What are you waiting for, Zhdun? - Village Magazine

5 2

July-August 2018

T

HE FRIENDLY chap waiting patiently on the city bench pictured

is called Zhdun and Zhdun has an unusual penchant, or compul-

sion perhaps, for waiting. It’s in his name, Zhdun is a play on

‘zhdat’, the Russian verb to wait, and so it’s his inescapable

reason to be, at least until that something special comes along

to satiate that which we know not what.

It’s not even certain that he’s a he, he could be a she, or a hermaph-

rodite or or some form of inspired zooidal spacecraft transporting the

millions and billions but whatever the truth, we are quite sure of one

thing, Zhdun is a dab hand at playing the waiting game. He (for conveni-

ence) has become a ubiquitous ﬁgure in the annals of Russian and

Ukrainian sub-culture (where he goes by the name of Pochekun), social

media, even the political sphere, where he sits, waiting, watching, with

hands folded and seemingly mute, alien cum seal cum future face of

humanity.

Our alien friend may have won the limelight in Mother Russia but he

does not hail from her vast shores. He is Dutch by birth, created by sculp-

tor Margriet Van Breevoort and was originally given the intimidating

moniker of ‘Homunculus Loxodontas’, embodying patience and making

appearances in hospitals and children’s wards where he has been teach-

ing the young the virtues of sitting still and waiting

His misappropriation and depiction led to legal proceedings and the

subsequent granting of temporary usufructuary rights (right to use) to

Russian internet company CD Lands.

Regardless of the controversy, it is fair to say that the winsome alien

has been richly, if not legally, re-imagined by the Russian internet com-

munity, in whose space he subsists, sedentary and often silent: ‘the one

who waits’.

Zhdun is cute, his large imploring eyes bespeak the adoring child, or

the doting pet, or the large neotenous features so seemingly de rigueur

with Japanese women. If one is to mine the inexhaustible ground of the

Russian online world one will ﬁnd our cuddly meme endlessly mired in

romantic entanglement or selﬁe liaison, with captions such as “wait for

me”, “I’ll wait for you”, “please, don’t make me wait”, “you’re the one I’m

waiting for”.

Not being able to answer back he may make the ultimate companion,

the lifemate-in-waiting,

saecula saeculorum

. Any snap can be given a war m

dollop of frivolity with the inclusion of the cuddly and dazzlingly passive

From the modalities of a Russian meme to the universal malaise.

By Shane Fitzgerald

What are you waiting for, Zhdun?

What are you waiting for, Zhdun?

From the modalities of a Russian meme to the universal

malaise.

Shane Fitzgerald

The friendly chap waiting patiently on the above city

bench is called Zhdun and Zhdun has an unusual

penchant, or compulsion perhaps, for waiting. It’s in his

name, Zhdun is a play on ‘zhdat’, the Russian verb to

wait, and so it’s his inescapable reason to be, at least

until that something special comes along to satiate that

which we know not what. It’s not even certain that he’s

a he, he could be a she, or a hermaphrodite or or some

form of inspired zooidal spacecraft transporting the

CULTURE

Zhdun, and to ask why him in par ticular would be akin to raking

over the hermeneutical minutiae of Ronald McDonald before

buying a Big Mac; you can if you wish but it really isn’t

necessary.

And if that was the full extent of the zhdunian repertoire then

no doubt he would fail to be a ﬁgure worthy of enquiry. How-

ever, the alien has a darker side and will reward those who wish

to peel back the layers and look inside, redolent of the mysteri-

ous allure of an r-rated matryoshka.

The meme spills over from the kitsch fairground of the selﬁe

to the unseemly twilight of the Russian political game, where

the real and unreal meet in the performance of power, even spin-

ning back asymptotically to the Soviet memoriam, the past life of the

Russian Federation and a metaphysical space open to boundless inter-

pretation. Here we ﬁnd Zhdun recast as implacable judge passing down

sentence to Alexey Navalniy, the totemic leader of the non-systemic oppo-

sition, or as one of the court ofﬁcers looking on with dispassionate

disinterest, now lithe and angular.

Alternatively, we see the alien wrapped in a Soviet-red headscarf

warning computer users of the dangers of idle chatter or barging into the

particularly esteemed company of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin one

evening in Yalta. In his political garb Zhdun sits in the Ukrainian parlia-

ment with a smattering of deputies waiting for the country’s business to

take centre stage, or is pictured in Saint Petersburg looking on at the

seemingly never-to-be-completed building of a football stadium; he even

sympathises with Vladimir Putin as he is kept momentarily waiting by

Recep Erdogan at a meeting in Turkey, “Well, waiting for the next

election?”.

