Besieged Leningrad: Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster 9781501756818

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BESIEGED LENINGRAD

BESIEGED LENINGRAD

Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster

POLINA BARSKOVA

NIU Pross I DoKalb. IL

Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb 60115 © 2017 by Northern Illinois University Press All rights reserved 2625242322 2120191817 12 3 45 978-0-87580-772-0 (paper) 978-1-60909-230-6 (e-book) Book and cover design by Yuni Dorr Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Transliteration and Translations INTRODUCTION

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WALKING THROUGH THE SIEGE Routes, Routines, and the Paths of the Imagination

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2 SPATIALIZED ALLEGORY Speaking Dystrophy Otherwise

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PARADOXES OF SIEGE VISION Darkness, Blindness, and Knowledge 73

4 FRAMING THE SIEGE SUBLIME Urban Spectacle and Cultural Memory

5 THE SPATIAL

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PRACTICE OF SIEGE READING

6 READING INTO THE SIEGE Heterochronic Directions of Escapist Reading Notes 197 Bibliography Index 227

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Acknowledgments

Sofia Ostrovskaia, a diarist with a rare gift for observation, exclaimed during the most bitter winter of the Leningrad siege (1941-1942): "Beautiful city. Miraculous city. Ville miraculeuse et luciferienne. Disfigured, wounded, leaking blood, impoverished and yet beautiful and yet in spite of everything full of its unique kind of pride-unique, estranged from everybody, the pride of unique loneliness and unsurpassed greatness! .. :' 1 It is strange to thank an entire city, especially this city of the past-yet nevertheless, this is to whom I owe my inspiration. This book started during my visit to the exhibition "The Siege Diary" in the Museum of Urban History of Petersburg in 2005. There, while wandering among the images of besieged Leningrad, I asked myself, "How was it possible that there existed a world of such magnitude and power?" For me this historical and aesthetic representation of the Siege was so revelatory and incomprehensible ... How did there exist this world of Siege culture? Why was it hidden from the inhabitants of the city for many long decades? And how were we supposed to understand it now, as it was coming to light at last? This is when and why I began talking to Siege survivors and their heirs, began going to the archives, began seeking every kind of evidence and publication on this difficult topic. My understanding of Siege culture was shaped by my Petersburg interlocutors: Tatiana Pozdniakova, Nina Popova, Anna Mikhailova, Marina Bokarius, Sergei Iarov, Alla Lapidus, Alena Spitsyna, Valerii Dymshits, Vladimir Piankevich, Tatiana Voronina, and Nikita Lomagin. I want to thank everybody in St. Petersburg who assisted my Siege culture research. This thinking came as an extension of and was shaped by my graduate project-a study of the culture of Leningrad in the 1920s and 1930s. This was influenced by my mentors at the University of California at BerkeleyEric Naiman, Viktor Zhivov, Irina Paperno, Linda Williams, and Ann Nesbet, and my peers, Luba Golburt, Boris Maslov, Michael Kunichika, and Viktoria Somoff, among many others.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A project with Olga Matich, "Mapping'Petersburg'/Petersburg;' spurred my thinking on various ways to study the city, especially as a phenomenon of both culture and practice. Discussions with my collaborators on this project contributed significantly to how I saw writing about the city of one's (often strange) dreams. I have presented and taught this subject at numerous venues and events where input from my generous and fearless colleagues helped me to move from one stage of the project's development to the next: Mark Lipovetsky, Kirill Kobrin, Ilya Kalinin, Sergey Glebov, Harriet Murav, Serguei Oushakine, Ilja Kukuj, Emily Van Buskirk, Stephanie Sandler, Ilya Kukulin, Evgeny Dobrenko, Alexis Peri, Jeffrey Hass, Mikhail Iampolski, Sergei Loznitsa, Jessica Gorter, Irina Sandomirskaja, Viktoria Schweitzer, Viktor Alferov, Liudmila Vlasova-this project could not have happened without your support. Of all these events, it was the 2015 conference at the LudwigMaximilians-Universitat in Munich, "Narrating the Siege: The Blockade of Leningrad and its Transmedial Narratives;' that showed me how fruitful discussion can be and how much still remains to be done in this field. I am grateful to my co-organizer, Riccardo Nicolosi, for all his help and patience. The proceedings of this conference have now been published: Blokadnye narrativy (Siege Narratives) (Moscow: NLO, 2017). While this book was in the works, it inspired other scholarly (and notso-scholarly) projects of mine: "Diary" by Sofia Ostrovskaia was also published by NLO (Moscow, 2013); an anthology of unofficial Siege poetry, Written in the Dark, was published by Ugly Duckling Presse (Brooklyn, 2016); a book of (non-)fiction about the Siege post-memory, Zhivye Kartiny (Living Pictures), was published by Ivan Limbakh Press (Petersburg, 2014). Previous versions of this material were published in Slavic Review, Ab Imperio, and Neprikosnovennyj Zapas. I am grateful to these publications for permitting me to expand on these articles. I am endlessly grateful to Hampshire College and its faculty, students, administration, and staff for being ready to share their ideas about this project with me-in classrooms, conference rooms, and private conversations. Annual summer stipends allowed me to continue my work during all these years. Two people within the generous Five Colleges Academic Community extended their knowledge and gave me constant supportthank you, Jeff Wallen and Catherine Ciepiela.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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I thank the Blavatnik Foundation for permitting me to work with their unique collection of Siege postcards. I also want to thank my friends and family-Nonna Barskova, Freya Crawford, and Ostap Kin-for loving with me the terrific besieged city of Leningrad.

Transliteration and Translations

I use a simplified version to transliterate Cyrillic in the body of the text: for example, Olga Berggolts, Lydia Ginzburg, Viktor Shklovsky, Tatiana Glebova. However, in the notes and the bibliography, I adhere to the Library of Congress guidelines for transliteration. Quotations follow the preferences of the author. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.

BESIEGED LENINGRAD

INTRODUCTION

Today when artists try to depict Leningrad as it was during the Siege, it is precisely the color that doesn't come across. It comes out wrong ... I can't quite put my finger on that color, that light. It was sickly, and powerful, and amazingly beautiful. Perhaps it came from within, from a different state of being, a different mode of perception. - Iaroslav Nikolaev 1 I feel the breathing and language of the city. - Konstantin Kordobovsky 2 This book focuses on aesthetic responses to urban disaster. During the Siege of Leningrad, from September 1941 to January 1944, the city and its people, surrounded by the military forces of Nazi Germany, suffered 872 days of famine, cold, and darkness, and lost around 1,000,000 to hunger. The Siege experience and its representations are unique. Unlike victims of other twentieth-century political and social disasters such as the Soviet Gulag and the Nazi Holocaust, the inhabitants of Leningrad were for the most part neither displaced nor instantly robbed of their familiar urban environment. Their ties with the city were broken but not demolished; they were doomed to continued contact with Leningrad while it underwent gradual but grave changes. The stakes of my project became clear to me in July 2008, when I traveled to do archival research between St. Petersburg-formerly Leningrad, site of the Siege-and Oswi~cim, Poland, site of the Auschwitz death camp. These travels helped to sharpen the overall inquiry of my study-to assess how people subjected to catastrophic events relate to their cultural and physical environment. What if the site of mass death is not covered with faceless barracks, not separated from the outside world by rows of barbed wire or fashioned from the rubble of adjacent

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INTRODUCTION

villages that have been leveled for building material? What if it is not completely without history and meaning for its victims who, unlike those in Auschwitz, were not brought from afar and robbed of their identities and cultural roots? What if instead this site is, like Leningrad, a city of architectural grandeur, a palimpsest consisting of myriad levels of historical, cultural, and personal memory? The inhabitants of Leningrad lost virtually everything in the disaster except their place, and this place served them as an inexhaustible source of contemplation and writing. These multiple functions create a challenge that readers of Siege urban representations must confront. Through close readings, they have to untangle the many layers and agendas of these works, as they attempt to perceive representations of the shattered city as a site of unique complexity.

Enter the Siege Room: Challenging the Retrospective View

"I open my eyes and I see nothing:' This is the first shocking sentence uttered by the protagonist of Alexander Sokurov's film Russian Ark (2002), a whimsical exploration of what the director claims is the "Petersburg period of Russian historY:' According to Sokurov, this period extends from Peter the Great's founding of Petersburg in 1703 to the city's horrific ordeal during the Nazi Siege. 3 Curiously, in Russian Ark, the exploration of time is framed as an exploration of space. The film's protagonists are a strange couple. The narrator is a cameraman of the contemporary world, and his partner is a French time traveler of the early nineteenth century. 4 The space of the Hermitage Museum in which they dwell is saturated with meaning thanks to its complex, layered history as a building. Before us is the historical space of the Winter Palace, the residence of the Romanov dynasty during its threehundred-year reign, and a symbolic space populated by the present-day imaginations of the characters who lived during the historical period. The odd pair moves freely from one gallery to another, from one historical period to the next, chatting and quarreling about the meaning of Russian history- only the Siege room is not open to them. When they approach the room, their uneasiness about it turns to dread. The Russian time traveler insists on leaving immediately, exclaiming, "Not this room! Anything but this room!" But his foreign companion insists

INTRODUCTION

on entering. Through the dim light, inside they detect an old man who is constructing a coffin out of gilded picture frames. The old man is upset and scared, and though his speech is unclear and somewhat delirious, we grasp that he wants the intruders to leave him and his treasured coffin alone. He scares them off, uttering barely distinguishable curses and threats of cannibalism. The audience cannot clearly see what is going on in Sokurov's Siege room, which appears to be a claustrophobic and incomprehensible space. For the director, the gap that separates the Siege from those who perforce consider it retrospectively occasions a woeful crisis of historical understanding. The room itself is like a gilded coffin in the museum-a capsule of dread in a container of aestheticized history. The present book addresses this sensation of impossibility. To the perspective portrayed in Sokurov's film I juxtapose the hypothesis that the symbolic room of the Siege can be entered, and that the spatiality of the Siege can actually be comprehended by studying its representations. Representing the urban space was a central commitment-if not obsession-of the Siege writers. The task of the present book is to study this commitment: why did the inhabitants of besieged Leningrad write about it so devotedly, meticulously, and diversely? Analyzing the corpus of texts . depicting the space of the besieged city, I show that historical trauma leads not only to silence-unrepresentability-but also to a creative quest for a changed discourse and the emergence of a new poetics. 5 The book investigates the tropes and rhetorical strategies that appeared when the experience of the Siege space was translated into writing. What representational challenges were overcome, and how? In this introduction, I present three spatial metaphors that allude to various ways of thinking about the Siege space today: the impenetrable room of horror in the memoryscape, the direct observation of the ever-morphing ruin, which both escapes and provokes description, and the ideal virtual archive of the Siege texts. If the latter existed, it would contain writings about the total Siege space, and thus enable us to fully comprehend the historical disaster. All these mirage-like metaphors reveal how problematic it is to access the environment of the besieged city retrospectively-limited by the distance of half a century. The book's introduction and epilogue discuss the retrospective inquiry of our contemporaries, who, in hope and frustration, interrogate the Siege

INTRODUCTION

spatiality from the twenty-first century. The six intervening chapters contain close readings of various depictions of the Siege space by its direct witnesses. My intention is to demonstrate differences in the agendas of those within and outside "the Siege room;' between those who seek understanding and solace for their own urgent historical pain and those who need to understand the pain of the historical Other, by connecting with the experience and language of direct witnesses. In a two-minute scene Sokurov manages to reveal the essential ambivalence with which the Siege is perceived in public opinion today. The room of the Siege, a hidden room in the palace of the Bluebeard fairytale villain, simultaneously attracts and repels the browser of history. The film protagonists want to enter it, but they fear it at the same time. As Lisa Kirschenbaum points out in her study of the mythologies surrounding legacies of the Siege, the image of the blokadnik (as a besieged city inhabitant was called at the time; plural: blokadniki) is a "powerful and ambiguous icon:'6 Curiously, the author of the only existing exploration of Siege spatiality and its representations, art historian Grigory Kaganov, expresses an opinion similar to Sokurov's concerning the singular and especially prohibitive image of the Siege space. In his chapter on the Siege urbanscape, Kaganov describes it as "the experience of limitedness, in which the gaze cannot travel. The streets are blocked off. The houses are dead, the windows are dark, even the trees are devoid of life ... There is no sky, no snow-there is only constraint:' 7 Kaganov is interested in the Siege representations as a subject of study, and focuses primarily on qualities of these works that remain inaccessible to those outside the tragic historical experience. I suggest that the interpretations of both Sokurov and Kaganov superimpose the contemporary perspective onto the view within the Siege situation. Indeed, a dark enclosed space was part of the perception of the Siege spatiality as it took place-but only one of many perceptions. Its subjects perceived the Siege space not as lacking sense, but as producing multiple senses. Analyzing the representations of space by the inhabitants of the besieged city often reveals mutually contradicting aesthetic positions. Next to the negation of light and color we see an abundance of color. Simultaneously depicted as a site of human limitation and demise, the Siege space was featured as a space of openness, possibility, and knowledge, beauty and memory. These semantic variations might be perplexing to the contemporary interpreter of history, but I nevertheless maintain

INTRODUCTION

that this complexity, and not one but multiple perspectives, allow us to understand this aesthetic phenomenon.

The Siege Ruin as Waterfall and Palimpsest: The View from the Siege As spaces with elusive meaning, ruins acquired special importance in the Siege representation, for both empirical and symbolic reasons. Indeed, for the entire duration of the Siege, the inhabitants of Leningrad were constantly confronted with the views of ruined buildings, which they experienced with all of their senses. They looked at the ruins, walked in and past them, touched them and disassembled them, and they returned to them to excavate their valuables. But the ruin also became a metonymic shortcut-depicting and interpreting it allowed writers to express their many ideas and anxieties about the urbanscape as a whole. This relationship was as unstable as the environment itself, constantly changing, unpredictable, and difficult to grasp. The spectacle of ruin became an integral part of the city and an emblem of the sensorial connection with it, which engendered acute questions about the possibility of one's assimilation into this radical urban makeover. Close readings of two instances of Siege ruin-writing show the urgency and complexity of the blokadnik's attention to his immediate environment and the meanings connected to the ruined spaces by observers. Lydia Ginzburg, a brilliant scholar and writer, once an avid participant in the Russian Formalist circle, worked on her Siege notes for forty years without ever hoping for their full publication. Over time the manuscript itself acquired the dimensions of a ruin in which her memory dispersed into many loosely connected fragments. It is a demanding and fascinating text, both thematically and structurally, in which the topic of space representation plays an integral part: Otter's daily route passed by the houses that were bombed in different ways. 8 Sometimes the split-open houses resembled the theatrical constructions of Meyerhold-well-arranged doors that led to nowhere-horrific and bizarre stage sets ... A person understands with some surprise that as he sits in his own home he is suspended in the air and other people below him are suspended in

INTRODUCTION

the same way. The houses are continuously being destroyed, the process of destruction persisting like a waterfall ... A new relationship with the houses emerged. [... ] People began talking about the houses, thinking about the houses. [... ] Sometimes they attempted to imagine the unimaginable and unbelievable in concrete terms. [... ] By the fall the city had already begun to acquire new, unfamiliar features.[ ... ] Amid the familiar accepted literary symbols these features made a strange and confusing impression. The signs went on to oscillate and confound their meanings. 9

Within this episode, Ginzburg repeats the phrase-"relationship to the houses changed" -three times, thus urgently calling our attention to a distinctive quality of perception of the Siege spatiality: it was never static. The ruin depicted by Ginzburg is akin to the ruin theorized by Julia Hell and Andreas Schonle as "an object and as a process;' and thus it reflects the mutability of the destruction in the city and the mutability of its perception. 10 Besieged Leningrad was an environment of constant, radical, and unpredictable change: this change could be sudden-for example, as a result of bombing-or gradual, as in the decay of the ruins left by the bombing. During the 872 days of the Siege the city was constantly transformedmost acutely during the first year. Witnesses called it the "season of death'' (smertnaia pora): beginning in fall1941, with the first Nazi air raids and the appearance of bomb shelters and blackouts, moving on to winter 1941-1942, with its corpse-ridden heaps of snow, and then, for survivors, into the difficult spring of 1942 with its forced cleaning of the streets, the emptiness of the urbanscape, and relocation into "dead" apartments. 11 In Siege writing, the ruin becomes a metaphor for the trauma of the city's inhabitants, a wound that, because immediate healing was not possible, must at least be covered up. But it was unclear how words could put bandages on the site and relieve the urban pain; the Siege writers thus used aesthetics as a way to anesthetize the experience. One Siege space observer who had ardent curiosity about the meaning of the ruin was the artist and diarist Vera Miliutina, today remembered mostly for her 1942 etchings of the bombed-out and desolate halls of the Hermitage Museum. In Miliutina's Siege notes, we learn how she bravely navigated the ravaged and frozen streets of Leningrad, as well

INTRODUCTION

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as the difficult "pathways" of the Siege art world, where one's combined stylistic and ideological allegiance could often be the price of one's bread ration-that is, of life itself. Like many of her artist peers who are featured in this study, Miliutina engaged in a double act of witnessing-as both an artist and a writer-describing not only the city she saw but also her mode of artistic depiction of the city. On her daily hours-long walk to her place of work, she pays embittered yet sharp attention to changes in the urbanscape: I remember a horrifically destroyed house at the corner of Ligovsky Prospect and Raz'ezzhaia Street. And even though our eyes were accustomed to spectacles of dread, this ruin amazed us with the size of its gaping jaw: it screamed, shouted, agitated! It had been covered with a huge board of plywood, and on it was [Vladimir] Serov's idealized poster (a woman with a dead child in her arms reproachfully looking into the distance). And weirdly enough, this poster made less of an impression on us than the terrible ruin that it covered, the real war victim. And one night, for some reason, this poster-wall suddenly disappeared from the uninhabited Ligovsky Prospect. And once again the mutilated house was revealed in cross-section, with its upended stories. 12 What haunts Miliutina here is the orchestration of a poignant competition between two images of Siege destruction: the one she claims to be "real" -the physical ruin caused by the bombing-and its camouflaged double, shaped by the requirements of official Siege propaganda. Oddly, the sentimental yet brutal poster-fresco of the mourning mother calling for revenge is used to mask a site of destruction seemingly too horrific to be channeled into a monolithic propaganda message. According to Miliutina, even if the real ruin does its own work of agitation, it also overwhelms the observer with its awful scream. Whereas the idealized poster is movable and can disappear overnight, thus reexposing the site of destruction, the ruin continues to affect passersby with its aura of authentic (real) victimhood. Unlike the two-dimensional figures on the poster with their one-dimensional message of vengeance, it is the destroyed building that Miliutina perceives as disturbingly and suggestively anthropomorphic-expressing its own ineffable suffering with a soundless scream.

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INTRODUCTION

What kinds of representation, then, are competing in Miliutina's Writing? She exposes and proscribes the ideological "cover" in order to magnify the "original:' But this original is also problematic. Far from being a direct, neutral image, it is a product of Miliutina's own version of reality-her writing. She is an artist who denies "truth'' to propaganda and attributes authentic meaning to the wounded site beneath the propaganda veneer (elsewhere in her notes Miliutina condemns the poster's artist, Vladimir Serov, chair of the Artists' Union of besieged Leningrad, as a cynical servant of the regime). Daring to face and to register the site of destruction, Miliutina also registers her lack of an adequate artistic language of description that would feel authentic. As Paul Fussell observes in his seminal study of the poetry that emerged during the First World War, "One of the cruxes of ... war, of course, is the collision between events and the language available-or thought appropriate-to describe them:' 13 The historical quest for such a language by the Siege writers is the subject of my study. In her urban scene, Miliutina thus touches on several topics that permeate Siege urban writing: the perceived anthropomorphism of the suffering city; the layered temporalities of the blokadnik's contact with the urbanscape (the initial shock of traumatic change, subsequently reshaped into a routine by the Siege walker's daily encounters with the site of destruction); and the perception of the city as a site of debate over representation, where different versions of reality, artifice, and authenticity compete with one another. Miliutina's scene of the ruin has its own agenda: to make the "real" prevail over the "fake;' to become the voice of the city's pain, to allow it to find its own expressive means. In their ruin representations both Ginzburg and Miliutina show what complex constructs of perception and imagination these sites were for those who witnessed them, and how the writer struggles to find language adequate to reflect the "unimaginable" experience of being within, being a part of the ongoing destruction. Both look for the means to represent what seems to escape representation. To ask how the ruin screams is a metaphorical question. The ruin does not scream-the one who sees the ruin needs to scream but often cannot. Therefore, to produce this text of witness and pain the observer must activate new rhetorical devices. Depicting the ruin became a symbolic synonym for depicting the Siege urbanscape in the Siege now-for the Siege writers, its presentness and immediacy, marked by the lack of logical coherency and historical causality, sometimes

INTRODUCTION

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challenged the possibilities oflanguage itself. Following Lyotard's formulation of the impossibility of representing historical horror as the differend, "the unstable state and instance of language wherein something must be able to be put into phrases yet cannot be;' the creative quest of this study is to show that because the Siege writers could not halt the urge to depict the ruin, they had to reinvent their language.

Speaking the Siege Pain Otherwise: Structure and Method Bombing ... Fires ... The houses are aflame ... Our fate: hunger, and cold, and darkness The living wander like phantoms, And so many dead are carried away on sleds! At the morgue they're stacked like sticks of firewood. I can't describe this! My words are too weak! 14

In these seemingly simple lines, the anonymous author expresses the quintessential problem of Siege representation: in spite of the overwhelming desire of witnesses to register their experience, it was just too much for words: too painful, too unfathomable, too urgent. The quest for this new know-how of Siege urban representation defines the method and structure of this book. In the first three chapters we will look at how the quintessential aspects of the Siege inhabitant's daily relationship with space-movement, corporeality, and visibility-were textualized. Overcoming these difficulties lies at the core of how witnesses write about them. All three chapters demonstrate the mechanism of rhetorical substitution, whereby direct representation of the Siege reality is mitigated by the workings of imagination and memory. My task in chapter 1 is to show that when movement around the city turned into slow-motion torture with repetitive and dangerous routines, writers invoked their urban memories and imaginary memory-based routes and trajectories to enable their work of representation. The discussion in chapter 2 revolves around how looking at the body (one's own or another's) caused only shame and disgust, and how the propaganda images

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INTRODUCTION

of normalized heroic bodies caused only anger and alienation. This caused inhabitants of the city to turn to the dreams of non -Siege allegorical bodies and the various kinds of contact between them. In chapter 3 I consider the dilemmas of Siege (in)visibility and its representations. Ultimately, when the very act of vision became impossible due to blackouts and the failure of electricity, inhabitants of the city had to conceive of different ways to make sensory contact with their city. Using touch and hearing as auxiliary substitutes in their daily practice, they replaced in their representation what they could not see with what they wanted to see. Sokurov's protagonist describes his fear of blindness and the impossibility of discerning the city's past, saying, "I open my eyes and I see nothing:' This comment is equally intense to the besieged city inhabitants but it has a different meaning. In contrast to not understanding remote history, these inhabitants were unable even to recognize their immediate surroundings, for many reasons: it was not only the lack of light in the city but also that, often, they no longer cared to see. Two passersby, victims of famine-caused dystrophy, look at each other and do not see. 15 The Siege trauma precluded the possibility of a direct gaze and direct representation, thus creating the need for a different kind of language in which the dislocation of semantic intention becomes the main rhetorical mechanism. Analyzing the ways that Siege writers dealt with the challenges of creating a language to describe the Siege space, in chapter 4 I offer the notion of the Siege Sublime, a combination of devices that substitute an aesthetic "cover-up" for the direct experience of trauma. This concept exists for me in the context of other versions of the Sublime that emerged in the twentieth century, when historical disasters engendered idiosyncratic aesthetic responses. For example, two distinct illustrations of the twentieth -century political Sublime are the Archipelago Gulag Sublime, revealed in the work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn by Harriet Murav, and Carol Zemel's figuration of the Holocaust Sublime in photographs of the liberated Nazi camps. 16 Both versions use Burke's and Kant's ideas of the Sublime-a response that emerges in the sight of power and horror as a reaction to an unrepresentable event, and nevertheless produces an aesthetic counterpart. Murav and Zemel show how witnesses and interpreters of these historical events of horror manage to re-create them in such a way that they will be received as aesthetic productions.

INTRODUCTION

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The Siege Sublime belongs to the same order of political and aesthetic phenomena: I argue that it lies not in the distinction between the horrific and the beautiful, but rather in the observer's tendency to replace or reconstruct the horrific with the beautiful, and, crucially, is often perceived through the prism of imaginative transfers of subjectivity and cultural memory. Often the city of the stark, unrepresentable present is augmented by the city of mythological usable pasts: urbanscape and memoryscape become superimposed and indistinguishable. How was this exchange and connection between the city of the present and the city of the past realized? In other words, what were the tools and materials of the writing? In chapters 5 and 6 I demonstrate how various pasts of the city were incorporated into the creation of its aestheticized present, approaching this question via the realm of Siege reading: what literary models were used to write about the Siege space? Which mechanisms of appropriation were activated? Related questions of the functionality of the Siege book and Siege reading allow me to explore the task of Siege spatial writing as a dense and inventive system, a network and a patchwork of intertextual appropriation and repurposing. To represent trauma, the Siege subject often had to dislocate it-to depict it otherwise: my study reveals an arsenal of rhetorical tropes of such substitution and transfer, ultimately identifying allegory (the Greek term for "speaking otherwise") as the master trope of Siege urban poetics: To be written at all, to be extracted from the realm of the unrepresentable, Siege experience had to be presented indirectly. Allegory was used pervasively to make this space anthropomorphic, to create a traumatic conflation of the city and its inhabitants-we see it in propaganda posters and in intimate self-portraits, in diary sketches and urbanscape poems. City and citizen are often represented as indissoluble-as morphological similars and metonymic communicating vessels. Through complex mechanisms of personification, Siege writers and artists sought to graft their own Siege body onto the body of Leningrad itself. The artist Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva explains her refusal to be evacuated, saying her "heart had grown stuck to the walls of the city;' and the poet Olga Berggolts, addressing the city, writes: "I've frozen into your inimitable ice:' The allegorical imagination, which finds a way to speak of unspeakable things in transformed terms, was crucial for yet another persistent strategy of Siege urban writing-ekphrasis-the description of visual images by

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INTRODUCTION

textual means. A quality uniting all these intensely varied utterances is the Siege authors' commitment to a specifically visual kind of writing, in which they translate images, sites, and spectacles into words. A significant portion of the material analyzed here belongs to Siege artists who supplemented their visual renditions of the Siege urbanscape with verbal accounts, attempting to compensate for the zones of silence and the inadequacies of representation that the Siege trauma forced on them. And even when it was not executed by professional artists searching for fuller means of expression, Siege writing by necessity blurred the boundaries between the visual and the discursive. Attempting to own their historical pain, many of the witnesses considered in this study chose to transgress the border between the visual and the verbal, hoping thereby to reconstruct and preserve their impressions within the dialogic ekphrastic system, where discursive means seeking to translate or rather to reexpress the image in text. One of the peculiar and important examples of this collaboration between the text and the image, crucial for the Siege situation, can be found in the specific, intersecting genre of art and media-the postcard. This book uses several of such postcards in its discussion for the reason that postcards presented a crucial way for the inhabitants of the city to send their "vital signs" -information about situations in their lives and in the life of their city-outside. This desire to inform the people outside of the Siege ring, however, was controlled by many instances of censorship: the image "content" of the postcard was controlled by the ideological-cum-aesthetic-censorship organs of the Leningrad Artists' Union and the all-mighty censorship "hub" GORlit, while the actual individual message written on the postcard was controlled by the organs of censorship that looked over the postal services of the country at war. Given these severe limitations, how much could the inhabitants of the besieged city express in their postcard messages? I argue that ekphratic figurations made it sometimes possible for their creators to deliver the urgency of their message without stating the severity of the situation directly. Almost any traditional postcard, by default, contains text and image, thus offering an intensely ekphrastic utterance. And yet the postcard that I'd like to discuss in this introduction is even more multilayered. This evocative instance of a postcard connecting the visual and textual is found in the following example, which made its way through history with the text of its actual sender.

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Fig. O.la and O.lb Both sides of postcard by Geogry Fitinhoff, "Za vodoi" (Fetching water) (1942). Collection of the Siege postcards. Courtesy of Blavatnik Archive Foundation, New York.

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INTRODUCTION

But here, instead of the official authors of the postcard connecting the text and the image, it is the individual author-user of the postcard who accompanies the image (women of the city taking water from the ice-covered river by Georgy Fitinhoff) with the literary text that "comes to the mind" of the sender-a fragment from Vera Inber's poema "Pulkovsky Meridian'' (1942), which was published and widely read in the city immediately upon its completion. This postcard, like the Morozov-Tikhonov postcard (figure 2.1), also works as a memory-trigger and a time-machine. Its sender (about whom we know only that her name was Vera, a namesake of Inber) writes: "When I look at this picture, as if against my will memory comes of the winter of 1941 and the following passage from Vera Inber's poema: A HbiHqe ITbiOT H3 HeBKH, H3 HeBbi

(MeTpOBbiJ'f ne;n; KOnH XOTb nep;OKOnOM). CTOHT, o6Mep3wne ;n;o CHHeBbi, 06MeHHBaJICb wyTKOH HeBecenOH, qTO y)l( Ha qTo, MOn, HeBCKaJI BO;n;a, A H 3a Hero oqepe;n;h. Be;n;a! [And now they drink water from the Neva River (Where you need an icebreaker to break the thick ice). They stand there, frozen to the color of blue, Exchanging with each other their bitter joke: That, isn't that strange, there is line these days even to get some water from the river. 0, horror!]

What is remarkable is that on both postcards the textual and the visual "work" together, aiming at creating the fullest possible impression of experience of the besieged city. The mechanisms of collaboration, though, differ slightly: in the case of the first postcard, the ekphratic effect is programmed by the official authors of the postcard, while in the second case, the user of the postcard adds literary text to the image to make the effect of her message even stronger, clearer, and more poigniant. How the images and texts of the urban disaster come into dialogue in the besieged Leningrad spatiality is an important focus of my study. To represent the Siege, the representer had to create some kind of distance, a psychological buffer between his or her subjectivity and the

INTRODUCTION

17

site of pain. For this reason, yet another powerful rhetorical mechanism for enabling the representation of Siege space was defamiliarization [ostranenie] -a process described by Viktor Shklovsky in his important 1916 essay, '~rt as Device:' According to Shklovsky, "the technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar; to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object:' 17 It is a serious understatement to say that the Siege made the form of the city and its citizens' lives more difficult, thus shifting the focus of urban experience. Shklovsky, whose thinking about defamiliarization was bolstered by his experience of the first Siege ofPetrograd (1919), foresaw such a shift. In his 1923 memoir, Sentimental Journey, he develops the idea of defamiliarization as a result of historical change: "The main defining quality of life during revolution is that now one feels everything [vse oshchushchaetsia, everything is palpable]. Life becomes art:' 18 The city dweller thus becomes able to experience the city as if anew-but without losing connection with the "familiar" image of the city. The Siege sharpened the perception of Leningrad as a vessel of multiple temporalities, where the new and often disorienting seemed to be superimposed upon the habitual and familiar. Hence the mournful exclamation of the protagonist of one Siege novel, who journeys in January 1942 from the front lines to the city's main thoroughfare: "He couldn't believe his eyes-it's impossible not to recognize, and difficult to recognize [Nevsky Prospect]:' 19 This duality can be found everywhere in representations of the Siege space, where a longing for the urban past coexisted with a more eager regard for urban change. Based on the Siege writers' primary attention to urban perception, the method of my inquiry is twofold. I subject the texts to double scrutiny: literary analysis, with its questions of genre and style, tradition and ideological intention; and specific questions concerning urban representation-how does it reflect processes of urban perception and cognition and how does it describe urban movement, vision, and memory? 20 Responding to Henri Lefebvre's seminal insight that human beings produce the space they live in, 21 I pose the following questions: what exactly does it mean to produce the space of the Leningrad Siege, the space of military, political, and social crisis? What is produced-the space or its representation, a conceptual plan of the city or its social and aesthetic reality? And who

18

INTRODUCTION

produces it, who has the power to produce the catastrophic besieged cityand hence to represent it-the Nazi forces, the city government (as well as the central government, i.e., Moscow), blokadniki themselves in their daily routines, or others who represent the city in multiple interconnected and/ or contradictory ways, or all these agents together? According to Lefebvre's design for complicating the notion of space, the mental and the social are necessarily mutually linked together, and representation both produces and is produced by practice. Following Lefebvre, I look at the space of besieged Leningrad as a site for producing spatial knowledge because the city inhabitants considered this knowledge of their new, dangerous city to be a crucial survival skill. Analyzing the Siege representation of movement through the lens of the Parisian Situationists' derive, 22 or representations of blackouts and the attendant deficit of vision through the questioning of spatial practice and its sensory apparatus by Michel de Certeau and his followers,2 3 we can critically enrich our understanding of the abundance, urgency, and complexity of urban representation in Siege texts.

Locating the Archive: How Do We Read Siege Spatial Writing? In contrast to the impassable room in the symbolic memoryscape of Petersburg history and the ruin-metaphor of the immediate perception of the Siege disaster, with its multitude of constantly morphing signs and meanings, the notion of the ideal Siege archive container appears to be altogether utopian and thus perhaps even more alluring for a scholar. Where and how do we find access to Siege writing about a space that would allow one to comprehend this problem in all its complexity? And moreover, what were the forms and tasks of Siege writing? In fact, there was at one time an attempt to realize the dream of creating an archival vessel that would preserve the memory of the Siege-as a space and as a text. In 1943, before the Siege ended, the development of a museum of the Siege had already begun. It was to be a place to which survivors would bring their memorabilia (ration cards and pieces of the inedible "bread" remaining of the dead, self-made heating ovens called burzhuika and vremianka, and the gruesome sleds on which the dead

INTRODUCTION

19

bodies were transported across the city) and their writing in every form and genre possible (diaries, letters, works of fiction and poetry). This enthusiastic influx of material was due largely to the personality and ideas of the first Siege museum director, Lev Rakov. 24 An outstanding art and military historian, a playwright, a dandy and a wit, a fearless man who survived the long years of Stalin's camps and fought at the Leningrad front, Rakov had his own strong opinion about what the Siege museum should be, based on his dedication to the memory and mythology of Petersburg in all its historical ordeals and incarnations. Rakov's ultimate design aimed to collect as much written evidence of the recent tragedy as possible and to re-create its space by effectively using dioramas and the physical remains of everyday Siege life that would show the most recognizable features of the besieged Leningrad space: the artists who survived the Siege created dioramas that attempted to reconstruct the urban space in 1941-1944. One of these depicted a sky filled with falling bombs. In the next room, the fragment of a building ruined by bombs had a hole in it through which one could see the unfading panorama of the Neva embankment. The museum's soundscape was created by the ticking of a metronome warning of the approach of Nazi bombers. The dim light in some rooms and glimmering light in others reminded visitors of the ever-changing light in the city-from blackouts to fires. For visitors to the museum, Rakov's design was intended to create the effect of presence by evoking the main sensory components of the Siege spatiality. This project was abruptly interrupted in 1949 in connection with the "Leningrad affair" (1946-1953), a political campaign of purges aimed at ending the emerging myth of Leningrad's political independence by eliminating those who were in power in the city during the Siege-not only the Party leaders, but also the leading figures of city education and culture. The Siege writing archive collected through the efforts of Lev Rakov and his colleagues was partially obliterated (burned in the museum's courtyard) and partially dispersed following the directives of the Leningrad Affair organizers. Allegedly, its remains ended up in the Secret Police files (at the time called the NKVD, now the FSB, and still mostly closed to the public). For his museum activity, Rakov was arrested again and spent another five years in the camp. Instead of the Siege museum and archive, what survived and persisted was the legend of a museum collection that could represent the Siege disaster in full, as it "really was:'

20

INTRODUCTION

Now, looking back at Rakov's ambition to put together a collection of textual evidence of the Siege in its totality, we need to revisit his quest: what was this literature really? How do we understand this phenomenon of Siege writing, and, specifically, Siege spatial writing? How can its full scope be reconstructed today? The corpus of Siege writing is voluminous and diverse: in this study, I examine only one conceptual part of it: texts created during the Siege that addressed the Siege as their subject. I am also interested in the creative processes of appropriation: which pre-Siege texts that were read in the besieged city became fertile ground for the creative processes of the Siege writers? I claim that interest in the urban image was so pervasive that through this lens one can study the whole corpus by asking: What do we learn about Siege writing as a whole by concentrating on the representation of space? Can we at least map and designate the contours of this phenomenon by observing its crucial components? We can dissect the Siege writing corpus for analysis in different ways depending on the intention of inquiry: perhaps the most obvious and distinctive categorization lies between the official and nonofficial segments, the former written for immediate publication, approval of the city censorship, and purposes of propaganda, and the latter without these concerns. Sometimes-and this is important and atypical-the same author might write both kinds of texts in response to the same situation. My task is to bridge these two parts of Siege urban writing by asking how official and nonofficial Siege city writings differ from, contradict, and/or corroborate each other. Rather than reading Siege urban representations by dividing them into neat categories of genre, time of publication, and author's stance vis-a-vis the official position, I try to re-create the polyphony of this complex corpus and topic. Yet another productive take on Siege writing lies in an exploration of the richness of its genre and media approaches. One finds discussions of the Siege space in every imaginable genre of literary fiction (from novels to vaudeville) and nonfiction (letters and diaries play an important part in this investigation). This broad genre repertoire is connected with a variety of authorial skills and authorial positions: the space was described by professional writers as well as by people who had never written before the Siege. I discuss a number of textual representations belonging to the Siege artists who sensed the inadequacy of their professional tools for the enormous task of capturing

INTRODUCTION

21

the Siege. This caused them to seek a· different, ekphrastic mode of representation, oscillating between word and image. Analyzing filmscripts and postcard rhymes, and, importantly, "hybrid" diaries, where image and text enhance and support each other, we arrive at a conception of Siege urban representation as an aesthetic phenomenon that created new approaches in medium and genre. This introduction begins with the words of the artist Iaroslav Nikolaev about the urgency of this task-to preserve the image of the Siege city in representation. Nikolaev speaks about light-the fragile, almost ineffable quality of the urbanscape. This seemingly minor, eccentric point-how and when the light of the Siege can be represented-is in fact quite characteristic. It shows the observers' understanding of the unstable status of the Siege spatial image, which might dissolve into thin air or-even worse-be misinterpreted if treated outside the immediate historical context. Indeed, the artist's anxiety is understandable: what kind of cultural framing is necessary in order to preserve through aesthetic practice the unique moment of traumatic spatial experience? The texts collected and analyzed in this book demonstrate the intensive imaginative labor dedicated to the task of responding to the catastrophe that endangered the city of Leningrad.

