3
In 1930, Grigory Etkind was arrested at his apartment in Leningrad. Five months later, his son came home from school one day and asked a gray-bearded man, who was sitting on the staircase, “May I pass, please?” “Fima,” said the man, using his son’s nickname. Later that night, Grigory explained to the twelve-year-old Yefim what had happened. Along with hundreds of other “nepmen” who had launched small businesses a few years earlier, Etkind was arrested for not being able to pay the exorbitant taxes with money he did not have.1 Etkind and his fellow prisoners were kept in overcrowded cells where they had to stand on their feet for weeks, tortured with unbearable heat, blinding light, sleep deprivation, and continuous interrogation.2 After months of this treatment, an official gathered a large crowd of prisoners and announced that four of them, including Etkind, were to be executed. These four were removed and shoved into a paddy wagon. After a short trip, Etkind was thrown out of the speeding car onto the pavement in front of his home. He waited for his family, not knowing if they themselves had been arrested, until he saw Yefim and realized that his son did not recognize him. The next morning, Grigory went to the barber and asked for the “full renovation” (polnyi remont). But the psychological damage was irreversible; Yefim wrote that his father never returned to his former self.3
A sophisticated scholar and effective memoirist, Yefim Etkind knew how to begin his story so that a feeling of horror would haunt his readers. He began with the scene on the staircase: one day he came home from school and did not recognize his own father. He also used two literary comparisons to relate this event to his readers. Comparing his father’s experience to the mock execution of Dostoevsky in 1849, Etkind wrote that when he worked on Dostoevsky in the 1990s, he was still thinking about his father’s mock execution and anticipation of death. In another attempt to capture this horror, Etkind compared his father’s story with A Terrible Revenge, the novel by Nikolai Gogol. “What I heard from my father seemed to me even scarier than Gogol’s Terrible Revenge. How one can possibly live with this? I do not remember how I managed to handle my disgust with the world.”4
Looking more closely at this novel, we might get a better idea of the twelve-year-old Yefim’s response. A Terrible Revenge (1832) tells a story of magic, incest, and murder. A sorcerer seduces his daughter; the dead rise from their graves; the earth shudders as if alive. In the end, yet another apparition of magical forces punishes evil and restores peace. What happens at the start of the story, however, resonates with the terrible but unavenged experience of Grigory and Yefim. Gogol’s story begins at a wedding party where the father-sorcerer arrives in disguise; even his daughter does not recognize him. People are scared by his foreign appearance, but they also feel as though they have seen him before; maybe he has come from hell? He is the familiar become unfamiliar and frightening. He is the uncanny.
Grigory Etkind was not a sorcerer. He was a small entrepreneur who recycled old books and magazines into folding paper. It was the treatment that he received in prison that made him unrecognizable. The horror of power attached to its innocent victim and accompanied him even after this power released him. With surprise, I found similar situations in other stories that describe the return from the gulag. Some of these stories read as true; others are definitely fictions; probably, most of them present a mixture of memory and imagination.
Why Misrecognition?
Starting from 1953 and until the end of the decade, millions of returnees were coming home, though many of them no longer had any home to come back to.5 The millions of people who had never seen the gulag welcomed its living remains, the returnees, with mixed feelings. This chapter analyzes several stories in which those who returned from the gulag were misrecognized by their loved ones. I do not claim that cases of misrecognition were statistically frequent in real life. However, the prominence of these narratives in the memoirs, imaginative literature, and films about the gulag deserves study.6
Recognition is a concept from classical poetics that made its way into philosophy and political theory. Developed by Hegel and advanced by the French-Russian philosopher Alexandre Kojėve (Kozhevnikov), the problem of individual and group recognition has been revisited by James Taylor, Pierre Bourdieu, and other Western philosophers.7 Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth juxtapose the struggle for recognition, which aims at achieving respect for cultural differences, with the struggle for redistribution, which aims at reaching economic and legal equality.8 The possibilities for applying these ideas to socialist societies have not been adequately debated.
