8.1 Introduction: ‘The End of Something’

For more than twenty years, the Russian opera diva Anna Netrebko was leading an iconic transnational life, working in most prestigious theaters all over the world and living between her three luxurious homes in St Petersburg, Vienna and New York. In all her social media, she was advertising this lifestyle as highly enjoyable and enriching. She was stressing how much at home she was feeling both in the West and in Russia, advocating a cultural mix of Russian and European dressing styles and life habits (Mattison, 2005; LIFE, 2022). She became an embodiment of the mass media fairytale about a transnationally (and even supra-nationally) integrated cosmopolitan with the Cinderella roots, who lives as if above the state while also in every state of her professional membership (Smirnova, 2022). And when the global world started to break apart in the milieu of the post-2022 geopolitics, Netrebko firmly declared that she would stay above the politics, still hoping to be integrated in every national culture as she always used to be (Netrebko, 2022). To her great surprise, this cosmopolitan membership was suddenly interrupted by the political loyalty requirement at both ends. And Netrebko found herself sidelined first in the global opera industry because of her political neutrality, and then in Russian culture because of her attempt to restore the disrupted European career (KP.RU, 2023). This example shows how easily super giant stars can be thrown down from the sky, and leads us to look into a rather tragic story of their integration. Netrebko’s de-idolization was perceived by my informants as ‘the end of something’—not exactly the end of their careers but the end of something that had been keeping their work and lives together: they were ‘perplexed and disoriented by the loss of something precious that was running away’ from them. They clearly saw their ‘own lives getting out of control’ until they started to see that this ‘pivotal something’ was actually their integration.

How could it happen that such a highly calibrated artist as Netrebko was turned in a jiff into an international scapegoat? How could it be possible that in March 2022, she was suddenly disintegrated everywhere, with rather challenging options of reintegration? Perhaps we should ask whether elite migrants are, in fact, ever integrated. Their stories may provoke us to think about integration in unexpected ways. This chapter explores integration experiences of migrant artists that refer to the intersecting spaces of their western work, everyday life at destination, transnational fandom, and home return. I illuminate the integration problems that my informants have and the coping strategies they use to enable their own integration, which can be compared with a cosmic iceberg, or celestial comet, by its tremendous and often catastrophic impact upon the migrant’s career and wellbeing. I argue that integration is the main—although significantly under-utilized—agentic tool of elite migrant networking.

8.2 ‘Not on Stage—Not on Page’: A Game Called Integration

8.2.1 Gender and Sexuality: The Price for Integration

For almost eight years, Lana has been married to her husband, who is bisexual. Although she does not regret this matrimony, she notes on the difficulty of maintaining its public face in different parts of the world and in different spaces of her life:

When I am at work in Italy, everyone knows who we are, and they are fine about it – about accepting us the way we are. But when we are invited to our Italian friends or neighbors’ parties, we have to tell lies and pretend to be a normal couple. And when I travel back home, it is even worse.

In relation to the gender identity and to the space of performing sexuality and gender relations, the integration of Lana and a few other informants becomes the most controversial. Lana admits, as also supported by mass media (Ross, 2017; Salazar, 2018; Woolfe, 2019), that in their professional circles in Italy—that is, within the global and Italian operatic industries—it is not necessary to concoct a new gender identity for herself or for her husband: ‘Here in Europe there is a very strong gay lobbying in opera, and the majority of musicians are generally very tolerant to sexual minorities’. Thus Lana does not have to pretend to be the wife of a straight man when she is among her Italian colleague musicians, who are accepting gay singers and mixed-orientation partnerships as a norm in their professional networks. However, when she and her husband visit his native town in the south of Italy, especially on the occasion of his high school reunion, he presents himself to his childhood friends and to the neighborhood of his upbringing as a traditional heterosexual man. So does Lana have to sustain this myth about her husband’s heterosexual preferences and heterosexual promiscuity:

If my husband’s old school friends and relatives figure out that he is attracted to men, it will be a disaster for him and for his entire family. It will destroy their lives. I mean all their social relations will drastically change. Everything will change to the worse. That is why, he has to assure all his childhood friends that he is fond of women and that he is a lady-killer who is cheating on me all the time. His home-towners like this kind of stuff, and I have to pretend to be a happy and forgiving cuckold wife. This is part of the game called ‘our sacred marriage’.

In other words, this is part of the game called ‘Lana’s integration’. As she further explains, her husband was eager to marry her because he needed to sustain his public face for a broader Italian society, to please his family and relatives and to create an identity shield for himself and for them. At the same time, he also cared a lot about Lana and wanted her to stay in Italy and to make a career there. This matrimony was thus a tool for the integration of both of them. ‘Although everyone in his family knows about his sexual orientation, they still deny the truth and want to sustain this “ideal traditional family” myth. You know, they say “not on page—not on stage!”’, notes Lana, ‘His family will not accept his choice and our family the other way’. Her mother-in-law once said that she was happy that he had eventually settled down and married a good-looking girl like Lana so no one would remind her of this family shame: ‘“Do whatever you want but don’t make us blush in front of our neighbors”’, as Lana recalls the words of her mother-in-law addressed to Lana’s husband. ‘So I have to concoct many things about myself when I step into the bigger world out of my cosmopolitan but petit opera house’, Lana sadly adds. She confesses continuously telling lies to her husband’s friends and relatives about waiting for her macho husband at home nights long, about throwing hysterical scenes of jealousy and eventually forgiving him each he comes back, and about loving this macho type of man in spite of anything:

I keep doing this because these lies make our marriage appeal attractive to the wider public. We cannot just tell them that my husband never cheats on me with another woman and that he only has one lifetime serious relationship with a man who is in the same position. Everyone would think of us as perverts. This is pretty much the same as in my home country, although not as tough.

In fact, the worst part of Lana’s ‘integration lies’ is related to her home visits. In her country of origin, she is not only forced to spin lies about her intimate relations with the husband but also to participate in dirty jokes about gay people, which are rampant not only in her hometown neighborhood but also in her professional circles back home. ‘I have to laugh when I hear all these dirty jokes about sexual minorities and their so-called perversion and even to contribute to such conversations with some sort of approval such as a smile’.

For example, Ada recalls a couple of disturbing sexist encounters she experienced during her professional activities back home. Once she was rehearsing a love scene with her tenor partner and performing faked theatrical kisses on stage. Their stage director suggested that they should “give the audience, at least, one real kiss to make it all look authentic because people generally like this kind of stuff”. Ada was hesitant, thinking that her husband might not like this idea. She was feeling uncomfortable about such performance of intimacy. However, her colleagues started to persuade her to make this kiss, joking that her husband “should not mind because the tenor partner was gay”. They kept telling her that it would be “no big deal—just like kissing a woman—because they, the gays, are not really the men—they are like women”. Breathing with difficulty while trying to maintain her self-control, Ada ‘kept swallowing the air in [her] whimsical attempts to squeeze a smile as a response’. ‘I was afraid to confront them because I needed this job’, she says, ‘So I didn’t want to set those people against me by any slightest hint of protest’. The other time, when she was rehearsing with her co-national pianist already in Italy, they were discussing a male colleague who was a famous singer. Ada noted how comfortable he made her feel every time they were working together. The pianist responded, “No wonder: he is gay. You can talk about anything with them because they are like us, women. It is like an all-girls company”. ‘I squeezed a smile, pretending that I liked the joke’, confesses Ada:

But everything was burning inside me ready to explode. I have many gay friends who always support me, and at that point I felt like I was betraying them with my silence. But that woman pianist was really very good and I was afraid to damage our relationship by openly confronting her. It is indeed very difficult to find a good pianist who would understand the nature of your voice and your professional needs. I am now so ashamed of myself. I have a friend who is married to a bisexual man. And I know that she also works with this pianist. I cannot even imagine what she feels when she hears this.

The conspiracy of integration becomes even more overwhelming when my female informants such as Lana are forced by circumstances to tell fake stories about their husbands’ lady-killing adventures to their unsuspecting mothers and to their whole family clan, who are unaware about the actual truth:

While my mother-in-law knows the truth about us and our marriage and even supports us morally in private, my own mother knows nothing about how we live, and I am afraid of enlightening her. I am just horrified by the consequences. I cannot even imagine what will happen if she discovers who we actually are and how we live.

Lana and other women involved in mixed-orientation partnerships admit ‘feeling guilty about betraying’ their husbands by such lies: ‘Of course, my husband understands all this and, consequently, tries to avoid any possible confrontation either by playing the “right husband” role or by not attending family events whether it is possible’. Lana usually travels home without her husband. However, when she was was to bring her husband to her parents’ wedding anniversary, she had instructed him well in advance on how to behave and what to say. ‘Luckily, he does not know my native language except maybe for a few words. Still there are many tacit things that cannot pass unnoticed, and he can feel them’.

Another informant who is in the same situation as Lana is concerned about the transnational upbringing of her child:

My child is growing really fast, already asking me why dad is not travelling with us. And I do not know what to say. I also must teach the double standard of respecting the gay rights when we are in Italy and disrespecting them when we are in my country of origin. I do not know how to explain that in the country of grandma we should keep quiet and smile in response to such jokes while in Italy we should cut them off.

‘It is even worse for a gay man’, notes one of my male informants:

When I am in Italy everything is fine but when I travel back home, I hear dirty jokes about men like myself and I have to pretend that I am fine about joking this way. When I do not share such jokes, other men back home look at me with suspicion, and it terrifies me. I keep asking myself what would happen if anyone somehow figured out the truth. I hope it will never happen, and I keep working on it not to happen. I know it is not nice to tell lies about yourself like this. It makes me feel so bad. But this is the only way to survive and to be accepted. It break me apart and I sometimes do not know anymore who I am.

There are four gay men among my informants (at least, those who have admitted this in the interviews), and all four confess continuously experiencing a sharp emotional pain associated with their reintegration on both professional and personal grounds not only in Russia but also in other former Soviet republics. The informants acknowledge that this sexism comes from governmental messages, which are strongly supported by operatic circles. ‘On the one hand, you can sometimes hear a new stance about gay people’s contributions to the world of art. Yet in parallel, there is another—much stronger—rhetoric of mockery at them. So you cannot trust anyone back home’.

8.2.2 Ethnic Stigma: The Diva and the House Maid

However, the crucifixion of the gay man is not the end of their reintegration story. In their integration, the space of sexism invariably intersects with racism, especially for ethnic women with Asian roots, including Kazakh singers. This is probably grounded in ethno-sexual stigmas attached to female migrants within the sphere of domestic work in Italy, which is dominated by Filipino and Ukrainian women (Marchetti, 2014, 2022). For example, twelve of my female informants admit being taken for domestic workers by their neighbors in Italy. As explained by one of the interviewed Ukrainian women singers:

I was buying a cup of coffee in a local coffee shop. Hearing my foreign accent, the shop assistant asked where I was from. After I had responded that I am from Ukraine, she inquired if she could hire me as a domestic worker to take care of her elderly mom. She did not even ask me where I work – she just assumed that I should be a domestic worker for her mom because I was a Ukrainian woman. After I had explained to her that I was a professional opera singer, she only shrugged her shoulders and took my order silently, without any apology. After that, I started to say that I was from Russia or Belorusy, although now it is even more problematic. That is why, since February 2022, I have been introducing myself to local people as coming from Kazakhstan.

Narrating a more offensive experience of her Italian disintegration, Zuleika recalls successfully performing the lead role on stage under the standing ovation. When she was leaving the opera house from the back door, the same person who had given her flowers an hour before told her that he was looking for a new Filipino domestic worker and asked if she would like to work as a domestic worker for his ageing father, ‘He did not recognize me without makeup. Yet my Asian facial features automatically made him assume that I was a Filipino woman’. As Zuleika further notes:

It actually happened to me more than once. One day my colleagues and I were having a cup of coffee in a nearby café. Hearing our conversation, a woman who was sitting over the adjacent table interfered, saying how much she liked opera and asked my colleague for an autograph. Then she looked at me and offered me the job of domestic worker in her house because her previous Filipino nurse had just resigned. Incredible! My Italian colleague, who was actually singing a secondary role, was asked for an autograph and I, the leading soprano, was asked to do the crap work! This encounter made me feel like falling apart. That is why I eventually decided to repatriate. Under other circumstances, I would have not returned.

8.2.3 New Spaces of Political Integration

Apart from the interviewees’ gender-and-ethnic integration, a large problem zone has been recently created around their political integration in the aftermath of the post-2022 geopolitics. My Russian informants who support Russia and/or feel uncomfortable about denouncing its polity, admit suffering in Italy from the public pressure to criticize Russia. ‘It often happens to you that, when you go to a coffee shop or an open market, someone asks you where you are from. You either have to tell a lie about originating from a fake place and pretend to be an ethnic Russian from somewhere in Kazakhstan or Georgia. Alternatively, you have to tell another lie about hating your own country. Either way is very painful’. However, the Russian informants who share the western rhetoric beyond the international sanctions now feel extremely disintegrated in Russia during their home visits.

