Are we really sentenced to die in this long and flat country? Do our destinies really depend on the life of this wasteland, a life that's as viscous as the saliva of a tuberculosis patient and as sticky as vomit? Has this bald space really marked us for life? An empty glass stands in front of me, and the lilac Moscow night looks at me through the window. This is a special aspect of the Moscow sky: a cold red flame shines through a dull grey background, and a lilac haze covers the rooftops. I'm writing to you once again, but I'm still unable to say the main thing, for vexation fills me: why are we so absurdly and hopelessly stuck in this clayey land? Can it be that life's almost over (and there won't be another), and we'll never embrace each other as free and happy individuals? How is it that I was unable to protect you and to shelter you with my body? I always believed that there's a lot of time ahead and that freedom and happiness will yet come, but now I look into a dark window and see that nothing will ever come and that there's no point in waiting and no point in living. I'm writing, yet I want to shout: let's run away and hide for ever so that the dusty wind of this land won't catch up with us, so that only you and I remain and everything that is alien disappears! I shout: please, please hear me and come with me before it's too late! let's run!

Why is there no order in my thoughts and in my life? I wanted to write about love, but it turned out that I wrote instead about Russia and Europe and intellectuals, and everything that's left on paper has nothing to do with you and me. It's all useless and alien.

I'll try to say it again, more clearly this time. No, it's not the Moscow night or the dull lilac sky that are before me. I write and distinctly see your face with its widely spaced eyes. I've never seen it distorted or anguished: even in a moment of despair or pain, even when tears were in your eyes, your features were as regular as ever, and your eyes were firm. Now I know why people need harmony, for if there's a feature or skill that this notion refers to, it's to be able to look firmly through tears. Yet I've no firmness myself: all my firmness is in you. I feel it only when I look into your eyes. When I'm no longer able to make out your features in a dark window pane, when darkness covers them and only a meaningless black window pane remains, I know I'm lost.

I've always viewed the term "self-expression" with mistrust: I, for one, can't express anything. I've no views of my own, and, properly speaking, I've but one view: I look at you. It's this view that I try to express, and I don't care how I do it. At first, I tried to paint, and all my paintings were painted letters. Do you know how I painted? I wanted to describe how much I loved you, yet it turned out to be necessary to tell about politicians, old women sitting on benches and stunted poplars; otherwise, my account was incomplete and unconvincing. The blank sheet of paper that I had to fill became occupied and inhabited by the wrong things and the wrong people. That's how life is: it's full of chance people who came in for a minute and then stayed. There's no one I need besides you, and I've been often filled with despair, for there are too many superfluous things and people, yet for some reason it just isn't convincing without them. They've already become part of my life, they feel at home there, and for some reason I feel myself to be responsible for them. I've realised that my memory and consciousness are full of things that aren't entirely me, and therefore my love depends not only on me but also on those strangers that have occupied me. In a strange way, this feeling of being dependent on and indebted to others exists despite the fact that I lead a fairly secluded life.

Painting has the advantage of being a silent activity: you shut the door, and you're alone in your studio. When the need arose to add words to the painted letters, I realised that I had lost the habit of speaking. I got used to being alone and forgot how to speak. Over the years, the aversion to all company became my dominant trait. When a noisy company gathers to share general ideas, I get sick. I despise groups of like-minded people. It's difficult to understand now where's the cause and where the effect: either I hate general enthusiasm and therefore can't stand gatherings, or, vice-versa, my dislike for noise makes me detest enthusiasm and general views. It makes no difference. Over the years, everything that I wanted to say at gatherings but didn't became my only way of participating in life. The noise of my surroundings was so loud and drowned out to such an extent the voice that resounded within me and called me that I sometimes had the impression that I didn't exist. This eternal din deafened me and made my ears buzz. When I heard this intrusive sound, saw liberal and original people moving their mouths and looked at their faces disfigured by their convictions, I didn't want to make out what they were saying. No, I didn't simply consider them to be fools; I considered them to be an unpleasant hindrance that was created on purpose to prevent me from hearing what I had to say and what was resounding within me. I used to believe that the latter is the voice of a guide or the call of history, and various lofty thoughts came into my mind. Later, I realised all of a sudden that a chorus of foreign voices resounds within me, too ? the same vexing and dissonant cacophony as from without.