In his Poetics, Aristotle defined recognition as “a change from ignorance to knowledge, and thus to either love or hate, on the part of personages marked for good or evil fortune.”9 Depending on this fortune, “anagnorisis,” or misrecognition, played different roles in tragedy and comedy. In comedies, acts of misrecognition created distances, swapped statuses, and deconstructed the social order.10 In tragedies, misrecognition does not drive the plotline as in comedy but provides a summary reflection and sometimes a culmination to it. When the act of misrecognition occurs inside the family or among friends, it demonstrates the power of fate, which tragically overwhelms individual love. Fate transforms a hero beyond recognition: even those who love him do not recognize him. Odysseus’s wife and son did not recognize him after his decades of wandering (his dog and wet nurse did). Oedipus failed to recognize the father he did not know; Hamlet hesitated before he recognized the ghost of his father. A corollary of misrecognition is imposture, when an individual denies her identity and continuity by pretending to be a different person. In a touching moment in Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, when the impostor deceives everyone into accepting his false identity, he discloses his real self to the only person whom he loves. Ironically, only when everyone misrecognizes him in the way he desires does he realize his deepest desire to be recognized as his real self. Characteristic for feudal Russia, impostors also played an unusually big role in Soviet history.11 Among the many reasons for this is their ability to generate allegories for crucial ideas about identity, power, and recognition.
In 1919, the young Osip Mandelstam told his girlfriend and later wife, Nadezhda, that the two themes most important to him were death and recognition. “He was thinking not only about the process of recognition of what we had already seen and known,” according to Nadezhda, “but about the spark which accompanies the recognition of something hidden and still unknown, but appearing in the proper moment, such as fate.” Osip’s strong definition of recognition as the grasping of fate was connected to his understanding of death. “I had the feeling that death for him was not the end but the justification of life,” wrote Nadezhda Mandelstam decades later.12 But Osip’s lonely death in a distant camp, the typical death of a goner, was far from being “the justification of life.” These goners were semicorpses whose suffering deprived them of any decency, hope, and memory (see chapter 2). In a sense, everyone in the country was a “goner,” said Nadezhda; “on both sides of the barbed wire, all of us have lost memory.”13 However, this transformation happened in different ways on each side of the barbed wire, with the result being a deep lack of communication, a kind of mutual nonrecognition.
A monument to the recognition of the Other, Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs read as a remarkable document of mourning, arguably the most important Soviet-era text of atonement. The attitude that the author and the readers have toward Osip Mandelstam, a great poet and unique personality, contrasts with the impersonal, nonsacrificial character of his mortification in the camp. Osip simply died in a camp, eliminated like millions of others. Boldly, Nadezhda made no attempt to ascribe a redemptive meaning to Osip’s death. Describing the challenge he threw down to the authorities before his arrest, she did not attempt to construe his death as an act of self-sacrifice. After all the detective work that she had done in order to delineate the circumstances of her husband’s murder, she saw it with clear eyes, as a senseless act that had no reason, purpose, or justification. The rhetorical effect is created by the tremendous disparity between the attitude of this author and her readers toward Osip Mandelstam and the senseless, nonsacrificial character of his annihilation. In the course of the memoir, this effect interacts with another feature of the Soviet mourning—the uncertainty surrounding the deaths of the victims. The time, place, and circumstances of deaths in the camp remained unknown, as if such deaths were simultaneously both a state secret and a matter of mere detail, not even worth mentioning. The uncertainty of the loss meant that incompleteness would be a central feature of the work of mourning.
I take the story of misrecognition as a trope, which means more than it says, and my interests here are both rhetorical and historical. Historians know that those victims of the camps who survived and returned to their families experienced multiple social and personal problems.14 The surviving goners struggled with massive psychological transformation. Famously, Primo Levi committed suicide after many years of writing about the Nazi camps. The agony of his Soviet counterpart Varlam Shalamov is less well known (see chapter 5). Scholars of Holocaust literature state that “only few of the few who survived the camp believed they had remained ‘themselves’ throughout their ordeal.”15 Multiple memoirs of the gulag survivors and their relatives say, as a cliché, that those who returned from the camps returned as different people. With the return of the survivors, the identity loss of these people—still alive but no longer themselves—became visible and horrifying. If the internal perspective on this transformation was uncertain and inexpressible, the act of misrecognition of a survivor by her family illustrated the nightmare of the identity loss in a short, clear plot. In a bitter irony, this plot manifested the victorious power of the state, which had achieved its transformative goal by changing its targets beyond recognition. By the same token, this plot expressed the despair of survivors and their families, who felt their estrangement precisely in the moment of the long-awaited reunion. Emphasizing the external, physical change of face, body, posture, dress, and hair, the story of misrecognition worked as a parable for the deeper feelings of internal, psychological change. In cultural memory, the parable of misrecognition became a potent device for expressing the horror of the camps, the guilt of those who escaped them, and the lack of communication between those two parts of Soviet society.
