Embrace Sad Russian Boy Season

It's gonna be cold, it's gonna be grey, and it's gonna last you for the rest of your life.

The Melt is a newsletter by, about and largely to entertain Jason Diamond. Hopefully you also like it and will consider subscribing and sharing this post.

Today it’s sunny and I feel great besides the fact that it’s the middle of November and I would really love to be layering up right now, but it’s a little too warm. The thing is that it’s an autumn warm, so it’s not really warm or chilly. I can’t really tell what it is, but I know it is certainly not proper Sad Russian Boy Season.

I’ve been tweeting a little about Sad Russian Boy Season as sort of a joke for the last few weeks. People have been talking for the last few years about Christian Girl Autumn with its pumpkin spice lattes and Gilmore Girls feel and, to be honest, I felt a little left out. I felt like me and my people—the people that look nothing like the Christian Girl Autumn trope; people who might consider the cartoon character Daria a hero; people with good beards; people who multiple books that are over a hundred years old every year; people that go to Starbucks and order black tea, etc.—needed our own thing. And so, here we are.

This might be an ongoing dive into this idea, but the first thing I have to say is that you 100 percent do not need to be Russian. I myself am, technically, of Russian stock, but only because one of my ancestors was living in one country one day, then the next day it was Russia — or the other way around. I forget. Then they had to leave because. well, history. Either way, as you probably know by now, I’m more run from the Cossacks Russian. Yet while I’m a big ol’ mutt of Jewish genes, I tend to default to my Russian and Romanian-born ancestors the most and tell people my family come from those places instead of trying to explain the whole Mountain Jews thing or “I think one part of my family was Austrian but they said they were German…or maybe they said they were German and that was a lie because Eastern Euro Jews were sort of looked at as hicks and German Jews had better standing before, you know…Hitler.” It also doesn’t hurt that I grew up around a lot of Russians and that when I traveled to the old country for the first time, I had a real Paul Simon “angels in the architecture” moment whenever I’d spot a perfect example of Stalinist architecture. For whatever reason, I’ve just always felt a real connection to Russians. My guess would be the very simple explanation that Russia is a lot of things, but most of all, it is very weird. I know that simplifies stuff on the most juvenile way, but that’s the best way to put it. Russia is weird. It has been around in one form or another for centuries, and has been invaded and taken over, and reset and redone countless times over. It’s had all kinds of different rulers and has embraced various ideologies and been home to numerous groups over the centuries. And on top of those things that I boiled down to the most basic possible way I can as an admitted outsider, the weather is not so great. All of that, I have to imagine, combines together in some way to create this large, difficult to understand thing that is Russia.

I’ve been thinking a lot about all of this because of an upcoming New York mag/Grub Street piece I’ve got publishing this upcoming week, but also because the idea of everybody being a little more Russian makes sense to me these days. That’s where Sad Russian Boy Season comes in. See, Sad Russian Boy isn’t sad in the emo sense. Sad Russian Boy Season is an embrace of the fact that you have no idea what the hell is going to happen tomorrow, so you may as well sit around sipping vodka with your friends tonight. I know that sounds very Robin Williams telling his students to seize the day, and it is, in a way—just without that aww shucks, everything is going to be OK thing Americans seem so fond of. Sad Russian Boy Season is embracing the fact that things might very well not be OK, and you’re just going to have to deal with that when you get there. But for now you’re alive and that’s worth being happy about.

So, what is the Sad Russian Boy Season starter pack? Let’s start with this painting of Vsevolod Garshin that Ilia Efimovich Repin painted and you can go look at if you want to walk around the Met. This is maybe the purest distillation of Sad Russian Boy Season’s entire feel from the fact that Garshin looks like Jon Stewart, to the writer’s sad life and death to the fact that, for some reason I’ve never totally understood, Penguin picked the painting to go on a cover of one of the best Sad Russian Boy Season novels, Oblomov:

Oblomov, you say? And yes, I do say Ivan Goncharov’s 1859 masterpiece, one of my favorite books ever. A book, that is…actually funny? A book that, along with other Russian works like Eugene Onegin and A Hero of Our Time, laid the groundwork for everything from A Confederacy of Dunces to Larry David? Yes to all of that. Oblomov and the other superfluous Russian men of the 19th century aren’t sad, per se; it’s more of a general malaise hanging over them. The cynical bourgeois of these books really have it all compared to their countrymen, yet they have nothing at the same time. They’re broken and they don’t even realize it. I’ve always had the feeling that’s a deeply American trait as well. So why not embrace it with a warm bear hug? Eat something smelly, drink something strong and then go for a long walk in the cold. Jump in a frozen lake or let somebody slap a a bushel made of oak leaves all over your body.

What’s most important when it comes to Sad Russian Boy Season is to remember you don’t need to be sad to embrace it. Instead, it’s remembering that the world is a sad place and there’s really nothing you can do about that. All you can do is keep on living and trying to squeeze a little enjoyment out of every moment as best you can.