1/2009 Narrating the Multiple Self: New Biographies for the Empire

Дистрофики, толстушки, аллегории: к проблеме репрезентации

Полина Барскова

SUMMARY:

Статья изучает проблему репрезентации блокадного тела, используя как дискурсивные, так и визуальные тексты, возникшие в Ленинграде в период 1941–1944 гг. Чем объясняются радикальное разнообразие и противоречия в изображении блокадного тела? Каковы стилистические и риторические приёмы, используемые для его описания и воссоздания? Автор предлагает рассматривать тропологию аллегории как терапевтическую рамку, позволяющую очевидцам, оказавшимся в контакте с блокадным телом (как своим, так и чужим), рассматривать его вне посттравматической реакции отвращения, которое является одной из центральных эмоций, пронизывающих дискурс блокадной телесности.

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1.Vera Inber. Pochti tri goda: Leningradskii dnevnik. Moscow, 1968. Pp. 69, 177.↩

2.Vladimir Boriskovich. Iz dnevnika // I. A. Brodskii (Ed.). Khudozhniki goroda-fronta. Vospominaniia i dnevniki leningradskikh khudozhnikov. Leningrad, 1973. Pp. 387-388. For an excellent discussion of the genre of traumatic landscape, see Ulrich Baer. Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma. Cambridge, MA, 2002.↩

3.Berggol’ts recounts in a letter the disturbing landscape she witnessed during one of her forest walks: “Nature was very scarred, very abused by the war, and cannot for the life of it forget what has happened to it, although it’s trying. [T]he hardest-hit places are those where skirmishes took place – most horrifying of all are the bandages, a multitude of furiously white […] bandages now winding along the ground, now hanging and streaming in the wind from the charred, rust-colored branches of young pines.” One is struck by the anthropomorphic organization of this scene, with wounded trees “bandaged” after battle. Оl’ga Berggol’ts. P’esy i stsenarii. Leningrad, 1988. P. 562.↩

4.I found useful Marina Warner’s rich and multifaceted discussion of gendered personification in art and allegory in Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form. New York, 1985. Another important source for this study was James J. Paxson. The Poetics of Personification. Cambridge, 1994.↩

5.Lidiya Ginzburg. Blockade Diary. London, 1995. Pp. 9, 10, 101.↩

6.Lisa Kirschenbaum. “The Alienated Body”: Gender, Identity and the Memory of the Siege of Leningrad // Nancy M. Wingfield and Maria Bucur (Eds.). Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe. Bloomington, 2006. Pp. 221-234.↩

7.Consider, for example, the precision with which Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva describes her Siege weight loss and changing body image: “Stages of my feelings regarding my weight loss: Yesterday I experienced the first signs of emaciation. When I lost my first 30 pounds, I even enjoyed it, since I felt lighter. But now I just feel emaciated.” Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva. Pis’ma // Boris Suris (Ed.). Bol’she chem vospominan’ia: pis’ma leningradskikh khudozhnikov, 1941-1945. St. Petersburg, 1993. P. 40. Vishnevskii engages in similarly detailed physical self-description; see Vsevolod Vishnevskii. Leningrad: dnevniki voennykh let. Moscow, 2002. Vol. 1. Pp. 28, 32, 34, 59.↩

8.Pavel Luknitskii. Skvoz’ vsiu blokadu. Leningrad, 1988. P. 149.↩

9.Leonid Panteleev. V osazhdennom gorode // Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh. Leningrad, 1972. Vol. 3. P. 355. Perhaps the most visually immediate example of the “habitualization” of the spectacle of death comes in footage included by Sergei Loznitsa in his film Blokada (2006) of pedestrians seemingly ignoring a corpse lying at the very center of the city, in the middle of Nevskii Prospect by the Anichkov Bridge.↩

10.E.g., Mikhail Platunov’s Za khleb (1942), Aleksandr Nikol’skii’s Podol’skaia ulitsa (1942), Gavriil Malysh’s Blokada (1942), etc.↩

11.Ol’ga Berggol’ts. Tvoi put’ // Stikhi i poemy. Leningrad, 1979. P. 329.↩

12.Vera Kostrovitskaia. Diary // Cynthia Simmons and Nina Perlina (Eds.). Writing the Siege of Leningrad. Pittsburgh, 2002. P. 51.↩

13.Philippe Aries. The Hour of Our Death. New York, 1981. Pp. 571-575.↩

14.Inber. Pochti tri goda. P. 44.↩

15.Vera Kostrovitskaia’s diary is quoted in L. S. Georgievskaia, A. K. Bonitenko. “Postavim pamiatnik v samom tsentre goroda leningradskoi zhenshchine…” // Andrei Dzeniskevich (Eds.). Zhenshchina i voina: o roli zhenshchin v oborone Leningrada, 1941-1944 gg. Sbornik statei. St. Petersburg, 2006. P. 292.↩

16.Hermitage curator Mariia Shcherbacheva recalls: “I felt as though ‘microbes of death’ [mikroby smerti] were getting inside me, poisoning my consciousness. I dropped everything and left the bomb shelter.” Nina N. Papernaia (Ed.). Podvig veka. Leningrad, 1969. P. 39.↩

17.Inber. Pochti tri goda. P. 74.↩

18.Quoted in Papernaia (Ed.). Podvig veka. P. 66.↩

19.J. Hillis Miller. Versions of Pygmalion. Cambridge, MA, 1990. P. 5.↩

20.Aleksandr Pakhomov. Leningradskaia letopis’ // Khudozhniki goroda-fronta. P. 261.↩

21.Vera Isaeva’s diary is quoted in G. I. Lisovskaia. “Ia ne geroistvovala, a zhila…” // Zhenshchina i voina. P. 268.↩

22.Linda Nochlin. The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity. London, 1994. Pp. 19-21.↩

23.Pakhomov recalls (Leningradskaia letopis’. P. 263) his transformation of tragic pictorial “Siege ethnography” into a developed propaganda narrative: “I depicted a bundled-up woman on Dvortsovyi Bridge pulling a sled with a dead child wrapped in a sheet. But I didn’t like this drawing. The specific nature of the Siege was expressed, but the main thing was lacking. This Siege scene featured a collection of Siege ethnography, Siege misfortune, but the collection was cold and indifferent. And it was only when I drew a close-up of a hunger-exhausted Leningrader on a children’s sled whom an MPVO [civil air-raid defense] girl was holding up by his shoulders so that he wouldn’t fall that I felt I had hit upon the right tone (“To the Clinic”). The theme of the picture was not a woman’s family grief, not the horrors of the Siege, but a suffering Leningrader, anguish for a human being, concern for a human being.”↩

24.For a detailed outline of the development of Soviet poster propaganda, see Victoria E. Bonnell. Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin. Berkeley, 1997. Bonnell suggests (P. 74) that the Soviet poster replaced the allegorical mechanism with the idea of typage in the 1930s, but re-introduced allegory during World War II. An excellent discussion of competition and negotiation between beautiful and damaged bodies in Stalinist discourse can be found in Lilya Kaganovsky. How the Soviet Man was Unmade: Cultural Fantasy and Male Subjectivity under Stalin. Pittsburgh, 2008. Kaganovsky’s convincing identification of representation of the damaged male body as a subversive tool of Stalinist propaganda seems to find its exception in the case of Siege propaganda, in which actual damaged bodies were excluded or rhetorically retouched.↩

25.On the functioning of “TASS windows” (okna TASS) in Leningrad during the Siege, see I. V. Selivanova, N. N. Shkol’nyi. Leningradskie “Okna TASS”. 1941-1945 gg. v sobranii Rossiiskoi natsional’noi biblioteki. Katalog. St. Petersburg, 1995.↩

26.Frontovoe okno TASS #3. August 1943. Poster by V. Selivanov, text by V. Saianov. Reproduced in I. V. Selivanova. Riadovoi blokadnoi epopei: khudozhnik Vasilii Selivanov. St. Petersburg, 2006.↩

27.Walter Benjamin. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. London, 1977. P. 166.↩

28.“Man absolutely requires butter. When my niece Marina was sick, she kept asking for butter – even just a little on her tongue. If I were a poet, I would write a poem about butter and set it to music. How much greed for fat runs through the Bible and Homer!” Viktor Shklovskii. A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917-1922 / Trans. Richard Sheldon. Ithaca, NY, 1970. P. 178.↩

29.At present the main published source of “unofficial” Siege art is V. E. Loviagina. Blokadnyi dnevnik: zhivopis’ i grafika blokadnogo vremeni. St. Petersburg, 2005.↩

30.Tat’iana Glebova. Risovat’ kak letopisets (strantitsy leningradskogo dnevnika) // Iskusstvo Leningrada. 1990. No. 2. P. 33.↩

31.Leonid Panteleev. Priotkrytaia dver’. Leningrad, 1980. P. 411.↩

32.Vishnevskii. Leningrad: Dnevniki voennykh let. Vol. 1. P. 59.↩

33.Ibid. P. 81.↩

34.Ostroumova-Lebedeva. Pis’ma. P. 47.↩

35.Dnevnik V. I. Vinokurova // Sergei Chernov (Ed.). Blokadnye dnevniki i dokumenty. St. Petersburg, 2007. P. 258.↩

36.Dnevnik A. G. Bermana // V. M. David and V. E. Levtov (Eds.). Budni podviga: blokadnaia zhizn’ leningradtsev v dnevnikakh, risunkakh, dokumentakh. St. Petersburg, 2007. P. 181. Citizens were acutely aware that food distribution in the starving city was unequal, and that social privilege or fortuitous professional placement could be the key to survival, not to mention profit. The following diary entry may be seen as typical: “Not everyone is starving. [Golodaiut ne vse.] Salespeople still have 4-5 pounds of bread at the end of the day, and that’s how they make their profit. They buy all kinds of goods and save a huge amount of money. Officers and police stuff themselves, as do clerks of voenkomaty [military committees], who can get everything they need at the special shops. Neither do cooks, canteen directors or waiters starve.” Dnevnik B. Kapranova // Budni podviga. P. 42.↩

37.Eric Naiman. Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology. Princeton, 1997. P. 215.↩

38.Leonid Panteleev. V osazhdennom gorode. P. 318. My understanding of the workings of disgust(s) owes much to Robert Rawdon Wilson. The Hydra’s Tale: Imagining Disgust. Alberta, 2002.↩

39.Nikolai Byliev. Iz dnevnika // Khudozhniki goroda-fronta. P. 337.↩

40.Glebova. Risovat’ kak letopisets. P. 15.↩

41.One finds many such instances of gendered disgust among the emaciated bodies of the Siege: “A clear, sunny day. [In the courtyard of the Iusupov Palace] a great number of men and women are sunning their skin-wrapped bones all in a jumble, in a state of utter undress, and not at all shy before one another or [Palace] visitors. Having been turned by dystrophy into sexless creatures, the men and women do not speak to one another. They have not only lost all mutual interest, they are now full of mutual antipathy: purely feminine features have become repulsive to men, and vice versa.” Dnevnik D. N. Lazareva // Trudy Gosudarstvennogo muzeia istorii Sankt-Peterburga. 2000. No. 5. P. 212.↩

42.This gloomily grotesque phrase obviously had a basis in the reality of the Siege. I. V. Vinokurov, a teacher of geography arrested and shot in 1943 for “anti-Soviet propaganda,” made an observation in his diary that became one of the reasons for his demise: “On Pokrovskaia Square I came upon a crowd of people looking silently upon the torn-up corpse of a fat young woman. Who did this, and why?” Blokadnye dnevniki i dokumenty. P. 232.↩

