Jacopo Mavica

Penumbra - an email to two Russian persons, written on March 15, 2022

This piece isn’t aimed at creating more ‘points-of-view’, or giving voice to previously unheard stories, or nuancing the perspectives on any given subject. Instead, it attempts to drag out from the bureaucratic penumbra the associations, the considerations and actions around and behind this email. 

Edited email, with footnotes, 2021

Footnotes: 

1. Invitation letters

are legally not necessary for obtaining a VISA. They serve as  supplementary documents and are added to the mandatory ones, hoping to facilitate the VISA application process. They might seem redundant, but often they become the sole basis for the decision of the embassies whether an application will be successful or not. This is especially true for nationals from certain countries  requesting a European Schengen permit, countries that are suspected of generating unwelcome migration flows or sending agents or extremists. Now, with the Russian war in Ukraine, Russia has become one of them. Russian nationals´are at a point where they have to be afraid of being denied entry into Europe, and their VISA application being turned down. While the sanctions have blocked most bank operations outside of Russia for them, the incessant arrests within Russia of anyone who even remotely appears to make a political statement drives Russians to want to leave their homeland even more. All of this puts enormous pressure on something that should be just additional or supplementary. The invitation letter became a crucial document, capable of dramatically changing the trajectory of the two people’s lives to whom this email is addressed. At the same time, even if unintentionally, these letters can serve as a sort of alibi against the Russian regime. Any truthful answer to the question: ‘why did you decide to leave the country?’, would be interpreted as propaganda against the state and endanger the applicant. 

2. Some spaces are blacked out

for privacy. Data protection is a legal requirement in all countries that are under the rule of law. The Russian embassy in Berlin employs an unknown number of agents and spies from at least three secret services. In Russia, the government has been surveying tele- and internet-communication and violating privacy rights and  internet freedom for many years. The security service FSB can intercept all communications and internet traffic with the Russian national interception system SORM. It’s become common sense for many Russians to avoid using emails or VKontakte, the Russian Facebook analogue, and shift to Telegram. Both VKontakte and Telegram were founded by Pavel Durov. In 2017, lots of ordinary people were sentenced to jail-time for “internet extremism”, just because they had posted memes or saved images on their VKontakte page. VPNs and proxy servers were blocked under the same banner of fighting “internet extremism”. Durov abandoned VKontakte and created Telegram, hoping to offer the Russians a free and unsurveilled messenger service. In 2018, the Russian government tried to ban Telegram for withholding their encryption keys, unsuccessfully until now. But is Telegram really safe? 

When some spaces here are blacked out, it is not more than a measly attempt to conceal the identities of the people who try to emigrate from Russia, and the identity of persons trying to help them. Most Russians have learned from bitter experiences that  all that is done for privacy ends up as something akin to plastic wrap:

everpresent/ 

covering something/ 

transparent/ 

we are the product wrapped up/ 

and if someone really wants that which is covered/ 

It is little trouble ripping apart this transparent sheen/ 

however obscure/ 

it may seem.

3. 17:59 

What you don’t see: this matter couldn't have been left for the next morning. The two addressees needed the letters urgently, maybe just in time before borders would be closed and flight routes canceled. If you get a visa and your destination is at all reachable, say, in the country where your family is from, you would reach it only after a round-about contouring of strange shapes, perimeters, tracing the silhouette of countries you won’t visit any time soon. The work connected to these letters has to be done in overtime, in addition to one's studies and one’s daily workload. But for what job? Or maybe for love? Friendship? Family obligations? Solidarity? Altruism? Wanting praise? Wanting some kind of compensation? How can something like this be repaid? Action is, no matter what, still action. And that you were able to take this action was only possible because your parents moved to the outskirts of the capital and sent you to a school, then a university. Now you are working, and all of this is happening, but your company is German. So you might be lucky. The pay, the pay doesn’t matter, your money is stuck in Russia, but maybe you aren’t, maybe you won’t be.

