Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

These extended passages have neither particular purpose nor direct meaning. I would call them “lyrical” if it wasn’t for their strangely impersonal quality. The seeing eye feels detached, as if it belonged to no one, has no focus — it roams around the space that was once a home, a peaceful place to live, rest, and move about in, and is now transformed into a hard and impenetrable surface, nameless and beyond understanding. “It is as light as day outside. The moonlight is blinding. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Ursa Major shine so brightly.” It’s as if the viewer herself disappears at these moments: the person who sees the changing earth and sky is no longer me , but someone else. The body aches, it itches, it is full of fear, it tries and fails to forget itself, but the beholding eye moves freely and without haste, as if it were the air itself with its unlimited reserves of time, looking at the riverbanks and buildings.

In the memoirs of those who fought outside Leningrad during those months, and who saw with their own eyes the parachutes hanging like huge chandeliers over the icy beam of the spotlight, and the pulsing multicolored streams of fire lifting from the burning city, the narrative moves in the same way, with these trancelike pauses. It feels as if the front line and the besieged and dying city had suddenly become reflecting halves; as if there were no difference between them (780,000 people died in the first year of the Siege). Propagandists loved the phrase “Frontline City.” It both elevated and explained the rebirth of the everyday experience as a strange offshoot of daily decline and disaster. The boundary between the everyday and the unthinkable disappeared. In the Leningrad Public Library the cold corpses of librarians lay on the floor, but you could still borrow a book.

The people who lived in the city and on the frontline changed themselves as fast as they changed their own understanding of what was possible and natural. Lydia Ginzburg’s Notes from the Blockade describes with precision these stages of rebirth, which were above all physical, affecting personal hygiene and domestic tasks, manifesting as gray hairs and graying skin and crumbling teeth, displacing even the desire to read, but honing the instincts for adaptation and survival. In the summer of 1942, when the cold was gone and hunger no longer at its peak, this led to a new and unusual problem: a gap between this moment of rest and a hardwired fight for existence. A leather cushion on the armchair (a gift, a sweet memento from a past life) now merely gave rise to an intense sense of bewilderment: “the opportunity to return their original meanings to objects.” But what to do with the books sitting on the shelves? They appeared to have crept their way back into view, though there was still no interest in lifting them off the shelves. The new skills of lighting the stove, dragging a bucket of water up the congealed ice on the staircase, balancing dishes and bags and ration books, and the terrible daily rituals of waking and getting ready to go out — all this belonged to someone new. It was better to leave that old “I” behind and not look back. Eventually everything around forgets its past and itself and mutates: vodka becomes bread, furniture becomes sugar. This is how Ginzburg described it: “They made cakes out of greens, and cutlets out of herrings.” For her there was a clear lesson in this: “Every product had to cease being itself.” And it goes without saying that this applied to people as well.

Nikolai Nikulin describes this process in himself. He was called up in 1941. By the end of that autumn he was a bewildered walking skeleton, but a sudden change came over him. Louse-ridden and weak, he spent a night in a shell hole, weeping with his misery and helplessness:

I found strength from somewhere. Toward dawn I crawled out of the hole and began skulking about in the empty German dug outs. I found a frozen potato, hard as a stone. I lit a fire. […] This is the moment when I was reborn. I developed a defense mechanism, I found some energy, a sense of how I needed to act to survive, a newfound alertness. I started scavenging for food […] I gathered up the dry crusts and ends of bread around the stores and canteens, I found food wherever I could. I started being taken up to the front lines.

The new man, the man who learns how to survive, is of use not just to himself, but to the state — he’s effective, and in this there is no distinction between the frontline city and the line of fire. Ginzburg’s texts from the besieged city are animated by the idea of “usefulness,” which she understands in a surprising way. The Western world had proved itself powerless in the face of Hitler, she wrote, and the only thing that was capable of tackling him was the Soviet Leviathan: a corrupted and terrorizing system, which had dehumanized the individual to such an extent that he had learned to sacrifice himself without even realizing it. Meaning is given to the individual existence through the collective opposition to a clear evil — even as that existence disintegrates, frozen with horror, or behaves with repulsiveness or stupidity. From the womb of a dying city, from within the sacrifice, Ginzburg offers herself and her class of “intellectuals” a very different form of mobilization: refuting the personal and self-interested in the name of a form of austere citizenship, indifference to each individual fate, but salvation of the whole. This would have been impossible before the war, but the war had changed the old relationships. Where are the famous academics and intellectuals now, she asks? They stagger through the streets, their empty flats looted. The effective man is reborn in wartime, cleansed of his old habits. He has nothing left to weigh him down and is now useful to the collective effort.

As if in the same spirit of service, Lydia Ginzburg’s prose is concise and workmanlike. The notes, which exist in a number of variations, are selected for their specific subject matter, from which a sense of the typical can be gleaned, observations that serve as a basis for conclusions. All personal matters are eschewed, as if the personal were considered to be dead already, a matter for study, evisceration, analysis; description, but only in order to pass general comment. Everything unnecessary (hedonistic accounts of the wondrous and beautiful) is shoved out. Although in the huge volume of her texts about the Siege of Leningrad there is one fragment (which feels almost ashamed of itself) in which the narrator almost imperceptibly falls into the familiar mode of trancelike contemplation:

People in cities often hardly realize that the moon doesn’t just shine on the dacha, but on the city as well. We used to think it natural and obvious that it would be light on the streets at night. I remember how I felt it for the very first time. It was a pitch-black night, a November darkness. You could barely distinguish the black of the sky from the black of the buildings, which stood like huge blocks (a few tiny cracks of light from chinks here and there). The strange dark-blue streetcars looked like they were double-deck, as they cast a long shadow on the wet black asphalt.

Large pairs of lights from cars rose in the direction of Nevsky Prospect and drew closer. They were dark blue, or greenish or dirty-orange-colored, for some reason. The lights took on unprecedented significance. They passed in pairs (and in a chain sometimes) and they thrust their dense beam through the fog like a tusk.

The text, which has up till then operated somewhere between report and abstracted general experience, suddenly stops for a closer look, then brims over like water. The self is momentarily effaced and all circumstances and duties are forgotten. After a few lines the author comes to her senses, rushing to add that “for our contemporaries there is no mysticism, no Romanticism in this,” only inconvenience — but the experience of her comrades in misfortune, who were also entranced by the nightscape and the light, suggests otherwise. The collective “us” of the city’s inhabitants, which Ginzburg defined herself against, was nearly threadbare by then, so thin you could see the city’s bridges and buildings through its fabric. It seems as if these shameful trancelike moments, where a person contemplated the existence of a world beyond her, were the only manifestations of Lydia Ginzburg’s unrealizable dream of a shared space.