SUNDAY, APRIL 10 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ BD B3
not protecting Russian speakers, as he claims;
he is killing them. Most of the possibly thou-
sands of Ukrainians killed in the total destruc-
tion of Mariupol spoke Russian as a first
language. Putin has claimed that Russians in
the West or those who somehow think like
Westerners are scum, traitors and insects.
What then is left? When culture isolates itself,
it ceases to exist. The associated procedures of
denunciation, persecution and conformism
generate a culture of sorts, but a sadly generic
one that has nothing specifically to do with the
country where they take place.
A culture has to involve unpredictable en-
counters. Russian culture up to now has been
deeply involved with Poland, with Germany,
with the United States, with everything that it
now defines as alien and untouchable. Putin
complains that Russian culture has been “can-
celed” by the West. “They’re now engaging in
the cancel culture, even removing Tchaikovsky,
Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff from post-
ers,” he said. “Russian writers and books are
now canceled.” He has reached peak tyranny,
and therefore peak irony.
It is true that some Western performances of
Russian works have been canceled. Yet this is a
reaction to an entirely unprovoked war of
destruction. And the word “canceled” trivializ-
es what Putin himself has done to Russian
culture by silencing his own country, seeking to
destroy Ukraine and calling Russians abroad
scum. Culture arises from contact, and contact
requires humility. In the poem by Mayakovsky,
who was Russian, culture arises when we
understand our haughtiness toward others as
a mask of ignorance. An encounter is only anGood: The senseless violence is not directed
against you but against Ukrainians. Everyone
relax.
Is that culture?
Like Hitler’s swastika, the Z the Kremlin
uses has no inherent significance. It functions
as a stand-in for culture: You display this
meaningless symbol to buy time for excuses for
mass murder that you will think up later. You
pin ribbons with the symbol on your clothes so
you do not have to say anything with your
mouths. You form a letter with your bodies as
an act of loyalty to an undefined cause. You are
expressing your readiness to accept that defini-
tion, whatever it might turn out to be — you are
obeying in advance. You write the Z on the
doors of people who think otherwise in order
to threaten them.
The rest of us can measure the staggering
courage of individual Russian protesters and
dissenters against that silencing violence of
empty ritual. These Russians create culture by
expressing themselves and acting unpredict-
ably, and so they are immediately repressed.
Public culture has collapsed as the talented flee
or are punished. Educational culture is under
threat as schoolchildren and university stu-
dents are fed war propaganda and as aspiring
teachers are denied courses in social sciences
and world literature.
Ukraine is a bilingual country where people
switch freely between Ukrainian and Russian.
At present, Ukraine is the world’s most impor-
tant shelter for Russian-language creativity. A
single line of one of Zelensky’s appeals to
Russians has more vitality than the entirety of
Russian television since the war began. Putin isFOURTH DIMENSION.
Three-dimensional geometric space is
usually represented by the coordinate
axes x, y and z, each perpendicular to
the others. Four-dimensional space
introduces an extra coordinate —
represented often as w — which cannot
be seen, exactly, but can be
mathematically modeled and imagined.
It goes side to side, up and down, and
also somewhere else — forming into
conceptual objects such as tesseracts,
which are analogues of three-
dimensional cubes. Fourth-dimensional
geometry is hard to render. It’s even
harder to wrap the mind around.
This is a story that is told in reverse,
about reversal, about making, about
unmaking. No, not in reverse, but
upside down. You were here on a Friday
when you went to the hospital. You were
here the following week when we took
you home. By Monday, you were gone.
The next day, I learned someone had
taken my identity, an event wholly
unrelated to your death: a Mystery
Kristin Keane who had opened
overdrawn accounts, now defaulted, in
my name. The order of events matters
less now than the feeling of them: a
Then Time memory emerging after a
Between Time.
I am sorry if the way I’m constructing
this story causes you to lose your
bearings. I’m just not sure, now, where
things end or begin.
See also MANY-WORLDS
INTERPRETATION.SEA.
I can hardly bear to look at my
favorite picture of you anymore because
it is everything I miss: you at the sea.
The photograph is about losing the light
inside it, but it is also about the waves
churning at your feet. There was no
knowing then that the beach my father
photographed you on before you ever
put me into the universe would become
the beach I now live beside. I walk on it
now, each week. I put my feet in the
same spot and turn away from the sun.
When I’m there, I look at the sand,
the water, I contort my body into the
same shape you have in the photograph,
I crouch toward the tide. I bend myself
to look at the sea. I smile.