From play to politics the central feature remains the same, the experi-

ence of waiting, whether for the impossible fulﬁlment of teenage fantasy

or re-modulated as the ceaseless, never-ending revolving door of Kafka,

where participant is stripped of agency and doomed to walk the wheels

of a big machine. Zhdun may play the role of system representative,

meting down justice and edict from the impasse of a celestial bureau-

cracy, the alien’s amorphous features akin to the f aceless void, unfeeling,

uncaring, as Crowley’s ‘dweller in the abyss’, Choronzon, standing between

the world of man and self-realisation.

Conversely, Zhdun may be cast as citizen, his vague visage signifying

the everyman, the unknown soldier, condemned to an anonymity he is

powerless to affect as he looks in at the party he will not be invited to,

in some sort of absurd political aquarium where the exhibits make the

rules.

‘It is Zhdun’s very malleability, his amorphousness, that lends itself to

such re-interpretation. The alien’s features impute a passiveness, a pas-

sivity, an inability to act or move or speak or resist; symbolically, he has

no mouth, and therefore, in effect, he cannot speak or be spoken to, he

has no legs, he cannot move or be moved. All we have is a large ill-deﬁned

circle with two large eyes watching on unblinkingly, while the two arms,

pathetic and disproportionate, straddle the stomach with a resigned

acceptance. This may inculcate the futility of resisting that which is irre-

sistible, or indicate the limbo experienced by the human animal as it ﬂoats

about, trapped in the interstices, when in thrall to large dehumanising

institutions.

It is this sense of waiting, this feeling of being impossibly silenced yet

inescapably implicated, as the patient anaesthetised yet horribly awake,

that strikes a chord with the Russian cyber generation. This afﬁnity may

be couched in a mocking absurdist humour or charged with a genuine

subversive will.

Navalniy's campaign against Dmitry Medvedev

This internet generation and its offshoots have been called the post-

Bolotnaya youth of Russia, after the square where protests broke out in

Moscow in 2012 following Putin’s inauguration. It has been said that

Zhdun stands for this segment of Russian society;

highly aware yet wholly marginalised, plugged-in

yet seemingly powerless.

This burgeoning civil society emerged from the ranks of the youthful,

urban internet-users of Yekaterinburg, Vladivostok and Moscow, who

sought not revolution but a reformation of state institutions and appara-

tuses, an end to corruption and something more representative for their

democracy to represent. Those that would seek change have been increas

-

ingly pushed to the side and silenced; by the 2014 interdiction on the

freedom of assembly, by media collusion, foreign agent laws and a gen-

eral circumscription of civil society.

Although, as seen in May this year in protests across Russia, again fol-

lowing the inauguration, the space for genuine action and protest still

remains for those willing to step forward, take the risk and cleave open

the necessary cavity. It seems that there has never been a machinery built

large enough that the right group, at the right time, cannot manage it.

It should also be said that these Zhduns, these indefatigable lookers-

on, many of whom are wholly disenchanted with the never-ending Putin

story may also use their impressive critical faculties for observing the

moving world elsewhere. Nowhere is this truer than in Ukraine, where we

have two crises inextricably intertwined, the Ukrainian and the Ukraine.

The former crisis attesting to the internal inconsistencies and disharmony

that plague the country, the latter the power games taking place bet ween

an expansive US using twenty-ﬁrst century universalist language to

achieve nineteenth-century imperialist aims, a naïve and mind-bogglingly

inept EU and a largely reactionar y Russia drawing a line in the sand across

a country that is equal parts brother and equal parts self, all for the soul

of Ukraine.

These post-Bolotnaya Zhdun youths may seek to extricate themselves

and Russia from a thinly-veiled authoritarianism, but that does not mean

they will so willingly give up their Russian pride and run into the arms of

a West that forever says one thing and does another, raising hypocrisy to

the status of exalted fetish, and forever refusing to see things from Rus-

sia’s point of view.

The alien’s folds unfurl to reveal not only the vagaries of triﬂing love

and the joyous meaninglessness of memolog y but also the deeper malaise

of a generation not being heard. They watch on with an almost self-debas-

ing voyeurism as power inexorably perpetuates itself, and perhaps Zhdun

stands not only for the dull enervation of a real and imagined incapacity,

but also for a people who would ask questions, who do want answers,

who do want change.

