In Memory of Memory

by Maria Stepanova

  My darling, mother is so frightened of losing me, and has been since I grew up, not even losing me, just letting me go into the world naive and unprepared, she considers me a child, and the idea that I could get married before becoming an educated, independent woman causes her so much pain. She doesn’t speak of it, occasionally she hints at it in jest, but I know, I know that if that happened it would be the last straw for her.

  So you see, I’m in such pain too, but I can’t do what I read in your eyes today. How complicated it all is! Harder than you could ever know!

  A long time ago, when mother destroyed her own life for me, when she turned down her beloved at my request, I made a promise on father’s grave: I promised that I would make her no less of a sacrifice in my turn.

  That time has come. I’m telling you to wait, my darling, just as mother once said to her own beloved, “Let’s wait until Lyolya is quite grown up.”

  Please don’t tell me that I don’t understand how difficult it all is. I understand it only too well . . .

  I sent you that letter because otherwise I would have had to send today’s letter. I didn’t realize how deep your suffering was.

  I’m so sorry!!

  If I’d known I would never have been so cruel.

  And then today I had to tell you what I never wanted to have to tell you.

  I’m so sorry about that, too!

  I underestimated your feelings, I was scared to share what belonged to me. But your tear taught me that I don’t exist anymore, there is only “us” and we have to get through difficult times, full of self-denial, and we have to repay the sacrifice to a person who gave up so much for one of us. This is the only way out I can see, my darling. Will you be able to do this, my sweetheart? Will you have enough strength and resolution? Please decide. From today onward I will be absolutely open with you. You must understand absolutely what I am asking of you.

  It may be that our sacrifice will help us look into the future with joy, perhaps by supporting each other we will be able to get through those dark hours. Perhaps the inescapable nature of our situation will make us stronger.

  I can’t bear to think of a different outcome. I’m sure you will support me, after all how could I lose you now that you’ve become so close and dear to me? I can’t!

  Please promise me that you will help me carry out what I have always considered to be my sacred duty. Promise me that your love is deep enough, and I will be so very happy. I will feel renewed certainty that I made the right choice in you . . .

  I promise in return that I will lighten the heavy burden of your daily troubles with my gratitude and loving attention, because I value your sacrifice very highly. That tear, your tear has done so much good, my love.

  Your loving Olya

  2.

  Undated.

  My dearest

  How endlessly slowly the days are passing, how depressingly slowly.

  These last three days have seemed an eternity.

  I’m out of sorts, I can’t do anything. I want to be with you, to bear your troubles with you, although, thank God [crossed out], they are behind you now, but that only gives me a little relief, mostly my mood is desolate.

  I sit and read your letters and I realize once again just how good you are.

  My sweet friend!

  How can I tell you what I’ve suffered and what I’ve thought over these last long days, how can I tell you about all the terrible sadness, how my soul ached. My dearest, I hope our life together will be lit by the love and tenderness I feel in your letters.

  So much has been left unsaid. But I have no words! I’m no good at sharing confidences.

  On the other side of the paper:

  I want our happiness to be enveloped in the new feelings you have woken in me. I want our relationship to be one of tender touch and attentions, and for the bitterness to remain undisturbed deep in our hearts, the angry words to remain unspoken. Even our thoughts should be constantly occupied with each other’s happiness.

  I am changed . . .

  Farther down, in my grandfather’s large handwriting:

  My darling

  These few words will tell you everything I am thinking, everything I desire and dream of, more than if I wrote a hundred words, because you would still have to read between the lines to understand what I want to tell you. It can’t be expressed in words because words only convey my thinking, and not my feelings. My darling, be happy!

