In Memory of Memory

1. The Jewboy Hides From View

My great-grandmother’s postcard correspondence (dozens of cards that had winged their way across the prewar borders of France, Germany, and Russia) has survived by some miracle, but its incompleteness intrigues me. The correspondents constantly refer to letters written and received and they are always promising to write more, in more detail. But none of these letters have survived, though doubtless they did once exist, and the explanation for this is almost too obvious: our continuing love affair with the visual. When, in my childhood, I leafed through the two stuffed postcard albums, I noted the skeleton embracing a marble-skinned girl, and the lights of Nice shining by night, but I never thought to turn the cards over, to where handwriting and postmarks jostled against each other — there was no need. The family knows everything about itself that needs to be known.

I began reading the cards a century after they’d been written, and, as I read, events lined up obediently. It became slowly clearer who was answering whom, and in what order. Apart from the main topics of conversation and the very few details in passing, one thing struck me: in all this correspondence there was not one reference to Jewishness, however superficial. And beyond this absence (of festivals, rituals, anything connected with the observance of tradition), lay another: Yiddish, the language of exile and humiliation, was never spoken.

There were flashes of Latin, the professional language of diagnosis and assessment, and tiny scatterings of French and German. But words from the language of home, words that could have served as little shared call signs or beacons of understanding, seemed to have been excluded from daily use, forbidden for conversation. Only once, when the discussion focused on family matters and summer examinations, my future great-grandfather suddenly reached for a phrase from this hidden register: «(«эс редцех а зай!»)» written just like that, with the double quote marks and the brackets, as if the phrase had been placed under the glass of a museum case. The meaning of the phrase “es redt zich azoi” is remarkable, literally “it is indeed so,” but the actual sense is the exact opposite: “it is supposed to be so, but I don’t believe a word of it.” What did hiding it in its punctuation mean? It seems obvious now: it was a form of distancing from the people who spoke “like that,” an attempt to define a common ground with a correspondent who lay outside the sphere of Jewishness, its general opinions, its intonations. That was how their childhood spoke: loudly, incorrectly, without brackets or quote marks. That — according to observers from outside — was how they were supposed to speak.

In the 1930s the poet Osip Mandelstam read a description of himself in an emigrant poet’s memoirs. The author considered Mandelstam’s face so characteristic that he must remind even the old shopkeepers of their grandsons, “some little Yankel or Osip.” The same half-insulting, half-sentimental tone is heard in the late notes of another poet and critic, printed in a journal that had once published Mandelstam. These notes adroitly turn past events into little anecdotes, which is to say that they attempt to pass off the singular as typical. Among them is a description of the young Mandelstam visiting the journal’s editorial office with his mother, Flora Osipovna Verblovskaya, whom the author insultingly calls “mamasha” in the memoirs. Her speech is carefully stylized and even accented (and this was probably even clearer for the contemporary reader, more sensitive to the “deviant” in speech): the hilariously plain dealing appeal of the foreigner, “You tell me what to do with him. We’re in trade, the leather business. But all the boy can think about are his poems!”

You could say that what is being sent up here is class, and not race, but it is Jewish identity (not poverty, nor a comic combination of insistence and uncertainty, and hardly even his poetry) that defines how Mandelstam is seen from the very outset in the literary circles of the early twentieth century. His identity was considered exotic then, to such an extent that it overshadowed everything else. Most of the documents relating to his first literary steps openly mention his “roots,” and the tone of these mentions is shocking today. Mandelstam first appears in Mikhail Kuzmin’s diaries without a name: “Zinaida’s little jewboy.” The writer Zinaida Gippius’s letter recommending the young poet to the influential Valery Bryusov had this to say: “A certain nervy young Jew, who was tied to his mother’s apron strings only two years ago, has come on tremendously recently and even writes a good line from time to time.” In the papers of the famous Bashnya literary salon in St. Petersburg, where attendance was meticulously recorded, especially of writers, Mandelstam is repeatedly called Mendelson. Because what difference does it really make?

On October 18, 1911, the poet Andrei Bely wrote to Alexander Blok: “You mustn’t think I’ve become a chernosotenets [member of the ultranationalist and anti-Semitic ‘Black Hundreds’ movement]. But through both city noise and rural dreaminess I can hear louder and louder the future movement of race.” Blok was also listening to the underground rumblings: he was preoccupied with the relationship between Aryanism and Jewry, and the difference between yids (dirty, illiterate, incomprehensible) and the more acceptable Jews. Ten days later he wrote in his diary: “Had tea at Kvisisan this evening, Pyast, me, and Mandelstam (the eternal).” The shadow of the half-mentioned Eternal Jew stretches forward into the 1920s, when an offended fellow poet wrote an article in which Mandelstam is mentioned as a Jew (“hungry wanderer, Ahasverus”) and then given the epithet of “the Khlestakov of Russian poetry,” after Gogol’s comic impostor. As predictable as a menu: the mention of tribe and race as a starter, followed by the main course of personal slur. In Blok’s own words, from notes in his diary, written many years later, when he had more time for Mandelstam’s poetry: “You gradually get used to him, the jewboy hides from view and you can see the artist.”

In order to get noticed, the “jewboy,” whoever he was, had to hide himself away: purge and recast himself, improve himself and destroy all traces of family, race, or tribe, or adherence to place. In 1904 Thomas Mann wrote approvingly about the family of his future wife: “One has no thought of Jewishness; in regard to these people, one senses only culture.”

It was understood that belonging wholeheartedly to the world of culture meant rejecting your Jewishness. To insist on Jewishness seemed almost old-fashioned, “as if nations still existed after the fall of the Roman Empire, and it was possible to build a culture on the raw idea of nation” wrote Boris Pasternak. It’s worth noting that in all the general excitement about national heritage and folk arts and crafts, the flourishing of the Viennese movement in art and the Abramtsevo artists’ colony, the patterns and the firebirds, there is only one national identity left out of the party. At the turn of the century, enlightened, educated, secular European Jews felt no kinship with their relatives in the galut, with their accents, their chickens, their cozy inseparableness — and the cumbersome load of their religion. No lyric memoirs — for those who had the opportunity or the inclination to assimilate, everything that reminded them of the musk of Judaism was perceived as ugly atavism, the fish’s tail dragging the lucky survivor ashore. This lasted for decades: in Isaiah Berlin’s Personal Impressions, he describes a meeting with Pasternak in 1945: “He was unwilling to discuss the subject — he was not embarrassed by it, but he disliked it: he wished the Jews to assimilate, to disappear as a people. […] If I mentioned Jews or Palestine, this, I observed, caused him visible distress.”

The children of the turn of the century had three choices before them, and they all looked much the same. Revolution, assimilation and Zionism: there they were, like three allegorical figures spaced apart on the colonnade of a deserted building. Herzl’s dream of a Jewish state, conceived only a short while before, had not yet taken full shape. Yiddish or Hebrew? The choice of language was the subject of many heated discussions, and even back then Hebrew was the preferred choice: the language of denial of the current “self” (victim, exile, refugee) in favor of the ancient and original “self.” Assimilation, the voluntary immersion into the powerful river of another culture, happened gradually and naturally with a certain level of education and wealth. The archaic religiosity of parents faded before the eyes, and revolution (with its obligatory equality and brotherhood) was even more tempting because it knocked the barriers of nationality and social standing off the table with one sweep of the hand. On October 17, 1905, my great-grandmother joined street protests, arm-in-arm with half acquaintances and strangers, each of whom felt like a family member — and it felt natural because they had come together to build a new and better world, based on the stable foundations of reason and justice. This new sense of community had something in common with traveling: you suddenly found yourself a thousand miles from everything you knew and, as if floating on air, you felt yourself to be better than before, brighter, more beautiful, capable of greater depths of both good and evil. The leaflets she handed out in the town’s barracks talked of a reality very far from her own experiences in childhood and early womanhood, and so it was even more important to communicate their message to others. It was, even to her ears, a new message — those concepts had not existed in the language of her household.

The other thing I noticed while reading the postcards, which danced back and forth between 1907 and 1908, was the warm, unquestioning sympathy the correspondence radiated. Alongside this warmth was the very thing an external world noted and attributed to us: the bonds of family, the inseparable clan, the continual care for every cell of the living organism, which drew into itself family, friends, relatives, acquaintances, the acquaintances of acquaintances. This was how Jews were represented in jokes and on cheap broadsheets — they knew their kind, they helped their own, they supported each other. There were a lot of them, and they kept to themselves. It’s hardly surprising when you realize the level of loneliness they felt, the wasteland surrounding them — these people who had taken a tentative step away from tradition were outsiders, with nothing and no one, apart from themselves.

What looks from outside like a comic scrabbling (soon to be captured in countless caricatures of Jews, like cockroaches, skittering away into nooks and crannies — fetch the insect powder!) is in fact the safety net of recognition and familiarity under the high wire. Even this becomes tiresome — not just for those looking on, but for the Jews themselves. The logic of assimilation, with its belief in progress and its basis in the sentiment that “not everyone will be taken into the future,” required of people that they admit (in their heart of hearts) that not all Jews are alike. So the enlightened residents of Vienna suffered terribly at the inpouring of their Eastern kin, with their mispronunciations, their inability to acclimatize to city life; so the secular inhabitants of Odessa took against the new Rabbi, brought from Lithuania, with his exalted ways and silly strictures.

Proust’s narrator observes with curiosity the eccentricities of his friend Bloch, a caricature of a Jew, armed with a host of carefully chosen mannerisms (like that other stereotypical character, the gay Baron de Charlus). One of his traits is a declarative anti-Semitism, loud and affected diatribes against the excessive numbers of Jews, quite literally everywhere, with their opinions and their noses!

This episode has a tragicomic Russian counterpart — a quote from a letter by Boris Pasternak, written in 1926, “Everywhere you look, a mass of yids, and — this has to be heard — it’s almost as if they deliberately want to make themselves into caricatures, or they’re writing their own denunciations: they haven’t even a shadow of aesthetic feeling.”

Unlike Proust himself, the narrator is not burdened by his Jewish or homosexual identity. He was created by the author in the role of an observer, a piece of clear glass, whose gaze would be unaffected by the shameful diseases of the century, one of which Proust considered to be assimilated Jewishness, not knowing himself what was harder to forgive: being different, or wishing to be like everyone else. In his opinion this wish was doomed to failure. In a later episode with Bloch there is an impromptu parade of “the unwelcome” across the Balbec beach, whose main failings are the peculiarities of their breed, which can’t be drowned out, or polished out of them:

It isn’t altogether clear on first reading who would not care to mix with whom: the “solid troop” or those who watch them pass. Of course, people of the Orient, as E.T.A. Hofmann described them a century before, could certainly be ill-educated and ridiculous: this is often the preserve of those who have had to arm themselves against constant suffering and who mistrust sudden good fortune. Jewish children of the Belle Époque were the first or second generation to have a secular education; they were the product of a series of decisions, each of which drew them further out from under the protecting roof of tradition. Hundreds of new concepts, of shifts of behavior and changes to everyday ritual, entered their lives together with education, and all these needed to be invented from scratch, based on this novel object, culture, to which they now had a right. It is somewhat comparable to the early post-Soviet experience as I remember it twenty years later, now life has more or less straightened itself out: the new words have found homes, and what was once clumsy mimicry seems to have become the reality.

In the 1900s the new language, spoken with an unaccustomed awkwardness, began on the beaches, in artistic salons, in rooms misted with cigarette smoke where young medical students gathered. The first attempts to talk about the world as if it now also belonged to them had a parodic quality. They were overly demonstrative, the outsider’s uneasy connoisseurship, trying to create the impression that “we Jews” have occupied such armchairs forever, that there is not a restaurant, a wagon-lit, a lift that could surprise us, that we have the right to admire ourselves in the plate glass mirrors of civilization. This is where Mandelstam’s famous “yearning for world culture” originates — it is nothing to do with the literary movement Acmeism, a short-lived Russian phenomenon. Mandelstam clutched to the memory of world culture as he did to the life buoy of friendship, but his longing for conversation as equals was more ancient and more pained.

In Proust’s novel the young writer Bloch describes going to Venice to “sip iced drinks with the pretty ladies,” and he says of the resort hotel: “As I cannot endure to be kept waiting among all the false splendor of these great caravansaries, and the Hungarian band would make me ill, you must tell the ‘lighft-boy’ to make them shut up, and to let you know at once.” In a letter written in 1909, eighteen-year-old Mandelstam also makes colossal efforts to write in keeping with the European tone of his addressee, the poet Vyacheslav Ivanov:

This is a touching and convincing imitation of what will later be the theme of Nabokov’s opening chapters in Speak, Memory: the comforting presence (and, later, the utter absence) of Swiss hotels, English collapsible tubs, and gleaming Pullman cars. Yet something almost imperceptible in the intonation gives the impression of a tiny gap between the author and his bourgeois comfort. Mandelstam’s family fell into rapid decline and this was his last visit abroad, and to Europe. He would remind himself of it all his life, up until the point when his memory is compressed into his late, great poems in the 1930s.

In the year after the Revolution, in the St. Petersburg Writers’ House an evening of new poetry was announced. Somewhere in the Writers’ House there was a bust of the poet Nadson, who had died young. He had been incredibly famous at the end of the nineteenth century and was now all but forgotten, twenty years later. His friend, the elderly Maria Dmitrievna Vatson, said of the bust to Anna Akhmatova, “I want to get him out of there, because he might get hurt otherwise.”

I am so scared of hurting these people, even more so because I feel it in myself, this sense of hurt, a blood link and a proximity with each of them, all those who hid their Jewishness like an embarrassing defect, or paraded it like a cockade in full view of everyone. Very soon even that choice became a fictitious one: whatever a Jew did — with his seed, his immortal soul, his corrupting flesh — he could not alter the contract drawn up with the external world, as the twentieth century demonstrated. Even the right to weakness (to treason and denial) would be withdrawn with the other rights, as even atheists and converts were drawn into the extermination camps.

On April 20, 1933, Thomas Mann wrote in his diary: “I could have a certain amount of understanding for the rebellion against the Jewish element…” He was writing about the recently introduced law forbidding Jews to work for the Civil Service, the first of dozens of carefully planned restrictions intended to set into motion the engine of regression in the Jewish element, their thorough and meticulous distancing from civilization, and its capacity to make life bearable. Step by step their existence was reduced to the bare biological minimum. Among all the various prohibitions (visiting swimming pools, public parks, stations, concert halls, traveling around Germany, buying newspapers, meat, milk, tobacco, owning woolen goods or pets) there was one stipulation: after August 1938 every Jew whose name did not unambiguously indicate Jewish heritage had to add “Israel” or “Sarra” to his or her name: Maria Sarra Stepanova, for example.

At the beginning of the 1950s my twelve-year-old mother walked to her old Moscow school one morning, with its wide parade staircase, the polished banister rails rising in caressing curves. From above, on the top landing, Vitya, my mother’s neighbor, hung over the rails and shouted down: “Gureeevich! What’s your grandmother’s name?” Both my mother and Vitya knew full well that grandmother was called Sarra Abramovna — just Sarra alone was putting the knife in, but Sarra Abramovna… It was a doubled roar, like two rampant lions, shamelessly unambiguous, SARRAABRAMOVNA! It stood out like a sore thumb: living with a name like that was really just hysterically silly.

Not-A-Chapter Sarra Ginzburg, 1905–1915

1.

Aleksandr to Sarra Ginzburg in Pochinky, December 24, 1905

Next to grandmother on the photograph we used to call “Babushka on the Barricades” there is a person whose face will appear from time to time in the archive. His full name isn’t ever given in the correspondence. Grandmother’s girlfriends mockingly called him Sancho Pancho, in reference to Don Quixote’s companion with his undying devotion.

This postcard has a stormy seascape on the front by the painter Aivazovsky, a picture that graced the walls of Russian living rooms and community halls for decades: the soapy-green underside of the sea, a huge wave cresting over the shattered remains of a mast to which the drowning seafarers are clutching. A boat is sinking in the distance. Above the picture someone has added by hand: Greetings from Nizhny!

What were they arguing about with the Socialist Revolutionaries that December? And who was arguing? Judging by Great-Grandmother’s circle of acquaintances, Sancho, like her other friends, was close to the Bolsheviks, and it seems likely they were discussing the necessity of revolutionary terrorism. Just before that, after the October Manifesto in 1905, the Socialist Revolutionary Party announced its own Combat Organization. The Bolsheviks insisted that an increase in terrorism and expropriation was essential; the SRs felt differently. But the Bolsheviks pressed ahead without them and between Autumn 1905 and Autumn 1906, 3611 civil servants were assassinated.

Sarra used to go home from school for the holidays to Pochinky, to her father and sisters “to be fattened up.” She was a student in Nizhny Novgorod, at the best gymnasium in the town, and her friends also studied there. This particular new friend made the classic mistake in writing her name: Sara, instead of Sarra. But it seems she did travel to see him and stood next to him on the Barricades, with her black eye and her absurd bonnet in disarray on the side of her head. The day Aleksandr sent her this postcard there was rioting at the Sormovsky Factory and the snowy streets were blocked with whatever came to hand — wooden boxes, office cabinets. The Governor of Nizhny had already sent an urgent message to the capital: “Dangerous situation in the town. There could be trouble tomorrow. We have no troops.” On December 29, the date on the Pochinky postmark, the protesters were already shooting from cannons.

2.

Platon to Sarra Ginzburg (in prison), February 9, 1907

A barefoot harpist with burning eyes and a mane of black hair sits on a deserted and melancholy shoreline. A text reads: N. Zikhel, Solace in Music.

Two years had passed. Sarra Ginzburg had been arrested for handing out illegal literature and she was in prison in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. “Little Sarra” must be Great-Grandmother’s lifelong close friend, Sarra Sverdlova, who was also the sister of the ruthless Communist Yakov Sverdlov.

Platon was the party nickname for a rather brilliant man, Ivan Adolfovich Teodorovich, the son and grandson of Polish political rebels, a professional revolutionary, Lenin’s friend and advisor, and a member of the Central Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Ten years after this he became the first Soviet People’s Commissar for Manufacturing, and then almost immediately left the Soviet People’s Commissariat as a protest against War Communism. Thirty years later, on September 20, 1937, he was shot, after being sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court.

The Second State Duma had just been elected, the first had lasted a mere seventy-two days. The second unhappy attempt at Russian parliament lasted for thirty days longer before being disbanded. There genuinely were a lot of leftists in the parliament, making up more than a third. It’s a strange experience to read the lists of deputies from that Second Duma: they include a huge number of peasants (169), 35 laborers, and only 6 manufacturers, 20 priests, 38 teachers, and even a single poet, Eduard Treimanis-Zvargul, who lived in Riga and wrote in Latvian. Comrade Platon had also put himself up for election, but hadn’t been elected.

3.

Aleksandr to Sarra Ginzburg, August 12, 1907. Portrait of a Woman.

4.

Aleksandr to Sarra Ginzburg, October 17, 1907

The postcard has the caption Don’t go! and shows a woman seeing off a revolutionary in an astrakhan cap. He has a mustache and carries a revolver. In the background, snowy roofs and a little onion dome. Above the image someone has added by hand: you would have told me to go!

October 17, 1905, was the day the October Manifesto was published, in which the Tsar promised the people of Russia civil liberties and the creation of a State Duma.

5.

Mikhail Fridman to Sarra Ginzburg, December 26, 1909

A girl with large yearning eyes and hair loose over her shoulders, sitting by a window, her hands placed uselessly on her knees. Caption: Richon. If only I were a bird!

6.

Dmitrii Khadji-Genchev to Sarra Ginzburg, Montpellier, December 29, 1909

The letter is entirely preoccupied with arrangements, the tiny cramped handwriting fills a page from top to bottom, the shifts from French to a deformed Russian look like mistakes born of haste and agitation. Two days until the New Year. Sarra is just about to return to Montpellier.

7.

Aleksandr to Sarra Ginzburg, January 4, 1910

A German postcard with a Berlin postmark. Two peasant lovers are kissing in the rye, he has a flaxen mustache, she wears a brightly colored skirt. To the side a little ditty concerning Liebesgedanken.

8.

Dmitrii Khadji-Genchev to Sarra Ginzburg, July 27, 1912 (translated from French)

On the other side:

9.

Dmitrii Khadji-Genchev to Sarra Ginzburg, Tyrnovo, October 29, 1912

War on European soil began two years before the outbreak of the First World War. The First Balkan War was already underway in 1912.

10.

Sarra Ginzburg to Mikhail Fridman, November 1913

A jury had just vindicated Menachem Beilis, a Jewish man accused of the ritual murder of a twelve-year-old boy from Kiev; the notorious trial was often compared to the Dreyfus affair.

11.

Sarra Ginzburg to Mikhail Fridman, Paris, February 18, 1914

12.

Sarra Ginzburg to Mikhail Fridman, March 29, 1914

13.

Sarra Ginzburg to Mikhail Fridman, May 8, 1914

14.

Sarra Ginzburg to Mikhail Fridman, October 1914

This postcard is sent from within Russia, on the front a view of the Anichkov Bridge. The First World War began in July, three months earlier.

15.

Mikhail Fridman to Sarra Ginzburg in Petrograd, October 1914

A drawing by Leonid Pasternak: an injured sailor leans against a wall, red paint on his face to make it look flushed. A handwritten note reads: This is the last sketch from contemporary life by Leonid Pasternak. Isn’t it true to life? Misha

16.

Sarra Ginzburg to Mikhail Fridman, November 1914

17.

Sarra Ginzburg to Mikhail Fridman, December 4, 1914

18.

Mikhail Fridman to Sarra Ginzburg, April 10, 1915

Sarra and Mikhail’s ketubah, their prenuptial agreement, written in Hebrew, was signed a year later in April 1916. My grandmother Olga (Lyolya) Fridman was born a few weeks later.

2. Selfies and their Consequences

Moving through the rooms of a gallery from portrait to portrait it becomes abundantly clear, and you’d think obvious, that the various ways of preserving the “I” — canvas and oils, pastels and paper and all the rest — come down to the single basic formula x=y. At a specific moment in a person’s continuing presence, that person hands over the right of posthumous representation to the portrait. The job of the portrait is to draw together and condense everything that makes you what you are now and will become, your past and future, and to sort all this into a fixed shape that is no longer subject to the laws of time. This process bears a direct relation to the old adage “the best words in the best order,” only the conditions are more stringent, and the order lays claim to being the single, decisive summing up. In a sense every portrait wants to be a Fayum Mummy portrait, to be shown like a passport as you cross the border between living and dead; when the work is at an end, you come to an end yourself. For this reason no person needs more than one portrait, one is enough, all the other portraits of Philip IV of Spain are like zeros lined up after a four, multiplying the distinctness of his features, tallying them up.

Photography casts even this principle into doubt, to the extent that it is now possible to believe that the identity of a portrait’s subject can and should be made up of a dozen different jigsaw pieces, selected from a range of various and sometimes not even acquainted versions of the “I.” A selfie (the most extreme manifestation of the belief in mutability) is born of the need to fix the image in place, and the conviction that the face of today and the face of tomorrow are infinitely different. Developing this principle leads us down the way of cinematography, a road composed of a thousand momentary prints. This might be a good point to remind ourselves of Aristotle’s definition of memory as the imprint of a seal. He goes on to talk about states of mind that are incompatible with memory, like passion, age, youth, describing them as a flood of raw unorganized movement: “Both the very old and the very young are defective in memory. They are in a state of flux.” A precise impression is not possible, instead the shape of a movement is left on the surface of the mind, like a half-erased tire mark on a road.

A portrait of movement — this is exactly how we see ourselves now, presenting our faces daily to the camera, or changing our social media avatar. Social media play this game with enthusiasm, constantly inventing new ways to arrange images: “my face five years ago,” “my photos with this or that friend,” “last year in pictures,” presented so they appear to be the turning pages of a book, or grandly as “a film.” It’s not even that Facebook helpfully remembers (chooses what to remember and what to forget) for me and on my behalf that I find so fascinating — it’s that the never-ending nature of the flow seems to oblige me to feed it with new photographs. Your own face needs constant updating or you’ll forget how it used to look.

Each new face casts off and cancels the ones before. It reminds me of the way a space rocket releases each stage, one after the other, in order to pick up speed. Elena Shvarts describes in a poem a room in which all her past, worn-out, and cast-off selves are “crowds /Of the dwindling, clothed, unclothed / Of the raging, and joyful, and sorrowing,” among whom the soul runs like the flame along a safety fuse. Charlotte Salomon draws her subjects in much the same way. Here’s a woman leaving her home on her way to end her life. Eighteen little figures repeating across the page in different phases of movement, a little like a corridor with intention moving down it. Each following figure confirms the decision of the one before, each new figure moves a step closer to the hole in the ice.

Rembrandt’s younger contemporaries, Von Sandrart, Houbraken, Baldinucci, all wrote studies of his life. These were not motivated by a love of his pictures, but were rather an attempt to depict a curious instance, an example of “how not to go about it.” The list of his crimes was long, but the complaints against him were all strangely similar — along with his “ugly plebeian face” and the crooked letters of his signature, he was accused of what must surely follow from these basic flaws: a crooked sense of taste. A predilection for the creased, the wrinkled, and the dog-eared, the bedsore, the mark of a tightened belt on the skin, for anything that bore on it the imprint of life.

For his first biographers, Rembrandt’s unwillingness or inability to derive contentment from the best, the select, the exemplary — to know how “to distinguish and to choose from life the most beautiful of the beautiful” was a serious failing. It had to be explained in some way, best of all by his background, his education, and his resulting pigheadedness. The biographers (including Von Sandrart, who knew Rembrandt in life) also insist on his desire to model from nature, and as any event back then needed a precedent, they nod to Caravaggio, who was at the time the archsinner in this worship of nature.

I don’t know that it’s worth taking this too seriously: you don’t need much of a pretext if you’re bent on studying with nature, at her school of lifelong disintegration. However, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna there’s a work by Caravaggio that sends me straight back to Rembrandt, although the connection between them is a half rhyme at best. This work is “David with the Head of Goliath”: the fiery brightness of what stands out from the surrounding gloom only makes the arc of the composition more visible. The adolescent boy with his childishly plump cheeks balances the weight of the huge head of his vanquished foe. The color is already draining from the head, the jaw hangs slack, a tooth gleams in the light, and the eyes have neither light nor expression. The boy’s yellow trousers and white linen shirt are the same shades of color as the clothes in the famous 1658 self-portrait by Rembrandt, the cane in Rembrandt’s left hand is tipped with the same dull metal as the sword David rests across his shoulders. A yellow jerkin encloses Rembrandt’s chest like a cuirass and the folds of his shirt are escaping from under it, his heavy paunch is girdled with red, and the same red in the Caravaggio picture colors the strands of flesh that dangle from the dead man’s neck.

If you stare at David and his trophy for long enough, at the balance between the killer and the killed, the tender and the stiffening, the dimmed and the illuminated, between what you might simply call the rotting and the blooming, you discover that there is no difference between victor and vanquished. You might think that the whole and calculated construct of the painting is about this, but it is suddenly brought dramatically into focus when you realize that the living boy and the dead giant have the same face, that they are different stages of the same process, and a graphic example of all those “before and after” comparisons we are so used to seeing. It is thought that Goliath’s face is that of Caravaggio himself, and it becomes even more fascinating when you look across at the child and it occurs to you that it is in fact a double self-portrait.

At this moment the triangle (the two protagonists and you, the viewer) bends, breaks apart, becoming open-ended like a horseshoe: all the ages and changes in this face as it travels from beginning to end are compressed, hammered into its invisible curve. What I see is the literal expression of the classic perspective of “souls looking down at the body they have left behind.” The author (who offers for our view not a body, but bodies, the estranged and cooling corpus of a whole lived life) is in a strange place, equidistant from everything, and this position excludes him from any reckoning or choice. This might be the first example I know of an artist’s subject becoming not just the “I” as a result, but the “I” as a movement.

Art historians believe around eighty of Rembrandt’s self-portraits to be authentic (that is, attributed to Rembrandt, though occasionally with the assistance of members of his workshop), and fifty-five of these, or so I believe, are oil on canvas. This is a lot: a tenth of his whole prodigious output. Some of them are painted over other works in the absence of a ready canvas, forming a second layer of paint over the initial image. The already painted canvases were not necessarily Rembrandt’s own. This was recycling in its purest form and everything was reused — other people’s work, his own failed pictures and drafts, expressive little “tronies,” little genre paintings. Among the canvases were the portraits his patrons didn’t want. On their surfaces the artist himself appeared, his face momentary, one-off.

But only his face. The used canvases became a kind of drafting space or a sketchbook for the artist, where he could react fast, perhaps because his patrons paid for canvases or gave them to him for their own portraits. The self-portraits, arranged in a long line, examined consecutively, make a kind of catalog, a selection of snatched reflections, that very same following after nature. “After Nature,” as Sebald’s first book was called.

It seems that the speed with which an image was transferred to the canvas was important to Rembrandt. More important than other circumstances or obligations.

In the authoritative series A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, published by the Rembrandt Research Project, the self-portraits are given their own thick volume. Despite this, one of the main purposes of the accompanying editorial is to warn the reader from seeing the portraits as a special category. We shouldn’t see them as a distinct project or subproject, a lyric diary lasting years, a Montaigne-style inquiry into the self.

The editor of the volume is engaged in a polemic against something even greater than the human tendency to retell the past with a contemporary vocabulary and to present Rembrandt’s works as a quest for identity (or a search for an interior reality, opening up the space for introspection). This is not about a conflict of methodology, nor the extent to which we can eradicate the sin of anachronism — a sin inherent in any attempt to read a text that has moved a good way along the timescale. It’s more likely that his is just one more attempt to kick against the pricks, to preserve the dignity of the past, and the rights of knowledge — the first of which is an immunity to ready-made concepts and imported frames of reference. There is no longer any escape from these: the agitated search for connection is in the air itself, the air a society breathes in an age of decline in the absence of common lines and unambiguous answers.

When the foundations of our day-to-day life subside and shift, hindering any attempt at systematic interpretation, we begin to search out handrails, and to welcome even the merest hint of structure. You begin to see order in any sequentiality, trusting chance and coincidence as if they demonstrated an intrinsic connection between things. There are a number of texts dedicated to Rembrandt’s project, and each of them says more about us than it does about him, just like the first biographies. And yet there is something vaguely troubling about the optics that make us see the self-portraits as if through a microscope, the “interior world of their author” magnified, each movement of spirit, dark corner of the soul, or grief-marking laid bare for the purposes of study. I can’t help thinking that the meaning of the many-headed multitude of sketched Rembrandts (their actual face value) is in fact in limiting them to exteriority, to the Aristotelean imprint of today. This is enough in any case: they give far more than we ask of them.

