Igor Vishnevetsky's Leningrad

St. Petersburg has a magnificent mythology, with plenty of gods and monsters roaming about.  Igor Vishnevetsky's short novel, Leningrad, seems to be well-versed in this fantastical landscape.  In his short tale, we see the appearance, however fleeting, of several different layers of deities.  After all, before Zeus and his crew ascended to Mount Olympus, Titans ruled the world.  And before that, there were other gods, including Chaos and Gaia.  Vishnevetsky's god groupings include Finns, Baltics, Slavs, Vikings, Germans, Huns, Tartars, Mongolians, Hanseatic League members, nomads, Orthodox Russians, and Novgorod Russians. But of course he is primarily concerned with the gods of St. Petersburg and their perhaps continuing attempt to resist the age of Leningrad, or even the age of the Nazis which threatens to make all other gods irrelevant.

Vishnevetsky's city is symbolized by dozens of different holy sites, including the Bronze Horseman, St. Issacs, Kazan Cathedral, the Peter and Paul Fortress, the Hermitage, Krondstadt, the Neva, the Collegia Buildings, the Admiralty, the Tauride Gardens, Vasilievsky Island, Smolny, Anichkov Bridge, and October 25th Street.  His heroes include Genghis Khan, Block, Sologub, Hippius, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Khlebnikov, Tchaikovsky, Kirov, and dozens of other intellectuals and statesman.  Some of Vishnevetsky's heroes do evil things, like Stalin or Peter the Great, but we recall that even Hercules killed his own family in a fit of madness.  

Vishnevetsky's socialist city is modern in some respects but always in touch with the primordial conditions that gave rise to the first gods.  For Leningrad during the siege was often without water, electricity, transportation, heat, or, most importantly, food.  It was beset by bombs, and "pockmocked all over from the dancing of elephants or rhinoceroses."  The siege was a return to an age of primitive sacrifice, or illiteracy (books were burned for heat), of cannibalism even.  But even in the midst of chaos, Leningrad resisted total destruction.  Mythical history is cyclical after all. It has no beginning and no end.  Thus atheist Russia re-encounters religious Russia in the midst of its agony.  "Well, then, what does God 'advise us' us?" The answer:  "That no winter of crushing hunger will ever smear us into snowy Nothingness."  

The Communist Queue

One of the most emblematic aspects of life in the Soviet Union was the queue. Ordinary citizens waited in line for almost anything. The Soviet economy may have produced impressive gains in industrial output. It may (or may not have) dramatically reduced extreme forms of poverty and inequality. It may have launched rockets into space, equipped a powerful army with advanced artillery, and mined huge quantities of mineral resources from the Siberian earth. It could not, however, keep the store shelves full. The history of the Soviet economy is the history of a weak consumer economy. Whereas capitalism struggled with the fact that some citizens couldn’t afford to get a hold of any of the countless products the system produced, communism dealt with a much different paradox: people often had money but nothing to buy with that money.

So what exactly is a queue? Lidiya Ginzburg makes sense of the term in a general sense, even though the breadlines she describes took place at one of the worst moments in a horrible century, the siege of Leningrad. She’s a sociologist analyzing the phenomenon of the queue in exquisite detail.

The queue is made up of hostile, irritable people, who are nevertheless united by a common goal of keeping order and ensuring that line-jumpers don’t overwhelm the structure of the established line. The queue has gender elements: women have more experience with waiting in line for essentials—they did so even before the siege. Women are also more likely to accept the premise that their time is essentially worthless: they can wait all day if need be.

Men aren’t constructed this way. They feel entitled to cut in line and some always attempt to do so. Even when everybody is suffering together, men think that they suffer more precisely because they are not accustomed to suffering. People talk in queues, but their discourse follows special patterns. To begin with, people are extraordinarily rude to anybody they suspect might harbor any feelings of superiority.

The queue is democratic—everybody waits—and it’s important to reassert this fact at all times. People naturally talk about food (or whatever it is for which they are waiting) in the queue. In a siege, the discourse can be divided into four categories, according to Ginzburg: informational, emotive, story-telling, and self-aggrandizing.

Ginzburg’s close reading of the queue procedes right up to the counter, where customers strain every muscle in their neck hoping to see just exactly how much food they will receive. As Ginzburg sees things, the person at the head of the line wants to participate in some kind of ritual by watching the bread as it gets weighed on the scale. She likens this event to horse-racing, where the crowd feels as if it too were carried along by the horses that are actually running the race.

