THE ORIGINS OF

NOSTALGIA
ii
THE ORIGINS OF
NOSTALGIA

Memories and Reflections

SVETLANA BOYM

EDITED BY RON ROBERTS

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First published in the United States of America 2022

Copyright © Estate of Svetlana Boym, 2022

Introduction © Ronald Anthony Roberts, 2022

The following works are published here by permission of the Estate of Svetlana Boym:
“Cosmos in the Girls’ Washroom”
“Children, We’ve Been Deceived!”
“The Secret Life of a Communal Apartment Neighbor”
“Tearing Away”
“Sasha, Misha, Napoleon and Josephine (circa 1992)”
“Replace the Irreplaceable! A Tale of Immigrant Objects”
“My Significant Others: Zenita, Susana, Ilanka”

The following works are quoted with attribution. Whilst every effort has been
made to locate copyright holders, the publishers would be grateful
to hear from any person(s) not here acknowledged.
Vladimir Vysotsky, “Pesenka o pereselenii dush” (Song of the Soul’s Transmigration”).
Bulat Okudzhava, “Dezhurny po apreliu” (“A Patrolman of April”).
Vladimir Vysotsky, “Ona byla v Parizhe” (“She’d Been to Paris”).
Vladimir Vysotsky, “Ban’ka po Belomu” (“Heat the Banya”).
Bulat Okudzhava, “I’m writing a historical novel.”

For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. 156 constitute an

extension of this copyright page.

Cover design by Eleanor Rose

Cover image: Flowers on a granite memorial plaque at the Bratsk Cemetery in memory of
the fallen Soviet soldiers of the 2nd World War © Aleksandr Zubkov / Getty Images

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Boym, Svetlana, 1959–2015, author. | Roberts, Ron, 1955–, editor.
Title: The origins of nostalgia: memories and reflections / Svetlana Boym; edited by Ron Roberts.
Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Summary: "The final unpublished works of the late philosopher, cultural critic and media artist,
Svetlana Boym, The Origins of Nostalgia comprises a series of autobiographical reflections which provide
unique insights and background to Boym's existing body of work"—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021048723 (print) | LCCN 2021048724 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501389931
(hardback) | ISBN 9781501389979 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501389948 (epub)
| ISBN 9781501389955 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501389962 (ebook other)
Subjects: LCSH: Boym, Svetlana, 1959–2015. | Boym, Svetlana, 1959–2015—Childhood and youth. |
Slavists—Biography. | Computer artists—Biography. | Immigrants—Soviet Union—Biography. |
Nostalgia. | Soviet Union—Social life and customs. | LCGFT: Autobiographies.
Classification: LCC PS3602.O974 Z46 2022 (print) | LCC PS3602.O974 (ebook) |
DDC 814/.54 [B]–dc23/eng/20211117
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021048723
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021048724
ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-8993-1
PB: 978-1-5013-8997-9
ePDF: 978-1-5013-8995-5
ePUB: 978-1-5013-8994-8

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For Musa and Yury Goldberg
 Photograph of Svetlana in her Cambridge home. © Estate of Svetlana Boym.
Used with permission.
 CONTENTS

Introduction: “Snippets of experience” 1

1 Cosmos in the Girls’ Washroom 5

2 Children, We’ve Been Deceived! 17

3 The Secret Life of a Communal Apartment Neighbor 39

4 Tearing Away 65

5 Sasha, Misha, Napoleon and Josephine (circa 1992) 85

6 Replace the Irreplaceable! A Tale of Immigrant Objects 103

7 My Significant Others: Zenita, Susana, Ilanka 115

Acknowledgments 156
Index 157
viii
 Introduction
“Snippets of experience”

Having grown up in a “communal apartment,” I inherited some of my

grandparents’ and neighbors’ stories.
—(SVETLANA BOYM 2017: 138)

Marcel Proust wrote that “The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain
of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes,
to behold the universe through the eyes of another.” All of Svetlana Boym’s
writings are testimony to her unwavering capacity to see the world afresh—to
render familiar what was hitherto strange and to make of the familiar, something
vibrant and new. In her life and work, she straddled both Eastern and Western
thought at a crucial historical moment, taking full creative advantage of her
situation to prize open our understanding of the cultural flux which has so
far defined the twenty-first century. It is a critical moment of global nostalgia
which may either mark a pause in the collective human venture, a staging post
for looking back to past hopes or possibly a point of inflexion before darker
times. Then again, Svetlana always blinked at such binary thinking—invoking
the imperatives of the Soviet avant-garde writer Viktor Shklovsky’s third way
as the impossible option which must be taken.
2 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

The pieces collected here, all autobiographical or semi-autobiographical,

“snippets of experience” as Svetlana would describe them, capture her penchant
for seamlessly melding, poetically and dream-like at times, the intensively
personal with the everyday and the world-historical. We can see in several
of the accounts the formative conditions for the thinking which she was to
develop later. They provide glimpses of a childhood and young adulthood in
Leningrad/St. Petersburg that was in creative spirited revolt with the stifling
conditions and imposed utopia of totalitarian rule, the everyday conditions
of which are still poorly understood in the floundering Western democracies.
We ignore this knowledge at our peril. Included here is a piece “Tearing Away”
(translated from the Russian by one of Svetlana’s students Maria Vassileva and
with an introduction by her childhood friend Natal’ya Strugach) written by
Svetlana in Leningrad in 1981, a time when she was excluded from Herzen
University, Leningrad and was awaiting permission to leave the Soviet
Union. In its evocative and melancholic tone can be detected the relentless
daily grind of a system of social control, fraying at the edges and dying in
slow motion. Beyond observations on the Kafkaesque dimensions of Soviet
life and bureaucracy we also see here the importance of friendships, familial
and otherwise, which contributed to Svetlana’s flourishing and to her always
humane, if occasionally ironic, outlook on the world.
Anthropologists and psychologists have enabled us to see that through
memory people don’t just recall the world, they actively rebuild it and recreate
it and hence, the past never ceases to be in flux. For readers familiar with
Svetlana Boym’s work and for those new to it, these stories will enable what
has gone before to be viewed in a different light. The reconstruction of the
past permits a window to be opened to different futures and to a different
relationship with the world and its peoples.
In his Book of Embraces, Eduardo Galeano provides us with a brief allegorical
tale—of a world which “is a heap of people, a sea of tiny flames,” each of which
 INTRODUCTION 3

shines with his or her own light. No two flames are alike. There are big
flames and little flames, flames of every colour. Some people’s flames are so
still they don’t even flicker in the wind, while others have wild flames that
fill the air with sparks. Some foolish flames neither burn nor shed light, but
others blaze with life so fiercely that you can’t look at them without blinking
and if you approach, you shine in fire.

Svetlana’s flame blazed fiercely and with fun, rooted to the earth, elegant and
assured. It was a pleasure to know her and a pleasure to edit these works which
she has left to us.
Ron Roberts

References
Boym, S. (2017) The Off-Modern. London. Bloomsbury Academic.
Galeano, E. (1992) Book of Embraces. New York. Norton. The quote is from The World, 15.
Proust, M. (1913/2003) In search of lost time, vol. 5. London. Penguin.
4
 1
Cosmos in the Girls’
Washroom

One of the first things I learned how to draw in the kindergarten was a cosmic
rocket. I was bad at drawing anything from real life, like cats, dogs, people or
buildings. But the rocket was different. Using all of the available colored pencils,
from red to gold, I pictured fairy tale vehicles with bright flames shooting from
its tails and the proud “USSR” written on its body. Poised between heaven and
Earth, my colorful rockets ecstatically defied the force of gravity. Other kids
loved rockets too. Our urban playgrounds were strewn by the small rockets;
we would slide down their shafts and then climb back up again and again,
building true friendships on the way, until our anxious parents interrupted our
games with their little adult concerns about our food, cold and safety.
Born at the time of the Soviet cosmic triumph in space, my generation was
supposed to look at the world as if from outer space. The word sputnik, Russian
for “satellite,” means a “companion,” or even, a “significant other.” Indeed,
Sputnik, first launched in 1957, was one of our first companions and favorite
toys. We did not dream of becoming doctors and lawyers, but cosmonauts
(or, if the worse came to the worst, geologists). We were encouraged to aim
upward and not westward. Indeed, a trip to the Moon seemed more likely than
a journey to America:
6 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

“Would you like to have a million?” asked the lead singer.

“No!” answered a chorus of Soviet children.
“Would you like to go to the Moon?”
“Yes!”

The cosmic journey was to be a joyful emigration, upwards, not westwards. It

might cost a million (dollars) now, but then it was free. Every fairy tale we read
in our early childhood spoke to us about a journey far away, to St. Elsewhere
or into the Kosmos. Whenever the Russian hero Ivan the Fool found himself
on the crossroads, ordered to go “there nobody knows where” to find “that
nobody knows what,” we suspected that he had traveled into space, just like
Gagarin.
The American term “outer space” refers to something contiguous to Earth, a
new frontier—not so much the wild West, but the wild sky. The Soviet notion of
cosmos, on the other hand, comes from the Greek, meaning “order, ornament,
harmony,” and suggests a harmonized chaos, where human or divine presence
is made manifest. The word Cosmos links Soviet space technology with the
mystic theories of Russian cosmism from the late nineteenth century, it was
part of a history of technology, an enchanted technology, founded on charisma
as much as calculus, on pre-modern myth as well as modern science, In the
exploration of the cosmos, science merged with science fiction, and ideology
sounded like poetry.
In the 1950s and 1960s Soviet advances in space exploration were directly
linked to the advent of Communism: “This generation of Soviet citizens will live
in the era of Communism,” proclaimed the New Program of the Communist
Party on July 30, 1961. Only three months earlier, on April 12, 1961, the first
man flew into space, Yuri Gagarin (1934–1968), the exemplary Soviet citizen
of the future, became known all over the world for his larger-than-life smile,
framed in the halo of a space helmet. When Gagarin made his flight, the Soviet
Union was about to proclaim itself the winner of the Cold War. His triumph in
 COSMOS IN THE GIRLS’ WASHROOM 7

the cosmos promised a victory over time and space, ensuring a radiant future
and the transcendence of all earthly hardships.
In the world of our childhood there was no individual death. The war
heroes committed heroic feats, but that was different. I remember how I
asked what happened to the first animal sent into space, a dog with the
most common name “Laika.” We were never told that Laika didn’t come
back, or even worse, wasn’t meant to come back. It’s hard to write this, but
Laika … died. And the same happened to the immortal Yuri Gagarin. In
1968 he died tragically in what appeared to be a routine training accident,
incommensurable with his successful cosmic journey. Extraordinary cosmic
achievement was followed by ordinary earthly negligence. After Gagarin’s
death, a popular female star sang a love song for him, addressing the
cosmonaut with the intimate “you:”

The earth is empty without you.

How can I survive these lonely hours?
Only the stars share with you their tenderness.

This cosmic romance, however, did not survive our teenage years. The seeds
of its demise date back to the late 1960s, but by the 1970s we started to prefer
the yellow submarine of a smuggled Beatles album to yet another rocket,
which seemed to fly only on the front page of the newspaper Pravda. Like the
cosmonaut himself, the dream of cosmos proved mortal.
By the time we became teenagers, rumors about the human and animal
victims of the Soviet space program, always shrouded in secrecy, abounded. It
was as if the exploration of black holes within the universe aimed to cover up
the black spots of Soviet history.
With some trepidation I realize that we were the generation that was
supposed to live in the era of communism and travel to the moon. We did
not fulfill our mission. Instead we were forced to confront the ruins of utopia;
eventually, we discovered mortality and went westwards, not upwards.
8 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

My father became a communist right after Yuri Gagarin’s flight into space;
by his own admission, the decision to enter the Party was his only way to
secure for me a place in his factory’s kindergarten, otherwise I would have to
be abandoned to my own devices or to the transient babysitters.
In the absence of religious holidays, the rhythm of our year rolled around
the revolutionary holidays that were also seasonal and vaguely winked at their
religious predecessors. The main one was the secular “New Year” (January 1,
all Union party—not surprisingly now it’s a three-week holiday that includes
Western and Eastern Christmas and New Year according to the Old and New
calendar. Those who celebrate Chanukah or Crazy Kwantza keep quiet now
and celebrate whatever comes). Then there were minor Winter and Spring
festivities—the Day of the Soviet Army, Men’s day February 23 and the
International Women’s Day, March 8 and the Day of the Soviet Aviation, April
12. The main revolutionary holidays, May 1 and November 7, were marked
with public demonstrations and military parades. As kids we were dragged
to the demonstrations with a promise of meager fun and lots of obligatory-
voluntary rituals. My father occasionally volunteered to carry a big banner
from early morning till late in the evening—for this service to the Party he
could get a day off for his vacation and could stand on one of those prop-
mobiles carrying heroic stage sets. There is a faded color photo of me next to a
partially lit Cosmic map. I am wearing my fake-fur hat that looks like a cosmic
helmet, age ten or so. I look very serious, as always, with heavy Brezhnev-
style eyebrows, not yet trimmed. There are colorful non-cosmic balloons in
my hand and I look like I am elsewhere, perhaps, dreaming of being lifted out
of the whole demonstration as soon as possible but not before we sing a catchy
song together which must be “The March of the Aviators:”

We were born to make fairy tales come true,

to conquer distances and space.
Reason gave us steel wings for arms
and a flaming motor for a heart.
 COSMOS IN THE GIRLS’ WASHROOM 9

The strange inflated motor of the heart in the first couplet jeopardized the
journey of the Soviet Icarus. Never practice this at home kids! Don’t inflate
anything. If you do, don’t fly outside, please, at least not literally. Remember
best flying vehicles were for dreams only.
So, what were we supposed to do with this immense energy of cosmic
dreaming—so misdirected? What happened to that cosmic drive in the
country of “scientific atheism” with no religious education whatsoever?
Discouraged by ideology that took over even Gagarin’s shy smile, we looked
for sly ways towards the absolute. My unofficial search for cosmic encounters
moved from disillusionment to wonder. In the last years of my high school in
Leningrad there was a fashion to have spiritualist séances like in the literary
salons of the late nineteenth century and with it came interest in the occult and
cosmic with a small “c.” Kycha and I decided to organize one such séance in
her non-communal apartment when her family was away. We set little plates
on the wet table around the letters and I could just swear the plates shivered
a little. But how to read that elusive wet rift? Can we replicate it when our
friends will come? Thriving for success in matters spiritual and cosmic usually
prepares you for a failure.
Kycha didn’t want to leave things to fickle chance. So, she suggested that in
case the spirits are not in the mood for dialogue, I could use an empty glass
and mumble something. I could be the spirit of, Lermontov, for example. The
choice was mine.
All the girls gathered in a somber and mysterious mood. There was some
trepidation in the room. They called for poets and cosmonauts. The spirit of
Yuri Gagarin seemed angry. The arrow advanced towards the letter “W” but
stopped right there. The poets didn’t yield our address either. Then Kycha gave
me a hint and I began to woo into the empty glass: “I am a sp—iiii—rii-t of
Lermontov.” “It’s boring and sad and no respite from life’s travails.”
The evening was a success and I never came out of the closet. But as a
result, I lost trust in cosmic communication for a while. How can you speak to
10 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

the Kosmos through the empty glass? It made me sad; the cheater got cheated
out of the cosmic experience.
The same year we had a very different experience of cosmic learning that
involved no impersonation and no images.
We had one unusual teacher in my high school who prided herself on
attending Leningrad University. Her specialization was in Marxist-Leninist
critiques of Western Intellectual history. Our history had a clear master plot
and a Hollywood happy ending. Only at the end, the boy didn’t get the girl (or
the other way around), but still everyone lived happily thereafter in the radiant
future. After the bumpy road, there was the light at the end of the tunnel,
Scientific Socialism and Communism, a Classless Society, from everyone
according to ability, to everyone according to their needs, Scientific Atheism,
Paradise on Earth, victory over the West, roundtrips to the Kosmos, almost as
easy as the early trips to the Crimea.
We already knew the master plot and the critique, so we were most
interested in what was most criticized. We hung on the teacher’s lips hoping
to gain access to the forbidden knowledge. This time the bad guy was very
glamorous, mysterious and politically incorrect—“subjective idealism.” The
eccentric seventeenth-century philosopher George Berkeley believed that
maybe the world is immaterial and doubted the existence of everyday objects
as well as abstract concepts. Are this table and chair near us real, or mere tricks
of color and light? Maybe they only exist in our minds? Perception was the key
word. We don’t know anything beyond our perception. Imagine how exciting
is that?? No big words: School, Motherland, Blackboard, Communism,
Capitalism. No tall guy with pimples who doesn’t return your gaze—it’s all
perception!!
I couldn’t contain myself. I lost a sense of my bodily limits. I was closing and
opening my eyes, pinching myself, excited to suddenly come into direct touch
with my perception. I must have written a secret note to Kycha. Immediately
after the class we ran to the only private place in the whole damned school
 COSMOS IN THE GIRLS’ WASHROOM 11

building that probably had broken listening devices. There we could get a little
peace and quiet and just think it over. No, we didn’t sit on the toilets; the stalls
were opened. We sat on the windowsill; on the threshold between inside and
outside. Luckily most girls ran around the corridor flirting with guys in the
intermission and neglecting natural needs. We immediately voted to create
The Club of Subjective Idealists, Salut, George Berkeley! We were so happy
that Berkeley stood up to Newtonian certainty. Hey, did the apple really fall
on your head or was it all in your head already? The little worm of an English
migraine crawling out of the fruit’s heart in the uncertain twilight?
“Wait,” asked Kycha, “what about us, do we exist?” Yes, yes, I thought. Exist
we must, at least for the duration of this cold afternoon in the girls’ washroom.
For if we didn’t exist, who would question our existence?
I recall little of the rituals of the Club of Subjective Idealists. Perhaps it had
none. Our world was defamiliarized. Victor Shklovsky had already invented
his o-stranenie but we didn’t know it yet and Berkeley was our first step towards
it. We got a break from the master plot. George Berkeley led us into philosophy
through a side corridor of mind-shattering immaterialism; a shadow play of
real and unreal. No synthesis was possible, however many diagrams you’re
willing to draw on the blackboard. The blackboard melts under your chalk like
spring earth filled with worms and weeds. It’s March out, no Soviet holidays
in sight, no May First demonstrations, no banners with neon profiles of dead
cosmonauts, no larger-than-life Lenin and Brezhnev. Immaterialism triumphs.
We walk out of school in dirty Leningrad sleet to doubt our drab teenage life
and catch the sun blinks with the sun blink net of our imagination. We won’t
hold them in captivity for too long, just play and let go.
That philosophy of light and perception dubbed “subjective idealism” was a
liberating road, off-Enlightenment. For me it was about the tricks of light, not
total illumination; artistic lucidity, not didactic elucidation. Later, it might have
found its serpentine way into serious art and philosophy, influencing avant-
garde theories of light and even Albert Einstein. I learnt though that Berkeley
12 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

briefly traveled to New England and hoped to build Palladian architecture in

Rhode Island. He was a genial and cosmopolitan eccentric who might have not
expected the following in the Leningrad washroom. But did he really exist?
That mysterious flicker of light opened a fissure into the universe through
which we connected to other sympathetic worlds, non-contemporaneous with
ours.
A year later I had my most significant cosmic encounter. It happened during
a physics class. Usually I listened to our mildly dim-witted but generally good-
natured physics teacher in a distracted fashion. I liked theory but experiments
always failed me. That was the class like no other. It was the time of the freezing
Leningrad thaw.
“Good morning, pupils,” she said. “Today’s topic: The Universe.” And then
she read in a dull and deadpan tone of voice as she always did:
“Point one: The Universe is unmeasurable and infinite.: Vselennaia
beschislenna i beskonechna.”
Vselennaia beschislenna i beskonechna
I could hear the blood flowing in my body. I listened no more. Vselennaia
beschislenna I beskonechna. I was outside time and space.
Whispering, haunting, promising, mysterious, ineffable consonants—
chisssle skonechhhhn vsellennannan
It was a poem, but more than a poem—vssssbschhh—the birth of the poem
from the spirit of primordial shimmer.
Chichichi—nnnna … nechnnnnnnaa ….vs—a cosmic kiss, a breath … and
then a melodic accord—na, na! The Universe was humming in my head and I
could embrace the cosmos as long as I closed my eyes.
I never remember what happens before and after an important event. That
moment in the physics class had a long duration of time, melodious, folding,
shimmering. Who cares for the plot? There was no before and after, no how,
what or so what. Even the best investigative journalist wouldn’t be able to get
out of me what I did coming out of class; did I hustle with other kids finding
 COSMOS IN THE GIRLS’ WASHROOM 13

my winter coat thrown in the communal heap, looking for my hateful warm
trousers and a burgundy hat with a tussle? Then I might have walked home
on Kirov Avenue past the empty store called “Shoes” which sold medium-
heel pumps with prim bows that could have been worn by the first woman
cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova twenty years earlier. I ran by the closed movie
theater “Ars” with the poster for an old Italian movie blowing in the wind and
bravely walked into the secret passage of interconnected yards that only street
kids knew. I can hang the scenery around like an amateur theater director
with rags from 1970s Leningrad underground art, half-finished abstractions
grey on grey, or surrealist beaks on top of naked girls (the artist died from
unknown causes on the eve of perestroika.) Or if you prefer, I borrow a stylish
candle from Sir George Berkeley and give the scene some classical depth, the
dignified Palladio style room, spacious and airy, just the way he dreamed it,
not far from me now, in Newport, Rhode Island.
Vselenna beshchislenna i beskonechna. There was something euphoric and
unspeakable there. A teenage sublime. It stayed with me because it didn’t have
a name. It didn’t inscribe into anything, wasn’t circumscribed by it. Perhaps,
my photographs, not words, capture that wonder and flicker of light.

