Editor's Note

In the film Strolls with Brodsky the poet, sitting at a table in a Venetian cafe, with his back to the sea, was asked whether he missed his native city. He replied that, yes, he did miss a good many little things. In photos of Petersburg-Leningrad of the 1980s and '90s he was pained most of all by the absence of the old streetcars, the famous “Americans” with “sausage” bumpers and automatic doors that would not close. Such things meant that the city he had once lived in was no more.

He went on to speak of how writers are products of literature, of “belles-lettres,” because for them the past is of more significance than the present, let alone the future...

A writer's memory is not so much a natural trait as an element of poetics, and this is of greater significance the more the history of his country-and his literature-abounds in traumatic events and tectonic shifts that cover over what happened, it seems, only yesterday and serve to warp the retrospective view.

The history of Russian literature produced by authors, if one looks at it realistically and not “patriotically,” that's to say, not from its folkloric and epic origins, is compressed, in all, into about two-and-a-half centuries. And this, probably, is the reason why memory in general, and writer's memory in particular plays a unique role in it. Memory is not only the starting point, woven, so to say, into the fabric of writers' works, but it has also has established itself as something approaching the status of a genre.

There is no other European literature over the last two hundred years that has so many examples of writers' memoirs as has Russian literature, beginning at least with the “Notes” of Gavrila Derzhavin and Ivan Dmitriev. The same can be said of reminiscences of writers, often of ones who have themselves written memoirs.

What results is a stereo-optic effect; reflections from these lenses set up at angles to one another are scattered through the whole of Russian writing. The boundary between artistic invention and real life that any memoirist asserts turns out to be porous. And this despite the fact that readers who could manage a text in French as easily as one in Russian remained for quite a long time under the influence of European traditions that separated artistic works from “documents” more or less distinctly...

The twentieth century, in this sense, left its predecessor far behind, even though it tried, unconsciously, not to lose sight of it. Khodasevich began writing memoirs at almost the same age as was Pushkin when he died, since what lay ahead, for a Russian poet, was decline, old age, a time for recollections...

The schism between before and after the catastrophe, between the mother country and the emigration, the unsteadiness of the ground disappearing from under one's feet naturally led to the search for some point of support-in memory, in the thing that no one can either take away or destroy. The memoir element in literature of the Russian diaspora is inseparable from imaginative literature; the two pervade each other constantly and thoroughly. The regular “digressions” into childhood and youth in the Russian novels of Nabokov, the nostalgically Orthodox pictures and sighs in Shmelev, the “Moscow fables” of Osorgin, all the prose of Korovin, not to mention the “specifically memoir” works of Bunin and Teffi, Tsvetaeva and Gippius, Amfiteatrov and Don Aminado. The same is true in the mother country: Veresaev and Andrei Bely, Olesha and Valentin Kataev, and so on...

It may well be that all that will remain of some writers is their memoirs. There are more examples of that in the history of literature than one can count...

The variety of genres also looks impressive. From the semi-fabrications of Georgy Ivanov to the autobiographical novels of Berberova (it's interesting that both provoked the irritation-and even the anger-of “eyewitnesses” to the events described), from Akhmatov's fragments to the multivolume epics of Ehrenburg and Paustovsky...

All of this has been published, republished, read, examined and... never really studied. Volumes have been written on the contents of the memories. But there is scarcely a line, in Russian at least, about their poetics.

And yet, the task of the memoirist involves form just as much as content: how is one to write? I don't mean style. As Krzhizhanovsky said, “God isn't in the style but in the truth.” But truth in literature is not just ethics, it's also poetics.

The memoir is the elder among the literary genres, and it's appropriate for it to set about writing its own memoirs, so to say. Yet the theoretical definition of this genre still awaits clarification.

In fact, what is a memoir? The story of a life? If so, then how is that different from a novel, which is also “the story of a life”? The fact that in the first the hero is real and in the second imaginary changes nothing; this isn't an answer but a question that leads to a new labyrinth of questions.