43.Ol’ga Berggol’ts. Dnevnye zvezdy // Vstrecha. Moscow, 2000. Pp. 201-202.↩

44.Mikhail M. Bakhtin. Rabelais and His World / Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington, 1984. Pp. 25-26.↩

45.M. V. Iudina. Vy spasetes’ cherez muzyku. Moscow, 2005. P. 111.↩

46.This allows the reader to interpret this image within the framework of twentieth-century Russian culture’s well-known apocalyptic tradition, including for instance Natal’ia Goncharova’s lithograph “The Pale Horse” (from her cycle “Mystic Images of War”), whose deathly rider clearly transcends gender, transcending as well the pain it brings and personifies.↩

47.Benjamin. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Pp. 174-175, 183-184.↩

48.Julia Kristeva. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York, 1982. P. 4.↩

49.Adriana Cavarero. Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence. New York, 2009. Pp. 16-17.↩

50.My understanding of the workings and repercussions of symbolic aphasia is informed by Serguei Oushakine. In the State of Post-Soviet Aphasia: Symbolic Development in Contemporary Russia // Europe-Asia Studies. 2000. Vol. 52. No. 6. Pp. 991-1016.↩

51.Glebova. Risovat’ kak letopisets. P. 28.↩

52.Benjamin. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. P. 183.↩

53.Aileen Rambow calls such psychological projections into the “beautiful” post-Siege future “anticipated reminiscence.” Aileen G. Rambow. The Siege of Leningrad: Wartime Literature and Ideological Change // Robert W. Thurston and Bernd Bonwetsch (Eds.). The People’s War: Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union. Urbana, IL, 2000. P. 160.↩

54.Glebova. Risovat’ kak letopisets. P. 30. Time travel is a repeated topos of the artist’s diary: “I recall my whole previous life. The start of the revolution. There was a spiritual upswing then, an animated and youthful quality, although there was a pretty decent amount of hunger then, too. One has to hope with all one’s might for a new life.” Risovat’ kak letopisets. P. 33.↩

55.Oushakine. In the State of Post-Soviet Aphasia: Symbolic Development in Contemporary Russia. P. 995.↩

Примечания

[1]Vera Inber. Pochti tri goda: Leningradskii dnevnik. Moscow, 1968. Pp. 69, 177.

[2]Vladimir Boriskovich. Iz dnevnika // I. A. Brodskii (Ed.). Khudozhniki goroda-fronta. Vospominaniia i dnevniki leningradskikh khudozhnikov. Leningrad, 1973. Pp. 387-388. For an excellent discussion of the genre of traumatic landscape, see Ulrich Baer. Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma. Cambridge, MA, 2002.

[3]Berggol’ts recounts in a letter the disturbing landscape she witnessed during one of her forest walks: “Nature was very scarred, very abused by the war, and cannot for the life of it forget what has happened to it, although it’s trying. [T]he hardest-hit places are those where skirmishes took place – most horrifying of all are the bandages, a multitude of furiously white […] bandages now winding along the ground, now hanging and streaming in the wind from the charred, rust-colored branches of young pines.” One is struck by the anthropomorphic organization of this scene, with wounded trees “bandaged” after battle. Оl’ga Berggol’ts. P’esy i stsenarii. Leningrad, 1988. P. 562.

[4]I found useful Marina Warner’s rich and multifaceted discussion of gendered personification in art and allegory in Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form. New York, 1985. Another important source for this study was James J. Paxson. The Poetics of Personification. Cambridge, 1994.

[5]Lidiya Ginzburg. Blockade Diary. London, 1995. Pp. 9, 10, 101.

[6]Lisa Kirschenbaum. “The Alienated Body”: Gender, Identity and the Memory of the Siege of Leningrad // Nancy M. Wingfield and Maria Bucur (Eds.). Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe. Bloomington, 2006. Pp. 221-234.

Ab Imperio

Ab Imperio

Дистрофики, толстушки, аллегории: к проблеме репрезентации

Примечания