8
In what is arguably the most important film of post-Soviet memory, Khrustalev, My Car! by Aleksei German (1998), the military surgeon Klensky is arrested and then raped on his way to the gulag. Suddenly, his tormentors dress him in a pristine uniform, sprinkle him with perfume, and take him to the ailing Stalin. As Klensky regains his military posture and clinical focus, Stalin dies in his arms, producing a final expulsion of flatulence. At one stroke, Klensky reverts from the stinking, bare life of a prisoner to the sublime condition of a professional, dutiful citizen. In the same X-shaped movement, the dictator departs from his duty and, quickly passing through the stage of stinking, bare life, is annihilated forever. The central scene of the film occurs when the sovereign and the abject meet and their positions swap.
A disciple of Grigory Kozintsev, the author of the Soviet Hamlet (see chapter 7), Aleksei German based his previous film, My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1984), on novels that were written by his father, the writer Yury German, who glorified the secret police and survived the terror untouched. Khrustalev was a fantasy, said German, about what would have happened to his father if he had been arrested. “It all comes from my childhood—the faces, the feelings, everything.”1 A son narrates both films, but Lapshin presents a father who admires the Soviet regime and glorifies its police, while Khrustalev mourns a father who became a victim of that same police. Working through these Hamletian themes, German’s films also borrowed their sharp movements across the social space from the picaresque novel, in which both Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin noted a capacity to change statuses, unsettle the routine, and mourn the victims of history. Thinking about the connection between Stalin’s gulag and Bakhtin’s carnival, I began to notice these picaresque constructions in other Russian films about the Soviet past. Like Khrustalev, some of these films, probably the most remarkable ones, also develop in two turns: the first from citizen into victim, the second from victim into citizen.
. . . but not sacrificed
A remarkable example of these two turns is the story of General Kotov in Nikita Mikhalkov’s epic trilogy, Burnt by the Sun (1994, 2010, 2011). The first and most successful episode ends when Kotov, a dashing Red Army commander played by Mikhalkov himself, is arrested and beaten by agents who, in an instant, turn him into a bleeding, bare-living body. Fifteen years later, the Russian public watched the opening of the second episode in which the same Kotov, featuring his gleaming parade uniform and triumphant smile, greets Stalin at his stately dacha. Kotov is still played by the tireless Mikhalkov, but a different actress has been brought in to play Kotov’s wife, as handsome as she was sixteen years earlier. She has baked a huge cake for Stalin: a chocolate Stalin face floats on top of white cream. Stalin is eager to taste it, but nobody dares to cut into his chocolate portrait. Finally, Stalin moves to cut the cake himself; but then Kotov suddenly shoves Stalin’s face into the cake. Humiliating the adored tyrant, Kotov yells hysterically. He wakes up in a barrack and we realize that the scene was Kotov’s dream, and Kotov is now a convict in the gulag. In this brief and drastic dream, we watch the X-shaped movement of Stalin, who falls from his heavenly stature into the sticky mess of the cake, and Kotov, who leaps out of his prisoner’s existence back to his uniform and status.
In Aleksandr Proshkin’s film The Cold Summer of 1953 (1987), the central character is a captain of military intelligence who, after many battles with the enemy, finds himself in the gulag. In 1953, after Stalin’s death, the former captain is living in exile in a northern village, refusing to work and barely surviving on the leftovers that some of the locals give him out of pity. Everyone calls him by his nickname, Luzga; his actual name and his past are irrelevant. Still alive, he is a goner, exhausted, apathetic, and silent. But when a gang of former prisoners, released from the camps during the chaotic amnesty of 1953, come to the village intent on rape and plunder, Luzga comes back to life and saves the village.2 The captain gives the lie to external definitions. He was judged as a dying object of power; actually, he is the heroic subject of his own life. Again, this is an X-shaped movement across the political space. Those who held power turn into slaves of the gang; the lowest of the low becomes the embodiment of power.
Luzga is bitter but complacent. Relying on the popular conventions of British and American spy films, The Cold Summer presents a central character who demonstrates perfect integrity and is essentially foreign to his environment. But unlike his luckier colleague James Bond, Luzga belongs to the same political community as the villagers and the bandits. His difference from them is presented as moral, not political. In Proshkin’s film, there is no symmetry between the soon-to-be-dead Luzga and those who personify the Soviet regime in the village. But in the state of emergency that is depicted in the film, it is Luzga who puts a stop to random acts of violence and restores legal order. In the micropolitics of this story, the goner becomes the sovereign of the domain that he pacifies by killing his enemies and sacrificing his friends.
It is not quite plausible that an exhausted, chronically underfed man could defeat a gang of armed bandits. However, it is true that thousands of World War II combat officers ended up in the gulag. Like so many other stories of Stalinism, Luzga’s situation is incomprehensible and unthinkable, but we know that it occurred on a mass scale. Along with the film’s dynamic plot, this clash between the fundamental improbability of the gulag and the public knowledge of its historical reality secured the film’s success.
Thus the victims—Klensky, Kotov, and Luzga—all turn into heroes. This transformation is the gulag version of old tales about Brer Rabbit, Ivan the Fool, and the Prince and the Pauper, which show the magical ascendance of the lowest of the low to the highest of the high. Anthropologists interpret such folk stories as mental “weapons of the weak,” hidden transcripts that the oppressed compose to disavow their dependencies and to produce mental drafts for future rebellions.3 However, we do not see rebellions in these films. The travels and transfigurations of their picaresque characters occur in a moral rather than in a political universe.
The difference is made clear in Pavel Lungin’s Island (2006). The film was shot in Kem, which is mainly known as the transit hub for the nearby Solovetsky camp. However, there are surprisingly few references to the gulag, Stalinism, or other recognizable features of the Soviet period in this film. The action starts with a wartime scene in 1942, when the protagonist, Anatoly, appears as a pathetic coward, a sailor who betrays his captain to a Nazi and then kills the captain in exchange for his own life. Since the film begins in the familiar black-and-white idiom of Soviet war movies, this betrayal provokes a well-conditioned disgust. Then we leap to 1974, the screen obtains color, and we recognize the same Anatoly as an ascetic, pious, and witty elder of an Orthodox monastery who works miracles, speaks truth to power, and inspires awe among his fellow monks. Both the script and the director heavily emphasize this transfiguration.
The central scene of the film presents both of the characters, Anatoly and his former captain, encountering each other once again. The captain, now an admiral, delivers his hysterical daughter to the famous elder for healing. After a successful exorcism, the two men, Anatoly and Tikhon, recognize one another, though neither in the least resembles his former self. The actors who play these two old men are deliberately chosen to look the opposite of those who played the same men in their youth. Two life trajectories have crossed and all but swapped. The traitor has turned into a saint; the hero who met his death with a cigarette in his lips has evolved into a suffering father and nervous bureaucrat. “Do not be afraid,” says Anatoly, the former coward, to Tikhon, the former hero.
Thus Anatoly learns that he did not kill his captain after all. Having committed no mortal sin, he is ready to die, and he dies without fear. The film follows the trajectory from the lowest to the highest, from bare life to sovereign, but in a spiritual disguise. At the same time, the film skips over the entire world in between these two poles. When it turns up somewhat unexpectedly in a commercially successful product of contemporary cinema, this picaresque plotline needs an explanation. The commonality of this self-refashioning in post-Soviet films about the past, which occurs in religious as well as in secular contexts, leads me to suggest that these miraculous transformations are not only part of a new Russian piety, but belong to a broader pattern of memory.4
. . . this is me
Khrustalev also tells the improbable story of a citizen who is first turned into an outcast and then elevated to the very summit of power. However, in this film, the two turns of the story are performed in a different context from the one described above. This is a context that is more plausible historically, and more satisfying aesthetically: the context of a personal story of mourning. Critics have argued that German’s film possesses a “dreamlike” and “disorientating quality” and that its different parts work in different ways.5 I submit that the film is a coherent narrative of mourning that makes perfect sense when read as such.
Aleksei Klensky, a man who lost his father in his adolescence, tells the story from off-screen. He mourns his late father, confesses his guilt toward him, and fantasizes about his return. Aleksei is twelve years old when the action of the film starts, but he narrates the story as an old man. On screen, we see Aleksei as a boy, never as an adult. Throughout the film, however, we hear his aged voice sporadically commenting on the film’s action. The gap between two stages of one person, which in Island is represented by two remarkably different actors, is suggested here via the unbridgeable difference between the face of a boy and the voice of the same man forty-five years later.