There is a question which has probably been solved long ago by philosophical minds but which puzzled me, ignorant as I am. It's necessary to draw a distinction between the foreign things that are within me and the foreign things that are without. It is clear that neither of them could ever become mine or be identified with me. Then why does one of them evokes a sense of duty in me and the other the exact opposite: the desire to forget and reject? The phenomenon of the appropriation of the other by one's own consciousness does not seem suited here. What consciousness does with time and space does not apply to the heart's experience, which can never be appropriated but only shared. I don't understand why foreign things outside us do not make us want to become a participant, while foreign things within us give us the desire to do so. For all that, neither of them are mine.

I didn't know the answer before nor do I know it now. Yet I don't exclude that I've learned it from you. You've taught me a simple truth over the years: responsibilities are more important than rights. You've taught me to see love itself as a responsibility and not as a right ? as a war front and not as a resort. You made me understand these words so clearly that I want to use them today to describe consciousness. To describe our simultaneous attraction to and repulsion from what is foreign, I will use the terms "responsibility" and "right." Foreign things within me are most likely connected to responsibilities, while foreign things that make up our environment constitute the domain of rights. To assert oneself in a foreign environment is what the actualisation of rights is all about. The performance of a duty with respect to someone whom your consciousness has accepted is a responsibility, if I understood you correctly. In any event, that's how I interpreted it, and as a result I began to see the struggle for human rights, which characterised the end of the nineteenth century, in a different light.

We've grown up with the belief that there's nothing more noble than the struggle for human rights. Everyone around us ? all very respectable and intelligent people ? stood up for human rights or, at least, worried about their own. The State oppressed them with responsibilities, yet their hearts were full of pain from seeing rights violated. From everywhere, from all the ends of the earth, you could hear the human rights slogan. Committees, institutes and congresses were charged with working on this holy task. Don't you think that we can employ the struggle for human rights and its antithesis, the struggle for responsibilities, as historical categories?

Which of them is more worthy? The latter even sounds inane, as if one had to struggle for responsibilities! They are urged upon us by dictators and satraps. They should be rejected in favour of rights. Human rights are the motto of contemporary civilisation. In their name, discoveries and revolutions are made, newspapers are published and films shot. There's no doubt that the desire of the middle class to preserve itself as such, i.e., with a multitude of rights and a minimal number of responsibilities, is the driving force of twentieth-century history. Naturally, people in the West have more rights, on the whole. Of course, it would be difficult to give rights to one and all, yet everyone should at least see from a distance what kind of rights exist. Isn't this the most common image of historical progress: from responsibilities to rights?

Yet that's not what I wanted to speak about. I'm constantly making asides. Still, to make yet another digression, I can't avoid mentioning the Russian intelligentsia when speaking about rights. After all, its self-awareness was based on the performance of duty, yet what did it all lead to? An unceasing fight for rights. I've already said something about this, yet let me say some more.