  9. The Problem of Choice

  “All the earth is a sacred tomb, the ashes of our fathers and brothers are everywhere” is a line from the Orthodox Burial Service. Since there is only one earth (and we are its only human dwellers), the meeting place between the quick and the dead, traditionally the cemetery, could be in fact any scrap of land under our feet. But the cemetery still works for us, in fact it has even too many functions. In eighteenth-century Venice, monasteries had special reception rooms where the secular and worldly could come to make music, play dominoes, chat among themselves, drink coffee, and (almost incidentally) visit their dead. The monks and novices sat separated from them by an iron grille, nodding at their conversations, but leaving back into their own very different lives. Over the last two or three hundred years the cemetery has become such a zone of one-way conversation, like a visiting room in a monastery or a prison camp, always fragmentary, always partial. But the cemetery has other, far more ancient preoccupations: it is also the place of letters, of inscribed witness.

  The cemetery as address book for all humanity sets out everything we need to know with concision. In effect it comes down to names and dates — we don’t need to know any more. We read and remember at most two or three familiar names, for who could fix all its thousands of pages in the mind? But supposing those who lie there have an interest in whether they are remembered? All they can hope for is a chance passerby to stop and read; a stranger, filled with an age-old curiosity about life before he appeared in the world, who will pick out their grave from all others, and stand and remark on it. This belief in the redemptive regard of a stranger — in his eyes, flickering between the stone-carved lines of text, from letter to letter, imbuing each with temporary life and teleological warmth — makes orphans of the tombstones without inscriptions, or the stones with such worn faces they can no longer be read. A tombstone might seem almost pointless, functioning merely as a road sign (Here Lies a Person!). After all, the important stuff is under the tombstone and not on it, and people know their own dead, don’t they? Still, for some reason, the inscription, what the person under the gravestone was called and how old they were, is essential to us. Why it is so is another matter entirely.

  This need is very ancient, far older than Christianity and its belief in resurrection for all. In Economy of the Unlost Anne Carson offers a careful and surprising comparison between two bodies of work (by Paul Celan and Simonides of Keos), and maintains that it is on the burial mound, where there is only a stranger’s death, a stone, and the need for a clarifying text, that poetry emerges from its shell of sound and comes into its own as a written art, aimed at the one looking at the tomb, and his ability to do what the words cut into the stone ask of him: to use his memory and its “sense of order.” The epitaph is the first written poetic genre, the subject of the contract between living and dead, a pact of mutual redemption. The living offer the dead a place in their memories, and they believe, to use the poet and songwriter Vladimir Vysotsky’s words, “the dead won’t leave us in our hour of need.”

  The poet, whoever he might be, is quite essential: he carries out the task of redemption, makes a life “portable,” decouples the sign from the body and the memory from the place where that body lies. Once read, the epitaph takes wing: a vehicle, a right of passage, giving the dead a new verbal existence, unlimited movement within the internal and external space of memory, in the anthologies of world poetry and the corridors of our minds. Still, w
hat do the dead care for our anthologies?

  “The responsibility of the living to the dead is not simple,” writes Carson. “It is we who let them go, for we do not accompany them. It is we who hold them here — deny them their nothingness — by naming their names. Out of these two wrongs come the writing of epitaphs.” Poetry as an epistolary form, a letter intended for a recipient, begins with the attempt to right the wrong inherent in the idea of choice, which divides the human population into two categories, the interesting and the less interesting, those who are fit for retelling, and those who are only fit for oblivion.

  A cemetery doesn’t make that choice: it attempts to remember everyone. That must be why they have been pushed out to the very edges of our towns, to the periphery of vision and consciousness, as if the volume of life lived by others, as well as the quantity of these others, is simply too much to contain in the mind. Our daily lives are surrounded by the displaced peoples of human history, the agitated sea of the dead, who have been crossed off the list and denied every right, except the right to an inscription and the occasional posy of flowers. There are rare times when they become more visible, and at these moments reality distorts, breaks down into its separate layers, and as my little boat makes its way across the black surface of the water, pale faces rise from the depths. I can make out each of them clearly, I regard them, I can put my hand out to them and pull them into the spotlight.

