The Long Return

In this piece, I reflect on identity as something unfinished, layered, and resistant to clean allegiance. Through a paired holiday recommendation, Julia Ioffe’s Motherland and the film An Englishman Abroad, I explore exile, return, and the persistence of what we believe we have left behind. Drawing on my own life across countries, and on a formative encounter in the Hermitage with a small Scythian golden horse, I argue that identity does not disappear when circumstances change. It waits. These works do not offer nostalgia or comfort. They offer recognition. They remind me, and perhaps the reader, that home is often plural, memory is active, and what once shaped us tends to return when we finally make room for it, though rarely on the same terms. 

A condensed summary is provided below. The full essay, including references, is available only as a downloadable PDF.

The Long Return.

1. Identity today

As nationalism is resurgent in ways that feel violent and intellectually flawed, it is worth remembering that the world rarely offers clean identities or uncomplicated allegiances. Most lives, certainly mine, are shaped by overlap, contradiction, and residue. 

That is why I recommend this pairing for the holidays: Julia Ioffe’s Motherland and the film An Englishman Abroad. Each approaches the question of belonging from a different angle, yet together they illuminate something I have come to recognize in my own life: identity moves in circles rather than straight lines. What seems to vanish often returns, altered but intact. We do not usually choose these returns. They arrive when something in us finally makes space.

2. A Personal Story

I write from experience. I have lived in several countries and none replaced the others. Each left a residue that never fully faded, even when I believed I had outgrown it. In the spring of 2005, I traveled from London to St. Petersburg, officially to attend a shipping conference. Unofficially, I had maneuvered the trip so I could finally spend time in a city I had not yet allowed myself to know.

St. Petersburg at the time felt suspended between eras. Imperial façades, Soviet scars, and new wealth coexisted uneasily. That sense of temporal layering mirrored something I was beginning to understand about myself. One afternoon, I entered the Hermitage through a quiet side route and found my way into the Department of Prehistoric Culture, far from crowds and guidebooks. In the Scythian and South Siberian section, I found what I was looking for: a small golden horse, no larger than a clenched hand.

That object stopped me. The Scythian smith had captured not motion, but the tension before motion, a stillness charged with life. Standing there, I was returned abruptly to a childhood memory, a gift that ignited a longing for a country I did not know, its literature, and its history.

Looking back, I see how Russia and horses moved in and out of my life like a tide. Forgotten for years, buried beneath careers and cities, then reappearing unexpectedly. That they should converge in that quiet cellar in St. Petersburg now seems inevitable, though it would not have felt that way at the time. Had someone told me thirty years earlier that I would spend my fifties breeding and raising horses, I would have laughed, though perhaps with a trace of recognition.

3. Two suggestions for the holidays.

This sense of delayed return informs how I read Motherland. Ioffe’s book is a century-spanning account of modern Russia told through the lives of women, including her own family. It is both intimate and unsparing. Her perspective, shaped by emigration and dual belonging, allows her to explain Russia without sentimentality. The book ends on a melancholic note, one that aligns closely with my own view of the direction in which we are heading. When people ask me how to understand Russia, I often say simply: read Julia Ioffe.

From page, I turn to screen. An Englishman Abroad, written by Alan Bennett, tells the story of Guy Burgess, the disgraced British spy living in Moscow exile. The film captures his loneliness, his charm, and his quiet despair. Burgess longs for an England that no longer exists, yet remains bound to it. The film is often funny, sometimes painful, and deeply humane. It understands exile not as heroism, but as a condition.

4. Not a monolith.

What links these works, for me, is not nostalgia. It is recognition. Both refuse the comfort of clean belonging. They portray identity as fractured, persistent, and unresolved. Over the holidays, they offer a reminder that identity does not resolve itself into a monolith, and that what we once left behind often waits, patiently, to be encountered again, though never on the same terms.

The full essay is available only as a downloadable PDF.