The intelligentsia was justly called by one tyrant a "stratum," for it separates the people from those in power. And thus it can either serve the people or the authorities. What it chooses to do is, as one says, its own business. This choice has been made prettier by a civilised terminology: the intelligentsia prefers to see its choice as being not between the despicable authorities and the ignorant people but between East and West, civilisation and barbarity, democracy and totalitarianism. They think that they can shift the gears of history without getting their hands dirty from contacts with mechanics and apparatchiks. Of course, they've got to decide whom they're going to convince and whose opinion is important. They're not going to tell a mechanic, after all, that progress is preferable to traditional ways or a peasant woman that an open society is better than a closed one. What could that riffraff, overwhelmed by fate, understand anyhow? The only thing those curs have on their minds is to stuff their bellies and get screwed. So the intellectuals have got no other choice than to make friends with those in power (after all, they've got to convince someone). At least, the latter are informed ? they also like the West, they go there to buy clothes ? and, if they're encouraged or interested a bit, Russia might start to budge. And the people will also be better off, thinks the intellectual. They'll thank us later. For the time being, let them wait while the authorities hand out jobs to intellectuals ? after all, that's what History is all about!

Consider the dynamics of rights and responsibilities in our consciousness. We used to disdain to be on friendly terms with the authorities, yet now we strive to do so. The authorities, so we tell ourselves, were the first inner Europeans and have more rights than others. We used to think that we are responsible for the world, yet now we believe that world owes us more than it gives. In a funny way, intellectuals have come to believe that the struggle for their own rights has cultural significance: in their own persons, they stand up for common values. Survival has become an act of civic virtue. When an intellectuals buys himself a chest of drawers, he thinks that the world has become a little better. The Russian westerniser of the nineteenth century longed for abstract notions that seemed useless to the common man: enlightenment, ecumenism, etc. The present-day westerniser is a practical creature. He knows from bitter experience that abstractions are of little use and that you can never predict how they'll be used. He is out to construct something material: it is material comfort, well-being and peace of mind that will make him a fully-fledged member of the middle class, i.e., of the substance that is the foundation of the Western world. The intellectual defends his right to be a petty bourgeois. This is the principle right for which he struggles. He wants to become a petty bourgeois for ideological reasons: he builds himself a datcha in order to construct a world in which rights are respected.

Unfortunately, intellectuals are going to be duped. The authorities make use of them to conduct election campaigns and negotiate deals on oil wells. As soon as an agreement is reached, they'll be invited to perform their usual, i.e., servile, duties. That's difficult to accept.

There's nothing more seething, and at the same time less significant, in the world than Russian intellectuals. This gives rise to talk about Russia's unrealised possibilities and the like. It's all nonsense. They did as much as they could and weren't capable of anything else. Besides, who didn't realise himself? Among the young men who had learned to read journals, curse and wear their hair shaggy, was there a single one who didn't consider himself to be a cultured individual and wasn't able to make himself noticed?

You probably think that I'm speaking about unimportant things and with a lot of emotion to boot. Yet you're mistaken. I'm speaking about the heart of the matter, as if I didn't know. Indeed, I know this subject all too well, for I'm speaking about myself. This senseless intellectual with a lot of ambition is me ? who else? Everything that I've just written is about me. It was my own mediocrity that didn't allow me to do or love anything for real. And so long as I thought quasi-thoughts, experienced quasi-feelings and said quasi-words, that other that was outside me approved. It said to me: behave reasonably, insist on your rights and defend ours, and you'll see that everything will be alright and that we'll come to an understanding. This Kantian imperative became a guarantee of our mutual liking and impotence, mine and the other's. Now when it's too late to change anything, I say tardily and pitifully that I've been a coward and a liar all my life. Even when I looked brave, I was scared and rotten inside. I was afraid to do what I had to on account of simple, everyday fear, of the fear not to be liked, the fear to offend or hurt someone's feelings. All my life I feared the consequences of my actions. I was afraid of being abandoned, of not being loved, of being called bad, and of being good, too. I was afraid of Russia, of becoming poor, of living in the West and also of losing the West. I was afraid of abandoning an implicit yet powerful convention of being, which calls itself a moral code yet is in reality a code of general impotence.

