Light and Shadow

From early morning, the light hits the window and floods my small apartment by the Mediterranean Sea with pastel tones. I wake to the alarm’s cry and step out onto the balcony to smoke. I had promised myself to save the few cigarettes left from last night for the next boozy get-together with friends, but the sharp smell of smoke pairs far too well with the bitter taste of black coffee. So I sink into my Acapulco chair, light my cigarette, and welcome the new southern day, promising to bring plenty of sun and fun.

Actually, I am tired of this dazzling sun. I long for the rain, the slush, the thick darkness of a northern night. I feel as though I have renounced my native language, as one renounces a husband in pursuit of a foreign lover. Having barely let me taste a brief, fleeting freedom, it casts me aside to fate, like Theseus abandoning Ariadne.

Ten years ago, when I left Russia (as if forever), my country, my city, and my language were all different. Back then, I set off toward a fairytale, non-existent, black-and-white Paris imagined by Godard, ‘to live my life.’ That was exactly how I answered anyone who asked, “What are you doing in France?” — “Living my life!” Few caught the cinematic reference, but everyone ‘admired’ the audacity of yet another Slavic blonde with red lips and a mysterious gaze.

A decade later, my native St. Petersburg feels alive and multifarious : cafés serve lavender coffee (a rare nastiness, by the way), public transport offers Wi-Fi (where would you find that in France?), daredevil taxi drivers rule the roads, and the lingering Soviet gloom still reigns in some neighborhoods, while high-rise ghettos loom around the city. The snow melts into grey slush underfoot; everything seethes and shifts.

As the smoke from my menthol cigarette curls slowly between my slender fingers and dissolves into the Côte d’Azur air, I think about those St. Petersburg boys and girls — among them Joseph Brodsky — who in the 1970s gathered for readings and debates in the city’s courtyards and nicknamed it Saint-Germain-des-Prés, as if it were Paris; who in the 1990s watched New Wave films and envied their French peers. Strictly speaking, there was nothing to envy: the French had everything except the essential thing — dreams and inner freedom.

Me too, I spent my youth dreaming of other cities. And now my native city no longer belongs to me. It is only a misty ghost rising on the banks of the Neva: cold as an empty sheet of graphite. Here, nothing can truly begin or end, like my first love, which never began and never ended. One can invent an infinite number of stories here, but none can be written. This city, as if banished from the sun’s daily course, exudes a thick, grey tension.

Once, at a party, I was asked an intriguing question: “Which era would you like to live in?” The 90s! Back then, everything was excessive and real. There was a shortage of money, food, clothing. But there was happiness. There was a hunger for life. People injected themselves with lethal doses of love, laced with heroin. Today, we look at those who survived that tragic era as if they had sold their souls to the devil. Those who couldn’t step across the threshold into the new millennium remained fragile, naive children with sorrowful eyes. Memories of them fade each year like old photographs. I know so little about that time. Yet it was the first decade of my life, so I feel as though I know everything about it, intuitively, by touch. I feel the elusive, painful beauty of the 90s, teetering between the sublime and the horrific. I am poisoned by it forever.

In my imagination, the 90s in Russia are like a black-and-white film, the only colored spot being Renata Litvinova’s red dress. Then came the noughties: fat, greedy, sparkling like champagne. The film vanished, replaced by digital. Cinema had officially died. It was no longer a play of light and shadow; now it was all pixels. The information that had once been so scarce became available with a single click. Nothing remained sacred. Even love became a contract between two partners.

Last night, before falling asleep, I watched a movie with Nicole Kidman. Her character was named Claire. Ever since Kidman gave up her red curls and began dyeing her hair blonde, this name suits her. She’s all clear, light, airy, almost transparent, wearing flowing silk blouses tucked into geometric dark pencil skirts that underline her severity — almost sternness — her inner backbone. Fragile as porcelain, yet imbued with surprising resilience, she moves with quiet determination as the plot unfolds. The Russian star Renata Litvinova is the same. Both actresses belong to the same generation and carry the same message. Presumably, they share the same plastic surgeon.

Yesterday I was too tired and drifted off before the movie ended. Back then, I would stay awake at night on the shabby green sofa that comically jutted out of our six-meter kitchenette, preventing the kitchen door from closing and shielding me from the noises of the corridor. I would sit reading, when suddenly one of the bedroom doors creaked, the nightlight flicked on: someone in the household hurried to the toilet. I trembled with fear and clutched the book Cinema by Touch even tighter.

I don’t remember exactly how I got this book. Maybe I begged it from my mother, maybe I bought it myself in the lobby of Dom Kino (the Cinema House), saving money that had been given to me for transport. I had just started my first year at university and decided that there was no life for me outside those dark, cold cinema halls with uncomfortable seats and a crackling projector. It was then I watched Bertolucci’s The Dreamers and fell in love with cinema. Later, I discovered the cinema magazine Seance. And then Cinema by Touch, a collection of reviews by Sergei Dobrotvorsky — one of Seance’s principal authors, who died a decade ago — became my “Bible”.

It was only years later that I began to notice errors in those texts, realizing that poetic interpretation often overshadowed than analysis. But at the beginning, I idolized that book, unaware of the author’s tragic fate. And now, fifteen years later, I learn that his death was due to a heroin overdose… Could it have been otherwise?

I read the memoirs of his ex-wife, Karina Dobrotvorskaya, trying to grasp the era that shaped my childhood. I look at their black-and-white photograph on Rossi Street, the St. Petersburg street that seems to be the most perfect and symmetrical in the world. That couple so reminds me of my parents: he — a talented ‘looser’ and addict, her — a kinda Femme Fatale with a devilish gleam in her eyes. She left him, made the right choice, succeeded, blossomed. And he remained an unrecognized genius, a faded image on an overexposed film strip.

I also remember the mysterious blueness of Katya Golubeva’s eyes, the St. Petersburg-born actress and muse of Leos Carax. It seems she recently died in Paris under unexplained circumstances. They say her body was found at a metro station. Was it suicide? There is something ineffably beautiful, tragic, exalted about all of these 90s icons: a lost generation, deceived by the American dream, who witnessed the collapse of everything firsthand. They are like my parents. To cope, one needed enormous inner strength and energy. Some withstood the strain, others did not. Mother managed; father did not.

We are different now. We no longer have that infantile sincerity, naivety, lightness. We know everything about ourselves; our conversations can’t go on without psychological terms. Probably my parents’ love was ‘toxic’. Yet without it, I wouldn’t exist.