Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

I have a permanent address now and so I am writing again in the hope of a reply. Please write and tell me how you all are, whether you are well? How are Mother, Auntie Beti, Lyonya, Lyolya, the baby, Sarra Abramovna? I’m worried that I haven’t heard from you.

I was in Leningrad until March, so the food situation was fairly bad. At the end of February I went to Lake Ladoga, and the food got better immediately and I feel quite fit and well now.

Please write as much as possible about everyone and everything. I can’t wait to hear. All my love to Mother, Auntie Beti, Lyonya, Lyolya, their baby and Sarra Abramovna.

My address: PPS 939,994, s/p 3 Battalion, 7 Company, Junior Lt Gimmelfarb L. M.

In Spring 1942, stiffly, almost unwillingly, life began returning to its former shape. Food supplies increased, a market opened, things could once again be bought for money. The city was coarser, in the sun it seemed almost rural — here and there patches of land appeared from under the snow, ready for sowing potatoes, cabbage, and cucumbers. In April the city’s inhabitants came out onto the streets to clear them after the Terrible Winter. The Terrible Winter lived on of course, it seemed to breathe through every crack, but still the changes felt like heaven. This insubstantial, shaky euphoria (there was no faith in it, but still a desire to linger beneath a glassy sun) washes through the Siege diaries during these weeks and months. At the beginning of summer Klavdiya Naumovna writes to her son:

Things are happening again, life feels quite exhilarating, especially after the winter. People are washing themselves, they’ve started wearing their best dresses. The streetcars are running, shops are reopening. There are lines for perfume in the shops — they got perfume into Leningrad. It does cost 120 rubles a bottle, but people are buying it and I was even given some. I was so happy. I love perfume! I sprayed some on and I don’t feel hungry at all, I feel as if I were just returning from the theater, or a concert or a café. This is especially how I feel wearing “Red Moscow” scent.

Shaporina confirms this, writing that the air was wonderful — and how delicious the radish was. She didn’t have much hope left, but at least they were still alive.

Otter, Lydia Ginzburg’s hero and alter ego, expresses the same feeling of a suspicious absence of hunger, waking with a “wonderful, still undiminished lack of suffering.” Otter’s Day , from which she later draws the perfectly constructed Notes from the Blockade , was written with some distance in 1943 and 1944, but the description of life returning to its former state, without apparent reason, seems very real in its unlikeliness. “The window was open. He was neither hot nor cold. It was light all around. And it would stay light the whole of the white night through. He didn’t even feel like eating. […] Otter threw back the sheet and exposed his body to the light, bright air, neither cold nor hot.”

There was a welcome lull in hostilities on the Leningrad Front. Nikulin wrote of the “layering of corpses” that had been left over the winter and had reappeared when the snow melted: the September dead in their light jackets and shoes, overlaid by the marines in their felted peacoats, the Siberians in their short fur jackets, and the city’s volunteer defense forces. The roads were wet and impassable, the dugouts filled with water. Spring dried everything, made the earth even again, decorated it with green, and disguised the graves. “The soldiers rested behind their defenses. There were hardly any new dead or wounded. Training began, they even started showing films […] They built bathhouses everywhere, and got rid of the lice.” It was a sunny summer: they slowly got ready for an offensive. Lyodik’s mother asked him if he was due leave and he replied that “no leave is given in wartime. When the war is over then I hope to see you all, my dearest ones.” Singers came and gave concerts to the soldiers — the still-unknown Klavdiya Shulzhenko sang “The Blue Scarf,” which had been adapted for her and which would later become a wartime classic:

July 5, 1942

Dear Mother,

I got a postcard from you yesterday and I was delighted. A little while ago I got another one. I was happy to know that you and all the family are in health and doing well. Did you get my letter where I wrote down everything in detail? On the same day I wrote to Father but I’ve had nothing back from him yet. I sent you 700 rubles, I wrote to you about this. Did you receive them?

Here everything is just as before, the days pass uneventfully. The weather is good. A few days ago we had a show: jazz, readings, two dancers, a singer and a baritone. I especially liked how they sang “Chelita” and “The Blue Scarf,” and how they played Dunayevsky’s jazz. For a long while I couldn’t get the concert out of my head, because it was such a big luxury for me. Probably those despicable Germans heard the music as well, as it was put on not far from the front line.

I am doing well. I live in hope of seeing you, father and all our dear family very soon. I am so proud of Father that he has been promoted to a guardsman. I hope in my turn I can justify the faith placed in me by the nation as a Red Army Officer.

Mother, tell me everything, I want to know about everyone. I have one request. If possible could you send me envelopes as they are hard to come by here.

I wish you health and happiness. I send you all my love.

P.S. I met some soldiers from our part of Moscow. It was good to talk to them. One of them lived and worked on our street.

Before the war “The Blue Scarf” had seemed little more than a simple ditty, and the words were quite different. It was almost by chance that it became the hymn to the soldier’s blues: another young lieutenant on the same Volkhovsky Front handed the singer, Shulzhenko, a piece of paper with his version of the lyrics, and they stuck:

Many of the popular songs of the period had similar fates. The fashionable “Chelita” was given new life by the Soviet music hall stars of the thirties. The Mexican original was more urgent and more sublime, but the Soviet version had some catchy lyrics and carefully managed class awareness: the Mexican señores may have promised her heaps of pearls, but the heroine only has eyes for the baker’s boy under the midday sun. A famous Red Army song, “Boldly We Go Into Battle for the Soviets,” has a White Army twin, “Boldly We Go Into Battle for Holy Rus,” only the latter is sung in a slow deep voice, as if rising up from underground. Both versions have a common root (or branch) in the beautiful song “The Scented Buds of the White Acacia.” Grandmother Dora, who remembered the Civil War well, used to sing a song about the Priamursky Partisans to me in my childhood, and only years later I found unexpectedly its perfect reverse, the same tune used for the war march of the opposing Siberian Infantry. Even the salon waltzes from the piles of old manuscripts have their strange echoes in Soviet propaganda songs.

The Second World War song “Katyusha,” composed in Russian in 1939 by Matvei Blanter, was sung across the world — one of its incarnations was the hymn of the Spanish Blue Division, who fought on the Leningrad Front, but on the side of the Wehrmacht. In this version the singer sings of a spring without flowers, far away from a loved one, and the ignoble foe swimming in vodka. It’s a sad song and it ends with the promise of a heroic end. In a single battle at Krasny Bor, over a thousand Spaniards were killed in only an hour.