1

WALKING THROUGH THE SIEGE Routes. Routines. and the Paths of the Imagination

Footsteps

How did they, how could they walk-the inhabitants of the besieged city? This basic and apparently straightforward question would nevertheless overwhelm and bewilder me throughout the course of my studies of Siege spatiality. What made it possible for them to keep moving for hours and hours, in a state of total exhaustion, through a frozen city that too often turned into an impassable ruinscape? And then, what terms did they use to conceive of their walks-and what terms should we later scholars use to interpret their representations of Siege walking? How did they invent practices and shape forms of discourse to help make their new, forced modes of movement comprehensible and sustainable? One thing is clear: the ability to walk was a crucial survival skill for any blokadnik: "I walk along, carefully stepping over the corpses. They say the most important thing in this profession of dystrophic is not to fall down. If I fall down, I won't have enough strength to get up .... And then thousands of people will step over me with the same indifference as I now step over thousands of corpses:' 1 No matter how wretched their modes of movement were, Leningraders tried to keep on moving. In her autobiographical memory text Daytime Stars (Dnevnye zvezdy) (1959), Olga Berggolts describes Siege movement at its most wretched. Two women are trying to make their way across the frozen Neva and, at the end of a narrow, icy path, are confronted with a mountain of ice on the

Walking through the Siege

23

river's right bank: "'Shall we crawl, girlfriend?"Yes, let's crawl: And on all fours, side by side, pressing closely against each other, supporting each other with our shoulders, we began to crawl upward, clutching with our hands at the topmost notches cut into the ice, dragging our feet behind us with difficulty, from one step to the next, stopping to take a break after every two or three steps:' 2 The whole spectrum of horrific verbs of motion is used by blokadniki to express their deformed mobility: to crawl, to limp, to stump, to straggle, to trudge-any and every mode of walking had to be used in a city robbed of every other means of transportation. From mid-autumn 1941, when the streetcars ceased to function (buses and taxis had stopped running earlier in the summer), every destination in the city could only be reached on foot. People walked to work (forced to do so by the need for rations and by the fear of being arrested for sabotage), to get food and water, to bury their dear ones, to move from their destroyed dwellings to more habitable ones, and-on very few occasions-to visit relatives and friends, though such a luxury became even rarer during the winter. 3 The city turned into the site of one mass pedestrian trek. Today, for those who watch Siege newsreel footage in either Roman Karmen's (1942) or Sergei Loznitsa's (2005/6) version, it might be startling to see how persistently they stride. The Siege-time could be characterized by three phases of mass city-wide transportation: "First, the transportation of corpses during the winter months; secondthe transportation of personal belongings during the evacuation; and now perhaps the biggest one-the city-wide task of cleaning the snow and excrement from the streets:' 4 The most decisive relationship with Siege space was the need to overcome distances by large numbers of people who had never before had to walk for hours on end, under assault from severe weather, bombings and destruction, their own hunger. In no way did the besieged city become static, but its forms of mobility became deeply peculiar. Sociologist John Urry has posited a necessary connection between urban mobility and modernity, whereby new modes of transportation give rise to new social networks and practices. 5 But wartime Leningrad needed instead to recover older modes of movement and transportation, to readjust to the immediate present and future by looking back into the past. This chapter examines urban mobility in a time of catastrophe, which I suggest is by necessity regressive. The blokadnik, moving forward by looking back, had to build

24

CHAPTER 1

a new relationship with a disrupted environment by constantly reshaping the self as well. Walking in the besieged city was never just a matter of physical exertion-it was also a mental and emotional struggle. In order to conceive of the mutual influence between the self and its walking practices, I find it useful to draw on the concept of psychogeography, introduced by the Situationists in 1950s Paris. The task of psychogeography, they proclaimed, was to investigate the psychic effects of the urban context on the individual. 6 They advocated the practice of walking beyond the physically and officially marked contours of the terrain, and saw urban geography as reconfigurable and customizable through the imagination. In a less utopian vision, under Siege conditions, the desperate work of the spatial imagination still worked in a similar way-as my textual analyses in this chapter demonstrate-and turned Siege walking into the main mechanism for producing a new kind of space, constantly painful and constantly multilayered, reconfigurable, flexible. The classical philologist and harsh Siege diarist Olga Freidenberg serves as a witness here 7: "People would overcome huge city distances on foot. They would walk from one end of the city to the other, from one street to another in a gloomy, taciturn stream. The city was buried in deep snow. They would walk for hours, muffled up in scarves, blankets, shawls .... They would pull behind them sleds and children's tobaggans, with beams, logs, boards, kindling, sticks, dragging children's sleds with their household goods, burzhuiki [small, free-standing metal stoves], sacks:'8 "Once I went to the University. The streets were covered with snow and silence. Yellow excrement and slops were everywhere. These streets, where I lived through so much, love, rendezvous, my whole life .. :' 9 Freidenberg's grim, sober description shows how for her the urban past enters the Siege Now. Leningraders were forced to use all kinds of old- fashioned "technology" to move around the city, recycling their previous experiences of the catastrophic disruptions and reversals of a "progressive" urban modernityIudenich's siege of 1919 and its aftermath being the most recent and the freshest in their memories. Leningrad now evoked in its inhabitants an almost dual sense of time and experience-it was perceived as a new, different, difficult city "superimposed" on the image of its old, familiar self. To negotiate such a city successfully means to stimulate two interrelated modes of active cognition:

Walking through the Siege

25

learning and recalling. Such a bifurcated urban gaze is registered in the diary of the writer and functionary Vsevolod Vishnevsky: "Everything exists in a gloomy cold. You keep stopping to look at buses frozen in the snow.... Everything is so familiar, and nevertheless makes a new impression every time:' 10 Blokadniki constantly oscillated between these two impressions-of strangeness and of mnemonic belonging. Walking in ruins, as Tim Edensor reminds us, presents us with "modes of passage that are improvisatory, uninformed by conventions, continually disrupted and expressive:' 11 To walk in the catastrophic city meant to succumb incessantly to defamiliarization and to overcome it, to suffer from its challenges and to take advantage of its benefits. These psychogeographical paradoxes will inform and stimulate the interpretations throughout this study. Here is another description-by the actor Fedor Nikitin-of the flow of Siege walkers, which aims, unlike Freidenberg's, to demonstrate kinetic unity and collectivity rather than temporal multilayeredness: People, like shadows, take on substance only at close range. Silence. No factory whistles, no traffic roar, not even human speech. One can hear only the crunch of footsteps on the snow, and the closer to Liteiny Prospect, the louder and more distinct they become. And on the Prospect itself, where the steps of thousands of people rushing to work flow together, this crunching turns into an orchestral forte .... They walk silently, they walk with difficulty, slowly, but they walk! And they rush slowly! ... It's an epic procession! 12 The oxymoronic rhetoric in this passage ("rush slowly;' silence and sounds) helps to convey its overall oxymoronic agenda-to affirm the problematic connection (of individuals and of their steps) in the catastrophic procession. In order to stress his tricky point, Nikitin attempts to create in his reader the sensation of a sonic unity: while the pedestrians are shadow-like and invisible, it is the growing confluence of their steps that produces the sound. Nikitin insists on this confluence of movement, even if it combines independent and even conflicting units, and his rhetorical construction engenders a question: What actually was the nature of the Siege step? Nikitin ignores this question. He's concerned with the steps' only ideologically correct purpose-to become a part of the flow, of the whole movement of Leningrad workers rushing to their working places. For him, this ideological goal-orientation overshadows the particulars of the

26

CHAPTER 1

walking process. However, as Michel de Certeau notes: "[Footsteps] are myriad, but do not compose a series. They cannot be counted because each unit has a qualitative character: a style of tactile apprehension and kinesthetic appropriation. Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities:' 13 And this is precisely how the Siege step was frequently perceived: as a difficult singularity, as alienated in the process of walking as the individual pedestrian was alienated in the midst of the Siege crowd-what Lydia Ginzburg characterizes as "alienation from those running alongside you" (ottorgnutost' ot riadom begushchikh ). 14 While Nikitin stresses togetherness, Ginzburg's interpretation of Siege walking focuses on separateness, on contact coming undone. Her ruling epithet is "disgusting": "Torn galoshes. The boots (you can't get new ones) are warped, stiff, covered with bumps of some kind. I walked with my head down, thinking about my feet. It's my feet, after all, that are responsible for my direct contact with the world. Disgusting contact:' 15 For Ginzburg, the very process of Siege walking manifested the defamiliarized Siege body's relations with the defamiliarized Siege space: "Every step was a conscious act. ... On the very worst days, it was difficult not just to climb stairs, as always, but unbearably difficult just to walk on level ground. The conscious will had to intervene in matters that had never in one's life concerned it before. The will would announce: I'm walking, that is, it's actually my body that's walking, and I jolly well have to keep up with it. Let's say I move the right leg forward, the left stays behind, then props itself up on the toe and bends at the knee (and how poorly does it bend at the knee!) .... It was a truly disgusting dancing lesson!" 16 The process of Siege movement as a rhythmical and even artful routine is also registered by Nikolai Tikhonov in his description of a walk during a nighttime bombing raid: "I would press myself to the wall, I would leave it swiftly and bound forward, hold my breath, wait for a bit, take a step, all ears; my body would again move along the wall, slithering as if I were a lizard, then I would straighten up and move out to the center of the sidewalk. ... My movements were calculated and rhythmically repeated:' 1 ~ Both writers, Ginzburg and Tikhonov, describe the walking process with an obsessive level of detail, stressing the emerging dissonance between the work of the body and the work of the will that makes the process of movement possible and yet makes it also emotionally suspect-what Ginzburg insistently calls "disgusting:' What engenders this disgust? I suggest that

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27

it is the intense self-control that is now required, the attention that Siege walkers were forced to devote to their walking. In the second chapter, I offer a detailed reading of various scenarios of the blokadniki's attitudes toward their bodies-disgust being one of the most powerful. The "natural" urge then was to 'disappear' the deformed, suffering body, to ignore it; and any occasion when the body had to be called to mind was experienced as challenging. Siege footsteps produced both pain and text: they were percieved in terms of their artful complexity (hence the comparison to music in Nikitin and to dance in Ginzburg), but they were also strange, unpredictable, and demanding-psychologically as much as physiologically.

Circles Soviet poet and diarist Vera Inber notes in her diary: "Over these several days it was not just people's faces that changed-the visage of the city itself changed too. The fences disappeared, including ours .... Some kind of new topography emerged: passageways, alleys, shortcuts, paths linking the courtyards:' 18 What shaped this new Siege topography? Primarily, the shifting destination points, which posed a grave danger since one of the most urgent needs of Siege pathmaking was to conserve human energy-and every extra step could be fatal for the emaciated dystrophic. A usual route to get bread, for example, depended not only on where, in which store blokadniki would finally be able to get their ration (sometimes they had to try several stores), but also on the constantly changing urbanscape. There were the fresh ruins, and all kinds of obstructions and distractions caused by the sudden air raids and the need to take cover. Upon leaving their dwellings, blokadniki could never be sure what the exact trajectory of their walkscape on that day would be (not to mention that none of them knew whether they would return home at all). Curiously, these divergent, flexible (by necessity) walkscapes often consisted of"locked;' rigid, claustrophobic segments hemmed in by strict spatial boundaries. One of the common images in survivors' texts are the impossibly narrow and slippery icy paths they had to traverse. In her memoirs devoted to Siege walking, Nina Mokhova-Loseva, who was a child during the Siege, recalls one winter walk to get food with her father along just such a path, packed on either side with mountains of ice and snow much taller

28

CHAPTER I

than she was. All she could see, from behind, was her father's swollen and purple neck (when he came home on leave from the Leningrad front, he was emaciated and virtually unrecognizable), and all she could sense was the aroma of the soup that he was carrying in his tiny soup container. 19 The Siege path consisting of such "locked" segments constituted a difficult hybrid of two modalities or lines of movement discussed by social anthropologist Tim Ingold: wayfaring and transport: The path of the wayfarer wends hither and thither, and may even pause here and there before moving on. But it has no beginning or end. While on the trail the wayfarer is always somewhere, yet every 'somewhere' is on the way to somewhere else. The inhabited world is a reticulate meshwork of such trails. . . . Transport, by contrast, is tied to specific locations. Every move serves the purpose of relocating persons and their effects, and is oriented to a specific destination. The traveller who departs from one location and arrives at another is, in between, nowhere at all. 20

In terms of its task-to conserve one's energy and to reach one's destination-Siege walking belongs to the category of transport. Indeed, blokadniki desperately needed to make it from point A to point B: but how-if at all-point B could be reached was a matter of tireless spatial negotiation and the immense labor of walking. For this kind of transport to work, the pedestrian had to be maximally creative in putting together a sequence of the safest, shortest, and most efficient segments-otherwise he or she would perish in the very course of the walk. To that end, the "transporter" also had to be a "wayfarer" in constant imaginative contact with the environment. As Edensor reminds us: "In contrast to the deliberate channelling of movement in the regulated city, the physical structure of ruins invites and constrains walking in a distinctive fashion. Under conditions of continuous decay, material structures and routeways are not distributed according to an ordering scheme but emerge according to happenstance .... Those present in ruins tend to walk contingently and improvisationally, their multiple manoeuvres, moods, gestures and rhythms belying any sense of walking as a singular practice:' 21

The Siege walk presented itself to blokadniki as a variety of circular trajectories with a shifting variety of symbolic meanings. Thus emerged the notion

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29

of the inner circle of surveillance, in opposition to and defiance of the outer circle of the Nazi besiegement. The city was constantly patrolled by various military and policing units, and this created a peculiar duality of chaos and order in the city, sharply diagnosed by Freidenberg: "History has known sieges and catastrophes. But no one had ever before thought that human disasters could assume the form of normal, everyday life. Radio forbade any movement on the streets [during the air raids-PB] and demanded that the population take cover in the shelters. And yet it was illegal to be late for work. Everything and everybody had to be in their proper places:'22 The main tasks of this patrolling were thus to make sure that the proper order prevailed, to expose and execute "subversive elements" (alleged spies and saboteurs), as well as-when possible-to collect the corpses from the streets (a task that began in mid-autumn). I had an opportunity to use an interview of Viktor Torkanovsky, who served on an NKVD patrol during the first months of the Siege. 23 His detailed explanations allow one to envision how this circular walking routine operated. Torkanovsky's unit was stationed at the Golodai Island barracks north of the city and had to travel for hours, through Vasilievsky Island, to reach Smolny Party Headquarters. The unit consisted of two or three soldiers with a full load of rifles, hand grenades, and ammunition, but by November 1941 this load had become too heavy for the emaciated patrols. Torkanovsky recalls that although it was his duty to carry his commanding officer's weapons, he would do so only when they were walking along Nevsky Prospect, the most public avenue in the city. Once they turned off Nevsky the officer would often relieve the youngster, at that point totally enervated by hunger, and shoulder his own rifle. Along their route, the patrols would enter various buildings and institutionsfor example, the Philological Department of Leningrad State University, where they observed classes in session and also had a chance to rest. When asked about his main impressions of what he saw in the city, Torkanovsky mentioned the large numbers of people resting, sitting on the pavement everywhere in the city- Siege wayfarers would also segment their routes by dividing them into periods of walking and resting. He mentioned as well the various "props" that people used during that first autumn: ski poles and a range of improvised canes, while their belongings were moved on homemade trolleys (to be replaced, come winter, by the infamous sleds), and, most conspicuously, the plywood boards that were widely used for transport by those seeking to relocate and evacuate.

30

CHAPTER I

He also remembers how the human flow in the city perceptibly diminished throughout the fall, and became a mere trickle by wintertime, when only critical need could "push" blokadniki to the streets that fell outside the range of their "close-by radius" (as archival scholar Georgy Kniazev called it in his diary)-the proximate sphere in which the blokadnik could safely function. 24 The presence of regular military patrols on the streets was supposed to give the impression of a well-ordered life in the front-city, even while its inhabitants and the patrols themselves were suffering severely from malnutrition and exhaustion. Since the route of Torkanovsky's unit passed by the navy cruisers along the Neva, their unit befriended some sailors. Though the latter were not officially allowed to distribute food to the citizens, they secretly fed the patrols by "just putting pasta into our mouths, by hand:' And yet Torkanovsky had to leave the service because of his worsening dystrophy and slowly walked home over the Neva ice, supporting himself with his cane. His task of surveillance was over, and in February 1942 he was evacuated from the city: his mother pulled him by sled to the Finland railway station. The notion of the circle became a master metaphor for Siege space, and the idea of the encircled city produced all kinds of rhetorical repercussions. The city's propaganda machine gave birth to peculiar kinds of inner circles in an effort to counteract and downplay the horrific and overpowering meaning of the outer Nazi one. In addition to the poema by Nikolai Tikhonov, much celebrated by the authorities, titled "Kirov With Us" (Kirov s nami, 1941), one of the most peculiar examples here is Grigory Kozintsev's screenplay The City in a Ring (Gorod v kol'tse, 1942), written soon after his evacuation to Alma-Ata in the fall of 1941, when the military fate of Leningrad was still alarmingly unresolved. Here the notion of circular space acquires a number of interconnected meanings. The first part of the screenplay follows the omnipresent Party official, Comrade Shchukin, in his circling surveillance of the rubble-strewn streets of the endangered city. 25 "Streets pass by. The car speeds along. In the darkness, you can see the beautiful outlines of the streets:' When Shchukin notices especially severe destruction, he feels immediately compelled to inform none other than Comrade Stalin himself: "Stalin was very concerned about this building-1'11 have to phone him about it:' 26

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31

In Kozintsev's screenplay, the city surrenders, and we then encounter Shchukin's comrade-in-arms, Irina, "bound hand and foot" in the newly opened brothel for Nazi soldiers (soldatskii publichnyi dam). Irina's first encounter with a Nazi client is permeated with a somber sense of historical catastrophe mixed with the bawdy grotesque. The soldier's attempt at German "civility" (with merciless derision, Kozintsev has him prepare for the carnal act by-reciting Schiller!) gives Irina the time and opportunity to strangle him; he perishes as the brothel burns down in an avenging fire that ruptures the claustrophobic space of the occupation: ''A fire breaks out, the corpses of the fascists burn, the window opens wide, and the autumn wind bursts in, fanning the.flames into a gigantic bonfire:' Ironically, Kozintsev's word choice in the climactic scene of the killing of the rapist echoes the metaphoric title of his film: as Irina strangles the soldier, "the ring of her hands keeps squeezing and squeezing:' The "siege" of the enemy soldier's deadly embrace replicates the military besiegement of the city, while the "ring" in which he perishes counteracts the "ring" of the occupation under which the city is suffering. In a splendid and uplifting reversal, the smallest "innermost" ring (of Irina's hands) defeats in some sense the outermost ring of the Nazi Siege. In Kozintsev's puzzling-and, judging in retrospect, completely unrealizable- screenplay, we see how the notion of the outer circle of the Nazi Siege engenders other circles: the ring of revenge, the perilous and claustrophobic space of the brothel, as well as the circle of surveillance practiced by the Party authorities. 27 This latter circle-of all-embracing, all-seeing urban knowledge-was a crucial antidote for Leningraders' pervasive anxiety that the failure of knowledge would leave them helpless and unprotected. Thus two circles in the city's consciousness-the outer one of the Nazi besiegement and the inner one of surveillance and control-were figured to reflect on and to compete with each other. While the task of "protection'' and control prevailed in the official version of Siege circular topography, it was not the only possible interpretation. To make circle(s) can mean in Russian both to gain control and to lose it ( okruzhit' I kruzhit'), as we see in the following episode from Anatoly Darov's novel Blokada ( 1946), a unique Siege text-the only work of Siege fiction we know of that was begun during the events and did not have to go through the apparatus of Soviet censorship in the process of its creation or publication. Darov began publishing fragments from his novel in 1943 in

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Novaia mysl' (New Thought), a newspaper published on occupied territory in the town of Nikolaev (Mykolaiv), Ukraine. The full text came out as a book in Munich in 1946 immediately after the end of war. Walking is one of the main narrative networks in Darov's text: the characters are in continuous contact with their suffering and changing city, observing and describing it. One of the protagonists, the poet Vladimir Basov, circles (kruzhit) the city, attempting to find a burial place for his

beloved: I will bury you, Sara, even if I have to go round to every city cemetery: Smolenskoe, Preobrazhenskoe, Okhtenskoe.... Along the way, look at your beloved city.-He carefully cleared the little mounds of snow from her glassy eyes-and set out walking-slowly, but with broad strides, with his head lifted high, stepping over the corpses or walking around them, stumbling into the antitank barriers or the reinforced concrete stakes, colliding with the other pedestrians .... Whether they went around every cemetery or just half of them, whether they wandered for one day or two-in any case Obukhov Bridge had flashed by in his consciousness several times already.... And he went on and on. Maybe not "on and on'' but "again and again" -it was the enchanted circle of the Siege that was winding around him .... Only then did he understand that he was circling around the city.28 The destination of Vladimir's walks cape is at once very pragmatic and yet pragmatically unattainable: he has to find a burial place in a city that has basically rejected its prewar, "normal" burial rites. The epic burial journey described by Darov is not such a radical hyperbole. In Siege diaries one finds descriptions of comparably overwhelming burial walks: for example, the quest by the literary critic Tamara Khmelnitskaia. She had to bury both her parents, who died on the same day in January 1942: I'd made a deal with that character from Volkovo cemetery, the one with the shovel-like in Hamlet. It wasn't a cheap deal either: half a loaf of bread and two packs of Belomor cigarettes for the both of them. So I dragged mine [her parents] on a sled to the cemetery, but he wants his pay first. I take out my purse-and there's only one pack in it. I forgot the other one! He says: "Go home, get me the second pack, and then I'll bury them-but till then they're going to lie right up here:' So I had to

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33

go back home through the whole city-for the second time now, but at least the sled was empty, and grabbed the cigarette pack, then back to the cemetery, without the sled, thank goodness-that was the third time. He buried them both, and then I went back home again-that's the fourth time-in all that frost. 29 Similarly, the quest of Darov's protagonist takes him around the whole city in multiple circles, and walking on this scale takes on the tone of tragic irony that pervades all of Darov's Siege writing. 30 Vladimir's walk is a gloomy parody of the travel guide itinerary. His walkscape is parodic not only because the "guided party" is dead, but also because the "guiding party:' delirious from hunger and weakness, loses his way, and indeed any kind of spatial control. He finally ends his walk at the deserted Hermitage Museum, by the empty frame of one of its most celebrated masterpieces, Rembrandt's "Prodigal Son:' In Russian "prodigal" means "to lose one's way" in both the moral and the spatial sense-the latter is the one activated here. "The face of the Prodigal Son-isn't it his own face?" 31 Through his drifting, Darov's protagonist arrives at a new understanding of himself and his space. This psychogeographical trajectory conjures up the walking practice promoted and implemented by the Situationists-the practice of derive (drifting), "a walking technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances" which aimed to "scrutinize the subconscious life of the citY:' 32 By rejecting the vision of urban practices as purely utilitarian, practitioners of derive sought to expose new meanings, connections, and associations. For them it was a whimsical practice of urban discovery and a revolt against the regulated urbanism of capitalist consumption, even a potentially violent mental practice targeted at the destruction of the eliched relationship between space and its practitioner. 33 For blokadniki their drifting was a traumatic practice, forced upon them-and yet somehow it also had the potential to reveal new ways of siting the endangered self within its new and challenging environment. The drifters of Paris sought new points of connection between the environment and the self. The drifters of Leningrad sought to explain to themselves how their environment could come to cause such pain and how it could be comprehended anew. Darov's drifting opposes the regulated and regulating circles of Siege propaganda: instead of appropriating propaganda meanings, it attempts to make its own.

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In his wayfaring search for a burial place, as we've seen, Darov's protagonist finally drifts into the Hermitage to leave his dead bride there. The choice of this "burial place" is especially significant because it reveals a disturbing kinship-the whole city has turned into a fascinating, museum -like cemetery ("Does it really make any difference where [I leave her]?- the whole city's like a cemetery anyway" 34 ). The exhausted, delirious walker experiences the city and the museum in similar terms. Here he is, inside the museum: "He looked all around himself at the walls on every side covered with ice, fragments of bombs and shells, black stains:' 35 In its Siege version, the Situationists' urban uncanny becomes the stuff of a dystrophic delirium whereby the consciousness of the urban practioner loses its way and thus-finds a kind of freedom from the illusionary circles imposed by the Siege control apparatus. The prodigal son of the catastrophic city seeks to renounce the limitations of disciplined topography by attempting to enter the frame of a museumized, lifeless urban culture. Unfortunately, such a walking practice cannot protect the Siege subject. Neither surveillance nor drifting could serve the purpose of survival-not really. Lydia Ginzburg, in her incessant quest for the rational, also describes the trajectory of Siege movement as circular. And yet her understanding of the circle is antithetical to the circular figurations we've been discussing-to the protective yet confining surveillance and to (self-) destructive drifting. The problem that Ginzburg poses with her "circular movement of dystrophic life" 36 is that of the bare minimum of movement necessary for survival. Ginzburg repeatedly sketches out in her notes the rhetorical figure of a circle of routines that could keep the Siege subject biologically alive-although emotionally numb and cognitively passive. In keeping with her system of "uncertain and confused signs;' Ginzburg's circle is highly ambivalent: one needs to follow it in order to live, but it also burdens the subject with melancholy (toska) because it leaves no space for free will or creativity-in fact, it suppresses them: This was a real, physical race in a circle from home to office, from office to cafeteria, from cafeteria to cafeteria, from cafeteria-back home .... Some trudged along, others, spurred on by their eternal suffering and vain desire, ran-faster, faster!- through the wildly beautiful frost-covered city. 37 The Siege circle consists of recurring and constantly recommencing segments. And melancholy would resume regularly as well. In the

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35

short intervals without melancholy, the mind finally realizes with piercing pain that these purposes serve no purpose, that all the gestures are repetitive .... 38 This was a lockstep sequence of absolutely unfree movements, rituals .... They followed one after the other in ironclad order. The amoeba swims in a circle, extending and retracting its tentacles. The dystrophic person runs in the freezing cold-from one meal to another. 39 Ginzburg's circle stands literally for movement in space, and symbolically for the cyclical sequence of "rituals" that must be performed: it's movement in both space and time. In his analysis of the anthropology of Ginzburg's circle, Kirill Kobrin argues that this circle serves as a protective buffer, a shield against the central phenomenon of Siege psychological reality-defamiliariz ation, the perception that one's habits and habitat have been completely destroyed. Kobrin stresses an important paradox that underlies Ginzburg's understanding of Siege traumatic psychology: the effect of defamiliarization both harms and illuminates the Siege subject. The Siege subject seeks out this effect and learns from it-and tries to anesthetize it at the same time. Kobrin elaborates: To avoid destruction, "blockade person'' "ritualizes" his life as much as possible and then "routinizes" it. Things either return to their habitual series or they are made into new ones. "Blockade person" could survive only by defeating defamiliarization, by shaping new mighty repetitive routines .... He had created a "regimen'' with its rigorous discipline, its cause- and -effect conditioning, its teleology and continually recommencing efforts of will: thus he created a circle. And then-disappointed by the mere fact of "surviving"-he broke the circle with new efforts of will and mind:' 40 Kobrin quotes Ginzburg on "mere surviving": "The circle has to close .... The flow of existence is determined by weariness, the exhaustion of the ritual gestures of the day.... The circle drearily seeks its non-existent endY Ginzburg's circle of physical survival is peculiar in the temporal sense, being absolutely concentrated within the Siege Now, isolated from other temporal planes-of memory, of foreboding. The Siege-time of repetitive routines (allegedly necessary for survival) is an arrested time, as depicted in the diary of the translator Sofia Ostrovskaia, who, like many other

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CHAPTER I

citizens, had the unfortunate opportunity to compare her experience in the besieged city with that in prison: All this time, locked within the walls of one room and the unwritten tables of the strict schedule of the hours, reminds me with an acute physical sensation of my time in the prisons. It's almost all the same: the precise and suffocating regularity of the days, ... the division of the day into hours according to the signals for food and sleep, the interest in food not as food but as an external event . . . Torturous boredom, prison boredom. . . . The besieged city and prison ... No difference at all, my dear reader. 42

Ginzburg observes that the Siege self is opposed to the circle of routines that limits its mental contact with the environment: ideally, the urban practitioner aspires to remember, to compare, to evoke, and to feel. One of the crucial concerns of Ginzburg's Siege prose is how to break this circle of the enclosed, muted urban consciousness. Her answer: by the act of writing. "The circle is the Siege symbol of a consciousness closed in on itself. How can it be broken? People run in a circle and cannot reach reality. How can one break out of this circle by an act? To write about the circle is to break through if' 43 How then could one depict the Siege circular movement so as to break the circle of non conscious routine? In the analyses that follow, I show how various survivors attempted to break the circle of the Siege regimen by depicting different kinds of nonlinear walking practices. In these representations, the psychogeographic quest is figured as inherently mnemonic and empathic, in active dialogue with the city.

Strotung Representing changed modes of walking means taking into account the changes that have overcome the space where one walks. Anatoly Darov approaches this task boldly by bringing his reader to the most central and overwrought avenue in the city-Nevsky Prospect, known for centuries as the main site for the city's flanerie, a mode of walking that has no particular destination but is largely concerned with seeing and being seen.

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The novel's central (and autobiographical) figure, the young journalist Dmitry, is posted by his military unit to the besieged city, where he chooses to visit Nevsky Prospect-which even during the Siege appears to be the place to be ("Everybody wants to be on Nevsky!" -as the truck driver who takes him there exclaims). When he arrives, he rushes to check out the newspaper freshly glued to the wall (alongside propaganda posters and black market advertisements about exchanging various goods for food). Perusing the newspaper (which must have been Leningradskaia Pravda, the only local paper that ran throughout the winter), his attention is caught by an article titled "Nevsky Prospect" and signed by a certain M. Zhilov: "The newspaper barely manages to mingle in happy fashion-the not entirely truthful, the entirely untruthful, and the boastful.... In this harmonious choir of cheerful articles only one feature story stands ouf'44 In this peculiar example of urban legibility, Dmitry "reads" Nevsky while experiencing it, the article serving as his textual guide to the locale's history, meaning, and present state. The content of this article is so suggestive that I felt compelled to undertake a special leg of my research to find its prototype. Could something so piercingly harsh and yet so whimsical really have been published in Leningradskaia Pravda during the winter of 1941-1942? Who could have authored such a text? The result of my research was both disappointing and illuminating. The article in Darov's text does indeed seem to be a fiction (it had no direct prototype)-but a curious source of inspiration lay behind it. My investigation revealed a tale of two Siege authors, equally interesting and strikingly different in their fates and writerly aspirations. The tone of the article's author, whose name makes the protagonist smile amiably, allows us to conjecture that Darov modeled "M. Zhilov" on Nikolai Tikhonov, a renowned Soviet poet and one of the main contenders (along with Vera Inber, Vsevolod Vishnevsky, and Olga Berggolts) for the official title of "the Siege poef' Tikhonov's stature allowed him a certain degree of maneuver in both the form and content of his writing. He was, after all, a tributary of the early Soviet avant-garde who had changed his course and now flowed into the proper ideological channels. As Lydia Ginzburg observes harshly, in her account of a 1943 conference of Leningrad writers: "Tikhonov occupies the post of major poet. ... He's the only one among all those present who was once a poet, perhaps not a significant

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CHAPTER I

one, but a real one. He'd like this to be remembered.... That's all in the past now, but it gives him the right to have this conversation:'45 Indeed, Tikhonov's were the only materials in the Siege press that were allowed to "get distracted" from the urgent propaganda agendas, concentrating instead on a timeless image of the city: "The icy gloom of the winter night. The huge embankment straight as an arrow.... The car is moving along and for a moment the huge edifices of the palaces, the bridges, and the fortress emerge from the gloom. The shadow of history that lies across the stones does not make them old .... The old passerby whispers: Young man, do you know what city you're living in? You're living in Troy!" 46 Tikhonov's reputation as the Siege poet of choice was sealed by his reception of the 1942 Stalin Prize for his writing about Leningrad's struggle. Vera Inber in her congratulatory panegyric depicts Tikhonov's writings as an inalienable part of the winter urbanscape: "And indeed, the picture seems symbolic: the empty street covered with snow in December 1941, the issue of Leningradskaia Pravda, and the Leningrader, all bundled up, reading the fiery lines of the poet in the besieged city."47 During the first Siege winter, Tikhonov did in fact author some odic prose about the role and predicament of Nevsky Prospect during the war. This text, however, was published not in the newspaper, but in a propaganda brochure that Darov could have read: "Nevsky Prospect! How many memories are connected to this legendary thoroughfare, how many descriptions of it can you find in Russian literature! ... The first battalions of the home guard marched along Nevsky in the summer of 1941. During the first Siege winter, the streetcars, automobiles, buses, all frozen in the snow, stood as gloomy symbols of the peaceful life that had come to an end .... [But] neither the shelling nor the bombing could deface this beauty!" 48 The attractions of the city's central avenue are used here by Tikhonov mainly for their inspirational propaganda value. But, as I conjecture, his writing in its turn could have inspired Darov to insert in his imaginary version of Leningradskaia Pravda an imaginary article about N evsky that aims not so much to agitate as to compare, to confront the "real" Nevsky of the Siege with its literary predecessors-and to propose his own version of a walking practice that might restore to blokadniki the depth and sharpness of their spatial sensations. Hence Darov puts his description of the Siege Nevsky in the context of the two genres that, as Julie Buckler reminds us,

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were central to Nevsky writing in the nineteenth century: the panoramic stroll and the individual anecdote. 49 The most promin~nt example of the former is Nikolai Gogol's tale "Nevsky Prospect:' And the latter-Petersburg prose where an individual shapes a discursive relationship with his environment-is best represented by Fedor Dostoevsky's White Nights, whose protagonist, the Dreamer, prefers friendship with the houses to friendship with their inhabitants. Both these methods of urban contact, the panoramic and the empathetic, are transplanted by Darov into the winter of 1941-1942 in a poignant experiment. He asks: Are the modes of nineteenth-century urban literary practice still relevant? To what extent is the Siege walker a successor to the Flaneur and/or the Dreamer? With his macabre irony Darov-or rather "M. Zhilov" -observes: "The besieged love Nevsky Prospect just as they always have. They love to live on it through the pathetically bright shopwindow reflections of the past; it seems they even love to die here, after taking their last stroll in life within its walls. There are more corpses on Nevsky than on any other streef' 50 The walking practice as figured by Darov is mainly a mnemonic one. For him, to stroll means to walk along and toward the Past, to maintain contact with it. And the past here is, first and foremost, literary: as we've mentioned, Darov sets up a clash between the "real" Nevsky of the Siege and its literary antecedents-the Nevskys of Gogol, Dostoevsky, et al. In the case of Gogol, the intertext is introduced overtly through the epigraph and becomes the obvious source of dialogue: "There is nothing better than Nevsky Prospect!" 51 The essay's opening follows Gogol's lead: '~nd, indeed, Nevsky Prospect, there is nothing better than you in this city! And not in this city only! How many epochs you've gone through!" It is also from Gogol's tale that Darov appropriates the central mode of Nevsky walking: prokhodit'sia- to stroll (to walk to and fro, consuming the urban spectacle, seeking to satisfy one's urban curiosity and desires). Darov's comparative experiment aims to discover what kind of stroll is possible or appropriate on the Siege Nevsky. Darov first takes up the immediate target of Gogol's flanerie, the elusive figure of beauty, attempting (and understandably failing) to translate it directly onto the Siege Nevsky: "In the evenings, the cold evenings, one can meet here the most beautiful-with the spiritual beauty of hunger-women, pale, with eyes full of beauty and madness .... Gogol's artist Piskarev would not find here his 'object' -the pretext for his suicide. But he could die of hunger faster than the others:' 52

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Erotic flanerie has no place on Nevsky during the first winter of the Siege, Darov concludes sternly. Beautiful strangers are replaced by women desperately looking for something else entirely: "Bundled in shawls and blankets, the women walk from the Eliseev market to Gostinyi Dvor, there and back:' 53 What are they looking for, Darov asks, in a street filled mainly with corpses and memories of past grandeur? "What is it that brings people here? Maybe the very air of the quite abundant Eliseev market saturated with the smoky aromas of delectable produce.... The air simply breathing with the spirit of well-fed contentment? But not only this! [What brings them is also] Information: that's what also nourishes people in wartime. And hope-for cheerful, joyful, screaming headlines:' 54 The Siege Nevsky stroll is shown as a hunt for illusions (the smell of- unobtainable-food , or good news-manufacture d by Soviet propaganda), and thus the basic teleology of flanerie is reaffirmed: as it did centuries ago, Nevsky produces illusions and invites the stroller to consume them. In the diary sketch by Tatiana Glebova we see the poignant image of the Siege information consumption where a woman follows the last news on her way to a cemetery to bury her child. Thus two urgent Siege destinations become connected. While connected teleologically to previous incarnations of Nevsky flanerie, the Siege stroll is also markedly different-being a dystrophic stroll, the stroll of physically emaciated people with a changed state of mind: "Everybody walks with their measured dystrophic gait. ... After only a few days I too adopted this same walk-You adopt it when you have no other choice.... I am dizzy, and it seems to me that I'm endlessly walking along Nevsky Prospect, from one end to the other: that's why my narrative, I suppose, is lacking in coherence." 55 Here Darov makes a crucial point: his Nevsky stroll is temporal as well as spatial. Again Gogol serves as his starting point. In Gogol's "Nevsky Prospect" we are shown the avenue over the course of an entire day, with different temporal phases co-present in the panoramic all- inclusive vision of the Gogolian time machine. In contrast, Darov's temporal stroll alternates various historical layers by linking together descriptive paragraphs that start with "then'' and "but now" (kogda-to I a teper'). On the Siege Nevsky, time is shown to be not "unified" but disturbed (all the clocks are dead here), severed from an unclear future-but saturated with its openness to the past.

Walking through the Siege

Fig 1.1 Tatiana Glebova, Woman Reading a Newspaper (1942). Courtesy of Elena Spitsyna.

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Thus it is the temporal irregularity of the Nevsky Siege stroll, as conceived by Darov, that presents a striking contrast with the "prison-like" circle of Siege routines. Instead of firmly, predictably moving from one goal to the next, this mnemonic stroll is not cohesive or finite: as Edensor would put it, "It conjures up other times ... that disrupt linear flow:' 56 Another aspect that distinguishes Darov's stroll from the dystrophic circle of routines is that here the stroller enjoys full-even though heartbreaking-contact with his environment. "I am hungry and saddened, but I can spend a long time by your every building.... They live one life with us.... They look far ahead with their broken windows and there is such sadness in them! Such Petersburg sadness.... Here's a house that has bared its innards after the bombing ... It is suffering and I am suffering:' 57 The protagonist's empathy toward the suffering buildings is modeled on the White Nights Dreamer's ("The very houses are known to me. When I am walking along, each of them seems to slip out into the street ahead and look at me"). 58 However, in Darov's case, the stakes of the citizens' intimacy with their environment are very much higher. By empathizing with the destroyed buildings, Siege walkers are awakened to their own human condition. This anthropomorphic connection turns the numbing dystrophic circle into a psychogeographic quest for the self. The alienation (otchuzhdenie) of dystrophy is broken by contact with one's memory and one's environment. My story about the affinity between Nikolay Tikhonov and Anatoly Darov's visions of the Siege Nevsky has a curious and surprising sequel. In 1956, years after the Siege was lifted (and long after Darov had left the USSR), Tikhonov returned to the topic and did in fact write an essay called "Nevsky Prospect:' Obviously, he could not have read Darov's novel-and yet their kindred observations confirm my notion about the congeniality of their spatiotemporal sensibilities. In this retrospective essay, Tikhonov also contemplates the look of the city through the kaleidoscopic lens of memory: This was Nevsky Prospect at quite an out-of-the-way hour of the century, if I could put it that way, at the hour of the Leningrad siege. For a second I closed my eyes, and suddenly it started to seem funny to me. Is this Nevsky? Is it Leningrad? It can't be!

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Just wait, I'll open my eyes, and, as if in a time machine, I'll be transported back to my childhood. The gleaming armor, the horses with their satiny shine .... It's the guard heading to the Field of Mars for the May Day parade. I stopped to wait for this whirl of unpleasant objects in the air [the German bombs] to subside. I remembered this part of Nevsky on the eve of the war. None of the people filling the street remembered any May Day parades; really, everything on Nevsky was so different, as if a hundred years had passed. But all I had to do was open my eyes-and I am once again in the prehistoric darkness, and if a mammoth should now come from behind a corner, I wouldn't be surprised. 59

Under the influence of the lethal screaming of the bombs, the flickering between light and darkness, Tikhonov experiences the Nevsky space as temporally layered. The avenue becomes a time machine whose trigger is danger. The city's main historical thoroughfare exposes to the traumatized observer its pre- and postrevolutionary self, as well as its image during the high Stalinism of the 1930s. The urban form becomes a vessel of coexisting temporalities, a recapitulation of historical layers induced by historical trauma-in this case, by the Nazi air raids. In Heritage of Our Times (1935), the philosopher Ernst Bloch remarks, Not all people exist in the same Now.... They rather carry an earlier element with them .... History is no entity advancing along a single line, ... but it is a polyrhythmic and multi-spatial entity, with enough unmastered and as yet by no means revealed and resolved corners:' 60

I suggest that both Darov and Tikhonov want to construct the besieged Nevsky as a "polyrhythmic and multi-spatial entity" -one that can activate memory and empathy in such a way that a stroll along it becomes an act of re-humanization.

Returning One of the most frequent, necessary, and excruciating walking routines in the besieged city was the trip to fetch water. People would move to any

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source of water, not only rivers but also the broken pipes of the water supply, often located many blocks away from their lodgings. Siege texts often describe this scene with a striking clash of the trivial and the dreadful. It is this clash that becomes thematized in Olga Freidenberg's account: I just learned dreadful news: there's no more water in our house. That same day I saw people carrying buckets of water along the streets. It turned out they were scooping it up right on the street, at the corner of Sadovaia and Gorokhovaia! From so far away? Yes, there was nothing closer. I took the kettle and set out. I see ... that right on the street a ditch had been dug, and gushing into the ditch from a fire hydrant was water- dirty, muddy.... On their knees, squatting on their haunches, amidst shouts and noise, pushing and spilling over each other, women and children, old men and women were scraping up the muddy water with their dirty vessels. All around a slippery field of half-melted ice had formed. This was a motley tableau vivant, a genre scene from somewhere in seventeenth-century Asia.... Soon after they began carrying on the sleds not only corpses but water as well. They carried it from the Neva, from the Moika, from who knows what faraway land. Heavily overburdened, with full buckets, starving people would trudge along in the cruel frost, trudge and then stop and trudge along again. They immediately began profiteering on the water, selling it for five rubles a bucket or more. This was an ordinary urban sight. 61

What does Freidenberg mean by an "ordinary" sight? What's striking here is how desperately yet actively the Leningraders learn to inhabit their new situation, an important part of which was the city's temporal regression. The Siege engineers new behaviors, different social and economic scenarios, new historical associations and contexts: the situation is permeated with disastrous everydayness. Rather than bringing urban life to a standstill, it activates it in multiple modes that are both "unseemly" and effective. A similar task-representing the everyday consequences of urban disaster-defined the inquiry of Siege artist Alexei Pakhomov. In his memoirs he describes his work on one sheet of his lithographic cycle Fetching Water (Za vodoi, fig. 1.2). Pakhomov's quest, however, was bound by the norms of propaganda: to be published and exhibited he had to depict Siege routine as a heroic and exceptional act rather than a "natural;' inherent part of the disastrous everyday. His task was to essentialize the extraordinary

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quality of the situation: "I wanted to depict everything new that the war, the Siege had brought us. The sight of the Leningrad streets was not an ordinary one. The lithograph Fetching Water was one of the first works of my Siege series. It was also the result of a rigorous selection of impressions, not just a sketch, a fixation of the facts .... [I needed to depict] the extra-ordinariness, the Siege-ness of this scene and to strengthen its dramatic qualities .... At first I depicted the girl and the woman as too fragile and refined. But that wouldn't call up any sympathy in the viewer. They were just sissies-let them toughen up! Why feel sorry for them? What I needed to show were people who were hardy and strong, but wasted away and exhausted by hunger:' 62 Both Freidenberg and Pakhomov understand that the task of fetching water is essential to the Siege experience (blokadnost'), but they depict it differently: Freidenberg frames it as an everyday practice-and Pakhomov as pathos. While practice implies the emergence of adaptive mechanisms (for example, people can turn even muddy water into a saleable commodity on the black market), pathos implies that the scene is an exception and a disruption of the social tissue. This quintessential Siege route and routine also figure at the center of Olga Berggolts's narrative poem "Your Path'' (Tvoi put') (1945). Her stance was unique in Siege writing because it attempted to combine the two modes mentioned above: seeing the Siege as a space both open to ordinary human practice and exceptional. A close reading of the poem reveals that both words in the title point to notions that are intriguingly problematized by the author. So, whose path is actually being described here, and what kind of movement is encoded in her notion of"path''? As Katharine Hodgson convincingly claims, Berggolts's Siege diction shifts stylistically between different voices and registers. Its efforts to voice both official and private perspectives lead to what some scholars see as inconsistency3: Hodgson alludes to Carin Tschopl's view that "the fractures in style and structure are connected with the poems' representation of the conflict between the official response to the siege and a search for a different response:' 64 In the case of "Your Path;' however, we don't just have a binary division of the poet's voice but rather a complex series of substitutions. "Your" (tvoi) in the lyrical narrative addresses in turn her husband, her lover, the poet's self (before and during the Siege), death, the enemy, and-finally and victoriously-the city itself. Consequently, one

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Fig. 1.2 Aleksei Pakhomov, lithograph," Za vodoi" (Fetching water) (1942). © 2016, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Courtesy of Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg.

might suggest that an important movement within the text is the developing metamorphoses of the poet's addressee, her alter ego, which finds resolution in the poet's fusion with her own city: ITo cyMpaqHbiM yTpaM Tbi 3a Bo~o:if. xo~wn Ha Jib,II;HCTbi:if. HeBcKw:if. . . .

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47

li1 Ha JhiTeHHOM 6biJI 0/];MH MCTOqHMK.