In some sense the self-portraits are close to the fashionable teaching aids of the time, which set out for future artists the permissible limits of bodily expression for suffering, astonishment, horror, and joy. This logic (based on an ancient faith in “characters,” a range of types explaining human variety with a few templates) predetermines the further splitting of movements of spirit into a series of consecutive emotions, each one of which is a separate capsule, insisting on its own existence. These are universal, each has its own facial expression, meaning that what has been observed once can be applied many times, like a mathematical formula or a prayer.

Houbraken, the most lenient of Rembrandt’s ill-wishers, saw in his work above all a carelessness of approach, something akin to crossing the road at a red light.

What is interesting here is not Houbraken’s faith in ready templates, but the belief that the emotions exist as separate zones (just like the human types), and that they can be carefully delineated. Anger and pity are thought of as static states, like phases in a process, yet the point where they mix is not thought of as a separate space because there is an intangible line between them. In his comparison of the work Rembrandt and Montaigne made on the subject of themselves cultural historian Andrew Small refers to Foucault and The Order of Things, which concludes that despite the chains of vital resemblances, a person is imprisoned and limited by the parameters that describe her borders and leave the center untouched.

Rembrandt’s contemporaries and detractors all reproached him for exactly this: a disrespect for borders — or his lack of ability to draw a line between one thing and another, between light and dark (a draftsman’s chief asset). On this matter they all agree, finding the very manner of drawing unacceptable, “without contour or definition by means of inner and outer lines, but consisted entirely of violent and repeated strokes.” “Clean outlines ought really to be drawn in their proper place and in order to conceal the danger [of this lack] in his works, he filled his paintings with pitch-black; and so it was that he demanded nothing from his pictures as long as they maintained a universal harmony.” “…The other figures could scarcely be distinguished one from another, in spite of their being all closely studied from life.” The attempt to resist what Pushkin called “the mixing up of everything” with a whole variety of rational arguments looks both touching and futile in hindsight, if only because Rembrandt doesn’t impose change, he changes the system from within: he stretches it out to its full extent until it gives under the strain.

In his world there are no precisely drawn borderlines between figure and background, color and blackness, or, to extend the thought, between the self-portrait and the “tronie” nonportrait. It’s as if the corpus of self-portraits rethinks the ruled line of ready-made states, while asserting the presence of another line where states are countless and flowing, like shades on a spectrum, but still held in an arrangement moving toward a clear and distinct end: a sequence of facial developments, along which change flickers without altering the overall reckoning. The task of emulatio (imitation, meaning not just the copying of the original, but the exceeding of it) is embedded in the nature of the genre — and one’s own body becomes an artist’s model, the ideal, unpaid model, over which ripples of emotion, age, phases of life play: a sequence of emblems. Alienation, the constant companion of observation, is essential here, as well as precision in the reproduction of what is seen.

A commentator has likened the relationship between Rembrandt and his own images to a trial of the self. Wouldn’t it be more exact to call them “a refutation of the self” (however what happened between mirror and canvas was translated into the language of the seventeenth century): the alienation from, and shearing off of a whole phase of life, together with the one who has just lived it. For this to happen the artist has to very literally come out of himself, to be exteriorized to the point where he no longer sees the difference between himself and any one of his patrons (or, as in the Dresden self-portrait, between his young, pink-cheeked self and the dead bittern this self holds by the legs).

All the phases of this process are simultaneously discrete and unending. We see before us not inquiry (with its implied result), but fixation, a diary of observations from nature. There is not a single retrospective self-portrait — each new day is fixed and immediately exhausted, cast off, a waste product. In this respect it’s important to look at the self-portraits in order, one after the other, as on their own they have the quality of scientific observation: another notch in the doorjamb marking a new height and age. It is not introspection, but rather the refusal to indulge in introspection; the externalizing and separating of the passing minute. Not autobiography, but autoepitaph.

Often a single portrait is repeated a few times, sometimes with variations and sometimes almost without, in different materials, oil, engravings, by the artist himself or his students. It’s very clear that the concerns of the post-Romantic era, the necessity of avoiding repeats, the whole search for the new and uncaptured, all lie outside Rembrandt’s circle of interests. Add to these the logic of self-knowledge, which is far too easy to impute to anyone found to be interested in their own persona. Perhaps the intention (however it was formulated back then) was not to acknowledge the opening curve of a new segment of life, but to fix the typical, to pin it down. I was this. I will never be this again.

The “selfie” genre operates in exactly this way. It is concerned with the contemporary: the search for variation has been replaced by the production of repeat images. Anyone on social media knows how often pictures appear in little clusters, a few self-portraits all taken in the same place and presented to the world one after the other, out of the sheer impossibility of choice. A number of tools have been developed in order to give the appearance of variety to these clusters: filters that refashion a picture in the manner of an artistic system, in the style of Munch, Klimt, Kandinsky, leaving the core of the self untouched.

It’s this core we’re concerned with. As usual all questions asking “how” are simply a way of answering the fundamental question of “who.” Rembrandt experts all tell of the incredible variety of media for the age, the different ways of applying paint, the brushwork. In this sense Rembrandt has no “signature,” no authorial manner, nothing of what was valued by the art of a new age obsessed with the personal. Or rather, he has too many of them. For each new task he develops a new technical approach, which you could call a filter. It’s a little like our photographs, with their pretense at variety. The difference is first and foremost in what’s present in every Rembrandt portrait, glancing out like the skull beneath the skin, in every fold of flesh — and what the poetics of the selfie eschews at all costs. Facebook photos, like the fairy-tale mirror on the wall, seek to persuade us of our invulnerability. As they dispassionately record each new wrinkle they insist that the face in the mirror is still ours, still the fairest of them all, hardly changed from the day before yesterday.

Jean Cocteau said that cinema is the only art form that records death at work. Rembrandt’s self-portraits are solely occupied with recording death, and lined up together they make a sort of protofilm — whereas the kilometers of selfies, taken and uploaded for communal access, look like the exact opposite to me: the chronicle of death as it walks among us, no longer of any interest to anyone.

Even stronger then is the temptation to see the sequence of Rembrandt’s oil paintings as a narrative arc, a kind of graphic novel, with the face as hero. All of the events and adventures happen to the face, as if it were a character you could manipulate at will, allowing for distortion or dislocation. And these distortions happen of course, although they have little to do with the subject. That is, yes, the metamorphoses of the face are accompanied by changes in the entourage: a little further to the left or right, but you’re still the hero, the emperor, the unfortunate, the old man, no one, yourself. Sometimes this “I” is more successful than in real life, appearing in the clothes and the pose of the princes of this world. Often, the subjects insist on their just deserts — appearing with a gold chain over the chest, the sign of an artist’s success. Rembrandt never received such a reward in life, but the portraits set this to rights. Most of all the artist is quite literally testing the model for durability, for its ability to reinvent itself.

The quality of loving-kindness is intimately connected with the work of the hands, with the touch of the brush on the canvas, stroke by stroke. Here it is conjoined with the powerful energy of alienation, or distance, to put it simply. The painted Rembrandt changes from canvas to canvas, but retains an unchanging presence — almost like the protagonist of a comic or cartoon, Tintin or Betty Boop, whose depictions have become a symbol, a few oversized characteristics grouped around an empty space. The mathematical constant, along with the constant of the subject, have been canceled out. Sometimes the portrait necessitates smaller eyes, sometimes larger, sometimes they are apart, sometimes closer-set. The chin, too, gets longer and then shorter again. The nose however remains unchanged — if you think of the features of a face as a collection of personalities then the comic stubborn nose, with its bulbous tip would be the main character, the hero of the tale.

Then there’s the ear with its fleshy lobe. There’s an apocryphal tale that Rembrandt deliberately darkened the wonderfully painted Cleopatra in order to make the single pearl stand out. Cleopatra, if she ever existed, has not been preserved. In an early self-portrait from 1628, with its captivating combination of rosiness and red hair, transparent shadows and flickering surfaces, Rembrandt’s ear is that single pearl. The lighting is what you might call “dimmed houselights”: that melancholy half light that rescues any photograph or film, imparting to it a sudden perfection. The face is immersed in darkness, and only the very button of the nose is illuminated. Part of the neck, the soft cheek with its downy hair and a corner of the white collar appear almost gilded with the light of the disappearing sun, and a ring of hairs on his nape are lit like wires. The center of the composition has followed the light and shifted to the left, and the crimson earlobe (disproportionately puffy, as if he’d just had it pierced and it was still stinging and swollen) is suddenly everything: the sunset, an expensive earring, an unseeing and flesh-covered third eye.

Consider the “Portrait of a Young Woman with a Fan,” dated 1633 (its pendant, showing a bearded man, rising from his armchair to greet someone, is now somewhere in Cincinnati). It’s a virtuosic work, a demonstration of mastery: thick scalloped lace, the black and wine-red fabrics, the earrings and necklace all appear to hold symbolic meaning that might be deciphered like a rebus. But none of it bears any relation to the face, which is wide and flat as a tray. No message plays across its surface, merely the smooth evenness of the concentrating listener. Something in it looks familiar though, like a fin emerging from the waves and then disappearing again, and it unsettles and distracts from the task, which the artist has so marvelously fulfilled. The young woman has neither name nor biography, giving rise to the suggestion that she never existed, and that both works were calling cards, painted to show the artist at his best and attract new patrons. Something in her figure and the turn of her shoulder, in the way her sleeve is tucked up and her large hand rests on the arm of the chair is in vague contradiction with the silk and gold of the artist’s task. Her eyes are wide apart (a slight skin fold in one eyelid) and she has a broad forehead, an inelegant nose (the bulbous tip is tinged with red) and the expression on her face combines a high level of attentiveness with a little boy’s excited readiness. I can’t rid myself of the thought that Rembrandt liked the idea of painting a female version of himself, just another of the many possible-impossible forms of being — especially handy if a portrait of an unknown woman was suddenly needed.

The heavy-browed, the surprised, the smirking, contented, and self-satisfied, the suspicious, despairing, and desperate, the slicked-back and curly-haired likenesses of Rembrandt formed their own scale, they were a school unto themselves. The face seems to be able to teach itself to meet every given standard — and at the same time to refute it. The Dresden “Self-portrait with a Dead Bittern” with its mustache, the feather in his cap, the extended hand holding the bird like Goliath’s head, has its echo in the victorious Samson, standing with his hand on his hip at his father-in-law’s gate.

The comparatively spare late self-portraits, with their dark hats and white linen caps, are even more economical, a serial testing of the faces of acceptance, despair, mockery. They have something in common, it seems, a particular quality to the gaze, although it’s easier to define in an apophatic sense, to note what is absent. They are missing the integral attribute of the genre: an attempt to penetrate. The portrait with its fist of meanings, an embodied demand for attention, a place in the sun, tries to break open your head like a door, to enter in and make itself at home. It has the intensity of a message in a bottle, a voicemail — a letter that sooner or later will become the very last letter.

Rembrandt’s self-portraits are beings of a different type. They don’t demand attention, but with all imaginable generosity they offer up to you their own attention. The internal space of the portraits is given over to this, the gaze we meet at the threshold opens up to us, allows us in, creates a soft indent for our momentary stay, a womb-like hollow, deliberately intended for partings. What is parting from what here? What is ending, which is hardly begun? If we remember that we are looking (even in the same portrait with the yellow jerkin), in the most literal way, with Rembrandt’s eyes, and through his mind, as if it were a coin-operated telescope presenting a segment of distant reality to us up close, then at this very moment, we are able to cast off our own selves with a mixture of tenderness and gratitude. What happens then is the simultaneous disappearance of both pans on the scales, both parts of the equation, the y and the x. In the hollow, in the deserted meeting place, only its permanent resident is left: the invisible dead monkey.

3. Goldchain Adds Up, Woodman Takes Away

In W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz there is a long list — a page or more — of confiscated goods taken from the flat of Prague Jews after they have been dispatched. Everything is itemized, down to the jars of strawberry jam with their conserved summer light. Sometimes we can trace the objects’ journey (I almost added “posthumous”), and there are even photographs of the warehouses where the confiscated goods were stored — a little like transit camps, barracks for captive objects. Long tables, as if in preparation for a wedding feast, are stacked high with orphaned china and crockery, terrible in their ornate nakedness; wooden shelves like bunks, inhabited by pots and pans, sauce boats and teapots, forced to rub along. It’s as if someone’s cupboards had been sliced open like a belly and the contents had slithered out — and this is in effect what happened. There are whole rooms of polished wooden cupboards and cupboards of neatly piled, cold-to-the-touch bedlinen, ancient pillows and duvet covers. These warehouses were closed distribution points, places where the privileged could come and be presented with a gift from someone else’s halted life. The same warehouses existed in Soviet Russia — the furs and furniture of the spoiled bourgeoisie were handed out to the victorious, the people of a new Social formation.

In contemporary Europe, with its barely healed wounds, black holes, and traces of displacement, a well-preserved family archive is a rarity. A set of furniture and china that has come together over decades, inherited from aunts and grandmothers and once thought of as an ancient burden, now deserves its own special memorial. Those who were forced to flee (it hardly matters from whom they fled) burned documents, shredded photographs, cut off everything below the chin — officer epaulets, army greatcoats, civil service uniforms — and left their papers with other people. By the end of the journey very little is left for the memory to cling to, and to set sail on.

Exercises in bringing the past closer to understand it remind me of those school tests where you are asked to tell a story based on a picture, or to draw a picture based on a few existing elements: nose, tail, and paw. Whether you like it or not, you are simply more visible than those who came before you. And we have nothing to lay our foundations on — like most of the people who escaped from the black ink of the twentieth century, taking only what they could.

What can you do when your imagined subject’s possessions amount to almost nothing: a postcard and five photographs that have survived by accident? The imagination bodies forth, the objects acquire mass and the links between them, both past and invented, and smeared thickly with a priori knowledge of that object, establish their own order. But objects from the long distant past look as if they’ve been caught in the headlights, they’re awkward, embarrassingly naked. It’s as if they had nothing left to do. Their previous owners and functions are gone and they are doomed to aimless existence. It is much like retiring from work and finding yourself unable to build a new life. The list of clothing I took to pioneer camp as a ten-year-old (three white t-shirts, blue shorts, a pioneer cap), is hardly different from the lists of property that were so lovingly drawn up in the seventeenth century, the frock coats, garters, and breeches. They slowly grow cold in the absence of human touch, of being spoken of and remembered, and each item is suffused with a touching glow when it is brought briefly back out of oblivion. Together with a white cloth of silver doublet and another black silk doublet we find: five East Indian wicker baskets, a green armosin sash, six hair wigs, a cane, being a walking stick with an ivory knob, and a Turkish tobacco pipe. This comes from a list of items belonging to Lodewijk van der Helst, drawn up in Amsterdam on January 7, 1671, on the occasion of moving to his mother’s. It’s a long list and nothing is left out, down to the “various silks and other textiles of “antique” clothes and what belongs to it, as part of the art of painting.” We know almost nothing about the artist Edo Quitter, except that he died in 1694 and all that remains is a list of his still-living possessions, drawn up December 10:

Rafael Goldchain’s book I Am My Family: Photographic Memories and Fictions might be described as an album or a catalog, the paper equivalent of a completed art project. This extraordinary book’s concern is memory and the vanity of memory.

Goldchain was born in Chile in 1953. He is what is known as a second-generation survivor, a son and grandson of those who managed to escape.

The project (I don’t know how else to describe it) begins like other such projects: the father tells the son a story, and as the story continues the father becomes more deeply immersed in it. It seems Goldchain wasn’t very interested in his own family history until he became a parent himself. No one spoke of the past in his home, the silence was sealed tight, much like a message in a bottle, not yet ready to be opened. This is usual: “we didn’t speak of those things,” “he kept his silence,” “she never wanted to talk about it” — the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of survivors quote the same phrases. Goldchain lived in various places: Jerusalem, Mexico, Toronto, and it was only when he was close to forty and his first son was born that he realized he was the same age as his grandparents on the eve of the Second World War, and that he knew nothing about them, or even about those he had lived with his whole life.

There comes a day when the scattered pieces of knowledge need to be fixed in a transmission line. It’s a truism that the “dough” of comprehension only rises to its shape in the moment of telling, and in this telling it then sags and subsides. Here’s the emblematic account, a picture from the golden library of generalized experience: a mother or father is recounting family history to the child, passing it from one mouth to another. This is how Art Spiegelman begins Maus, the classic work about the Holocaust and how it is spoken of; this is how hundreds of other works begin:

When the listener is a child, simplicity isn’t just appropriate — it’s essential. The sharp corners round themselves, the lacunae quietly disappear. The tale of the past constantly risks becoming a tale of the future. We have to make the knowledge bearable, skirt the painful, repair connections — or the world will fall apart.

Only a few photographs remain of the huge clan of Goldchains living in Poland a century ago, and they are all reproduced at the end of the book in an appendix. The book begins with an introduction, and then a warning by the author, and only then the real meat of the book: eighty-four photographs recreating the body of the family. Each is presented like a studio photograph on a monochrome background, the portrait extending downward to the chest. They include men and women in hats, heavy-boned women with piercing gazes, little jug-eared yeshiva students, peasants from the shtetl, imposing gentlemen to whom the respectable labels “Don Moses” or “Don Samuel” adhere as a matter of course. There’s no sleight of hand about it, and I won’t try to pretend that there is. You can see immediately that despite the different ages and genders, the face is the same — we are following the family resemblance down a mirrored corridor. The Goldchain family album is a collection of self-portraits, made in an attempt to resurrect a lost connection, to find oneself in the features of another.

The Soviet poet Gennady Aygi has a book in which he translates into words the first months of his daughter’s life with a deep attentiveness, silence by silence. He describes what he calls the “period of likenesses,” a short period of time during which familiar and unfamiliar faces and expressions flit across the baby’s face like passing clouds, as if the fretful ancestors looked down at the mirror-face of the child, both recognizing it and impressing on it their own. Goldchain says something similar when he describes his working process as being a spiritual medium: ghostlike shapes swim up from the depths of the image, but only briefly; the likenesses are not perfect, they can’t be held fast.

From the first glimpse the imagined photographs of an imagined family (what it might have been, what it never did become) shock with their abundance. There’s a plethora of types of person, as if they were competing for places on the ark. It reminded me of the parade of professions in August Sander’s photographs, although in this case all the subjects are members of the same family — as if the Goldchains had been chosen to settle a new world and had to be prepared for all eventualities. There are peasants and city dwellers, two chefs, and the author appears to lose his mind over the family musicians: violinist, saxophonist, accordionist, drummer, another violinist, a tuba player. It’s like some Kafkaesque trade fair, where one and the same person sits at every stand, and peers out from every barrel. The wider the selection of professions, the more we peer straight to the depths and the differences vanish before our eyes. All that is left is typology: profession, age, costume, and the quality of the costume, the frame of the formulaic, which the author will stick his head into, for example “a middle-aged, stylish woman, suffering from chronic, mild depression — there is one in every family.”

There are family members about whom nothing is known except for the name, and the lifesaving operation demands the invention of clothes and an exterior appearance. Sometimes the self-portrait doesn’t work, Goldstein simply isn’t able to catch the likeness with a “real-life cut out.” But these also come in useful: names are made up for them, the family grows larger. A “Naftuli Goldszajn” appears in the world, whose nonexistence up to that point was only a matter of chance. As it says in the introduction “…we are faced with a black-and-white image of a man who might have lived in Poland sometime after the 1830s. He must be a Goldchain, since he looks like all the others.”

For Goldchain, the attempt to tell his son about his heritage becomes a journey into the Kingdom of the Dead: to become each of them, to stand in their places, to allow them to look out through him like a window. The author becomes a way out, the bottleneck of the family story, the only way and the only material for saying all that can be said. You can call the result of this anything you like, but you couldn’t call it a family history. The brevity of the descriptions, their feathery-perfunctory quality (well-dressed, distinguished-looking, in a hat, with a bird) become clearer with each photograph: in this thoughtful, subtle project a whole tribe and an entire world appears on a single face, and the result is strange and unsettling. The problem with memory (its unrecognizable, rainy darkness, lit with the sharp flashes of guesswork) is removed at once: the entire tribe, three or thirty generations back, is me, all me, me with a mustache, me in a bonnet, me in a cradle, me in the grave, indivisible, irrevocable. Once again the past gives way to the present.

The structure of the book tells us a great deal about the mechanism of authorial view: after the introductions, the portraits, the laconic notes on the characters/types, there are some diary jottings from years before the project was being prepared: everything that could be gathered together, including guesses, fantasies, a few real photographs. Among these, an old woman with a wonderful face, who would have been quite impossible to impersonate. The notes are handwritten and you have to make an effort to decipher them, becoming a textual critic in the process — this moment of resistance makes the material irresistible. Here Goldchain and I are as one: the bare threads of knowledge give us wings. The text includes some “ready-mades,” everyday objects, fragments of authentic letters and documents and although they don’t amount to much, by some authorial magic they are transformed and rendered compelling.

Such magic is rare, which is why I am picking through different approaches to the past, as one might pick through dried peas, in the search of one that might work. Anna Akhmatova once said that there is nothing more tedious than someone else’s dreams or someone else’s fornication — but other people’s family histories also leave unwanted traces of dust and whitewash on your hands. There are very few ways to flick the switch and turn the uninteresting into the enticing corridor of new experience, and people seldom succeed. Rafael Goldchain’s approach was to create for himself and his son the illusion of continuity; to add to his own family a chorus of imaginary figures who shared his own features and his gaze. This is the world of compensation where the lost is returned in triplicate, where Job’s children and flocks increase in number and the unexpected is canceled out.

The catastrophe is displaced, the hole is resealed, things find their places once again, everyone is alive, there are no omissions, no silences. It is, in its own way, Paradise before the Fall (there are far too many people now who think that Europe in 1929 or Russia in 1913 were such paradises). We long to have our pictures taken before such a backdrop: I was there. But “there” does not exist. The oath of fidelity to family history becomes its destruction, a parody of the resurrection of the dead: another is replaced by oneself, the known world is squeezed out by the invented world, hell is other people becomes the family album where everyone is in their rightful place, pretending to be alive. Ideally they would also talk — but in your voice, like an answering machine gone rogue.

In the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington there’s a whole type of exhibit that is displayed so it can’t be seen unless the visitor makes a conscious choice to view it: usually this constitutes video materials or photographic sequences, which are just terrifying — how might one describe such things more exactly? These images are even less reconcilable with life than the rest of the exhibits. The viewer is kept apart from them by a low barrier, so to see the actual images you have to stand up close. The intention here seems to be that viewers can then half-close their eyes and deliberately protect themselves — not from knowledge of what happened, because that is always there inside, descending lump-like from the throat to the stomach; not from the actual details, after all you don’t have to look at the layers of slowly rotting bodies, one on top of another, or the murderers being washed with hoses to cool them down, or a bulky old woman trying to hide a naked little girl behind her. No, you don’t need to get too close to those screens.

Sometimes it rather seems to me that the pictures need protecting from us: so that the nakedness of the dying and dead remains their business and illustrates nothing, invokes nothing, serves neither as a basis for conclusions nor identifications after the event. It isn’t about the fact that this turning of a life inside out, in as little time as it takes to show a film clip, to show its seams and fibrous lining, is a type of the deformed experience described by Varlam Shalamov: it has no meaning, no use, it cannot be applied, nor can it be unseen. All it can do is destroy you from the inside out. And this isn’t simply because all one’s systems of self-defense strive to neutralize the images into mere “pictures,” screens that are estranged from real life for the purpose of terrifying and titillating us.

The further the contemporary world wades into the past (up to the knees, the waist, the chest, by stages transformed to marble, like the character in Carlo Gozzi’s The Raven) the louder the conversation about who owns it: the right to this or that scrap of the old world — and who has no such right to the past. Usually the inheritors and defenders are those who are closer by dint of knowledge or birth, scholars, family, associates. After them come all those who consider the dead to be their own property. It’s fascinating to watch when a stranger is drawn to this fenced-off property: someone from outside, someone who has not worked off their debt to this common ground. Events mostly unfold with the logic of a fight over an inheritance — and the first accusation flung at the outsider is his or her I. Someone like him or her has no business to be sniffing round such things, and so must be driven by self-interest, or worse, unfounded interest — overwrought, chance, without roots. Here the metaphors of agriculture and vegetable growth work best: blood-and-soil hums under our feet. So, even posthumously (which gives an especially morbid quality to the affair), the fair-haired Sylvia Plath was accused of the appropriation of images of Jews and ovens in the poems she wrote in the last months of her life. Accusations of exploitation hang in the air above the fields of memory, over the bent spines of her workers, her households, her underground streams, and the tips of her arrows.

There are those who manage to work in the past’s territories (to use the poet Dmitri Prigov’s expression: “to bide there, and yet to emerge dry”), as if without noticing where they are. In the (very short) history of Francesca Woodman there is nothing that speaks of the past’s vulnerability, or even shows particular interest in the old world. The daughter and the sister of an artist, she began photography at thirteen. When she died at twenty-two she left behind a body of prints, a few videos, and a large number of negatives, all connected by a rare sense of unity, not of method, but of approach. What preoccupies her — that is, the subject of her compulsively perfectionist art — is hard to formulate, not least for her. Her typed letters (written in a rush, so the words are often begun, then left unfinished, then a space, then she starts the word again, very much in the manner of the piping voice we heard on her videos) hardly try to explain the tasks she has set herself. The letters might be described as the bubbling surface of a river, flexing itself over rocks.

There are two types of writing about Francesca Woodman, and they might be characterized as biographical and formal. Interest in her work grows in both camps: the character of her work and her early death combine to give her a special sort of fame, she very quickly became an icon for the unhappy young; another divinity in the post-Romantic pantheon; a highly prized incompatibility with life. In Woodman’s case, because her favored material was the female body, it is easy to read her subject as the impossibility of living in a male world, under the male gaze, or the hopeless attempt to avoid this gaze by hiding or pretending to be someone else. Rosalind E. Krauss interprets Woodman’s message this way in one of the first articles about the photographer, written at the beginning of the 1980s. Krauss’s article lays the foundations for the perception of the work as the chronicle of a disappearance, a commentary on Woodman’s own future death. As this version gained popularity, the most frequently used word in any discussion about Woodman became “haunted,” spoken with the kind of comfortable horror we reserve for ghost stories. If we adhere to this interpretation of Woodman’s output then our role is to witness the fair-haired girl disappearing underwater, or lost in the roots of a tree, or flickering behind tattered wallpaper, extenuated, finally fading out, and yet ceaselessly documenting all this for our entertainment and edification, in the best traditions of confessional lyric.

The photographs certainly allow this interpretation, alongside many others. Their natural environment is the smoky light of metamorphosis, of various kinds of transformation and distortion, which do not permit a perception of the self as a thing of wonder, or even an anomaly: in Woodman’s world this is just the natural order of things. Seen from the outside Woodman’s subjects fit in a tradition of homemade Victorian shadow theaters: fluttering ghosts strolling with lost maidens.

Seventeen-, eighteen- and twenty-year-old Francesca enjoyed dressing up. She loved and wore old clothing, what we’d now call vintage, flowery dresses, woolly tights, Mary Jane shoes. At school she told the girl who shared her room that she hated contemporary music and had never watched television in her life. It seems she was telling the truth. The documentary The Woodmans gives at least some insight into her upbringing, the right art school, the uncompromising exclusion of anything her parents thought unworthy. At some point Francesca’s father notes in passing that if his daughter had been interested in her girlfriends rather than in photographic angles and the specifics of lighting, then he would have had nothing to say to her. This seems to have been the truth, and I can only pity the child. The “fabricated” quality of Woodman’s person and her work resembles an integrated and successful project — the clarity of the handwriting and decision-making, the consistency and the ambition of every move — and this is yet another reason to think of her as a victim: of the times, of circumstances, of parental ambition. The expectation of success, the drive to success (and the inability to adapt to the inevitable delays and obstacles) is familiar to all children of professionals, the young musicians and ballerinas, in whom far too much effort and faith is placed, and it adds something to our understanding of her life and death. What it doesn’t explain is the more than eight hundred photographs taken by Woodman in her hope of creating something of her own.

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.” This is the opening of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, written in 1958, the year of Francesca Woodman’s birth and one of the best books on the relationship between the human and the uncanny, when the uncanny itself takes a sudden interest in the human. The book’s heroine is forced to convince herself of her own materiality by carefully noting each action: drinking a cup of coffee, buying a red sweater against her family’s better judgment, a victory, a beginning to life; but as the book progresses she blends more and more into the cursed house.

A few quotes, taken at random, from writing about how Francesca is disembodied in her own photographs: “her own body becomes transparent, strangely weightless, almost fleshless, blurring the boundaries between the human body and its surroundings,” “her body, caught in movement by the camera like a dark haze, as if she were as unbodied and unhuman as the air surrounding her,” “a ghost in the house of the woman artist.” Francesca Woodman took her own life, the result of a long depression, and as is so often the case, a fatal concurrence of the absurd and the hurtful: her bicycle was stolen; she didn’t get a grant; she had relationship troubles.

Suicide shines on any fate like the most powerful spotlight: it conspires to make the shadows deeper and the failures sharper. But Woodman’s family and friends collectively and convincingly refute the biographical interpretation of her work, drawing attention to another formal side of her work, the planned brilliance of these little shots, their particular humor, the language of coincidence and chance, the visual rhythms, the shadows of André Breton and Man Ray, the lifted hands metamorphosing into birch branches, branches voting with a lifted hand. They are irritated by the critics’ insistence on the theme of disappearance, but when you look at these pictures it is hard not to feel an answering desire to dissolve, to allow oneself to flow into the frame, the interior or the landscape. Or flow together with the author to the point where you become indistinguishable: The cliche of Woodman as a genius at self-portraiture nearly obscures the fact that many of the bodies, and even the faces we interpret as the confessional self belong to other women.

These women were friends, models, people she knew. Sometimes we see their faces, sometimes they resemble each other to a strange degree, sometimes they are shielded from view by mute objects: plates, black lace, even photographs of Francesca herself. Sometimes they are completely faceless, unpossessed to the point of dereliction, severed from us by the edge of a print, or parts of the body: someone’s legs in stockings, breasts and collarbones (in another picture), a hand emerging from a wall, the body of a woman in flight, a leap, blurred. None of this belongs to anyone — it is quite literally nobody’s: like a black umbrella or a crumpled stocking, it is simply part of the location, the interior of whatever abandoned house Woodman had chosen (for she only used such interiors). If we ask ourselves who all these orphaned arms, legs, shoulder blades belong to, what sort of a creature it could be (what species of being), then we might guess that all these constituent parts make up a single entity, something like a collective body — the body of death, or more precisely, the body of the past.