The story as Aleksei tells it is a mixture of reminiscence, conjecture, and fantasy.6 The film is grainy black-and-white with a barely audible soundtrack. Its narrative gaps and allegoric sidesteps require interpretation, like a dream. The distance between Aleksei Klensky, the narrator of the film, and Aleksei German, its creator, is intentionally short. Klensky bears German’s first name and matches his age. He also shares German’s fascination with the father figure. However, Aleksei is the narrator of the story and not its witness or cameraman. We see him and his family in 1953; we also see large chunks of the action that Aleksei could not possibly have seen. Like narrators of modern novels (by Vladimir Nabokov, say, or Philip Roth), Aleksei Klensky realizes his power to combine what he has seen and what he has imagined in one complex narrative, which is now unfolding before our eyes. From this distance in time, memory is not precise, but neither is it arbitrary. It is not innocent either. At the very start of the film, we observe a scene in which the twelve-year-old Aleksei has apparently had a wet dream; having soiled his underpants, he rinses them, looks in the mirror, and spits at his reflection. “This is me,” comments his voice forty-five years later. For the next couple of hours, we watch his father enjoying himself with power, cognac, and physical exercise. This father is a dazzling general, military neurosurgeon, and cheerful alcoholic. His huge body, beautiful uniform, funny tricks, and success among women provide a striking contrast to his son’s adolescent ordeals.
But the film is the story of the father’s arrest. It is set in 1953, immediately before and after Stalin’s death. Running his military hospital at the time of the “Doctors’ plot,” General Klensky foresees disaster.7 In an attempt to help him, a foreign journalist in Moscow passes Klensky a message from his relatives in Stockholm. After receiving it, Klensky flees, leaving his wife a note. The agents search his apartment. One of them asks Klensky’s son, Aleksei, to report on his father if he comes home.
Soon, the agents capture Klensky and put him into a covered truck with other prisoners, who gang rape him anally and orally. The rape scene is unbearably long and horrifying; it evokes a visceral response of disgust and fear. This scene reduces a suave general to a bleeding, vomiting, and weeping victim, an ordinary goner who can be killed but not sacrificed because his life is not worth living. By the force of art, after watching the scene we feel something similar about ourselves. With unprecedented power, this scene embodies the fear that the Stalinist regime provoked among its actual and potential victims.
Homosexual gang rape as an emblem of the horror of the gulag merges two literary traditions of representing Communism. The anti-uto-pian oeuvres of Yevgeny Zamiatin, Aldous Huxley, and many others have connected the idea of Communism with the dissolution of marriage, the family, and traditional ways of love. A different but interdependent tradition connects the twentieth-century totalitarian dictatorships with homosexual violence. Influential in Russian literature, this tradition merges, in a peculiar way, homophobia with liberalism.8 But Klensky’s story does not end in the torture wagon. A new group of officials abduct him, bleeding and stinking. They wash Klensky, dress him in uniform, and bring him to Stalin. The soon-to-be-dead dictator is dirty, unconscious, and pitiful. Administering medical help, Klensky soon finds Stalin dying in his arms. In gratitude, Lavrenty Beria releases Klensky, who returns home to his family.9 But upon seeing his father, Aleksei calls the police to denounce him, as he had promised the agent he would. After a heart-breaking scene, Klensky leaves his family forever. “I never saw my father again,” reports the voice of the aged Aleksei from beyond the screen.
Klensky’s suffering at the hands of the state is senseless in the most profound, existential meaning of the word. Like Benjamin’s “radical stoics,”10 Soviet victims lived and died with the sense of the absurd; but for those who loved them, this senselessness is unbearable, second only to the loss itself. Their work of mourning invests the loss with reversibility and the absurd with meaning. The second, ascending line of the X-shaped tale emerges out of this tension. In the final frames, we see Klensky as a train conductor. Drinking, working out, and joking around, Klensky seems as comfortable in his new circle of drivers and prostitutes as he was among generals and academicians. His new job is no less important than his former one, operating on brains. His train transports those who have been released from the dissolved camps back to their homes.
