Why should I read Michael Idov?
Because he is Russia's answer to Dave Eggers.

What a bear says when he sees a couple making love in the forest




Now that educated Russian discourse has all but emigrated from print to the Web (taking especially to the criss-crossing blather streams of LiveJournal, which looms surprisingly large here), it was only a matter of time before we discovered the bane of every English-language Internet forum: the macro meme. 

Going into the origins of the term "macro" is an exercise in tedious arcana; the important thing is that it means an image posted as part of a dialogue. For instance, if I wanted to vent my frustration with my opponent's dimness, I could a) say so, or b) do a Google image search for the word "moron" and post the first result. Voila: a macro. A kind of emoticon on steroids, with a whiff of found art. (Pitchforkmedia.com, a taste-making music site, has recently pioneered a video macro: their review of a new Jet album, in its entirety, consisted of a YouTube clip of an ape rather nonchalantly pissing in its own mouth.)

A macro meme, then, occurs when the stars align just right – and a single image grabs the imagination of millions. The picture becomes a hieroglyph: a valid unit of speech with a communally agreed-upon meaning. On the American Web, this happened on truly grand scale with a photo of a certain snow owl. Head cocked, beak ajar, the bird could have been surprised, or scared, or ornery; the anonymous meme creator thought it looked incredulous. He or she enhanced the image with the words O RLY – instant-message shorthand for "Oh, really?" Within months, O RLY took over the world: The owl showed up whenever someone somewhere said anything silly, or controversial, or painfully obvious. The meme's added appeal was that you could slap the letters O RLY on any image of anyone looking shocked, or mischievous, or arch. Or, as it happened, Fox News pundit Bill O'Reilly.

This year, the Russian Internet got its very own O RLY. As our experience with, say, Marxism should show, we tend to over-intellectualize things, take them to the utmost logical limit, stage a vicious backlash, a backlash to the backlash, and never quite move on. So our first macro meme is a doozy.

What's fascinating about the original image – by now as iconic as the Mona Lisa in certain circles – is that it's equal parts schoolyard doodle and genuine lubok, naïve folk art. Russians love to groan about being reduced to easy clichés by Westerners who just don't get it, but here we are with our first macro meme and, what do you know, it involves a bear. The artist depicts, in childishly prurient detail, an interrupted pastoral outing wherein the beast surprises a couple making love “en plein air.” As befits a Russian folk tale, however, the bear appears to be pretty friendly or at least intellectually on par with his human counterparts. Its front paws splayed out in a gesture of greeting, it utters the immortal phrase, rendered in a somewhat Westernized comic-book speech bubble: "Preved."

The bizarre appeal of Preved is very similar to O RLY, but it's also more complicated (of course). On the text side, we have a horrendous misspelling of "hello," implying a very provincial, blue-collar pronunciation. More importantly, there's a method to this misspelling – you basically replace all voiceless consonants with voiced ones, a trick which can be easily applied to virtually any other word in the language. This makes no sense whatsoever in English, but try it in Russian (dry id in Ruzh'n) – it's as addictive as the spelling affectations of hip-hop patois. Превед, кросафчег (a corruption of привет, красавчик - hello, gorgeous) became an instant national catchphrase – but then again, almost anything touched by this padonsky ("gutterpunk") spelling did.

But wait, there's more. On the visual side, we have an endlessly replicable gesture: those arms, outstretched in a "gotcha" move or else in preparation for a bear hug. Sure enough, thousands of photos floating around the Net, notably including one of Belarussian dictator Lukashenko, got the Preved treatment. Next up was a wealth of Preved-themed art across the media, including at least one haiku:

желтая листва /
скрипит под коленями /
сюрприз косолап

(Yellow foliage /
Is crunching beneath my knees /
Lo! Ursine surprise).

Rocker emeritus Boris Grebenshikov toyed with the idea of titling his latest album in gutterpunk-speak. In short, Preved, with its intertwining currents of mangled language, primal myth, fairy tale, schoolyard and barnyard has become a perfect storm of sorts. Since then, there's been other attempts to launch memes – I recall a fluffy white cat inserted, Zelig-like, into various historic scenarios; but none quite ruled the Russian Internet quite as totally as the mighty bear did, albeit for a brief moment.

So: Salud, кросафчег. 

— Michael Idov

Read the new issue (with a bear on the cover)