The Voice Over

It is striking how the authorial perspective in these essays connects authors as different as Shaporina (a member of the Soviet cultural establishment, whose voluminous diary demonstrates remarkable independence and freedom from self-censorship) and Sebald. Shaporina’s diary is “obviously, flagrantly overabundant,” Stepanova writes, “as if it lacks a filter to distinguish the important things from the unimportant, the superfluous from the essential, the verisimilar from the fantastic. Rumors, gossip, dreams, jokes, conversations in lines and worldly salons, news of banishments, executions and hungry deaths come billowing in a thick, blind wave. The index of names at the end of the second volume takes up twenty-seven pages; the book, issued by NLO Press, is a Noah’s Ark where everything that breathes and talks swims out of nonbeing: peasants, Red Army soldiers, literary functionaries.” Stepanova emphasizes this same pattern—“everything is so important”—in Sebald’s texts, where the same “rescue of the drowning” takes place, rescue “of all those displaced and forgotten persons of world history, of everything that disappears, from people and peoples to obsolete crafts and gas lamps.” For Stepanova, this is an essential trait of authors who bear witness to epochs of destruction and obliteration, and it is Sebald, as far as Stepanova’s literary sensibilities are concerned, whose sense of purpose is exemplary, including ways his ethical impulse transforms the aesthetic:

In the realm of literature, Sebald steps up against the tyranny of the engaging—on behalf of everything uninteresting, which is invariably deprived of the right to a reader. […] What Sebald does is a kind of soft, almost speechless revolution: we see the floors collapse and the snowy dust pour down. He doesn’t try to persuade you that uninteresting is the new interesting. He doesn’t insist that you ought to feel bored, as his guild colleagues often will.

Sebald simply removes the “boring/not-boring” gauge from the dashboard and honestly recollects everyone he is capable of reaching—in the mode of a common cause. His grief and his passion reside in the fact that all the component parts of the created world deserve recollection and re-understanding—and he works himself off his feet, attempting to utter a word (a picture, a quote, a hint) for each one of those who have lived.

This is one of the framing motifs in Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory, and Sebald’s example looms large in her novel. But perhaps the most succinct and important early introduction to the novel is her essay “Over Venerable Graves.” Its title alludes to a line from Pushkin’s poem “When lost in thought I wander beyond the town.” The “venerable graves” of that poem are ancestral graves in a village, which lack pompous decorations and inscriptions. What such graves evoke in our minds is a sense of private, inconspicuous existence as the foundation of the world:

Our natural inclination to look at history as an exhibit of accomplishments (or a sequence of traumas) is suddenly pushed out by other kinds of histories. Cooking pots, bedsheets, irons, porcelain, faience, diapers, baby powder, hollow gold rings, underskirts, postcards from the city of Gorky, a Niva edition of Chekhov, sleds, a Napoleon cake, union fees, ring four times, theater clutch bags, two-kopeck coins, quarter-kopeck coins, a monthly pass (September), a vocabulary notebook, a butter dish, a mimosa, a ticket to the Moscow Art Theater. Over each grave, like a post, like a beam, there is an invisible (maybe glowing, maybe devoid of any color or weight) mass of what has been. It reaches as high, it seems to me, as the sky, and indeed the sky rests on it.

It is remarkable how Stepanova’s vision in “Over Venerable Graves” resonates with her early poem “A Gypski, a Polsk I, a Jewski, a Russki,” that opens this volume. In it, “unforeseen ancestors” come to invade the poet’s space (or mind), demanding recognition and acceptance. Ancestors or not, these people seek the poet out because they want to be remembered, and a “plaintive bead” made of crystal that hangs around the speaker’s neck (evoking a “crystal voice”) explains the choice of this unruly crowd. Over the span of two decades and across dramatic transformations of poetics, one aspect of the pragmatics of Stepanova’s speech keeps coming back like a pendulum. It has to do with an archaic notion of poetry as speaking on behalf of multitudes—yet it appears ever more modern with every return.

NOTES

*   This and subsequent quotations come from the present edition.

1.  Dmitry Kuzmin, “The Vavilon Project and Women’s Voices Among the Young Literary Generation,” in An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets, ed. Valentina Polukhina and Daniel Weissbort (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005), 211.