Stagnation-era hippies adopted Friedrich Nietzsche’s critiques of metaphysics and embraced his elevation of play and becoming in defiance of Soviet official ideology and its emphasis on a higher purpose and rationality.  The drawing-filled notebooks in the archive of hippie Azazello communicate such a Nietzchean perspective, including its ecstatic, presentist temporality, and a lethal innocence.  Like other hippies of the Soviet 1960s and 1970s, Azazello was a frequent inpatient of psychiatric hospitals and paid mightily for “dropping out of socialism.”[1]  In the face of attacks on his mind and on his person, he continued to make art and poetry, take solace in music, and seek freedom in psychedelic drugs.  Psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott was probably not read by Azazello’s circle, but his psychoanalytic theory of play allows us to see the ways Soviet hippies adopted the figure and temporality of the child for therapeutic as well as creative ends.  Childlike fantasies and playfulness maintained a space of spontaneity and unrestraint amid the violence of everyday socialism.

 

Winnicott asserted that the psychotherapeutic clinic was a domain in which an experience of life as play could be taken up, elaborated upon, and renewed.  In his oft-quoted words: “Psychotherapy takes place in the overlap of two areas of playing, that of the patient and that of the therapist.  Psychotherapy has to do with two people playing together.”  Winnicott quotes the poet Tagore in his classic Playing and Reality (1971): “On the seashore of endless worlds, children play.”[2] The epigraph is appropriated from the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus (also central to Nietzsche’s Ubermensch), who described existence “as a child building sandcastles on a shore, eagerly awaiting the next wave to wash away his creation so as to begin creating again.”[3] Soviet hippie aesthetics utilized the paradoxical language of childlike playing to try out various possibilities in the protected space between fantasy and reality.  Through the systematic use of drugs, music, poetry, and art, hippies weighed options and acted out potential outcomes.  Their perspective, moreover, was not confined to the small and rarefied milieu of privileged youth.  Hippie aesthetics and sensibility were made palatable for broad audiences by Soiuzmul’t fil’m in one of the most beloved animated films of the Stagnation era: Bremenskie muzykanty (Bremen Town Musicians, 1969).[4] The film’s popularity testifies to the influential reach of hippie culture, and situates it in the very heart of late-Soviet life.

 

Playing, Becoming

 

As sports fans, musicians, and parents can testify, playing is serious business.

It is through playing and only through playing, Winnicott famously posited, that children and adults find themselves, live creatively, indeed, live at all.  Playing has a location: it develops in the potential space between inner psychic life and the external environment, at the intersection of subjective experience and shared reality.  The capacity to play is acquired in early childhood through parental sensitivity, care, and reflection.[5]  

 

Playing has a temporality: it stretches the moment and stuffs it with meaning.  We need only to think of the small child “lost” in play or the film spectator weeping silently during a poignant scene.  Cultural life, like psychotherapy and play, takes place within a frame that sustains a certain paradox.  Activities within the frame are accepted as authentic but only so long as they are known not to be real.[6] Just as one would never ask a toddler if her transitional object was found or created ex nihilo, one would never interrupt a soccer game shouting that the premise was pointless and the scoreboard fake.  Such an act would not merely be destructive; it would be madness.[7]

 

Playing has a feeling: it demands emotional intensity and commitment.  This is what lends playing authenticity and sincerity.  And yet, play cannot be taken literally, judged according to “objective” or positivistic criteria, as in the case of the crazy person who disrupts soccer games.  The paradoxical quality of play must remain unchallenged, not only for the game to continue, but also for creativity and cultural engagement to bloom.

 

         Though unfamiliar with Winnicott, hippies were passionately engaged with the work of Nietzsche, another influential theorist of play.[8]  Following the philosophical tradition of Heraclitus, Nietzsche challenged metaphysical thinking by putting forward becoming as the innocent play of the world.  For Nietzsche, the becoming of play operates as the main category of ontology, “displacing the privilege of atemporal, substantial Being: metaphysics as the attempt at an impossible reversal of time—a source of bad conscience, nihilism, and ressentiment—is overcome in a gesture that inaugurates new opportunities for action and new horizons of life.”[9]  Nietzsche explains:

 

In the world only play, play as artists and children engage in it, exhibits coming-to-be and passing away, structuring and destroying without any more additive, in forever equal innocence.  And as children and artists play, so plays the ever-living fire.  It constructs and destroys, in all innocence.[10]

 

In Nietzsche’s early writings, the child and the artist are symbols of the “pursuit of ideals without ideality,” modeling “a future that has not been absolutely determined and programmed in advance by a subject … The child and the artist do not submit themselves to the play of becoming, knowing what they are going to create, only that they are going to create.”[11]  This sort of creative capacity was equated by Nietzsche with his much vaunted “innocence,” the generative innocence he sought and held to be the consummate testament to the life of “will to power.”[12]

 

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1884), the figure that Nietzsche utilizes to convey that which elevates itself—that which overcomes—is the Ubermensch-as-child:

 

The child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a scared Yes.

Yes, a sacred Yes is needed, my brothers, for the sport of creation: The spirit now wills its own will, the spirit sundered from the world now wins its own world.[13]

 

Close readers of Nietzsche emphasize that his symbolic child, while placed at the pinnacle of the process of self-overcoming, should not be understood as a model of subjectivity superior to all those preceding it.  The Ubermensch as Heraclitean child, in other words, is not meant

 

to explain human life in terms of some ultimate goal, either as history or of the individual, but on the contrary to indicate that such processes have no goal—are properly liberated or affirmed to the extent that they are recognized, joyfully, as open and indeterminate.  The identification of self and becoming that erases the opposition between self and action is what Nietzsche calls “life.”[14]

 

Soviet hippies’ version of Nietzschean becoming found its fullest expression in the notion of kaif, a feeling of elation—even transcendence—a high achieved through drugs, music listening, haptic experiences, and other ephemera.[15] Kaif—its ethos, its ability to open lifeworlds and enable dreaming—can be grasped nearly on every page of the notebooks of Azazello, nicknamed after the demonic character from Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita (1967).  In sketches, song lyrics, and original poetry that span nearly two decades, Azazello conjures up an ecstatic temporality, celebrating willful abandon and guileless destructiveness.

 

Azazello, self-styled Ubermensch, intrepid child-hero of poetry and art, was also a Winnicottian analyst of sorts.  Within the transitional space of his notebooks, between fantasy and reality, he played with genre and poetic verse in order to heal himself: to write himself back into existence after a deadening three years of incarceration in a psychiatric hospital in the latter 1980s.  From within the harsh reality of the psikhushka he mapped a path of fantastical, lyrical rebirth, mixing the vocabularies and sensations of children’s fairytales and legends with the songs of Jim Morrison and the Rolling Stones.

 

Winnicott wrote about the therapeutic encounter that, “where playing is not possible then the work done by the therapist is directed towards bringing the patient from a state of not being able to play into a state of being able to play.”[16]  Like almost all Winnicottian statements, this one is deceptively simple.  He was referring here not only to the broadening of the patient’s horizons, a spontaneous heightening of curiosity or the pleasure and newfound freedom of exploration.  Such moments certainly occur in treatment, and are welcome, but Winnicott meant something more fundamental.  For him, play is the spatiotemporal framework of the analytic session and makes psychotherapy possible.[17]  Psychoanalyst Marion Milner, who influenced Winnicott’s thinking, explained:

 

The frame marks off the different kind of reality that is within [the session] from that which is outside it … the full development of that creative illusion that analysts call the transference … Play in the analytic relationship takes place by the evolution of shared experience in an intermediate space, where patient and analyst have the possibility of finding, by a mixed process of invention and discovery, new ways of knowing and of being known that their starting-point gave no means of predicting.[18]

 

When we play, whether in the real world or within the analytic session, we weigh our options and act out potential outcomes in relative security, without impingement.  In a world where psychiatry was coopted by the carceral state for the purpose of social control, and in the absence of flesh-and-blood therapists, Azazello undertook his own cure.  As the infant uses its transitional object, Azazello used his notebooks, providing a material basis for the spatiotemporal dimension of kaif.  Like therapy sessions, the notebooks framed a locus of play and illusion in which to find ways of affecting an ever-encroaching Soviet environment—to seek the new and bear the loss of the known while maintaining hope.[19]

