Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

So, for example, in May 1914, only weeks before the outbreak of war, a postcard from Paris arrives in Saratov. It is decorated with almond blossom and Spring, perhaps the personification of April, leans down over a sleeping infant. The caption reads: sogno primaverile . On May 30, the day my great-grandfather received this card (in which Sarra writes that she is returning from an exam “quite shattered”), the young pilot Alfred Agostinelli, former chauffeur of Marcel Proust and the model for Albertine, crashed his plane near Antibes and drowned in the Mediterranean. Agostinelli registered for his flying lessons as Marcel Swann, as if the hero and the narrator of In Search of Lost Time had merged into one person. Proust paid for these lessons and he’d even promised to buy Albert an airplane with Mallarmé’s lines about the swan who couldn’t fly etched on the fuselage. “A poem you loved, even if you thought you didn’t understand it,” Proust wrote in a letter that was never opened. On the day it arrived the addressee didn’t come home.

Sometimes touch alone is enough to establish kinship. I’m thinking now of the famous 1950s experiment with baby monkeys. The babies were taken away from their hairy birth mothers and put in an enclosure with surrogate mothers: one made from wire and another from soft plush. All the babies without exception tried to squirm into the arms of the “soft mommy,” to hold on and press themselves against her and hug her. As the experiment progressed the soft mommy began to cause them pain: under the soft fur she was covered in spikes. But this didn’t stop the baby monkeys — they made little cries of pain but they didn’t release their hold. Perhaps she even became dearer to them because of the efforts they had to make to stay close to her.

Month after month I transcribed my family’s letters and documents, poring over the microscopic handwriting, the rapid accounts of long-dead conversations. I began to understand them better and love them more. I wondered whether imitation often ended in this way: the young poet who was exiled to Voronezh together with Mandelstam began to think he himself was the author of Mandelstam’s poems and I, too, carefully copying out the commas and little mistakes of my ancestors, was no longer able to see the line that divided their lives from mine.

I typed up my father’s thrilling and surprising letters, sent from Baikonur in 1965, where secret space installations were being constructed. There was a military presence on the steppe, and my father and his friend Kolya Sokolov were civilian instructors. I remember from my childhood the accounts of how my father had caught a wily little vixen, a qarsaq , on the Kazakh steppe and was attempting to train it, but the proud little beast wouldn’t eat or drink and wanted its freedom, so after three days they let it go. I found his letters among the papers at Aunt Galya’s, and there were lots of them: about the qarsaq and life on the steppe, everything down to how they made their camp and slept under an awning made from a damp sheet, and rinsed the floor with water every night. The people and circumstances of these letters became firmly fixed in my head as I typed them up, page by page. It was as if they had always been there, a natural progression of my own internal landscape. My twenty-six-year-old father hitching a ride to spend an evening drinking with a group of geologists from Moscow; arguing with the foreman over the empty shed under the workshop; losing patience with his team of fitters; stuffing a marmot; trying to send a rifle home wrapped in a fur jacket — behaving like the hero in a Soviet-era “cheerful-young-men-building-Socialism” film. This didn’t much surprise me: the letters were written fifty years ago.

At some point in the process, without giving it much thought, I sent the file with the letters to my father and asked him whether I could quote from the letters in my book. I didn’t doubt for a moment that he would give me permission: they were wonderfully well-written texts; lively, funny, and very distant from our world now. Yet there was something else: in my head, the letters I had typed up had become my own. I had become used to considering them part of a collective history of which I was the author. Papers found in a pile, of no use to anyone else; do what you want with them, throw them away or keep them — their fate depended on me, their publisher. Quoting from them meant saving them, leaving them in their box meant consigning them to a long darkness. Who else, if not me, should decide how to deal with them?

Without being aware of it, I had internalized the logic of ownership. Not in the sense of a tyrant, lording it over his hundreds of enslaved peasants, but perhaps like the tyrant’s enlightened neighbor, with a landscaped park and a theater in which his serfs acted and sang. The subject of my love and my grief had become my property, to treat as I wished. My other heroes couldn’t object or react, for obvious reasons. They were dead.

The dead have no rights: their property and the circumstances of their fate can be used by anyone and in any way. In the first few months and years after death, humanity attempts to restrain its enterprising spirit and behave with decency — its interest in the not-yet-cold corpse is kept in check, if only out of respect for the living, the family and friends. Years pass and the rules of decency, the rules of the collective, the laws of copyright, all give way like a dam breaching under the weight of water; and this seems to happen more rapidly now than in the past. The fate of the dead is the latest gold rush; the history of people we don’t really know much about has become a major subject of novels and films, of sentimental speculation and sensational exposure. No one will defend them, no one asks us.

A homeless person would have the right to be angry if her photo were used on the cover of a family calendar. A man condemned to death for murder is still able to prevent the publication of his letters or diary. There is only one category denied this right. Every one of us owns his or her history, but only to a point, only while we own our body, our underwear, our glasses case. At the beginning of the new century the invisible and indescribable majority of the dead became the new minority; endlessly vulnerable, humiliated, their rights abused.

I believe this must change, and change within our lifetimes, just as it has changed over the last hundred years for other groups of the abused and humiliated. What unites all the minorities, puts them in the same boat (or on the same many-decked liner) is other people’s sense that their subjectivity is incomplete: women who need to be looked after ; children who don’t know what’s best for them ; black people who are like children ; the working classes who don’t know what’s in their own interests ; the dead, for whom nothing matters any more . Even if you aren’t in any of the former categories, you are certain to be in the last.

My father didn’t answer for a day or two. Then he Skyped me and said he wanted to talk. He wouldn’t give me permission to reproduce his letters in the book. He really didn’t want them published. Even the one about the vixen? Even that one. He hoped I would understand. He was absolutely against the idea. Because, he added very clearly, nothing happened quite in that way.

I was horrified and offended. My Not-A-Chapters with their family histories were working out nicely: a chronicle, an arpeggio, a ladder running up the book from the beginning of the century to 1965, and my father’s tales of jaunty builders and soldier’s boots felt like a necessary rung. How could I make do without it? I argued, I questioned, I gesticulated. When we’d both calmed down a little, my father said, “I can’t bear to think that someone will read those letters and think that’s what I am.”