*******

My private Kosmos lay hidden somewhere inside me. I was uneasy with
big words, afraid to overshadow the mystery with the official heroics. In the
meantime, as we were growing up the cosmic heroes were dying out and
the story of the Soviet Kosmos was turning into a tragic parable. Cosmic
exploration began as a philosophical and scientific quest for free space and
the defiance of earthly gravitation; it culminated in a Soviet mega-industry
that made dreams come true and, inadvertently, put an end to all collective
dreaming.
The Soviet rocket underwent a metamorphosis of scale and power. First it
was a dream image and a scientific fantasy, the small model rocket invented
14 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

by Tsiolkovsky and designed by Korolev. The model paved the way for the
actual construction of space technology. The rocket became the larger-than-
life vehicle to the glorious future; it was supposed to conquer space and make
the Soviet Union the most powerful country in the world. The myth of cosmos
came to an end together with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, or perhaps
even earlier. It was the last utopia in which science, ideology and dreams
worked together in an attempt to break loose from the dystopian human
condition. The Soviet space program is no longer the model of the future but
a souvenir of the past. By the end of the twentieth century, the cosmos had
turned from a futuristic utopia into a space for nostalgic remembrance.
The conquest of space changed our perception of Earth; the journey into
space made possible the concept of a “global village.” Today’s fantasies do not
unfold in the heavenly heights but in the virtual dimensions of the Internet.
Hardly a space of wonder and sublimity, of immortality and immensity, it
nevertheless supports the faith in technological progress and a new illusion
of infinity. It is based on big data, not big dreams. As for the Soviet fairy tale,
it ended as mysteriously as it began. Ivan the Fool, the Soviet Icarus, was not
burnt by the sun but rather by his earthly circumstances. We are still not
entirely sure if he went “there nobody knows where” and found “that nobody
knew what,” or lost his way. The cosmic fairy tale ends with the debris of ruins
and souvenirs, with a very earthly archeology, not a cosmology.

*******

Away from the Soviet rockets, the cosmos discovered in the girls’ washroom
still plays hide and seek with me. Recently I had a medical diagnosis that
made me acutely aware of my mortality. A week later at the exhibit in the
Boston Science Museum I saw the “Nebula Butterfly” for the first time. It was
a human-scale photograph made by the engineers of the Hubble Telescope. It
captures on film “the gas of a dying star that races across space at more than
600,000 miles an hour.” To the flawed human eye only, it appears as a dainty
 COSMOS IN THE GIRLS’ WASHROOM 15

and ephemeral butterfly. There is nobody else in the cosmos to admire the
butterflies.
Vselennaia eschislenna I beskonechna … I smile to my teenage self and we
play cat’s cradle with the colorful strings of the universe. I know, I know, dear
Sir George, the butterfly probably doesn’t exist, just the flicker of the camera.
And I? I barely exist either. “No, no, on the contrary,” roams the voice with a
gentle Irish accent, as if amplified by the empty glass of some three hundred
years: “This cat’s cradle is all yours and the butterfly is real. Real, because
immaterial. You can trust it, girl. This beautiful unheroic butterfly.”
16
 2
Children, We’ve Been
Deceived!

Once upon a time I was a brave Little Red Riding Hood. I was already four and
a half; my velvet cap was bloody red and my basket was filled with the sweets
of yesterday, wrapped in glittering foil.
“You were all dressed up and ready to go,” my mother begins her story. “You
took your stuffed giraffe with you and were not scared of the wolf. You were
only afraid of doctors who gave shots. So, I told you that you were going to the
show, not to the hospital. Nothing to worry about.” Little Red Riding Hood
was going to the House of Culture for the New Year’s celebration called yolka.
If she could sit more or less still and enjoy the show, she would get a special gift
of “Bird’s Milk” chocolates, named after something that doesn’t exist.
At first, Little Red Riding Hood did exactly what her mom told her to, and
sat more or less still. The curtain went up and a doctor wearing large glasses
and a long white gown appeared on stage. His name was Dr. Aibolit, “Ay, it
hurts!” “Do you remember Dr. Aibolit, the beloved hero of children’s stories?
He used to sing a song we all loved: ‘It’s actually good that we feel so bad right
now!’ Dr. Aibolit was carrying an injection needle, human-size. The moment
you saw the needle, you jumped out of your seat and ran straight to the stage.

‘Children, we’ve been deceived’ you screamed.

‘This isn’t a show, this is a hospital!’
18 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

All hell broke loose. Kids began to scream and run away from their parents,
following you. ‘It’s true, it’s true!’ one little boy shouted. ‘Little Red Riding
Hood is brave; she always tells the truth!’”
“You know this was my first year at a new job,” says my mother in conclusion.
“All my colleagues were there and I was so embarrassed for you. You disrupted
the whole celebration.”
My mom’s tale of Little Red Riding Hood’s feats always gave me a good
feeling. I got the children out of the boring New Year’s show and stood up to
Dr. Aibolit: “It’s not ‘even good’ that we are doing badly, doctor! Ay, it hurts,
and it can only get worse! And why are your spectacles so big? And your needle
so sharp? Hey, kids, let’s get out of this silly show, grab ‘Bird’s Milk’ without
permission and run outside to play spies.”
I disrupted the fairy tale because I truly believed in it. Not the way grown-
ups did. They just use fairy tales to make us do something unpleasant in so-
called real life: “And then Ivan the Fool went into the dark forest and stopped
at the crossroads. No, he doesn’t have to kill the dragon, he has a more difficult
task: to go to nobody-knows-where and find nobody-knows-what …”
“And at that moment you would open your mouth very wide,” my mother
says laughing, “so that we could finally stuff some food into you.” The food
didn’t taste good, some eggplant salad or codfish oil. My mom lived through
hunger and was very worried that I was a poor eater. But this was no excuse.
This trick was unfair to the fairy tale.
They were not made to deceive or pacify little disobedient children. They
were great on their own—like in other countries. Fairy tales had real magic to
them, not the petty pretense of the adult world. They made sense to us and we
could master their rules better than those of real life.
During that celebration in the House of Culture I wasn’t in the show at
all. I was Little Red Riding Hood, flesh and blood. So what, that I wasn’t a
curly blond with vacant blue eyes like the goody-goody girl in my picture
book “Tales of the Brothers Grimm.” “Why are your eyes so big and black,
 CHILDREN, WE’VE BEEN DECEIVED! 19

Little Red Riding Hood?” the kids in kindergarten used to tease me. “Why
are they so dark and dirty? You have to wash them with some good soap.” I
wasn’t going to cry to please them and to bleach my eyes with tears. I was a
different-looking, dark-eyed Red Riding Hood, a character without a plot but
full of energy.
In Russian fairy tales, the storyteller always makes excuses for himself. “I
was there, I drank mead and beer, but it all ran down my whiskers, not a drop
did I swallow.” In short, there was a thing or two that he couldn’t stomach.
And if the storyteller is a woman of a certain age, with barely visible whiskers,
her whole mouth might be smudged with the undigested remains of the fairy
tale feast.
The memories of my childhood bleed into the edges of my mother’s story.
Something always remains unsaid or undigested. That forest road that Red
Riding Hood took still haunts my dreams. It skirts a lake with muddy water
and goes into the narrow corridor of a communal apartment, and then down
the dark passage of an anonymous train station. It leaps in and out of fairy
tales seamlessly and without a break. And there is a scrap of red cloth on the
margins of the shot, and a narrow escape.
I hope to stumble onto something, to find a clue, a scene of fear and wonder
and a Bird’s Milk chocolate. Like Ivan the Fool, I have an assignment: to go to
the crossroads of fear, abandoned by dragons and angels, and to find my way
to “nobody-knows-where to get nobody-knows-what.” I am on my way! And
I promise I won’t take any shortcuts or bring back any blond princesses. I will
make sure to look elsewhere.
So why has little Red Riding Hood loomed so large in our childhood?
The “girl meets wolf ” story is just as old as the “girl meets boy” story. In the
medieval tales of French and Italian peasants, a little girl meets a werewolf in
the forest and reveals all her secrets to him. He quickly eats her grandma, puts
on the grandma’s clothes and then asks the girl to come to bed with him and
finishes her for dessert. Scholars have spoken a lot about cannibalism, blood
20 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

rituals, sun and moon cycles and menstruation. One thing is clear: the story is
brutal; it doesn’t spare cruelty and has no redemption. Violence is not hidden
behind the scenes, it’s right there in plain view. The modern cult of childhood
hadn’t been invented yet, and little peasant children were brought up on fearful
tales without any palliatives.
The seventeenth-century French writer and courtier Charles Perrault
created a more literary version of the story for the court of Louis IV: the girl
acquires her fashionable red cape and the wolf learns gallantry. He becomes
less brutal, but no less dangerous, Don Juan, the seducer. The age of the heroine
stretches from childhood to early puberty; the French Red Riding Hood is a
kind of Lolita in the making.
The celebrated folk tale collections of German authors, the Brothers Grimm,
contained many versions, always with a virtuous blond heroine. In the later
version, the little girl and her grandma outwit the wolf, because they have already
read the fairy tale; they lure the beast to the house with the smell of homemade
sausage and trap him fearlessly.
The Brothers Grimm were beloved by Russian and Soviet children, but after
the revolution there emerged a very strong local tradition as well. Children’s
literature in the Soviet Union became a retreat for many experimental writers
and artists who otherwise couldn’t publish their work. So, without knowing it,
we grew up on Aesopian tales of dissent, but also on literature that had a great
sense of humor and play. Kornei Chukovsky, a poet and a friend of many great
poets from Khlebnikov to Mandelshtam, was the first author of the poem
about Doctor Aibolit, a kind doctor who receives a message from the monkey
Chichi to go to the banks of the river Limpopo in Africa to cure Chichi’s sick
sisters and brothers. In 1966, a well-known film for children and adults was
made called Aibolit 66 which used shifting screens, mime, live actors and
animation, and was at the forefront of cinematic experimentation. Doctor
Aibolit was no superhero; he was just a great animal lover and a believer in
random kindness and medical science.
 CHILDREN, WE’VE BEEN DECEIVED! 21

In the Khrushchev era of de-Stalinization and thaw, the story of fear and
seduction got another twist as an experimental cartoon, released in 1959,
“Peter and Little Red Riding Hood.” The Soviet pioneer Peter; a brave and
mischievous boy comes late to the movie theater; the cartoon of the fairy tale
“Little Red Riding Hood” had already started. Peter decides to sneak into the
movie theater through the hole in the fence and suddenly finds himself right
in the middle of the movie itself.
Peter has read the fairy tale and he wants to warn the blond foreign Red
Riding Hood to be cautious. His true antagonist is not really the wolf but the
cartoon storyteller himself. At the very beginning, Peter meets two animated
announcers-narrators who guide everyone through the story. “Who are they?”
Peter asks the local talking duck. “They are announcers” (dictors, in Russian,
which sounds almost like “dictators”), they tell everybody, what everybody
already knows. These dictors-dictators try to expel Petya from the cartoon; he
didn’t go through the vetting process! He comes uncensored! Peter so offends
one of the dictors he demonstratively disconnects himself. So, while the little
foreign Red Riding Hood is still a damsel in distress, she finds a new helper.
The Soviet pioneer of the 1960s doesn’t want to be a superhero but an author
of a new kind of story.
Of course, there is no violent content in the movie. It is gentle and fun.
When Soviet immigrants came to the US before perestroika, they were shocked
by the violence in American popular culture. American suburban kids often
saw more violence on-screen than off, and they became anaesthetized to it. By
contrast, Soviet kids witnessed physical fights, alcoholism, bullying, but it was
rarely represented in the movies or on television. Violence in the Soviet media
was mostly off-screen, and it was rarely spoken about or recalled.
The wolf in “Petya and Red Riding Hood” is not to be feared but to be
laughed at. He is just a grey wolf next door. The figure of the enemy in the
1960s is discredited and ridiculed. The whole culture of fear of the Stalin era
is called into question. The new merry era of the 1960s is forward-looking,
22 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

the past is mostly off-screen. And yet little children are still haunted by
inexplicable fairy tales.
Let’s go back to that House of Culture in Leningrad, to the cheerful Soviet
1960s of my childhood. “Thank you, dear Motherland, for a happy childhood”
was the slogan. We didn’t just read old tales; we were learning to draw the
rockets and sputniks of the future with colored pencils. We were told that
when we grow up, we would live with Communism, or at least in the Cosmos
on Mars, the red planet. The melancholic Moon was for bourgeois Americans.
“C’est si bon,” “it’s so good” was a popular French song of the time, sung by
Yves Montand in a black turtleneck. He came to the USSR in the late 1950s
and returned to France disillusioned. But never mind: his poem rhymed nicely
with the Soviet phrase: “Life has become merrier, life has become better,” just
with a different accent.
This brief time of transition between Stalin and Brezhnev was called “the
Thaw” (ottepel’). Some hoped it would become a Leningrad Spring, just like
the later Prague Spring, but instead, the melting ice of the Soviet puddles froze
over again during the Brezhnev era of stagnation (zastoi). But this happened
later. In the early 1960s my parents were very young and hopeful. Only in their
early twenties, they still wanted to catch up on everything they had missed in
their own wartime childhood. Now the Great Patriotic War was over, Stalin
was dead, political thaw was in and so were miniskirts and updos; new poetry
readings were taking place in stadiums, and Italian movies with cat-eyed
beauties and free-spirited long takes captivated audiences. Love was in the air
with lyrical whispers of the new sincerity and occasional melancholic notes of
1930s tangos. “Please add that we had no shower in our communal bathroom,
no toilet paper, no privacy,” says my mother. “We were humiliated all the time
in our everyday life. Always check with me when you write these things.”
Ok, done. Right after I was born, my mother and father finally got a room
of their own with high ceilings in a communal apartment with the family of
neighbors who were complete strangers to them. Our windows looked out
 CHILDREN, WE’VE BEEN DECEIVED! 23

onto a dark, enclosed Leningrad courtyard, but my mother bought very

modern curtains in Estonia that looked like fish nets capable of capturing sea
monsters and stars. As I peeped through these curtains into the dark windows
and ruined balconies on the other side of the building, the world appeared to
me more magical than depressing. Our room was brightly illuminated by a
red lampshade made in Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia; it looked like a friendly
UFO or a gift from outer space.
When my father washed dishes in the communal kitchen, he used to sing
a cheerful song: “We were born to make fairy tales come true.” The song was
called the “March of the Aviators” or “March of the Enthusiasts” and it had
an uncanny history far from its original creators, two Jewish musicians. The
song was beloved by both Nazi and Stalin propaganda. The words in the Soviet
version went like this:

We were born to make fairytales come true

To conquer distances and space
We were given steel arms as wings
A flaming motor for a heart

If we look closely at the words of the song, we realize that the cheerful
humanoid airplanes are not so safe for flying. To have a flame in one’s heart is
necessary for revolutionary enthusiasm, but when it comes to the heart of the
airplane, the motor is not advised to be in flames. Mixed metaphors are unsafe.
How come millions of Soviet people had been singing the song since the 1930s
and nobody ever noticed the internal sabotage? This was precisely because all
those millions sang it together. This Soviet fairy tale was meant to be recited
by an enthusiastic marching crowd, and not read closely on a solitary page. To
tell the truth, when my father sang it alone in our communal kitchen, he was
happy that the Stalinist times, when the song was written, were over, and he
could now laugh along with the song. The last thing we wanted was to make
fairy tales come true. Let fairy tales be fairy tales. If they were to come true, the
24 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

flaming motor of someone’s heart would definitely explode and the collective
organism would cease to function properly!
My mother would never sing a song like that. She distrusted fairy tales
of any kind and hoped to instill in me a sense of reality. She was only six
when Hitler’s armies invaded the Soviet Union, and she had to flee to Siberia
with her mother and brother. She didn’t talk about it much, and I learned all
the details of her wartime childhood when I was filling out her application
for aid from the German government two years ago. She was approaching
the application form as if it were the diary that she never kept. Her diary.
I include here some of her memories that didn’t fit into the application
form slots. As Leningrad was under siege by the Nazi army, families with
children were being evacuated. My mother, aged six, and her brother, aged
nine, were separated from their mother and transported in jam-packed
trains under constant bombardment to Yaroslavl, but the German armies
were approaching that city too; so they fled on a swarming and overcrowded
steamboat filled with screaming people to Saratov, where they reunited with
their mother and their cousins and fled further to Siberia. (CUT? There
was no information in the Soviet media about Nazi executions of the Jews.
After Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939, during the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact
between Stalin and Hitler, all information about the targeted extermination
of the Jews was considered “propaganda,” and some Polish Jews who fled to
supposed safety in the Soviet Union before 1941 were arrested and ended
up in the Gulag. My great-grandmother was in a hospital in Belarus as the
German armies were advancing. She still had good memories from World
War One, when German soldiers were much less cruel to the Jews than the
local Belarusians and Ukrainians. This time she was executed. Her daughter,
my grandfather’s sister and her family joined my mom and her brother.) My
mom was the youngest among the children: her older cousin, a spoiled,
blue-eyed Marochka, and my mom’s older brother who occasionally bullied
her. They all lived surrounded by the Siberian forests where non-fairy tale
 CHILDREN, WE’VE BEEN DECEIVED! 25

wolves howled gruesome lullabies. “The snow came up to the windowsills

and sometimes to the floor of our rooms. I still have frostbite on my hands,”
says my mother. The locals were not always kind to the Jewish refugees from
Leningrad. When my mother started school, the local boys followed her with
a song: “kike, kike, kike, running on a little spike.” It rhymes in Russian:
“zhid, zhid, zhid, po verevochke bezhit.”
Once upon a time my mom’s mother, Grandma Rosa, had to leave the
children behind and make a long walk through the Siberian forest in order to
reach the neighboring town. She had to sell most of their personal belongings
in order to buy food for the children. While she was away and the kids were
home alone, a local man stopped by their apartment. He said that Rosa was
lost in the forest and she had no food left with her and was very hungry. He
asked the kids to send some food. My mom and her brother Misha gave the
man all the food they could find in the house. Grandma Rosa came back to
the empty house. She never met that man in the forest and he vanished with
all their winter reserve. This was Red Riding Hood redux, made for the dark
Siberian night, without good costumes. The man was no wolf and he didn’t eat
little children. He just left them starving.
“I don’t remember myself smiling till the age of 11. When the war was over,
I began to smile and laugh again,” wrote my mother in her application. I was
editing her text with a pragmatic Western approach, making sure she puts the
right information into the right box. “Do you really want to say this that you
didn’t smile till the age of eleven? You know they are looking for facts, you
should say exactly in which towns you were, how you were fleeing by train
and boat under German bombardment, how you lived your life with Siberian
frostbite, and how traumatic it all was.” “Why do you always try to embellish
things?” asked my mother. “Just put it the way it happened.”
My mother was most happy when she observed something beautiful and
new and it didn’t come from books. Books were naïve deceptions. Children,
don’t be deceived, life is scarier than fairy tales. Swimming was her way to
26 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

joy—she feels free on the surface of the water, moving away from the shore
towards the horizon, where she could escape from all the dark forests of her
life, and from us too. It was my mother who taught me to swim. We still swim
together, but I am much less brave than she is. Usually I don’t go too far from
the shore and always make sure that my feet can find the bottom. She still
swims much better than me. I come out and read in the shade, observing
my mother at a distance in the middle of the lake. “Life is not literature,” my
mother tells me with mild reproach. Of course, I am a literature professor and
somehow it ended up being my life.
For my father, the difference between life and books or films was never
so crucial. What was important was shared experience, a sincere intonation,
the right mood. In this sense, he was very 1960s. He was ten during the
war: his father stayed in Leningrad during the blockade, while his mother,
my grandmother Sonia, was arrested and spent six years in the Gulag. As a
teenager during the war, he grew up believing that there exist “us” and “them,”
true friends and real enemies, and the most important and difficult thing is to
distinguish one from the other. Perhaps not finding such clear demarcations
in his everyday life, my father loved to organize imagined communities, clubs,
states within the state, playing games with other childish adults. First, he
organized the Club of Faithful Fans of Zenit (KZBZ in Russian), dedicated to
the Leningrad football team that lost the game on the day I was born. Then
my father created his labor of love, the movie club “Kino and You,” in the
Petrograd District House of Culture on Leo Tolstoy Square, near our home.
This wasn’t a place merely to see movies that weren’t shown in official Soviet
theaters, it was more of a pretext to talk about life, to create a true community
of friends and film club members. My father’s club was like a little 1960s fairy
tale kingdom with kinder laws, a little more freedom of speech. There was a
lot of talk there, not much action and a lot of dreaming. The film club was my
unofficial babysitting station. I was brought there from an early age. When I
was a child, my father sometimes read me fairy tales and petted me on the
 CHILDREN, WE’VE BEEN DECEIVED! 27

head as if I were a little fairy tale animal. He even called me zver’, a little beast,
and told me not to be afraid.
My parents started leaving me alone from the age of five. They didn’t go too
far, just across the square to my father’s film club in the local Palace of Culture,
to play their own adult games. Italian neo-realist films, black-and-white and
tantalizingly open-ended, were followed by intense Polish existential dramas
and French comedies. The club “Kino and You” was not only a place to watch
movies, but also to talk about them, to see and to be seen. Since some of the
movies had more adult content than a five-year old could take, I was left in our
room in the communal apartment with the drunken neighbors. Though in the
US leaving little children alone would be considered unthinkable, in the Soviet
Union of my childhood this was the norm. Strangely, I retain good memories
of this time spent alone, when I somehow created my own time-space of fun
and freedom—with flashes of fear. My mother tells me that I was a very well-
behaved girl then. She or my dad would set the alarm clock to 9:30, and at
that time I had to go straight to bed and not wait for them to come home.
Sometimes, they would find me in bed asleep in my dress and even an apron,
because I was so obedient and tried to go to sleep on time. Parents, you’ve been
deceived. Of course, I didn’t follow orders. I would play as long as I wished and
then once I heard their footsteps on the staircase, I would jump into bed and
pretend to be sleeping, just like the wolf in grandma’s clothes.
My grandmother Sonia disapproved of my parents leaving me alone in our
communal flat. She would call me and start asking me questions:
“Did you check under the bed, Svetochka? Bend your knees and look
underneath? Maybe there is a wicked thief hiding there? Did you check the
back door? Are the big hook and the chain on? Did you check behind the fishnet
curtains in the dark corner?” Luckily there was only one-and-a-half rooms,
so there wasn’t much space for the wicked thief to hide. My grandma was a
Gulag survivor. She had nightmares about being arrested again. Unwittingly I
inherited some of them.
28 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

