In Memory of Memory

by Maria Stepanova

  Did you receive the money back? If you didn’t then there is no need to worry. I don’t need any money at all at the moment. And anyway I received twenty rubles in wages. How are you feeling, Mother? Is your arm quite better now?

  I’ll finish now. I wish you health and happiness and I send you my love. All my love to the family, especially Auntie Beti, Uncle Syoma, Uncle Busya and Aunt Rosa, Lyonya and Lyolya.

  love,

  Lyodik

  Lyodik was mobilized straightaway and found himself in a war that hadn’t yet started. The letter above was written on his nineteenth birthday. German forces had already tightened their grip on Leningrad. The 286th Division was put together hastily from evacuees, boys barely out of their teens, local volunteers, whoever they could find. The 994th Rifle Regiment was part of this. They were thrown straight into battle.

  There is a small river, the Naziya, in the direction of Mga Station, and all around, for up to twenty kilometers, spreads endless forest and boggy ground. Kirill Meretskov, who was in command of the Volkhovsky Front, and whose actions resulted in the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of soldiers in this area, wrote years later that “I have rarely been in an area less suitable for a military offensive. I will forever remember the endless expanse of forest, the impenetrable marshes, the standing water on peat bogs, the broken roads.” The 994th Rifle Regiment survived among these peat bogs for three years, holding and losing positions. It began in September 1941, when their troop train arrived in the fog. The train didn’t even reach the junction — the Luftwaffe was overhead, and there were no Soviet planes around. The soldiers disembarked under fire, slipping about, dragging carts and weapons into copses. They could barely tug the carts with their wooden axles to safety. Then there were weeks of nonstop air raids. Along with the bombs, barrels fell from the sky. The barrels had holes punched in them and as they fell they made an unbearable screaming noise. Sometimes field kitchens went missing in the forests, because the staff were afraid to cross open ground, and the soldiers went hungry. They were armed with nothing more than rifles. On 11 September, when the Germans attacked in tanks close to the village of Voronovo there was panic. Soldiers dispersed across the marshes. After a few days the division had lost half its men and a large number of officers.

  Astonishingly, it is possible to reconstruct the events of these days and weeks with a fair amount of detail. A number of texts, interviews, and letters belonging to those who survived have been preserved. The Battalion Commander of the nearby 996th Regiment remembered that there was no artillery support for two months: in addition to a rifle, every man was given a hand grenade and a bottle of incendiary liquid. It got colder. There was no bread, only dried crusts. There were no spirits either. The soldiers got hot food once a day. Some took the greatcoats off corpses and wore them over their own coats. They slipped and slid through the snow to HQ and back. They shared things between the different companies and boiled the meat from dead horses.

  There was a day when we didn’t receive any orders to attack. The Germans didn’t bomb us either, or shell us. You couldn’t even hear firing. There was a deep silence all down the line, through the Sinyavinsky marshes. Imagine that! A day of silence. After an hour or two the men were seized by panic, deep unease. [ . . . ] Some men were on the point of throwing down their rifles and running back to the rear . . . We, the officers, walked the lines and calmed the men, for all the world as if we were facing German tanks.

  In Lyodik’s letters there is nothing about this, not even a hint. Almost all the letters had the “checked by military censor” stamp on them, but the censor would have found nothing to concern him in these letters. In one of the accounts of the Volkhovsky Front there is a quote from a letter by a Lieutenant Vlasov written on October 27, 1941:

  The first freezing temperatures and the snow is driving the Fascists mad. Especially when they look through their binoculars and see us with our padded clothes and our warm caps and a greatcoat over the top. We can see them, they’re still in short jackets . . . All I can tell you is that the military operations are currently going our way, and those officers of Hitler’s won’t be eating in the Hotel Astoria as they dreamed of doing.

  I see this scene, the warm hats and snow drifts, as if through the same set of binoculars; the rather forced humor, the bravado, was usual for a commanding officer. Still, you might expect a lieutenant to be more open about the fact that he was actually “at war” in a letter to his wife.

