Soviet
Death as a Draft of Homo Mortem
by Serge Roganav
“… If you shoot yourself,
you’ll become God, won’t you?
- Yes, I’ll become God…”
F. Dostoevsky “Demons”
1.
Death was an instrument of the XX-th century. The appearance of the
new century in history required the death of the old one. Man has easily
forgotten his own limits and has ruthlessly destroyed those who are
condemned by belief to be mortal, dominating as im-mortal. His potentials
were boundless except his absolute limits of his earth existence. But
he declined his own death, which couldn’t be his need, as it was
inaccessible to him and unwanted. Inaccessible to his consciousness
and will death had lost its place in the human existence. His “out-of-place”
death ruled history like decay, like mere decomposition, destruction
available either as fear and laughter or as delight of his power and
nonentity. The former Christian death as a finite story of “wandering”
of immortal soul in the ultrasensual realm transformed into an instant
event of “cessation of vital psycho-physiological functions”
and as inaccessible to his mind and will, lost its “place”
in man’s existence. Biological death appeared as a symbol of immortality
of new men. We called this historical movement “an epoch of God’s
death.”
2.
The first steps of im-mortal humanity in the shade of “dead God”
are the predominance of murder in the first half of the XX-th century
both in world wars and in the reality of the political systems of communism
and fascism. These regimes are not the only invention of im-mortal people,
but it was under them that death openly appeared as a master of time.
Mass destruction of similar beings embodied the ineradicable human need
for stability and peace. The powerful illusion – the murder is
a universal means of self-confirmation - allowed re-creation of the
new world. “Belief” in other’s people death as a murder
and passion for suicide, at first glance, mere acts of absolute violence
of human will on human nature, dominated in actions and comprehension
of the historical everyday life of the century.
The world of culture couldn’t go on moving beyond the new good
and evil. Philosophy of the XX-th century found itself acting outside
the limits of the world of murder in wars, revolutions and concentration
camps, astonished by the contemplation of its own decline. Freezing
of thought was soon over, but the aims and means of the new comprehension
didn’t differ at all from the aims and means of the world of “absolute
violence.” Habitual removal of the cultural world from the real
death of people allowed to continue moving thoughtfully in the world
of ideas, images, symbols but in reality, the “end” of all
created by man and of man itself dominated in the world of mentality.
“The play in the cemetery of ideas” became commonplace.
The dictatorship of the new culture doomed “values” and
“ideas” to ruin – the world submissive to the new
man was inaccessible to them, and they could be and had to be destroyed.
They were even denied the right to die submissively, following the new
mankind like humanity were denied to be submissive itself and only when
people noticed the first signs of disintegration of the old, they rightfully
got down to destruction themselves.
The idea of death as an unreversible instant cessation of biological
functions is the latest acquisition of the man as well as an industrial
atheism. Traditionally, “to be” of instant cessation has
always belonged to another power – nature, political regime, war
or another direction of culture – man could treat the event of
another person’s death this or that way, but his own death became
“an impossible possibility” for him. Man needed murder or
another person’s death in order to create a New World or to be
opened to his own inevitability. Being deep in the analysis and comprehension
of “being-to-death,” “need-for-death,” man acquired
features of obedience in front of his own existence, devoid of illusory
gleam of eternity, against which in the end man secretly arouse.
No matter how hard man tried to keep serious expression on his face
in front of his “out-of-place” death, it lost its glamour
of creative power, and the need to comprehend this fundamental event
in the existence stepped back to the sphere of academic everyday life.
No matter, how man admired his own possible death, it became “wild”
(Aries) in the common life of the century; moreover, it became the most
widespread toy in all the civilized continents. The endless “murder”-play
forced out the former feeling of transience of all beings from books
and screens. Death had even ceased to astonish us. Our own end turned
into an obstacle, an annoying misunderstanding of nature, and the science
was fast to fight against it.
Nevertheless, the mankind of the last century faced its own real death,
but, at first, as a habitual for the latest history threat of its own
destruction and real destruction, which fully covered the essence of
what was going on. This insignificant event was as evident in history
as the defeat of fascist regimes as a result of the world war. The “Overman”
of Nazism took away the mystery of his death, and let a new power of
civilized mind and will to peace and prosperity to be firmly established.
