I recently realized that there is no cultural continuity in Russia — there is simply nowhere to get it when any attempt to create any links has been suppressed for over a century. No matter how the current war ends, the disintegration of Russian culture will continue because its foundation has been destroyed a long ago.

For example, in English-language music (especially British music) it is easy to trace the connection between genres and epochs: the new always builds on the old, national folklore goes into modern genres, forming uniqueness and continuity. This is a natural process.

In Russia, on the contrary, both the past and the future are systematically denied — to life in general. This is manifested not only at the state level, but also in everyday life: people try to be invisible and forbid to be visible to others.

Under conditions of censorship and dictatorship, any attempts to comprehend the present experience are blocked or destroyed. As a result, everything is reduced to imitation and propaganda, which is easier to forget than to revise.

Attempts to integrate Russian cultural experience with the world’s experience always end in emigration. This was the case in the USSR, and it is the case now. Almost everyone who could create new and lively, sincere things has to leave every 30-40 years: in the 1920s, in the 70s, in the 90s, and now. This deprives the country of a unified cultural foundation, but at the same time allows it to be preserved at least partially, but outside the state.

The thing is, it all started a lot earlier than I thought.

Originality and self-reflection

Over the past year I have read many different analyses, studies and memoirs related to Soviet music and visual art. I admit that reading them is somewhat painful because of the form, and not particularly enjoyable because of the content. But it’s interesting to read after my guesses a more serious analysis with references to studies. For example, about the lack of self-reflection in Russians writes art historian Andrey Khlobystin in “Schizorevolution”, 2017:

“There are practically no conceptual descriptions, no versions, and thus no history.There should be descriptions, reflection and discussions — then there will be a history of Russian art. Alexander Pyatigorsky spoke about the same problem in a related discipline: “So far in Russia there is no political history of Russia in the twentieth century, no history in the sense of Tacitus, no history in the sense of Klyuchevsky (…) the political reflection of the average Russian intellectual has not yet passed through the stage of that concentration, of being squeezed, in which he could take and write such a book. He doesn’t see this political history. Or, you might say, he doesn’t want to. (…) In the last ten years alone (…) there have been six books published in England” 1029. Alain Badiou writes the same thing: “Truths make their singular breakthrough only in the fabric of opinions (…) There is no other History than ours, there is no true world to come”

This may be an answer to the question of why what I do doesn’t arouse interest within Russia and sometimes even among the participants of the events themselves.

Russian sense of form

Khlobystin also writes about what I mentioned above: the large number of borrowings and the lack of its own foundation, the lack of integrity of Russian culture:

“We imply and feel a certain unity and own character in the vision of Russian artists of different epochs, a deep commonality of the most contradictory phenomena of Russian art. But to speak in relation to it about the “Russian sense of form” — sounds almost comical…when trying to create an image of Russian art, we are faced with insoluble problems, the main of which remain amorphousness of its general physiognomy, predilection for external borrowings, susceptibility to repeated irreversible breaks of tradition and as a consequence — the lack of a consistent plot in the development of artistic forms.”

“The understanding and reproduction of national forms as an external stylization rather than a living tradition emphasizes their introduction to our soil. Both at the emergence of Byzantine canons, and at the time of Peter the Great’s reforms, and at the beginning of the twentieth century, the impetus for a new form came from outside. Indeed, Russian art is similar to German art in its tendency to borrow and in its “non-self-sufficiency”. From the Renaissance right up to the twentieth century, luxurious Mediterranean forms, which emitted attractive impulses, determined the development of art in the rest of Europe. The invitation of Italians to build the Kremlin and its cathedrals was certainly not a manifestation of longing for Italy, which we do not have as old and strong a tradition as the Germans.

The generally accepted history of Russian culture and art looks like an endless quarrel, breaking up into tiny squabbles that prevent the construction of its consistent “evolution” (as science and modernist aesthetics demand). Outwardly, it disintegrates into several opposing periods, each of which denied and swept away the previous one, often simply demolishing its monuments, which is how modern Russian history began”

“Only in the 18th century did the secular art forms of the West overlap with the sacred ”content” of Orthodox art. We turned to classical European art when, as classical art history believes, the flowering of its forms had passed and there was a ‘loss of the middle’ (Hans Sedlmayr).”

“Official Russia, according to A. M. Panchenko’s remark, fell into either Greekophilism or Latinism. In the eyes of such “new teachers” of the XVII century as Sylvester Medvedev (teaching of Simeon Polotsky) and others, “Russian culture is a “bad” culture, it is necessary to build it anew, as if on an empty place, and for this purpose “educate the Russians” – of course, according to the standards of Western European baroque”. In line with this enlightenment movement, the spiritual values accumulated in Russia – books, professional music, architecture (prohibition to build tent temples), skills of communication between people, clothing, holidays, entertainment – are denied “1069. Then, for two centuries, the CP was now and then a powerful engine of Russian politics and culture — what only the title of Pushkin’s article “On the Wretchedness of Russian Literature” (1834) is worth! Throughout Russian history, dissidence was considered a good tone and simply the second profession of the Russian intelligentsia 1070, opposition to the almighty stupid complacency of power.”

All of this he writes about artists, mostly, but it also linking perfectly with the music I’m writing about: unofficial, underground & bootlegs with caricaturized cover art.