THE SIEGE BODY BEYOND INVISIBILITY

The poet Vera Inber attests in her Siege diary that during the blockade her desire to write was equal to her desire for food (khochu pisat’ kak khochu est’) and that throughout the period, creative work was the “most reliable anesthetic” (verneishee boleutoliaiushchee sredstvo).^[1] But whose pain might be soothed by this activity: that of the artist, the object of depiction, or the consumer of this work of art? And what new representational practices met the need to conceptualize the particular Siege-forged corporeality of the city and its inhabitants? If the Siege victim’s shattered subjectivity was healed most effectively through various modes of creative intensification, how, specifically, did this rhetorical anesthetic function to relieve both the public and private pain of the Siege body?
I begin to answer these questions with the help of a paradigm suggested in the military memoir of Leningrad artist Vladimir Boriskovich. During the Siege, Boriskovich left to fight on the Leningrad front. After sustaining an eye injury, he returned to the city – first, to its hospitals. In his memoir, Boriskovich narrates his injury and the gradual return to creativity that followed:

“A blinding blow! As if my whole head was shattered by an explosion of red and white light. My consciousness becomes clearer only when I hear the bubbling sound of blood pouring onto the snow. I am so excited and frightened that I cannot concentrate on the pain as such. Later they operate on me, and several days after, I can see again. I am entranced by the desire to capture what I saw – images of Russian nature that were living in my consciousness while I was blind. That’s how my Landscapes of War came to be. Later, following the doctors’ advice, I began working on portraits of wounds. While drawing a portrait of a person with an open wound through which I could see pulsing brain, I could hardly overcome a certain unpleasant feeling. But eventually my professional habit came to the rescue, and not without creative interest I looked for specific expressivity in the unusual, disfigured faces marked by pain and suffering. Soon I was allowed to go outside and observe daily life in Leningrad. I no longer saw grey suffering faces or torn-apart buildings. The city’s wounds were healing.”^[2]

Boriskovich’s account suggests the use of several strategies to suppress pain in the process of depicting it: at first, while the trauma of nearly being blinded and the artist’s concomitant anxiety are paramount, he seems to altogether banish the suffering human subject from his works, creating in its place a series of mental landscapes – images “living in [his] consciousness” during this period of blindness. In these works, the artist reinterprets pain spatially, camouflaging it through an anthropomorphic shift: the features of the dismembered body are transposed onto the environment. Human casualties have “disappeared” from these post-battle landscapes, but we see burnt trees, buildings, and bombed trenches haunted by physically absent, but acutely imaginable, disfigured bodies. Paradoxically, the absence of human subjects renders the images that much more eerie, the pain portrayed more distressing^[3]: bodily presence might be experienced as a spectral transparency, as in a Gothic ghost text, whereas, gazing upon Boriskovich’s landscapes, the spectator projects himself onto a space that, lacking its own subjectivity, projects back at him its wounds, thus supplanting the missing agent of the invisible battle. This post factum evocation of the landscape allows the artist to suppress not only human agency but its historical framework as well: if not for the caption, just what transpired here, who rained destruction upon this space, would be unknown.

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Ill. 1. V. Boriskovich, After the Battle, 1942.

In provoking his audience to reconstruct the meaning of an absent event, Boriskovich activates the rhetorical mechanism of reification – the opposite of allegory’s major vehicle, personification. Eschewing the embodiment of the abstract idea, Boriskovich chooses to disembody, to replace the physical with abstraction. The need to suppress his “certain unpleasant feeling” leads the artist to express the pain otherwise, in a fashion interpretable according to the etymology of “allegory”: allos + agoreuein (in Greek: other + speak openly, speak at an assembly).^[4] Examining the set of allegorizing tropes that emerge in the representation of the Siege body, I will argue that these tropes are triggered by the constellation of revulsion then in force: disgust toward one’s own suffering body, disgust toward the body of the other, and ideological disgust, engendered by historical disaster, toward mimetic representation of the body.
With the connective tissue of language and representation torn, unable to hold together the Siege flesh mimetically, what rhetorical strategies, what forms of speaking otherwise (allegory/ inoskazanie), grew in its place?
The further Boriskovich’s own injury recedes into the past, the more immediate becomes his relationship with pain: eventually, seemingly a-personal landscapes turn into “portraits of wounds.” Now the pain is addressed directly, and this creative, “professional” contact with it alleviates the artist’s earlier “unpleasant feeling”: he no longer experiences the pain as such, occupied instead with a challenging task, the quest for new expressivity. This would-be direct gaze – in fact mediated with a twist of the professional lens – seems to work wonders: not only does the artist cease to feel disgust upon seeing others’ wounds, he stops noticing trauma altogether. Contemplating Leningrad in 1944, he optimistically perceives it as healing, although we know from an array of sources that the city was at this time still in desperate straits. Boriskovich’s first impulse – to deny pain discursively, to de-personify, to alienate the hurting body – might be labeled the most immediate strategy, both psychological and representative, of coping with suffering; if the body vanishes, in this view, it does not – cannot – suffer. The most consistent literary identification of this strategy as applied to the Siege belongs to Lidiia Ginzburg. In Blockade Diary, she observes that

“sensations were alien, as if they were being experienced by someone else altogether. …The alienation proceeded, the splitting of the conscious will from the body, as from a manifestation of the hostile world outside. …For months on end people – the greater part of the citizens – used to sleep without undressing. They lost sight of their body. It disappeared into an abyss…. Through immobility I gradually achieved the disappearance of the body… this blissful total alienation of the body.”^[5]

In her article on the Siege body, Lisa Kirschenbaum insists on the centrality of this strategy for the alienation of pain in Siege accounts.^[6] Though one cannot deny the importance of this psychological mechanism, the bodiless body was but one of many bodies produced by the Siege: not all citizens lost sight of their own and others’ corporeality. One of the main tasks of this study is to demonstrate this period’s diversity of body types and body/self relationships, as well as the complexity of body politics and the politics of bodily representation in besieged Leningrad: how did the bodies of the Siege see, depict, and react to one another?
We find detailed descriptions of tortured yet meticulous self-observation in numerous diaries of the period (e.g., Glebova, Vishnevskii, Ostroumova-Lebedeva).^[7] The writer Pavel Luknitskii, who spent the Siege both in the city and on its outskirts with the army, both conscientiously describes in his diary the details of his deteriorating health and gladly declares himself an “invisible man,” his body seemingly shifting in and out of focus:

“Strange world! Where there is electric light – in stairwells and corridors, on streetcars – it is blue and dim, imparting a deathly quality to faces. A few meters away from this light, the world seems populated by invisible beings: someone is moving, shuffling along listlessly, mumbling – but there are no people! And suddenly, right up against you, at the level of your chest, floats past a tiny, mysterious, whitish disc, floating as if on its own in the darkness. And you recognize the human being it signifies only by the labored breathing. The phosphorescent disc, the so-called “luminophor,” is sold everywhere now as a way of preventing two pedestrians from accidentally bumping into each other in the dark. I picked up one of these discs as well. Pinning it to my chest in front of the mirror for the first time, I suddenly imagined that I had no body. And I immediately started laughing: I’m just an invisible man!”^[8]

We can also trace the reactions of citizens to the disintegration and death of the other, to death in public. These reactions usually present a complex combination of horror, psychological numbness, poignant attention, guilt, and denial. The writer Leonid Panteleev is dismayed that the sight of another’s pain no longer hurts him, interpreting this change as a side effect of the Siege trauma, both physical and spiritual.

“All winter, the corpse of an old man lay at the corner of Zhukovskii Street. Practically everyone trudging the sidewalk at the time almost automatically stepped over that grey, crooked, frozen-stiff body. But I didn’t step over it; I went around. And somewhere deep in my soul there stirred pride, even boastfulness: you see, this means I’m still alive, I haven’t yet lost the characteristics of a human being. And suddenly one winter morning I realized with a bitterness in my heart that for several days already I had been stepping over the corpse. This means I no longer had the strength to take those several steps around. I was mentally fatigued; this disrespectful, sacrilegious attitude toward the human body no loner scared or hurt me.”^[9]

Death becomes ultimately transparent and “frozen,” dysfunctional as an emotional catalyst: so numbed are observers by their own pain that the sight of death induces hardly any response at all. This pervasive visibility which is yet stripped of any power to leave impressions or elicit response is described by many citizens.^[10] Ol’ga Berggol’ts describes in verse the aftermath of a burst water main:

The water flowed, roaring and stiffening,
And people in its path cowered against walls.
But one man, tired of waiting,
Started across on the crust of the ice.
Stubbornly he started across, but didn’t break through;
Rather, he fell mid-stride, knocked over by a wave.
He froze in the current, and thus he lay,
Here, on Liteinyi Prospect, visible to all, in the ice.
In the morning people cut a hole
Nearby, and in a long queue
They would come to his transparent grave of ice
to fetch water, until March.^[11]

The ballerina Vera Kostrovitskaia matter-of-factly describes a ghoulish and surreal scene in which the transparency of the Siege body is foregrounded with particular starkness:

“With his back to the post, a man sits on the snow, tall, wrapped in rags, over his shoulders a knapsack. He is all huddled up against the post. Apparently he was on his way to the Finland Station, got tired, and sat down. For two weeks while I was going back and forth to the hospital, he “sat”
1. without his knapsack
2. without his rags
3. in his underwear
4. naked
5. a skeleton with ripped-out entrails
They took him away in May.”^[12]

The corpses in these narratives exemplify the Siege habitualization of public death: their presence marks urban routes and routines as if bodies were street signs. Philippe Aries’s dichotomy between the visibility of pre-modern (“tamed”) death and the invisibility of modern death^[13] dissolves in the Siege-time alternation of corpse visibility vs. invisibility. And yet, despite this habitualization, the sheer pervasiveness of the corpse deeply penetrated the discourses of the time. Vera Inber, who was married to Leningrad surgeon general I. D. Strakhun and lived with him at the Erisman Hospital, would often describe dead bodies in her diary – first as seen in the morgue, and later all around her, inside the hospital and out:

“In the first room a completely naked male corpse lay on a stretcher. A skeleton would have been fatter. Here was something that didn’t even look as if it had ever been a living body with flesh and blood and muscles. On the abdomen, in a hollow, a note was pinned with the name of the deceased. I didn’t read it. In the next room several stretchers were arranged in a row. There were bodies of men and women. A quite inhuman thinness deprived them of age, and even of sex.”^[14]

Inber observes that starvation eradicates distinctions of age and gender, and even though this skeletal, bodiless body still “holds” its identity card, the observer is reluctant to read it, unable as she is to recognize this object as formerly human. The Siege body seems able to transcend the boundary between the animate and inanimate; the pain of starvation elides the difference. Kostrovitskaia writes:

“The relationship between people and the numerous old “Petersburg” sculptures has changed utterly; the latter now resemble living, thinking people. From the height of the Winter Palace, the Hermitage, the Rostral Columns, and the palaces on the Neva, hoarfrost-covered statues cast down their dignified gaze, silent witnesses and judges of events. In their stillness and constraint you sense the living and the human. They bear witness along with all the living.”^[15]

Paradoxically, according to this account, Leningrad statues appeared lifelike due to, rather than in spite of, their motionlessness: the animate/inanimate distinction was radically blurred, and this troubled zone of ambiguity should be understood as central to the allegorical problematization of the Siege body. Just as Boriskovich in his art transfers his pain onto the space of his memory, witnesses and victims of starvation projected their pain onto their environment. Though Leningrad observers sometimes lost sensitivity to the spectacle of death, in their accounts we find the idea of a peculiar “death bacterium”^[16]: fatality infects the inanimate objects and sites around them. Inber writes: “The bark is sliced off the oak trees, particularly the young ones, up to the height of a human adult. The stripped trees look like a human being without skin.”^[17] The Hermitage curator and artist Vera Miliutina adds: “In the Knight Hall, knights stand on their pedestals. Their armor is taken from them, they stand naked, covered with chamois-leather, headless, lifting their hands in despair.”^[18]
The knights of the Hermitage and the trees along the embankment of the Karpovka River, where Inber lived, are thus metaphorically equated with the corpses that covered the streets of Leningrad during the fatal winter of 1941-42: the acme of vulnerability in their nude – even flayed – state, these quasi-bodies figuratively multiply, as in some sinister kaleidoscope, the spectacle of Leningrad death. Moreover, they activate a process of prosopopeia or personification, but in a manner highly perverse. As J. Hillis Miller notes, prosopopeia typically “ascribes a face, a name, a voice to the absent, the inanimate or dead. It’s a cover-up, a compensation for death. It is a trope of mourning.”^[19] But the Siege’s discursive “death bacterium” strikes both people and inanimate objects: the latter acquire allegorical life only to have it snatched away, with the dead trees and dead knights of Leningrad not compensating for the disastrousness of Siege death, but reinforcing and multiplying it. With the ascription of missing limbs, skin, and faces – i.e., mortality – to inanimate objects, the idea of death becomes all the more palpable.
Still, one cannot but notice that in representations of the Siege, skeletal bodies are few, out of proportion to the grim reality of the more than one million victims. In fact, the discursive suppression of the skeletal body of the suffering, helpless citizen was not only a psychological necessity of the besieged city’s inhabitants themselves, but also coincided with the ideological demand of the historical moment. One of the most renowned Siege artists, Aleksandr Pakhomov, attests:

“Life came to a standstill. Particularly palpable were cold and hunger. I had a rather voluminous library of art books, many of which I hadn’t got around to examining previously, and so I decided to take this up. Lying under a pile of blankets, I carefully examined book after book. Having lain this way for a week or two, I felt the urgent need to do something. I started walking around the city, observing. I stopped in at the Erisman Hospital and found myself in the physiotherapy department, where I made some sketches of wounded soldiers. After that I began drawing in the morgue. I love the great classics of art, and I love the human body glorified therein. …At one time I was an avid student of plastic anatomy, and had only just, while lying in bed, been admiring reproductions of the works of the great masters that glorified the human form. And here in the morgue I saw a great many naked bodies, bodies of people who had died of hunger and from bombings and artillery fire. A sharp mental pain arose in me at the sight of the beautiful human body disfigured by starvation or explosives. I wasn’t trying at all to depict the horrors of war – I had no such intention – but everyone who saw my drawings agreed that they made a dreadful impression and that they should not be exhibited publicly.”^[20]

Pakhomov does not look for ways to suppress the pain of his model/object in his work; rather, his purpose is to channel through the creative process the pain he himself experiences upon observing mutilated corpses. He feels what the dead body no longer can, and seemingly unconsciously (ne otdavaia sebe v etom otcheta) foregrounds the contrast between the perfect, idealized body of the old masters’ atlases of anatomy and the disfigured (isterzannye) bodies of Siege victims. The pain is transmitted to the spectators/consumers of his sketches, who are repulsed by the graphic nature of these works. Importantly, we find evidence that some Siege artists practiced self-censorship in order to forestall the possible reaction of ideological disgust: “I had a great desire to record the appearance of the dystrophic [distrofik, i.e., chronically malnourished, starving], who at the time one saw constantly, but I didn’t want to work on this then; I wanted to make something that would keep people’s spirits up, including my own.”^[21]

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/barskova2.jpg>

Ill. 2. A. Pakhomov, Morgue Sketches, 1941-42.

We cannot know exactly which works Pakhomov studied during his brief Siege respite, but his subsequent sketches seem inspired most of all by Theodore Gericault’s infamous body-part still-lifes, of which Linda Nochlin writes: “The mood of these works shockingly combines the objectivity of science – the cool, clinical observation of the dissecting table – with the paroxysm of romantic melodrama…. [T]he absolute abjectness of these subjects [is highlighted] by their horizontal position: by laying them out in perspective, on a horizontal surface, Gericault consigns the mutilated heads to the realm of the object.”^[22] Similarly, in Pakhomov’s morgue sketches, instead of comprehensible subjects endowed with agency, participants in the Soviet war effort, we see dehumanized objects; not only the content but, crucially, the style of these works was unacceptable for the purposes of Soviet war propaganda.^[23]

ALLEGORICAL DISFIGURATIONS OF SIEGE PROPAGANDA

Only the stylistically correct body was allowed for display^[24]: for ideological reasons, the dystrophic, skeletal body was replaced in representation by certain body types – primarily body-ruin and the normalized heroic body – whose meaning was more easily controlled, hence more useful. Body-ruin emerged as a poster metaphor^[25]: one propaganda text induces the viewer to correlate destroyed buildings and “destroyed” citizens.
The poster subtitle reads:

“With their barbaric artillery strikes, Hitler’s thugs are destroying the cultural and artistic landmarks of the great Russian city of Leningrad and killing our women and children. The blood and wounds of Leningrad summon you, warrior: AVENGE US!
She lies on a Leningrad street,
Her dead mouth slightly open.
Seen from afar, she seems to be squinting,
And blood slowly trickles down her check.
[…]
Death to the Boche! No mercy for the enemy!
In the harsh labor of battle
We will smash the enemy still more mercilessly
For the suffering, the tears, the pain of Leningrad!”^[26]

Selivanov’s poster frames the bombing victim as a hybrid body: half-woman, half-historical landmark. This propaganda text carries out a double trope, personifying the city and reifying the person. The resulting hybrid only seems to be alive (“Seen from afar, she seems to be squinting”); its actual purpose is to represent death economically – localizing two affects in one body – and to call for revenge.

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Ill. 3. Poster by Nikolai Selivanov and Vissarion Saianov.

Thus did individual bodies acquire the allegorical outlines of the endangered city, the object of art, and the subject of history, recalling Walter Benjamin’s dictum that “in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica [the face of the nearly-dead] of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. …The greater the significance, the greater the subjection to death, because death digs most deeply the jagged line of demarcation between physical nature and significance.”^[27] The body of the Siege victim “deserves” inclusion in a poster only insofar as it is endowed with the significance of historical objectification. In the politics of Siege representation, the urge to document disaster competed with the “greed for fat” (of both discursive and literal varieties) diagnosed already by Viktor Shklovskii in his memoir of the “first” Siege of Petrograd (by General Nikolai Iudenich, 1919-1921).^[28] Not only were Leningraders frequently unwilling to see the skeletal body, they furthermore resisted revealing it to the “Big Land”. Propaganda focused on demonstrating to the Big Land mighty, heroic body of the defender of Leningrad, and not that of the martyr. This choice did not completely exclude the possibility of unpolished, less “full-bodied” representations – those aimed especially at inciting Soviet consumers of war propaganda to righteous anger (iarost’ blagorodnaia) – but the fact remains that Siege TASS window posters include troubled bodies, but no victims of famine, nothing like the skeletal bodies found in only recently-published sketches by Aleksandr Pakhomov, Mikhail Platunov, Gavriil Malysh, and Evgeniia Magarill.^[29]
The ideologically correct body of the inhabitant and defender of the besieged city typically resembles this image by Vladimir Serov (see Ill. 4).

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Ill. 4. V. Serov, A Girl Defending Her City. 1941-1944.

As chairman of the Leningrad section of the Artists’ Union, Serov expressed the official stance on Siege body imagery. The Siege diary of Tat’iana Glebova, a remarkable artist of the Leningrad avant-garde and favorite pupil of Siege starvation casualty Pavel Filonov, allows us to witness the process of negotiation, power struggle, and ultimate alienation of such artistic perspective as did not comply with the politically correct point of view:

“Serov rejected my poster, saying it’s very abstract. …Serov’s work is nothing but rubbish – his pieces have the whiff of the cheap diner. …Once again Serov rejected my poster, and ordered me to redo a card (the head). He rushes me, saying I should keep doing cards and forget about posters. Still, he doesn’t like how mine come out: “Your little designs are fine, but the cards need to be brighter.””^[30]

We can only guess why Serov rejected Glebova’s depictions of Siege pain guided by his own imaging of the Siege body. First of all that is of a capable warrior: the girl holds an axe useful both for fighting and construction, and is full-bodied and strong. She has nothing in common with the human “fragments” of Pakhomov’s morgue sketches; rather, Serov presents us with a narrative of consolation. Indeed, consolation is implicit in the fact that a narrative exists; whereas the horror of Pakhomov’s human “fragments” stems from their utter lack of identity, story and/or history: who were they? Why, how did they die? Crucially, their horrific unidentifiability recalls the incomprehension Panteleev describes in his diary regarding the onset of the hunger epidemic:

“It was October 1941. Three workers were brought in to the hospital. The physician on duty runs in and says: “I cannot identify the disease. All three are unconscious, have a weak pulse, weak breathing. We called the chief surgeon, who said he had no idea what was going on, and had no diagnosis for this condition.” All three were found in the street, in different parts of the city – and soon more and more people were found in such condition. And only later were they able to identify the diagnosis: alimentary dystrophy.”^[31]

Thus was the Leningrad famine at first read as a mysterious disease by physicians unable to construct a convincing, holistic diagnosis from fragmented symptoms. By contrast, Serov offers us a well-rounded narrative: we see working factories and a team of laborers carrying building material in the background, and we can imagine the future bomb-shelter. This composition is entirely comprehensible; it may seem inordinately optimistic, but there is nothing abstract (otvlechennyi) about it.
The ideological desire to see the normalized body of a Leningrader full of energy and ready to defend his/her city is most fully realized in the poster series “Aunt Dasha (Tetia Dasha) On Duty” by the artist N. Slyshchenko and Ol’ga Berggol’ts. The first poster in the sequence shows Aunt Dasha extinguishing incendiary bombs on the roof of her building. The subtitle reads “Be like Aunt Dasha – protect your roofs!” The second poster similarly urges citizens to follow Dasha’s example, in this case by donating jewelry and other valuables to the Defense Fund. Aunt Dasha’s ample figure and bogatyrsha/amazon-like behavior set the standard citizens were to follow in the transformation of Leningrad into a “front-city” where every citizen can fight and none are helpless victims of German aggression. Seeing Berggol’ts’s Aunt Dasha dispose of bombs and give up gold earrings, one was supposed to feel that life in the city was heroic, full of well-organized self-sacrifice, and still… cozy – like Dasha herself.

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Ill. 5. The poster «Aunt Dasha On Duty» by N. Slyshchenko and O. Berggol’ts (1941)

This double standard of ideological representation, replacing skeletal human fragments with wholesome warriors, finds poignant reflection in what is possibly the Siege-time Leningrader’s most shocking impression – that of the disparate body shapes on display in the besieged city’s crowds. A witness observes: “One sees contrasting types in the street: either pale, gray, swollen faces; or rosy gals, stout women with an air of health, about whom one wonders: who supports them – their lovers, their husbands?”^[32]
The disconcerting combination of contrasting types in the starving city understandably produced wildly disparate reactions. Some felt consoled and inspired by the sight of healthy female forms. Vsevolod Vishnevskii, a representative of Moscow’s literary-ideological Leningrad mission, remarks: “Once in a while one can see a neatly-dressed, rosy woman – what a pleasant reminder of the healthy life!”^[33] Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, the celebrated etcher of Mir iskusstva and a savvy survivor of the Soviet experience, exclaims with somewhat puzzled excitement: “Today I made a portrait of a Komsomol girl – Tosia, who sells bread in a bakery. She’s giving me 1 kg of black bread and 0.5 kg of white for the portrait. Tosia has a charming, cute face, light blonde hair, and very dark brown eyes whose outer corners reach sharply up toward her temples. Her fat, pudgy cheeks are bright red and glossy. One wonders how flowers of such blinding beauty can grow in our starving, besieged city?”^[34]
Ostroumova-Lebedeva’s uneasy savoring of this seemingly out-of-place “flower” of physical health is echoed in the following diary account by V. I. Vinokurov:

“The words “dystrophy” and “dystrophic” [distrofik] were previously unknown to the citizens of Leningrad, but now you hear them everywhere: in offices, in lines, on streetcars. These words, used both when relevant and not, are losing their original meaning and acquiring a new one. For example, a slow moving streetcar is no longer compared to a turtle, but to a dystrophic. Several years ago in order to insult somebody you’d call him a “kolkhoznik,” but now a new pejorative term has emerged – “dystrophic.””^[35]

While for some citizens the idea of dystrophy was insulting and unacceptable, others, on the contrary, felt disgusted by the spectacle of the well-fed. Not without reason, voluptuous forms were associated in the winter of 1941–1942 with the abuse of privilege and with crime: “How disgusting are these well-fed, white and buxom ration card women [talonshchitsy] in cafeterias and stores [whose job it is to] clip the ration cards of starving people, and who steal these same people’s bread and groceries.”^[36]
These diverse reactions present the modern reader with a somewhat confused, self-contradictory picture: what kind of body could be interpreted and depicted as acceptable in the besieged city? Which body was merely distanced as the body of the other? Which was rejected in disgust (including ideological disgust) as the body of the enemy? Eric Naiman describes the 1920s valorization of a particular body type, shaped by the conflicting contexts of War Communism food shortages and the controversial access to food under the New Economic Policy (NEP): “Under NEP the thin female body was not only fashionable; it was invested with ideological purity, while its antipode – the woman who could not be confused with a man – was not simply ‘old-fashioned’ but the Enemy.”^[37] I would argue that during the Siege of Leningrad, every body type was seen from one vantage point or another as the Enemy: the emaciated evoked disgust because they reminded the besieged of their own pain, while the fat evoked disgust because they belonged to the offensive other, who had access to desirable food. As noted for instance in Panteleev’s diary description of a bakery, a kind of superimposition of disgusts emerged: “Behind the shop-counters stand fat, sad ladies with emaciated faces. They’re fat because their white smocks are pulled over winter coats.”^[38] The diarist’s intonation registers disapproval of these phonily fat women: one guesses that the bread line is so depressing a site that mere figurations of the hypothetical powerful other with access to food elicit a complicated cluster of revulsion. There may even be at work here a competition of disgusts aimed at banishing one’s own emaciation, seen as just as unacceptable as one’s privileged neighbor’s corpulence; both these mimetic bodies, meanwhile, feel the pressure of the politically correct bodies of the Siege poster.

DISTURBING BOUNDARIES: ALLEGORICAL BODIES OF THE SIEGE IN CONTACT

Given these conflicting disgusts, what kind of body image could serve to both express and anesthetize Siege pain? And how could it coexist in the same real or discursive space with the other body types already mentioned? In what follows, I discuss texts that depict the interaction of “contrasting” body types, as well as of these bodies with “third parties” – observers who sometimes happened to be artists. The first example is a description from the diary of the artist Nikolai Byliev of a visit to a bathhouse. During the first Siege winter, the bathhouse constituted a rare, exotic pleasure, and one of the few sites (another being the hospital) where Siege flesh dared to reveal itself.

“In the gloomy, unlit lobby there are several people who have – like me – an air of disappointment. I open the door and see a subject [siuzhet] right out of Goya. Bony, angular women are washing. Their breasts hang down like empty little bags. I stand in the doorway in my felt boots, sheepskin coat and cap. Not one of them so much as looks in my direction. Next door, I find another room; it’s empty. I enter and take my clothes off. It’s been so long since I saw my own legs! So that’s how they are now! Hardly any muscle. They’re sticks. Suddenly – loud voices. The door flings open, and in barges a throng of hardy lasses in quilted jackets and ear-flap hats. Seeing me, they all burst out laughing. “What a baby chick! Sit, sit – we’ll wash you right up!” These are police women sent from the Land Beyond the Siege. They are the ones for whom this steam room has been prepared. They’re strong – the picture of health. What a striking contrast with what I’ve just seen on the other side of the wall. I look at their full legs, arms, torsos, breasts, as if at some sort of miracle, as if I’ve suddenly found myself in a Rubens painting come to life. But what is emaciation? Not merely physical weakness, but indifference, a stupor of the soul. I’m in no condition to evaluate, like an artist, the magnificent nudity that has suddenly appeared before me. It’s all the same to me. I leave.”^[39]

Though Byliev claims he cannot function as an artist because of his emaciation, he obviously can still see as one. His gaze conditioned by the “professional habit” mentioned by Boriskovich, he sees not bodies as such but as objects of art associated with specific aesthetic traditions, bodies as quotations from Goya’s uber-realistic Disasters of War and the allegorical delights of Rubens. Notably, these embodied citations enter into a relationship of “striking contrast” only in the mind of the artist, which functions as a sort of connective tissue. In reality, they do not meet, separated as they are by the wall between steam rooms, which symbolically doubles as the barrier of the Siege separating Leningrad from the Land Beyond: on one side, skeletal “horrors,” on the other, zaftig, healthy police women, and between them a wall, and an artist for whom this wall is porous and transparent. The emaciated women in the first room, too preoccupied with the rare and troubled joy of the bathhouse to concern themselves with the unlikely prospect of masculine voyeurism, pay no heed to the male artist; neither are the healthy women in the second room affronted by his presence. For the first group, the distinction of gender disappears altogether; for the second, Byliev is not a bearer of this distinction, but simply a “baby chick.” While the two female body types are mutually unseen, the artist can see and compare them, though he is unable or unwilling to “evaluate” what he sees in any terms other than those of art history. The fate and function of the Siege artist-mediator is to be invisible, lest he or she fail in the mediating role, eliciting the indignation of the observed and depicted, as Glebova registers in her diary:

“I was drawing people in line. A wretched old woman started demanding to know why I was drawing: what, was I drawing emaciated faces so I could send them to Hitler? A man defended me, saying that when the need strikes, an artist cannot keep from drawing. I showed her my sketches and pointed out that I happened to be focusing on the faces of the young. Then she started bitterly complaining that the young still looked all right, and then laid into me, saying it was clear I too must be well-fed, seeing as I could draw and was making money this way.”^[40]

In Byliev’s narrative, the Siege artist is corporeally unimportant; he is distilled into the role of the gaze and memory of art. According to this paradigm there can be no direct contact between the “contrasting” body types of the Siege.
The bathhouse episode of Ol’ga Berggol’ts’s autobiography Daytime Stars (Dnevnye zvezdy), meanwhile, presents a much more direct, provocative type of body contact:

“A peculiar sort of politeness reigned in the bathhouse, and there was something sickly about it. It was roughly the same politeness people use at funerals. Yes, this was dystrophic politeness. I took a look at the women. The dark, skin-wrapped bodies of the women – but no, not women; they had ceased to resemble women: their breasts had disappeared, their stomachs were hollowed out, and crimson and blue spots of scurvy crept along their skin. These were black or bluish-pale shadows, unwomanly, on disgustingly thin legs, bereft of all feminine charm, all feminine essence. [W]hat had become of humanity’s greatest delight, its mother, its lover? I repeat, dismemberment is nothing compared to these bony bodies: after all, the absence of arms does not make the Venus de Milo ugly. Whereas here, everything was in its place, and there was nothing [nichego ne bylo].
One should have been amazed that they dared bare this abused, emaciated, dark, spotted body in the light of day.
And suddenly in came a young woman. She was white, smooth, shimmering with golden peach fuzz. Her breasts were firm, round, almost erect, with shamelessly pink fuzz. But the main thing was this skin color right out of a Kustodiev painting – intolerable against the backdrop of these brown, blue, and spotted bodies. We wouldn’t have been more frightened if a skeleton had come into the steam room. Oh, how frightening she was! – frightening by virtue of her normal, picture-of-health, eternally feminine flesh. How could this have managed to survive? She was not merely more frightening than any of us. She was nauseating, repulsive, disgusting, with her breasts and thighs made for conception, with everything that was now lacking and that could not be, that was once natural but had become shameful, because it was impossible and forbidden.^[41] Crazed by this blasphemy, the women whispered behind her back: “healthy, rosy, fat!” A quiet hissing of disgust, contempt, indignation – “slut, slut, slut!” – was directed at her.
She shouldn’t have been here.
“She slept with some thieving cafeteria manager, she has probably stolen herself, she’s robbed us, robbed children.” And a frighteningly bony woman came up to her and gave her a light pat on the backside, saying jokingly:
“Hey, beauty, don’t come in here, we’ll eat you up.”^[42]
Unwilling to touch this silky, gleaming skin, the others squeamishly avoided the woman as if she were contagious, a leper.
Later there was another incident. I saw a little old woman splashing herself in a copper basin. Even considering the ugliness we presented, this old woman was an exceptional phenomenon, so little of the human did she possess. It was as if she had been deliberately invented [kak by narochno pridumannaia]. Her seemingly charred face comprised entirely visible bones, she was completely bald, and her very round, bulging belly was supported by spider-like legs, with her genitals, moreover, hanging below; she looked not at all like a human being, but a spider. And she was alive, clearly alive! She wasn’t even splashing herself, but rather using her inhuman little paws to dampen her bald skull. Our whole desecrated essence was concentrated in her. She sat in a kindly sunbeam, with a seven-colored radiance over her head; she sat like Death itself, like War itself.”^[43]

Obviously, Berggol’ts’s bathhouse scene admits no fully acceptable body; each is disgusting and shameful. But while the first two body types described – the “typically” emaciated body and the smooth, privileged one – strike us as realistic representations, the third is made quite differently. Juxtaposing such sharply divergent types, Berggol’ts intensifies the abnormality of each, recalling the spatio-temporal simultaneity of contrasting body types typical of vanitas representations, in which the ugliness of pitiful old women serves to highlight a young beauty’s sins of lust and light-mindedness; proximity results in mutual de-normalization.
The ugly old lady strikes Berggol’ts as a surreal, “as if deliberately invented” (kak by narochno pridumannaia) figure. What would be the purpose of such an invention? Despite this body’s arousal in others of all manner of “unpleasant feeling” (nepriiatnoe chuvstvo), the person inhabiting this body is the only “woman” enjoying herself in the Siege bathhouse. Unlike the others, she is not ashamed of herself and is free of self-disgust. This creature might remind us of the Kerch terracotta figurines of “senile pregnant hags” that inspired Bakhtin’s formulations on grotesque bodies: “It is pregnant death, a death that gives birth. There is nothing completed, nothing calm and stable in the bodies of these old hags. They combine a senile, decaying, and deformed flesh with the flesh of new life, conceived but as yet unformed. …Moreover, the old hags are laughing.”^[44] But there is nothing “pregnant” about Berrgol’ts’s old woman: though her belly is swollen, it’s not new life but the pain of starvation that fills her, and even if she does enjoy herself, her laughter will not be shared. After all, as literary scholar Boris Tomashevskii summed up the Leningrad Siege for pianist Mariia Iudina: “Laughter was removed” (Byl – sniat – smekh).^[45]
As a grotesque body, Berggol’ts’s figuration is sterile; the ugly old hag comes to possess an allegorical function akin to that of apocalyptic iconography.^[46] I suggest that this textual freedom becomes possible because this is not a mimetic body but an allegorical one. The allegorical body of the old woman is wrapped, as in Benjamin’s formulation, in layers of melancholic empowerment:

“[A]ll of the things which are used to signify derive, from the very fact of their pointing to something else, a power which makes them appear no longer commensurable with profane things, which raises them onto a higher plane…. Considered in allegorical terms, then, the profane world is both elevated and devalued. …For allegory is both: convention and expression; and both are inherently contradictory. …If the object becomes allegorical under the gaze of melancholy, if melancholy causes life to flow out of it and it remains behind dead, but eternally secure, then it is exposed to the allegorist, it is unconditionally in his power.”^[47]

This allegorical existence on some “other plane” renders the old woman inaccessible to the typical emotional mechanisms of the Siege – disgust, fear of being (mis)represented, fear of dying: she (or it?) cannot die, for she is not alive, at least not in the sense we apply to the other participants in this scene. This figure serves as the epitome of the Siege-era troubled body: “Our whole desecrated essence was concentrated in her. She sat in a kindly sunbeam, with a seven-colored radiance over her head; she sat like Death itself, like War itself.” Importantly, she is both the essence and the exception (iskliuchitel’noe iavlenie), and as such she is exempt from the disgust-centered and disgust-permeated paradigm of typical Siege body relations. Using the terminology of the eminent theoretician of allegory Angus Fletcher, we might say that Berggol’ts’s old woman is an agent of personified abstraction, hence free to enjoy the tepid sunbeam and the lukewarm water of the Siege. Even the verb that Berggol’ts uses for this figure’s self-splashing – “bliuzgat’sia” – expresses her threshold status in this text: Fasmer’s dictionary confirms the word’s obvious contextual kinship with “bryzgat’sia,” while Dal’ gives its meaning as “to engage in idle chatter” (pustoslovit’). The combined associations result in “idly splashing” or splashing in abstraction. For the purposes of representation, the acceptable body of the Siege has to differ from mimetic composition; it has to belong to an “other plane” – that of the imaginary.
Let us consider the dynamics of the old woman’s independence from the disgust she evokes in observers. Monstrous and unattainable, she transcends others’ aversion to her by transgressing traditional boundaries, situating herself between life and death, between the human and the (spider-like) bestial, between age and – with her pregnant appearance – youth. According to Julia Kristeva’s famous elaboration, it is “not the lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.”^[48] Berggol’ts’s allegorical monster may be abjected, but it eludes objectification, existing beyond the reach of observer revulsion, in a zone of constant shift and changing signification.
What might be the immediate reaction to the spectacle of Siege monstrosity? According to Berggol’ts’s account, the mask, the face of horror – “in her eyes, deep-set within her skull something was shining” – suppresses the power of speech in onlookers, reducing it to a “sobbing, humid whisper” of imcomprehension. Hence the victim of Siege violence herself becomes an agent of victimization, of sense-deprivation, much like the Medusa, who, in the words of philosopher Adriana Cavarero, “alludes to a human essence that, deformed in its very being, contemplates the unprecedented act of its own dehumanization.”^[49] The aphasia, the traumatic crisis of signification induced by such a monster, moreover, constitutes a rupture in the tissue of representation.^[50] To avert the crisis, the mechanism of rhetorical compensation must be activated: while registering the speech-arresting effect of the Siege monster on observers, Berggol’ts proceeds to allegorize the old woman, rendering her “Death itself, War itself.” The Siege monster thus held at bay by the allegorizing distance of exemption, and washed in an iridescent glow (“over the old woman’s bald, black little head danced a distinct seven-colored rainbow”), its powers are transmuted: it can symbolize, but it cannot arrest discourse, nor disrupt the gaze.
The shift of exemption can further be seen in another attempt to perform an acceptable representation of the Siege body – Tat’iana Glebova’s cycle In the Canteen (Leningrad Besieged). In February-March 1942, Glebova, her health in grave danger, was finally put in a special clinic (statsionar) where a fortunate few of the Leningrad intelligentsia were fed and thus saved from death by starvation. Glebova writes in her diary: “I’ve had a blissful life in the clinic. I’ve eaten, lain in bed, sketched my fantasies and read. For three weeks now I’ve been eating in the high calorie (usilennogo pitaniia) diet canteen and drawing dystrophics while they eat. I want to eat and I want to work in art.”^[51]

