Laughter, Music, and Memory at the Moment of Danger: Tsvetaeva'sMother and Musicin Light of Modernist Memory Practices

Abstract

In this article, Monika Greenleaf shows how Marina Tsvetaeva protested the erasure of her generation's intimate and embodied styles of memory by postrevolutionary historical narrative. While Soviet writers began to disappear into the Lubianka, labor camps, translation programs, children's literature, and silence in the 1930s, exiled writers found themselves in European capitals contesting the keys to legitimate memory before the emigration's fracturedmilieux de mémoire.In a piece written for oral performance in Paris, Tsvetaeva uses Bergson's famous techniques of bodily and musical memory-retrieval and comic revelation of temporal rhythms and archetypes to frame her childhood memoir as an exemplary mimetic rite for her generation. Bergson's synergistic theory of “matter and memory“ promised total recall, whereas Walter Benjamin's meditation on the different nature of memories that “flash up at the moment of danger” offers new insight into the fiercely selective comic scenes her mnemonic technique “produces.” Greenleaf's examination poses the question: What is the nature of the past that involuntarily repeats itself through our bodies and the very configuration of our imaginations: living Being or copying machine? Is the poet's act of memory socially useful or dangerous and “mad“? Mimesis according to Aristotle or Plato?