Elf Sternberg

I disagree with Tolstoy; I think he had it backwards. Everyone is happy in their own unique way; it is in our misery that we are all similar.

Some things are difficult to translate. One of them, I believe, is the peculiar and remarkable Russian affinity for misery. I think that a combination of circumstance and cultural predilection has fostered an identification with misery and hopelessness in that world, as with happiness and possibility in ours. The senses of tragedy, fate, and general pessimism run so thoroughly in that society -- not at all without justification -- that happiness seems like a tacky foreign souvenir, almost, or perhaps a short-lived, unstable isotope. I think it is this impermanent, unstable "nature" of happiness that Tolstoy sought to convey with his story "Semeinoye schast'ye" ("Family Happiness"), about which you were paraphrasing, if I remember correctly.

Or, to address your statement crudely: if millions of people over many generations spend most of their time enveloped in misery, then they will become pretty good at it, with lots of individual refinement and variation, especially given the Russian premium on imagination. In our culture, by and large, people tend to strive for something better, hoping that effort or fortune will brighten their horizons. We spend lots of time enveloped at least in the anticipation of that happiness, and in many cases generating very creative manifestations of it.

I didn't "get it" about this and many other aspects of Russian culture until I lived there, despite having studied the language/lit/history/politics/etc. intensively for two years. Just didn't fucking get it, not in the slightest. I don't know whether it's possible to do so.

Coda: My last visit to Russia was in 1992, to Provideniya, a very remote outpost on the Bering sea, a tiny neo-town built around a government installation. I happened to stay with a family in the newest apartment building in town, the only one that didn't appear to be actively falling down, basically a stack of enormous concrete cubes. I commented to my host that he had a nice apartment, in such a well-built structure... he responded that yes, it was a solid building, but "one of my neighbors is a scientist and has determined that it was poured from concrete made from highly radioactive sand, and I worry greatly about the health of my two young daughters...."

Cheers,
- Eddie