Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

Fervent Joseph Cornell, with his boxes and his clippings, the teenage “fairy girls” he would go out of his way to visit daily, whom he insisted on referring to in his notes as les fées (apricot fée at the café counter, fée aux lapins in the toyshop), his adulation of film stars and descriptions of their hats, is in a no-man’s land somewhere between the territory of professional art and the reserve of art brut, which at that point hadn’t gained its later status. His means of existing put him in the same camp as those we think of as mad or “possessed,” who give witness to the extreme experience, who look at our lives from a different angle, who make art without quite being aware of what they are doing. Their work needs biographical framing — it seems unreadable without this, just as you might place a stencil or colored paper over an encrypted text in order to read it.

In this sense, the artist Cornell, a Christian Scientist, a man who counted the hours till he could go and get an ice cream, was the close relative of Henry Darger, a hospital caretaker who wrote an enormous illustrated novel about young martyrs and heavenly wars in his Chicago lodgings. Both men worked and worked as if their survival depended on it, multiplying versions, accumulating essential source material in quantities that would be enough for several lifetimes, and then sorting everything into envelopes. (In Darger’s case these were labeled: “Plant and child pictures,” “Clouds to be drawn,” and in Cornell’s, “Owls,” “Dürer,” “Best White Boxes.”) Both entered into ambiguous and undefined relationships with their own heroes. Their ardor burnt so brightly and with such an even flame of fervent revelation that even the saints would have been envious. “Transcendent feeling about swan box” or “an intolerable sadness at passing a blue house” were all part of the daily fare. “Breakfast of toast, cocoa, boiled egg, tomato, bun in kitchen — words are singularly inadequate to express the gratitude felt for these experiences.”

“The depiction of thoughts through the depiction of associated objects” mentioned by the Russian poet Nikolai Zabolotsky is one of the very oldest mnemonic devices, a way of bringing thought back to mind. The memory is the last form of real estate, available even to those who have been denied all else. Its halls and corridors of stale air hold reality at bay. Cornell’s files and drawers of preparatory work were like a cellar or an attic in a house where nothing is ever thrown away; his boxes were the drawing room and parlor where the guests sat.

In one of Cornell’s diary notes he mentions a visit to the New York Museum of Natural History. He sat in the library and copied something out, all the while stealing glances at an old portrait of a Native American princess.

Had never been in this department before which is so peaceful and probably has not changed in at least seventy years […] Wandered around downstairs and noticed (also for the first time) the breathtaking collection of birds’ nests in their original condition complete and replete with eggs.

He visits the planetarium and its daytime stars and with the pleasure of familiarity he describes the glass-fronted displays of astronomical devices. It’s notable that this museum, with its Indians and dinosaurs, was the model of an ever-accessible, unmoving, constant paradise for another. In J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye the teenage Holden speaks in Cornell’s words:

The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. You could go there a hundred times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.

I love being in this museum, most of all in the rooms of old dioramas: the calm unassailable dignity of the stuffed animals posing against a backdrop of painted hills and forests, just as my great-grandfathers and grandmothers posed against backdrops of painted gardens and mists. The real world of sawdust and wool quietly and seamlessly extends into the illusory, into rosy vistas and nut-brown muddy tracks, a soapy soft-focus that I remember from illustrations on postage stamps in the albums I saw as a child. The blue of the sky never fails to remind me of Cornell, the okapi in their striped socks reach out to tear off an absentminded leaf, the deer shake their antlers, and the lynx crosses the snow carefully — in the warm air every sound rings out. Then there’s an image of wet autumn woodland speckled red, and I begin to cry, very quietly, under my breath, because it’s the very same Moscow wood where I used to walk with my parents once, many thousands of miles ago, and we are now looking at each other again.

There’s a memorial in Moscow at Lyubyanka, a square surrounded by high buildings that have housed the various incarnations of secret police for the last hundred years. It’s an unobtrusive memorial, usually just called “the Stone,” the Solovetsky Stone, brought from the Solovetsky Islands where, in 1919, one of the very first Soviet prison camps was opened. Many more followed.

Every year in Autumn there is a special day when people gather to take part in a communal event. Everyone is given a little square of paper with the name, surname, and profession of a person who was executed during the years of Communist Terror. Then they line up to approach the Stone in order to say these names aloud. It lasts a whole day, and could go on far longer. Even toward evening, when it’s getting cold, there is no shortage of people in line. Those who lost parents and grandparents read their names alongside the names of strangers. Candles are lit by the Stone. A few years ago our ten-year-old son went to stand in line. He knew more or less why he was there, but he got cold and miserable waiting his turn. Then suddenly, when he heard the names and dates being read out, he seized hold of his father and burst into tears: “They killed that person on May 6, on my birthday, Dad… how unfair is that, Dad?”

Birthdays do matter after all. My grandmother Lyolya was born on May 9, Victory Day. I learned that important fact almost before I learned to walk. My mother loved to remember the Spring of 1945 when they returned to Moscow from evacuation: fireworks over the Kremlin, a long table with everyone eating together: family, friends, all the inhabitants of the communal apartment, and all this felt like a natural ending, like a long-awaited birthday present. Grandmother was born in 1916, but the year wasn’t important. The general victory celebration completed her own quieter celebration, confirmed that her birth date wasn’t just chance.

The natural connection between Grandmother and May 9 was such an integral part of family mythology that it was only recently that it occurred to me that the she was in fact born on April 26, back in the old world and according to the old Julian Calendar. It occurred to me, too that her father, my great-grandfather Misha, was born under a different name and lived with it for a few years. Among the old papers there is a certificate given to Mikhel Fridman, apothecary’s apprentice, and however hard I strain my eyes I can’t make out the moment of transformation, when something shifts and Great-Grandfather appears in the world as the young lawyer Misha, a court solicitor in polished boots, carrying volumes of Tolstoy. All I know is that he gave his student nephew a single piece of advice: “Live an interesting life.” Did he live an interesting life, I wonder? For these people, changing names was as common a matter as moving from one town to another. My other great-grandfather, the handsome Vladimir Gurevich — in his striped jacket with a jaunty group of friends at the seaside — unexpectedly turns out to be Moisey Vulf, according to his papers. How did he pull off the old skin, and how did he choose the new one? Mikhel becomes Misha almost effortlessly, Vulf becomes a Vladimir, as if he had always been a Vladimir. Sarra’s brother, the wonderful Iosif, the firstborn and favorite son of Abram Ginzburg, who broke his father’s heart when he converted to Christianity, was transformed into Volodya (hardly the obvious shift from Iosif), as if the age demanded of its children only blue-eyed straightforwardness.