In Memory of Memory

by Maria Stepanova

  Mandelstam’s new poems written in exile in Voronezh on how “we are full of life to the highest degree” weren’t simply contributions to this new collective effort, brilliant as lectures on physics, proof that he could measure time in five-year plans, measure time like everyone else, like Pasternak — no, these poems had far bigger concerns. They laid no claim to the recent past, nor the palpably accessible present, but tried to cut a large crooked piece out of the future with tailor’s shears, to run ahead and begin to speak in a universal language that did not yet exist. And they succeeded in this.

  The work done by these poems was, according to Mandelstam, of the highest significance — so obviously important — and it needed to be delivered to Moscow like a nugget of precious metal or a gigantic ear of corn, like an agricultural or scientific achievement. This was the reason for Nadezhda Mandelstam’s trip to Moscow in that winter of 1935: it was clear to both of them that the literary world only had to see these poems and they would take their rightful place under the glass sun of the near future — what I say now, every schoolchild will learn.

  Their confidence in the poems’ urgency and significance made them hurry, and so speeded up the inevitable disaster.

  “Overall I’m pleased with myself — I have done and am doing everything I can. And after this we wait for the inevitable. [ . . . ] we mustn’t go anywhere, or ask for anything, or do anything [ . . . ] I’ve never felt so intensely that we mustn’t act, we mustn’t make a noise or give them the runaround.”

  But they could do no differently.

  *

  A decade earlier, in 1926, Marina Tsvetaeva went to London for the first and last time in her life: “I am going to London for ten days where I will have, for the first time in eight years (four Soviet, four in emigration) some TIME. (I am traveling alone).”

  She would spend that miraculous uppercase TIME unexpectedly and not at all as a tourist. In the space of a few days and with unwavering determination, she would write a furious article that she was not able to publish in her lifetime. The article was called “My answer to Osip Mandelstam.” A London friend and critic, a great fan of Mandelstam’s prose, showed her Mandelstam’s book of essays, Noise of Time, published in Leningrad. Tsvetaeva couldn’t hold back, she thought the book despicable. Mandelstam had written about Feodosiya in the Crimea in 1919, when it was held by the White Army, and Tsvetaeva absolutely refused to accept the tone of comic admiration Mandelstam adopted to speak about their mutual friend, a volunteer White Army colonel with his poems and his illusions . . . a man on the losing side, in other words.

  Tsvetaeva’s sense of outrage was very personal, perhaps too much so. The matters discussed in the chapters about Feodosiya had direct relevance to her own home and poetic affairs, and she wrote about these in a very different tonal range. Tsvetaeva’s husband Sergei Efron had been a volunteer in the White Army, and volunteering was for her a pure and heroic gesture of self-sacrifice; perhaps more importantly her old friends were the inspiration for the official portrait, the template of a “noble life.” The distorted and compressed style of Mandelstam’s description was not, for her, a literary device, but simply mockery of those who couldn’t defend themselves. Much of this is easier to understand with the distance of a century: for example, Mandelstam’s phrase “nanny-colonel,” which so upset Tsvetaeva, was in fact imbued with tenderness for Mandelstam — he signed his letters to his wife with the nickname “nanny.”

  Their optical systems were incompatible, and there is no reason why they should have been compatible. But Tsvetaeva’s annoyance moves seamlessly from the chapters about the White Army in Feodosiya to Mandelstam’s writing about the past, the heart of the book and its reason for being. Time passed, but the enmity remained. In 1931 Tsvetaeva wrote to a friend about “Mandelstam’s stillborn prose, hateful to me, in Noise of Time, where the living are merely props, where everything alive is just an object.”

  A sense of bewilderment at Noise of Time seems to have united readers of very different mindsets. Nadezhda Mandelstam reported that “everyone refused to print the thing, as it had no subject and no plot, no class awareness or social significance.” But Tsvetaeva saw only an attempt at class awareness, the fine trappings of the surrender and death of a Russian intellectual. In the same article she writes that Noise of Time is Mandelstam’s gift to the authorities.