And who are actually those whom my informants tell lies or the truth? Apart from their local communities at origin and destination with whom the interviewees maintain physical contact, there are also transnational digital communities of their fans to which migrant-artists invariably seek integration. Artists’ fan office is a specific and highly politicized space of their integration and transnationalism. ‘Fandom integration’ is how I would like to define the reciprocity in the digital (social media) communication between artists and their fans all over the world.

At first sight, it may appear that this phantom space is only virtual (not real), like an innocent online game; and autonomous (free from politics). However, the post 2022 reality of the global opera and geopolitics shows how easily this “free virtual” space of artists’ communication with their invisible fans can become politicized and manipulated by structures of power, bringing forward tangible consequences for the migrants’ lives. The visual innocence of this artist-fan communication is akin to the nucleus of a comet, which the astronaut can see only after it strikes him/her. ‘I never thought that managing my social media would be so provocative’, says Rurikh, ‘Before the war started, I used to think that my social media were only for bringing me closer to my fans, catching their attention and thus creating higher attendance rates for my performances. I never suspected that the way I write to my fans would be used as a political weapon against me’.

A few years ago, their fan office activities might indeed appear apolitical, although not without a distinct national profile. If we, for example, compare the social media and the blogging spaces of my informants and those of US transnational singers, we can clearly see that the latter do not advocate the cosmopolitan lifestyle associated with global opera. They mostly share the technicalities of their operatic productions and nuances of their voice technique. On the contrary, migrant-artists from the former Soviet bloc widely disseminate the cosmopolitan and transnational lifestyle by publicizing to their fans their dress tastes, spa resort preferences, luxurious trips, diasporic parties with ethnic homeland cuisines and transnational family values. In fact, Anna Netrebko never shares details of her voice technique but only those of her transnational lifestyle. Moreover, there is now a strong investment in female singers’ sexuality as a requirement for their fandom integration.

Throughout the centuries, there has been always a historical cult of male sexuality in western opera as illuminated by the success of the Italian castrati divos (such as Farinelli), Enrico Caruso, Mario Lanza, Mario del Monaco, Dmitry Hvorostovsky, Erwin Schrott and Jonas Kauffmann (Segond, 1981; Clement, 1989; Wisenthal, 2006; Wilson, 2010; Kotkina, 2017). While the Soviet fans were under the spell of their own idols Sergei Lemeshev and Vladimir Atlantov (Kotkina, 2017). In contrast, the contemporary operatic fandom has experienced the re-symbolization of sexuality toward the operatic femininity. To be well integrated on the transnational level among their fans, the woman singer from the post-Soviet bloc should sustain the sexuality myth of Cinderella who first suffers in poverty at origin, then makes a fantastic social mobility through her sexuality and the life-changing encounter with an influential transnational patron. For example, the younger Anna Netrebko was noted to rival the sexuality of Audrey Hepburn (McGrath, 2007) while the Georgian soprano Nino Machaidze was referred to by her fans in a striking resemblance with Angelina Jolie (Weber, 2011). These images have penetrated the fandom space of the post-Soviet migrant singers all over the world.

Looking into their social media, I kept thinking that, before 2020, their fandom integration had been indeed weakly politicized: their language of communication was understood precisely by their fans in different countries and the disseminated sexuality of their sexuality and cosmopolitan lives (as tools of their integration at both ends) appeared transparent everywhere. The success of their fandom integration was added by their pandemic posts about the importance of staying at home and sustaining the healthcare integrity of their communities at destination and origin and also caring about the wellbeing of older generations who were more fragile to the covid-19 impact.

The politicization of their fandom integration started to escalate with unprecedented velocity in February 2022, in the aftermath of the shifting geopolitics. In the light of the extra-polar public opinions both at origin and destination about this global military conflict, my informants immediately grasped the reshaping contradictory requirements for their European integration and homeland reintegration, which they started to mitigate through their fandom integration, or through the maintenance of their social media. Those strategies included writing in a different national language for the fans back home and for the fans located in Italy and Europe.

Another strategy was to differentiate between the audiences for specific posts and to limit the fandom for a specific post. For example, when they were criticizing Russia and its polity, the post was designated for western fans and was written in Italian. The Russian sentiments were either not expressed at all or limited specifically for Russia-based fans. ‘I feel like a schizophrenic’, says Rurikh, ‘who one minutes says one thing and five minutes later makes an entirely different statement’.

I now try to write to different groups of my fans on different days of the week: for example, I communicate with my Russian fans on Monday-Tuesday and to my other fans on Wednesday-Thursday. However, it is not a panacea at all. All this extra-polar communication does not only make me feel very dirty and amoral but may also be dangerous. What if I crisscross the posts and send a specific message to the wrong audience? Imagine that I may write, by mistake, to my fans in Russia about hating my own country and glorifying Ukraine! That would be a disaster for me as person (as a son and brother) and professional. I will never be able to sing in Russia again.

Some informants from Russia or Belorusy avoid the topic of political or national loyalty in their communication with fans. ‘However, they [fans] still provoke me to respond to such messages, asking for my opinion, tagging me in their comments about Russia and the sanctions’, says Ada, ‘and if I do not respond, they may unfriend me and start writing bad things about me in their own social media, which are out of my control, so other people would not like to be my fans. The same about my Italian fans’. The expanding logic of pathological integration has made Ada and other Russian interviewees creative in their mitigation strategies. ‘I have eventually invented a trick’, notes Stas:

I may write a response to a specific comment, for example, in the middle of the Italian night when everyone is sleeping in Italy (in Russia it is already the late morning or early afternoon hours), keep it for a couple of hours and then delete it. And it works this way. But you must be careful because some of your fans may have insomnia and may actually read your midnight posts. So I try to delete them faster and also to restrict the access to them.

8.3 Truth or Dare?

‘Everything is so complicated. In Russia, I have to lie about my own sexuality while in Italy I dare to be who I am. Then I have to lie about my political solidarity in Italy. And my fans make it even more complex. I wonder if it is ever possible to dare to tell the truth about yourself every time without the consequence of exclusion?’ (Male informant from Russia.)

