The Mixed Multitude

Abstract

This article is the result of my reflexion, on myself, on my city, on my country in this political, military, cultural situation that is ours now. As If I had gone back to my years of youth, I asked myself the same obsessive and inescapable questions over and over again: how could this have happened, how could we, and in particular I, do something to avoid the catastrophe? When did this country, which seemed be committed to the path of freedom, commit a fatal error? What have we done that we should not have done? And who is this “we”? Who is this “me”? Is there any future left for those who have so easily and unwittingly repudiated it to favour an illusory present, bewitched by a past that was itself invented by ideologues from their ivory tower? Are they many in Russia that endorse the war, and where are the sources of our resistance? What is happening to our language, to human nature? I raise all this as an artist and as a human being who is facing a critical situation.

Those reflexions took me three long months, from the stifling heat of August to the darkest days of November, which was cold in Russia. This article is the diary of my observations on the things of this world, on the dead and the living, on the mystical and the mundane, on the changes that have affected Moscow and its inhabitants in the last few months, on the process by which I understood that there are two “peoples of Russia”, impossible to mix, who are ontologically hostile and who have now met at a crossroads, although they are following opposite directions.