  We should keep in mind the level of inflammation (all too easy to imagine today) in the reader’s consciousness on both sides of the Soviet border. Both prose and poetry had a secondary — and at times primary — function, to witness an author’s political choice (which flickered about like a cursor, depending on circumstances). The text served to answer the question of “which side is the author on,” and only after that did it serve its more ordinary purposes. In Mandelstam’s case, with his unavoidable postrevolutionary travels to Batumi and Kiev and everywhere in between, this question is on hold until the beginning of the 1920s, but by 1924, when Noise of Time was submitted for publication, it couldn’t be put off any longer.

  Mandelstam’s paired poems “January 1, 1924” and “No, I was never anyone’s contemporary . . .” were written when time was out of joint: the old world was giving way to the new, but they were written, and this is important, from the new world. The old carriage was still rocking forward, carts were still creaking past at midnight, nothing had come to a standstill, but there was no way back. No return. A pact with the future had been signed simply by the act of moving forward, by being drawn into the general mêlée. For Mandelstam, as for many others, this seduction by what he called the “twilight of freedom” was tinged with unambiguous ecstasy, and his New Year’s poem about the change of fate, written against the backdrop of Noise of Time, wasn’t just an attempt at farewell, but a rebuttal of the past.

  *

  How quickly they took to reminiscing, as if the past, crumbling to dust in front of them, needed fixing in the mind before it was blown away by the wind. Clattering along, heaped untidily high like a barrow of old possessions, the twenties unexpectedly became a time of memoirs. A lid was slammed shut over the old world, and all available memory, all abolished knowledge remained under it. Pasternak’s autobiographical work Safe Conduct and Andrei Bely’s memoirs were fixated on Moscow student conversations at the break of the centuries, like archaeologists poring over excavations: these conversations were data that needed reanimating, deciphering, presenting to the contemporary world.

  Noise of Time was one of the first such texts, written in 1923, when the new world had barely set fast. It immediately fell out of line and spent a century looking as ill-fitting as The Good Soldier Švejk on the parade ground of the twentieth century’s big memoir projects, although it initially seemed to resemble these. The century of Kafka and Platonov, which began with a powerful surge toward change, collective utopia, and a global yearning for the new, very quickly shifted into an awareness of itself as a space for retrospection. As the Modernist era drew to a close, memory and memory’s half brother, the document, came to be something of a fetish, perhaps because they hint gently at the reversible and inconclusive nature of loss, even in a world that is constantly changing its order.

  What began with Proust continued with Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and ended with Sebald’s prose. Between these points are the pages and pages of connective tissue: other texts without any claim to literary status but brought together with an a priori and unquestioning belief in the value of everything lost and the necessity of resurrecting it simply because it isn’t there any longer.

  Against a backdrop of the memoir canon’s tower blocks and skyscrapers, Mandelstam’s prose stands apart as a little remote building in a district preoccupied with other business. Noise of Time reacts warily to any potential reader, and not just because of the mystically dim light of Mandelstam’s mode of thinking — “in dropped stitches” as he describes it. In any case, after a century of careful reading that light is now bri
ghter. I believe the difficulty lies in the text’s own pragmatics, the task the author has set it.

  The purpose of these strange memoirs is to nail down the pine coffin lid on lost time, drive in the aspenwood stake, and turn on one’s heel. It is hardly surprising then that the author has few allies in this task, so very few that it’s almost easier not to notice what is going on and why. This is despite the fact that Mandelstam describes the purpose of his efforts of memory with absolute precision. This passage, so often cited by those who have written about his prose, repeats his message, with its stress on the repeated word “inimical”:

  My memory is inimical to everything personal. If it were up to me I would only scowl when I recalled the past. I could never understand those writers, Tolstoy, Aksakov, Bagrov’s Grandson, in love with their family archives with their epics of household reminiscences. I say again that my memory is not loved by me, it is inimical to me, and it works not to reproduce the past, but to make it strange.