The cannonade of victories deafened mind in such a way that it was impossible
to notice death as such, and death of the winners overtook the history
of the XX-th century in no time – for many people the collapse
of the political regimes of communism was like thunder out of the blue
sky.
The Soviet epoch of “god-man” came to its end without any
interference from outside, as a result of the Soviet society development;
it died peacefully long before the rise of the post-soviet expanse.
It could be left unnoticed, but for the rest of the last Russian decade.
Death in history doesn’t usually leave the ordinary idea of a
century, sunk into a web of ethics, political freedom and democratic
institutions but now common life stepped back facing the new and unusual
for the traditions image of death. The latest history of Russia is the
only place in contemporary life, where natural death of the whole is
easily accessible to it, disclosed to it and goes away together with
the epoch, is the only event in the modern history of the post-christian
culture, that makes everyday life itself, not only highest sphere, return
to their sources. “The death-of-god epoch” got to speak
in the language of plain human actions.
3.
Death or murder of gods is an ordinary event in history: from sacrifices
of gods in ancient tribes to disorderly death of show-business stars.
Each epoch sought and found its gods, and their death in the form of
“intransient” or “superhuman” values reminded
of itself every time when new generation of the transient world started
moving. For many times, gods have properly embodied the death of generation
and epoch. The institution of replacing one’s own death by the
death of god or godman is the oldest invention of mankind. Reason taught
itself long ago to avoid fatal inevitability and to find those, whose
death could leave the tribe or its leader the necessity to die in the
name of natural surrounding surviving or the tribal customs, or the
prosperity of the ruling clan. “The tragedy” of Christian
god’s death has diverted itself by the impetuous flow of the century
and doesn’t bother the minds of the generations any more. “Mankind
parts with the past laughing” (K. Marx), it was only “gone
forever” that kept its air of seriousness on book pages. The restless
man of century has got lost himself among national and strange gods,
among the ancient and new one, among the dead gods and the newly-born
ones. The greatness of the historical movement was always measured by
the greatness of destroyed values and no epoch started without the death
of the old “divine” sources at the beginning of its movement.
It was the exultant freedom of the new historical human image that was
hidden behind these “tragedies.” Not death of gods but the
beginning of new history of immortal humanity that destroys longlasting
culture of monotheism.
The former man was destined to habituate on the boundary of eternity
and history. Any way of action is an irreversible process of choice,
which arose and is inevitably developing to its end – all the
human existence is the history of choice from birth to death. We call
it the world of transient. Only the transient is able to be the history
in reality. How can relativity of human doubt be fixed up in human existence
on the Earth from birth to death? How can we be possible as irreversible
presence in the real space and time of history? It’s through the
fact that human doubt is always relative in the face of eternity, and
a man is mortal being, he is born and dies. Every time in the history
of culture such sort of doubt-questions give the same doubtful answers.
The power of “pre-eternal” illusion over the mortal world
was so boundless and history was so sluggish that it took centuries
to learn to overcome the transciency of human needs and abilities and
to see the wholeness in the funitude of one’s own being –
death.
Death was the only event that filled up with itself the impossible
connection of the eternal and the transient, an inevitable and irreversible
event in human existence; it was the only event that allowed him to
be steady in the earth world, that disclosed him up the way to the “depth
of human spirit,” and that was why any movement in the history
and thought of the christian culture was always, first of all, the answer
to the question about of death, the search of another attitude to death
– no matter whether we talk about the transiency of human existence
or the transiency of human cognition. In the end, the time has come
when mankind inevitably needs all the human history and all its existence,
from beginning to end. Man got to be easily satisfied with his own world,
his own aims and means and could freely proclaim not only the beginning
of the death of God, but also the murder of the decrepit “eternity,”
for the new mankind began dominating over its former limits. It got
to become the creator of its own history itself.
4.