Tpy6y npopBaB, nop;3eMHaH Bop;a Op;Ha)l(p;bi c BonrreM BbipBarracb M3 noqBbi, li1 nOnJibiJia, CMep3ruiCb B fllbi6bi llbp;a ... li1 JIIO;D;M KCTeHaM )l(aJIMCb nepep; Hero, Ho Bp;pyr op;MH, ycTaB nepe)I(Mp;aTb,Hanepepe3 now err no KOpKe Jibp;a, Q)l(ecToqacb now err, HO He npopBaJicH, A c6MT BOJIHOH, cBaJIMJICH Ha xop;y, li1 BMep3 B nOTOK, M TaK Jie)l(aTb OCTaJICH 3p;ecb Ha JlMTeHHOM, BM;D;HbiH BCeM,- BO Jlbp;y ... . . . .H cqaCTJIMBa, ... MOH ropop;, qTQ HBOiliJia B cyp;b6y TBOIO ... .H KTBOeMy npMrBO)I(;D;eHa BM/];eHbiO, .H BMep3Jia B TBOH HenOBTOpMMbiH rrep;. [In the gloomy mornings You'd go to icy Nevsky to fetch water ... And on Liteiny [Prospect] there was a source of water. One time, when a pipe broke, the underground water Burst out of the ground with a howl, And began to pour out, freezing into scrolls of ice. And the people in its path cowered against the walls ... But one man, tired of waiting,Started across on the crust of the ice. Stubbornly he started across, but didn't break through; Rather, he fell mid-stride, knocked over by a wave, And froze in the current, and thus he lay, Here, on Liteiny Prospect, visible to all,-in the ice ... . . . I'm happy ... , my city, that I've entered into your fate ... I'm nailed to your vision. I've frozen into your inimitable ice.] 65 Berggolts turns this tragic incident into a metaphor of belonging. The poet's identity is rebuilt through identification with her city. This process of

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CHAPTER I

fusion is closely associated with various mnemonic impulses filling Berggolts's Siege text: she announces that her Siege self was permeated with the work of memory during the events; and after them-her concern is not to allow the ideological constructions of post-Siege propaganda to erase this experience: 66 Bee rrpeBpaTMJIOCb Bp;pyr B BOCIIOMMHaHbe: BcR )I(J13Hb, Bee qyBCTBa, p;a)l(e R caMa, J1oKa BOKpyr B CBMpeiiOM O)I(M,ll;aHbe CroRT Bparw, 6e3yMCTByer 3MMa ... ToMy, KOMY rrpMlliJIOCb Korp;a-Hw6yp;b Crop;a xop;MTb, -He roBopw: "3a6yp;b". 5I 3Haro Bee. 5I TO)I(e raM 6bma, 5I ry )l(e Bop;y )i(ryqyro 6parra ... [Everything suddenly turned into memory, All of life, all the feelings, even I myself, While all around, fiercely waiting, Stand the enemies, [and] winter is raving mad ... To anyone who ever had To come here, -don't dare to say: "Forget:' I know everything. I was there too, I came to get that same burning water ... ]67

In her autobiographical prose The Neva Gate (Nevskaia zastava, 1959) the poet continues her quest to define what role memory played in the preservation of the Siege self. 68 Figuring memory as both spatial and experiential, she depicts her routes to and from the places of her childhood and insists that each one of them was a path of return: for her there's no such a thing as an isolated, one-way walkscape. Berggolts's task here is to create a textual form that would reflect the form of her spatialized memory: "I looked into the depths of the Neva gate ... and my whole life spread out before me .... I was not just remembering, I was living through what is, what was, and what shall be. These 'vosperezhivaniia' were sudden, fragmentary, scattered, and at the very same time merged into one powerful stream:'69

Walking through the Siege

49

The neologism coined by the poet-vosperezhivaniia, a cross between vospominaniia [memories, recollections] and perezhivaniia [experiences as they are lived through]-is crucial for her endeavor: she thus compresses memory and experience, refusing to distance them, to let them go. Berggolts notes that her mnemonic experiences comprise both parts and wholes. What kind of text can contain such memories? How does Berggolts organize her account of walking? In his elaborations on walking, temporality, and narrative, Edensor suggests: "Stories that are fragmented, non-linear, impressionistic and contingent are better suited than traditional linear narratives to the experience of walking in ruins:' 70 In The Neva Gate we have an ambitious narrative attempt to evoke both the spatial and the temporal aspects of walking in the "dead" city. "I decided that along my way I will give myself tiny tasks: here I am now at this lamp post. Now I have to get to the next one:m To replicate this mode of walking, segmented by necessity into small "portions;' the text also becomes fragmented into small subchapters- ·~nton Pavlovich is angry" (the name of a movie on the poster pole where she takes a break),72 "Smoke break;' "Steps in the ice:' The account of her February walk is written in fragments that correspond to the segments of her movement. But while it's important for Berggolts to indicate that her Siege path is segmented, she finds it equally important to insist that it's connected to the uninterrupted whole of her experience. Hence she defines her Siege path as the path of return (put' vozvrata): "So I went beyond the Neva gate at the beginning of the dry, golden October of 1941, drunk with the consciousness of everything that surrounds me, ... even if it was before my memory:'73 ·~nd only four months later I set off on the same road, but in the opposite direction, going from the city to the Neva gate. I went to see my father in the first days of February 1942:'74 "With the same feeling of quiet determination I set out the next morning on my journey back to the city along the very same path by which I came here, almost dead, the day before yesterday and by which, immensely happy, ecstatic, immortal, I set out from here-four months ago:'75 The interconnectedness, the unity of the poet's walks capes is what gives them meaning and a sense of purpose. Berggolts makes an important distinction between the repetition and the continuity of her walking efforts. By return (vozvrat) she means not only the direction of the walk (walking back) but also-giving back ("my main desire was to give back"), the

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sharing of her Siege vision and inspiration. 76 Thus the connections with her city and with her memory become the two main axes around which Berggolts builds the representation of her walking practice. The textual walkscapes discussed here, by Darov, Tikhonov, and Berggolts, were all written over time, from the days of the disaster through its aftermath. The difficult dystrophic footsteps of the Siege and its minimalist, compulsory, nonconscious circle of routines are contested in these narratives by efforts to "break the circle" -or rather to enrich and complicate it with memory and empathy, enabling the survivor to recall and recognize anew both self and city.

2

SPATIALIZED ALLEGORY Speaking Dystrophy Otherwise

The vast archive of visual material representing the bodies of Leningraders under the Siege is bound to leave today's viewer with a feeling of acute uneasiness. A good part of this uneasiness is engendered by the puzzling and poignant disparity among the bodies represented. Portraits and self-portraits of dystrophic artists in their "dead" apartments and anatomical studies from the morgue mingle with posters and huge street frescoes where athletically proportioned heroes rebuild the city's ruins. Grotesque sketches portray plump, rosy-cheeked cafeteria waitresses serving an emaciated clientele. Reading diaries and notes, manuscripts and published texts only adds to the sense of incongruity: the authors' bodies are-simultaneously-hidden and displayed, depicted as both disgusting and heroic. In trying to account for such representational cacophony, this chapter has grown out of two root questions: What were the various strategies and tasks in that time and place for representing the Siege body, both discursively and visually? And to what extent did the spatial context create or transmute these various modes of representation? Ironically, the text that offers the most useful vocabulary for thinking about Siege bodily dynamics antedates the Nazi Siege of Leningrad. This is Viktor Shklovsky's essay"Petersburg During the Blockade;' written in 1923, describing everyday life in the city during its siege by Nikolai Iudenich's army in 1919 and the horrific aftermath in the winter of 1920. As so often with Shklovsky, his text begins with a provocation: in this case, its title. In 1923 the city was not Petersburg anymore (and it would soon cease to be Petrograd)-and the misnomer signals that his essay will go on to register every kind of incongruity-historical, topographical, psychological,

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and physiological. Shklovsky even begins his narrative about "Petersburg during the Blockade" in Moscow. Moscow itself is besieged by crows who come to feast on corpses: "What struck me in Moscow was the abundance of crows .... The crows were flying over the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in a spiral as if they were trying to surround Moscow.... Some crows (it seemed like many) swirled around the cupola of the cathedral like flies. It made the cupola look dirty.... They formed ranks, shifting constantly in the air.... I don't know what the crows were up to, but they were certainly up to something. Perhaps it was just a demonstration .... Now the crows in Petersburg are not visible (voron ne vidno):' 1 Readers might well ask: Why begin in Moscow, with its disgusting murder of symbolically politicized crows? Aren't we in the "wrong" place? And then Shklovsky executes his signature "knight's move" (khod konia) and transports his readers to Petersburg, where "the crows ... are not visible:' Moscow is being used here apophatically: Moscow is everything that Petersburg is not. It is also, crucially, a locus of the representable: dirt, decay, politics; whereas Petersburg turns out to confute representation. The crows are not seen in Petersburg not only because they are gone but because they cannot be seen by the Siege subjects, whose terrible suffering has deprived them even of vision. And yet Shklovsky's essay concerns itself, first and foremost, with sensory reality, with the behaviors and reactions of the besieged urban body. This body is essentially oxymoronic, at once pure and dirty: "Petersburg is dirty because it is very tired .... Considering again the corpus of the Siege postcards, we find that many of these urban representations completely lack human figures: we see a striking, people-less city. For example, in one mesmerizing postcard series, the artist Viktor Morozov illustrates the text of one of the besieged city's most illustrious writers-Nikolai Tikhonov. The text is also peculiar: it is a collection of urban sketches, "The Year of Leningrad': describing life in the city from May of 1942 till January of 1943. Tikhonov presents the city as an anthropomorphic and yet people-less entity, and Morozov aptly transfers this environment of the troubled, empty city into a different medium. Another important and curious quality ofTikhonov's cycle ofliterary sketches and Morozov's cycle of postcards/illustrations is that Tikhonov "starts" his calendar in May of 1942, thus skipping the "deadly" season

Spatialized Allegory

53

Fig. 2.1 Postcard by Nikolai Tikhonov and Viktor Morozov, "December, 1942:' Collection of the Siege postcards. Courtesy of Blavatnik Archive Foundation, New York.

of 1941-1942. However, its specter is present in Tikhonov's "calendar": he returns to these events in several narrative flashbacks. For example, in his sketch about May of 1942, he writes: "Those who saw Leningrad in January and February wouldn't recognize the city now. Snowdrifts lay in the streets, ice formations descended from the roofs, everything was full of hills of filth, trash covered the streets, ruins of the walls were seen everywhere .. :· In the text directly illustrated by the artist on the postcard in question, Tikhonov also returns to the December of 1941, reminding the reader of the severe frosts that paralyzed the city during the first year of the Siege. The image of the city in Morozov's postcard is ghostly-instead of real, living people, mostly memories are lurking here. The inhabitant of the besieged Leningrad who might send this postcard outside of the city would be sending a highly complex message: here was an impression of the city as it was in the "now': in December of 1942, but also of the city as it was a year before-in the unnamable, and often appearing to be unrepresentable, December of 1941.

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The most coherent literary identification of this strategy during the Siege belongs to Lydia Ginzburg. In Blockade Diary, she observes that sensations were alien, as if they were being experienced by someone else altogether.... The alienation proceeded, the splitting of the conscious will from the body, as from a manifestation of the hostile world outside .... For months on end people-the greater part of the citizens-used to sleep without undressing. They lost sight of their body. It disappeared into an abyss .... Through immobility I gradually achieved the disappearance of the body ... this blissful total alienation of the body. 2 In her article on the Siege body, Lisa Kirschenbaum insists on the centrality of this strategy for the alienation of pain in Siege accounts. 3 Though one cannot deny the importance of this psychological mechanism, the bodiless body was but one of many bodies produced by the Siege: not all citizens lost sight of their own and others' corporeality. Our task is now to demonstrate the diversity of body types and body/self relationships, as well as the complexity of body politics and the politics of bodily representation in besieged Leningrad. How did Siege bodies see, depict, and react to one another? We find many passages of tortured yet meticulous self-observation indiaries of the period (see, for example, Glebova, Vishnevsky, Ostroumova-Lebedeva).4 One diarist, the writer and philologist Pavel Luknitsky, who spent the Siege both in the city and on its outskirts with the army, conscientiously notes the details of his deteriorating health and cheerfully declares himself to be an "invisible man;' his body seemingly shifting in and out of focus: Strange world! Where there is electric light-in stairwells and corridors, on streetcars-it is blue and dim, imparting a deathly quality to faces. A few meters away from this light, the world seems populated by invisible beings: someone is moving, shuffling along listlessly, mumbling-but there are no people! And suddenly, right up against you, at the level of your chest, floats past a tiny, mysterious, whitish disc, floating as if on its own in the darkness. And you recognize the human being it signifies only by the labored breathing. The phosphorescent disc, the so-called "luminophor;' is sold everywhere now as a way of preventing two pedestrians from accidentally bumping into each other in the dark. I picked up one of these discs as well. Pinning it to my chest in front of the mirror for the first time, I suddenly imagined that I had no body. And I immediately started laughing: I'm just an invisible man! 5

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55

We can also trace the reactions of citizens to the disintegration and death of the other, to death in public. These reactions are marked by a complex combination of horror, psychological numbness, poignant attention, guilt, and denial. The writer Leonid Panteleev is dismayed that the sight of another's pain no longer hurts him, interpreting this change as a side effect of the Siege trauma, both physical and spiritual. All winter, the corpse of an old man lay at the corner of Zhukovskaia Street. Practically everyone trudging along the sidewalk at the time almost automatically stepped over that grey, crooked, frozen-stiff body. But I didn't step over it; I went around. And stirring somewhere deep in my soul there's pride, even boastfulness: you see, this means I'm still alive, I haven't yet lost the characteristics of a human being. And suddenly one winter morning I realized with bitterness in my heart that for several days already I had been stepping over the corpse. This means I no longer had the strength to take those several steps around. I was mentally fatigued; this disrespectful, sacrilegious attitude toward the human body no longer scared or hurt me. 6

Death becomes ultimately transparent and "frozen;' dysfunctional as an emotional catalyst. So numbed are observers by their own pain that the sight of death hardly affects them at all. This pervasive visibility, which is yet stripped of any power to leave an impression or elicit a response, is described by many citizens? The ballerina Vera Kostrovitskaia mentions a ghoulish and surreal scene in which the transparency of the Siege body is foregrounded with particular starkness: With his back to the post, a man sits on the snow, tall, wrapped in rags, over his shoulders a knapsack. He is all huddled up against the post. Apparently he was on his way to the Finland Station, got tired, and sat down. For two weeks while I was going back and forth to the hospital, he "sat" 1. without his knapsack

2. without his rags 3. in his underwear 4. naked 5. a skeleton with ripped-out entrails

They took him away in May. 8

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The corpse in this narrative exemplifies the Siege habituation to death in public: the presence of corpses marks urban routes and routines as if bodies were street signs. Philippe Aries's dichotomy between the visibility of premodern ("tamed") death and the invisibility of modern death 9 dissolves in the Siege-time alternation of corpse visibility vs. invisibility. And yet, despite this habituation, the sheer pervasiveness of corpses penetrated deeply into the discourses of the time. Vera Inber, who was married to Leningrad surgeon general Ilya Strashun and lived with him at the Erisman Hospital, often described dead bodies in her diary-first as seen in the morgue, and later all around her, inside the hospital and out: "In the first room a completely naked male corpse lay on a stretcher. A skeleton would have been fatter. Here was something that didn't even look as if it had ever been a living body with flesh and blood and muscles. On the abdomen, in a hollow, a note was pinned with the name of the deceased. I didn't read it. In the next room several stretchers were arranged in a row. There were bodies of men and women. A quite inhuman thinness deprived them of age, and even of sex:' 10 Inber observes that starvation eradicates distinctions of age and gender, and even though this skeletal, bodiless body still "holds" its identity card, the observer is reluctant to read it, unable as she is to recognize this object as formerly human. The Siege body seems able to transcend the boundary between the animate and inanimate: the pain of starvation elides the difference. Kostrovitskaia writes: "The relationship between people and the numerous old 'Petersburg' sculptures has changed utterly; the latter now resemble living, thinking people. From the height of the Winter Palace, the Hermitage, the Rostral Columns, and the palaces on the Neva, hoarfrost-covered statues cast down their dignified gaze, silent witnesses and judges of events. In their stillness and constraint you sense the living and the human. They bear witness along with all the living:' 11 Paradoxically, in this account, the very "stillness" of the Leningrad statues-their lack of motion or speech-is what makes them appear lifelike: the animate/inanimate distinction was radically blurred, and this troubled zone of ambiguity should be understood as central to the allegorical problematization of the Siege body. Just as Boriskovich in his art transfers his pain onto the space of his memory, the witnesses and victims of starvation projected their pain onto their environment. Though Leningrad observers sometimes lost their sensitivity to the spectacle of death, in their accounts we find the idea of a peculiar "death bacterium" :12 mortality

Spatialized Allegory

57

infects inanimate objects and the sites around them. Inber writes: "The bark has been sliced off the oak trees, particularly the young ones, up to the height of a adult human. The stripped trees look like a human being without skin:' 13 The Hermitage curator and artist Vera Miliutina adds: "In the Knights' Hall, knights stand on their pedestals. Their armor has been taken from them, they stand naked, covered with chamois leather, headless, lifting their hands in despair:' 14 The knights of the Hermitage and the trees along the embankment of the Karpovka River where Inber lived are thus metaphorically equated with the corpses that covered the streets of Leningrad during the fatal winter of 19411942. The acme of vulnerability in their nude-even flayed -state, these quasi-bodies figuratively amplify, as in some sinister kaleidoscope, the spectacle of Leningrad death. What's more, they activate a process of prosopopeia or personification, but in a manner highly perverse. As J. Hillis Miller notes, the rhetorical figure of prosopopeia typically "ascribes a face, a name, a voice to the absent, the inanimate or dead. It's a cover-up, a compensation for death. It is a trope of mourning:' 15 But the Siege's discursive "death bacterium'' strikes both people and inanimate objects: the latter take on allegorical life only to have it snatched away. The dead trees and dead knights of Leningrad do not compensate for the disastrousness of Siege death: they reinforce and multiply it. Ascribing missing limbs, skin, and faces-that is, mortality-to inanimate objects makes the idea of death all the more palpable. Still, one cannot help but notice that in representations of the Siege, skeletal bodies are few and not in proportion to the grim reality of the more than one million victims. In fact, the discursive suppression of the skeletal body of the suffering, helpless citizen was not just a psychological necessity for the inhabitants of the besieged city themselves. It also coincided with the ideological demands of the historical moment. One of the most renowned Siege artists, Alexei Pakhomov, attests: Life came to a standstill. Particularly palpable were cold and hunger. I had a rather voluminous library of art books, many of which I hadn't got around to examining previously, and so I decided to take this up. Lying under a pile of blankets, I carefully examined book after book. Having lain this way for a week or two, I felt the urgent need to do something. I started walking around the city, observing. I stopped in at the Erisman Hospital and found myself in the physiotherapy department, where I

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made some sketches of wounded soldiers. After that I began drawing in the morgue. I love the great classics of art, and I love the human body glorified therein .... At one time I was an avid student of plastic anatomy, and had only just, while lying in bed, been admiring reproductions of the works of the great masters that glorified the human form. And here in the morgue I saw a great many naked bodies, bodies of people who had died of hunger and from bombings and artillery fire. A sharp mental pain arose in me at the sight of the beautiful human body disfigured by starvation or explosives. I wasn't trying at all to depict the horrors of war-I had no such intention-but everyone who saw my drawings agreed that they made a dreadful impression and should not be exhibited publicly. 16 Pakhomov is not looking for ways to suppress the all too apparent pain suffered by the bodies he is drawing; rather, his purpose is to channelthrough the creative process-the pain he himself experiences upon observing these mutilated corpses. He feels what the dead body no longer can, and seemingly unconsciously (ne otdavaia sebe v etom otcheta) foregrounds the contrast between the perfect, idealized body of the old masters' atlases of anatomy and the disfigured (isterzannye) bodies of Siege victims. This pain is then transmitted to the viewers of his sketches, who are repulsed by their graphic starkness. We even find evidence that some Siege artists practiced self-censorship in order to forestall the possible reaction of ideological disgust: "I had a great desire to record the appearance of the dystrophic [distrofik: that is, chronically malnourished, starving], whom one saw constantly at the time, but I didn't want to work on this then; I wanted to make something that would keep people's spirits up, including my own:' 17 We cannot know exactly which works Pakhomov studied during his brief respite from the Siege, but his subsequent sketches seem inspired most of all by Theodore Gericault's infamous body-part stilllifes, of which Linda Nochlin writes: "The mood of these works shockingly combines the objectivity of science-the cool, clinical observation of the dissecting table-with the paroxysm of romantic melodrama .... The absolute abjectness of these subjects [is highlighted] by their horizontal position: by laying them out in perspective, on a horizontal surface, Gericault consigns the mutilated heads to the realm of the objecf' 18 Similarly, in Pakhomov's morgue sketches, instead of comprehensible subjects endowed with agency, participants in the Soviet war effort, we see dehumanized objects.

59

Spatialized Allegory

Not only the content but, crucially, the style of these works was unacceptable to those in charge of Soviet war propaganda. 19

The Allegorical Disfigurations of Siege Propaganda For purposes of display, only "stylistically correct" bodies were permitted: ideological factors ensured that the dystrophic, skeletal body was replaced in representation by other body types-primarily the body-ruin and the normalized heroic body-whose meaning was more easily controlled, hence more usefuP0 Body-ruin emerged as a poster metaphor: one propaganda text (fig. 2.2) induces the viewer to correlate destroyed buildings and "destroyed" citizensY The poster caption reads: With their barbaric artillery strikes, Hitler's thugs are destroying the cultural and artistic landmarks of the great Russian city of Leningrad and killing our women and children. The blood and wounds of Leningrad summon you, warrior: AVENGE US!

.,..,....•c•• *"'"'• m....- .....,..IIUQIIIIIT .... _. ................................... _.....,.. ~ ....._. IJMTYIIIM I IICIJCClll . . _ .