  Yet how to choose and whom to choose? Between the clear necessity of saving everyone indiscriminately, and the desire, equally human and obvious, involuntary as a muscle spasm, to choose from the multitudes the very one, the only one, there is no space for a correct decision. This is a zone of infernal wrongness, run through with one’s own and others’ suffering, warped by a general helplessness, shot through with an electric arc, welding past and present until both are burnt out. Any text, any speech rooted in the impossibility of choice flares up and burns, without answering its own questions. Perhaps it is best not to choose? To reel off names one after another until the pages run out? Or limit oneself to what (who) is closest? Or to find something that answers to a single vaguely formulated principle and pull it loose, like a colored thread running through the fabric of time? Or maybe it is simpler just to close your eyes and fall backward, as if you knew familiar arms would be waiting to catch you?

  *

  The Great Hall of the State Archives, with its bright, full-length windows, was packed with readers, and the whisper of page-flicking echoed in the air. The information I needed was scattered throughout the various collections. I had inventory numbers and inscrutable references, but slowly the contour of a possible request took shape, like the spine of a large fish glimpsed in the murk of a lake. The unremarkable names of my relatives, all those Ginzburgs, Stepanovs, and Gurevichs, lengthened the process; I was showered with pellets of time-hardened information, like mothballs from an attic, none of which pertained to my family’s history, but were in their own way peepholes into other lives, wriggling beyond my reach.

  There was, for example, an official report written in 1891 concerning a Gurevich, who was not a relative, but who had reached a high rank despite his Jewishness, and had become the Governor of the Odessa Prison Fortress. In Russia’s South that was briefly possible, especially in Odessa, with its magnificent disdain for the thin partition walls of nationality. Close to Odessa, in Kherson, his namesake, my great-grandfather, was building his first factory. But this unknown Gurevich was having troubles, and one hundred and twenty years later I sat reading, line by line, an account of his downfall.

  The report was addressed to Mikhail Nikolaevich Galkin-Vrasky, the Head of the recently founded Central Prison Service:

  In the past year, during a visit to Odessa, Your Excellency observed the local Prison Fortress and was much pleased with the order found there. He was moved to intercede on behalf of the prison’s management, for their diligence and special efforts. As a result the Prison Governor Court Councillor Gurevich, among others, was, by Royal Assent, granted the Order of St. Anna, Second Class. Unfortunately a few recent occurrences in the prison have shown Gurevich’s lack of competence for this position, which requires, above all, unceasing vigilance, an ability to grasp a situation rapidly, and to take the correct measures. These qualities are especially necessary in the Governor of Odessa’s Prison Fortress, which houses a significant number of hard labor convicts. Without appropriate and careful supervision, these convicts have a deleterious influence on the other prisoners, who become their obedient servants and help them attack the prison systems. Gurevich does nothing to counteract this, and it now appears that he frequently places hardened criminals in the same cells as petty offenders and as a result the latter become quickly demoralized and find it hard to submit to the demands of prison discipline. If that weren’t enough, observation of Gurevich has revealed that he often allows himself to grant indulgences and permits small lapses in discipline for the hardened criminals, simply to curry favor with them. A cowardly man, timid, weak of character, and underhand, Gurevich is not only unable to keep control himself, he also hinders the efforts of his assistants and the prison guards, and prevents them using the prerequisite energy to rein in the prisoners. As a result the smallest upset in prison life becomes a notable event, and any real trouble quickly escalates into serious rioting.

  I do not consider it excessive to list the following examples from the life in Odessa Prison Fortress as evidence of the above claims:

  1. Prisoner Chubchik, notorious for his brutal murders, burglaries and banditry, and sentenced to indefinite hard labor, boasted more than once that he could escape while incarcerated in Odessa Prison, and despite this he remained almost unsupervised. Chubchik and two of his comrades, also sentenced to hard labor, used the excuse of laundry washing to leave their cells several times a day and spend time in the latrines, where they managed to saw off an iron bar from the window bars using a thin metal file they had on their person, then to tie together sheets and towels to make a rope, and Chubchik even managed to take off the manacles he wears at night and drop down through the hole in the window into the prison yard, where he made his way to the fence. Luckily he was noticed and apprehended in time.