Misrecognition of the Returned
A short story by the highly successful author and singer-songwriter Bulat Okudzhava, “Woman of My Dreams” (1985), describes Okudzhava’s memory of his mother’s return from the gulag in 1947.16 The protagonist is a twenty-two-year-old student whose mother is serving ten years in the gulag. He studies Pushkin at the University of Tbilisi and lives in a communal apartment with an elderly neighbor. The student is poor and lonely. He feels “no despair” but admits to yearning for his mother. He has a few photographs of his mother, and he cherishes her “dear and ghostly” image.17 His neighbor, a heavy, aged man “with widely spread ears with grey wool sticking out of them,” plays some role in the story. He never talks to the student and avoids meeting his eye. Gradually, the student realizes that his neighbor has recently returned from the camps. Now he seems ghostly: “nobody saw him entering the doors,” and the student imagines him flying “in and out of the window.” Suddenly, the student’s mother sends a telegram announcing her release. She is coming to live with her son and will soon arrive by train from Kazakhstan. The student is petrified by the fear that he will not recognize his mother upon her arrival. He fantasizes that she is an old, hunched, gray woman. With horror, he imagines that she will see that he does not recognize her and that his misrecognition will aggravate her suffering. But he imagines how happy they will be together and how they will talk endlessly about their lives in separation. When he finally meets her, he does recognize her. To his relief, she has barely changed physically; she is still strong and young. They hug each other and go to his home. He wants to ask her about her life in the camp, but “her face was hard, stony.” Her eyes were “dry and empty; she looked at me but did not see me.” She would not answer the questions addressed to her personally, such as “Do you want some cherries?” In response, she would say, “Who, me?” When the neighbor comes to say hello, the mother starts talking with him, but the son does not understand them. Communicating with strange words and gestures, they go through the ex-convict ritual of reeling off and comparing lists of the gulag sites where they were held, exchanging geographical place-names that mean nothing to the son. They seem to speak a secret language that the son does not share.
In an effort to revive his mother’s old self, the son takes her to the cinema to see a famous movie that was brought back from Germany by the Red Army as a trophy, The Woman of My Dream.18 This film is important for the son. Watching a beautiful actress living her happy, peaceful life on the Danube is “the most precious” experience that this student has. The son hopes that this film will have a similar effect on his mother, helping to restore her, as if the film were “a prescribed medicine or even better, a miracle.” In fact, for the mother this movie is intolerable; she leaves the cinema in the middle of the film.
The “feel-good” foreign film reveals to the mother and the son the tragic foreignness that separates them. Watching this movie with her, he thinks the “implausible thought” that “the shiny Austrian carnival on the banks of the glorious Danube was impossible to combine with those circumstances” in which his mother lived in the camp. In the analysis that Okudzhava eloquently presents here, the twenty-two-year-old protagonist could not establish any contact with women of his own age and culture, because his development was delayed by the “black mystery” of his mother’s arrest. With her release, his feelings of confusion and guilt only deepened. Love for another woman would feel like a betrayal of his mother, and this betrayal seemed a heinous crime not so much because she was his mother but because she was a gulag returnee. In this story, the cinematic “woman of my dream” works as a transitory object of desire, which the protagonist can enjoy without betraying his mother. The Nazi film star who played this role, Marika Rökk, probably seemed more attractive because she was a foreigner and, even better, a screen image. The student feels that his admiration of Marika must surely be shared by “everyone in Tbilisi”; now that his mother is with him, he wants to share with her his fascination. But his mother has no patience for Rökk. The student is left alone with his desire for the foreign woman of his dreams and compassion for his long-suffering mother. This unsteady mix would unfold further in the inconsistent cultural developments of the Thaw, of which Okudzhava became a leader. Later, another famous poet and bard, Vladimir Vysotsky, married a star whom he first saw in a French film. Their romance would constantly have to do battle with Soviet visa restrictions, meaning long separations that he described in his songs.
