Memory, Indestructible as the Eternal Metals: Three Russian Views

Abstract

Memory, Indestructible as the Eternal Metals:Three Russian Views Caryl Emerson (bio) How do the metals come to be assigned to cultural eras, and what is the minimal geological formation necessary for marking a boundary? A Golden Age inaugurates and blesses; Ages of Iron and Bronze are savage fallings-away from that mythical center, but a Silver Age – like the spiraled terraces of Purgatory Mountain – has more hope in it; it suggests a cyclical return, a reflective source of light that is cooler, more derivative and deliberative, but still indisputably precious. The parameters of Russia's Silver Age, both spatial and temporal, have proved most difficult to define. Rylkova confronts the issue head on, as a problem in redemptive memory and the reevaluation of times. Ambitious in its claims but not eccentric in its use of historical fact, revisionist but intuitively believable, her essay concludes by offering perennially good advice: that historians of culture must consider the status of a cultural period or event, no less than the events themselves, as historically conditioned, dynamic, and often deceptive. The essay is also pleasurably "undertheorized." It builds its case from the bottom up, out of primary sources and familiar opinions – but scrupulously arranged so as to unfold in their own time, independent of later reconceptualizations. It is Rylkova's thesis that the "Silver Age" and its precious aura did not exist as such while its practitioners were active and alive. There was simply Russian modernism, or Decadence: loud, creative, self-absorbed, already attracting passionate negative attention in the early 1920s from political radicals, cultural conservatives, and the modernists themselves. She reminds us of the miserable reception granted the writings of Sirin (the young Vladimir Nabokov), the sympathy for Berdiaev's post-revolutionary "crisis of humanism" lectures, the revived admiration for Tolstoi's hyperdidactic Ivan Il'ich as a model for the brave, new, purposefully non-aesthetic man of the 1930s, and the pervasive disgust for immoral art and artists that threads its way through the first two Soviet decades. Rylkova gives us, in effect, an early 20th-century cultural scene where the dyspeptic pronouncements of the 1909 Vekhi essayists were not outrageous or scandalous; they were mainstream. It was only when the baser metals of the Revolution began to be perceived as permanent, both in the Soviet Union and the diaspora, that Russian modernism was redefined out of moral naughtiness into a site of nostalgia. At this point it ceased to attach itself forward, to a liberating (although contaminated) avant-garde, and instead looked backward, to [End Page 501] a vanished and now chaste Golden Age. The "Russia we lost forever," its "forfeiture," had to be engineered. Throughout this redrawing of paradigms, Rylkova only rarely brings in a present-day critic or methodology to buttress her empirical evidence. She briefly mentions Clifford Geertz, whose essay on "Art as a Cultural System" makes the commonsensical point that cultures can evolve out of a literacy and lose the ability to see things as contemporaries saw them; later on, Cooley and Schwartz are cited as authorities for the observation that collective memory is energized through its ability to reconceptualize watershed events of the past. Her final theorist is Mikhail Bakhtin, who, in his writings on intercultural dialogue from the 1950s–70s, is credited with upgrading the Formalist idea of "estrangement" (ostranenie) into the more robust concept of "outsideness" (vnenakhodimost'). The latter term presumes evaluation, which the Formalists had always been loathe to touch; it allows us to draw definitive borders around others, rediscover them, measure ourselves in light of them, glorify them. Being outside – deeply and irrevocably outside, looking in on a corpse – triggers cultural memory in an intensely creative, life-restoring way. While Rylkova does well not to burden her piece with distracting theoretical speculation (her thesis does not need it), the commentator's temptation is great to gloss this essay with additional details from Russian theorists of culture who have addressed precisely Rylkova's concerns. Giving in to that impulse, I devote the remainder of these comments to the Silver Age dilemma Rylkova is describing as it might have been viewed by three eminent Russian thinkers who addressed the problem of historical memory...