I did not trouble about a black border for my name. I thought only of how to inscribe that imaginary “psychic point” more firmly and reliably inside the close confines of my room’s square, far from the eyes of all those bad mathematicians incapable of distinguishing the real from the imaginary, the dead from the living. Relations, acquaintances, and even friends have an extremely poor grasp of non-obviousnesses; until a person is served up to them in a coffin as a cadaver vulgaris[3] under a trihedral lid, with two five-kopeck coins over the eyes, they will go on obtusely pestering that person with their condolences, questions, and traditional “how do you dos.”

After graduating from the institute, I moved to Moscow and began studying pure mathematics at the university. I never finished. One day, on my way home from the main library with a four-volume dictionary of philosophy (Gogotsky’s) under my arm, I was passing down a long, vaulted corridor when my path was blocked by a crush of students jamming the entrance to a lecture hall. For a political meeting, evidently. Someone’s head stuck up out of the crowd and screamed in a strange birdlike voice, craning a blue-collared neck: “Anyone who doesn’t belong should leave. Everyone else into the lecture hall.”

The words “doesn’t belong” hobbled my legs. Clutching my dictionary volumes to my chest, I squeezed into the hall. The doors closed. First came long, obscure speeches. Then a short word: police. The dictionary was suddenly unbearably heavy in my arms. They took our names and escorted us—between bayonets—to the Manège. Another door closed. I felt more and more bewildered. The excitement all round me had clearly subsided. Some faces looked almost abject.

I was bored. The minutes crawled by on the wall clock. The door would not open. I opened my dictionary. A sort of bibliographical curiosity from the mid-nineteenth century. My eye immediately fell upon the word ethics.

Then I understood: This old dictionary was an intelligent conversationalist. Well, of course, only old-fashioned and less-than-intelligible ethics could have shut me up inside a manège with all these people for whom I had no use.

Now, on reviewing my memories, I see that my thinking was flawed by a fatal miscalculation, a stubborn mistake that I persisted in making time and again: I considered everything that took place under my frontal bone to be absolutely unique. I conceived of psychorrhea in only one specimen. I never suspected that the process of mental deadening could be creeping—from skull to skull, from an individual to a group, from a group to a class, from a class to an entire social organism. Hiding my half existence behind the opaque walls of my skull, concealing it like a shameful disease, I did not consider the simple fact that the same thing could be occurring under other skullcaps, in other locked rooms.

The other day, while leafing through Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii by Herberstein, who visited Russia in the early sixteenth century, I found this sentence: “Some of them derive the name of their country from the Aramaic word Ressaia or Resissaia, which means: dispersion by drops.”

If those “some” existed so long ago, then, multiplying from century to century, they must gradually have seized hold of all the levers and signaling devices of that “life.” They saw Russia—and forced others to see it—as Ressaia: a spattering of isolated drops. Over long decades of stultifying work, they perfected and refined their technique of splintering society until they had either destroyed or numbed the connective tissue knitting its cells into one. We lived like separated drops. Like waifs.