Soviet communism is a radical implementation of “the death-of-god
epoch.” The former “miserable” existence and Homo
sapiens’s independent world died struck by the revolutions in
the beginning of the last century - it is only what is intelligeble
to human mind, what is depend on human will, that got the right to be
called “Human.” The energy of millions was aimed at creating
a New World of history and nature. The genuine need to create the new
is now carefully forgotten; moreover, it is denied the right to have
some place in the recent past. It is not the need to re-create human
history, but the “inhuman” ways and means of revolutionary
changes that let the contemporaries to deny the past “to be human,”
to keep away from their own sources in order to conceal their own nature
– the new “doers” of history establish their own “civilized”
principles, easily breaking connection of recent events.
“Divine elements” of the transcient world are easily forgotten,
and now we avoid talking about the death of the Soviet empire, as the
death of “the last” values of human culture, as the death
of the epoch that has put an end to the former human existence, as the
death of what any history had to be ended with, on the whole, as the
death of the epoch for which its own death was impossible. This forgetfulness
is born not so much by the triumph of the new order of the Russian world,
by the irony of modern knowledge, but by our up-to-date reality –
we are just completing that which were our own “last values”
not so long ago, that could not come to an end themselves as well as
the “last values” of Great October’s epoch.
“The invisible” death of Soviet regime came to reality
in the form of “deconstruction” of the whole regime; it
got its second wind thanks to the breakthrough of the Soviet man, the
transformation of Soviet norms, values, ideals into the new space and
time. This “revolutionary destruction,” in fact, reanimates
the communist epoch which is gone away long ago, allowing the long-avaited
freedom to step out. “Resurrected” dictatorship confirms
the right of the Soviet reformers to another reconstruction of their
own world – our freedom could be impossible without the “dead
communism"’s permission to fight. “The struggle”
required the image of “destruction” and death of the “rotten-to-pieces
regime,” and so became the illusion of the beginning of social
reforms. The becoming of the new living space of Russia and its political
system comes to its own death as a result, but not the traditional invisible
death of the century, but death as such. We are not talking about the
death of Stalin epoch - it belonged to the other generations, but about
the death of the Soviet generation, which exploded by democratic reforms
its own history. It is not a particular death, as a triumph of civilized
humanism, but death as such, that came into being as an aim and way
for the last Soviet generation, that occupies our everyday life.
Despite the attempts to find some new words, acts or social structures,
it doesn’t open up any other measurement for the Soviet reformers’
generation, it doesn’t admit anything new to their up-to-date
reality; like the previous history, death seemed inaccessible, but was
disclosed in the present as an event, “taking place” in
the human silence, but its habitual image – “disintegration,”
“decomposition,” “decay,” - turned into a caricature.
The only result of our history is the loss of death, as such. For us,
the new “doers” of all-national happiness, another person’s
death destroyed and disappeared. Now it is possible, but as an event
devoid of value and sense for the man. Why do we talk about the loss
of sense and value of death for us as the main result of our history?
The loss of death was opened up as a new need, the need not just to
treat death but to realize one’s own. This need, as usual, is
hidden by the cover of political doctrines, ideological discussions,
and cultural values. Our generation has no time to understand what is
going on in the Russian everyday life, but it does act, and while reconciling
the society, which “ruined” the epoch of the whole century
quite recently, there appears something new that has to be comprehended
and realized into knowledge. The generation faces the so far unclear,
vague feeling that our own stead[i]ness does not require a desperate
escape from the present but it requires its own death in the present.
We could not act any other way - through history man has never come
out so “humanly,” relying only on himself and disposing
of his possibilities; that is why death comes out as his human possibility
that must be comprehended and realized.
The need for death is just like an obedient admission of one’s
own failure. This “general to all mankind” gets struck in
inactivity, or in that man is closed down to the world in the abyss
of his own uselessness and unnecessity. The social instinct of self-preservation
– to avoid one’s own death – as before, conceals death
in the illusory forms of reality. One can now lose oneself in the old
image of death – lose oneself and save oneself in the “impossible
possibility” for the modern man in order to hide from oneself
what is going on: the death of the newest history does not just belong
to our generation, but the existence of this generation itself is becoming
“the impossible possibility” outside the reality of the
human death world.
