The Voice Over

What Alice Found There

(Alisa Poret)

1.

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

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

2.

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

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

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

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

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

And here I woke up and, without opening my eyes (because I was in a stranger’s home, surrounded by disgraceful furniture, the little vases, the ugly velvet curtains), imagined the entire pitiful scene: my poor, my always poor Busya is busting his head trying to figure out what to get me. And I knew how he would sit at the edge of the horrible couch and say, “Forgive me, but you understand,” and how I would respond “Of course, we survived the war, you are alive and you love me, I don’t need anything else …” and how we would almost cry while embracing.

But it was all different. I opened my eyes and saw Boris squatting by the side of my bed. He was holding an English book, Alice in Wonderland, and it was open to the first page, my favorite picture from childhood. Busya’s eyes were kind, brown, like a setter’s, devoted, and they shone behind his glasses. “Oh you’ve given me such a lovely, lovely, wonderful present,” I said happily.

Almost all fragments in Poret’s noteboks are set up in a similar way; here we see all the characteristic traits—a defiant indifference to big history (and its circumstances, which are left unexplained, but are dropped into the story in passing, as if the author will not deign to pay attention to the war, to being poor and displaced), and the sharp, falcon-like or magpie-like, attention to details, which are invariably more important than circumstances—the disgraceful curtain is a gentle shield from the cold and gloom of the times that have come.⁴ But the main thing—the ever surprising thing—is the rising intonation of the storytelling, a keyboard heady with the mix of distrust and delight, on which the story runs ever higher, reaching the high C, the joyous resolution. Each story refuses to be a simple “tale of the past,” becoming instead a circus act; each plot does a backflip, whips around, takes a bow and waits for our applause and appreciation. It’s possible that these anecdotes were worn smooth like pebbles from years of being recounted orally (what Akhmatova called her records⁵) and once written down, they continue in the same vein. But Akhmatova’s records are an instrument, part of a larger project of exacting historical justice. What Poret’s writings do to the past can seem like unartful table-talk, a pile of ancient witticisms and yarn-spinning, where anecdotes along the lines of “a lover climbs the balcony,” the cute things someone’s children said, and endless stories about cats and dogs become entangled in a way that only makes sense to the storyteller. The tiny, pin-size accounts of people referred to by mere initials, collected, written down, illustrated—this is the yield of an entire life, its result, an amusement park ride of senseless generosity. And yet, as strange as it may seem, it has a distinct goal—and one not devoid of a kind of pragmatism.

3.

When Poret’s “Memories of Daniil Kharms” began to circulate (in the pre-Gutenbergian sense—they were only printed in 1980) in the late sixties or early seventies, they were not received well. The echo of this discontent still lingers (“free and apparently unreliable” is what Wikipedia has to say about Poret’s memoirs), which shouldn’t surprise us. Poret recounts the life of another person the same way she does her own: subjecting it to a strict editorial process. The editor’s logic is roughly as follows: events lose their scale and sometimes their meaning, details are comically enhanced, the main point is forced out of the frame, and thus the outside view of the events becomes sharper and more grotesque, clearly stylized following either the English (eccentric-Chestertonian) novel, or the silent films of Chaplin and Keaton. Maybe this was Poret’s intent: she tries to reinforce her perspective by means of montage. The finished reel has everything, facial expressions and gestures, stunts and phrases—and any one of the latter could become a caption or a title card that fills the entire screen—and behind the text, just as behind the frame, there is the invisible weight of what is implied, for those who are ready to notice.

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

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

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

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

It may be that this is a genuine solution or at least a direction one can take: if you cannot live your life without the color scheme of daily horror, you can still tell it the way it was conceived. This strange kind of everyday heroism (entirely divorced from pathos, devoid of any pathetic element) leaves very little room to maneuver. The answer to “how are you?” can only be “fine, thank you”; it seems unthinkable to just squander your pain in public—and almost the entirety of your life is left beyond the borders of what can be said. You end up having to rеinvent it, to lay it out in all its splendor, turn on all the lights, remember all the plots that can fit the story line of this great adventure. Make it so that only the front-facing part of the story remains. Live in a way that leaves no room for shame.

In a movie that’s currently playing in theaters, the hero survives a shipwreck and finds himself on a boat with a giant tiger—and together they drift for a long time until they reach a safe shore. There, of course, it turns out that he imagined the tiger in order to forget the unthinkable and unbearable events that actually occurred. The story of Alisa Poret, who spent years not wanting to notice the tiger in her own boat and wrote a picture book about it, is one of the few happy endings of the previous century. And one of its models.

4.

A large fish, which had lived for quite a long time in an aquarium at the zoo, was released into the sea. They watched it from the pier. All day long it swam in circles no bigger than the walls of its former cell. The next day, the circles grew a little larger, on the third day even more so, and only on the fourth day did it swim away.

This entry in Alisa Poret’s notebook is called “FREEDOM.”

2013

Translated by Maria Vassileva