Woodman titled one of her photographs a portrait of “legs — and time” in her journal. She wrote of the objects featured in a late series of works, which went into her artist book before her death (the photographs are pasted on the pages of an old geometry primer, be fire with fire, I suppose, the new order prevailing over the old): “These things arrived from my grandmother’s they make me think about where I fit in the odd geometry of time.” The geometry of time is indivisible from its texture, which is constantly transforming itself, crumbling, breaking apart, evaporating, and then reforming in the vapor, ruled by the laws of the organic world. The phrase “body of work” takes on a living, almost medical sense: these photographs register the body of the world as a physical entity, with its pile, its skin, the dirt that eats into the pores, its twitching extremities, its ceaselessly shifting surfaces.

The eroticism of the images takes us a long way from the straight and narrow of human desire; it’s the crushed white fabric, barely touched by the sun, that seeks a meeting/illumination, far more than the bare shoulder of a woman does. Woodman’s interiors and landscapes are filled with naked bodies, bride-white Wilis trembling like water reeds. Never sated, they stare wolfishly into the forest of further possibilities. Their zone of interest passes along the boundary of their own skin and no external touch can compare with the drive for adventure already set in motion within them. In this sense the ghosts are harmless: they are entirely focused on themselves and what has happened to them. The fact that Woodman called her photographs “ghost pictures” is telling. All her ghostly images — a cloud of human form condensed around a tombstone or someone’s face peering out of the wardrobe, legs hanging out of another wardrobe, doors taken off their hinges and hung at a strange angle — are stages in a process, and the meaning of this process lies beyond the photograph, somewhere in time. The long exposure, the incredibly slow shutter speed and darkroom techniques reveal particular qualities in the person, an ability to be anything at all — a movement, an erosion, a whirlpool. Although she is more vulnerable and less lasting than, say, a floral-patterned tile, a person suddenly discovers she can walk through walls, cover objects with a fine layer of dust, rise out of nowhere, be air and fire. “And then I flew,” as the woman in Tarkovsky’s Mirror says.

The body, one’s own or another’s, is the essential material, the modeling clay, must be tested simultaneously for strength and fragility. In one of her self-portraits, a transparent telephone cord stretches from Woodman’s mouth as if she were vomiting a chain of soap bubbles. In other pictures shards of mirror press into the flesh of the stomach or thighs; breasts and sides are covered in pegs, hanging from the skin like beaks. Here is time passing, the human is washed away but objects keep their outlines; there is no difference between oneself and others, just an unending impersonal tender love. This is the pure matter of oblivion — an ocean without a window, as Mandelstam wrote — forever scattering, drawing itself together, then shrinking away; saving face, then suddenly removing it, ripping it off. Sometimes, not always, very seldom in fact, a ripple appears on the surface of the watery flow, something that presses from inside comes into focus, swelling, rising up, crystallizing, almost against its will. This is how the past rises up into the contemporary world, like a drowned man from the murky waters. This is how Francesca’s body rises from the floral patterns and chipped whitewash, not disappearing or fading into the background, but coming into focus, sharpening, print after print. In one of the videos she is folded into paper, writing her name on it, letter by letter — and then she rips the paper from inside and emerges into the light.

4. Mandelstam Rejects and Sebald Collects

“I’ve never seen Moscow look so calm, so rich, so peaceful and cheerful. Even I’ve felt its calming effect…”

In December 1935 Nadezhda Mandelstam traveled to Moscow from Voronezh to manage the affairs of her exiled husband. Being in Moscow was good for her: the mood of celebration in the city, the brightness and certainty of its own righteousness and its place at the center of the world, all had a calming effect — the word “calm” appears twice in two sentences, as if she needed to stress it.

The spirit of the Soviet thirties is immediately recognizable in her letters to her husband, just as it is in the cheerily urban paintings of Yury Pimenov, or Bulgakov’s late prose: a funny and terrifying world that never tires of insisting on its overwhelming sense of cheerful completeness. The daytime city (dresses, factories, parks) is all the harder and smoother for the existence of a nighttime city that is better left unmentioned. The presence of terror even seems to invigorate. It forces its way into the reality of the scurrying ant’s nest, imparting a very particular jittery sensation, bubbling like seltzer, a fresh breeze over the river, the morning lightness of those who survived the night:

Impossible for me to forget that we are the direct offspring of this ant heap of the celebratory and the disappearing; flower sellers, cab drivers’ backsides, people clinging on to the hand rails on the outside of busy streetcars — or that my own twenty-year-old grandmother was among them on the Moscow “A” streetcar, fondly called “Annushka”; part of the crowd, part of this movement, part of this language.

The wide arc of the thirties is so colored by its time, its canvases and texts mingle together in the air over their authors’ heads. Dates and places of birth are more important than direct relationships. These works have their own elusive common denominator: the sudden return of cozy domesticity, life’s comforting thickness giving people, with their spindly civic rights and short memories, a false sense of being rooted in the present. This new coziness knew what to promise (as Pasternak wrote: “In the Spring we’ll add to our living space, / I’ll take on my brother’s room”). Life was becoming more enjoyable, in 1935 citizens were given permission to celebrate New Year and a “pact on general work and collective celebration” was sealed with Christmas tree resin.

Mandelstam’s new poems written in exile in Voronezh on how “we are full of life to the highest degree” weren’t simply contributions to this new collective effort, brilliant as lectures on physics, proof that he could measure time in five-year plans, measure time like everyone else, like Pasternak — no, these poems had far bigger concerns. They laid no claim to the recent past, nor the palpably accessible present, but tried to cut a large crooked piece out of the future with tailor’s shears, to run ahead and begin to speak in a universal language that did not yet exist. And they succeeded in this.

The work done by these poems was, according to Mandelstam, of the highest significance — so obviously important — and it needed to be delivered to Moscow like a nugget of precious metal or a gigantic ear of corn, like an agricultural or scientific achievement. This was the reason for Nadezhda Mandelstam’s trip to Moscow in that winter of 1935: it was clear to both of them that the literary world only had to see these poems and they would take their rightful place under the glass sun of the near future — what I say now, every schoolchild will learn.

Their confidence in the poems’ urgency and significance made them hurry, and so speeded up the inevitable disaster.

“Overall I’m pleased with myself — I have done and am doing everything I can. And after this we wait for the inevitable. […] we mustn’t go anywhere, or ask for anything, or do anything […] I’ve never felt so intensely that we mustn’t act, we mustn’t make a noise or give them the runaround.”

But they could do no differently.

A decade earlier, in 1926, Marina Tsvetaeva went to London for the first and last time in her life: “I am going to London for ten days where I will have, for the first time in eight years (four Soviet, four in emigration) some TIME. (I am traveling alone).”

She would spend that miraculous uppercase TIME unexpectedly and not at all as a tourist. In the space of a few days and with unwavering determination, she would write a furious article that she was not able to publish in her lifetime. The article was called “My answer to Osip Mandelstam.” A London friend and critic, a great fan of Mandelstam’s prose, showed her Mandelstam’s book of essays, Noise of Time, published in Leningrad. Tsvetaeva couldn’t hold back, she thought the book despicable. Mandelstam had written about Feodosiya in the Crimea in 1919, when it was held by the White Army, and Tsvetaeva absolutely refused to accept the tone of comic admiration Mandelstam adopted to speak about their mutual friend, a volunteer White Army colonel with his poems and his illusions… a man on the losing side, in other words.

Tsvetaeva’s sense of outrage was very personal, perhaps too much so. The matters discussed in the chapters about Feodosiya had direct relevance to her own home and poetic affairs, and she wrote about these in a very different tonal range. Tsvetaeva’s husband Sergei Efron had been a volunteer in the White Army, and volunteering was for her a pure and heroic gesture of self-sacrifice; perhaps more importantly her old friends were the inspiration for the official portrait, the template of a “noble life.” The distorted and compressed style of Mandelstam’s description was not, for her, a literary device, but simply mockery of those who couldn’t defend themselves. Much of this is easier to understand with the distance of a century: for example, Mandelstam’s phrase “nanny-colonel,” which so upset Tsvetaeva, was in fact imbued with tenderness for Mandelstam — he signed his letters to his wife with the nickname “nanny.”

Their optical systems were incompatible, and there is no reason why they should have been compatible. But Tsvetaeva’s annoyance moves seamlessly from the chapters about the White Army in Feodosiya to Mandelstam’s writing about the past, the heart of the book and its reason for being. Time passed, but the enmity remained. In 1931 Tsvetaeva wrote to a friend about “Mandelstam’s stillborn prose, hateful to me, in Noise of Time, where the living are merely props, where everything alive is just an object.”

A sense of bewilderment at Noise of Time seems to have united readers of very different mindsets. Nadezhda Mandelstam reported that “everyone refused to print the thing, as it had no subject and no plot, no class awareness or social significance.” But Tsvetaeva saw only an attempt at class awareness, the fine trappings of the surrender and death of a Russian intellectual. In the same article she writes that Noise of Time is Mandelstam’s gift to the authorities.

We should keep in mind the level of inflammation (all too easy to imagine today) in the reader’s consciousness on both sides of the Soviet border. Both prose and poetry had a secondary — and at times primary — function, to witness an author’s political choice (which flickered about like a cursor, depending on circumstances). The text served to answer the question of “which side is the author on,” and only after that did it serve its more ordinary purposes. In Mandelstam’s case, with his unavoidable postrevolutionary travels to Batumi and Kiev and everywhere in between, this question is on hold until the beginning of the 1920s, but by 1924, when Noise of Time was submitted for publication, it couldn’t be put off any longer.

Mandelstam’s paired poems “January 1, 1924” and “No, I was never anyone’s contemporary…” were written when time was out of joint: the old world was giving way to the new, but they were written, and this is important, from the new world. The old carriage was still rocking forward, carts were still creaking past at midnight, nothing had come to a standstill, but there was no way back. No return. A pact with the future had been signed simply by the act of moving forward, by being drawn into the general mêlée. For Mandelstam, as for many others, this seduction by what he called the “twilight of freedom” was tinged with unambiguous ecstasy, and his New Year’s poem about the change of fate, written against the backdrop of Noise of Time, wasn’t just an attempt at farewell, but a rebuttal of the past.

How quickly they took to reminiscing, as if the past, crumbling to dust in front of them, needed fixing in the mind before it was blown away by the wind. Clattering along, heaped untidily high like a barrow of old possessions, the twenties unexpectedly became a time of memoirs. A lid was slammed shut over the old world, and all available memory, all abolished knowledge remained under it. Pasternak’s autobiographical work Safe Conduct and Andrei Bely’s memoirs were fixated on Moscow student conversations at the break of the centuries, like archaeologists poring over excavations: these conversations were data that needed reanimating, deciphering, presenting to the contemporary world.

Noise of Time was one of the first such texts, written in 1923, when the new world had barely set fast. It immediately fell out of line and spent a century looking as ill-fitting as The Good Soldier Švejk on the parade ground of the twentieth century’s big memoir projects, although it initially seemed to resemble these. The century of Kafka and Platonov, which began with a powerful surge toward change, collective utopia, and a global yearning for the new, very quickly shifted into an awareness of itself as a space for retrospection. As the Modernist era drew to a close, memory and memory’s half brother, the document, came to be something of a fetish, perhaps because they hint gently at the reversible and inconclusive nature of loss, even in a world that is constantly changing its order.

What began with Proust continued with Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and ended with Sebald’s prose. Between these points are the pages and pages of connective tissue: other texts without any claim to literary status but brought together with an a priori and unquestioning belief in the value of everything lost and the necessity of resurrecting it simply because it isn’t there any longer.

Against a backdrop of the memoir canon’s tower blocks and skyscrapers, Mandelstam’s prose stands apart as a little remote building in a district preoccupied with other business. Noise of Time reacts warily to any potential reader, and not just because of the mystically dim light of Mandelstam’s mode of thinking — “in dropped stitches” as he describes it. In any case, after a century of careful reading that light is now brighter. I believe the difficulty lies in the text’s own pragmatics, the task the author has set it.

The purpose of these strange memoirs is to nail down the pine coffin lid on lost time, drive in the aspenwood stake, and turn on one’s heel. It is hardly surprising then that the author has few allies in this task, so very few that it’s almost easier not to notice what is going on and why. This is despite the fact that Mandelstam describes the purpose of his efforts of memory with absolute precision. This passage, so often cited by those who have written about his prose, repeats his message, with its stress on the repeated word “inimical”:

This is a surprising conceptual frame for a writer who is intending to do just that — recall the past — and to do it at thirty-two, hardly the ripest age for such an occupation. He was one of the first, if not the very first, of his generation to do this: before it sets fast. The prose is concerned with the bodily and intimate, the domestic world, its sounds and smells, with the way that a madeleine dipped in tea, and a tender (hope-filled) melancholy, can be converted into a viable currency. His mother and father, a bookcase behind green taffeta, the dachas in Finland, violin concerts, walks with nanny and so on and so forth, all details for a cozy account of his childhood, which appears to have been a huge influence on his later life, demanding great efforts on his part to tear himself free.

The result is a very peculiar text, peculiar firstly in the degree of compression with which units of tactile, auditory, and olfactory information are concentrated into a dark mass, shot through with veins and clots of amber, or into mineral seams, only visible in the beam of a miner’s headlamp. There is no place to pitch your tent among the formulae opening like flower heads; every phrase is the sealed door to a corridor. The past is described like a landscape, perhaps even a geological case with its own history and methodology. A tale of childhood is transformed into a scientific text.

It seems to me that the logic is this: the author is the cartographer of a place he does not wish to return to. So right away and insofar as he can, he subtracts the human factor, the little pilot light of tenderness that’s nearly always present in any discussion of the remembered past. The text spreads out before us from one winter to the next: in frost, clouds of steam, and the rustle of fur coats. Room temperature would be the most unimaginable luxury — the natural climate for this prose is freezing weather. In the language of cinematography, a freeze-frame is a static shot, and in some ways Noise of Time is constructed like a camera, describing the circles that surround such freeze-frames, shots of moving shapes without their teleological warmth (or with it hidden away down their furry sleeves). This is what Tsvetaeva means when she says, so unjustly, but so exactly: “Your book is a nature morte. […] without a heartbeat, without a heart, bloodless — just eyes, a sense of smell, hearing.”

The function of a historical nature morte, as Mandelstam conceived of it, runs counter to childhood and familial tenderness to give a precise diagram, an adaptable formula for the past. It works like a military parade, in a procession of rows and geometric shapes: puffed sleeves reflected in the glass dome of the Pavlovsk Station; the vast volume of squares and streets filled with a mass of people; architecture and music together as one. But any geometric construct is undermined by the guttering, smoking little flame of the 1890s, the musky, fur-clad world of Judaism. Literature (its wispy icon lamp, its teachers and family members) has the dark warm taste of the family affair; Jewishness is either climbing up out of the chaos, or growing its shaggy runic coat anew. In the presence of both, the picture is blackened with soot, retreating back into the black earthen mass of its cultural layer. Lucky then that architecture and music have an older brother in logic: the Marxist class system.

I’m not talking here about the usual demonstration of Tsarist excesses justifying a speedy revolution: that’s how Tsvetaeva read Noise of Time, seeing it as a desire to please the authorities. In fact there are little signposts scattered with a child’s slyness throughout the work, pointing the way to a more precise science, gathering all the disparate narratives into one. Of course it’s likely that a childish political pragmatism also affects the work: many writers were scrambling to show their undying support for the changes. But Mandelstam’s adolescent Marxism, past or actual, had a serious, structuring intent: it was like an arrow, its flight directed at the final break, the “full screeching turn of the cumbersome steering wheel” as he described it, toward a clear, fully articulated here and now that somehow needed to come about.

From this here and now Mandelstam looked back at the burial of a century, just as a few years later he would look down on Lamarck’s “staircase” and the constant temptation of disintegration, that indiscriminate green tomb. A shuddering affection for the near past characterizes Mandelstam’s prose and sets it apart from its other simpler brethren. Memory is not sentimental, it is functional, it works as an accelerator. Its job is not to explain the author’s origin to him, nor to reproduce the infant’s cradle in order to rock it. Memory works on behalf of separation, it prepares for the break, without which the self cannot emerge. Shove the past away like ballast so we can be propelled forward. No speed, no future.

In light of what came later it might seem that this separation was pointless. There was Mandelstam squirming, squealing his starling song, demanding this and that, living on the hoof, always passing over the present in favor of the unfulfilled promise. “Making a noise and giving them the runaround,” as Nadezhda Mandelstam put it. But where did it lead? The new, the turn of the wheel, was paid for with the good old currency of collective fate, mass slaughter, labor camp dust, and labor camp death. And there was Tsvetaeva, with her unwavering trust in the past, her magnificent dismissal of news and newspaper truths. We know only too well that their disagreement, that ancient meeting of past and future, ended in nothing, in the most literal sense of the word: in dust, in two unmarked graves at different ends of the million-headed cemetery. No one won that argument. Everyone lost.

In a late interview on the subject of history, W. G. Sebald described an experiment: a rat was placed in a tank of water and observed to see how long it could swim. It lasted a short while, perhaps a minute, and then it died — its heart stopped. Some rats were given the unexpected opportunity of climbing out — just as their strength was leaving them a hatch opened in the wall of the tank, and through it shone the blinding light of freedom. When the rats were thrown back into the tank, those who had experienced this miracle of salvation behaved differently: they swam and swam along the walls of the tank until they died of exhaustion.

None of Sebald’s books can be read as a consolation, whichever way we understand that word. There is no provision for the version of events where a hand is stretched out to life as it chokes and splutters in the watery darkness. He skirts any matter bordering on the divine with a long-held polite disbelief. It is quite pointless to treat his prose as a source of biographical material, but in the second part of The Emigrants, the section titled “Paul Bereyter,” there is a passage about the divinity classes, which irritate and upset in equal measure the hero of the story, the schoolteacher, and the schoolboy who is the narrator of the story. A child growing up in postwar Germany could end up with the most upended view of the world order: back then, one of the main attributes of the big town, distinguishing it from the frivolous village, were the spaces between buildings, filled with rubble and clinker, heaps of bricks, wastelands. Sebald absolutely refused to consider himself a thematic writer, of the catastrophe of European Jewry (he felt the same solidarity with all the annihilated, even the trees and buildings, and I wouldn’t say that people were more important to him than the rest). In the lectures he gave in 1997, later published in English as On the Natural History of Destruction, he spoke about a different sort of memory: about the carpet bombing of German cities in the last years of the war and the amnesia it had produced in those who had survived it:

Sebald uses a few German sources and accounts by Allied pilots and journalists who witnessed the bombardment for his description of the fires that rose some two thousand meters into the air, so that even the cockpits of the bombers above were warmed by the flames; the scalding water in canals; and the corpses lying in puddles of their own fat. In the logic of Sebald’s lists, whatever else there might be place for, there is none for theodicy: the space in which one might turn to God with a question or a reproach on one’s lips is utterly filled, like the ark, with all those who didn’t escape.

In this sense Sebald didn’t need to choose between the drowned and the saved, or the perished and those who still await death. The feeling of comradeship in the face of our common fate, just like in a town under siege or a sinking ship, makes his approach universal and all-embracing. There is no miracle. Everything we see before us, including ourselves, will disappear, and it won’t take long. So there is no choice: any object or fate or person or name board deserves to be remembered, to flicker once again in the light before all is finally dark.

This lens, this way of looking at the world as if through a film of ash, through Celan’s stationary screen, is particularly persuasive when you realize that the author will be with you until the end, that he is himself already on the other side, and is stretching out his hand to you from over there. In Marina Tsvetaeva’s terrifying poem “Pity…” a woman stops by the unknown dead (“Not your husband? No. // Do you believe in the soul’s resurrection? No.”) hardly herself understanding why, until at the end:

But Sebald’s speech doesn’t just follow the departed. It is as if he has fastened himself to their slant rain-like structure, actually becoming one of those moving along the road toward the past. The narrator of his documentary fictions occasionally inhabits the contours of the author: he has the same history, a few friends among the living, the mustache and passport photograph of Sebald, but a strange transparent quality stops us from thinking of him as real. We follow everything this person does — his movement, which resembles a person driven along by a gust of wind; his hours of work and leisure, which do not coincide with ours; his chronicles of journeys and transfers, of bus routes and long-past hotels, where he watches a woman busying herself at a rolltop desk, as if the forces of gravity still acted on her as they had in life, and there was no point in hurrying on. The listing of street names and railway stations, as if the author doesn’t quite trust his own memory and preferred to note everything down with the greatest care, attaching restaurant receipts and hotel bills. And the photographs that are embedded into the text serve to identify Sebald’s work as accurately as a set of fingerprints. When the photos were being prepared for print Sebald would devote long hours to making them indistinct, as muddily unclear and homogeneous as he could.

Mandelstam pushed the past away, shoved it aside, compressing it into hard matter. But Sebaldian time is constructed quite differently — it has a porous, interstitial structure, like the monasteries in cliff faces, each cell in the rock still maintaining its parallel existence.

When we get close to these texts the problem of their authenticity comes to the fore. It’s as if in working out the relationship between invention and truth, we make a decision on whether or not we can trust the author. This is how you might choose a guide through mountainous territory where every mistake could mean death. It’s almost touching, how pragmatism shapes our persistent interest in the documentary carcass, in the prototype for this or that character and to what degree they are acquainted with or related to the author. Whether the boy on the cover is a real image of the boy inside — what if none of these people are actually real? Critics of Sebald sometimes cast him in the role of a museum curator or a park guard, wrapping the statues to protect them against the frost and checking the glass in the orangery windows: that role is redundant. If we bear in mind that there are no windows and there is no orangery then the function of this prose becomes clearer: it provides the illumination needed for a few things to become discernible. In Austerlitz he describes it like this: “…the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision.”

I am so very in favor of any combining of the real and imaginary past, the documentary and fictitious, which allows Sebald to set his light machine in motion so the transparent discs of the past move, overlapping each other, filtering the light from one to the next, so that when a real event unexpectedly manifests itself (a real uncle from the family album, an original picture) I am strangely troubled, as if the chosen prototype had unexpectedly turned out to be a special case. I feel this particularly when Sebald is writing about images.

The last part of The Emigrants ends with an extraordinary fragment of memoir. When I haven’t read the book for a while I remember this passage as an enormous text, almost infinitely extending, making up at least half of the entire book. But when I reread The Emigrants I am shocked to find it painfully short, no more than twenty pages. And I think to myself that I don’t really want to know who wrote it. Is it the real woman with a name that begins with the letter L, who decides to think about her childhood, only her childhood, on the very threshold of death: her mother’s books, roses, the road into town? Or is it Sebald himself, speaking in the woman’s voice? Whichever it is, the fragment breaks off suddenly and the book ends with a cinematic darkening of the scene. And then the author tells the story of a photograph he once saw by chance.

Photographs are reproduced throughout the pages of Sebald’s work, scattered like the breadcrumbs Hansel and Gretel plan to use to find their way home. But this image is not shown, merely described, and I have this description before my eyes, always. It is a workshop of some sort in the Łódź Ghetto, dimly lit, in half darkness. Three women bend over the diamonds and triangles of a woven carpet. One of them, says Sebald, has blonde hair and the air of a bride. The second woman’s eyes are in shadow and can’t be made out. The third weaver is looking at me with so steady and relentless a gaze that I cannot meet it for long.

I never thought I would ever see this photograph. Like the well-known portrait of Barthes’s mother in a winter garden, which is described but doesn’t appear in his great book, I thought of this photo as simultaneously real and nonexistent. How strange it was therefore to find that it fits the description absolutely. The picture of the three women was taken by a man named Genewein, a Nazi, the chief bookkeeper of the Łódź Ghetto. In his spare time he documented the hard work being done in the workshops under his charge with a confiscated Movex 12. The collection of pictures includes color images: a group of children dressed in various shades of brown with their caps to one side of their heads. The picture with the carpet and the three weavers is black-and-white, and, unlike the others, when you see it you don’t immediately go cold with horror — the scene imitates life so closely, the calmly seated subjects in front of the camera, the light from a window in the background falling on them, touching their shoulders and hair as if nothing much is happening. This is exactly how it is described in The Emigrants, but with one important omission. In the softly lit air between us (between the women and the camera, between them and me) something that looks a little like a frame hangs at an angle, made from many vertical threads pulled tight. The carpet is rising slowly up this loom and it will soon obscure the room and all those in it. Strange that Sebald didn’t notice this rising veil of carpet. Perhaps it wasn’t there when he looked at the picture.

Not-A-Chapter Lyolya (Olga) Gurevich, 1947

Undated, written after 1944 and the return from evacuation.

Addressed to Berta Leontyevna Gurevich, her mother-in-law (the mother of Lyonya), who lives separately from them.

5. On One Side and on the Other

Obverse:

Painted porcelain boys and girls of various sizes, with bright mouths and caps of black or yellow hair. Other cheaper versions, plain basic-white. All are bisque dolls manufactured in Germany for decades from the 1840s. In the small town of Köppelsdorf, in the oak land of Thuringia, whole factories produced nothing but dolls. Most of them were large and expensive with real hair, bodies of kidskin, and flushed porcelain cheeks, but there were other simpler figures. In Ernst Heubach’s furnaces thousands of tiny dolls were fired, on sale for pfennigs and sold everywhere, like boiled sweets or soap. They looked like lost stubs of soaps, stiff little hands slightly in front of them, motionless legs in tiny socks, and because they were hollow and only their faces were varnished to save money, they could be put in the bath and they would float, little and modest, on their painted fronts.

There are many tales of these dolls as possessions. Apart from their obvious occupations (born “for the roll of a fist, for the life in a pocket” or the work of the tiniest units of humanity, as in the Tsvetaeva essay “My Pushkin”), they were placed on the shelves of dolls houses, hidden in Epiphany pastries to bring luck to the finder, and even, if it is to be believed, dropped into cups of tea instead of ice. I can’t find any confirmation or rebuttal of the story that the broken dolls were used as packaging chips for transported goods, but it is clear that they were the foot soldiers of the toy world, ephemeral, easily replaceable and multipurpose.

The lion’s share of this clay army was sold outside Germany. The tiniest were thumb-height and cost next to nothing. The bigger dolls were thirty to forty centimeters tall and were more prized by shopkeepers and their owners. Their export only stopped during the First World War, when selling dolls to the enemy began to feel awkward, and enterprising Japanese manufacturers took the place of the Germans. The Japanese dolls were made to the same model but using cheaper materials and only fired once. They smashed more easily, too. Lonely, valueless dolls crushed under the weight of time, like bird skulls crushed underfoot, they reappeared without limbs, black holes in place of joints. Some even returned from the earth, soil ground into the bisque, piles of broken dolls dug up from factory land. Years later their scarred white bodies were once again salable commodities, like everything from the past, sold as virtual lots on eBay, regiments of them, in sixes, tens, dozens. They are grouped carefully, or so it seems to me, with one or two near perfect specimens, victorious in the battle against time. An overfired back or a broken wrist hardly matters to these heroes, their heads are thrown back proudly, and their cheeks are round and glistening. The rest hardly aspire to being anything beyond splinters. This heap of survivors has only one name in the English-speaking world: frozen Charlottes.

Reverse:

Charlotte is one of the classic names of the Germanosphere, where the number of blonde little Lottes nearly outnumbers the contingent of Margaretes or Gretchens. Lotte, the cause of Werther’s suicide, with her apples and Brötchen, a pink band round her white dress — and before you know it she’s back as Thomas Mann’s muse. Goethe’s Lotte, who came involuntarily to mind in 1939 when the old world crumbled under the jackboots of the new. Despite this, the German dolls were only called “Charlottes” in America.

On February 8, 1840, the New York Observer reported: “A young woman, whose name is given as Miss _____, froze to death while riding twenty miles to a ball on the eve of January 1, 1840.” A Portland journalist, Seba Smith, known for his love of maudlin subject matter, used the story as the basis for a ballad, which had some success: a few years later the “blind Homer of Benson, Vermont,” William Lorenzo Carter, set it to music as “Young (or Fair) Charlotte.” The 1840s was a time of snow fascination, the romance of the blizzard and frost. In the early 1840s Hans Christian Andersen published his “Snow Queen”: “She was fair and beautiful, but made of ice — shining and glittering ice. Still she was alive and her eyes sparkled like bright stars, but there was neither peace nor rest in their glance. She nodded toward the window and waved her hand.” Seba Smith wrote a second snowy ballad in the early 1840s “The Snow Storm,” in which a young mother perished to save her baby, but the success of this fell far short of his “Young Charlotte.”

“Young” or “Fair” — the song was sung with interchangeable epithets to suit sentiment across ten US states, and its story is both like and unlike the version of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Red Shoes,” where the girl’s terrible vanity is the cause of her undoing and amputation. But there is no morality, no anguish in “Young Charlotte,” the text has the marmoreal balance of an antique frieze. A beauty rides to a ball with her intended, on a winter’s night, desiring to be “seen,” and so they drive across the snowy hills to the sound of horses’ hooves and merry bells and all she wears is a silken coat and a silken scarf. The sleigh’s speed increases with every verse of the ballad (“Young Charlotte said with a trembling voice: I am growing warmer now”), the stars shine coldly and the ballroom grows closer and closer. But when they arrive the heroine is cold and hard as stone. One of the less polite names for this song was “A Corpse Going to a Ball.” The young man dies of a broken heart and is buried alongside his love.

The little china figurines crossing the Atlantic from Europe would soon be known as “frozen Charlottes” because of their rigid little bodies. To this day they are known by the same name, it’s become a shorthand for these creatures of horror, the tiny white people of nightmares, and without a voice they are unable to object. The male figurines rapidly became known as frozen Charlies and they were no more able to object. Their curls their socks and their spectral whiteness makes them look like the small gods of a less ancient pantheon. Unlike the Greco-Roman Gods, who lost their color together with their power, there was never enough paint to go round for all the frozen Charlottes.

Obverse:

Arthur Rimbaud was interested in new technologies. He sent his family long lists of essential items, dictionaries, reference books, tools, and equipment to be delivered to him (no easy task) in Abyssinia. The parcels arrived in Harar. There was always something missing, but his camera at least arrived safely. Seven of the photos Rimbaud took have survived. In a letter to his mother and sister, written on May 6, 1883, he describes three self-portraits, including one “les bras croisés dans un jardin de bananes.” In another he stands by a low fence, which looks like a cartoon railway track. Beyond the fence there is nothing. Uninterrupted desert, filling the whole print. You might think you can see a point where the gray of the land washes into the gray of the sky but it’s unlikely. If we believe his account, Rimbaud the entrepreneur, in his white trousers, was photographed in “un jardin de café” and “sur une terrasse de la maison,” but it would be hard to imagine anything less like a garden. Although we can only really guess at what we are seeing because something in the developing or printing of the pictures went wrong. All the photographs Rimbaud took — the market square with its awnings, the tiny building with a many-sided cupola, a man sitting in the shade of a column with bowls and gourds laid out in front of him — are fading to white, and there is no way this process can be stopped. The photographs are disappearing before our eyes, slowly, imperceptibly, like the ring of moisture left by a glass on a table.

