Although sometimes I did realize. I remember once, a terrible teenager with a desire to fascinate, I told someone the family story of a curse. “And so, passionately in love” (I intoned) “with an impoverished Polish aristocrat, he converted to Christianity and married her, and his father cursed him and never spoke to him again, and so they lived in poverty and soon they died of consumption.”
This wasn’t exactly true — no one died of consumption. In the photo albums there are pictures of the cast-out son, looking happy in his prodigal state, wearing glasses, with grandchildren, all against an ordinary Soviet backdrop. But what about the Polish aristocrat? Did she exist or did I add her merely to embroider the story? Polish, to add the “exotic,” an aristocrat to add spice to the line of merchants, doctors, and lawyers? I don’t know. I can’t remember. There was something in my mother’s story, the faintest lighting of the way forward for my imagination. But there’s no way back: fantasy can’t be placed under the microscope to discover its kernel of truth. So my story continues to feature an unreliable Polish aristocrat — the doubtful cause of real and doubtless hardship. There was a curse, and there was genuine poverty, and my great-great-grandfather never did set eyes on his firstborn son again, and then they did all die, so in one way or another it is true.
I inherited one other thing that bears on the construction of this story, on how it was told and by whom. It’s the sense of our family as a matriarchy, a tribe of strong, individual women standing like milestones spanning the century. Their fates loomed large in my life, here they are in the front row — holding on to each other, merging into each other — of the many-headed family photograph. Strange when you consider that they all had husbands. The men in this family are barely illuminated, as if history consisted only of heroines, and couldn’t quite stretch to heroic men. There is truth to this, though it’s hardly the men’s fault. Women kept the family line going — one husband died young, another died even younger, a third was busy with other out-of-frame matters. In my head, and perhaps in my mother’s too, the line of transmission (that part of the story left, once the cheerful bustle of life has been tidied neatly into prehistory) was a staircase leading steadily toward me, consisting entirely of women. Sarra begat Lyolya, Lyolya begat Natasha, and Natasha begat me. The matryoshka (nesting) doll insisted on the preeminence of single daughters, each emerging from the one before and inheriting, with everything else, the gift and the opportunity to be the single teller of the tale.
What did I think I was up to all those years? I clearly wanted to build a monument to those people, making sure they didn’t simply dissipate into the air, unremembered and unremarked upon. But in fact it seemed I didn’t even remember them myself. My family history was a confection of anecdotes, barely attached to names or faces, unrecognizable figures in photographs, questions I couldn’t quite formulate because they had no starting point and, in any case, there was no one to ask. Despite all this, I had to write the book and here is why.
Jacques Rancière’s essay Figures of History makes many arguments that seem urgent for our times. He says, for example, that the artist’s duty is to show “what can’t be seen, what lies beneath the visible.” This pleases me, because the late Russian poet Grigory Dashevsky always saw this as the role of poetry, to bring the invisible to the point of visibility. Rancière’s most important point is this: in his writing about history, he contrasts “document” and “monument.” A “document,” for him, is any record of an event that aims to be exhaustive, to tell history, to make “a memory official.” A “monument” is the opposite of “document,” in “the primary sense of the term”:
that which preserves memory through its very being, that which speaks directly, through the fact that it was not intended to speak — the layout of a territory that testifies to the past activity of human beings better than any chronicle of their endeavors; a household object, a piece of fabric, a piece of pottery, a stele, a pattern painted on a chest or a contract between two people we know nothing about…
With this in mind, I began to see that the monument-memorial I’d hoped to raise was in fact built long ago. It seemed I even lived in its pyramid chambers, between the piano and the armchair, in a space marked out by photographs and objects, which were mine and not mine, which belonged simply to the continuing and disappearing thread of life. Those boxes of our domestic archive hardly spoke directly, but they were the silent witnesses, those piles of greetings cards and trade union cards were the epidermal cells of the lived and unspoken past, and, as storytellers, they were hardly worse than the documents that could speak for themselves. A list was all that was needed, a simple list of objects.
Perhaps I hoped to reassemble and reanimate from all these objects the corpse of Osiris, the collective family body, which had disappeared from the home. All these fragments of memory and pieces of the old world did create a whole, a unity of a particular sort. A whole vessel, but flawed and empty, consisting mostly of cracks and gaps, no better and no worse than any single person who has lived her term and survived — or, more accurately, that person’s final and unmoving corpus.
And of this twisted body, no longer capable of connecting its memories into a sequence — would it want to be seen? Even supposing it wants nothing, am I right to make it the subject of my story, a museum exhibit, like the pink stocking of Empress Sisi, or the rusty file with traces of blood that brought her story to its end? Putting my family on general view, even if I do it with as much love as I can muster and with the best words in the best order, is, after all, something of a Ham’s deed, exposing the vulnerable and naked body of the family, its dark armpits, its pale belly.
And most likely I would learn nothing new in writing it, and just knowing this made the act of writing even more fraught. Yes, free of scandalous revelation, far from the hell of Péter Esterházy, who found out that his beloved father had worked for the secret police, but also far from the bliss of having always known everything about your people, and bearing this knowledge with pride. Neither of these outcomes were mine. This book about my family is not about my family at all, but something quite different: the way memory works, and what memory wants from me.
In late spring 2011 a colleague visited me in Moscow to invite me to Saratov to give a talk about the internet journal where I was working. Our conversation very quickly turned to Saratov itself, a city I had never visited, and the birthplace of my great-grandfather. My colleague pulled out a tablet. He had a wondrous digital haul of scanned prerevolutionary postcards with views of Saratov: predominantly green-white vistas with trees and churches. As I flicked through, the lines faded into each other, and now I can only remember the wide expanse of river, dotted with ships. The tablet contained other wonders, a downloaded directory for 1908: gray lists of names and streets. “I’ve tried looking for my family,” said the colleague. “Hopeless task, really. There are ten pages of my surname.”