Other than looking for wicked thieves under the bed, I found these breaks
from my dear parents fun. Books kept me company. I discovered that there
are many more things one could do with them than with my favorite stuffed
giraffe or that East German rubber doll Nelly, with her bleached-blond hair
and glass eyes. Once I twisted off the doll’s head to see what was inside it. There
was nothing there, just the emptiness of pink rubber. Books smelled much
better—a mixture of Soviet printing glue and unforeseen adventure.
Once upon a time when I was five and a half, my parents came back from
the film club and entered a new fairy tale. They discovered that instead of
reading the book that they left for me, I had begun to write a book of my
own. My heroes were mostly red vegetables—Signorina Carrot and Signore
Pomodoro (courtesy of the Italian communist writer Gianni Rodari). Who did
what to whom? I don’t remember. One more realistic story featured a little girl
who went to play on a slide in the park shaped like sputniks. The girls didn’t fly
into the Cosmos but just slid down the slippery slope. (I am embellishing, as
usual. My early stories began and ended in media res and had poor character
development.)
I didn’t put my name on the cover of my first book, although I already knew
how to spell it. Instead I wrote in big letters, TALES OF THE BROTHERS
GRIMM. I thought that was the only book worth contributing to, like a book
of life. One shared collection of fairy tales with many slippery slopes and curvy
paths, scared Gretchens and wise Vassilissas. Thus, Little Red Riding Hood
became a little sister Grimm.
This sister-writer was the perfect babysitter. Writing protected me from the
wicked thief or the drunk neighbor urinating in the corridor. I didn’t need a
large number of toys that would become quickly obsolete and abandoned. Nor
did I depend on the digital screen, that would spoil me with instant gratification
under my fingertips, courtesy of software engineers and advertisers. VRI,
Virtual Reality of the Imagination, was the only available Soviet app, free with
the purchase of colored pencils.
 CHILDREN, WE’VE BEEN DECEIVED! 29

Literature became my best imaginary friend. Not just a specific literary

character, but literature as such offered an entry into another world created
through language and pictures, an alternative space out of space and time out
of time. The empty white pages at the end of the book were my favorite. I could
draw there and practice letters in cursive. Literature was the best game that I
could play alone, or rather with all kinds of creatures dead and alive, realistic
and fantastic, from the Black Forest of Little Red Riding Hood to the Limpopo
river of Dr. Aibolit.
Literature also provided the best romance, at least till I was a teenager. I
just couldn’t have crushes on the little sweaty boys with pimples from the 6-B
class. Instead, I created imaginary Prince Charmings for myself, and even
wrote secret messages from them to me which I would demonstratively “leave
behind” in front of the boys from 6-B. He had a foreign fairy-tale name, Dmitri
Brunie: Karamazov meets D’Artagnan.
When I was in the sixth grade, I took part in the literary Olympiad, where
we had to write a composition on the topic “My favorite hero.” The stock of
preferred heroes included young Lenin dreaming of the Bolshevik party,
Pavlik Morozov from the 1930s (who informed on his father for the sake of the
motherland) and Vasek Trubachev, who did something equally positive. My
choice of the musketeer D’Artagnan cost me my prize. I received an honorable
mention and a quiet reprimand for choosing a foreign hero. Was D’Artagnan,
with his dark and thick moustache, a suave wolf in musketeer’s clothing? Even
my father began to worry about my passion for D’Artagnan, and with my
mother’s encouragement he decided to talk to me and to turn me away from
that dark, handsome and reckless man, who in any case, “was emotionally
(and physically) unavailable.”
“Did you know that D’Artagnan never brushed his teeth?” asked my father
in a conspiratorial tone. “He must have really smelled. Do you see any mention
of D’Artagnan brushing his teeth in the book?”
30 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

He was right. There was no mention. I was shocked. The taste of

D’Artagnan’s sour breath kept me up at night. It almost destroyed my faith in
tall, dark and handsome men from the Old World. I remember that when I
came to America, one of the first things we were taught in our new immigrant
orientation program was to brush our teeth regularly and to use deodorant and
contraceptives. The rumor about Soviet bad teeth must have spread westwards.
We had to bring our oral hygiene up to the standards of the New World. After
thirty years in America I can testify that people here have fresher breath than
in the old country, but my brave hero-friend, the faithful musketeer, is missing.
Gone flossing?
Once upon a time I met a Leningrad D’Artagnan. It took place in a half-
empty trolley No. 1, which I regularly took from school back home. I might
have been ten or eleven. He was standing next to my seat and leaning against
me as the trolley bus went along its bumpy route. My D’Artagnan was in his
late twenties and had dark hair and kind dark eyes. He looked like a member
of my father’s film club or an extra in one of the second-rate Italian movies
that they showed there. I was reading dialogues in my English textbook. He
tried to strike up a conversation, but I didn’t answer. I had been taught not to
talk to strangers. When he saw that I was doing English dialogues he asked me
in English: “What is your name?” “My name is Sveta,” I answered like a good
pupil. We had an intelligent small conversation in Russian. And then he asked
me where I was going and where I lived. I wasn’t in the forest but in public
transportation, and I wasn’t carrying a cabbage pie to my grandmother, but
just coming home to an empty apartment in a dark enclosed courtyard. He got
off the trolley with me. We walked silently for a while.
“Can I come with you and help you with your homework?” he asked.
“No thank you,” I said politely. “My mother told me not to talk to strangers.”
I lingered at the trolley stop because I already knew that a good spy has
to cover her traces and mislead. The stranger didn’t insist. He looked sad, his
eyes were dark and kind. “Goodbye,” he said and walked slowly towards the
 CHILDREN, WE’VE BEEN DECEIVED! 31

buildings of the Medical Institute nearby. I have no idea whether this was an
act of random kindness or of random pedophilia. I only got scared afterwards.
“Why did you talk to him in the first place?” my mother asked. “Didn’t I tell
you to never talk to strangers?” “But he looked like somebody from the film
club,” I said.
There are two approaches to fear. The American way: there is nothing to
fear but fear itself. Confront the fear, head-on, like one cowboy confronting
the other: a fair fight, a few broken ribs and you’ll be the toast of the tavern.
In Russia you don’t talk about fear. You don’t run to the stage and scream
“wolf!” You turn your back on fear, recklessly or cautiously, depending on
the situation. In his autobiographical novella The Egyptian Stamp, poet Osip
Mandelshtam wrote something that goes against the grain of both traditions:
“With fear I have no fear.” Figure out the cause of your fear, give it space, make
architecture for it. Imagine the fear as a nomadic home and carry it through
your story. “Fear takes me by the hand and leads my way,” writes Mandelshtam
at the end of his tale, moving from the third person to the first.
Literature was both a source of fear and a cure for it; it distracted us from
the world around us, but also provided an alternative guide to life. Unlike
ideology, it taught us to tolerate ambiguity, to explore the world of possibility
and wonder, to cross borders into foreign times and spaces that were otherwise
beyond reach.
During my teenage years, my games were no longer solitary. My comrade-
in-arms in our early teenage years was my best friend, Natasha-Kycha; we were
like two musketeers, one for all and all for one. Our games were rituals for
an imaginary community of friends. One such game was called the game of
secrets. The “secret” was a rescued piece of trash, a glittering foil wrapping of
already-eaten chocolates, a piece of colored glass, a shard of bone china with
gilded edges and blue flowers. The game consisted in burying this precious
treasure from the trash somewhere on the outskirts of a public place, by the
fence of the garden or behind some shrubbery. The secrets were hidden in
32 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

order to be shared with a special few. Intimacy wasn’t based on total exposure
but on intimation, not on over-sharing but on understanding one another
with half-words. Visiting the secret burial place was a ritual of friendship.
All children’s games were, one way or another, games of hide and seek, of
intimation and cover-up. They carved out uncharted territories for kids that
existed in a different scale and invisibly for grown-ups.
Our friendship was real and literary at the same time. At the age of
thirteen we walked through the interconnected courtyards and discussed our
melancholic and belated times, the era of Brezhnev’s stagnation. We read too
much Mikhail Lermontov for our classes and thought that the golden age of
Pushkin (or the 1960s?) was over, and somehow the silver age was over too,
and we lived in some non-descript, grey age. We learned Lermontov’s short
poem by heart: “I’m bored and sad and there’s nobody to shake my hand. And
life, if you look around and think about it, is just an empty and stupid joke.”
We identified with the Hero of Our Time, the enigmatic Don Giovanni named
Pechorin, whose eyes didn’t smile when he smiled. He was traveling aimlessly
in postwar times along the Crimean shore, playing games of chance with a
Serbian gambler or seducing a beautiful Circassian girl named Bela, without
much pleasure.
Even our hooliganism was literary. We used to play phone tricks on strangers.
For example, we would check the names in the phone book and when we
would find Dostoevsky, we would call and ask politely: “Is this Dostoevsky?”
“Yes, Dostoevsky speaking,” responded a deep male voice. “Idiot!” we would
scream in response. We were caught at our own game when we reached a Mrs.
Lermontova, and tried to ask her if she was bored and sad and had nobody
to shake her hand, it turned out that it was all true, and she wouldn’t let us go
without a long poetic conversation that we desperately tried to end.
All our books were about male friendships, but really the relationships of
our early teens were all among girls. We had one small gang of former Little
Red Riding Hoods pitched against another one.
 CHILDREN, WE’VE BEEN DECEIVED! 33

When I was in the fifth grade, the class master put me on school trial. It
was a mini-version of a show trial. I was accused of organizing secret societies,
conspiring against other pupils in the class, and writing a slanderous novel
about it. The accusation wasn’t entirely untrue. Kycha and I had organized a
notorious secret society of Black Mimosas, and we sent chivalrous messages
to the leader of the other girls’ gang, the beautiful A-student Katya P., now
happily residing in Canada. I think we actually liked each other and somehow
it was understood that this was only an adventurous game, like in The Three
Musketeers. Our secret message was peppered with classical references:

Femida has been bribed. Let Fortuna help you!

Black Mimosas.

Russian Mimosas were normally the flowers that boys gave girls for
International Women’s Day; they were semi-dry and sickly-yellow in color, but
with a tender smell. Our mimosas were ever-black but we wrote our messages
in milk, just like young Lenin in his prison cell. This was the most interesting
thing we learned in the long history of Leninism; how Lenin made an inkpot
out of bread and poured some milk in it and began writing secret messages
explaining that we, the true revolutionaries, “would take a different path.” You
had to bring the sheet of paper close to a flame and watch the shaking letters
emerge in front of your eyes. It felt like uncovering hieroglyphs of the past.
Except for the threat that Femida, the Goddess of Justice, has been bribed,
the messages weren’t particularly violent. The trial wasn’t initiated by Katya
herself, who rather enjoyed the attention we were showering on her and was
herself an excellent player. It was her divorced father, who might have felt
guilty that he didn’t visit his daughter very often, who informed on us to the
ideologically obsessed teacher. During the trial I had to face the whole class and
listen to the accusations in conspiracy with a straight face and unblinking eyes,
thinking of brave D’Artagnan. Kycha was the only one who testified for me. My
parents, too, were on my side, somehow; they knew it wasn’t for real, but they
34 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

treated the event as yet another disciplinary measure of our authoritarian class
master. After the trial we ran to our headquarters in the girls’ toilet where we
could cry freely and support each other.
Kycha stayed behind in Leningrad when I went to pioneer camp. It might
have been there, when I was fourteen, that I played my last game. Like in
the old fairy tales, there was a dark forest with protruding roots and bright
red mushrooms with white dots, a lovely lake with muddy waters and salty
cabbage pies in the collective canteen. This was the pioneer camp affiliated
with my father’s factory, which had its own mini House of Culture with shows
and marches. We still wore our dirty pioneer ties, but mine had a torn end. I
didn’t like getting up in the morning, making my bed in two minutes army-
style and running to march with the other sleepy overgrown pioneers: One,
two three: Pioneers are we! We are the pioneers. Who’s marching in one line—our
pioneer detachment! Pioneers, to struggle for the cause of the Communist party
be ready! Answer, salute: Always Ready!
My parents knew that I had outgrown my pioneer salutes, but the camp
was in such a fairy-tale natural setting, and in any case, there was nowhere
else to put me up that summer. On the first day of the camp I met a girl my
age, an engineer’s daughter from my father’s factory called Alla. She was tall,
handsome and athletic, with the broad shoulders of a professional swimmer.
Her dirty blond hair was tied in a neat ponytail. It was instant attraction and
intense friendship. We walked, swam together and talked about books and
boys, more the former than latter.
In the beginning we were enchanted by each other—by our common
interests and differences. But Alla was a natural leader and I was always in the
party of the opposition. We started to grow apart. She had her own fan club of
girls from our detachment and they had long discussions on everything from
new make-up purchased on the black market to sports and contraceptives.
They had their own games of secrets, too, in which I didn’t partake. Alla was
the ring mistress, and I was the only one who resisted her domineering charms.
 CHILDREN, WE’VE BEEN DECEIVED! 35

I remember girls’ chatter, not-so-clean pioneer ties hanging at the heads

of the narrow beds, and me hiding in my bed, my back turned to the others,
escaping to the Sherwood Forest of my English book. In our English classes we
always read about the people’s heroes—from Robin Hood to the Angry Young
Men. In our classes on English phonetics we sat in front of the mirror and were
taught some mythical nineteenth-century British English that required us to
open our mouths and show teeth making the uncanny grin of a Cheshire cat. I
preferred Robin Hood and his coterie of ragtag friends who stole from the rich
to Alla’s blue-shaded, deodorant-sharing pioneers. I was neither with them
nor against them—just to the side, a fellow non-traveler.
Alla couldn’t tolerate this kind of defiant non-belonging. She started to refer
to me as zhidovka (a kike in feminine) and to make anti-Semitic remarks. I
didn’t react because they didn’t seem to have any bearing on our relationship.
One girl from Alla’s fan club even came up to me and said sweetly that I didn’t
really “look Jewish.” She thought I was OK. This wasn’t a struggle around
prejudice but around power. Alla became conspicuously aggressive and I was
studiously defiant. In the meantime, we marched together in the morning and
swore pioneer friendship and participated in swimming competitions, since
we were both good swimmers.
Once our pioneer leader, a man in his twenties with mild manners and a
long moustache where lots of beer and tall tales traveled, selected Alla and
me for a special trip to the forest lake. He used this occasion to meet his own
paramour, a female cultural organizer from another detachment. Alla and I
were left alone to swim in the forest lake without adult supervision.
That lake—moon-shaped with weeping willows on the banks—stayed
with me. The water was eerily calm and muddy. I was swimming slowly,
feeling the dark green algae under my fingers. And then my head was
underwater and I couldn’t see anymore. Somebody was pressing me hard
face down. Holding me forcefully under water, a few seconds, a minute, an
eternity. I tried to escape and come back to the surface but someone’s hand
36 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

kept pushing me down. There was no bottom under my feet, nothing to

grasp to. I choked.

Was this only a game? The drowned and the saved?

I don’t know, I had no name for it.

I can’t remember how I managed to make it to the shore and somehow

laugh it off. I ran to the village store near the camp and called my father. I asked
him to take me out of the camp. He said that he couldn’t. He realized it was
tough for me, but such was life in the country, and I needed to learn to survive.
He promised to move me to another detachment as quickly as he could. I don’t
blame him because I didn’t tell him exactly what happened. I couldn’t utter it,
and he wouldn’t have been able to hear it anyway. He didn’t ask any follow-up
questions. Perhaps he was afraid to have his own worst fears realized.
I wished somebody else had witnessed what happened at that lake, not just
me. It could have been a lumberjack from a nearby village, a kindly Baba Yaga
walking home to her hut on chicken legs, a Princess Frog or at least a talking
duck who could do a good underwater shot. Maybe they could tell another
version of the story with a different ending: an athletic girl kissing a scared
friend on a wet cheek, a pioneer leader diving to save me, me fighting back and
swimming in brave pioneer strokes back to the shore.
But the talking duck had already been eaten. The pioneer leader was necking
with his girlfriend. My mother and grandmother were far away, in some house
of culture. My adversary was a handsome athletic blond girl who looked like
a heroine of the Socialist Realist paintings. An overgrown Little Red Riding
Hood, whom everybody liked, put an end to my childhood games.
More importantly, I might have misrecognized my Prince Charming. He
wasn’t a suave wolf, pioneer Peter or D’Artagnan, but Doctor Aibolit with
the huge needle. I should have run towards him, not away from him. Why
is it that kind doctors are made unsexy in world literature? From Flaubert to
Chekhov, they come out as mild-mannered and kindly cuckolds. Dr. Aibolit
 CHILDREN, WE’VE BEEN DECEIVED! 37

would have led me to a kinder world of painted lakes and singing monkeys,
where small human deeds really matter and there is still a place for artistic play
and random kindness. When I watch Aibolit 66 today—the 1966 film made
for both children and adults—I realize once again there was no single female
character there with whom I could identify. Even the singing monkey Chichi,
the doctor’s friend, was a perky blond.
My mother tells me the story one more time of my protest at the House of
Culture. She describes how hard she tried to make a good costume for me with
the help of Aunt Genia, who was an excellent tailor, and how I embarrassed
her at the end, for no reason. Dr. Aibolit was just about to sing his song about
how it’s actually good that things are pretty bad, or how we should all be happy
whether we like it or not.
“‘Children, we were deceived,’ you screamed, and all the kids ran after you.”
“I wish I could do it again,” I said. “Just go out there and shout what I mean.
I was so brave then.”
“You were very scared,” said my mother.
38
 3
The Secret Life of a
Communal Apartment
Neighbor

Till the age of seven I lived in the same room with my parents. The first
memory that comes to my mind is that of the heavy curtain (port’era) that
partitioned our shared room. Dark yellow, with heavy ornamental appliqué,
the portiere was a porous partition between children and adults. During my
parents’ parties—vecherinki—the portiere took human shapes as the guests
walked in and out of the child’s corner. Smudged silver shades, blurry cat-
eyes, unfolding updos, young sweat on the polyester dresses and the inevitable
“tape recorder music” in the background with its adventurous unofficial ease.
It might have been my favorite song by Vladimir Vysotsky. Then I thought it
was about funny baobabs. Actually, it was about migrating souls.

Some people trust Muhammad, and some– Jesus for salvation,

And there are also such types who treat these ones with spite,
While there is Hindus’ idea of the soul’s transmigration,
Which says that we don’t die for good, and I believe it’s right.
Enjoy your life and don’t be cross,
Don’t gripe about your fate –
Directly into a big boss
40 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

Your soul may migrate.

Don’t worry if ye’re but a hand, ye’ll be reborn a foreman,
With time ye’ll be a minister – it’s really not a joke!
If you act dumb – too bad for you, then for some thousand years
you’ll be reborn a baobab and die a baobab.1

I didn’t know what religion meant; for me the song was the greatest fairy
tale. Nobody died. Everyone traveled elsewhere and became somebody or
something else. I wanted to become a babbling baobab and dance all night
with the youthful grown-ups.
My life unfolded around partitions, doors, walls and curtains of many
kinds—from the porous portiere in the room of my parents to the invisible
but perceivable iron curtain. There was always a place for a shadow play and
a desire for secrecy in the midst of collective exposure. For as long as I can
remember. I always hoped to transmigrate—if not into a big boss, at least
into an exotic plant or bird with a foreign afterlife. Like the majority of urban
kids of my generation, I was a single child; this was partly due to the difficult
housing arrangements in the communal apartments. The Soviet single child
was treated as a part of a larger group, a member of unofficial and official
collectives—not just a nuclear family. My first childhood memories are public,
not intimate. I am in the company of my parents’ friends and members of the
extended family, like my perky cousins with whom I had little in common.
My parents have an exceptional record—a loving marriage of half a century,
yet I didn’t spy on their intimacy. Most of all, I remember the texture of our
partition. So much for the primal scenes and Victorian Peeping Toms.
The partition was the central architectural feature of Soviet communal
living. Some were mere curtains but most of them were made of plywood
and they marked the intersection of public and private spheres within the
apartment. After the expropriation and nationalization of property, especially

Vladimir Vysotsky, “Pesenka o pereselenii dush” (“Song of the Soul’s Transmigration”).

1
 THE SECRET LIFE OF A COMMUNAL APARTMENT NEIGHBOR 41

in residential blocks in the old city center, the rooms and hallways were
partitioned and subdivided, creating weird angular spaces, with a window
opening onto a sunless back yard or without any windows. Every tenant
exercised their imagination in inventing curtains and screens to delineate their
minimum privacy. A plywood partition was so much flimsier than a wall, more
a sign of division than division itself. It let through all the noises, the snoring,
the fragments of conversations, the footsteps of the neighbor, and everything
else you can think of. The partition served not so much to preserve intimacy
as to create an illusion that some intimacy was possible.
Secrecy is one of the most important ways of keeping the illusion of privacy.
But secrecy in the communal apartment was a game of searching for alternative
communalities. There used to be an unofficial children’s game we played in
the kindergarten, called “the game of burying secrets” which had nothing to
do with the official collective “hide-and-seek” orchestrated by the teacher, a
game in which there were no secrets and nothing in particular to seek or to
find. Our game consisted of a ritual burial of our little “secret” somewhere
on the outskirts of a small urban garden or yard where the teachers brought
us. The secret was not precious in itself: a piece of colored glass found in the
trash; an old stamp; a piece of the glittering foil wrapping of chocolates; an
old badge. The burial ceremony was performed by a group of close friends
and hidden from the kindergarten authorities. The secret had to be hidden
in order to be shared, to become a bond between friends, a talisman of our
hidden community. This secrecy is not solitary; it has to be dramatized in
public. Games of secrets were played by adults in their attempts to establish
alternative communities and styles of personal collecting, which was not the
same as individual privacy. The space of the communal apartment defined the
topography of my childhood nightmares and dreams. Maybe if I manage to
reconstruct it, I can find a secret burrow to my younger self? To the Svetka,
Zenita carving her little corner for private games.
42 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

Here is another scene that lays bare the boundaries between public and
private in the communal apartment. The same song is playing about baobabs
but this time it’s not for dancing but warding off the curious neighbors and
keeping the conversation more private.
My parents are having foreign guests for the first time in their life in our
room in the communal apartment. Our neighbors, Aunt Vera and Uncle
Fedia, are home. (Russian children call their neighbors aunt and uncle, as if
they were members of one very extended family.) Uncle Fedia usually came
home drunk, and if Aunt Vera refused to let him in, he would crash right in
the middle of the long corridor, the central thoroughfare of the communal
apartment, obstructing the entrance to our room. As a child, I would often
play with peacefully reclining and heavily intoxicated Uncle Fedia, with his
fingers and buttons, or tell him a story to which he probably did not have much
to add. This time we were all in the room, listening to music to tone down the
communal noises, and my mother was telling our foreign guests about the
beauties of Leningrad: “you absolutely must go to the Hermitage, and then
to Pushkin’s apartment museum, and of course to the Russian Museum.” In
the middle of the conversation, as the guest was commenting on the riches of
Russian culture, a little yellow stream slowly made its way through the door
of the room. Smelly, embarrassing, intrusive, it formed a little puddle right in
front of the dinner table.
No one seems to remember what happened afterwards. In the apartment,
Uncle Fedia and Aunt Vera were displaced by lonely Aunt Valia, who worked
in a bread factory, and her mentally ill son Yura, and then by a couple of
homonymic drunkards, Aunt Shura and Uncle Shura, who endearingly called
themselves the “Shurenkis.” And if it were not for the benevolent foreign
guest enjoying the beauties of Soviet public places, and for my mother’s
deeply personal embarrassment, the story would not have been particularly
exceptional. After all, as one of my Soviet friends remarked, some neighbors
peed into each other’s teapots. Yet this scene, with its precarious coziness
 THE SECRET LIFE OF A COMMUNAL APARTMENT NEIGHBOR 43

of a family gathering, both intimate and public, with a mixture of ease and
fear in the presence of foreigners and neighbors, remained in my mind as a
memory of home. The family picture is thus framed by the inescapable stream
of Uncle Fedia’s urine, which so easily crossed the minimal boundaries of our
communal privacy, embarrassing the fragile etiquette of communal propriety.
And it smells too much to turn it into a mere metaphor. This is something that
is hard to domesticate.
If there had been such a thing as a Soviet cultural unconscious, it would have
been structured like a communal apartment with flimsy partitions between
public and private, between control and intoxication. The Soviet “family
romance” was adulterated by the fluttering sound of a curious neighbor’s
slippers in the communal apartment, or by an inquisitive representative of the
local Housing Committee. It was a romance with the collective, unfaithful to
both communitarian mythologies and traditional family values.
The communal apartment was the cornerstone of Soviet civilization. It was
a specifically Soviet form of urban living, a memory of a never implemented
utopian communist design, an institution of social control, and the breeding
ground of police informants between the 1920s and the 1980s. This is a place
where many battles for the reconstruction of daily life were launched and
most of them were lost. Here the neighbors engaged in quite un-Marxist class
struggles; “domestic trash” triumphed and privacy was prohibited only to be
reinvented again against all odds. Kommunalka—a term of endearment and
deprecation—came into existence after the post-revolutionary expropriation
and resettlement of the private apartments in urban centers. It consisted of
all-purpose rooms (living rooms, bedrooms, and studies became a “decadent
luxury”) integrated with “places of communal use,” a euphemistic expression
for shared bathroom, corridor, and kitchen, spaces where hung schedules of
communal duties and where endless complaints were exchanged among the
fellow neighbors. The communal neighbors, most often complete strangers
from different classes and social groups thrown together by the local Housing
44 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

Committee, were joined in a pre-modern practice of “mutual responsibility.”

