Trafika Europe 13 - Russian Ballet

Naum Vaiman

ineffective accumulation of means, people resorted to swindles and cons, break ins and thefts, card games and romantic seductions, all of it for the sake of that sweetest of delights: you huddling together in the morning in an unmade bed with a book among the disheveled sheets…. Once, inFebvre, inhis TheStruggle forHistory , I happened upon the following especially painful paragraph: “I love history. Had I not loved it, I would not have become a historian. Severing my life into two parts, giving one of them over to professionalization, ridding myself of this part, as it were, and dedicating the other half to the satisfaction of my deepest personal needs – this is what seems abhorrent to me.…” My father was teaching me the exact opposite: first you must acquire a trade, and in your spare time, you can do whatever the heck you want. Being in agreement with his evaluation of the current historical moment – after all, I was being raised by a hereditary proletarian-anti-Soviet provocateur and terry towel realist – I dejectedly set out to “obtain a profession” at the Electrical Engineering Institute of Telecommunications, and thereby acquired an “internal conflictedness” in full measure. Humbled by this compromise, I came to despise this Institute, teeming as it was with the energetic members of my tribe, who were passionate about group backpacking trips and the permissible earnest enthusiasm of student song, and with the children of the military elite, slightly aggrieved in connection with

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