Several years ago a global opera star from the former Soviet region made a derogative Facebook post about sexual minorities back home. That anti-gay blog was widely criticized in the global opera circles and mass media, following the termination of the singer’s western contracts (Cuthbertson, 2014). How could a cosmopolitan artist make a statement that clearly contradicted the ethos of the expanding global opera industry? Since I never had a chance to talk to that singer, I cannot tell whether this post was an outcome of authentic reintegration, qualifying the singer as a sexist – or an act of pathological reintegration, pointing to the artist’s vulnerability within the sexist polity of the orthodox homeland.

There is, however, some truth behind it – the truth that the world of opera is very precarious as totally dependent on the world politics and also on the state power. In fact, global opera migrants often experience such sexist and other discriminatory encounters back home, which become their turning points and change their transnational lives forever. This example illuminates the the nexus between integration and reintegration: migrants’ reintegration at origin can significantly affect their integration at destination.

It can be also vice versa, as the cases of other migrant-artists how. For example, when I was reading newspaper articles about Anna Netrebko’s post-2022 fluid positionality (KP.RU, 2023), I was asking myself why mass media and her Russian fans never tried to understand her motivation. It was assumed that her integration in the West and her reintegration in Russia should be disconnected and unproblematic. The main problem is that wider audiences often have no idea how problematic, contradictory and interconnected elite migrants’ experiences of (re)integration can actually be. ‘This is so unfair!’, said Zina when we were discussing Netrebko’s story, ‘No one tried to understand her as a woman and as a mother! Everyone knows that she has a disabled, autistic child, who will never be well served and educated in Russia. I think she was “betraying” her homeland for her child, to keep him safe and sane. This is what any normal mother would do. This what I would do’.

My Russian informant, who has a young daughter with mental health issues, also confesses:

I cannot raise my girl in Russia, where there are no adequate resources for children like her. There she would be a social outcast, a person of the second brand. Whereas in Italy, she receives good educational services and develops like a normal person. She is a special child who needs a special attitude, which simply does not exist in Russia. It is very tragic but opportunities for people like her simply do not yet exist in my home country. That is why, I did criticize Russia in 2022 to keep the opportunity to stay and work in Italy and to raise my daughter there. I know this does not make me look good. But I am just the mother. Who would dare to judge me for this?

Fox and Mogilnicka (2019) call such experiences ‘pathological integration’—or engagement in a wrong—or ‘pathological’—social behavior such as racism, xenophobia, forced solidarity or sexism with the purpose of being accepted by (or integrated in) a society that is afflicted by and is normalizing negative social forces. As an example, they illuminate how migrants learn and engage in acts of racism in the UK, in order to achieve a better integration in this country, which is penetrated by various forms of racism and xenophobia (ibid). However, one may ask what is viewed as a pathology. And the beauty of this vision of integration is, of course, in the eye of the beholder. Not all my informants complain about forcefully learning and participating in the above noted acts of racism, sexism or anti-patriotism. Some interviewed men admit having the sexist bias about gay people or the racial bias against Asian nationalities. For them, such sexist and racist discourses become the acts of their authentic (re)integration rather than the so-called ‘pathological integration’, or disintegration: ‘To be honest, I feel uncomfortable about pretending that I love all these gay and non-white people. If you want to build your career in Europe, you must learn to be cosmopolitan. Luckily back home you may be yourself’.

‘I have already reinvented myself once from traditional woman to the post-modern wife of a bisexual man’, says Lana:

It was difficult but I now feel authentic about this. And now I have to continuously refashion myself back again between here and there. At this point of my life, I just want to remain myself without any further metamorphoses. Now I want to be known as the wife of a bisexual man, who is my husband and a nice person. But I have to tell lies. The only person with who I have been honest in my local community was the mother of my child’s school friend.

Lana admits, to her own shame, that, because of her privileged mobility, she was never able to attend the parents’ meetings in their school or make friends with other parents and mothers:

It is only during the pandemic lockdown, when I was staying at home most of the time, that I started to chat online with the mothers and became friends with one of them. We found that we had very much in common. With her, I was able to open up and share intimate things. She was a single parent who used to be in the same marital situation as myself. And she was advising me on not doing stupid things (such as telling lies) that had once destroyed her own marriage. Unfortunately, our friendship was short-term: it interrupted after the pandemic because I had to resume my normal life – the life ‘on the wheels’.

In the lives of my informants, there was indeed a short period of community engagement during their pandemic lockdown—a controversial story of their integration and networking.

8.4 Pandemic Integration: A Privilege Taken Away or a Missed Chance?

Looking into the impact of he global pandemic upon my informants, let us think about a well-off English stockbroker who arrives in the faraway island Tahiti in hope of becoming a true artist and in search of his niche. Deadly ill and self-isolated for several years, he creates his magnum opus before he dies. Based on the life of the vagabond painter Paul Gauguin, the famous novel The Moon and Sixpence by William Somerset Maugham resonates with many real-life examples of talented people creating their masterpieces in the conditions of isolation. Their list includes the cholera-quarantined Russian poet Alexander Pushkin and the KGB-exiled Soviet poet Joseph Brodsky. Their stories also make me think about international opera singers such as my informants, quarantined in Italy throughout 2020. As the Covid-19 pandemic had dramatically escalated, the country went into forced lockdown in March 2020, a few days after the closure of opera houses and the cancellation of all artistic events.

Faced with the Covid-19 lockdown, many transnational opera singers from the post-Soviet bloc quickly became fervent advocates of the #stayathome strategy in Italy, where many of them had chosen to be in that difficult moment of time. ‘Italy is my home now. It is my second native land, a place where I should be at this moment’. ‘I’m traveling back home today, to my Milano, and as the rest of Italy, I will stay home’, wrote one of them in her public blog. This affirmation of Italy as the second home is a harbinger of their integration provoked by the pandemic—the pandemic integration. Pandemic integration may sound like an oxymoron: in fact, the rhetoric of quarantine and isolation appears contradictory to the socialization-advocating logic of integration into the local community. However, the digital society in which we live for a large part of our life may offer alternatives. We can further ask to what extent these alternatives are valid in terms of providing agency with new ways to and whether pandemic integration (which quickly brings in positive but short-lived outcomes) has been a good thing for elite migrant-singers.