No — I don’t smile. I can’t smile. I
imagine myself smiling.
Plutarch famously wants to know if a
ship whose parts have all been replaced
over time is in fact the same ship. I want
to know if I can ever really stand on the
sand in the same place you once stood
47 years ago. That is the thing about the
sea: Can it be the same, if the specks of
sand and drops of water have changed?
See also MANY-WORLDS
INTERPRETATION; WAVES.BARTHES, ROLAND (1915-1980).
A French philosopher and
semiotician, Barthes is the author of
“Mythologies,” an exploration of how
popular culture infuses art, literature,
food and more with new meanings.
Barthes was concerned with signs,
interpretations and relationship
patterns inside of systems, like how
roses carry messages of passion, or how
arrows suggest motion or direction.
The day after his mother died in 1977,
Barthes began writing reflections of her
death on small strips of paper. The
collection of 330 cards was published
first in France as “Journal de deuil” and
later translated as “Mourning Diary.”
Barthes recorded reflections for two
years — from the fall of 1977 to the
summer of 1979 — while he wrote other
works. Note by note, he attempted to
record and make sense of his mother’s
passing in a collection of reflections
accumulated into a postulation of a
book. In one of his earliest entries, he
notes how after someone dies, the
future itself gives way to a sort of
unhinged manufacturing of time he
refers to as “futuromania.”
See also CHANGE.
SOPHIE BASSOULS/SYGMA/GETTY IMAGESENCYCLOPEDIAS.
Encyclopedias are books, organized
alphabetically and comprehensively,
covering an area or areas of knowledge.
Lately I’ve conjured to mind those we
kept in our apartment’s hallway
growing up — a row of “The World Book
Encyclopedia” with spines bound in
leatherette the color of worn baseballs.
Encyclopedias provide factual
information, but like all texts, they are
authored, constructed so that subjects
become captured. Things can be held
under a magnifying glass one entry at a
time, forever. Does that permanence
give them some semblance of ongoing
existence? Definitions shift. Things
change, and therefore so do meanings —
but on the page, the words are
impervious to adaptation, to learning.
Maybe I can gain something from that
sort of cataloguing now. After all, it was
those books I went to so often back
then, when I wanted to understand
something.
I’m left with so many questions, like:
How will I find you? Will you return?
What role will time play in altering my
relationship to you in the past, the
present and future?
An encyclopedia will keep our things
safe — it will keep them forever.
See also ENTRY; EVERYTHING.MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGEST
o make sense of time in the wake of my mother’s death, I found myself turning to narratives about alternate universes and time travel,
cultural touchstones like “Quantum Leap,” and other artifacts from our lives. Growing up, we kept a collection of “The World Book
Encyclopedia” in our apartment’s hallway, and as I grieved, I wondered if a similar catalogue would help. The result of that effort is my
memoir, “An Encyclopedia of Bending Time,” in which I interrogate the limitations of science, the reaches of love, and the work of untangling
grief, time and memory. Each entry is a love letter to my mother and an attempt to reach for a new identity without her in it. Here are five of them.A memoir of loss, in encyclopedia entries
ESSAY BY KRISTIN KEANEISTOCK EVGENIY ANDREEV/GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO REDLIO DESIGNS/GETTY IMAGESWAVES.
Waves are formed by energy moving
through water generated by wind, tides,
objects, seismic activity and other
things. Lizard tails regrow, spiders
regenerate parts of their legs. When a
sea cucumber is dismembered, each
piece goes on, born again to life. Are
these things like waves? Are they what
they once were? Is a lizard’s tail the
same tail if a part of it — the stem from
which it emerges — remains intact?
What about the sea? What about each
new wave that crests over a break? What
about how they roll to the sand?
I’m not sure I will ever be able to get
Plutarch’s paradox out from under me
now.
Waves are also particles undulating in
electromagnetic fields. They bend and
reflect when they encounter obstacles in
their paths.
They are also like emotions rising.
Like sadness. Like grief.
You can wave with your hands. You
can cup them in the air, curl your
fingers around the atmosphere and
move them back and forth.
You can say hello with this motion,
and with your hands in the air the same
way, suddenly change its meaning
completely: A greeting can now become
a goodbye.
Twitter: @kitenearsinkKristin Keane is the author of “Luminaries.”
Her memoir, “A n Encyclopedia of Bending
Time,” will be published Tuesday.tivists and musicians who appear on our televi-
sion screens and in our newspapers.
