The Voice Over

It was as if the world Shaporina had viewed from the start as phantasmagorical (“the land of the Morlocks,” she writes, recalling H. G. Wells’s novel) had once again confirmed its evil qualities, justifying her worst expectations. But at this very moment something unforeseen happens to the author and the text of the diaries: the emphases shift, the passive voice of proud suffering changes to the active, the inertia of expectation turns into a plot of overcoming. The diary’s tempo changes, there are unexpected pauses (“the lamps turned on, it was getting dark, the fog was blue”). Just as before, the author is like a handheld camera recording everything that moves: the large and small objects that enter the shot. But it’s as if she allows herself to hover, to freeze, to pause, to fall into something like a hungry faint: stupefied contemplation of beauty. In the space of the diaries, which she had been keeping all her life at the tempo of the daily news (facts, rumors, somebody’s remarks, evaluations)—these pauses (“I got off the tram at the Academy of Sciences, and my spirit froze from the beauty of the Admiralty embankment”), filled with long, free descriptions (“while a weather balloon slowly sailed upward amid the quiet trees”)—are something resembling a protective cover. Here, for almost the very first time, the author and the reader manage to catch their breath—or to regain consciousness.

This experience in extremis became an unexpected reward for Shaporina. In a minute of happiness she’ll say “this is to pay me back for the blockade”; years later she’ll call the blockade the gist of her life.

From the next room, empty like the whole apartment, came the sound of a radio. […] A soprano voice, a tenor came pouring out. In the dark of night the cannons boomed heavily and terribly. A dying voice, monotonous, repeated, “Everything goes away … everything collapses … everything falls … everything goes away … I’m dying.” […] I would get up in the dark, heat up some tea, give her something hot to drink, inject camphor. And went back to bed indifferently, because I had no strength. But now it seems to me that I could have helped her spirit more, I should have read the Gospel aloud to her. Although she could very well have taken that for the last rites.

3.

One of the first things that strike you in the two-volume body of this book is the scale: over a thousand pages, hundreds (if not thousands) of surnames, the many-legged and many-headed human mass, sinking before one’s eyes under the ice of an anthropological catastrophe. From days of old, diaries have been made up of domestic matters—one’s era, friends, one’s little universe, sometimes ripped along the seam upon contact with faceless and indiscriminate common fate. Here there’s something else. Already by the early 1930s the main content of these notes turns out to be the background: big and little history change places, and big history more or less lives at the cost of little history—uses it for nourishment, occupies its space, drinks its air.

Diary writing acts on its own will: it soaks up everything, gets heavy, before your eyes the flesh of pages and other people’s stories accrues. Was that what Shaporina wanted? Who knows? She, and she was not the only one (the same dream is present in Olga Freidenberg’s postwar notes), considered it essential and unavoidable to have a Moscow Nuremberg trial—a trial of the Soviet system. Shaporina’s notebooks can indeed be read as a corpus of evidence prepared by the prosecution. But even in that capacity it is obviously, flagrantly overabundant—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.