It's comical to think that I imagined myself to be a bearer of culture. Don't ask me of which culture, for I don't know the answer. Following M. de Jourdain, I've made a discovery: not only am I speaking in prose but also in the framework of cultural studies. Just like all speech is either prose or verse, a judgement can only be historical or cultural in nature. For example, when you speak at lunch about legislative elections, you're involved in historical studies. When you buy a newspaper at a newspaper stand, you become a participant of cultural studies. Everything without exception can be used: cultural studies is a waste-free industry. You become significant despite yourself, a cultural individual almost by accident. The right to hold views was a great relief to me. And not just to me alone. Cultural studies is a discipline of the triumphant democratic system: it's very correct, for it makes every citizen important in the face of the authorities. From now on, no petty bourgeois must look up to Lev Tolstoi, for he's created just as much as the latter and, all things considered, his work's much more humane. If you take all that he's said to his wife and co-workers, you'll get first-rate materials for cultural studies! "Why turn our chatter into a subject for study?" someone might ask. "Why didn't our traditional disciplines, which led a secluded existence, suffice?" No, they didn't. The time has come for members of the middle class to speak out. Greek civilisation had Socrates, the Renaissance Ficino, and our civilisation has Jourdain. In Russia and in Europe, Jourdain writes about only one thing: the individual and his rights. I'm a present-day Jourdain, for I've learned to talk nonsense and do nothing. I'm a Jourdain who's decided to become a lover-hero.

You say that it's not compatible? On the contrary, Jourdain is the hero of our time; our civilisation rests on his shoulders.

Jourdain is the world's bulwark. As long as he's in good health, everything's alright with the world. Jourdain is the embodiment of a person who is his own goal; he's the triumph of the Kantian imperative. The petty bourgeois has become the measure of all things: he makes the world balanced and saves it from extremes. If you want to find out whether a society's civilised, progressive or democratic, you've just got to check if there are any petty bourgeois there and if they feel at ease. For example, the well-known "open society," which is opposed to totalitarianism, is simply a petty bourgeois society, i.e., a society in which the interests of the petty bourgeois are well protected. The term "middle class" has something majestic about it, and if the middle class is flourishing in a given society, it means that the latter's progressive, peaceful and civilised. If the middle class is not doing so well, it's time to raise the alarm, for barbarity's just around the corner. When a certain avant-garde artist (who drew funny comics with tadpoles) emigrated from Russia, he said in an interview that he was leaving because freelance artists did not become part of the middle class in Russia. These were the man's (bless his heart!) very words. In his progressive fervour, he imagined that freelance artists used to be members of the middle class, as if it were possible to join inspiration with intellectual comfort.

In modern history, the image of Jourdain the creator ? the petty bourgeois in the arts ? is the most important one. The petty bourgeoisie has long ceased to be a class and is now a historic formation. It seems to me that the very notion of civilisation as a comfortable form of the development of society is due to the petty bourgeoisie ? a notion that is wide-spread in this new historic formation. The accompanying notions of progress, self-expression, etc., belong to the same formation and should be considered along with it. A geranium seed gives rise to a geranium, even if you call it an oak tree. However, modern times have witnessed a remarkable selection that has produced a geranium that is as large as a sequoia.

If you detect a hint of mockery in my words, believe me, it's directed first and foremost at me.

I'm like that myself; I used to live and think in the same way. I lived in a cowardly and haughty manner, held views and plumed myself on my right to them, and didn't want to have any responsibilities at all, for I was afraid of them and hid myself from them. It's so difficult to tell others ? those whose rights you've been charged to uphold (and who in return look out for yours) ? that they're foreign to you and that you don't give a damn about their rights. Today, when the best part of my life is over, there's nothing I can do but write: forgive me, I did nothing but lie all my life, I wasn't able to defend you, to protect you with the golden veil of love, yet I wanted to do so, I really did. All my life I wanted to tell others that I couldn't care less about their rights, for I wasn't a member of their company and never wanted to be. While I'm still able to see and feel, I want to succeed in breaking out of this convention, for it made me weak out of the best and most humane considerations and in the name of Kant and the Enlightenment.

