Solovyovo: The Story of Memory in a Russian Village

5 Wonders

5 Paxson.120-149 8/16/05 10:52 AM Page 120 Paxson.120-149 8/16/05 10:52 AM Page 121 I tak blizko podkhodit chudesnoe k razvalivshimsia griaznym domam . . . And how near the miraculous draws To the dirty, tumble-down huts . . . —ANNA AKHMATOVA, 19211 122 MIR CHUDESNOGO (THE WORLD OF WONDERS) * * * There are memories of strange and miraculous things. What can be made of them? The boundaries of the radiant past were relatively easy to define. In certain discursive contexts, the past is always better than the present. In light of this, the “radiant past” was defined in a simple binary manner. The task there was to draw out the particular dynamics of symbolism in that part of narrative memory. Other important narratives in Solovyovo —ones that define and reiterate key landscapes in social memory— are rather more elusive. 5 Wonders 1. Translation by Hemschemeyer (1992:280). Paxson.120-149 8/16/05 10:52 AM Page 122 When speaking of beings that inhabit the forest or lurk in the barn, or ghosts that fly in the night, folklore casts these stories into categories and analyzes them in their own terms (and often in a historical vacuum). It divides them by taxonomy, morphological structure, themes, and characters . Fairytales, which comprise a genre, are stories about unseen beings that pass into the world of the living. The field of Russian folklore has inspired some of the great currents in twentieth-century thought: formalism , structuralism, and generic studies.2 And yet, folklore appears to be marked by an unspoken axiom: Purer genres existed before. What exists now—a mix of folkloric, Christian, New Age, Soviet-spiritual, and even belief in alien worlds—is seen as a murkier version of what once was. Wondrous things of many different kinds happen. How are we to deal with the fact that fantastic things happen with many names, some of which are not neatly located in the catalogues of folk literature? Disparate characters enliven stories with diverse plotlines, but the point, as far as memory is concerned, does not end in chaos. Similarly to how Ries’s (1997:51–64) babushki—lost on the way to buy sugar in Moscow—fill ancient folkloric functions, the village stories mix modern and ancient themes and deal, along the way, with basic problems of group identity, power, and contradiction. For the purposes of plotting pathways in memory, I identify the boundaries of the world of the chudesnoe by understanding the narrative genre in terms of function, and not in terms of thematic content. In other words, even if a large part of the world of the miraculous is inhabited by fantastic forces and beings that come from Russian “folk culture,” it is not defined by them. Rather, the miraculous is defined by what happens within that space—that is, it is defined by what it does and not by what it is. So what does it do? In the broadest sense possible, in the world of the chudesnoe, is a world where the regular, predictable aspects of time and space are suspended. When one is there, one can expect invisible beings to come into view, sounds to ring out when there is no source, and time and distance to collapse as flat as an unopened top hat. For the purposes of my analysis, I am more concerned with the nature of this spatiotemporal malleability than with the characters that enliven it. Genre is the theoretical contract that says that meaningful orders of discourse indeed exist, ones with WONDERS 123 2. Roman Jakobson, Vladimir Propp, and Mikhail Bakhtin, respectively, are the bestknown Russian innovators in these fields. Paxson.120-149 8/16/05 10:52 AM Page 123 broad societal relevance. The idea that this genre can be plotted as a topographical symbolic space shifts the focus from the boundaries of the discourse to its internal resonances, textures, symbolic configurations, and directions. As in the case of the radiant past, this sketch of narrative space aims at understanding the way certain kinds of talk iterate and reiterate the relationships between agency—at individual and group levels—and power. In the language of memory’s topography, I am mapping how interdimensional power of a certain quality is introduced into social circles. The approach to the world of wonders is heralded by certain linguistic and gestural modes; narrative changes within its bounds. Paths through this symbolic space...