Lev Shlosberg

13 November 2024

by Lev Shlosberg

Source: Facebook

Just yesterday I wrote about how society’s manipulators distort the meaning of concepts, and today we had sad confirmation of that fact. And how. Philologist Kirill Yurievich Rogov wrote a text about the “party of the blood of other people” and a little about me. It’s hard to contemplate ignorance of the Russian language in a graduate of Moscow State University’s School of Philology, a candidate of philological sciences. But the disaster was something else: Kirill Rogov didn’t understand what I’d written about. And this is so blatant that I’m forced to comment on the incident.

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As far as I can tell, Kirill Yurievich did not read the text on the “party of the blood of other people” or didn’t finish it due to a shortage of time or a lack of need. When you have to write something quickly, you’re not interested in reading, just so you get it written. Using the famous device of Russian social thought—“I haven’t read Pasternak, but I condemn him”—Kirill Rogov wrote that by talking about the “party of the blood of other people,” I was stating that the mentioned Dmitry Bykov, Sergei Parkhomenko, and Viktor Shenderovich “did not have a wrong opinion, they had ‘the blood of other people.’”  Kirill Yurievich drew a conclusion for greater clarity: “To me, this is fascism in essence. All terror campaigns have been set up this way.” No one before Kirill Rogov had given an interpretation like this to the “party of the blood of other people.”

Kirill Yurievich, this text is especially for you. I hope you’ll read it. The “party of the blood of other people” is the party of people who are calling for the war’s continuation, that is, for continuing to kill people in order to achieve political goals. They are calling for the continued killing of Ukrainians by Russians and of Russians by Ukrainians in order to restore an improperly understood justice, to replace the regime in Russia, to rearrange the world—and all this at the price of other people’s lives. Meanwhile, the participants themselves in the “party of the blood of other people” have no plans to go into the trenches and don’t intend to risk their life under any circumstances, but they do want to obtain a political result. The blood of other people is the blood of people they don’t know who have perished on the field of a battle whose continuation they are calling for.

Accusing me, Kirill Rogov writes that “…in this way [we] exclude them [the participants in the ‘party of the blood of other people’] from the ‘focus of empathy.’ We understand them as ‘not ours,’ strangers, dangerous people for whom sympathy does not apply,” meaning the persons mentioned.

Kirill Yurievich, for the authors you mention, the other people are those people who are daily perishing on and outside the field of invective. They are other people in terms of their lives, their blood, their deaths. Your colleagues are indifferent to those lives, blood, and deaths to the point of cynicism. What is insanity? Here it is—insanity. The madness of indifference. Is that really so hard to understand?

The new interpretation of “party of the blood of other people” was found to be to the point not only by the media with the respected brand that published it but also by the one-celled propagandist public pages, compared to whose lexical capacity Ellochka Lyudoedka’s dictionary looks like an encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. The astonishing synchronicity of the subsequent publications (as in the instance of “victim of aggression”) allows me to assume that the stokers of the virtual ovens knew about the arrival of the new “fuel” well in advance.

Kirill Yurievich, you are a scholar, you know that all conclusions and corollaries have to be preceded by painstaking study of the topic. Reading my 8 August comment took three minutes at most. You mean you couldn’t find those three minutes? Or was the demand for help from your colleagues so urgent that you couldn’t be bothered to read it, just to write? Why do you do that to yourself?

And then there’s the Freudian slip about “fascism in essence.” Did you find that in scholarship yourself or did someone suggest the direction of your thought?  Whose “find” was it? Whoever’s it was, it was you who wrote and published it. Do you understand the meaning and cost of what you wrote? What is this “in essence”?

My God, what a shame and disgrace. And how sad, Kirill Yurievich.

Once you wrote a work about two hundred-year-old literature, “The Idea of the ‘Comedy of Manners’ in the Early Nineteenth Century in Russia.” And now everything is so sad in these texts that there’s no room for comedy or tragedy. It’s just one big farce.

[For links to key texts, see the comments to the Facebook publication]

Translated by Marian Schwartz