COPIES: THE MIMETIC COMPONENT OF REMEMBERING

Introduction

Monika Greenleaf and Luba Golburt

A preoccupation with memory arises when fear of amnesia is in the air. It has often been observed that literature performs many of Russian cul­ ture's most crucial tasks of self-reflection, among them its long-standing examination of the autonomy, malleability, and specific forms of personal and national memory.1 Russia's repressive political history and censor­ ship, together with repeated state-sponsored surges of modernization, have made the threat of cultural amnesia or forced forgetting all the more concrete. While such a context has generated a conception of memory as a heroic act of consciousness, recent trends in memory studies have also looked to everyday life and material culture for ways to move be­ yond a heroic dissident narrative. Drawing on both approaches, the pres­ ent cluster of articles seeks to reanimate, in the Russian context, those aspects of memory that consciously or unreflectively represent the past precisely by repeating its patterns as well as the narrative commonplaces of its commemoration. When we consider the "mimetic" component of remembering, we are focusing on the repetitive cultural rituals, formal traditions, and bodily habits that cause past experience to be replicated in the present as "second nature"—not as heroic or transcendent acts of consciousness.2 The four papers in this cluster thus present copying, tra­ ditionally dismissed for its dead automatism, as an alternative, ubiquitous, and valuable mnemonic practice.

We would like to thank Polina Barskova, Anna Muza, Irina Paperno, Lynn Patyk, and Mark D. Steinberg for their expert suggestions and Oksana Bulgakowa for her inspiring workshops on "visuality and literacy" and "memory and film" in twentieth-century Russian culture, conducted under the auspices of Stanford's Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. 1. Gregory Freidin, "By the Walls of Church and State: On the Authority of Literature in Russia's Modern Tradition," Russian Review 52, no. 2 (April 1993): 149-65. 2. This approach aligns with new trends in art history and film studies that examine the non-narrative, "figural" persistence of the past. See, for example, Francis Haskell, History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven, 1993); and Stepha­ nie Sandler's recent reconsideration of the concept "fidelity" in the relation between the document and cinematic image in her Commemorating Pushkin: Russia's Myth of a National Poet (Stanford, 2004), 136-74. An alarming instance of the erasure of image-history is explored in Larisa Maliukova, ed., 90-e: Kino, kotorye my poteriali (Moscow, 2007). Most rel­ evantly for our topic of involuntary mimetic memory, see (literally!) Oksana Bulgakowa's analytical assemblage of culturally imprinted body language disseminated through film in her DVD, produced with Dietmar Hochmuth and Gregor Hochmuth, The Factory of Gestures: Body Language in Film (Berlin, 2008).

Slavic Review 68, no. 4 (Winter 2009) 744 Slavic Review

When, in Lev Tolstoi's fictional memoir Detstvo (Childhood, 1852), the boy copies his tutor's verse and produces a scripted and traitorous image of his mother in place of his own flow of unrepeatable details and unique feelings, the author is intent on contrasting two models of memory: one ritualistic and imitative, the other spontaneous, innate, and creative.3 Tolstoi's parable pits the Platonic conception of mimesis as pernicious imitation, copying, and estrangement from truth against the Aristotelian view of mimesis as the child's natural, inborn faculty for absorbing the world through bodily mimicry. We will give a brief elaboration of these crucial concepts here, before returning to our account of Russian litera­ ture's particular and national rehabilitation of "involuntary memory." Plato makes the idealistic and political argument against mimesis in a number of his works, most famously and dramatically in The Republic? Arguing that truth exists only in the form of pure ideas or essences, of which natural phenomena are already a secondary reflection, Plato logi­ cally denounces artistic imitation for its twice-removed distortion of ideal truth, insisting that it is akin to releasing ever-more-spurious copies-of- copies into the world, corrupting the language in which men think and communicate. Recognizing the Poet as the masterful creator of sensuous and emotionally gripping images, Plato dramatically ejects him precisely for his power to subvert the Republic's orientation toward the single truth. Still more important for our purposes, the Poet's images evoke a different nonpresent locus of value: not in the domain of Reason and Idea, but in the domain of personal and shared emotional memory. Walter Ong sees Plato's attack on the Poet as a quarrel between Greece's newly literate and older oral cultures. The modernizing elite, intently transferring its memo­ ries to the written record and the kind of logical cognition that literacy enables, attempts to outlaw the bodily, mimetic rehearsal of its memory stores by the "conquered" preliterate culture.5 Postcolonial theory logi­ cally extrapolates the initial quarrel between Word and Image, (universal) Reason and (recalcitrant) Memory to the history of political conquest and cultural domination, in which the subaltern is often granted the expres-

3. L. N. Tolstoi, Detstvo, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 90 tomakh (Moscow, 1928-58; hereafter PSS), 1:46. 4. The other relevant texts are Plato's Cratylus, Theatetus, and Sophist, and Aristotle's De Memoria et Reminiscentia and On Interpretation. Plato, Complete Works (Indianapolis,1997), 101-293, 971-1223; Aristotle, Categories, and De Interpretatione, trans. J. L. Ackrill (Oxford, 1963), 113-55; and Aristotle, De Memoria et Reminiscentia, in Richard Sorabji, Aristotle on Memory (London, 1972), 47-60. For a clear and brief discussion of the philosophical dis­ tinctions involved, see Paul Ricoeur, "Passe, memoire et oubli," in Martine Verlhac, ed., Histoire et Memoire (Grenoble, 1998), 35-40; and Ricoeur, "Mimesis and Representation," in Mario J. Valdes and Paul Ricoeur eds., A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination (New York, 1991), 137-55. Rene Girard has given us many far-reaching theorizations of mime­ sis: see "Innovation and Repetition," in Rene Girard, Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953-2005, ed. Robert Doran (Stanford, 2008), 230-45; and Girard, "From Mimetic Desire to the Monstrous Double," in Timothy Murray, ed., Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought (Ann Arbor, 1997), 87-111. 5. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London, 1982), 79-100. Introduction 745 sive domain of song, dance, exotic costume, and poetic memory precisely as an archaic, nostalgic reserve, distant from the rational and legal dis­ courses of power. Any subject fit for the modern world must symbolically sign the Descartian contract: 'Je pense, done je suis" (I think therefore I am)—where "suis," usually translated as "I am," also means "I follow." For Aristotle the mimetic capability plays a much more positive role in a system devoted to accurately perceiving and studying the reality of natural phenomena. Like Charles Darwin, Aristotle sees mimicry as the species-specific, human tool for absorbing empirical knowledge of the outside world.6 Making a fundamental distinction between epic (narra­ tive, past) poetry and dramatic (performed, present) poetry in his Poetics, Aristode assigns mimesis to the domain of drama and tragedy, specifying that theater's purpose is to arouse and bind the spectators' chaotic emo­ tions to the present performance but then provide a cathartic purge of those emotions by means of a strictly ordered developmental structure with a meaningful and chorally repeated resolution. The Poet is not pre­ emptively expelled but called upon to help citizens picture and expel their accumulated inner turbulence. Importantiy for later theoreticians of memory, Mary Carruthers writes, Aristotle insisted that "memorial phantasmata are both representations of things and 're-presentations' of experiences no longer present." In other words, "time is a dimension of all images in the memory." In fact, in De Memoria Aristotle betrays an ap­ prehensive attitude toward the potentially disordering power of the mem­ ory image, prescribing a procedure of conscious recollection in orderly mnemonic chains, and warning against "spontaneous recollection" as "too risky and irrational."7 One way to control the potentially dangerous importation of past time and emotional fluidity into the present was to tie memory to spatial im­ ages, to render it iconographically.8 Renaissance painting delivered tem­ poral phenomena to die spectator in a readable, clearly lit, geometri­ cally ordered iconographic display. Giordano Bruno's obscure memory images have been said to mark a post-Renaissance "crisis of mimesis" in that they subvert the Renaissance's strict rational and visual control over mimetic images, charging them with "magicized" and labile emotional affect.9 We see a parallel counterpoint in the eighteenth century's pre­ dilection for readable iconographic tableaux or sculptural compositions

6. Anthropologist Michael T. Taussig calls the mimetic faculty "an ineffable plastic­ ity in the face of the world's forms and forms of life," citing Walter Benjamin's still more lapidary definition: "the art of becoming other." Consequently, the mimetic comprises the power to re-present, but also to falsify and mask, the world. See Taussig's innovative Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York, 1993), 34-40. 7. Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cam­ bridge, Eng., 1990), 76, 79. 8. In her classic study, Frances Yates shows how the articulations of a visualizable space like a many-roomed house could be used to classify and store memories and re­ trieve them in an orderly, conscious sequence. See Frances Amelia Yates, The Art of Memory (London, 1992). 9. Itay Sapir, "Narrative, Memory, and the Crisis of Mimesis: The Case of Adam Elsheimer and Giordano Bruno," in Collegium. Studies across Disciplines in the Humanities and 746 Slavic Review that "copy" pagan/philosophical origins direcdy into eighteenth-century space—and J. G. Herder's early objection to this flattening of intervening temporal experience. In an early essay on "Selbst-Beschreibung," Herder argued for fearless exploration of the peculiar details and hidden layers of personal memory where "dark desires like kings lie sleeping."10 It has become a commonplace to regard voluntary and involuntary memory as in some essential and significant way mutually exclusive. Walter Benjamin elaborated the deepest explanation for this phenom­ enon.11 In 1932, as early Nazism gathered around him, he explored the relation between the eroding traditions of European memory culture and the type of memory that "flashes up at the moment of danger."12 Meditat­ ing on the "little pictures" that flash before the mind's eye at the moment before death, he proposes that only "what has not happened to the subject as an explicit and 'living experience' can become a component of the memoire involontaire." It is precisely the "fresh, brief" images of commodi- fied modern life that copy themselves into the modern unconscious and form its unique memory repository, in place of the old integrative prac­ tices of the storytelling culture.13 If Benjamin tries to theorize a modern liberation from narrative memory through the "new barbarism" of the purely mimetic fragment, Erich Auerbach's postwar Mimesis qualifies as one of the last great acts of storytelling, converting the vivid details of each text's mimetic style into developmental stages in its grand integration of European cultural memory.14 Turning to Russia, we find these interconnected patterns in the ap­ proach to memory intensified.15 Repeated impositions of modernizing rigor, from Peter the Great to perestroika, devalued Russian customs and traditions. It fell to literature to address the perennial Russian anxiety about merely imitating Europe, to remember forgotten Russian identities and restore their prestige. In this context, as early as the eighteenth cen­ tury, copying became identified with mindless adoption of foreign forms. The coincidence of the rise of Russian literature with the Romantic valo-