~

,...... .....,.. , . . . .

~~~--

...__ --.

.......__ ·---·----......·--

Fig 2.2 Poster by Nikolai Selivanov and Vissarion Saianov (1 943). From the author's collection.

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She lies on a Leningrad street, Her dead mouth slightly open. Seen from afar, she seems to be squinting, And blood slowly trickles down her cheek. ... Death to the Boche! No mercy for the enemy! In the harsh labor of battle We will smash the enemy still more mercilessly For the suffering, the tears, the pain of Leningrad! 22

Nikolai Selivanov's poster frames the bombing victim as a hybrid body: half-woman, half-historical landmark. This propaganda text performs a double trope, personifying the city and reifying the person. The resulting hybrid only seems to be alive ("Seen from afar, she seems to be squinting"); its actual purpose is to represent death economically-localizing two affects in one body-and to call for revenge. Thus did individual bodies lose their personhood and become allegories for the endangered city, defined by its aesthetic and historical significance, recalling Walter Benjamin's dictum that "in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica [the face of those on the verge of death] of history as a petrified, primordial landscape .... The greater the significance, the greater the subjection to death, because death digs most deeply the jagged line of demarcation between physical nature and significance:' 23 The body of the Siege victim "deserves" to be displayed on a poster only insofar as it can be turned into an historical "lesson:' In the politics of Siege representation, the urge to document disaster competed with the "greed for fat" (both the discursive and literal varieties) already diagnosed by Viktor Shklovsky in his memoir of the "first" Siege of Petrograd. 24 Not only were Leningraders frequently unwilling to see the skeletal body: they even resisted revealing it to the "outside world" (Bol'shaia Zemlia, literally "Big Land;' that is, the land beyond the Siege). Propaganda focused on exhibiting to the Big Land the mighty, heroic body of the defender of Leningrad, and not that of the martyr. This choice did not completely exclude the possibility of unpolished, less "full-bodied" representations-those aimed especially at inciting Soviet consumers of war propaganda to righteous anger (iarost' blagorodnaia)-but the fact remains that Siege TASS window posters include troubled bodies, but no victims of famine, nothing like the skeletal bodies found in the only

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61

recently published sketches of Alexei Pakhomov, Mikhail Platunov, Gavriil Malysh, Evgenia Magarill, and others. 25 The ideologically correct body of the inhabitant and defender of the besieged city typically resembles this image by Vladimir Serov (fig. 2.3): As chairman of the Leningrad section of the Artists' Union, Serov expressed the official stance on Siege body imagery. The Siege diary of Tatiana Glebova, a remarkable artist of the Leningrad avant-garde and favorite pupil of Siege starvation casualty Pavel Filonov, allows us to witness the power struggle over this imagery-the process of negotiation and the ultimate suppression of any artistic perspective that did not comply with the politically correct point of view: "Serov rejected my poster, saying it's very abstract.... Serov's work is nothing but rubbish-his pieces have the whiff of the cheap diner. . .. Once again Serov rejected my poster, and ordered me to redo a card (the head). He rushes me, saying I should keep doing cards and forget about posters. Still, he doesn't like how mine come out: 'Your little designs are fine, but the cards need to be brighter:"26

Fig. 2.3 Postcard by Vladimir Serov, Defenders of Leningrad (1 941). Collection of the Siege postcards. Courtesy of Blavatnik Archive Foundation , New York.

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Serov's own imaging of the Siege body makes his rejection of Glebova's depictions of Siege pain readily comprehensible. First of all, Serov depicts the body of a capable warrior: they have nothing in common with the human "fragments" of Pakhomov's morgue sketches; rather, Serov embeds her in a narrative of consolation. Indeed, consolation is implicit in the fact that a narrative exists; whereas the horror of Pakhomov's human "fragments" stems from their utter lack of identity, story, or history. Who were they? Why, how, where did they die? Their horrific unidentifiability recalls the incomprehension (described by Panteleev in his diary) that marked the onset of the hunger epidemic: "It was October 1941. Three workers were brought into the hospital. The physician on duty runs in and says: 'I cannot identify the disease. All three are unconscious, have a weak pulse, weak breathing. We called the chief surgeon, who said he had no idea what was going on, and had no diagnosis for this condition: All three were found in the street, in different parts of the city-and soon more and more people were found in such a condition. And only later were they able to make the diagnosis: alimentary dystrophy:m Thus the effects of the Leningrad famine were at first read as a mysterious disease by physicians unable to construct a convincing, holistic diagnosis from fragmented symptoms. In contrast, Serov offers us a well-rounded narrative. We see working factories and a team oflaborers carrying building material in the background; we can imagine the future bomb shelter. The composition is entirely comprehensible: it may seem inordinately optimistic, but there is nothing abstract or undecipherable about it. The disconcerting combination of contrasting types in the starving city understandably produced wildly disparate reactions. Some felt consoled and inspired by the sight of healthy female forms. V sevolod Vishnevsky, a representative of Moscow's literary-ideological mission to Leningrad, remarks: "Once in a while one can see a neatly-dressed, rosy woman-what a pleasant reminder of the healthy life!" 28 Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, the celebrated etcher of Mir iskusstva (World of Art) and a savvy survivor of the Soviet experience, exclaims with somewhat puzzled excitement: "Today I made a portrait of a Komsomol girl-Tosia, who sells bread in a bakery. She's giving me 1 kg of black bread and .5 kg of white for the portrait. Tosia has a charming, cute face, light blond hair, and very dark brown eyes whose outer corners turn sharply upwards

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toward her temples. Her fat, pudgy cheeks are bright red and glossy. One wonders how flowers of such blinding beauty can grow in our starving, besieged city?"29 Ostroumova-Lebedeva's uneasy savoring of this seemingly out-ofplace "flower" of physical health is echoed in the following diary account by V. I. Vinokurov: "The words 'dystrophy' and 'dystrophic' were previously unknown to the citizens of Leningrad, but now you hear them everywhere: in offices, in queues, on streetcars. These words, used both when relevant and not, are losing their original meaning and acquiring a new one. For example, a slow-moving streetcar is no longer compared to a turtle, but to a dystrophic. Several years ago in order to insult somebody you'd call him a 'kolkhoznik; but now a new pejorative term has emerged-'dystrophic:" 30 While for some citizens the idea and image of dystrophy were insulting and unacceptable, others, on the contrary, felt disgusted by the spectacle of the well-fed. Not without reason, voluptuous forms were associated in the winter of 1941-1942 with crime and the abuse of privilege: "How disgusting are these well-fed, white and buxom ration card women (talonshchitsy) in cafeterias and stores [whose job it is to] clip the ration cards of starving people and who steal these same people's bread and groceries:' 31 These diverse reactions present the modern reader with a somewhat confused, self-contradictory picture: What kind of body could be interpreted and depicted as acceptable in the besieged city? Which body was merely distanced as the body of the other? Which was rejected in disgust (including ideological disgust) as the body of the enemy? Eric Naiman describes the 1920s valorization of a particular body type, shaped by the conflicting contexts of War Communism food shortages and the controversial and uneven access to food under the New Economic Policy (NEP): "Under NEP the thin female body was not only fashionable; it was invested with ideological purity, while its antipode-the woman who could not be confused with a man-was not simply 'old-fashioned' but the EnemY:' 32 I would argue that during the Siege of Leningrad, every body type was seen from one vantage point or another as the Enemy: the emaciated evoked disgust because they reminded the besieged of their own pain, while the fat evoked disgust because they belonged to the offensive other, who had access to desirable food., A kind of superimposition of disgusts emerged, as noted for instance in Panteleev's diary description of a bakery: "Behind

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the shop-counters stand fat, sad ladies with emaciated faces. They're fat because their white smocks are pulled over their winter coats:' 33 The diarist's intonation registers disapproval of these deceptively fat women: perhaps the bread line is so depressing that even an ersatz reminder of the hypothetical powerful other with access to food elicits a complicated kind of revulsion. What's at work here may even be a cluster of competing disgusts aimed at banishing one's own emaciation, which is seen as just as unacceptable as the corpulence of one's privileged neighbor. And meanwhile both of these mimetic bodies feel the pressure of the politically correct bodies of the Siege poster.

Disturbing Boundaries: Allegorical Siege Bodies in Spatial Contact

Given these conflicting disgusts, what kind of body image could serve to both express and anesthetize Siege pain? And how could it coexist in the same real or discursive space with the body types we've already mentioned: the dystrophic, the well-fed, the heroic? At this point, we need to explore texts that depict the interaction of "contrasting" body types, as well as of these bodies with "third parties" -observers who sometimes happened to be artists. Here is a description, from the diary of the artist Nikolai Byliev, of a visit to a bathhouse. During the first Siege winter, the bathhouse offered a rare and exotic pleasure, and it was one of the few sites (another being the hospital) where Siege flesh dared to reveal itself. In the gloomy, unlit lobby there are several people who have-like me-an air of disappointment. I open the door and see a subject [siuzhet] right out of Goya. Bony, angular women are washing. Their breasts hang down like empty little bags. I stand in the doorway in my felt boots, sheepskin coat, and cap. Not one of them so much as looks in my direction. Next door, I find another room; it's empty. I enter and take my clothes off. It's been so long since I saw my own legs! So that's how they are now! Hardly any muscle. They're sticks. Suddenly-loud voices. The door flings open, and in barges a throng of hardy lasses in quilted jackets and ear-flap hats. Seeing me, they all burst out laughing. "What a baby chick! Sit, sit-we'll wash you right up!" These are policewomen sent from the Big Land. They are the ones for whom this steam room has been prepared. They're strong-the picture

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of health. What a striking contrast with what I've just seen on the other side of the wall. I look at their full legs, arms, torsos, breasts, as if at some sort of miracle, as if I've suddenly found myself in a Rubens painting come to life. But what is emaciation? Not merely physical weakness, but indifference, a stupor of the soul. I'm in no condition to evaluate, like an artist, the magnificent nudity that has suddenly appeared before me. It's all the same to me. I leave. 34 Though Byliev claims that he cannot function as an artist because of his emaciation, he obviously can still see as one. His gaze conditioned by the "professional mindset" mentioned by Boriskovich, he sees not bodies as such but as objects of art associated with specific aesthetic traditions, bodies as quotations from Goya's tiber-realistic Disasters of War and the allegorical delights of Rubens. But these embodied quotations enter into a relationship of "striking contrast" only in the mind of the artist, which functions as a sort of connective tissue. In reality, they do not meet, separated as they are by the wall between the two steam rooms-a wall that symbolically doubles as a Siege barrier separating Leningrad from the "outside world": on one side, skeletal "horrors;' on the other, zaftig, healthy policewomen, and between them a wall, and an artist for whom this wall is porous. The emaciated women in the first room, too preoccupied with the rare and troubled joy of the bathhouse to concern themselves with the unlikely prospect of masculine voyeurism, pay no heed to the male artist; neither are the healthy women in the second room affronted by his presence. For the first group, the gender distinction disappears altogether; for the second, Byliev has no real gender: he's simply a "baby chick:' While the two female body types cannot see each other, the artist can see and compare them, though he is unable or unwilling to "evaluate" what he sees in any terms other than those of art history. The fate and function of the Siege artist-mediator is to be invisible, lest he or she fail in the mediating role, eliciting the indignation of the observed and depicted, as Glebova registers in her diary: "I was drawing the people in the queue. A wretched old woman started demanding to know why I was drawing: What, was I drawing emaciated faces so I could send them to Hitler? A man defended me, saying that when the need strikes, an artist cannot keep from drawing. I showed her my sketches and pointed out that I happened to be focusing on the faces of the young. Then she started bitterly complaining that

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the young still looked all right, and then laid into me, saying it was clear I too must be well-fed, seeing as I could draw and was making money that waY:' 35 In Byliev's narrative, however, the Siege artist is corporeally unimportant; he is distilled into the role of the gaze and memory of art. According to this paradigm, there can be no direct contact between the "contrasting" body types of the Siege. The bathhouse episode in Olga Berggolts's autobiography Daytime Stars (Dnevnye zvezdy) presents a much more direct, provocative type of body contact: A peculiar sort of politeness reigned in the bathhouse, and there was something sickly about it. It was roughly the same politeness people use at funerals. Yes, this was dystrophic politeness. I took a look at the women. The dark, skin-and-bones bodies of the women-but no, not women; they had ceased to resemble women: their breasts had disappeared, their stomachs were hollowed out, and crimson and blue spots of scurvy crept along their skin. These were black or bluish-pale shadows, unwomanly, on disgustingly thin legs, bereft of all feminine charm, all feminine essence .... What had become of humanity's greatest delight, its mother, its lover? I repeat, dismemberment is nothing compared to these bony bodies: after all, the absence of arms does not make the Venus de Milo ugly. Whereas here, everything was in its place, and there was nothing [nichego ne bylo]. One should have been amazed that they dared to bare this abused, emaciated, dark, spotted body in the light of day. And suddenly in came a young woman. She was white, smooth, shimmering with golden peach fuzz. Her breasts were firm, round, almost erect, with shamelessly pink nipples. But the main thing was this skin color right out of a Kustodiev painting-intolerable against the backdrop of these brown, blue, and spotted bodies. We couldn't have been more frightened if a skeleton had come into the steam room. Oh, how frightening she was!frightening by virtue of her normal, picture-of-health, eternally feminine flesh. How could this have managed to survive? She was not merely more frightening than any of us. She was nauseating, repulsive, disgusting, with her breasts and thighs made for conception, with everything that was now lacking and that could not be, that was once natural but had become shameful, because it was impossible and forbidden. 36 Crazed by this blasphemy,

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the women whispered behind her back: "Healthy, rosy, fat!" A quiet hissing of disgust, contempt, indignation-"slut, slut, slut!" -was directed at her. She shouldn't have been here. "She slept with some thieving cafeteria manager, she's probably been a thief herself, she's robbed us, robbed children:' And a frighteningly bony woman came up to her and gave her a light pat on the backside, saying jokingly: "Hey, beauty, don't come in here, we'll eat you up:' 37 Unwilling to touch this silky, gleaming skin, the others squeamishly avoided the woman as if she were contagious, a leper. Later there was another incident. I saw a little old woman splashing herself in a copper basin. Even considering the ugliness we presented, this old woman was an exceptional phenomenon, so little of the human did she possess. It was as if she had been deliberately invented [kak by narochno pridumannaia ]. Her seemingly charred face comprised entirely visible bones, she was completely bald, and her very round, bulging belly was supported by spider-like legs, with her genitals, moreover, hanging below; she looked not at all like a human being, but a spider. And she was alive, clearly alive! She wasn't even splashing herself, but rather using her inhuman little paws to dampen her bald skull. Our whole desecrated essence was concentrated in her. She sat in a kindly sunbeam, with a seven-colored radiance over her head; she sat like Death itself, like War itself. 38 Obviously, Berggolts's bathhouse scene contains no fully acceptable body; each one is disgusting and shameful. But while the first two body types described-the "typically" emaciated body and the smooth, privileged one-strike us as realistic representations, the third, the "little old woman;' is made quite differently. By juxtaposing such sharply divergent types, Berggolts intensifies the abnormality of each, recalling the spatiotemporal simultaneity of contrasting body types typical of vanitas pictures, in which the ugliness of pitiful old women serves to highlight a young beauty's sins of lust and light-mindedness: proximity results in mutual denormalization. The ugly old woman strikes Berggolts as a surreal, "as if deliberately invented" figure. What would be the purpose of such an invention? This body arouses all manner of "unpleasant feeling" in the others, and yet the person inhabiting this body is the only "woman" enjoying herself in the Siege bathhouse. Unlike the others, she is not ashamed of herself and is free of self-disgust. This creature might remind us of the Kerch terracotta

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figurines of"senile pregnant hags" that inspired Bakhtin's formulations on grotesque bodies: "It is pregnant death, a death that gives birth. There is nothing completed, nothing calm and stable in the bodies of these old hags. They combine a senile, decaying, and deformed flesh with the flesh of new life, conceived but as yet unformed .... Moreover, the old hags are laughing:' 39 But there is nothing "pregnant" about Berrgolts's old woman: though her belly is swollen, it's not new life but the pain of starvation that fills her, and even if she does enjoy herself, her laughter will not be shared. After all, as literary scholar Boris Tomashevsky summed up the Leningrad Siege for pianist Maria Iudina: "Laughter was removed" (Byl-sniat-smekh). 40 As a grotesque body, Berggolts's figure is sterile; but the ugly old hag comes to possess an almost apocalyptic aura. 41 I suggest that Berggolts can treat her so freely in the text because this is not a mimetic body but an allegorical one. Separated thus from mundane reality, the allegorical body of the old woman falls under the power, as Benjamin suggests, of the author's melancholia: All of the things which are used to signify derive, from the very fact of their pointing to something else, a power which makes them appear no longer commensurable with profane things, which raises them onto a higher plane .... Considered in allegorical terms, then, the profane world is both elevated and devalued .... For allegory is both: convention and expression; and both are inherently contradictory.... If the object becomes allegorical under the gaze of melancholy, if melancholy causes life to flow out of it and it remains behind dead, but eternally secure, then it is exposed to the allegorist, it is unconditionally in his power. 42

This allegorical existence on some "other plane" renders the old woman inaccessible to the typical emotional mechanisms of the Siege-disgust, fear of being (mis)represented, fear of dying. She (or it?) cannot die, for she is not alive, at least not in the sense we apply to the other participants in this scene. This figure serves as the epitome of the Siege-era troubled body: "Our whole desecrated essence was concentrated in her. She sat in a kindly sunbeam, with a seven-colored radiance over her head; she sat like Death itself, like War itself' She is both the essence and the

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exception (iskliuchitel'noe iavlenie), and as such she is exempt from the disgust-centered and disgust-permeated paradigm of typical Siege body relations. Using the terminology of the eminent theoretician of allegory Angus Fletcher, we might say that Berggolts's old woman is an agent of personified abstraction, hence free to enjoy the tepid sunbeam and the lukewarm water of the Siege. Even the verb that Berggolts uses for this figure's self-splashing-bliuzgatsia-expresses her threshold status in this text: Max Fasmer's etymological dictionary confirms the word's obvious contextual kinship with bryzgatsia, while Vladimir Dal's dictionary gives its meaning as "to engage in idle chatter" (pustoslovit'). The combined associations result in "idly splashing" or splashing in abstraction. For the purposes of representation, the acceptable Siege body has to differ from a mimetic composition; it has to belong to an "other plane" -that of the imaginary. Let's consider the dynamics of the old woman's independence from the disgust she evokes in observers. Monstrous and unapproachable, she transcends others' aversion to her by transgressing traditional boundaries, situating herself between life and death, between the human and the (spider-like) bestial, between age and-with her pregnant appearanceyouth. According to Julia Kristeva's famous elaboration, it is "not the lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite:'43 Berggolts's allegorical monster may be abjected, but it eludes objectification, existing beyond the reach of observer revulsion, in a zone of constant shift and changing signification. What might be the immediate reaction to the spectacle of Siege monstrosity? According to Berggolts's account, the mask, the face of horror-"in her eyes, deep-set within her skull, something was shining"suppresses the power of speech in onlookers, reducing it to a "sobbing, humid whisper" of incomprehension. Hence the victim of Siege violence herself becomes an agent of victimization, of sense-deprivation, much like the Medusa, who, in the words of philosopher Adriana Cavarero, "alludes to a human essence that, deformed in its very being, contemplates the unprecedented act of its own dehumanization:' 44 What's more, the aphasia, the traumatic crisis of signification induced by such a monster, constitutes a rupture in the tissue of representation. 45 To avert the crisis, the mechanism of rhetorical compensation must be activated: while

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registering the speech-arresting effect of the Siege monster on observers, Berggolts proceeds to allegorize the old woman, rendering her as "Death itself, War itself' The Siege monster thus held at bay by the allegorizing distance of exemption, and washed in an iridescent glow ("over the old woman's bald, black little head danced a distinct seven-colored rainbow"), its powers are transmuted: it can symbolize, but it cannot arrest discourse, nor disrupt the gaze. The shift of exemption can be seen in yet another attempt to perform an acceptable representation of the Siege body-Tatiana Glebova's cycle In the Canteen (Leningrad Besieged). In February-March 1942, Glebova, her health in grave danger, was finally put in a special clinic (statsionar) where a fortunate few of the Leningrad intelligentsia were fed and thus saved from death by starvation. Glebova writes in her diary: "I've had a blissful life in the clinic. I've eaten, lain in bed, sketched my fantasies, and read. For three weeks now I've been eating in the high calorie (usilennogo pitaniia) diet canteen and drawing dystrophies while they eat. I want to eat and I want to work in arf' 46 Glebova's sketches indeed show dystrophies enjoying their scarce food, the most topical and realistic subject for that time and place, but they also show her fantasies-dreamy waitresses serving desirable food in abundance. Dystrophies and waitresses seem to share the same space, but upon closer examination a stark distinction between the two kinds of bodies emerges. In particular, the waitresses are at once zaftig and sylphlike (transparent, dreamy). And this is precisely why they are not offensive. Like the allegorical ugly old woman in Berggolts's narrative, these waitresses are not denizens of the immediate reality of the Siege but products of temporal fantasy and memory. They emerge in reaction to the shift that is, according to Benjamin, peculiar to the temporal dimension of allegory: "The mystical instant [Nu] becomes the 'now' Uetzt] of contemporary actualitY:' 47 Except that here the opposite occurs: contemporary actuality dissolves, producing a quasi-mystical coexistence of temporalities; a moment of Siege time coincides with the pre- or post-Siege dream-moment. Siege-era accounts reveal numerous instances of Leningraders dreaming of a projected, post-blockade future. 48 But Glebova belongs to another category: her fantasies hark back to the past. The artist recounts: "The air-raid siren sounded almost all last night, with twenty-minute

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lulls, right up till morning. At night, in order to fall asleep, I lull myself with cozy stories about how someone and I (the way we are, modern people) are somewhere out in the boondocks traveling by ... post carriage, in the time of Pushkin; we have dinner at an inn in front of a roaring fireplace in the company of people of that era, and it's terribly interesting to examine them up close:' 49 Escaping thus into the past, Glebova exempts, frees herself from the trauma of presence and presentness. She performs the same time travel in her Canteen series: the era of plenty enters the Siege as a phantasm that can never be fully embodied, becoming for Glebova a quasi-abstraction, alluring and unattainable. Following the logic of compensation, Glebova overcomes the lack of an acceptable Siege body by conjuring up images of bodies past, employing the sort of mechanism described by Serguei Oushakine: the "lack of a new creative symbolic production ... is to be filled by complex patterns of usage of the symbolic forms acquired during the previous stages of individual and societal developmenf' 50 Most of the body works analyzed in this study share a single purposeto camouflage traumatic effect, to compensate for the observer's inability to represent the Siege body without triggering a complex system of revulsion. Allegorical thinking becomes instrumental to the healing mechanisms of Siege representation, especially insofar as the trope of allegory has the power to blur the boundaries between animate and inanimate, self and other, now and then. Different kinds of Siege allegorization, however, pursued radically different purposes. While propaganda allegory strove to turn the Siege body into a weapon of psychological warfare, allegorical representations created for less official, private purposes were mostly aimed at soothing the pain of Siege trauma by providing an escape from the wretched corporeality of the moment. In Boriskovich's landscapes, the allegorical body of wounded space creates a site where the missing maimed humanity can somehow be present. The allegorical body of the ugly old woman in Berrgolts's bathhouse scene is deindividualized: it serves as the quintessential other by virtue of being every body-everybody's war, disfigurement, and death. Without individuation, such a body feels neither shame nor pain; indeed, it can even enjoy the meager delights of the Siege-time bathhouse. The allegorical body of Glebova's sketches is that of the phantasmatic past,

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distanced from the bodies of dystrophies by both time and authorial irony. The spectacle of voluptuous waitresses could be construed as inappropriate and even disgusting during the Siege, but the dream of these waitresses affords Glebova the freedom of time travel, and a palliative irony directed both at herself (also a dystrophic) and at the misplaced iconic representation of Stalinist abundance. In order to be seen, then, the Siege body had to be morphed, as did Siege vision itself. We need to study how these diverse metamorphoses were effected if we are to fully account for the creative intensification so paradoxically brought forth by the merciless season of the Siege of Leningrad.

3

PARADOXES OF SIEGE VISION Darkness. Blindness. and Knowledge

Agents of Light In the previous chapter we looked at physical bodies (and their absence)one's own body and the bodies of others in their contact with the Siege spatiality. There we were concerned with reactions to the sight of those bodies, with what the subject sees. Now we turn to the peculiarities of visual perception itself, and I would like to begin by revisiting this passage from Pavel Luknitsky's diary: The world seems populated by invisible beings: someone is moving, shuffling along listlessly, mumbling-but there are no people! And suddenly, right up against you, at the level of your chest, floats past a tiny, mysterious, whitish disc, floating as if on its own in the darkness. And you recognize the human being it signifies only by the labored breathing. The phosphorescent disc, the so-called "luminophor;' is sold everywhere now as a way of preventing two pedestrians from accidentally bumping into each other in the dark. I picked up one of these discs as well. Pinning it to my chest in front of the mirror for the first time, I suddenly imagined that I had no body. And I immediately started laughing: I'm just an invisible man! 1

Luknitsky's puzzled laughter signals the uneasy ambiguity of his situation: to become "invisible" on the dark Leningrad streets meant relief from the horror of one's disfigured corporeality, but it was also uncomfortable, scary,

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and dangerous. Of all the changes brought about by the Siege in people's perceptions of the space around them, darkness was felt to be the most demanding and controversial. Luknitsky focuses here on the pin saturated with a light-producing chemical: the luminophor or light-bearer. As we explore other representations of Siege vision, we will find more evidence of how light became a thorn of contention, in texts and in practices. Who was allowed to bear light, to emit light in the darkened city? Who had the knowledge and strength to do it? Who was in control of vision there? Lydia Ginzburg offers a striking interpretation of darkness in her Siege notes: It was precisely this sense of the literal; what the dark city gave us was just this sensation that certain vague and yet deeply organic tendencies were being disclosed .... I remember how this [sensation] came to me for the first time. It was black as pitch, the darkness of a November night. You could scarcely tell the blackness of the sky from the blackness of the buildings .... The weird blue streetcars looked like doubledeckers because of their deep reflections in the wet blackness of the asphalt pavement. After the first strong and purely aesthetic impressions, everything quickly shrinks into a sensation of inconvenience and difficulty, into the literal realization of every possible tendency towards inconvenience and difficulty (of all things-walls, street corners, ice-covered sidewalks, whatever). The strongest sensation of all, though, is of the evil will of things; what's more, it's the darkness that first discloses this evil will. Or, to be more precise, it [darkness] discloses man's certainty that the world is hostile to him. Why is man afraid of the dark? He's afraid that in the dark he won't be able to escape what awaits him .... And those lengthened distances, or rather the lengthened experiences of distance from one corner to another, just a few steps .... A normal streetcar masks itself with light. With its windows all lit up it invites you to come in and make yourself comfortable, it offers an illusion of safety. But these weird blue streetcars, filled with people of no determinate color, signal right away that they are an imperfect mechanism, a danger to human beings, full of difficulty.... Blue and black are the colors of death: black traditionally, blue perhaps by association with the blue color of a corpse. But here this symbolism becomes perfectly real. Now these really are the

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colors of death or mortal danger, problematic, but nonetheless serving as a reminder, a verification of our indifference?

For Ginzburg, darkness serves as an agent provocateur for blokadniki sensibilities-and even as the trigger for their fear (one of Ginzburg's pet subjects). Darkness makes perception difficult and, in doing so, paradoxically makes it possible again; it breaks through the protective psychological filter of indifference that has emerged in reaction to numbing and overwhelming trauma. Darkness sharpens the senses and lengthens walking distances; it gives one the sensation of a new and different corporeal existence (we are all now"blue" and "invisible" people). But this new existence is unremittingly problematic: it will always lack the comfort of habit and fail to protect us. How were these complex, even contradictory reactions to darkness represented during the Siege? The very notion of representing darkness would seem to be a contradiction in terms: darkness prohibits vision and hence representation in general. But in military terms, darkness also serves the task of secrecy, concealment. It is no longer a common, amorphous, omnipresent darkness: it is darkness with a purpose-blackout. Representing darkness thus challenges the languages of representation, both discursive and visual, in just as forbidding a way as darkness itself challenges the urban practitioner. The focus of this chapter took shape in my mind during my interview with Anna Mikhailova, daughter of the FEKS group first cameraman Evgeny Mikhailov and great-niece of the artist Konstantin Somov. She lived through the Siege as a teenager, along with her mother and sister, but it took her fifty years to begin producing various memory texts about that event, including poetry. With rare precision, Mikhailova's poems reproduce the subjective flow of a blokadnik's sensory impressions. So I was particularly struck by a passage where this flow comes to a dead halt, with a stark identical rhyme: Cpep;w KpoMeiiiHOi1 TeMHOTbi, HacTopo)l(eHHbi w op;eThi, Jle)I(HM M MOJiqa )l(p;eM paCCBeTa, Ocrrerriiiwe OT TeMHOTbi.

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[In the midst of pitch darkness, On the alert, still fully clothed, We lie awake and wait silently for dawn, Blinded by the darkness.] 3

The almost pleonastic rhyme "darkness/darkness" figures here as a symptom betraying the same claustrophobic sensation that urban subjects experienced in 1941-1942. Darkness puts a lock on Mikhailova's stanza, surrounding it and forcing it to recreate, poetically, the sensation of a bounded and limited space. And darkness here also has a double function: it robs one of vision and at the same time awakens one's sensory apparatus, intensifies one's awareness. We will be exploring representations of the mutations that emerged in the relationship between the city and the city practitioner at a time when Leningrad ceased to be primarily an object of vision. What other kinds of sensory contact did this change induce? How was the darkness registered in the stylistic choices of political rhetoric? In the disaster that was the Siege, as Ginzburg suggested in her observation discussed above, "signs shifted and wavered; they got confused; they had no time to settle down:'4 Darkness was just such an unstable sign; darkness-its meaning and the tasks it imposed-was rife with contradictions for the inhabitant of the besieged city. On the one hand, it disrupted urban routes, routines, and habitual identities, assaulting the very idea of urban civilization at its core; on the other hand, it protected the besieged city from enemy surveillance and could even be turned into a rhetorical weapon of propaganda. Analyzing the uses and abuses of darkness allows us to explore, up close, the network of contradictory discourses and modes of adjustment that shaped daily existence for the Siege subject. Taking as our point of departure Michel de Certeau's distinction between two visual practices, seeing "from above" (the voyeur) and seeing "from within" (the lover), we might explore how this distinction might apply to the "blind" practices of the traumatized city. From the viewpoint ("from above") of the official Leningrad propaganda of the time, the main task of darkness is camouflage. In this discourse, the notion of darkness is replaced by the notion of blackout. Purposeful and expedient, the blackout blocks the enemy's access to knowledge and rearticulates, strengthens the position of self-knowledge within the city.

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In January 1942 Leningrad radio broadcast a curious propaganda text that helps us to understand how darkness was reconceptualized for propaganda purposes. Titled "The Fairy Tale of the Flashlight" (Skazka o ruchnom fonarike) and written by Vsevolod Azarov, it recycles the Gavroche episode from Victor Hugo's epic novel Les Miserables ( 1862) for the Siege situation: 5 "When a pack of rabid Fritzes6 approached Leningrad, the city took a plunge into darkness. It hung curtains over its windows, put out its street lamps, and even covered its golden spires so they wouldn't sparkle. But the rabid Fritzes wanted to peer into the city, and so they set many [suburban] villages on fire. The flame rose up into the sky and illuminated the inaccessible city. The city lit up. But the rabid Fritzes, no matter how long and hard they looked through their binoculars, couldn't see a thing and couldn't understand why the city was holding out so tenaciously and not giving up. On that very night Kim Rzhanov7 braved the street with his little electric flashlight:' 8 The individual light of Kim's flashlight is juxtaposed to the perilous glow of the Nazi fires: while the former informs and leads the way, the latter, paradoxically, blinds and blocks information about Leningrad. In spite of all the terrible light they might produce, the Nazis cannot see life in the besieged city: this requires different kinds of vision and different kinds of optical tools. Kim's flashlight becomes the perfect instrument for a "secret agent" in the city, engaged in a state-supported operation of control: it collaborates with the protective blackout and privileges the designated agents of power. Kim Rzhanov is sent by Smolny Party Headquarters to deliver call-up orders. As metonymy would have it, he turns into a particle of light himself, parceling out to the blokadniki their authorized functions in the war effort: The city was grimly beautiful. In the war-troubled sky, the black needle of the Admiralty spire rose up as stern as a command. From all the squares huge gray barrage balloons with their elephant's ears quietly surged up into the air and swung slowly in place. The faraway glow of the fires illumined them. Kim went from house to house, climbed the dark stairways, knocked on the doors. "Who's there?" -they'd ask him from behind the door. ''I'm from the Voenkomat [military district committee]. I have call-up orders for you!" he'd answer, and then he would start to wind up his flashlight with

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a buzzing sound. They'd let Kim into the apartment. Kim would shine his flashlight around the room-a total mess: they had obviously been making hasty preparations for a departure to the front. 9

This limited and focused light, under the direction and control of Smolny, is shown to be vital to its urgent military agenda. What's more, it's the only light the city needs-anything beyond it is a useless and dangerous surplus. There were in fact devices in the city analogous to Kim's flashlight-here and there one finds mention ofluminophors (liuminofory) in Siege diaries not intended for immediate publication, as in Luknitsky's diary quoted above or in the diary of Nina Lazareva, who mentions that making the light-pins added to her and her family's meager bread allotment ("I worked at home in order to get my worker's ration: I colored round pins with phosphorous dye. People would wear them in order not to crash into each other in the dark of the blackout" 10). No mention of these pins, however, was permitted in Siege propaganda texts, and the radio committee censor crossed out any references to them in Azarov's original text. Even in Siege-time brochures imparting specific instructions on camouflaged light, we find a somewhat reluctant description of their functioning: "Figure 73 shows how helpful for pedestrians were luminous pins, which would become fluorescent while their bearers would be in the open light. However, this process cannot be discussed here in more detail:' 11 In the Siege account of the writer and zoologist Vitaly Bianki, "The City Abandoned by Birds" (1942), we find a detailed description of the spectacle of luminophors in the streets of the city, expressively titled "Joyless Fireflies": The huge city is in total blackout. It doesn't dare to light any fires. Black winter. Yet people have to walk somehow along these black streets. And so, in order not to run into each other in this infernal darkness, people have to give each other light signals-but weak enough that the enemy won't notice them. On their coats appeared round buttons, pin-fireflies. In the total darkness, a darkness that threatens immediate death, points of light move lifelessly towards each other. Like accursed souls in Hell. The most peculiar thing: there have emerged workshops that turn the pins into works of art and fashion. The artists turn out pins in the shape of elephants, mountain

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goats, polar bears ... Why animals? If it were up to me, I'd make pins with views of the city, of its buildings, still intact or reduced to rubble, ... of the fire of conflagrations, of the total darkness of the city drowning in mortal dark. 12

For Bianki, the spectacle of darkness is quintessential for his perception of the city as nightmare, as a living Hell. For him, the light pins are primarily figured not as instruments to combat danger and discomfort, but as symptoms of the urban catastrophe. Even if they fight the darkness, they cannot win; and hence, Bianki claims, they should depict the darkness that they actually frame. But the only official light sources were sent out directly from Smolny, along with the official message, and this message served the couriers, like Kim Rzhanov in Azarov's story, as a mechanism of navigation, turning them into the only agents of knowledge: "On the streets Kim would encounter others like himself, couriers from the Voenkomat-mostly children and old men, sometimes even distinguished old professors in their funny hats with tassels-all of them out delivering call-up orders:' And so light in the city acquires a political function and becomes a privilege: only the one who produces it can enjoy its results-can see in the darkness. Thus Siege ownership of a focused light source accords with the dictum of the phenomenologist of space and vision Gaston Bachelard: "Tout ce qui brille voit" (Everything that gives off light can see). 13

Imposing Blindness; Employing the Blind

Siege reality, however, obviously differed from its propaganda version: Siege subjects did in fact suffer cruelly from the darkness. Siege survivor Galina Saliamon writes in her diary: "When they cut off the electricity, I suddenly found myself in total darkness day and night. I was no longer a human being but some kind of animal in a hole:'' 4 Saliamon's dire pronouncement brings us to that dimension of the Siege condition which echoes what political philosopher Giorgio Agamben has described as the state of exception with its main subject being the powerless homo sacer, "the human victim who may be killed but not sacrificed:' Following this logic of exception, where "useful" and "useless" citizens were

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rigourously separated and ascribed various chances for survival, the huge majority of blokadniki were robbed of their right to civic existence and experienced their new situation as a reduction to "bare life;' a condition that put them beyond participation in the political and social possibilities. 15 By depriving citizens of their ability to see (in a way similar to "allowing" them different amounts of food according to their "usefulness" to the city), the Leningrad government basically excluded most of population from participating in a civilized form of urban practice: Leningraders no longer "belonged" to their city, but they were still at the mercy of governmental power. While the blackout was supposed to protect the city, it actually hurt the citizens-and the total darkness that "joined" it in the winter when apartments had no electricity whatsoever made it even worse. Applying Agamben's ideas of biopolitical versus thanatopolitical treatment to the situation of the Leningrad besiegement, Irina Sandomirskaja elaborates: "The useless ones-2.5 million people at the beginning of the siege-therefore find themselves bereft of representation and power. Their agency is equally insignificant and reduces to desperate begging in bureaucratic offices. In the eyes of the military rule, these are mere biomass, albeit with unknown and potentially disruptive properties. The biomass needs to be taken care of: contained, observed, statistically expressed, steered, fed, sanitized, and organized, where possible, for the purposes of war:' 16 Paradoxically, representations of the imposed darkness analyzed in this chapter served the victims of this situation as the instrument of empowerment: those who could not/were not allowed to see in the dark were at least able to speak of and in it. "Deviations" from the blackout were severely punished: Viktor Tartakovsky, who served on a secret police patrol during the fall of 1941, recalls that they would shoot without warning into any window with a light in it. This inhumane practice accounts for the striking stanza by Olga Berggolts: I'm in a city where there are no evening lights, Where only in a "dead" room does a window, undarkened, now and then blaze up, But the windows of the living are blacker than black. 17

One finds Agamben's notions ante facto in the fierce Siege writing of Olga Freidenberg. In her diary-memoir, aptly titled ''A Human Besieged"

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(Osada cheloveka ), Freidenberg ranks the extinction of light in the city as one more crime of"exception" perpetrated by the Soviet authorities against their subjects, alongside the crimes of indifference, irresponsibility, and administrative incompetence: The old year burnt out in our curses, and the new year was born full of the light of promise. On December 30, 1941, light disappeared in our apartments completely.... They couldn't arrange to economize on light the night before, to give us just a few hours of light the next day to celebrate the New Year! As always-contempt for human beings! Apartments, pharmacies, offices, stores were shrouded in darkness. During the daytime-darkness from the boarded-up windows, and then night arrives at 3 p.m. Tiny smoky lamps [koptilki] emerged. They added their smoke to the smoke of the homemade stoves [burzhuiki]. In the stores and offices we moved like the blind, with our hands stretched out in front of us, constantly stepping on each other. We would enter the stores-and enter into total darkness. By touch or by the sound of a voice we'd find the last person in the queue, we'd shout out our last names to hold our place in the queue. Next to a dim, stinking oil lamp [koptilka), the saleswomen would tear off the coupons [of our ration cards). You can imagine how many extra coupons they tore off, depriving the hungry of their rightful share! 18 The same sensation of helplessness and loss of orientation-leading to severe psychological deterioration-is registered in the diary of the young librarian Ekaterina Kots. Her diction, unlike Freidenberg's, is not epic but lyrical, in the sense that Kots speaks only about her own experience with no attempt at a panoramic depiction of conditions in the city as a whole: Out on the streets was absolute darkness-no street lamps, no hint of light from the curtained windows (they fined you for that), blue headlights on the cars. Sometimes you'd spot a passerby with a tiny flashlight-and you'd follow him. Some people can make things out a bit in the dark-but not me: I go totally blind. Some people began wearing fluorescent pins so they wouldn't run into each other in the dark. One evening I came home late and entered our courtyard. Here begins a story straight out of Edgar Allan Poe. I couldn't find the door where I expected and began rushing about-I'd completely lost any sense of direction. I almost stumbled over

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the manhole cover; I touched with my hands the woodpile and the bricks of the wall, but I couldn't locate the door to my apartment. It had disappeared without a trace-as in some nightmarish fairy tale. Suddenly I noticed a man with a flashlight. I began screaming, calling for him, but he paid no attention. This was not untypical for that time. The torture went on for at least half an hour. But then finally somebody opened the door and let me in: and my cold, lonely room looked so cozy after all that torturous wandering in the dark! 19

Kots gives a vivid account of a severe and complex condition: Siege blindness, where visual incapacity is imposed by the city government's administrative fiat (the blackout was perceived by many as a punishment). Living in a city without light and electricity deprives the Siege subjects of their ability to navigate the city in their usual, pre-Siege way and pushes them to activate different sensory skills: hearing, touch, even smell. Thus Siege blindness gave rise to new ways of experiencing space, these ways being immediate and urgent to the point of pain-hence Kots calls them "torture:' With the exception of those few connected with the institutions of power, the population-whose survival allegedly was not critical to the survival of the front-city-was reduced to the state of exception (to borrow Agamben's term again). Those for whom the Leningrad power apparatus had no use were blinded by it. In an ironic turn, however, physical blindness could make one eligible for inclusion within the body of military power. Like many other central phenomena of Siege daily life, the condition of blindness, the lack of vision could produce different meanings and serve various functions: blindness could both destroy and augment social identity. As social anthropologist Tim Edensor remarks: "Distanced, visual apprehension is impracticable when attention must focus upon obstacles in the way and when material contingencies must be dealt with. A mindful, preoccupied mode of movement is engendered by the need to manoeuvre, but we may also suddenly become aware of bodily strain, the texture of the immediate surroundings and the eruptions of memorY:' 20 While most blokadniki were traumatized by the Siege darkness and blindness, there existed a tiny fraction of people whose blindness had already forced them to compensate for the loss of one sense with the heightening of others (including hearing, of course) and thus made them into sensitive agents useful to the State. The notion of the compensatory

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transformations activated by darkness becomes central to the phenomenon of the Siege slukhachi ("listeners") and the discourses that reflected upon it. In December 1941 Petr Popkov, the chair of Lengorispolkom (Leningrad City Executive Committee) at Smolny Party Headquarters, came up with the idea of recruiting and training blind citizens who could "listen to the sky" and forewarn the city against the Nazi bombers. At the time, the most effective mechanism for registering the approach of enemy planes was the sound locator (zvukoulavlivatel'). The sound locator consisted of two pairs of large gramophone hornsbasically, megaphones. One pair moved horizontally and registered the distance from the sound; the other moved vertically and registered its pitch. The crossing of these signals allowed one to fix on the location of any plane. The sound locator could also increase the volume of the sound. Reports indicated that blind listeners were able to detect the Nazi bombers much earlier and more accurately than their "normal" counterparts. More than fifty blind persons responded to the initial call from Smolnybut only twelve were able to show up for the exam in January 1942, the most deadly month of the Siege. 21 One of these blind recruits was Eduard Galvin, a journalist and writer, who recorded his Siege experience both in his personal diary and on the pages of his journal Put' VOSovtsa (VOS being the All-Soviet Association of the Blind), which he translated from the Braille. In his diary, Galvin describes his Siege existence in a laconic and restrained tone, though he covers the whole emotional range typical of everyday life in that catastrophic time: cycles of fear, despair, and indifference, the claustrophobic sense of space-"we're living in confinement" (zhivem v zakliuchenii). His sensory apparatus intensifies his reactions to the nonvisual phenomenology of life under the Siege. Unlike sighted persons, whose reactions to their own bodies were discussed in the previous chapter, Galvin cannot see his emaciated body-but he can feel it by touch: "When I put on and take off my clothes, I'm afraid of touching my body. I'm squeamish about touching my bare bones. I feel something like disgust when I touch my shoulders and hips:' 22 Though Galvin was almost completely blind (his "remainder of sight" was minimal) he could register, when informed by his sighted wife, the rare reappearances of light during the winter months: "When my wife returned from the store, she told me about the almost unimaginable: there