Reverse:

Google Maps makes efforts to renew its satellite photographs as often as possible, but not always and not everywhere. Many towns, with their boulevards, tourist information offices, and unattractive monuments have a reliably unchanging profile for months, if not years: if you zoom in on Moscow on a snowy evening you see summer roofs and green spaces. Nearer the center of the earth, or wherever the program considers that to be, the changes happen faster — but even so they aren’t fast enough. A woman leaves her lover, he smashes up the car and it goes to the scrapyard. He leaves town, she unfriends him on Facebook, but on Google Maps the colorless box of the car is still parked outside her door.

Obverse:

In his documentary tales of Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk describes a particular variety of local misery called hüzün, very different from European notions of melancholy, which arise from an awareness of the shortness of life. Hüzün, on the other hand, is not directed at the future and the sense of life passing, but at what has already passed and yet still suffuses our daily lives with its soft glimmer. The sensation is brought on by the counterpointing of past greatness with present wretchedness and mediocrity. For Pamuk it is based on a classic “before and after,” what was and what has come to be, his bifocals allowing him to keep both the created model and its destruction (the ruin and its former glory) in focus. He remembers Ruskin in a passage where he talks about the chance nature of the picturesque, about how we find a visual pleasure in decay and dissolution, a pleasure that no urban architect has ever intended us to feel, in the deserted yards and marble flagstones overgrown with grass. A new building becomes picturesque “after history has endowed it with accidental beauty.” In other words, after history has chewed it up and spat it out, unrecognizable.

Pamuk also quotes Walter Benjamin’s phrase about the exotic and picturesque features of a city being of more interest to those who do not live there. When you think about it, the phrase applies equally to different forms of the past, not just its visibly aging stone skin of towers and turrets — but all the other boxes and cases in which a person packs and unpacks herself. Houses, beds, clothes, shoes, and hats — anything abandoned by its owner that hasn’t yet quite fallen apart is suddenly filled with a new posthumous brightness. Our delight in vintage, as we call it now, comes precisely from entering a past life not as equals, but like a little girl in her mother’s wardrobe, knowing full well we are trying on someone else’s belongings.

The more the contemporary world plays at olden days, the further those days recede, spinning slowly down to the murky depths where nothing can be made out. The impossibility of exact knowledge is in the physical disintegration which protects the past from our trespasses; it forms a hygiene barrier against mixing with us, the present. For us, this impossibility is an advantage. The owners have left the house, they’ve gone away, and there is no one to see how we are dividing up all their many goods. For the full enjoyment of those olden days we need those who once peopled them to die — then we can begin the yearning process, trying out the role of rightful heirs. The heaped mass of witness accounts only teases us in our hunger: rifle through the bank of pictures, enlarge them, bring them up close to your eyes, spend a lifetime gazing at a single iconic image. It’s all pointless: scoop it all out, to the very bottom of the cup, its tin walls, you can walk in to the house of the past, but you can’t penetrate it, nor will it enter you, like the chill slick of a ghost that appears out of nowhere in the warm twilight of a July evening.

Obverse:

…and then I suggested to myself that I divide memory into its three types.

The memory of what is lost, inconsolable, melancholy, keeping tally of these losses while knowing that nothing can be returned.

The memory of what has been received: sated after-dinner memory, contented with one’s lot.

The memory of what has never been — seeding ghosts in place of the real. Like the magic comb of Russian fairy tale: a deep dark wood springs up where the comb is thrown down and helps the hero to escape pursuit. The phantom memory does much the same for whole communities, protecting them from naked reality and its drafts.

The object of remembrance can be the same in all cases. In fact, it is always the same.

Reverse:

My fear of forgetting, of allowing anything to escape my hold — my mind — from the still-warm past, was justified and even extolled in the Old Testament. What is more, the people of the Old Testament were obliged to remember, and any failure to do so led to certain death. The chapters of Deuteronomy insist repeatedly on the remembrance of God: “Beware that thou forget not the Lord thy God, in not keeping his commandments, and his judgments, and his statutes, which I command thee this day.” The scholar of Jewish history Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi recounts in his book (itself called Zakhor, the Hebrew imperative “remember!”) how this powerful drive to remember lasted all the centuries of exile and diaspora. It was memory that demanded the scrupulous adherence to laws, to the achieving and the preservation of perfection — not by the individual, or the family, but by a whole people taken as one. A pure, holy life became the pledge that ensured survival, and no single detail could be lost or omitted.

Unusual historical events, understood to be without precedent, gave rise to the fear of forgetting. The prohibitions and obligations of Jewish faith were in some ways the result of these events, their imprint left on the mutable human wax. For many generations there was no further attempt in Jewish tradition to chronicle what had happened to the Chosen People, as if the Torah was the last word on the subject and nothing more was needed. It’s said that the Russian futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov quickly lost interest when reading out his own poems and would break off with “and so on and so forth…” Yerushalmi describes something similar in Zakhor, but with different words: “Perhaps they already knew of history what they needed to know. Perhaps they were even wary of it.”

It wasn’t that they went into a new age utterly unaware of the discipline of history: there are plenty of examples in the texts and missives circulating around medieval Europe showing that the dates and markers of an unwritten history were well within the field of vision for Jewish scholars. They noticed these events, but nothing had the necessary magnitude to become part of the holy tradition. All the major events were long behind them as they’d happened at the very beginning. In a world dominated by precedent, when the destruction of the First and Second Temple was one single event, and the difference between Babylon and Rome was insignificant in the face of perpetual catastrophe, all the assaults and pogroms of the new wave of persecution (in France, Germany, and Spain) were simply continuations on a theme. The epitome of this approach to the past is Megillat Ta’anit (the scroll of fasting), which also sets out the red letter days in the calendar, the days for feasting, rather than mourning and fasting. These were the dates of feats and celebrations, recorded from pre-Maccabean times and up to the destruction of the Second Temple. A Scholion or commentary gives the dates of events separately. The scroll is not an effort to make history, but has a very different task: structured around the turning of the seasons it lists the days and months and not the years. In a later incarnation it becomes the Christian liturgical year. In the Jewish tradition there is no difference between the recent and far past, just as there is no difference between past and present.

In this way the Judaic memory is free from the need to commit everything in history to memory, free to choose the significant and essential, to cut away the inessential. The limitations were of a different kind; the imperative not to forget fitted well with the duty to focus — on one’s own history among other things — when multifarious details threatened to overwhelm the fundamental truths. Jewish historiography (which barely existed before the Enlightenment and which suddenly blossomed in conditions of assimilation, departing from tradition for the simple reason that there was no real tradition; even the first persuasive history of the Jewish people was written by a gentile) seemed an unnecessary science; everything one needed to know was stored on a different shelf. Yerushalmi quotes Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, in which Rosenzweig maintained that the meaning of Jewishness lies in its ahistoricity: the Jewish people stood outside the general current of time and had even achieved a desired stasis through their observance of an unchanging law. Rosenzweig’s work was published in 1921. Twenty years later the current once again washed against their shore. History claimed its own.

Even the Nazi imagination worked as if from inside the logic of the Jewish world, as if they desperately wanted to confirm or deny a thesis, to test the strength of the contract the Jewish people had with their God. Acts of punishment were meted out in accordance with their foreign calendar, although without discerning between days of mourning and days of feasting. The massacre of Jews at Babi Yar took place on Erev Yom Kippur and the destruction of the Minsk Ghetto was timed to coincide with Simchat Torah. The clearing of the Warsaw Ghetto began at Passover. Even such violent plungings into the black hole of catastrophic knowledge can be considered a sort of confirmation. The impossibility of forgetting searches out its own markers, its own mounds, familiar stones, or ravines and refuses to be comforted for its children, for they were not. Yerushalmi’s Zakhor is a book about memory as the highest of all the virtues, and yet it ends with a near prayer for oblivion: that it might cease to be a sin, that all the rips and tears might be left in peace, to be themselves, untroubled.

Obverse:

Dybbuk means “cleaving to” or “clinging to”; the description often involves the sense of grafting, like a gardener experimenting by splicing a pear shoot to an apple tree, or a briar rose to a garden rose. The restless soul of Ashkenazi legend cannot be parted from this world, either because the weight of sin is too heavy upon it, or it has simply got stuck staring at something living, and can no longer trace the way home. A soul whose death was terrible or shameful, or who won’t be divested of earthly joys, wanders from door to door looking for a crack to force themselves through, a person who can be inhabited like a tidy, well-swept house. It might be an old man, weakened by illness and no longer able to pinch tight the corners of his own body, or a woman tormented by waiting, or a person whose own soul is not stationary, but wanders back and forth like a pendulum. Clinging to this person, the dybbuk worms his way in, puts down roots — this home is warm and raw. Ten men wearing burial shrouds and blowing on a shofar (ram’s horn) must beg the evil spirit to leave the body, but are not always successful in talking it round. It cries pitifully and begs its tormentors in many different voices, calling them by their names and listing the sins they have until now kept private, and their birthmarks and their childhood nicknames…

This is just like the past when it won’t leave. It cleaves to the present, burrows under its skin, leaving its spores there and talking in tongues and ringing its bells, so there is no greater joy for a person than listening and remembering what has never happened to him, crying for those he never knew, calling by name those he never saw.

Reverse:

I once read a book on the ghosts of birds that described the relationship between an Indigenous tribe and its dead ancestors. It was laid out very precisely, like diplomatic protocol, and based on a complicated system of agreements and indulgences. Its descriptions of protocol included chance meetings — that awkward moment when you walk into a dead person on a dark road, like a pillar of icy air. I’d like to quote from the book but I can’t — I picked it up and read from it in an overseas bookshop, and I’m afraid I will misremember the text. In many ways this resembles my negotiations with the past, which are based on hard facts, like the hard cover of a book, but I have to resurrect them from thin air and resign myself to the inevitable inaccuracies: in the same way they draw the image of a bird from just its claw or its feather, once it has become a shade.

It’s no secret that the people of the past are easily and quickly transformed into something unrecognizable and often nonhuman. In “The Arm,” a short story by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, a dead pilot drags a burnt log from his cockpit with the words: “This is my navigator.” This fictional account has its nonfictional doppelgänger in a dream the prose writer Vsevolod Ivanov had just before his death. He dreamed that he was with Anna Akhmatova at a World Congress of Writers, in Greece of all places (at the time it was easier for a citizen of the USSR to cross the Lethe than an international border). This fantastical trip, the dream of a Soviet writer in hospital in the summer of 1963, had a distinctly paradisiacal nature. “In the morning I went downstairs and I saw a woman sitting at the table and weeping. Anna Andreevna, I said to her, Anna, why are you crying? And she answered that she had seen her son in the table, only her son was pink, and the table was black marble.”

The records of dreams are inaccurate in an unintentional way: did the oneiric Akhmatova see the face of her son (who was brought up by strangers a long way away from her, arrested, rearrested, and rendered unrecognizable by labor camps) in the polished marble surface? Or was the table actually her child in the dream, like the burned log of the navigator: a four-legged marble child, black instead of pink, her little Lev, found by her in the unattainable and paradisiacal Greece? Her table son, upon whom the dead are laid out to be dressed for the grave, like the rock where Jesus was laid to be washed and anointed. In “Requiem,” Akhmatova compares her still-living son with the crucified Christ, and her suffering with the suffering of the Mother of God. Years later he returned from the camps and was rearrested, as if these passages into the world of the dead and back again were quite normal.

The philosopher Yakov Druskin was a member of the Chinarei, a group of Leningrad poets and philosophers who had formed a very close circle in the thirties and who were slowly squeezed out of existence by Soviet reality. They were excluded from official writing structures (by their own choice and also because the radical nature of their texts hardly met the expectations placed upon “fellow travelers,” those writers who weren’t currently aligned with official party policy, but were “catching up”). For a while they flourished in their modest way, working for children’s magazines, writing virtuosic poems and short stories, playing cards and spot-the-difference, going to the races and sunbathing on the thin strip of Neva sand by the Peter and Paul Fortress. Little by little their untroubled and dimly lit patch of shade shrunk in size, and they became more and more conspicuous. Members of the circle were arrested, exiled to other towns, or they lost their work, but they kept coming back, as if unaware how transparent their spare little existence had become. In his diaries Daniil Kharms, perhaps the best known of all the Chinarei, interspersed prayers, metaphysical problems, and longings for female folds and smells with the odd note that he had no money, nowhere to get money, and was growing hungry. Kharms did indeed die of hunger in an NKVD jail in the terrible winter of 1942, during the Siege of Leningrad. Aleksandr Vvedensky died in a freight car during his enforced evacuation from Leningrad in December 1941. Leonid Lipavsky went missing in action in September 1941. Nikolai Oleinikov didn’t last as long as his friends — he was executed in 1937.

Druskin alone survived, hardly understanding himself why he had been spared. He never once ceased his conversation with the dead. More and more space in his philosophy notebooks is given over to writing out dreams in which he sees his dead friends and tries to make certain that it is really them, that they have returned at last. He can’t be certain; the experiment is fruitless. Druskin and his friends are cutting open the chest of a person they believe to be Lipavsky “to see whether this is a dream or not” but they immediately forget what they are trying to prove. One of his ghosts doesn’t want to acknowledge him, another is transformed so he looks like a Soviet writer (just as he might a log of wood or a marble table or a wardrobe). On April 11, 1942, Druskin writes up yet another dream meeting with his dead friends. He dreams of them all the time, he sees them more now than when they were alive:

Pulkanov is not a common surname. No one in Druskin’s circle had that name. The dream had fitted the name over someone like a cloak and masked that person, hidden him so well we don’t even know who he was. Perhaps he was the dreamer.

6. Charlotte, or Acts of Insubordination

I love books, films, and stories that begin like this: a person arrives at a small home in a remote part of let’s say France, opens the windows, goes out onto the balcony, moves the furniture around. She lays out her books, crawls under the table to plug in her computer, studies the contents of an unfamiliar kitchen cupboard and chooses the mug she will use. She walks to the village for the first time and buys tomatoes and cheese. Sits down at a table in the only local café and drinks coffee or wine. She wrinkles her eyes in the bright sun and returns to the house. She watches the television, looks out of the window, up at the ceiling. If she’s a writer (let’s say) then she starts work earlier in the morning.

Usually this moment of unspoiled happiness, work that has at last found its proper space and time, blessed utter peacefulness, is interrupted by some unasked-for act. In Islamic texts there is a euphemism for death — “the destroyer of pleasure, disbander of gatherings” — and this seems to me to be the perfect description of the storytelling dynamic, which has the task of pitching the peaceful prehistory at such an angle that everything is set in motion and the hero begins the slow roll down the slope, arousing both the reader’s sympathy and irritation. We know and dread what literature and history offers us in this situation. The heroine will never finish the page she is writing because uninvited guests will arrive. The hero has no time on his own because a murder happens nearby. The resurrection is halted because a war has just begun.

At the end of 1941, twenty-four-year-old Charlotte Salomon did something rather odd. She left Villefranche-sur-Mer, a villa with a view over the Côte d’Azur where she had been staying with her grandparents. Things were different now: the money had run out, her grandmother had died, and they were relying on the pity or the whim of their hosts. Like many other German Jews, they had once been respectable, but hardly knew where to turn now. Charlotte left abruptly, in the manner of a person suddenly standing up and leaving a room. She took lodgings in nearby Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat and stopped seeing friends. It isn’t clear what she lived on, but we know where she lived, in a tiny hotel with the age-old name “La Belle Aurore.” She spent six months there, quite alone, working on what would be her great work, Life? Or Theater?, a sequence of 769 gouache pictures in which images are interspersed with text and musical phrase. There are also a number of pages of material that didn’t make it into the main body of the piece: all in all she painted 1326 gouaches. When she ran out of paper she painted on the other side of the rejected sheets, and toward the end of the process she painted on both sides of every sheet.

The gouaches were painted on sheets of A4 paper in such terrible haste that she had to hang them around the walls of her little room so they would dry quicker. They were overlaid with tracing paper on which phrases, “stage directions,” and what might be termed “instructions” were written to tell the viewers what musical phrase they should have in their head when looking at the picture. Sometimes this could be complicated: the melody itself had another text attached, a bitter little street ditty to the tune of the “Horst-Wessel-Lied” or “Habanera.” Music was an intrinsic part of the narrative. The pages themselves are ordered in three parts with a prologue and epilogue and even a defined genre: a “Dreifarben Singespiel,” a three-color singspiel — the phrase should instantly bring to mind The Magic Flute, the most popular singspiel in the German canon, and also Brecht and Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper, banned only a short time before, but still resounding in everyone’s ears.

The music Charlotte (or CS as she signs her work) incorporates into the work is hardly esoteric. It’s the music of the period, the music the people of her world had in their shopping baskets, from Mahler to Bach and back again, from the music halls to Schubert’s Miller song cycle. She wanted to remind people of the familiar (and to parody it), but eighty years later there is practically no one left who could instantly recognize these tunes. The sound element no longer resonates, it is merely suggested and is, in its own way, like memory itself, with its inevitable dark spots and corrections. To quote Salomon:

The high register, quickly supplanted by mocking tongue twisters and the many-voiced dialogues interrupting the authorial voice all make perfect sense if we think of it as theater, with the opening sheet as the cover of program notes or a play text, with curly scripts and theatrical flourishes and a cast list. Just like traditional theater, the Prologue and Epilogue come out center stage to deliver their explanations and warnings. Yet Life? Or Theater? doesn’t unfold neatly like a play. Nor is it a guide to be slipped in a pocket — it is so big you can barely pick it up. To read it from beginning to end would be a real undertaking, requiring both time and willpower.

It is also extraordinarily hard to exhibit the work properly, and not only because of the vast space you would need to do it thoughtfully, in narrative order. The images themselves seem to demand more — they want to be a book, the pages interleaved with transparent overlay so the text interacts with the image showing through, and we can lift the curtain and look at the naked image beneath, without its veil of text. There is a complex balance between the out-of-frame voice of the handwritten text (which changes color for certain key words and phrases, sometimes several times on a page) and the live transmission of the reportage-style images: this balance doesn’t just suggest a rhythm for reading/looking, it insists on one. What we see needs to be treated like “temporary art,” in the same category as cinema or opera. To do this through museum exhibition seems impossible — the full work is never on display and so the very first graphic novel never looks anything more than a series of talented sketches.

In the Amsterdam Jewish Cultural Quarter, where the Salomon archive is kept, there is a single case where (of 1300 gouaches) a mere eight pages are displayed. The work is damaged by exposure to light, so the display is limited and continuously changed. Displaying them in book form would be even more damaging, as it is said every single touch would cause irreparable damage. Life? Or Theater? has become something like holy writ — never seen, known only by reproduction and hearsay. It can be quoted or interpreted or called upon, but never just read in the order intended.

About her work, Salomon wrote:

“Soul-penetrating” is a sly self-ironizing, but when we consider Life? Or Theater? it isn’t really an overexaggeration, more of a diagnosis. The narrative has all the qualities of sensationalist fiction: it can’t be put down, it breathes fire and frost. The narrator, named simply “the author,” lays before the reader a story that spans generations, includes eight suicides, two wars, several love stories, and the victorious onslaught of Nazism. Anyone who knows that it closely follows the real history of Charlotte’s family (and there’s a long tradition of understanding the “three-colored singspiel” as a purely autobiographical work), also knows how the story ends. In September 1943 the Nazis conducted what they called the “cleansing of Jews” in the Côte d’Azur — the efforts of Vichy France seemed to them, and probably were, lacking in assiduousness, and tens of thousands of refugees were quietly minding their own business down by the Mediterranean. By then the rhetoric of Jews as insects, bedbugs, cockroaches, as constant as the sound of running water, had hardened to become perceived reality, and it was time to “take back control.” A man called Alois Brunner was put in charge of the operation and it was effective: a villa owned by an American woman in Villefranche-sur-Mer was one of many “decontaminated.” The villa was called L’Ermitage and a Jewish couple lived there pretty openly: Charlotte and her husband of only a few months. They were taken at night, their neighbors heard screams. On October 10, a freight transport (with x number of freight “units,” as they wrote in the consignment notes) arrived at Auschwitz. On the same day, just arrived, twenty-six-year-old Charlotte Salomon was put into a group destined for immediate destruction. This was unusual: a young woman, full of energy and able to draw as well, had an increased chance of surviving longer. But Charlotte was visibly pregnant. Clearly that decided her fate.

The horror reflex, the onrush of pity when we face such information is overwhelming, it shapes our understanding: a long history of critical inertia mean that we see in Salomon’s work the spontaneous (and artless, in the face of her silence) expression of a pure heart. Any story of a victim is doomed to be emblematic — an arrow pointing toward a collective fate, a collective death. Charlotte Salomon’s life story tends to be thought of as typical: the result of layers, one forming on top of another, of political and cultural conditions, of terrible and immutable patterns. But it was against all of this that she rebelled, and I think she felt herself to be victorious. Life? Or Theater? isn’t the witnessing of a victory, but the victory itself, the battlefield, the captured castle, and a declaration of intent on 769 sheets of paper. All the same, it is often treated not as an object, but as material (as raw material from which fragments can be taken, and the excess discarded), and not as an artistic achievement but as an act of witnessing (which can be used in different generalizing contexts), not as a result but as an unfulfilled promise — a human document, in short. This interpretation could not be further from the truth.

Almost everyone writing about Charlotte in the last few years has cautioned against the obvious danger of seeing the work as an account of death told by a victim. This singspiel in pictures, written on the Côte d’Azur just before the world ended, is not a tale of the Holocaust (although unlike its author it has, against the odds, become a survivor). But it takes special effort from the viewer to stand in front of these works and simultaneously remember and forget, to know and not to know about Auschwitz at the end of the tunnel. The pages of Life? Or Theater? are overlaid with tracing paper and through it we see the image, but at any moment we can remove this filter to find ourselves alone with pure color.

In the summer of 1941 Charlotte Salomon had a stroke of luck that overwhelmed her and made her life feel charmed: rounded up and imprisoned, she was one of very few who were released and managed to escape disaster and death. In her text, alongside the initial “The action takes place in 1913–1940 in Germany and later in Nice, France,” she writes “Or between heaven and earth beyond our era in the year I of the new salvation.” So Noah might have described himself with his sons, or Lot’s daughters, and that is how Charlotte saw herself and her situation: the known world had ended, together with everyone she had loved or hated. They had died, disappeared, or been dispersed to other places. She was much like the first person in a new world, the recipient of unexpected and indescribable largesse — she had been given a renewed and redeemed world: “Foam, dreams — my dreams on a blue surface. What makes you shape and reshape yourselves so brightly from so much pain and suffering? Who gave you the right? Dream, speak to me — whose lackey are you? Why are you rescuing me?”

Straight after the war, when Charlotte’s father and stepmother were finally able to come to Villefranche-sur-Mer to search for her — for anything, traces, tokens, tales — they were handed a file that Charlotte had left with an acquaintance with the words: “This is all my life.” The logic of the “typical” that I spoke of earlier pushes us to search out analogies, and in this case an analogy was waiting in the wings: in exactly the same way Miep Gies gave Otto Frank a bundle of papers, including Anne Frank’s diary, when he returned from concentration camp. There is, astonishingly, a very real connection between these stories in that Albert Salomon and his wife hid in Amsterdam, not far from the Franks, and Otto Frank chose to show them Anne’s diary before anyone else. A little later they decided together with Otto what to do with Charlotte’s drawings. I have an idea of them in the fifties and sixties, parents who had lost their children, sitting together and arranging their children’s posthumous fate. The first publication of Salomon’s work appeared in 1963 and the quality of its reproductions remains thrilling. Eighty of the thousand-plus gouaches are included and the book is called Charlotte: A Diary in Pictures. “In pictures” — as if we are talking about a little girl, Anne Frank’s age or even younger. The diary is a traditionally female genre, a sort of mirror-mirror-on-the-wall: the spontaneous and unadorned voice of the feelings. The joy of the genre is in its very immediacy and simplicity. Anne Frank’s diary was carefully edited to make it a text of consolation rather than horror, and was already making headlines all around the world, it had become the most influential text about the Holocaust, a way of thinking about it without thinking about railway lines, pits, and corpses, pushing all these horrors back to the epilogue: and then they all died. Whether consciously or not, Anne Frank’s diary became a model for the first publishers of Salomon’s work, who insisted on the convergence of Charlotte the author and Charlotte Kann, the fictional heroine of the work, young victim, so very promising, so little fulfilled.

The tradition set by the family both elides author and heroine, and yet suggests at the same time that actually “things happened quite differently.” Whatever the reality was, we only know how Charlotte had wanted to tell the story at any cost. It’s hard to distort the carefully constructed Life? Or Theater?, the editing principle already lay at the heart of its structure and the 500 rejected drawings testify to this — but the first publishers’ impulse to “tidy the story up” meant they didn’t stop at cutting the images, presenting fragments from the carefully composed whole image without indicating they were fragments, and crossing out or rewriting phrases. They had a harder job than the editors of the Anne Frank diary, where only very particular elements of the text were censored: anti-German outbursts, hurtful things about Anne’s mother, chat about contraceptives, shocking for the time — and, more interestingly, any reference to the everyday Jewish experience, like Yom Kippur, which would be inaccessible to a wider readership.

The editorial changes to Salomon’s singspiel ran counter to everything, foremost actual authorial intent: Salomon had shaped the work like the film of a family’s history, run from beginning to end as if everyone was dead and gone, including her, and nothing could touch her anymore. Everything that happened from the 1880s onward was subject to revision, to satire and distancing: deaths, marriages, meetings and new marriages, career hopes, the love of art. That sort of chronicle, describing lives over several generations as the movement toward an inevitable endpoint, won Thomas Mann the Nobel Prize. But then his work was far more conservative.

You could, I suppose, tell it like this: an old, honorable, and assimilated Jewish family, oil paintings on the wall, a summer house in Italy, candles on the Christmas tree, breaking into “Deutschland über Alles” at moments of national fervor. And far too many suicides. We’ll skip the brothers and other relatives and begin with one of the daughters, the more melancholy daughter, who leaves the house one November evening and drowns herself in a lake. A few years later the second daughter, the happier one, gets married. Eight years later, after promising her own daughter she will send her a letter from heaven, she jumps to her death from a window. The daughter is never told how her mother died: she thinks she died of flu.

New governesses, trips to Italy, the little girl grows up. She is called Charlotte after her dead aunt and her living grandmother — as if the line of Charlottes can’t be broken. One day her workaholic father (“And I will be Professor. Don’t disturb, please don’t disturb me.”) meets that peak of refinement, a blonde woman who sings Bach. In Life? Or Theater? she has the clown-like name Paulinka Bimbam. I should add here that for one reason or another all the characters with some connection with the stage have operetta-style names with jester’s bells attached: Bimbam, Klingklang, Singsang. These masked players have double names to match their own comic duality. Bimbam’s real name was Paula Lindberg, but even that was not her real name: she was the daughter of a rabbi, and her real name was Levi. She was Jewish like everyone else in Charlotte’s life. Ten years later Charlotte wrote about her family that one should remember they lived in a society consisting entirely of Jews.

The marriage of science and art (medicine and music, of Albert Salomon and Paula Lindberg) pleased fourteen-year-old Charlotte more than anyone. Her relationship with her stepmother can only be described as passionate, and as time passed this passion became weighted with its attendant sentiments: jealousy, misery, exigency. Lindberg wanted to be a mother to the orphan, but instead she became embroiled in a white-hot crush friendship, a pleasure and a torment to them both. Our only clear source for this is Life? Or Theater? where much of the information may be deliberately or involuntarily distorted — but what can’t be mistaken is the level of attention directed at the heroine of the novel (or the operetta?), Paula. There are hundreds of portraits of Paula and they reproduce with terrifying precision the expressions and movements of Paula’s face (in a video interview with Paula, made decades later, it’s these expressions you recognize first — the face is old, but the mannerisms are unchanged). There’s a page filled entirely with the bodies and the faces of Paulinka: sullen, passionate, animated, downcast, detached. In the center, her official portrait on a playbill with a list of the towns where she had sung to great acclaim. Only the character of the singspiel, Amadeus Daberlohn (Alfred Wolfson) takes up more space in the narrative.

The many pages of “drawn” writing stand outside the main body of the text. This writing was intended as an epilogue, but constantly strives to become a letter to an addressee, Wolfson, whose fate Charlotte did not know. Parts of this “letter” are online at the Jewish Cultural Quarter Museum in Amsterdam. It has been excerpted and quoted, but never published in its entirety. At one stage in the composition of Life? Or Theater? the artist thought of the whole work as a speech in a dialogue with Wolfson, a way of proving to him her own ability to regenerate. The work has an addressee who is the person Charlotte Salomon considered or wanted to consider her beloved, and in dozens of scenes she rehearses the notion of inseparability, from embrace to complete union.

This can perhaps be explained by the fact that the gouaches depicting Paulinka are lit with erotic energy, but they never cross the line into the territory of love: the narrator deliberately holds the narrative on the brink, hinting and never clarifying (“our lovers have made it up again”). This page is a rapid burst of images of the two women moving toward each other, the little girl in her blue bedroom, stepmother by her bed, their embrace caught in nine frames, Paulinka bending down, her stepdaughter moving toward her, suddenly tiny, a babe in her mother’s arms. The embrace is full, Paulinka’s face is pressed against Charlotte’s breast, the white sheets blossom pinkly. In the last image at the bottom of the page the childish blue pajamas are gone, and instead we see the naked shoulders and arms of both women. Charlotte’s eyes are screwed up and the sheet is now a crimson wave. The explicit nature of the drawings has no textual equivalent — if a thing is left unnamed, does it exist?