On social media, both young stars and giants (including all my informants) immediately started to act as the leaders-by-example and the interpreters of the global #stayayhome strategy. They were not only inviting their fans both in Italy and at origin to remain indoors: they were also sharing how they themselves were living their daily lives in the milieu of the lockdown. They were persuading admirers to follow their suit by speaking about their daily routine of doing indoor sports, helping their own children with homework, cooking meals for their spouses and partners, cleaning their house with their own hands for the first time in many years, or simply thinking aloud about the nature of art and life. My informants admit having enjoyed this rare opportunity to reunite with the family or to (re)decorate their houses, and thus have shown how staying at home can be a ‘luxury’.

And staying at home, they had a chance to spend more time socializing with their neighbours, parents from the school community and teachers online. Although digital, this format of socialization allowed them to get to know the people from their community much closer and even initiate friendships and kindred spirit relations such as the mother solidarity or women solidarity. With their ‘new’ friends, they were continuously discussing various critical issues related to their marriage, intimate relations, raising children and schooling while also triggering their interlocutor’s interest in classic music. In their article about Russians living in Australia, Akifeva et al. (2024) note the propensity of talented but unsuccessful migrant-artists to engage in voluntary community activities such as teaching or disseminating art as a substitute to their broken careers. However, for my informants, pandemic integration was more than a necessity, more than a second choice. It was their first-choice pastime, which made them happy as persons and professionals who were changing the world. In this sense, their pandemic integration had allowed them to arrive at the ultimate value of integration—the creation of a community of authentic mutual interest and respect. Although this community was created through digital means, it was not imagined. It was real and living together through the pandemic. On a short-term basis but the pandemic integration had created much stronger, although strange and short-lived, community bonds than their homeland gravity. It was their special pandemic gravity that had brought them together with their families and fans in an unprecedented moment of global artistic and interpersonal intimacy.

Moreover, thinking about the global goal of public health (Triandafyllidou, 2023), they were continuously disseminating video-messages to multiple audiences in their countries of origin, whose quarantine regulations were not transparent. In such humanistic messages, they were persuading the audience, by their own example, to go to the supermarket in a mask and to avoid social gatherings: ‘Here in Italy, I see many people falling ill from the coronaviru every days. My dear co-nationals back home, I am appealing to your common sense: please be responsible and stop communicating face to face. Close up and practice singing. If this is not possible because your neighbors object, spare yourself and others, and let your respiratory system rest.’

This invitation to stoicism and almost Spartan discipline owed to the long-terms traditions of self-discipline and self-sacrifice in the world of Soviet music, as always advocated by the legendary Soviet opera diva, a famous dissident-artist and a pioneer (predecessor) of elite operatic migration Galina Vishnevskaya: ‘Never give way to despair! Always master the art of patience’ (Vishnevskaya, 2017). A previously overlooked segment of elite migration, opera singers had become the impromptu agents of transnational patriotism and solidarity under the pandemic crisis.

However this is the sunny part of their pandemic story and everyday pandemic integration. There is a darker side that highlights the precarious nature of their high-flying transnational careers. The interviews and also existing literatures recognize the importance of timely access to the market and to networks of the global opera industry for an ambitious opera singer, whose career is invariably structured by fixed working schedules and age limitations. All informants admit having invested a lot in their global mobility and vocal technique, in order to be able to compete on the world market over new desired roles and powerful networks, and to attract the attention of agents and theatres. Although to different degrees of success, they had indeed invested a lot in building their networks over their ‘protostar’ and ‘young-star’ years preceding the pandemic.

In 2020, the global pandemic had created uncertainty about the timing of the reopening of opera houses and an artist’s ability to survive economically and professionally. And my informants found themselves unable to travel even within the EU or back to their homelands, while they were not always allowed to practice within their condominium walls (Italian municipal laws prohibit such practice). The pandemic border closures had thus shown to know no class nor distinction: migrant workers both at the higher and lower ends of the labour market were left trapped, jobless and very scared.

While no less painful, the post-pandemic recovery was more socially stratified. If in the aftermath of the theaters’ closure in 2020, both young stars and giants suddenly found themselves unemployed or suspended, the post-pandemic reality was experienced differently by these two groups of migrant-artist throughout 2021–2022.

‘I’m stuck in Italy: I can’t travel like a real artist anymore. So I have started to re-qualify for a secretarial job.’ This is what one of my pandemic-affected informants, a former opera singer from Russia, said in summer 2021 about her employment situation at the moment. At the age of 30, she was unable to secure work in opera houses outside Europe due to pandemic-caused travel restrictions, and vaccine and quarantine requirements. The pandemic inability to travel has literally buried her operatic career alive. ‘No travel means no contact and no networking’, she sadly confessed. Her pandemic failure from the sky, or transformation into a brown dwarf, was not unique. My other ‘young star’ informants had a feeling in 2020–2021 that their careers had ended before they had really begun: ‘I have invested so much in finding the right people and the right roles in various international locations that, when it’s all suddenly cancelled now, my artistic life is literally becoming moribund’.

Cancelled trips and postponed auditions and concourses had caused real damage to their careers in the making. For younger stars, digital auditions were not a substitute for live ones: ‘Online performances and virtual auditions only work for established singers. Who of these powerful people in another country will bother to listen to my compact disk (digital record) if they don’t know me?’ The post-pandemic recovery continued to bloc and destroy their network access.

Apart from the frequent cancellation of performances and auditions, my informants also had to cope with the complexity of quarantine and vaccination requirements for international travel, which differed from one country to another. Their inability to travel and, consequently, to network on the international scale was caused not only by their pandemic isolation but also by what Anna Triandafyllidou (2023) calls ‘vaccine nationalism’, or diverse vaccine policies all over the world and countries’ competition over the best vaccine.

The interviewed young stars living in Italy or Germany at that time complained that their EU vaccines were not accepted in Russia or China. They were also unable to travel for important vocal concourses, masterclasses or performances, without a costly and disruptive quarantine. For example, Kupava could not participate in prestigious masterclasses in Europe because of such difficulties with vaccination and quarantine requirements: ‘If you get vaccinated in your country of origin, it may not work for another country where you may be offered a job. If you are not vaccinated in the right country, you will end up with a rather costly quarantine, for which I personally have no money because I simply haven’t earnt it yet’.

On the contrary, the performance schedules of opera super-giants showed that they were still well networked, highly mobile and in demand on the international opera circuit. Even modest red giants, who had passed the stage of concourse participation and network building prior to the pandemic, felt confident throughout 2021–2022. As one of noted, ‘The pandemic has shown that I am always wanted by my network. My agent takes care of everything including the vaccine certificate and any rescheduling’. Unlike her less experienced colleagues, she had already worked in prestigious theatres in Europe and beyond before the pandemic struck.