 

Hippies in Soviet Popular Culture

 

In the iconic animated film, Bremenskie muzykanty, the heroes enter on a donkey-drawn modish plaid suitcase-as-wagon to a rock and roll drumbeat and rhythm guitar.  The Donkey, wearing a matching plaid mantle of saturated blue and red, provides an occasional accompaniment of “la-la-la, yeah, yeah-yeah, yeah-yeah” as the other band members—a teenaged Troubadour, Cat, Rooster, and Dog on bass and electric guitars—sing their theme song:

 

There’s nothing better in this life,

Than to roam the world with friends!

In friendship struggles aren’t daunting.

We take every path!

 

We will not forget our calling –

To bring laughter and joy to others!

For palaces’ seductive domes

We’ll never trade our freedom!

 

Our floors are fields of flowers.

Our walls are giant pines.

Our roof – the clear blue sky.

Our good fortune – to live this fate!

 

The lush voice of actor and pop singer Oleg Anofriev belts out the tune as his character, the Troubadour, lies on his back atop the hurtling wagon, effortlessly strumming a guitar and swinging his leg to its rhythm.  Blinding yellow curls caress his neck, and a bright orange Baja jacket and matching embroidered bell bottoms hug his strapping physique: the young man is carefree, happy, and chic.  His animal friends, too, are decked out in the latest western fashions.  The white and black striped cap perched on the Donkey’s long blonde mane contrasts nicely with his plaid attire; the Rooster’s large cherry-red comb, over-sized belt buckle, and thick-rimmed blue glasses are decidedly rockabilly revival; the Cat’s colorful bowtie suggests psychedelic; and the floppy-eared Dog’s gold medallion, and black and red upright electric bass epitomize cool.

 

Before most Soviet children and adults had seen or heard of hippies they learned to recognize them by watching and listening to Bremenskie muzykanty on screen and records.  Although they perform circus acts for a vaguely seventeenth-century kingdom in the early part of the cartoon, the Bremen musicians of Soiuzmul’tfil’m communicate both sartorially and musically that they are a rock and roll band, one that manages to evoke both home and abroad by moving seamlessly among musical styles: from psychedelic rock to nostalgic doo-wop, so-called gypsy art songs and 1960s estrada to Beatles-style melodies and funk.  In their generic eclecticism the Brementsy truly resemble the first generation of Moscow hippies, who adapted flower children’s costume, musical taste, and gentle politics of peace and personal freedom to hardboiled Soviet conditions.[20]

 

Here I consider how the hippie culture popularized by Bremenskie muzykanty gave expression to a non-teleological time and space of play and becoming.  Both the original film and its sequel of 1973, Po sledam bremenskikh muzykantov,[21] distilled and presented to the Soviet public the worldview of Moscow hippies by linking the presentist and free-flowing worlds of children, traveling musicians, and animals in variously intricate and extravagant ways.  The temporality instantiated by the animators and composer Gennadii Gladkov through such linkages did not stand in diametrical opposition to the Soviet way of life.  Nor did the films’ values pose an overt challenge to socialist ideals: like actual Soviet hippies, they offered utopian depictions of friendship, love, egalitarianism, creativity, and spontaneous collaboration.  What they failed to portray was movement—or, rather, linear movement.  Instead of proffering a happy cadence of progress and the approach of a tangible and radiant future, the Bremen musicals enticed audiences with sudden eruptions of emotional intensity, a road going nowhere, genre mixing, and transcendence of generational logic through sincere, childlike outlooks and postures.