The inability of mother and son to reconnect amounts to tragedy. The internal transformation that this woman underwent during her ten years in the gulag is so deep that “she is entirely different,” the student tells his neighbor with horror. This neighbor seems to understand what has happened; the author and the reader who, unlike the mother and the neighbor, have not experienced the camps do not understand it. Set inside the most intimate relationship between mother and son and rendered even more painful by the unusually good physical condition of the mother, this gap is deeply unsettling. Since she cannot talk about her experience to her son, there is no way for them to bridge their mutual estrangement. Punished by her withdrawal, he does not ask questions either: “I wanted to ask how she lived there but I was scared and did not ask.” Two lives, one in the camp and another “in freedom,” are incommensurable.19
Yevgenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind, a classical camp memoir, documents a symmetrical moment of misrecognition from the opposite perspective of the exiled mother who misidentified her son. In 1948, Ginzburg, then in exile in Kolyma, managed to arrange for her son, Vasily Aksenov, the future writer, to join her there. At sixteen years of age, Vasily had not seen his mother for eleven years. They met at the house of the local big shot, who was hosting a party. The hostess, who had overcome many obstacles in order to carry out her good deed of delivering Vasily to his mother, now entertained her guests by suggesting that Vasily guess which one of two women was his mother. The mother and son recognized one another. However, Ginzburg recognized Vasily because he looked like her elder son, Alyosha, who had died years earlier; she only remembered Vasily as a four-year-old. Even though she knew that this was Vasily and otherwise controlled her emotions very well, she inadvertently blurted out the name “Alyoshenka!” at the moment of her reunion with Vasily. At this moment, her mourning for the dead son outweighed her joy at finding the living one.20
This part of Ginzburg’s life-story is set in the same historical moment as Okudzhava’s “Woman of My Dreams.” Both narratives include reunion scenes involving two future leaders of the Thaw and their repressed mothers. Both involve moments of misrecognition. Okudzhava’s story is written from the perspective of a son who imagines misrecognizing (even if only for a moment) his mother after separation, while Ginzburg’s story is written from the perspective of the mother who really does (even if only for a moment) misrecognize her son after separation. In addition, Ginzburg’s story presents a social game in which the long-suffering victims have to recognize one another for the amusement of their benevolent masters. Okudzhava’s story is written as a fiction with an explicit autobiographical element; Ginzburg’s story is written as a memoir—that is, a true story of the past with some measure of selection or exaggeration. But the most important difference lies in the follow-up to the moment of misrecognition. Okudzhava’s character remains distanced from his mother; in this case, the fear of misrecognition prefigured the actual alienation. On the contrary, Ginzburg and her son immediately developed a deep relationship. During their first night together, she told him the detailed story of her arrest and life in the camps; this was, she writes in her memoirs, the first oral performance of the future book of these memoirs. In both narratives, the moment of misrecognition illustrates the tremendous change in the personalities involved, but it does not predetermine the subsequent development of their relationships.
Misrecognition by the Returned
In Vasily Grossman’s novel Everything Flows (1955–1963), Ivan Grigorievich returns from the camps. Ivan had been arrested as a student and imprisoned in the camps for twenty-nine years; his fiancée, friends, and relatives thought about him for a long time, but not that long. Grossman analyzes the process of forgetting the camp prisoners by using the Soviet concept of “propiska,” local right of residence, which he combines with Freudian metaphors: “First, the man lost his right of residence in life and travelled into people’s memory. Then, he lost his right of residence in memory and moved into the subconscious. From there, he showed up sporadically, like a jack-in-the-box, and frightened people with these unexpected, instantaneous appearances.”21 Survivor’s guilt manifests itself in fear or even hostility toward the victim’s memory.
