The Voice Over

W. G. Sebald’s book of essays A Place in the Country has come out in English for the first time. It’s hard to say why it wasn’t published sooner—given his present importance, one might assume that every page preserved would already be published (“every tiny curl!”—as Tsvetaeva said of her own posthumous legacy, knowing very well how it goes). But no. This may be because the book’s “German” frame (six essays about German writers you can’t exactly say have entered worldwide circulation) makes it something like a private album: a family conversation—closed to strangers—with his own language and cultural tradition. To me, though, it seems that in books and articles of this kind (written as if sideward, past oneself) the occasion allows one to express the main thing—and that an essay about Robert Walser, for example, may well be the central text among everything by Sebald, the one where he speaks about himself, his work, and his spiritual organization with tormenting, unbearable clarity and directness: the one where he says everything.

Sebald occupies a peculiar position in Russia: here he’s an underground classic, because he literally doesn’t exist on the surface; people refer to him as if he’s a buried treasure. It’s the grotesque flip side of his world fame, which quickly turned him into something like an institution, if not an industry. The words of Susan Sontag, who raised the issue of literary greatness in connection with Sebald’s name,¹ have come true with terrifying completeness: his work and fate, not at all suited to this, now become something of a new standard of calibration. It’s strange to look at his posthumous fate with a stranger’s eyes: how he’s hastily being turned into an object of general love (a common-place)—into an answering machine for ethical questions, a ready source of citations in dissertations and epigraphs in novels. But Sebald is untranslated in Russia, unfamiliar and undigested (of all his books only one has come out in Russian, and that was back in 2006).² He exists as secret knowledge: people don’t write about him, but they talk; they don’t discuss him—rather, they allude to him. This is even more bizarre because it’s precisely here that his manner of existing in literature ought to be as essential as it could possibly be.

Winfried Georg Sebald, born in Germany in 1944; he wrote his name, the German version of the Soviet Iosifs, Vladlens, and Oktyabrinas,³ with dots, as the initials W. G. At home they called him Max. The name he published under, like the language he wrote in, was part of a complex (and, for him, indubitably tormenting) system of promissory notes. The story of his life can be told in a few paragraphs—let’s see whether one paragraph is enough: the contour of an exile’s life (Mann, Canetti, Benjamin), but chosen by himself; years of work teaching, several published books written in German, gradually and then swiftly growing fame, with which he tried not to get too comfortable—giving precise, dry, very well-weighed interviews with (almost otherworldly) civility, not really taking part and not refusing. Then his sudden death in an automobile accident in early winter: December 14, 2001.

W. G. Sebald’s first and last book in Russian so far is none other than Austerlitz—his last major prose text (there were only four in all—and two, Vertigo and The Rings of Saturn, are minimally related to his established reputation as a thematic author who wrote about the Holocaust). Austerlitz is the best known and most like a conventional novel, or what is usually considered a conventional novel. Everything written below is a kind of attempt to speak about Sebald as if he were already translated, published, read in Russian, as if his work were already a part of our circulatory system (as it ought to be)—and we could look at it not through the window of a tour bus, but with wide eyes of belonging.

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