There are three axes in this film. The psychological axis is formed by the disparity between the father and the son and the son’s tortured feelings. The historical axis is shaped by the representation of the Stalinist terror, which deprived millions of sons of their fathers, and imbues the idiosyncratic events on the screen with broader meaning and verisimilitude. The narratological axis is defined by the relations between the narrated reality (what the viewer perceives as representing the actual life-world of the narrator) and the narrated fantasy (what the narrator and viewer agree to accept as fantasy). There are also zones of indistinction, in which reality claims are dubious or contested. These axes structure Aleksei’s lifelong melancholia, an incomplete and never-to-be-completed mourning for his father, which mixes love, guilt, and self-hatred. The son remembers his father and also imagines his ordeal, his grandeur, and, most important, his survival. The father’s return would mean the redemption of the son’s guilt. The son is melancholic, but he is not mad. He knows (and he tells us) that his father has not returned; but the passing decades have not eased his loss, guilt, and fantasy. The son’s guilt is the central point of these three axes. In Aleksei’s case, the universal guilt of the son merges with the historically specific guilt of the survivor and, moreover, the traitor. In this hyperemotional film, the highest tension follows Aleksei’s denunciation, when the son and the father weep together before the father leaves the son forever. Psychologically, Aleksei’s feelings are structurally similar to Anatoly’s in Island. Both men feel remorse for their betrayal of the paternal figure. Both men live on the hope that actually, their victims survived their ordeal and will come back, bringing mercy by the very fact of their survival and also by their forgiveness. Anatoly attains this mercy, Aleksei does not; but Aleksei keeps his father alive for as long as he tells his story.
Historically, Aleksei German reconstructs the misery and chaos of life in the Soviet Union in the 1950s. A large part of the film documents seemingly unmotivated outbursts of aggression, which the exhausted, frightened adults direct at each other and Aleksei. His mother participates in this; his father does not. In the hysterical world of late Stalinism, Aleksei remembers his father as the embodiment of sanity and masculinity. In a long close-up at the beginning of the film, we watch the tense face of General Klensky upside-down, as he performs a gymnastic exercise. In the last frame of the film, we see him, also in a long close-up, balancing a glass of liqueur on the top of his head. Performed by the extraordinary actor Yury Tsurillo, who combines physical power with inexhaustible irony, this memorial image of the father is highly unusual, tragicomic, and subtly uncanny.
Though the historical background and the psychological conflict are the most remarkable features of this film, they are both incomprehensible without a careful analysis of the narrative structure. Since we watch and hear the first-person narration, we assume that only those events in which the narrator participated as a witness, and those events about which he could have heard from other credible witnesses, constitute his memory. The other events that he narrates—though he could not possibly have seen or heard about them—constitute his imagination. While the memory parts of the film feel plausible, detailed, and even precise, the imaginary parts are weird and outlandish. These boundaries between memory and imagination are sometimes evident and sometimes vague. It is up to the critic to map them.
. . . a tear as hot as fire
Aleksei could not possibly have seen the scene in which his father attends to the dying Stalin. Nor could he have heard about this scene from his father, because they did not talk after his father’s return. Immediately following the scene in which he remembers how he denounced his father, he says, “I never saw my father again.” In doing so, he reveals to the viewer that his father’s visit to Stalin’s dacha never really happened. Now, is the rape of the father also a fantasy of the son? This scene is Aleksei’s answer to the inescapable question that, for many years, Nadezhda Mandelstam asked her husband in a persistent nightmare: “What are they doing to you ‘there’?”11 Aleksei could not possibly have witnessed or heard about this scene, but he imagines it in a desperate act of mimetic mourning. Horrifying as it is, Aleksei’s fantasy is no crueler or no more senseless than myriad real-life Soviet stories of investigative or transformative torture. The nightmarish scene of the gang rape in the paddy wagon destroys the father’s dignity precisely in the area in which the son admired and envied him most of all, the area of masculinity. The more guilt the son feels, the more remarkable an image of his father he produces.
Four uncoordinated phantasms accompany the father’s disappearance. First, the father is doubled, producing a man who looks, smokes, and performs tricks like the father, but is not the father. We see Klensky’s double at the crucial moments of the film, first in Klensky’s hospital, where he is kept as a privileged patient, and then after the rape, when this double, with other uniformed officials, escorts Klensky to Stalin. One could speculate that the production of doubles and clones is the imminent result of the Soviet-style process of leveling differences.12 Since we do not see Aleksei in either of the scenes with the double, we should treat this double as Aleksei’s fantasy rather than his testimony.
