The unexpected power of fleeting friendships

From Aristotle on, we’ve learned to see long-lasting relationships as more valuable. But what does that leave out?

In Russian, a poputchik is a stranger you meet on a journey who you end up confessing everything to because you know you’ll never see them again. Like the English “fellow traveller”, poputchik was repurposed to describe Marxist sympathisers, but the original meaning intrigues me most.

The idea that we might safely unburden ourselves to strangers, or have their secrets bestowed upon us, is deeply embedded in Russian culture. It’s there in Leo Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata: as the windows tremble and the tundra passes in a hypnotic blur, Pozdnyshev tells his life story of marriage, betrayal and murder. Or in Venedikt Erofeev’s 1970s satire Moscow to the End of the Line, in which a retired cable fitter drunkenly hops a train and unfurls a sublime monologue on politics, society, love and, of course, vodka. A Russian friend jokes that this is “therapy, Soviet-style”.

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