Upon receiving the ration, the lucky person goes home, but new trials wait, as he or she must decide upon a specific strategy of consumption. Is it best to save the scarce item, or devour it at once? In some ways, the queue fits Ginzburg’s larger theme about suffering, that we use suffering to deflect us from recognizing the absolute horror of non-existence. As bad as lines are, they allow us hope that at some point—perhaps in one hour, perhaps in three—we will achieve something definite. There’s a cure for scarcity—waiting—but there is no cure for nonbeing or death.

Stalingrad in History and Literature

After posting on the first days of Russia’s involvement in World War II, I’m thinking that a discussion of Stalingrad might be in order. Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad gives me a good starting place. The book depicts the importance of Stalingrad, the ferocity of the struggle there, and the tragedy it came to represent for the German army. It seems that both Stalin and Hitler made mistakes here, and that their egos became enmeshed in the battle to an unprecedented degree. This, the battle for Moscow, the siege of Leningrad form the backdrop of Russia’s heroic defeat in Germany, but in each case the result was far from certain for quite some time. Stalingrad looked certain to fall, but Russia hung on. By conventional standards, Germany had all but defeated Russia here, until the conflict degenerated from a class of concentrated forces into a street battle. From there, the Russians apparently made the decision, both individually and collectively, to die rather than surrender. This decision made a final German victory in the ruins of the city much more difficult, if not impossible. The prolonged conflict (and the geographical convenience of a large river) brought increasingly complex supply problems upon the Germans, who were very far from home, cold, and eventually surrounded by partisans. And of course Hitler made things much worse for Germany by insisting that the German army could not make even a tactical retreat to preserve its escape route. Beevor’s book highlights the German tragedy, as soldiers fought house by house with dwindling supplies as well as dwindling contact with loved ones back home. Hitler preserved the myth of German invincibility as long as possible, refusing to allow his army to retreat or surrender, and telling the German public that a victory was all but certain. Another book that sheds light on the battle is the voluminous novel by Vassily Grossman. Grossman’s book, which was nearly lost to history, still doesn’t receive the attention it deserves. Its length may be one reason it lacks readership, but perhaps its unrelenting pessimism is another. Grossman, a Jew, lost his family in the holocaust. He was also a war correspondent in Stalingrad and so didn’t have the luxury of seeing war as anything other than bleak and devastating—for souls as well as peoples. The book is complex and modern and brilliant. Moreover, it’s that rare thing, a book about war that is at once sweeping and personal.

Russian Death

Before Nick starts telling folks that Tolstoy got it wrong when it comes to death, I have to quote from Lidiya Ginzburg's Blockade Diary, which describes the ultimate death scene: the siege of Leningrad during World War II. According to Lidiya, Russians prepared for the German onslaught by reading War and Peace. And this, after they had already been through World War I which, modern critics like Paul Fussell tell us, was supposed to have killed all respect for 19th century portrayals of battlefield heroism. In particular, Lidiya says, people read Tolstoy to find out whether or not they were doing what they were supposed to do in the midst of the hell and horror that was all around them. But props to Tolstoy aside--it says something about a man who was still relevant after the purges--Ginzburg's Blockade Diary is all about the Russian capacity to embrace spectacular ends. Russians' real genius, it seems, was to embrace the fact that they as a people would survive, and that individual catastrophe meant nothing. She didn't find jingoism when Hitler attacked without warning, but the following common sentiment: "Well, one thing is for certain: we're done for." But the "we're" in that sentence refers to those who were talking, not the Russian people as a whole.

Ginburg's Diary is brilliant. Leningrad was the ultimate death. She analyzes the slow death in phrases such as this: "So painful, so fearful was it to touch one another, that in propinquity, at close quarters, it was hard to disdinguish love for hatred--toward those one couldn't leave." Or, referring to the body: "The body advertised its presence through pain and itching.." or "In winter, after people were discovering bone after bone, the alienation of the body proceeded..." And later, realizing people hadn't the strength to sit upright any more, "It turned out, for example, that the vertical posture was by no means inherent in the human body; the conscious will had to hold the body under control; otherwise it would slither away as if it were falling down a cliff..."