increasing in frequency, following her friends, who, like many Russian Jews of our generational cohort, born in the ‘90s, found some refuge from the liberal discontents of Russian citizenship in the city’s lively bar-café scene. As the gruesome scenes of Hamas’ massacres flooded the screens of our phones and computers, we commiserated; I had asked her if the people she knows in Israel are okay, she thanked me, said that yes, everyone is okay, though those who lived in the south would constantly hear the shootouts nearby. She wrote another, longer message, which read like those we would send each other in the spring of the previous year, recapping who had been crossing our minds as being in potential danger, the unexpectedly vast network of people one ends up checking up on. In addition to the worry over those she knows personally, she had been reflecting on five years of traveling to Israel, that, of course, in this time she had been charmed by the idea that there was a shared home just for us, that this home stands there for us, like a communal apartment to which you gain entry by being a jew, that this was a place that helped her recover her own identity; that she felt a lot of pain for this place. 

Choosing to read her message as a statement of disenchantment with this idea, I wrote to her that, of course, pain is pain, that pain isn’t subject to ideology, that “the cognitive and the emotional can exist in complex entwinement with each other,” that I understood and thought of my time in New York in similar terms, that there I found “an Israel of sorts for myself,”. This was why, I wrote, I could and can afford to avoid Israel because I have—well, had—New York. She did not respond to this; the next time we spoke, we did not touch on the matter. But, in the subsequent weeks of watching her posts, it became evident that I had chosen to read her message incorrectly. 

Those aren’t necessarily terms in which I’d put it now, but the sentiment remains: luck has always played a big role in where a Jew ended up when escaping something if the opportunity to escape presented itself in the first place. Israel has resolved the question of where to go for many Jews; in doing so, it has also created a feedback loop between the legitimization of its ethnonationalism and its appeal to one of the lowliest human impulses—entitlement and vengeance. The targets of these appeals are often people of obscured backgrounds, like my cousin or me, and how effective it is depends on what choices are available at a given time. In any case, I write these sentences from my childhood bedroom in Moscow—so much for luck and the availability of choices. Still, Adorno, again: “it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.” For me, this is what should have been learned from history; but history, I am now convinced, is a pointless place to look for lessons. History can only tell us that at certain junctures, what was thought impossible previously, becomes possible, and that it can be replicated with even greater efficiency and more horrifying yield.

The paradox of history is that nothing is ever new, and yet the ways things manifest themselves are always native to their time. This is what I’ve been tugging at in all of this writing, I think: the set of resources at humanity’s disposal, as well as the set of that which it lacks, is unprecedented, and is not likely to be the same again; not with the velocity of technological progress, which moves like an aggressively accelerating treadmill. And so, in geopolitics too—the only reason to attempt molding rhetoric in the familiar shapes of the past is to obfuscate present evils, to elevate the haphazard, deathly movements of the power-hungry to grand historical designs. 

Wars are broadcast in real-time on the internet now. To watch a war on the internet is to experience the disorientation of distorted reality, most privy primarily to what a given algorithm dispenses to them. Perhaps therein is the discomfort in wielding the emblems of suffering produced by viral imagery as a tool of rhetorical strategy: it identifies tragedy with the individual, leaning on the notion of an event’s singularity—a tricky category that, at best, in direct terms lays bare the component parts of a tragedy and, at worst, serves as a convenient lever of propaganda, spurring reactive nationalisms of the kind that we see the Israeli government performing. The war in Gaza is singular, but it also exists within a greater pattern of expansionist greed and aggression utilizing ethnic cleansing as its chief method—absurd, irreconcilable with modernity, wherever and however it happens. And yet. 

In this context, I think a lot about Azerbaijan's expulsion of Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) which followed a nine-month-long-blockade of the region. All of it is well-documented by those subject to it—from the war in 2020, to standing in weeks-long lines day and night for the mere chance of obtaining bread, to the armed offensive against a depleted population, to the unending line of cars as this population leaves its home in its entirety, forever. Accompanied by a measly amount of coverage in English, this happened right before our eyes just a few weeks before the events at the forefront of global news now. The lack of intervention, the practical absence of the matter from public conversation seemed unfathomable to anybody watching and few, it seems, were, be it by dint of the algorithm’s movement or simple neglect. This is, of course, not to compare or measure the scales of devastation against each other. Rather, it is to point out the global, shared nature of the crisis we find ourselves living through—the weapons with which Azerbaijan mounted its final attacks on the formerly Armenian enclave in Karabakh were bought from Israel; these final attacks were conveniently timed to a moment when Russia was too busy with its own imperial assault on Ukraine to enact the CSTO commitments which were in a state of lapse to begin with, due to friction between Armenia’s prime minister Nikol Pashinyan and Putin.

It’s hard not to resort to various shades of pessimism in all of this. Often, it feels like there’s not much else available. But increasingly, one hopes, the fact that the profound failure of global politics is streaming live, means that it will finally be seen. I won’t propose anything so hopeful as the idea that a collective realization of the profane absurdity of the systems to which we are subject—our governments which insistently purport to represent us—and the suffering borne of them, might result in a greater sense of solidarity. But I am tempted to, if only for the fact that my own current state of suspended citizenship and civic belonging, or exile, as I now refer to it in jest, makes it feel like it may be an inevitable place to arrive.