Our life in all its aspects, all of contemporary civilisation and all our hopes and desires develop under the slogan of human rights. We are all fortunate heirs of the victorious Enlightenment. Rights, rights, rights! Women have a right to love, poets to self-expression, publishers to profit, the State to territory and people, citizens to freedom and happiness, and all these rights are compatible with one another. Society is clad in the armour of its rights. Jourdain is covered with rights like Hercules with his lion skin. Just try and put one of these rights into question or take something away from it! You won't succeed. Everything's organised so well, so surely and with so much dignity: what more do I need? Why am I complaining? Why am I making everything so complicated?

I can't shake off the feeling that we are the victims of a global fraud, of a joke played by time ? that "the time is out of joint," as the bard says. In my youth, I found a simple explanation for this: I was living in a country that passed decline off as prosperity. Those times are over, and I've seen other countries, which were beautiful and bountiful. All the same, I haven't been able to get rid of the feeling that I'm part of a play that was specially conceived and that everything around me is false. Indeed, this feeling has grown stronger. The world is like a house (Borges would have liked this comparison) with a series of linked rooms, and the doors between them are locked. Someone who's locked in one of the rooms thinks that beyond the doors of his cage lies freedom. He beats at the doors, yet, when he breaks them down, he finds himself in a room that is identical to the one from which he just came. The infinite length of this series of rooms is what freedom is all about ? and it's the only freedom we know. A person breaks out of one cage into the next, and there's no end to it (to be precise, the only end is death). A fellow from Chita longs to go to Moscow, from Moscow to Paris, from Paris to New York, and each time he repeats the same words ? "freedom," "self-expression" ? and in each room he's assured that he'll find it there. I remember how we made fun of the newspaper Pravda, whose name signified "truth" yet which published overt lies. Nevertheless, for some reason we didn't find funny the name of the radio station Svoboda ("Freedom"). And I'm at a loss why there hasn't yet appeared an international media empire entitled "Human Rights."

The following question troubles me: how could the demand for rights, which were designated as the goal of progress yet which were, by the requirements of morality, limited by the rights of others, become entirely satisfied? What makes us think that the goal of history has been reached and that rights have all been accorded? Why is the club of victorious rights so smug? Are there no victims? There's some contradiction here, which is latent in the very imperative. For some time now, I've had the impression that Marquise de Sade and Immanuel Kant are complementary figures. It's possible to satisfy one's own desires fully and allow others to do the same only under the condition that others have set themselves the goal of subordination. A sadist is free in the presence of a free masochist, and both of them consider themselves to be their own goals. Don't think that I'm comparing Sade and Kant. Not in the least. I'm only asserting that time makes thinkers appear in complementary pairs ? for example, Camus and Sartre, Delacroix and Ingres. Together they obtain the needed results. To tell the truth, I borrowed this thought from Noah, who took animals into his arc in pairs. One of them goes too far in one respect, the other in another, yet together they achieve the required result. And, if the goal was to form a member of the middle class, enlightened and endowed with rights yet controllable and intimidated, the result's been attained. The struggle for human rights? Yes, of course, but for which rights? You know, I'm not certain that people aren't fighting for those rights which allow them to escape corporal punishment.

