In Memory of Memory

by Maria Stepanova

  He is buried in the village of Voronovo, Mginsky District, Leningrad area.

  This notification is needed to begin the process of applying for a pension.

  Commanding Officer of the 994th Rifle Regiment, Lt Col Popov

  Military Commissar of the 994th Rifle Regiment, Commissar Gus’kov

  Chief-of-Staff Capt Zhizhikov

  *

  February 19, 1943

  Dear Vera Leontevna

  I received a letter from your husband, Mikhail Gimmelfarb, who wanted to know about his dearly beloved son, Leonid. I can tell you that your son died the death of the Courageous, while defending Leningrad on August 27, 1942. He was a worthy son to the homeland. You should be proud to have brought up such a son. Of course it’s a terrible shame, but what can we do. War is pitiless, it demands sacrifice. We must find joy in the fact that the blood spilled by the Russian nation was not in vain. We, the soldiers of the Red Army, will avenge your son’s death. I am asking you as I don’t know your husband’s address and couldn’t answer him personally.

  I wish you good health and send you courage.

  Deputy Commanding Officer. N Regiment

  A. Ugolkov

  *

  April 1, 1944

  Dear Comrade Begun,

  In answer to your letter I would like to inform you that Mikhail Gimmelfarb was sent to serve in a military unit on February 10, 1944. On his way to his destination he was killed by enemy fire on February 11, 1944.

  His death notification was sent by the same military unit to his home address.

  Military Unit fieldpost address 24778 c

  Lt V. Maratov

  Lyodik always mentions the baby in his letters, still nameless and without gender. The baby has either appeared, or is just about to. This unborn child who was so important to him was my mother, Natasha Gurevich. She used to tell me all about Lyodik when I was small. She had chosen him in childhood to be her hero, making him the secret center of her little world, and she remembered him as long as she lived. The envelope of letters, photographs, and death notifications has her handwriting on it.

  9. Joseph, or Obedience

  In Würzburg there is a palace, the Würzburg Residence, and in it a fresco by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo that is unlike anything else in the whole wide universe. That’s a silly thing to say, of course, because everything in the universe is like everything else; “everything rhymes,” as Marina Tsvetaeva said. The fresco blushes pink the length of the ceiling, and is filled with the incredible creatures reality usually keeps hidden in the circus or the Hollywood costume department. But here they are all, gathered in a parade of the Four Continents. The Continents have detached themselves from their geographic positions, gathered their belongings, and made haste to join the celebrations in honor of the Prince-Bishop of Würzburg. The artist himself arrived at the party before anyone else, sitting out three years in the northern town — three whole years, while this phantasmagoria was appearing on the ceiling: parrots, monkeys, dwarfs and Indigenous peoples, serving girls, empresses, crocodiles, the white legs of heavenly creatures, half-dissolving in the rosy atmosphere. All of them angled to look down on our far thinner existence, like a lid on a boiling saucepan, hinting at the fact that reality can be far brighter and more fascinating than the version we have constructed for ourselves.

  This rainbow apparition was nearly destroyed in the air raids during the Second World War, when over 900 tonnes of TNT was dropped on the town in just a few weeks. The square where they burned books on a spring evening in 1932 was unrecognizable by 1945; the adjoining residence a mere ghost. The palace no longer had a roof, and what hadn’t been consumed by fire was spoiled by rain and soot. The pale white stucco ceiling in the Throne Room had disappeared as if it had never existed — its painstaking relief had been more like the seabed than the ceiling of a place of pomp and splendor: the feathers and the flagpoles lay in patterns reminiscent of fish bones picked clean, and the spears gathered in sheaves could, without much effort, pass as the masts of shipwrecks.