The relationship between Daberlohn and Paulinka is never elucidated, either. It remains a matter of projection and guesswork. It’s vitally important for the text and the narrator that the relationship be presented as a triangle with Charlotte forming the third side: the grown-up and equal rival. The singing teacher who has promised Paulinka Bimbam that he can perfect her singing cannot avoid falling in love with the singer because in the world of the singspiel she is irresistible, as any indifferent divinity should be, and because his passion is the fuel for her flight. He still finds time to pay attention to the little girl and her drawings, and even to have a separate love affair with her, taking walks and talking with her, and this doesn’t seem to surprise her in the least. She rather feels a deep sense of gratitude. He is writing a book and she illustrates it: their relationship is shaped so it can be grown into, and it gives a purpose to her existence. She remembers his theories, she inhabits them; his theory that one cannot begin a life without the experience of going through death (and the need to “go out of oneself,” the cinema as a machine invented in order to leave one’s “I” behind) becomes the hull of the enormous ship Life? Or Theater? Their meetings in the station café (Jews are prohibited from going to other cafés) and on park benches (also prohibited, but they risk it) are placed right at the center of the text, along with hundreds of pictures of Daberlohn’s face, framed in his own rather simpleminded sermons.

Everything takes place against a backdrop of passing crowds, mouths stretched into cries, children boasting about their ballpoint pens requisitioned from Jewish shops. On one of the sheets, depicting Berlin at the time of Kristallnacht, Salomon distinctly appears among the names of looted shops (Selig and Cohn). To describe what is happening at that point among her circle of acquaintances she invents the word combination menschlich-jüdisch: she speaks of these human-Jewish souls as if she were speaking of some strange wild hybrid that needed to be observed and studied. And that is more or less how it was.

In 1936 the Jew Charlotte Salomon won a place at the Berlin Academy of the Arts, an impossibility, according to the laws of the time, and perhaps only because the Academy was overwhelmed by Charlotte’s uncommon bravery and doggedness. The Academy was later forced to explain their behavior, and it’s worth noting how they did this: Charlotte was allowed to study because of her asexuality, as someone who was clearly not capable of exciting male Aryan students. In Life? Or Theater? Charlotte writes up a dialogue from the entrance interview: “But do you accept Jews?” — “You probably aren’t Jewish.” — “I am a Jew, of course I am.” — “Well, never mind.” A fellow student, featured in a few of Charlotte’s gouache drawings, remembers her as an outsider, dressed in gray, like a somber November sky.

Three years later Charlotte was dispatched against her will to France to live with her grandparents. They were by then impoverished, but somehow contrived to live much as they always had. In a publication of Life? Or Theater? published in 1969, the picture of her saying farewell to Daberlohn (one of many silent embraces owing something to Klimt) is titled “a fantasy.” Paula Lindberg insisted till her dying day that the love triangle embodied in the singspiel was teenage invention and that it had never happened. In the images on the following pages we see a general farewell at the station: Charlotte’s stooped father, who has just been released from Sachsenhausen concentration camp; her stepmother in a mink coat; Daberlohn’s round glasses.

As for the “soul-penetrating nature of the work,” Salomon encouraged the reader to see a lyrical shape in the work, something along the lines of a love story. A “romance,” to employ that useful term, which holds within itself both the kernel of narrative and a system of nuance underpinning everything in the book, and most importantly the love interest. It’s a word Freud uses in his important 1909 article “Familienroman der Neurotiker,” which is traditionally translated as “Family Romances.” In the article, Freud describes a particular stage of development when the child begins to consider how he, such a “special” child, could be born to such ordinary parents, and so he invents new parents: spies, aristocrats, divine presences invented in his likeness. He thinks of himself as a victim of circumstance, kidnappings, fraudulence: a Romantic hero imprisoned in the fortress of dramatic realism. Pasternak writes of this with understanding in an early poem, the inevitable experience of “dreaming that your mother is not your mother, that you are not you, that your home is a foreign land.”

The subject of Life? Or Theater?, with its suicidal angels, fairy-godmother stepmother, and magical teachers is apparently such a “romance” and I occasionally catch myself on the word, as if I were considering it a “he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not” tale. It is of course nothing of the sort — nothing could be further from the virtuous stepdaughter trope, like Cinderella or Snow White. The work has both the structure and the sweep of an epic. It’s a wake for the disappearing world. Charlotte Salomon is writing — with precision and complete self-awareness — the decline and destruction of her class, the only one she ever happened to know. The days were numbered for the enlightened, lofty Jewish bourgeoisie with its refined taste, expensive habits, and little sermons on positivism. (Life must go on, says Charlotte’s rather sinister grandfather after the suicide of his daughter. You can’t get around what you are, he pronounces in 1939 as the shadows are gathering. Everything natural is holy, he repeats.) The family had become a relic, a people of the past, living by inertia and dying by their own will. Charlotte Salomon became the dining-table chronicler of this age of decline, bewilderment, and pitiful efforts to keep one’s dignity intact.

Without meaning to, Charlotte’s hateful grandfather gave his granddaughter an unbelievable, albeit rather depressing, gift by offering her the possibility of a new life. At an opportune moment he told her the whole family history, and he gave it to her pretty straight: the eight suicides lined up in a row looked like an invitation: you’re next. But the knowledge of what had happened, once laid bare, had the opposite effect. In one of the gouaches Charlotte, bent over the pans on a stove, says approximately this: “What a wonderful thing is life! I believe in it! I’ll live for each and every one of them!”

So the colossal system of Life? Or Theater? begins to unfold from the tiny speck of an unexpected revelation. The story of a tribe, seen from the outside, by a person who has lost their connection with the old world.

The director of the Jewish Cultural Quarter Museum in Amsterdam once commented that the problem with Life? Or Theater? was that there was nothing to compare it with — in the whole of world art there was nothing that stood alongside it. Its loneliness coincides rather strangely with the massive wave of interest in the history captured in the work. The artist has become yet another icon of collective suffering, an important figure, the synopsis for a Hollywood film, not because of what she did, but because of what they did to her.

I want to write about the singspiel itself, and its wondrous complexity, as if it weren’t connected with the fate of its maker — but it doesn’t seem possible. There’s something in the character of the work that makes us want to lay a filter over our reading to ease it, and then to throw the same filter aside in irritation. This is not autobiography, although it is incredibly similar. Neither is it an exercise in self-help therapy that we are witnessing, nor an effort to contain trauma (although Charlotte herself tells us more than once that the work is not an end but a means). It’s not even an anti-Nazi text — the Nazis in Life? Or Theater? are not more comic or frightening than any of the other protagonists. “I was each of them,” states the author.

This is not true either. Both named and unnamed are present in the work: the text about trauma, what one might term “female optics,” the sign of the Catastrophe, the magic of childish thought: if I draw it, that’s how it will come to be. All these readings are rational and justifiable in themselves; it’s the incongruity between the scale of the singspiel and its reception that hurts. It’s as if we rummaged through the archives of the male art world and found that the whole body of textual interpretation of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time was based on Proust’s biography: Proust and Jewishness, Proust and homosexuality, Proust and tuberculosis. This thing Charlotte Salomon invented and made is far more than its own reflections.

I keep wanting to discuss Salomon’s singspiel, with its carefully conceived theatrical frame, as if it were literature. I keep using the words “text,” “book,” and “read.” Perhaps this is because its drifting space has the contours of the classic nineteenth-century novel, the sort her grandparents might have read, the tradition continued by Proust, Mann, and Musil. But I’m wrong — as far as I know there are no references to literature or to writers in the work, although there are dozens of direct and indirect references to the musical and visual arts. Literature was invisible, but you could feel it in the air you breathed during adult conversations. Operetta is the younger sister of the Dombeys, the Karenins, and is occupied with the same immutable concerns: that thematic high road of “the disappearing world.” Charlotte Salomon serves up the institution of the bourgeois family; a torture chamber, with the caressing instruments of pressure and exclusion. Since the object of her observation is her own history, it is harder to see the shadowy model for her text: the nineteenth-century novel, where everything is both symptom and verdict.

She is fighting a world order, and what angers her most is that it’s doomed and yet won’t put up a fight: it would rather delude itself and clutch at straws. Sitting by the hospital bed of the dying century, she isn’t quite sure whether to love or hate it, save it or put it to death — and she makes the decision to disown it, curse it and give away its terrible secrets. You could compare Life? Or Theater? with the comics in vogue at the time, or today’s graphic novel, but neither would be exact comparisons: the images in comics and graphic novels are shaped both by their chronological sequencing, and by the borders between each frame. These borders chart a route through a selection of images, they help the reader negotiate that route and protect her from misunderstanding and loss of focus.

In Salomon’s work all the borders are removed and every sheet can be gazed at infinitely, like a figure eight or a Möbius strip, where everything happens simultaneously. The same character makes a series of movements, each hardly differing from the next, as if the author is hoping to preserve the most minute phases of that character’s movement for all eternity. We can only guess how much time passes between each phase. Perhaps minutes, or perhaps months — it could well be either. The coexistence of different layers of time in the singspiel makes it unique, perhaps resembling only the calcified time of the poem, which is temporally and rhythmically defined by the reader’s breath. What Charlotte depicts, the absolute past and its capsule of color, is a place so remote that everything happens simultaneously there, both recent and long past; the phrase begins again before you have finished saying it.

This place, this world, is very tightly packed; the people, both the familiar and the unnamed masses, swarm and multiply. Although the actual cast list is short, we have the sensation of being on a crowded station concourse or a beach at high season. Here the measure of time is very clearly shown: its repetitiveness, its monotony, its transparent sack filled with bodies, gestures and conversations. All this space is filled with intense and powerful color — red, blue, yellow, and all of their combinations. Griselda Pollock has produced very detailed work on the function of color in Salomon’s universe — every character is given not only a musical phrase but a color code:

But the power of the work resides in its ability to resist any interpretation, especially that of its own narrator, who quotes the theory of her hero as if it is holy scripture — the same hero who presses her against the wall in a dark corridor a few pages later with the words: “What a lovely neck you have, child. Let me kiss it. Won’t your mother be home soon?”

It does seem as if one of the main drivers of the drawn text and the “talking pictures” is the refusal to pass judgment. Every point of view is understood to come from outside the text, and no motivation or explanation is provided for anything; it is all treated with the same icy malice. If Charlotte really ascribed a magical function to her work, then she was not wrong to do so. She succeeded in locking the past away in a room, and we can still hear it restlessly pacing, and beating at the walls.

The German word “Erinnerung” (memory) has a distant echo in the Russian ear: the flight of the Erinyes (or Furies), those vengeful divinities who remembered and pursued the guilty to the corners of the earth, however they tried to remain hidden. The extent of memory, its ability to catch those who try to evade it, depends directly on whether we can turn and meet it head-on. This is exactly what the heroine of Life? Or Theater? does when she faces her decision: to take her life or to embark on something really quite mad. That is, to become everyone she ever knew, to speak with the voices of the living and the dead. At this point between her and the author there is no border.

Not-A-Chapter The Stepanovs, 1980, 1982, 1983, 1985

1.

Addressed to my grandfather, Nikolai Stepanov, from his niece. The letter is undated, but appears to be from June 1980. My little round big-eyed grandmother Dora Zalmanovna Stepanova (maiden name: Akselrod) died in May 1980. She and my grandfather were the same age, both born in 1906. He outlived her by five years.

Galina is the daughter of Grandfather’s much-loved sister, Masha. She lived near her mother in the village of Ushakovo in Kalinin District. Up till then they had been used to corresponding frequently but that summer Grandfather broke off correspondence for a long while.

2.

From my grandfather, in reply to his niece, Galina. Unfinished draft. June 1980. My fifty-year-old aunt Galya was dealing with grief in her own way. She and her father, my grandfather, who was unyielding in his demands and his assessments of others, didn’t get along, and months passed before they could find a way of living together harmoniously.

3.

Undated, but clear from the content that this is July 1980. Father and I were traveling and staying by a lake, Galka was in a sanatorium. On two scraps of writing paper, paper-clipped together, my grandfather has written in his firm hand: “Page from diary.” He is writing here (as it later becomes clear) about my mother.

4.

Nikolai Stepanov to Natalia Stepanova

Grandfather is writing here to my mother in Mishor, the Crimean resort where we were holidaying in 1983. It’s possible he didn’t send the letter. This is a draft and I couldn’t find a clean copy in my mother’s papers.

5.

A draft of a letter from Grandfather to his own sister. It is undated but I think it is from 1984 or even 1985, when Grandfather was fast losing his memory and becoming sadder and more remote.

7. Yakov’s Voice and Isav’s Photograph

When you start sorting through the things and concepts of the past you can tell instantly which are still wearable, like old clothes, and which have shrunk, faded, like a jumper that’s been through the wrong wash. Those yellowing suede gloves, like plate armor in a museum, look as if they belong to a schoolgirl or a doll. They seem to belong with certain intonations, certain opinions; they’re smaller than we imagine humans to be — if you look at them through the wrong end of the telescope, they have an ant-like precision; yet they are very far away. Sebald describes an empty house with its dusty carpets, a stuffed polar bear, and “golf clubs, billiard cues, and tennis rackets, most of them so small they might have been intended for children, or have shrunk in the course of the years…” Sometimes everything in the past (untranslatable, unusable, barely meeting today’s needs) seems child-sized, to be treated with the fond condescension of those who have left childhood behind. The simplicity and naivety of the past is habitually overstated, and this has gone on for centuries.

The once-acclaimed novel Trilby graced my parents’ shelves like a living presence, its spine still hard, the golden letters gleaming. The Russian edition was published in some haste in 1896, by then George du Maurier’s tale had been published in America and Britain in unprecedented print runs of hundreds of thousands of copies. The only picture in the Russian edition was on the cover, a tall woman in an infantryman’s greatcoat, caught around the waist by a belt, standing determined on a small rise, bare white legs, one hand held out, holding a cigarette, her hair loose on her shoulders. Despite all this she resembles nothing more than a milkmaid. She has a purposeful straightforward air, as if to quash any ideas of silliness, and this impression is borne out when you read the book.

The story of Trilby follows an artist’s model, posing “for the altogether” in Parisian art studios. She makes friends with some jolly English artists whose odd habits include daily ablutions in hip baths, then falls in love with one of them but gives him up, convinced he is destined for a better woman. All of this is very sweet, especially the heroine with her wide-eyed loving-kindness and her tuneless singing. The softhearted Trilby suffers from neuralgia and the only person who can help her is a man named Svengali, a rogue, a hypnotizer, a great musician, and a dirty Jew. Dirty in the most literal sense — the cleanliness of others merely makes him laugh uncontrollably. He has bony fingers and a “long, thick, shapely Hebrew nose”; “he would either fawn or bully, and could be grossly impertinent.”

At the beginning of the twentieth century the “Svengali” became a phenomenon in and of itself: not the name of a literary hero but a term to describe someone exerting a mysterious force on others. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary dryly defines a “Svengali” as a person who “manipulates or exerts excessive control over another.” The Oxford English Dictionary adds the words “mesmeric” and “for some sinister purpose.” The inexplicable ability to control another, to turn that person on and off like a desk lamp according to your will, so intrigued readers that the story, rather than falling into obscurity, lived on in a whole series of screen versions. Most of these were no longer named after the novel: from the end of the 1920s the novel became indistinguishable from the magnetic “Svengali, Svengali, Svengali.”

Neither author nor reader would have had cause to reflect much on this matter-of-course anti-Semitism. It was as natural as birdsong; simply another feature of Du Maurier’s book, as much as the constant jokes at the expense of the Germans or the discussions of women’s beauty (a “deformed” woman, a “squinting dwarf” will only “inflict on his descendants a wrong that nothing will ever redeem”). But the difference is that, unlike all the prejudices expressed en passant, the Jewishness of Svengali seems to fascinate the narrator. He returns again and again to the theme, picking through a fairly standard selection of descriptives: greasy hair, bold and brilliant eyes, a comic aspect, a cruel sense of humor, physical and moral uncleanliness. And there is his great talent, which for a time even allays the disgust of the hearty, hygienic heroes with their drooping whiskers: “There was nothing so humble, so base even, but that his magic could transform it into the rarest beauty without altering a note. This seems impossible, I know. But if it didn’t, where would the magic come in?”

Du Maurier’s Trilby is entertaining and good-natured, uniting both author and reader in a rare feeling of satisfaction, even self-satisfaction: “and they would try and express themselves to the effect that life was uncommonly well worth living in that particular city at that particular time of the day and year and century, at that particular epoch of their own mortal and uncertain lives.” The action of the novel takes place toward the end of the 1850s, and everything is retrospectively gilded with the spirit of the Belle Époque: the three Baudelairean flaneurs taking their strolls down the “crowded, well-lighted boulevards, and a bock at the café there, at a little three-legged marble table right out on the genial asphalt pavement”; and enjoying more traditional amusements, like donkey rides and hide-and-seek in the Bois de Boulogne. The suspension springs of progress are well-oiled: these children of civilization laugh at prejudice, and even illegitimate love engenders sympathetic respect in them. The horror and the repulsion they feel for Svengali is all the more striking against the backdrop of this Great Exhibition of modern virtues. It feels as if it has something to do with the rasping friction between two extremes: a superhuman ability and what seems subhuman to the author.

This ancient combination presents itself as a threat once again in the post-Romantic age, the source of a scandal that might blow up at any moment. The raw element of virtuosity, born of the gutter, the dirt, and the dust, stooping at nothing, in the hands of the “foreign” — Jews, gypsies, mediums — is balanced by the presence of standards, the flowering of complete ordinariness that knows its boundaries and is pleased with this knowledge. The cheerful little Parisian art studios are pleasurable forays into the life of a Bohemian. With the same cozy pleasure the novel’s heroes perform Romantic and realist roles, drawing toreadors and coal miners. Painting in Du Maurier’s novel belongs to the decent world — but music is to be avoided at all cost.

George du Maurier himself drew cartoons for Punch for several decades, caricaturing modern aesthetics, the emancipation of women, the mass enthusiasm for china. He was especially excited by the comic potential in technological progress: “Please look a little pleasant, Miss. I know it’s hard; but it’s only for a moment!” says a photographer to a young woman. Elderly parents sit by an enormous plasma screen, called the “telephonoscope,” and watch their offspring play lawn tennis. A housewife gaily operates dozens of levers: pull one and you hear an opera transmission from Bayreuth, turn another and it’s from St. James’s Hall. One hundred and fifty years later the jokes aren’t so very funny, the problems they face are pint-size (“doll-like, puppetlike” as the poet Elena Shvarts writes), but one of the drawings from 1878, a year after the phonograph was invented, is incredibly touching.

A woman in a housecoat and a man in a jacket and hat stand studying the contents of a wine cellar. They have already chosen a few bottles and they are intently looking round at the shelves, but the bottles contain voices, and not wine. The long caption (all Du Maurier’s captions are long) reads:

On the wine cellar’s shelves are Rubinstein, Tosti, all the musical hits of the period, long since scattered and vanished; opera stars whose voices we have been told about but will never hear. Perhaps only Adelina Patti, recorded later, at the beginning of the twentieth century, can still be heard, although it’s a strange sensation, the voice barely emerges from the bottle throat, and the 1904 coloratura sends shivers down the spine, as if a ghost were tickling you. The other inhabitants of the wine cellar were not so lucky. The more famous ones look down at us from old photographs: garlanded, bright-eyed, monochrome. One or two didn’t even have this honor, just a name, a few mentions: “never made gramophone recordings of her voice”; date of death unknown. Sometimes the picture ripples, there is the flicker of an anecdote: St. Petersburg students once lay in the February snow so Christina Nilsson could walk across them to her coach. In another story she’s taking aim in a damp, cold wood and firing — and the bear drops down to the ground, flat as a bearskin rug. Here’s another: the graduates of West Point each cut a golden button from their dress coat and make from the buttons a heavy golden wreath to lay on the singer’s shoulders as a souvenir of her audience. The aria swells, but we can’t hear a single note. The “great Trebelli,” as Joyce called her, putting on her men’s clothes to play the role of Gounod’s Siébel: white stockings, ruffled sleeves, and a white feather. Another diva signed her name on the wall of a London restaurant where they served borscht on a Sunday: blue curtains, light-blue wallpaper, and the autographs of the habitués preserved under a piece of glass.

Somewhere in the lowest drawers of my parents’ polished cabinet were deposits of sheet music. There was no one with any musical skill left in the family to sort through the scores. When we moved to a new apartment in 1974, the piano that had stood for seventy years in the old apartment was on the list of essentials, what needed to be taken up into the new life. The millipede-like dining table that could seat twenty, the huge carved sideboard that looked like a house, the rocking chair and the chandelier with its serried rows of crystals — all remained in the old life. But the “musical instrument,” like the portrait of a half-forgotten relative, took up its position against the wall and stood patiently, putting up with my reluctant scales, studies, and Old French chansons until they dried up of their own accord.

The pages of music were a different matter. The jumbled sheets were marked with little blackberry stains of sound I couldn’t decipher, but they were interesting for other reasons: their names written in a spidery script, running from beat to beat, syllable to syllable, with my finger following. These had nothing in common with the everyday Soviet world: “Lit-tle-black-boy-Tom, in-Alger-ia-born, where none-fear-death and love-is-strong.” Sometimes a piece of music would be illustrated. I have a dim memory of the cover of “The Salon Waltz: A Dream of Love after the Ball,” cherubs teeming under the sleeping debutante, the silky puff of her gown, her tiny slippers on the carpet. All this seemed ancient, and not because of its remoteness in time — at that point, the 1920s felt like yesterday. Then and now were completely irreconcilable. We had our own intimate pleasures, but they were from an entirely different songbook with different lyrics: the wooden seats on the train to the dacha and the noisy blue-tinged counters at the grocery shop, with their alkaline tang and sour-cream smell. Next door in the hardware store the wooden drawers held oily mounds of nails of differing sizes and shapes; at the market black-eared rabbits were sold alongside poorly gilded wooden angels; farther on, a line for liters of fermented kvas stretched as far as the telephone box.

The music my relatives bought over the years was not complicated, it was meant to be played at family gatherings: waltzes, foxtrots, and tangos to dance to at home; Tchaikovsky romances, “We will be silent, you and I”; and a Technicolor range of hit parade numbers for singsongs. On the back of the sheets the names of other songs were pressed together in a list, a hundred or more on each sheet. The sight of them gave me to understand the volume of sound that had been lost and gone underground, pushed out beyond the periphery of the known world.

None of this can be reproduced, least of all the kinds of feelings brought on by “Romances and Songs from Gypsy Life”: the endless sweet friends, the stars and the sunsets, the misty morns and gray dawns, dark nights and sleigh bells, the perfumed white acacia and the roses, the “sweet scent of you”; when the lilac blossoms, and countless “I want to love!” and “I don’t want to forget!” It’s hard to imagine all this being sung, murmured, and squawked by a million voices all at once: voices in tenements and rented rooms, in offices and on dacha verandas, over keyboards and to gramophone records. It poured from open windows like water from a watering can until it had flooded all Russia. Even when it began to disappear it still buzzed like a spinning top as it soaked into the ground. The simple quantity of music held in the airwaves back then, a time still unused to other joys, was enormous: it swelled in vast rainclouds, forever promising rain.

Du Maurier’s cartoon advised bottling what had already been conserved, wound onto black shellac records. When sound was first recorded, the many imitators of Adelina Patti, pouring their own more modest voices into the romances and arias of Glinka, were out of a job. Caruso and Chaliapin now strode into the family parlor. In the new century people didn’t sing, they sang along and they knew the music not from the page, but from the voice, the raw and irresistible original. Fewer people now played music, and more listened to it; music imperceptibly ceased being a domestic affair at about the same time as domesticity itself began to reveal its ephemeral quality. Pillowcase-size, light as a feather, it could be folded into a traveling case. Music, like much else, became an instance of deferring to authority, his master’s voice. Listeners gathered around the communal radio, they swapped gramophone records, they rushed to the cinema to hear the jazz recordings played before the feature.

As the dead get more distant, their black-and-white features look ever nobler and finer. When I was younger people still used to say of prerevolutionary photographs: “What wonderful faces, you don’t see faces like that anymore!” Now we say that about the faces of Second World War soldiers, or students in the sixties. And it’s quite true: you don’t see faces like that anymore. We aren’t them. They aren’t us. A picture cunningly replaces this terribly obvious fact with simple parallels. They are holding a child, and we sometimes do that, too. That girl looks just like me apart from her long skirts and squashed hat. Grandmother is drinking from my cup, I am wearing her ring. Them too. Us as well.

However effortlessly convincing the (full and exhaustive) knowledge offered by the pictures seems, the words that accompany them, written back then, relocate us in our own time. The little beak of the punctum taps at the points of similarity; whereas the voice, reminding us of the real extension of time, can barely be heard from the other side of the abyss. Years ago, the vivacious eighty-year-old redhead Antonina Petrovna Gerburt-Geibovich, an older friend of my mothers, admitted shamefacedly that her mother-in-law had reproached her for her “officer’s” tastes: “I love gladioli and champagne!” I was immediately aware that champagne and contemptible officer’s tastes were very far from the world I inhabited, and even the ordinary gladioli couldn’t bridge the gap. But Antonina had no regrets. She had come from a tiny shtetl in the middle of nowhere, was married for her looks and her boldness, could read in eight languages and used to recount, laughing, how her gallant Polish father-in-law said to her before the wedding: “I am so very glad of this infusion of young Jewish blood into our wilting dynastic line.”

The Gerburt coat of arms (an apple on a red background, pierced through by three gold swords, two from the upper corners of the shield, and the third from below) and its dynastic history barely interested her. Jewishness excited her far more, and in her lonely little apartment she would passionately relive the successes and failures of those who shared her “young Jewish blood.” Around the age of twelve I used to visit her and she would treat me with volumes of ancient Greek literature and kovrizhka with nuts. Once, I left her apartment with a feeling of intense embarrassment, hardly able to explain this feeling to myself. On that particular day she had taken out a battered volume of poetry and read an old and sentimental poem. As she finished the poem, I noticed in horror that she was crying.

Only photography shows the flow of time as if it had never existed: just the length of women’s skirts sliding up and down. Text is a different matter: it consists entirely of time, which opens the little windows of vowels and shakes out the mothlike consonants, filling the gaps between paragraphs and haughtily displaying the full range of our differences. When you look at the page of an old newspaper, the first thing you feel is its hopeless remoteness. There is a strange stylistic kinship between texts of the same moment, written in the same cross section of time, but it has nothing to do with authorial intention and can only be seen in hindsight. With a distance of twenty or thirty years it’s hard not to notice the single intonation, the common denominator welding together newspaper, shop sign, poem read from the stage at the all-women college, the conversation on the way home. It is as if every age produces its own particular dust that settles on every surface and in every corner. Even those who behave as if they stood outside the idea of the “typical” suddenly make a linguistic gesture that’s common to their contemporaries, without even noticing it, as if they were unaware of the pull of gravity on them.

There were plenty of other entertainments besides Trilby in the 1890s, many of them relating to science. The century saw itself as enlightened (and in a sense it was): a little hill onto which humanity had climbed and was now happily looking back over the ground traversed. Behind it lay much to learn from: prejudices overcome, wars that could never be repeated, religious extremism, the depths of poverty; all of this, to be sure, had taken watchfulness but it had yielded to rationalism. Civilization had reached into the furthest parts of the globe and was busy gathering its unusual souvenirs. The World Exhibitions and their many clones presented to the public the highest achievements of humanity, but the audience also wanted to hear about its darker corners, remained curious about the strange nations at the earth’s rim, doomed by fate to be the comic sidekick to the victorious and favored children of progress. This natural-historical curiosity needed feeding.

In April 1901 a daily paper in Moscow reported to the educated public that an all-female troupe of Dahomey Amazons, who could be seen in the Manezh, were “more curious than any ‘blacks’ who had come to Moscow before. They demonstrate some interesting dances and military formations.” The Amazons soon transferred to a more appropriate venue. “Yesterday at the Zoological Gardens the Dahomey Amazons began their performances of dancing and military moves. These will take place three times a day on weekdays and five times a day on holidays.”

It hardly raised eyebrows, this idea of adding to the exotic fauna of the zoo with enclosures for rational man in his natural surroundings. What became known as a human zoo — Laplanders, Indians, Nubian villages “with live inhabitants” dressed in traditional costume, holding naked live babies — was an everyday reality in American and European zoos by the mid-1870s. Public morality at the time demanded that “natives” be dressed decently and sometimes public taste demanded quite the opposite: the clothing didn’t seem “revealing” enough, nakedness befitted the savage man. The exhibits wove their mats and smoked their pipes, demonstrated their bows and arrows and the now unnecessary accoutrements of labor. Sometimes they died, sometimes they revolted. Between the exhibits and the millions of spectators there was nearly always a barrier or a fence to illustrate the boundary between humanity’s past and its much-improved present.

In 1878, when the couple in Du Maurier’s drawing were busy inspecting the bottles of stoppered music, the Exposition Universelle in Paris featured alongside the megaphones and phonographs a “Negro Village” with around 400 inhabitants. Twenty-five years later, at an even more visually arresting exhibition, the representatives of the “lesser races” were confined in cages. At the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904 the crowds streamed to view the primitive nations. On that occasion, the evolution of man had been illustrated carefully with a line that ran from “primates to pygmies” (“Cannibals Will Dance and Sing!”) to Filipinos, Native Americans, and on, at last, to the happy visitors to the Fair. Racial theories prevalent at the time embodied the competitive system, and white man’s victory was a plain indication of his superiority.

The Amazons came in handy: they were more interesting to look at than the glum Inuits with their shaggy dogs. They offered an almost real threat. These female warriors who had been defending the Dahomey throne for two hundred years still had terrible strength and were the stuff of legend, potboilers, and wet dreams. The war between Dahomey and the French dragged on until the army of Amazons was decisively routed. Their weapons (machetes, and something resembling an ax) were no match for bullets, and long bayonets gave Europeans the advantage in hand-to-hand combat. But even a year before, a troupe of “tame” Amazons had visited Paris to demonstrate their fighting techniques. They were dressed in the wildest of outfits: to survive one has to fit in with other people’s preconceptions.

An eleven-year-old boy was taken to see such a demonstration of fighting techniques in Moscow. Later in his life Boris Pasternak would remember how

I look at the words and the possessions of the dead, laid out for us in the cabinets of literary museums, or ready for printing, or lovingly conserved, and I feel more and more as if I were looking into an enclosure containing the silent and closed ranks of the “exhibited.” When you spend a long time with what the old inventories called “linen belonging to the deceased,” the bars of the cage start to come into focus more sharply, and what lies behind recedes from view.