Ivan Grigorievich is constantly preoccupied with the issue of recognition. Once, after his release from the gulag in 1955, he saw his late mother in a dream. She was walking along a road full of trucks and tractors, a road that he had seen in the camp; he cried, “Mama, mama,” but she could not hear him in the noise. “He had no doubt that if she looked back, she would recognize her son in the grey prisoner; if only she heard, if only she looked back.” This fear of having changed so much that he would not be recognized, as a physical individual, even by his mother, is soon realized by the actual situation of not being recognized, as a moral individual, by his cousin. Arriving back in Moscow, Ivan Grigorievich visits his cousin, Nikolai Andreevich, a prosperous scientist. Decades earlier, the cousins loved one another, but both feel discomfort when they meet again. Nikolai Andreevich wants to ask Ivan Grigorievich about his experience in the camps. He also wants to tell Ivan Grigorievich about his guilt for some of the compromises that he had made in his life as a typical Soviet intelligent. But he cannot bring himself to start asking and confessing. Both have survived and both feel survivor’s guilt, but their feelings are as different as their modes of survival; neither of the cousins is ready to discuss them. To describe the gap between them, Grossman uses stunning metaphors of “foreignness.” Ivan Grigorievich’s face seems “foreign, unkind, and hostile” to Nikolai Andreevich. “It was the same feeling that Nikolai Andreevich felt during his trips abroad. There he felt it impossible, unthinkable to talk to foreigners about his doubts, to share with them the bitterness of his experience.” Now he feels the same way toward his cousin. By the same token, the old prisoner, Ivan Grigorievich, does not want to share his pain and mourning with his cousin either. “Ivan Grigorievich imagined how he . . . would talk about those who had gone into the darkness. Their fates were so intolerably sad that even the most tender, quiet, and kind word about them would feel like the touch of a dumb, abrasive hand to a bloody heart that had been torn open.” Avoiding this theme of mimetic mourning, the only one of interest to him, he chooses an exoticizing metaphor for his camp experience: talking about it would be like telling fairytales of a thousand and one polar nights. Ivan Grigorievich and Nikolai Andreevich recognize one another as physical persons; they do not deny that they are the same relatives who have maintained their physical continuity from those times when they knew and loved one another. However, they deny one another their mutual acknowledgment as moral individuals. Both of them experience the changes that the other has gone through, not just as an aging and development of the same person but as a radical transformation of identity, as though the remembered person had been replaced by a stranger or even an impostor. “Who is the actual Kolia?” Ivan Grigorievich asks himself: is it the Kolia he remembers, or the Kolia standing in front of him now? At several points, Grossman underlines emphatically the fact that what both cousins actually end up saying to each other is “entirely opposed” to what they wanted and intended to say.
From his formerly beloved cousin, the calamity of misrecognition is transferred to Ivan’s formerly beloved city. Traveling to Leningrad where he had lived before his arrest, Ivan Grigorievich simultaneously “recognized the city and did not recognize it.”22 He sees his dead camp-mates there, greeting him from behind corners, and smells “the spirit of the barracks,” which he fears has now spread inexorably across the whole country; from now on, he will always be fighting against the compulsive desire to return to the camps or their ruins. As the story develops, Ivan Grigorievich finds a job, a room, and a woman. She dies soon afterward, but he keeps talking to her about love, camps, and history. As we saw in chapter 2, the story ends with Ivan Grigorievich’s trip to his parental house in the Caucasus. Of course he does not find the house; but on its site, he is rewarded by a vision of his late mother’s tenderness to him. Like the mysterious pilgrims described in one of the young Joseph Brodsky’s first poems (see chapter 5), at the end of his pilgrimage Ivan Grigorievich finds consolation in the intransigence of his life-world. Despite all the transformative efforts of the state that moved people, things, and the country beyond all recognition, “The world has not altered. No. It has not altered. It is what it has been,” wrote Brodsky in 1958.23 “The same, unchangeable” are the final words of the story about Ivan Grigorievich. Everything flows, but he is still recognizable, and this is his victory.
Varieties of Misrecognition
Identity has many levels, and so does identification. Andrei Bitov’s Pushkin House (finished in 1971, published in 1978), a novel that gained cult status among the late-Soviet intelligentsia, presents a literary scholar who was celebrated in the 1920s, imprisoned in the gulag in 1929, and released in the 1950s. Though the protagonist had survived his twenty-seven years in the camps, he abandoned his scholarship. Having returned to Leningrad, he spent his time drinking with his former camp warden.24 All that he wanted was to get back to the camp, or at least to the ground on which the camp had once stood. His grandson, the young literary scholar Leva, longs to meet his famous grandfather. He had seen many photographs of his grandfather, all of them taken before his arrest. Leva read and admired his grandfather’s works; he wanted to be the heir and follower of his grandfather’s ideas. “With pride, Leva felt in his own face, the face of his grandfather.”25 But upon finally visiting his grandfather’s apartment, Leva is greeted by a person whom Leva immediately rejects; there is no way that this person could be his grandfather. The person has a weather-beaten and tanned face, a red neck, and a dumb expression on his face. Even his drinking companion, the former chief of his camp, looks more intelligent. “I have become a different man,” the person who opened the door, Leva’s grandfather, tells him. The trauma of the camp turned an erudite, innovative scholar into a husk of a man, compulsively seeking out reenactments of his trauma, and bent on self-destruction. As Bitov said later, he based this character on real-life scholars who had spent many years in camps or exile, such as Mikhail Bakhtin (see chapter 4).26 When the old man eventually disappeared, his family assumed that he had gone back there, to the site of his former camp, to die. Once he was safely out of the way, the Leningrad Institute of Russian Literature established a cult around the late scholar, in which Leva also took part. Bitov’s feat of imagination is astonishing. Writing fiction with no autobiographical underpinnings, he exploits his license with an intensity that the actual memoir cannot afford. The misrecognition of the grandfather by his admiring grandson and the grandfather’s disgust in response to this admiration both demonstrate the scale of transformation that the gulag imprinted on its prisoners.