  This reluctance characterizes Lyodik Gimmelfarb’s letters, too: he is absolutely intent on saying nothing about himself. He asks endless questions, mostly about his mother’s health, which worries him terribly. Does she get tired at work? He asks her not to worry on his account, he is quite, quite well. If he is silent for longer than a month then it’s only because of his “shocking laziness in writing letters.” He is just as before. How are Lyonya? Lyolya? Their new baby? Sarra Abramovna? And how are Uncle Syoma and his wife? What has Uncle Busya written? How are you all, my dearest family? Please don’t worry about me. It’s completely unnecessary. Be happy, healthy. I have everything I need.

  *

  At the beginning of the war in Leningrad, Daniil Kharms and the artist Pavel Zaltsman met by chance at a friend’s house. We can imagine what they spoke about, since neither had any illusions, and Kharms at some point during the meeting said about the imminent future: “We will be crawling away, without legs, holding onto the burning walls.” Around the same time, in an air raid shelter on the Arbat in Moscow, Marina Tsvetaeva rocked to and fro, repeating to herself “and the enemy just keeps going . . .” Kharms’s wife, another Marina, wrote, of the day before his arrest, that they had had to move a chair in the corridor, and Kharms was “afraid that misfortune would come upon them if they moved the chair.” Kharms was arrested on August 23, 1941. Perhaps he could hear the muttering in the clear sky from his cell on September 8 as the planes flew overhead to bomb the Badayev food storage warehouses.

  Many people remembered that sunny day. Nikolai Nikulin, an officer cadet at the time and future art historian, whose memoirs were published posthumously, watched the antiaircraft shells exploding in the blue sky like cotton wool clouds.

  The antiaircraft guns fired a wild uncoordinated barrage, missing the bombers. The planes didn’t even break formation, they flew on toward their target as if they barely felt the antiaircraft fire. [ . . . ] It was very frightening and I suddenly found myself hiding under a piece of tarpaulin.

  The incendiary bombs hissed and went out in the sand. When it was finally quiet a black cloud half-covered the sky over the city. Sixty-one-year-old artist and diarist Lyubov Shaporina looked out her window:

  High in the air the white balls of explosions and the desperate antiaircraft fire. Suddenly a white cloud began growing up from behind the houses and roofs, bigger and bigger. Other white clouds piled up around it, lit golden in the sunset. They filled the whole sky, the clouds were bronze and a black stripe rose from below. It was so unlike smoke that for a long time I couldn’t believe it was a fire. [ . . . ] The picture was grandly, sublimely beautiful.

  In the diaries and notes written during the Siege of Leningrad in the terrible winter of 1941 (known from then on as “The Terrible Winter”), there are often “zones” that are utterly different from the rest of the text. Resembling the bubbles forming under ice, these zones are the spaces set aside by different authors for the seeing and describing of beauty. The starving city was completely taken up with the business of survival, but from time to time it fell into deep contemplation, just as its people sometimes fell into deep sleep in the freezing cold, no longer afraid to die. The tempo of the writing changes: what had been a hasty noting down of details, conversations, anecdotes — chronicles of daily dehumanization undertaken in order to save these experiences from oblivion — suddenly changes the pace of its breathing and becomes a meditation on the clouds or the effects of light. This is even more
striking when you consider how the writers of these texts were entirely occupied by the exhausting labor of survival. Their acts of witness are addressed to a future reader who will be able to grasp the situation in all its horror and shame, who will see the arrests and the exiling, the nightly air raids, the streetcars standing silent, the baths filled with frozen sewage, the fear and hatred felt by those standing in bread lines.