But what is it that they want, what is it that they

are waiting for?

It is not too hard to imagine what twenty-something, urban, plugged-in,

socially-aware Russian internet users want when they look out at the world

through the prism of their computer. More than likely, much like the rest

of us, it begins with those little things that have the largest proportions

– free and unfettered access to information, unrestricted internet, the right

to mess around on social media, exchange ideas, discuss bits and pieces

and engage in the time-honoured art of bullshitting. At a higher level, an

July-August 2018

5 3

Wait for me

Zhdun is cute, his large imploring eyes bespeak the

adoring child, or the doting pet, or the large neotenous

features so seemingly de rigueur with Japanese women.

If one is to mine the inexhaustible ground of the

Russian online world one will find our cuddly meme

endlessly mired in romantic entanglement or selfie

liaison, with captions such as “wait for me”, “I’ll wait

for you”, “please, don’t make me wait”, “you’re the one

I’m waiting for”.

Not being able to answer back he may make the

ultimate companion, the lifemate-in-waiting, saecula

saeculorum. Any snap can be given a warm dollop of

frivolity with the inclusion of the cuddly and dazzlingly

passive Zhdun, and to ask why him in particular would

be akin to raking over the hermeneutical minutiae of

Ronald McDonald before buying a Big Mac; you can if

you wish but it really isn’t necessary.

Waitforme

5 4

July-August 2018

honest and trustworthy police force, strong social supports, decent pay.

At the highest, open and pluralist media, consistent rule of law and a

rules-based constitutional order, transparency of government and free and

fair means of deciding those who will occupy the seat of power; a people

being listened to, a people with a voice.

This does not and should not mean that Russia and Russians aspire to

every single value or belief that may be bounced about abroad. Respect for

conventional family and religion, traditional gender roles, pride in one’s own

culture and history, the desire for strong and stable leadership: these are not

necessarily values that every person will espouse or hold, but many Rus-

sians, both young and old, believe in them deeply and presumably have every

right to.

But there are also universals that transcend isms and time, and that is why

it is quite possible to make some presumptions as to the aspirations of many

younger Russians. The need to be protected, the need to be secure, the need

to trust and be trusted accordingly, the need to speak and be listened to,

the need to feel free and be respected. These are universals. It just so hap-

pens that some societies allow for their existence and ﬂourishing somewhat

better than others. And it also just so happens that some societies allow the

lesser qualities of humankind to abound more than some others.

Zhdun too has a universal aspect. It has been perspicuously ventured that

the alien’s disquieting purgatory relates also to the universal inertia of

modern man, or more to the point, postmodern man, 'Waiting for Godot'.

So terminally aware of every permutation, every eventuality, ever y success,

ever y f ailure, he slips into a debilitating lassitude, as Vladimir and Estragon,

Didi and Gogo, in Beckett’s seminal meditation on the stasis of modern

man; trapped between the antipodal limitations of life, birth and death,

salvation and oblivion, creation and destruction, the ﬁnitudes that mediate

his existence in a world where all can be imagined but nothing is possible.

These essential ﬁnalities, these grand universals, of fer naught but the slow

inevitability of science and the phantasmagoria of a religion that no longer

holds for the critically thinking. And so, all he can do is wait, tragically

aware of the limitations of his own mind and the meaninglessness of an

intelligence that would be so hyper-aware and yet so terrif yingly inept, and

yet still he waits, hoping for something to break the boredom and impend-

ing doom, until perchance he learns how to fashion a world of fun and

value in which he can learn to forget.

There is a beautiful word in Russia that per fectly encapsulates this vague

sickness of the soul, ‘toska’ (ттттт). The word itself deﬁes convenient trans-

lation and perhaps it will be prudent to defer to Vladimir Nabokov, “No

single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and

most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any

speciﬁc cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing

with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness,

mental throes, yearning. In particular cases, it may be the

desire for somebody or something speciﬁc, nostalgia, love-

sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui,

boredom”.

What are you waiting for?