In 1952, another future leader of the Thaw, Andrei Siniavsky, met his father, Donat, upon the latter’s release after a nine-month prison term. Right from the gates of a provincial prison, Donat took his son deep into the forest to talk. He told Andrei that he had become the subject of a “scientific experiment” in prison: he was now connected to a frightening electric apparatus, and “they” were controlling his thoughts and words by a kind of radio communication. “They” were listening to this conversation as well, the father believed, and so he cut off the conversation. The son was in despair. Writing about this situation decades later in his autobiographical book Goodnight!, Siniavsky was self-consciously ambiguous about his father’s condition: maybe this was a hallucination caused by psychological trauma, or maybe his father really was under surveillance using some secret technological device invented by “them.” What is clear from Siniavsky’s account is that the father’s revelation caused a painful alienation between the father and the son. Tortured by this irresolvable gap between his adored father and himself, Siniavsky ends this episode with a confession of filial guilt:
The joy of seeing my father was mixing with an inexhaustible longing; it was as if by finding him I lost something forever. . . . We intensely enjoyed the sight and smell of one another. But still, we were distant, as never before. . . . I had to rush back to Moscow, having left my father alone with his haunting voices, with no help, in this uncanny desolation. He could not help me in my solitude, either. He would never learn what I was thinking and where I was going. I could not burden him. But my guilt before him is not decreased by that.27
Siniavsky presents this conversation with his father as his initiation into the particular kind of literature that he would practice as a writer. Calling it “grotesque” or “fantastic,” Siniavsky believed that he received from his broken father a mysterious ability to communicate with improbable worlds. Overcoming the gap that separated him from his father, he developed a new identification with him. Thus the future Abram Tertz developed his strange literary style. “Spirits were at work. I could not disentangle myself from them, being elevated by a sense of something like a poetic horror . . . on the edge of the sublime. . . . My father passed his condition to me.” The shock of seeing his father transformed by his unimaginable experience to the point of nonrecognition shaped Siniavsky’s literary career (see chapter 6).
Yearning for their imprisoned parents, the Soviet orphans imagined them as exotic heroes or romantic martyrs. It was not easy to recognize them in the aged and exhausted victims of senseless terror who actually returned from the camps. Trying to imagine the incomprehensible, their friends and relatives construed the prisoners’ bodies and experiences as strange, foreign, and uncanny. Again, Nadezhda Mandelstam documents the quasi-melancholic process of this incomplete work of mourning in the situation of the uncertainty of loss. “There is nothing more frightening than a slow death,” wrote Mandelstam, meaning not a slow dying but the slow acceptance of death. Her nightmare, in which she asked Osip, “What are they doing to you?,” haunted her until she received an official paper that informed her about Osip’s death, though it did not specify when he had died. This paper dispelled the dream, but not the hope. Nadezhda finished her first book of memoirs with doubt (maybe he is still alive?), and she ended the second with a letter addressed to him, in case she should die first.
