Transliteration Note
In the main body of the text, the transliteration of Russian names has been simplified with a view to making them easier on the Anglophone reader’s eyes (hence, for example, Yury Brodsky rather than Iurii Brodskii). Likewise, where established conventional English spellings of particular names and place names exist, these have been given preference (hence, for example, Mandelstam, not Mandel’shtam). In the footnotes and bibliography, Russian names and sources have been transliterated according to the Library of Congress system. The acronym for Gosudarstvennoe upravlenie lagerei (State Administration of Camps) should be rendered as “GULag,” but I have opted to spell this word “gulag” and understand it in a broader meaning. All translations are mine unless stated otherwise.
Acknowledgments
This book is rooted in the history of my family, the Etkinds, and in my background, as part of the ex-Soviet intelligentsia. Decades ago, my father, the art historian Mark Etkind, told me that he wanted to write a book about the artists who perished during Stalin’s terror. He died soon afterward and did not have the chance to write it, but he could have written some of the pages that appear in my book. My uncle, Yefim Etkind, inspired many of my speculations, and I refer to his brilliant writings—his memoirs as well as his scholarship—often, though not often enough. This book is my work of mourning for both of them, and also for my stepfather, Moisei Kagan, a prominent philosopher who fought in World War II, survived ideological purges, wrote excellent books, and lived long enough to lose faith in the Soviet regime, though not in Marxism. Apart from my family, I knew only a few of the figures about whom I have written in the following chapters. Once, however, in 1986, Dmitry Likhachev helped me win what seemed a hopeless conflict; more recently, his writings—memoirs and scholarship—have helped me to make sense of my own conflicting ideas. I also know Lev Klein, another camp survivor and brilliant scholar; it so happened that many years ago he published my first article. I have no reason to think that these persons would agree with me if they read these pages: the work of mourning is as rebellious as it is mimetic. But I cherish my belief that they would, and actually did, support the effort.
A long time ago my conversations with the leaders of the Memorial Society in St. Petersburg, Veniamin Iofe and Irina Flige, helped me to elaborate the general framework of this book. Later, this project benefited from several awards that were equally important. In 1999, I was a fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, where I chatted over lunches with Aleida Assmann, the leading expert in German memory, and Stephen Greenblatt, the leading Shakespeare scholar. Their impact on my thinking is much appreciated. In 2001, I received a grant from the Open Archives of the Central European University. I am grateful to Istvan Rev, the director of the archives, not least because I also used this grant to take my wife, Elizabeth Roosevelt Moore, on a honeymoon doing research at several sites of the former gulag in the Russian North. We later continued with a tour through the former plantations of the American South. Many of my current ideas were conceived in my conversations with Elizabeth, as we both tried to explain and understand our legacies. In 2006, I received a fellowship from the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, and I want to send my thanks to Gyan Prakash, Michael F. Laffan, Anson Rabinbach, and Stephen Kotkin for the many fruitful exchanges and events that followed. Readers of my book will note the influence of my cofellow at the Davis Center, Ronald Schechter.
In 2010, I received a large grant from HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area) for the collective study Memory at War: Cultural Dynamics in Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. With the support of the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge, we have created a unique research environment for studies of memory and mourning across eastern Europe. My colleagues at Cambridge, Simon Franklin, Emma Widdis, and Rory Finnin, helped me to shape the Memory at War project, and this is another opportunity to thank them. The participants of Memory at War have given me invaluable inspiration and feedback, and I want to thank, among others, Julie Fedor, Uilleam Blacker, Ellen Rutten, Sander Brouwer, Galina Nikiporets-Takigawa, and Jill Gather. Among the many interactions in the larger European framework connected to this project, those with Jay Winter, Andrzej Nowak, and Andriy Portnov were particularly helpful.
I received valuable feedback after my talks at the Research Seminar of the Slavic Department of Princeton University (2008); the conference “Finding a Place in the Soviet Empire” at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2011); the conference “Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe” at King’s College, Cambridge (2011); and the joint seminar “Memory and Literature after Auschwitz and the Gulag,” which Dominick LaCapra and I gave at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2011. A series of Interdisciplinary Mellon Seminars in East European Memory Studies, which Harald Wydra and I gave to a fantastic group of graduate students and colleagues at CRASSH (the Cambridge Center for Research in Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities) in the spring of 2010, helped me to articulate some long-standing ideas.
This book has benefited greatly from discussion of its emerging parts with many friends and colleagues around the globe. Comments by Jana Howlett were important for chapter 3. Comments by Maya Turovskaya were crucial for chapter 7, which also benefited from the advice of Dmitry Bykov, Lilya Kaganovsky, Emma Widdis, Susan Larsen, and Simon Lewis. I conceived chapter 5 during my visit to the Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, where Jane Sharp, Allison Leigh-Perlman, and Jochen Hellbeck provided much-needed guidance through its collections; Allison Leigh-Perlman kindly read this chapter and helped me to improve it. Comments by Eric Naiman, Caryl Emerson, and Tim Portice were important for chapter 11. At the later stages of this project, Dmitry Bykov provided much-needed inspiration. Nancy Condee and Julia Vaingurt generously commented on the manuscript and helped to correct some of my mistakes.
