I have always been interested in the possibility of knowing the future. After all, if prediction is possible, it means that future is predetermined, it is written down somewhere prior to its occurrence.
I am inclined to believe in the possibility of such determination because of my own experience with subconscious premonitions.
My early years were spent in USSR, a country from which at the time no one ever emigrated. When I heard the combination of words “Russian emigrant”, I always envisioned a person who left Russia during or right after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Like in the French Revolution, aristocrats were killed and persecuted by the new regimes. Thousands escaped and found themselves in foreign countries, stripped of their status and wealth. Soviet propaganda showed them working as doormen in Paris restaurants.
Soon after, the gates of Russia were closed and no one could emigrate.
In the middle of 20th century no Russian could imagine that this situation might change in the foreseeable future. So in my mind I couldn’t imagine that one day I could become an emigrant. This idea had never consciously occurred to me. I have no doubt about it.
Nevertheless, twice in my youth the idea of emigration hit me, jumping suddenly out of my subconscious, like Punch out of the puppet booth. In both cases, especially in the second, it happened at very important moments of my life, moments of the extreme emotional stress.
The first case involved a study of the English language. I obviously had no talent for foreign languages. I had been studying English in preliminary school, high school and two universities a total of 16 years. And at the final exam in the Film School I couldn’t remember the word “good”.
I had been writing poems and therefore could not help being interested in English poetry. I tried to read English poets, searching nearly every word in the dictionary, as my vocabulary was close to zero. So, of course, I didn’t manage to read much. Still several verses, that I read being still in high school, managed to touch me personally so much, that I translated them into Russian. I remember these lines of my translation of Byron’s “Childe Harold” even now:
Adieu, adieu! my native shore
Fades o’er the waters blue;
The night-winds sigh, the breakers roar,
And shrieks the wild sea-mew.
Yon sun that sets upon the sea
We follow in his flight;
Farewell awhile to him and thee,
My Native Land—Good Night!
A few short hours, and he will rise
To give the morrow birth;
And I shall hail the main and skies,
But not my mother earth.
Prior to my emigration, I never again translated poetry from Russian to English.
The second case occurred at one of the most important, if not the most important moment, of my life.
The sacred dream of my young years was to become a student of Moscow State Film Institute. At that time, only a person who had a diploma of the Institute could work as a film director in USSR. Every year 12–15 young persons were admitted to director’s department of the Institute. They were picked up from the entire multi–million populated of USSR, other communist countries and developing countries, which regimes were friendly to Communists. As Soviet government was at the moment openly anti-Semitic – Jews such as me practically had no chance to get into this Institute.
To understand how important this examination was to me, I can say that I felt that passing this exam was literally a question of life or death.
The candidates were not informed in advance what they will be asked to do at the exam. It was classified. So I felt a nervous tension unequal to what I ever experienced in any other situation.
We were seated at desks. A stack of paper was placed in front of each. We were instructed to write a story on any subject. Theme, we were told, is irrelevant. The only thing that matters was the story should have emotional impact delivered in the form of cinematic imagery. So, they told us: Choose what you care about and what you can best imagine.
I already said that I didn’t care about the subject of emigration. I even had never had a single thought about the subject.
Still, the subject immediately popped out of my subconscious and I started writing without hesitation.
I envisioned the moment when an emigrant, who lived most of his life outside Russia, comes back to his home.
The professors of the Film Institute loved my story: I was accepted as a student. I could not explain why I had chosen the story, a subject so unexpected and so distant from my life.
A few years after this exam, I started thinking about the choice of country of residence. Then a few years further along an official possibility for emigration opened for Jews alone, and I left the country with confidence that I would never come back. At that time it was impossible to imagine the possibility of an emigrant being permitted to return.
The Soviet Union dissolved and I returned to Moscow for the first time after 17 years of absence.
Then I actually experienced the very emotions that I had described in my story during the preliminary examination to the Film Institute.
Does this mean that my future was predetermined and the mental stress released information about the future hidden in my subconscious?
Or are premonitions just our secret desires, hidden for the time in our sub-consciousness, and become reality only because we have subconsciously prepared this reality?
EDITOR: Tsukerman returned to Russia on a wave of international critical acclaim for his movie “Liquid Sky”, a cult classic. Two decades later another movie that he co-wrote and directed, “Perestroika” was in part inspired by his own emotions upon returning to Russia. “Perestroika” can be rented through NetFlix. Surprisingly, the very popular “Liquid Sky” is not available from this source.
