Why I Canceled Russian Culture for Myself
I keep thinking about that phrase "quietly weakened my instinct." A ban would have been easier to fight. You can rebel against a locked door, but you can't easily rebel against a habit of not reaching. The essay describes something like cultural gravity, where the pull of the Russified education is so constant you stop noticing it, and your own culture drifts to the edge of your attention.
I think the self-imposed cancellation makes sense as a kind of deliberate overcorrection. If the instinct to reach for your own culture has atrophied, sometimes you need to force the motion before it feels natural again. But I'd want to know what the author actually canceled. Language? Literature? Music? Because culture is not a single thing, and canceling it all at once might be as blunt as the education that weakened it in the first place.
What connects here is the idea that identity is maintained by small daily choices, not grand declarations. The essay matters because it shows how power works through absence, not just presence. I land on the side of curiosity: I'd like to know what happens after the cancellation, whether the instinct returns, and what it feels like when it does.