“Others must die and give the way to the new” and “I
must die myself, depriving myself the need to expect the new”
are the two quite different dimension of human existence, different
images of man. Death in history is easily charged to another one, as
a rule, not to one of us, but to the hated one, and saves the “new”
ideals and values. Now the need for death requires neither salvation
nor violence. In reality, the need for death itself appears as an unusual
opportunity not to lose oneself, and this need requires death not as
an event “on the other side” of human being, but what is
within the capacity of man from the beginning to end. This unusual “need”
is already opened up to the experience of death, is ready to search
and finally finds it.
This new for us need – to realize one’s own death –
steps out, at first, as outward violence, which seems to draw us back
in our own world, but then it takes shape as a hidden need to take shape
as we are, despite all the attempts to go beyond the limits of our “former”
Soviet existence. No matter in what way this need is revealed to the
generation - in the contemplation of the crash of our plans and projects
or in the everyday reality of social reforms - in either case our wholeness
makes us come back to our proper essence, even when people are lost
in the illusion of political renaissance or in the endless play of philosophies.
We are not talking about some other, more “worthy” or on
the contrary “depressed” image of human being, we are talking
about our hidden decision to act the way history does, to choose ourselves
as history does and to act in history, an irreversible process with
its beginning and end. To reject the new opportunities is a simple need
to remain oneself, to stay the way we really are. To speculate about
the necessity of human death now means not to speculate about the opportunity
of suicide or about destroying the political institutes of power, not
about the opportunity for man or generation to stay in the form of the
“living cadaver,” but about the opportunity of completing
one’s own existence.
Each epoch and each man are given their own death. In what way can
a man die and how can a human death make sense? Time and space in the
history of human being are now revealed in the opportunity to realize
one’s own death. Man realizes his own death, his originality (self-being)
is in the possibility do this and in the way he does it. Birth and death
belong to man and are realized by him. The problem of death is neither
one of “transitory nature” of human being nor the one of
the attitude in this or that way to the fact of “natural death.”
It is the problem of his real existence in the transcient world, for
us - the problem of our reality in our own transcient being.
In the Soviet everyday life the need to realize one’s own death
could not but arise: literary madness of the beginning of the epoch
with the course of time always find place in the future reality of careful
social instincts – “If you shoot yourself you will become
God…” – this unclear mad need a century afterwards
is expressed by absolutely other human words : “if you can die
– you will become man.” The need to realize “the impossible
possibility,” i.e. the need to destroy oneself, sounds like a
former murder, suicide, but now such “threat” rises on the
bound of destruction and death and doesn’t allow us to say just
plain words. The habitual image of fatal inevitability is in paradoxes
of everyday reality, for it faces a new man, something that appeared
long ago out of and apart from the traditional world of culture.
The salutary distance of the West between personality and culture,
between sense and integrity of an individual doesn’t exist in
Russia. Any problem of the Russian world always turns into a personal
one; it is possible only as a personal choice and decision. How can
the history die? and does my history have to die? are inevitably questions
about oneself, about one’s own death and its possibility. Is my
death possible or should I die myself?
5.
One has only “to ask for death” and an instant event of
“the cessation of biological functions” of man disappears
in another order of madness. My death has its own history – from
the ordinary mourning for the nearest, available to everyone from the
simple question: “ Whom does the realization of my death belong
to?” The realization of my death belongs to me. I’ll realize
my death one day.
The search of the meaning and value of death, the “analysis”
of “death” need step back as well as its image of “instance,”
and now it is not the sense and need of “impossible possibility”
that occupy my mind, but the meaning and need of realization of my death.
We guess that we are mortal: both people and history. We “know”
that we are mortal, but now we do not know why we are mortal, why we
are mortal not related to something else, but mortal regarded to ourselves.
That is only why we are real in the real world.
Never mind god’s death in the form of political dictatorship
or the world in supersensible values - now we are absolutely different.
All these “instant cessation,” “soul leaving its body“
are the things that someone else faces; they are for someone else, the
things that could never belong to us because of our perpetual human
unsoundness, and if they did belong to us, as victims of an accident
and suicide. It is not only god and man in front of the god that died,
but the death of the lonely person in the shadow of Eternity is also
dead. The world allows itself to play with death, because it is dead.
The endless line of the tragic images went to pieces, when I died myself,
and only then I was opened to my death.
