This self-immolation, which she was ashamed of and secretly proud of, imbues the master plan, the main labor of her life. All the rest (including her contributions to the arts, spelled out on the book’s cover2) would be laid aside for the sake of the need to help, or would slip through her fingers, or would simply enable her family to survive. Survival, hers and other people’s, in all of its multifaceted, sometimes unimaginable forms, quickly becomes the sole subject of the diary. Survival that was not only physicaclass="underline" Soviet jargon in the mouth of a young woman from the nobility, the imperfect Russian speech of émigré relatives, laziness, fear, stupefaction—Shaporina notices and describes all the traits of decay, simplification, and spiritual petrification, her own and other people’s. What she assembles is a chronicle of common degradation, as uncompromising as everything she did, and extremely sharp.
Shaporina was one of those who went abroad in the first years after the revolution—and who voluntarily returned to the USSR. Many émigrés thought about it (in the 1920s, and especially in the 1930s, the years when the Soviet seedling was flowering ostentatiously), and many decided to do it—some (like Aleksey Tolstoy, whose family was friendly with hers) out of love for life on a grand scale, and some because “strength is over there,” as Tsvetaeva said to Mayakovsky the only time they met in Paris. The peculiarity of Shaporina’s story is that she both left and came back without seeming to notice that she was making a historical or political choice; she left because of a break-up with her husband, in rage and sorrow, packing and collecting the children in haste, and she went back to her husband, too, at the first call. The consequences of that nonchoice were admittedly the same as for everyone: catastrophic.
1933: “Now most people have realized that there’s nowhere to go; no matter what there are prisons everywhere and hunger everywhere. The intelligentsia still unconsciously wants to jump out somewhere, they run off to the polar circle, to the Pamirs, into the stratosphere, while the peasants just sit there on their benches, perishing.” 1935: “They’re exiling people to Turgai, Vilyuysk, Atbasar, Kokchetav, to places where you have to ride 150 miles on camels, to places you only can get to by dogsled.” 1938: “Vasya [Shaporina’s son] is often put out that I don’t go to the movies, to the theater. Impressions slide over him, over today’s young people, without reaching consciousness. They’ve been accustomed since childhood to the horror of the contemporary situation. The words ‘arrested,’ ‘shot’ don’t produce the least impression.” 1939: “And here we are, poor people of the 20th century, forced constantly to run into the 16th or beginning of the 17th. And not to scream from horror, but to pretend that you don’t see, you don’t hear.”
2.
Who is Shaporina addressing, who is supposed to read this series of “J’accuse” that stretches over decades? Most likely a distant descendant, a new link in the family chain: she didn’t count on interest from her close relatives. Compared to the diaries and notes of her famous contemporaries, people with a more developed instinct of self-preservation (recall the marginal note by Kornei Chukovsky in his own diary record: “This was written for presenting to the authorities”), Shaporina’s notebooks say everything as frankly as a condemned or mad person. No Aesopian tricks, no softening, no omissions—rather the opposite: the daring of her formulations seems also to have in mind the enemy reader, a person who reads as an official duty. Each assertion is conceived and carried out as a slap. It is striking as well that she (from a noble family, with relatives in emigration, half her friends arrested or exiled) nonetheless remained at liberty, and that her diaries, which were written without a backward glance, don’t hold even a hint that any other turn of fate was possible, not a shadow of the fear that everyone shared then. Even after unwillingly agreeing to become an informer for the NKVD (“I just have to fool him, I don’t think it’s very hard”), i.e. having been assured of an acute interest in her and her circle, Shaporina doesn’t give up her habit of daily writing from life: her “tail” becomes one of her characters: the shameless, the comical and the powerless. She is haunted by other fears: of poverty and a hungry death. The point where she came face to face with these fears also became the highest point of her destiny.
Many Leningrad blockade memoirs stress the necessity of preserving this experience of departure from the norm for history. They do this in order to endow one’s suffering with value, to make it work, but also because life that gets out of the grooves seems exotic, exceptional, unique. Shaporina’s diary is something of an exception. Long before the blockade, her text had turned into a strange travelogue whose author wasn’t walking or traveling anywhere. The surroundings themselves change; the space one is accustomed to mutates and demands a new description, like an unfamiliar country where everything is alien and of the essence: the landscape, the language, the local mores. Soviet Russia here is described as a new uncountry: a place as far from the well-ordered and lucid lands over the border as it is from its own past, a wild field overgrown, living outside sense and law. All that’s left to do is to wait for a rescue, which can only come from outside, like a ship coming for Robinson Crusoe. For long years Shaporina was occupied with the everyday chronicle of waiting (getting hold of food, reading, prayer, concern about someone near and dear, meetings with the cannibal aborigines). As the blockade began, reality finally came together with her perceptions, abandoning the pretense that it was adequate for life.
It was as if the world Shaporina had viewed from the start as phantasmagorical (“the land of the Morlocks,” she writes, recalling H. G. Wells’s novel) had once again confirmed its evil qualities, justifying her worst expectations. But at this very moment something unforeseen happens to the author and the text of the diaries: the emphases shift, the passive voice of proud suffering changes to the active, the inertia of expectation turns into a plot of overcoming. The diary’s tempo changes, there are unexpected pauses (“the lamps turned on, it was getting dark, the fog was blue”). Just as before, the author is like a handheld camera recording everything that moves: the large and small objects that enter the shot. But it’s as if she allows herself to hover, to freeze, to pause, to fall into something like a hungry faint: stupefied contemplation of beauty. In the space of the diaries, which she had been keeping all her life at the tempo of the daily news (facts, rumors, somebody’s remarks, evaluations)—these pauses (“I got off the tram at the Academy of Sciences, and my spirit froze from the beauty of the Admiralty embankment”), filled with long, free descriptions (“while a weather balloon slowly sailed upward amid the quiet trees”)—are something resembling a protective cover. Here, for almost the very first time, the author and the reader manage to catch their breath—or to regain consciousness.