  These extended passages have neither particular purpose nor direct meaning. I would call them “lyrical” if it wasn’t for their strangely impersonal quality. The seeing eye feels detached, as if it belonged to no one, has no focus — it roams around the space that was once a home, a peaceful place to live, rest, and move about in, and is now transformed into a hard and impenetrable surface, nameless and beyond understanding. “It is as light as day outside. The moonlight is blinding. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Ursa Major shine so brightly.” It’s as if the viewer herself disappears at these moments: the person who sees the changing earth and sky is no longer me, but someone else. The body aches, it itches, it is full of fear, it tries and fails to forget itself, but the beholding eye moves freely and without haste, as if it were the air itself with its unlimited reserves of time, looking at the riverbanks and buildings.

  In the memoirs of those who fought outside Leningrad during those months, and who saw with their own eyes the parachutes hanging like huge chandeliers over the icy beam of the spotlight, and the pulsing multicolored streams of fire lifting from the burning city, the narrative moves in the same way, with these trancelike pauses. It feels as if the front line and the besieged and dying city had suddenly become reflecting halves; as if there were no difference between them (780,000 people died in the first year of the Siege). Propagandists loved the phrase “Frontline City.” It both elevated and explained the rebirth of the everyday experience as a strange offshoot of daily decline and disaster. The boundary between the everyday and the unthinkable disappeared. In the Leningrad Public Library the cold corpses of librarians lay on the floor, but you could still borrow a book.

  The people who lived in the city and on the frontline changed themselves as fast as they changed their own understanding of what was possible and natural. Lydia Ginzburg’s Notes from the Blockade describes with precision these stages of rebirth, which were above all physical, affecting personal hygiene and domestic tasks, manifesting as gray hairs and graying skin and crumbling teeth, displacing even the desire to read, but honing the instincts for adaptation and survival. In the summer of 1942, when the cold was gone and hunger no longer at its peak, this led to a new and unusual problem: a gap between this moment of rest and a hardwired fight for existence. A leather cushion on the armchair (a gift, a sweet memento from a past life) now merely gave rise to an intense sense of bewilderment: “the opportunity to return their original meanings to objects.” But what to do with the books sitting on the shelves? They appeared to have crept their way back into view, though there was still no interest in lifting them off the shelves. The new skills of lighting the stove, dragging a bucket of water up the congealed ice on the staircase, balancing dishes and bags and ration books, and the terrible daily rituals of waking and getting ready to go out — all this belonged to someone new. It was better to leave that old “I” behind and not look back. Eventually everything around forgets its past and itself and mutates: vodka becomes bread, furniture becomes sugar. This is how Ginzburg described it: “They made cakes out of greens, and cutlets out of herrings.” For her there was a clear lesson in this: “Every product had to cease being itself.” And it goes without saying that this applied to people as well.

  Nikolai Nikulin describes this process in himself. He was called up in 1941. By the end of that autumn he was a bewildered walking skeleton, but a sudden change came over him. Louse-ridden and weak, he spent a night in a shell hole, weeping with his misery and helplessness:

  I found strength from somewhere. Toward dawn I crawled out of the hole and began skulking about in the empty German dug outs. I found a frozen potato, hard as a stone. I lit a fire. [ . . . ] This is the moment when I was reborn. I developed a defense mechanism, I found some energy, a sense of how I needed to act to survive, a newfound alertness. I started scavenging for food [ . . . ] I gathered up the dry crusts and ends of bread around the stores and canteens, I found food wherever I could. I started being taken up to the front lines.

  The new man, the man who learns how to survive, is of use not just to himself, but to the state — he’s effective, and in this there is no distinction between the frontline city and the line of fire. Ginzburg’s texts from the besieged city are animated by the idea of “usefulness,” which she understands in a surprising way. The Western world had proved itself powerless in the face of Hitler, she wrote, and the only thing that was capable of tackling him was the Soviet Leviathan: a corrupted and terrorizing system, which had dehumanized the individual to such an extent that he had learned to sacrifice himself without even realizing it. Meaning is given to the individual existence through the collective opposition to a clear evil — even as that existence disintegrates, frozen with horror, or behaves with repulsiveness or stupidity. From the womb of a dying city, from within the sacrifice, Ginzburg offers herself and her class of “intellectuals” a very different form of mobilization: refuting the personal and self-interested in the name of a form of austere citizenship, indifference to each individual fate, but salvation of the whole. This would have been impossible before the war, but the war had changed the old relationships. Where are the famous academics and intellectuals now, she asks? They stagger through the streets, their empty flats looted. The effective man is reborn in wartime, cleansed of his old habits. He has nothing left to weigh him down and is now useful to the collective effort.

