The “salt” of life

Abstract

AbstractIn 2015, during the cease‐fire in Ukraine, Misha, a Cossack, a veteran of Afghanistan and Chechnya, and a “volunteer” in the ongoing war, waited impatiently to be called back to the front, smoking in his truck parked across from his apartment in St. Petersburg. Misha's commitment to a life of combat is an invitation to think of war not as an interruption of ordinary life but as an ongoing, corroding presence in contemporary Russia. In turn, his truck's liminality, moving between home and front, pushes us to reconsider domesticity in its relationship to this ongoing presence of war. From the perspective of Russia, domesticity does not appear to be an obvious object of aspiration and a stable space of return “after war.” More poignantly, domesticity turns out to constitute the shifting ground of relationships at play when people negotiate ethical commitments and achieve a form of attachment to life—what Misha called the “taste” or the “salt” of life.