The letters of my grandmother written in her girlhood, which I transcribe, line by line; the Soviet songs Aunt Galya wrote up; the letters of a philosopher, the diaries of a machine worker — all of this reminds me more and more of the brain, pelvis, and sexual organs of Saartjie Baartman. The Hottentot Venus, as they loved to call her, was a much-favored object of scientific interest at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The shape of her body, the diameter of her nipples, and the line of her buttocks were living proof for various different types of evolutionary theory and formed the basis for boldly sexual prepositions. The well-known naturalist Dr. Georges Cuvier paid particular attention to the length of her labia. She was exhibited to medical students, enlightened amateurs, and crowds at freak shows. On occasion you were allowed to poke her. Her service to “humanity” did not end with her death: for one hundred and fifty years her remains were exhibited in museums in France and only reluctantly withdrawn from view in 1974. We, the people of the past and the present, are endlessly vulnerable, desperately interesting, utterly defenseless. Especially after we are gone.

8. Lyodik, or Silence

In Spring 1942, in the Leningrad Region, lines of soldiers walked through the twilight, one behind the other, holding on to each other as tightly as they could. They were usually led by the soldier with the best sense of direction. With a stick he felt for potholes and the bodies of people and horses, and the chain of the unseeing followed him and tried their best to wind their way around obstacles. Nyctalopia is the Greek name for a condition that begins in the following way: the sufferer stops being able to tell blue and yellow apart, the field of vision narrows, and on entering a lit space he sees colored spots in front of his eyes. Its name among the people is “moon blink.” It is caused by the long winter, a lack of vitamin A, and extreme fatigue. I once read this description of it in a memoir: “I could only see two small stretches of land and they were directly in front of me. Everything else was hidden in darkness.”

Leonid Gimmelfarb, my grandfather’s nineteen-year-old cousin, was somewhere in the marshes and forests in this district: his 994th Rifle Regiment had held its position since the autumn, during which time the regiment had completely replaced its personnel as well as its commanding officers several times. Lyodik, as he was called at home, wrote regularly to his mother who had been evacuated to the faraway Siberian town of Yalutorovsk. He’d been in these parts before: he’d sent his first letters to his mother from training camps in the region in May the previous year. In one letter, he wrote that he’d gone to Leningrad to apply to the college of aviation, “although of course I wasn’t accepted, they said I wasn’t right.”

On September 1, 1939, the first day of the Second World War, a conscription act was passed in the USSR, leading to mass conscription. The children and grandchildren of all those of doubtful lineage (aristocrats, factory owners, merchants, officers in the Tsarist army, priests, richer peasants) were also included, although they had to serve as infantrymen without hope of promotion — the military academies and colleges remained closed to them as they had been before. The new act seemed fair on the whole, since it was based on a need for equality, though it lowered the conscription age quite considerably, from twenty-one to nineteen, and even eighteen for those who had left school early. Lyodik wrote that it was warm and comfortable in his tent, which slept ten recruits. They’d built a bench and a table and even decorated it a bit, and he’d set himself the challenge of learning to play chess better. New regulations had come in and now instead of a kilo of bread they each received 800g. There was a “vegetarian day,” when they ate cheese instead of meat, and even if it wasn’t exactly fun, at least they understood what was going on, and it kept them busy.

In my mother’s papers there was a special bundle with Lyodik’s letters and childhood postcards. The little boy, standing in his felt boots with shining galoshes and his lambskin cap pulled down over his eyes, was an important part of her own childhood — his absence made him almost her contemporary, and the fact that he was fated to die at the terribly young age of twenty was overwhelming. When Lyodik’s mother, the wizened, gray-haired Auntie Verochka, died and was buried somewhere along the wall of the Donsky Crematorium, all that remained of her worldly possessions was this little bundle. The death notice, and strips of army paper with numbers on and little notes: “greetings from the front,” “all my love,” “P.S. I am alive and well.” “Alive and well” was pretty much all Lyodik’s letters amounted to, although he used every possible occasion to send word. “Nothing much to report” was the mantra, and it filled the sheets of paper — whatever was going on around him was by now beyond description. What he couldn’t quite suppress though was a strange ringing, it wasn’t in the words themselves, but still it sounded in the background. Much as if a calm person were writing calming words, just as a tank rumbled down the street and all the china in the cupboards began to hum.

In pencil, on the lined sheet of an exercise book:

Lyodik was mobilized straightaway and found himself in a war that hadn’t yet started. The letter above was written on his nineteenth birthday. German forces had already tightened their grip on Leningrad. The 286th Division was put together hastily from evacuees, boys barely out of their teens, local volunteers, whoever they could find. The 994th Rifle Regiment was part of this. They were thrown straight into battle.

There is a small river, the Naziya, in the direction of Mga Station, and all around, for up to twenty kilometers, spreads endless forest and boggy ground. Kirill Meretskov, who was in command of the Volkhovsky Front, and whose actions resulted in the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of soldiers in this area, wrote years later that “I have rarely been in an area less suitable for a military offensive. I will forever remember the endless expanse of forest, the impenetrable marshes, the standing water on peat bogs, the broken roads.” The 994th Rifle Regiment survived among these peat bogs for three years, holding and losing positions. It began in September 1941, when their troop train arrived in the fog. The train didn’t even reach the junction — the Luftwaffe was overhead, and there were no Soviet planes around. The soldiers disembarked under fire, slipping about, dragging carts and weapons into copses. They could barely tug the carts with their wooden axles to safety. Then there were weeks of nonstop air raids. Along with the bombs, barrels fell from the sky. The barrels had holes punched in them and as they fell they made an unbearable screaming noise. Sometimes field kitchens went missing in the forests, because the staff were afraid to cross open ground, and the soldiers went hungry. They were armed with nothing more than rifles. On 11 September, when the Germans attacked in tanks close to the village of Voronovo there was panic. Soldiers dispersed across the marshes. After a few days the division had lost half its men and a large number of officers.

Astonishingly, it is possible to reconstruct the events of these days and weeks with a fair amount of detail. A number of texts, interviews, and letters belonging to those who survived have been preserved. The Battalion Commander of the nearby 996th Regiment remembered that there was no artillery support for two months: in addition to a rifle, every man was given a hand grenade and a bottle of incendiary liquid. It got colder. There was no bread, only dried crusts. There were no spirits either. The soldiers got hot food once a day. Some took the greatcoats off corpses and wore them over their own coats. They slipped and slid through the snow to HQ and back. They shared things between the different companies and boiled the meat from dead horses.

In Lyodik’s letters there is nothing about this, not even a hint. Almost all the letters had the “checked by military censor” stamp on them, but the censor would have found nothing to concern him in these letters. In one of the accounts of the Volkhovsky Front there is a quote from a letter by a Lieutenant Vlasov written on October 27, 1941:

I see this scene, the warm hats and snow drifts, as if through the same set of binoculars; the rather forced humor, the bravado, was usual for a commanding officer. Still, you might expect a lieutenant to be more open about the fact that he was actually “at war” in a letter to his wife.

This reluctance characterizes Lyodik Gimmelfarb’s letters, too: he is absolutely intent on saying nothing about himself. He asks endless questions, mostly about his mother’s health, which worries him terribly. Does she get tired at work? He asks her not to worry on his account, he is quite, quite well. If he is silent for longer than a month then it’s only because of his “shocking laziness in writing letters.” He is just as before. How are Lyonya? Lyolya? Their new baby? Sarra Abramovna? And how are Uncle Syoma and his wife? What has Uncle Busya written? How are you all, my dearest family? Please don’t worry about me. It’s completely unnecessary. Be happy, healthy. I have everything I need.

At the beginning of the war in Leningrad, Daniil Kharms and the artist Pavel Zaltsman met by chance at a friend’s house. We can imagine what they spoke about, since neither had any illusions, and Kharms at some point during the meeting said about the imminent future: “We will be crawling away, without legs, holding onto the burning walls.” Around the same time, in an air raid shelter on the Arbat in Moscow, Marina Tsvetaeva rocked to and fro, repeating to herself “and the enemy just keeps going…” Kharms’s wife, another Marina, wrote, of the day before his arrest, that they had had to move a chair in the corridor, and Kharms was “afraid that misfortune would come upon them if they moved the chair.” Kharms was arrested on August 23, 1941. Perhaps he could hear the muttering in the clear sky from his cell on September 8 as the planes flew overhead to bomb the Badayev food storage warehouses.

Many people remembered that sunny day. Nikolai Nikulin, an officer cadet at the time and future art historian, whose memoirs were published posthumously, watched the antiaircraft shells exploding in the blue sky like cotton wool clouds.

The incendiary bombs hissed and went out in the sand. When it was finally quiet a black cloud half-covered the sky over the city. Sixty-one-year-old artist and diarist Lyubov Shaporina looked out her window:

In the diaries and notes written during the Siege of Leningrad in the terrible winter of 1941 (known from then on as “The Terrible Winter”), there are often “zones” that are utterly different from the rest of the text. Resembling the bubbles forming under ice, these zones are the spaces set aside by different authors for the seeing and describing of beauty. The starving city was completely taken up with the business of survival, but from time to time it fell into deep contemplation, just as its people sometimes fell into deep sleep in the freezing cold, no longer afraid to die. The tempo of the writing changes: what had been a hasty noting down of details, conversations, anecdotes — chronicles of daily dehumanization undertaken in order to save these experiences from oblivion — suddenly changes the pace of its breathing and becomes a meditation on the clouds or the effects of light. This is even more striking when you consider how the writers of these texts were entirely occupied by the exhausting labor of survival. Their acts of witness are addressed to a future reader who will be able to grasp the situation in all its horror and shame, who will see the arrests and the exiling, the nightly air raids, the streetcars standing silent, the baths filled with frozen sewage, the fear and hatred felt by those standing in bread lines.

These extended passages have neither particular purpose nor direct meaning. I would call them “lyrical” if it wasn’t for their strangely impersonal quality. The seeing eye feels detached, as if it belonged to no one, has no focus — it roams around the space that was once a home, a peaceful place to live, rest, and move about in, and is now transformed into a hard and impenetrable surface, nameless and beyond understanding. “It is as light as day outside. The moonlight is blinding. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Ursa Major shine so brightly.” It’s as if the viewer herself disappears at these moments: the person who sees the changing earth and sky is no longer me, but someone else. The body aches, it itches, it is full of fear, it tries and fails to forget itself, but the beholding eye moves freely and without haste, as if it were the air itself with its unlimited reserves of time, looking at the riverbanks and buildings.

In the memoirs of those who fought outside Leningrad during those months, and who saw with their own eyes the parachutes hanging like huge chandeliers over the icy beam of the spotlight, and the pulsing multicolored streams of fire lifting from the burning city, the narrative moves in the same way, with these trancelike pauses. It feels as if the front line and the besieged and dying city had suddenly become reflecting halves; as if there were no difference between them (780,000 people died in the first year of the Siege). Propagandists loved the phrase “Frontline City.” It both elevated and explained the rebirth of the everyday experience as a strange offshoot of daily decline and disaster. The boundary between the everyday and the unthinkable disappeared. In the Leningrad Public Library the cold corpses of librarians lay on the floor, but you could still borrow a book.

The people who lived in the city and on the frontline changed themselves as fast as they changed their own understanding of what was possible and natural. Lydia Ginzburg’s Notes from the Blockade describes with precision these stages of rebirth, which were above all physical, affecting personal hygiene and domestic tasks, manifesting as gray hairs and graying skin and crumbling teeth, displacing even the desire to read, but honing the instincts for adaptation and survival. In the summer of 1942, when the cold was gone and hunger no longer at its peak, this led to a new and unusual problem: a gap between this moment of rest and a hardwired fight for existence. A leather cushion on the armchair (a gift, a sweet memento from a past life) now merely gave rise to an intense sense of bewilderment: “the opportunity to return their original meanings to objects.” But what to do with the books sitting on the shelves? They appeared to have crept their way back into view, though there was still no interest in lifting them off the shelves. The new skills of lighting the stove, dragging a bucket of water up the congealed ice on the staircase, balancing dishes and bags and ration books, and the terrible daily rituals of waking and getting ready to go out — all this belonged to someone new. It was better to leave that old “I” behind and not look back. Eventually everything around forgets its past and itself and mutates: vodka becomes bread, furniture becomes sugar. This is how Ginzburg described it: “They made cakes out of greens, and cutlets out of herrings.” For her there was a clear lesson in this: “Every product had to cease being itself.” And it goes without saying that this applied to people as well.

Nikolai Nikulin describes this process in himself. He was called up in 1941. By the end of that autumn he was a bewildered walking skeleton, but a sudden change came over him. Louse-ridden and weak, he spent a night in a shell hole, weeping with his misery and helplessness:

The new man, the man who learns how to survive, is of use not just to himself, but to the state — he’s effective, and in this there is no distinction between the frontline city and the line of fire. Ginzburg’s texts from the besieged city are animated by the idea of “usefulness,” which she understands in a surprising way. The Western world had proved itself powerless in the face of Hitler, she wrote, and the only thing that was capable of tackling him was the Soviet Leviathan: a corrupted and terrorizing system, which had dehumanized the individual to such an extent that he had learned to sacrifice himself without even realizing it. Meaning is given to the individual existence through the collective opposition to a clear evil — even as that existence disintegrates, frozen with horror, or behaves with repulsiveness or stupidity. From the womb of a dying city, from within the sacrifice, Ginzburg offers herself and her class of “intellectuals” a very different form of mobilization: refuting the personal and self-interested in the name of a form of austere citizenship, indifference to each individual fate, but salvation of the whole. This would have been impossible before the war, but the war had changed the old relationships. Where are the famous academics and intellectuals now, she asks? They stagger through the streets, their empty flats looted. The effective man is reborn in wartime, cleansed of his old habits. He has nothing left to weigh him down and is now useful to the collective effort.

As if in the same spirit of service, Lydia Ginzburg’s prose is concise and workmanlike. The notes, which exist in a number of variations, are selected for their specific subject matter, from which a sense of the typical can be gleaned, observations that serve as a basis for conclusions. All personal matters are eschewed, as if the personal were considered to be dead already, a matter for study, evisceration, analysis; description, but only in order to pass general comment. Everything unnecessary (hedonistic accounts of the wondrous and beautiful) is shoved out. Although in the huge volume of her texts about the Siege of Leningrad there is one fragment (which feels almost ashamed of itself) in which the narrator almost imperceptibly falls into the familiar mode of trancelike contemplation:

The text, which has up till then operated somewhere between report and abstracted general experience, suddenly stops for a closer look, then brims over like water. The self is momentarily effaced and all circumstances and duties are forgotten. After a few lines the author comes to her senses, rushing to add that “for our contemporaries there is no mysticism, no Romanticism in this,” only inconvenience — but the experience of her comrades in misfortune, who were also entranced by the nightscape and the light, suggests otherwise. The collective “us” of the city’s inhabitants, which Ginzburg defined herself against, was nearly threadbare by then, so thin you could see the city’s bridges and buildings through its fabric. It seems as if these shameful trancelike moments, where a person contemplated the existence of a world beyond her, were the only manifestations of Lydia Ginzburg’s unrealizable dream of a shared space.

In mid-autumn the weather in the city was only just beginning to cool. People talked about the inevitable food shortages to come, but they were still serving food in the cafés. After the air raid they filled the bath and washed the children, but very soon the idea that you could turn on the tap and water would flow from it became inconceivable. The city was being bombed, the windows were taped over, and darkness filled the evenings, but the dark-blue streetcars continued to run until December. Food rations decreased. Instead of 600g of bread they now gave workers 200g. In September Lyubov Shaporina went shopping, got her bread ration, and stopped to read a newspaper board. Then she realized she’d forgotten to get the five eggs she was permitted. A few weeks later, the simple idea of forgetting to get one’s ration was in itself unimaginable. One person wrote that they had been sleeping in their clothes for many days, ready to go down to the shelter at night. That Terrible Winter they slept in their icy apartments fully dressed, pulling any rags they could find over themselves (when spring came and Lydia Ginzburg had survived, she found it hard to make herself take off her felt boots and change back into shoes). Fuel supplies ran out in September and it was becoming colder. Everyone was sent to chop wood: teenagers, girls in thin coats and light shoes. Snow fell for the first time on the night of October 7. The following day Lyodik turned up in the besieged city.

Purple ink on a small sheet of paper

At the very same time Lyubov Shaporina was writing in her diary that the stewed cabbage cores she’d found outside the city were very good, and it would be worth stocking up on them. It was evening. Lyodik had already left his aunts and he was walking down the unlit streets, returning to his unit. By nightfall the clouds had parted and the stars were bright. Shaporina was waiting for “surprises” — her euphemism for air raids. “Marina Kharms came to see me. Daniil Ivanovich [Daniil Kharms] was arrested six weeks ago, the building next to theirs has been destroyed and their house has a crack running through it. All the windows have been blown out,” she wrote. “Marina has nothing to live on, and her anguish over Daniil is killing her.”

On the same day German intelligence reported back to the High Command for the 18th Army on morale in the besieged city, and recommended broadening the approach to propaganda: “It is essential to use leaflets as a medium which is both unexpected and can bring about confusion among the enemy, by suggesting that Soviet measures are in the German interest. For example: workers should not refuse to take up arms, as at the necessary moment they can turn these against their red masters.” This is a strange echo of the words quoted in the case against Kharms. If we are to believe the unnamed secret police informant, Kharms once said: “If they force me to man a machine gun from the rooftops during street battles with Germans, then I will fire, not at the Germans, but at them.”

Secret Police reports, quoted in a book about the Siege of Leningrad by historian Nikita Lomagin, kept a precise record of defeatist attitudes in the besieged city. In October there were 200–250 manifestations of “anti-Soviet sentiment” a day. By November it was 350. In the shops where bread lines began forming at 2:00–3:00 a.m., and flocks of teenagers came begging for crusts, conversations were all about how “the Germans would come and restore order.” Shaporina wrote, and not unsympathetically, about a circulating myth: that special bombs would fall and cover the city with smoke, and when the smoke dispersed there would be a German policeman standing on every street corner.

I remember how in the first weeks of war Lev Rakov, the former lover of the poet Mikhail Kuzmin and a handsome scholar and Russian dandy, said reassuringly to a friend in a Leningrad café, still with all its windows sparkling and intact: “You worry too much. What if the Germans do invade. They won’t stay for long. And then the English will come in their stead, and we’ll all be reading Dickens. And anyone who doesn’t want to won’t have to.”

For many, Dickens was a savior in the besieged city, he was medicine for the soul, and a source of warmth. People read and reread his novels, and read them aloud to children, particularly Great Expectations with its ice-cold house and its wedding cake overhung with cobwebs; in sixteen-year-old Misha Tikhomirov’s diary he writes that he has kept for the evening’s reading (for added sweetness) “three scraps of dried bread (very small), a piece of rusk, half a spoon of caramelized sugar.”

Today I am rereading Lyodik’s letter from that October, with the padded jacket and the handkerchiefs. I want this blissful scene from Dickens to go on forever: the aunts giving warmth and succor to the freezing, half-animal soldier, fussing around him, dressing him in anything they can find, happy that he is alive and they are alive, and feeding him with their very last (or nearly last) provisions. And all this in the worst hours of war, in a city that has gone black from the inside out, where soon no one will be able to help anyone; all this in an apartment with taped-up windows, shining on the inside like an amber lamp.

The letter was passed between relatives and not subject to the censor so Lyodik could have written as he pleased, but he didn’t and wouldn’t have written freely. On the Leningrad Front in Autumn 1941, letters were increasingly being stopped by the censor. In the city alone the censored letters numbered in the thousands. Even those that reached their destination were different from Lyodik’s letters: most of all in their desire to share their experience of what was happening around them. Some ask for items of equipment or clothing or cigarettes; others describe the workings of gun batteries, or explain what a political officer’s job is. Some promise to beat the enemy to the last, and describe how it is to be done (“Dear Manya, dear sister, I’m on sentry duty a lot and it’s unbearable”). Leonid Gimmelfarb, Lyodik, is, as usual, very well, and the whole thing begins to seem more and more peculiar, especially after a month with no letters and then a new letter in which he mentions both his laziness and tonsillitis.

Impossible to verify this, but I can’t dispel the thought that in those terrible weeks tonsillitis was hardly reason enough to leave the front line for a hospital, especially a hospital in Leningrad, which, to compound matters, would have been hard to reach. My immediate thought was that Lyodik had been injured and didn’t want to tell his mother, and this seems both likely and unknowable. In Nikolai Nikulin’s notes he says that no one got sick at the front: there was nowhere to be sick. They slept in the snow, and if anyone had a fever they simply walked it off. Nikulin remembers how the nails came away from his frostbitten fingers, and recalls a radio operator who spent a night on all fours because he was in constant pain from a stomach ulcer. Another witness wrote about the permanent hunger:

On November 16, the 994th Regiment held their position under artillery fire. A cold day, around minus twenty degrees. It was impossible to build any kind of concrete defense on the marshland, so the soldiers dug in as best they could. The Germans advanced to occupy a part of the Russian front line, but constant gunfire gave the Germans no opportunity to advance farther. On the following day the attack faltered, the Germans fell back. The ground was frozen, so they found pits that had been dug earlier in the autumn and threw four hundred bodies in them. The remaining dead, both German and Russian, were left lying in the battlefield. Soon the snow fell and covered their bodies as best it could.

Lyodik’s letter was sent on November 27. It isn’t clear where he was writing from, or what had happened to him. Why didn’t the Leningrad relatives ever write to our side of the family to say that he had been ill? How did they make it to the hospital at a time when some people no longer had the energy to climb stairs? How did they get home afterward? On November 25, the bread rations were reduced again. Workers, children, and dependents now received 125 grams of bread a day. Hospital workers and the injured had it a little easier. Doctor Klavdiya Naumovna — I don’t know her surname — (her diary notes are addressed to her evacuated son, “my golden boy Lesik,” and the diary breaks off in 1942) writes,

At the beginning of December Shaporina noticed that people’s bodies were beginning to bloat with starvation. Their faces had the yellow tinge of scurvy, “there were many like them in 1918 as well.” She recalled someone saying they had seen two frozen corpses on the streets. During these weeks the presence of death swelled to occupy more and more space in the texts about the Siege. The authors described the lines for burial spaces, the sleighs and carts loaded with the newly dead, corpses lying on the streets, corpses scattering from the back of trucks. Toward the end of January this horror had become the ordinary state of things, along with the daily coexistence with death, taken for granted, barely worth mentioning. On the morning of January 1, 1942, the seventy-year-old artist Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva noted down, not without pride, that she had eaten wood glue: “Never mind. A shudder of disgust ran through me from time to time, but I am sure that was simply just an excess of imagination. The jelly of it wasn’t revolting, if you added cinnamon or a laurel leaf.”

It was too easy to fall into thoughts about food, dangerous and inescapable thoughts, and then lose the will to keep moving — these thoughts made up the secret heart of life under siege. It was frighteningly tempting to talk about food, and people tried to avoid it, especially in company, or at work, or in places of public assembly. At home in the evenings, food was the only channel of conversation, spreading into the warm shallow waters of collective reminiscing: of dinners, of breakfasts, restaurant napkins, and little pools of yolk. Dreams about food to be enjoyed once the war was over were fantasies with a particular poisonous joy: they warmed the mother and daughter falling into sleep with visions — bread that didn’t need to be measured out but could be ripped into hunks, sprinkled with sugar and doused in oil, blushing potatoes fried to perfection. The city’s inhabitants considered it best to fend these mirages off, as they soon became the beginning of the end. In the same way they advised people not to stuff their bread ration in their mouth as they left the shop. Food had to be discussed carefully and selectively because any mistake could end in scenes of wild ferocity, terrible accusations. In the letters and diaries the least mention of food gave rise to a whole list of accounts of food, which few could refrain from: Let me tell you all about the food we used to eat at a party!

In Lyodik’s letters no mention was ever made of food.

This letter seems particular and strange, at a slant to the rest. The other letters always begin with a fountain of questions and end with a symmetrical collection of answers (the Aunts, baby, etc., etc., the order is pretty much the same always: from close family outward). The questions would seem formal if they weren’t underpinned by melancholy. This melancholy is not in the words themselves but in the space behind them, and in the number of letters — have they reached their destination? — and in the insistence of the repeated phrasing. It’s as if a person wanted desperately to send news, but was instead obliged to simply cover the whole surface of a piece of paper with one and the same question. The correspondence is the only way to reach out and touch his beloved family, but at the same time he can’t let them know what is actually happening to him. Only very occasionally the seams come apart and you can see the padding inside. The summer before, Lyodik wrote to his aunt, my great-grandmother: “I am glad you’ve settled so well and you have your own smallholding and even chickens. You made me laugh when you said you’d be very glad to leave it all and go home. However good it is, home is better always. We don’t need to hide this fact, right?”

The excerpt about training is one of the only places where the anxiety eating away at him is visible. The whole matter is squeezed into a few unsure sentences, and the “choice” made (“I had no say in the matter”) seems not entirely fixed — it could possibly be undone. He wants to hear what his mother makes of it: “Will you write to me and tell me?”

There was a desperate shortage of officers of all ranks on the frontline. By January 1, the commanding officers on the Volkhovsky Front had been almost entirely replaced. On October 4, 1941, Order 85 was implemented to deal with this shortage, “On the Creation of Training Courses for Junior and Mid-ranking Officers in Every HQ and Division.” Stalin himself amended the order, decreasing training times to match the situation: a month for those on frontline duties, two months for those stationed at bases. The latter applied directly to Lyodik, with his recently acquired military experience:

There was an amendment in the third paragraph as well: Stalin changed the phrase “best officers” to the more realistic “educated” officers. There were extremely low demands placed on trainers, and the training itself was incredibly short. Officers were supposed to lead their soldiers into attack and so they fell first, dying in their thousands. The country needed ever more officers — it was hungry for them. They stood out more than the men they led, and could be blamed when the platoon retreated under heavy fire, or when a sentry left his post to warm up.

Daily food allowances for hungry frontline soldiers were far more generous than they were for recruits in the besieged city. Rations were constantly being reassessed and reduced in 1941, but all the same rations for soldiers on the frontline were unbelievably luxurious compared to allowances in the city just ten kilometers north. There was tobacco and 900 grams of bread, meat and cereal, onion and potato. Anyone with scurvy was given vitamin C tablets. The rations for the wounded in hospital were fairly generous, too. They got 600 grams of bread a day, meat, fish, but also milk and butter, juice or fruit extract. For those in recovery the bread ration rose to 800 grams. In comparison with this the life of a recruit was pared back to the minimum, and rumors about how bad life was reached the frontline.

Even if Lyodik hadn’t been afraid of facing hunger on his training course, or if he hadn’t seen with his own eyes what was going on in Leningrad, he still would’ve had grounds for anxiety. The conscription act had included those of “doubtful lineage” but only up to a limit: the children and grandchildren of priests, aristocrats, and merchants were fine for basic military service but they were not eligible for officer ranking. Lyodik (Leonid Gimmelfarb) had a complicated backstory: relatives abroad, whose new colored photographs were in the old albums, and grandfathers whose lineage and position were best left unmentioned on forms. Rising through the ranks made all that a little more visible as the forms were more scrutinized, one’s position less secure. And perhaps there was also his shame at leaving his comrades on the frontline. Besides, Lyodik, with his dislike of melodrama, must have found the position of an officer repellent: controlling the circumstances of others, always in the wrong, dragged into the limelight against his will.

The frontline soldier Ivan Zykov describes officer training in Leningrad, though at a higher level: commanding officer of a battalion. The training took place in a former school on the outskirts of Leningrad, where they slept as well, with their revolvers under their pillows and their loaded rifles stacked in pyramids. They didn’t once go into the city, because there was nothing to do in town but remember its prewar glory. There was no heating in the school — the water pipes had frozen back in November. They say that some theaters were still open, that the actors shuffled onstage with sunken faces to act.

The freezing weather lasted a very long time. “The snow fell, and fell, and fell. The square, the banks of the Neva, the peeling facade of the Winter Palace, the broken windows of the Hermitage — it all seems somehow distant and fantastical, a fairy tale of a dying city, where Chinese shadow puppets still move, hurrying about until they breathe their last.” By February the constant talk was of cannibalism; dark rumors filled the pages of diaries. “Professor D, a pathologist, says that the liver of a person who has died of starvation has a bad taste, but when mixed with brains, is delicious. How on earth does he know???” These stories are relayed with the repeated refrain: “True or false?” The extreme naturalism of the description returns both the storyteller and the reader to their senses. Around this time Shaporina, who remained an objective and sober narrator, almost to the point of removing herself from the narrative, writes: “I have become a cave dweller.” She received her ration of 450 grams of meat and “I didn’t have the patience to cut it with a knife and fork, I picked it up in my hands and ate it.”

In Spring 1942, stiffly, almost unwillingly, life began returning to its former shape. Food supplies increased, a market opened, things could once again be bought for money. The city was coarser, in the sun it seemed almost rural — here and there patches of land appeared from under the snow, ready for sowing potatoes, cabbage, and cucumbers. In April the city’s inhabitants came out onto the streets to clear them after the Terrible Winter. The Terrible Winter lived on of course, it seemed to breathe through every crack, but still the changes felt like heaven. This insubstantial, shaky euphoria (there was no faith in it, but still a desire to linger beneath a glassy sun) washes through the Siege diaries during these weeks and months. At the beginning of summer Klavdiya Naumovna writes to her son:

Shaporina confirms this, writing that the air was wonderful — and how delicious the radish was. She didn’t have much hope left, but at least they were still alive.

Otter, Lydia Ginzburg’s hero and alter ego, expresses the same feeling of a suspicious absence of hunger, waking with a “wonderful, still undiminished lack of suffering.” Otter’s Day, from which she later draws the perfectly constructed Notes from the Blockade, was written with some distance in 1943 and 1944, but the description of life returning to its former state, without apparent reason, seems very real in its unlikeliness. “The window was open. He was neither hot nor cold. It was light all around. And it would stay light the whole of the white night through. He didn’t even feel like eating. […] Otter threw back the sheet and exposed his body to the light, bright air, neither cold nor hot.”

