The Voice Over

In one of her diaries—and she kept them, day after day, year after year, from 1898 to 1967¹ (not counting the years of her female life, when she experienced all the things that make up the eternal material of novels: youth, falling in love, marriage, children, hurt feelings, rejection of any kind of hope)—Lyubov Shaporina, née Yakovleva, recalled an incident with her classmate. It was in Naples, in 1905; her friend had wound up there without friends, without acquaintances, without money, in a filthy and frightening hostel, and she waited to be rescued, having barricaded the door with a dresser. “When I went into her room, she threw herself into my arms with sobs. […] After she had calmed down a bit, she said, ‘I kept thinking: what was going to happen next? Is this just a bad joke, or would it be for my whole life?’ And that’s what I think all the time, too. Many people have died that way, without an answer to their question.” Shaporina wrote this in Leningrad, in December 1943, in the heart of a bad joke that would end, for her, only with her life.

The role she was fated to play, the work of a common monument builder, and in a certain sense of the observer of a common graveyard, would have surprised her. The diary began as private, she thought of it that way, and the main engine that drove her through the years and pages was perhaps the energy of hurt feelings, the power of resistance that originated in the circumstances of everyday life and wasn’t extinguished even after fifty years. The hurt feelings had a simple plot: she wasn’t loved, and as you first read that seems inexplicable. Her life is the exemplary, purebred life of a good person, which if abbreviated easily fits on a hagiographic template. Decades of loneliness: her husband, the Soviet composer Shaporin, went through mistresses with funny last names; her son, the spit and image of his father, grew (and lived) farther and farther from her; her beloved daughter, born late, died at twelve, and the burning longing for her only became stronger over the years; her grandchildren grew up and disappointed her. Decades of self-sacrifice: in 1937, Shaporina, whose own life was unsettled, took in and raised as her own the two daughters of an acquaintance who had been executed (one of them, when she got older, would successfully sue to take Shaporina’s room). At the same time, there was nothing stoic in Shaporina’s loneliness: bypassed once and for all by what the Soviet dialect she hated called happiness in personal life, she continued (according to her own codex, which allowed neither weakness nor deviation) to accomplish feats to the glory of faithfulness and to hope in vain for a symmetrical response. The objects of her devotion would change, disappear, move into the background; the logic of self-immolation never changed.

This self-immolation, which she was ashamed of and secretly proud of, imbues the master plan, the main labor of her life. All the rest (including her contributions to the arts, spelled out on the book’s cover²) would be laid aside for the sake of the need to help, or would slip through her fingers, or would simply enable her family to survive. Survival, hers and other people’s, in all of its multifaceted, sometimes unimaginable forms, quickly becomes the sole subject of the diary. Survival that was not only physical: Soviet jargon in the mouth of a young woman from the nobility, the imperfect Russian speech of émigré relatives, laziness, fear, stupefaction—Shaporina notices and describes all the traits of decay, simplification, and spiritual petrification, her own and other people’s. What she assembles is a chronicle of common degradation, as uncompromising as everything she did, and extremely sharp.

Shaporina was one of those who went abroad in the first years after the revolution—and who voluntarily returned to the USSR. Many émigrés thought about it (in the 1920s, and especially in the 1930s, the years when the Soviet seedling was flowering ostentatiously), and many decided to do it—some (like Aleksey Tolstoy, whose family was friendly with hers) out of love for life on a grand scale, and some because “strength is over there,” as Tsvetaeva said to Mayakovsky the only time they met in Paris. The peculiarity of Shaporina’s story is that she both left and came back without seeming to notice that she was making a historical or political choice; she left because of a break-up with her husband, in rage and sorrow, packing and collecting the children in haste, and she went back to her husband, too, at the first call. The consequences of that nonchoice were admittedly the same as for everyone: catastrophic.