While internationally established singers felt ‘immune’ to the impact of the pandemic on their careers, the networking reality of the interviewed young stars and protostars was that of extreme precarity. They knew that, without privileged mobility, they had no chance of building their networks. On the one hand, the pandemic nationalism, which was mobilizing people to fight together for the global common good (Triandafyllidou, 2023), facilitated the informants’ integration into Italian society and culture and fostered their socialization with various people. However, this mode of integration was not supportive of their elite migrant networking. This is probably because pandemic integration was another mode of pathological integration, and pathological integration cannot change social relations in a positive way for a long time. Still Lana and a few other interviewees recall this geopolitical shift as the only period of time when they could remain themselves in their local community, at least, understood by some of its members and not bothered by what the network might think.

8.5 The Tail of a Comet

‘I want to remain myself, without telling lies and breaking apart’ is what I often heard from my interviewees, pointing to their utmost desire to be integrated. And their stories illuminate that integration has, in fact, a very complex architecture, with many spaces (such as ethnic or gender relations) constructed subjectively by each individual migrant and in intersection with other spaces (Fox & Mogilnicka, 2019; Federico & Baglioni, 2021; Ahrens & King, 2023; Erdal et al., 2023). Integration is a complex phenomenon and a central theme in migration scholarship (Amelina, 2013; Kušniráková, 2014; Penninx, 2018; Barglowski, 2019; Triandafyllidou et al., 2023). If we think about its definition more in-depth, we can see that the main feature of integration is the reciprocity of culture, or the reciprocity of values between the migrant and the host society: the host society should be respected and often taken for granted by migrants, while the migrants should be also respected and often taken for granted by the host society (Favell, 2003; Penninx, 2018). The reciprocity is about compromises made by both parties. This means that migrants should not be forced to master skills that might make them feel uncomfortable. The main issue is where we can find this borderline that delineates the situations that must be compromised from those that must not. How to know where and when migrants must adjust and where they must retain the right of saying no without losing their other rights and privileges.

Looking at integration from this ‘reciprocity/compromise’ angle, some scholars argue that integration as such does not exist because reciprocity or compromise cannot be achieved to the fullest, or everywhere and anytime: it is always primarily the migrants’ obligation to respect a new culture rather than vice versa (Brubaker, 2001; Joppke & Morawska, 2003, Favell, 2003; Anthias, 2013). Given this, scholars believe that, a purely theoretical (or utopian) category, integration is thus torn away from the reality of migrants’ lives, in which they experience daily encounters with racism, xenophobia, sexism and other forms of injustice that penetrate the host society and that cannot be changed (Fox & Mogilnicka, 2019; Grzymala-Kazlowski, 2018, 2020). Their main argument is that, in reality, it is not possible to achieve integration unless you achieve its proxy, and what you call integration is mostly how you think about our own engagement with the host society norms (Federico & Baglioni, 2021).

It is, in fact, much easier to expect that the migrant would change his/her individual preferences and behaviors rather than to hope for the society to change its norms, which often happens (Anderson, 2013; Fox & Mogilnicka, 2019). Exhausted by their own inability to fight the city hall, migrants, who must build their new lives and careers decide to somehow adjust to a cruel societal standard and try to persuade themselves that they like it.

Nevertheless, we should still remember that, even if we accept the notion of integration as synonymous to utopia, its main construct is still the reciprocity and the feeling of comfort it gives to the migrant rather than identity crisis or the existential condition of ‘breaking apart’. In this sense the concept of reciprocity resonates with the migrant’s honest belief in the virtue of what s/he is doing. Even if it is not fully attainable, the idea of integration should not be separated from the concept of reciprocity to be compressed into the concept of survival. Perhaps, integration is something that migrants should be seeking while keeping the integrity of their own identities and while also clearly understanding how far or close they are positioned toward their own integration (Grzymala-Kazlowski, 2018, 2020; Federico & Baglioni, 2021). From this angle, the majority of my informants do not always clearly understand that they are disintegrated in some spheres of their transnational lives, even though they claim to be integrated.

In this sense, migrants’ integration can be compared with an iceberg, whose tip is always seen above the water while the globe (its main and most dangerous part) is hidden deeply underneath and undetected unless it hits your boat. What the interviewees perceive to be accomplished as integration (language integration, informal socialization during community dinners parties or the overall attractiveness of the local Italian culture) is only the tip of their integration iceberg. There are, in fact, many substantial problems that remain undiagnosed by them, leading to detrimental consequences for their careers and wellbeing. This is also illuminated by the stories of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers from diverse professional backgrounds who try to integrated in Europe (Federico & Baglioni, 2021; Isaakyan et al., 2023).

Further, I would like to draw the parallel between integration experiences of global elite migrants (as illuminated by my interviewees) and the cosmic iceberg (or comet), whose visible part is its long beautiful tail (made of light gas) and invisible part is the tiny and hardly seen nucleus (with a much heavier weight and an extremely strong power of destruction). In the oceanic iceberg, it is its underwater globe that can kill a boat such as ‘Titanic’. While in the cosmic iceberg (or comet), it is its nucleus that can destroy a planet and even its whole galaxy with a much more long-term effect such as the death of a civilization (Schechner, 1997; Brandt & Chapman, 2004; Fernandez, 2006).

The majority of my informants strongly believe that they know the Italian language and their local professional culture very well and that they have, therefore, never had any problems with integration. For example, the website of Masha presents her as the native-level speaker of Italian, English and German. While Snejana noted many times during the interview on her ‘impeccable Italian and brilliant Oxford English’: ‘With my impeccable Italian and perfect English, I feel quite comfortable in Italy and anywhere in Europe. I feel like I am always part of my local community wherever I work’.

However, the deeper analysis shows a different picture. For example, Methodius, who is also very proud of his ‘outstanding and native-like proficiency in Italian’, was complaining to me during the interview on being frequently stigmatized as a gay man in his Italian workplace and on having eventually resigned because of that:

In that opera house, I was assigned a pianist coach, with whom I was working for a long time. He liked me very much as a professional because of my adequate attitude to work and professional ethics. As a musician, he was a perfectionist, giving a tough time to many other singers, from whom he was expecting the same degree of professionalism and perfectionism. Unfortunately, many of them were not very happy with this attitude and his despotism. But I never complained. And I never argued with him. That is why he always preferred working with me rather than with my other colleagues. And I appreciated his professional support and always benefited by this additional attention and extra training time. He is also a foreigner from Eastern Europe. Once when we were working on a very difficult aria, we heard behind our shoulders our Italian colleagues talking about us and saying that we were inseparable “like in a perfect marriage”. We both became immediately deeply hurt by this sexism. That was so unfair! We are both straight men. At that time, I had a girlfriend from a very orthodox family with whom I was engaged, and he already had a family of his own. None of us needed the ‘sexual minority’ reputation even if it was false. We were both so scared about our reputations that we soon stopped working together and even resigned from that place, although the place itself was very good in professional terms.