 

Bremen Musicians as Flower Children

 

Bremenskie muzykanty appealed to spectators of all ages, but one nevertheless wonders why the Gennadii Gladkov, Iurii Entin and Soiuzmul’tfil’m chose to evoke hippiedom in an adaptation of a folktale ostensibly aimed at children.  Indeed, the Bremen Town musicians of the 1973 sequel are markedly more hippie than their 1969 predecessors: the V neckline of the Troubadour’s shirt plunges further to reveal a larger portion of suntanned chest framed by an oversized pointed collar.  He and his girlfriend, the Princess, don crowns of flowers; she prances barefooted across meadows in a red skin-clinging micromini dress as their animal friends fish and dance around a campfire.  In the penultimate scene, the animal musicians perform psychedelic tunes for the kingdom while impersonating “foreign singers” in Jim Morrison wigs, pointed toe high-heeled shoes, kaleidoscopic shirts, giant sunglasses, and the inevitable patched bell-bottomed jeans.

 

A likely reason for the felicitous incorporation of hippie aesthetics and themes into these late-socialist animated films was the already established link between hippiedom and childhood, both in the popular imagination in the West and, as I mentioned, in Soviet hippies’ self-stylization and politics.  Juliane Fürst, in her oral history of the relatively small but vibrant Stagnation-era hippie scene, informs us that Soviet audiences were first introduced to the new subculture by the 1967 Rovesnik article, “Children with Flowers and Without Color.”  While the piece excoriated hippiedom as a capitalist diversion of youth from truly leftist activism, it also pointed to the affinity between childlike and hippie behaviors, and provided a detailed description of the predilections and attitudes of young Hyde Park hippies, “barefoot and clad in colorful … attire, in search of a life without money and materialism.”[22] The Moscow hippies affirmed their identification with children in 1971 by adopting the Day of the Defense of the Child as a special hippie holiday and insisting that they too were children, “the true subjects of the celebration.”  The same year, Fürst notes, Moscow hippies “planned a demonstration in defense of Vietnamese children and against the Vietnam war in front of the American embassy.”[23]

 

Nietzsche was not the only source for countercultural appropriations of the child. Children were especially apt symbols of generational rebellion against both capitalism and the socialist state because childhood, as delimited in the twentieth century, signifies a queer temporality, a period of delay, and a world apart from adult concerns.  Children allow adults to imagine a space of not-yet and, as theorist Kathryn Stockton suggests, sometimes grow sideways rather than up, forming horizontal alliances that eschew parental, domestic, or future-oriented temporality.[24]  In their supposed flower-picking innocence and through play with siblings, friends, and animals, real and figural children offer adults the possibility of a life and pleasure outside the normative family and law-enforcing state.[25] In the stalled time of childhood, hippies found a subversive potential because, in Stockton’s words, delay always betrays: “how can children be gradually led by degrees toward domains they must never enter at all as children?”  Paradoxically, children-as-innocents represent danger—the danger of managing their own delay, and of agency in their own pleasure.[26]

 

Many paradoxes also structured the lives of Brezhnev-era flower children.  Although their modes of identification and beliefs ran parallel to those of family and the state, hippies, initially in Moscow, and gradually throughout the major cities of the Soviet Union, forged lines of filiation, meeting places, and rituals in the very heart of educational, ideological, and cultural institutions: at Moscow State University, the Komsomol, and the Bol’shoi Theater.  Hippies called themselves a system, sistema, suggesting rigid structures and explicit rules but, really, the sistema was a loose and informal social network.  Soviet hippie culture took shape at specific public sites, friends’ apartments and in imitation of mainstream western youth culture (not always actual hippie aesthetics in the West).  Yet, it advocated aimlessness, a peripatetic life, and outsider status.  Initially, the sistema consisted of children from the Soviet ruling bureaucratic class but eventually the network grew more inclusive and by the mid-1970s faced arrest, caroused with queer youth, and shared spaces with gay cruising grounds.[27] Like actual children who engage in fantastical and strange play enabled by the benign neglect of nearby but preoccupied adults, flower children initially met and played rebelliously beside but in full view of their law-creating privileged Communist Party parents, managing to fashion rich emotional and aesthetic worlds.  When the longhaired Bremenskie muzykanty wandered onto Soviet screens, parts of these colorful, obscure hippie subcultures were made known and vivid to the wider public.