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was light! We haven't seen light for the whole month of December and half of January! How did they get light in that store? My wife talked about it constantly-she was so excited. I'm almost sure I've heard her laughter when light emerged:' 23 When Galvin receives the news about his assignment as a listener, his first reaction is not a surge of patriotic zeal, but joy about his now increased chance of survival (he'd be getting a worker's ration). In a diary entry from January 16, 1942, Galvin meticulously describes his walk across the city to the censorship committee (Gorlit), where he had to register new issues of his journal: Today-and not for the first time-my wife burned the flat cakes. The smell pervades our whole apartment: unfamiliar and unpleasant. I'm trying to determine-by their taste-what kind of flour went into them. Tastes like ground flaxseed hulls .... Later we go out, linking arms as we usually do. Out on the street there's a pleasant frost and solemn silence. She's walking along next to me, stiff-legged, not bending her knees, hitting the packeddown icy snow with a peculiar sort of thudding sound. This icy layer on the streets is especially smooth and slippery today, just as thick on the street as on the sidewalk. One can hear only the muted steps of the passersby, not very many of them, and conversations in low voices. Long gone is the street noise of even six weeks ago. The queues have almost disappeared. You can tell where there's a queue today by the smell of bread. It's not the usual smell of rye bread ... nor is it the smell of pastry baked with butter and sprinkled with sugar or caraway seeds. No, it's a special, sharper kind of smell, but it's so pleasant and pungent that next to the bakery my whole mouth fills with saliva. You slow your pace involuntarily in those places but you also have to slow down because of the queue that crowds the sidewalk. Lightly, almost without a sound, a car passes by, most likely a passenger car. Suddenly three more cars emerge, ... even creating a miniature semblance of the traffic of days gone by. But it only lasts a moment, then silence descends; once again all you can hear is the muted steps of passersby. I listen intently for the topics of the conversations. Only stray words reach my ears .... "One cannot work under such conditions;"'! buried mine (the speaker's husband) three days ago:' ... I listen intently: I want to hear a joke, laughter-but to no avail. When was the last time I heard laughter? Walking today is difficult. It's so far from the 25th October Prospect to the Bridge,

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but my wife assures me that it was a good route choice: at least here we won't have to walk around any obstacles.... I pass by another queue, bumping against the women: some are silent; others are grumbling, cursing. I'm indifferent to all of it. I just want to get home. 24 In Galvin's account, the topography of the city is constantly changing: bombings, severe weather, desperate queues create new obstacles for the blind walker who must stay constantly alert in order to readjust his routes and routines as necessary. Galvin describes his walk as a continual series of reactions to sensory irritants. For example, he slows down by the queue, not only puzzled by its angry amorphous shape, but also tempted by the smell. The trajectory of his movement is governed by both fear and attraction. Galvin's contact with his urban environment needs to be extremely close and active. It is critical to note how mnemonic sensory orientation works together and yet also competes in Galvin's perception with his reaction to present realities. 25 He compares memories of his senses past (the smell of pastry, the sounds of a busy street) with the new developments, thus translating his habits into the new reality. In her study of sensory memory, C. Nadia Seremetakis says: "Each smell generates its own textures and surfaces. No smell is encountered alone. There are combinations of smells that make up a unified presence:' 26 In Galvin's case, combinations of smells make up a unified absence: smells of the burnt flat cakes and the wet, deficient Siege bread replace his earlier memories, thus giving the practitioner necessary signals about his existence and, in more specific terms, about the new topography which expresses itself in a whole system of absences-absence of street noise, absence of the pastry smell, absence of laughter. A comparison between Galvin's private diary and the "official" texts he published in his journal shows how differently the mechanisms of sensory compensation have been treated in each case. In his published novella "On the Don;' Galvin describes a tank driver, blinded by an explosion, who manages to drive the deadly machine again under the enthusiastic leadership of his lieutenant: "With his inner vision, blind Shirokov could guess the position of the tank's turret. Obeying this inner vision and his lieutenant's orders, Shirokov directed the machine from side to side, pounding down machine gun fire and mortars. His hearing grew keener: it seemed to him that over the roaring of his tank he could hear the sounds of the battle

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outside. Thanks to his lieutenant, he knew everything he needed to do. The darkness around him was no more. All his physical sensations melted away: he became all concentrated attention and sense of purpose:'27 The mechanisms of compensation that Galvin describes in his diary are radically different from those he ascribes to his protagonist Shirokov in this novella. Galvin's walk through the perils of the besieged city is made possible by his heightened senses (sometimes with the guidance of his emaciated wife), while Shirokov miraculously "regains" his sight thanks to his patriotic fervor and the commands of his military superior, rather than to any sensory readjustments. As for Galvin's experience as a "listener;' it could only be made public decades after the Siege had ended, and in fictionalized form: only then did it become possible to write about this peculiar event. However, both versions based on Galvin's materials-"Leningrad Ballad" (Leningradskaia ballada), a documentary sketch by Semyon Bytovoi (1974), and "I Know the Night" (Ia znaiu noch'), a novella by Viktor Shutov (1961)-frame the ordeal of the "listeners" within the narrative protocols of Socialist Realism, basically cloning the style of Galvin's own propaganda writing. In both stories the blind characters regain their ideological vision through the agency of their military and political superiors, who zealously oversee their mission. In Bytovoi's "Leningrad Ballad" the blind hero is discovered by the narrator-protagonist, a journalist turned army captain, whose inspiration for the idea of recruiting "listeners" comes from two romanticized, even utopian literary accounts about blind people: H. G. Wells's "The Country of the Blind" and Vladimir Korolenko's The Blind Musician (Slepoi muzykant). "In the winter of 1942, when hundreds of Leningraders died;' the narrator visits the dark and frozen Leningrad Public Library, where he reads Wells's novella: "They had made for themselves new imaginations with their ever more sensitive ears and fingertips:' 28 Inspired by Wells's notion of "new ways of vision;' the narrator proceeds to recruit twelve blind Leningraders to listen to the dangerous skies-which leads to the surge of patriotic feeling among them. The story ends with the "sacrificial" death of one of the listeners: by "giving" in active service to the Soviet Motherland, the blind prove that they too can play an active role in the battle. To see means to fight: what's more, it means to belong to the larger Soviet wartime community.

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In Shutov's rewrite, "I Know the Night;' the blind protagonist is also saved from his "mole-like" (krotinoe) existence by the chance to serve his country in the war: "He almost forgot about his blindness. His lifelong tragedy receded. Thoughts about his soldierly duty took possession of his heart. He would spend whole days in training: they would play records for him with the sounds of the German airplanes:' And in one conversation, a driver remarks jokingly: "'You must have double hearing or something. All the energy that other people put into vision has moved into your ears!"' 29 But it's not his training or his uniquely sensitive hearing that restore his sight. It's the result of joining the Soviet military collective: "He felt as if he were ascending a huge mountain. A vast distance opens up before him. He could see now, and he sees millions of people:' 30 We can see that ideological Siege texts meant for publication and private ones offer different means for the restoration of vision or the cultivation of substitutes for it. In his diary, Galvin describes sensory substitution, the awakening of all his senses so that he can safely navigate the ever-changing and dangerous city. In its ideologized version-the one followed by the post-memory texts of Bytovoi and Shutov-what matters instead is the "inner vision'' generated by the sense of belonging and service to the larger ideological community, the sense of being led by it. Curiously, we see that the blindness resulting from government-imposed darkness led to the exclusion and isolation of the Siege individual, whereas in the unique scenario of the listeners' physical blindness led to inclusion in the community and provided the means for biological (their work rations) and social survival. Siege "blindness" was not determined by biological factors alone; rather it was a complex social and political phenomenon that required authors to employ equally complex and multilayered means of representation.

Recognition ofthe Dark In his diary, Galvin describes one of the most gruesome obstacles in Siege topography: a city pavement covered with corpses. "Two trucks crashed into each other on Karl Liebknecht Street. One of them was filled with corpses. These all fell down onto the street. Pedestrians became very upset

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about this because they couldn't get past. I listen to their complaints, trying to imagine the spectacle:' 31 For Galvin the mountain of corpses on the city ice presents a double problem. He can neither pass it by nor imagine it; hence it blocks not only the road but his sensory apparatus. Once again, as so often in Galvin's diary, the episode is presented in matter-of-fact prose-not emotionally. Emotions were often too much of a luxury for citizens paralyzed by dystrophic "indifference:' In his later, "politically correct" rewrite of Galvin's story, Shutov returns to this episode, but his version has a different accent and a new message: On the Kirovsky Bridge Boikov was ready for a break. He strained his ears, trying to catch the sound of the rippling water [of the Neva] breaking through the ice. The bridge arched slightly at its midpoint. Now, he supposed, he must be halfway across. Suddenly his cane bumped against something soft. The blind man stopped, drew back a step, then reached out with his right hand, came closer, sat down, and touched the obstacle on his path. "Comrade;' he whispered and began to shake the man lying there. Silence. As rapidly as he could, he began to run his fingers over the body. The glove, the coat .... Carefully he touched the emaciated face. It was cold; the hair, the eyelids had frozen together. The blind man got up and called for help. Nobody answered him. Into his city death was creeping-death from hunger, from frost, from darkness. Boikov walked around the dead man and went on. He got as far as the Field of Mars and stopped there. It was precisely here, at the Grave of the Soldiers of the Revolution, that the idea of his soldierly duty (soldatskii dolg) took possession of his heart. 32

Comparing these two texts, what strikes the reader is that Shutov frames Galvin's prototypical episode-the experience of the dead body as a roadblock-with an ideological message rooted in a specific symbolic locale. 33 Boikov's tragic recognition of the nature of the obstacle on his path takes place at a site of ritualized mourning: the Field of Mars, the tomb of those who perished in the "revolutionary struggle:' It is "precisely here" that sensory impression turns into ideological conviction, only here that Boikov's mind decisively turns to thoughts of his "soldierly duty:' The shock of the sensory is not a rare topos in Siege texts. But ideological texts feel compelled to invest this shock with a ritualized meaning,

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while in private texts the immediate fact of having navigated through one more obstacle to survival is enough. While for Lidia Ginzburg the idea of the new knowledge-including consciousness, relationships, and experience-introduced by the Siege is constantly linked to trauma and permeated by contradictions, in ideological texts this new knowledge has a monolithic meaning and purpose: to inspire the blokadnik's service to the state. Any such knowledge is thus reduced to a narrow realization of the primary importance of one's civic duty (and specifically of one's civic mission, triggered by an ideologized thirst for revenge). The sensation of the newness of the environment that provokes new knowledge is connected to the psychological mechanism of estrangement (ostranenie), the experience of the loss of the familiar in a situation of rapid historical change that was discussed before in connection to Viktor Shklovsky's representation of the first Siege of the city in 1919-an experience that I claim is crucial to the blokadnik's relationship with space. Estrangement is contingent on impediment-impeded vision being the most conducive. The sensory journey from blindness and lack of vision toward vision and recognition often produces a striking effect. This effect is especially powerful in Siege texts that describe visits to the city by outsiders, in contrast to the gradual evolution of the blokadniki's awareness of their city, under siege since September 8, 1941. 34 This plot, the visit to the besieged city, becomes especially popular starting in the spring of 1942, when representatives of cultural power began arriving from Moscow with the aim of controlling the devastated city and correcting its ideological "mood:' While Alexander Fadeev and Roman Karmen structured their versions of the visit to the besieged city around the goal of progressively improving urban conditions and built their texts around their own arrival and/as the arrival in Leningrad of a victorious spring, 35 there also emerged such texts as Vitaly Bianki's arresting "Gorod, kotoryi pokinuli ptitsy;' which could be published only many decades after the writer's death, in which Bianki, in anguish over his impressions of the deadly city, offers a series of shocking tableaux: corpses abandoned on heaps of rubbish, smiles of dystrophic indifference, the historical center of the city in ruins. 36 The principal narrative trope in such travelogues is the conflict between desire and impossibility: one desperately wants to find the familiar city of one's memories, but one cannot. The city has changed too fast and too

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drastically; the look of things now confounds one's ingrained urban habits. This incongruity becomes central to Ekaterina Alexeeva's novella "The Dreamer;' broadcast by Leningrad radio in 1942. Alexeeva's text features a protagonist who is too absentminded, too abstract and abstracted to fully grasp the meaning of the war against Nazi Germany: "By his nature he was not a fighter-he was a dreamer. Even at the front he remained that same dreamer, and all the paraphernalia of his military service seemed to him no more than the fake trappings of the stage extra, compelled by the will of the fates to participate in the grand tragedy of world historY:' 37 It is only when the army posts him back to his hometown of Leningrad during the winter of 1941-1942 that the Dreamer is able to attain a properly ideological vision by recognizing the terrible effect the Siege has had on the city and its citizens. The first shock-the first difficult visual recognition-comes in the shape (or rather the absence of shape) of the sack containing the corpse of his wife. The city was drowning in complete silence, broken only now and then by the sound of dark cars passing. Just as rare were the pedestrians, with their faces of the living dead. A few sleds on long runners caught his attention: people were dragging them along piled with large sacks of a peculiar shape: narrow, crudely stitched up like mailbags. They made a strange impression on him. There was something disquieting and distressful in this new impression. He tried to concentrate, to focus his vision on this impression-but could not. Turning onto his own street, he somehow against his will stared intently [pristal'no vzgliadelsia] at the bundle at his feet, and a chill sent icy needles running all over his body. Like a lightning bolt, in just a fraction of a second, the insight [prozrenie] pierced him-sharp and agonizing. So that's what they are! Corpses! Why couldn't he figure it out at once? After all, the outlines of the bodies were clearly traceable through the outer wrappings .... Never had the sight [vid] of mutilated corpses on the battlefield produced such a strong impression on him as this sight [vid] of the long body with the indistinguishable face, all sewn up in a white sheet. 38

This is the body of his wife. The Dreamer has trouble recognizing it, nor can he immediately recognize his child ("a small skeletal creature entered the room, with the skin barely stretching over the bones of her face").

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Operating with the terms of vision ("stared intently;' "insight;' "sight"), Alexeeva demonstrates the complex process of recognitionof the beloved dead, of the situation in the city. And since Alexeeva's novella was created as a propaganda text, it is through this very shock of recognition, this sudden in-sight, that the Dreamer also recognizes his duty and function in the war-which triggers, as is usual for such texts, the urge for revenge. He ceases to be a Dreamer, becomes a Warrior, and goes off to avenge his disfigured city. In Alexeeva's text, the mechanism of intensified recognition through estrangement is depicted subtly: it is the blurred silhouette of a familiar object (the body, sewn into a sack; the city, covered in snow) that makes recognition difficult, and requires that very effort which produces new meaning and new knowledge. But estrangement in Alexeeva's text is a one-way street, a process that cannot be reversed. What has once been estranged and thus recognized stays as it is; it will continue to serve its purpose: strengthening the warrior's consciousness. However, if we examine a broader array of Siege texts, we see that the processes of estrangement and familiarization worked as complex, dynamic doubles in the blokadniki's experiences. Insight, the desire to see and the lack of this desire, the habits of not seeing or partially seeing, all coexisted for the Siege subject in continual search of ways to soothe the pain of the besiegement. One of the most peculiar accounts of the encounter with the Siege darkness problem can be found in the writings of Mikhail Bobrov, a mountain climber at the time of the Siege and one of four young Leningraders who were assigned to paint the spire of the Peter and Paul Cathedral with protective camouflage dye in order to disorient enemy aircraft. 39 The team of four teenagers had to work under the hail of bullets from the Nazi bombers, almost fainting from starvation: the assignment took place in November and their workers' rations were not issued until winter-when for some of them it was too late. When I asked Bobrov-How could you perform in the dark?-he responded: At that point we didn't experience the city as dark anymore. In all the months since the Siege started, our eyes had grown accustomed to the different sources, qualities, and quantities of light. First of all, the snow-which arrived very early in 1941-served as a light reflector in the beams of the searchlights. But also-the city was lit by the glow of the persistent fires and

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explosions. From the height of the spire, we had a continuous view of the burning city. Along the Neva river we saw the ships with their antiaircraft guns shooting at the German planes. We really could see everything. 40

The darkness that produced estrangement and disrupted the familiar at the beginning of the Siege, according to some accounts, turned into part of a new and dreadful Siege routine by the onset of the first deadly winter: "People stepped over (perestupili) the blackout. All of that lost its significance because of the winter. Nobody paid attention to the dark. There was no light in the street. We were not allowed to go out in the street at night, and we had no reason to do so, frankly speaking. Thus we couldn't feel the calamities anymore:' 41 According to Bobrov and Ginzburg, the urban pathology of darkness became "normalized;' mediated, turned into a new routine by the disasters that followed. Moreover, when the light itself-whose return had been so fervently awaited-did in fact restore the city dwellers' ability to see, it could also be perceived as a lever for the next cycle of estrangement, transformation, and routinization. Here is Ginzburg's account: But somehow in the spring-right when the streetcars began to run againsomebody crushed my glasses on the streetcar (I had put them in my pocket). I had the prescription for new ones-but, as it turned out, it was impossible to order lenses. There just were no lenses. And the world went dim, faded. I would go past those monumental Leningrad vistas and could not restore to them their somewhat artificial radiant clarity.... That annoyed me. This annoyance became so overpowering that I lost all desire to regain my full vision .... The world pressed down on one's worn out, ailing consciousness .... Beyond the blind windows in the most intimate proximity lay the city, the tormented city that I wouldn't want to part with even now.... I knew how I could love this city-its empty streets, the snowdrifts in the gardens, the wounded houses .... But just then I was all hurting, irritated surface, and I begged the city not to touch me. 42

Ginzburg insists on connecting urban vision and knowledge in all its dimensions-znanie (knowledge); soznanie (consciousness); osoznanie (realization). But she never allows us to ignore the pain and complexity

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associated with prozrenie (the recovery of sight, insight). During the Siege, the transformations of vision-whether they proceed from its limitations or its recovery-are pregnant with all kinds of traumas: the skills of vision are often traumatic skills. In contrast to this complicated network of impulses, official texts always link the recovery of vision to the forging of ideological identity. While in censored texts the darkness (be it a citywide blackout or the individual biological darkness of the blind) is always controlled and controllable, in other texts, not intended for immediate publication, the darkness, when it falls, figures as one of the blokadnik's most potent enemies. Darkness has the potential to engender and shape new knowledge of the city-at a price; and the various texts we have discussed offer different scenarios for how this knowledge functions and to what extent the individual can bear such knowledge.

4

FRAMING THE SIEGE SUBLIME Urban Spectacle and Cultural Memory

A(n)estethics ofthe Siege Gaze In January 1942, Dmitry Lazarev, a member of Leningrad's technical intelligentsia, an engineer and specialist in optics and camouflage, and a connoisseur of music and theater, wrote in his diary: Though we had put the body of my father-in-law in a cold room, the time had nevertheless come to bury him. Our trip ... seemed endless. Finally we were at the gates of the morgue-a former woodshed. Opening . .. the door, we saw in the moonlight a high pile of corpses, some dressed any old way, and some wrapped in bedsheets. We began our ascent to the top of the pile, climbing over frozen and slippery-as-ice stomachs, backs, and heads. Despite the cold, the stench in the shed was overpowering.... We felt a dull indifference to the death of a loved one. The way back was easier. We even stopped for a minute, struck by the unusual beauty of besieged Leningrad in the moonlit night. There was no movement of any sort, no pedestrians at all. The houses with their black shadows looked like a grandiose stage set for some surreal performance. 1

What makes this tragic text unusual, what sets it apart from other, at times equally horrific accounts of twentieth-century history? It is remarkably common to find in narratives of historical trauma that survivors and witnesses experience "psychological death;'2 temporarily losing sensitivity to pain they can neither digest nor conceptualize in its immediacy.

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I propose that one of the most shocking elements of Lazarev's account is the paradoxical intervention of beauty into the zone of horror, of artifice into the realistic narration of death. Lazarev and his helper pause to observe the unusual beauty of the frozen, empty city. The "unreal" city amazes and touches them, while the very real death of Lazarev's fatherin-law does not. Can we understand this gaze as a quest for reaction, for some kind of active dialogue between the agent and the object of the gaze, a dialogue that failed to take place at the improvised morgue? The response to horror appears to be replaced here by response to beauty. But what consolation lies in the "stage set" -how can artifice undo or even assuage the effect produced by a pile of corpses? Or does the pile of corpses become a less real scene if arranged upon an urban stage and illuminated by moonlight? Lazarev was only one of the many citizens of besieged Leningrad struck by the both deeply disconcerting and powerful contrast between the "form" and "content" of Leningrad during the winter of 1941-1942. 3 The aesthetic collision provided by mournful processions making their way through the city within an architectural "frame" was often expressed in terms of ambiguity. For example, in parallel to Lazarev's account, the artist Solomon Iudovin executed dozens of works that winter depicting Leningraders dragging the legendary children's sleds through the vast empty squares, past the famous architectural landmarks of the city. One's reaction to Iudovin's urban scene might be ambiguous: the "frame" of the grandiouse architectural ensembles both soothes and confuses the viewer, serving as an overpowering compositional distraction (fig. 4.1). The imbalance between modalities-private internal suffering on the one hand, and public, external opulence of visual impression on the other-often led citizens to react with rhetorical, open-ended questions regarding the confusing juxtapositions offered by the Siege urbanscape. The poet and diarist Vera Inber inquires with frustrated puzzlement: B 3TOM ropo,~:~e, B KOTopoM EoJihHhrx

u MepTBhrx MHo)f(aTcR pR,~:~hr,

K 'leMy 3TM KpMCTaJihHbre rrpocTopbr, XpycTaJib ca,~:~oB u cepe6po BO,Lihr? 4

[In this city, in which The ranks of the sick and the dead multiply,

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Fig. 4. I. Solomon Iudovin, "Moving to The New Apartment" (1942). © 2016, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Courtesy of Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg.

What's the use of these crystalline expanses, The crystal of gardens, the silver of water?]

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At times the citizens' ability to distinguish between the beautiful and horrific appears completely distorted; "normal" psychological reactions seem to "freeze" in response to the spectacle of frozen urban death (macabre Siege irony turned corpses found under the snow into snowdrops). 5 Observers attempt to tame the horror by formulating it as spectacle: the unrepresentable is shielded and therefore tempered by the terminology of beauty. The actor Fedor Nikitin writes: At the intersection of Stremiannaia and Marat streets, I was struck by [the following] spectacle. On the pavement lay a rectangle of ice ... as if carved from the Gulf [of Finland], and inside was confined a beautiful young woman in a green dress. Her face was not at all deformed; her blue eyes were open and staring into the distance; her copper red hair had frozen in threads through the ice and become a sort of continuation of her head. This was Ophelia, the ice version. The spectacle was so beautiful that at first you couldn't experience it as tragically horrific. 6

The actor's observation is echoed closely by that of the artist Valentin Kurdov, who recounts: I see an American cracker box. Inside the box I see the frozen body of a small child. In this frost, the baby looks like a cherub with ice-covered eyelashes. I paused, struck by the strange and inexplicable beauty of this spectacle. The splendid classical architecture of our city seemed incompatible with the American cracker box and the child's dead body. I understood that I had encountered a super-fantastic reality that no sound logic could encompass. 7

These accounts can be seen as quintessential formulations of the psychological contradictions engendered by the spectacle of the Siege. Here we might ask: between the Kantian Sublime that produces pleasure through pain and the Burkean sublime that engenders horror as juxtaposed to beauty, which formulation corresponds to the Siege spectacle? 8 Leningraders were traumatized by physical and psychological loss and to some degree emotionally disabled, and still the notion of aesthetic pleasure in response to the beauty of their environment often served them as a stand-in for the notion of horror. Building on one witness's pinpointing of

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a certain sublimity [vozvyshennost'] ,9 I propose explicating a Siege sublime that does not lie in the distinction between the horrific and the beautiful, but rather in the observer's tendency to replace the horrific with the beautiful, or to reconstruct the horrific as beautiful in order to express what LaCapra defines as "unrepresentable excess in traumatic limit events:' 10 I suggest that the Siege sublime is thoroughly oxymoronic: instead of creating pronounced distinctions, as both Burke and Kant posit, it brings together uncombinable notions and reactions, with the resulting superimposition usually described as "unreal" or "surreal:' 11 This chapter will look at the phenomena of Siege beauty, Siege spectacle, and Siege sublime via the following questions: how did citizens of the besieged Leningrad construe their relationship with the urbanscape? What were the possible functions and meanings of the city's cultural memory during the Siege? To what extent did representing the endangered city constitute a strategy of psychological survival, and of preserving the site described? Envisioning a Siege sublime that operates by filling the lacunae of psychological loss with "anesthetizing" cultural material, this study aims at tracing the specific strategies of such gap-filling.

The View from Above: Strategies of Sublimation and Estrangement In the Siege chapter of his Petersburg: Images of Space, Grigory Kaganov justly claims that Siege spatiality was often defined by limitation: low visibility in the lightless city; the slit trenches [shcheli] used for shelter during air raids; windows covered with plywood and blankets. 12 Kaganov's formulation jibes with Lydia Ginzburg's observation that "boarded-up windows became a mark of people buried alive, and perishing as they were, jammed together. It had the funeral symbolism of boards, immuring people in cellars, and the weight of upper storeys collapsing on them''; 13 and with the remark of the architect Igor Chaiko: "Winter gave the impression of a tomb, some sort of dark, creepy, closed-up space that you'd accidentally climbed out of. It was the feeling of a person having awoken from lethargy somewhere deep underground:' 14 Without disputing this claustrophobic conception of Siege space, I would suggest that this was not the only visual experience of spatiality

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functioning at that time. Following another important observation by Ginzburg about the "uncertain and confused signs" of the Siege urbanscape, 15 I will show that this urbanscape was experienced by Lenin graders not solely as a site oflimited vision, but also, to the contrary, of new opportunities for creative gaze. The rediscovery of urban beauty is a common topos for Siege diarists. For example, the actor Fedor Nikitin exclaims: Yesterday was amazing-a magical winter fairy tale. Morning, evening, and night, I saw such beauty that it took my breath away. And I wasn't the only one-everyone was captivated by this beauty.... And what's criminal: in peacetime we never noticed it, never took advantage of it! But now only in war have we seen it .... 16

What led Leningraders to reevaluate their relationship to the image of their city? One key reason for the emergence of this sensation of new urban beauty was the fact that the everyday life of besieged inhabitants underwent certain practical changes, especially in daily routes and routines. Iury Kolosov, a historian of the Siege who during the blockade at age ten worked for Smolny Party headquarters as a courier carrying important parcels around the city, states in an interview: My constant routes through the city gave me ample opportunity to assess the unique character of the appearance of the Siege. It could be explained by the huge masses of snow that nobody would clear away, which produced an eerie lighting effect, and by the scarcity of peacetime "urban distractions": ads, slogans, etc. The city looked unusually pristine. 17

Emaciated citizens had to walk many miles at a time: to get water or food, to get to their place of work, or to "bury" their relatives. Elena Martilla notes in her diary: "I have to cross the whole city to get to the School of Arts. It's very far but I find it interesting: to walk and walk and walk:' 18 Another factor was the psychological impact of physical trauma. The artist Rimma Neratova writes: "Hunger greatly sharpened impressionability and visual memory: whatever one's gaze fell upon-the living and the dead, and the whole beautiful dead city-was

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committed to memorY:'' 9 The combination of these factors-fear oflosing one's life and/or Leningrad, physical and psychological suffering, and redefined patterns of movement through the city-created a new bifurcated urban gaze. The Leningrader gains the ability to experience the city as if anew without losing his/her connection to the "traditional" image of the city. Such double perception puts an interesting twist on Viktor Shklovsky's programmatic definition of the essentially "defamiliarizing" function of art. The Siege indeed made the form of the city and the sensory perception of its inhabitants, to employ a brutal understatement, difficult, thereby shifting the lens of the urban experience. Shklovsky, whose theorizing about estrangement was influenced from the very beginning by the experience of war, 20 foresaw such a shift, developing in A Sentimental Journey the idea of defamiliarization as a result of historical upheaval: '"The main distinction [quoting Eikhenbaum] between revolutionary life and ordinary life is that now everything is felt: Life became art:' 21 The problem of Siege-time estrangement exists in the scholarly literature today thanks to Lydia Ginzburg's elaboration of this topic in her Blockade Diary [Blokadnyi dnevnik]. Emily Van Buskirk discusses the notion of self-estrangement as Ginzburg's means of identity construction during this historical disaster. Van Buskirk demonstrates that this method allows Ginzburg to create in her text a protective distance between the hybrid author-narrator and his/her object of depiction, a distance paradoxically enabling both anesthetization and objectivity. 22 Kirill Kobrin in turn examines Ginzburg's analysis of defamiliarization as originating in the catastrophic dissolution of byt, interpreting Ginzburg's Siege estrangement as a psychological enemy that must be overcome so that new habituation can emerge. 23 The present study suggests yet another type of Siege estrangement, one operant in aesthetic terms and born of the relationship between the urbanscape and its observer. Building on numerous accounts of Leningraders who had the poignant fortune to appreciate their city from above, I will discuss one "artful routine" especially productive of this sort of estrangement: standing watch on Leningrad rooftops, tasked with extinguishing incendiary bombs. It was thus that a quintessential impression of the first Siege autumn, with its never-ending bombardment, was formed. Citizens experienced this activity with such an acute

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perception of strangeness that it had to be counterreflected and routinized in war propaganda. Deprived of their predisaster routines and norms, Leningraders frequently perceived the estranging and thus aestheticizing urban gaze as problematic. Neratova notes: People died on roofs as well. Everyone standing watch suffered greatly from the cold.... Papa often stood watch with the teacher R., who died on a roof from exhaustion .... Papa said the roof wasn't as scary as the basement; on the roof everything is clearly visible, you can tell what part of the city is being bombed, and you never get tired of looking at the lively sky: it's very "beautiful:' I was afraid papa could get blown off the roof. 24

Relating her father's opinion of the benefits of life and death on the nighttime roof, Neratova puts the perceived "beauty" of the urbanscape unfolding therefrom in quotation marks; this is some different kind of beauty in need of new interpretation. Traditional aesthetic vocabulary felt inadequate and, moreover, unethical. The artist Tatiana Glebova, the favorite pupil of Pavel Filonov, rejects savoring the tragic spectacle of the besieged city: "I am not inspired to describe the beauty of air battles, searchlights, rockets, explosions, and fires; I know what horror this extravaganza brings, and so it doesn't delight me, but fills me with a deep hatred:' 25 The actor Feodosy Griaznov similarly attempts to resist the allure of the spectacular: Last night for the first time [the enemy] used signal rockets on parachutes to mass-illuminate various districts. It was so bright you could read a newspaper. The spectacle was stunning in its beauty.... But it was an ominous beauty. The German pilots could see as if it were day. And in that bright illumination you could see their airplanes flying and bringing death and destruction. They scour the skies, seek, aim for, and destroy their targets. 26

In the view of both Glebova and Griaznov, then, terms descriptive of beauty are inadequate to describe an urban spectacle permeated with horror. Curiously, we find some perceivers of Siege beauty excusing themselves on the grounds of ignorance of a particular situation, as in the

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case of the Badaev warehouses fire, which spectators viewed as beautiful before fully comprehending its tragic meaning for the city. The historian Dmitry Likhachev notes: "It was evening, and over the city arose a cloud of remarkable beauty; it went up in thick puffs like whipped cream. It grew and turned pink. [Only] subsequently did we find out. .. :'27 The artist Liubov Shaporina's description echoes this gesture of retrospective comprehension: Suddenly, from behind the roofs a white cloud started to grow; it expanded quickly and other clouds piled on this one. They were all dyed amber in the setting sun. They filled up the entire sky; then the clouds turned bronze, while from below a black stripe started moving upwards. It was so unlike smoke that for a long time I could not comprehend that it was fire .... It was an immense spectacle of stunning beauty. 28

As soon as the full horrific meaning of such spectacle is attained, witnesses tend to translate their impressions into terms of the Siege sublime, wherein categories of awe and horror, pleasure and disgust clash and unite oxymoronically: Hap; KMpOBCKMM CTOMT TaKow 3aKaT, KaK poBHO p;eCJITb MeCJIQeB Ha3ap; KaK 6yp;To 3apeBo Hap; JleHMHrpap;oM, KaK 6yp;To 6bi Bap;aeBCKMe CKJiap;bi fopeiibiM )l{MpoM 3a HeBow 'lap;JIT. IlO)KapHOH JieCTHMQeH, KaK B COH, KaK B cap;, Mbi nop;HMMaeMCJI B TaKow 3aKaT. 29 [Over the Kirov bridge there is such a sunset As exactly ten months ago, As if a blaze over Leningrad, As if the Badaev warehouses Are spewing fumes of burnt fat over the Neva. We climb up a fire escape-as to a dream, As to a garden-to such a sunset.]

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Zinaida Shishova, the author of these lines, is one of several important Siege poets who turn the new vantage point of the view from above into a metaphor of creative sublimation. The poet depicts her contact with Siege spectacle as resulting from ascendance ("we climb up"), which exempts the observer from her immediate environment at the cost of traumatic loss (markedly, Shishova's text mixes terms of disaster, disgust, and repose: "burnt fat;' "dream;' "garden"). In Nikolai Tikhonov's story "Spring" ["Vesna''] we find an intensely allegorical expression of the sublimating Siege gaze. This work describes the controversial cleaning campaign of spring 1942, when emaciated Leningraders were made to clear the streets of snow, soot, and excrement. Peculiarly, terms of beauty were as central to this campaign's propaganda as notions of heroism and resistance: Jlemmrpa;n;eQ! ... Tbi 6y;n;eiiib JiorraToi1 w JIOMOM Bo Jib;LJ;bi M cyrpo6bi Bpe3aTbCR, qT06 He OCTaBHJia IIRTeH 6JIOKap;a Ha rrpeKpacHoM w CTporoM JIHQe JleHHHrpa;n;a. 30 [Leningrader! ... You will be the shovel and the crowbar Cutting into ice and snowdrifts, Lest the siege leave any blot On the beautiful, austere face of Leningrad.]

In Tikhonov's text, the protagonist discovers on the roof of his building, amidst the disgusting debris of the horrific winter, a statue of Venus: The roof was flat, big, with an alcove at one end. You could see the city spread out far and wide. It was a springtime, greenish-blue expanse. The whole roof was buried in piles of icy garbage, with planks and all sorts of trash sticking out .... After two hours of work, he hit something hard with his shovel, and from the snow, a head appeared. He looked upon the marble head as a miracle. He saw the magnificent torso rising out of the dirty snow, showing strangely white against the background of a burnt wall, with a beautiful, somewhat haughty head. "I think it's Venus. All my life I've read how Venus was born out of the foam of the sea, but my Venus is born out of God knows what-but is being

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born." He looked at the Venus he'd dug up, suffused with the pink light of daybreak. The enormous city was bathed in a fiery sea of translucent light; it was so youthful, so strong, so spring-like .... Are you looking from a special point of view [so spetsial'noi tochki zreniia], Ivan Nikolaevich ?31

The rising torso embodies the new beauty of Leningrad, from the discovered perspective of which (the "special point of view"), the beholder sees the city in terms of ecstasy, both emotional and aesthetic-an ecstasy, indeed, bordering on the sensual. Having found the allegorical representation of Venus on the roof, and rediscovering his desire for the "beautiful, somewhat haughty" goddess, the protagonist rediscovers that unique view upon or within the ruined city-awash in festive, warm colors. We find similar metaphoric moves of sublimation and unexpected "colorful visions" in the following texts by Olga Berggolts and Natalia Krandievskaia, who likewise negotiate the value and significance of the Siege view from above: 0 HeT, R He Ko~yHCTByro! TaK 6hmo! HaM Bee o )fKaJI Mno-MepTBoMy nanKM no):I:>KaJI. 0 KaKOM 0):\MHOqeCTBe ,lJ;MKKeHC nMCaJI? lJeJIOBeK HMKOf):la He 6biBaeT 0):\MH. 32 [A may-bug in flight fell right onto a book Opened to Dombey and Son. It buzzed a little, and then tucked up its legs as if dead. Of what solitude did Dickens write? A person is never alone.]

In these texts, Krandievskaia not only appropriates the Dickensian "bromine of compassion;' but manages to "improve" upon Dickens's espousal of humaneness by using her own system of values. Her perception of the

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Siege, filled with precise observation and empathetic humor, appeals to Dickensian optimism rather than to his sometimes abysmal sentimentality. Like Leo Tolstoy's ghostly double in our discussion above, Dickens also becomes incorporated into the Siege experience. For his part, Panteleev recalls: In the most horrific days of that winter I read Dickens's Great Expectations. The book had just come out in a new translation; I bought it at a stall on the street. I read it by night, by the light of a smoky night -lamp. And I know that for me that night-lamp, its soot, and my breath-vapor have become forever linked with everything I was reading about, with the spirit and gloom and light and smells of Dickens's novel. Whether you like it or not, whether I like it or not, you are with me for life, Pip! You're a blokadnik. 33

Readers looked to Dickens not only as a source of abstract or generalized humaneness. He also taught specific lessons on how to be or remain a human being: for example, how to savor food in the Leningrad of January 1942, when the most urgent need was simply getting enough to eat. Panteleev elaborates: One morning mama brought me a ration .... At the time, I remember, I was reading Dickens. And so I, restraining myself, trying not to rush, so as to draw out the pleasure, ate that ersatz morsel [surrogatnyi kusmanchik], played the part of the sybarite, enjoyed myself.... I broke the bread awkwardly, and a tiny crumb fell on the floor. I didn't pick it up. But later I lay for a long time reading Great Expectations, and the whole time, you know, felt as though I had something pleasant to look forward to. You forget yourself, become engrossed in reading, and then-what's this? Let me seesomething very good awaits you ... What is it? Oh, yes! A breadcrumb lies hidden under the bed. At any moment, I can bend down, look for it, find it, and put it in my mouth. 34

In his piecemeal consumption of his bread ration, Panteleev eats in the same way as he reads, since Dickens's novels themselves were intended for serialized publication and consumption, masterfully maintaining the reader's appetite from one portion to the next. Reading a serial novel over time meant that developments in the reader's life would become

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intertwined with developments as the protagonists experienced them, the novel's events bleeding into those of everyday reality. And among Dickens's novels, Great Expectations is perhaps the most amenable to a Siegetime sentimental education, closely following as it does the trials and tribulations of an individual protagonist rather than presenting a convoluted entanglement of characters; and also because it was published in especially brief installments. 35 Splitting a plot into micro-portions (usually according to chapter divisions) was intended to maintain suspense even when the novels were published in their entirety. In the besieged city, the Dickensian ideology of plot organization became a significant aid in formulating the question crucial to every Leningrader: can this historical catastrophe have a happy ending for me personally? With this in mind, Vsevolod Voevodin's "The Bookstore" ("Knizhnaia lavka," 1944) presents a useful elaboration of how Dickens served the needs of Siege readers. The story describes the destruction by fire of an illustrious collection belonging to the elderly bookseller Pavel Fedorovich (reportedly modeled on none other than Fedor Shilov). This catastrophic event is framed by a double emplotment: the meta-discourse of the author-narrator and the bookseller on the meaning of Dickens during the Siege, and Pavel Fedorovich's promise to deliver to a friend the one volume missing from his edition of Dickens's collected works-David Copperfield. In the story's denouement, these two subplots neatly intertwine. The author concludes that Dickens's singular importance for Siege psychology consists in his ability to construct happy endings in spite of the terrible darkness of human and social relations exposed in his plots: "Why don't the endings of his novels irritate us, or seem phony? Dickens's strength lies in the fact that he very much believes in happiness; for him, happiness-that fantastic happiness of his-has the force of a biological law:' 36 Voevodin juxtaposes this desire for "fantastic" happiness to the "fantastic" ordeals of the war years: "Limitless hardship, fantastic deprivations, enormous, historically unheard-of pain-all of this is the truth. This is Dickens in reverse!" 37 While, as we have seen, Siege-time readers tended to use Poe as their "Dickens in reverse" (due to the American's meticulous analysis of just the sort of "fantastic" torments instantiated in the Siege), Dickens himself came in handy as a template for imagining "fantastic" happy outcomes to catastrophic events. While Pavel Fedorovich's book collection succumbs to fire and ice, one volume does manage to survive.

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Needless to say, it's David Copperfield-which the narrator receives from a boy who accidentally found it in the ash-covered snow at the site of the fire, thus undoing the collection's total extinction ("everything had burned down'') with a Dickensian plot-twist. As the narrator exclaims: "What a funny chain of circumstances!" In a letter to his father (renowned literary critic and poet Kornei Chukovsky), the writer and military journalist Nikolai Chukovsky explains what sort of plot constructions are born of the Siege environment: ''I'd like to write a big novel, a plot-heavy one, with mysteries, for young people and unsophisticated readers. On the defense of Leningrad, which is so unusual that there has never been anything like it in the world. Any words about heroism would be too small and flat for such a grand-grand to the point of strangeness-task. If you write the truth, it would come out as a grotesque-that is, just what is needed for an unsophisticated novel with plot and mysteries:' 38 This conception of the "truth of the Siege" as a matter of the grotesque, where the revolting is mixed with the comical, the horrific inseparable from the sublime, sheds light on the question of why the Siege situation was so fruitful for the reception of Dickens, why his characters managed to transform so readily into blokadniki.

The Siege Narrative between Past and Present: Rereading Proust

While Dickens and Poe provided readers with mechanisms for psychologically adjusting to the present of the Siege, readers also sought ways of reconstructing biographical pasts-individual pasts, that is, as opposed to the communal, retrospective past of the historical novel: "I understand full well that one must record what is happening around one today, this minute; write the truth alone and only the truth; but for some reason I am drawn also to memories of childhood. It's as if my memory has been purified, cleansed by something. I see everything, down to the last little button, to the tiniest leaf on a wallpaper-pattern flower:' 39 The majority of Siege subjects projected their imaginations onto the "beautiful future after the Siege";40 but also frequent were attempts to anesthetize the Siege present by recalling an "idyllic" past. Memoirs became a fashionable genre among the Siege intelligentsia, even acquiring a

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performative dimension: authors' readings from their memoirs turned into solemn events for select audiences, summoned by exquisitely crafted invitations. Our focus here, however, will not be on the "pure" memoirs written during the Siege, but rather on Siege diaries with memoiristic undercurrents, strongly present, for example, in texts by Vladimir Konashevich and Leonid Panteleev. For both men, the openly acknowledged model is Proust's long novel A Ia recherche du temps perdu. The memoir of the celebrated artist and book illustrator Vladimir Konashevich, On Myself and My Work (0 sebe i o svoem dele), begins during one of the worst periods of the Siege, the December of 1941. The artist describes the unusual whiteness of the Siege cityscape: "People are pulling white, unpainted caskets on sleds. Everything is white. There's a mass of snow.... This white winter reminded me of long-ago Moscow winters, when snow covered the streets in the same way.... It became very quiet. ... How vividly it all comes back to me:' 41 By the mechanism of Proust's "involuntary memory;' the deathly whiteness of besieged Leningrad suddenly calls up to the author's mind the festive, cozy whiteness of his childhood. The most emblematic instance of Proustian memory is the "ecstasy of the madeleine" 42 : the "sweet sensation"43 evoked by the pastry not only allows the narrator to escape from the troubling present into a charming past that had seemed lost forever, but also soothes the narrator's conscience with regard to his Aunt Leonie, once beloved but later forgotten. Such strategies of selective memory and forgetting become useful for Konashevich, who is not only seeking some method of escaping from the "horrifying, unbearable, impossible" Siege life, 44 but also endeavoring to reconstruct his relationship with his sister Sonia. This sister was the main dramatis persona of his childhood, with whom the artist was very close and whom he was essentially forced by Siege circumstances to abandon to death from starvation. Konashevich does not hide the genesis of his method: In one part of his endless, memoir-like novel, Marcel Proust recounts how a pastry dipped in tea resurrected in his memory an otherwise completely forgotten aunt, and along with her, a whole epic of provincial life. If he hadn't happened to dip the pastry in tea, following an old custom from childhood, he wouldn't have recalled this aunt. If I hadn't happened now, sitting in