There was a welcome lull in hostilities on the Leningrad Front. Nikulin wrote of the “layering of corpses” that had been left over the winter and had reappeared when the snow melted: the September dead in their light jackets and shoes, overlaid by the marines in their felted peacoats, the Siberians in their short fur jackets, and the city’s volunteer defense forces. The roads were wet and impassable, the dugouts filled with water. Spring dried everything, made the earth even again, decorated it with green, and disguised the graves. “The soldiers rested behind their defenses. There were hardly any new dead or wounded. Training began, they even started showing films […] They built bathhouses everywhere, and got rid of the lice.” It was a sunny summer: they slowly got ready for an offensive. Lyodik’s mother asked him if he was due leave and he replied that “no leave is given in wartime. When the war is over then I hope to see you all, my dearest ones.” Singers came and gave concerts to the soldiers — the still-unknown Klavdiya Shulzhenko sang “The Blue Scarf,” which had been adapted for her and which would later become a wartime classic:

Before the war “The Blue Scarf” had seemed little more than a simple ditty, and the words were quite different. It was almost by chance that it became the hymn to the soldier’s blues: another young lieutenant on the same Volkhovsky Front handed the singer, Shulzhenko, a piece of paper with his version of the lyrics, and they stuck:

Many of the popular songs of the period had similar fates. The fashionable “Chelita” was given new life by the Soviet music hall stars of the thirties. The Mexican original was more urgent and more sublime, but the Soviet version had some catchy lyrics and carefully managed class awareness: the Mexican señores may have promised her heaps of pearls, but the heroine only has eyes for the baker’s boy under the midday sun. A famous Red Army song, “Boldly We Go Into Battle for the Soviets,” has a White Army twin, “Boldly We Go Into Battle for Holy Rus,” only the latter is sung in a slow deep voice, as if rising up from underground. Both versions have a common root (or branch) in the beautiful song “The Scented Buds of the White Acacia.” Grandmother Dora, who remembered the Civil War well, used to sing a song about the Priamursky Partisans to me in my childhood, and only years later I found unexpectedly its perfect reverse, the same tune used for the war march of the opposing Siberian Infantry. Even the salon waltzes from the piles of old manuscripts have their strange echoes in Soviet propaganda songs.

The Second World War song “Katyusha,” composed in Russian in 1939 by Matvei Blanter, was sung across the world — one of its incarnations was the hymn of the Spanish Blue Division, who fought on the Leningrad Front, but on the side of the Wehrmacht. In this version the singer sings of a spring without flowers, far away from a loved one, and the ignoble foe swimming in vodka. It’s a sad song and it ends with the promise of a heroic end. In a single battle at Krasny Bor, over a thousand Spaniards were killed in only an hour.

There was death everywhere that summer. On the other side of no-man’s-land Lyodik wrote to his cousin: “I think I will join the Party, so I can defeat the damned enemy in a Bolshevik spirit! Here’s to victory! Here’s to meeting again soon!”

Surprisingly, soldiers and officers still received a wage in wartime. In 1939, an infantryman received between 140 and 300 rubles a month, and artillerymen and tank crew received slightly more. Soldiers on active service received additional “field payments.” For officers these payments were set at 25 percent of the basic wage. Junior Lieutenant Gimmelfarb was in command of a platoon and his minimum wage would have been 625 rubles. In the bundle with the papers that the beautiful Verochka Gimmelfarb left on her death were the yellow stubs of money transfer orders, on the back of each a few words including the unchanging “love, Lyodik.”

This was his last letter. On August 25, Lyubov Shaporina, writing up conversations she’d had, noted in brackets: “(I’m writing and somewhere outside the city or on its outskirts there’s prolonged gunfire, an artillery duel, the guns are muttering deep and low, threateningly, like a big storm approaching.)”

On August 27, the ill-fated Sinyavinsky Operation began. The offensive was intended to breach the Siege at its narrowest point, where besieged Soviet troops were only 16 kilometers away from the main Soviet army. But it was across an area of marshland and forest, which the Germans had reinforced with gun emplacements, dugouts, and minefields. Hundreds of meters of barbed wire, fences with gun slits surrounded by ditches of marsh water, “and the guns kept roaring and the radio plays a cheerful tune. It’s rumored the offensive has begun,” Shaporina wrote.

The 994th Rifle Regiment had been given orders to take the village of Voronovo and dig in there. Beyond a stream lay two half-destroyed hotel complexes held by the Germans. The Commanding Officer of the 1st Battalion described it all very carefully in his memoirs: the constant firing meant the infantry had to keep low to the ground, a few tanks breached the line and crossed a bridge only to find they were alone and exposed, five days of incessant and futile fighting, officers dying one after the other.

The man who wrote this returned home crippled. Lyodik Gimmelfarb’s mother received the standard notification of death. It says that her son was killed on August 27, on the very first day of the Operation. In the fog of mass slaughter, the dates and anniversaries of death could only be approximate since no one knew the actual dates. Aleksandr Gutman, who commanded a battalion in a neighboring regiment, said that they wrote “fell in battle” on all the notifications of death, as it wasn’t always possible to rescue the bodies of comrades from the battlefield and the record of the dead was poorly kept. The last moment of clarity before the darkness descends is a few hours before the beginning of battle:

Lyodik always mentions the baby in his letters, still nameless and without gender. The baby has either appeared, or is just about to. This unborn child who was so important to him was my mother, Natasha Gurevich. She used to tell me all about Lyodik when I was small. She had chosen him in childhood to be her hero, making him the secret center of her little world, and she remembered him as long as she lived. The envelope of letters, photographs, and death notifications has her handwriting on it.

9. Joseph, or Obedience

In Würzburg there is a palace, the Würzburg Residence, and in it a fresco by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo that is unlike anything else in the whole wide universe. That’s a silly thing to say, of course, because everything in the universe is like everything else; “everything rhymes,” as Marina Tsvetaeva said. The fresco blushes pink the length of the ceiling, and is filled with the incredible creatures reality usually keeps hidden in the circus or the Hollywood costume department. But here they are all, gathered in a parade of the Four Continents. The Continents have detached themselves from their geographic positions, gathered their belongings, and made haste to join the celebrations in honor of the Prince-Bishop of Würzburg. The artist himself arrived at the party before anyone else, sitting out three years in the northern town — three whole years, while this phantasmagoria was appearing on the ceiling: parrots, monkeys, dwarfs and Indigenous peoples, serving girls, empresses, crocodiles, the white legs of heavenly creatures, half-dissolving in the rosy atmosphere. All of them angled to look down on our far thinner existence, like a lid on a boiling saucepan, hinting at the fact that reality can be far brighter and more fascinating than the version we have constructed for ourselves.

This rainbow apparition was nearly destroyed in the air raids during the Second World War, when over 900 tonnes of TNT was dropped on the town in just a few weeks. The square where they burned books on a spring evening in 1932 was unrecognizable by 1945; the adjoining residence a mere ghost. The palace no longer had a roof, and what hadn’t been consumed by fire was spoiled by rain and soot. The pale white stucco ceiling in the Throne Room had disappeared as if it had never existed — its painstaking relief had been more like the seabed than the ceiling of a place of pomp and splendor: the feathers and the flagpoles lay in patterns reminiscent of fish bones picked clean, and the spears gathered in sheaves could, without much effort, pass as the masts of shipwrecks.

Everything has been restored: the stucco and the mirrors, and the shifting tones of the room, where silver flows into green as if there were no difference between them. The huge fresco, with its varied wonders and crocodiles, shines as it always did. Roberto Calasso describes its rose-tinted luminosity as the last breath of happiness in Europe in his book about Tiepolo. Despite its teeming, multicolored crowds, he insists on apprehending it as a single spellbinding composition. “We are in the midst of a sample of humanity that is not yet exotic, but not provincial.” It is able to establish a “relationship of familiarity” with “every imaginable figure, human or semidivine, such as the Nymphs or other denizens of rivers and springs. For Tiepolo, the plumed Indian woman riding an alligator is no more singular than the European musicians who played at court.” In this peaceful demonstration the real and the invented appear as equals; mysterious creatures and strange substances alongside the representatives of the familiar world, as if that were the only way. There is no image too banal, no novelty too shocking for these crowds. Tiepolo “invented something one might dream about to this day: a democracy leveled off toward the top, where aesthetic quality makes it possible to eliminate any divergence in status.”

On the website of the Whitney Museum of American Art there’s a description of a work of art that sounds a little like an inventory of someone’s trouser pockets, a list Tom Sawyer might have aspired to. It reads: painted wood and printed paper, aperitif glasses, marbles, plaster head, painted cork ball, metal rods, brad nails, and painted glass. All this, collected into the cardboard term “assemblage,” and kept in a specially made glass-fronted wooden box. We might think of it as a shopfront, or a jewelery box, or an icon surround, a suitcase with a transparent lid: in every case the essential attribute is that the contents are singled out, exposed and inviolable under their glass shroud (and perhaps they might even be invisible, living inside their own belly).

The artist Joseph Cornell is best known for his boxes. He made a huge quantity of these over his long life. At first he used ready-made boxes for his strange projects, and then he began making them himself in the basement of his little suburban home. There are dozens of these boxes: he gave some to people he admired. Occasionally his admiration cooled and he wrote to the recipient to ask for the return of the gift to its owner. In one way or another, they always remained his, his treasure, his precious…

All Cornell’s boxes are glass-fronted; there’s a teasing element in this, as every little object seems intended to be touched, the colored sand run through your fingers, the marbles transferred from glass to pocket. Sealed shut, like museum cabinets, the boxes promise play and yet suggest that playtime is delayed indefinitely. The box’s addressee is usually long gone; one of Cornell’s most famous boxes is meant as a gift for a great ballerina who died in 1856. “Taglioni’s Jewel Casket,” lined in brown velvet and garlanded with a necklace of large gems, contains sixteen transparent cubes, like ice cubes, resting on blue glass and waiting for their owner. An inscription in the lid tells the story:

Taglioni only came to Russia in 1837; the fairly unlikely story of the honorable highwayman is different in its original telling: instead of a panther skin spread over the snow there’s a carpet spread over the wet slush, and there is no mention of the ice cubes. The only “actuality,” to use Cornell’s word, is Cornell himself — and his ardent belief in the power of boxes and caskets. His many closed chambers could be brought together to form a doll’s house, filled with priest holes and secret rooms, “Suitcases,” “Soap Bubble Sets.” Or perhaps a doll’s town, complete with “Hotels” and “Observatories,” “Dovecotes,” “Pharmacies,” “Aviaries,” “Sand Fountains.” These are the titles of series, rather than individual works, consisting of many variations, each leading to the next, like a suite of rooms.

Cornell died on December 29, 1972, a year before his seventieth birthday. He would have enjoyed the date, placed in a celebratory box between Christmas and the New Year; he was born on Christmas Eve as well. He spent almost all his life in the same place, Utopia Parkway, 3708, in a modest suburban house, with his elderly mother and his disabled brother Robert. His studio was in the basement, where he kept tens of thousands of images and photocopies ready for future works, boxes of essential objects (“best white boxes — Empty,” “Plastic Shells new-1960”), files of notes and clippings. His strange passions made him a specialist in many niche areas, from ballet iconography to the history of silent film, and even experts would sometimes turn to him for advice. As he grew older he became increasingly impatient with collectors and tried to avoid selling his work or even exhibiting it. There was one sure way to get a hold of it, though — to visit him at home in the company of a young ballerina or starlet, and afterward buy up anything that the old man gave her as a gift.

After the death of his brother, Joseph Cornell often said that Robert had been the better artist — Robert (as an acerbic critic once noted) mostly drew mice, and was seriously into model railways. A sequence of works was dedicated to his memory, signed “Joseph and Robert Cornell.” The simple and rather sad mechanism, which stood behind this desire to bring the two names together, to make something together, was the main engine for Joseph’s very many activities, it was what made him tick. Robert Cornell, Taglioni, Gérard de Nerval, and many others, each in their own way, all demanded love, little temples to the embodiment of memory. These usually took the form of the little boxes: memorials to a meeting, drafts of a space where a conversation might take place.

Over long years of rummaging in antique shops, Cornell perfected his complex system of internal rhyme to the point where he could couple anything together with little or no effort. In this lay his sense of secret delight. He considered his teachers to be Mallarmé and Baudelaire: both were informed by a sense of the “correspondences” riddling the world with their countless ant trails, but in Cornell’s work this has the opposite effect. His objects learned a new obedience — each item considers for a moment, then lies down in its place and makes itself useful: all the objects became family. Every object has the chance to bask in the golden light of “being seen”; the wood shavings, the colored sand, and the cork balls exhibit a majesty and poise more befitting to ballerinas and poets. It seems as if the fact of future oblivion and decline was enough to make any object invaluable to Cornell. Every new work was constructed like Noah’s Ark, with the intention of preservation at its heart.

Anyone who lived in 1970s Russia will recognize in Cornell’s boxes the game of sekretiki or “little secrets” — the passion of my childhood. Nothing in the humdrum reality of this time could have explained the appearance of this game. Strictly speaking it was only a “game” in the sense that it had rules. Sekretiki wasn’t just any activity, it was a secret that you shared only with your closest friends and it was like no other game played in the street or at school. It was “underground” in the most direct sense of the word because the little secrets were kept under the ground, like treasure or dead bodies. In the country, where people were always bent over the land, planting seeds or digging out food, there would have been nothing special in this, but we were children of the city who knew the way home from school by the cracks in the pavement, and we had no relationship with the black and granular earth that every Spring gave the acacia and the lilac its freedom.

To make a “little secret” you had to drop down and press yourself against the earth. Choose a place, dig a little hole, look around and check no one is watching, put in the precious object, cover it with a piece of scrubbed-clean glass and then pour the earth back over, tamp it down so it looks untouched. Now I realize that these tiny tombs, lined with foil and filled with a tiny supply of all the beauty in the world were very like ancient burial chambers, with their assortment of objects ready for the immortal life. Very special things were chosen for the “little secret,” things that were few and far between: gold and silver paper, feathers, clippings from newspapers with a photograph of an actor or actress, precious beads or buttons, sometimes even tiny little dolls or figurines. The essential layer of glass turned the “little secret” into a shop window waiting for someone to come past and look in.

Like all buried treasure (X marks the spot), they weren’t very reliable hiding places, and you could more or less forget about ever seeing your trove again. Very few people knew about the burial place, two or three trusted friends. But a few days later, when you checked back under the bush there was nothing there. The “little secret” had disappeared as if it’d never existed. Either some boys, who had followed your movements with a predatory eye, had dug it up, or a rival had found it and buried it somewhere else. Or perhaps you’d simply forgotten where to dig (all your little remembered coordinates proving false friends). Sometimes it felt as if the sekretiki, like underground rivers, or seams of gold, lived according to their own instinct and could even move from place to place.

There was nothing much for the sekretiki above ground. The aesthetic system of Soviet life was thorough and in its own way convincing, but it adhered to an unspoken bias toward understated, decent, cheerful modesty, with no pretense to the gaudy or extravagant. Some insignificant departures from the norm were acceptable, as long as these were only small steps out of line: sentimentality, the soft focus of tenderness or grief as a response to understandable and general feelings, like yearning for lost youth or love for one’s children, or hope for something better. Anything suggesting equality or unity was acceptable, but eccentricity, standing out from the crowd without justification, was quite another thing. Anything that could be interpreted as outlandish behavior (even earrings in the ears of schoolgirls) was seen as an attempt to break through into a space labeled “unacceptable exclusivity” and that sort of thing — opulence, plumes and tails, silk stockings and sparklers — was in danger of destroying the general equilibrium and had to be kept at bay. Perhaps that is why it now feels to me as if the “little secrets,” filled with the “outlandish,” a concentration of the burlesque, forbidden beauty, crystal beads, cut out paper roses, became political refuges, crossing both state and other boundaries.

At various moments in history, in the villages and the rural hamlets of this vast country, people hid sawn-off shotguns and Grandfather’s revolver and even Tsarist gold coins. Nearer Moscow, in the gardens of summerhouses and allotments, anti-Soviet literature lay in the damp darkness — the seditious books and manuscripts that were too dangerous to keep even in the attic. Our apparently pointless little secret burials might have had a direct relationship with this history: we were hiding from chance view the beauty that was so lacking around us, and which we didn’t want to share with anyone in our sekretiki.

Years later I came across the word in a book of memoirs. A short text, written in English in the 1950s, with nothing to do with the underground sparkle of foil and glass. The book described the period of pogroms in the south of Ukraine in 1919 through the eyes of a little girl, how the people in the village lay awake at night waiting for them to come, and then they did. It recounted how the women and children hid wherever they could, under fences and behind tree stumps, and then returned to their houses to wash and dress the murdered. The people living there had different ways of hiding, the hiding places necessary when flight is impossible: brick-lined secret rooms, underground holes, dugouts with whole families sheltering in them to sit out the pogrom. Sometimes they managed to escape notice. The memoir gave these hiding places a name. It was spelled with English letters, but the Cyrillic pulsed feverishly from within: sekreten.

In December 1936, in a New York gallery, Joseph Cornell showed his first film to a small audience. It was called Rose Hobart and it lasted about seventeen minutes. The lens of the projector was covered with blue glass that gave the image a lunar tint. The film was in slow motion and had no sound, as if the action was happening twenty years before, in the age of the silent movie.

The thirty-two-year old Salvador Dalí was in the audience. In the middle of the screening he jumped to his feet and shouted that Cornell had robbed him. He insisted that this idea had been in his subconscious, these had been his, Dalí’s, dreams, and Cornell had no right to use them as he wished.

After Dalí and his wife and muse Gala had left the gallery, the film continued: dark-blue Indigenous people in light-blue loincloths chased crocodiles down to the river with poles, wind fluttered the palm fronds, a woman of exquisite beauty moved toward something and looked at it closely, and then did this another few times. The sun was eclipsed, a bubble appeared on the surface of the water, round as an eye. A woman played with a monkey. Cornell showed none of his films after this one, although in some ways it had fulfilled its function, even on its own.

It’s curious that Dalí considered stolen what belonged to neither him, nor Cornell — at least not according to the definition of intellectual property. Everything in the film shown at the Julien Levy Gallery that day, with the exception of one or two shots, was taken from the adventure film East of Borneo, made in 1931 and lacking all artistic distinction. Reviewers of the original film noted the implausible plot, the incredible number of disasters and the wooden acting of the actress playing the lead role. She was called Rose Hobart and her high cheekbones and auburn hair was a combination potent enough to ensure her immortality.

The action-packed East of Borneo lasted 77 minutes. It was soon dropped and forgotten, and the reels of film could be hunted down in the shops selling antiques and second-hand goods — there were plenty of such shops around Times Square. Cornell, who collected up anything with even a passing relevance to his many love interests, had a particular fascination with Hollywood’s cast-offs: photos of auditions, film stills no one needed, memorabilia from b movies, all nameless starlets and aging divas. When he got hold of the film reel for East of Borneo he simply cut out the superfluous — anything that had nothing to do with Rose, or got in the way of seeing her. In his film, named in her honor, absolutely nothing happens — but then that is perhaps why it’s so captivating.

Instead of rushing about on a mission, the heroine, always dressed in a colonial white, is doomed to live out what might be called a “pure” organic existence. In the first scene the camera creeps through the jungle darkness toward a lit hut where Rose is asleep and we see her through a transparent curtain: she looks quite diminutive, as if we were looking at a scene in one of Cornell’s boxes. Her white hat lies on a table. She moves in the lit interior, her face is quite expressionless, and only her outfits change in Cornell’s edited frames: a dress, another dress, a soft white raincoat with rounded lapels. She speaks, pressing her hands to her breast, but we can’t hear anything: the film has been silenced. Some of her movements are repeated, some two or three times as if we are being asked to follow her every gesture in its flowerlike unfolding. For the most part this is a narrative of looking: the heroine freezes and looks, staggers back, looks again.

In one scene a lovesick raja draws back the curtain and offers the white woman the rare sight of a volcano erupting. They watch it together, like moviegoers on a dark balcony. He wears a turban of fine material and she wears a floor-length evening dress — and before them the fire and the darkness. In the same shot there is a huge parrot, one of Cornell’s favorite creatures.

Almost all Cornell’s films are constructed in this same way. Not one lasts more than twenty minutes and as a rule they are usually much shorter. They are rarely talked about, perhaps because they are so strange. In one of his films, called Centuries of June, the camera is held at the eye level of a nine-year-old and its gaze wanders endlessly, over a wooden staircase and up a wall, up at the sky through the leaves, at the knees of children digging in the earth, the white socks of a little girl walking away down a street. Another film tells the story of a children’s party (one of the characters is gnawing at a huge apple, which grows to the size of the moon by the end of the film). His films are a sequence of strange and wonderful images: a black hole opening in the sky; a circus acrobat in white hanging from like a fish on a line, swinging her legs in the darkness and circling like a bud opening. Branches crash and rustle, the arrow on a weathervane turns to point like a bird’s beak, seagulls clap their wings; a fairy girl, her hair loose about her shoulders, rides a white horse; and a terrifying caricature of a Red Indian pulls a black mask down over his face and throws knives at his gentle squaw without ever hitting her. In another film a blonde-haired girl runs about a park holding a ripped cream-colored umbrella. Pigeons bathe in the fountain, the pigeons suddenly fly up, a sullen girl stands in the middle of a square and doesn’t know where to turn. Water flows. It’s a little like something filmed from a phone — as if the camera was set to record and left to capture life in all its pointless capaciousness.

Cornell saves everything that is dear to him, rescuing it from the passing of time in the same way that a child might take scissors and cut a picture of a favorite prince or princess out of the page of a book. And in the same way, in 1930s Soviet Russia, people would repeatedly go to watch a famous film about a Red Army Commander. The film, named after its eponymous hero Chapaev, was the site for the last encounter between the old world and the new. There’s a scene of “psychological warfare” in which White Army soldiers advance, with cigarettes in their mouths, only to be mowed down by Chapaev’s machine gun. As they fall, they are replaced by new soldiers with cigarettes in their mouths. The poet Mandelstam, exiled in Voronezh, describes this scene: the men come out, a cigarette “in the death grip of their teeth / machine-pressed officers / in the open groin of the heath.” The White Army men march in parade formation to the beat of a drum and they fall silently, one by one, to the stutter of machine gun fire. “How beautiful they are,” says one Red Army soldier to another. The White Army extras for this scene were dragged out of their oblivion to demonstrate once again that the victor is always right, and the beautiful are always the vanquished. The marchers included the poet Valentin Stenich, the first Russian translator of Ulysses. He was executed in 1938. It’s said he did not conduct himself with honor at his interrogations. God forbid anyone should find out how we conduct ourselves at ours.

There’s a myth connected with this film. In the end brave Chapaev, the hero of legends and jokes, dies. Injured, he swims the icy Ural river (“The water colder than a bayonet” — so the song goes), and the enemy shoots at him as he swims and we know he won’t survive. In more than one memoir from the time, the author tells the story of going to see the film three or four times, because it was rumored that in a cinema somewhere on the edge of town Chapaev swims free.

Stalin’s order concerning the poet Mandelstam, which led to his exile, was “isolate and preserve.” This feels like a good summary of Cornell’s long arduous years of hard labor. For him, to isolate (to pick out, reserve, and place in the correct context; to surround with correspondences and rhymes, bottle up, and seal; to find a space where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal) meant to preserve. In the Old Church Slavonic version of the Gospel of Matthew the treasures must be “hidden,” so “to preserve” in this interpretation means “to hide,” whereas in the King James Version the phrase used is “lay up,” as you might “lay up” supplies for winter in an attic or a barn, or in a vast warehouse. One such warehouse was the place of a revelation that changed Cornell’s life.

He told the story of this single ineffable moment of vision more than once. Circumstances had made him the breadwinner for his family, providing for his mother and invalid brother, and his job as a sales rep involved trawling round the little Manhattan fabric shops with samples. One evening at sunset, when all the windows of the big warehouse on West 54th Street were aflame with light, he saw in each window the image of Fanny Cerrito, the Italian ballerina, famous in the 1840s. She stood up on the roof of the building, and at the same time she was closing the blinds in hundreds of windows. “I heard a voice, and I saw a light,” as he said about another similar incident. After this he had many more visions, and became a connoisseur of these moments of sudden transformation. Cerrito was born in Naples in 1817. Cornell’s series of Neapolitan boxes (maps, views of Vesuvius, the blue of the sky) offered her a new and eternal home.

In Cornell’s diaries a passionate love of the past combines with a hunger for new and related practices to his. He is absolutely a contemporary artist: he reads Breton and Borges, he is friends with Duchamp, he follows Dalí’s work with interest, he is in correspondence with half the art world, he cites Magritte (he has a grief-filled collage dedicated to his brother’s memory with Magritte’s locomotive flying out of its fireplace like a bird let loose from its cage). He makes reference to Brancusi and Juan Gris, and his library of books on contemporary art is worn thin with constant handling. This is his context, he is in conversation with these artists. The peculiar thing is, of course, that no one ever really answers him. He knows all of them, and yet he is barely recognized — he spends his life in a vague periphery. The history of art eventually incorporated him, but he was still somehow the odd one out, like the obligatory weirdo at a fashionable gallery opening.

It’s not surprising: people and animals can sense an outsider. The task of the leader of any regime, any avant-garde, is to change the world: familiar objects need to be transformed, or to be viciously mocked so they are forced to renew themselves. Cornell used the tactics of the avant-garde in order to achieve something quite different; his colleagues sensed this and treated him with justifiable distrust. Duchamp’s hat rack, with its horns turned outward, conveyed its essentially alien nature (its “estrangement,” as the Formalists would have described it), but for Cornell the holiness of the ready-made was inviolable. In a world in which the artist had a right to everything, he behaved with the scrupulousness of the collector, keen to preserve his property in its very best state. His found objects were not the starting point for further distortion, but much-loved creatures with their own subjectivity. In a sense he continued C. S. Lewis’s theory that pets who are drawn into a loving relationship with a human grow their own soul, and in doing so are given a chance at eternal salvation. For this to happen, as I understand it, the dog or the canary doesn’t even have to feel love, but just has to have love poured over it by the nearest human. Cornell’s objects are redeemed in life in the same way: simply by being so very loved.

Love is an ungainly and absurd sentiment, invented to instill a certain amount of resignation and self-irony in a person; a state of lost equilibrium, created by the ridiculous situation and the inability to behave like a free and weightless being. It’s too much concerned with weight, it bends the lover to the ground, to his own weakness and mortality. It’s heavy to carry, even heavier to witness. I believe this partly explains Cornell’s incomplete reputation, its slightly crooked nature. Unlike Hopper or O’Keefe, with their finished work, which has traveled a long way from its author, Cornell’s boxes remain his “little secrets,” the cast-offs of a barely concealed passion. The viewer becomes witness to something almost too intimate, like a domestic peep show involving plush teddy bears, but devoid of any eroticism (eroticism would be more ordinary). Cornell is simultaneously too mad and too simplehearted to be taken seriously. These qualities are usually enough to relegate an author to the nursery, the pink bookcase full of tales of gallant knights; to the children, waiting patiently for the fearful tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen.

If we consider art as a profession then Cornell was never allowed to join its trade union. He remained an awkward dilettante, the one who tries to fit in and fails: he lacked something and so the big children wouldn’t play with him. Or perhaps he had too much of something: he was too fervent maybe. In his relations with life he behaved like he had a schoolgirl crush, like when a younger girl in a nineteenth-century novel followed a favored older girl around, trying to please her, keeping the precious ribbon she dropped. The chill of the experiment, which made twentieth-century art bearable, had no hold on his work, and this is important: Cornell in the world of art is rather like the huge but herbivorous elephant, surrounded by predators.

There is a famous story about the emigrant Vladimir Nabokov who once applied to join the literature department of a certain university. One of the panel was against the appointment. A clever and witty man, he noted that Nabokov was indubitably a “big” writer, but then the elephant was a big animal: you wouldn’t appoint it to teach zoology. This famous put-down is almost better known in Russia than the life’s work of this witty scholar. Every time I remember the story I am filled with pity for the shelterless elephant, who had neither use for nor satisfaction in his own greatness. Cornell was a similarly large beast, with no space for him in the collective landscape, and this was hardly without cause. But it didn’t seem to hold him back. In one of his late notes he writes of how he has a real memory of seeing another of his idols, Houdini, at the Hippodrome — and Houdini had made an elephant disappear.

The predator senses its prey from a long way off. In the letters and memoirs of those who knew him there is often a thick cloud of embarrassment. The weight of ecstasy the artist felt at each new manifestation of the material world was not easy to tolerate: for him life seemed to consist entirely of desserts and exclamation marks, pink foam and balloons. As I read his diaries, letters, working notes, the exclamation marks, and the revelations — daily, hourly, inexhaustibly — this incontinent enthusiasm began to irritate as much as the little French words Cornell used to decorate his suburban life. His excesses went well beyond the pale of normal behavior and into areas where none of his contemporaries would have strayed: enthusiasm as a way of surviving reality had been discredited, thrown out onto the heap, it was the preserve of dilettantes and those on the margins. The constant will to ecstasy had been as natural as breathing in the age of Goethe and his Russian counterpart, Karamzin, but one hundred years later an inability to “distance” oneself was frowned upon. Marianne Moore, whose poetry Cornell loved, was in a correspondence with him, and happily accepted his gifts of boxes with their precious contents, but when he asked her to write him a reference for a very important grant, she reacted as if this might have compromised her in some way.

Fervent Joseph Cornell, with his boxes and his clippings, the teenage “fairy girls” he would go out of his way to visit daily, whom he insisted on referring to in his notes as les fées (apricot fée at the café counter, fée aux lapins in the toyshop), his adulation of film stars and descriptions of their hats, is in a no-man’s land somewhere between the territory of professional art and the reserve of art brut, which at that point hadn’t gained its later status. His means of existing put him in the same camp as those we think of as mad or “possessed,” who give witness to the extreme experience, who look at our lives from a different angle, who make art without quite being aware of what they are doing. Their work needs biographical framing — it seems unreadable without this, just as you might place a stencil or colored paper over an encrypted text in order to read it.

In this sense, the artist Cornell, a Christian Scientist, a man who counted the hours till he could go and get an ice cream, was the close relative of Henry Darger, a hospital caretaker who wrote an enormous illustrated novel about young martyrs and heavenly wars in his Chicago lodgings. Both men worked and worked as if their survival depended on it, multiplying versions, accumulating essential source material in quantities that would be enough for several lifetimes, and then sorting everything into envelopes. (In Darger’s case these were labeled: “Plant and child pictures,” “Clouds to be drawn,” and in Cornell’s, “Owls,” “Dürer,” “Best White Boxes.”) Both entered into ambiguous and undefined relationships with their own heroes. Their ardor burnt so brightly and with such an even flame of fervent revelation that even the saints would have been envious. “Transcendent feeling about swan box” or “an intolerable sadness at passing a blue house” were all part of the daily fare. “Breakfast of toast, cocoa, boiled egg, tomato, bun in kitchen — words are singularly inadequate to express the gratitude felt for these experiences.”

“The depiction of thoughts through the depiction of associated objects” mentioned by the Russian poet Nikolai Zabolotsky is one of the very oldest mnemonic devices, a way of bringing thought back to mind. The memory is the last form of real estate, available even to those who have been denied all else. Its halls and corridors of stale air hold reality at bay. Cornell’s files and drawers of preparatory work were like a cellar or an attic in a house where nothing is ever thrown away; his boxes were the drawing room and parlor where the guests sat.

In one of Cornell’s diary notes he mentions a visit to the New York Museum of Natural History. He sat in the library and copied something out, all the while stealing glances at an old portrait of a Native American princess.