 

Real Existing Hippies

 

The archive of Azazello, hippie poet, artist, proud drug user, and boyfriend of the nomenklatura hippie muse Ofelia, consists of 36 notebooks of paintings, notes, song texts and contact details produced between 1972 and 1993.  It is a rich source of hippie sensibilities and material life.  Together with a collection of loose papers of original poems, the notebooks outline a coherent aesthetic and worldview at the center of which is an ethic of play and a temporality that privileges childlike ruthlessness, make-belief, authenticity, and spontaneity.[28]  They resound, too, with a yearning to grasp the object of primordial loss, to witness and capture the vanishing mediator, the in-betweenness of things: one’s own birth and death, the material sonority transmitting speech, the gaze that supports visual memories, the real of a childhood created retrospectively.  “Immense is the number of words / lost because of significance / inherent in them,” Azazello muses in his 1992 poem, “On Childhood”: “The best years are remembered / the way one thinks of summer / in springtime. / а tribute to sentimentality— / childhood. / after my birth— / for i was born, that much is certain— / eternity retreated into the realm of legends, / myths and fairytales became my signposts […]”  And, further in the poem, another reference to erasure, a fleeting gesture, that which is lost to memory or repression: “mental memos taken as mementos / abandoned or deleted in a hurry, / or burned upon departure.”[29] Similarly, in another, untitled poem, Azazello expresses an excruciating, impossible wish to recover the pieces of a shattered self, and for transcendence: “i am approaching the critical mass, / my own “EGO.” / i am approaching the start / of the final countdown. / i am approaching the borders of memory, / the regions where it becomes fictionalized. / i am not able to forget everything, / and it’s killing me.”[30]

 

Azazello’s hippie-as-destructive child is not incompatible with drug use, which enables the departure from linear time and actualizes a space and time of ecstatic play.  The notebooks are filled with drawing of broken clocks, trips to the moon, fairytale knights and Alice in Wonderland characters that signal the stoppage of linear time.  Because time is disrupted, gender and sexuality are as well.  Bodies are fragmented—often presented as part objects—most commonly as eyeballs pierced with needles and dripping syringes.  Human figures appear androgynous, naked and emaciated, and without genitalia.[31]  “When kingdoms collapse you walk and sing,” writes Azazello[32]: destruction is part of the creative process of becoming, where the future is so open, so vague and ever growing as to be unrepresentable.  The fluidity of time is rendered as pastiche and the blend of “adult” themes and children’s culture conveys an oceanic temporality: cats, poppies, castles, and multicolored kingdoms cover page after page.  Princesses, syringes, and Pierrots repeatedly illustrate a dark innocence (Figs. 1 & 2).[33]

 

Fig. 1: Az04, 1977-1978, 4

 

 

Fig. 2: Az04, 1977-1978, 11

 

“Time is out but time to live and love and sing loud” enigmatically serves as a banner atop drawings of clocks, a hippie swinging from a pendulum, harlequins and maniacal children.[34]  Ink bleeds and oozes over once crisply sketched portraits, giving some of the notebooks a palimpsestic quality.  Album covers are reproduced and song lyrics from the Beatles and Pink Floyd are transcribed.  An atomic cloud hovers over flower children dancing and playing music (Fig. 3).  Drug induced kaif is held up as the ultimate experience.  The hippie-as-child is a Spirit, a destructive force that invents a new world and transmits novelty itself among other flower children and also “adults.”  Azazello’s hippie manifesto declares:

 

We, the hippies, are the makers and creators of the New Spirit, which we pass on through pictures and drawings, poems and prose, through music, through song and dance, through outfits and ornaments, through relationships among ourselves as well as with the society of Adults.

We want to see ourselves united by a creative force whose aim is the creation of a Luminous Space that will overtake our Mind and Soul. We want our relationships with each other to be pure, without deception … Sincerity is the fulcrum of our relationships.

Each one of us carries the fire.  For some, it is brighter, for others—less so, others still don’t even know about the fire, but they have it nonetheless, even if just a spark. […]

Just as before, we reject violence and intolerance, conformism, hypocrisy, dishonesty and other muck that the Adults use in an attempt to raise others to be like them. These are not for us …[35]

 

In a similar philosophical statement, Azazello writes: “We force the smoke to crawl through our lips / into our lungs in quick eruptions, / we splash around our long hair / intertwined with the grass in the sun, / we’ve soared over the earth and are flying through the sky like the waning fire of the rainbows.”[36]  Hippies, Azazello tells us, are as pure as the elements, attuned to all that is experiential and sensorial.  Their creative productions carry messages over ever-expanding time and space.  

