The Voice Over

Those born around the turn of the century, like Vladimir Nabokov in 1899, Daniil Kharms in 1905, or Alisa Poret in 1902, do not resemble a family at all. But so many people who, being too young, did not get to swear allegiance to the fourth estate¹ and feel indebted to it, told their story in this very manner, marking a “before” and an “after.” As if the inoculation of guilt, so typical of the Russian intellectual, had not been done in time, and meanwhile all the memories of the old world had gotten lost or twisted—when it had been vital for them to hold their ground and survive. “Isolate, but preserve”: these words from Stalin’s verdict on Mandelstam’s first trial also describe an attitude toward the past in those people, for whom it could never become a straight path into the future—but instead remained as a kind of immovable, inalienable property, some kind of last resort. That’s how Nabokov writes about his childhood; that’s how, in another country and from within another catastrophe, the doomed heroine of Sebald’s The Emigrants recalls the tiniest details of her childhood; that’s how Vaginov’s Unknown Poet² looks at the book spines of the family library. And in the late sixties, this is the approach taken by Alisa Poret, the artist who produced the first and canonical illustrations for the Russian edition of Winnie the Pooh, the student of Pavel Filonov and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, but most of all a friend of her friends and contemporary of her contemporaries—an acquaintance of Alexander Vvedensky and Nikolai Oleinikov, Maria Yudina and Igor Sollertinsky, the beauty Alisa, whose name filled Kharms’s late notebooks. She remembers these people in passing, as a group of “brilliant weirdoes and eccentrics,” but her memoirs begin thusly: “The time has come to write about my childhood.”

2.

“The time has come to write about my childhood. I am very glad to do this—I don’t have a single bad memory and nothing but the greatest gratitude toward my parents for the excellent, intelligent and placid upbringing that my brother and I had.” The excellent, intelligent, and placid—like all of her work—handwritten notebooks of Alisa Poret have been lovingly and carefully published by the small Moscow press Barbaris; the first volume was just released, and we await the second.³ Poret thought of her life as that of an artist (and her childhood memories are full of colored pencils and thoughts about beauty and ugliness), but half a century later, the emphasis ends up falling elsewhere: and the way the narrator treats the past contributes to that.

Here we should explain how these notebooks are organized because they have very little in common with regular memoirs. The cover of the first volume promises “notes, drawings, memories,” and that’s exactly what’s on the inside—every page is a single unit of a larger strange unity: note-drawing-memory. They are little stories, written down by Alisa Poret either off the cuff in the course of recollection, or following some kind of system we can no longer retrace, though some of its features are obvious: chronology is not a priority, but some of the plots form cycles: “Fears,” “Presents,” and of course “Childhood,” which is the one Poret repeatedly falls back on and reexamines. All of them, or almost all, are illustrated, furnished, like a window or a Christmas tree lantern, with a small colorful image; they are all written down with a special, festive hand: various inks whose color changes with the intonation of the story. When the narrator wants to raise or lower her voice, to amaze or amuse, lowercase letters get up on their tiptoes and become capitals; important words and key phrases are written in large red letters.

Poret’s notebooks are very much like an Andersen picture book, and though the book itself is never mentioned, the register of fairy tales—from “the Christmas tree was aglow” to scary tales of fortune-telling and prophecies—is where she feels most at home. But another book appears instead—the story of Alice in wonderland, which Alisa loved, and whose heroine (who visited strange places and had courteous conversations with strange creatures) she probably related to: the tiny self-portraits that fill the pages of her notes always show her as a young girl—with round, puzzled eyes, golden hair, and a doll-like, unfinished quality to her movements. Alisa reminisces about Alice under special circumstances: on her first birthday after the war, April 15, 1945. This story is part of the “Presents” series, and I will quote it in its entirety:

Busya and I were so poor, it’s hard to think now how we managed to survive.

And so my day came—April 15. A day on which I used to rise like a lark, and was always in a cheerful mood, and Easter was just around the corner, and there were hyacinths on the table, and sunshine, and presents, and friends, and a new dress, and my family, and my beautiful house, and the long table—and Leningrad.