Methodius firmly believes that his Italian has always been impeccable and that he immediately grasped the derogative meaning beyond that sexist comment. I was deeply sympathetic with him because of such injustice. However, having anonymously discussed this encounter with my Italian friends who were musicians, I continued to mourn over his professional destiny yet from another angle. From the angle of integration, Methodius now appeared to me as the victim of his own linguistic ignorance rather than of somebody’s evil intent. As my musician friends have explained to me, the Italian expression ‘to be in perfect marriage’ means an absolutely different thing when applied to the ‘singer-pianist’ teamwork. It is a piece of professional slang meaning that the singer and the pianist merely work together very successfully and should always collaborate like this to achieve the best results. It is, in fact, an appraisal of excellent collaborative work and it is only used when the speaker is aware that none of the referees is gay. I realized that Methodius’ colleagues would have never said this had they suspected in any way that he or his pianist was gay. Thus the fact that Methodius and his pianist were identified as the ‘perfect marital couple’ actually means that they were never perceived as gay people in their opera house. This subtle linguistic nuance belongs to the invisible nucleus within the integration iceberg. Invisible to Methodius and his pianist, it had significantly damaged their careers by causing their unnecessary resignations while also pointing to the lack of their integration.

My interviewees’ were often attracted to the tail of their integration comet without considering its impending nucleus. Astronomers note that the cosmic iceberg is much more dangerous than the oceanic iceberg for the following reasons. First, it is its hydrogenic—or highly explosive—texture that can lead to a disaster if a spacecraft or a planet shows a negligent attitude to the passing comet (Schechner, 1997; Brandt & Chapman, 2004; Fernandez, 2006). On analogy, the more glamorous the career of the informant—the more disastrous was his/her fall from the sky. My interviewees complained about their suddenly destroyed careers, reputations and interrupted network memberships.

Second, a cosmic iceberg is much more difficult to detect in a timely manner because its visible part (tail) is much bigger in size and extremely beautiful compared with its invisible tiny yet heavier part (nucleus) (Schechner, 1997). The discrepancy between the size and the weight in the cosmic iceberg is what makes the awareness harder (ibid). ‘I saw this glamorous world of music, communication with very interesting famous people, glamorous Italian smiles—and did not realize that there were more subtle nuances such as looking for a patron, choosing the right spouse or the right influential friend, or simply keeping my mouth shut’.

Third, astronomers note that a cosmic iceberg such as asteroid or comet is an outcome of a stellar nursery collapse (Prialnik, 2000): therefore, its presence becomes tangible only after the stellar nursery disappears and a black hole evolves (Brandt & Chapman, 2004). The interviews show that only after the singer’s elite career ended and s/he was excluded from his/her stellar nursery network, s/he began recognizing and confronting the cosmic iceberg of integration. It is mostly when they started to sense the evolvement of a black hole in place of their habitual stellar nursery and their own inability to live in a stretched condition that the majority of them acknowledged for the first time how important their integration would be. ‘I found out that quite a few people from my local community were actually close friends of an influential opera patron’, says Marfa, ‘But at the time of my star growth, no one could tell me about them’.

She admits that she was lucky to study in an elite Italian conservatory and to get apprenticeship in a prestigious vocal academy. All the time she was also hoping for a miracle that one day a famous producer would knock at her door, saying that occasionally he had heard her rehearsal. Exhausted by waiting and merely by losing her time, she eventually found out that she was not wanted by any agent or producer anymore: she was not that young to win concourses and she had lost her technique. Only after she had requalified into artistic manager and started to assist other aspiring singers in their rising careers, she realized what integration mistakes she had made as a protostar:

I did not make enough friends among local people. Whereas I should have attended the local communal events such as dinner parties, street fairs and festivities because Italy is a small country where everyone knows everyone. In Italy everyone is a friend or relative of everyone. I could have met the uncle of the right producer there. But I did not go there. Of course, no one would share this information out of competition. But when I became an artistic manager myself, I started to learn this from my senior colleagues who give this advice to singers: use the local culture!

Her example shows that the integration resources are highly stratified—that is, not accessible to everyone in the same way. Marfa was initially lost in the complex architecture of integration amidst its multiple resources, which she spotted only after her career ended.

8.6 Spaces and Strategies of Integration

Integration indeed has a very complex structure, which is manifested in the configurations in which its different modalities intersect both in time and space (Fox & Mogilnicka, 2019; Grzymala-Kazlowski, 2020; Ahrens & King, 2023). The integration of migrants encompasses different spaces or modalities of their transnational lives such as professional- and everyday integration at destination and reintegration during home visits (which may also be on the professional or everyday level) (ibid). For global elite migrants such as artists and athletes, there is an additional modality of integration—their fandom integration, which is located at the transnational crossroads of professional and everyday integration. Apart from that, there are such additional yet important integration modalities as gender integration, ethnic integration and crisis integration (illuminated, for example, by the covid-19 and post-2022 -solidarities) that penetrate the above noted four spaces of migrants’ work, everyday lives at destination, home visits and fandom (specifically for artists).

It is also important to acknowledge that all these spaces of integration are intrinsically interconnected in the lives of global elite migrants, sometimes creating integration paradoxes that may be difficult to mitigate. Strange as it may sound, the interviews illuminate that the professional integration of migrant-artists (with such its benefits or outcomes as better theater placement, better agent or better role) directly depends on their everyday local integration. The informants admit that Italy is a very small country, ‘where everyone knows everyone’, and that it is very likely to meet an influential patron/agent or his relative during local community events by using the so-called small world ties. ‘That is why, it is important not only to go to our professional schmoozing parties but also to very local events such as local wedding or birthday’, says Rurikh, ‘Italians love all this. They go there all the time just to meet new people and to make friends. You can indeed meet very important people there, just sitting at the same table over a glass of wine and chatting about a soccer game. As simple as that!’. Thus their everyday integration can provoke encounters that would become the urning points for their careers.

