In Memory of Memory

by Maria Stepanova

  Each of us is in fact a witness to and participant of a lasting catastrophe. Our desire to shore up the past against rapid dissolution, and to keep it intact like the gold reserve, can easily become a fetish of sorts, something we can all sign up to, a zone of unspoken consensus. Events of the past hundred years have not made humanity more resilient, but they have made us think of the past like a refugee’s suitcase, in which the dearest items of a life have been lovingly packed away. Its real value means nothing now, it has been multiplied by the consciousness so many times, because it’s all we have left. One of the characters in Nabokov’s novel The Gift describes “a picture of flight during an invasion or an earthquake, when the escapers carry away with them everything that they can lay hands on, someone being sure to burden himself with a large, framed portrait of some long-forgotten relatives” and the general indignation when “somebody suddenly confiscated the portrait.” In the petri dish of memory things and events from the old world have become survivors themselves, saved by a miracle, their presence invaluable simply because they have reached us.

  Tsvetan Todorov talks somewhere about how memory is becoming a new cult, an object of mass veneration. The more I consider it, the more I think that the global obsession with memory is simply the foundation, the essential precondition for a different cult: the religion of the past, as we knew it in olden times; a little splinter of the golden age, proof of the fact “that things were better back then.” The subjectivity and selectiveness of the memory means we can fix on a historical “excerpt” that has nothing in common with history itself — there will be people out there for whom the 1930s were a lost paradise of innocence and permanence. Especially during times dominated by the dull fear of the unknown. In comparison with a future we don’t want to inhabit, what has already happened feels domesticated — practically bearable.

  This cult has its double, they reflect each other’s symmetry like the points on a horseshoe and between them the self-doubting contemporary world lies unmoving. Childhood is the second object of our guilty love. This love, too, feels doomed, because childhood comes to an end and its supposed innocence should be preserved, cherished, defended at all cost. Both the past and childhood are perceived as stasis, a permanently threatened balance — and both are most venerated by societies in which the past is misrepresented and childhood is abused with impunity.

  The whole contemporary world breathes the air of postmemory with its conservative reconstructions: make a country great again, return its former fabulous order. The screen has two sides and it isn’t just those clinging to the sides of the funnel who can project their hopes, fears, and histories onto it — the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the silent majority are also waiting for their moment to resurrect their own version of past events. In Russia, where violence circulated ceaselessly, society passing from one space of tragedy to the next as if it were a suite of rooms, a suite of traumas, from war to revolution, to famine and mass persecution, and on to new wars, new persecutions — the territory for this hybrid memory formed earlier than in other countries: spiraling, multiplying versions of what has happened to us over the last hundred years, dimpled with inconsistencies, like a sheet of opaque paper blocking out the light of the present.

  At home we had a file of clippings from that once-fashionable Soviet literary magazine Yunost, and I spent many happy hours in my childhood poring over it. The poems, prose, and caricatures seemed to come from a different reality, similar to one I knew, but somehow removed, illuminated. Today, those clippings I loved look even stranger: the sense of a beginning, everyone looking forward, in love with the future. Everything was about newness. A story about a box of oranges on a Siberian construction site in the Far East, poems that interchanged “heroine” and “heroin,” and a picture of a comic pair of stilyagi (him in a beard, her with a heavy fringe) changing an old table with a lace cover for a modern table on three skinny legs. The point of the image was that they were replacing like with like, the Soviet spirit demanded from its citizens indifference to bourgeois delights. From today’s perspective, sharp with longing for a disappeared world, the caricature looks more depressing than it was intended to be. Those young people were voluntarily casting out the old world with its carved legs and reliable oaken gravitas. And that is how it was. In 1960s and 1970s Moscow the dumps overflowed with antique furniture: our own four-meter-high sideboard with its colored glass was left in the communal apartment when we moved. There was no room for it in the new modern apartment with its low ceilings.

  No one would have reproached my parents for this — a complete and utter indifference to this kind of loss reigned. Besides, there was a youthful audacity in their irrational behavior: their readiness to part with intact, robust, and fit-for-purpose furniture thirty years after the war showed their belief in the permanence of their new existence. Other homes kept hold of their block of housemaid’s soap, and grain and sugar and cardboard tubs of tooth powder in case of a rainy day.

