The Voice Over

What was implied (and not said out loud until the very last moment), especially in the circles of Kharms and Poret, was essentially the same thing: that people who fit a certain profile were gradually displaced from the ranks of the living, that the air was being pumped out by the hour from the chamber of time where they had found themselves. “I am not yet in despair,” Kharms wrote in 1937. “I still seem to be hoping for something, and I think my situation is better than it actually is. Iron hands drag me toward the pit.” All of this happened gradually and very slowly; at first the “circle,” which then consisted of nearly all of the Petersburg-Leningrad intelligentsia, retained some measure of illusion and the mental space to entertain it. In the mid-twenties, you could still be part of the left (“We are the only real left-wing poets in Petrograd, however we cannot publish our work here”⁶); later on, you could draw nearer to the world of official literature but jump out of the way the moment it tried to take a good look at you; you could also make money, even good money, with handicrafts of sorts: children’s verse, theatre set designs, all kinds of non-shameful and pleasant trifles. Over time, there were fewer and fewer such opportunities. Those who came too close to the flywheel of the ideological machine—published, served, were in power, socialized freely and boldly, were seen or heard a lot—were the first to disappear, to sink into the vortex of the Leningrad “writers’ case,” like Oleinikov and Nikolai Zabolotsky, like Blok’s “Russian dandy” Valentin Stenich. Others followed: minor painters and actors, gamblers and chatterboxes, regulars at the restaurant of Grand Hotel Europe, thirty-year-old children, all of them born “before.” Weirdoes and eccentrics (freaks and outcasts), the category that included Kharms and Vvedensky, held out longer than others—they were the last to be taken.

Alisa Poret’s life took place along the edges of this abyss and was by no means an exception to the laws of common misfortune. Her father died in 1924; her first husband, an art historian, died in 1927, and her second—the painter Pyotr Snopkov, who happily won her away from Kharms—died in a camp in 1942; the war, the Leningrad blockade, the destitution, the evacuation, the displacement and deprivation—this is the backdrop to her memories, as it was for everyone else. The difference is in the memories themselves: there is not a trace of despondency, of immersing oneself in the common darkness. Its absence is so striking that I had to read the book twice to be convinced of my mistake and see how far off the mark I was: the book lays out all the facts without resorting to euphemism or omission, all the accents are in the right place, all the dead are named. The crux is its tone and intonation, which color everything Poret writes, transforming it into a tale of good fortune: the story of a life lived radiantly—with intelligence, calm, and ease.

The easy breathing, the ability to waltz until the very end—this is one of the hallmarks of Poret’s inner life, one of the pillars of her self-esteem. For this ease she was willing to sacrifice a lot; the cost includes certain refusals, including the refusal to explain herself. “I solemnly promised all of my husbands that I would be true to them as long as they liberated me from the obligations of motherhood, and if it so happened that I fell in love with someone else, I would tell them honestly and there would be no deception or secret affairs.” This is how major decisions, plot twists, and cataclysms are described in Alisa’s story—with the logic of a comic opera, like the fireworks of chance or hidden rhyme: “so it happened,” “it was foretold,” “couldn’t have been any other way,” without explanations or superfluous psychology.

The feeling of transparency, solidity, and an almost infantile invulnerability, which these writings leave in the reader, hardly corresponds to our knowledge of the world for which they serve as a cover. It could be that such was their hidden task: hush, no complaining! To live in spite of, to live regardless, to live as if nothing had happened. This is not the Russian kind of bravery, it is far from the ability to live and die in public; but for Alice Poret, half-Swedish and half-French, it might have felt natural to fashion her life with a different style, with more freedom and ease, like a witty translated novel. In some ways this logic—its joyful, girlish cynicism—resembles Kharms’s strategy of self-fashioning, his method of leaving the frame of his surroundings, his breeches, leg warmers, and bowler hat, his refusal to look like he belongs here.