4. At least four people were involved in this email chain

and it just so happened that the four people most involved are two couples. From two different generations, and two different countries. Different circumstances lead to the same situation, at the same place at the same time. Why? There must be something larger, behind swaying currents, something swimming underneath these waters. The film Левиафан (Leviathan) by Zvyagintsev came out in 2014. The biblical sea monster becomes a symbol of fatigue throughout the film as the exhausted characters, members of a low income rural family, are bent under the will of rich landowners and bureaucrats. They always return to the shore, catching a glinting hint of scales, a fin caressing waves, or a tail lazily moving the water, before its motion is reduced to errant bubbles surfacing in the licking sea as their house crumbles to dust in the background. At some point we are shown a skeleton of some unidentified marine creature washed ashore. Hobbes’ Leviathan isn’t given a funeral, it’s left out bare, in the open, all is pointing to its death. But what happens when governments die? When the government that should rule out  individual arbitrariness for the rule of law drowns in despotism, what is there to do? Those four, those two couples: one was just settling into life, their jobs and startups were taking off. The other one was picking the ripe fruits of their labor, thirty years in this country. Let me tell you of all the doors that were shut in my face, son, but you have to keep going. I know it's hard but you should trust in the goodness of people’s hearts. And now this goodness of people’s hearts is met with the empty ribcage of the pile of bones on the beach. Relationships end up on different sides of the same river. Relatives that drop the startup you just set in motion together, to flee the country. Friends arrested, so they won’t be able to leave. Empty offices, positions revoked, people quit, and you realize the project you were building, the building you had planned, will never be what you envisioned, but it’s still there, as something different, something empty, a shell without its innards on a shore.

5. Dear ___, dear ___

It’s common for emails to begin like this and end with something along the lines of yours faithfully, sincerely, or best. This standard cordiality extends past emails, electronic bureaucracy, and also covers physical, real-life, face-to-face administrative meetings. Especially true for VISA interviews, one should pay attention to the forms of politeness, and prepare well beforehand for any question that might be thrown at you. Reply calmly to anything they ask you: what’s your reason for travel, where will you be staying, for how long, with whom are you going on this trip. A background check reveals a discrepancy in the spelling of your surname in your two passports, the Russian and the Kazakh one. You are forced to explain all over again, once more, that with nationalist powers established in your country, the appearance of your national identity gets homogenized according to the wishes of the sovereign. Citizens of countries under the Soviet Union were often pushed to change the ending of their surnames to -ov or -ev. This process was dubbed Russification. Can blame be shed onto your ancestors for bending to this pressure? At the end of the day it’s just some letters on a glossy piece of paper. Certain things have to be sacrificed for survival, for well being, for your family. And what would be the alternative? To resign from the ‘greater’ collective? To abandon the hopes for a better life in the name of preserving some national identity? Or should you tell the visa interviewer that actually the discrepancy is more of a typo than anything else? But you are still part of a system, even if all you do is against it, you become a reactionary, bound by the same mechanisms as people who don’t oppose it. At the end of the day, you have forgotten how to speak Kazakh. Now you are taking classes in Kazakh, so you will be able to tell your family that you have never met about all of this.

So – it is usually in everyone’s best interest to go about bureaucratic matters dressed in cordiality. The suit we wear at interviews can be a bit tight around the neck, but that’s only because etiquette is a hurried tailor, too busy to account for everyone’s differences. But it might help the document application process if you choke on a mother tongue trying to burst out before surnames change on glossy paper. And you are added to a greater imagination, a greater fiction. Now you are silent. Paper speaks louder than you. Спасибо Вам! Thank you (plural, formal), as you close the door behind you. Now I can rest, knowing I am (Russi)(Americ)an. Is this solace? Until another Tower of Babel falls I won’t have to remember where I’m from.