Freud believed that the image of the double, originally invented in myth or delusion as “an insurance against the extinction of the self,” becomes “the uncanny harbinger of death.”13 One of many reasons for the horror that doubles evoke stems from the fact that they obstruct the processes of recognition (see chapter 3). If Aleksei should see Klensky again, how could he be sure it was his father? Multiplying Aleksei’s uncertainty, his father’s double works as a powerful trope that suggests the incomprehensibility of terror. Alluding to the uncanny doubles of Gogol’s and Dostoevsky’s stories, who subverted the sacred order of the bureaucratic world, Klensky’s double plays an entirely different role. The existence of the double casts into doubt any possible evidence of Klensky’s survival that might come from the elusive world of the gulag. It also undercuts any rational effort to understand what happened to Aleksei’s father.14
Second, the father spends a night with a woman who wants to have a child with him, thus promising Aleksei a chance to have and find a brother. This and other erotic scenes in the film belong to the sphere of imagination as opposed to memory. Throughout the film, the aged Aleksei juxtaposes his father’s potency with his own sexually deprived youth. In this spirit, after the meeting with General Klensky, the Scandinavian socialist recites cryptic lines from Lermontov’s “Demon,” a parable of superhuman masculinity that is fatal to the female: “By a tear as hot as fire, / An inhuman tear” In the crucial scene in which Klensky departs, a Jewish boy sings the folk song “Tumbalalaika”: “One night a young lad could not sleep / And he thought and thought / How to marry and not be shamed.” The father is lost not only because of the son’s political betrayal but also because of the son’s sexual maturation. As we saw in other stories of children’s guilt (see chapter 3), the power of the narrative comes from the confluence of these two strands, one historically specific and the other psychologically universal.
Third, Aleksei’s memory breaks out of the cinematic duality of the visual and the acoustic and absorbs another sensory domain that is unusual for film: the olfactory. Beginning with Aleksei’s memory of his wet dream, the film culminates in his intense fantasies of the pains, sounds, and smells of his father (and of Stalin, the father of the people). The anal processes in this film include a fascinating demonstration of the logistics of toilet usage in a communal apartment; the sounds of farting that many characters produce in their constant attempts to threaten and humiliate others; Stalin’s bloated stomach and terminal fart, which is shown in detail as Klensky’s therapeutic success; the violation of Klensky’s anus and his subsequent bleeding, suffering, and futile self-help; and the repetitive complaints of Stalin’s internal security at Klensky’s offensive smell after the rape. The sensory intimacy of Aleksei’s fantasy brings him into closer contact with the memory of his father than any other detail could. Exploring sensory domains that are new to Russian cinema, German forcefully provokes in his viewers responses of unusual intensity, from fear to revulsion to the feeling of the dense reality of the represented life-world. Precisely because a large part of this film is introduced as the self-conscious fantasy of the narrator, it is elaborated with naturalist detail and sensory power.
Fourth, after the rape scene the father is turned into a semihuman, half-animal monster. Though the rapists call him “a cockerel” he behaves like a dog. He drinks from a puddle and paws at a pile of snow to cool his bleeding mouth and anus. Like a dog, he sniffs the dying Stalin. For a long time, cultural critics have speculated on monsters and doubles as two major types of the uncanny. “There is no monster who does not tend to duplicate himself . . . no double who does not yield a monstrous aspect on closer scrutiny,” said René Girard.15 The reduction of a human person to bare life inevitably leaves an uncanny trace, an irreducible leftover of the dear and familiar that has become foreign and then horrifying. Agamben, in his own fantasy of the bare life in the camp, described transformation as the “lupization of man and humanization of wolf.”16 In a more general perspective, we are dealing with another manifestation of the Clorinda effect, a compulsive process that transfigures the object of mimetic mourning into a monstrous form. As in some other post-Soviet film tragedies such as 4 (see chapters 10 and 11), dogs accompany human characters throughout German’s film. Responding to the image of the dog at the very start of the film, the final hint at this transformation of the father into a beaten-up dog, a parody of the werewolf, is bizarre and bitter; but it also bears hope for the father’s viability and return.
