Rites of Place: Public Commemoration in Russia and Eastern Europe

Taking and Retaking the Field: Borodino as a Site of Collective Memory

 Taking and Retaking the Field: Borodino as a Site of Collective Memory Julie Buckler Mikhail Lermontov’s poem “Borodino” (1837) marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1812 battle fought on Russian soil against Napoleon’s Grand Armée.1 The poem, familiar to every Russian schoolchild, stages an encounter between a youth and an old veteran. In the opening stanza, the youth asks, “Tell me, Grandfather, isn’t it true that fire-scorched Moscow was not without cause [nedarom] given over to the French? There were battles over it—they say these were something!” This gambit elicits the story of Borodino, and the old veteran recounts his experience in more than a dozen stanzas of folksy speech.The poem’s oft-quoted line “Nedarom pomnit vsia Rossiia pro den’Borodina” (“With good cause all Russia remembers the day of Borodino”) underscores the ritual nature of the veteran’s narration and the younger generation’s indebtedness to its elders. Lermontov’s poem enacts the sharing of a legacy, thereby renewed, drawing its readers along with the youth and the veteran into a community of remembrance. “All Russia remembers Borodino,” and with this declaration Lermontov’s poem enacts the workings of collective memory and reinforces knowledge of the historical event. Well known during the nineteenth century, Lermontov’s poem was a good fit for the Soviet period, when it was much anthologized, memorized, and recited. And “Borodino” also suits the imperial nostalgia of the postSoviet period, with its lavish annual celebrations and battle reenactments.  julie buckler The oral legend conveyed by the old veteran remains public property, a meeting place for history and the present.The story of Borodino purveys a potent national myth, celebrating the selfless patriotism and shared suffering of the Russian people, and asserting the Russian nation’s special status, both divinely and world-historically conferred. Lermontov’s was not the only poetic injunction to remember Borodino . In contrast to Lermontov’s populist paean, Denis Davydov’s 1829 elegy “Borodinskoe pole” (“The Field of Borodino”) emphasizes the shared memories of an elite group. Seventeen years after the battle, an aging hussar visits the deserted Borodino field and mourns the dwindling number of living witnesses to the battle. He longs to join his fallen comrades in their death-sleep. In contrast, Lermontov’s youth prompts the veteran to retell a beloved story that the youth himself doubtless knows by heart. These two poems delineate modes for commemorating Borodino that have both been prevalent since 1812. While it might seem that Lermontov ’s collective and largely triumphalist style of commemoration won out over Davydov’s more private and elegiac version, the field of Borodino has proved sufficiently capacious to encompass both responses, as well as many others.The nationalist myth of Borodino has been celebrated in a spirit of modesty and reverence, as well as with grand imperial bombast. Battlefield sites such as Borodino, Waterloo, Gettysburg, or the Somme have a special energy. Battlefield sites often eschew burial places for human remains, instead using physical memorials as place markers for the absent bodies. Indeed, the powerful sense of absence, not only of the dead bodies but also of the physical traces a battle leaves upon a natural landscape, transforms the visitor into a spiritual medium, alert to a palpable sense of what cannot be seen.2 A battlefield site such as Borodino is in every sense larger than the sum of the individual monuments there. Approximately 120 kilometers west of Moscow,the Borodino museumpreserve is the oldest battlefield museum in the world, founded in August 1839, and receiving some three hundred thousand visitors annually.3 The history of Borodino field since 1812 illustrates the internal contradictions at the heart of the mythology; the battle’s monumental status has remained a constant, whereas the commemorative site has been prey to the vagaries of time and circumstance. Today, there is a poignant contrast between the worn physical artifacts at the museum-preserve and the unquestioned signi ficance accorded to the battle as historical event, and this contrast itself may be Borodino’s most salient feature. The veteran in Lermontov’s poem prefigures this contrast when he compares the heroic past (his own “powerful and ferocious tribe”) to the impoverished present (the youth and his ilk, a poor substitute for “bogatyr-warriors”). For Davydov’s hussar, similarly, taking and retaking the field  the...