The Voice Over

If you like, it’s as if they are incompatible with life; they’re not a text but something else: a rupture, a rift, a yawning abyss, a black hole. Or even a pit: a sated maw with threads, scraps of cloth, and fibers of flesh dangling from it. This pit lies before the reader in place of the text (of the text that could have arisen here if history and culture had been uninterrupted), like the wreaths of artificial flowers that mark the place where someone died in an accident along our roads.

No one, I think, is ready for such a death, and is it even possible to prepare for it? It-can-happen-to-anyone is a watermark that comes through on each page of Shaporina’s text. The chronicle of a certain type of people being gradually crowded out of life is horrifying in itself. But it is precisely this type (even if without any right to it) that seems to us our own. Lyuba Yakovleva-Shaporina with her splendid education, her knowledge of five languages, her Europeanism at home, and her love for art (painting/theater/translations) would recognize herself in a typical young woman in a trendy Moscow café (design-photography-journalism)—if only in her lack of preparedness for the catastrophe, in her collection of pointless knowledge and desires, unsuited to life on an uninhabited island. Her fears and prejudices are a near echo of our own; her circle’s opinions and doubts hardly need to be translated into a new Russian. Our way of living, too, brought down to the average, severed and distorted, attempts to keep in memory another, better one, which we weren’t the ones to establish—and it is precisely the memory of what should be that was an unceasing torment for Shaporina. She knew better than anyone that her life had not been lived right, had gone off into another riverbed, away from law and grace, and (unlike many people) she could never make peace with that.

A hundred years ago she was thirty-two, she was sitting on the sun-drenched Piazzale Garibaldi, a Russian woman in Rome, happy and of no interest to anyone. We, too, for now, still possess that possibility, and a certain amount of time to take advantage of it.

2011

Translated by Sibelan Forrester

What Alice Found There

(Alisa Poret)

1.

There’s a famous children’s fairy tale in which time is divided into a life before and a life after. Before, children (the king’s children, of course) went to school with stars on their breast and swords at their side, and they wrote with pencils of diamond upon golden slates, and could say their lesson by heart just as easily as they could read it from the book. You could tell at a glance how princely they were. Meanwhile, their sister sat on a little footstool. She had a picture book that had cost half a kingdom. After, it goes without saying, there were no more stars, no more pictures; and let me remind you what happened to these children, if we translate the story from the language of fairy tales: loss of human form, exile, emigration, hard and torturous labor, trial, execution. And, of course, a miraculous rescue: where would we be without that?