This experience in extremis became an unexpected reward for Shaporina. In a minute of happiness she’ll say “this is to pay me back for the blockade”; years later she’ll call the blockade the gist of her life.
From the next room, empty like the whole apartment, came the sound of a radio. […] A soprano voice, a tenor came pouring out. In the dark of night the cannons boomed heavily and terribly. A dying voice, monotonous, repeated, “Everything goes away … everything collapses … everything falls … everything goes away … I’m dying.” […] I would get up in the dark, heat up some tea, give her something hot to drink, inject camphor. And went back to bed indifferently, because I had no strength. But now it seems to me that I could have helped her spirit more, I should have read the Gospel aloud to her. Although she could very well have taken that for the last rites.
3.
One of the first things that strike you in the two-volume body of this book is the scale: over a thousand pages, hundreds (if not thousands) of surnames, the many-legged and many-headed human mass, sinking before one’s eyes under the ice of an anthropological catastrophe. From days of old, diaries have been made up of domestic matters—one’s era, friends, one’s little universe, sometimes ripped along the seam upon contact with faceless and indiscriminate common fate. Here there’s something else. Already by the early 1930s the main content of these notes turns out to be the background: big and little history change places, and big history more or less lives at the cost of little history—uses it for nourishment, occupies its space, drinks its air.
Diary writing acts on its own wilclass="underline" it soaks up everything, gets heavy, before your eyes the flesh of pages and other people’s stories accrues. Was that what Shaporina wanted? Who knows? She, and she was not the only one (the same dream is present in Olga Freidenberg’s postwar notes), considered it essential and unavoidable to have a Moscow Nuremberg trial—a trial of the Soviet system. Shaporina’s notebooks can indeed be read as a corpus of evidence prepared by the prosecution. But even in that capacity it is obviously, flagrantly overabundant—as if it lacks a filter to distinguish the important things from the unimportant, the superfluous from the essential, the verisimilar from the fantastic. Rumors, gossip, dreams, jokes, conversations in lines and worldly salons, news of banishments, executions and hungry deaths come billowing in a thick, blind wave. The index of names at the end of the second volume takes up twenty-seven pages; the book, issued by NLO Press, is a Noah’s Ark where everything that breathes and talks swims out of nonbeing: peasants, Red Army soldiers, literary functionaries.
A ramified and extensive system of acquaintances (and Shaporina was on good terms with all of St. Petersburg/Leningrad and half of Moscow) and the rituals conjoined with it, which already seemed very odd in the growing shadows of twilight—these are one of the constants of her life. Maintaining connections (visits, flowers, correspondence, carefully thought-up little gifts) required tremendous time and energy. Shaporina is an entirely social animal who knows and loves her place on the class ladder, thinking of herself (unlike Mandelstam, whose seditious verses she quotes sympathetically and inexactly) as one of: a continuer of her family, a representative of her class, an heir to and preserver of European culture. She notices and furiously records any traits of secession from the known and beloved norm, and some of her evaluations are astonishing: “I’ve read half of Tynianov’s book Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar, and I’m suffering physically from disgust and anger. To dare to mount a critique of Griboedov, of Pushkin. But why not? (With a Jewish accent.) We blow up the Simonov Monastery, the church of the icon Soothe My Sorrows, the church of Saint Nicholas the Grand Cross and so on—and you keep quiet; we do a lot of other things and you sit still for it, well now we’re bathing your final treasure, your first love,3 in the slops: you can tolerate anything, it serves you right. It serves us right.”
It’s not for nothing that “With a Jewish accent” appears here. Simple-hearted and ineradicable anti-Semitism is just as much a part of her spiritual profile as passionate patriotism—and the desire to die in Rome (“there alone”), as love and hate of the Russian element (“it’s the people that is vile, not the government”), as sensitivity to hurt feelings and not bearing grudges. And as aristocratic arrogance (everything that irritated her in her unloved son was explained by Shaporin’s petit-bourgeois blood) and an inborn democratism (“What does aristocratism have to do with this? It’s just that I, apparently, just like you, am not the daughter of a bitch! I just despise them”). And—as the ability to change and readjust her attitude toward an event, a person, a country.
Russia and Europe constantly outweigh each other on her internal scales. “There’s no place here for people with a free spirit, and we should make every effort to expatriate in the future.” The dream of emigration, the shaky hope in the Varangian (“let a German Schutzmann stand on every corner”), the constant glance over her shoulder at Europe as the image of a better, undistorted way of being—these are among the diary’s main themes. But then, during the “Thaw” when she’s already a very old woman (“My God, can it be that I’ll really never go abroad?”), Shaporina makes it to Geneva for two months, to visit the family of her adored brother, and immediately starts an argument about the fates of Russia: “For forty-two years already we’ve been fighting off everyone who hoped to take Russia with their bare hands, and we’ve grown stronger than ever.” “What’s the point of this great power talk?” they answer her. Then and there Shaporina also discovers with deep sadness that her history, her extreme (as people would say now) experience have no value and present no interest for her nearest and dearest. “At first I didn’t understand the reasons for their indifference, it seemed to me, toward Russia, toward everything I had lived through over this time. Sasha wouldn’t let them ask me questions about the blockade, the war.” She herself seems to feel a certain inappropriateness of her story at the table of the living: “I wouldn’t myself start talking about something that’s painful to touch on.”
4.
The defensive mechanisms established by life itself (by the habit of safety, the need for spiritual balance) prompt us to shy away from a certain kind of information: the kind that causes pain without being able to soothe it. This knowledge, with which there’s nothing to be done, is what Shalamov writes about in his Kolyma Tales: experience that is tormenting, useless, and corrupting in its fruitlessness. The reality Shaporina documents has a similar nature. What she describes is the experience of sinking slowly into death and posthumous existence in a world with dislocated conceptions and sagging logical connections. This is not Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago or Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved (that is, not an outright imitation of hell). Be it hell or Hades—still, the fact that its landscape recalls ours, and one can even make out there glimmers of concerts, dachas, and florists’ stands, explains the despair that comes with reading these diaries.
If you like, it’s as if they are incompatible with life; they’re not a text but something else: a rupture, a rift, a yawning abyss, a black hole. Or even a pit: a sated maw with threads, scraps of cloth, and fibers of flesh dangling from it. This pit lies before the reader in place of the text (of the text that could have arisen here if history and culture had been uninterrupted), like the wreaths of artificial flowers that mark the place where someone died in an accident along our roads.