Like Freud’s melancholia, Nadezhda’s mourning did not recognize the loss. In contrast to Freud’s melancholia, her psychological process was realistic; it did not deny the reality of the loss through wishful fantasies on the edge of delusion, but responded to the actual uncertainty of the information about the loss. In her efforts to learn the fate of her husband, Mandelstam actively sought evidence, developed conjectures, and subjected the available information to reality checks. She found and interviewed several ex-prisoners who said that they had met Osip in the camps, but their stories were not credible. One of them was the poet Yury Kazarnovsky (1904–1956?), a goner who survived and bore witness.28 Nadezhda Mandelstam’s critical words about Kazarnovsky’s stories of Osip’s death are exemplary: “his memory had turned into a huge soured pancake, where the facts and realities of living in the camp were baked along with fantasies, legends, and mere fiction.” She wanted facts, actually one single fact: “What are they doing to you ‘there’?” But Kazarnovsky told her about his own miraculous survivals. Mandelstam believed that this pancakelike memory was characteristic for many survivors whom she happened to know, particularly those who were released early in the 1950s (later, ex-prisoners often recycled other people’s stories). For life that had been reduced to its bare essence, only death was meaningful enough to enter the narrative. Survivors, wrote Mandelstam,
did not draw a firm line between facts, which they witnessed, and the legends of the camps. . . . In the consciousness of these stricken people, places, names, and events mixed together into a roll that I had never been able to untangle. Most of these camp stories, as I learned them, were confused lists of those bright moments when the narrator was on the brink of death but miraculously survived.29
While Mandelstam tested the reality of her loss, Kazarnovsky tested the reality of his survival. Focused on their fictional realities, they could not find common ground. In the gulag and around it, the tortured uncertainty about one’s life or death reflected the melancholic uncertainty about the death of the other.
Personal Recognition and Social Distribution
Depicting the situation that was difficult for both those who returned from the camps and for those who remained “free,” various authors converged on a rare and striking event. They document the actual moment of misrecognition or the anticipation, fantasy, or nightmare of such misrecognition. The momentary failure to recognize one’s returning father or one’s arriving son; the fantasy of misrecognizing one’s mother or being unrecognized by her; the nightmare of not being recognized by a husband—all this opens a gap in the most intimate texture of the self. The gap has to be filled by a narrative construction that can take a lifetime to produce. Whether such misrecognition actually happened or was imagined, its meaning is still the same: it stands as a parable of terror, an all-embracing allegory for the subjective experience of “repressions.”
Unlike the recognition-acknowledgment of political and cultural groups, which is normally a subject of struggle, recognition-identification inside the family is usually taken for granted. Family life relies on the recognition of personal identities, which are construed as continuing throughout a lifetime. Precisely because of this, misrecognition among people who are connected by family relations and common experience has an enormous impact on those involved. When misrecognition occurs between those who love each other, it is charged with guilt and fear. These uncanny moments testify to the loss of compassion, trust, and solidarity. Short moments of misrecognition are attributed to larger factors, such as historical shifts, unlawful incarcerations, or the flow of hostile, irreversible time. These holes in the ego need to be filled by communication, imagination, and writing. In the personal narrative of a survivor, misrecognition of a significant other works as a powerful device, a trope of the utmost intensity. It demonstrates the scale and degree of the transformation that people underwent at the hands of the state. It admits the unforeseen alienation between those who were “free” and those who were “repressed.” It reveals the pain of the victim and the guilt of the survivor. This story, of a person whom the state had changed to the point where even her closest others failed to recognize her, works as a condemnation of the transformative power of the state. This is my explanatory hypothesis for the stories about misrecognition and the return from the gulag.
On the next level of interpretation, the plotline of misrecognition stands as a parable for the story of Soviet socialism, its idealistic aspiration and tragic failure. According to its ideological purposes and legal foundations, the Soviet system sacrificed the recognition of individual and group differences for the sake of redistribution of material goods, such as food, housing, basic services, and, ideally, all forms of capital. Despite its massive violations on all counts, this normative principle of socialism was not questioned throughout the Soviet period.30 In order to eliminate what the system called “classes,” it split itself into two vastly different regimes, making their difference larger than people could have imagined before, after, or outside of this process: “free citizens,” on the one hand, and the prisoners of the gulag, on the other. In lieu of all human differences, one bipolar dimension of disparity was constructed. All differences were compressed into this binary opposition. The state invested all its power in enlarging this difference. The project was largely successful. When the inhabitants of these two worlds met, they could not communicate, talk about their different experiences, or cohabitate in common spaces. They did not recognize one another.
Though no single narrative can embrace the Soviet terror, the story of misrecognition serves as its allegory. In an uncanny way, scenes of misrecognition of a father by his son, of a son by his mother, of brother by brother, illuminate the extent of the Soviet state’s radical intervention into the most private aspects of family and kinship. The closest of relatives did not recognize each other because the state effectively transformed one or both of them. With the collapse of the gulag and, later, the USSR, the story of the misrecognition of the returned became a trope for the tragedy of “repressions” and the futility of “rehabilitation.” Strikingly, the interminable mourning for those who did not return but were not known to be dead transformed the longing of love into its opposite, the horror of the uncanny.