  As if in the same spirit of service, Lydia Ginzburg’s prose is concise and workmanlike. The notes, which exist in a number of variations, are selected for their specific subject matter, from which a sense of the typical can be gleaned, observations that serve as a basis for conclusions. All personal matters are eschewed, as if the personal were considered to be dead already, a matter for study, evisceration, analysis; description, but only in order to pass general comment. Everything unnecessary (hedonistic accounts of the wondrous and beautiful) is shoved out. Although in the huge volume of her texts about the Siege of Leningrad there is one fragment (which feels almost ashamed of itself) in which the narrator almost imperceptibly falls into the familiar mode of trancelike contemplation:

  People in cities often hardly realize that the moon doesn’t just shine on the dacha, but on the city as well. We used to think it natural and obvious that it would be light on the streets at night. I remember how I felt it for the very first time. It was a pitch-black night, a November darkness. You could barely distinguish the black of the sky from the black of the buildings, which stood like huge blocks (a few tiny cracks of light from chinks here and there). The strange dark-blue streetcars looked like they were double-deck, as they cast a long shadow on the wet black asphalt.

  Large pairs of lights from cars rose in the direction of Nevsky Prospect and drew closer. They were dark blue, or greenish or dirty-orange-colored, for some reason. The lights took on unprecedented significance. They passed in pairs (and in a chain sometimes) and they thrust their dense beam through the fog like a tusk.

  The text, which has up till then operated somewhere between report and abstracted general experience, suddenly stops for a closer look, then brims over like water. The self is momentarily effaced and all circumstances and duties are forgotten. After a few lines the author comes to her senses, rushing to add that “for our contemporaries there is no mysticism, no Romanticism in this,” only inconvenience — but the experience of her comrades in misfortune, who were also entranced by the nightscape and the light, suggests otherwise. The collective “us” of the city’s inhabitants, which Ginzburg defined herself against, was nearly threadbare by then, so thin you could see the city’s bri
dges and buildings through its fabric. It seems as if these shameful trancelike moments, where a person contemplated the existence of a world beyond her, were the only manifestations of Lydia Ginzburg’s unrealizable dream of a shared space.

  *

  In mid-autumn the weather in the city was only just beginning to cool. People talked about the inevitable food shortages to come, but they were still serving food in the cafés. After the air raid they filled the bath and washed the children, but very soon the idea that you could turn on the tap and water would flow from it became inconceivable. The city was being bombed, the windows were taped over, and darkness filled the evenings, but the dark-blue streetcars continued to run until December. Food rations decreased. Instead of 600g of bread they now gave workers 200g. In September Lyubov Shaporina went shopping, got her bread ration, and stopped to read a newspaper board. Then she realized she’d forgotten to get the five eggs she was permitted. A few weeks later, the simple idea of forgetting to get one’s ration was in itself unimaginable. One person wrote that they had been sleeping in their clothes for many days, ready to go down to the shelter at night. That Terrible Winter they slept in their icy apartments fully dressed, pulling any rags they could find over themselves (when spring came and Lydia Ginzburg had survived, she found it hard to make herself take off her felt boots and change back into shoes). Fuel supplies ran out in September and it was becoming colder. Everyone was sent to chop wood: teenagers, girls in thin coats and light shoes. Snow fell for the first time on the night of October 7. The following day Lyodik turned up in the besieged city.

  Purple ink on a small sheet of paper

  October 8, 1941

  Dear Mother,

  Please forgive me for not writing more often to let you know I’m fine. I keep meaning to but just don’t get around to it. You do take things very hard, and there really isn’t any need.