Using a different artistic language, Aleksei reproduces the ordeal of Fyodor from Nabokov’s The Gift, a novel of the son’s mourning for his murdered father, who keeps returning to the son in night dreams.17 Adoring their lost fathers, both sons desperately believe in their survival. Construing their fathers’ fate as uncertain, the sons engage in unbridled fantasies about their fathers’ heroic adventures that would bring about their salvation and return. Starting the narrative with the pedantic reconstruction of his youth in the shadow of his father, Aleksei shifts into sheer fantasy. The task of a filmmaker, as German understands it, is to depict his dreams as though they were real. “The boy fantasized or dreamed about the general. But we had to show it in such a way that the viewer would believe us,” said German.18
The film ends with a cheerful picture of Klensky balancing a glass of wine on the top of his head while standing on the roof of a moving train. If, after all, Klensky is still eager to perform his tricks, then Aleksei can keep waiting for him to come back. But actually, what the viewers believe is not that the image of the living and playful Klensky is true, but that Aleksei, now in his sixties, cherishes this image as the dearest part of his inner life. In Aleksei’s melancholic fantasy, which contrasts with Hamlet’s, the father survives betrayal by the son to return with unusual powers. Emerging from his bare, doglike life, he performs his final service to Stalin and brings the prisoners of the gulag home.
. . . two symmetrical figures
First, a citizen turns into a victim. Second, a victim turns into a hero. As we have seen, a number of Russian films about Stalinism play out this masterplot of mimetic mourning. Historically, perpetrators often became victims, though for a victim to become a perpetrator was less common. Theorizing the Nazi camps, Giorgio Agamben argues that the sovereign and its victims both mark limits of the juridical order. “The camp is thus a structure in which the state of exception . . . is realized normally.” Since the tyrant and the camp are both states of exception, they are intrinsically connected; they both live in the Hobbesian state of nature. Using an archaic terminology in which homo sacer is another name for a goner, Agamben formulates: “As the two extreme limits of the order, the sovereign and homo sacer present two symmetrical figures: the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one in respect to whom all men act as sovereigns.”19
But thinking about the Holocaust and the gulag, is there any way in which it makes sense to talk about a symmetry between the victim and the tyrant? The films under consideration operate not through a philosophical construction but through a dynamic plotline. A protagonist first is lowered into the hell of political victimization and second, reshapes himself into the position of a sovereign of his life-world. Like a werewolf, this accursed character transgresses the very borders that define him, demolishing the hierarchy of power along with his acquired stigmata. A similar process happens to sovereigns. As German said in an interview, summarizing ages of Russian political myth-making, “The Russian mentality is such that everyone is longing to be someone else. One tsar became a wanderer, another one became a monk. . . . To go and hide is an important component of the Russian mentality.”20
No symmetry mysteriously spreads from the tyrant to the victim and back to the tyrant, equalizing them in a manner that is entirely foreign to a totalitarian regime. Agamben vastly exaggerates when he says, “The state of exception and the state of nature are nothing but two sides of a single topological process . . . as in a Möbius strip.” Postcatastrophic memory constructs this Möbius strip, which Agamben attributes to the very functioning of the state. In a belated attempt at justice, the mourning memory constructs the symmetry between the sovereign and the victim. This posthumous mechanism elevates the sick, weak, soon-to-be-dead victim to the level of the tyrant. In a reciprocal move, it brings the tyrant down to the level of a victim. This symmetry and this mobility are fantasies, but not random ones. On the contrary, in the works of post-Soviet filmmakers they appear recurrently, maybe even obsessively. They form a systemic allegory that shapes cultural memory in its desperate search to imagine the unrepresentable and to make sense of the meaningless. While the historical processes of victimization had no understandable meaning for either the victims or the perpetrators, cultural memory tends to redeem these processes in hindsight by turning victims into sacrifices and even more, into self-sacrificial heroes who earn leadership and sovereignty in exchange for their losses. Arguably, this redemptive mimesis is an operating mechanism of melancholy.
By its very nature, this work of mourning employs allegories that are, as Walter Benjamin put it, “the only pleasure the melancholic permits himself, and a powerful one.”21 The severe truth of the pathetic, stinking goner who does not know why he suffers because no such reason exists is redeemed by a gigantic transformation of historical reality. At each end of this eerie equation between the superior perpetrator and the lowest of his victims, the work of memory transgresses the frame of history.