  7. Injustice and its Different Facets

  Many years ago the stepfather of a friend of mine was in the hospital with very little time to live, perhaps no more than a week. He was a war veteran, a mathematician, and a fine man. One morning he asked my friend with some urgency to come back to hospital that evening with her mother. Something had happened to him a long time ago and he’d spent his whole life thinking about it without ever telling a single soul. Although he’d never spoken about it, clearly he had witnessed a miracle, something incredible, something he couldn’t have raised in the normal way. But now he was afraid he was running out of time, and he wanted to tell his closest family. When they got there that evening he didn’t have the strength to speak, and by the next morning he had lost consciousness. He died a few days later, without having told them anything. This story, like the very possibility-impossibility of finding out something important, lifesaving, hung over me like a cloud for many years, constantly shifting in its significance. Often I drew a simple moral from the story, something along the lines of always speaking out, always saying things before it’s too late. At other times it seemed to me that in certain situations life itself enters and turns out the light, to relieve the distress of those left behind.

  “How very strange,” I said to my friend, not long ago. “You never did find out what he wanted to say. I often think about what might have happened to him, and when. It would’ve been during the war, I suppose.”

  My friend was politely surprised. She asked me what I meant, as if she didn’t quite believe what she’d heard, but didn’t want to doubt my sincerity. Then she said gently that nothing like that had ever happened. Was I sure that it was their family? Perhaps I’d misremembered.

  We never spoke of it again.

  Memory brings the past and present into confrontation in the search for justice. This passion for justice, like the obsessive scratching of a rash, tears any system from the inside, forcing us to seek and demand retribution, especially on behalf of the dead — for who will defend them, if not us?

  Death is the primary injustice and the most extreme manifestation of the system’s (and for “system” read “world order”) disregard for human life. Death dismantles the border (between me and nonexistence), reassigns values and makes judgments without asking for permission, denies me my right to take part in any human gathering (apart from that multitudinous assembly of the disappeared), and reduces existence to nothing. The heart hates injustice, it seeks victory over death, it pushes back against this fundamental injustice. For centuries this pushback was the Christian promise of salvation, both indiscriminate and individual at once: resurrection for all.

  Salvation only works when one condition is met: somewhere near us, and beyond us, there must exist another, wiser memory that is able to hold in its cupped hand everyone and everything; those who have already lived and those who are yet to come. The purpose of funeral rites and the hope of all who hear them are drawn together in the Orthodox prayer
to God asking for “memory eternal” for the dead. Here, “salvation” and “conservation” mean the same thing.

  Secular society takes the idea of salvation out of the equation, and in one stroke the whole construction loses its balance. Without a belief in salvation, “conservation” becomes no more than an institutional archive: a museum, a library, a warehouse, allowing a sort of conditional and limited immortality — a greatly extended single day, the only version of eternal life that is possible in the emancipated new world. Technological revolutions, one after another, have made vast digital warehouses possible, and “possible” in the human tongue means “indispensable.”

  Long ago, the memory of a person was passed into the hands of God, and any extra efforts to preserve her memory might have been considered excessive, perhaps pointless. Being long remembered was the preserve of those few who understood how to achieve it, or wanted it very much, and you could quite happily die and be resurrected without this, as the task of remembering everyone had been delegated upward, to the highest level.

  Any attempt to fix a memory, to give it body, usually meant a list of wonderful attributes. In Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, there is contempt for the written memory:

  Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.

  By the nineteenth century and its technological revolutions, remembrance suddenly becomes democratic practice, and archiving a matter of general importance. It’s called something different and it’s thought of differently, but it manifests as an urgent desire to obtain photographs of all one’s family. At first the disembodied voice provokes fear and recoil, then slowly the horned head of the gramophone is domesticated, and Moscow dachas ring to the sound of mezzo-soprano Vyaltseva. Change happens slowly, and at first the whole process seems to fit well within the ancient tradition of collecting the best and most representative things: Caruso’s voice is recorded, a speech by the Kaiser.

  Cinema appears — it too has a purely functional use, as another way to retell history. But now from the viewing platform of hindsight, you realize that something else entirely was intended (by whom?), leading directly to the high point of all human progress: the selfie stick. The home movie. Giving everyone the opportunity to retain everything forever. Immortality, as we understand it, is a kind of trick: the complete and total disappearance of any one of us can be hidden, like a grave, under a scattering of little deceptions that give the illusion of presence. And the bigger the pile of tiny deceptions (saved moments, little speeches, photographs), the more bearable the nonexistence of oneself and others. The daily visual and verbal debris is suddenly made respectable, it’s no longer swept under the carpet, but carefully put away for rainier days.

  You’d think that in order to become a whole archaeological strata (and lift the ground under our feet a meter or so), the rituals and materials of our life would have to be obsolescent, used up, detritus, like everything created by humans until now. But it’s a strange thing: since the invention of photography and sound recording these rituals and materials have forgotten the art of decomposition, just like today’s plastic waste. They won’t be returned to earth and dust — they pile up higher and higher. They are of no use for the future. Anything that cannot adapt and change is fruitless and surely must be doomed.