  Everything has been restored: the stucco and the mirrors, and the shifting tones of the room, where silver flows into green as if there were no difference between them. The huge fresco, with its varied wonders and crocodiles, shines as it always did. Roberto Calasso describes its rose-tinted luminosity as the last breath of happiness in Europe in his book about Tiepolo. Despite its teeming, multicolored crowds, he insists on apprehending it as a single spellbinding composition. “We are in the midst of a sample of humanity that is not yet exotic, but not provincial.” It is able to establish a “relationship of familiarity” with “every imaginable figure, human or semidivine, such as the Nymphs or other denizens of rivers and springs. For Tiepolo, the plumed Indian woman riding an alligator is no more singular than the European musicians who played at court.” In this peaceful demonstration the real and the invented appear as equals; mysterious creatures and strange substances alongside the representatives of the familiar world, as if that were the only way. There is no image too banal, no novelty too shocking for these crowds. Tiepolo “invented something one might dream about to this day: a democracy leveled off toward the top, where aesthetic quality makes it possible to eliminate any divergence in status.”

  *

  On the website of the Whitney Museum of American Art there’s a description of a work of art that sounds a little like an inventory of someone’s trouser pockets, a list Tom Sawyer might have aspired to. It reads: painted wood and printed paper, aperitif glasses, marbles, plaster head, painted cork ball, metal rods, brad nails, and painted glass. All this, collected into the cardboard term “assemblage,” and kept in a specially made glass-fronted wooden box. We might think of it as a shopfront, or a jewelery box, or an icon surround, a suitcase with a transparent lid: in every case the essential attribute is that the contents are singled out, exposed and inviolable under their glass shroud (and perhaps they might even be invisible, living inside their own belly).

  The artist Joseph Cornell is best known for his boxes. He made a huge quantity of these over his long life. At first he used ready-made boxes for his strange projects, and then he began making them himself in the basement of his little suburban home. There are dozens of these boxes: he gave some to people he admired. Occasionally his admiration cooled and he wrote to the recipient to ask for the return of the gift to its owner. In one way or another, they always remained his, his treasure, his precious . . .

  All Cornell’s boxes are glass-fronted; there’s a teasing element in this, as every little object seems intended to be touched, the colored sand run through your fingers, the marbles transferred from glass to pocket. Sealed shut, like museum cabinets, the boxes promise play and yet suggest that playtime is delayed indefinitely. The box’s addressee is usually long gone; one of Cornell’s most famous boxes is meant as a gift for a great ballerina who died in 1856. “Taglioni’s Jewel Casket,” lined in brown velvet and garlanded with a necklace of large gems, contains sixteen transparent cubes, like ice cubes, resting on blue glass and waiting for their owner. An inscription in the lid tells the story:

  On a moonlit night in the winter of 1835 the carriage of Marie TAGLIONI was halted by a Russian highwayman, and that enchanting creature commanded to dance for this audience of one upon a panther’s skin spread over the snow beneath the stars. From this actuality arose the legend that to keep alive the memory of this adventure so precious to her, TAGLIONI formed the habit of placing a piece of artificial ice in her jewel casket or dressing table where, melting among the sparkling stones, there was evoked a hint of the atmosphere of the starlit heavens over the ice-covered landscape.

  Taglioni only came to Russia in 1837; the fairly unlikely story of the honorable highwayman is different in its original telling: instead of a panther skin spread over the snow there’s a carpet spread over the wet slush, and there is no mention of the ice cubes. The only “actuality,” to
use Cornell’s word, is Cornell himself — and his ardent belief in the power of boxes and caskets. His many closed chambers could be brought together to form a doll’s house, filled with priest holes and secret rooms, “Suitcases,” “Soap Bubble Sets.” Or perhaps a doll’s town, complete with “Hotels” and “Observatories,” “Dovecotes,” “Pharmacies,” “Aviaries,” “Sand Fountains.” These are the titles of series, rather than individual works, consisting of many variations, each leading to the next, like a suite of rooms.