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front of this temporary stove, which since 1918 has been called a burzhuika, to be stoking it with all sorts of rubbish-postcard albums, photo frames, fragments of old furniture-then the Ufa steppe wouldn't have been called so vividly, so persistently to my mind .... My stove occasionally started to smoke, and the smell reminded me of the smell of the dung chips they use to heat stoves in the steppe. 45

This blissful "transport" to the Ufa steppe of his childhood allows the artist to block out, for the moment at least, the grim recent fate of his playmate of those years: Early July 1942. I have only now learned of the death of my sister Sonia, whom I now recall as a plump five-year-old tot whose cheeks completely covered up her button of a nose .... She died of exhaustion. My conscience is not clean, and I do not look back on my sister's death calmly. However, what I am writing is not a diary, to which feelings are entrusted; memoirs do not care about an unclean conscience. Thus all of that is out of place here, tonally speaking, and not in keeping with the times.

According to Konashevich's striking formulation, writing a memoir (instead of a diary) can protect the self from the corrosive effect of a dehumanizing historical catastrophe. By "repeating" childhood through the memoiristic act, Siege-time readers of Proust regain, in their imagination, their own humanity and that of their loved ones; they are able to reconstruct the temporal continuity disrupted by the trauma of the Siege. For blokadniki, then, rereading Proust became a valuable exercise in therapeutic repetition. Some Proust scholars even argue that Proust's text cannot really be read, but only reread, constituting as it does a convoluted system of narrative gaps, returns, and all manner of breakdowns in traditional linear chronology. Examining the Siege reception of Proust, one comprehends the significance of the role played by rereading in attempting to return to one's predamaged self (the self that first read the book, before the catastrophe). The bookseller in Voevodin's story dreams of renewing his acquaintance with the works of a favorite writer: "Really, one has to reread again; or else you come home, and .. :'46 The reappropriation of a wellloved text muffled the disrupted historical environment's tragic novelty, its otherness.

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For example, the enormous importance ascribed by Proust to the senses, to taste, smell, and touch, induces Panteleev, who also reads the French novelist during the first winter of the Siege, to alter his perception of the tastes and smells around him. The listing in his Siege diary of numerous sensory memories from his childhood unmistakably alludes to the "thousand smells" of Aunt Leonie's house. On the verge of death, and taken to the hospital by relatives, Panteleev observes: "The smells! ... The soot from the night-lamp, the fumes of the little stove, the rubbing alcohol, the ether.... One frosty day I came into the ward and suddenly remembered ... how nice it used to be in the winter to enter my mother's bedroom, with its frosty air; how subtly in it merged not the scents but the after-scents of mama's perfume, papa's cigarettes, the smell of frost (zapakh moroza):' 47 What makes Panteleev's mnemonic method unique is that the associative memory of the "smell of frost" not only transports him back through the years, but also moves along an opposite vector, turning a comforting childhood memory into a remedy that is decisive for his recovery from Siege trauma.

Blok(i)ada: The Game of Return The role of poetry in life under Siege was far from straightforward, and its reception was not without controversy. On the one hand, blokadniki would often turn to poetry when the fear oflosing one's humanity, or life itself, ran particularly high. The artist Vladimir Kurdov notes: ''I'm reading poetry nonstop. I've reread Pushkin, Lermontov, Mayakovsky, Blok, Nekrasov, and in general I enjoy the suffering that I can achieve this way. And it's nice when, alone in an empty apartment, you can suddenly start to howl from anguish; other times I have a good crY:' 48 On the other hand, rereading beloved verse could sometimes be experienced as a bitter reminder of the extent to which the human spirit has deteriorated: "I hardly read any poetry: it's superstitious and pathetic to read what I love best; taking pleasure is sacrilegious. Sometimes I call to mind just the first lines in order to take in a little bit of the aroma of flowers and wine. I keep the poetry of my favorite authors bottled up in my memorY:' 49 Thus does the librarian Olga Khauze protect the poetry in her memory from the aggressive intrusion of trauma. Unlike the proponents of poetry's therapeutic function within the

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traumatic experience of Soviet history (Varlam Shalamov, Evgenia Ginzburg, Dmitry Likhachev, and others), Khauze suggests that the human relationship with poetry might be damaged by historical trauma, and so should be "extracted" from this experience. 50 I would like to turn now to a specific case of poetry reception during the Siege, and here my subject will be the poetry of Alexander Blok, an idol of the Russian intelligentsia since the early twentieth century, whose writings were synonymous with the Russian version of urban eschatology. Curiously, reciting Blok became a poignant Siege-era game called blokiada (a pun associating the epic-sounding "Blokiad" with Siege [blokada]), as described by the writer Anatoly Darov: "Half a liter of boiled water flavored with wood flour and a tablespoon of kasha were eaten up without delay, but we sat at the table for hours on end. We read, chatted, exchanged bread ration cards for butter or vice versa. Fixing offended eyes on our empty plates, we made a competition of reciting the verse of Blok: given the first line, you had to say which poem it was, and from which collection:'51 Darov makes a number of semantic replacements here: the absent food is supplanted by poetry, and the Siege itself, for the time being at least, is crowded out of the picture by this poetic game. In another diary entry describing an evening of charades, the poet's name playfully subverts the historical disaster: the word blokada is deconstructed into Blok and ad, 'Hell': Sometimes in the evenings, games of charades were arranged. Whether it was done for our sake, or was entertainment for the adults themselves, I don't know. I will always remember mama in her broad-brimmed hat like Blok's Stranger and papa in a long nightshirt portraying a sinner whom mama-as-devil was frying in a pan. I don't remember how the [final] syllable 'a' was conveyed, but the whole word in its entirety was presented thus: a sled with a bucket of water and cans for the cafeteria kasha being pulled by a dystrophic stumbling from hungerY

The "Blokian'' games of the Siege go well beyond the poet's name: it is his actual poetry that appears to have the power to deconstruct the Siege experience metonymically, replacing it with "congenial" historical impressions. Blok's poetry gave exhausted Siege readers a charge of vitality: "By the way, about Blok: I couldn't help buying various books, even some I

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didn't need, including a collected works of Blok. I read and was happy, hailing him like a friend, like springtime:' 53 Readers were transported back to their Petersburg youth by Blok's writings, as Vsevolod Vishnevsky notes: "In spare moments I read the diaries of Blok ( 1911-1913) and am taken back to prewar Petersburg, always dear to my hearf' 54 Blok's diaries reflect in poignantly attractive detail the poet's penchant for slumming, his obsession with the marginal-both topographically and socially-sides of urban life. Reading his diaries during the Siege allows the blokadnik to revisit a layer of urban memory that had been ousted during the Soviet period, but now became more prominent during the disaster. This kind of"retro" reading also served to interpret the present moment of the Siege. Blok's musings on the turbulent history of the early twentieth century, on revolutions, World War I, and the Civil War, especially the events of the Petro grad crisis of 1919-1921, acquired a new relevance during the Siege. Georgii Kniazev writes: I reread the long narrative poems of Blok. They are written with such pain, suffering, and sadness. Blok understood in his own way, like a member of the intelligentsia. He did not know Stalin's heroism, Stalin's humanism. The most frightening thing is, I am experiencing many things for the second time [italics in original-PB]. Including hunger, destruction, and war. You can't help repeating yourself in such a situation. When was that, twenty-three, twenty-four years ago now? But there's something about the present that has never been before: the grandiosity of the scale of events, and the super-insignificance of the individual. That's new. And it's frightening in a new way. Blok died too soon. His troubled soul gave way at the junction between two worlds. And whether or not he died this way in reality, at some point he said, apparently in great spiritual turmoil: "There is no exodus from the snowstorms-and I am happy to perish:' And we, too, also seeing "no exodus from the snowstorms;' are perishing, but not happily. 55

Rereading "The Scythians" ("Skify") and "The Twelve" ("Dvenadtsat"') during the Siege, Kniazev comes to certain conclusions regarding such notions as historical continuity, temporality, and repetition. Some of his observations might seem mutually contradictory. For example, Kniazev laments that the chronicler Blok died too soon and so could not witness the logical triumph of revolutionary events in "Stalin's humanism"; but he

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also comments sardonically on his own fate-in an excessively long life, his own "triumph'' is the privilege of witnessing history repeat itself: "The most frightening thing is, I am experiencing many things for the second time:' The unsettling sensation of historical deja vu was a pervasive topos in the Siege diaries of the intelligentsia, with Blok's poetry appearing to function here as a sensory trigger. Observers compare the two sieges, the two famines, turning for experience (obrashchaias' za opytom) to the first and often noting that the second, the Nazi Siege, makes the earlier one retrospectively into a sort of "cultural construct" -as opposed to the "real thing" of the present. Sofia Ostrovskaia analyzes this dichotomy: Famine? Famine. Real famine? Real. I knew the famine of the Civil War period. But that wasn't famine .... Real famine has come only now. Its bared teeth are horrifying. We can no longer starve romantically, the way Anna Akhmatova did in 1919, lying in bed and admiring a rose bought with the only money she had left. We have been stripped of even the romance of decorative dying (for posterity, for the critics, or for one's own delight). People who are starving crazily seek salvation in shelters or dig trenches, or they stay in unsafe buildings, because that's where they can savor their wet, heavy bread .... What do roses and decoration have to do with it? 56

For Ostrovskaia, the experience of the Iudenich siege of 1919 becomes an ante-factum simulacrum, shaped and used by artists for the allegedly narcissistic purposes of self-creation and self-display. According to her reading, Anna Akhmatova's performative behavior during the famine of 1918-1921 is symptomatic of the inapplicability of the "romantic" experience of that period to the experience of 1941. As opposed to this historicocultural dissonance, however, the diarist sees Blok's utopian messianism as newly relevant for interpreting the historical "repetition" of the Siege. Blok's prophecies are read as bridging two stages of the apocalyptic scenario that is Russia's twentieth century. Interpreting the Siege in terms of Blok's "Scythians" allows blokadniki to conceive of their situation apophatically: they, the inhabitants of besieged Leningrad, are neither victims, nor the "heroes" of official discourse, nor bourgeois observers: rather, they are Blokian Scythians, who possess the spiritual energy to stand apart from the indifferent civilization of the West and resist the malevolent civilization of Nazi Germany:

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What a delight, when the chamberpot is no longer in the house!-just think, ladies and gentlemen, ... what astounding happiness! All you Europes [sic] out there, can you really understand this, you who never knew the famine and destruction of 1919-20, you who do not perceive, with your five petit-bourgeois senses, the sufferings of the Russian citizen, who in 1942 has once again entered 1919! Yes, yes, most kind Europes, you don't know that here what is being born, or perhaps has already been born, is a sixth sense. We are very poor, very dirty, very ignorant. But we are Scythians, we are Scythians! 57 By way of a Nietzschean eternal return, Ostrovskaia projects the sensation of "once again entering" (vtorichnoe vstuplenie) a realm of urban collapse onto an affirmation of the city's inherent otherness. 58 Blokadniki transpose Blok's formulation of a uniquely Russian historical destiny from the nation as a whole to the city of Petro- Leningrad (as Kniazev terms it), a utopian chronotope where time stands still and/or moves in circles, where death is inseparable from beauty. In Anatoly Darov's novel The Siege (Blokada, 1946), Leningraders who constantly reread, cite, and discuss Blok also describe the Siege as a space of apocalyptic utopianism. The "new Scythians" envisioned by Ostrovskaia become for Darov "Apocalyptians" (apokaliptiane), whose natural habitat, Petropol: is a topos of exemption and redemption from history. An old professor, starving in the cellar of the Hermitage Museum, confesses his understanding of the city's historical situation to the novel's young quasi-autobiographical protagonist (Darov himself was born in 1920): "We must drink it down to the dregs: drink from the chalice of universal sorrow down to the very dregs .... Russia is like the Kingdom of God-it has to be within us .... We are suffering for the Petersburg period. For its as-yet-unperfected perfection:' For Darov, the besieged city, an enchanted Petropolis, possesses a strange temporality that functions according to the narrative of the Apocalypse, its inhabitants transcending the limitations of linear, "progressive" time: The whole city is deserted. All through the city are traces of the enormous collapse. Navy patrols go around like the phantoms from 1918. And yet it stands, as if enchanted-Petropolis. Death catches up to you everywhere. As if the Biblical storehouses have indeed been opened, and the "world's supply"

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of cold and hunger has thundered down on the heads of the besieged. Or this is the beginning of the end of the world: not an atomic explosion, or planets colliding, but a cosmic cooling-the Russian version of the Apocalypse. All through the city you hear the creak, creak of sleds. As if thousands of people have returned to childhood, swaddling each other like dolls and pulling each other on children's sleds. And those who haven't returned to childhood suffer from delusions of grandeur: slowly and grandly, paying no attention to the whistle of bombs, they walk down the street on their way somewhere, and their wide-open, motionless eyes gaze unblinking through blizzards, fog, and haze-into eternity. These are the Apocalyptians. 59

Darov's Petropolis froze at the moment of its first disaster in 1918, and the ghosts of Blok's "twelve sailors on patrol" still prowl along its streets: nothing has changed since the revolution in this city "outside" time. Petropolis is deadly and empty, and its ageless citizen-visionaries can transcend the barriers of time with their unique interpretation of history. Darov's Siege Blokiada finds a echo in Vladislav Glinka's story "The Master's Little House" ("Domik magistra"), published in the literary journal Zvezda in 1943. Here Blok's poetry becomes a narrative device allowing the author to construct a peculiar double, or circular, temporality. Glinka's setting is besieged Leningrad in the spring of 1942 and a small provincial Russian town during the Civil War of 1918-1921. A chance Siege-time encounter with a friend now in the hospital, an avid reader and performer of Blok's poetry, reawakens the narrator's memories of the formative events of his youth, when he befriended an intelligentsia family. Blok's writings enter Glinka's text in the disembodied voice of the narrator's first love: "Right next to me, at the level of my ear, I heard a woman's voice: 'I don't think you can compare him with anyone. His words are all simple, but so expressive. Remember how he talks about Russia?' And she read, distinctly and deliberatively: 'Russia, beggarly Russia! To me your gray huts, your wind songs are like the tears of a first love: 'An actress or a teacher; I thought, turning completely into the faculty of hearing:' 60 The aural effect of Blok's poetry is reprised twenty years later in the Siege hospital that Glinka describes in full detail: its corridors covered with frost and soot, its virtually helpless medical personnel and the emaciated, wounded soldiers in their care. In order to comfort the despairing patients, the narrator recounts for them triumphant episodes from

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Russian history, while confessing to the reader that the primary aim of his hospital propaganda was to bring past and present together so that they could mutually inform each other: "I intentionally constructed my narrative such that everyone would compare the past with the great struggle of todaY:' 61 Given this narrative structure, where past and present are in constant contact, we are hardly surprised when, in the gloom of the hospital corridor, the narrator hears a voice from the past: And then, right nearby, a woman's voice spoke: "I understand that you think he's outmoded. But I used to love him, read him a lot, and knew him well. Sometimes even now, at the front, I'll see the glow of a fire, and remember: I listen to the roar of the fray, And the Tatars' trumpet-calls, I see over Rus' in the distance A broad and quiet fire. I pricked up my ears. The voice seemed familiar. "Indeed, it's very apt;' replied another woman. And suddenly, from somewhere, a summer evening came to me in a flash .... And again, just as it was that evening, I don't see her.... No, such a second encounter cannot be. "What's it from?" "'The Scythians:" 62

Blok's poetry exists in this story as a disembodied sort of historical dialect, a vehicle of compositional association binding together the narrative's complicated temporality: listening to Blok allows the narrator to travel

back and forth between two wars, two epochs. This narrative function coincides with the role ascribed in Siege diaries to Blok's poetry, which bridges the city's moments of crisis and organizes its special temporal and spatial modality-the modality of apocalyptic utopia. The philologist Sergei Rudakov (whose main literary contribution is usually thought to be his friendship with Osip Mandelshtam in Voronezh) also writes in his Siege notes about Blok's impact on his own composition of an epic poem during the blockade: Verses materialized with an enviable ease. The epic is quotational .... That is, it is repeated to such an extent that any feature is relegated to the already

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past, the already shown. This is what helped me to remember some favorite things of Blok's, to remember his "Retribution" ["Vozmezdie"], which carries on both the Pushkinian theme of Petersburg and the rhythmic characteristics of Pushkinian verse of the Petersburg scene. The sense of time in "Retribution'' is manifest in a conventional, obliquely referenced chronology: B Te p;HH rrop; rreTep6yprcKHM He6oM ,!l;BOpRHCKaR CeMbR ... B Te HesarraMRTHhie rop;bi Ehm I1eTep6ypr e~e cTpaiiiHei1.

)KHJia

[In those days under Petersburg's sky Lived a gentry family ... In that time immemorial Petersburg was even more frightening.] There is the same motif in historical realities: BocToKa cTpaiiiHaR sapR B Te rop;hi qyTh e~e anena ... qepHb rreTep6yprcKaR masena IIop;o6oCTpacTHO Ha QapR. [The frightful dawn of the east In those years was still only faintly scarlet ... The Petersburg rabble gawked Obsequiously at the tsar.] During the epic winter of 1941-1942, a winter that demanded art, all of this once again became a mere means to express a new theme, a means stemming from a theme already realized thereby. The outward restyling [perelitsovka] in fact developed an old theme. The title, usually not necessary, and thus generally absent in my work, is here explained by what is called "cultural ties":

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... B Te OTAaJieHHhie roAa,

0 KOHX 6yAYil\He BHYKH ITo 6rreAHbiM aepcHHM HayKH

J1 He y3HaiOT HHKOrAa ... fpo60B AJIH MepTBbiX He XBaTaJIO, qepHb neTep6yprcKaH 6pocarra Ee3 norpe6eHHH poAHbiX. [From "Retribution" ... In those remote years Which future grandchildren Will never recognize From the pale versions of science There weren't enough coffins for the dead, The Petersburg rabble threw Their own relatives away without burial.] All it took was to point at an object, a phenomenon, and it became verse. It was easier and less agitating not to resort to this magical ability ... CKoJib3HT 3aMepnmx MYMHH pHA. Bee TIOBTOpHMO B 3TOM MHpe. IIecKoB erHneTCKHX o6pHA BocKpeCHyrr a CeaepHOH IIaJihMHpe. [A line of frozen mummies glides past. Everything in this world is repeatable. A rite from the Egyptian sands Has been resurrected in the Northern Palmyra.] They are not here, but internally, they-the Theban sphinxes of the Neva at the Academy of Arts-are present in these verses. At the time, verse was precisely a listing of facts. There was no certainty at all that the winter would end. 63

Rudakov's aim of shaping his Siege epic "Iz 'Vozmezdia"' (literally, "Out of 'Retribution"') by way of "restyling" raises numerous questions and

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allows us to analyze the very notion of the temporal dimensions of Siege writing. According to Gary Saul Morson's reading, Bakhtin's "epic time"which Morson connects to Goethe's notion of the Absolute Past-is "one in which, from the perspective of the epic singer, all of the really important events are over"; the past is "'walled off absolutely from all subsequent times:" 64 But Rudakov's idea of epic time is totally opposed to Bakhtin's. For one thing, the Siege winter, in Rudakov's experience, was a season without limit: nightmarish and endless, it keeps on advancing as if the subject's personal timespan might come to an end before the torment does-"There was no certainty at all that the winter would end:' Paradoxically, this season in hell both defied the pretensions of art and yet "demanded" art. In its bare presentness, the only form of"narrative" that the disastrous reality could accommodate was enumeration: '~t the time, verse was precisely a listing of facts:' If we compare the Siege of Leningrad to the Siege of Troy, as many Siege writers did in their quest for an epic model, we can see that the enumeration of ships (the famous list from the first book of Homer's Iliad) has been replaced by the enumeration of the corpses lying along one's urban route. A list of this kind can be found in the majority of Siege texts-for instance: On the hunched little Potseluev Bridge, an old woman had ... fallen from the hump down onto the pavement. Tonia went up and pulled her, "ready;' to the side. This is how all conscientious citizens act; in Leningradskaia pravda and on leaflets and at meetings everyone is asked not to leave corpses lying around any old place, nor "oneself to die any old place;' as hungry wits have been joking.... And here's another old woman-sitting near a mailbox. Her head is lowered; it's as if she's lost in thought. ... "That's number 201, counting from Nevsky to Teatralnaia!" cheerfully said a short fur coat passing by, calmly, but with an effort, stepping over the corpse. 65

In order to impart some kind of epic distance to this reality, Rudakov uses a preexisting pattern. And this is Blok's narrative poem "Retribution'' (1919), in which the "epic singer" describes the Petersburg politeia of the Pobedonostsev epoch, before the advent of the fin de siecle-an epoch responsible, in Blok's view, for limiting the possibilities of his own generation. Blok sees the fate (political, cultural, even demographic) of his generation as "retribution" for the sins of its predecessors. Following the

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same apocalyptic scenario, Rudakov adopts Blok's ideas on historical predetermination along with his very diction, and rewrites the Siege as the repetition of a previous experience, the development of an "already realized" theme. The sphinxes on the Neva embankment surveying from above the new lines of mummified corpses abandoned by the "Petersburg rabble" might serve as an aesthetic emblem for the city's preordained historical fate. These sphinxes become markers of the city's connection to a larger historical frame (that is, Leningrad as a "repetition" of Egypt and/or Troy). Their presence alerts the observer to the paradoxically disjointed temporality; uprooted from the banks of the Nile and brought to the Neva, these figures in turn import into the presentness of the Siege the new relevance of past events and mythologies. We see this also in the diary of Kniazev, who constantly visited the sphinxes to make sure that they were still there: "Passers-by. Sleds. The deceased in rags, like mummies. Brown splotches in the snow. The shattered frame of a car across from the sphinxes. Clocks showing some fantastic time .... That's how it is, my whole trip:' 66 The combination of the ghastly markers of Siege reality with the "alien'' sphinxes yields curious results: mummies take on a dual temporality, belonging (along with rubble from the bombings and the excrement) to the February of 1942, but also to the "epic;' phantasmatic time out of which the sphinxes came to Petersburg and became an inalienable part of its eclectic cityscape. What does this strategy of rewriting from a position of dual temporality imply? For Rudakov, the Siege winter is filled with tragically productive contradictions. It is without limit or telos, and defies artifice; at the same time, it demands art, and engenders a sense of history repeating itself. In order to express these contradictory sensations, Rudakov suffuses his text, written about and in the present, with multiple and complementary layers from the historical and cultural past. This exercise obviously goes beyond the aesthetic realm. The pain experienced upon the collapse of one's routines resulted in an estrangement that was, first and foremost, traumatic, and yet, if one could rechannel the trauma, it could also be aesthetically productive (see chapter 4). The besieged subject strove to recreate urban routines once again, and to reframe Siege events as "deja vu:' Let us return to the original questions of this chapter. How did the Siege inhabitants shape, through their acts of reading, the imaginary spatialities intended to protect them from their gruesome reality? What were the directions of escape through reading? As evidence analyzed in this chapter

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demonstrates, many Siege readers tried to escape from their space and their situation via operations of memory, via morphing the ties that bound them to their Siege temporality. Like Konashevich rereading Proust, Siege readers would build their protective, intimate capsules of readerly imagination by separating themselves from the Siege communal time and imagining the locus of a private time of their own-that of their childhoods, far away from turmoil of the besieged city. The Siege was perceived by many as a markedly eschatological event, its whole meaning wrapped up in its outcome; and so its various narrators had to use the city's pasts for their scenarios of its present and future. The workings of cultural memory became radically intensified in the making of the Siege catastrophe-text. This in turn prompted all kinds of rereading, for which the urbanscape served as a producer of topographical and historical interpretations as well as a slate on which those interpretations could be mapped.

Instead of an Epilogue: Making Sense of the Siege's Echoes The purpose of any epilogue presupposes a major change in the narrative focus: usually the perspective on the plot events shifts from being "in the present" to being "in the past;' the pace of the narrative accelerates, and a different kind of narrative knowledge comes into play-the omniscient narrator of the epilogue knows about the characters what they don't know about themselves in the "main'' part of the plot. But the epilogue author lacks at least one thing the characters do possess: the direct experience of what they have gone through. Since my study has resolutely focused on the "space of practice;' on the lived experience of Siege subjects as they were experiencing it, an epilogue would be out of place. But I still feel the need to confront the problem of whether we have any way at all of re-creating, vicariously, the spatial experience of the Siege, given that we have no direct, experiential memory of it, but only fragmented and highly problematic archival data, the authenticity of which often appears to be compromised by ideological distortions. I would like now to revisit the task, the method, and the findings of my study by approaching this problem through a somewhat different lensthe recent attempts by three contemporary artists to reconstruct the Siege

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sensory realm and its relationship to Siege spatiality-Sergei Loznitsa's The Blockade (Blokada, 2005), Alexander Sokurov's We Read "The Book of the Blockade" (Chitaem "Blokadnuiu knigu:' 2009) and Igor Potsukailo's I Hear the Blockade (Ia slyshu blokadu, 2009), all of which draw upon Siege archives. One of the inspirations for this closing turn of my inquiry comes from James Young and his pioneering explorations of the role and power of art in shaping and channeling the postmemory of the Holocaust, when artists (and their audiences) have no memories of the events, but only "necessarily hypermediated experiences of memory:' And, more broadly, he asks "how well historians can represent the past without knowing how the next generation has responded to it in its art and literature. That is, without knowing how such history is being mediated for the next generation and why it is deemed so important to remember in the first place:'67 What is it then about the Siege soundscape that made it so important to Leningraders at the time, and why do the present day interpreters of history-the authors of the three media-works that I will be discussingchoose to explore their relationship with the urban catastrophe through this particular sensory dimension? I suggest that it is both the ephemeral nature of sound and its peculiar relationship to time that is so attractive to postmemory artists. After all, their recreations of the Siege soundscape can be regarded as their personal takes on the idea of a Siege echo-a reflection of the original sound that can only reach the listener after a certain amount of time has passed. In studying these three dissimilar echo-constructions, we can gain some insight into the traumatic urge to reexperience instances of historical sensory disturbance. As for the "original sounds;' one is struck by two seemingly contradictory auditory scenarios in the Siege testimonials. On the one hand, the city catastrophically loses its sounds, submerging into the silence of death-as described, for example, by the ballerina Vera Kostrovitskaia, who recounts the gradual "extinction" of the orchestra in her courtyard, its sailor-musicians dying one by one, and concludes: "It became completely dark and still:' 68 On the other hand, the city acquires a new sonic nature, opening itself to a world of unfamiliar audio-phenomena, and a new audiotopography. I argue that instead of seeing an opposition between silence and nonsilence in the besieged city, we should view them rather as codependent phenomena, whose interplay has been described by Paul Theberge as "relational silence:'69 At first, overwhelmed and disturbed by

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the disappearance of the usual city noises (for example, those produced by transportation, factories, children at play, urban fauna), Siege subjects would readjust by discovering new sounds either introduced by the war (the sounds of bombing, shelling, air raid sirens) or foregrounded by it. That is, they would be attending to less obvious sounds now made more prominent by the disappearance of the usual background noise: the newly "highlighted" random footsteps, or the muffled music coming from radio loudspeakers on the streets. This correlation of silence and its dynamic opposite-the new, emerging nonsilence-is rehearsed in many Siege texts; and the ability to react to the new soundscape marks the emergence of the new Siege subject: I was not walking in silence, although it was as if everything had come to a standstill and gone quiet around me. From time to time I heard bombs exploding somewhere nearby.... An echo repeated this muffled moaning of the city. Something seemed to be whistling, howling, something disgustingly, plaintively rattled above one's ears, as if flying through the air were poisonous insects unknown to man, insects iron-winged and malicious. Total darkness descended. 70

Besieged Leningraders, overcome by the darkness, compensated for this optical deficiency by striving to achieve a new and different sensory contact with their city: after all, being able to navigate the disastrous city was one of the main skills necessary for survival. Visual contact with the city was precipitously displaced, then replaced by sonic contact, and this shift still awaits a detailed investigation. The besieged city is depicted in numerous sources as the "hearing city": for example, in the verse of the poet and translator Tatiana Gnedich ("the black, fierce city is all attention, all ears")/ 1 or in the memoir of Tamara Khmelnitskaia (who studied poetry in translation with Gnedich during the winter of 1941-1942): "In those dark Siege days, if you were walking along the street on your way somewhere, most often your guiding beacon was not light, but sound-usually a voice from a loudspeaker, sometimes someone's footsteps:' 72 One of the most obvious reasons for this enforced intensification of hearing was the need to react to dangers that for a critical period of time

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could not be seen, but only heard-bombs and shells. The scholar of sound Steven Connor remarks: The terror of the air-raid consists in its grotesquely widened bifurcation of visuality and hearing. On the one hand, there is the dominative distance of the bomber's aerial perspective, or the even greater and more decorporealized ballistic visuality of the guided missile; on the other, there is the absolute deprivation of sight for the victims of the air-raid on the ground, compelled as they are to rely on hearing to give them information about the incoming bombs. The inhabitants of cities subjected to aerial bombardment during the Second World War and after have had to learn new skills of orienting themselves in this deadly new auditory field without clear coordinates or dimensions, but in which the tiniest variations in pitch and timbre can mean obliteration. 73

The psychological vector of this horrific "learning" experience, the relationship between Leningraders and the Nazi bombings, was complex: it ranged from initial shock, panic, and denial ("The explosions cause the public to scurry, fear, gasp, question, and tremble")?4 to habituation to the regular attacks, and even a growing ability to interpret and navigate the deadly cacophony. A new urban topography emerged, based on aural recognition: city inhabitants could tell whether the sound belonged to a Nazi or a Soviet plane, and which area of the city was under attack. 75 These new auditory skills induced the development of new urban routines (since the timing of the Nazi bombings were marked by a nightmarish regularity) and routes (the famous street sign, subsequently memorialized-"During Artillery Bombardment, This Side of the Street is Particularly Dangerous" -serves as an expressive symptom of the new mapping strategies). 76 The writer Leonid Panteleev's sober and astute dictum that "war educates" was all too true: 77 in order to survive, besieged Leningraders had to be reeducated, reshaped in sensory terms, in acute reaction to constant changes in the environment. The most perceptive analysis of this hermeneutic mechanism belongs, not surprisingly, to Lydia Ginzburg. Ginzburg turns the Siege education via estrangement into her main paradigm for aesthetic-cum-psychological resistance to the traumas of the besieged city. In effect, she subverts trauma by turning it into a subject for

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analysis. Within this paradigm, sound (which she occasionally visualizes, referring for instance to the "round sound of an explosion'') occupies a critical position: Suddenly you become conscious of a heavy, shuddering sound. This is the bombardment of-for now, evidently-a different part of the city. If it weren't for this sound, it would be impossible to guess what was happening. Hearing this sound, N. always experiences the crazy feeling that phenomena are somehow upside down, turned inside out. Confusion in the categories of time and space. The sound of a far-off explosion is the untrackable present, which, by the time you've become conscious of it, has already turned into the past. ... This is the forever memorable experience of time overturned.78

For Ginzburg, Siege sound is the symptom and catalyst of a new spatiality and temporality, a provocation and challenge; it is also a sign of change-usually chaotic and disturbing, replete with new hermeneutic possibilities. Following her assertion that "signs, not having time to take final shape, wavered and got mixed up;' 79 we might interpret Siege sound, unstable and challenging, as a provocation against prewar sensory "normalcY:' In this context, the sign functions as a difficult question mark, connoting the traumatic realm of nonhomogeneity and non totality. This crucial and volatile importance of sound for the Siege urbanscape renders it a key element for the production of meaning in all three works analyzed here. In terms of genre, these works should be seen as peculiar hybrids: they are based on, indeed composed from authentic documents, and yet feature radical inclusions of interpretative, ahistorical fictional devices and gestures. Loznitsa's film presents a series of seemingly random episodes from the Siege saga of 1941-1944. The director discovered footage of these events collecting dust in a number of Petersburg archives. 80 I would suggest that much of what he found and chose to include in his own film was gathered from the censored-out remnants of The Battle for Leningrad (Bitva za Leningrad, 1942), the main cinematic text of official Siege-time propagandaY Fortunately, we have a rare opportunity to follow the logic of the censoring machine's mutilating work: a discussion of The Battle for Leningrad by Party leaders (Zhdanov, Popkov, and Kuznetsov) has survived in

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a shorthand account. According to the highly influential opinion of these men, the original film suffered from the following defects: -Lack of cohesion and the absence of a master narrative. "Episodes of the film are pulled in from all over the place. They want to show one locationthe city being cleaned up-and they jump to another.... The film is not coherently edited .... It's a big hodgepodge. Everything needs to be put into a system .... Currently there is no narrative-a narrative would explain a lot!" -Excessively gruesome detail. "As for the deceased-where are they being taken to [kuda ikh vezut]? I don't think it is necessary to show very many of them .... It will result in too many difficulties. A collapsed building, fires all around, everything covered in ice, people scarcely able to move, and the fighting is not shown .... The damage [to the city] is overdone in the film:' -"Obsessive" interest in the suffering beauty of the city. "The question of monuments should be steered clear of, because it's not so much monuments that need to be shown as the living Leningrad:'82 Six decades after this attempt, and the censorship to which it was subjected, Loznitsa has created a film that radically reverses the rules and expectations of the Soviet ethos of Siege representation. 83 His Blockade concentrates on the most unbearable topoi of life in the besieged citycorpse-filled streets, buses and trucks frozen into the ice, road-to-Calvarylike expeditions for bread and water. The film emphasizes changes in the city's image as well: the disappearance of monuments, the "wounding" of the embankments and facades under constant bombardment. Most importantly, The Blockade challenges the politically motivated desire for a useful and teleological master-narrative that would ascribe meaning or purpose to the hellish world of the Siege. And it is by his innovative approach to sound that Loznitsa undoes the totalitarian narrative of The Battle for Leningrad. He rejects the power of the voice-over, which, according to Pascal Bonitzer, "is assumed to know:' 84 Problematizing Michel Chion's influential notion of synchresis ("the spontaneous and irresistible weld produced between a particular auditory phenomenon and visual phenomenon when they occur at the same time" ), 85 Loznitsa allows the sounds and images in his film to belong to entirely different

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historical layers. So far from being welded, sound and image question and even eclipse one another. The final (censored) version of The Battle for Leningrad that appeared on Soviet screens in the summer of 1942 was disciplined by the consoling and explanatory commentary of its voice-over narration, and by its uplifting soundtrack collaged-for the urgent needs of official patriotism- solely from Russian and Soviet composers (Borodin, Glazunov, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich). Loznitsa's film, on the other hand, works rather as a Siege diary, reflecting on the experience of limited space and the difficult progression of time. Like a citizen caught unawares in the besieged city, the film dashes from one impression, experience, or tragedy to the next, without any teleological or unifying historical direction. Zhdanov thus had a point: the diaristic approach does indeed evoke an atmosphere of chaos-but it is a chaos reflected in disaster-sharpened senses. Loznitsa shows us fires and bombings, protective barrage balloons (known in the language of the Siege as "elephants"), scaffolding-all the novel and thus spectacular elements of the Siege "stage set:' One of many sensory contradictions of the Siege was that although it presented a new and poignant version of the urban spectacle, visibility was at the same time severely compromised, thus creating a unique auditory environment. Leaving aside the crucial "voice of power" embodied by Leningrad radio (almost entirely absent in Loznitsa's film, but constituting the main narrative matrix for Sokurov), the Siege soundscape evoked by the director is dense, multifarious, and seemingly incomprehensible. Since the actual "raw" footage Loznitsa used for his film had no sound, the director's task was to recreate or (re)invent the sounds of the blockade. The director comments on his decisions: "I didn't want to use either music or voice-over for one simple reason-both disrupt the process of vision and hamper other modes of perception:' 86 Thus in The Blockade, sounds are fragmented, superimposed on one another, disorganized. "We made the dialogue indistinct. ... A series of distressing sounds were devised and interspersed: a cry of Mom, Mommy!, a phrase from a Beethoven sonata, the sound of women's high-heeled shoes, the crunch of vertebrae in the scene of a hanging, a cry of Oh, Lord!, and so on:' While creating a disconcertingly ambivalent "dialogue" between the background "white" noise of the Siege and such ambiguous solo sounds, Loznitsa highlights meanings and sensations by exaggerating the volume

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of the sound. In episodes depicting explosions and fires, the sound blasts from the screen: the rawness of destruction emerges even before its visual counterpart -as Ginzburg noted, one hears death before seeing it. These focal points of aggressive loudness punctuate a soundtrack that arcs from the cheerful chirping of birds and clattering of streetcars in September 1941 to the fading auditory environment, the dead silence of winter, and back again to the noise of life-specifically, the ceremonial salvos marking the end of the Siege in January 1944. Loznitsa moves rapidly from the worst months of winter to the triumphant breach of the blockade, from the ultimate "low" to the ultimate "high" of historical experience-an experience that, in Loznitsa's vision, is comprised of flashes of consciousness rather than homogenizing continuities. Sounds are not connected to actions and objects according to the constraining rules of synchresis; they exist rather as disembodied associations, which the viewer might also experience as historical associations, as indirect, suprapersonal memories. Loznitsa desynchronizes the sounds in various ways: they are perceived by the viewer before and after acts of destruction; they become connected to images decades after the latter were shot. This temporal rupture gives rise to a peculiar sensation enabling our own nondiegetic presence in or access to the past, with the sounds of "now" bringing the Siege closer to our aesthetic experience. The ambivalent status of the originating source of the sounds in Loznitsa's film sharpens our sensitivities: according to Peter Verstraten, the disconnection of sound from image "creates anxiety"87 -a phenomenon that may be crucial for the viewer's sense of being authentically within rather than "comfortably outside" the experience of historical disaster. Disembodied sound is also at the center of Alexander Sokurov's inquiry into the nature of Siege witness and the problematic medium through which it is conveyed. The primary source of sound in his film is radio, as it functioned in the Siege context. For an observation on radio's ability to convey sound as if it existed independently from its source, we can turn again to the astute Ginzburg: "The sound arose punctually at a particular time, detaching itself from the disc of the loudspeaker, filling the apartmenf'88 But this pervasively immaterial quality describes not just the Siege situation, with its tenuous materiality, wherein sound and body alike are ultimately decorporealized: this aspect of radio is universal, as Allen S. Weiss declares: "Radio is a vast necropolis where the voices of people, both

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still living and long dead, continue to circulate, all the while disintegrating and mixing with each other in a promiscuous auditory montage:' 89 But it is this very aspect that makes radio so apposite for Sokurov's purpose. Unlike Loznitsa's realm of fragmented, disoriented Siege sounds, detached from their material and historical sources, Sokurov's sound is maximally and statically focused. The whole action of the film takes place in the studio of a St. Petersburg radio station, where the camera observes present -day Peters burgers reading from The Book of the Blockade (Blokadnaia kniga) by Daniil Granin and Ales Adamovich, which consists of citizens' Siege diaries and memoirs (heavily edited and almost overwhelmed by the authors' extensive commentary). According to Sokurov's press statements, this choice of setting was motivated primarily by the desire to focus attention on the act of reading as such; but in the context of the Siege universe, such a mise en scene acquires a rich variety of meanings. During the winter of 1941-1942, the human voice emanating from a radio speaker constituted a Leningrader's main connection to life outside of the dark, frozen, corpse-filled apartments. In addition to succinct, often euphemistic war communiques on the situation at the fronts, and the metronome sounds the authorities broadcast to warn of impending air raids, radio would deliver to the blokadnik's claustrophobic world a surprisingly rich tapestry of cultural programming produced by the Leningrad Radio Committee (whose writers included such notables as Lydia Ginzburg, Olga Berggolts, and Veniamin Kaverin). Programming intended for the city's inhabitants differed significantly from versions broadcast to the "outside world"; Leningraders, for example, heard Zinaida Shishova's remarkable poem "Blockade" ("Blokada;' 1943), the account of a mother's struggle to save the life of her starving son, which would never have been permitted to sound outside the city. Programs of "loud readings" (gromkie chitki, in the peculiar phraseology of the time) included Russian and Soviet literary classics (Pushkin, Leskov, Tolstoy, Nikolai Ostrovsky), alongside texts composed for the immediate needs of the hellish Siege byt (everyday life)-on the military uses of darkness, the peculiarities of Siege "cuisine;' medicine, and so on. 90 It is worth noting, though, that the Leningrad radio broadcasts were not received by blokadniki with unanimous enthusiasm and trust: they also served as a source of frustration, even eliciting forms of defiance. For some, Leningrad radio was not the transmitter of congenial and

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sympathetic voices who shared in their listeners' traumatic experience of besiegement, but an unacceptable, perhaps inimical source of teleology imposed from above, a unified voice of power, devoted not to "truth;' but to its concealment for the purposes of propaganda. 91 Thus, the fact that Sokurov brings his performers and his audience "back" to the radio studio serves a multifaceted purpose, exploring the power of the individual voice to deliver a personal, historical account as well as paying homage to the "rehumanizing" role played during the Siege by radio. But one could also interpret this return to radio as a gesture aimed at purging it of its propaganda layer. And by turning The Book of the Blockade into a "radio show;' the director uses the primary medium of the Siege moment to effect a kind of epoch-spanning rapprochement between his contemporary audience and the subjects of the Siege. For Sokurov, this film is one of several attempts to reflect on the history of St. Petersburg in the twentieth century. 92 Asked about his own stake in this particular project, the director evokes the dilemma of how to represent a city that was, as Viktor Shklovsky put it, "at once dead and alive:' 93 Sokurov remarks: How do I conceive of the Siege? As a nightmarish, devilish strainer people were forced to pass through; having undergone, on this fatal journey, that which the living cannot endure, many nevertheless came out alive. This is a nightmare experience. I am not certain that it will never happen again. The Siege was one of the main fields of battle with Nazism as such. The Siege is also a painful question for the whole of Russian history: is victory worth the price in human life? 94

The director first raised this question in The Russian Ark (Russkii kovcheg), when, in a "forbidden room" at the Hermitage, a puzzled Marquis de Custine (one of the sharpest critics of the meaning of Petersburg in Russia's history) is confronted by a restoration artist, starved to death during the Siege, who thinks that the "well-fed" intruder means to steal his coffin. The question here is not only the "cost" in human life of a country's maneuvers toward victory, but also the consequences, in terms of lives wasted, of the state's political practices, its experimentation on its human "subjects:' Even if a life is not directly cut short by the Siege, what kind of life does this trauma turn it into, and how can this experience of dehumanizing

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transformation be shared? We can also note a continuity from The Russian Ark to We Read "The Book of the Blockade" in terms of the provocative treatment of the role of narrator. If, in the earlier film, the narrative is built around a dialogue wherein one participant is invisible and internalized, another whimsically unstable, in the later one we see a further performative deconstruction of the narrative function. Sokurov seeks to echo the multivoicedness of the Siege experience by entrusting the readings of Siege experiences to manifold voices. Selections from Granin and Adamovich's book are read by people from diverse social strata, possessed of varying levels of sophistication and experience in the recreation of narrative. The schoolchildren, librarians, housewives, and soldiers of The Book of the Blockade speak through modern-day schoolchildren, librarians, housewives, soldiers-and actors. Sokurov claims that any element of virtuosity in the performance has been kept to a minimum, readers having been afforded virtually no time for preparation or rehearsal. And yet the mix of "laypeople" and professionals creates a tellingly ambivalent tension. While the stars of the Petersburg stage (Oleg Basilashvili, Olga Antonova, Leonid Mozgovoi, and Larisa Malevannaia, among others) try to adapt themselves to the Siege narratives with a kind of smooth flexibility, the rest of Sokurov's highly variegated cast seems to experience the shock of the Siege material right in front of his camera. Like the Marquis in The Russian Ark, they are made to enter the "forbidden room" of the city's taboo past. As Sokurov puts it in a press release on the film: "The past encircles us, spiraling now closer, now farther away. But it is always there:' To this day, the Siege remains a historical event non grata, investigated by a handful of specialists and living mainly in the tortured memory of such survivors as reluctantly volunteer narratives of their own dehumanization. Sokurov's aesthetic minimalism enables him to lay bare, in all their rawness, wounds that few post-Soviet artists have hitherto dared to touch; if we continue in the vocabulary of trauma medicine, Sokurov's operation strives for surgical sterility and precision. The only visual factor that "distracts" us from the voices reciting the excerpts from The Book of the Blockade is our desire to follow, to observe the act of reading, which comes across visually as bare, minimalistic, and difficult. Again, paradoxically, Sokurov's task turns out to have some affinity with Loznitsa's: both seek a rapprochement between our present condition and the remote historical trauma of the Siege, and both would disentangle a homogenizing master