Scholarship often entails disagreeing with friends, but it is equally important that friendship survives the arguments. Sometimes openly and sometimes implicitly, I argue in this book with Alexei Yurchak, Svetlana Boym, Yuri Slezkine, Mark Lipovetsky, Leonid Gozman, Eli Zarecky, Mischa Gabowitch, Natan Sznaider, Oleg Kharkhordin, Ilia Kalinin, Kevin Platt, Caroline Humphrey, Dirk Uffelmann, and Ilia Kukulin. Thanks to them all, and I hope that our arguments will continue.
I am extremely grateful to Julie Fedor, who read and edited my manuscript, corrected many of my mistakes in style and substance, and challenged me to rework some parts of the book. Julie’s contribution to this work is very much appreciated, and I can only wish to be able to reciprocate her help in the future.
Finally, my warmest thanks go again to Elizabeth. Her eye, taste, and care helped me to write this book from the start to the end.
. . .
Some chapters of this book have been published, in different versions, as journal articles. A part of chapter 3 was published as “A Parable of Misrecognition: Anagnorisis and the Return of the Repressed from the Gulag,” Russian Review 68 (October 2009): 623–640. A version of chapter 6 was published as “Sedlo Siniavskogo: Lagernaia kritika v kul’turnoi istorii sovetskogo perioda,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 101 (2010): 280–303. A version of chapter 8 was published as “The Tale of Two Turns: Khrustalev, My Car! and the Cinematic Memory of the Soviet Past,” Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 4, no. 1 (2010): 45–63. Early versions of chapter 9 appeared as “Vremia sravnivat’ kamni: Kul’tura politicheskoi skorbi v sovremennoi Rossii,” Ab Imperio 2 (2004): 33–76, and “Hard and Soft in Cultural Memory: Political Mourning in Russia and Germany,” Grey Room 16 (Summer 2004): 36–59. A part of chapter 10 was published as “Post-Soviet Hauntology: Cultural Memory of the Soviet Terror,” Constellations 16, no. 1 (2009): 182–200. Parts of chapter 11 were published as “Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied: Magical Historicism in Contemporary Russian Fiction,” Slavic Review 68, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 631–658, and “Magical Historicism: From Fiction to Non-Fiction,” East European Memory Studies 4 (March 2011): 2–5. This book benefited from the editorial work and feedback that were provided by these journals’ editors: Irina Prokhorova, Mark Steinberg, Michael Gorham, Marina Mogilner, Birgit Beumers, Alexander Skidan, Felicity D. Scott, and Ian Zuckerman.
After the French Revolution, relatives of the guillotined victims used to gather regularly for Bals des victimes, or Victims’ Balls. Women wore a red ribbon marking the point where the guillotine cut. They cut their hair to bare their necks, imitating the haircut given the victim by the executioner. Inviting the women to dance, men would jerk their head sharply downward in imitation of decapitation. Dancing and flirting, they manifested their mourning for their fathers and mothers in macabre details.
It is possible that the whole story of these Victims’ Balls is a subsequent, nineteenth-century romantic legend.1 Many authors have repeated it, however, as I am doing now. Whether the French decadents of the postrevolutionary generation really gathered at Victims’ Balls or not, they fantasized about doing so, passing these fantasies on through generations, all the way to us. These legendary balls provide a prototypical case of what I call mimetic mourning—a recurrent response to loss that entails a symbolic reenactment of that loss.2 This re-presentation of the past—making the past present, if only in symbolic, detoxicated form—addresses the questions that constitute the core of mourning: How did it happen? Where and when? Why did it happen this way? Could it have happened differently? Could I have done something to prevent it? The mourner addresses these questions to herself and others, who might be either witnesses to the loss or its fictional narrators. Whether the mourner has evidence that testifies to the circumstances of the loss, or whether the reminiscence and the witness are pure fantasy, these re-presentations—bringing the dead back to life in imagination, text, social interaction, or performance—are at the core of mourning.
It may be that, in general, the story of terror consists of two parts: the ascending part of history and loss, and the descending part of memory and mourning. While the ascending slope is all about mass murder and lonely deaths, the descending one is about symbolizing, sharing, and bonding. In Victims’ Balls and mourning plays, poetry, humor, and pleasure play strangely prominent roles. For the descendants of the French revolutionary Terror, there was some pleasure in dancing at the Victims’ Balls, composing stories about them, and sharing them with their peers and juniors. In contrast to some later concepts, such as Freud’s repetition compulsion and the connected ideas of trauma and the posttraumatic, the stories of Victims’ Balls presume that their participants operate in full consciousness of their individual losses and their collective mourning. Sharing experience is a source of pleasure, and this is why we retell such stories also with some residual pleasure.