Social Sciences, Vol. 1, The Traveling Concept of Narrative, ed. Matti Hyvarinen, Arm Korhonen andjuri Mykkanen (Helsinki, 2006), 84-96. 10. See Helmut J. Schneider, "The Cold Eye: Herder's Critique of Enlightenment Visualism," in Wulf Koepke, ed.,Johann Gottfried Herder: Academic Disciplines and the Pursuit of Knowledge (Columbia, S.C., 1996), 53-60. 11. In its most famous Freudian version, the memory trace is simply that which has been erected to protect the psyche from reexperiencing the flow of traumatic experience; conscious memory substitutes for the truth of experience, which manifests itself in strange recurrences. 12. This formulation appeared in "From a Small Talk on Proust, Held on My 40th Birthday," in July 1932—the year Benjamin contemplated suicide. Walter Benjamin, Se­ lected Writings, Vol. 2, Pt. 2, 1931-1934, ed. Michael W.Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 613. 13. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1996-2003), 1:613; Benjamin, "On the Image of Proust" (1929), in Selected Writings, 2:237-47; Benjamin, "The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov," in Selected Writings, 3:143-66. 14. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (1953; reprint, Princeton, 2003). 15. This introduction's ambitious scope and selective coverage necessitate citing only sample primary texts and critical studies from an enormous field. Introduction 747 rization of self-expression and rebellion against universalizing narratives helps to explain the tendency to extol literary acts of memory as heroic acts of resistance. While thus molding the national subject, Russian writ­ ers were also responsible for articulating new psychological and narrative models of the self. Acute personal memory became a preeminent theme around which the Russian sense of self coalesced. Our cluster thus draws attention to another meaning of the copy, to the ways in which remember­ ing opened itself up as a repetitive and imitative, yet also contingent and adaptive, process of perception and creative embodiment. Aleksandr Pushkin established a number of lasting practices in Rus­ sian literature's negotiation of its right to engage in controversial acts of memory, including digression, Aesopian "poetics of mute juxtaposition," symbolic condensation, and the metahistorical presentation of history in Boris Godunov (1825) as fabricated, rumored, silenced, and not direcdy presentable in language. When all else failed, he wryly disguised his writ­ ing as mimicking Sir Walter Scott's and left diary traces for "a future Wal­ ter Scott" to interpret.16 Perhaps precisely because acts of memory were strictly policed, Mnemosyne presided in Pushkin's authorial mythology as poetry's creative matrix. The deferral of clear self-expression and histori­ cal narrative to the future enlisted future readers, writers, and critics as en- ablers of the writer's suppressed meanings. Critics would appropriate the Romantic heroism of memory for their own scholarly acts of "anamnesis"— summoning a delicate cultural world back from the dead. Yet Pushkin left one more instruction regarding memory that bears most directly on our volume's title. In his lyric poem "Chto v imeni tebe moem" (What's in my name for you, 1830), Pushkin instructed his feminine addressee to pro­ nounce his name aloud at any moment of silence and loss:17

Ho B aeHb nenajtH, B THUJHHC ripoH3HecH ero TOCKVH; Cica>KH: ecTb naMHTb 060 MHe, EcTb B MHpe cepaue, me >KHBy a . . .18 (On a day of sadness, in silence // Pronounce it with longing, // Say there is a memory of me, // There is in the world a heart where I live.) The moment of bodily utterance or summoning activates each of the pronouns from a dead and mute inscription into a living, resonant pres­ ence for the other. Classical nineteenth-century education, given a much

16. A. S.Pushkin, "Dnevniki, 18godekabrial824,"Polnoesobraniesochineniiv 10tomakh (Moscow, 1949; hereafter PSS), 8:57. Indeed, Pushkin's preoccupation with remembrance spans his entire career, from the precocious "Vospominaniia v Tsarskom Sele" (1814) to his late historical work, culminating, for example, in Kapitanskaia dochka (1836). 17. In the poem's famously ambiguous fulfillment of a lady's request to sign her au­ tograph album, Pushkin first dispersed the (as though forbidden) sounds of his name p—oo—sh—kin throughout the poem's first two stanzas. Pushkin's phonetic device is an excellent example of de Saussure's theory of the anagram, which Mikhail Gronas applies in another context. See Mikhail Gronas, Cognitive Poetics and Cultural Memory: Russian Liter­ ary Mnemonics (New York, 2009). This forthcoming book offers several ingenious methods and case studies in what its author has called a "mnemocentric" approach to Russian lit­ erature. We thank Mikhail Gronas for sharing his manuscript. 18. A. S. Pushkin, "Chto v imeni tebe moem," PSS, 3:163. 748 Slavic Review broader lease on life by Soviet rote memorization, ensured that precisely this, most automatic and state-mandated, paradigm of mimetic imprint­ ing would bind memories of Russian childhood and adolescence inextri­ cably to the literary traditions of the nation.19 Romantic poetics, with its narrative poems centered on exotic and silenced native girls, its Walter Scottian novels about border peoples and their obsolescing dialects converted into dances and songs for the im­ perial capital, and its fascination with authentic fragments rather than iconographic totalities, inaugurated the nineteenth century's preoccu­ pation with narratively unintegrated mimetic memory as the dangerous and potentially explosive underside of the successful civilizing (industri­ alizing, rational-scientific, administrative) process. This was particularly important for the late self-theorization of Germany and Russia as nations with past rituals, and individuals with memories and reflexes, that did not fit the integrative iconography of European history.20 Nikolai Gogol' of­ fers the most spectacular array of such mimetic vestiges, wherein Russian, Ukrainian, and European, Orthodox and Catholic actors display their au­ tomatisms on a flat-lit stage, all equally distant from any common explan­ atory narrative. It is also Gogol' who attached Russian anxiety about lack of originality, mere "copying" of European forms, and violation of the sa­ cred unity of the Orthodox word and icon, to the figure of the copy-clerk, the printing press, the iterative name, and typographic multiplication of signs and errors. Every Gogol' text features moments where the mimetic or phonetic gesture, reiterating, becomes larger than life, signaling un­ named forces the narrative is at a loss to subsume. With respect to mimetic