(Every communal apartment dweller is probably scarred for life by that
symbolic “mutual responsibility”—a double bind of love and hatred, of
envy and attachment, of secrecy and exhibitionism, of embarrassment and
compromise.) The communal apartment was not merely an outcome of the
post-revolutionary housing crisis but also of a revolutionary experiment in
living, an attempt to practice utopian ideologies and to destroy bourgeois
banality. Hence this is a Soviet common place par excellence, which reveals
all the paradoxes of the common place and of Soviet communality. The
archeology of the communal apartment reveals what happens when utopian
designs are put into practice, inhabited, and placed into history—individual
and collective.
It also stands as a metaphor of the distinctive Soviet mentality. It was a
favorite tragicomic setting for jokes. Thus, when Stalin was taken out of the
mausoleum, people joked that Khrushchev had resettled Lenin’s communal
apartment (which in the post-Soviet time might be further privatized).
Actually, this joke is appropriate since the communal apartment was conceived
in Lenin’s head. Only a few weeks after the October Revolution of 1917 Lenin
drafted a plan to expropriate and resettle private apartments. This plan inspired
many architectural projects of communal housing and new revolutionary
topography. The “rich apartment” was defined by Lenin “as the apartment
where the number of rooms equals or surpasses the number of residents who
permanently inhabit this apartment.” A minimum living space of about ten
square meters per person and thirteen square meters per family was established.
In his memoirs Joseph Brodsky calls his family’s living quarters, poetically and
quite literally, “a room and a half.” What appears striking in Lenin’s decree is
that it suggests a different understanding of home and space than one is used
to in Western Europe or in the United States. A person, or rather a statistical
unit (in Lenin’s expression, the soul of the population), was not entitled to a
room or to a private space but only to a number of square meters. The space
 THE SECRET LIFE OF A COMMUNAL APARTMENT NEIGHBOR 45

is divided mathematically or bureaucratically as if it were an abstract problem

in geometry, not the real space of existing apartments. As a result, most of
the apartments in the major cities were partitioned in an incredible and often
non-functional manner, creating strange spaces, long corridors, and so-called
“black entrances” through labyrinthine inner courtyards.
Imagine entering one of the communal apartments in Leningrad/St.
Petersburg, not mine but the one across the street. We pass by the back staircase
and stop in front of the massive door with several separate bells: “three rings
for Petrov, two for Khaimovich, one for Skripkina, four for Genalidze.” This is
the first affirmation of separateness; if we don’t have a separate door, at least
we’ve got a separate doorbell; if not a separate kitchen, at least a separate gas
burner. If we share the same electric light, then each of us should have a switch;
even if it is completely irrational and inconvenient, we will go all the way along
the long corridor to our room in order to turn on the lights in the toilet. In
circumstances of extreme over-crowdedness and imposed collectivity there
is an extreme almost obsessive protection of minimal individual property.
Just be sure to remember how many times you have to ring the bell, and God
forbid you ring the wrong one! As you enter the communal corridor you hear
the flutter of slippers and the squeaking of the floors and you notice many
pairs of eyes scrutinizing you through half-opened doors. Some look at you
indifferently, others with suspicion or with basic self-defensive hostility,
just in case. When a guest comes to the apartment it is everyone’s business,
a mini-event, a source of gossip and argument. Please don’t forget to clean
your feet, right on the threshold of the communal apartment. Do it thoroughly
and just a bit longer than needed, otherwise you will violate the schedule of
communal duties, especially the timetable of corridor-cleaning, and bring a lot
of communal misfortune to your host.
A never-composed oral history of a Soviet communal apartment, where
KGB informants and Gulag survivors, kitchen dissidents and drunks
shared the same toilet and read the same newspaper Pravda there, offers an
46 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

alternative oral history of the whole country. My grandmother Rosa lived

with ten families in the partitioned apartment of the lawyer Goldberg (not
a relative) who was resettled into one room and died during the Leningrad
blockade. The collective included an old woman named Glebovna, who
claimed to have swept the floors of the Winter Palace, and had been a maid
of the first owner of the apartment (she hid a little photograph of Tsar
Nikolai II in the back of a drawer); Gertruda Genrikovna, a piano teacher
of German descent, who was exiled during the war to a special camp for
Russified Germans in Kazakhstan and had nineteenth-century porcelain
figurines representing all the nations of Great Russia; there was the former
Stakhanovite and now drunkard Uncle Kolia; an old Bolshevik, Aunt Aleftina
who worked as an accountant in Smolny and later for the Leningrad Party
Committee and used to enjoy special vacations in the Party sanatorium. In
the 1950s, during the purges of Jewish doctors, Aleftina stopped talking
with my grandmother in the communal kitchen, checking if she was using
any blood in her sauce. Luckily in the later post-Stalinist years their kitchen
was guarded by a handsome and mostly semi-naked sailor Nikita, a KGB
informant of a younger generation. He displayed the special Peruvian
panties he bought for his perpetual fiancé Galya, who when Nikita went
sailing befriended Leningrad underground poets.
The communal apartment is not to be confused with a kibbutz or merely an
apartment with roommates. There were many utopian projects of garden cities
and houseboats with common kitchens and collectivized children. Some of
these avant-garde buildings are now beautiful ruins of unfulfilled modernity.
Communal apartments might have shared some tenets with these architectural
dreams but were mostly arbitrarily remodeled and unfairly distributed old city
apartments. Since the late 1920s and especially during the Stalin years the
communal apartment had become a major Soviet institution of social control
and a form of constant surveillance that lasted until perestroika.
 THE SECRET LIFE OF A COMMUNAL APARTMENT NEIGHBOR 47

Alone, in the communal apartment, 1964–1975

Twenty years ago, I thought that if I transform myself from an unhappy

communal apartment dweller into a cheerful scholarly mythologist of Soviet
life, I would be able to recreate the Soviet common places. Looking back at my
textual communal apartment I see many spaces of forgetting. What I forgot
or didn’t feel was worthy of writing were more individual experiences in the
collectivized space, in particular, my own.
Being alone as a child in the communal apartment seems like a paradox, yet
that’s what stayed most in my memory. I look at my childhood pictures and
notice my unsmiling face, except for a perky look with a fake dimple on the
retouched picture taken in the official photo-atelier where I am dressed like
Little Red Riding Hood. I seem to have more of a relationship with my giraffe
than with my same-age cousins with bigger ribbons in their cute girlish hair.
I believe my childhood was a pretty good one, considering the circumstances,
but somehow in my first childhood memories I pretended to be childish. I
remember less of being a child and more about trying to “pass for a child” and
later longing to be a child when I was one no more.
From the age of five, my parents left me alone in our room in the communal
apartment to go the film club “Kino and You” which was located in the Palace
of Culture on Leo Tolstoy Square. I wasn’t particularly unhappy about that at
all, more curious. I was supposed to go to bed according to the alarm clock
at 9:30. I rather loved my time alone. I had my parents’ large room all for
myself and felt like a princess in disguise. I drew pictures, I didn’t have to clean
my drawers or pretend to play with silly rubber German dolls. I could draw
pictures and letters. Occasionally my grandmother would call and inquire if
I had checked under the bed for a wicked thief or if the crook on the back
door was properly in place. “You were such an obedient girl then,” my mom
usually says with a wistful sigh. “You always went to bed exactly according to
48 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

the alarm clock. You tried so hard to be on time, that you would hide under the
blanket in your half-unbuttoned dress and close your eyes.” Yeah, right. I had
to disappoint my mother about many things. I wasn’t a virgin when I married
my first husband. And no, I didn’t go to sleep on the sound of the alarm clock.
I jumped into bed with my dress still on when I heard my parents’ footsteps on
our back staircase. And I didn’t keep my eyes wide shut.
On one of many such nights out, my parents came back to my half-asleep
self and discovered a little notebook on the floor. On the cover, written in
shaky colored letters in my five-year-old handwriting was “Tales of the
Brothers Grimm.” Inside they found my stories in big letters in colored pencils.
The stories (written by me) were mostly about the red vegetables—Signorina
Carrot escaping the evil grip of Signore Pommodore (courtesy of the Italian
communist writer Gianny Rodari). There was also a more realistic tale about
a girl who wants to go to the slides (gorki) in the garden shaped like a sputnik
but there are evil boys there. (It remained open-ended.) The reader of fairy
tales left unsupervised by the communal apartment committee became a
writer! How could she watch the alarm clock when she was in the middle of
going down the cosmic slide?
I thought from those early hours of solitude I learned to be creative, to
inhabit my own world and just hang out with imaginary friends. Who needs
parents or neighbors when you can just draw eyes on your thigh and wrap your
knee with the sheet, white like a blank canvas? And then you can tell secrets to
your imaginary friend. If only my grandma didn’t call sharing her Gulag fears,
it would be better. That wicked thief under my bed made funny noises even
when I saw no trace of him. I continued looking under that bed even when my
grandma wasn’t calling. He haunted the dusty darkness in the closet. At least I
knew that the alarm clock was lovingly set for me by my parents for 9:30 and
that sooner or later they would come home after the movie and hopefully this
would happen before the big cartoonish wolf would eat my dear grandmother
 THE SECRET LIFE OF A COMMUNAL APARTMENT NEIGHBOR 49

Sonia, put on her old secondary school teacher glasses and squash her favorite
little Tchaikovsky bust on her bureau with his bestial paw.
Maybe in those moments I discovered both creativity and panic. They lived
next to each other like neighborly Jekyll and Hyde. One was euphoric and the
other scary. At the age of seven, in the first grade I inherited my grandmother
Sonia’s six-square-meter room and moved out of my parents’ quarter with
the floral bas-relief on the ceiling. In my newly conquered kingdom, I could
dream of an ever-expanding world. I drank a lot of weak sweet tea with the bisé
cookies that my grandmother Sonia made and looked through her window
into the narrow yard with ruined balconies. I was close now to the kitchen and
the door to the “black staircase” with dirty water in the basement that stored
the childhood fears I could never face.
As a teenager, I escaped regularly to the happy underground of writing.
I was no underground woman though (not as nasty and sickly as I thought
Dostoevsky’s character to be). Besides, my hero was the passionate and ironic
poet of the “lost generation” (of the 1830s) Mikhail Lermontov. After several
sequels I stopped writing “Tales of the Brothers Grimm,” and just wrote
sketches for a novel about a Spanish nun Dolores who had a double and a
magic ring. The powers of that ring are now forgotten; I abandoned the novel
since it was discovered and publicly ridiculed by our class master. I continued
to write poems about the knight in shining armor who always lingers and never
arrives on time. These were followed by a realistic chronicle of the girls’ games
in our class that culminated with the secret society “The Black Mimosas” that I
started with my best friend Kycha. Our motto was inspired by not listening to
our history teacher: “Femida has been bribed! Let Fortuna help us!” We were
like two female musketeers—one for all and all for one. Girls’ friendships are
undervalued in culture, you have to go to male role models and “bromances”
to use my teenage niece’s favorite word. Kycha was a friend in need, the first
and the most faithful.
50 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

As a teenager I discovered the space of interiority between the covers of

the slim green notebooks, with Pushkin’s verses about liberty on the front
cover and multiplication tables on the back, made by the Leningrad factory
“Svetoch” with the “Order of the Red Banner of Labor.” The diary writing lasted
from 1974 till my immigration when I had to leave the skinny green notebooks
behind in the Soviet Union due to the limit and potential subversive quality of
the “hand written documents” that were subject to strict inspection. It’s hard
for me to imagine what the custom’s officer would have made of Lermontov’s
angst and my teenage angst repeated throughout the notebooks: “And life, if
surveyed with cold-blooded regard, is stupid and empty – a joke …”
Here are some excerpts from the diary of a communal apartment teen:

May 1, 1974

Today I lost the notebook of my poems and etudes. It hurts so much. Impossible
to restore anything. Why do I value all these notes? Maybe I am just too self-
involved and look for a “genius” inside me and am afraid to reconcile to the fact
that I am just a very ordinary person and my life will also be very ordinary.
But somewhere in my unconscious a thought bites at me (gryzet), that what if I
become “talented,” these notes might be needed for someone. They will be even
a subject of discussion. Every person is most afraid to be ordinary and average
(zauriadnym i riadovym) and secretly hopes that out of a million he might be
the extraordinary one. This is ridiculous, absurd. Probably this requires from a
person great will power, to stifle one’s ambition, one’s “I” and think about people
around him, about the home. Are these high phrases? Can a person thinking just
about himself be useful for the society and what kind of society would that be?
Does it need this help?

I am waiting for something that would transform my life, but I don’t have a big
goal, except for an idle Manilov dream to be talented. One cannot live like that!
You have to be sincere and honest even in trifles. I am sure I will never commit
 THE SECRET LIFE OF A COMMUNAL APARTMENT NEIGHBOR 51

treason or back stabbing (podlost) on a large scale. But what about small villainy
or a dirty trick (malenkaia podlost?) It’s good that I can still evaluate my actions,
without making them black or white.

Still, why is life so dirty? Why do they want to kill everything beautiful and pure?
I won’ t let it happen! I want to keep for the rest of my mind an impression of
something beautiful, sublime, daring and not let anybody take it away from me.
I want some miracle to come true.

I think it’s over with S. I still hope for our meeting in Zelenogorsk, but there is
not much hope. This year since we met was like a parody on true life. I don’t have
anything sacred left, I don’t know what I believe in. I’ve lost interest in family
holidays, New Year, spring vacations, birthdays. I have to “measure my desires
to life” (Balzak, The Magic Skin). But my desires don’t come to life like fairy
tales. Maybe it’s too early for them to come true? Maybe I was born too early or
too late? That’s why I live in the time of a lack of faith and contentment, the cult
of things and possessions, and poverty, dimness (bednota, bleklost’) of feelings.
Maybe I exaggerate and life is still ahead of me? I want it to be interesting! I want
to become somebody! Who? Who needs me?

Do I hope one day to become famous and for writing to be important? Who says
so? Do I have too high an opinion of myself? And yet it is so important to do
something useful in life, to become somebody … I am just sitting here, life is so
grey, so bleak …

“It’s dull to live in this world, ladies and gentleman” (Griboedov)

Why is life so dirty? I have to hold on to something beautiful, elevated, to keep

me going …

S. didn’t call me. I know, I know I wrote this before. It’s been a while since
Zelenogorsk … It was not real. Time to say good bye to the fairy tale …
52 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

I live in the time of no-faith in anything (bezverie), contentment, the cult of

things (kult veschej)

Or maybe I exaggerate? My whole life is ahead of me. I want it to be interesting! I

want to become somebody, really, I want that very much. But who will I become?
Who needs me?

June 12, 1974

The school year is over. All over. Emptiness. I waited for this day, waited
impatiently … The exams are over, they were not so difficult. The last day. And
suddenly it struck me. The year is over and nothing much happened to me? I
am in the eighth grade! All hopes, all disappointments … Two smug mugs of the
twins Trizniak’s and Irka’s very powdered face, that’s all. We said goodbye for the
summer like we see each other in an hour.

And now, “there is nothing I await from life. I experience something terrifying
as if life repeats through centuries. The generation of poets who died during
the Second World War, Vsevolod Bagristsky, Mayorov, were barely 25 and the
Decembrist poets of the nineteenth century were 23–25. Our time is the time of
Lermontov—emptiness and lack of spirit (bezduxovnost-)”

“With sadness I survey our present generation!

Their future seems so empty, dark, and cold,

Weighed down beneath a load of knowing hesitation,

in idleness stagnating, growing old …

And we both love and hate by chance, without conviction,

We make no sacrifice for malice, or for good.

There reigns within our souls a kind of chill constriction,

Whene’er the flame ignites the blood.”

 THE SECRET LIFE OF A COMMUNAL APARTMENT NEIGHBOR 53

It seems that this is written about me.

Before bed, I feel like philosophizing, as usual. Just to distract, to think of this and
that—just not about myself. About my “warm and complacent, well-fed” (syt)
life, about loneliness and about S.

He doesn’t think about me. Soon the moment will come when I go back to
Zelenogorsk and will see him. And everything will be clear. Will he come up to
talk to me? …

If he doesn’t come, I will get terribly upset.

He comes—I will forget him in a moment, but will have a feeling of well-fed
(sytyj) satisfaction. Both versions are no good … But as I am writing this, I think
the second version is a bit better. I am a funny person, after all. Boredom.

“And life oppresses us, a flat road without meaning, An alien feast where we have
dined.” (Lermontov, Meditation)

And the best years of our lives are passing, all the best years. Dear Lermontov,
You would have been able to understand me, but the centuries lie between us.
You felt bad 150 years ago, and I feel bad now.

I wish there was school again, exams, worries. I am afraid to be alone with myself.

9th grade. September 9, 1974

I am almost an adult. I have to think about the future. And I “look at the future
with fear and look at the past with longing” (Lermontov). I have to make decisions
and figure out myself. Enough of the childish dreams of beautiful happiness that
will be delivered to me on a little plate with a golden rim (na bliudechke s zolotoj
kaemochkoj). I have to force through the road for myself, really force through
(probivat). There are many people more talented than me. I am average, but I
have to work on my capacities to the maximum. I have to work. My motto: more
action. My future depends on me. To write, to work, to aspire (stremit-sia).
54 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

And all these romances (romany) distract me from that! They are not real, just
funny and tragic. Why is everything repeating itself then? Why S. again? I know
that he has someone real in his life and everything is impossible between us. I
want to laugh at myself but I don’t know how. I think I like him a little. And not
the way it was last year (of course, there is still vanity there). I know I have to stop
with S., to save my “nervous system.” He likes me so little, only when I go with
the flow and what would happen afterwards? Wouldn’t it be funny to start 10th
grade with the entry; ‘S. again.’

*******

My parents and grandparents were too scared to keep diaries. In Stalin’s times a
diary could be used to incriminate you for your thoughts and hints. Calls from
barely identifiable S. and Yu. might be just as suspicious as the reflections on
life’s bleakness. Literary quotation mostly from the standard school program
could have been seen as an Aesopian language. Who is this guy Lermontov
to be so down on everything all the time? Soviet life in a 1970s communal
apartment might not have struck a Western observer as characterized by
“the cult of possessions” and contentment; there was more romantic struggle
against the “domestic trash” in my family than there was “domestic trash” or
treasure. To my surprise I find nothing about my parents in the diary and
no description of our communal dwellings. There is no mention of the black
entry to our house, the dark yard, the cheerful wallpaper of my room, the
portiere and window curtains, the floor patterns, the art nouveau bas-relief on
the high ceiling of my parents’ room—all those material details that years later,
in immigration I found so evocative.
There I was on the red pillows of my little bed made in Czechoslovakia, circa
1966, pouring my thoughts into yet another notebook, the color of military
green. My chest of drawers is a total mess, not to be organized by any future
archivist. Looking through the narrow unwashed window, or just staring into
my eventless crumbling ceiling, I am waiting for the phone calls. S.? Yu.? If not
now, when?
 THE SECRET LIFE OF A COMMUNAL APARTMENT NEIGHBOR 55

My perpetually drunk Aunt Shura is also waiting for my phone calls. When
not working (which somehow was most of the time), she was lurking behind
her door at the end of the corridor, ready to intercept all calls. Since S. rarely
called and if he did, the conversation was short and practical, Aunt Shura
didn’t find him suspicious. (She didn’t see his long foreign scarf clearly made
in Finland.) It was my other “boyfriend” or rather phone-pal, Misha, that
drew her interest and there I had to be vigilant. My relationship with Sasha
was mostly about him not calling me and if he did call, it was about moving
beyond talking (which I wasn’t quite ready to do). Misha did call and we talked
forever—to delay meeting.
Misha’s deep hot voice is whispering into the communal receiver as I am
sitting in the long corridor on an awkward chair playing the mental chess
game on the black and white tiles of our floor. He tells me about Nietzsche
and Napoleon and living above the bleak, corrupt everyday life. Aunt Shura
walks around the corridor, back and forth, back and forth between her room
and the kitchen. Carrying her teapot, then a cabbage pot and then carrying
nothing just smiling maliciously. She would soon inform my parents about this
dangerous phone call and a conversation about suspicious foreigners—maybe
not even Jews, but worse: Nietzsche and Napoleon. And then I am back to my
room watching drunks in my dark yard, or the familiar lonely exhibitionist
who opens his raincoat to a scared female passerby. I see many people in hats
looking down at their feet, at the puddles and trash in the asphalt yard, always
looking down.