 

Azazello often endeavored to compose from the perspective of a child rather than an adult looking back on childhood.  Like a child at play, he focused on an elastic present—the immediacy and pulsation of the moment—and often denied generational time.  Juxtaposing references as diverse as children’s author A. A. Milne and American rock guitarist and singer-songwriter Jimi Hendrix, he lived and made art in an external yet close relation to late-Soviet culture.[37]

 

Fig. 3: Az21, 1982-1983-1985, 22

 

***

 

The notebooks and poetry of Azazello functioned, I argue, as a therapeutic project of self-expression and healing.  They allowed him to play with identity and also with time.  In the role of the Ubermensch-child who creates and destroys innocently, Azazello carved out for himself a space of freedom and fantasizing that transported the past into the present and expanded the latter, instantiating a reverberant temporality—what some LGBTQ scholars have called “queer” or  “ecstatic time.”[38]

 

Elsewhere I have written about the “queer temporality” of the Stagnation era.[39]  For its exponents in LGBTQ studies, queer temporality not only serves to communicate and theorize the experiences of ephemeral socialities, but also to mobilize them politically, bringing queer time into being.  The writings on queer time thus offer plans for political becoming, utopias-in-formation.  Jack Halberstam was among the first to grant the notion of queer time an extensive elaboration, attributing it to the AIDS crisis, which forced an “emphasis on the here and now” and an “erotics of the compressed moment.”[40]  Queer temporality in Halberstam’s view is a mode of time deeply invested in the present, undoing narrative and expanding the potential of the moment.  It is not structured by generational thinking and at odds with futurity.  Inattentive to a national historical past, cathecting the transient and the contingent, it means for some living in drug-induced “rapid bursts” or with the malleability and fanciful impression of Dali’s melting clocks.[41]  For Halberstam queer time offers opportunities for embodiments and subcultures that defy naturalized capitalist logics of punctuality, efficiency, and productivity and thrive “outside the frames [...] of [the reproductive] family, longevity, risk/safety and inheritance.”[42]

 

Similarly, Elizabeth Freeman, in Time Binds, described queer time as nonsequential, a warped chronology, contrasting it to chrononormativity, defined as “the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity.”[43]  Freeman also proposed the idea of “temporal drag”—a type of queer performativity that works against contemporary forms of pastiche by operating as a “stubborn identification with a set of social coordinates that exceed one’s own historical moment.”[44]  Temporal drag is a type of performance that instantiates anachronism, reviving disavowed and discarded modes of feeling.  Finally, Jose Muñoz drew on Martin Heidegger and Ernst Bloch to conceptualize queer time as ecstatic time—a “horizontal temporality that allows one to step outside oneself, to comprehend a temporal unity which includes the past (having been), the future (not yet), and the present (making present).”[45]  In conjunction with the notion of ecstatic time, Muñoz emphasized queer potentiality—“a mode of nonbeing that is eminent, a thing that is present but not actually existing in the present tense.”[46]  Somewhat differently from Halberstam, he viewed queerness primarily as the near future, the not-quite here that inspires hope and critical investment in utopias.

 

Muñoz’s dual notions of ecstatic time and queer potentiality are perhaps especially apt in an analysis of the Azazello materials.  Every notebook, paradoxically because of its attention to chronology (mention of contemporary albums, songs, and seasons), is not so much a space of timelessness as temporal elasticity, a suspension that nonetheless moves and transforms: between its covers, some of Azazello’s nostalgic artistic productions are a form of temporal drag, while others traverse periodizations, genre, and generational distinctions, dislodging meanings and recombining signifiers.  Such temporal and symbolic fluidity also gestures forward—toward the near future—to audiences who will aim to understand hippie community and values.  On the evidence, then, the notebooks were not only used as instruments of self-care; they were also conceived as an archive.