The fact that rights in an open society and the market in a free market society have been declared to be factors that guarantee development does nothing to change the state of things: the market has long ceased to expand, and rights are accorded as a function of rank for the purposes of preserving the status quo in society. There are standards for everything: vegetables, relations, and views. The system of market ties cannot be put into question, for it's more important than the goods offered. Who said that the essence of the market is competition? A good market is when your neighbour has as much as you, so that no one is offended. It's important to show a broad spectrum of self-expression, yet one shouldn't express anything. The main thing that is expressed is the unlimited opportunity of self-expression. The market's function is not to offer a choice, the function of rights is not to possess and the function of self-expression is not to express: all these are nothing but symbols of society and should not be used in a utilitarian way. The consumer should neither have a choice nor a way out, but only a monotonous abundance of identical opportunities that are never realised. The situation of individual liberty is identical to that of vegetables. Just like the diversity of vegetables, freedom undoubtedly exists in the sense that there isn't any need for it. It exists in the sense that it doesn't. The "open society" is just an ideology ? in fact, the most dynamic one today. Like all ideologies, the open society has created its own nomenclature, its own ruling elite, its own bureaucrats and, of course, its own proletarians. The fact that every member of the open society ? be it an individual or a country ? formally has equal rights doesn't alter the strict hierarchy in any way. On the symbolic and semiotic levels, everyone in this best of all worlds has equal rights, yet the important thing is that human rights education has taught everyone to have desires that are in keeping with their status. All societies must be open, yet some of them are naturally more open than others.

I wrote this only in order to say that freedom and love have become signs or stars on epaulettes and therefore void of meaning. Yet you asked me, "so what?" You asked me why I wrote all this, why must one speak in such a complicated way about simple things. You said that all of this is obvious ? and so what am I getting at? What do I want to say? "State it simply!" Yet I wanted to do so.

If there was still something of an activist about me, I would say that freedom is not the most important thing and human rights are not the goal. If something's worth struggling for, it's responsibilities; the more responsibilities a person has, the freer he is. This is the reason why a king has more freedom than a shopkeeper. Yet today these words seem empty to me. What freedom is one talking about? What's the use of this freedom, anyway? I'm ashamed of the years that I spent seeking rights and inventing goals. I haven't got any goals of my own. It's too late to reject those who came into me and made themselves at home there, regardless of whether they had a right to it or not. You and I are made up of foreign people and a foreign country. That's absurd, yet that's the kind of absurdity that I've arrived at in the course of my reflections. Man is constituted of other people.

This assertion seems to make the question of the independent individual pointless. What can I do? I wasn't aiming at this, and it doesn't make me glad, yet our love itself is constituted of responsibilities to foreign things and people that are probably of no use to us. Like chains, they bind us, yet they also connect us to each other, indissolubly and for ever.

I've often depicted lovers embracing ? a man and a woman pressing their faces together. Yet if I were to depict love again, I would draw a man and a woman standing back to back, just like adulterers who were burnt at the stake or like soldiers who are encircled. This is how lovers should stand in the face of the world.

We are drawn together by more than corporal passion or happiness; we are drawn together by more than the like or dislike for freedom and Europe or for responsibility and Russia. We are drawn together by the lack of rights: we're knee-deep in this frozen wasteland, and we're here to stay. I can't say what for ? I don't know. It'd seem that nothing here is worth dying for. Nothing except our love, yet it so happened that this love is traversed by others' lives, and there's nothing we can do about it. So let's die here, in this accursed country; let's die without embracing each other but standing back to back, pressing our shoulder blades and spinal cords together and without inspiring false hopes in each other. Our life's over, and it's high time for us to admit that we've lost and that there never was and never will be a way out for us, for life in itself is hopeless. You can't win in love just like in history (now we know it); longing and persistence is all that we're entitled to. I'm afraid that I won't be able to give you anything else, yet how long will your strength of mind, which is now shared among the two of us, hold out? Self-expression is an activity for progressive ladies. There's nothing we can do except perform our duty (that applies both to love and history) and perform it tenaciously, as you've taught me. This bodes neither happiness nor well-being for us, yet let's be courageous enough to admit it and accept defeat calmly, as it becomes soldiers. No, not defeat! When I wrote this, I only meant defeat as others understand it: it'll never concern you and me. We are covered by the golden veil of love with its flowing threads, the veil of peace and faith, strength and trust, and nothing ? neither death nor defeat ? will ever rend it. Give me your hand: I won't ever let you go. I feel your lean back pressing against my shoulder blades, and I know that you're protecting me. Hold me tighter.