Black Entrance, 1986

In 1986 in Boston, I started to have dreams of my house. In one dream I stand

in front of my house and I try to enter it but I can’t. I don’t remember what
the doorknob looked like. In the dream I don’t see the ornamental façade of
my house on 79 Bolshoy Avenue. I rush quickly by the broken shards on the
56 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

mosaic floor of the lobby and rush through the dark corridor fearing there
is someone hiding behind the elevator right near the door of the mysterious
office named Little Red Corner, the office of the Housing Committee, which
seems to be forever locked or forever in the middle of a meeting. I am scared
of a familiar ghost, a drunken man in the dark. I hear his resounding laughter
followed by his stinking, spitting threats: “Fuck your mother in the mouth,
you little bitch … Stinking ass.” If I could only twist my tongue to repeat the
curses, if I could only forgo my shameful intelligentsia habits and linger on
every guttural sound “kh” the drunkard would stop laughing at me. I could
enter my house fearlessly and give the hallway stranger a wink of complicity. I
could have been home by now. My compressed lips are ready for the forceful
“u” sound, my throat is about to utter the guttural sound. But somehow, the
air is blocked, the sound freezes on my lips and my obscenities remain mute,
harmless, unheard and unheard-of defenseless.
There were two ways to enter our communal apartment: from the backwater
of Karpovka River, on Petropavlovsky Street, 4, you enter into the yard and
then proceed to our dark staircase in its corner. The other way was more
glamorous. On Bolshoy Prospekt 79 you see a grey neo-baroque façade with
bay windows and statues not far from the famous art nouveau buildings with a
fantastic gothic tower. You enter into a lobby with bas-reliefs and mosaics, the
cosmopolitan style of the turn of the twentieth century that one encounters
all over the world. There was, of course, no doorman there in the Soviet era
and you would proceed at your own risk on the ruined mosaics and shards of
broken glass into another unlit passage that led to the courtyard.
The entrance that I had just failed to take used to be the main entrance
to the house. It was a typical fantastic building of the turn-of-the-century
cosmopolitan architecture that combined neo-baroque façades, Roman
masks, magic birds and historical ornaments from different époques. In our
case, we had to go through that building in order to get to the interior yard
from where you take a back entrance up to our place. To enter the communal
 THE SECRET LIFE OF A COMMUNAL APARTMENT NEIGHBOR 57

apartment requires a long rite of passage: in and out through a dark hallway
with ruined mosaics and broken beer bottles and across the interior yards
full of communal trash, with occasional graffiti and half-erased hopscotch on
the asphalt. Visiting a Soviet home, one is struck not only by a deep contrast
between the public and private spheres, and by that strange no-man’s land, the
space that belongs to everybody and to nobody, but creates discomfort in both
public and private existence. The hallway occupies a special place in the Soviet
mythical topography; it is a space of transition, a space of fear, the dark limit of
the house. It could preserve traces of a building’s former elegance: fragments of
mosaics and ruined, not-so-classical pilasters with obscene graffiti scribbled all
over. The hallways are usually inhabited by old drunks, local fools, youth gangs
and teenagers in love. Here all sorts of unofficial initiations take place. At best
there would be a few romantic kisses with poems of Lermontov or Esenin and
a benevolent rant of the local war veterans with a bottle of Stolichnaya. For the
darker side, we would have to picture all sorts of unreported crimes happening
in the hallways from rape to murder, committed in a state of total intoxication.
The Soviet bard Bulat Okudzhava dedicated a song to communal “black
staircases” inhabited by black cats and ghosts of fear. The black entrance to the
communal apartments leads to a dark corner of the Soviet unconscious. In
the song the black cat that “never cries nor sings” embodies the suspicions of
Stalin’s times, the mutual fears and occasional tragic complicity of informants
and victims who often inhabited the same communal apartment. The end
of the song is a poetic reflection on the Soviet collective mentality. All it
will take is “to put a new light bulb on the black staircase”—one collective
illumination, metaphorically speaking, and then some of the dark fears
can be eliminated. But somehow collective inaction conspires to keep the
public spaces dark. The black staircase is an unofficial Soviet public site,
not iconographic like the Metro or palaces of culture; this in-between was
everybody’s and therefore nobody’s responsibility. It was on the outskirts of
the visible Soviet topography.
58 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

My house, a typical old St. Petersburgian building partitioned into many

communal apartments, was located on Bolshoy Avenue near the Karpovka
River, which in the nineteenth century constituted the urban frontier. The
building was rumored to have belonged to a wealthy St. Petersburg engineer,
a nouveau riche with a non-Russian name and cosmopolitan, eclectic tastes.
For me the cosmopolitan façade of my building was my private “window
into Europe.” Somehow it made me feel that by osmosis I belonged to a
larger “nostalgia for world culture” reflected in the façades of my city. I could
walk all the way on Bolshoy Avenue or on Kirovsky Avenue decorated by
these incredible buildings that mimicked all styles—from Greco-Roman, to
baroque, from neo classical, to Moorish and from there to the late Stalinist Art
Deco. This was a living history book for me to inhabit. Joseph Brodsky wrote
that he learned more about world culture from the Petersburg façades than
from books. The city was not fully censored; it belonged to all of us and no
propaganda posters could disfigure it.
After the Revolution all the apartments on Bolshoy 79 were subdivided
with partitions and “densified” by the additional neighbors. As for the original
owner, he was forever erased from history and from the well-kept list of house
residents in the Building Committee Office. (It was rumored that he was a
Cadet. He even collaborated with the revolutionary government. But around
1926 he obtained a foreign passport and “went traveling.” He may have died of
consumption on the French Riviera with a little volume of Pushkin’s poems in
his hands. Perhaps he suffered a heart attack in a small Mexican village while
making love to a beautiful member of the local Trotskyist group … I am glad
he did not turn into an anonymous neighbor in the partitioned and subdivided
apartment on the third floor, vanishing in the purges of 1937 or 1942.) With
the engineer’s disappearance, the single narrative of the house bifurcates into
the fragmented tales of the countless neighbors in the communal apartments.
I am as forgotten in the books of the now defunct Housing Committee as is
 THE SECRET LIFE OF A COMMUNAL APARTMENT NEIGHBOR 59

everyone else. Only the whimsical eclectic façade remains whole, defiantly
incompatible with the new Soviet style.
In the late 1970s I worked as a Leningrad tour guide, mostly for the Young
Pioneers from provincial towns. “Leningrad, Petersburg, Petrograd—these
three names tell the whole history of our Soviet city-hero.” The first line of our
memorized tour had an obligatory notation: the voice rises on every name of
the city and falls on the “hero.” The tourist agency “Sputnik” was located not
far from Bolshoy Avenue and the bus often passed near my house. The goal
of the tour was to take the visitors away from the Petersburg cosmopolitan
eclecticism to the classical ensembles on the squares around Neva, the
monuments to Lenin with his hand outstretched and the revolutionary cruiser
Aurora. But the tourists couldn’t help themselves and would get excited by the
exotic birds and masks on my street. “This building on Bolshoy,” I was supposed
to say (condemning ascending note) “with strange beasts on the façade derives
from foreign models, lacks classical proportions, and does not present any real
architectural value.” Occasionally, I would add a wink of complicity there that
would make the value of Leningrad masks skyrocket in a flash.

October 13, 1975

God, how sad. I feel the no-exit situation and aimlessness of existence
(bezvyxodnost- I bezysxodnost sususchestvovania). Also, all my hurts and small
“unhappiness”—are all trifles in the face of real human suffering. Maybe it’s just
the whining that comes with my age? I have to suffer through it, how can it be
otherwise; I just need S. or Yu. to call me and just talk in a human way. It’s just
a small thing I need for my equilibrium and then I can write and believe again.
About my so-called writing (naschet moej pisaniny)—too many ideas and too
little will power, discipline and time. They say that life is like a chess board and
you walk on white or black squares. I’ve been walking on black ones for too long.
And sometimes I think it’s a grey square equally distant from black and white.
60 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

Now I believe in my ambition. Here is an interesting idea.

“I want to live for immortality and don’t accept a partial compromise.” Dostoevsky,
Brothers Karamazoff

And what if in my life I would have to accept the partial compromise? Sad.

October 14, Sunday

A little bit of statistics, as Mayakovsky wrote, there are many professions, good
and different (xoroshix I raznyx). This October here are my plans about institutes.

1. Institute of Nadezhda Krupskaya, technical translation.

2. Herzen Pedagogical, Mathematics in English

3. Theater Institute, directing Leningrad University, Czech or Polish philology.

Really, I dream all the time about Leningrad University, journalism philology,
psychology, but I know it’s off limits to me, it’s a “forbidden fruit.”

Everything is normal. Neither gay, nor sad, there is a routine, waiting for
evenings, vacations, study, entertain myself. As usual. A little bit edgy when the
phone rings, but in general Vse, all right (all right in English) … Long live the
everydayness!

January 15, 1975

Happy New Year! This year should be merry! At midnight I laughed after having
drunk just half a glass of champagne. It should be a calm year, for a person needs
so little to be merry. And now I will advertise my new theory.

Evolution, its driving forces or “Svetlana Goldberg, and her role in the Russian
Revolution.”

We, the people invented thousands of conventions, wars, borders and kinds
of national territories and social systems. But only one thing is eternal,
 THE SECRET LIFE OF A COMMUNAL APARTMENT NEIGHBOR 61

the humaneness in human beings. What I mean is not reason, but what is
conventionally called “heart.” But heart as an anatomic organ has nothing to
do with it. “Heart” is the realm of humaneness. This is our only treasure, love,
friendship, loyalty to our convictions. Everyone loved—the heroes of Homer,
Shakespeare, Puskin, we love and so will our descendants. People loved during
the feudal social regime, during slavery, capitalism and socialist regimes. People
loved, were possessed by doubt, sought after truth, higher truth (pravda, istina.)
But people loved differently, the culture of love and human relationships is
changing. And that’s the process of evolution. All technical achievements are
but means for the goal (vozvyshenie) of a human being and world harmony.
It’s a utopia, a fairy tale, but there is an element of truth here. If we preserve a
primordial human nature, happiness is possible. And all the vanity and egoism
are testimony to the rotting of the society. Society (of any kind) develops “by fits
and starts” (in English). Just progress is impossible.

End to part 1 (like in a good detective story).

Continue. This is called I am looking for justice. Came to the conclusion: there
is no absolute justice. What people call Justice might seem like living without
compromises, but it can also be to their advantage. Too much “uncompromising”
or too much profit—neither would work.

My motto:

“Subject everything to doubt!” Karl Marx.

I am concerned about social problems, I want to take part in governing,

the state, to contribute to the society (of honest people), not to feel myself
“second class.” I don’t want to compromise! I want to be honest, even when
this goes beyond the conventional frame (ramki obshepriniatogo). Honest to
the bottom, but it’s not always possible and not always nice to the people
around me.
62 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

A Homecoming, 1991–2015

Ten years after I left the USSR, I finally entered the dark courtyard of my
house—and that was no dream. The main entrance was blocked, and on the
broken glass door an outdated poster advertised a video salon featuring Rambo
II, Emmanuelle and a Brazilian soap opera, The Slave Isaura Part IV. The first
impression was disappointing. The house looked like a mere lookalike. “What
is happening here?” I asked an elderly woman standing on the street where
there used to be a bus stop. “Repairs,” she answered.
So, I failed to enter my house through Bolshoy 79 and had to sneak in through
the broken wooden fence on the other side of the yard. I was surrounded by
heaps of trash, telephone wires, pieces of old furniture, worn-out slippers, the
pages of a 1979 calendar, mysterious schedules and graphics, all fragments of
the perfect technical organization of labor whose purpose was now entirely
lost, along with pieces of a broken record by a once-popular French singer of
the 1960s. Yes, it’s him, Adamo. “Tombait la neige / Tu ne viendrais pas ce soir
/ Tombait la neige / Tout est blanc de désespoir.”
Climbing through the trash, I made my way upstairs. Some of the partitions
had been taken down, and the whole framework of our interpersonal and
communal interactions was broken. All the wrong doors, which once were
locked and hidden behind the wallpaper to keep separate entrances for the
neighbors, were open. The communal kitchen, our apartment forum, seemed to
have shrunk in size, and so had our interminable corridor, where the communal
telephone once hung. The apartment looked like an abandoned stage set.
Suddenly I looked up in disbelief. That floral bas-relief on the ceiling in
my parents’ room was still there, with the exposed wire where the lamp once
was. In a painted window frame on the yellow wallpaper, a vase of flowers
and an open book on the sill, and an empty center in the middle, there used
to be a glossy poster of a view from a window of a faraway Mediterranean
 THE SECRET LIFE OF A COMMUNAL APARTMENT NEIGHBOR 63

country, something like Crimea, only abroad. The window frame immediately
brought back memories. It was painted by my then husband, Kostya, during
the brief six months in the 1980s when we lived with my parents. We were in
limbo then, not sure whether to become refugees or refuseniks. The apartment
had been already slated for repairs and the neighbors got another place to live
while we continued in the familiar disrepair. The dark room did not have a
window and we used to joke that this poster was our “window to Europe.” It
was our last fantastic plan; should we be refused the visa; we could become
escape artists and move through the painted frame to the mythical West. The
poster itself was gone but the frame still evoked our liminal selves.
I approached the kitchen window into the yard: black balconies with holes
were still precariously attached to the building and a few uprooted plants
continued to inhabit them. An old lonely drunk wandered into the gaping
hole of the back entrance. He stopped to urinate near the skeleton of the old
staircase. And then I look out: in the center of the yard there was an old truck,
as if from World War II and there was one huge graffiti on the wall: DEATH. I
frame it just the way it is.

*******

Next day after visiting my house, I went to see my best high-school girlfriend
Kycha, with whom I shared so many adventures in our early teenage years.
“Remember that little park where we buried our secrets? It has been
privatized now. You can’t go to that part.”
“I have something for you,” she added suddenly and gave me a pile of green
notebooks with Pushkin’s silhouette and multiplication tables in the back.
“Your diaries.”
I reread them for first time in twenty years, on a bleak March day in 2015.
To my surprise I relate to my earlier writing much more than to the building
in which I lived, even though it is our communal apartment that appeared to
64 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

me in my dream and which I explored obsessively in my work. Maybe now I

can extend my hand now to that little Soviet dreamer, all embarrassment apart.
I am still scribbling in my corner, dispersing myself in virtual bites, making
sense of the small data. Ok, my home is bigger, but X. still didn’t call. And
humanity remains endangered. (Emoticon, smile. My teenage self would so
disapprove!)
I couldn’t bring the diary into immigration. But I carried with me what was
mine: the emerging voice, the turn of a phrase, the interior designs. I changed
languages but not always the ways of storytelling. Our secret self is like an
immigrant trickster who plays hide-and-seek with us and yet persists through
continuities and gaps with an accented integrity.
At the end, the diary was a better holder of memories and forgetting than
the architecture of the former home. “Forever you, the unwashed Russia! The
land of slaves the land of lords: And you, the blue-uniformed ushers, And
people who worship them as gods.” Lermontov, who else.

*******

I returned to America and showed my parents my photograph of our yard with

the word “Death” scribbled on the wall. They seemed remarkably unfazed. It
was back in 1990 and they had left the Soviet Union only three years earlier
and felt no nostalgia. “We heard from friends that they were making a movie
in our yard. Lenfilm studios, I think. And they brought an old truck in and
left it there. It must have been something about the war and the Leningrad
blockade.”
“No, no, it was a film about the poet Daniil Kharms who lived somewhere
nearby. He wrote about a man who left his house with a cane and a sack and …
never came back.” One day in 1937 Daniil Kharms left his house to buy a pack
of cigarettes and never came back …
 4
Tearing Away
Foreword and translation by
Natal’ya Strugach

Foreword

Some people have a special gift for inspiring others to create. Meeting someone
from this stratum is a stroke of luck, and becoming their friend is a real
fortune. Svetlana Boym—Harvard professor, scholar of cultural studies and
Slavic literature, writer, photographer and artist—belonged to this rare class of
inspiring people. Our friendship began when we were still children. Talking to
her always made me feel recharged by a life-giving energy which made it easier
to think and to breathe.
We were in the same grade at Leningrad school #80. Svetlana began to use
her writing to make sense of the world when she was ten or eleven. She wrote
in her journal—swashbuckler stories, epigrams, poems. Sometimes we would
write together, especially in the spring, sitting on a bench in a park on Kirovsky
Prospekt.1 I still have some of the funny poems and sketches we worked on.

The title of the story was chosen by Natal’ya Strugach, a classmate and friend of Svetlana who here
writes the foreword.
1
One of the main streets of the Petrogradsky District of Saint Petersburg, it is now named
Kammenoostrovsky Prospekt.
66 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

Svetlana studied Spanish philology at the Herzen State Pedagogical University.

In the summer of 1979, she met the young Moscow architect Konstantin Boym
in Koktebel’. They got married that winter. Kostya was planning to emigrate to
America, and Svetlana decided to go with him. She dropped out of her program
(she was in her fourth year at the time), threw away her Komsomol membership
card, worked odd jobs as a translator and tour guide and went back and forth
between Moscow and Leningrad. It took almost a year before the couple received
official permission to leave the country, and she spent that entire time in constant
worry and anticipation. The story we have here is about that period of her life. In
1981 Svetlana and Konstantin were allowed to leave the USSR, and after several
months in Italy, they finally made it to America. There, Sveta accomplished a
great deal: she got a scholarship to study at Boston University, she wrote and
defended her dissertation, became a tenured professor at Harvard, wrote several
highly regarded books of scholarship, as well as a play, a novel and many stories.
Her books have been translated into many different languages. You can read all
about this on Wikipedia. To me, she remained the dearest of friends.
When Sveta left for America, she gave me her handwritten journal because
she wasn’t allowed to leave the country with it. In the 1990s, when she came
to Russia as a tourist, I returned it to her. Unfortunately, the journal was lost
after her death in 2015. I still have a copy of the story published here, which
she wrote right before she emigrated. It’s unfinished, and it was written by a
21-year-old girl, not a Harvard professor. I am certain that she never planned
on publishing it later, when she was already a professional writer. But after
thinking about it, and talking to Sveta’s parents, I decided to publish it. Now
that Svetlana is no longer with us, her writing is all the more interesting and
valuable, and this story captures so well the oppressive atmosphere of Soviet
Moscow, the heaviness of fear and unfreedom. Moreover, from a psychological
point of view, this story is an interesting example of the interior life of a young
woman who is planning to leave for good—because when people left back then,
they left for good. The protagonist repudiates everything that surrounds her,
and her sadness is akin to a deep depression: she feels unwanted and rejected
 TEARING AWAY 67

by the people, the city, the country, and she senses malevolent, judgmental
eyes on her wherever she goes. She is no longer really here, but not yet there
either. Her family is her only source of strength and support. How can it be that
the rare ability to inspire others can coexist with such feelings of discomfort,
sadness, solitude? Talented people often have to contend with this paradox.
Svetlana Boym died in 2015, aged fifty-six. She was very sick, she knew that
she was probably going to die, but she kept writing articles and stories until
almost the very end. Starting in the 1990s, Svetlana only wrote in English.
Right now, there’s a large effort to translate her books into Russian. My son,
Aleksandr Strugach, translated one of her most important scholarly books,
The Future of Nostalgia, which will soon be published. Her final stories,
written in English, were about our childhood, about Russia. I have begun to
translate them into Russian; maybe they too will be published. And now we are
publishing Sveta’s first story, written in Russian.
The story is untitled. I would title it “Tearing Away.”
[I present it to you here and I hope you will read it generously and with
understanding. The spelling and punctuation of the author have been
preserved.]
*******

The wolfhound age springs at my shoulders

though I’m no wolf by blood.
—OSIP MANDELSHTAM2

Moscow, rush hour at the tram stop. A dark autumn wind, the weather is damp
and oppressive. A tram comes slowly around the turn. The crowd becomes

Translation by Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin.

2
68 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

agitated, a giant mass of grey or dark brown coats, jackets, bags, it starts to
move, rushing toward the narrow half-open door.
A large woman with a mohair beret and a short woolen coat, looking like a
school head mistress, shoves her way past a red-eyed young man whose tie is
sticking out: “Why do young people always get on before everyone else?”
A tipsy guy in his fifties steps on the foot of a young woman in a black
leather coat, “O hello, miss,” and sweeps her aside.
Two stocky middle-aged men with briefcases – “It’s always so crowded” –
push him and rush toward the front. Somebody steps aside to make room for
an old lady, hunched and grimacing, a stuffed string bag in her hands. She is
clambering up up up with all her might.
People are pushing through in ever greater numbers. Now groups of
three, five, six at a time are getting in. It’s no longer a matter of individual
willpower, there’s a special force at play, the will of the crowd, an aggregate of
accelerations, shoves, elbows. And some slight adjustments: “Hey you, move
into the car,” “don’t crush me,” “put away your umbrella.” After some effort,
the final sentence has been passed: the door of the tram closes with a screech.
The last person on is a girl with a knit hat slipping off her head, her dark hair
showing underneath.
This is me. I got into the tram. I make my way deeper into the car, hide in the
corner by the ticket machine. I am now part of the collective, and I immediately
enter into a special system of relations with all of its happy members.
I am standing by the ticket machine, which, of course, means I have to do
the honors: to put in money and tear off tickets. It’s a special kind of ritual:
“Could you be so kind,” “please, pass it on,” “if you could please, two tickets”
(the politeness is staggering! A minute ago, we were all elbowing each other).
“I only have ten kopecks … two tickets … Thank you, I don’t need any change.”
I smile. I am also polite. But I’m the only one who does not pay. Who would
I pay? And for what? Of course, I clench 3 kopecks in my pocket just in case, so
that I’m ready if the need arises. The people standing next to me seem to read
 TEARING AWAY 69

my thoughts: they look at me with unfriendly suspicion. This frightens me, I step
away from the ticket machine and make my way to the cold iron armrest of a seat.
The members of the tram collective have certain rights and responsibilities,
as well as their freedoms. Here, as in Hyde Park, you can talk about lots of
things. The crush creates a sense of intimacy: any conversation can be heard,
can be joined, and is in no way binding.
At first, they talk about some things we don’t have. Two women with packed
bags:

“Hullo. So, did you manage?”