 

To view Azazello’s notebooks as archival from the start is to present a Winnicottlike paradox.  How does one create an archive if one’s way of seeing the world is grounded in playing and becoming, a hippie performance that disrupts the usual categories of body and time, and then vanishes?  What, precisely, do the notebooks hold?  Here again Muñoz is helpful.  In Cruising Utopia, he argues that queer acts like drag and voguing transmit queerness through fleeting gestures, movements, and soundscapes—a wink, a subtle twist of the hip, a tilt of the head, an accented remark, a thumping house music beat.  Those aspects of queerness, passed among performers and spectators, are left on the dance floor, on stage, at the club; and yet traces remain in the felt experience of participants, in muscle and sense memory—the lingering materiality of performance.  Muñoz builds an archive around such “ephemera,” evidence that could not easily be integrated into straight, above-ground life and written history.  He explains:

 

Ephemera comprise the temporary, the discardable, the gestural, the residual, at times the imperceptible … Think of ephemera as trace, the remains, the things that are left hanging in the air like a rumor.  I [am] making a case for a hermeneutics of residue that looks to understand the wake of the performance.  What is left?  What remains?  Ephemera remain.  They are absent and they are present, disrupting the metaphysics of presence.”[47]

 

Muñoz ends his book with an improbable rhetorical leap from Heideggerian ecstatic time to the drug MDMA, suggesting “taking ecstasy with one another, in as many ways as possible” as a means of effecting a timeless, queer collectivity.  He links the erotic and the sacred in the hope of inspiring a “fuller, vaster, more sensual, and brighter” political act.[48]

 

Might such a politics be of use in illuminating something essential about hippies and the Soviet culture they tried to escape, as it were, from within?  What is kaif, after all, if not an instance of ecstatic temporality, a hole in late-socialism, a dizzying potentiality?  The notebooks, one may well speculate, helped Azazello to stretch the zone of kaif long enough to capture its fleeting traces.  Their pages reek of cigarettes and are textured by irreverent wear and tear: a blood stain, a phone number scrawled over meticulously drawn art, water and ink spilled on a hastily sketched pattern for a blouse or blue jeans.  Each stroke of the pen that repeatedly drew faces, eyeballs, and sinewy hair and muscles, each ink blot that bled over English song lyrics meticulously copied, held onto and documented the ephemera of a pulsating, nonchronological temporality.  Azazello’s notebooks, like every “unofficial” (or, queer) archive conceived as such, preserved in partial and faint form the promise of a more ample subject—ahead of himself and with others—radically singular and connected relationally across time and cultures (Figs. 5 & 6).

 

Fig. 5: Az12, 1976-1977, 23

 

Fig. 6: Az12, 1976-1977, 39

 

Ecstatic Time or Death Drive? : The Ephemera of Hippie Culture

 

Azazello evoked ecstatic temporality through references to fairytales and childhood, animals and castles.  He and his “princess,” Ofelia, appeared on horses and among knights and kings in a place intimate yet far away.  Like a child, he engaged in repetitive play, rendering similar images over and over, as if chasing and failing to capture the ineffable and fleeting—kaif?  In the notebooks, animals and medieval fortresses flow from twisting 1970s bodies, making them capacious vessels of mythical events and personages.  Azazello and his fellow hippies thereby acquire bigger selves and a wider impact (Figs. 7-9).  Was this always a childlike fascination with repetition, or was it, rather, darkness and nihilism—a self-destructive idée fixe?

 

Fig. 7: Az04, 1977-1978, 22

 

Fig. 8: Az04, 1977-1978, 8

 

Fig 9: Az07, 1979, 6

 

Winnicott’s contemporary of Jacques Lacan also wrote about the paradoxical condition of subjectivity: a transient, primordial moment leading to permanent loss.  He asserted that one’s sense of self (and specular unity as such) is created through an internalized understanding of oneself as an object (I have, rather than I am, a body), a certain framing or delimitation of one’s perspective.  The subject of the unconscious depends on exclusion, difference, and reflexivity.  Fundamentally split, subjects view themselves from a gaze located elsewhere, a gaze supported by the social world and by language, which in turn lend validation and coherence to identity and self-possession.  In the aftermath of the mythic “the mirror stage,” the child sees himself from the vantage point of caregivers who nominate his image (“Look, that’s you!”), and seeks love and approval from others.  However, as we know from the myth of Narcissus, who drowns in an attempt to reach his own reflection, the mirror stage also inaugurates a mortal tension: if self-distance (and therefore time) collapses, and if the lost object feels too close, the subject’s existence is threatened.[49]