Zhdun, it turns out, then fulﬁls the frissons of fanciful love,

where an oddly compelling alien meme will wait to the end

of time for your company alone. The one who waits may also

stand for a Russian people who await a meaningful role in

the political sphere. And if the Russian people, in part or in

large numbers, seek to be part of the big picture, to be

included in the wheels of power and to have their questions

answered, can we, on the opposite side in what is sometimes

called the West, say that we are ﬁrmly included when it

comes to making the big decisions that shape all our lives,

that someone up there takes account of us, that we are lis-

tened to, that we are satisﬁed, that our democracies are

fully-functioning and healthy, bestowing their goods and

rights equally, that we have got all we expected and wait for

nothing more? Zhdun may be an entity born of the Russian

constellator y mind but the message transcends borders and

imposes its imperative on all those tired of waiting, in Russia

and beyond.

Every morning, I’ll be waiting

And if that was the full extent of the zhdunian repertoire

then no doubt he would fail to be a figure worthy of

enquiry. However, the alien has a darker side and will

reward those who wish to peel back the layers and look

inside, redolent of the mysterious allure of an r-rated

matryoshka.

The meme spills over from the kitsch fairground of the

selfie to the unseemly twilight of the Russian political

game, where the real and unreal meet in the

performance of power, even spinning back

asymptotically to the Soviet memoriam, the past life of

the Russian Federation and a metaphysical space open

to boundless interpretation. Here we find Zhdun recast

as implacable judge passing down sentence to Alexey

Navalniy, the totemic leader of the non-systemic

opposition, or as one of the court officers looking on

with dispassionate disinterest, now lithe and angular.

Alternatively, we see the alien wrapped in a Soviet-

red headscarf warning computer users of the dangers of

idle chatter or barging into the particularly esteemed

company of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin one

evening in Yalta. In his political garb Zhdun sits in the

Ukrainian parliament with a smattering of deputies

waiting for the country’s business to take centre stage,

or is pictured in Saint Petersburg looking on at the

seemingly never-to-be-completed building of a football

stadium; he even sympathises with Vladimir Putin as he

is kept momentarily waiting by Recep Erdogan at a

meeting in Turkey, “Well, waiting for the next

election?”.

WaitingforthenextelectionI’m

waitingforametrotobebuiltinChelyabinsk

From play to politics the central feature remains the

same, the experience of waiting, whether for the

impossible fulfilment of teenage fantasy or re-

modulated as the ceaseless, never-ending revolving

door of Kafka, where participant is stripped of agency

and doomed to walk the wheels of a big machine.

moved. All we have is a large ill-defined circle with

two large eyes watching on unblinkingly, while the two

arms, pathetic and disproportionate, straddle the

stomach with a resigned acceptance. This may inculcate

the futility of resisting that which is irresistible, or

indicate the limbo experienced by the human animal as

it floats about, trapped in the interstices, when in thrall

to large dehumanising institutions.

It is this sense of waiting, this feeling of being

impossibly silenced yet inescapably implicated, as the

patient anaesthetised yet horribly awake, that strikes a

chord with the Russian cyber generation. This affinity

may be couched in a mocking absurdist humour or

charged with a genuine subversive will.

Wearewaitingforchangewithsubversivemusician

ViktorTsoi.I’mwaitingforanexplanation#He’snot

Dimontoyou.

Navalniy'scampaignagainstDmitryMedvedev

This internet generation and its offshoots have been

called the post-Bolotnaya youth of Russia, after the

Zhdun may play the role of system representative,

meting down justice and edict from the impasse of a

celestial bureaucracy, the alien’s amorphous features

akin to the faceless void, unfeeling, uncaring, as

Crowley’s ‘dweller in the abyss’, Choronzon, standing

between the world of man and self-realisation.

Conversely, Zhdun may be cast as citizen, his vague

visage signifying the everyman, the unknown soldier,

condemned to an anonymity he is powerless to affect as

he looks in at the party he will not be invited to, in some

sort of absurd political aquarium where the exhibits

make the rules.

ZhdunasChurchill,RooseveltandStalinlookon

laughing.Navalniy–PrisoneroftheCastle

‘It is Zhdun’s very malleability, his amorphousness,

that lends itself to such re-interpretation. The alien’s

features impute a passiveness, a passivity, an inability

to act or move or speak or resist; symbolically, he has

no mouth, and therefore, in effect, he cannot speak or

be spoken to, he has no legs, he cannot move or be

Every morning I'll be waiting

We are waiting for a change with subversive musician Viktor Tsoi; I'm waiting for and

explanation #He's not Dimon to you

Zhudun as Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin look on laughing;

Navalniy – Prisoner of the Castle

Waiting for the next election; waiting for a metro to be built in

Chelyabinsk

CULTURE

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