“You know, I stood there for another two hours after I saw you, they ran out
right when I got to the front.”
“Tough luck. You should go to the universam3 around eight in the morning.”
“Yesterday I waited in line for cheese. And there wasn’t any! And before that
ham, salted pork.”
“Don’t even start! My sister came from Tula. Each person gets 200 grams
of butter!”
“We’re feeding the entire world. And we had to host the Olympics!”
“But we did a great job at the Olympics. I saw the closing ceremony.
Beautiful! It was so well organized!”
“We watched it in color at my neighbors’. Our guys shut everyone up!”

On the other side, a large man in a fox hat and a woman in her forties with
very regular features talk about the things we do have:

She: “People live so well nowadays: everyone has an apartment, a rug, a

color television. No one goes hungry.”
He, with skepticism: “People just have a lot of money. No one lives off their
salary. Take salespeople, waiters, and others too …”
“Come on, there are very few people like that.”

3
Supermarket; this acronym (from “universal self-service store,” “universal’nyi magazin
samoobsluzhivaniia”) has been used since 1970.
70 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

A fat little man bravely enters the conversation:

“Everyone’s lying, alright? What, like you don’t know? They’re lying!”

The drunk man, like the medieval jester, can always speak his mind. He will
be forgiven; he is entirely harmless.
I stay quiet, I smile, look around. Conversations on the tram always break
unexpectedly and at the most interesting moments. People love variety here.
A minute later everyone’s attention and enthusiasm turns toward a girl who
failed to give up her seat for someone. Yelps of outrage, hissing, judgment. I
make my way toward the exit, people are shoving me from all sides, as if saying
goodbye, their elbows catch my side, my back, my stomach.
The tram stops. People fly out like peas spilling from a jar. A minute ago, we
were its contents, and that brought us together. A minute later and we slither
off alone down the dark, damp streets. I continue the conversation in my head.
“Yes, there is no meat. Yes, they’re lying. Yes, there are carpets, but …”
But I cannot allow myself the sincerity of the tram, my situation is different.
I walk faster. I am scared to walk by myself down this dark street. Both
sides are lined with the giant white rectangles of apartment buildings. I walk
past them like they’re a line of soldiers. I can feel the piercing gaze of their
symmetrical windows. There is light in them. Hundreds of tiny cookie-cutter
apartment-cells, in which all kinds of different people watch the same movie
on their TVs (some in color, some black and white). And on the blue screen
brave chekists4 overcome each and every hurdle, and expose a dangerous
conspiracy by parasites and enemies of the state.
I live in an older building. I walk through the narrow well of the inner
courtyard, and climb up to our apartment on the fourth floor. I am greeted by
the deafening blare of the radio.
“All that nonsense propaganda about how détente is threatened by the
Soviet Union violating the Helsinki Accords …” I turn down the volume. It’s

4
A chekist is an official working for the Cheka, the name of the Soviet state security organization from
1918–22, or any of its later descendants.
 TEARING AWAY 71

alright, my grandmother had turned it up, they’ll do the weather report after
the news, and she doesn’t even know how cold it is today.
Everyone’s already home. Mom is on the phone in the hallway.

“Yes, definitely stop by. Allochka just got home.”

“At the institute? It’s fine. She’s taking her exams.”
“Yes, she’ll be done next year.”
“Thanks, I’ll tell her.”

That, of course, is about me. Except that I am no longer at the institute and
I am not taking any exams. I had to withdraw from the program when my
husband and I submitted the documents to leave the country, but my mom
doesn’t like to talk about this, and she always makes up stories about my exams
and papers.
You can hear every phone conversation at home. Walking through the
hallway, people feel obliged to add their two cents. Dad turns on the record
player. Dixon, “Texts and Dialogues,” spills out from under the door and asks
in Russian-English: “When you finish your talk?”
I am sad, I don’t feel like doing anything, I yell back from my room: “When
do you finish your talk?”
I go to my dad.
“Yes?” He asks.
“Daddy, do you finish, it’s a question!”
“Alright, do you finish, what’s the difference? You’re not practicing with us
at all.”
“I will, I will,” I tell him. (My husband is out of town for two days, and I
promised to spend them with my parents.) I pick up the textbook – Bonk,
volume one. Dad is reading a touching story about the encounter between Mr.
Smith and comrade Petrov. “Mr. Smith is a great friend of the Soviet Union,
comrade Petrov would like to show him Lenin’s Mausoleum on the Red Square.”
Mister Smith “is very happy,” he loves Moscow and its giant squares and new
72 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

neighborhoods. He’s especially taken with Gorky street, which “after the Great
October Socialist Revolution” transformed from a narrow street into a central
artery.
I start asking him questions about the text:

“Who is mister Smith?”

“He is an Englishmen. He is a friend of our country.”
“Who is comrade Petrov?”
“He is a KGB agent!”

We burst out laughing. Our laughter summons my mom. She also speaks
English and doesn’t want to miss anything. “Meine Tochter speak English only
with father.” (My mom studied German in school and loves to show off her
knowledge of both languages.) My parents used to find English a nightmare
– what’s the point of breaking your tongue, contorting it between your teeth,
making ridiculous sounds, why not just speak plainly, like in Russian?
Now they’re used to it, they’ve stopped asking stupid questions. To them
English is a game with its own rules and restrictions, a sad game, because they
are forced to fold complex thoughts into simple short sentences, but still a fun
game, like a child’s set of building blocks.
As usual, the “lesson” doesn’t last long. Dad wants to surprise us and, as if
by chance, turns on the tape player. We hear the hissing, rustling crackle of a
worn-out tape. And suddenly, out of the past, out of the shapeless scraps of
sound, emerge the guitar chords and the piercing, awfully familiar intonation
of Okudzhava:

Ah, what marvelous nights,

But my mom is sad and worried.
Son, why do you walk
so alone,
so alone?
 TEARING AWAY 73

I hold the roads of April end to end.

The stars have grown so large and kind …
Mom, I am on duty,
I must attend
to April5

This song is twenty years old but it still strikes the same secret sadness about
something mysterious, and now entirely impossible.
The room is swimming in front of my eyes, the decorations are changing.
I see the old garish wallpaper, the heavy curtains and the tiny television set in
the corner. Behind the wall, our half-drunk neighbor is snoring again. We’re
all living in the same room: me, my mom and my dad. In the corner, behind
a curtain, are my little bed and table, color pencils and open books strewn all
around. My parents have guests over. They are dancing, laughing, listening to
Okudzhava, or maybe Vysotsky:

Why would she think of me, she’s already in Paris,

Marcel Marceau himself is talking to her now …6

My parents are young, happy.

The sixties … The upheaval is behind us, and soon everything should be
alright. There are exhibits of impressionist art, books about modern painting.
Mom and dad bought a giant Degas nude and hung it over the bed. Grandma
gasped in horror when she first saw it (though Degas is her contemporary).
And when they asked little Alla, “who’s your favorite artist?” she answered,
without a moment’s thought, “Ivan Gogh!”
Everyone goes to hear Voznesensky, Akhmadulina, Evtushenko7, everyone
is reading Aksyonov and Hemingway. My parents sold all of their old furniture

5
Bulat Okudzhava, “Dezhurny po apreliu” (“A Patrolman of April”).
6
Vladimir Vysotsky, “Ona byla v Parizhe” (“She’d Been to Paris”).
7
These poets’ readings drew huge crowds in the 1960s, during the Khrushchev Thaw.
74 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

except for three stools. They hung something resembling a fisherman’s net on
the window, “so that there’s more light.”
The radio promises communism in twenty years. But something is starting
to crack, to break. I remember a vacation in Crimea, my parents gathered with
their friends every night, they would listen to the Voice of America and have
lively discussions. Unrest in Czechoslovakia. How will this end, what kind of
changes were coming?
I was shaped by the 70s. We’d heard stories about the Stalin years, and the
echoes of the sixties still reached us. In high school, we listened, mesmerized,
to the Beatles and Jesus Christ Superstar, and dreamed of wearing faded jeans.
Five years later we could buy a new pair of name-brand blue jeans for a hefty
sum, roughly the equivalent of one month’s salary for a Soviet engineer. Our
attitude toward contemporary music became more critical. Disco and Boney
M evoked a mocking smile. I overlapped with the last of the hippies, but they
seemed completely disillusioned and tattered. They would turn before your
very eyes into black market hucksters or else the usual engineers and heads
of families. We were skeptics even in high school, snickering at the ornate
phrases in history and literature textbooks, but still able to repeat them when
necessary, articulating each word with great pathos. We were formalists, we
didn’t have the tiniest bit of enthusiasm, and older generations saw this clearly.
Everything flows, everything changes. In our old room (now just my
parents’ room), there is new wallpaper, and the heavy curtain is gone. The
Degas nude has been replaced by some kind of landscape in a gilded frame.
French vases, a gift from my grandmother for my parents’ wedding, sit atop
the piano. They had spent twenty-five years in a heap on a shelf, and now my
mother is dusting them every day and talking about them – are they from the
18th or 19th century? It’s good that my parents haven’t lost their sense of time.
Five years ago, my dad did not say goodbye to his friend, who was leaving
for Israel, and now he completely understands the choice I’ve made. But their
 TEARING AWAY 75

sympathies still lie with the past, and Okudzhava and Vysotsky are still playing
today, except Vysotsky is newer, from a French record:

Heat up the banya, in black –

I’ve grown so unused to this world –
I will burn, I’ll go mad in the heat,
and the steam will loosen my tongue8

Two months ago, Vysotsky died of a heart attack. Aksyonov left for America,
and Okudzhava is writing elegant historical novels:

in a dark glass
under imported beer
a red rose blossomed
slowly and proudly
we write as we hear
we hear as we breathe
we breathe so we write
not trying to pleasе …9

My parents are scared now. My mom was already called to the first department.10
When someone is studying English and complaining of heart trouble, that’s
not a good sign. Some of her coworkers have stopped saying hello to her just in
case, others have been looking at her with hostility (or maybe she is imagining
it?). Her old friend knows all of this and feels bad for her, but makes sure to
call us from a payphone, “so that nothing comes of it.”11 Their circle of friends
grows more and more narrow.
8
Vladimir Vysotsky, “Ban’ka po Belomu” (“Heat the Banya”). The original lyrics are “heat up the banya
in white.”
9
Bulat Okudzhava, “I’m writing a historical novel.” This song was dedicated to the novelist Vasily
Aksyonov.
10
The First Department (“pervyi otdel”) was in charge of the political security of Soviet workplaces.
11
This popular expression describing excessive caution (“kak by chego ne vyshlo”/“what if something
happened”) comes from Anton Chekhov’s story The Man in a Case (“Chelovek v futliare”), in which the
protagonist is exceedingly cautious and judgmental of those who behave improperly.
76 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

Ring ring ring. The phone interrupts my thoughts, rings for a long time,
boring and demanding. Finally, mom picks it up. I’ve recently lost my taste for
talking on the phone. It’s always the same. All of my phone conversations fall
into one of two categories.
First category:

“Hello.”
“Hello.”
“How are things?”
“You know …”
“Still in school?”
“Still in school.”
“Taking your exams?”
“Taking my exams.”
“It’s going okay?”
“It’s going okay.”

Second category:

“Hello.”
“Hello.”
“How are things?”
“You know …”
“Still waiting?”
“Still waiting.”
“How long has it been?”
“Seventeen months (eighteen, nineteen, twenty … ).”
“You went to the OVIR?12”

12
The OVIR (“Otdel viz i registratsii,” “Office of Visas and Registration”) was the Soviet Ministry of
Internal Affairs department responsible for issuing exit visas to Soviet citizens seeking to emigrate.
Starting in the late 1960s, many Soviet Jewish citizens applied for exit visas to emigrate to Israel (and,
later, the United States). Many cases would languish in the OVIR for years; the popular term for those
denied an exit visa was “refusenik” (“otkaznik”).
 TEARING AWAY 77

“Nothing?”
“Nothing.”

This time it’s my friend Nina calling. She loves mysteries of all kinds.

“Hello.”
“Hello.”
“Oh, I have some news.”
“Okay?”
“My parents and I went to the hospital today. They won’t let us see my
cousin.”
“What? Who’s in the hospital?” (This is a new development, and I’m feeling
lost.)
“You don’t get it?”
“I don’t get it.”
“Alright, I’ll call again later.”

I spend some time mulling over the mysterious code of Nina’s words. Soon
enough they line up in a simple and logical manner. Nina is scared to talk
directly – which means this is about documents. The hospital is OVIR; the rest
is all clear, they got an invitation from their cousin, but their documents are
not being accepted. A new ruse, a new trap, another turn in the endless maze,
which is near impossible to get through. I know that soon enough Nina and I,
and someone else will meet up, will talk at length about what we can do, and
probably come to the conclusion that we should just do something, we should
go to various offices, write letters, do whatever we can. We will even write one
of the thousands of letters that goes nowhere, and as usual, they won’t dignify
us with an answer.
And time keeps passing, and we wait longer and longer. We are still caught
in a complicated spiderweb of relationships and compromises, hypocrisy and
fear. Except our cards are all on the table. The giant secretive machine could
start moving at any moment and decide our fate. Some man with a closely-
78 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

cropped haircut and a soldier’s bearing will walk into the right office and pick
our file off the right shelf. He will open it and make a decision with a stroke
of the pen. And what exactly governs him? His personal striving or the will of
the giant machine, where thousands of compromises intersect, thousands of
plans and circumstances! We try to guess what they might be. Who will be the
next president of the US? What will they decide in Madrid? Are they trying to
silence the Voice of America broadcast? What’s happening in Poland? Who will
go from faraway Tehran to faraway Baghdad? So many different circumstances
have to fall into just the right pattern, which will then set the machine into
motion. We will never know which drop made the glass overflow.
The radio is still on in the kitchen. “The Washington hawks have long tried
to rope their allies into a despicable venture: to disturb the present power
equilibrium in the hopes of gaining military advantage over the Soviet Union.
As for the USSR, like Leonid Ilych Brezhnev said in November, he is in favor
of preserving détente, of extending it, of a peaceful and equal collaboration
between governments …”
Yet another evening discussion by yet another political commentator. This
too is a part of our lives, our constant accompaniment. It’s the background
to our dinners, our conversations, our thoughts. Grandma interacts with
the radio more than the rest of us. She is at war with it, she curses it, she
argues with it. Sometimes she will spend hours by the radio just listening to
some Beethoven symphony or Tchaikovsky concert. But if you step into the
kitchen right at twelve, when my parents are already sleeping, you will see the
following picture: grandma, bent over the kitchen table, pulling at the radio
antenna, turning all the knobs at once, muttering to herself, as if casting a spell.
She’s trying to catch her favorite “Broadcast for midnighters.” The radio emits
only noise, crackle, and some barely discernible phrases in a distinctly non-
Russian intonation. But grandma is still happy, now she can really, truly talk
to her heart’s content. Grandma curses everything, starting with world politics
and ending with contemporary fashion and music. I often make fun of her for
it, though I probably shouldn’t.
 TEARING AWAY 79

My grandma is a member of the longest-suffering generation, the one born

at the turn at the century. Her older brothers used to go to meetings of the Free
Philosophical Association and attend Chaliapin premiers.13 Her first childhood
love was shot at age 18 for being a Kadet.14 That was in 1919. Grandma never
finished university, but spent her entire life working in schools. In 1937, her
husband was sent to prison, and they never saw each other again. Then came
war, evacuation, hunger.
In 1948 grandma was arrested. My dad and his sister raised themselves.
And in 1953, a couple of days after Stalin died, grandma received the following
letter in prison from her son: “Mommy, oh god, what a loss! I almost didn’t go
to the funeral, but …”
Soon after, grandma was released and rehabilitated, and life slowly went
back to normal. But an oppressive fear and distrust still lingers in her heart.
It is still there many years later, grandma doesn’t believe in the possibility of
leaving, she’s scared to even talk about it. Why, she still remembers how in
1914 her older brother was planning to leave for America.
Many Jews left at the time. It was a normal everyday occurrence – back
then. But now is a very different time. It’s hard for me to talk to her about this.
She is scared for me.
I sit in the kitchen with grandma, together we cast spells over the radio
receiver, I press the buttons, I pull the antenna. All we get in response is
crackling noise and snippets of upbeat music. Today the “Broadcast for
midnighters” has been cancelled due to technical difficulties. We tell each
other good night and go to bed.

13
The Free Philosophical Association (“Vol’naia filosofskaia assotsiatsiia” or “Vol’fila”) was a cultural
organization based in Petersburg (with branches in Moscow and Berlin) active from 1919–24, which
held lectures and discussions on topics of art and culture through the lens of philosophy and the
tenets of socialism. Many prominent members of the intelligentsia frequented these meetings; the
Association was led by the writers Ivanov-Razumnik and Bely. Feodor Chaliapin was a famous Russian
opera singer.
14
The Constitutional Democratic Party (“Konstitutsionno-demokraticheskaia partiia” or “K-D,” thus
the name “Kadets”/“Cadets” for its members) was a liberal political party in the Russian Empire. After
the October Revolution, the party was suppressed by the Bolshevik government.
80 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

II

The next morning. I sit in bed and look out the window. I can see a small scrap
of grey sky and the curved black lines of empty balconies. The bright colors of
laundry hanging in some of them, half-frozen plants lining others.
I like this inner courtyard: in spite of everything, it has its own special
character and stands out amidst all the other identical small courtyard-wells.
As always, Sunday morning begins with the ring of the telephone. I run out
to the corridor, but mom got there first. I can tell by her tense expression that
the conversation is about me:

“Yes, she’s taking her exams.”

“All’s well, thank you.”
“Yes, her husband is travelling for work.”

Yes, all is well.

All is good, all is normal, all is fine. My poor mother! A minute later, the
phone rings again. This time I get it.

“Hello. How’s it going?”

“Fine.”
“You coming?”
“I’m coming. Four o’clock?”
“Yes.”

I completely forgot, today we have that most noteworthy event – a class

reunion. It’s not hard to guess what will happen, we meet up every year. The
first moments – oohs and aahs and joy. We will drink. Misha Voskresenskii,
the life of the party who once would recite Esenin’s “The Black Man,” will bring
the coolest records, share witty anecdotes about his district party committee
job, and promise to bring us all Ceylon tea and Finnish cervelat.
 TEARING AWAY 81

Tanya Gellerman, “the brightest girl in school,” will talk about a popular
novel published in the latest issue of Foreign literature. She never managed to
get into the literature department at the university, finally her parents shoved
her into the Institute for Rail Transport. Now she’s languishing at some kind of
research institute, knitting, reading Foreign lit, you know, a sweet, intelligent
girl …
Irka S. will do what she always does at our meetings, she will try not to
draw attention to herself, maybe she’ll talk about clothes or discos, but we
still remember how in tenth grade she would run to the district committee,
gathering files and character reports, and, of course, we all know that she’s not
really studying history, she managed to get into the special program of the law
department.
Andryusha, our old komsorg,15 “the most honest and just,” will tell a funny
story about his learned dog Toby and her incredible puppies.
And I, like always, will smile at everyone and answer: “Great,” “Thank you,”
“I am taking my exams.” Everything’s fine, fine, fine …
There are a couple more hours until the meeting. Enough time to distract
yourself with your favorite things. My old field of study was medieval history.
(The deeper into the past, the better.) Even though the institute spent four years
trying to teach me this, I never really learned how to deftly add the requisite
spoonful of tar:16 “The historical limitations of the author were the product of
certain social frameworks …”
I open a little book of medieval poetry. Hundreds of enigmatic sonnets
about La Belle Dame, “golden-haired, divine, untouchable.” Maybe these poets
despaired over the terrible gulf between the ideal and the real, the earthly and
the divine. Maybe they only dressed up their ambivalence using these familiar,
customary forms. Or maybe they did not suffer at all, they merely practiced

15
Komsomol organizer, leader of a unit of the Komsomol, the communist youth party organization for
Soviet youth ages fourteeen to twenty-eight.
16
This references a popular Russian expression: “a spoonful of tar ruins the barrel of honey” (“lozhka
dyogtia portit bochku myoda”), whose meaning is similar to the English “fly in the ointment.”
82 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

belles lettres, wrote programmatic verse, not unlike contemporary production

novels. (Today I can’t escape this depraved ahistorical approach.) And what
about “The Song of Roland?” A wonderful heroic epic or a savage piece of
propaganda? It seems to me that it made a significant contribution to the
ideological battles of its time, and in this sense is a work worthy of imitation.
“Tu-ru-ru,” the radio, as usual, interrupts my train of thought right on time.
“Tu-ru-ru-ru. Тhe time in Moscow is 2 o’clock. You are listening to Radio
Mayak. The General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union, Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet
…” The voice is remarkably cheerful and animated. No need to listen any
further. You can tell by the timbre and voice modulation what it’ll be all about.
I’ve already deduced the pattern: any news broadcast can be divided into three
parts.
Part one: “News and visits from socialist countries.” Extreme optimism,
major key.
Part two: notes of sarcasm, then anger and indignation can be detected.
“The American military continues to supply arms to the Republic of South
Africa …” “Unemployment reaches record numbers in capitalist countries
…” Decline, crisis, fear. But here, too, not all hope is lost: “As the newspaper
Daily World reports, this week oil refinery workers went on strike …” “English
women expressed their support,” “a delegation of French schoolteachers is
demanding improvements to their workplace environment …”
And finally, part three: “A Hymn to Labor,” “In Soviet Lands,” “In Preparation
for the Nth Congress,” “The Labor Watch of the Five-Year Plan,” “The collective
farm ‘Ilyich’s way’ in the Zhdanov region has committed to …,” “Workers at
the ‘Red Diesel’ factory completed ahead of schedule …”, “The brigade team
contract model is becoming more and more popular …” It all ends on a note
of mighty cheer. It’s amazing how precisely it is thought out and put together.
It is a complete, passionate radio-sonata in three parts: allegro, adagio, allegro
 TEARING AWAY 83

molto bravo. At the triumphal sound of the allegro molto bravo I put on my
grey coat and white hat and leave the house.
I walk to the subway station. The buildings aren’t all that scary in broad
daylight. Awkward dirty-white boxes against a grey sky. Not a single bright
spot in sight. My grey and white outfit blends into my surroundings. I walk on
the wet asphalt; dirt, puddles, and broken branches under my feet.

we write as we hear
we hear as we breathe
I can’t shake off these words.

Step. My boot pinches. Step. That damn car really had to splash me. Step …
I think I just ran into an old lady carrying a pail. Ding-ding, damn it, watch
where you’re going! I walk faster. “We write as we hear, we hea …”
Finally, the subway. I press into the crowd, step onto the escalator without
thinking, look down. In front of me is a sea of people, all moving chaotically,
bumping into each other. In a couple of seconds, I will join them, and the
stream will carry me to the platform. I can close my eyes, clear my thoughts,
stop worrying; no matter what, sooner or later I will find myself on the train.
My empty mind fills with snatches of memorized phrases and poems.