 

Subjectivity is located at the rims of the eyes, the mouth, and the nostrils.  The subject is an edge-condition and traces the drive’s circular route, where outside meets inside through voice, gaze, and smell.  The fantasy frame is maintained—one’s very autonomy and sense of reality are sustained—by an anchoring missing object (what Lacan called objet petit a), the impossibility of experiencing one’s own birth and death.  Illusory wholeness is achieved, in other words, because the subject does not see his own gaze, the back of his head, his eye sockets (and does not have to worry about them).[50]

 

What can be made, then, of Azazello’s repeated efforts to make visible his own gaze; to recover the lost object; to get to other side of the looking glass?  He writes:

 

when i finally die, and I won’t die anytime soon,

although i will certainly die young,

i want to behold my eyes as a child

in the broken mirror

that the wind knocked down and shattered.

or could it be that i shattered myself,

that i trampled and crushed my own self?

that i mixed myself with my own blood,

having drowned in my black blood

my grownup eyes

reflected in the mirror shards.[51]

 

Against the tenets of Nietzschean overcoming, and in conflict with playing, Azazello here longs to turn back the clock and reacquire his childhood eyes, darkened and broken through adult living.  In a similar vein, in the notebooks he frequently draws the eye, separated from the body; sometimes it appears pierced by a syringe, sometimes marked by a line, arrow, or conical shape—a representation of the gaze (Figs. 10 & 11).  I am inclined to view the recurring eyeballs and needles as depictions of Azazello’s great theme: the return to wholeness through drug use and intoxication.  In chronicling his efforts at transcendence, Azazello tries recursively to capture the ephemeral encounter with the drive, and the very cause of his desire: rapturous kaif.  It “drowns him in his own blood,” overwhelming him with simultaneous pleasure and pain.  The archive thus can be seen as a compulsion to repeat, the testament and result of a futile project.  An effort to seize the object that makes possible the visual field through its very exclusion is destined to end, as it did for Narcissus, in death.

 

Fig. 10: Az07, 1979, 13

 

Fig. 11: Az12, 1976-1977, 20

 

Epilogue: ‘Stagnation’ as Ecstatic Temporality

 

Ofelia died in 1991 of a drug overdose, her body found in the river Setun’.  Her relationship with Azazello, marked by addiction and violence, ended around 1982.  But the Princess of Bremeskie muzykanty represents a different trajectory.  While under her father’s aegis, she inhabits a realm not of a specific generation, but representative of generational time itself.  It is pastiche, a pastel mixture of bygone times and towns, ruled by a dithering King who perpetually carries between two pink fingers an egg in a holder—a singular soft-boiled egg that he sometimes slurps with a spoon.  Clearly symbolic of feminine brittleness and reproduction, neither the egg, nor the kingdom proves appealing to the Princess.  In trying to soothe his daughter and after briefly abducting her in the 1973 sequel, the King proposes rather pathetic salutary measures: “Your condition is hysterical, try this dietary egg, my dear girl … or maybe we’ll send for the doctor.”  The Princess rejects the King’s offer, and with it the bondage of oedipal striving, the feminine gamete, and growing up (or old).  Thanks to the prompt rescue efforts of her dear animal friends, she soon escapes once again to the temporal domain of the hippie Troubadour—to all that is present, free, and eternally novel; and to the queer time of infinite delay, hippie exuberance, colorful desires, and planning-free, animal-like existence.  The makers of the Bremenskie muzykanty films satirized Soviet norms, to be sure, and gave expression to western influence and an imagined West.  But, more than that, I have argued here, they employed hippie aesthetics and sensibilities to make strange, expand, and enliven the era of Stagnation—their own Soviet time and space.