In the stories of Victims’ Balls, participants come together physically in a ritual of collective mourning, a behavior that we often observe among survivors of a catastrophe and the first generation of their descendants. Later generations continue to mourn and share, but they do not feel the need to bond and dance with their peers. As time passes and generations replace one another, their mournful, mimetic performances migrate to the increasingly virtual spaces of theater, art, and literature, and then to film, television shows, and social media. Academic historiography also plays its role in this broad process.
This book is part and parcel of this long-term development. I submit that, haunted by its unburied past, late-Soviet and post-Soviet culture has produced memorial practices that are worthy of detailed study. While the American historian Stephen Kotkin perceives a “Shakespearean quality” in the post-Soviet transformation, it is no surprise that the participants of this process employ equally dramatic metaphors, partially invented and partially imported, in their attempts to understand what has happened to their civilization.3 In fact, the leading cultural genres in Russia often seem to be building on Gogol rather than on Shakespeare, and they manifest unusual, maybe even perverted, forms of mourning the past and comprehending the present.
Working independently on different continents, two leading cultural critics have formulated a “Fifty-Year Effect”: this is how long it takes for literature to estrange the tragic past, process its experience, and elaborate a convincing narrative capable of gaining wide if not universal acclaim. Stephen Greenblatt proposed this Fifty-Year Effect in his study of Shakespeare’s, and specifically Hamlet’s, relation to the Reformation.4 Dmitry Bykov applied the same idea to Russia’s historical prose, from Lev Tolstoy to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.5 Fifty years, or two cultural generations, is how much is needed to make the work of mourning culturally productive. I would speculate that the historical processes of catastrophic scale traumatize the first generation of descendants, and it is their daughters and sons—the grandchildren of the victims, perpetrators, and onlookers—who produce the work of mourning for their grandparents: mass graves for the generation of terror, trauma for the first postcatastrophic generation, and mourning for the second.
Written in the 2000s, the current book is largely focused on the 1950s and 1960s, the productive time of post-Stalinism that would define many features, good and bad, of the forthcoming postsocialism. But in culture, any regularity is an invitation to violation, and the scope of this book extends far beyond the events that happened fifty years ago. Its early chapters examine the experience of those authors who were incarcerated in the 1930s and wrote their texts of scholarship and trauma in the 1950s. Then, the central chapters discuss the mourning processes of those whose parents were murdered or jailed in the 1930s, though some of the mourners were themselves also jailed in the 1960s. Finally, this book’s concluding chapters lead the reader to the cultural products that have been composed by the current generation of writers and filmmakers, who have been looking at the terrible past of their ancestors and teachers from the distance of fifty years and beyond, with a focus that shifts in time with every passing year.
Warped Mourning discusses many cultural genres, from films to memorials, but its focus is on literature. The book begins with a discussion of the relations between mourning and other cultural and psychological processes, such as trauma, repetition, revenge, and humor. In chapter 2, I argue that mourning for the past is often connected to warning about the future, a correlation that is particularly clear in the aftermath—and anticipation—of man-made catastrophes. Chronologically, the action of this book starts in the dark decades, from the 1930s to the 1950s, when the Soviet state arrested its citizens, tortured them in specialized camps, and let some of them return home, where these survivors met again with their families and colleagues. As I demonstrate in chapter 3, the cultural consequences of these encounters were both important and unusual. Under a regime that refused to acknowledge its own violence, mourning its victims was a political act, an important and sometimes even dominating mechanism of resistance to this regime. The book continues into 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev blamed the now-deceased Stalin for the “unjustified repressions,” and then into the Thaw of the early 1960s, which I interpret as the era of Soviet Victims’ Balls. In contrast to those balls that allegedly occurred in the period of the Restoration in France, the revolutionary regime was still in power when the mourning games started in Russia. In chapter 4, I read and contextualize some of the deepest, though disguised, stories of trauma and mourning that the surviving victims of terror, many of them professional historians, published after their release from the camps or exile. Chapter 5 shifts to other cultural genres of mourning, such as visual art and poetry. In chapter 6, the book takes its step into the mid-1960s, when intellectuals played melancholic games with the Soviet courts. The weird combination of mimetic mourning and political resistance led the most consistent mourners precisely and inexorably back to the sites of memory of Soviet terror, into the camps. In chapters 7 and 8, I discuss how late-Soviet and post-Soviet Russian films unfold their mourning for the victims of the past in narratives, high and low. Chapter 9 surveys monuments to the Soviet victims and speculates about their relations to texts of poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction. In chapters 10 and 11, the reader will learn about the current state of the post-Soviet mourning. It is as warped as ever, though in a new Russian way, of course.