6. Attached:

here is the invitation letter and the documents you’ll need for the application process. What kind of attachment is between an email and a file? Indifferent, emotionless, uncaring (leaning more towards tolerant than inconsiderate), there is an underlying emptiness or void separating them, but attached they are nevertheless. Zvyagintsev comes to the rescue once again. His film Нелюбовь, with its poor English translation, Loveless, came out three years after Leviathan in 2017. The movie’s English title appears inaccurate to any Russian speaker. The word Нелюбовь comes from the conjunction of the negative prefix не- (non- or un-) and the noun любовь (love). So нелюбовь is not lovelessness, an absence of love, but an emotion in itself, ‘un-love’, maybe the feeling of the lack? The emptiness created by presence without affection? The plot of the movie leaves the viewer with a pervasive sense of this feeling. The shadow cast over the events becomes more apparent as eyes adjust to the penumbra. Two parents in a crumbling relationship and their son, suffering in their neglect. Boris, the father of Alyosha is soon to become a father again from his lover Masha, and Zhenya, the mother, is dating a wealthier man with an older daughter. Both have different lives waiting for them, and both make abundantly clear that there is no space in these next lives for Alyosha, who overhears his parents considering giving him to an orphanage. The next day the child disappears. The policemen that get called to the scene are generally uninterested, dubbing an investigation ‘pointless’ as a pre-teen running away wouldn’t get far and would probably come back himself after a couple of days. Alyosha does not return. The resulting search forces the parents to spend more time together, a time continuously punctuated with their arguments. This movie captures a general feeling permeating public or private life in Russia, penetrating into the most mundane relationships. Un-love, a sense of emotional emptiness and lack of care, undeniably still works as a kind of connection. In this same manner the files are attached to the email. Carelessness also shapes bureaucratic communication. Maybe this relationship is not only Russian, but an effect of other things: globalization, the exponential growth of technology, the cult of the individual, … Relationships and attachments have become a checklist of gestures surrounding an empty core. And yet: , while the parents and the police don’t care, a volunteer group takes over the search for Alyosha, in the neighboring forest. An altruism emerges in spite of the omnipresent absence of love. And isn’t this email also proof of that? In a moment of crisis, a helping hand, deaf, silent, blind, still reaches out. Someone has stayed behind, worked overtime, for their coworkers have offered you a possibility to get out. And others are doing the same. Notwithstanding the apathetic fog enveloping the situation, the action digs a shaft of light that can always reach even the darkest corners of your room.

7. You shall submit

What is the difference between submittal and submission? Whatever the procedure, one must fit into a set of characteristics. The individual is then forced to bend under this list of prerequisites, and to reduce themselves to it. To stray away from these limits would mean to fall out of the bureaucratic order..

Lose your apartment because of your birthplace. Lose your job because you were seen at a political rally. Remember son, you can’t go to a political rally, we can’t risk you being arrested, we’re here on птичьих правах (bird’s rights), you have arrived here from warmer climates, you were never fully here on the ground, you may only observe and hope for spring to last as long as possible. Seasons change, you fly away. On the ground are those who bend their wings in order to walk. And you wonder, how far can one yield before one is no longer one. One of the four persons loves theater. They told you over the phone about Romeo Castellucci’s new play. You pretend to know who that is. They say it’s called Bros and it doesn’t have a cast, or rather there are just two actors that appear in every rendition but the others get hired from the location of the tour stop. They all sign a contract that states they shall submit to any order they receive without question. And they’re made to do all these crazy things, Castellucci really pushes them to the limit. Marching, carrying out acts of violence, reenacting torture scenes, performing some sort of militaristic ritual in formation while facing a statue ventriloquizing indeciphrable messages, imitating flailing fish on a dried out riverbed, posing for a photo shoot while hugging a huge photograph of a monkey under which a body in a plastic bag twitches. It’s easy to make the comparison to the real world. Acts that cannot be forgotten or forgiven. Lost identities. Do they not realize? How much further would this have to go for them to break the contract? Are they like the actors? They bow down, but to whose orders? In front of whose statue do we don our caps?

8. The consulate

could be someone to whom we have to bow down to. But can you really submit to a middleman? The consulate submits to the legislation and government of the state. The state submits to the people/the constitution/the dictator/powerful interest groups/the ruling party/capitalism/a cleptocracy/tribalism/a ruling family/…. And all of those in power because of historical contingency/movements/elections/revolutions/the corrupted nature of man/modernity/subservience/imperialisms of all sorts/…. The causes of it all are endlessly deferred, the closer we try to get to them the more we can feel Zeno’s Paradoxes. We’re drowned in contradictions of multiplicity and continuity. Timothy Morton coined the term ‘Hyperobject’: “a hypothetical agglomeration of networked interactions with the potential to produce inescapable shifts in the very conditions of existence”. While the philosopher discusses the term in an environmental context, it isn’t out of place here. This phenomenon of endless deferral is a symptom of a Hyperobject; endlessly vast and intricate, and ungraspable to human comprehension. We’re all middlemen, submitting to something that is always present yet unseen. At the same time, Timothy Morton states: “Hyperobjects reveal to us humans that the whole is always weirdly less than the sum of its parts”. You felt suffocated over the phone, the empty gazes of the streets reminded you of your parents, you haven’t talked to them for so long. 

9. VISA

- the locus of all of this. But what does it mean when we say VISA? It is probably an acronym. Here are some definitions found on the internet: