Besieged Leningrad: Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster

BESIEGED LENINGRAD

Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster

POLINA BARSKOVA

NIU Press

DeKalb, IL

Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb 60115

© 2017 by Northern Illinois University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17     1 2 3 4 5

978-0-87580-772-0 (paper)

978-1-60909-230-6 (e-book)

Book and cover design by Yuni Dorr

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov

This ebook contains special characters that may be unreadable on some devices.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Transliteration and Translations

INTRODUCTION

1. WALKING THROUGH THE SIEGE

Routes, Routines, and the Paths of the Imagination

2. SPATIALIZED ALLEGORY

Speaking Dystrophy Otherwise

3. PARADOXES OF SIEGE VISION

Darkness, Blindness, and Knowledge

4. FRAMING THE SIEGE SUBLIME

Urban Spectacle and Cultural Memory

5. THE SPATIAL PRACTICE OF SIEGE READING

6. READING INTO THE SIEGE

Heterochronic Directions of Escapist Reading

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Sofia Ostrovskaia, a diarist with a rare gift for observation, exclaimed during the most bitter winter of the Leningrad siege (1941–1942): "Beautiful city. Miraculous city. Ville miraculeuse et luciferienne. Disfigured, wounded, leaking blood, impoverished and yet beautiful and yet in spite of everything full of its unique kind of pride—unique, estranged from everybody, the pride of unique loneliness and unsurpassed greatness! . . ."¹

It is strange to thank an entire city, especially this city of the past—yet nevertheless, this is to whom I owe my inspiration.

This book started during my visit to the exhibition The Siege Diary in the Museum of Urban History of Petersburg in 2005. There, while wandering among the images of besieged Leningrad, I asked myself, How was it possible that there existed a world of such magnitude and power? For me this historical and aesthetic representation of the Siege was so revelatory and incomprehensible . . . How did there exist this world of Siege culture? Why was it hidden from the inhabitants of the city for many long decades? And how were we supposed to understand it now, as it was coming to light at last?

This is when and why I began talking to Siege survivors and their heirs, began going to the archives, began seeking every kind of evidence and publication on this difficult topic. My understanding of Siege culture was shaped by my Petersburg interlocutors: Tatiana Pozdniakova, Nina Popova, Anna Mikhailova, Marina Bokarius, Sergei Iarov, Alla Lapidus, Alena Spitsyna, Valerii Dymshits, Vladimir Piankevich, Tatiana Voronina, and Nikita Lomagin. I want to thank everybody in St. Petersburg who assisted my Siege culture research.

This thinking came as an extension of and was shaped by my graduate project—a study of the culture of Leningrad in the 1920s and 1930s. This was influenced by my mentors at the University of California at Berkeley—Eric Naiman, Viktor Zhivov, Irina Paperno, Linda Williams, and Ann Nesbet, and my peers, Luba Golburt, Boris Maslov, Michael Kunichika, and Viktoria Somoff, among many others.

A project with Olga Matich, Mapping ‘Petersburg’/Petersburg, spurred my thinking on various ways to study the city, especially as a phenomenon of both culture and practice. Discussions with my collaborators on this project contributed significantly to how I saw writing about the city of one’s (often strange) dreams.

I have presented and taught this subject at numerous venues and events where input from my generous and fearless colleagues helped me to move from one stage of the project’s development to the next: Mark Lipovetsky, Kirill Kobrin, Ilya Kalinin, Sergey Glebov, Harriet Murav, Serguei Oushakine, Ilja Kukuj, Emily Van Buskirk, Stephanie Sandler, Ilya Kukulin, Evgeny Dobrenko, Alexis Peri, Jeffrey Hass, Mikhail Iampolski, Sergei Loznitsa, Jessica Gorter, Irina Sandomirskaja, Viktoria Schweitzer, Viktor Alferov, Liudmila Vlasova—this project could not have happened without your support.

Of all these events, it was the 2015 conference at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Narrating the Siege: The Blockade of Leningrad and its Transmedial Narratives, that showed me how fruitful discussion can be and how much still remains to be done in this field. I am grateful to my co-organizer, Riccardo Nicolosi, for all his help and patience. The proceedings of this conference have now been published: Blokadnye narrativy (Siege Narratives) (Moscow: NLO, 2017).

While this book was in the works, it inspired other scholarly (and not-so-scholarly) projects of mine: Diary by Sofia Ostrovskaia was also published by NLO (Moscow, 2013); an anthology of unofficial Siege poetry, Written in the Dark, was published by Ugly Duckling Presse (Brooklyn, 2016); a book of (non-)fiction about the Siege post-memory, Zhivye Kartiny (Living Pictures), was published by Ivan Limbakh Press (Petersburg, 2014). Previous versions of this material were published in Slavic Review, Ab Imperio, and Neprikosnovennyj Zapas. I am grateful to these publications for permitting me to expand on these articles.

I am endlessly grateful to Hampshire College and its faculty, students, administration, and staff for being ready to share their ideas about this project with me—in classrooms, conference rooms, and private conversations. Annual summer stipends allowed me to continue my work during all these years. Two people within the generous Five Colleges Academic Community extended their knowledge and gave me constant support—thank you, Jeff Wallen and Catherine Ciepiela.

I thank the Blavatnik Foundation for permitting me to work with their unique collection of Siege postcards.

I also want to thank my friends and family—Nonna Barskova, Freya Crawford, and Ostap Kin—for loving with me the terrific besieged city of Leningrad.

Transliteration and Translations

I use a simplified version to transliterate Cyrillic in the body of the text: for example, Olga Berggolts, Lydia Ginzburg, Viktor Shklovsky, Tatiana Glebova. However, in the notes and the bibliography, I adhere to the Library of Congress guidelines for transliteration. Quotations follow the preferences of the author.

All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.

INTRODUCTION

Today when artists try to depict Leningrad as it was during the Siege, it is precisely the color that doesn’t come across. It comes out wrong . . . I can’t quite put my finger on that color, that light. It was sickly, and powerful, and amazingly beautiful. Perhaps it came from within, from a different state of being, a different mode of perception.

—Iaroslav Nikolaev¹

I feel the breathing and language of the city.

—Konstantin Kordobovsky²

This book focuses on aesthetic responses to urban disaster. During the Siege of Leningrad, from September 1941 to January 1944, the city and its people, surrounded by the military forces of Nazi Germany, suffered 872 days of famine, cold, and darkness, and lost around 1,000,000 to hunger. The Siege experience and its representations are unique. Unlike victims of other twentieth-century political and social disasters such as the Soviet Gulag and the Nazi Holocaust, the inhabitants of Leningrad were for the most part neither displaced nor instantly robbed of their familiar urban environment. Their ties with the city were broken but not demolished; they were doomed to continued contact with Leningrad while it underwent gradual but grave changes. The stakes of my project became clear to me in July 2008, when I traveled to do archival research between St. Petersburg—formerly Leningrad, site of the Siege—and Oświęcim, Poland, site of the Auschwitz death camp. These travels helped to sharpen the overall inquiry of my study—to assess how people subjected to catastrophic events relate to their cultural and physical environment. What if the site of mass death is not covered with faceless barracks, not separated from the outside world by rows of barbed wire or fashioned from the rubble of adjacent villages that have been leveled for building material? What if it is not completely without history and meaning for its victims who, unlike those in Auschwitz, were not brought from afar and robbed of their identities and cultural roots? What if instead this site is, like Leningrad, a city of architectural grandeur, a palimpsest consisting of myriad levels of historical, cultural, and personal memory? The inhabitants of Leningrad lost virtually everything in the disaster except their place, and this place served them as an inexhaustible source of contemplation and writing. These multiple functions create a challenge that readers of Siege urban representations must confront. Through close readings, they have to untangle the many layers and agendas of these works, as they attempt to perceive representations of the shattered city as a site of unique complexity.

Enter the Siege Room: Challenging the Retrospective View

I open my eyes and I see nothing.

This is the first shocking sentence uttered by the protagonist of Alexander Sokurov’s film Russian Ark (2002), a whimsical exploration of what the director claims is the Petersburg period of Russian history. According to Sokurov, this period extends from Peter the Great’s founding of Petersburg in 1703 to the city’s horrific ordeal during the Nazi Siege.³

Curiously, in Russian Ark, the exploration of time is framed as an exploration of space. The film’s protagonists are a strange couple. The narrator is a cameraman of the contemporary world, and his partner is a French time traveler of the early nineteenth century.⁴ The space of the Hermitage Museum in which they dwell is saturated with meaning thanks to its complex, layered history as a building. Before us is the historical space of the Winter Palace, the residence of the Romanov dynasty during its three-hundred-year reign, and a symbolic space populated by the present-day imaginations of the characters who lived during the historical period.

The odd pair moves freely from one gallery to another, from one historical period to the next, chatting and quarreling about the meaning of Russian history—only the Siege room is not open to them. When they approach the room, their uneasiness about it turns to dread. The Russian time traveler insists on leaving immediately, exclaiming, Not this room! Anything but this room! But his foreign companion insists on entering. Through the dim light, inside they detect an old man who is constructing a coffin out of gilded picture frames. The old man is upset and scared, and though his speech is unclear and somewhat delirious, we grasp that he wants the intruders to leave him and his treasured coffin alone. He scares them off, uttering barely distinguishable curses and threats of cannibalism.

The audience cannot clearly see what is going on in Sokurov’s Siege room, which appears to be a claustrophobic and incomprehensible space. For the director, the gap that separates the Siege from those who perforce consider it retrospectively occasions a woeful crisis of historical understanding. The room itself is like a gilded coffin in the museum—a capsule of dread in a container of aestheticized history.

The present book addresses this sensation of impossibility. To the perspective portrayed in Sokurov’s film I juxtapose the hypothesis that the symbolic room of the Siege can be entered, and that the spatiality of the Siege can actually be comprehended by studying its representations. Representing the urban space was a central commitment—if not obsession—of the Siege writers. The task of the present book is to study this commitment: why did the inhabitants of besieged Leningrad write about it so devotedly, meticulously, and diversely? Analyzing the corpus of texts depicting the space of the besieged city, I show that historical trauma leads not only to silence—unrepresentability—but also to a creative quest for a changed discourse and the emergence of a new poetics.⁵ The book investigates the tropes and rhetorical strategies that appeared when the experience of the Siege space was translated into writing. What representational challenges were overcome, and how?

In this introduction, I present three spatial metaphors that allude to various ways of thinking about the Siege space today: the impenetrable room of horror in the memoryscape, the direct observation of the ever-morphing ruin, which both escapes and provokes description, and the ideal virtual archive of the Siege texts. If the latter existed, it would contain writings about the total Siege space, and thus enable us to fully comprehend the historical disaster. All these mirage-like metaphors reveal how problematic it is to access the environment of the besieged city retrospectively—limited by the distance of half a century.

The book’s introduction and epilogue discuss the retrospective inquiry of our contemporaries, who, in hope and frustration, interrogate the Siege spatiality from the twenty-first century. The six intervening chapters contain close readings of various depictions of the Siege space by its direct witnesses. My intention is to demonstrate differences in the agendas of those within and outside the Siege room, between those who seek understanding and solace for their own urgent historical pain and those who need to understand the pain of the historical Other, by connecting with the experience and language of direct witnesses.

In a two-minute scene Sokurov manages to reveal the essential ambivalence with which the Siege is perceived in public opinion today. The room of the Siege, a hidden room in the palace of the Bluebeard fairytale villain, simultaneously attracts and repels the browser of history. The film protagonists want to enter it, but they fear it at the same time. As Lisa Kirschenbaum points out in her study of the mythologies surrounding legacies of the Siege, the image of the blokadnik (as a besieged city inhabitant was called at the time; plural: blokadniki) is a powerful and ambiguous icon.⁶ Curiously, the author of the only existing exploration of Siege spatiality and its representations, art historian Grigory Kaganov, expresses an opinion similar to Sokurov’s concerning the singular and especially prohibitive image of the Siege space. In his chapter on the Siege urbanscape, Kaganov describes it as the experience of limitedness, in which the gaze cannot travel. The streets are blocked off. The houses are dead, the windows are dark, even the trees are devoid of life . . . There is no sky, no snow—there is only constraint.⁷ Kaganov is interested in the Siege representations as a subject of study, and focuses primarily on qualities of these works that remain inaccessible to those outside the tragic historical experience.

I suggest that the interpretations of both Sokurov and Kaganov superimpose the contemporary perspective onto the view within the Siege situation. Indeed, a dark enclosed space was part of the perception of the Siege spatiality as it took place—but only one of many perceptions. Its subjects perceived the Siege space not as lacking sense, but as producing multiple senses. Analyzing the representations of space by the inhabitants of the besieged city often reveals mutually contradicting aesthetic positions. Next to the negation of light and color we see an abundance of color. Simultaneously depicted as a site of human limitation and demise, the Siege space was featured as a space of openness, possibility, and knowledge, beauty and memory. These semantic variations might be perplexing to the contemporary interpreter of history, but I nevertheless maintain that this complexity, and not one but multiple perspectives, allow us to understand this aesthetic phenomenon.

The Siege Ruin as Waterfall and Palimpsest: The View from the Siege

As spaces with elusive meaning, ruins acquired special importance in the Siege representation, for both empirical and symbolic reasons. Indeed, for the entire duration of the Siege, the inhabitants of Leningrad were constantly confronted with the views of ruined buildings, which they experienced with all of their senses. They looked at the ruins, walked in and past them, touched them and disassembled them, and they returned to them to excavate their valuables.

But the ruin also became a metonymic shortcut—depicting and interpreting it allowed writers to express their many ideas and anxieties about the urbanscape as a whole. This relationship was as unstable as the environment itself, constantly changing, unpredictable, and difficult to grasp. The spectacle of ruin became an integral part of the city and an emblem of the sensorial connection with it, which engendered acute questions about the possibility of one’s assimilation into this radical urban makeover.

Close readings of two instances of Siege ruin-writing show the urgency and complexity of the blokadnik’s attention to his immediate environment and the meanings connected to the ruined spaces by observers.

Lydia Ginzburg, a brilliant scholar and writer, once an avid participant in the Russian Formalist circle, worked on her Siege notes for forty years without ever hoping for their full publication. Over time the manuscript itself acquired the dimensions of a ruin in which her memory dispersed into many loosely connected fragments. It is a demanding and fascinating text, both thematically and structurally, in which the topic of space representation plays an integral part:

Otter’s daily route passed by the houses that were bombed in different ways.⁸ Sometimes the split-open houses resembled the theatrical constructions of Meyerhold—well-arranged doors that led to nowhere—horrific and bizarre stage sets . . .

A person understands with some surprise that as he sits in his own home he is suspended in the air and other people below him are suspended in the same way. The houses are continuously being destroyed, the process of destruction persisting like a waterfall . . .

A new relationship with the houses emerged. [. . .] People began talking about the houses, thinking about the houses. [. . .] Sometimes they attempted to imagine the unimaginable and unbelievable in concrete terms. [. . .] By the fall the city had already begun to acquire new, unfamiliar features. [. . .] Amid the familiar accepted literary symbols these features made a strange and confusing impression. The signs went on to oscillate and confound their meanings.⁹

Within this episode, Ginzburg repeats the phrase—relationship to the houses changed—three times, thus urgently calling our attention to a distinctive quality of perception of the Siege spatiality: it was never static. The ruin depicted by Ginzburg is akin to the ruin theorized by Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle as an object and as a process, and thus it reflects the mutability of the destruction in the city and the mutability of its perception.¹⁰

Besieged Leningrad was an environment of constant, radical, and unpredictable change: this change could be sudden—for example, as a result of bombing—or gradual, as in the decay of the ruins left by the bombing. During the 872 days of the Siege the city was constantly transformed—most acutely during the first year. Witnesses called it the season of death (smertnaia pora): beginning in fall 1941, with the first Nazi air raids and the appearance of bomb shelters and blackouts, moving on to winter 1941–1942, with its corpse-ridden heaps of snow, and then, for survivors, into the difficult spring of 1942 with its forced cleaning of the streets, the emptiness of the urbanscape, and relocation into dead apartments.¹¹

In Siege writing, the ruin becomes a metaphor for the trauma of the city’s inhabitants, a wound that, because immediate healing was not possible, must at least be covered up. But it was unclear how words could put bandages on the site and relieve the urban pain; the Siege writers thus used aesthetics as a way to anesthetize the experience.

One Siege space observer who had ardent curiosity about the meaning of the ruin was the artist and diarist Vera Miliutina, today remembered mostly for her 1942 etchings of the bombed-out and desolate halls of the Hermitage Museum. In Miliutina’s Siege notes, we learn how she bravely navigated the ravaged and frozen streets of Leningrad, as well as the difficult pathways of the Siege art world, where one’s combined stylistic and ideological allegiance could often be the price of one’s bread ration—that is, of life itself. Like many of her artist peers who are featured in this study, Miliutina engaged in a double act of witnessing—as both an artist and a writer—describing not only the city she saw but also her mode of artistic depiction of the city. On her daily hours-long walk to her place of work, she pays embittered yet sharp attention to changes in the urbanscape:

I remember a horrifically destroyed house at the corner of Ligovsky Prospect and Raz’ezzhaia Street. And even though our eyes were accustomed to spectacles of dread, this ruin amazed us with the size of its gaping jaw: it screamed, shouted, agitated! It had been covered with a huge board of plywood, and on it was [Vladimir] Serov’s idealized poster (a woman with a dead child in her arms reproachfully looking into the distance). And weirdly enough, this poster made less of an impression on us than the terrible ruin that it covered, the real war victim. And one night, for some reason, this poster-wall suddenly disappeared from the uninhabited Ligovsky Prospect. And once again the mutilated house was revealed in cross-section, with its upended stories.¹²

What haunts Miliutina here is the orchestration of a poignant competition between two images of Siege destruction: the one she claims to be real—the physical ruin caused by the bombing—and its camouflaged double, shaped by the requirements of official Siege propaganda. Oddly, the sentimental yet brutal poster-fresco of the mourning mother calling for revenge is used to mask a site of destruction seemingly too horrific to be channeled into a monolithic propaganda message. According to Miliutina, even if the real ruin does its own work of agitation, it also overwhelms the observer with its awful scream. Whereas the idealized poster is movable and can disappear overnight, thus reexposing the site of destruction, the ruin continues to affect passersby with its aura of authentic (real) victimhood. Unlike the two-dimensional figures on the poster with their one-dimensional message of vengeance, it is the destroyed building that Miliutina perceives as disturbingly and suggestively anthropomorphic—expressing its own ineffable suffering with a soundless scream.

What kinds of representation, then, are competing in Miliutina’s writing? She exposes and proscribes the ideological cover in order to magnify the original. But this original is also problematic. Far from being a direct, neutral image, it is a product of Miliutina’s own version of reality—her writing. She is an artist who denies truth to propaganda and attributes authentic meaning to the wounded site beneath the propaganda veneer (elsewhere in her notes Miliutina condemns the poster’s artist, Vladimir Serov, chair of the Artists’ Union of besieged Leningrad, as a cynical servant of the regime). Daring to face and to register the site of destruction, Miliutina also registers her lack of an adequate artistic language of description that would feel authentic. As Paul Fussell observes in his seminal study of the poetry that emerged during the First World War, One of the cruxes of . . . war, of course, is the collision between events and the language available—or thought appropriate—to describe them.¹³ The historical quest for such a language by the Siege writers is the subject of my study.

In her urban scene, Miliutina thus touches on several topics that permeate Siege urban writing: the perceived anthropomorphism of the suffering city; the layered temporalities of the blokadnik’s contact with the urbanscape (the initial shock of traumatic change, subsequently reshaped into a routine by the Siege walker’s daily encounters with the site of destruction); and the perception of the city as a site of debate over representation, where different versions of reality, artifice, and authenticity compete with one another. Miliutina’s scene of the ruin has its own agenda: to make the real prevail over the fake, to become the voice of the city’s pain, to allow it to find its own expressive means.

In their ruin representations both Ginzburg and Miliutina show what complex constructs of perception and imagination these sites were for those who witnessed them, and how the writer struggles to find language adequate to reflect the unimaginable experience of being within, being a part of the ongoing destruction. Both look for the means to represent what seems to escape representation. To ask how the ruin screams is a metaphorical question. The ruin does not scream—the one who sees the ruin needs to scream but often cannot. Therefore, to produce this text of witness and pain the observer must activate new rhetorical devices. Depicting the ruin became a symbolic synonym for depicting the Siege urbanscape in the Siege now—for the Siege writers, its presentness and immediacy, marked by the lack of logical coherency and historical causality, sometimes challenged the possibilities of language itself. Following Lyotard’s formulation of the impossibility of representing historical horror as the differend, the unstable state and instance of language wherein something must be able to be put into phrases yet cannot be, the creative quest of this study is to show that because the Siege writers could not halt the urge to depict the ruin, they had to reinvent their language.

Speaking the Siege Pain Otherwise: Structure and Method

Bombing . . . Fires . . . The houses are aflame . . .

Our fate: hunger, and cold, and darkness

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

The living wander like phantoms,

And so many dead are carried away on sleds!

At the morgue they’re stacked like sticks of firewood.

I can’t describe this! My words are too weak!¹⁴

In these seemingly simple lines, the anonymous author expresses the quintessential problem of Siege representation: in spite of the overwhelming desire of witnesses to register their experience, it was just too much for words: too painful, too unfathomable, too urgent. The quest for this new know-how of Siege urban representation defines the method and structure of this book.

In the first three chapters we will look at how the quintessential aspects of the Siege inhabitant’s daily relationship with space—movement, corporeality, and visibility—were textualized. Overcoming these difficulties lies at the core of how witnesses write about them. All three chapters demonstrate the mechanism of rhetorical substitution, whereby direct representation of the Siege reality is mitigated by the workings of imagination and memory.

My task in chapter 1 is to show that when movement around the city turned into slow-motion torture with repetitive and dangerous routines, writers invoked their urban memories and imaginary memory-based routes and trajectories to enable their work of representation. The discussion in chapter 2 revolves around how looking at the body (one’s own or another’s) caused only shame and disgust, and how the propaganda images of normalized heroic bodies caused only anger and alienation. This caused inhabitants of the city to turn to the