Integration back home—or reintegration during their home visits—is no less important because some homeland producers or musicians can be part of the overall transnational network. Above that, reintegration will support development of new skills (as described in the previous chapter) that are important in global opera. It would be difficult to master a new technique without being integrated or accepted. Diasporic co-nationals may also impact on professional integration yet in controversial ways. Thus the pianist with whom Ada was working was enabling her professional integration by helping her to grow as a musician. At the same time, this integration was substantially debilitated by the pianist sexist jokes.

Intertwining with each other, these spaces form a continuum of migrants’ agency. Integration emerges through contingent hierarchies, and the migrants have to choose how to approach each space and which to prioritize (Fox & Mogilnicka, 2019). These contingent hierarchies can be illuminated by the experiences and societal norms of racism, sexism (specifically for women) and various crisis solidarities (especially related to covid-19 and the post 2022 military conflict), and migrants must decide how to domesticate these spaces (ibid; Garner, 2006; Back et al., 2012; Gilroy, 2013 [1987]). Integration hierarchies go hand in hand with active choice, or migrant agency. Thus different migrants display different integration behaviors when dealing with sexism, racism and solidarity. The complex architecture of integration points to its resemblance with a cosmic iceberg, or celestial comet. To what extent the comet nucleus becomes devastating depends on how the migrant understands his/her own integration and what s/he chooses amidst its spaces.

It is sometimes difficult to make the right choice because the complex structure of integration coveys the invisibility of its evil—the invisibility, or the tacit nature, of societal norms that migrants may find disturbing. From this angle, integration can be roughly divided into two basic parts: the tip and the globe (like in the iceberg) or the tail and the nucleus (like in a comet). In fact, there are proxies of integration (such as language skills, everyday socialization, easy naturalization and even gainful employment) that create the illusion of reciprocity. These are the most visible, the most transparent and the easiest requirements for integration that literally lie on the surface (like the tip of an iceberg) or within the zone of visibility (like the tail of a comet) and persuade the migrant that everything should be easy at destination. At the same time, Fox and Mogilnicka (2019) note that there are always more covert and invisible societal norms that underpin integration (or acceptance by the host society), lie beyond the migrant’s awareness and may contradict the theoretical conception of integration. They are hidden deeply inside the new polity, resembling the globe of an iceberg or the nucleus of a comet, the encounter with which may be detrimental for the migrant.

A striking feature of integration is its conspiracy, related to the mastery of a wrong behavior by the migrant: in many cases, no one at destination explicitly tells the migrant about the norms of racism, sexism or other prejudiced behaviors that become pre-requisites for their integration (Fox & Mogilnicka, 2019). Therefore, the migrant often has to blindly astrogate through this conspiracy, in order to find his/her way. When accepting the rules of such pathological integration, the migrant may engage in a range of new and mutually exclusive integration behaviors and conspiracies in different spheres of his/her life at both destination and origin: ‘In in Russia I lie about my own sexual identity pretending to be straight. I thus conceal my real identity. And in Italy I also lie but about not pretending to be straight in Russia. Thus in Italy I lie about disclosing who I am in Russia. Incessant rounds of spinning lies all the time’.

Astronomers who study comets and asteroids, distinguish between their small and large celestial bodies (Schechner, 1997; Zhang et al., 2019). Small bodies hit planets and galaxies much more often and with a lot of damage, however, without a serious existential threat (ibid). On the contrary, there are comets that are called “planet killers” or even “galaxy killers”, who can destroy the whole galaxy, especially during an inter-galactic collision (Brandt & Chapman, 2004). Given the long-term hazard of a comet, it is important to detect it in advance and to mitigate its impact (Zhang et al., 2019). Scientists note different mitigation strategies that spaceships can employ (ibid). First, the spacecraft can distantly deflect the comet with a laser, changing its course [the strategy of avoidance] (ibid). If we further compare the migrant with a spaceship, an example of deflection can be the migrant’s avoidance of a specific situation where s/he may be disintegrated or pathologically integrated. This is illuminated by Lana’s plans to temporarily discontinue her home visits with the purpose to exclude potential cross-cultural confrontations with her daughter and husband and to impede her family disintegration. The extreme example of deflection is Zuleika’s repatriation.

Second, the ship can disassemble the comet with a laser also distantly by taking it apart, or destroying it [indirect confrontation] (Zhang et al., 2019). The disassembly of false integration is illuminated by the re-construction by Rurikh and Ariadna of their internet posts for different users. Another example is the informants’ learning of new integration skills such as nuances of the local language or culture.

Third, the ship can physically intercept (stop) the comet through the physical encounter (Zhang et al., 2019) [direct confrontation]. Some informants did manage to openly confront those who were obstructing their integration, although it was not a frequent practice. The outcome was either complete disintegration or improved integration. For example, Zina directly interrupted an anti-gay joke made by her colleague at origin by saying that this is now how she feels comfortable about viewing people. ‘First, they were looking at me with their eye wide open as if I were an extra-terrestrial. Then one of them blushed and said, “OK, maybe you are right. Maybe the world is changing”. And we went on as if nothing had happened. They never joked like this anymore in my presence, and nothing changed in relation to my career’.

Aziza also recalls saying to the Italian woman who was offering her the ‘domestic worker’ job that she was a professional opera singer and that not everyone from Asia is actually a domestic worker. She then invited this woman to her show by offering her a free guest ticket.

I thought about such encounters for a long time because they had happened to me before. I kept thinking what I could do to make these people change their minds about my appearance, and then I saw a movie with this kid of trick of politeness and I decided to use it, and it worked (Aziza, age 35).

The woman apologized and even attended Aziza’s performance two days later and gave her flowers. However, Ada lost her homeland contact because of such interception of the anti-gay comment at origin. ‘I should have probably tried to adjust to it’, she concluded, ‘It was a very good network connection that I had lost because of my intolerance to racism and sexism’.

Ada regrets not having chosen the pathological integration path while Lana regrets the other way. The above-mentioned pathological integration is akin to landing or living on a comet: imagine that, instead of deflecting, disassembling or intercepting the comet, the spacecraft will decide to land and live on it. This strategy has been never addressed in astrophysics and would probably belong entirely to the realm of science fiction. However, if successful, the conviviality with the comet would only mean one thing—the end of astrogation: the spacecraft will lose its own course and will cease to be a spaceship. This is exactly what engaging in pathological integration means to Lana and my other informants—to have their agency and identity destroyed, ‘to live like a schizophrenic, moving to nowhere and gradually falling apart’, like a dead star.