WE WANT TO LIVE FOREVER. NOT ONLY INTO THE FUTURE BUT ALSO FROM THE PAST.
As children, Slavs could never have known that the east would one day move west. What a strange idea. Who would have ever thought a direction could move in another direction? While Parisians, Londoners, and New Yorkers move east within their respective cities, to escape the ghost of gentrification and real-estate prices, the geopolitical establishment presents the shift west as manifest destiny. Today, a Polack sees himself first as a Polack, second as a European and third, if pushed, as a slav. In an attempt at semantic seduction, Eastern Europe now calls itself Central Europe. A new Atlanticism pulses between Poland and the Ukraine. But such manoeuvers often hide an unforgiving past. For too long now the slavs has faced the sunset, and too often forgets to bask in the morning sun. We try to correct that position. Like archeaologists of the everyday, Slavs aim to excavate those singular moments when the Tatar and the Mongol free themselves from 700 years of tattered revisionism. We want to be evenly

tanned. So we face Eurasia only to bring it to bear on what remains for us an admittedly, and unashamedly, Eurocentric culture.

Slavs come from far away but are no closer to understanding where ‘here’ begins and ‘there’ ends. The slavic penchant for the absurd stems from a glut of being dislodged, often from within, as if from one’s own present. Displacement happens long before the search for work or studies, it happens in utero.

But Slavs at home are no less displaced than Slavs abroad. We are not nomads. We are rooted to one too many places. What’s more: the places in our heads and hearts sometimes fail to recognize the ones on the maps and vice versa. We are the hair on a mother’s head, pulled in different directions by her numerous children. It hurts but, as John Cougar once sang, it hurts so good. The country we call home, the country we used to call home and the country we dream to call home are all very distinct and disparate places. It is the result of a productive schizophrenia: we are in all of them at once, a ravishing sensation but one tempered by the slow, sobering devastation of never being in any one entirely.

Slavs do not mince words. Nor are we consensual. Criticism by its very nature must sting. But that is no excuse to turn to a qualifer for an antidote. ‘Constructive’ criticism is simply a less frontal and partially handicapped term. Fat-free butter has no place in Slavs’ critical vocabulary.

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