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narrative into a plurality of elusive, sometimes incomprehensible voices, sounds, and silences. One question worth asking in this respect is whether Sokurov's choice of reading material serves his purpose. Granin and Adamovich's Book of the Blockade (1977-1981) is a paradoxical text. When it appeared in the time of the Brezhnevian "stagnation;' the book was perceived as an act of unprecedented civic honesty and historical openness. Indeed, amidst the gilded flow of previous accounts constantly rehearsing the city's collective "heroism" and "stoicism;' Granin and Adamovich managed to present a more objective interpretation of the Siege situation, focusing in their book not on the allegorical virtues of the "front-city;' but rather on the price Leningraders had to pay so that the place they lived in might survive. However, from today's point of view, the authors' approach might strike one as an obstacle to any real historical polyphony; what they present is more like a pseudo-polyphony, since they intrude so thoroughly and systematically into the body of witness both written and oral. Indeed, The Book of the Blockade is built up through extensive interpretive interventions: one of the most telling instances of the authors' purpose is when Granin and Adamovich declare that their editorial function is to present the material in its most accessible form. This statement of the need to "edit for form'' is immediately followed by one that seems rather to entail "editing for content": "Not only did people starve, die, overcome suffering-they also acted. They worked and supported the war efforf' 95 The Book of the Blockade affirms the organization of the Siege on two levels-that of the actual plot (in tune with the propaganda of the time, the authors rehearse yet again a version of the Siege city as a well-organized space), and a meta-level, where the editors arrange the Siege voices into the meaning they desire. Sokurov's goal, by contrast, is to present accounts of the Siege in "pure" form, allowing the audience to be neither distracted nor anesthetized. In each segment of the film, a new reader presents an extract from the Siege diaries-texts, it should be stressed, here finally liberated from the "comforting" framework of the explications provided by Granin and Adamovich, which comprise a significant portion of their book. Perhaps the most important achievement of Sokurov's film is that it enables us to observe, up close, the processes of historical repetition and performative mourning. The unmoving camera allows us to follow the intense microdynamics of the readers' reactions to what they are reading: a slowing down of the

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voice here; a jerk of the facial expression there; tears; and sudden, awkward silences. Sokurov's seemingly straightforward project actually partakes of a merciless artistry: enforcing the reenactment of a narrative of trauma, it makes us into secondhand witnesses. By placing the Siege soundscape at the heart of their works, both Loznitsa and Sokurov raise the question of whether those distant and how vanished sounds can be represented retrospectively. Sadly, the Leningrad radio archives did hold recordings of actual Siege sounds: they even survived the Siege, but were allegedly deleted as a consequence of the Leningrad Affair (1946-1953). All we have now are replicas of the original sensory experience. To what extent, then, can the post factum re-creation and interpretation of those sensory experiences claim an aura of authenticity? Are they doomed to the secondary status of historical simulacra, or can they actually effect some sort of desynchronized-what Weiss might call "phantasmatic"- access to the past, some breach through the chronological barrier? The sound-inspired works of Loznitsa and Sokurov allow us to approach these questions in new ways-complex, provocative, inspiring. Igor Potsukailo's sound composition "I Hear the Siege" is also provoked by the dearth of authentic Siege sounds. Consequently, Potsukailo has to "invent" replacements replicating the original sounds. He uses both the approach of Loznitsa (by adding modern reconstructions of sounds to the implied Siege situations-explosions, fires, walking, etc.) and of Sokurov (by using the surviving studio recordings of speeches by Anna Akhmatova and Dmitry Shostakovich, and so on). The shift of medium-from film to "sound installation" -is most decisive in Potsukailo's choice of the space. He locates his sounds in the mythologizing arena of Soviet war memory par excellence: the Memorial Hall (Pamiatnyi zal) of the grandest Siege monument in Leningrad history-Mikhail Anikushin's Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad (1975-1978). Every element of this space was designed to turn fragments of the Siege everyday (ration cards, bullets, pieces of bread, pages from Siege diaries) into objects of sacralized memory, placed inside individual glass vaults and lit by marble torches. For decades after the erection of the monument, the soundtrack in the Hall consisted of a designated set of solemn musical works like the Requiems of Mozart and Verdi, Bachianas Brasileiras no. 5 by Villa-Lobos, and the Fifth Symphony of Tchaikovsky. According to Lisa Kirschenbaum, Anikushin's monument aims for "the recuperative affect" by ascribing

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sculptural bodies to the disembodied and harmonious melodies to the silenced. 96 In contrast, Potsukailo's project speaks rather to the fragmentariness of Siege memory, with the yawning gaps of State-imposed amnesia. Positioned in this environment of prescriptive, controlled mourning, the sounds collected by Potsukailo seem to offer the possibility of an authentic and individual approach to Siege memory as opposed to a mythological and collective one. And yet they also alert us to the limitations of such reconstructive projects. After all, the Siege sounds-even in their recorded form-proved to be so vulnerable to the merciless control of the ideological apparatus that contemporary artists have nothing at their disposal that might be deemed the authentic sounds of the catastrophe. What they have is rather a reflection of that sound: a representation of the artist's conception of that faraway realm so thoroughly distanced from us by the workings of historical amnesia and propagandistic distortion. What I want to highlight by bringing into the discussion these recent representations of the Siege as a sensory experience is a radical difference in the task of witnessing: those who depicted the Siege in situ had to find ways to represent the unrelenting source of their trauma and thus to rechannel their pain, while the postmemory artists strive for authenticity, for some connection with that pain, now long gone and distorted. What strikes a scholar of the Siege archive is the wide variety of reasons for which people write the Siege space and thus of the modes and devices that they employ. One could argue that the main reason was for the purposes of military and ideological propaganda-to create an image that could be used as a message: this is how Leningrad fights (in most cases) and how it fights (rarely) and thus how it should be fought for. But there were many ways of imaging the Siege beyond the fomenting of propaganda that were of a more private and complex nature. In addition to the crucial reason, to bear witness, there was always another one, to alleviate their pain therapeutically by turning their experience into an object of art. For the blokadnik, relationships with the besieged space were acutely complicated: in order to inhabit it, one had to imagine it, and this operation led to the incessant production of images of a shockingly ambivalent nature. The Siege city was constantly perceived as physically trying and, paradoxically, satisfying-aesthetically, ideologically, mnemonically. It is this complexity that most of the depicters whose work I analyze in this study bring in their process.

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Most of the instances of Siege writing presented here impress us by their combination of two impulses-to depict Siege spatiality as it is perceived and experienced at the very moment of the historical disaster, and, at the same time, to contextualize it within the tradition of Petersburg-Leningrad representations. As we can see, for example, in the discussion of the celebration of the city's 240th anniversary in 1943, these two focusing devices, to look at the "now" and "then" of the city, create an effect of double vision and representation, temporally speaking. Writers on the Siege space are always, at the same time, readers of the multiple representations of their city: this is why the study of the Siege literary readership assumes such importance here. The space of the Siege now was perceived by its subject in dynamic conversation with its historical predecessors. Every situation of Siege sensory experience-be it contact with the soundscape or the emaciated body's contact with its spatial environment-was mentally connected with similar situations in the past and their representations and interpretations. Thus the Siege representations of the city are always palimpsests aiming to register at once the urgency of the present situation and its connectedness with tradition. In this light, it is important to stress yet another function of the Siege representation-by depicting the city in distress, its inhabitants and practitioners learned it; it was an operation of cognition. Addressing Andreas Schonle's statement in his study of the role of the representation of ruin in Russian historical consciousness, that representations of ruins was "aesthetic struggle for survival;' I show that cognitive and aesthetic urges were conflated for blokadniki in their desire to create city images. The art historian Nikolai Punin records in his diary a Siege conversation with his wife: "This snow is so beautiful, this day so beautiful in its fragility. 'It is time; says Tika, 'but war is a space that will turn into time only in the past: 'Only that space is beautiful that turns into time right away; she said:' According to Punin's wife, Marta Golubeva (Tika), time and space were divorced by the trauma of war, and only in a retrospective gaze could they be reunited in one coherent narrative. The task of the retrospective artist, then, may be to shape such a narrative; the task of the scholar is to explore the incoherence, and the ways in which the subject of the historical disaster adjusts psychologically to this incoherence. Punin's diary entry suggests to us that Siege subjects often understood their situation as a paradoxical one, filled with perceived value and

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pathology, bringing about the destruction of the psyche and the intensification of emotion, forcing one to forget, to recall, and to learn anew. The main task of my study has been to present the vast spectrum of blokadniki responses to their spatial situation. This situation was continually changing over the hours and days and months from 1941 to 1944: it was never monolithic or static. Day after day blokadniki had to overcome and to estrange, to interpret and to learn, to depict and to suppress the new, challenging, and in many cases deadly combinations of spatial phenomenasigns and sensations that together made up that whole which we define as the traumatic spatiality of the besieged city. Immersed in this space, people suffered constantly from pain and discomfort; yet also-as a consequence-their situation constantly engendered new knowledge of their city and of their bodies, as well as their capacity to reinvent and describe the relationship between the two. Thirteen years after the depiction of the macabre "Siege room" in The Russian Ark, of the Hermitage that allowed no trespassers from other periods of history, Sokurov, again, returns to the topic of the Siege Hermitage in his new film Francophonia (2015). In this recent work the director questions the meaning of the Siege in aesthetic terms, juxtaposing the plight of the Siege Hermitage to the fate of the Louvre during the occupation of Paris. Sokurov revisits the "ark'' trope by showing the Louvre as an aesthetic space protected from destruction by an understanding of all parties involved, both French and German, that art collection should be divorced from the political fates of the city at war. The besieged city, and its main museum as its symbol, on the other hand, are shown as subject to the political abjection of civilized Europe, beyond the saving power of humanity that sometimes surpasses political divides. Next to the Louvre, as a place where the world of art can find protection from the world of war, the Siege Hermitage is shown as a glaring ruin, the dead end of culture. In the present study I argue a different understanding of the Siege aesthetics: I show that even in a situation of ultimate disaster, Leningrad created aesthetics of its own, a vast and complicated network of cultural representations of the Siege reality. And it is by looking particularly at its one specific segment, its urban imagination, that scholar of the Siege today can find the most direct access to the aspirations, limitations, and peculiarities of the Siege's creative world.

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The main tasks for the authors of the Siege urban representation were to bear witness and soothe their pain: exorcism worked. For many, according to their own accounts, closely observing and depicting their city became a means of psychological and creative transfer, and thus mitigation of personal suffering. The pain of the Siege that dared not to speak its name became representable when observed on and connected to the body of their beloved city. This book looks at crucial aspects of the daily routines during the Siege, and studies various modes of its aestheticization and symbolization: how blokadniki depicted their movement, their bodily behaviors, their sight, their reading-and how they connected all of these functions to their urban environment. Another important quality of Siege urban representation by blokadniki is that they had to deal not only with the constant trauma of the Nazi Siege, but also with the ideological control exercised by the Soviet state over their representations. The Nazi Siege caused pain, but the Soviet apparatus of power aggravated this pain by controlling and limiting possibilities of expression. Each chapter shows representations of the various forms of the Siege urbanity reflected in different lenses with different intentions of publication and circulation. The image of the city that rises from all these sources can be perceived as a zone of constant aesthetic negotiation: how can be the unrepresentable be represented-and for whom? Comparing the published writings and private diaries of notable Siege writers, such as Olga Berggolts, Vera Inber, and Vsevolod Vishnevsky, we see that they were in a constant quest for an image of the city that would serve many and different purposes. In their diaries they wrote about the atrocities and abominations, about disappointments and fears; in their public works they wrote about heroism and courage. Bringing these versions of the Siege urban imagination together, superimposing various filters of expression, one receives evidence of the most acute and intense work of the traumatic urban imagination. And yet, though thinking about the political maneuvering of the Siege-image creators is always fascinating and disturbing at once, I would like to finish this book with the poem of the author who was not concerned with any form of publication-Gennady Gor. 97 The fate of this poet's Siege work is astounding, even for the Soviet's merciless century. Gor did not publish a line of his Siege poems during his lifetime (he died

Reading Into the Siege

195

in 1981), and they became known only once his children found them in his papers after his death. Gor's Siege poetry exists in the world outside of the Soviet ideological and aesthetic reality: following the steps of Leningrad Avant-garde of the 1920-1930s, which was mostly demolished by the time of the Siege, Gor depicts besieged Leningrad as the site of every kind of violence, where personality is doomed for dissolution: 3,~:~rapa ITo HeJIOBKaH ynhi6Ka, CepBaHTeca HeJIOBKaH noxo,~:~Ka, HeHy)l(HaH, HO 30JIOTaH pbi6Ka, TpeBO)l(HaH, onacHaH Haxo,~:~Ka. MeHH y6blOT, H3Haro, B noHe,~:~eJibHMK I1 6pocHT TYT )l(e, r,~:~e MYMbiBaJibHMK. I1 6y,~:~eT MOM y6MiiQa YMbiBaTbCH, I1 Y.z:IMBJIHTbCH TaM, r,~:~e QeJioBaTbCH, I1 YMbiBaHCb, 6y,~:~eT Yllbi6aTbCH.

[The uneasy smile of Poe, The ungainly gait of Cervantes, The unneeded but golden fish, The unsettling dangerous find. They'll kill me, I know, one Monday, And fling me right here, by the washstand. And my killer will stand washing And marveling where it's for kissing And stand smiling while he washes.j9 8

The two parts of the poem oppose each other in striking contrast. In the second part, the poet creates various versions of dismemberment and dissolution: he imagines his death from the hands of a mad Siege cannibal and, moreover, addresses the linguistic subjectiyity of his potential murderer. The very agrammatical language of the poem embodies the horror of the situation. And yet, the poem begins with the relocation into the Siege-situation of two giants of humanism-Poe and Cervantes.

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Gor asks: what is their role in all this? What happens to art and literature in the midst of destruction-do they become completely obsolete? His answer is appropriately oxymoronic: he calls poetry at the time of the Siege "The unneeded but golden fish:' And I cannot but agree with this poignant vision. It would be untruthful to say that poetry and art had supernatural powers to save lives during the Siege, but they did have the power to help Siege subjects express their experience. The golden fish in Gor alludes to one more great work of poetry, Alexander Pushkin's "Tale of the Old Man and the Golden Fish;' where a golden fish acts as a magician who can grant "true men" any three wishes. Into the Siege courtyard, filled with the remains of human bodies, Gor transfers Poe, Cervantes, and Pushkin-reminding us that there is literally no place where poetry cannot go, no sight that poetry cannot touch, and that even in the grimmest situation poetry can grant the most urgent wish-to stay human.

Notes

Acknowledgments 1. Sofia Ostrovskaia, Dnevnik (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2013), 367.

Introduction 1. Iaroslav Nikolaev, "Kazhdyi god 18 ianvaria;' in Podvig veka, ed. Nina Papernaia (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1969), 142. 2. Konstantin Kordobovskii, "Pis'ma:· in Bol'she, chem vospominaniia, ed. Boris Suris (St. Petersburg: n.p., 1991), 340. 3. The estimated number of Siege victims has provoked one of the sharpest debates in Siege historiography-according to different accounts, the losses run from 600,000 to 1,500,000 human lives. This huge range can be explained, among other factors, by the uncounted refugees from the occupied territories who came to the city in the fall of 1941 (and became the first victims of famine in the city) as well as people who perished in January 1942, when the urban infrastructures basically failed to register the extent of the disastrous mortality. See M. N. Frolov, "K voprosu o chisle zhertv blokady Leningrada;' Istoriia Peterburga 3, no. 31 (2006): 50-55; A. R. Dzeniskevich, Blokada i politika: Oborona Leningrada v politicheskoi koniunkture (St. Petersburg: Nestor, 1998); and S. B. Bizev, "Smertnost' grazhdanskogo naseleniia v gody blokady;' PhD diss. (St. Petersburg State University, 2001). 4. One of the possible prototypes for this figure is Marquis de Custine (1790-1857), the author of the scandalous travelog La Russie en 1839, in which he creates a highly original, idiosyncratic image of the country. 5. This thesis is addressed most prominently in the work of Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 4. 6. Lisa Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 108. 7. Grigorii Kaganov, Sankt-Peterburg: Obrazy prostranstva, 2nd ed. (St. Petersburg: Izdatel'stvo Ivana Limbakha, 2004), 195. 8. "Otter" is the name of Ginzburg's Siege notes narrator-cum-protagonist. The word is a playful hieroglyph on both "Author" and "Other:' For the latest publications and interpretations of Ginzburg, see Emily Van Buskirk and Andrei Zorin, eds., Lydia Ginzburg's Alternative Literary Identities: A Collection of Articles and New Translations (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012). 9. Lidiia Ginzburg, Prokhodiashchie kharaktery: Proza voennykh let. Zapiski blokadnogo cheloveka (Moscow: Novoe Izdatel'stvo, 2011), 325. Bracketed ellipses indicate omitted material; suspension points original. 10. Julia Hell and Andreas Schiinle, Ruins of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 79. 11. Among the ideological texts framing the street-cleaning campaign in the spring of 1942, a special place belongs to radio propaganda. The propaganda messages combined the intonations of threat and inspiration-for example, Aleksandr Flint: "Citizen of Leningrad, don't wait until they take you by the throat, clean your beloved city yourselfl" (TsGALI St. Petersburg, fond 7278, op. 2, ed. 678). For an informative summary of the specifics of the Siege "seasons;' see Kirschenbaum, Legacy

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of the Siege of Leningrad, 41-77. On the development and change of perception of their situation by the blokadniki, see Polina Barskova, "Avgust, kotorogo ne bylo i mekhanizm blokadnoi travmy: razmyshleniia o blokadnoi khronologii," Novae literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 116 (August 2012), http:// magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2012/116/b!O.html. On events of the siege, see Richard Bidlack and Nikita Lomagin, eds., The Leningrad Blockade, 1941-44: A New Documentary History from the Soviet Archives, trans. Marian Schwartz (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). 12. Vera Miliutina, quoted in Vera Miliutina i a nei, Aleksandr Rozanov, ed. (Moscow: Prometei, 1991), 36. 13. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 169. 14. Anonymous, "V dni blokadY:' I thank Tatiana Pozdniakova for sharing this document with me. 15. A limited number of specialized medical sources about dystrophy emerged in the city during and shortly after the Siege: for example, Alimentarnaia distrofiia i avitaminozy: Nauchnye nabliudeniia za dva gada otechestvennoi voiny (Leningrad, 1944); M. Chernorutskii, ed., Alimentarnaia distrofiia v blokirovannom Leningrade (Leningrad: Medgiz, 1947). The most complete source on Siege dystrophy in English is John Barber and Andrei Dzeniskevich, eds., Life and Death in Besieged Leningrad, 1941-44 (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2005 ). For one of the most illuminating yet idiosyncratic perspectives on the Siege doctors' perception of dystrophy, see the writings of Vladimir Garshin, a pathoanatomist and writer: "Tam, gde smert' pomogaet zhizni;' in T. Pozdniakova, ed., Peterburg Akhmatovoi: Vladimir Garshin (St. Petersburg: Nevsii dialekt, 2002), 125-39. On the notion of "moral dystrophy;' the psychological repercussions of the famine disease, see Barskova, ''Avgust, kotorogo ne bylo:' For the most expansive exploration of the problems of Siege morality, see Sergei Iarov, Blokadnaia etika: Predstavleniia o morali v Leningrade v 1941-42 gg. (St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2011). 16. Hariett Murav, Russia's Legal Fictions (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 188. Carol Zemel, "Emblems of Atrocity: Holocaust Liberation Photographs;' in Shelley Hornstein, Florence Jacobowitz, eds., Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 242. 17. Viktor Shklovskii, "Iskusstvo kak priem;' in 0 teorii prozy (Moscow: Krug, 1925), 7-20. 18. Viktor Shklovskii, Sentimental'noe puteshestvie (Berlin, 1923), 383. 19. Vsevolod Vishnevskii, Leningrad: Dnevniki voennykh let, 2 vols. (Moscow, "Khudozhestvennaia literatura:' 2002), 1:86. 20. Among the main inspirations for my positioning of the Siege spatiality texts within the frame of urban studies are Alexander Coward and Jill Steward, eds., The City and the Senses (Cambridge: Ashgate, 2007), and Mirko Zardini, ed., Sense of the City: An Alternate Approach to Urbanism (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2006), which have been paralleled by emerging studies of the urban sensory apparatus and its reactions to historical change that look at the Russian case, such as V Lapin, Peterburg: Zapakhi i zvuki (St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii Dam, 2007) and S. Yu. Rumiantsev, Kniga tishiny: Zvukovoi obraz goroda (Moscow: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2003). 21. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 22. Among the recent explorations of urban movement that were most informative for my conceptualization of the specific kinds of mobility practiced in the besieged city are John Urry, Mobilities (Cambridge: Polity, 2007); Francesco Careri, Walkscapes (Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2002); and Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst, eds., Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot (Surrey: Ashgate, 2008). 23. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 91-111. 24. Lev Rakov, "V kaple vody;' Zvezda I (2004), http://magazines.russ.ru/zvezda/2004/l/ r9.html.

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199

Chapter 1 1. Anatolii Darov, Blokada (New York: Rausen Publishers, 1964), 306. 2. OJ' ga Berggol'ts, Dnevnye zvezdy (Petrozavodsk: Karel'skoe knizhnoe izdatel'stvo, 1967), 131. 3. On the collapse and change of the burial rituals in the city, see Sergei Iarov, Blokadnaia etika, 334-49. 4. Aleksandr Boldyrev, Osadnaia kniga (blokadnyi dnevnik) (St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii Dom, 1998), 81. 5. Urry, Mobilities, 66-89. 6. Careri, Walkscapes, 90. 7. On the social and ideological agendas of Freidenberg's diary see Nina Perlina, Ol'ga Freidenberg's Works and Days (Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2002), 181-93. 8. Ol'ga Freidenberg, "Osada cheloveka;' Minuvshee 3 (1991), 16. 9. Ibid., 26. 10. Vishnevskii,Leningrad: Dnevniki voennykh let, 1:86. 11. Tim Edensor, "Walking Through Ruins;' in Ingold and Vergunst, Ways of Walking, 129. 12. Fedor Nikitin, "Zapiski frontovogo aktera;' in Fedor Mikhailovich Nikitin: Akter, uchitel', grazhdanin, Galina Ziablova (St. Petersburg: Dean, 2010), 83. 13. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 97. 14. Ginzburg, Prokhodiashchie kharaktery, 440. 15. Ibid., 435. 16. Ibid., 213. 17. Nikolai Tikhonov, "Nevskii Prospekt;' in Povesti i rasskazy (Moscow: Khudozhestvennia Literatura, 1965), 562. 18. Vera Inber, Stranitsy dnei perebiraia (Iz dnevnikov i zapisnykh knizhek) (Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel'), 88. 19. Nina Mokhova-Loseva, "Blokadnoe detstvo;' Zvezda 9 (2013), http://magazines.russ.ru/ zvezda/2013/9/12m.html, accessed September 15,2013. 20. Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (London: Routledge, 2007), 83-84. 21. Edensor, "Walking Through Ruins;' in Ingold and Vergunst, Ways of Walking, 127. 22. Ol'ga Freidenberg, "Osada cheloveka;' 41. 23. The interview with Viktor Torkanovsky was recorded by Eugen Ostashevsky in 2010. 24. Georgii Kniazev, Dni velikikh ispytanii: Dnevniki 1941-1945 (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2009), 33. 25. Though the script never names the city, one can find exact intersections between Kozintsev's description of the "city in the circle" and besieged Leningrad in his notebooks. See Georgii Kozintsev, "Zapisi iz rabochikh tetradei, 1940-1946;' in Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1984), 4:399. 26. I would like to thank Iakov Butovskii, who made it possible for me to read the manuscript of the unpublished screenplay Gorod v kol'tse (1942), TsGALI St. Petersburg, f. 622, op. 1, ed. 273/198. 2 7. On the topic of the circulation of information and the crisis of knowledge in the besieged city, see Barskova, "Avgust, kotorogo ne bylo:' 28. Darov, Blokada, 270. 29. Tatiana Akulova, ed., Eta pristan' est'. Portrety. Razmyshleniia. Vospominaniia o liudiakh i pisatel'skom dome (St. Petersburg: Aura-Info, 2012), 440. 30. The old cemeteries of St. Petersburg mentioned in this passage were mostly situated on the outskirts of the city. On symbolic representations of St. Petersburg cemeteries, see Julie Buckler, "The City's Memory: Public Graveyards and Textual Repositories;' in her Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityshape (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 218-47. 31. Darov, Blokada, 272. 32. Careri, Walkscapes, 90.

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NOTES TO CHAPTER I

33. Adam Sadler, The Situationist City (Boston: MIT Press, 1998), 81. 34. Darov, Blokada, 270. 35. Ibid., 271. 36. Ginzburg, Prokhodiashchie kharaktery, 322. 37. Ibid., 265. 38. Ibid., 440. 39. Ibid., 277. 40. Kirill Kobrin, "To Create a Circle and to Break It ('Blockade Person's World of Rituals')" in Van Buskirk and Zorin, eds., Lydia Ginzburg's Alternative Literary Identities, 240. 41. Ibid. 42. Sofia Ostrovskaia, Dnevniki (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2013). 43. Ginzburg, Prokhodiashchie kharaktery, 358. 44. Darov, Blokada, p. 268. 45. Ginzburg, Prokhodiaschie kharaktery, 98. 46. Nikolai Tikhonov, "Gorod velikogo Lenina-Gorod-Geroi;' Leningradskaia Pravda, january 22, 1942,2. 47. Vera Inber, "Poet blokady;' Leningradskaia Pravda, April23, 1942,2. 48. Nikolai Tikhonov, Leningrad (Penza: Izdatel'stvo gazety Stalinskoe znamia, 1943), 5-6. 49. Buckler, Mapping Petersburg, 116-57. 50. Darov, Blokada, 299. 51. Nikolai Gogo!, "N evsky Prospect;' in The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 245. 52. Darov, Blokada, 304. 53. Ibid., 303. 54. Ibid., 305. 55. Ibid., 307. 56. Edensor, "Walking Through Ruins;' in Ingold and Vergunst, Ways of Walking, 137. 57. Darov, Blokada, 30 I. 58. Fyodor Dostoevsky, "White Nights;' in A Gentle Creature and Other Stories, trans. Alan Myers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 4. 59. Tikhonov, "Nevskii Prospekt;' 564. 60. Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 97, 62. 61. Freidenberg, "Osada cheloveka;' 25. 62. Aleksei Pakhomov, "Leningradskaia letopis:' in Khudozhniki goroda-fronta: Vospominaniia i dnevniki Leningradskikh khudozhnikov, ed. Iosif Brodskii (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1973 ), 266. 63. Katherine Hodgson, Voicing the Soviet Experience: The Poetry of Ol'ga Berggol'ts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 74. 64. Carin Tschopl,Die sowjetische Lyrik-Diskussion: Ol'ga Berggol'c Leningrader Blockadedichtung als Paradigma (Munich: Fink, 1988), 189, quoted in Hodgson, Voicing the Soviet Experience, 74. 65. Ol'ga Berggol'ts, "Tvoi Put:' in Poemy (Leningrad: Sovetskii Pisatel; 1955), 40. 66. For the most comprehensive account of Soviet propaganda uses of Siege mythology after the war, see Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, esp. 113-86. 67. Ol'ga Berggol'ts, "Tvoi Put';' 40. 68. On the defining role of memory in Berggol'ts work, see Katharine Hodgson, "Nikto ne zabyt i nichto ne zabyto": Pamiat' v tvorchestve Ol'gi Berggol'ts;' in Tak khochetsia mir obniat': 0. F. Berggol'ts, issledovaniia i publikatsii, ed. N. A. Prozorova (St. Petersburg: Pushkinskii Dom, 2011), 90-98. 69. Ibid., 125. 70. Edensor, "Walking Through Ruins;' in Ingold and Vergunst, Ways of Walking, 137. 71. Berggol'ts, Dnevnye zvezdy, 123. 72. ''Anton Ivanovich Serditsia" (1941). Directed by Aleksandr Ivanovsky. Lenfilm Studios. 73. Ol'ga Berggol'ts, Dnevnye zvezdy, 94. 74. Ibid., 149.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

201

75. Ibid., 123. 76. Ibid., 130.

Chapter2 1. Viktor Shklovsky, "Petersburg during the Blockade;' in Knight's Move, trans. Richard Sheldon (Normal, London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2005), 10. 2. Lidiya Ginzburg, Blockade Diary, trans. Alan Myers (London: Harvill Press, 1995), 9, 10, 101. 3. Lisa Kirschenbaum, "'The Alienated Body': Gender, Identity and the Memory of the Siege of Leningrad;' in Nancy M. Wingfield and Maria Bucur, eds., Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 221-34. 4. Consider, for example, the precision with which Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva describes her Siege weight loss and changing body image: "Stages of my feelings regarding my weight loss: Yesterday I experienced the first signs of emaciation. When I lost my first 30 pounds, I even enjoyed it, since I felt lighter. But now I just feel emaciated:' Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, "Pis'ma;' in Suris, ed., Bol'she chem vospominan'ia, 40. Vishnevskii engages in similarly detailed physical self-description: see Vishnevskii,

Leningrad: Dnevniki voennykh let, 1:28, 32, 34, 59. 5. Pavel Luknitskii,Skvoz'vsiu blokadu (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1988), 149. 6. Leonid Panteleev, "V osazhdennom gorode;' in Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh (Leningrad: Detskaia literatura, 1972), 3:355. Perhaps the most visually immediate example of "habituation'' to the spectacle of death comes in footage, included by Sergei Loznitsa in his film Blokada (2006), of pedestrians seemingly ignoring a corpse lying in the very center of the city, right in the middle of N evsky Prospect by the Anichkov Bridge. 7. For example, Mikhail Platunov's Za khleb (1942), Aleksei Nikol'skii's Podol'skaia ulitsa (1942), Gavriil Malysh's Blokada (1942). 8. Vera Kostrovitskaia, "Diary;' in Cynthia Simmons and Nina Perlina, eds., Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women's Diaries, Memoirs, and Documentary Prose (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), 51. 9. Philippe Aries, The Hour of Our Death (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), 571-75. 10. Inber, Pochti tri gada, 44. 11. Vera Kostrovitskaia's diary is quoted in L. S. Georgievskaia and A. K. Bonitenko, "Postavim pamiatnik v samom tsentre goroda leningradskoi zhenshchine ... ;• in Andrei Dzeniskevich, ed., Zhenshchina i voina: 0 roli zhenshchin v oborone Leningrada, 1941-1944 gg. Sbornik statei (St. Petersburg: Izd-vo S.-Peterburgskogo universiteta, 2006), 292. 12. Hermitage curator Mariia Shcherbacheva recalls:"! felt as though 'death bacteria' [mikroby smerti] were getting inside me, poisoning my consciousness. I dropped everything and left the bomb shelter:' Quoted in Papernaia, ed., Podvig veka, 39. 13. Inber, Pochti tri gada, 74. 14. Quoted in Papernaia, ed., Podvig veka, 66. The knights' armor has been stored away for safekeeping during the Siege, leaving the bare mannequins. 15. J. Hillis Miller, Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 5. 16. Pakhomov, "Leningradskaia letopis';' in Brodskii, Khudozhniki goroda-jronta, 261. 17. Vera lsaeva's diary as quoted in G. I. Lisovskaia, "Ia ne geroistvovala, a zhila ... ;· in Dzeniskevich, ed., Zhenshchina i voina, 268. 18. Linda Nochlin, The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1994), 19-21. 19. Pakhomov recalls his transformation of tragic pictorial "Siege ethnography" into a developed propaganda narrative: "! depicted a bundled-up woman on Dvortsovyi Bridge pulling a sled with a dead child wrapped in a sheet. But I didn't like this drawing. The specific nature of the Siege was expressed, but the main thing was lacking. This Siege scene featured a collection of Siege ethnography, Siege misfortune, but the collection was cold and indifferent. And it was only when I

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NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

drew a close-up of a hunger-exhausted Leningrader on a children's sled whom an MPVO [civil air-raid defense] girl was holding up by his shoulders so that he wouldn't fall that I felt I had hit upon the right tone ('To the Clinic'). The theme of the picture was not a woman's family grief, not the horrors of the Siege, but a suffering Leningrader, anguish for a human being, concern for a human being:' Pakhomov, "Leningradskaia letopis7' in Brodskii, Khudozhniki goroda-fronta, 263. 20. For a detailed outline of the development of Soviet poster propaganda, see Victoria E. Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Bonnell suggests (74) that the Soviet poster replaced the allegorical mechanism with the idea of typage in the 1930s, but reintroduced allegory during World War II. An excellent discussion of competition and negotiation between beautiful and damaged bodies in Stalinist discourse can be found in Lilya Kaganovsky, How the Soviet Man Was Unmade: Cultural Fantasy and Male Subjectivity under Stalin (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008). Kaganovsky's convincing identification of the representation of the damaged male body as a subversive tool of Stalinist propaganda seems to find its exception in the case of Siege propaganda, in which actual damaged bodies were excluded or rhetorically retouched. 21. On the functioning of"TASS windows" (okna TASS) in Leningrad during the Siege, see I. V Selivanova and N. N. Shkol'nyi, eds., Leningradskie "Okna TASS" 1941-1945 gg. v sobranii Rossiiskoi natsional'noi biblioteki. Katalog (St. Petersburg: Rossiiskaia natsional'naia biblioteka, 1995). 22. Frontovoe okno TASS #3, August 1943. Poster by V Selivanov, text by V Saianov. Reproduced in I. V Selivanova, Riadovoi blokadnoi epopei: Khudozhnik Vasilii Selivanov (St. Petersburg: Deistvuiushchie litsa, 2006), 23. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: NLB, 1977), 166. 24. "Man absolutely requires butter. When my niece Marina was sick, she kept asking for butter-even just a little on her tongue. If I were a poet, I would write a poem about butter and set it to music. How much greed for fat runs through the Bible and Homer!" Viktor Shklovsky, A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917-1922, trans. Richard Sheldon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), 178. 25. At present the main published source of "unofficial" Siege art is V E. Loviagina, Blokadnyi dnevnik; Zhivopis' i grajika blokadnogo vremeni: Al'bom-katalog (St. Petersburg: Gosudarstvennyi muzei istorii Sankt-Peterburga, 2005). 26. Tat'iana Glebova, "Risovat' kak letopisets: Stranitsy leningradskogo dnevnika;' Iskusstvo Leningrada 2 (1990), 33. 27. Leonid Panteleev, Priotkrytaia dver' (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel; 1980), 411. 28. Ibid., 81. 29. Ostroumova-Lebedeva, "Pis'ma:' in Suris, Bol'she chem vospominan'ia, 47. 30. "Dnevnik V I. Vinokurova:' in Sergei Chernov, ed., Blokadnye dnevniki i dokumenty (St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii dom, 2007), 258. 31. "DnevnlkA. G. Bermana:' in V M. David and V. E. Levtov, eds., Budni podviga: blokadnaia zhizn' leningradtsev v dnevnikakh, risunkakh, dokumentakh (St. Petersburg: LIK, 2007), 181. Citizens were acutely aware that food distribution in the starving city was unequal, and that social privilege or fortuitous professional placement could be the key to survival, not to mention profit. The following diary entry may be seen as typical: "Not everyone is starving [Golodaiut ne vse ]. Salespeople still have 4-5 pounds of bread at the end of the day, and that's how they make their profit. They buy all kinds of goods and save a huge amount of money. Officers and police stuff themselves, as do the clerks of the military committees [voenkomaty], who can get everything they need at the special shops. Neither do cooks, canteen directors or waiters starve:' "Dnevnik B. Kapranova:' in David and Levtov, eds., Budni podviga, 42. 32. Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997),215. 33. Leonid Panteleev, "V osazhdennom gorode;' 318. My understanding of the workings of disgust(s) owes much to Robert Rawdon Wilson, The Hydra's Tale: Imagining Disgust (Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 2002).

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203

34. Nikolai Byliev, "Iz dnevnika;' in Brodskii, ed., Khudozhniki goroda-fronta, 337. 35. Glebova, "Risovat' kak letopisets;' 15. 36. One finds many such instances of gendered disgust among the emaciated bodies of the Siege: ''A clear, sunny day. [In the courtyard of the Iusupov Palace] a great number of men and women are sunning their skin-wrapped bones all in a jumble, in a state of utter undress, and not at all shy before one another or [Palace] visitors. Having been turned by dystrophy into sexless creatures, the men and women do not speak to one another. They have not only lost all mutual interest, they are now full of mutual antipathy: purely feminine features have become repulsive to men, and vice versa:' Ekaterina Lazareva, "Dnevnik;' Trudy Gosudarstvennogo muzeia istorii Sankt-Peterburga 5 (2000), 212. 37. This gloomily grotesque phrase obviously had a basis in the reality of the Siege. V. I. Vinokurov, a teacher of geography arrested and shot in 1943 for "anti-Soviet propaganda;' made an observation in his diary that became one of the reasons for his demise: "On Pokrovskaia Square I came upon a crowd of people looking silently upon the torn-up corpse of a fat young woman. Who did this, and why?" Chernov, ed., Blokadnye dnevniki i dokumenty, 232. 38. Ol'ga Berggol'ts, "Dnevnye zvezdy;' in Vstrecha (Moscow: Russkaia kniga, 2000), 201-2. 39. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene lswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 25-26. 40. M. V. Iudina, Vy spasetes' cherez muzyku (Moscow: Klassika 21, 2005), 111. 41. This allows the reader to interpret this image within the framework of twentieth -century Russian culture's well-known apocalyptic tradition, including, for instance, Natal'ia Goncharova's lithograph "The Pale Horse" (from her cycle "Mystic Images of War"), whose deathly rider clearly transcends gender, transcending as well the pain it brings and personifies. 42. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 175,183-84. 43. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4. 44. Adriana Cavarero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 16. 45. Serguei Oushakine, "In the State of Post-Soviet Aphasia: Symbolic Development in Contemporary Russia;' Europe-Asia Studies 52, no. 6 (2000): 991-1016. 46. Glebova, "Risovat' kak letopisets;' 28. 47. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 183. 48. Aileen Rambow calls such psychological projections into the "beautiful" post-Siege future "anticipated reminiscence:' Aileen G. Rambow, "The Siege of Leningrad: Wartime Literature and Ideological Change;' in Robert W. Thurston and Bernd Bonwetsch, eds., The People's War: Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 160. 49. Glebova, "Risovat' kak letopisets;' 30. Time travel is a repeated topos of the artist's diary: "I recall my whole previous life. The start of the revolution. There was a spiritual upswing then, an animated and youthful quality, although there was a pretty decent amount of hunger then, too. One has to hope with all one's might for a new life:'"Risovat' kak letopisets;' 33. 50. Oushakine, "In the State of Post-Soviet Aphasia;' 995.

Chapter 3 1. Luknitskii, Skvoz' vsiu blokadu, 149 2. Ginzburg, Prokhodiashchie kharaktery, 303-4. 3. Anna Mikhailova, "Stikhi;' Zvezda, no. 2 (2010) (publication prepared by Polina Barskova). 4. Lidiia Ginzburg, Prokhodiaschie kharaktery, 229. 5. On urban knowledge in Hugo's novel, see Richard Maxwell, The Mysteries of Paris and London (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 191-225. 6. Literally, "Hanses:'

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7. I would like to thank Kirill Kobrin for bringing to my attention the origins of the young protagonist's name: while his last name makes him as necessary as bread (rye, rzhanoi), the first name brings to mind Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim (190 1) about a deft and brave young boy. 8. V sevolod Azarov, "Skazka o ruchnom fonarike;' TsGALI St. Petersburg, f. 7278, op. 2, ed. 745. 9. Ibid. I 0. Ekaterina Lazareva, "Dnevnik;' 228. II. A. Gershun, Printsipy i priemy svetovoi maskirovki (Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo AN SSSR, 1943), 139. 12. Vitalii Bianki, "Gorod, kotoryi pokinuli ptitsY:' Likholet'e (Moscow: BUTS, 2005), 176-77. 13. Gaston Bachelard,Laflamme d'une chandelle (Paris: PUP, 1961), 102. 14. Galina Saliamon, Ostrovki pamiati: Vospominaniia (St. Petersburg: Zvezda, 2008), 23. 15. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 83. 16. Irina Sandomirskaia, "A Politeia in Besiegement: Lidiia Ginzburg on the Siege of Leningrad as a Political Paradigm;' Slavic Review 69,no. 2 (summer 20 10),306-26. 17. Ol'ga Berggol'ts, TsGALI St. Petersburg, f. 293, op. 2. ed. 1076. 18. Freidenberg, "Osada cheloveka;' 18. 19. Ekaterina Kots, "Na moiu doliu vypal schastlivyi lotereinyi billet:' Istoricheskii arkhiv 3 (1999), 82. 20. Edens or, "Walking Through Ruins:' in Ingold and Vergunst, Ways of Walking, 134. 21. "Slukhachi;' Materials of the St. Petersburg Museum of the History of the Blind Society (Muzei Obschestva Slepykh). 22. Eduard Galvin, "Dnevnik:' The manuscript is held at the St. Petersburg Museum of the History of the Blind Society. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. On the notion of presentness in the Siege discourse, see Polina Barskova, "Nastoiashchee nastoiashchee: o vospriiatii vremeni v blokadnom Leningrade;' Neprikosnovennyi zapas 2 (2011). 26. Cf. Nadia Seremetakis, "Memory of the Senses:' in The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity, ed. C. Nadia Seretakis (Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1994), 29. 27. Eduard Galvin, "Na Donu;' Put' VOSovtsa 1-2 (1942). 28. H. G. Wells, "The Country of the Blind;' in The Short Stories of H. G. Wells (London: Ernest Benn, 1960), 177. 29. Viktor Shutov,"Ia znaiunoch';' Chastnyi sluchai: Povesti (Kiev: Izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury Dnepr, 1974), 23. 30. Ibid., 31. 31. Galvin, "Dnevnik:' Archive of the Society of the Blind, St. Petersburg. 32. Viktor Shutov, "Ia znaiu noch7' 21. 33. According to the historians at the St. Petersburg Museum of the History of the Blind Society; both Shutov and Bytovoi consulted their materials. 34. On the notion of evolution within the Siege psychology, see Barskova, ''Avgust, kotorogo ne bylo:' 35. Roman Karmen, No pasaran! Memuary (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossia, 1972); Aleksandr Fadeev, Leningrad v dni blokady (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel: 1944). 36. Bianki,Likholet'e. 37. Lidiia Alekseeva, "Mechtatel7' TsGALI St. Petersburg, f. 293, op. 2, ed. 506. 38. Ibid. 39. On the Bobrov team's Siege experience, see Mikhail Bobrov, Khranitel' angela (St. Petersburg: SPbGUP, 2008). 40. Alekseeva, "Mechtatel7' ibid. 41. Ginzburg, Prokhodiashchie kharaktery, 450. 42. Ginzburg, Prokhodiashchie kharaktery, 435, 436.

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Chapter4 I. Lazarev, "Leningrad v blokade: Vyderzhki iz dnevnika;' 203. 2. This term is suggested by Rimma Neratova in V dni voiny: Semeinaia khronika (St. Petersburg: Zhurnal Zvezda, 1996), 94. Vitalii Bianki reports that one of his strongest impressions during a visit to the city in 1942 was that Leningraders would narrate the horrors of the deadly winter smiling. Bianki, "Gorod, kotoryi pokinuli ptitsy;' Likholet'e, 172. On emotional numbing as a frequent result of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), see Bessel A. VanderKolk, "The Complexity of Adaptation to Trauma: Self- Regulation, Stimulus Discrimination, and Characterological Development;' in Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society, ed. Van der Kolk et a!., (New York: Guilford Press, 1996), 182-213. On the translation of the mechanism of psychological trauma into terms of collective cultural conceptions, see Neil J. Smelser, "Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma;' in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander eta!. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 31-59. 3. The account of Sofia Gotkhart, a student in the Russian Literature department of the Herzen Pedagogical Institute, gives an unexpected twist to the frequent diary tapas of the Siege burial procession in reaction to the cultural environment. She writes: "We put two children's sleds one behind the other, tied them together, and tied my uncle's body to this contraption. Our way was lang-more than four kilometers along Nevskii Prospect, Liteinyi Prospect, Sadovaia Street. The day was all frost and sun [moroz i solntse], everything was sparkling. And the whole way, we saw dead people on sleds:' In order to highlight the shocking contrast, Gotkhart, who attended G. A. Gukovskii's lectures on Russian romantic poetry that whole winter, uses Pushkin's celebrated line from "Winter Morning" ["Zimnee utro"] (1829). V. Vikhnovich, ed., Dve sud'by v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine. Soj'ia Gotkhart. Leningrad. Blokada. Isaak Kleiman. Riga. Getto (St. Petersburg: Izdatel'skii tsentr "Gumanitarnaia akademiia;' 2006), 63. 4. Vera Inber, Dusha Leningrada (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1979), 17. 5. Bianki, "Gorod, kotoryi pokinuli ptitsY:' Likholet'e, 180. 6. Fedor Nikitin, "Blokadnyi dnevnik;' manuscript, "A muzy ne molchali" Museum of Siege Culture (School 235, St. Petersburg), I 05-6. Nikitin's perception of a Siege beauty (in the sense of a beautiful girl, and of beauty generally) preserved in icy death as if in a museum exhibit, producing the impression of ambivalent spectacle, recalls the observation of Georgii Kulagin: ''I've noticed that hunger affects young women completely differently from everyone else. They don't get bloated; their features are not distorted, don't become disgustingly ugly, as is the case with all of us. They don't get bags under their eyes; their cheeks don't puff out; their lips don't droop. Their skin does not take on a sallow tinge, nor do their heads start to resemble skulls wrapped in parchment. It's as if nature is playing a cruel joke, leaving them attractive until the end. Gradually they get thinner. Their cheeks take on a lusterless, lily whiteness; their eyebrows become darker, as if being drawn in more strikingly with each passing day.... Too earthy, sometimes vulgar, they gradually turn into marble beauties out of a fairy tale, porcelain shepherdesses at the Hermitage:' Kulagin, Dnevnik i pamiat': 0 perezhitom v gody blokady (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1978), 151. 7. V. Kurdov, Pamiatnye dni i gody (St. Petersburg: Arsis, 1994), 182-83. 8. Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961, 2003), 47-48; Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (Menston, UK: Scalar Press, 1970), 36. For an illuminating discussion of the influence of these theories of the Sublime on aesthetics in the context of the historical upheavals of the twentieth century, see Brett Ashley Kaplan, Unwanted Beauty: Aesthetic Pleasure in Holocaust Representation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007). For useful applications of theories of the Sublime to the discussion of modernity, see Christine Battersby, The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference (London: Routledge, 2007). 9. Fe din, Svidanie s Leningradom, 14. 10. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 93.

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11. My formulation of the Siege Sublime as aesthetic reaction to the challenge of the unrepresentability of history is informed by, among other sources, the Gulag Sublime that Harriet Murav posits based especially on Solzhenitsyn's oeuvre. Murav claims: "The writer and reader of the Gulag share a similar feeling of individual powerlessness. These conditions and effects, taken together, permit us to see this text as a particular form of the sublime. The theme of the unrepresentable in Solzhenitsyn's text serves to bind individual readers together:· Murav, Russia's Legal Fictions, 188. Another important rereading of sublime theory that influenced my interpretation is F. R. Ankersmit's Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 12. Kaganov, Sankt-Peterburg: Obrazy prostranstva, 192. 13. Ginzburg, Blockade Diary, 27. 14. A. 0. Evlanova, ed. '1\rkhitektor I. Chaiko i ego blokadnyi dnevnik;' in Trudy gosudarstvennogo muzeia istorii Sankt-Peterburga, vyp. 5 (2000): 110. 15. Ginzburg, Zapisnye knizhki: Novae sobranie, 175. 16. Nikitin, "Blokadnyi dnevnik;' 127. 17. Iurii Kolosov, interview with the author, St. Petersburg, July 1, 2008. Igor' Chaiko confirms this impression in his diary: "There are no lights, and so silhouettes of the city are particularly beautiful, acquiring some sort of stamp of eternity; now architecture is nature itself' Evlanova, '1\rkhitektor I. Chaiko i ego blokadnyi dnevnik;' 111. We find a similar conclusion in the diary of Leonid Panteleev: "Yesterday I wrote someone that Leningrad has become more Petersburgian than before (probably because there is less civilization: there are few streetcars... and few people on the streets). The moon has replaced electric streetlights:· Panteleev, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:368. 18. Elena Martilla, "Dnevnik;' manuscript, OR GRM, f. 100, op. 570. The new absence of public transportation in the city, requiring Leningraders to travel everywhere on foot, is mentioned in numerous diaries; Nikitin describes this situation as "epic movement" ("Blokadnyi dnevnik;' 89), while the scholar Ol'ga Freidenberg in her diary writes: "People overcame huge urban and suburban distances in a stream. They went from one part of the city to another in a silent stream of people:' Freidenberg, "Osada cheloveka;· 16. Such imagery cannot but contradict frequent references to the besieged city's "emptiness:' we might suppose that both impressions were correct: the streets of Leningrad during the Siege became both more populous (due to the lack of transportation) and less so (due to mortality and evacuation), an ambiguity appreciable upon viewing Sergei Loznitsa's documentary The Siege (Blokada, 2006). For an analysis of Loznitsa's inventive treatment of Siege footage, see Polina Barskova and Sergei Loznitsa, "The Siege (Blokada, 2006);' Kinokultura 24 (2009). 19. Neratova, V dni voiny: Semeinaia khronika, 97. The only detailed description I could find of hunger-induced hallucination diagnosed as such by a Siege diarist is found in Bernshtein, "Leningradskii torgovyi port v 1941-1942 gg.;• 208. 20. For a discussion of Shklovskii's aesthetic theory as a product of historical cataclysms experienced in his youth (especially World War I), see Galin Tihanov, "The Politics of Estrangement: The Case of the Early Shklovsky;' Poetics Today 26, no. 4 (2005): 665-96. 21. Shklovsky, A Sentimental Journey, 2 71. 22. Van Buskirk, "'Samoostranenie' kak eticheskii i esteticheskii printsip v proze L. Ia. Ginzburg;' Novae literaturnoe obozrenie 5 (2006): 261-81. 23. Kobrin, "To Create a Circle and To Break It ('Siege Man's' World of Rituals):' 24. Neratova, V dni voiny: Semeinaia khronika, 33. 25. Glebova, "Risovat' kak letopisets;' 29. 26. F. Griaznov, "Iz blokadnogo dnevnika;· in Dozhivem li my do tishiny: Zapiski iz blokadnogo Leningrada (St. Petersburg, 2009), 110. On the position of the spectator within the politicized discourse of Petersburg theatricality in the twentieth century, see von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, 1917-1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press,1993),193-203. 27. Dmitrii Likhachev, Vospominaniia (Moscow: Logos, 2007), 303. 28. Liubov' Shaporina, Dnevnik (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2011), 23. 29. Zinaida Shishova, Blokada (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel',1943), 22. 30. Aleksandr Flint, TsGALI St. Petersburg, f. 7278, op. 2, ed. 678.