19. What the state could not control were the exact moments of silence or danger when this paradigm would be invoked. Thus, Evgeniia Ginzburg, in her memoir of the Stalinist labor-camp, Krutoi marshrut (Journey into the whirlwind, 1967-77), would make her internal recitation of memorized classical poetry the core of her humanistic resis­ tance to brutal interrogation, unwitnessed in the "Soviet night." This is a good example of the "mere" mimetic being elevated to a mnemonic and ethical paradigm. Evgeniia Ginzburg, Krutoi marshrut (Frankfurt am Main, 1967). One finds an even more complex and ambivalent bond with the Russian poetic tradition in Varlam Shalamov's grim gu­ lag tales, such as "Sherry-Brandy," "Afinskie nochi," "Vykhodnoi den'," "Pocherk," and "Sergei Esenin i vorovskoi mir." Varlam Shalamov, Sobranie sochinenii v 4 tomakh (Moscow, 1998). For a shrewd deconstruction of the device of internalized quotation, see Natasha Kolchevska, "The Art of Memory: Cultural Reverence as Political Critique in Evgeniia Ginzburg's Writing of the Gulag," in Beth Holmgren, ed., The Russian Memoir: History and Literature (Evanston, 2003), 145-66. Among other recent studies that examine the role of memoirs in reconnecting old and new myths and producing cultural commodities for a changing literary market, we would like to acknowledge Irina Paperno's forthcoming Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams (Ithaca, 2009). For reasons of space we can likewise only generally acknowledge the abundant new scholarship on the institu­ tionalized commemoration of national writers through ritual observance of anniversaries, commemorative sculpture, museums, and biographical plays and films. Closest to our con­ cerns with narrative versus figural memory, intertextual citation and parody, "the past as deferral," and the threatening copy or simulacrum is Renate Lachmann's magisterial study, Memory and Literature: Intertextuality in Russian Modernism, trans. Roy Sellars and Anthony Wall (Minneapolis, 1997), 1-24, 36-49, 194-242, 298-314. 20. P. la. Chaadaev, "Filosoficheskie pis'ma. Pis'mo pervoe," Polnoe sobranie sochinenii iizbrannyepis'ma (Moscow, 1991), 1:320-39. Introduction 749

"re-presentation," no predecessor would provide twentieth-century writ­ ers with such a fertile model for copying. That not only the fragile content of memory but also the manner of its retrieval and construction for others had a primary ethical import became a central postulate of Russian realism. In the period of the Great Reforms, accompanied by the liberalization of censorship and the publication of historical archives, writers seized a mandate to expose the hidden stories and stigmas of Russian reality, beginning with the institutions of serfdom, the Siberian penal colony, and the internal and familial scars of autocracy in such works as Aleksandr Herzen's Byloe i dumy (My past and thoughts, 1852-1868) and Fedor Dostoevskii's Zapiski it mertvogo doma (Memoirs from the house of the dead, 1854-61). Yet Russian realism was far more than an assertion of direct access to reality. On the contrary, no aspect of human perception, recollection, and verbal shaping escaped realism's rigorous conditional analysis. Thus in Memoirs from the House of the Dead, the narrator's efforts to induce the convicts to submit their hidden pasts to the common iconographic idiom of a confessional narrative fail. Bluntly speaking, his and their bodies are too different, physically inscribed with ontologically untranslatable experience.21 Thus, he falls short of deliver­ ing to postreform readers a common ground of guilt and ethical con­ sciousness on which their future coexistence could be built. War and Peace, begun three years later, must have been in some way a challenge to the landmark of Memoirs from the House of the Dead.22 Tolstoi aims to create a common ground between the traditional orders of Russian society by supplanting a discredited historical narrative with communica­ ble memories rooted in universal sentience. The most vivid scenes from the lives of Tolstoi's fictional characters plant themselves in the reader's memory by virtue of their strange freshness of physical and psychic obser­ vation, inducing us to "see" the fiction as the experiential memory that historical texts and fixed monuments have cloaked from us. Those scenes of the novel that emerge out of the confusion of war and the deaden­ ing repetitiveness of social forms precisely as unforgettable memories— indeed patterns for the reader's own memory formation—aspire to render and activate involuntary physical memory in their readers.23 Thus, among the many kinds of remembering and memory narration that are shown to be subject to generic and ideological shaping, conscious intentionality, and unconscious rewriting, such works as War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov assign an ontologically privileged role to the "flashback." This

21. Crucial aspects of the memoir's ontological ambiguity and labyrinthine eluding of memory are plumbed in Nancy Ruttenburg's new book, Dostoevsky's Democracy (Princ­ eton, 2008). 22. Tolstoi considered Memoirs from the House of the Dead the most truthful work of Russian literature yet written. Upon rereading the work in 1880, Tolstoi called it "the best book in all modern literature, including Pushkin" in a letter to N. N. Strakhov of 26 Sep­ tember 1880. Tolstoi, PSS, 63:24. 23. Tolstoi's Anna Karenina is generally acknowledged as the founding novel of the Russian modernist tradition, but from the specific perspective of experimentation with mimetic forms of memory, War and Peace (and Childhood) are its precursors. 750 Slavic Review past moment, lodged in our bodies and neurology, cannot be intention­ ally retrieved but is triggered to replicate itself in the present by a chance concatenation of stimuli.24 It thus gifts the recipient, whether Nikolai and Natasha flooded by strange forgotten details on a boring day in the nurs­ ery, or Dmitrii Karamazov with his "pound of nuts" flashback during his courtroom interrogation, with a feeling of the indestructible integrity of reality flowing under the appearance of separation, fragmentation, and mechanical predictability in modern time.25 It is worth pointing out that Russian realist authors anticipated and laid the formal and philosophical foundation for modernism's preoccupation with mimetic or synaesthetic memory. Thanks, perhaps, to the proximity of scientific, juridical, ethnographical, philosophical, and theological ar­ ticles in the thick journals where successive installments of Russian novels were published, novelists targeted "deterministic," universalizing scien­ tific theories of human change for overturning.26 The thick journals and their diverse readerships thus formed the new milieux de memoirewhere the Russian work of memory could be founded on a respect for the persistent difference of its mimetic recurrences.27 Indeed, they relied on the sub­ liminal power of readers' memory (as well as their forgetfulness) to pro­ duce a whole interconnected work out of the intermittence of the novel's installments in unpredictable dialogue with the ever-altering present.28 It is said that Henri Bergson became "the father of Russian Modern­ ism" when his treatises on "duration," vital being, the soul's perpetual

24. Several recent studies devoted to the mnemonic functions of the arts and literature have shown how accurately, for example, Marcel Proust's investigation of the "madeleine" flashback anticipated neuroscience's much later understanding of the biochemistry and biophysics of "physical memory." Russian realist descriptions also demonstrated prescient accuracy. See Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist (Boston, 2007), 75-95; Suzanne Nalbandan, Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience (New York, 2003); Christine Koch, The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach (Denver, 2004), 187-204. 25. Tolstoi, PSS, 10:275-77; F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 30 tomakh (Leningrad, 1976), 15:106-7. 26. Harriet Murav, Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky's Novels and thePoetics of Cultural Critique (Stanford, 1992), 34-39, 144-48. 27. The illuminating distinction between lieux and milieux de memoire was proposed by Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire," Representations, no. 26, Special issue on Memory and Counter-Memory (Spring 1989): 7-25; see also Pierre Nora, ed., Les Lieux de Memoire (Paris, 1984-1992). Nora associates modernity with the disap­ pearance of remembering communities (milieux de memoire) and the emergence of places (lieux) of memory to compensate for this absence. 28. Interest in the poetics and sociology of installment publication amid the sur­ rounding context of the thick journals has grown in recent years. See Gary Saul Morson, "Introductory Study: Dostoevsky's Great Experiment," in Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer's Di­ ary, Vol. 1, trans, and annotated by Kenneth A. Lantz (Evanston, 1994), 1-117. See also William M. Todd III, "Anna on the Installment Plan: Teaching Anna Karenina through the History of Its Serial Publication," in Liza Knapp and Amy Mandelker, eds., Approaches to Teaching Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (New York, 2003). This article is itself an installment from Todd's forthcoming book on serial publication in Russia 1860-1880. See also Deborah A. Martinsen, ed., Literary Journals in Imperial Russia (Cambridge, Eng., 1997); and Kate Hol­ land, "The Novel in the Age of Disintegration: Dostoevsky and the Problem of Genre after the Great Reforms" (forthcoming). Introduction 751

"creative evolution" in time, and the essential unity of "matter and mem­ ory," became Russian best sellers in 1909-1913.29 According to Bergson, all past experience was sensorily imprinted in the body's archive, but ac­ cess to it was blocked by the modern intellect's efficient habits of cogni­ tion and information-storage.30 It was the artist who stripped away con­ ventions of thought, "identification," and narrative and released the vital being of time. One consequence was that nineteenth-century works of art did not have to remain trapped in the concerns of the past. Tolstoi and Dostoevskii's (as well as Pushkin and Gogol"s) aesthetic worlds could break through the conventional narrative order of literary history and historical context. This liberation of Russia's "classics" from nineteenth- century agendas into the freely interacting "world of art" demonstrated in another way time's ability to creatively transform the past.31 The modernist destruction of old conventions, including categories of memory, and the particular effort of Russian modernist artists in the pre- and postrevolutionary years to erase the mimetic border between art and life, took countless forms, from (Nietzschean) zhiznetvorchestvo (life-creation), to Viacheslav Ivanov's theorization of historical events as a tragic mimetic spectacle.32 Many avant-garde artists allied themselves with the Utopian drive of the new political regime to "construct" a new Soviet body that would implement a newly mechanized futuristic society, to a significant degree by suppressing the old body and its memories. The flourishing avant-garde theater provided the ideal site for playing out this cathartic drama over memory. Thus Nikolai Evreinov directed The Storming of the Winter Palace in 1920 as a mass-spectacle that used all of Petrograd and its new citizens' bodies and replaced any memories of chaos with choreographed order.33 Vsevolod Meierkhol'd transformed

29. See Hilary L. Fink's original insight and detailed argument for Russian preexist­ ing affinities with Bergsonism in Bergson and Russian Modernism, 1900-1930 (Evanston, 1999), 3-41; as well as a thorough elaboration of the influence of these affinities in the successive stages of literary modernism, ending with an elucidation of Daniil Kharms's absurd as a tactic against Immanuel Kant and temporal causality. 30. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and William Scott Palmer (New York, 1988). 31. Although the avant-garde famously urged its members to toss Pushkin off the ship of modernity, Eugene Onegin became the exemplar of modernist world creation, fusion of "matter and memory," and even, to borrow James Joyce's expression, protean "entelechy": "But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I memory because under everchanging form?"James Joyce, Ulysses, ed, Hans Walter Gabler (New York, 1986), 156. Iurii Tynianov's article "Mni- myi Pushkin" developed the idea that twentieth-century readers were obliged to scrape away the false memory of Pushkin purveyed by the "greybeards" of the nineteenth century with their ethical agendas. Iurii Tynianov, Poetika. Istoriia literatury. Kino. (Moscow, 1977), 78-92. This was a patently Bergsonian injunction. See Alexandra Smith's new examina­ tion of such modernist practice in Montaging Pushkin: Pushkin and Visions of Modernity in Russian Txuentieth-Century Poetry (Amsterdam, 2006). 32. Zhiznetvorchestvo can be defined as the artistic organization of texts and acts in a fused poesis/pragmatics. See also Irina Paperno andjoan Delaney Grossman, eds., Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism (Stanford, 1994). V. I. Ivanov, "O sushchestve tragedii," Lik i lichiny Rossii: Estetika i literaturnaia teoriia (Moscow, 1995), 90-103. 33. Robert Leach, "Revolutionary Theatre 1917-1930," in Robert Leach and Victor Borovsky, eds., A History of Russian Theater (Cambridge, Eng., 1999), 304-5. 752 Slavic Review the stage's representational space into "performance-machines," actors' bodies into sites of efficient ("Taylorist") gesture and accelerated rhythm, and plays themselves into events of public "dispute" and consciousness- reformation.34 His radical revivals of the classics dramatized modern the­ ater's power both to transform memory beyond recognition and to make it insistendy present. In the struggle over state and individual rights to memory and com­ memoration, it was the modern fictional memoir produced by Russian artists in emigration that reappropriated Bergson's ideas of duration se­ creted indelibly in the body, in order to reassert the power of preternatu­ ral individual memory to "body forth" its world. Vladimir Nabokov's Dar (The gift, 1938), written in emigration during the era of Stalin's show tri­ als, explicidy exposed zhiznetvorchestvo as a narrow, infectious, and sui­ cidal form of mechanical imitation, used parody and irony to change the valence of imitation and repetition, and joyously performed the dynamic interfusion of Russian past and present in the young poet's psyche. Both Nabokov and Marina Tsvetaeva, in her cycle of autobiographical sketches and lyrical portraits of contemporaries, aimed to disrupt any coalescing public consensus, whether Soviet or diasporic, on how to read a text/the past for meaning.35 Meanwhile, socialist realism continued to sculpt the Russian classics into stamps for what Evgenii Dobrenko has called "the making of the Soviet writer and reader."36 Perhaps because Russia experienced and promoted the revolutionary destruction of the past in its most extreme form, we can observe two types of copying at work in Soviet postrevolutionary theoriza- tion of memory. Socialist realism harked back to the iconographic model­ ing of time through the close copying of a canonical set of realist icons, implying that their ideal, indeed mythical status was now disclosed for­ ever and not subject to temporality. Pushkin, Gogol', and Tolstoi served as Old Testament prefigurations of the new Soviet word. Meanwhile, Russian formalist drinkers of the 1920s viewed memory as generic, a storehouse of forms that related to each other in a spatialized, performative pres­ ent through repetition, parody, and inversion.37 The temporal essence of memory could find no place between these two representational poles. Each side of the Cold War divide disqualified the other's narration of

34. For a brief discussion of the incorporation of Frederick W. Taylor's time-and- motion studies, invented for the purpose of increasing efficiency in the workplace by at­ tending to bodily rhythm, into Meierkhol'd's biomechanics, see Robert Leach, Vsevolod Meyerhold (1989; reprint, Cambridge, Eng., 1993), 52-54. 35. Later, however, when he rematerialized as a postwar American author, Nabokov would make a concerted effort to graft his reading of the Russian literary legacy, as well as his heroic performance of Russian creative memory, onto the imbricated institutional systems of replication that American publishing and academia afforded. 36. Evgeny A. Dobrenko demonstrates the necessary correlation of the two in his im­ portant pair of studies: The Making of the State Writer: Social and Aesthetic Origins of Soviet Lit­ erary Culture (Stanford, 2001) and The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature (Stanford, 1997), both translated by Jesse M. Savage. 37. An influential text was Iurii Tynianov, "Dostoevskii i Gogol: K teorii parodii," Literaturnaia evoliutsiia: Izbrannye trudy (Moscow, 2002), 300-339. Introduction 753 human experience as ontologically tainted, machine-produced "copying" of Soviet or capitalist narrative mythemes, from which all living connec­ tion to the Russian classical legacy and its authentic forms of memory had been drained. In Nabokov's opinion, which he neady inscribed in a library copy of a catalogue of current Soviet publications, "there [was] no Soviet literature."38 The test case for mutually mandated amnesia would be the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Boris Pasternak's almost for­ bidden act of poetically reconstituted "living memory" in Doctor Zhivago (1956). The controversy around the award in both the Soviet Union and the west attested to the degree to which the novel failed to fulfill the cri­ teria for memory performance developed on either side of the amnesiac divide. Neither Tolstoian standards of authenticity and mythical recog- nizability, nor standards of preternatural modernist recall, were satisfied. It was, instead, an act of memory that incorporated its own damage and blurring.39 In that sense, it was perhaps the right work to begin the process of dismantling absolute lenses of memory during the period of the thaw and to initiate a new public conversation among professional historians and laymen alike about the partial and always historically conditioned nature of the retrospective memory act itself. On the other hand, the period of the thaw also featured such star­ tling restorations of "buried manuscripts" as the publication, after three decades of concealment, of Mikhail Bulgakov's polyphonic novel of the 1930s, Master and Margarita (1928-40, pub. 1966-67). Its arrival was hailed as a reaffirmation of its own heroic prophecy of supernatural transmission: "Manuscripts don't burn." Its status as a site of darkly comic resistance to the evenly lit utopia/surveillance system of Soviet aesthet­ ics, which "re-presented" a mimetically vibrant, alternative Soviet reality, language, and religious consciousness to the parched survivors of social­ ist realism, turned it into a site of new memorialization. Readers eagerly inscribed themselves as graffiti on the famous staircase wall leading up to the enchanted apartment and also by packing director Iurii Liubimov's daring, then "permitted dissident" production at his Taganka Theater.40 For elite readers, the furtive collecting and samizdat of the hermetically difficult poetry of the acmeist and futurist poets furnished another locus of restoration and specialized exegesis, as of sacred written texts miracu­ lously transported to effect a mutual "resurrection" of die present by the past, and the past by the present. Interestingly, it also recreated the typi­ cal Russian milieu de memoire, neither individual nor collective, neither purely literary nor purely oral, of the kruzhok (little circle). Each poem was part of a circle of communication among modernist poets, which could in turn be coaxed to full resonance only by the hermeneutic work of an elite

38. Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton, 1991), 134. 39. For a sensitive reading of the tension between sensory memory and narrative time that cannot be recuperated as a chronological development, see Susanna Witt, Creating Creation: Readings of Pasternak's Dohtor Zivago (Stockholm, 2000). 40. Anatoly Smeliansky, The Russian Theater after Stalin, trans. Patrick Miles (Cam­ bridge, Eng., 1999), 30-45, 90-110. See also John Bushnell, "A Popular Reading of Bul­ gakov: Explication des Graffiti," Slavic Review 47', no. 2 (Fall 1988): 502-11. 754 Slavic Review circle of readers. Thus a once-vital cultural institution of the past copied itself into the present, revising the way Soviet readers had been taught to submit their memories to the collective state narrative. It is perhaps not surprising that when, in the turbulent era of pere- stroika, the elites were reshuffled and hermetic exegesis by a kruzhok lost its raison d'etre, the official policy of glasnost, abetted by the sudden availability of "everything fit to print" and then the Internet, removed the aura of literary acts of memory as guardians of the mythical connec­ tion between the endangered past and the present. Pressed by the sur­ feit of print and other media, the value of the memory commodity fell dramatically even as archives opened, disgorging the names and files of the repressed in horrifying numbers, and oral historians rushed to draw out and record the memories of victims before it was too late. It became too late far too soon. The threat that looms over the Russian collective memory now, after glasnost itself has become a dated concept and new repressive policies in relation to historical information are taking shape, is therefore both familiar and distinctive. Familiar is the return of uniform, centrally mandated history curricula, raids on the offices of Memorial, the rehabilitation of Stalin as a national figure, and the reclassifying of previously accessible archives.41 Familiar, also, is the anxiety that Russia is copying the west, not least in its importation of global media. New is the surplus of information in print and on the Web, where autonomous cultural memory and analysis are losing their value and the encroaching corruption of memorial discourse goes unnoticed. Equally new are the openly apolitical preoccupations of the post-perestroika generation, even of its literary elite. Heroic acts of memory—assuming they are possible in an age that is paradoxically both skeptical and desensitized to memo­ rial pathos—would have to discover new venues and genres where the construction and perpetuation of collective memory can be revived as a meaningful task.42 It is in this context that the field of memory studies in Russian liter­ ary scholarship has been very productive of late precisely as a result of its analytical resistance to the heroism and aesthetic value of memory and its synthesis of a wide variety of approaches to memory developed in the west during the past few decades.43 Our thematic cluster likewise aims

41. Anatolii M. Khazanov, "Whom to Mourn and Whom to Forget? (Re) constructing Collective Memory in Contemporary Russia," Reckoning with the Past: Perpetrators, Accom­ plices and Victims in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Narratives and Politics, special issue of Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 9, nos. 2-3 (2008): 293-310. 42. Patrick H. Hutton identified this conundrum of finding an ontological basis for history under the conditions of modern indifference in History as an Art of Memory (Burl­ ington, Vt., 1993), xxv, 12. This deeply coherent study has shaped our thinking from the outset, while Kerwin Lee Klein's intensely skeptical article has alerted us to the multiple pitfalls of engaging in what he terms "the memory industry." See Kerwin Lee Klein, "On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse," Representations, no. 69, Special Issue on Grounds for Remembering (Winter 2000): 127-50. 43. Some of the most fruitful investigations of Russian collective memory have come from historians and have focused on the multiple legacies of the Soviet regime, the gulag, World War II, and the siege of Leningrad. For some striking examples, see Veronique Introduction 755 for synthesis. Certain common threads weave together the articles' vividly different topics and styles of analysis. We direct our attention to the unre- flective, repetitive motions of memory, even though we remain sensitive to the insights of the heroic memory discourse. While drawing on the insights gained from the types of international memory studies that have crystallized in other fields (history, philosophy of history, anthropology, sociology, trauma, and postcolonial studies), the authors included here find that some of the deepest theoretical probings into the nature and function of such involuntary memory are conducted in the space of litera­ ture. Thus, although we are interested in the nonliterary agents, sources, and audiences of memory discourse, here we work primarily on texts. And even as we draw on different theories and approaches, we pay special at­ tention to those that emerge from our authors' textual practice. In her article "Remembering 'The Terrorism': Sergei Stepniak- Kravchinskii's Underground Russia," Lynn Patyk compellingly shows how Russian terrorism, which conceived of itself as a philosophical and physi­ cal reincarnation of the French revolutionary movement, linked its scat­ tered performances of modern violence to specifically Russian icons and rituals of religious or Romantic-aristocratic self-sacrifice from the past. By activating spectators' and readers' deepest involuntary memories and recognitions of "likeness," Russian terrorism succeeded in grafting the shockingly new onto a mimetic ritual that unified actors and audience, against the state's monopoly on historical spectacle, in an underlying Russian temporality that "flashed" its existence in intermittent acts and sympathetic acts of interpretation. Drawing on Pierre Nora's influential theories, Patyk suggests that Underground Russia's re-presentation of old lieux de memoire enabled new milieux de memoire, extending as far as Eu­ rope, to coalesce.

Garros, Natasha Korenevskaya, and Thomas Lahusen, eds., Intimacy and Terror (New York, 1995); Irina Sherbakova, "The Gulag in Memory," in Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, eds., The Oral History Reader (New York, 1998), 235- 45; Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, Mass., 2006); and a catalogue of a Boston University exhibit: Territories of Terror: Mythologies and Memories of the Gulag in Contemporary Russian-American Art, exhibition and essay by Svetlana Boym (Boston, 2006). We found the greatest resonance with our theoretical nexus of memory and mimesis in Thomas Lahusen's poignant biographical deconstruction, How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin's Russia (Ithaca, 1997). Lahusen shows how the writing of the only allowable socialist realist autobiography had created an exemplary Soviet man, Vasilii Azhaev, by methodically erasing every trace of the life he had lived, or even a conceptual language in which his life could be thought. Lahusen's book thus questions the dichotomy of the heroic and the nonheroic, memory as consciousness and memory as repetitive habit, suggesting that totalitarianism is a mnemonic system that breaks the bond between the body and its "own" experience, much the way a virus commandeers a cell's genetic material to replicate only itself. On the siege of Leningrad, see Nina Perlina and Cynthia Simmons, eds., Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women's Diaries, Memoirs, and Documentary Prose (Pittsburgh, 2002); Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad: Myth, Memories, and Monuments (Cambridge, Eng., 2006). Polina Barskova has recently presented some fascinating findings on the artists who stayed behind in Leningrad and provided the aesthetic modeling of the blockade, the terrible and sublime mnemonic images necessary for numbed sameness to locate itself temporally and spatially. 756 Slavic Review

Revolution, followed by the so-called restoration of the past, induces a sense of cyclic vertigo. In Luba Golburt's article, "Catherine's Retinue: Old Age, Fashion, and Historicism in the Nineteenth Century," nineteenth- century writers from Pushkin (with his Ur-text The Queen of Spades) to Herzen and Ivan Turgenev, dwell on the human fossils of the previous era whose bodies and habits amount to machines for its ritualistic repetition. An unreflective bearer of temporal markers, the ancient body precipitates flashbacks and an essential erasure of the boundary between the past and present in its onlookers, resulting in two forms of inability to "move for­ ward": obsession and parody. Both of these lead to plot-involution and/or entrapment in a magic space of replicating images, which often take the form of involuntary flashbacks to literary prototypes. If Golburt shows how the repetitive starukhi and their entourages of obsolete objects can serve as sites of narrative arrest and surreal regres­ sion in realist texts, Sara Pankenier's article, "The Birth of Memory and the Memory of Birth: Daniil Kharms and Lev Tolstoi on Infantile Amne­ sia," directs our attention to an equally surreal site for the exploration of memory, the first-person autobiographical narrative of an infant. In each author's case, mimetic repetition on the bodily and textual levels plays a marked role. Pankenier suggests that each infant's body, far from being a tabula rasa, quickly becomes colonized by a powerful predecessor copying himself into the world through it: in Tolstoi's case, through an existen- tially anguished enactment of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's texts; in Kharms's case with every trick of parodistic, mechanical, and absurd resistance to "organic" continuity. Thus, one might speculate, the erased spirit of the avant-garde reproduced itself as de-psychologized technique, absurd rupture constantly generating unsettled consciousness—and where? In children's literature, under the very nose of socialism's Utopia. In Monika Greenleaf's article, "Laughter, Music, and Memory at the Moment of Danger: Tsvetaeva's Mother and Music in Light of Modern­ ist Memory Practices," Marina Tsvetaeva protests against another kind of erasure. During the 1930s, when Soviet writers disappeared one by one into the Lubianka, the gulags, translation programs, children's literature, and silence, exiled writers found themselves in European capitals fighting over the keys to legitimate memory within the emigration's fractured mi­ lieux de memoire. Greenleaf shows how Tsvetaeva uses Bergson's famous techniques of bodily and musical memory retrieval and comic stripping of dead excrescence to frame her own childhood memoir, Mother and Music, written for paid oral performance, as a collective mimetic rite for her generation. It raises the question repeated throughout this cluster in perhaps its starkest form: what is the status of the past that repeats itself involuntarily through our bodies and the very configuration of our imagi­ nations: living Being or copying machine? Is the poet's act of memory socially useful or dangerous and "mad"? Mimesis according to Aristotle or Plato? Each contributor to this cluster is intensely aware of the historical mo­ ment and the surrounding discourses of historical change and historical Introduction 757 narrative, yet each has chosen a literary mode in which to investigate the relation of past to present, and by doing so, to act on the present. Repeat­ edly we see Aristotle's original definition oipoesis as the mimetic act that actually makes and remakes reality, manifest itself in the Russian choice of literature as a uniquely powerful sphere of action.