  This is a surprising conceptual frame for a writer who is intending to do just that — recall the past — and to do it at thirty-two, hardly the ripest age for such an occupation. He was one of the first, if not the very first, of his generation to do this: before it sets fast. The prose is concerned with the bodily and intimate, the domestic world, its sounds and smells, with the way that a madeleine dipped in tea, and a tender (hope-filled) melancholy, can be converted into a viable currency. His mother and father, a bookcase behind green taffeta, the dachas in Finland, violin concerts, walks with nanny and so on and so forth, all details for a cozy account of his childhood, which appears to have been a huge influence on his later life, demanding great efforts on his part to tear himself free.

  The result is a very peculiar text, peculiar firstly in the degree of compression with which units of tactile, auditory, and olfactory information are concentrated into a dark mass, shot through with veins and clots of amber, or into mineral seams, only visible in the beam of a miner’s headlamp. There is no place to pitch your tent among the formulae opening like flower heads; every phrase is the sealed door to a corridor. The past is described like a landscape, perhaps even a geological case with its own history and methodology. A tale of childhood is transformed into a scientific text.

  It seems to me that the logic is this: the author is the cartographer of a place he does not wish to return to. So right away and insofar as he can, he subtracts the human factor, the little pilot light of tenderness that’s nearly always present in any discussion of the remembered past. The text spreads out before us from one winter to the next: in frost, clouds of steam, and the rustle of fur coats. Room temperature would be the most unimaginable luxury — the natural climate for this prose is freezing weather. In the language of cinematography, a freeze-frame is a static shot, and in some ways Noise of Time is constructed like a camera, describing the circles that surround such freeze-frames, shots of moving shapes without their teleological warmth (or with it hidden away down their furry sleeves). This is what Tsvetaeva means when she says, so unjustly, but so exactly: “Your book is a nature morte. [ . . . ] without a heartbeat, without a heart, bloodless — just eyes, a sense of smell, hearing.”

  The function of a historical nature morte, as Mandelstam conceived of it, runs counter to childhood and familial tenderness to give a precise diagram, an adaptable formula for the past. It works like a military parade, in a procession of rows and geometric shapes: puffed sleeves reflected in the glass dome of the Pavlovsk Station; the vast volume of squares and streets filled with a mass of people; architecture and music together as one. But any geometric construct is undermined by the guttering, smoking little flame of the 1890s, the musky, fur-clad world of Judaism. Literature (its wispy icon lamp, its teachers and family members) has the dark warm taste of the family affair; Jewishness is either climbing up out of the chaos, or growing its shaggy runic coat anew. In the presence of both, the picture is blackened with soot, retreating back into the black earthen mass of its cultural layer. Lucky then that architecture and music have an older brother in logic: the Marxist class system.

  I’m not talking here about the usual demonstration of Tsarist excesses justifying a speedy revolution: that’s how Tsvetaeva read Noise of Time, seeing it as a desire to please the authorities. In fact there are little signposts scattered with a child’s slyness throughout the work, pointing the way to a more precise science, gathering all the disparate narratives into one. Of course it’s likely that a childish political pragmatism also affects the work: many writers were scrambling to show their undying support for the changes. But Mandelstam’s adolescent Marxism, past or actual, had a serious, structuring intent: it was like an arrow, its flight directed at the final break, the “full screeching turn of the cumbersome steering wheel” as he described it, toward a clear, fully articulated here and now that somehow needed to come about.

  From this here and now Mandelstam looked back at the burial of a century, just as a few years later he would look down on Lamarck’s “staircase” and the constant temptation of disintegration, that indiscriminate green tomb. A shuddering affection for the near past characterizes Mandelstam’s prose and sets it apart from its other simpler brethren. Memory is not sentimental, it is functional, it works as an accelerator. Its job is not to explain the author’s origin to him, nor to reproduce the infant’s cradle in order to rock it. Memory works on behalf of separation, it prepares for the break, without which the self cannot emerge. Shove the past away like ballast so we can be propelled forward. No speed, no future.