In the final analysis, as far as the reader is concerned, the unknown protagonist of a memoir is not a bit more real than a character in a novel, and verifying the facts set out by a memoirist is, in many cases, no simpler than verifying the “facts” of a novelist.

The first-person memoir discourse is likewise not a generic trait: it has been a regular feature of artistic prose almost from the time of Petronius in the first century.

In just the same way a reminiscence of someone is related to the novella and the short story. Even “verifiability,” using additional sources, is of little help in establishing a boundary here: prose writers have learned long ago, for the sake of veracity, to combine imaginary characters with real-life ones and invented incidents with actual, well-known ones.

There may be only a single difference that one can speak about more or less confidently. That is the difference in the tendency of the author's work. The prose writer strives to look like a memoirist, the memoirist to distinguish himself from the writer of artistic prose. Verisimilitude for the latter is not an aesthetic problem but an ethical one. But the memoirist can solve this only problem in no way other than formally.

There is no counting the number of those who have fallen victim to this paradox. It would seem that the solution is to be as simple and exacting as possible: just write everything as it happened, in order, including everything that memory provides; the material itself, as long as it is interesting, will save you; it's a one-and-only, unique life that's been lived, after all...

However, though life may be seamless, memory is discrete: the bright and precise pictures in it alternate irregularly and nervously with dark patches. The attempt to construct a logically connected plot here is either a matter of speculation or stylization.

Clever memoirists have always realized this. They have looked for ways to deal with it. I mean that they have looked for a form whose choice is organically linked with the task the author sets for himself. And those tasks may be-and have been-various. And it doesn't matter whether the memoirist is aware of them or whether they exist unconsciously, so to say: the modest “eyewitness account” (although, of course, author's modesty is itself an oxymoron); self-justification, in situations where the author's behaviour might strike contemporaries (and future generations) as-to put it delicately-dubious; the apology of a literary group or tendency to which the author belongs; settling scores with former enemies; revealing the real reasons behind events and doings that are more or less known to readers. And so on...

It is generally accepted to link the quest for form in literature with the coming of a new era and a new generation: the ostensibly “new content” insistently demands expression in “new” forms. The history of memoir literature, however, if it does not refute this idea, then at least significantly modifies it. Just think of the many different forms in which memoirs have been written!

Take, for example, the “Notes” on “historical” events, a sort of eyewitness's reply by a contemporary to questions posed by a later generation.

Or the “Confession,” where everything not open to ethical evaluation may be happily left out.

Or the “Autobiographical Novel,” that allows one to place oneself clearly in the centre of events, and on a larger scale than persons who, for the reader, may be more important.

Or, let's say, Vyazemsky's “Old Notebook,” essays interspersed with memoirs in the form of a genuine notebook.

People have written in strictly chronological fashion-and have rearranged dates, with repetitions and deletions-and from end to beginning, with ever increasing vividness-and seeming without paying any attention to time, sketching out only the high points, the boundaries of the narrative, encoding, in fictional fashion, the names of those involved and the things that happened to them-and with almost the day-by-day meticulousness of a diary, citing documents and the evidence of others...

It seems to me that now the problem of form, of the poetics and, thus, of the place of memoirs in Russian literature, is a particularly critical one now. This is so for two reasons. First, without dealing with it one cannot present the history of Russian literature in general and of the twentieth century in particular with compelling clarity. And second, the latest sharp bend taken in the road of the history of Russia is receding at great speed, leaving behind the still quite recent image of the country, its social situation and its way of life, separated from us by only ten or fifteen years; and with it, of course, the very existence of literature, art, theatre and music as they were then... Just for example, try and explain to those who didn't live there then just what the thick journals meant for readers in the seventies and even in the eighties...

It was too early to write about all this yesterday. For whom? Tomorrow, though, may be too late...

back

top