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/barskova6.jpg>

Ill. 6. Tat’iana Glebova, In the Canteen (Leningrad Besieged), 1942.

Glebova’s sketches indeed show dystrophics enjoying their scarce food, the most topical and realistic subject for that time and place, but they also show her fantasies – dreamy waitresses serving desirable food in abundance. Dystrophics and waitresses seem to share the same space, but upon closer examination, a stark distinction between the two kinds of bodies emerges. In particular, the waitresses are at once zaftig and sylphlike (transparent, dreamy). And this is precisely why they are not offensive. Like the allegorical ugly old woman in Berggol’ts’s narrative, these waitresses are not denizens of the immediate reality of the Siege but products of temporal fantasy and memory. They emerge in reaction to the shift that is, according to Benjamin, peculiar to the temporal dimension of allegory: “The mystical instant (Nu) becomes the now (Jetzt) of contemporary actuality.”^[52] Except that here the opposite occurs: contemporary actuality dissolves, producing a quasi-mystical coexistence of temporalities; a moment of Siege time coincides with the pre- or post-Siege dream-moment.
Siege-era accounts reveal numerous instances of Leningraders dreaming of a projected, post-blockade future.^[53] But Glebova belongs to another category: her fantasies hark to the past. The artist recounts: “The air-raid siren sounded almost all last night, with twenty-minute lulls, right up till morning. At night, in order to fall asleep, I lull myself with cozy stories about how someone and I (the way we are, modern people) are somewhere out in the boondocks traveling by… post carriage, in the time of Pushkin; we have dinner at an inn in front of a roaring fireplace in the company of people of that era, and it’s terribly interesting to examine them up close.”^[54] Escaping thus into the past, Glebova exempts, frees herself from the trauma of presence and presentness. She performs the same time travel in her “Canteen” series: the era of plenty enters the Siege as a phantasm that can never be fully embodied, becoming for Glebova a quasi-abstraction, alluring and unattainable. Following the logic of compensation, Glebova overcomes the lack of an acceptable Siege body by conjuring up images of bodies past, employing the sort of mechanism Sergei Oushakine describes thus: the “lack of a new creative symbolic production is to be filled by complex patterns of usage of the symbolic forms acquired during the previous stages of individual and societal development.”^[55]
Most of the body works analyzed in this study share a single purpose – to camouflage traumatic effect, to compensate for the observer’s inability to represent the Siege body without triggering a complex system of revulsion. Allegorical thinking becomes instrumental to the healing mechanisms of Siege representation, especially insofar as the trope of allegory has the power to blur the boundaries between animate and inanimate, self and other, now and then.
Different kinds of Siege allegorization, however, pursued radically varied purposes: while propaganda allegory strived to turn the Siege body into a weapon of psychological warfare, allegorical representations created for less official, private purposes were mostly aimed at soothing the pain of Siege trauma by providing escape from the wretched corporeality of the moment. In Boriskovich’s landscapes, the allegorical body of wounded space creates a presence on this site for missing maimed humanity. The allegorical body of the ugly old woman in Berrgol’ts’s bathhouse scene is de-individualized: it serves as the quintessential other by virtue of being every body, everybody’s war, disfigurement, and death. Without individuation, such a body feels neither shame nor pain; indeed, it can even enjoy the meager delights of the Siege-time bathhouse. The allegorical body of Glebova’s sketches is that of the phantasmatic past, distanced from the bodies of dystrophics both by time and authorial irony. The spectacle of voluptuous waitresses could be construed as inappropriate and even disgusting during the Siege, but the dream of these waitresses affords Glebova the freedom of time travel, and a palliative irony directed both at herself (also a dystrophic) and at the misplaced iconic representation of Stalinist abundance.
In order to be seen, then, the Siege body had to be morphed, as did Siege vision itself. The diverse devices of the representational metamorphoses involved need to be studied if we are to fully account for the paradoxical phenomenon that was the creative intensification catalyzed by the merciless season of the Siege of Leningrad.