Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

Other surnames stayed in place and their owners wore them as they were. The Ginzburgs and the Gurevichs, who were from distant Polish and Bavarian towns, heaved toponyms around like sacks of possessions. The Stepanovs, with their bland newly built surname (with its vaguely Greek root: “stefanos” meaning crown or garland), had nothing distinctive in their names. The branches of the family tree are curiously bare of “Rosen” and “Mandal,” of stars and precious jewels. But it is peopled with apparently gentle, peaceful Libermans and Fridmans.

In our own history the most interesting part is what we don’t know. In other people’s histories it’s the animal magnetism of elective affinities that singles out this one from hundreds of others. Sebald’s method, his way of thinking and speaking, is founded on refusing to choose. Although when you begin reading, his books can seem riddled with tunnels like an ant nest, all leading to unexpected consonances. “Across what distances in time do the elective affinities and correspondences connect? How is it that one perceives oneself in another human being, or, if not oneself, then one’s own precursor?” If we are to believe him, then these connections come about of their accord, in the way that a magpie drags everything it can find into its nest. Sebald was touched above all by dates that coincided, birthdays, deathdays, and events through which you could see your own life.

When I bring to mind a date or an important event, sometimes it gives rise to a thought experiment, the point of which I hardly know myself. “If a child had been born to that day,” I think to myself, “then that child would now be x years old.” I express it like that — born to the day, and not to me or someone else, as if the event that changed my life had also given birth to someone new. There are by now lots of these invisible children, and they are growing up; but I remember one of them more often than the others. The child born to January 15, 1998, a frosty, radiant day in Moscow and a gray tricklingly damp day in Würzburg — the date of my mother’s death — would now be an adult.

One evening in Moscow in E. P Peshkova’s flat, Lenin, who had been listening to Beethoven’s Sonatas, played by Issay Dobrowen, said, “I don’t know anything better than the Appassionata. I could listen to it every day. It’s wonderful, superhuman music. It makes me think, perhaps childishly, naively, but with pride, of the wonders humans are capable of.” And smiling and narrowing his eyes, he added sadly, “I can’t listen to music often, it acts on my nerves, it makes me want to say sweet and stupid things, stroke people on the head, who can still create such beauty although they live in filth and horror. But right now stroking people on the head is out of the question. They’d bite your hand off, it would be better to beat them about the heads, beat them mercilessly, although ideally we are against all violence toward men. Hmmm, it’s a hellish task.”

This paragraph from Maksim Gorky’s Days With Lenin , which was censored by the Soviet authorities, is often quoted, and especially the bit about “beating them about the heads.” It’s also been noted that Lenin got the Sonatas confused. Dobrowen himself later confirmed (from emigration) that he had actually played the Pathétique to the Great Leader. The story of the evening when Lenin was Gorky’s guest is fixed in the nation’s official memory, so much so that the 1963 film of the meeting Appassionata simply lifted its visual composition from the previous painting by the artist Nabandyan, “V. I. Lenin at A. M. Gorky’s home in 1920”: the striped divan, the warm half shawl worn by Peshkova, and the low-hanging lamp in the painting were as much part of the mythology of the evening as the music and the discussion, and the snowstorm whirling outside the window. The film opens with a shot of snow falling over the crenelated Kremlin walls; it’s an epic, hungry, terrible winter. Lenin and Gorky are feeding firewood into an iron stove in the icy apartment, a little girl runs in and begins talking about Crimea: “It’s not safe! The Whites have occupied Crimea!” In fact winter was still a way off. Dobrowen was summoned to play for Lenin on October 20, an autumnal evening. They say that Lenin constantly pressed Gorky to go abroad during that evening, and as he left he famously said: “If you don’t go, then we’ll exile you anyway.”

So everything happened — and yet it didn’t happen. They played music, but it was a different piece; there was a snowstorm, but only ten days later; the famous “we’ll exile you” comment was made, but was it really made then? Gorky himself was only a guest in the apartment, he hadn’t lived with his former wife Ekaterina Peshkova for many years; Dobrowen was actually a strange and invented pseudonym (meaning “good wine,” as he later explained). The pianist was by then a celebrity — schoolgirls treasured postcards with his portrait. I found one such portrait in my family archive: curled hair, a starched dickey, circles under his eyes: an artist at the height of his powers! Across the image is a sprawling signature, and on the other side there is a dedication:

To my dear friend

Isai Abramovich

With warm affection and in memory of graduating

from the Conservatoire

Your Isaichik

Moscow

20

May 1911

How did this postcard find its way into our family album? Isai Abramovich Shapiro, my great-grandfather’s brother-in-law, was a doctor with a practice in Nizhny Novgorod and a specialist in skin and venereal diseases. He was well-known locally and he lived in an expensive part of town. In another picture in the album he is with his wife and three children — sheepskin caps, coats with half capes — in a snowy garden among the birch trees, sitting on one of those ubiquitous slender bentwood chairs. Isai Abramovich could only have known the pianist from Nizhny Novgorod, where they’d both lived. Gorky was from Nizhny Novgorod, too: the hilltop house where he lived with Ekaterina Peshkova as a young man is still there. It’s one of the few places in the world where everything is as it was — plates with a cheerful pattern around the edge, the long table in the dining room, a relaxed couch with bolsters, metal-framed guest beds, porcelain washbowls, and slightly macabre bouquets, gathered by the owners a hundred or more years ago from the profligate green roadsides, and now condemned to last forever. I was told that the reason for this rare degree of preservation was due to “womanly foresight”: Peshkova knew she was married to a great writer and she made efforts to save everything for posterity: the blinds, the shutters, the toys of her living son and her dead daughter. When her marriage to Gorky fell apart she conceived of a time-delayed monument to their short life together. Their possessions were put away into boxes, inventoried, wrapped in fabric, and left until they could be brought back to the old house and placed in their former positions.

Whenever I go into a bookshop, I see there are more and more such inventories of possessions, especially in those parts of the world where they use Latin alphabets. In a New York bookshop the books lie with their covers catching the light: Proust’s Overcoat , Monsieur Proust’s Library , Rembrandt’s Nose , Van Gogh’s Ear , Catullus’s Bedspread , Vermeer’s Hat , The Brontë Cabinet , the history of a family in eight objects, one hundred photographs, ninety-nine discoveries.

I wondered if I had been too wrapped up in my thoughts to notice that the old world had breached its banks and flooded the current world; the search for lost time had become a general obsession, and everyone had thrown themselves into reading, writing, and describing our relations with the past. What I was still preparing to write turned out to be simply part of a much bigger movement. Everyone was engaged in “getting a good view” on the past, as if there was nothing else worth doing, as if this was the new form of the Grand Tour. The emptiness that fills villages burned to the ground, and the people inhabiting the rooms of others — all this has become part of the cultural program, like the Roman forum or the Paris Opéra.