I died in the epoch of Soviet collapse, not because the circumstances
or despair condemned me to death - all must die any epoch - but my death
became comprehensible to me and my consciousness without condemning
me to grief, without depriving me of happiness and joy. In fact, I didn’t
even notice when I died. All happened so dull that there was nothing
to be astonished at, as well as to the whole mankind, that has been
realizing it during its whole history itself and all the human deeds
and thoughts on the Earth realize too. I avoided a miraculous regeneration
and resurrection to the new life. I would notice completely nothing,
but something went wrong with time . . . past, present, future. Something
was wrong with “inside time.” It has stopped and an “extraterrestrial”
course began. There were more than enough new plans, new life, drafts,
but the habitual future and past did not exist for inner world and for
me. Neither did what used to be and what can and must be. It was my
“continue present” that became my present forever, something
I can hold with all my creature, and what holds me.
Human death stepped out openly in the modern world. “Instant
disappearance” strikes by its senselessness in the wholeness of
man. Now the death of the transcient human being has to be finite itself,
not an instant event, but the history, which a man enters in himself
and which he reveals himself as a history of his Rest; the need and
possibility to realize death is revealed as a real “earth history”
which has its beginning and its end, and, of course, as well as the
man himself, this “time-less” history is not limited by
the limits of biological nature. Death is given as my present way, not
the history of “dying” – dying fully belongs to the
former “christian” being – and not the history of
my reflections about “the fundamental event” of philosophers,
but death, as such – non-being.
The man is given “to be” and “not to be” keeping
his presence in the real world. The man is given to present in the world
by his own non-being. Non-being, as a real earth history, reality, gives
the man the most destroying “history” – Rest. Destruction
is the language of non-being, the language of death, as such. Rest is
given as destruction, and it is only as destruction that it emerges
as an absolute Rest of the man himself. My death revealed my wholeness,
and I don’t demand either ruin or suicide or obedient waiting
for the inevitable end. “The man is impossible without death.”
This statement has found its “place” now. “The impossible
possibility” has been unfolded as earth reality and has allowed
me, in the end, to exist in the world as a human being of the Earth
without demanding the impossible. Now I can say about myself: I am dead,
I am present by the world of death, by the world that has its place,
its space and time, but now as an absolutely different space-time of
my way.
6.
Immortality is rushing for the new beginning of the world, but the
beginnings always comes late and, as a rule, begins the end of epoch.
In the former death, unaccessible to me, no beginnings are possible,
neither is the independent completion of the earth way. The immortal
habitual image of culture goes away, leaving the space for an ordinary
mortal human being. The other “new” is inaccessible to me
and despite possible efforts, it is slipping off over the limits of
my mind and deeds – the new without me is getting stronger in
history. I have lost domination of immortality over the springs of culture,
reason and history. This “inaccessible domination” reveals
me as a person able to stay as such when leaving, as a person able not
to hurl back himself in despair, but to confirm my former authenticity
by the destroying rest of my present way.
Man is not born mortal; he becomes mortal. My death will be over and
will disappear together with me. Now, as transcient being I have to
learn to be present in the “transcient world” among many
people, in which some start their way, others die. I have gained my
own rest and, of course, I’ll lose all created by me remaining
the way I am “present” for myself and others up to the very
last day. “The fundamental idea” of the human cognition’s
transcience belongs to cognition itself. Man is mortal. Man is not born
mortal; he becomes mortal. If man cannot open himself up, as a result,
to the world of his own non-being, to the world of his own death, he
will endlessly spin round human finitude, armed with finite human cognition.
We are not interested in the question, how finitude of human cognition
can reveal to man or generations of people the way to the “unknown
depth.” Cognition can become known itself, can become rest itself,
and being destroyed, being transcient, come into culture as a real process
of human existence. I can see the whole of my generation and culture,
can see the rest, because I have gained rest myself, my death, and I
am calm to be here by own rest: everyday life itself is open to the
history of self-deconstruction of what has erected and created as its
own embodiment.
We step out as original beings with our own birth and death, and this
uneasy action slightly discloses a new image of man, still slightly
discloses what lies beyond the limits of thinking and language, beyond
the limits of conscious movement in the world of history and culture.