  Cornell died on December 29, 1972, a year before his seventieth birthday. He would have enjoyed the date, placed in a celebratory box between Christmas and the New Year; he was born on Christmas Eve as well. He spent almost all his life in the same place, Utopia Parkway, 3708, in a modest suburban house, with his elderly mother and his disabled brother Robert. His studio was in the basement, where he kept tens of thousands of images and photocopies ready for future works, boxes of essential objects (“best white boxes — Empty,” “Plastic Shells new-1960”), files of notes and clippings. His strange passions made him a specialist in many niche areas, from ballet iconography to the history of silent film, and even experts would sometimes turn to him for advice. As he grew older he became increasingly impatient with collectors and tried to avoid selling his work or even exhibiting it. There was one sure way to get a hold of it, though — to visit him at home in the company of a young ballerina or starlet, and afterward buy up anything that the old man gave her as a gift.

  After the death of his brother, Joseph Cornell often said that Robert had been the better artist — Robert (as an acerbic critic once noted) mostly drew mice, and was seriously into model railways. A sequence of works was dedicated to his memory, signed “Joseph and Robert Cornell.” The simple and rather sad mechanism, which stood behind this desire to bring the two names together, to make something together, was the main engine for Joseph’s very many activities, it was what made him tick. Robert Cornell, Taglioni, Gérard de Nerval, and many others, each in their own way, all demanded love, little temples to the embodiment of memory. These usually took the form of the little boxes: memorials to a meeting, drafts of a space where a conversation might take place.

  Over long years of rummaging in antique shops, Cornell perfected his complex system of internal rhyme to the point where he could couple anything together with little or no effort. In this lay his sense of secret delight. He considered his teachers to be Mallarmé and Baudelaire: both were informed by a sense of the “correspondences” riddling the world with their countless ant trails, but in Cornell’s work this has the opposite effect. His objects learned a new obedience — each item considers for a moment, then lies down in its place and makes itself useful: all the objects became family. Every object has the chance to bask in the golden light of “being seen”; the wood shavings, the colored sand, and the cork balls exhibit a majesty and poise more befitting to ballerinas and poets. It seems as if the fact of future oblivion and decline was enough to make any object invaluable to Cornell. Every new work was constructed like Noah’s Ark, with the intention of preservation at its heart.

  *

  Anyone who lived in 1970s Russia will recognize in Cornell’s boxes the game of sekretiki or “little secrets” — the passion of my childhood. Nothing in the humdrum reality of this time could have explained the appearance of this game. Strictly speaking it was only a “game” in the sense that it had rules. Sekretiki wasn’t just any activity, it was a secret that you shared only with your closest friends and it was like no other game played in the street or at school. It was “underground” in the most direct sense of the word because the little secrets were kept under the ground, like treasure or dead bodies. In the country, where people were always bent over the land, planting seeds or digging out food, there would have been nothing special in this, but we were children of the city who knew the way home from school by the cracks in the pavement, and we had no relationship with the black and granular earth that every Spring gave the acacia and the lilac its freedom.

  To make a “little secret” you had to drop down and press yourself against the earth. Choose a place, dig a little hole, look around and check no one is watching, put in the precious object, cover it with a piece of scrubbed-clean glass and then pour the earth back over, tamp it down so it looks untouched. Now I realize that these tiny tombs, lined with foil and filled with a tiny supply of all the beauty in the world were very like ancient burial chambers, with their assortment of objects ready for the immortal life. Very special things were chosen for the “little secret,” things that were few and far between: gold and silver paper, feathers, clippings from newspapers with a photograph of an actor or actress, precious beads or buttons, sometimes even tiny little dolls or figurines. The essential layer of glass turned the “little secret” into a shop window waiting for someone to come past and look in.

  Like all buried treasure (X marks the spot), they weren’t very reliable hiding places, and you could more or less forget about ever seeing your trove again. Very few people knew about the burial place, two or three trusted friends. But a few days later, when you checked back under the bush there was nothing there. The “little secret” had disappeared as if it’d never existed. Either some boys, who had followed your movements with a predatory eye, had dug it up, or a rival had found it and buried it somewhere else. Or perhaps you’d simply forgotten where to dig (all your little remembered coordinates proving false friends). Sometimes it felt as if the sekretiki, like underground rivers, or seams of gold, lived according to their own instinct and could even move from place to place.