  In light of what came later it might seem that this separation was pointless. There was Mandelstam squirming, squealing his starling song, demanding this and that, living on the hoof, always passing over the present in favor of the unfulfilled promise. “Making a noise and giving them the runaround,” as Nadezhda Mandelstam put it. But where did it lead? The new, the turn of the wheel, was paid for with the good old currency of collective fate, mass slaughter, labor camp dust, and labor camp death. And there was Tsvetaeva, with her unwavering trust in the past, her magnificent dismissal of news and newspaper truths. We know only too well that their disagreement, that ancient meeting of past and future, ended in nothing, in the most literal sense of the word: in dust, in two unmarked graves at different ends of the million-headed cemetery. No one won that argument. Everyone lost.

  *

  In a late interview on the subject of history, W. G. Sebald described an experiment: a rat was placed in a tank of water and observed to see how long it could swim. It lasted a short while, perhaps a minute, and then it died — its heart stopped. Some rats were given the unexpected opportunity of climbing out — just as their strength was leaving them a hatch opened in the wall of the tank, and through it shone the blinding light of freedom. When the rats were thrown back into the tank, those who had experienced this miracle of salvation behaved differently: they swam and swam along the walls of the tank until they died of exhaustion.

  None of Sebald’s books can be read as a consolation, whichever way we understand that word. There is no provision for the version of events where a hand is stretched out to life as it chokes and splutters in the watery darkness. He skirts any matter bordering on the divine with a long-held polite disbelief. It is quite pointless to treat his prose as a source of biographical material, but in the second part of The Emigrants, the section titled “Paul Bereyter,” there is a passage about the divinity classes, which irritate and upset in equal measure the hero of the story, the schoolteacher, and the schoolboy who is the narrator of the story. A child growing up in postwar Germany could end up with the most upended view of the world order: back then, one of the main attributes of the big town, distinguishing it from the frivolous village, were the spaces between buildings, filled with rubble and clinker, heaps of bricks, wastelands. Sebald absolutely refused to consider himself a thematic writer, of the catastrophe of European Jewry (he felt the same solidarity with all the annihilated, even th
e trees and buildings, and I wouldn’t say that people were more important to him than the rest). In the lectures he gave in 1997, later published in English as On the Natural History of Destruction, he spoke about a different sort of memory: about the carpet bombing of German cities in the last years of the war and the amnesia it had produced in those who had survived it:

  From what we now know about the ruin of this city it seems unlikely that anyone who then stood on the Brühl Terrace, with the air full of flying sparks, and saw the conflagration all around can have escaped with an undisturbed mind. The apparently unimpaired ability — shown in most of the eyewitness reports — of everyday language to go on functioning as usual raises doubts of the authenticity of the experiences they record. The death by fire within a few hours of an entire city, with all its buildings and its trees, its inhabitants, its domestic pets, its fixtures and fittings of every kind, must inevitably have led to overload, to paralysis of the capacity to think and feel in those who succeeded in escaping.

  Sebald uses a few German sources and accounts by Allied pilots and journalists who witnessed the bombardment for his description of the fires that rose some two thousand meters into the air, so that even the cockpits of the bombers above were warmed by the flames; the scalding water in canals; and the corpses lying in puddles of their own fat. In the logic of Sebald’s lists, whatever else there might be place for, there is none for theodicy: the space in which one might turn to God with a question or a reproach on one’s lips is utterly filled, like the ark, with all those who didn’t escape.

  In this sense Sebald didn’t need to choose between the drowned and the saved, or the perished and those who still await death. The feeling of comradeship in the face of our common fate, just like in a town under siege or a sinking ship, makes his approach universal and all-embracing. There is no miracle. Everything we see before us, including ourselves, will disappear, and it won’t take long. So there is no choice: any object or fate or person or name board deserves to be remembered, to flicker once again in the light before all is finally dark.