Matters are murkier in Putin’s Russia. A war
based upon a big lie is also hard on its culture of
origin. Everyone is looking at the Russian
nation — or perhaps, rather, for it. What does it
do to a society to invade a neighbor, which it
claims to love, on the basis of bottomless
self-deception? Americans have not yet recov-
ered from the lies they told about Iraq two
decades ago, and the Russian deception cam-
paign runs far deeper. How are Russian par-
ents altered when they deny to their children in
Ukraine that any war is taking place? What sort
of nation makes war and then forbids the use of
the very word?
This is Putin’s war, but it is far too simple to
say that it is only his war. It is made in the name
of Russia, and the killing and maiming and
abducting and deporting of Ukrainians are
being done by tens of thousands of Russian
citizens. As north-central Ukraine is liberated
by its own citizens, hundreds of corpses of
Ukrainian civilians are found in Bucha and
other towns, in positions that suggest atroci-
ties including rape, torture and execution.
“This is how the Russian state will now be
perceived,” Zelensky said. “Your culture and
human appearance perished together with the
Ukrainian men and women to whom you
came.” Massacres seem to be a normal Russian
occupation practice. Even as Russians are
committing war crimes that violate Ukraine’s
right to exist, Russians are told (and often seem
to believe) that they are refighting the Second
World War and resisting Nazis. That is a very
big lie, and big lies do lasting damage.
The active suppression of freedom of speech
and assembly turns a culture toward the abyss.
It takes labor to produce unceasing televised
propaganda and suppress other media. The
last few sources of actual war reporting in
Russia have disappeared. It takes violence by
thousands of Russians to suppress those with a
mind and the will to speak it in public. Rus-
sians reading poems are arrested. Russians
who carry signs with Bible passages are arrest-
ed. Russians who carry signs with only aster-
isks are arrested. Russians wearing hats in blue
and yellow, the colors of the Ukrainian flag, are
arrested. Russians who carry anti-fascist signs
are arrested.
Putin’s police know that anyone talking
seriously about fascism is talking about him.
Fascism claims to glorify the nation, but it
moves a society toward entirely generic behav-
ior, stimulated by a pattern of threat and
release from threat. In regime propaganda
videos, the police are the protagonists: First
their presence inspires fear, then you are
meant to feel relief as you realize that the police
are on your side so long as you conform in
advance to the regime’s demands. In one such
video, police sprint from their van toward a
group. The viewer is supposed to feel alarmed:
The officers are going to beat the crowd!
Instead, police and civilians all lock arms to
form a giant Z, the symbol of the invasion.
PUTIN FROM B1
Putin is proving Ukraine
has its own culture
encounter when we do not know just how the
other person will react. Freedom of speech
does not mean that everyone in your country
starts to make giant alphabet shapes with their
bodies when you say so. Putin’s freedom of
speech is not violated if Ukrainians act accord-
ing to their own convictions and resist him.
The actions of Ukrainians during this terri-
ble war have inspired respect — and humility.
Would we be so calm, so articulate, so resolute?
Americans and the West in general have been
right to listen to the Ukrainians — to their
desire to exist as a nation and as a state, to their
conviction that they can prevail. This is an
encounter, one that we did not expect, one
whose consequences are unpredictable. In this
sense, we all owe a debt to Ukraine.
So does Russia. Much as American culture is
unthinkable without English culture, Russian
culture is unthinkable without Ukraine’s. Kyiv
and Chernihiv, cities that Russia is shelling,
were homes to schools that provided educated
priests, professionals and bureaucrats to a
Russian empire where such people were in
high demand. All of Russian literature, goes
the saying, came from Gogol — and Gogol came
from Ukraine. Russia will now owe an even
greater debt to Ukraine. The sooner Ukraine
wins this war, the greater the chance that
Russian culture will survive.
Twitter: @TimothyDSnyderTimothy Snyder is the author of a half-dozen
books on Russia and Ukraine, including “The Road
to Unfreedom” and “Bloodlands.” He is the Levin
professor of history at Yale and writes the
newsletter “Thinking About ... .”SALWAN GEORGES/THE WASHINGTON POSTThe family of
Ukrainian soldier
Mykola Novikov
mourns at his grave
in Odessa on March- Novikov was
killed during a
Russian airstrike in
the city of Mykolaiv.
In Russia,
meanwhile, citizens
are forbidden from
protesting the
invasion or even
calling it a war.