On unfulfilled probabilities: why is anti-war creativity needed and does it help to stop Russia

On July 1, the tour of the famous actor Anatoly Bely ended in the USA with a solo performance "I'm here". The hero of the performance is a touching, confused, direct to the point of comicality "lost man" - a traveler with two backpacks, going nowhere. This is a man who laughs through tears, convulsively trying to build a new life around himself, gather strength and move forward, and at the same time - broken, childishly craving understanding and support. He practically does not talk about the war, with the exception of poems that seem to break out of him with the inexorability of the elements. And the rest of the time, he, embarrassed, laughing and crying, tries to prove to himself and others that he is doing well. And the most amazing thing is that in spite of everything, by the end of the performance you begin to believe: someday everything will really work out for him.

Anatoly Bely in the play “I’m Here.” Photo: Ksenia Kirillova

And, of course, speaking about the performance, one cannot fail to note the amazing performance of Anatoly Bely. His character created by the director Egor Trukhin, extremely lively, like a bare nerve, changes before our eyes from the ridiculous, clownish, in the spirit of Charlie Chaplin, to the deeply tragic - and back. Many have already written about the amazing depth of this image. I would like to say a little about something else - about whether anti-war creativity makes any sense now, when people continue to die every day.

Skeptics rightly point out that neither poetry nor performances can stop bombs, heal the wounded, raise the dead, and even rescue the authors of those very poems from prison - for example, Evgeny Berkovich, which recently again extended the arrest in the pre-trial detention center. This is usually objectthat creativity is a challenge to dumbness and inhumanity, a way to speak out, share your pain and cope with despair. But I would like to look at it a little differently.

A few years ago, it seemed to me that only practical and “global” things make sense - those that directly affect destinies and are capable of saving human lives. Starting to work against Russian aggression in 2014, I saw firsthand the existence of what I called “failed probabilities.”

An unfulfilled possibility is a story that never happened. An unlived life, a tragedy that never happened, a war that didn't start. History does not tolerate the subjunctive mood, and therefore in our life at any given time only one of the possible scenarios is embodied, thus erasing all the others. From day to day, we see only one of the possible probabilities: the one that eventually materialized. And often we cannot even imagine the very possibility of developing other, much more terrible options.

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An unfulfilled possibility is a Russian air base in Belarus that was not deployed in 2015-16, the construction of which was disrupted literally by a miracle. Most likely, if it had appeared then, Russia would have been able to draw Belarus into its war much earlier. An unfulfilled probability is a failed coup attempt in Montenegro or the full-scale invasion of Ukraine from the occupied Crimea that did not start in 2016.

In those days, Ukrainian military intelligence constantly reported: there is a high probability that provocation with "Crimean saboteurs" will be used by Moscow to try to break through the land corridor to the Crimea and capture new areas. Scouts celebrated concentration of large groupings of Russian troops in the north of Crimea. Dzhankoy was completely cordoned off by the Russian military. Traffic was partially blocked at the Angarsk Pass, several checkpoints were closed, and the Baltic Marines were already pulling up to Odessa. Luckily, we were able to get documentsproving the fabricated nature of the provocation. In those distant years, the reaction of the international community was still significant for the Kremlin, and perhaps that is why they did not dare to launch a new invasion at that moment.

Anatoly Bely in the play “I’m Here.” Photo: Ksenia Kirillova

Between realized and unfulfilled probabilities there has always been a space filled with daily work to prevent another, much more terrible reality. It seemed that it was enough just to find important information and make it public on a serious level - and an invisible wheel would turn, letting the story go on different tracks. But on February 24 last year, a terrible thing happened - despite all efforts to prevent it, the most terrible of all possible probabilities came true, and all the work at the “global” level suddenly lost its meaning.

So, no matter how trite it may sound, in the fate of each person there are their own “unfulfilled probabilities”: imperfect mistakes or a wrong choice. Each of us periodically faces our forks - moments when the turn of one invisible wheel is enough to start our life on completely different tracks. This wheel most often turns out not to be high-profile investigations or secret documents, but those same performances, poems, simple words that have some kind of inhuman power and are said in such a way that they are able to crash into the soul.

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Of course, it is foolish to hope that words can influence the executioner and tyrant. However, in addition to the mad dictator, the fate of ordinary people is most often influenced by exactly the same ordinary people - those who can shoot or not shoot, say or remain silent, inform or not betray. Practice shows that most of the meanness in this life is committed not by villains, but by ordinary people - those who, out of selfishness or fear, get used to war and kill the possibility of compassion in themselves. And, perhaps, it is precisely the words spoken at the right time that are able to revive this empathy that has not yet completely disappeared.

Of course, compassion cannot change the world, but it is quite capable of changing reality for a particular person. Even moral support, a lively response and a sense of unity can help you survive the most terrible trials, and in some cases even save a human life. A reality in which people have the opportunity to feel and survive someone else's pain, and a reality in which this pain does not exist - these are different probabilities, at some level even different universes. And that is why every word of truth and compassion has much more meaning than it might seem at first glance.

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