  In the apartments of the early twentieth century it was still fashionable to display stuffed creatures of various size and shape — from the stags’ and boars’ heads on the wall to the tiny birds, stuffed so delicately with sawdust that they looked alert and alive, frozen in the act of bathing their feathers. We often read of the elderly ladies who had generations of pets stuffed, to the point where any house with heavy curtains and fire screens went to auction with a dozen dusty terriers. There were other, more radical methods of conserving one’s nearest and dearest: at Gabriele D’Annunzio’s villa you can still see the souvenir made from the shell of his beloved tortoise. Fed to giant proportions, it is said the tortoise could barely crawl from room to room or along the avenues of the estate with its victorious-sounding title: “Vittoriale degli Italiana.” When she died from overeating, her body was scooped out of its horned case and the case made into a dish, an elegant tortoise tureen, to decorate the table and remind the poet’s guests of better days.

  The difficult, fragile status of the dead in the age of mechanical reproduction made their very existence a task: if we can no longer hope for a new meeting, the joyful dawn of resurrection, then we need to do everything possible to put what remains of the dead to good use. This conviction resulted in a surge of funereal souvenirs: locks of hair with the beloved’s initials bound in, photographs of the dead in which they look far brighter than the living — the long exposure of the studio photographer blurred the twitching features and tiny movements of the grief-stricken to unrecognizable emptiness, so it was immediately clear who, in the decorously dressed group, was the much-missed corpse.

  By the middle of the twentieth century the process had been taken to its “logical extreme,” however you want to understand that euphemism: the rouged face of a political leader lying in state in a crystal coffin on a main square, or millions of unknown bodies, seen only as a repository of raw material or spare parts. What began as the Russian “antideath” philosopher Nikolai Fedorov’s obsession to give life to the dead, to drag them from their oak coffins so they walked and talked again; what began as an attempt to resurrect the old world with the power of words — to make a glass of tilleul tea and use it as an elixir of life — hit against a living wall of the drowned and the lost, against the simple impossibility of remembering and calling the dead by their names.

  This tidal wave has rolled on for two centuries and is finally at our heels — but instead of the resurrection of the past we have artisans, the production of perfect casts, and taxidermy. The dead have learned to speak with the living: their letters, their voicemails, their posts on social media, all of this can be broken into its tiny elements. There’s even an app that uses the words of dead people to compose answers to questions put to them. For several years now this app, available in the Apple Store, has allowed us the peculiar indulgence of chatting with someone as famous as Prince or as unknown as the unfortunate twenty-six-year-old Roman Mazurenko, who was hit by a car. If you type into the chat box the words, “Where are you now?” Mazurenko answers, “I love New York.” There is no sense of awkwardness in all this. The seams all meet in the middle, the window doesn’t suddenly blow open, there is no cold wind to send a shiver down your spine.

  The digital creators of these verbal phantoms (made in the image of a friend) had plenty of material to work from as nothing is ever wiped in the digital age. Instead of one, the only, photograph, there are hundreds. No one, not even the photographer, manages to look at every snap: it would take years. But it doesn’t matter, the important thing is to store all these many moments, to keep them safe for the Great Looking, the Grand Viewer who has all the time and attention in the world, more than would fit in any lifetime, and who will draw all that has happened into one line of events. There is no one else to do it.

  Digital storage gives us a whole range of possibilities, and it affects how we see things: history, biography, one’s own or another’s text — nothing is seen as a linear sequence unrolling in time, glued with the wallpaper paste of cause and effect. In one sense this is pleasing, since no one feels unloved in this new world. There is space for everyone in the boundless world of the hoarder. On the other hand, the old world of hierarchies and bardic stories worked on the principle of selection: not quite saying everything; sometimes holding b
ack. In some senses, when the necessity of choice is removed (between good and bad, for example), then the very notion of good and evil disappears. All that is left is a mosaic of facts — and points of view, which are mistaken for facts.

  The past is now “pasts”: a coexisting layering of versions, often with only one or two points of contact. Hard facts soften to modeling clay and can be molded into a shape. The desire to remember, to recreate and fix in place, goes hand in hand with incomplete knowledge and partial understanding of events. Units of information can be lined up in any formation, any order, like in a children’s game, and the direction of play will utterly change their significance. My linguist friends, Americans, Germans, Russians, all tell me that their students are brilliant at finding subtexts and hidden meanings, but can’t, or don’t want to, talk about the text as a whole entity. I suggested asking the students to retell a poem, line by line, describing only what was going on. But I was told that this wasn’t possible, they simply weren’t able. The banal debt to the obvious, along with the need to tell a story, has been thrown overboard, lost in the detail, broken into a thousand bite-size quotes.