Tell me, uncle, was there a reason

that Moscow, burned to the ground,
was captured by the Freeeeeeeench …17
I know there will be a city,
I know that gardens will bloom,
when people like this …18

17
Svetlana is here quoting the beginning of Mikhail Lermontov’s poem “Borodino,” which is about
Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.
18
From Mayakovsky’s propaganda poem “Khrenov’s Story about the Kuznetsk Construction and the
People of Kuznetski,” this is an oft-quoted optimistic line that was used to motivate workers.
84 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

It looks like I am already on the train. There’s no place to hide now.

Thousands of eyes are fixed on me, measuring me head to toe. Of course,
they’ve noticed the grime on my shoes, the smudged lipstick, the torn glove
… No one talks on the subway; the noise of the train absorbs all other sounds.
Here you cannot allow yourself the gentle patriarchal sincerity of the tram.
Because of this solitude, time slows to a crawl in the tightly packed, brightly
lit subway car.
Thank god, this is my stop! But this is not yet the end. I have a transfer
ahead of me, another train, a long journey through a maze of underground
passages and escalators. I walk alone for a few steps, hide behind an awkward
marble column. But the avalanche of people finds me and carries me along,
along, along …
I am filled with hate for the girl whose sharp heel just landed on my foot.
I shove my elbows hard into the man standing next to me, and the shove is
returned with equal force.
All of us comprise one large entity. I no longer have any power over myself.
I just need to make sure not to fall behind, I just need to step on the cherished
escalator along with everyone else.

I know there will be a city,

I know that gardens will bloooooooooom …

January 23–February 6, 1981.

 5
Sasha, Misha, Napoleon and
Josephine (circa 1992)

“You are frigid,” he told her as they passed by the Gorky monument on Kirov
Avenue. She was sorry that he no longer touched her shoulder under the thick
wool coat but walked aloof, chewing pink Finnish gum. Frigid – frigidna.
Frigida, fetida, femida – she must have been a Roman goddess, with small
classical breasts and pupilless eyes of cool marble. It might have been her
on that photo in the history textbook, standing side by side with handsome
Apollo who had lost his masculine arms. Just before the barbarian invasion
… or was it just after? She caught her embarrassed reflection in the window
of the Porcelain Shop. It felt uncomfortably damp and raw. She wanted so
much to replay the whole scene, to put his hand back under her wool coat,
to experience the meaningful weight of his warm finger, to press her cheek
against his frosted moustache in that split-second right before they got to the
faded neon P of the Porcelain Shop. But it was too late now; he would not give
her another chance, another touch. They were already crossing the tram routes
and parting by the fence of the park with the poster for Leningrad Dixieland.
Season: 1975.
“‘Excuse me, miss, are you the last?” “Yes.”
“Well, miss … not anymore. Now, I am after you. So, what are we lining up
for? What’s on offer? Grilled chickens or ‘Addresses and Inquiries’?” “Addresses
and Inquiries, I hope.”
86 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

“Good … good … let’s hope together. That’s the only thing we can do these
days – hope. Right? I see you are not from around here …” “No. I am from here
…” “Oh yeah? You sure don’t look like it … Forgive my curiosity, miss, if you
are from around here, why are you lining up at the Information Kiosk?” …
“Just looking for my classmates.” … “Oh, OK. One has to do that from time to
time … I thought you were some kind of foreigner or something …”
Lana realized that she had forgotten how to make small talk in Russian.
She had lost that little invisible something that makes you an insider, a tone
of voice, a gesture of habitual indifference, half words, half said and fully
understood. Lana had emigrated from the Soviet Union eleven years ago: she
was told then that it was once and for ever, that there would be no way back
for her: it was like life and death. Now she was able to visit Leningrad again.
The city had changed its name, and so had she. She came back as an American
tourist, rented a room of her own, drank chilled orange juice at the bar in the
hotel “Europa,” that item of bourgeois charm. She felt guilty and tried to help
her Leningrad friends as much as she could. Usually it came our awkwardly;
they were too proud to accept her help and she was too direct to know how to
give it. Like other idle Westerners, she began to collect Little Octobrist stars
representing the baby Lenin with gilded curls, red banners with embroidered
golden inscriptions “To the Best Pig Farmer for the Achievement in Labour”
or “To the Brigade of a High Level of Culture.” Occasionally she wanted to
pass for a native here in Leningrad and betrayed herself in passing. Lana (or
rather, Svetlana) was born on Bolshoy Avenue, one of the most beautiful
avenues in Leningrad. But then again, everyone in Leningrad believed that
we lived in the most beautiful city in the world and most likely on the best
street, or at least the second best. She lived in Boston on a street with the
usual American understated name, Garden Street and then on Prentiss Street.
She taught foreign language and literature in the university but she felt more
at home, or more “chez soi” in New York City. Could she make small talk in
New-Yorkese? Yes, of course. During these years she had learned how to be
 SASHA, MISHA, NAPOLEON AND JOSEPHINE (CIRCA 1992) 87

a foreigner-insider, a foreigner-New-Yorker, together with other resident and

non-resident aliens, stateless legal and illegal city dwellers. She was among
the lucky green-card carrying New Yorkers and could demonstrate her picture
with a properly exposed right ear and a fingerprint. New York was just right.
It struck her now that she was much more comfortable in a place like home
than at home.
She was a regular at Lox Around the Clock, and could spell her name in
two seconds over the phone. Of course, she had an accent, but it was “so very
charming”, a delicious little extra, like the dressing on a salad that comes free
of charge with an order of Manhattan chowder – “‘What dressing would you
like on your salad, dear?” the waiter would ask her. “Italian, French, Russian
or blue cheese?”’ “Russian, please,” she would say, “and lots of fresh pepper.”
“What a sweet name you got there, miss. Can you spell it for me?” “Yes, S-like
Sam, V-like victory, E-like Ellen, T-like Tom, L-like Larry, A—like Anya …”
“All right! Quite a mouthful! Sovetalana?” … “Call me Lana, it’s fine.”
Besides teaching foreign languages, Lana auditioned to do voiceovers for
commercials whenever they needed accents. The last one she did was “La Latta,
European youglette, Passion Fat-free – I can’t believe it’s not yogurt.” Female
voice: “‘Was it Lisboa? Or was Odessa? It was La Latta – like love.” “Open
your lips, girl, don’t be shy. That’s not a kiss yet, just a promise of a kiss.” Lana
loved how casually the word “freedom” was dropped into every commercial
like a little protein. Usually what was free was the invisible, that little je-ne
sais-quois – forgive my French, that gives everything the right air. She loved
her “StayFree” tampons, never choosing “Always” that forever promised more
than they could deliver. Of course, if you watch a StayFree commercial you
might as well think it’s for a vacation spa. Lana imagined a radical ad for her
favorite StayFree. A woman artist sitting in her studio in dirty overalls, in the
midst of creative disorder. “I will express it,” she says with conviction. “I know
it’s coming. This is going to be my period piece!” She pours scarlet red oil paint
into the camera. And again. And again. “StayFree Feminine Pads.”
88 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

“Are you lining up for inquiries?”

“Yes …”
“And where is the line for addresses?”
“It’s here too.”
“Well, I actually need a phone number … Of course, it would be great to
get a home address too, but I know they’re not listed … It’s dangerous now …
What year is it? 1992! A scary year. It’s not like back in the seventies. That was
a safe time. Now I don’t blame them. What you really need nowadays is an iron
door … Don’t look at me like that … You think I’m joking … I know you’re
young, miss, you might think – an iron door, well, that’s a bit much … but let
me tell you I know a really honest guy, used to be an engineer in the old days
… he makes excellent iron doors. Real quality iron. You can call him. Tell him
I gave you his number. Tell him, Kolya told me.”
“Thanks. I’ll think about it …”
“Well, don’t think too long or it will be too late … No, of course, spit when
you say it. Touch wood. We don’t wish anything bad to happen … Maybe there
will be law and order in this land one day … or at least order …”
“Hm …”
“Come to think of it, maybe they don’t list the phone numbers either. Have
you got a pen, miss? Oh, this is such a great pen. What does it say here?”
“Ai LOVE Nyuu York …”
“Did you get it in Gostiny Dvor or in the House of Friendship?”
Lana began to fill out her inquiry cards to avoid further discussion of iron
doors. She wanted to find her first teenage loves, Sasha and Misha, with whom
she had had her first failed perfect moments. Both relationships had been
interrupted. With Sasha, they had split up after this declaration of frigidity and
a clumsy wet kiss; with Misha, they had to separate after sealing a secret erotic
pact of Napoleonic proportions. She would have liked to update their love
stories, to recover a few missing links, to fill in the blanks. They were complete
antipodes, Sasha and Misha. Sasha was blond, Misha dark; Sasha was her official
 SASHA, MISHA, NAPOLEON AND JOSEPHINE (CIRCA 1992) 89

story, Misha secretly telephonic; Sasha was beautiful, Misha intellectual. Sasha
knew too many girls and Misha had read too much Nietzsche at a young age.
It was almost twenty years ago and the song of the moment was called
“First Love.” “Oh, the first love, it comes and goes with the tide,” sang the
Yugoslavian pop star, the beautiful Radmila Karaklajić, blowing kisses out to
the sea somewhere near the recently bombed town of Dubrovnik … In his
white coat with blood-red lining, Sasha was beautiful; he had a long black scarf
and the aura of a black-market expert. He sang the popular song by Salvatore
Adamo about the falling snow: “The snow was falling and you wouldn’t come
this evening; the snow was falling and everything was white with despair
…” “Tombait la neige … tu ne viendrais pas ce soir …” His masculine voice
caressed her with the foreign warmth. French snow was falling over and over
again, slowly and softly, slowly and softly … How was it possible that she
wouldn’t come that evening? Oh, she would, she must come … and she just
couldn’t resist. She recalled the shape of his lips, soft, full and cracked, but
didn’t remember at all what they were talking about. Oh yes, she was a bit
taken aback when she found out that he had never read Pasternak. On the
other hand, he was a real man and sang beautiful songs. He put his hand under
her sweater. He touched her. He tried to unfasten her bra, those silly little
hooks on the back, but they just wouldn’t yield to him … “Oh, it doesn’t matter.
Let me help …” But he knew that a man must be a man, there are things that
a man must do alone … At that moment a noise in the corridor interrupted
them. It was Sasha’s father, a former sea captain, coming home after work.
The problem was that they did not have anywhere to go: there were no drive-
ins, no cars, no back seats available for them; no contraception and only the
cheapest Bulgarian wine. Like all Leningrad teenagers they went to walk on
the roofs of the Peter and Paul Fortress. That was a minor transgression. They
walked right under the sign “No dogs allowed. Walking on the roofs is strictly
prohibited …” They would get all icy and slippery and one could easily slip,
distracted by the gorgeous panorama of the Neva embankment. But it was
90 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

quite spectacular, the imperial palace dissolving in the mist, dark grey ripples
on the river, a poem or two … Wait, do you remember how it goes … ? “Life
is a lie, but with a charming sorrow …” “Yes,” she would say, “yes” … But that
day they parted before the entrance to the park. On the way she worried that
her nose was becoming frozen red and that she didn’t look good any more. She
was too embarrassed to look at him and could only catch glimpses of his blond
curls, his scarf and the dark birthmark on his cheek. Then there were some
clumsy gestures and an unexpected wetness on her lips. Did I kiss him or not?
She tried to concentrate because this was supposed to be her perfect moment.
“You are frigid,” he said very seriously. Frigid … frigid … a blushing goddess.
So, that’s what it was called? This clumsiness, arousal, alienation, excitement,
tongue-tiedness, humidity, humility, humiliation.
“Are you waiting for apricot juice?”
“No …”
“You mean the apricot juice is gone? I don’t believe it … this is really
incredible … All they got is the Scottish Whisky.”
“‘Miss, where are you from?”
This time Lana did not protest. She began to fill in Misha’s card – all in red
ink. Misha did not know French songs and did not care much about Salvatore
Adamo. They spoke only about Nietzsche, orgasms and the will to power.
“Orgasms: they must be simultaneous or nothing at all. They are beyond good
and evil … For protection women could simply put a little piece of lemon
inside them. It’s the most natural method, practiced by poets during the
Silver Age …” If her relationship with Sasha was a conventional romance with
indispensable walks on the roofs of the fortress, her relationship with Misha
was an example of teenage nonconformism. They dated mostly on the phone
and saw each other only about three times during their two-year ongoing
erotic conversation. She could still hear his familiar voice, which had already
lost its high boyish pitch and acquired a deep guttural masculinity, resounding
in her right ear. When she thought about Misha, she saw herself sitting in
 SASHA, MISHA, NAPOLEON AND JOSEPHINE (CIRCA 1992) 91

a clumsy pose on an uncomfortable chair near the “communal” telephone,

counting the black squares on the tiled checkered floor. The telephone was
placed in the corridor and shared by all the neighbors of the apartment. While
talking to Misha she had to lower her voice, because her neighbor Shura, the
voracious gossiper, was conspicuously going back and forth between her room
and the kitchen, slowing her steps near the phone. The rest of the time she was
probably standing behind the doors of her room, busy filling in the gaps in
Lana and Misha’s fragmented dialogue. With Misha she was very intimate but
their intimacy was safe, and the distance protected them from self-censorship.
They knew that they were partaking in a larger system of official public
communication. The invisible presence of the others, the flutter of slippers
in the corridor, pleasantly tickled their nerves. Lana met Misha on the Devil’s
Wheel – a special whirligig in the Kirov Park of Culture and Leisure. Misha
fell victim to the calumny of Lana’s girlfriend, Ira, who observed his immediate
affection for Lana. “He’s handsome,” Ira said, “but he has smooth rosy cheeks
… like a girl … you know what I mean …” “He has smooth rosy cheeks like a
girl …” – this strange sentence haunted Lana for the whole day, that beautiful
spring day when they were riding on the whirligig trying to touch each other
in the air in a moment of ephemeral intimacy, and then push each other away,
swinging on the chains. The song goes like this:

Just remember long ago in the spring, we were riding in the park on Devil’s
Wheel. Devil’s Wheel, Devil’s Wheel and your face is flying near me. But I am
swinging on the chains, I am flying – OH!

“Oh?” “I am swinging on the chains. I am flying.” “Akh, Akh.”

“I thought you were humming the old song ‘Devil’s Wheel.’ Haven’t heard it
on the radio for ages … It must be ten years old …”
“Yeah … I don’t know why it stuck with me.”
“It’s a nice song. I remember our great talent Muslim Magomaev used to sing
it on the TV on New Year’s Eve. It was when I was still married to my ex-wife
92 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

and our son was in the army … She would be making her New Year potato salad
in the kitchen with my mother-in-law and I would watch TV, that show called
‘Little Blue Light.’ And then there would be a clock and the voice of comrade
Brezhnev – first it was comrade Brezhnev himself, then his voice, and in the last
years the voice of an anchorman reading Brezhnev’s speech – poor guy had a
tic – but the speech always sounded so warm and familiar and it went so well
with a little glass of vodka and herring: ‘Dear Soviet citizens … The coming
year promises us further achievements on our victorious road to Communism
… I wish you good health, happiness in your personal life and success in your
labour.’ And then Muslim Magomaev would sing ‘Devil’s Wheel’:

Just remember long ago in the spring, we were riding in the park on Devil’s
Wheel. Devil’s Wheel, Devil’s Wheel …”

“I know these days you’re not supposed to remember things like that …
Now it’s called ‘the era of stagnation … ’”
“But it was such a good song …”
Lana was afraid to lose Misha’s face forever at the next turn of the whirligig.
“Devil’s Wheel, Devil’s Wheel, and your face is flying near me.” The words of
this popular song shaped their romance. But in this whirlpool of excitement,
in the swings of the Devil’s Wheel, in the cool air of a Russian spring, his
cheeks were getting rosier and rosier. The obscene words froze on the tip of
her tongue. He blushed like a girl. They were doomed … They would have
been a strange couple anyway – his girlish rosy cheeks and deep masculine
voice, and her boyish clumsiness and long red nails painted with an imported
Polish nail polish. They didn’t know what to do with their excessively erotic
and intellectual selves.
After the encounter on the Devil’s Wheel there were months of phone calls.
They carefully planned their next meeting and always postponed it. Finally,
they decided, now or never, they would conduct a secret ritual, the deepest
penetration into the mysteries of the soul. She left her house and walked away
 SASHA, MISHA, NAPOLEON AND JOSEPHINE (CIRCA 1992) 93

from the city centre. She passed the larger-than-life portrait of Lenin made
of red fishnet in the 1960s. Behind the monument to the Russian inventor
of radio, Alexander Popov, there was urban no man’s land, the old botanical
gardens with ruined greeneries, endless fences made of wood and iron. This
was the border zone – exactly what Misha looked for to perform their secret
ritual. “This could be done once in a lifetime,” he said seriously. “Napoleon
did it to Josephine.” She had to stand against the iron fence with her hands
behind her back and open her eyes very wide. Then he touched her eye with
his tongue. He touched it deeply, trying to penetrate into the darkness of the
pupil. For a second, he lingered, and then licked the white around her eyelids
as if drawing the contours of her vision from inside her. Her gaze acquired
primordial warmth and humidity. They paused for a moment. Her eyes
were overflowing with desire. They never condescended to kissing, holding
each other, or saying a romantic “I love you” on the roof of the fortress.
They despised these conventional teenage games. They committed a single
Napoleonic transgression, a moment of dazzling eye contact, a mysterious
pact of intimacy signed with neither ink nor blood.
“Miss, you’ll have to rewrite this … We do not accept red ink. And the paper
is wet. Try to be neat …”
“Forgive me. I have terrible handwriting …”
“That’s your problem. And hurry please, we close in an hour …”
“But we’ve been waiting an hour and a half.”
“Well, yesterday, people stood for three hours under drizzling rain. Be
grateful that you’re queuing for information, not for bread …”
“Oh, by the way, speaking of bread, you should have seen what they sell in
the cooperative bakery around the corner. Their heart-shaped sweet breads are
now five hundred roubles apiece … I mean this is ridiculous … They used to
be twenty kopecks – maximum.”
“What are you talking about? We didn’t even have heart-shaped breads
before … If it were up to you and people like you, we would still live in the era
94 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

of stagnation or, even worse, in the time of the great purges … You just can’t
take any change …”
“Hey, comrades, ladies and gentlemen, whatever … Stop yelling in line.
These working conditions are impossible! I can’t give out any information with
all of this shouting!”
And in New York there are a hundred kinds of breads – Lana suddenly felt
ashamed of it – bread with and without calories, with and without fat, bread
which is not really bread at all, but only looks like it. This bread will never get
stale; it is non-perishable, eternally fresh and barely edible. So sometimes you
have to rush to an expensive store, miles away to fetch foreign bread that lasts
only for a day, that is fattening and crusty and doesn’t fit in the toaster. So, she
did not express her views on the heart-shaped cakes. She tried hard to remain
neutral and friendly with all the strangers in the line and concentrated on
filling out her inquiry cards. But those two repulsively intimate episodes were
her main clues for Sasha and Misha. The rest was the hearsay of well-meaning
common friends, rumors, and most of them fifteen years old.
Sasha, rumor had it, was married and drinking. Or rather, at the beginning
he did everything right – he flirted with the black market in his early youth, but
then cut off all his blond curls and ties with foreigners and entered the Military
Naval Academy. He married his high-school sweetheart, whom he had begun
to date in the resort town of Z just about the time of their romance, and who
had heroically waited for him through all those years. Of course, they had a
very proper wedding in the Palace of Weddings on the Neva embankment and
they placed the crown of flowers in the Revolutionary Cemetery and took lots
of pictures with her white lacy veil and his black tuxedo. Sasha wanted to be
a noble army officer, like his father, a youngish-looking, well-built man, who
often played tennis at the courts of the town of Z. He was the “right stuff.” But
then something unforeseen occurred. Sometime in the early 1980s he started
to develop strange symptoms, losing hair and getting a dark rash on his arms.
Nobody was sure what it was. During his service somewhere in the Arctic
 SASHA, MISHA, NAPOLEON AND JOSEPHINE (CIRCA 1992) 95

Circle, Sasha might have received an excessive dose of radiation. But those
were the things that one didn’t talk about, you know what I mean … He quit
the service, left the city and underwent special medical treatment somewhere
far away. He came back supposedly cured. Is one ever? Lana’s distant cousin,
Sasha’s occasional tennis partner, said that he was in Leningrad, but that he
had moved from his old apartment and no longer spent summers in the town
of Z. Another common friend had spotted him in the subway passage, but
Sasha didn’t say hello. Was he preparing for a new diplomatic career? Secret
service? Private securities? The crowd was moving fast, the light was dim, and,
who knows, it might have been someone else altogether …
As for Misha, he was considered lucky. Like Sasha, he did not keep in touch
with old friends, but then again, those old friends did not keep in touch with
each other, just gathered occasionally, for someone’s birthday or a farewell
party. Misha started as unconventionally as one would expect of him. In the
late 1970s he managed to get into the philosophy department, which was an
almost impossible thing to do without connections. He had to settle for the
evening division, in which case he had to serve time in the Soviet army. What
might have seemed like a tragedy turned out to have a peculiar “happy ending”.
Misha spent two years in the Far East, in the most dangerous area, near the
Chinese border. He told her during one of their last long conversations after
he returned from the army that in his detachment, he was the only person with
a high-school education. So, he could satisfy his will to power. The soldiers
polished his boots, squatted in front of him and methodically brushed away
every tiny bit of dust. He liked it. He said that of all things in the world, he loved
power the most. Lana thought that he must have still been into Nietzsche.
By the age of twenty-one he was chosen to enter the Communist Party on a
special basis, two years before the official age of eligibility, which was twenty-
three. During the 1980 Russian Olympic Games – the last epic event of the
Brezhnev era – Misha was elected to the Leningrad Olympic Committee. He
called her then, appearing very friendly, and promised to get her some Ceylon
96 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

tea which had long vanished from the stores and could only be acquired by the
privileged few. She couldn’t forgive him for this tea for a long time. Perhaps
it was not the tea itself but a certain tone of voice … That year she became
something like an internal refugee and had to leave the university, “expelled
voluntarily.” She applied for emigration and soon after that friends stopped
visiting her. Occasionally they called from public phones and spoke in strange
voices, and then, when something squeaked in the receiver, quickly bid their
farewells: “Forgive me, I am out of change. I’ll call you later.” Lana was running
endless errands, as a therapy against fear, collecting the “inquiry cards and
papers” – spravki – to and from various departments of Internal Affairs …
And yes, good tea was really hard to get in those days, especially the sweet and
aromatically prestigious Ceylon tea.
She often imagined meeting Misha somewhere in the noisy subway, in the
midst of a crowd. He would proudly wear his great tan and fashionable brand-
new T-shirt with the winking Olympic bear, made in Finland. “I’ve been
transferred to Moscow you know,” he shouted at her. “I’ve been very busy lately.”
“Me too,” Lana shouted in response. “I am emigrating, you know.” She knew she
was compromising him at that moment, that she was saying something that one
did not talk about, something that one could only whisper in private and never
on the phone. A few strangers conspicuously turned around to look at them
as if photographing Misha’s face and hers with their suspicious eyes. And then
Misha blushed, in his unique girlish fashion, his cheeks turned embarrassingly
red, as in those teenage years, and he vanished in the crowd. But all of this
took place many years ago, and Lana no longer had any problems with tea.
Those fragments of intimacy with Misha and Sasha, tactile embarrassments
and unfulfilled desires, were the few things that remained vivid in her mind
from the “era of stagnation.” Those incomplete narratives and failed perfect
moments were like fragile wooden logs, unreliable safeguards on the swamp
of her Leningradian memory that otherwise consisted of inarticulate fluttering
and stutters, smells and blurs.
 SASHA, MISHA, NAPOLEON AND JOSEPHINE (CIRCA 1992) 97