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31. Tikhonov, Sobranie sochinenii, 4:499. 32. Berggol'ts, Stikhi i poemy, 336. 33. Natal'ia Krandievskaia, Grozovyi venok: Stikhi i poema (St. Petersburg: Litsei, 1992), 102. 34. See for instance Ivan Titov's remarkably detailed description of Siege color: "In the west, the sunset sky blazes pink; the city is a gloomy umber. The distances are purplish-blue; the sky over the city is enshrouded in a purple mist, and farther away, it is pink-green and blue-gray. Everything looks as if it's been evened out with a priming brush. And against this background you can see the pale-blue, proud St. Isaac's:' Brodskii, ed., Khudozhniki goroda-fronta, 203. 35. Neratova, V dni voiny: Semeinaia khronika, 107: "Wintertime Leningrad at war is preserved in my memory like a black-and-white etching: there's snow everywhere, and against the background of the white snow, the black figures of people, like slow-moving ants .... Against the background of snow and a gray sky, black forests, black buildings:' 36. Evlanova, ''Arkhitektor I. Chaiko i ego blokadnyi dnevnik;' 115. 37. Iaroslav Nikolaev, "Kazhdyi god 18 ianvaria;' in Papernaia, Podvig veka, 142. 38. Ginzburg, Blockade Diary, 25-26. 39. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 92. 40. Inber, Pochti tri gada, 183-87. 41. Here Panteleev paraphrases a line of Mandel'shtam's lyric "Leningrad" (1930), thus rewriting the poetic gesture of nostalgic return to a place of death. 42. Panteleev, Priotkrytaia dver', 356-57. 43. Andreev, Russkie bogi: Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, 158-59. 44. Pavel Kondrat'ev, letter to V. F. Matiukh (May 10, 1944), in Suris, Bol'she, chem vospominan'ia, 388. 45. Inber, Dusha Leningrada, 17-18. 46. A. S. Nikol'skii, ''Akademik arkhitektury;' in Papernaia, Podvig veka, 281. 47. Diarists often remark upon the dehumanization of death in besieged Leningrad. "This was such ... non-human death. They looked like old dry brushwood or piles of planks-an icy mass frozen together. Nobody was horrified-people just ignored it, and if they did look at it-then without any feeling:' Neratova, V dni voiny: Semeinaia khronika, 69. As if in grim affirmation of Roman Jakobsolis argument in "The Statue in Pushkin's Poetic Mythology" regarding the instability of the animate/ inanimate opposition in The Bronze Horseman, the originating template for the Petersburg text, Iakov Rubanchik subtitles his drawing: "Everything was dead, except for the sentry lions standing on the front steps with upturned paws, as if alive:' Loviagina, Blokadnyi dnevnik, 144. 48. V. N. Toporov, Peterburgskii tekst russkoi literatury: Izbrannye trudy (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPB, 2003), 7-66; Iury Lotman, "The Symbolism of St. Petersburg;' Universe of Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 197. 49. Toporov, Peterburgskii tekst russkoi literatury, 6, 29. 50. Andrew Kahn, Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman (London: Bristol Classical Press; Newburyport, MA: Focus Information Group, 1998), 96-97. 51. For a compelling and original discussion of the "negative side" of the Petersburg text, see K. G. Isupov, "Dialog stolits v istoricheskom dvizhenii;' in Moskva-Peterburg: Pro et contra (St. Petersburg, 2002). 52. Aleksandr Benua, "Zhivopisnyi Peterburg;' Mir iskusstva 2 (1901), 2-4. 53. Ibid., 4. 54. The beautiful, dying city of the past endangered by the aggressive, unscrupulous present is a crucial concept in the discourse of the symbolist city. See "The Ideal City, the Dead City;' in Sharon Hirsh, Symbolism and Modern Urban Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 257-77, 322-25. 55. For analyses of the representational spectrum of "death of Petersburg" discourse, see Yudina, "Metropolis to Necropolis: The St. Petersburg Myth and Its Cultural Extension in the 1910s and 1920s;' PhD diss., University of Southern California, 1999; Kaganov, Sankt-Peterburg: Obrazy prostranstva, 177-79; and Helen Goscilo, "Unsaintly St. Petersburg? Visions and Visuals;' in Preserving

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Petersburg: History, Memory, Nostalgia, eds. Helen Goscilo and Stephen M. Norris (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). 56. Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 15. 57. Georgii Lebedev, "Dnevnik;' manuscript, OR GRM, f. 100, op. 484. 58. Scholars have paid increasing attention to the intriguing problem of the "recycling" of the experience of the first siege by the second; see, e.g., Rambow, "The Siege of Leningrad"; and Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 27-29. 59. Viktor Shklovskii, one of the sharpest and most compassionate observers of Petersburg spatiality in the twentieth century, notes in 1927: "Petersburg is sprawling to its outskirts, turning into a bagel of a city [gorod-bublik] with a beautiful but dead center:' Shklovskii, "60 dnei bez sluzhby;' Novyi LEF 6 (192 7): 18. During the Siege, he registers the opposite movement: "The city was taken in such a tight circle that it lost its outskirts" (Shklovskii, Tetiva: 0 neskhodstve skhodnogo ), 40. Shklovskii, who always had an eye for paradox, notes that while the 1930s saw the city's historical memory suppressed and replaced with new Soviet content, the Siege again brought to light the city's historical center as well as its discursive centrality. This problem is discussed aptly by Cynthia Simmons in "Leningrad Culture under Siege (1941-1944):' For a comprehensive and illuminating study of the fading of artistic diversity in 1930s Leningrad, see Moisei Kagan, Istoriia kul'tury Peterburga (St. Petersburg: Izd-vo SPb-skii gumanitarnyi universitet profsoiuzov, 2000), 275-89. 60. Boris Zagurskii, Iskusstvo surovykh let (Leningrad: Izd-vo Iskusstvo, Leningradskoe otdelenie, 1970), 85. The manuscript was indeed published (Ostroumova-Lebedeva, Avtobiograficheskie zapiski [Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2003]), but not until1974 and in such form as demonstrated the editors' censoring zeal. The original manuscript is held at the Manuscript Department of GPB (f. 1015). 61. Anna Ostroumova- Lebedeva, "Dnevnik;' in Suris, Bol'she, chem vospominan'ia, 43. 62. Ibid., 44. 63. For a comprehensive summary of Ostroumova's oeuvre, see Kiselev, Grafika A. P. Ostroumovoi-Lebedevoi: Graviura i akvarel'. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1984. 64. Toporov, Peterburgskii tekst russkoi literatury, 26. 65. For a discussion of Ostroumova as a participant in the preservationist creation of the "static urbanscape" of Petersburg, see Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 61. 66. Inber, Pochti tri gada, 2 79. 67. Diarists connect the Siege's "frozen time" with its "frozen space:' Vsevolod Vishnevskii observes: "The frozen, quiet Neva. Quiet factory chimneys. On the nearest post we saw a poster: 'Great Festivities-22 june 1941: ... As if time had frozen! We wanted to take the poster, but it had frozen to the post. Houses were empty, windows broken.... I constantly felt that everything had gone numb, that the landscape was dead:' Vishnevskii, Leningrad: dnevniki voennykh let, 1:90. 68. Ekaterina Lazareva, "Blokada;' Trudy gosudarstvennogo muzeia istorii Sankt-Peterburga 5 (2000), 236. 69. Zagurskii, Iskusstvo surovykh let, 86. 70. The art historian Petr Kornilov recalls how Ostroumova would, in the winters of 1941-1944, share with visitors copies of Mir iskusstva as a most precious gift (P. E. Kornilov, "My byli vmeste;' in Papernaia, Podvig veka, 119). Ostroumova's creative work during the Siege made possible an open and eulogistic discussion of "Mir iskusstva'' in the press of the time; see Kornilov, "Po masterskim leningradskikh khudozhnikov: Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva:' Kornilov writes: "What people surrounded Ostroumova! She is especially proud to have belonged to the 'World of Art' group:' In the same article, dedicated to the fiftieth anniversary of Ostroumova's career, Kornilov mentions that though during the Siege the artist "ran out of drying oil, she still uses the same set of gravers she has always used;' thus emphasizing that unity of content is inalienable from formal unity. Ostroumova's view of the city became emblematic and decisively influenced such Siege artists as V. Morozov and N. Pavlov. 71. S. Smirnov-Kordobskii, "Pis'ma;' in Suris, Bol'she, chem vospominan'ia, 340. The artists Stepan Iaremich (1869-1939) and Vladimir Grinberg (1897-1942) mentioned here strongly influenced the tradition of the Petersburg urbanscape.

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72. Kornilov, "My byli vmeste;' 117. 73. For a chronological summary of Shillingovskii's career, see E. Grishina, P. A. Shillingovskii (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1980). 74. Kornilov, "My byli vmeste;' 121. 75. Curiously, though in her artwork Ostroumova asserted a timeless peacefulness, in her diary of the time she allowed herself to indulge in the imagery of apocalyptic destruction: "I would paint this picture thus: clouds of stinking black smoke have obscured the whole earth and sky. And tongues of fire, with sparks and steam, break through and dance about. And below people swarm about:' Ostroumova-Lebedeva, "Dnevnki;' 31. 76. Shillingovskii's interpretation of the eschatological continuity of the meaning of Petersburg during the Siege was not unique. Lebedev writes in his diary: "Now as never before I can hear Jeremiah's curse: 'For this city has been to Me a provocation of My anger and My fury from the day that they built it, even to this day!"' Lebedev, "Dnevnik;' April! 0, 1942. 77. Kaganov, Sankt-Peterburg: Obrazy prostranstva, 194-95. 78. Piranesi and his fictions of urban and historical decay held a strong fascination for the lithographers associated with the World of Art. Another astute study contemplating this influence is Betsy Moeller-Sally, "No Exit: Piranesi, Dore, and the Transformation of the Petersburg Myth in Mstislav Dobuzhinskii's Urban Dreams;' Russian Review 4 (1998), 539-67. 79. Iakov Druskin, Dnevniki (St. Petersburg: Gumanitarnoe agentstvo "Akademicheskii proekt;' 1999), 117. 80. Page numbers for issues of Leningrad under discussion are given in the main text. 81. The translation of fragments of Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman is mine. 82. Characteristically, Ostroumova depicts the Bronze Horseman without the defensive scaffolding built for it in the autumn of 1941, despite having observed the construction thereof that August. From her description of producing this reworking of an earlier sketch-"I worked ecstatically, as if intoxicated. My strength is diminished, my heart isn't working properly, and my hand shakes. But as soon as I took up my instrument, I felt my old confidence right away; the first print calmed me down''-we can see the artist drawing strength through this affirmation of continuity (Ostroumova-Lebedeva, Avtobiograficheskie zapiski, 3:296). 83. For a perceptive discussion of the role of Petrine mythology in Stalin's ideological project, see Kevin M. F. Platt, "Rehabilitation and Afterimage: Aleksei Tolstoi's Many Returns to Peter the Great:' in Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalisnist Progaganda, edited by Kevin M. F. Platt and David Brandenberger (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006). This fine article sheds important additional light on the subject of the classic study by Nicholas Riasanovsky, The Image of Peter the Great in Russian History and Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 84. On the Soviet mythologizing of Leningrad for propaganda purposes, see Maddox, '"Healing the Wounds': War Commemorations, Myths, and the Restoration of Leningrad's Imperial Heritage, 1941-1950:' 85. L. Ronchevskaia, "Dnevnik bez slov;' in Papernaia, Podvig veka, 165. 86. Krandievskaia, Grozovyi venok, 93. 87. Cf. Konstantin Fedin's succinct formulations of the Siege version of the Sovietization of Leningrad's "imperial heritage": "Leningrad has preserved its unity of past and present, the old and eternal city.... [This is] a city endowed since the time of Peter with a remarkably consistent tradition in art, literature, science, and industry.... There is much in our character that would be impossible to understand without reference to how that character is manifest in the Petersburg and Leningrad cultural-historical framework:' Fedin, Svidanie s Leningradom, 15, 53. 88. Vladimir Iakhontov, "Leningrad;' TsGALI Moscow, f. 2440, op. 1, ed. 18. 89. Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces;' Diacritics 16 (Spring 1986), 22-27. 90. Ostroumova's productive relationship with the genre of postcard began with her collaboration with the St. Eugenia Society at the very beginning of the twentieth century; for details, see Goscilo, "Unsaintly St. Petersburg? Visions and Visuals;' in Goscilo and Norris, Preserving Petersburg, 72-73.

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91. V. Baranov et al., eds., Leningrad: Arkhitekturno-planirovochnyi obzor razvitiia goroda (leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1943), 3. 92. V. Raevskaia-Rutkovskaia, "V osazhdennom gorode;' in Brodskii, Khudozhniki goroda-fronta, 53. Not everyone in Leningrad, however, was pleased with the quality of the propaganda art covering the streets of the city. Complained Konashevich: "These streets are nothing but a big smear. It looks like a brown-gray patchwork; from afar nobody can say what's going on:' Vladimir Konashevich, "Vospominaniia;' manuscript, OR GRM, f. 76, op. 2. 93. Nikitin was not only fascinated by the unique wartime beauty of his city (fascinated to the point of repetetive reiteration of this viewpoint), but saw it allegorically as the work of an artist: "We all are taken by this beauty .... It's as if a great impressionist put his rays into this amazing beauty to give it all the hues of color and light:' Nikitin, "Blokadnyi dnevnik;' 127. 94. Freidenberg, "Osada cheloveka;' 25. 95. V. M. Glinka, "Blokada: Fragmenty vospominanii, napisannykh letom 1979 goda;' Zvezda 7 (2005). 96. Gale MacLachlan and Ian Reid, Framing and Interpretation, Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1994, 22. 97. Vera Miliutina, "Rany Ermitazha;' in Papernaia, Podvig veka, 66. For information on Miliutina, I used a monograph of remarkable scholarly and emotional depth: Rozanov, Vera Miliutina i o nei. 98. Vladimir Kalinin, "Velikii dukh byl vmesto kryl;' in Papernaia, Podvig veka, 48, 57. 99. In the absence of actual objects of art, the frame acquired a new, higher aesthetic status within the museum space. Art historian Mariia Shcherbacheva recalls: "The frames glimmer with particular brightness against the dark-purple background of the walls. The rays of the setting sun pour through the ancient lilac windowpanes, creating remarkably subtle hues in the hall. We began collecting the most valuable frames to save them:' Mariia Shcherbacheva, "Dni blokady;' in Papernaia, Podvig veka, 36. 100. Mikhail Grigor'ev, "Dnevniki;' in Suris, Bolshe, chem vospominan'ia, 75. 10 1. The ghostly presence of Rembrandt becomes a repeated motif in topotexts evoking Siege spaces. Natalia Krandievskaia spent the first winter in the company of rats-and of images allowing her to tame horror via aestheticization: PeM6paHIITa nonyMpaK, Y TJieiO!l\eli neqypKw fOIIO/IHbiX Kpb!C ronaK, B3JieTarornwe rnKypKw. (Krandievskaia, Grozovyi venok, 100.) [Rembrandt's half-shade I By the smoldering small stove I The gopak dance of the rats, I Their jerking furred backs.] 102. The effect of detachment is a crucial impetus to producing art during historical disaster. The Czech artist Alfred Kantor, who drew while at the Birkenau death camp, writes: "My commitment to drawing came out of deep instinct for self-preservation.... By taking the role of observer, I could at least for a few moments detach myself from what was going on:' Alfred Kantor, The Book of Alfred Kantor (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971). 103. Grigory Kaganov, Images of Space: St. Petersburg in the Visual and Verbal Arts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 150. 104. Miliutina, "Rany Ermitazha;' 65. 105. Bianki, "Go rod, kotoryi pokinuli ptitsy;' 172. 106. Mikhail Gritsenko, "Komandirovka v Leningrad;' in Brodskii, Khudozhniki gorodajronta, 138. 107. Lotman, "The Symbolism of St. Petersburg;' 197. 108. Lebedev, "Dnevnik:' 109. Iakov Glikin in Papernaia, Podvig veka, 296.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

211

110. Inber, Pochti tri gada, 63. 111. Iosif Serebrianyi, "Pis'ma khudozhnika Serebrianogo iz blokadnogo Leningrada;' Trudy gosudarstvennogo muzeia istorii Sankt-Peterburga 5 (2000), 146. 112. Esfir' Levina, "Oruzhiem arkhitektury;' Stroitel'stvo i arkhitektura Leningrada 4 (1975), 10-11. 113. On the use of ruins as architectural inspiration and tools for construction, see Molok, "Capriccio, simulacra, proekt: Ruiny:' Voprosy iskusstvovedeniia 2 (1996), 27-52:' For convincing reformulations of the creative aspirations embedded within representations of urban destruction, consult Trigg, The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the Absence of Reason (New York: Peter Lang, 2006); and Page, The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940. 114. Mikhail Morozov in Papernaia, Podvig veka, 306. 115. Andreas Schonle, "Ruins and History: Observations on Russian·Approaches to Destruction and Decay;' Slavic Review 64, no. 4 (2006), 649. 116. Gritsenko, "Komandirovka v Leningrad;' in Brodskii, Khudozhniki goroda-fronta, 149. 117. Lebedev, "Dnevnik:' 118. Ibid. 119. Shaporina, Dnevnik, 1:304-305. 120. Bianki, "Gorod, kotoryi pokinuli ptitsy;' 168.

Chapter 5 1. Tat'iana Velikotnaia, "Dnevnik nashei pechal'noi zhizni v 1942 godu;' in Chelovek v blokade: Novye svidetel'stva, eds. V. M. Koval'chuk and A. N. Chistikov (St. Petersburg: Ostrov, 2008), 123-25. 2. Luknitskii, Skvoz'vsiu blokadu, 180. 3. Fedor G. Shilov, letters to V. A. Krylov (1943). These materials were shared with the author by Marina Bokarius. 4. The fullest existing catalogue of books published in Leningrad during the Siege is A. F. Veksler, Knigi nepobezhdennogo Leningrada: Katalog knig, izdannykh v Leningrade v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny (St. Petersburg, 1999-2003). 5. For a detailed account of bookstore activities during the Siege, see Iosif Barenbaum, Knizhnyi Peterburg: Tri veka istorii (St. Petersburg: Kul'tlnformPress, 2003), 325-93. 6. On one of numerous instances of a family surviving as a result of selling their books, see Glinka, "Blokada:' 7. An episode of a dying blokadnitsa giving away her books is described in Velikotnaia, "Dnevnik nashei pechal'noi zhizni v 1942 godu;' 123-25. 8. Varvara Vol'tman-Spasskaia, "Staraia kniga;' in T. V. Vasil'eva et al., eds., Radio: Blokada Leningrada, 170. 9. Glebova, "Risovat' kak letopisets, 30. 10. For footage of the library bombing, see Sergei Loznitsa's film Blokada (2005). 11. Fedin, Svidanie s Leningradom, 17. 12. Glinka, "Blokada:' 13. Likhachev, Vospominaniia, 303. 14. Evgenii Shvarts, Telefonnaia knizhka (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1997), 348. 15. For more on Tarasenkov's book collection, seeM. Belkina, "Glavnaia kniga: Istoriia odnoi biblioteki;' Novyi mir 11 {1966), 195-224. 16. Anatolii Tarasenkov, "Knigi;' in B. !a. Shiperovich, Knizhnaia lavka pisatelei, 1932-1957 (Moscow: Izd. Literaturnogo fonda SSSR, 1957), 48-49. 17. The notion of libromorphology is suggested by the discussion in Holbrook Jackson, The Anatomy of Bibliomania (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 34-35. For a cogent analysis of the rhetoric of the body politic in urban catastrophe, see David Harvey, "The City as Body Politic;' in

212

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Jane Schneider and Ida Susser, eds., Wounded Cities: Destruction and Reconstruction in a Globalized World (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 25-47. 18. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 1060; Lev Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii v 22-ukh tomakh, (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1981), 7: 181. 19. Shaporina, Dnevnik,1:333. 20. Mariia Mashkova, "Iz blokadnykh zapisei;' in Publichnaia biblioteka v gody voiny, 19411945: Dnevniki, vospominaniia, pis'ma, dokumenty, eds. A. N. Maslova et a!. (St. Petersburg: Rossiiskaia natsional'naia biblioteka, 2005), 68. 21. Ekaterina Suslova, "Nuzhno vyderzhat' i sokhranit' arkhiv;· Otechestvennye arkhivy 4 (2005), 93-94. 22. Taisiia Antonevich, "Pis'ma;· in Maslova et al., eds., Publichnaia biblioteka, 146-48. 23. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: Ihe Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books,1979),197. 24. Mashkova, "Iz blokadnykh zapisei;' in Maslova et al., Publichnaia biblioteka, 90. 25. Walter Benjamin, Ihe Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 206. 26. TsGALI St. Petersburg, f. 2 op. 26, ed. 18,1. 4. The main publication of Zinaida Ts. is Luchi i teni: Stikhotvoreniia Zinaidy Ts. (Petrograd,1916). 27. Shaporina, Dnevnik,1:329. 28. Bianki, "Gorod, kotoryi pokinuli ptitsy;• in Likholet'e, 174. 29. For a thorough description of Rakhlin's role in Leningrad cultural life in the 1940s, see L. Kopylov, N. Popova, and T. Pozdniakova, eds., "I eta bylo tak": Anna Akhmatova i Isaiia Berlin (St. Petersburg: Muzei Anny Akhmatovoi v Fontannom Dome: Draiv, 2009), 211-14. 30. Isaiah Berlin, Flourishing: Letters, 1928-46 (London: Chatto and Wind us, 2004), 604. 31. P. N. Berkov, Istoriia sovetskogo bibliofil'stva, 1917-1967 (Moscow: Kniga, 1971), 129. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 134. 34. Evgenii Shvarts describes the disturbing impression left by his meeting with Gollerbakh during the Siege: "The more Gollerbakh spoke, the more I was gripped by a particular sort of fear. . . . Behind the ordinary and familiar mask, I saw mental illness-a real persecution mania that had poisoned the unfortunate art historian:· Telefonnaia knizhka, 214. 35. Erikh Gollerbakh, "Dnevnik'' (manuscript), 564. This manuscript was shared with the author by Erikh Gollerbakh's heir Evgenii Gollerbakh. 36. Ibid., 565. 37. Ostrovskaia, Dnevnik, 185. 38. P. N. Martynov, Polveka v mire knig (Leningrad: Nauka,1969), 171. 39. Monika Buscher and John Urry, "Mobile Methods and the Empirical;' European journal of Social Theory 12, no. 1 (2009), 100. 40. Berkov, Istoriia sovetskogo bibliofil'stva, 1917-1967, 139. 41. Shilov,letters to V. A. Krylov (1943). 42. An instance of Shilov's discovering a friend's endangered diary during the Siege is described in detail in F. G. Shilov, Zapiski starogo knizhnika (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1959), 142. 43. "Materialy o priobretenii GPB beskhoznykh bibliotek i arkhivov: 1942-1943 gg.;' in Maslova et al., eds., Publichnaia biblioteka, 286-450. 44. Mashkova, "Iz blokadnykh zapisei;' 76. 45. Ibid., 66. 46. Shilov,letters to V. A. Krylov (1943). 47. While it is beyond the scope of this inquiry to untangle the workings of the Siege-era black market, I would like to refer the reader to certain sources and contemporary studies that shed a necessary light on this complex phenomenon, which saved the lives of thousands of Leningraders during the blockade. As early as 1946, when Anatolii Darov's novel Blokada (Ihe Blockade) was published in

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

213

Munich, strong voices emerged in praise of the Siege-era black market, a sentiment echoed in recently published Siege diaries by Dmitrii S. Likhachev, Vospominaniia, and Vladislav Evgen'ev-Maksimov, "Chernye dni Leningrada: Vospominaniia;' ed. Natal'ia Maksimova, with an introductory note by D. S. Likhachev, Zvezda, no. 2 (2001). Available electronically: http://magazines.russ.ru/zvezda/2011/2/ bl11.html. Recently, several scholars of the social history of the Siege have directed their attention to the economics and ethics of the black market; see the studies of Jeffrey Hass, e.g., "Norms and Survival in the Heat of War: Normative versus Instrumental Rationalities and Survival Tactics in the Blockade of Leningrad;' Sociological Forum 26, no. 4 (2011) and "The Experience of War and the Construction of Normality: Lessons from the Blockade of Leningrad;' in Nikita A. Lomagin, ed., Bitva za Len-

ingrad: Diskussionnye problemy: Po materialam mezhdunarodnoi nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii "Blokada Leningrada-spornoe i besspornoe," sentiabr' 2007 gada (St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii dom, 2009), 240-77; Richard Bidlack, e.g., "Survival Strategies in Leningrad during the First Year of the Soviet-German War;' in Robert W Thurston and Bernd Bonwetsch, eds., The People's War: Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 84-108; Vladimir Piankevich, "Rynok v osazhdennom Leningrade;' in Tat'iana Postrelova, ed., Zhizn' i byt blokirovannogo Leningrada: Sbornik nauchnykh statei (St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2010), 122-64; and Nikita A. Lomagin, Neizvestnaia blokada (St. Petersburg; Neva; Moscow: OLMA-Press, 2002). 48. Mashkova, "Iz blokadnykh zapisei;' 52. 49. Shilov, letters to VA. Krylov (1943). 50. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 211. 51. Buscher and Urry, "Mobile Methods and the Empirical;' 108. 52. Mashkova, "Iz blokadnykh zapisei;' 98.

Chapter6 1. N. S. Beliaev, Bibliotekari osazhdennogo Leningrada: Sbornik vospominanii, dnevnikov, pisem, dokumentov, Vypusk 2 (St. Petersburg: Muzei-biblioteka "Knigi blokady Leningrada;' 2003), 36. 2. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. John R. Stilgoe (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 182. 3. Lidiia Korneevna Chukovskaia, Iz dnevnika: Vospominaniia (Moscow: Vremia, 2010), 27. 4. Erikh Gollerbakh, "Dnevnik;' 182. 5. Shishova, Blokada, 20-21. 6. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978), 283. 7. Maria Balshaw and Liam Kennedy, "Introduction;' Urban Space and Representation (London: Pluto Press, 2000), 4. 8. Wolfgang lser, The Act of Reading, 282. 9. Panteleev, Priotkrytaia dver', 308. 10. John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 15-16. 11. Ginzburg, Zapisnye knizhki: Novae sobranie, 152. 12. Ginzburg masterfully brings together an analysis of Tolstoy's creative process and hypotheses regarding the acute topicality of the novel for the Siege moment. Ginzburg, "0 romane rva Tolstogo 'Voina i mir;" Zvezda 1 (1944), 125-39. 13. The first Siege-era publication of War and Peace (Gospolitizdat, fall1941) had a print run of 100,000 copies. For an example of the numerous "comparative" Siege publications on the War with Napoleon, see Elena Tarle, Dve voiny (Leningrad, 1941). 14. Lev Tolstoy, Voina i mir: Otryvki iz romana (Leningrad, 1942). 15. Neratova, V dni voiny: Semeinaia khronika, 82. 16. Inber, Pochti tri gada, 283. 17. Ibid., 283.

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NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

18. Lebedev, "Dnevnik:' 19. Ostrovskaia, "Blokadnye dnevnilct;' 233. 20. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 14-19. 21. Ostrovskaia, "Blokadnye dnevniki;' 207, 297. 22. Ibid., 270. 23. Natal'ia Krandievskaia, Grozovyi venok, 109. 24. Ostrovskaia, "Blokadnye dnevniki;' 270. On the importance of Goya's imagery for the rep-

resentation of the Siege body, see Polina Barskova, "The Corpse, the Corpulent, and the Other: A Study in the Tropology of Siege Body Representation;' Ab Imperio 1 (2009), 361-87. 25. Prominent claustrophobia/confinement texts of Poe include "The Premature Burial" and "Loss of Breath:' 26. Glebova, "Risovat' kak letopisets;' 30. 27. Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Tales and Poems (New York: Modern Library, 1938), 450. 28. On representations of claustrophobic Siege space, see Grigorii Kaganov, Sankt-Peterburg:

Obrazy prostranstva, 192-205. Lebedev, "Dnevnik:' Papernaia, ed., Podvig veka, 162. Krandievskaia, Grozovyi venok, 113. Ibid., 111. Panteleev, Priotkrytaia dver', 392. Ibid., 79. Jennifer Hayward, Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Pleasures from Dickens to Soap Opera (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 21-84. 36. Vsevolod Voevodin, "Knizhnaia lavka;' Zvezda 4 (1945), 24. 37. Ibid., 26. 38. Nikolai Chukovskii, 0 tom, chto vide/ (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2005), 613. 39. Lebedev, "Dnevnik:' Lebedev confirms this sentiment in another diary entry: "Each of us is experiencing what a person feels when recovering from a mortal illness. We see phenomena in new perspectives. In the colors and smells of things, we recognize the impressions of childhood. I've observed a strange phenomenon: the harsher the life situation, the more do we yearn for the past:' Ibid. 40. Lazareva, "Blokada;' 236. 41. Vladimir Konashevich, 0 sebe i o svoem dele (Moscow: Detskaia literatura, 1968), 17. 42. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1984), 1:100-153. 43. Marcel Proust, V poiskakh utrachennogo vremeni: Na puti k Svanu (Leningrad: Academia, 1926), 107. For this analysis, I consulted Frankovskii's Russian translation, which Siege readers of Proust read intently. Frankovskii himself died of starvation in Leningrad in 1942 in the apartment of Erikh Gollerbakh. 44. Konashevich, 0 sebe, 90. 45. Ibid, 87. 46. Voevodin, "Knizhnaia lavka;' 24. 47. Panteleev, Priotkrytaia dver', 404-8. 48. Valentin Kurdov, "Pis'ma;' in Suris, Bol'she, chem vospominan'ia, 266. 49. Ol'ga Khauze, "Blokadnyi dnevnik;' Istoriia Sankt-Peterburga 4 (2009), 79. 50. For an informative analysis of the importance of mnemonics for the Soviet self traumatized by the disruptions of totalitarianism, see Monica Greenleaf and Luba Golburt, "Introduction. Copies: The Mimetic Component of Remembering;' Slavic Review 68, no. 4 (Winter 2009), 743-58 51. Darov, Blokada, 13 7. 52. E. Iakubovich, "Vospominaniia o blokade;' Trudy gosudarstvennogo muzeia istorii 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

Sankt-Peterburga 5 (2000), 238. 53. Ostrovskaia, "Blokadnye dnevniki;' 259.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

215

54. Vishnevskii, "Dnevnik'; 217. 55. Kniazev, Dni velikikh ispytanii, 532. 56. Ostrovskaia, "Blokadnye dnevniki;' 203. Kniazev similarly denies the relevance of Akhmatova's Siege poem "Courage" ["Muzhestvo"], declaring it "outmoded" and full of"empty heroics:' Kniazev, Dni velikikh ispytanii, 535. 57. Ostrovskaia, "Blokadnye dnevniki;' 235. On the Nietzschean aspects of Blok's acceptance of the historical destruction wrought by the Bolshevik revolution, see Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal's reading of the poet's final article "The Collapse of Humanism" ["Krushenie gumanizma"] (1919), Nietzsche in Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 31. 58. My understanding of Blok's philosophy of utopian messianism draws on the analysis of Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia's Fin de Siecle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). 59. Darov, Blokada, 258. 60. V. Glinka, "Domik magistra;' Zvezda 516 (1943), 19. 61. Ibid., 38. 62. Ibid., 40. The quoted verse is actually from Blok's "Na pole Kulikovom:' 63. Rudakov, Sergey. Written in The Dark: Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad (New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016), 79-85. 64. Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 189. 65. Darov, Blokada, 229. 66. Kniazev, Dni velikikh ispytanii, 477. 67. James Young, At Memory's Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 1, 5. 68. Kostrovitskaia, "From the Siege Diary;' in Simmons and Perlina, Writing the Siege of Leningrad, 47-53. 69. Paul Theberge, ''Almost Silent: The Interplay of Sound and Silence in Contemporary Cinema and Television;' in Jay Beck and Tony Grajeda, eds., Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 55. 70. Tikhonov, "Nevskii prospekt;' in Povesti i rasskazy, 54. 71. Tat'iana Gnedich, Stranitsy plena i stranitsy slavy (St. Petersburg: Genio Loci, 2008), 29. 72. Tamara Khmel'nitskaia, "T. G. Gnedich v dni blokady;' in Gnedich, Stranitsy plena, 322. 73. Steven Connor, "Sound and the Self,' in Mark M. Smith, ed., Hearing History: A Reader (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 59. 74. Sofia Ostrovskaia, "Blokadnyi dnevnik;' 233. 75. Leonid Panteleev, Zhivye pamiatniki (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel', 1966), 207. 76. In the Siege diary of A. A. Griaznov, we read: "The enemy is literally pouring bombs onto the city, but it is possible to protect oneself from them. The bombardment usually begins at noon and is over within two hours; the evening bombardment lasts just an hour.... As if by law, it starts at 7:25 p.m:' A. A. Griaznov, "Blokadnyi dnevnik;' in Chelovek v blokade: Novye svidetel'stva, ed. V. M. Koval'chuk and A. N. Chistikov (St. Petersburg: Ostrov, 2008), 31. 77. Panteleev, Priotkrytaia dver', 357. 78. Ginzburg, Prokhodiaschie kharaktery, 330. 79. Ibid., 7. 80. Sergei Loznitsa, interview with the author, May 15,2008. 81. This was not, of course, the only film about the Siege produced during the war. Others include the documentary The Great Victory at Leningrad (Velikaia pobeda pod Leningradom, 1944) and the fictionalized accounts Two Fighters (Dva boitsa, 1944) and Once Upon a Time There was a Little Girl (Zhila-byla devochka, 1944). The few films that emerged in the besieged city itself (or rather what remained of these films), including Mittens (Varezhki) and The Lame Soldier (Khromoi soldat) by Lenfil'm Studio directors Pavel Armand and Naum Liuboshits, still await detailed research.

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82. "Iz stenogrammy obsuzhdeniia fil'ma 'Oborona Leningrada; sostoiavshegosia u sekretaria TsK VKP(b) A.A. Zhdanova;' in V.I. Fomin, ed., Kino na voine (Moscow: Materik, 2005), 210-11. 83. For more on the conceptual strategies informing the reediting of The Battle for Leningrad, see the memoir of Roman Karmen, the documentary filmmaker who, due to his reputation for political reliability, was invited from Moscow in the spring of 1942 to edit footage shot locally during the fall and winter of 1941-1942; and the diaries of the poet V sevolod Vishnevskii, the author ofthe original screenplay, who left the project when pressed to implement ideologically motivated "improvements": Roman Karmen, No Pasaran! Memuary (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1972), 107-28; Vishnevskii, Leningrad: Dnevniki voennykh let, 1:121. 84. Cited in Barry Mauer, "Asynchronous Documentary: Buiiuel's Land Without Bread;' in Beck and Grajeda, Lowering the Boom, 142. 85. Michel Chion, Film: A Sound Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 492. 86. Sergei Loznitsa, interview with the author, February 7, 2009. 87. Peter Verstraten, Film Narratology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 153. 88. Lidiia Ginzburg, Prokhodiaschie kharaktery, 340. 89. Allen S. Weiss, Breathless: Sound Recording, Disembodiment, and the Transformation of Lyrical Nostalgia (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 84. 90. On the work of the Siege Radio Committee, see Vasil'eva et a!., Radio: Blokada Leningrada. 91. The numerous testaments to blokadniki resistance to radio include the emphatic instance of Leonid Panteleev: "The scariest thing of all was the radio, which had now allowed itself to break its fast, and was transmitting light music ... [which] did nothing to muffle the roar of the wind, nor the thundering of the cannonade, nor the bitter thoughts and feelings which overtook a person standing in the fierce draft of the gateway of an old Petersburg building:' Panteleev, Priotkrytaia dver', 356. 92. Sokurov's other contemplations of the fate of Petersburg in the twentieth century include Sonata for Viola. Dmitrii Shostakovich (Al'tovaia sonata. Dmitrii Shostakovich, 1981), Petersburg Elegy (Peterburgskaia elegiia, 1990), St. Petersburg Diary: The Unveiling of the Monument to Dostoevskii (Peterburgskii dnevnik. Otkrytie pamiatnika Dostoevskomu, 1997), and St. Petersburg Diary: Kozintsev's Flat (Peterburgskii dnevnik. Kvartira Kozintseva, 1998). 93. Viktor Shklovskii, Tetiva. 0 neskhodstve skhodnogo (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel: 1970), 42. 94. Stas Tyrkin, "Aleksandr Sokurov: 'Moia nenavist' k natsizmu neiskorenima7' Komsomol'skaia pravda, September 8, 2009. http:/ikp.ru/daily/24356/542802/, accessed October 1, 2016. 95. Ales' Adamovich and Daniil Granin, Blokadnaia kniga (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel: 1982), 93. 96. Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 224-26. 97. I use the translation by Eugene Ostashevsky and Ben Felker-Quinn from the recent anthology of the Siege unofficial poetry: Polina Barskova, Written in the Dark: Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad (New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016), 38. 98. Gennady Gor in Barskova, Written in the Dark.

Bibliography

Archival Materials BLAVATNIK ARCHIVE FouNDATION, NEw YoRK GosuvAREVSTENNYI RussKII MUZEI, ST. PETERSBURG

Fond 100 MUZEI 0BSHCHESTVA SLEPYKH, ST. PETERSBURG

0TDEL RUKOPISEI GOSUDARSTVENNOI PUBLICHNOI BIBLIOTEKI (GPB), ST. PETERSBURG

Fond 1015 ROSSIISKAIA NATSIONAL 'NAIA BIBLIOTEKA, ST. PETERSBURG

Fond 1015 TSENTRAL'NYI GosUDARSTVENNYI ARKHIV LITERATURY I JSKUSSTVA

(TsGALI),

ST. PETERSBURG

Fond2 Fond 97 Fond 293 Fond 622 Fond 7278 TSENTRAL 'NYI GosUDARSTVENNYI ARKHIV LITERATURY I lSKUSSTVA

Fond 2440

Interviews Sergei Loznitsa, email correspondence, May 15, 2008. Sergei Loznitsa, email correspondence, February 7, 2009. Viktor Torkanovsky, interview with Eugene Ostashevsky, 2010. Iurii Kolosov, interview with the author, St. Petersburg, July 1, 2008.

(TsGALI), MOSCOW

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Index

Adamovich, Ales: "The Book of the Blockade'; 186; diverse readership of, 188; paradoxes of book by, 189 Agamben, Giorgio, 79-80 Akhmatova,Anna: readings of, 144; starvation in 1919, 170; speeches of, studio recordings, 190; Siege poem "Courage" ("Muzhestvo"), 215n56 Alexeeva, Ekaterina, 90-91 Andreev, Daniil, 107, 109-110 Anikushin, Mikhail, 190 Antonova, Olga, 188 Antsiferov, Nikolai: The Soul of Peterburg (Dusha Peterburga), 114 Aries, Philippe, 56 Auschwitz, 3-4 Azarov, Vsevolod, 77-79 Bachelard, Gaston, 79, 138, 150 Badaev: warehouse fire, 101 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 68; term outsidedness by, 157;"epic time': 176-1977 Balshaw, Maria, 153 Barthes, Roland, 157 Basilashvili, Oleg, 188 Bauer, 149 Bely,Andrei, 120 Benjamin, Walter, 60, 68, 70, 141, 148 Benua,Alexander [Alexandre Benois], 113, 115 Berggolts, Olga: addressing the city, 13; describing Sieve movement, 22; contender for the official title, "Siege poet'; 37; narrative poem, "Your Path" ("Tvoi put"') 45-50, bathhouse episode, in Daytime Stars (Dnevnye zvezdy), 66-71; "deviations;' in poem, 80; metaphoric moves of sublimation and unexpected "colorful visions'; in poem, 104; suffering tragic loss 106; troubled empowerment, led to a creative intensification in poem, 107; trajectory, of 108; contributor, to the Leningrad Radio Committee, 186; diary, comparing of 194

Berlin, Isaiah: visit to Leningrad, 143 Bianki, Vitaly: detailed description of, the spectacle of luminophors, 78; spectacle of darkness, 79; "Gorod, kotoryi pokinuli pritsy;' 89; visiting Leningrad, in February-March 1942, 142-143; judgment, on escapist strategies of Siege reading, 151 Bibliophile Society of Leningrad, 143; publication of, The Bibliophile's Almanac [Al'manakh bibliofila], 144 Bilibin, Ivan, 113 Bloch, Ernst, 43 Blok,Alexander: mentioning of, in poem 137; plot offering, 153; rereading of, during the Siege, 167-169; poetry of, as a sensory trigger, 170; ghosts, of poetry, 172; the role of poetry of, in other's work, 173; "Retribution" ("Vozmezdie"), 173-174, 176 Bobrov, Mikhail, 91-92 Bobyshov, Mikhail, 107 Bonitzer, Pascal, 182 Books: experience Siege-time renaissance, 134; private collections of, 144; spaces, plagued, 140; State Public Library's purchase and evacuation of, 144 Book collectors: apartments of, 141 Bookstores of Leningrad, 134; Lavka pisatelei (the Writers' Bookstore), 138, 143, 147; Lenokogiz, 147 Boriskovich, 56, 65, 71 Borodin,Alexander, 184 Buckler, Julie, 38 Burke, Edmund: 12, 98, Burkian sublime, 97; understanding, of sublime, 125 Buscher, Monika, 146, 148 Butovskii, Iakov, 199n26 Bykov, Pavel, 141 Bykova, Zinaida, 141 Byliev, Nikolai, 64-66 Bytovoi, Semyon, 86-87 Carmen, Roman, 23 Catherine the Great, 147

228

INDEX

Cavarero, Adriana, 69 Cawelti, John, 154 Cervantes, Miguel de, 195-196 Chaiko, Igor, 98 Chion, Michel: influential notion of synchresis, 193 Chukovskaia, Lydia, ISO Chukovsky, Kornei, 164 Chukovsky, Nikolai, 164 Connor, Steven, 180 Dal, Vladimir, 69 Darov,Anatoly: Blokada (Blockade) 31-34, 36-37, 39-40, 42; insertion of imaginary version, of Leningradskaia Pravda, 38; attempt to construct besieged Nevsky, 43; textual walkscape, of 50; description of a Siege-era game blokiana, 168, 171-172, 212n47 de Certeau, Michael, 18, 26, 76, 107 de Custine, Marquis, 187, 197n4 Dickens, Charles, 150, 153, 161; Great Expectations, 162-163; David Copperfield, 163-164 Dobuzhinsky, Mstislav: Petersburg (Peterburg), 114, 128; 117 Dostoevsky, Fedor, 39, 112, 137, 147 Druskin, Iakov: ideologist of OBERIU, 118 Druzhinin, Vladimir: "The Bronze Horseman;' 121 Dudin, Mikhail, 119-121 Dumas, Alexandre, 151-152 Dzhabaev, Dzhambul, 124 Edensor, Tim, 25, 28, 42, 49, 82 Eikhenbaum, Boris, I 00 Fadeev, Alexander, 89 Fasmer, Max, 69 Felker-Quinn, Ben, 216n97 Filonov, Pavel, 61, 101 Fitinhoff, Georgy, 15-16 Fletcher, Angus, 69 Flint, Alexander, 197n 11 Foucault, Michael, 140, 153; heterotopia, concept of, 124, 153 Freidenberg, Olga: witness, of movement in the city, 24-25; a duality of chaos and order in the city, 29, account, of the trivial and dreadful, 44; depiction of Siege experience (blokadsnost}, 45; diary-memoir A Human

Besieged (Osada cheloveka), 80; extinction of light, 81, 125 Fussell, Paul, I 0 Galvin, Eduard, 83-88 Garshin, 112 Gericault, Theodore, 58 Ginzburg, Evgenia, 168 Ginzburg, Lydia: space representation, in Siege notes, 7-8, I 0; characterization, of the Siege crowd, 26-27, "circular movement of dystrophic life;' 34; circle, stands for the movement in space, 35-36; description of, a 1943 conference of Leningrad writers, 37; literary identification of, alienation 54; darkness, in Siege notes, 74-76,92, 98; the idea of new knowledge, 89; the Siege estrangement, 100; the relationship between the city and the "user;' I 07, Blockade Diary, analysis of Tolstoy, 155; perceptive analysis of hermeneutic mechanism, 181; Siege sound, 182, rawness of destruction, 185; writer at the Leningrad Radio Committee, 186 Glazunov,Alexander, 184 Glebova, Tatiana, 40-41,54,61-62,65,70-72, 101,107,134,159 Glikin, Iakov, 129 Glinka, Vladislav: Hermitage scholar, 125; "The Master's Little House" ("Domik magistra''), 172 Gnedich, Tatiana, 180 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 176 Gogo!, Nikolai, 39-40 Gollerbakh, Erikh, 143-146, 148, 212n34, 214n43 Golubeva, Marta, 192 Gor, Gennady, 194-195 Gorky, Maxim: World Literature (Vsemirnaia literature) series, 146 Goya, 65, 159 Granin, Daniil, 186, 188-189 Grevs, Ivan, 147 Griaznov, Feodosy, I 0 1 Grigoriev, Mikhail: cellar inhabitant at Hermitage, 126 Grinberg, 117 Hermitage Museum: space, 4, 123; etchings of, 8; deserted, 39; burial place, 34; outlook, 56; workers, 57, 125-126, 201nl2; chronicler of, 126; the Rembrandts collection at, 126;

INDEX

cellars at, 126-127, 171; "forbidden room'' at, 187; "Siege room" at, 5, 193; topic in film, 193 Hillis Miller, J., 57 Hitler, Adolf, 59, 65 Hodgson, Katharine, 45 Homer, 176 Hugo, Viktor, 77 Iakhontov, Vladimir: Petersburg, 123; propaganda text, 123; Leningrad, 124 laremich, 117 Inber, Vera: "Pulkovsky Meridian;' 16; diary entry, 27; contender for the official title of"the Siege poet;' 37; description of Tikhonov's writing, as an inalienable part of the winter urbanscape, 38; depiction of dead bodies in diary, observation on effects of starvation, 56; mortality infects inanimate objects, 57; confusing juxtapositions offered by the Siege urbanspace, 95-96; Siegeinduced inspiration in the diary, of 108; conflicted nature of the Siege cityscape, 111; phenomenon of self-defense, 116; remark on Pushkin Museum's curator, 130; presence of Tikhonov's novel in the Siege consciousness, 156; comparison of published writings and private diaries, 194 Ingold, Tim, 28 lser, Wolfgang, 154 Iudenich, Nikolai, 24, 51, 113, 170 Iudina, Marina, 68 Iudovin, Solomon, 96 Kaganov, Grigory, 6, 98, 127 Kamensky, 120 Kant, 12,98 Kantor, Alfred, 21 On 102 Karmen, Roman, 89 Kaverin, Veniamin, 186 Khauze, Olga, 167-168 Khmelnitskaia, Tamara, 32, 180 Kennedy; Liam, 153 Kipling, Rudyard, 204n7 Kirov, Sergei, 30 Kirsakov, 121 Kirschenbaum, Lisa, 6, 54, 113, 190 Kniazev, Georgy, 30,169,171,177, 215n56 Kobrin, Kirill, viii, 35, 107, 204n7 Kolosov, Jury, 99, 127 Kolosova, Sophia: collection of, 12 7 Konashevich, Vladimir, 107,165-166, 178

229

Kordobovsky, Konstantin, 3, 117 Kornilov, Petr, 117, 143 Korolenko, Vladimir, 86 Kostrovitskaia, Vera, 55-56, 179 Kots, Ekaterina, 81-82 Kozintsev, Grigory, 30-31, 199n25 Krandievskaia, Natalia: metaphoric moves of sublimation and unexpected "colorful visions'; 104; 106-108, The Bronze Horseman, on, 122-123; Tolstoy enters the Siege, in a poem, 159; Dickens's influence, on poetry, 161; presence of Rembrandt, 210n101 Krestovsky, Vsevolod, 112 Kristeva, Julia, 69 Kurbatov, Vladimir, 143 Kurdov, Valentin, 97, 167 Kustodiev, Boris, 66 Kuzmin, Mikhail, 144 Kuznetsov (party leader), 182 La Capra, Dominick, 98 Lazarev, Dmitry, 94-95, 111, 128 Lazareva, Nina, 78 Lebedev, Georgy: Russian Museum curator, 129; 131,156-157 Lebedev, Veniamin, 147 Lefebvre, Henri, 17-18 Leningrad (journal), 121-122 Lermonton, 167 Lerner, Nikolai, 147 Leskov, 186 Lesman, Moisei, 152 Likhachev, Boris, 119 Likhachev, Dmitry, 102; Pechatnyi dvor (Printing Office), 136; 168 London, Jack, 151 Lotman, Jury, 112; characterization of Petersburg, 128-129 Loznitsa, Sergei: Siege newsreel footage, 23; The Blockade,179,182-186, 188-190 Luknitsky, Pavel, 54, 73-7 4, 78, 133 Lustberg, Erikh, 150 MacLachlan, Gale, 125 Magarill, Evgenia, 61, 107 Malevannaia, Larisa, 188 Malysh, Gavriil, 61 Mandelshtam, Osip: Voronezh, in, 173 Martilla, Elena: diarist, 99, 206n18 Mashkova,Maria, 138,141,147-148 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 137, 167

230

INDEX

Melnikov, Maxim: book-dealer, 146 Merezhkovsky: "December the Fourteenth" (14 dekabria), 133 Mikhailov, Evgeny: FEKS group cameraman, 75 Mikhailova,Anna, vii; Siege poems, 75-76 Miliutina, Vera, 8-10,57, 123, 126 Minash, R. !a.: librarian, 147 Mogiliansky,A. P.: librarian, 147 Moliere, 129 Mokhova-Loseva, Nina, 27 Morozov, Viktor, 16, 52-53, 124 Morozov-Tikhonov, see Morozov Viktor,

Tikhonov Nikolai Morson, Gary Saul, 175 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 190 Mozgovoi, Leonid: Petersburg stage star, 188 Murashkinsky: library of, 147 Murav, Harriet, 12, 206nll Naiman, Eric, 63 Napoleon, !55 Nekrasov, 112, 167 Nell, Victor, !52 Neratova, Rimma, 99, 101, 155-156 Nikitin, Fedor, 25, 97, 99 Nikolaev, Iaroslav, 3, 21 Nikolsky, Alexander, Ill Nochlin, Linda, 58 Novikov, 149 Ostashevsky, Eugene, 216n97

170-171; projection of vtorichnoe vstuplenie, 171 Ostrovsky, Nikolai, 186 Oushakine, Serguei, 71 Pakhomov,Alexei, 44-46,57-58,61-62 Panteleev, Leonid, 55,62-63, 108-109, !54, 162, 165, 167, 181 Parkhomov, 20 1n 19 Pavlov, Nikolai, 120, 124 Pechatnyi dvor (Printing Office), 136 Peter the Great, 4, 122-124 Petrograd, crisis of 1919-1921, 169 Piranesi, 209n78 Platunov, Mikhail, 62 Poe, Edgar Allan, 129, 153, 159-160, 164, 195-196 Popkov (party leader), 182 Popkov, Petr, 83 Potsukailo, Igor: "! Hear the Blockade" ("'a slyshu blokadu") 179; 190 Pozdniakova, Tatiana, 198n 14 Proust, Marcel, !53, 165-167, 178 Pushkin,Alexander: in Glebova's recount, 71; two opposed modes of Petersburg existed, after, 112; The Bronze Horseman, 120-123; Pushkin museum, 130; books and papers, of, 147; role of poetry during the Siege, 167; Pushkiniana theme of Petersburg, 174; "loud readings;' including, 186; "The Tale of the Old Man and the Golden Fish;' 196 Punin, Nikolai, 192

Ostrota (acuteness/sharpness), 110 Ostroumova-Lebedeva, Anna: refusal to be evacuated, 13; self-observation in diary, 54; physical health, 63; aesthetic bridging, 113; engage to complete decorative work, 114; nondiscrimination of historical epochs, 115; eschatological expressions of the Petersburg text, 116; described in texts by others, 117; urbanspaces, 118; lithographic depictions, 120; images of, on postcards, 124; description of the Siege weight loss, 20 ln4; timelessness peacefulness in diary, 209n75; depiction of the Bronze Man, 209n82; productive relationship, with the genre postcards, 209n90 Ostrovskaia, Sofia: an arrested time, repetitive routine, 35; book selling, tragic vacillation, 145; reading War and Peace, 157; acceptance of divisions, 158; analysis of two sieges,

Radlov, 147 Rakhlin, Gennady; organizer of Lavka pisatelei (the Writers' Bookshop), 142; 143, 146-147 Rakov, Lev, 19 Reid, Ian, 125 Reizov, Boris, 122 Rembrandt, 33, 126-127, 210n!Ol Romanov dynasty, 4 Rozhdestvensky, V sevolod, 144 Rubens, Peter Paul, 65 Rudakov, Sergei: 173; "Vozmezdie" ("Retribution"), 175-177 Rzhanov, Kim, 77-79 Saianov, Vissarion, 59 Saliamon, Galina, 79 Sandomirskaja, Irina, 80 Schiller, Friedrich, 31

INDEX

Schiinle, Andreas, 8, 192 Selivanov, Nikolai, 59-60 Seremetakis, C. Nadia, 85 Serov, Vladimir, 9-10, 61-62 Shalamov, Varlam, 168 Shaporina, Liubov, 102, 131; peremeshchenie vnimaniia (a shift of attention), 137-138; 142-143 Shcherbacheva, Maria, 201 n 12, 21 On99 Shchukin, 30-31 Shillingovsky, Pavel, 113, 209n76; Petersburg:

Ruins and resurrection (Petersburg: Ruiny i vozrozhdenie), 117-118 Shilov, Fedor: 134; 143, 146-148, 163 Shishova, Zinaida, 103, 107, 151-152, 186 Shklovsky, Viktor, 17,51-52,60,89,100, 187 Shostakovich, 184, 190 Shutov, Viktor, 86-88 Shvarts, Evgenii, 212n34 Siege: allegorization, 71; annihilation of books, 133; art world, 9; artists, 13; beauty, phenomenon of, 98; blindness, 82-83, 87; body, 51-52,54-5 7, 61-62, 69-72; body relation,26; cityscape, 111,131, 142; crowd, 26; darkness, 91-93, 180; defamiliarization, 35, 100-101; estrangement 101, 107; experience (blokadnost'), 45; game blokiada, 168; habituation to death, 56; history; 3, 8; information consumption, 40; knizhnik, 146, 148; "listeners': 83, 86; monstrosity, 69-70, movement, 36; museum director, 19-20; NKVD patrol in, 29; newsreel footage, 23; poetics, 13; polics of representation, 60; postcards, 15,52-53,61, 117; posters, 60, 64; press, 38; propaganda, 9, 38, 48, 78; propaganda art, 125; reader, 150; reading, 13, 133; ruin 7, 9; Siege Room, 4-6; space, 12-13, 17, 20, 23, 30; spatial image, 21; spatial writing, 18; spatiality, 5-6, 8, 16, 19, 22, 73, 98, 134; spectacle, 97, 126; Sublime, 12-13,94, 98, 102, 109; sublimity (vozvyshennost'), 98; topography, 27, 31, 134; trauma, 10, 14, 55, 71; traumatic psychology, 35; vision, 73-74; vision and inspiration, 49-50; visual representation, 51; walkers, 25, 27, 39, 42; walking in, 22, 24, 26-28; urban representations, 4, 11-12, 17-18, 20-21; urban writing, 10, 13; urbanspace,l4,95,131 Siege, Petro grad of, 17, 60, 113; image of, 19 Smirdin, Alexander: homage to Lavka pisatelei, 143

231

Sokolov: professor, 149 Sokurov,Aleksandr: Russian Ark, 4, 187-188, 193; We Read "The Book of the Blockade", 179, 188; disembodied sound, 185; aesthetic minimalism, 189; Francophonia, 193; contemplations of the fate of Petersburg in, 216n92 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 12, 206n11 Somov, Konstantin: artist, 75 Stalin, Joseph, 30, 124, 169; camp, 19; mythmaking, 122 Strakhun, Ilya: Leningrad surgeon general, 56 Sultan -Shakh, Anna, 126 Suslova, Ekaterina: description of Siege-time reading, 139 Tarasenkov, Anatoly, 136-13 7 Tartakovsky, Viktor, 80 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr, 184, 190 Theberge, Paul, 179 Tikhonov, Nikolai: postcard, 16; description of walking, during a nighttime bombing, 26; "Kirov with us" ("Kirov s name"), 30; contender of for the official title of"the Siege poet:' 37; reception of the 1942 Stalin Prize, 38; vision of the Nevsky Prospect, 42; Nevsky space, 43; texual walkspace, in 50; postcard text, 52-53; "Spring" ("Vesna"), 103; "approved" chronicles of besieged Leningrad, 119; a 1919 poem, 124 Tolstoy, Alexei, 122, 156 Tolstoy, Leo, 146, 153, 158-159, 162, 186; War and Peace, 134, 138, 155-157 Tomashevsky, Boris, 68 Toporov, Vladimir, 112, 115 Torkanovsky, Viktor, 29-30 Ts., Zinaida, see Bykova Zinaida Tschi:ipl, Carin, 45 Turgenev, Ivan, 147 Tyrsa, Nikolai, 113 Urban beauty, 113 Ukhtomsky,Alexei, 152 Urry, John, 23, 145, 148 Van Buskirk, Emily; 100 Velikotnaia, Tatiana, 133 Verdi, Giuseppe, 190 Verne, Jules, 142 Verstraten, Peter, 185 Villa-Lobos, Heitor, 190

232

INDEX

Vinokurov, V.I., 63 Vishnevsky, V sevolod: bifurcated urban gaze, 25; contender for the official title, "the Siege poet" 37; self-observation, in diary, 54; remark, on contrasting types in the starving city, 62; "approved" chronicler of the besieged city, 119; ideological significance of the monument, 120; refrain, repeats, 121; reading of Blok, 169; comparison of published writings and private diaries, of, 194 Voevodin, V sevolod: "The Bookstore" ("Kniznaia lavka''), 163, 166 Voltaire, 147 Voltman-Spasskaia, Varvara: An Old Books (Staraia kniga), 134

Voronina, Tatiana, vii Vygodsky, David, 147 Weiss, Allen S., 185,190 Wells, H. G., 86

World of Art (Mir isskustva) movement, 113-114 Young, James, 179 Zagursky, Boris, 113, 116 Zemel, Carol, 12 Zinoviev, Grigory: "Petrogradocentrism;' 119 Zhdanov, Andrei, 140, 182, 184 Zhuravlev, D. F.: librarian, 147

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