Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

P.S. I found these two postcards of old women among my papers, I’ve had them for two weeks without sending them. + aren’t they crazily old?

12.

Sarra Ginzburg to Mikhail Fridman, March 29, 1914

Misha, you should see the Spring we’ve been having!

It was an incredible morning today, I couldn’t tear myself away from the streets, the sunlight was pouring down, nor from the bright, laughing springtime faces I passed. I want to be one of those smiling faces, I want to leave the town and go somewhere where there are meadows, the first spring flowers, gather a huge pile of them and breathe in that uncomplicated and unbelievably fresh scent of meadow — don’t you? I feel very cheerful today, I have heaps of energy and I’ll try to use it well. I’m just starting my studies.

13.

Sarra Ginzburg to Mikhail Fridman, May 8, 1914

Just back from my exam. I’m quite shattered. Incredible how my nerves are on edge and no physical effort can hold them in check. The nervous reaction dominates everything. Everything went well, but I have another exam tomorrow — on birth and midwifery. If it goes well I can rest a while.

Write and tell me your news.

14.

Sarra Ginzburg to Mikhail Fridman, October 1914

This postcard is sent from within Russia, on the front a view of the Anichkov Bridge. The First World War began in July, three months earlier.

I am incensed by your careless indifference to me. Not a word in reply to my letters. S

15.

Mikhail Fridman to Sarra Ginzburg in Petrograd, October 1914

A drawing by Leonid Pasternak: an injured sailor leans against a wall, red paint on his face to make it look flushed. A handwritten note reads: This is the last sketch from contemporary life by Leonid Pasternak. Isn’t it true to life? Misha

Sarra, I only received your letter and your request to go into the university the day before I was due to travel to Voronezh, so I wasn’t able to do as you asked. But I think it’s pointless to make inquiries, it will be the same in Saratov as it is everywhere else. The declaration of war with Turkey is hardly going to change the situation. They’ll need doctors, and there are bound to be additional exams. But even if there are more exams, don’t let it upset you. When you finished in Paris you thought you would have to take an exam, so there’s no need to despair now. All the best, Misha

16.

Sarra Ginzburg to Mikhail Fridman, November 1914

2 o’clock at night

I’m alone now. I saw Olya and Sanka off a short while ago. I turned down my bed a truly luxurious one by Russian standards (the landlady spent some time abroad and knows what the bedlinen is like there, so she made up a bed for me in the same way). I was just about to go to bed, and I suddenly looked around my room and saw how cozy it all was. The white flowers that Polya brought are in the corner, it’s clean everywhere, and pretty, an electric lamp casts a soft glow, and I started to feel sad that you left without coming here. I wanted to send my greetings at least, as I can’t do anything else. Olya brought the postcard, my sadness is about the view, and not about you. Night night. Write soon.

17.

Sarra Ginzburg to Mikhail Fridman, December 4, 1914

The days last forever, and the nights even longer. How long will I have to wait for a letter from you. Can you feel my need, enough to answer me, enough to write to me right now? I’m cheerful though, so don’t be sad, Misha. S

18.

Mikhail Fridman to Sarra Ginzburg, April 10, 1915

I haven’t written for a while, Sarra. It’s all been a bit much recently. I’m sick of the endless grind. I would love to rest from all the worry and bother and live without a care in the world. But it hardly looks likely. I’ve been traveling every day to Tambov and Razskazovo — they had some unfortunate regulation issues there and it put me in a difficult position. Not that I really give a damn. I’ll go one more time and put an end to the whole business. Write to me in Saratov. My regards to your friends. Misha.

Sarra and Mikhail’s ketubah , their prenuptial agreement, written in Hebrew, was signed a year later in April 1916. My grandmother Olga (Lyolya) Fridman was born a few weeks later.

Moving through the rooms of a gallery from portrait to portrait it becomes abundantly clear, and you’d think obvious, that the various ways of preserving the “I” — canvas and oils, pastels and paper and all the rest — come down to the single basic formula x=y . At a specific moment in a person’s continuing presence, that person hands over the right of posthumous representation to the portrait. The job of the portrait is to draw together and condense everything that makes you what you are now and will become, your past and future, and to sort all this into a fixed shape that is no longer subject to the laws of time. This process bears a direct relation to the old adage “the best words in the best order,” only the conditions are more stringent, and the order lays claim to being the single, decisive summing up. In a sense every portrait wants to be a Fayum Mummy portrait, to be shown like a passport as you cross the border between living and dead; when the work is at an end, you come to an end yourself. For this reason no person needs more than one portrait, one is enough, all the other portraits of Philip IV of Spain are like zeros lined up after a four, multiplying the distinctness of his features, tallying them up.

Photography casts even this principle into doubt, to the extent that it is now possible to believe that the identity of a portrait’s subject can and should be made up of a dozen different jigsaw pieces, selected from a range of various and sometimes not even acquainted versions of the “I.” A selfie (the most extreme manifestation of the belief in mutability) is born of the need to fix the image in place, and the conviction that the face of today and the face of tomorrow are infinitely different. Developing this principle leads us down the way of cinematography, a road composed of a thousand momentary prints. This might be a good point to remind ourselves of Aristotle’s definition of memory as the imprint of a seal. He goes on to talk about states of mind that are incompatible with memory, like passion, age, youth, describing them as a flood of raw unorganized movement: “Both the very old and the very young are defective in memory. They are in a state of flux.” A precise impression is not possible, instead the shape of a movement is left on the surface of the mind, like a half-erased tire mark on a road.

A portrait of movement — this is exactly how we see ourselves now, presenting our faces daily to the camera, or changing our social media avatar. Social media play this game with enthusiasm, constantly inventing new ways to arrange images: “my face five years ago,” “my photos with this or that friend,” “last year in pictures,” presented so they appear to be the turning pages of a book, or grandly as “a film.” It’s not even that Facebook helpfully remembers (chooses what to remember and what to forget) for me and on my behalf that I find so fascinating — it’s that the never-ending nature of the flow seems to oblige me to feed it with new photographs. Your own face needs constant updating or you’ll forget how it used to look.

Each new face casts off and cancels the ones before. It reminds me of the way a space rocket releases each stage, one after the other, in order to pick up speed. Elena Shvarts describes in a poem a room in which all her past, worn-out, and cast-off selves are “crowds /Of the dwindling, clothed, unclothed / Of the raging, and joyful, and sorrowing,” among whom the soul runs like the flame along a safety fuse. Charlotte Salomon draws her subjects in much the same way. Here’s a woman leaving her home on her way to end her life. Eighteen little figures repeating across the page in different phases of movement, a little like a corridor with intention moving down it. Each following figure confirms the decision of the one before, each new figure moves a step closer to the hole in the ice.