The Voice Over

A ramified and extensive system of acquaintances (and Shaporina was on good terms with all of St. Petersburg/Leningrad and half of Moscow) and the rituals conjoined with it, which already seemed very odd in the growing shadows of twilight—these are one of the constants of her life. Maintaining connections (visits, flowers, correspondence, carefully thought-up little gifts) required tremendous time and energy. Shaporina is an entirely social animal who knows and loves her place on the class ladder, thinking of herself (unlike Mandelstam, whose seditious verses she quotes sympathetically and inexactly) as one of: a continuer of her family, a representative of her class, an heir to and preserver of European culture. She notices and furiously records any traits of secession from the known and beloved norm, and some of her evaluations are astonishing: “I’ve read half of Tynianov’s book Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar, and I’m suffering physically from disgust and anger. To dare to mount a critique of Griboedov, of Pushkin. But why not? (With a Jewish accent.) We blow up the Simonov Monastery, the church of the icon Soothe My Sorrows, the church of Saint Nicholas the Grand Cross and so on—and you keep quiet; we do a lot of other things and you sit still for it, well now we’re bathing your final treasure, your first love,³ in the slops: you can tolerate anything, it serves you right. It serves us right.”

It’s not for nothing that “With a Jewish accent” appears here. Simple-hearted and ineradicable anti-Semitism is just as much a part of her spiritual profile as passionate patriotism—and the desire to die in Rome (“there alone”), as love and hate of the Russian element (“it’s the people that is vile, not the government”), as sensitivity to hurt feelings and not bearing grudges. And as aristocratic arrogance (everything that irritated her in her unloved son was explained by Shaporin’s petit-bourgeois blood) and an inborn democratism (“What does aristocratism have to do with this? It’s just that I, apparently, just like you, am not the daughter of a bitch! I just despise them”). And—as the ability to change and readjust her attitude toward an event, a person, a country.

Russia and Europe constantly outweigh each other on her internal scales. “There’s no place here for people with a free spirit, and we should make every effort to expatriate in the future.” The dream of emigration, the shaky hope in the Varangian (“let a German Schutzmann stand on every corner”), the constant glance over her shoulder at Europe as the image of a better, undistorted way of being—these are among the diary’s main themes. But then, during the “Thaw” when she’s already a very old woman (“My God, can it be that I’ll really never go abroad?”), Shaporina makes it to Geneva for two months, to visit the family of her adored brother, and immediately starts an argument about the fates of Russia: “For forty-two years already we’ve been fighting off everyone who hoped to take Russia with their bare hands, and we’ve grown stronger than ever.” “What’s the point of this great power talk?” they answer her. Then and there Shaporina also discovers with deep sadness that her history, her extreme (as people would say now) experience have no value and present no interest for her nearest and dearest. “At first I didn’t understand the reasons for their indifference, it seemed to me, toward Russia, toward everything I had lived through over this time. Sasha wouldn’t let them ask me questions about the blockade, the war.” She herself seems to feel a certain inappropriateness of her story at the table of the living: “I wouldn’t myself start talking about something that’s painful to touch on.”

4.

The defensive mechanisms established by life itself (by the habit of safety, the need for spiritual balance) prompt us to shy away from a certain kind of information: the kind that causes pain without being able to soothe it. This knowledge, with which there’s nothing to be done, is what Shalamov writes about in his Kolyma Tales: experience that is tormenting, useless, and corrupting in its fruitlessness. The reality Shaporina documents has a similar nature. What she describes is the experience of sinking slowly into death and posthumous existence in a world with dislocated conceptions and sagging logical connections. This is not Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago or Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved (that is, not an outright imitation of hell). Be it hell or Hades—still, the fact that its landscape recalls ours, and one can even make out there glimmers of concerts, dachas, and florists’ stands, explains the despair that comes with reading these diaries.