Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

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 brighter. 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”: