Siege of Leningrad Revisited: Narrative, Image, Self

SIEGE OF LENINGRAD REVISITED: NARRATIVE, IMAGE, SELF Introduction Polina Barskova The siege of Leningrad, the longest-lasting military blockade in modern history, has never suffered from a dearth of written documentation. As early as September 1941, this tragedy drew the attention of journalists, historians, and poets, both in the USSR and the west. During the war, the most immediate purpose of this coverage was that of propaganda, to en courage Leningraders to persevere despite the loss of at least one million lives. After the siege ended in 1944, its narration acquired a somewhat peculiar character: often sensational and only partially informed in the west and euphemistically "neutralized" in the Soviet Union.1 Study of this topic was severely hampered as a consequence of "The Leningrad Affair" (1949-53); after a wave of severe purges, museums and archives dedi cated to collecting siege materials were shut down, thus disrupting any attempt at responsible scholarship. For the next four decades, until the time of perestroika, the siege engendered a mighty flow of descriptions. (A full bibliography of Soviet siege texts could easily number in the thousands.) Unfortunately, these accounts typically rehearsed variations on the themes of heroism and sto icism, with Blokadnaia kniga, in which the writers Daniil Granin and Ales' Adamovich used victims' and survivors' diary accounts to present a more objective interpretation of conditions during the siege, constituting the major and valuable exception.2 In this book, attention is focused not on the allegorical virtues of the "front-city" but rather on the price Lenin graders were forced to pay for their city's endurance. And though, from today's vantage point, Blokadnaia kniga might appear a somewhat com promised endeavor, given its inclusion of only stricdy censored versions of diaries and the didactic character of its editorial narrative, it marked an important first step toward open discussion of the siege ordeal. In the quarter century since the secrecy-loosening that began with perestroika and continued into the post-Soviet period, new attempts have been made to evaluate the events of the siege and bring its cultural heri tage to light. Several reasons for this revival of interest can be discerned. First and foremost, original primary sources finally became accessible to scholars and the general reading public, though thousands of siege dia ries in the numerous archival collections of Petersburg still await broad 1. In the west, the most comprehensive, if also controversial, account of the siege, is Harrison E. Salisbury, The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad (New York, 1969). Salisbury consulted only officially published Soviet sources in preparing this work. 2. Ales' Adamovich and Daniil Granin, Blokadnaia kniga (Moscow, 1979). Slavic Review 69, no. 2 (Summer 2010) 278 Slavic Review publication, at best reaching potential readers in disappointingly small print runs.3 The most important publication of such materials in Eng lish is Writing the Siege of Leningrad, edited by Cynthia Simmons and Nina Perlina, the first attempt to expose western audiences to the widely di verse range of perspectives in the besieged city.4 Other important recent publications include works by Nikita Lomagin, whose goal of publiciz ing declassified siege materials from the NKVD archives has met with a strong public resonance: naturally, the siege that emerges from the pages of these documents differs radically from the retouched formulations of official Soviet historiography. Lomagin's publications demonstrate mul tiple phenomena (for example, the intensification of black market and criminal activities; the mistrust and lack of dialogue between party organs of urban governance and the secret police; layers of dissidence in the city) that are crucial for our present understanding of how besieged Leningrad conceived its survival strategies.5 For the immediate purposes of the pres ent cluster, a key siege publication is the forthcoming first full edition of the siege writings of Lidiia Ginzburg, whose oeuvre has hitherto reached us only in fragmentary form.6 The article by Emily Van Buskirk in this clus ter aptly demonstrates how only full acquaintance with Ginzburg's corpus will allow us to appreciate the astonishing complexity of her writing. Another invaluable source of siege information is the witnessing pro vided by the survivors themselves. To date, the most thorough and pro ductive attempt to use the methodologies of oral history in this regard is that undertaken by a group of historians and sociologists at the European University, St. Petersburg, resulting in their remarkable anthology of in terviews Pamiat' o blokade.7 This project's treatment of historical memory forms an important complement to Lisa Kirschenbaum's recent mono graph The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995, for both texts fully expose the significant metamorphoses, if not the outright distortions, in troduced into the siege narrative by the workings of memory.8 Our cluster focuses on an equally slippery task addressed by many of the siege authors: to (re) present the siege, not in its aftermath, but in its immediacy, while, as Ginzburg puts it, " the signs were uncertain and con fused," in the time when, "before having had a chance to take shape, the 3. The most interesting recent publications of siege diaries include V. Koval'chuk, ed., Chelovek v blokade: Novye svidetel'stva (St. Petersburg, 2008) and V. Koval'chuk, ed., Dozhivem li my do tishiny: Zapiski iz blokadnogo Leningrada (St. Petersburg, 2009), as well as the periodic publications of siege materials in Trudy Gosudarstvennogo muzeia istorii Sankt-Peterburga. 4. Cynthia Simmons and Nina Perlina, eds., Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women's Diaries, Memoirs, and Documentary Prose (Pittsburgh, 2002). 5. Among Nikita A. Lomagin's publications, I would highlight Neizvestnaia blokada (St. Petersburg, 2002). 6. Van Buskirk is coeditor, with Andrei Zorin, of the forthcoming edition of Ginzburg's siege-era prose: Prokhodiashchie kharaktery (Zapiski blokadnogo cheloveka. Proza voennykh let) (Moscow, forthcoming). 7. M. V. Loskutova, ed., Pamiat' o blokade: Svidetel'stva ochevidtsev i istoricheskoe soznanie obshchestva. Materialy i issledovaniia (Moscow, 2006). 8. Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995: Myth, Memo ries, and Monuments (Cambridge, Eng., 2006). Introduction 279 painful associations became blurred."9 Representing the siege in its pres- entness became a challenging task for many narratives from the time. The translator Sofiia Ostrovskaia notes: "The dividing walls of time are crum bling. Time—now it is impossible to say anything about it, the only im pression being that the present lasts forever: it is as if we were born under siege, as if there has never been anything else, nor will there be."10 This impression of the uniquely isolated character of the siege time is echoed in the diary of Iakov Druskin, the only member of the OBERIU circle who survived the siege in Leningrad: "Before the war, time was sensed as an in- definitum; now there is primarily the sensation of eternity, infinitum. In the complete, almost catastrophic sensation of life, in fragility, in the unknow- ability of what will be tomorrow ... I have come to perceive the nature of eternity. Even outside time, I remain the same person. There are two times, utterly distinct, and both times are one and the same time, defined by me. That is, I have come to feel the fullness and fulfillment of the times, the eschatological nature of my noiu."u Both Ostrovskaia and Druskin ex press the sentiment that is central for the lines of inquiry of the present cluster: how can a historical and emotional self identify its position in the situation of the siege? How can the eschatological nature of the siege now be transformed into the material of depiction and interpretation?12 Beyond the newly gained access to siege sources, another factor en abling the revisiting of this topic was the appearance of new discursive paradigms engendering fresh contexts for historical knowledge. The most significant direction in this regard is the study of modern forms of geno cide and its narrative representation, which has found its fullest expres sion in American studies of the Holocaust. All three articles in this cluster draw upon the scholarly capital produced by this discussion in the form, for instance, of such parameters as the historicization of trauma, which has as its corollary the notion that the impossibility of representing histor ical disaster in its immediacy serves as a stimulus for creative supplemen tations. Our studies moreover treat the siege, not as an isolated historical episode, but in its connection to the whole of Soviet history, posing the key question of whether the experience of the siege was anomalous or, to the contrary, a quintessential symptom of a Soviet subjectivity that, as Irina Sandomirskaia argues, can be fittingly described in terms of alienation of the self and "political besiegement." The main task of this cluster is to reexamine forms and vectors of siege-era cultural production, from the quasi-diaristic narrative of Ginz- burg, who could never be certain her writing would reach a reader, to pro paganda postcards published in the besieged city to deliver the "proper" 9. Lidiya Ginzburg, Blockade Diary, trans. Alan Myers (London, 1995), 27. 10. Sofiia Ostrovskaia, "Blokadnye dnevniki," Russkoeproshloe, 2006, no. 10: 310.

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