We can see the new generation incomprehensible to us, and they will
have to gain their coming rest, being open to something different and
incomprehensible but nothing else conceals from us what has happened
and what is asking to come out by words and actions, but by the real
words and actions.
We point the world to death, though in fact we reveal our own secrets.
All the grounds and cultural cunnings, which reveal the new appearance
of the world to us, hide the new source of our choice from us and create
a new human mystery. “Civilized” silence of the West in
something that is “unthinkable” to death as a “madness”
of the Russian deed, which our proper existence appears to us. Non-being
is the first outline of the history of death, the necessary, and that
is why it is the inevitable reality of every human being. In his trying
in the “traditional way,” i.e. to require the death of another
person as the only possible way to himself, man reveals his image which
is quite different than the former one, the appearance of new tradition
and, without realizing his discovery, acts in everyday life as though
the new mortal man has come into this world.
7.
Every process has to become non-being in the end – man, history
and culture. We do not call up non-being to take part in earthly reality
due to this or that historical circumstance; we reveal ourselves, our
generations acting in the present in completely different space-time
measurements. The world of the contemporary generations of the post-christian
culture is newly-born. No matter what word might appear after “post”
– post-soviet space or post-modernism, any “post”
isn't able to belong to the gone forever, but allows the coming world
to gain new power . . . . The world of contemporary generations is dying.
Now it keeps and guards its own res,t and that allows him to really
be destroyed, and thus to be kept, in the end, in the memory of contemporaries
as the real human world.
Despite all efforts to “think of the unthinkable,” “the
possibility of the impossible” death of man, man and his culture
can go on with their own im-mortal movement and act as if death has
remained “inaccessible forever.” “The new “
avoids habitual words and images, springs up revealing oneself in silence.
This silence is unbearable for the one who leaves in rest; the world
of words, spoken and written, force out man himself, threatening his
presence with disaster. The non-being of their own century is inaccessible
to the players of the Big Game of Philosophy, but it expresses itself
in language of those who are striving in the endless word play to find
the way to what has no place in their own history, to what is split
as aporia of the “impossible possibility,” to what is available
only to the old values and ideals. Paradoxes of death are a vain play,
useless creation in the new reality, now the new silence speaks louder
and louder.
The need for creating a new mortal world in face of new immortality
is already “frozen” in rest; the world doesn’t need
either a new death or a new end of the world. It doesn’t matter
what ideas and fantasies can take up a human mind in the new millennium.
What matters is that any idea, any fantasy, is a human idea and fantasy.
We can speak about any values, about the man on the threshold of the
third millennium, but we have to lose “the new” in the end,
allow new values not only become but to stay in rest, in non-being,
to be destroyed and go away by our own hands in our time.
Humanity of new millennium habituates, not noticing a novelty of his
action, but first steps have made yet – not in the Soviet space
of decay and dissolution, not in the post-Soviet decay but in the Russian
everyday life. We don’t trouble whether ours or other gods are
dead – we have entered the world as real mortal beings long before
we ruined an old dimension of own world, and so our modern history doesn’t
dissolve in ruin. Argument of millenniums between the eternal world
and transcient world is exhausted in the pores of the Russian mode of
life. At the limit of limits of Russian history destruction of the future
mortal being has appeared, but he deprives the future of novelty yet
and steeps in a tradition of the conscious world.
8.
Striving for immortality is untranscient illusion. It has two sides
like a human being has and is inaccessible by its secrets. The escape
from present allows to raze to the ground the limits of present existence
and at the same time dooms to ruin those who forget forever his real
existence. Nobody mortal can guess the ruin or help the future to find
it’s right-to-death. The history itself starts the struggle for
the right to die in the world of human multitude, among nations, cultures
and people. A right-to-death steps out of the limits of human fights
for prolonging of earth’s human presence and starts to demand
new reconciliation for peace. Ability leaves the history; giving space
to future is becoming the first lesson of mortal humanity. Future-in-the-present
will see itself - whether we were able to avoid the ruin, revealing
the history of own non-being. Presentiment of this epoch has opened
for us yet.
