RUSSIAN SHAME
/Identity, which we should be proud of/
When between the achievement of an ideal and reality opportunities extends an abyss of impossibility, a void, a person overcomes this gap in roundabout, crooked way, thereby gaining his own identity. Russian shame is about creating identity through the personal experience, even if it’s trying to copy something initially.
The possibility of matching the ideals only in a distorted form become the moment of birth of something sincere - the (un)ideal, (un)completed and (un)defined - something different from the concept of the ideal, that poses the problem of the conventionality of this concept itself. The time has come for carnival, re-designation (re-labeling), flipping.
I am under pressure. All around try to cause shame in me for imperfection, my authenticity, my crooked path is taken as underdeveloped. High culture is trying to smooth out the sharp corners of unconscious frivolity, putting everything neatly on the shelves, but “the Russian kid can not be hidden behind wide pants”. This is a translation of Russian aphorism, which means that savagery and liveliness will never leave a Russian person, even if he wears a neat, ironed suit.
Monumental and dead ideal collapsing under the pressure of the dirt, of something honest and rectilinear living, emotional. Naivety and longing, decline and filth, mistakes and the inability to achieve the ideals allow me to live and feel authentically in Russian.
“Russian Shame” implies a rejection of existence in the position of the victim and marginalization. In a situation of impossibility of beautiful Apollonian monumentality, which imposed from without, the Russian man exists in the exalted Dionysian Chaos. Life is born in a flaw and mistakes.
.jpg)