  There was nothing much for the sekretiki above ground. The aesthetic system of Soviet life was thorough and in its own way convincing, but it adhered to an unspoken bias toward understated, decent, cheerful modesty, with no pretense to the gaudy or extravagant. Some insignificant departures from the norm were acceptable, as long as these were only small steps out of line: sentimentality, the soft focus of tenderness or grief as a response to understandable and general feelings, like yearning for lost youth or love for one’s children, or hope for something better. Anything suggesting equality or unity was acceptable, but eccentricity, standing out from the crowd without justification, was quite another thing. Anything that could be interpreted as outlandish behavior (even earrings in the ears of schoolgirls) was seen as an attempt to break through into a space labeled “unacceptable exclusivity” and that sort of thing — opulence, plumes and tails, silk stockings and sparklers — was in danger of destroying the general equilibrium and had to be kept at bay. Perhaps that is why it now feels to me as if the “little secrets,” filled with the “outlandish,” a concentration of the burlesque, forbidden beauty, crystal beads, cut out paper roses, became political refuges, crossing both state and other boundaries.

  At various moments in history, in the villages and the rural hamlets of this vast country, people hid sawn-off shotguns and Grandfather’s revolver and even Tsarist gold coins. Nearer Moscow, in the gardens of summerhouses and allotments, anti-Soviet literature lay in the damp darkness — the seditious books and manuscripts that were too dangerous to keep even in the attic. Our apparently pointless little secret burials might have had a direct relationship with this history: we were hiding from chance view the beauty that was so lacking around us, and which we didn’t want to share with anyone in our sekretiki.

  Years later I came across the word in a book of memoirs. A short text, written in English in the 1950s, with nothing to do with the underground sparkle of foil and glass. The book described the period of pogroms in the south of Ukraine in 1919 through the eyes of a little girl, how the people in the village lay awake at night waiting for them to come, and then they did. It recounted how the women and children hid wherever they could, under fences and behind tree stumps, and then returned to their houses to wash and dress the murdered. The people living there had different ways of hiding, the hiding places necessary when flight is impossible: br
ick-lined secret rooms, underground holes, dugouts with whole families sheltering in them to sit out the pogrom. Sometimes they managed to escape notice. The memoir gave these hiding places a name. It was spelled with English letters, but the Cyrillic pulsed feverishly from within: sekreten.

  *

  In December 1936, in a New York gallery, Joseph Cornell showed his first film to a small audience. It was called Rose Hobart and it lasted about seventeen minutes. The lens of the projector was covered with blue glass that gave the image a lunar tint. The film was in slow motion and had no sound, as if the action was happening twenty years before, in the age of the silent movie.

  The thirty-two-year old Salvador Dalí was in the audience. In the middle of the screening he jumped to his feet and shouted that Cornell had robbed him. He insisted that this idea had been in his subconscious, these had been his, Dalí’s, dreams, and Cornell had no right to use them as he wished.

  After Dalí and his wife and muse Gala had left the gallery, the film continued: dark-blue Indigenous people in light-blue loincloths chased crocodiles down to the river with poles, wind fluttered the palm fronds, a woman of exquisite beauty moved toward something and looked at it closely, and then did this another few times. The sun was eclipsed, a bubble appeared on the surface of the water, round as an eye. A woman played with a monkey. Cornell showed none of his films after this one, although in some ways it had fulfilled its function, even on its own.

  It’s curious that Dalí considered stolen what belonged to neither him, nor Cornell — at least not according to the definition of intellectual property. Everything in the film shown at the Julien Levy Gallery that day, with the exception of one or two shots, was taken from the adventure film East of Borneo, made in 1931 and lacking all artistic distinction. Reviewers of the original film noted the implausible plot, the incredible number of disasters and the wooden acting of the actress playing the lead role. She was called Rose Hobart and her high cheekbones and auburn hair was a combination potent enough to ensure her immortality.