The Voice Over

1933: “Now most people have realized that there’s nowhere to go; no matter what there are prisons everywhere and hunger everywhere. The intelligentsia still unconsciously wants to jump out somewhere, they run off to the polar circle, to the Pamirs, into the stratosphere, while the peasants just sit there on their benches, perishing.” 1935: “They’re exiling people to Turgai, Vilyuysk, Atbasar, Kokchetav, to places where you have to ride 150 miles on camels, to places you only can get to by dogsled.” 1938: “Vasya [Shaporina’s son] is often put out that I don’t go to the movies, to the theater. Impressions slide over him, over today’s young people, without reaching consciousness. They’ve been accustomed since childhood to the horror of the contemporary situation. The words ‘arrested,’ ‘shot’ don’t produce the least impression.” 1939: “And here we are, poor people of the 20th century, forced constantly to run into the 16th or beginning of the 17th. And not to scream from horror, but to pretend that you don’t see, you don’t hear.”

2.

Who is Shaporina addressing, who is supposed to read this series of “J’accuse” that stretches over decades? Most likely a distant descendant, a new link in the family chain: she didn’t count on interest from her close relatives. Compared to the diaries and notes of her famous contemporaries, people with a more developed instinct of self-preservation (recall the marginal note by Kornei Chukovsky in his own diary record: “This was written for presenting to the authorities”), Shaporina’s notebooks say everything as frankly as a condemned or mad person. No Aesopian tricks, no softening, no omissions—rather the opposite: the daring of her formulations seems also to have in mind the enemy reader, a person who reads as an official duty. Each assertion is conceived and carried out as a slap. It is striking as well that she (from a noble family, with relatives in emigration, half her friends arrested or exiled) nonetheless remained at liberty, and that her diaries, which were written without a backward glance, don’t hold even a hint that any other turn of fate was possible, not a shadow of the fear that everyone shared then. Even after unwillingly agreeing to become an informer for the NKVD (“I just have to fool him, I don’t think it’s very hard”), i.e. having been assured of an acute interest in her and her circle, Shaporina doesn’t give up her habit of daily writing from life: her “tail” becomes one of her characters: the shameless, the comical and the powerless. She is haunted by other fears: of poverty and a hungry death. The point where she came face to face with these fears also became the highest point of her destiny.

Many Leningrad blockade memoirs stress the necessity of preserving this experience of departure from the norm for history. They do this in order to endow one’s suffering with value, to make it work, but also because life that gets out of the grooves seems exotic, exceptional, unique. Shaporina’s diary is something of an exception. Long before the blockade, her text had turned into a strange travelogue whose author wasn’t walking or traveling anywhere. The surroundings themselves change; the space one is accustomed to mutates and demands a new description, like an unfamiliar country where everything is alien and of the essence: the landscape, the language, the local mores. Soviet Russia here is described as a new uncountry: a place as far from the well-ordered and lucid lands over the border as it is from its own past, a wild field overgrown, living outside sense and law. All that’s left to do is to wait for a rescue, which can only come from outside, like a ship coming for Robinson Crusoe. For long years Shaporina was occupied with the everyday chronicle of waiting (getting hold of food, reading, prayer, concern about someone near and dear, meetings with the cannibal aborigines). As the blockade began, reality finally came together with her perceptions, abandoning the pretense that it was adequate for life.