  2. [ . . . ] There are regular roll calls of the prisoners at named hours and senior members of prison staff are often absent at these roll calls, so the prison guards conduct them. Against prison rules bedding rolls are often carried out of the cells, not just by the prisoners on cleaning duty, but by every prisoner, and last year a hard labor prisoner in transit named Kuznetsov carried out his bed with the others and took it to the tower corridor, where he hanged himself with his own belt without being noticed.

  3. [ . . . ] cards, dominoes, bones, tobacco, and various metal objects were found on the men, and this was noted in the prison records. When Prison Inspector Eversman commented on this Gurevich replied with utter naivety that “you can’t do anything with these men, when the guards try to search them they bandy blows!”

  In the round of the peephole I can see Chubchik serenely playing dominoes with the other prisoners, but I can’t make out the fate of the timid Gurevich. Other reports from later years are attached to the case file and it is clear that things didn’t change in the Odessa Fortress even under a new governor, who also went on to be sacked. The images proceeding before my eyes as I read these papers are suffused with a peculiar and terrible reality, far more real than my great-grandmother’s yellowing spiderweb-lace dickey. Not intended for the eyes of others, nor for long life, the archived papers are illuminated on a first reading, as if they had been waiting for your attention — the unfortunate Kuznetsov at the moment of his death in the corridor, mentioned only once, but forever before my eyes, as if there were no one else to remember him and call him by his name — and I suppose there isn’t.

  *

  In Leningrad in 1930 an intriguing book was published with the title How We Write. Well-known authors, from Gorky to
Zoshchenko and Andrei Bely (and a certain number of representatives of Communist Party–approved literature, whose thinking was exactly what you might expect) contributed essays about their writing process, how the cogs of idea and execution meshed together. The writers also included the aristocrat Alexei Tolstoy, a man who had returned to the USSR from emigration to occupy the absurd but privileged position of the acceptable aristocrat, The Red Count. His prose is among the most remarkable in this altogether fascinating book.

  Tolstoy writes with unambiguous rapture about the texts that became both templates and sources of inspiration for him: seventeenth-century confessions under torture, extracted with the aid of pincers, clubs, and brands, written up by anonymous functionaries, deacons, and servants, in the presence of the victim. Tolstoy admired their ability to get to the heart of the matter, “preserving the particular nature of the torture victim’s speech,” “exact and concise,” so the reader can see and feel the language, its musculature. “. . . Here I saw the Russian language in all its purity, not spoiled by the dead form of Church Slavonic, nor translated under duress [ . . . ] into a fake literary language. Here was the language Russians have spoken for a thousand years, but no one ever wrote down.”

  Tolstoy’s text is very talented, arranged (with the help of many tiny literary maneuvers) to give his interest the appearance of respectability, something along the lines of an ethically sprung mattress, allowing the author to recoil from the reader’s enjoyment, and avoid falling into the black hole that yawns before the reader as soon as he even begins to concern himself with what is actually happening (and will continue to happen as long as the text lives) to the person whose Russian language you are tasting in your own mouth. Tolstoy’s taste has an invisible subtext. The political trials, exiling, and sentencing hadn’t yet reached their heights in 1930, but just beyond the world of his writing desk, too close for comfort, were the mass roundups by the OGPU, the Shakhty trial, and the recent execution of fellow writer Sillov. Pasternak wrote about the last of these in a letter to his father, saying “I will never be free of the effect of this act.” The Russian “records of proceedings,” as Tolstoy called them, with their sequence of confessions tortured out of the victims over the centuries, were clearly an invaluable source — but what end did they serve?