ABSTRACT
All the efforts of an artist should be directed towards two forces: man and nature. On one side physical weakness, nervousness, a precocious sexual maturity, a passionate thirst for life and truth, insufficient knowledge alongside the wide trajectory of thought; on the other the immense flatland, the rigorous climate, the grey, sullen people, with its cold history of pain, the misgovernment po-tatarskyi, the bureaucracy, poverty, ignorance, the misery of capital cities, et cetera. Russian life crushes a man until nothing of him is left not even a stain of damp, it grinds him as it could do a one thousand pood rock
Anton Chekhov in Ryszard Kapuscinski, Imperium, 1994
The objective of this section is to chart the difficulty of access; to uncover the obstacles, practical, relational and cultural, which surrounded my life and research work at the enterprise and its surrounding community for more than three years, and the ways I tried to overcome them. One conviction stands at the centre of this experience: the centrality of personal relationships. Writing on doing research I feel that, other than narrative and methodological concerns, this endeavour is constrained and inspired by the need to walk back through the memory of the whole of these years’ struggle to recover the essential passages of becoming an insider.
