Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

In the 1950s, continued Mikhail Sergeyevich, it seems the entire industry of psychological study had become a facade, a travesty of academia. In many ways it was a microcosm of the larger designs of the political establishment. It was common practice then for psychiatrists to gain positions of power by virtue of their political loyalties, and the outlets for true academic exchange of ideas were effectively shut down. Only one academic journal remained, espousing the official view, enabling the powers of the day to dictate the sharing and withholding of scientific thought.

I guess that time is interesting for me to study because it was when my father was working, and when I was receiving treatment. It’s the world I was treated by, so to speak. In the early fifties, a hearing was held and supposedly reactionary or idealistic psychiatrists were condemned and forced to publicly acknowledge their mistakes. Basically, it shut down the exchange of thought in the Soviet world of psychiatric research. And it meant the parameters of madness and sanity, as it were, could be dictated by the government from their offices in Moscow.

And then there’s the question of suicide, he said abruptly. Under the Soviet dogma, to take one’s own life was portrayed as weak-willed, a betrayal of the collective in favour of the self—privileging I over we . Those committing such an act were lacking proper faith in the Party; a person didn’t belong so wholly to themselves that they could decide whether to live or die. No, they were to put collective interests first. Killing oneself was the height of individualism, so they said, and it undermined their whole idea that labouring together—becoming we— could help prevent such inclinations. And maybe there’s some truth in the notion that being part of a common cause is good for you. But in this case it was the cause of a system born of theories taken to an extreme, theories that should never have left the books in which they were written. I think that common cause should be far less tangible—the pursuit of art, or some similar idea.

And so, although there were some early Soviet studies of suicide, they ceased by the end of the 1920s as the official stigma took hold. By the 1930s, suicide vanished, in a manner of speaking, as official statistics were no longer released.

Mikhail Sergeyevich went quiet, and seemed to have run to the end of his thoughts for the time being. We sat for a while before parting ways.

The next time she came to our apartment, I asked Anya about her father, what she remembered of his illness from when she was a girl. She was standing by the window, sipping tea. I couldn’t see what she was looking at outside, if she was in fact looking at anything beyond the other concrete towers.

I was very young when it all happened, she said, so I’m not sure if I really remember going to see him in hospital as a girl or whether, because I know he went to the hospital, I feel like I remember. Mama, even now, doesn’t like to discuss it. There was such a stigma around it. It’s like with the stories now, with glasnost . She’s worried, she’s got this fear of information, about things getting out of hand —I don’t know whether she means his illness or what people will think. Probably both.

But in some way it’s tied to his father, my grandfather. He was the one who wanted my father to go into hospital in the first place. He had absolute faith in the system, of course. Stalin and Brezhnev apparently sent their sons to asylums. They believed the right conditions for the body would fix the mind. Work therapy, that sort of thing.

Anya gestured towards the city beyond the window. I just hated it, she said. I never felt that I had proper friends, because they’d never know this thing about me, this secret that my mother convinced me was something to be ashamed of. And the official walls went up, bureaucratic walls, when it was known someone had psychiatric treatment on their file. It was hard for him to keep working.

Anya said that he was prone to outbursts, when he couldn’t articulate what it was that so hurt him on the inside, but everything in a physical sense, be it touch, food or noise, was unbearable for him at those times.

One day I went out and stayed at my friend’s house, Anya said, lighting a cigarette and resting one elbow on her hip. My father wasn’t working then, he was spending a lot of time sleeping, or disappearing for long walks. Those walks of his made me so anxious. The apartment was just so quiet. I couldn’t tell if anyone was home or if he’d gone out wandering again. I felt like something was about to break, a glass was about to shatter. I needed air. So I stayed at a girl’s house, a girl from school I didn’t even know that well, since I’d never let myself get close to anyone. When I came home the next morning, my father had taken a bad turn. Mama was packing his things. Folding his shirts, pressing socks into a large black bag. She told me he was going to spend a few days in a clinic. It had happened before. This time, though, Mama blamed me. Look what you’ve done! See, your father is sick with worry about you! She even hit my cheek. And I truly believed I was the cause. I was horrified. I never argued after that. I just drifted along silently with whatever she wanted. Until now, until glasnost . And now she hates that she can’t control it. I’m older now, I’m making my own decisions.

She exhaled, smoke making a thin barrier between her and the window.

Let’s talk about something else, she said. Your trip—you’re going soon. Tell me what Oleg has planned.

She gave a fractured sort of smile, her eyes ringed with those neat circles. She said it was good I was going; it would be such an experience, she said.

But inexplicably, or maybe for many reasons, I was uneasy about leaving Moscow. Maybe because I’d never travelled so long or far before—or perhaps on account of what I was leaving behind.

We took a Red Arrow sleeper train from Moscow to Leningrad. It left Leningrad station in Moscow at five minutes to midnight and we arrived the next morning, after dawn. It was the end of May 1989.

I had never been to Leningrad before. We stayed with Oleg’s friends Ivan and Susanna. I understood, without being told, that they were zeki , former prisoners, although I didn’t know their stories or what camps they had sat in. Ivan’s thick hair poured back in dark grey streams from his forehead. His shirt, navy blue, was buttoned neatly at the wrists and collar. His wife Susanna was a tall, statuesque woman with full lips and thin, fading hair. With a warm smile, she said many times how glad she was that we had come. She seated us at the kitchen table, from which I could see the living room, a site of unfettered creation: partly completed artworks, canvases, jars of translucent coloured water, curls of paper, paintbrushes, rags.

Ivan is something of a celebrity nowadays, Oleg said as we sat down to vodka and snacks. He nodded towards the unfinished artworks in the next room. Today’s generation prize Ivan and his work.

I wondered if Sukhanov would know of him.

Ivan waved away Oleg’s words. Fame, he quoted, is just the summary of all misunderstandings that crystallise about a new name. Rilke, he said with a nod.

Oh, think of your own words, said Susanna with a laugh both curt and fond.