Soviet past: Digital memories.

Today I came across a blog entry with a collection of pictures of the USSR from 1920s up to 1991 from the РИА «Новости» archive.

It's a very nice illustration of digitalisation of memories. What always strikes me most in such a memory work is its interactive character. Whereas the pictures show mostly nostalgic images of the Soviet past, in the comments to the entry we find references to the dark sides of the Soviet regime and the problems faced in the present.

Soviet past: in search for sincerity.

In the book “What is Soviet Now” (ed. Thomas Lahusen and Peter H. Solomon, Jr.) I came across an interesting article by Alexei Yurchak “Post-Post-Communist Sincerity: Pioneers, Cosmonauts, and Other Heroes Born Today”. He addresses the use of the Soviet aesthetics by contemporary Russian artists and on the examples of celebrated artists demonstrates that turn to the Soviet is not necessarily related to the nostalgia for the Soviet past but rather to the utopian ideals of sincerity associated with this past. For artists the Soviet past seems to be “the most valuable cultural capital in the global context. Turning to the explorations of that past may become an important artistic strategy for reintegrating Russian art into the global art scene.” (275)
Artists themselves deny any politics in their works and explicitly emphasize that they do not associate themselves with anti-Soviet dissent groups, neither they see themselves in favour of Soviet political regime, they rather strive to foreground the sincerity and belief of Soviet (common) people in their ideals, in contrast to pragmatism and lack of any idealism of contemporary (post-Soviet) people. Yurchak maintains, “this aesthetics bears its own political potential … which is based on the recorded categories of sincerity and idealism.”
Yurchak concludes that such a search for sincerity which is realized through turning to the Soviet past can be reduced neither to nostalgia, nor to the response to the market demand, it is rather an instance of “reassessing the history of the Soviet modernity, exploring its meaningful aspects, and separating its original ethical aspirations of the modernity from the political regime which relied on them for its ends” (276). At the very end, Yurchak add, if it is nostalgia then it is nostalgia for “what the past might have been, for the missed opportunity of creating an alternative world” (quoting Zizek, “Lenin Shot at Finland Station”, London Review of Books, August 18, 2005).
What made me to post all this in relation to my dissertation is exactly this last conclusion about the past that might have been but has never happened. Is it not the same instance that we witness in the turn to the UPA past? Is it not the same idealization of the failed revolution that could have succeeded (especially if we think about the /failed/ revolution in 2004)? The past that had not happened has always a better position than the past that had happened. It is the same situation as competing with the dead, it is not possible for the living to be better than the dead, the dead make no mistakes, the living do. It is amazing what strength an alternative history can give for memory, especially for the memory of future generations, endorsing in such a way cultural memory of the community. In contrast to this idealization of the alternative history of our contemporaries, I remember reading elsewhere (some memoires?) that members of OUN(m) were actually glad that UPA under OUN(b) lost because the alternative future could have been even worse than that of the future that actually had come after the end of the war.

Arno Geiger's "Es geht uns gut"

Recently I read a book by an Austrian writer Arno Geiger which is called “Es geht uns gut”. This is a wonderful novel about three generations of family Erlach settled in Vienna from the beginning to the end of the 20th century.

Narratives about each generation are intertwined like a patchwork so that linearity of the plot dissolves in a texture of “now” as if there were no past at all. Each part of the time is sense-giving to each other and it does not really matter which position within the time line the event occupies. Beside the fact that it is a wonderful piece of prose it made me think about couple of thing related to memory.
First, an immense role of materiality for memory retaining and developing. Here, I think not only about the “stuff”, although its meaning is not to underestimate, I think here first of all about a body as a witness of the past, bearer of memory and a representation of memory. I came with this thought when I was reading a passage where one of the main characters faces a woman in black and only after this he remembers that someone died. In this way, the woman served as an index of the past. This very much makes me think about Lefebvre’s discussion on body as a space, but for Lefebvre the point was the spatiality of body. My point is the remembrance and "representability" of body. Now I need to find who wrote about this body/memory relation. I remember a presentation on one of the conferences I attended several years ago there a researcher from Germany presented a paper on Varlam Shalamov’s "Kolyma Tales" and she looked at the body as a witness of the past, whereas body remembered tortures of the Gulag even if the mind refused to do so. I wish I could remember whose theories this researcher was referring to. Now, I remember Hayden mentioning, "Memory is also evoked through the bodily experience of the ceremony and its formal rituals, which is shared with others" (Hayden, 1999: 145)
Second, this novel made me think about the literature where the war is addressed in general. Such novels usually encompass three generations, this is their common feature. I did not read so many novels of this kind that were written in the post-Soviet countries, but when I think about the novels I read, the common feature is an immense role of imaginary and dreams that occupy the novel space (think about Oksanen’s or Zabuzhko’s novels, e.g.). In Zabuzhko’s novel “Museum of Abandoned Secrets” there is no direct transmitting of experience from one generation into the other, the past generation speaks to their ‘grandchildren’ exclusively through dreams, although these dreams are then proved to have been reality by the archival documents and the present. It is amazing how forms of representing the past seem actually being dependent on the past itself (there were literally few who could transmit the experience). And here I am not speaking exclusively about the UPA, I think about the Soviet framework of Great Patriotic War in general which did not allow any other schemes in transmitting the past except of glorious narratives of victory.
Third, while reading the novel I thought uninterruptedly on the question “Who needs the past?” The characters in the novel seemed reluctant to “know” what was going on in the past, what they were longing for, though, was coming back to the past where everything was better. So, past is not only a foreign country, it is a better country, which can never be reached.
PS: Just remembered the interview with Arno Geiger where he mentioned his father, who was seriously ill and did not always manage to recognize people or environment. Once he said to Arno Geiger: “Ich will nach Hause” (I want home), “Wo ist dein Haus?” (“Where is you home?” asked Geiger a bit perplexed as they were sitting in the father’s house), “Zuhause ist wie hier aber ein bißchen anders” (“At home is like here but a bit different,” was the answer).
A good ending for such a long and somewhat patchy post.