He visits the planetarium and its daytime stars and with the pleasure of familiarity he describes the glass-fronted displays of astronomical devices. It’s notable that this museum, with its Indians and dinosaurs, was the model of an ever-accessible, unmoving, constant paradise for another. In J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye the teenage Holden speaks in Cornell’s words:

I love being in this museum, most of all in the rooms of old dioramas: the calm unassailable dignity of the stuffed animals posing against a backdrop of painted hills and forests, just as my great-grandfathers and grandmothers posed against backdrops of painted gardens and mists. The real world of sawdust and wool quietly and seamlessly extends into the illusory, into rosy vistas and nut-brown muddy tracks, a soapy soft-focus that I remember from illustrations on postage stamps in the albums I saw as a child. The blue of the sky never fails to remind me of Cornell, the okapi in their striped socks reach out to tear off an absentminded leaf, the deer shake their antlers, and the lynx crosses the snow carefully — in the warm air every sound rings out. Then there’s an image of wet autumn woodland speckled red, and I begin to cry, very quietly, under my breath, because it’s the very same Moscow wood where I used to walk with my parents once, many thousands of miles ago, and we are now looking at each other again.

10. Things I Don’t Know

There’s a memorial in Moscow at Lyubyanka, a square surrounded by high buildings that have housed the various incarnations of secret police for the last hundred years. It’s an unobtrusive memorial, usually just called “the Stone,” the Solovetsky Stone, brought from the Solovetsky Islands where, in 1919, one of the very first Soviet prison camps was opened. Many more followed.

Every year in Autumn there is a special day when people gather to take part in a communal event. Everyone is given a little square of paper with the name, surname, and profession of a person who was executed during the years of Communist Terror. Then they line up to approach the Stone in order to say these names aloud. It lasts a whole day, and could go on far longer. Even toward evening, when it’s getting cold, there is no shortage of people in line. Those who lost parents and grandparents read their names alongside the names of strangers. Candles are lit by the Stone. A few years ago our ten-year-old son went to stand in line. He knew more or less why he was there, but he got cold and miserable waiting his turn. Then suddenly, when he heard the names and dates being read out, he seized hold of his father and burst into tears: “They killed that person on May 6, on my birthday, Dad… how unfair is that, Dad?”

Birthdays do matter after all. My grandmother Lyolya was born on May 9, Victory Day. I learned that important fact almost before I learned to walk. My mother loved to remember the Spring of 1945 when they returned to Moscow from evacuation: fireworks over the Kremlin, a long table with everyone eating together: family, friends, all the inhabitants of the communal apartment, and all this felt like a natural ending, like a long-awaited birthday present. Grandmother was born in 1916, but the year wasn’t important. The general victory celebration completed her own quieter celebration, confirmed that her birth date wasn’t just chance.

The natural connection between Grandmother and May 9 was such an integral part of family mythology that it was only recently that it occurred to me that the she was in fact born on April 26, back in the old world and according to the old Julian Calendar. It occurred to me, too that her father, my great-grandfather Misha, was born under a different name and lived with it for a few years. Among the old papers there is a certificate given to Mikhel Fridman, apothecary’s apprentice, and however hard I strain my eyes I can’t make out the moment of transformation, when something shifts and Great-Grandfather appears in the world as the young lawyer Misha, a court solicitor in polished boots, carrying volumes of Tolstoy. All I know is that he gave his student nephew a single piece of advice: “Live an interesting life.” Did he live an interesting life, I wonder? For these people, changing names was as common a matter as moving from one town to another. My other great-grandfather, the handsome Vladimir Gurevich — in his striped jacket with a jaunty group of friends at the seaside — unexpectedly turns out to be Moisey Vulf, according to his papers. How did he pull off the old skin, and how did he choose the new one? Mikhel becomes Misha almost effortlessly, Vulf becomes a Vladimir, as if he had always been a Vladimir. Sarra’s brother, the wonderful Iosif, the firstborn and favorite son of Abram Ginzburg, who broke his father’s heart when he converted to Christianity, was transformed into Volodya (hardly the obvious shift from Iosif), as if the age demanded of its children only blue-eyed straightforwardness.

Other surnames stayed in place and their owners wore them as they were. The Ginzburgs and the Gurevichs, who were from distant Polish and Bavarian towns, heaved toponyms around like sacks of possessions. The Stepanovs, with their bland newly built surname (with its vaguely Greek root: “stefanos” meaning crown or garland), had nothing distinctive in their names. The branches of the family tree are curiously bare of “Rosen” and “Mandal,” of stars and precious jewels. But it is peopled with apparently gentle, peaceful Libermans and Fridmans.

In our own history the most interesting part is what we don’t know. In other people’s histories it’s the animal magnetism of elective affinities that singles out this one from hundreds of others. Sebald’s method, his way of thinking and speaking, is founded on refusing to choose. Although when you begin reading, his books can seem riddled with tunnels like an ant nest, all leading to unexpected consonances. “Across what distances in time do the elective affinities and correspondences connect? How is it that one perceives oneself in another human being, or, if not oneself, then one’s own precursor?” If we are to believe him, then these connections come about of their accord, in the way that a magpie drags everything it can find into its nest. Sebald was touched above all by dates that coincided, birthdays, deathdays, and events through which you could see your own life.

When I bring to mind a date or an important event, sometimes it gives rise to a thought experiment, the point of which I hardly know myself. “If a child had been born to that day,” I think to myself, “then that child would now be x years old.” I express it like that — born to the day, and not to me or someone else, as if the event that changed my life had also given birth to someone new. There are by now lots of these invisible children, and they are growing up; but I remember one of them more often than the others. The child born to January 15, 1998, a frosty, radiant day in Moscow and a gray tricklingly damp day in Würzburg — the date of my mother’s death — would now be an adult.

This paragraph from Maksim Gorky’s Days With Lenin, which was censored by the Soviet authorities, is often quoted, and especially the bit about “beating them about the heads.” It’s also been noted that Lenin got the Sonatas confused. Dobrowen himself later confirmed (from emigration) that he had actually played the Pathétique to the Great Leader. The story of the evening when Lenin was Gorky’s guest is fixed in the nation’s official memory, so much so that the 1963 film of the meeting Appassionata simply lifted its visual composition from the previous painting by the artist Nabandyan, “V. I. Lenin at A. M. Gorky’s home in 1920”: the striped divan, the warm half shawl worn by Peshkova, and the low-hanging lamp in the painting were as much part of the mythology of the evening as the music and the discussion, and the snowstorm whirling outside the window. The film opens with a shot of snow falling over the crenelated Kremlin walls; it’s an epic, hungry, terrible winter. Lenin and Gorky are feeding firewood into an iron stove in the icy apartment, a little girl runs in and begins talking about Crimea: “It’s not safe! The Whites have occupied Crimea!” In fact winter was still a way off. Dobrowen was summoned to play for Lenin on October 20, an autumnal evening. They say that Lenin constantly pressed Gorky to go abroad during that evening, and as he left he famously said: “If you don’t go, then we’ll exile you anyway.”

So everything happened — and yet it didn’t happen. They played music, but it was a different piece; there was a snowstorm, but only ten days later; the famous “we’ll exile you” comment was made, but was it really made then? Gorky himself was only a guest in the apartment, he hadn’t lived with his former wife Ekaterina Peshkova for many years; Dobrowen was actually a strange and invented pseudonym (meaning “good wine,” as he later explained). The pianist was by then a celebrity — schoolgirls treasured postcards with his portrait. I found one such portrait in my family archive: curled hair, a starched dickey, circles under his eyes: an artist at the height of his powers! Across the image is a sprawling signature, and on the other side there is a dedication:

How did this postcard find its way into our family album? Isai Abramovich Shapiro, my great-grandfather’s brother-in-law, was a doctor with a practice in Nizhny Novgorod and a specialist in skin and venereal diseases. He was well-known locally and he lived in an expensive part of town. In another picture in the album he is with his wife and three children — sheepskin caps, coats with half capes — in a snowy garden among the birch trees, sitting on one of those ubiquitous slender bentwood chairs. Isai Abramovich could only have known the pianist from Nizhny Novgorod, where they’d both lived. Gorky was from Nizhny Novgorod, too: the hilltop house where he lived with Ekaterina Peshkova as a young man is still there. It’s one of the few places in the world where everything is as it was — plates with a cheerful pattern around the edge, the long table in the dining room, a relaxed couch with bolsters, metal-framed guest beds, porcelain washbowls, and slightly macabre bouquets, gathered by the owners a hundred or more years ago from the profligate green roadsides, and now condemned to last forever. I was told that the reason for this rare degree of preservation was due to “womanly foresight”: Peshkova knew she was married to a great writer and she made efforts to save everything for posterity: the blinds, the shutters, the toys of her living son and her dead daughter. When her marriage to Gorky fell apart she conceived of a time-delayed monument to their short life together. Their possessions were put away into boxes, inventoried, wrapped in fabric, and left until they could be brought back to the old house and placed in their former positions.

Whenever I go into a bookshop, I see there are more and more such inventories of possessions, especially in those parts of the world where they use Latin alphabets. In a New York bookshop the books lie with their covers catching the light: Proust’s Overcoat, Monsieur Proust’s Library, Rembrandt’s Nose, Van Gogh’s Ear, Catullus’s Bedspread, Vermeer’s Hat, The Brontë Cabinet, the history of a family in eight objects, one hundred photographs, ninety-nine discoveries.

I wondered if I had been too wrapped up in my thoughts to notice that the old world had breached its banks and flooded the current world; the search for lost time had become a general obsession, and everyone had thrown themselves into reading, writing, and describing our relations with the past. What I was still preparing to write turned out to be simply part of a much bigger movement. Everyone was engaged in “getting a good view” on the past, as if there was nothing else worth doing, as if this was the new form of the Grand Tour. The emptiness that fills villages burned to the ground, and the people inhabiting the rooms of others — all this has become part of the cultural program, like the Roman forum or the Paris Opéra.

I devour all these books, one after another, hardly pausing to marvel at my own unsated appetite as each new text requires me to seek out and devour the next. Pointless knowledge expands at an unstoppable rate: not like a building, which grows with the slow addition of floors, more like that terrifying wartime spring thaw when the bodies were slowly exposed by the melting snow. Perhaps I might have preferred to stand alone in the chalk circle of my obsession, but the circle is as crowded as a waiting room at the doctors where everyone is pronouncing gloomily on each other’s afflictions. It matters to all of us. When I meet someone new I hardly notice the moment when we begin talking about our grandparents and ancestors, comparing names and dates as happily as animals who have finally reached their watering spot and drink, shuddering with the delicious cold of the water. It usually happens about half an hour into the conversation.

One thing saddens me. This search for the past, like the search for the Holy Grail, separates the successful from the failures, and I belong to the latter: assiduous, but unlucky. I have never lost my hope of discovering the kernel at the center of the mystery, a key of some sort that opens the door to a secret corridor in our old apartment, where a shaft of sunlight falls on a host of other unseen doors. Not since I was taken, aged seven, to the green meadow where the Battle of Kulikovo had been fought. I knew about the battle, of course: the bloody encounter between a Moscow Prince and a Tatar Khan had taken place not far from Moscow, a few hours by car. I’d read and reread the Pushkin poem, where the hero, sometimes a knight at arms, sometimes a Russian warrior, wanders onto the site of the ancient battle, the valley of death. There, under the bright sun, he sees something along the lines of a vast educational installation: a heap of yellowing bones, armor and shields, arrows stuck into the ground, heads rotting in their helmets. All of it overgrown with ivy, the organic and inorganic piled up, as if that’s how it had always been. The hero grieves a little, then chooses himself some armor, and knows it will serve him faithfully and true.

I knew exactly what to expect. The excitement of this dramatic and possibly terrifying sight was augmented by the promise of booty: I’d find myself a souvenir, a little thing to remember it by, sure to be such a thing among the skulls and shields, rusting under the sky. A few arrow tips to carry in my pocket would be nice, although an elegant little dagger would be best of all.

The field was quiet and empty, and the wind blew waves over the bare green grass. Our dog ran about madly but found nothing; there was a little obelisk at the side of the field, nothing else. The main quality of an ancient battlefield turned out to be how transitory it was — all the interesting stuff had been dragged home by others well before I got there.

I once heard that “a small bag of Marina Tsvetaeva’s possessions” was kept in the drawer of a table at a certain literary museum (which is after all a place where the words and possessions of writers come, if not for immortality, then at least for a rest). The bag had been brought back from the place of her death, Yelabuga, by her sixteen-year-old son Mur after her suicide. Despite its survival, nothing had been written about it, and it hadn’t been exhibited — turn Proust’s overcoats, jackets, and all the other items inside out and this is what you get: objects that disappear, slipping easily through a tear in the lining into absolute oblivion, the deep pocket of nonexistence.

The bag’s contents hadn’t been cataloged, and so might be considered not-quite-existing. There was no way of guessing from the museum catalog that the single unit of the bag in fact held many items. It contained objects that have been passed over, despite the last forty years of passionate attention to Tsvetaeva’s every word; objects that were too damaged or homely to merit a museum cabinet. Tsvetaeva took them with her into evacuation, packing hastily what could be sold (anything French), things to remember others by (mustn’t be lost), and other unnecessary bits and pieces that found themselves in the pile almost by chance. No one knows why Mur thought these things important enough to gather up and bring back to Moscow from his mother’s dark hut in Yelabuga. Was he trying to save and preserve them — or was he in a blind haste, as his mother had been, simply seizing everything? Battered little tins, their contents unknown, beads, a pen, locks of children’s hair, some other nameless bits and bobs, which might have just been stuffed in the bag. But perhaps they were the dearest things, things that reminded her of her mother, her husband, daughter: a special stone, china fragments of an unforgettable cup. There was no one to tell. Objects no one knows anything about are instantly orphaned, they seem to protrude more, like the nose of a dead man. They join the ranks of those who are no longer permitted to enter.

Among the books, papers, chairs, dickeys that I inherited, there are far too many things life forgot to label — or to leave a reminder for, even a hint of where they came from and how they are connected to me. In the family album, Dobrowen’s portrait is next to a good quality reproduction of Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s widow. On the back my great-grandmother has written in her big handwriting: “Who gave you this picture of Nadezhda Krupskaya? I saw quite a different picture of her in a big portrait at Moisey Abramovich’s. S. Ginzburg, July 2, 1956.” It seems likely that Sarra’s companion took this picture. He had a photographic studio nearby in Moscow and his stamp is on this image. But I will never know the details. These huge and terrifying people who strode the century, Krupskaya, Sverdlov, Gorky, have slipped out of the family memory as if they were never there, and I will never be able to confirm their presence.

Once when I was fifteen my mother showed me something I’d never seen despite my endless rummaging in search of curiosities. It was a tiny, delicate lace purse, half the size of my palm. Inside, folded into four, the paper beginning to tear at the folds, was a piece of paper, and on it, written in a clear hand, the name Victor Pavlovich Nelidov. My grandmother Lyolya, Sarra’s daughter, had kept this little purse in the pocket of her bag, which she carried pressed to her side. I began asking about it, but my mother didn’t know who it was. I persisted, I wanted to know what to make of it. “Make of it what you will,” said my mother, and ended the conversation.

Do I need to say that I’ve tried more than once to find a trail to the invisible Nelidov? Who was he? A doctor? Why a doctor? I have had no success, only the usual feeling of walking into yet another empty green field and realizing once again that the absence of an answer was the answer, and if that upset me, I just had to get over it. As soon as I appeared, the past immediately declined to make anything useful of itself, or to weave itself into a narrative of seeking and finding, of breakthroughs and revelations. The division between what was mine and what belonged to others was the first to break down. Everything around me belonged in one way or another to the world of my dead. I was no longer really surprised to discover paper strips with French on them in the drawers of an old writing desk I had bought: tickets to a cinema in Paris to see two prewar films. One of the films was named after a poem by Victor Hugo “Lorsque l’enfant paraît.” If Great-Grandmother Sarra had been to the cinema in Paris one hundred years ago, then she might well have seen this film, even though the writing desk had nothing to do with her. Perhaps she didn’t see it, perhaps she saw other films (so of course I then rushed off to immerse myself in the chronicles of cinema, as if the names of films would reveal something to me). She must have gone to the cinema, to cafes and exhibitions, and met up with Russian and French friends — she must have had some interests. I’ve always felt that the popular device of making your fictional hero meet Gertrude Stein or Picasso or Tsvetaeva on the Paris streets was a rather shameful example of a sort of coercive literary logic, but in my head I did this constantly, chasing after any coincidences and proximities that might have helped my independently minded great-grandmother feel less lonely.

So, for example, in May 1914, only weeks before the outbreak of war, a postcard from Paris arrives in Saratov. It is decorated with almond blossom and Spring, perhaps the personification of April, leans down over a sleeping infant. The caption reads: sogno primaverile. On May 30, the day my great-grandfather received this card (in which Sarra writes that she is returning from an exam “quite shattered”), the young pilot Alfred Agostinelli, former chauffeur of Marcel Proust and the model for Albertine, crashed his plane near Antibes and drowned in the Mediterranean. Agostinelli registered for his flying lessons as Marcel Swann, as if the hero and the narrator of In Search of Lost Time had merged into one person. Proust paid for these lessons and he’d even promised to buy Albert an airplane with Mallarmé’s lines about the swan who couldn’t fly etched on the fuselage. “A poem you loved, even if you thought you didn’t understand it,” Proust wrote in a letter that was never opened. On the day it arrived the addressee didn’t come home.

Sometimes touch alone is enough to establish kinship. I’m thinking now of the famous 1950s experiment with baby monkeys. The babies were taken away from their hairy birth mothers and put in an enclosure with surrogate mothers: one made from wire and another from soft plush. All the babies without exception tried to squirm into the arms of the “soft mommy,” to hold on and press themselves against her and hug her. As the experiment progressed the soft mommy began to cause them pain: under the soft fur she was covered in spikes. But this didn’t stop the baby monkeys — they made little cries of pain but they didn’t release their hold. Perhaps she even became dearer to them because of the efforts they had to make to stay close to her.

Month after month I transcribed my family’s letters and documents, poring over the microscopic handwriting, the rapid accounts of long-dead conversations. I began to understand them better and love them more. I wondered whether imitation often ended in this way: the young poet who was exiled to Voronezh together with Mandelstam began to think he himself was the author of Mandelstam’s poems and I, too, carefully copying out the commas and little mistakes of my ancestors, was no longer able to see the line that divided their lives from mine.

I typed up my father’s thrilling and surprising letters, sent from Baikonur in 1965, where secret space installations were being constructed. There was a military presence on the steppe, and my father and his friend Kolya Sokolov were civilian instructors. I remember from my childhood the accounts of how my father had caught a wily little vixen, a qarsaq, on the Kazakh steppe and was attempting to train it, but the proud little beast wouldn’t eat or drink and wanted its freedom, so after three days they let it go. I found his letters among the papers at Aunt Galya’s, and there were lots of them: about the qarsaq and life on the steppe, everything down to how they made their camp and slept under an awning made from a damp sheet, and rinsed the floor with water every night. The people and circumstances of these letters became firmly fixed in my head as I typed them up, page by page. It was as if they had always been there, a natural progression of my own internal landscape. My twenty-six-year-old father hitching a ride to spend an evening drinking with a group of geologists from Moscow; arguing with the foreman over the empty shed under the workshop; losing patience with his team of fitters; stuffing a marmot; trying to send a rifle home wrapped in a fur jacket — behaving like the hero in a Soviet-era “cheerful-young-men-building-Socialism” film. This didn’t much surprise me: the letters were written fifty years ago.

At some point in the process, without giving it much thought, I sent the file with the letters to my father and asked him whether I could quote from the letters in my book. I didn’t doubt for a moment that he would give me permission: they were wonderfully well-written texts; lively, funny, and very distant from our world now. Yet there was something else: in my head, the letters I had typed up had become my own. I had become used to considering them part of a collective history of which I was the author. Papers found in a pile, of no use to anyone else; do what you want with them, throw them away or keep them — their fate depended on me, their publisher. Quoting from them meant saving them, leaving them in their box meant consigning them to a long darkness. Who else, if not me, should decide how to deal with them?

Without being aware of it, I had internalized the logic of ownership. Not in the sense of a tyrant, lording it over his hundreds of enslaved peasants, but perhaps like the tyrant’s enlightened neighbor, with a landscaped park and a theater in which his serfs acted and sang. The subject of my love and my grief had become my property, to treat as I wished. My other heroes couldn’t object or react, for obvious reasons. They were dead.

The dead have no rights: their property and the circumstances of their fate can be used by anyone and in any way. In the first few months and years after death, humanity attempts to restrain its enterprising spirit and behave with decency — its interest in the not-yet-cold corpse is kept in check, if only out of respect for the living, the family and friends. Years pass and the rules of decency, the rules of the collective, the laws of copyright, all give way like a dam breaching under the weight of water; and this seems to happen more rapidly now than in the past. The fate of the dead is the latest gold rush; the history of people we don’t really know much about has become a major subject of novels and films, of sentimental speculation and sensational exposure. No one will defend them, no one asks us.

A homeless person would have the right to be angry if her photo were used on the cover of a family calendar. A man condemned to death for murder is still able to prevent the publication of his letters or diary. There is only one category denied this right. Every one of us owns his or her history, but only to a point, only while we own our body, our underwear, our glasses case. At the beginning of the new century the invisible and indescribable majority of the dead became the new minority; endlessly vulnerable, humiliated, their rights abused.

I believe this must change, and change within our lifetimes, just as it has changed over the last hundred years for other groups of the abused and humiliated. What unites all the minorities, puts them in the same boat (or on the same many-decked liner) is other people’s sense that their subjectivity is incomplete: women who need to be looked after; children who don’t know what’s best for them; black people who are like children; the working classes who don’t know what’s in their own interests; the dead, for whom nothing matters any more. Even if you aren’t in any of the former categories, you are certain to be in the last.

My father didn’t answer for a day or two. Then he Skyped me and said he wanted to talk. He wouldn’t give me permission to reproduce his letters in the book. He really didn’t want them published. Even the one about the vixen? Even that one. He hoped I would understand. He was absolutely against the idea. Because, he added very clearly, nothing happened quite in that way.

I was horrified and offended. My Not-A-Chapters with their family histories were working out nicely: a chronicle, an arpeggio, a ladder running up the book from the beginning of the century to 1965, and my father’s tales of jaunty builders and soldier’s boots felt like a necessary rung. How could I make do without it? I argued, I questioned, I gesticulated. When we’d both calmed down a little, my father said, “I can’t bear to think that someone will read those letters and think that’s what I am.”

I could have carried on trying to persuade him, I still had things to say: it’s not about what you are, I thought petulantly. It’s not about you at all: it’s not you writing to your parents and sister, it’s the time itself writing, it’s a thousand Siberian radio programs and a hundred novels about Siberian construction projects and the vanquishing of the virgin earth, and about decent people and conscientious workers. I could have said: in our family’s letters you can see how the language used to describe the everyday experience changes — how the tone changes completely between the 1910s and the 1930s, how newspapers and films form internal speech. Your letters belong in that history, they are templates of the 1960s, not “how it actually was” but written in that concentrated form that gives us a feeling for the age. It’s not a book about what you were, it’s about what we see when we look back.

I said none of this aloud, luckily — we were already saying goodbye, and my sense of self-righteousness was growing — and it grew until I realized exactly what I was really thinking. I was very close to saying “I don’t care what you were,” but happily I didn’t get that far. Blessed are those who destroy all the letters and diaries they don’t want others to see. The written text creates a false impression of its own immortality: a silly billet-doux is set in stone, an irritable exclamation puts down a claim to be the last word. This was the subtext to our conversation: to put it crassly I was prepare to betray my own living father for the dead text, because I believed in it more. It then felt to me as if the letter itself had spoken and said: “Don’t touch me!”

I am afraid to think what Great-Grandmother Sarra might have said if I’d asked her whether I could publish her correspondence. But no one asks the dead.

I understood my father’s objections to be that his reports on life in Kazakhstan were stylizations of a sort, written to please and entertain his family. What I saw as a picaresque novel, adventures against a colonial backdrop, was a memory of dirt, depression, and desperate drunkenness for him; of barracks and sheds at the end of the world, swearing soldiers and constant and interminable thievery. The tone of his letters was faked, but time had preserved only this stylized bravado. Another sobering realization: if these letters, so detailed in themselves, couldn’t be used as witness accounts — those little fragments of bone from which the skeleton of the past can be reconstructed — then what hope was there of building anything from scratch, made of letters and handkerchiefs? It was what a psychoanalyst might dismissively term a “fantasy.” In the place of respectable research, I had been occupied all this time with the Freudian family romance, the sentimentalized past.

That is how it must be. We look at the photographs of our ancestors as we might look at a human zoo, wild beasts whose lives lie out of sight, deep within the enclosure. It reminds me a little of a folder of recipes I have. The recipes are written out by my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mother (and I spotted with a sort of shudder my own childish handwriting among them). For a long time the recipes were a call to action — wouldn’t it be marvelous to make all these recipes, to unite them in their culinary succession, to pretend to be each generation of woman in turn, bringing to life their circle of relationships, some known to me, some unknown: Murochka’s recipe for pie, Rosa Markovna’s biscuit recipe, Auntie Raya’s pike. Although in fact each possessive was a reminder to me that all these people with their pikes and pies no longer existed, and all that was left was the folder of paper. And it was unusable: when I sat down to read through the recipes, I immediately knew I would never cook these dishes. They were full of ingredients that had long since disappeared, Soviet-era cereals and grains, Soviet margarine. Mostly desserts and confectionery, each one so calorific it could replace an entire meal; rich creams and heavy sponges, endless biscuit recipes, tortes, pastries, and shortbreads, as if the lack of sweetness in life could be made up by ingestion. The diet of another, lost world. I had no desire to go back there, despite my nostalgia for its black-and-white inhabitants.

One of the strangest things I found in the boxes of papers belonging to the Stepanov family was not really even a “thing.” It was a page from a notebook, folded vertically into four and kept by someone. On it, a single sentence, unaddressed and without date or signature and written in a hand I didn’t recognize — unremarkable handwriting, perhaps Grandfather’s, perhaps Aunt Galya’s. But the sentence was as much of a shock as if it had been addressed to me, although perhaps the shocking part was the fact that it was intended for no one, spoken as if from inside a silent mouth. It read: “There are people who exist on this earth not as objects in themselves, but as extraneous specks or tiny spots on objects.”

I didn’t recognize the quote at first, although I did briefly appreciate the phrase’s beauty and precision. I thought that the sentence was perhaps an attempt to say something about the self, but in a way that didn’t upset or put anyone out. Someone who was known to me and yet quite unknown had secretly come to this phrase, and the fact that the words originally came from Gogol’s Dead Souls didn’t actually make much difference. The writer had altered one word. In the original this word is лица, which can mean both “faces” and “types (of person),” and they had changed it to the unequivocal люди (“people”). This small shift had surprising consequences: ripped from its context and framed by the notepaper the phrase had been transformed into a sort of poem, or a verdict.

Here is how it was:

And here’s what it became:

This, I feel, is how I see my family: their fragile, barely noticeable existence is like a speckled bird’s egg, so delicate it is crushed by the least pressure. The fact that they were tested and proved resilient in life only makes them more vulnerable. Against the backdrop of history and its well-constituted heroes, these lodgers with their photo albums and New Year’s greetings cards seem destined for oblivion. I hardly even remembered them myself. But although much was unknown or half-known or under a veil of darkness, I thought I knew a few firm facts about my family:

No one died in the Stalinist purges

No one perished in the Holocaust

No one was murdered

No one was a murderer

Now this seemed doubtful, or even simply untrue.

Once when I was ten or a little older, I asked my mother one of those questions you only ask at that age: “What are you most scared of?” I don’t know what kind of response I expected, probably “war.” In Soviet society at the time Kant’s starry heavens had been replaced by peaceful skies. The country lived in the fearful expectation of a third world war; in school we had military training in how to assemble Kalashnikovs and what to do in the event of a nuclear attack (it seemed clear that a machine gun wouldn’t help much). The abundance of old women arranged on the benches in the yard spoke as if in one voice: “If we can only avoid war…”

To my confusion, my mother answered momentarily and enigmatically. It was just as if she had held this answer in her head for a long time, waiting for someone to ask the question. I was puzzled by her answer — and I have always remembered it. She said: “I’m afraid of the violence that can destroy a person.”

Years passed, decades. Now I am the one who fears this same violence that can destroy a person. In me this fear has a sheen on it, as if my feelings of fear, anger, and resistance predate me and have been polished to a gleam by the many preceding generations. It is like entering an unknown room as if you had lived there all your life (and the demons I share the space with find it swept and garnished, as in the Gospels), in this room an undated film is being shown. When I awake I realize that the Germans have entered Paris and I need to hide the children; that the fearsome woman who sweeps the snow in the yard will interrogate me about my right to live there, that Mandelstam has been arrested and is entering a stadium through iron doors that resemble the doors to an oven. I was eight when I was told about Mandelstam and seven when I was told: we are Jews. But the black hole of the unspoken that lay at the center of the tale (perhaps because they themselves didn’t know) was more ancient than any explanation or example.

Every example, every photograph and book among the dozens I have read only confirms what I remember too well, with my gut memory. Perhaps this ancient horror began in 1938 when my still-young grandfather Nikolai gave up his service pistol and sat waiting to be arrested. Or perhaps later, in 1953, with the Jewish Doctors’ Plot, when Great-Grandmother and Grandmother, both doctors, both Jews, came home in the evenings and sat silently under the hanging lamp at the table in their communal apartment, waiting to be taken away. Perhaps in 1919, when my overly successful great-great-grandfather Isaak, “the owner of factories, property, steamships,” disappeared. We don’t know how or when he died, but we can well imagine what was going on back then in postrevolutionary Ukraine. Perhaps, and probably even earlier, in 1902, 1909, or 1912 when pogroms were taking place in Odessa and all across the south of Ukraine and the bodies lay on the streets. My relatives were there (a person is always there, in close proximity to the death of others and one’s own death), and it turns out I didn’t need to hear any of this from them. The knowledge has lived within me.

Many years later I visited the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in search of help and I am still thankful to the advisor who spoke to me there. We sat at a long wooden table in the library, which appeared to hold every book written on any matter that might be considered Jewish. I asked questions and got answers. Then the museum advisor, a historian, asked me what I was writing about and I began to explain. “Ah,” he said. “One of those books where the author travels around the world in search of his or her roots — there are plenty of those now.”

“Yes,” I answered. “And now there will be one more.”