Lana had already performed some of the obligatory homecoming rituals,

but they were too literal and therefore disappointing. She walked by the
ageing but still cheerful Gorky on the renamed Kirov Avenue, approaching
the windows of the Porcelain Store, which now sold all possible commercial
goods from chicken grills to Scottish Whisky and Wrangler jeans. Across the
street from the square with the monument to the Russian inventor of radio
(whose invention, among many other things, is now called into question) she
searched in vain for the red shadow of Lenin made of fishnet. The house where
she used to live was being repaired and on the broken glass door of the gala
entrance, she found a poster advertising a popular Mexican soap opera, “And
the Rich Also Cry.” Otherwise the façade looked exactly as in the old days, but
it appeared more like an impostor for her old house, or a stage set that clumsily
imitated the original. Lana climbed up to their communal apartment through
piles of trash. The place looked uncanny. The old communal partitions,
including the secret retreats of the neighbor Aunt Shura who bore witness to
her teenage romances, were taken apart and the whole drama of communal life
was forever interrupted. On the floor she found broken telephone wires, worn-
out slippers and pieces of a French record. She looked through the window:
black bottomless balconies were still precariously attached to the building and
a few rootless plants continued to inhabit them. A melancholy lonely drunk
urinated near the skeleton of the old staircase.
“Comrades, Ladies and Gentlemen. Remember who is the last in line and
no more lining up after that. Can I trust you?”
“But of course, we are all family here, miss. We know who stood in line and
who didn’t.”
“Hurry up, comrades. Prepare your inquiry cards neatly. Be sure to include
name and patronymic, place of birth, nationality, permanent address … We
are short of time here …”
Indeed, we are short of time, thought Lana. We are all only a phone call
away from each other. Misha, Sasha, let’s all get together. Let bygones be
98 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

bygones – God, we used to learn so many proverbs in our English classes

and then never had occasion to use them … Let’s chat, remember the golden
seventies, have a drink or two. What do you think? There are so many blank
spots in our life stories, and we don’t have to fill them all, it’s OK. We’ll just
have fun. Let’s meet in some beautiful spot with a view, definitely with a
view. We don’t need broad panoramas, no. And I don’t think the Temple of
our Savior in Blood is such a good place. (I heard they took the scaffolding
down and you can actually see it now; it’s been restored after so many years
… ) Let’s meet on the little bridge with golden-winged lions. “Let’s tell each
other compliments, in love’s special moments.” I didn’t make up this song;
it really existed. Take it easy, Sasha … I know what happened. I’ve heard. I
don’t have much to say about it, only that it could have been worse. Listen,
you looked really gorgeous in that white coat with red lining and I was
completely and totally seduced by that silly song … I must have had a real
crush on you. I even forgave you for not reading Pasternak. It’s just that we
took ourselves so seriously in those days, you and me … But tell me, where
did you get that cruel Latin word “frigid” from? In America, you know,
women are rarely frigid, but the weather frequently is … Hey, Misha. I’ve
really forgotten about that Ceylon tea of yours … it doesn’t matter anymore;
I’ve brought you some Earl Grey … Remember our telephonic orgasms in
the communal corridor? God, I wish someone had taped those … Should
we try to continue in a more sedate grown-up fashion and shock the long-
distance operator? I think I know something about you from the time your
army boots were still unpolished. The taste of your tongue in my eyes …
Where are you now? Way up or low down? As usual, beyond good and evil?
I am joking, of course; you might have forgotten your high-school Nietzsche
… Me, I’m fine really. I love New York, as they say. Like New Yorkers, love
it and hate it. It feels like home and I feel a bit homesick now, for that little
studio of mine on the Ninth West Street, bright but rather messy, without
pretense of coziness.
 SASHA, MISHA, NAPOLEON AND JOSEPHINE (CIRCA 1992) 99

Sometimes I go traveling to the end of the world, or at least to the

southernmost point in the United States. Last time I nearly slipped on the
wet rocks. You see, you need that, to get a perspective, to estrange yourself. It’s
dangerous to get attached to one place, don’t you think? And yes, of course I
must be having great sex. For that’s what we do “in the West” and it couldn’t
be otherwise. It’s not so simple. Physically we know much more about each
other, you know, we talk and we name things. But my new boyfriend says that
he hasn’t found himself yet. (Found whom, you would ask … ) I know it might
sound funny here, some people try to lose themselves and others to find …
Well … let’s have a cup of coffee.
Where shall we sit? You are local, you must know places. Yesterday we tried
to have a drink with my old girlfriend and we couldn’t find a place to sit. It was
raining. So, we ended up in the movie theatre, The Barricade, on Nevsky. They
have a nice coffee shop. We even bought the ticket to the movies, just in case.
They were showing Crocodile Dundee. The cleaning woman tried to get us to
go to see the movie.
“Hey, kids. Oh, it’s such a funny movie,” she said. “You just can’t stop
laughing. Our movies are never funny like that.”
“No,” I said, “we paid for the ticket but really we just want to sit in the coffee
shop since it’s open till the next show.”
“But – it can’t be done,” she said, “‘the coffee shop is for moviegoers only and
what kind of moviegoers are you?”
“We are ticket-holders. Besides, I have already seen Crocodile Dundee,” I
protested.
“It’s impossible … Don’t try to fool me. This is the first night …”
“I saw it in the drive-in in New London,” I insisted …
“Look, miss, leave the coffee shop this very minute. I tell you that in Russian,
loud and clear. Coffee is for moviegoers only.”
Maybe we’ll see a movie, Misha, something very slow, with long, long takes.
Wait, Misha, don’t rush … I am sure we’ll find a place nearby … I would have
100 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

invited you for a bagel, but it’s far away … We could talk about Napoleon. He is
sort of out of fashion now … I bet the waitress would take us for ageing foreign
students …
“The information kiosk closes in fifteen minutes.”
“Wait, dear miss, you’ve promised us so much … we’ve waited for so
long …”
“This is public abuse. I demand the ‘Book of Complaints and
Suggestions’ …”
“I am sorry, comrade, we don’t have it at this branch of the Information
Kiosks. You would have to go to the Central Information Bureau on Nevsky
Avenue. But they close at two today, so you are too late. And tomorrow they
have a day off.”
“That’s the whole problem … Whatever the reason, Russian people love
to complain … I would have prohibited those ‘Books of Complaints and
Suggestions’ … What we need is ‘The Book of Constructive Proposals.’”
“And who are you, mister? Are you a people’s deputy, or what?”
“No, I am not.”
“Well, we are very glad that you are not the people’s deputy. People have a
right to information. If they can’t get the information, they can complain …
We’ve been silenced for too long …”
“So what? Before we didn’t have any information, now it’s all over the place
… But who needs it when we can’t afford toothpaste! We don’t have toothpaste,
but we’ve got glasnost to freshen our breath … Information … If you want
my opinion, there is too much information these days, too much talk and no
change …”
“Excuse me,” she said very politely. “It is written here clearly: “The
Information Kiosk is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Thursday.”
“Today is Thursday and it is quarter to four now, therefore the kiosk should be
open for another hour and fifteen minutes.”
 SASHA, MISHA, NAPOLEON AND JOSEPHINE (CIRCA 1992) 101

“Hey, lady … and who do you think I am? Do you think I can’t read or
something? You try working here for a fucking hundred roubles per hour. I
would be making twice as much in the cooperative bakery … But I stay here
all the same. I feel sorry for folks like you, filling out those fucking inquiry
cards in the cold … Someone has to give people the information they need …”
“Excuse me, miss … Where are you from?”
102
 6
Replace the Irreplaceable!
A Tale of Immigrant Objects

The original Royal Heirloom Victoria & Albert cup was purchased in a
warehouse in Collinsville, Connecticut that no longer exists. I remember that
it was the only cup on the shelf that didn’t have the label “like new.” The cup
contained fine crazings in its glaze, and a brown stain, a memory of past tea
drinkers. “Authentic,” said the salesman. “Made of pulverized bone ashes.
Somebody’s grandma loved it.” I knew it wasn’t my grandma but it didn’t really
matter.
Since my immigration from Leningrad to Boston, I had developed a
fondness for the American flea markets, yard sales and free antiques that appear
miraculously on city streets on trash days. Too poor to shop for household
goods, we used to look for treasures from trash; coffee tables with missing
curved legs and incrustations, vanity cabinets with broken mirrors, clocks with
missing hands, how-to-change-your-life books and pieces of non-pareil bone
china. Trash hunting was a form of our subsistent living. It was fun too. We
repurposed other people’s souvenirs and made them our own. “The crazing on
this cup goes rather deep,” I told the salesman. “Can I get a discount?” “No,”
he said. “This is the final sale.” On the day I broke the cup I had my own fine
crazing, fractured tibia and fibula bones and a broken marriage. I had to learn
how to hobble around my house on one leg to avoid a repeat injury. When our
104 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

bones are intact, we walk the way we breathe – thoughtlessly. We trust our feet
to uproot us gently and land us safely in the near abroad. But now everything
was shaky again. The second home that I made for myself in Boston didn’t feel
like home anymore. It became a maze of displaced objects, souvenirs of past
lives, gifts from forgotten friends, extension cords connected to nothing, book
pages with sharp edges that make your fingers bleed. Hopping in the slip-proof
sock, the color of hospital beige, I felt I was on a domestic reconnaissance
mission. I touched every threshold, every deviant nail, every gap in the
wooden boards of the floor. The skeleton of my house revealed itself to me. I
crisscrossed its history like an obstacle course.
This fateful morning, I just want to have a good time. To drink some strong
tea with lemon from my heirloom cup without anyone’s help. I am sick and
tired of my step-by-step existence and of starting every morning with “rating
my pain on a scale of one to ten” in “My Diary of Pain” that the hospital nurse
left for me. In general, following instructions is not my strong point. How to
move objects in space, how to scratch the itch, how to lead a risk-averse life
without bending your knee. I like making my own rules. For example: How
to give a kiss on crutches. Follow three simple steps. Identify a body part of
the individual you intend to kiss and not an arbitrary moving target. Hug the
crutch with your armpit, lean forward with your upper body and extend your
neck. Just tenderness, no obligation. Make sure you don’t hit the funny bone.
If there is no human in sight, just kiss your bone china and take a long sip. So,
I climb on top of my mobile bed, stand on one leg, open the door of the glass
cabinet with the help of my crutch and barely holding onto the shelf, grab the
handle of my favorite tea cup. I put myself in harm’s way and take the risk for
its own sake. Mission accomplished! My Heirloom Victoria & Albert cup is
safe in my hands. I move to the kitchen, carrying the cup in one hand, jumping
on one leg and passing containers from one surface to another. I do it with the
dexterity of an experienced cast member, relishing my new self-sufficiency. I
hold the cup by its elegant handle, bring the gilded rim to my lips and drink
 REPLACE THE IRREPLACEABLE! A TALE OF IMMIGRANT OBJECTS 105

slowly. It’s pleasant to kill time, something I can’t afford to do when I stand
on my own two feet. At that nearly perfect moment the phone rings. I leap
to answer it, to respond, to bear weight, just like in the good old days. My
hand grasps for help, my elbow hits the cup and I watch it fall and break into
large shards, as if in slow motion. I know better than to leap to its rescue. The
remains of the heirloom are scattered on the black and white chessboard of the
linoleum floor. I cannot lean down to gather them. The only thing I can do is
to flee the wreckage with caution and care. It has to be left as it is. There is no
way for me to remove the traces. I cannot even bend my knee. Until the first
visitor comes, I will have to live next to the scene of the accident, the pieces
of bone china teasing me with their rough edges. But don’t worry about me.
I don’t break down. What scares me is how quickly I turn my back on grief. I
have learnt to break things. I have mastered the art of losing.
What’s lost is lost. A cup is only a cup. I hold onto its gilded handle, ever
more beautiful when attached to nothing.
A few hours pass eventless. Evening descends with a flash of twilight
blue, the color of the East German Kodak film of my childhood. There is a
knock at my kitchen door. I forgot completely about the visit of my colleague.
M. was supposed to deliver the files from a recent department meeting. M.
is sympathetic, but also very professional. I wonder for a moment what to
do about my mess. He is not obliged to bear witness to any of it. Should I
laugh it off or gently ask if he could sweep the pieces into the dustbin because
I cannot do it on my own? But then I would have to go into embarrassing
details about my bones, which only the injured could relate to. Will he think
it too intimate? Will it tamper with the New England sense of boundaries
which makes our relationship so comfortable? If he was Russian, I would ask,
but he is not. Besides, he lost his partner not too long ago; so he might be in
mourning. And he is, most certainly, short on time. M. greets me with warm
politeness. I don’t draw his attention to what is blatantly in front of him, and
he makes no mention of it. He walks through my barricaded kitchen and we
106 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

proceed directly to work. We have a nice talk. He apologizes that he came with
nothing: “empty-handed, as you would say in Russian.” On his way out, he
walks around the broken shards like a weathered journalist through ruins and
warzones, either oblivious of them or too mindful. I can’t tell. With nothing
better to do I am left to compose a requiem for the broken bone china.
One day in the middle of nowhere central Connecticut we stopped by an
old mill factory turned antique warehouse, itself part ruin, part construction
site. The visit was short because we wanted to make it home before dark. The
reticent New England sun was ready to retreat away from public view. Most
of the store’s displays were already in boxes and the place gave the impression
of a transit station where immigrants sorted their personal belongings.
I wandered through the rows of dispersed silver sets, oversized fur coats
with ripped buttons, catching my disheveled reflection in yet another vanity
cabinet straight out of a 1950s B-movie. Suddenly a single tea cup caught my
attention. It was not part of any set. It stood alone. Dark blue and gold with
rose bouquets in deep pink, the color of nostalgia itself. A belated Victorian
craze, the Queen mourning the love of her life, pressing her lips to the tender
rim. Fortified by pulverized bone ashes? No, that’s not it. I see instead my no
less virginal Aunt Mirrah in a dark blouse: her first barely kissed love died
in the battle of Stalingrad. A tentative kiss on a stairwell, a friendly postcard,
a light blush upon being discovered by a curious neighbor. Whatever it had
or hadn’t been we would never find out. After the war many women in my
family were widowed or unmarried. Aunt Mirrah lived with Aunt Berta in
a meticulously dusted semi-dark room stuffed with porcelain figurines of
bare-chested shepherdesses and their rosy-cheeked companions who blew
hot air into tibia-shaped flutes. Glass cabinets stood against the wall filled
with mementos of dispersed tea sets. (Don’t play with the key, children!)
And there it was: Royal Heirloom Victoria & Albert cup or its perfect
imitation. Aunt Mirrah derived an almost erotic pleasure from reaching
into the cabinet’s dark corners, outwitting the patina of time. The sparkling
 REPLACE THE IRREPLACEABLE! A TALE OF IMMIGRANT OBJECTS 107

clean china cabinet reflected in the double mirror gave the crammed room
an illusion of depth.
Such cabinets, filled with odd collections of cups, toys and souvenirs from
the places never visited, could be found in many postwar Soviet apartments.
Most of these apartments in the center of Leningrad were communal; behind
the gorgeous urban façades decorated with masks, exotic beasts, and columns
of all possible orders, were dark courtyards, back staircases, and dimly lit
partitioned flats crumbling from disrepair. The long corridors leading to the
shared kitchen and toilet were painted with a thin blue line below waist level
and decorated with endless lists of instructions and rules regulating communal
behavior. But the rooms opened into a different cozy world with a small oasis
of beauty, a private corner of the communal apartment with smelly toilets and
no shower. The cabinet of ordinary curiosities was an altar to personal dreams
from another age, neither properly Soviet nor consumerist.
The variety of objects was limited and predictable, and only the web of
family storytelling made those similar displays singular and unique. I might
be the last clumsy storyteller from the displaced dynasty, “differently abled,” as
they say in America. I know history from hearsay and books. I only imagine
what historical and personal upheavals these objects have witnessed. In the
late 1920s there was a campaign against “domestic trash” that promoted the
purge of foreign objects, including evil porcelain figurines of class enemies,
excessively decorative china cups, potted fichus plants that carried the seeds of
bourgeois hominess and the cagey and counter-revolutionary yellow canaries
which the Soviet poet Mayakovsly proposed to strangle, at least poetically if
not literally. “Quickly, comrades, twist the throats of the yellow canaries before
they twist the throat of communism,” he wrote in the poem “On Trash.” Yet
during the major revolutionary transformation of the country from Lenin’s to
Stalin’s times, most Soviet citizens lived with the private things from another
time, oddly outmoded and eccentric. How they survived dispossessions,
revolutions, relocations and then World War II and the siege of Leningrad,
108 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

I have no idea. During the siege, Aunt Mirrah must have hidden them
somewhere safe, nobody remembers where. She poured the remainder of her
love into them, swaddling them in warm cloth. The survival of Aunt Mirrah’s
heirloom cup was a miracle of courage and contingency. I remember how this
precariously glued treasure wobbled in the chest of drawers when we kids
played our irreverent hide-and-seek. What do you prefer, hiding or seeking?
Of course, I want to hide, to make myself invisible and immobile and watch
how the world can exist without me. How silly my friend looks searching for
me under the orange sofa bed. I have tricked everyone. Oh no! Now she’s going
to the coat closet! I hid there a week ago; what is she thinking? How I laughed
silently at the blindness of the seekers. Now I know that I liked to hide because
I never doubted that I would be found or at least that there would be someone
looking for me. You hide to be sought after. I played out my own disappearance,
but played it safe. And once found, I would jump with joy, causing the precious
altar to jiggle. “Hey, careful! Don’t jump around. Remember the cups!” Kind
Aunt Mirrah tutored me in math and offered me tea when I found the correct
solution to a difficult puzzle. Obviously, we wouldn’t even dream of drinking
from the precious cup; we would only admire it from afar. The tea was offered
in a simple Soviet cup with gilded red roosters. As the weak tea was getting
lukewarm in my Soviet cup, the heirloom roses on the Royal Albert exuded
the delicate aroma of an elegant past – not my aunt’s but someone else’s, which
she had accidentally inherited.
Somehow, in my family, the stories of cherished and lost objects are
better preserved than the stories of people’s lives. We spoke more about our
apartment interiors than about our interior lives. Psychotherapy was part of
the state security apparatus. My mother once said that what mattered was
just to have food and drink on the table, to be together and not to dig too
deeply into the past. She didn’t believe in complaining or in breaking down,
mentally or physically. Crazing was not for her. She simply couldn’t afford it.
My grandmother had an old feud with Aunt Mirrah and it was all about bone
 REPLACE THE IRREPLACEABLE! A TALE OF IMMIGRANT OBJECTS 109

china, not about the cruel fates of its owners – nobody wanted to touch on
that. Most members of their large family died young – from mass executions,
wars and disease. All that remained were old photographs in exotic costumes,
porcelain figurines, heirloom cups and tall blue vases, possibly made in
Limoges. My grandmother was arrested as a “rootless cosmopolitan” and sent
to the camps in 1949; when she came back in 1955, she was amazed to find that
her carefully hidden bone china and the vases survived her imprisonment.
Nobody was particularly interested to hear her story from the Gulag at that
time, but everyone talked about the enduring things. During the Khrushchev
Thaw of the 1960s my young parents fought their own campaign against
“domestic trash.” They wanted to live in a new way, with uncluttered rooms
and without the burden of the past. The old-fashioned tea set and vases were
sent into fashion exile and were relocated to the closet of our communal
apartment. I grew up with cheerful tea ware decorated with golden cocks and
yellow wallpaper with dandelions brightly illuminated by large red lampshades
– made in Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia – that looked like friendly UFOs. The
old things became valuable again when I decided to emigrate at the age of
twenty, looking for my own new life elsewhere beyond the stifling familiarity
of the communal apartments.
My parents had to come up with the money to pay endless bribes and fees
to make my emigration possible. My grandmother’s vases were sold for cheap,
there was no time to bargain, timing was everything. I emigrated back in the
1980s, before perestroika. At that time, I could take hardly any valuables with
me, just one suitcase and ninety dollars per person. I was young and didn’t
care too much about things. At the last moment my mother packed my cup
with the golden rooster because she had heard that everybody drinks from
paper cups in faraway America. Not so precious in my Russian life, the cup
became a priceless memento of emigration. When one moves from a land
of planned scarcity to a land of planned obsolescence, it is hard to preserve
one’s habits and frames of mind. Perhaps that’s why in America the frames are
110 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

often more valuable than the artwork. Frames are nailed to the walls of your
home; pictures are transitory and portable. People say that I did well on the
whole, I learned a new language and shortened my sentences. I married an
American man and tried to build a second home. I assimilated. I bought glass
cabinets of my own and some bric-a-brac in a vintage store called “History”
on Massachusetts Avenue that recently went out of business. My ex-husband,
a pacifist, collected toy soldiers from another time and constantly fought
imaginary battles. I assembled my own ragtag army of Russian clay heroes,
troikas, fat Madonnas, centaurs with balalaikas and magic birds with whistles
under their tails. I bought new replicas of Russian imperial china cups, the
“cobalt net.”
Unlike my careful aunts, I used my precious teacup all the time, saving it
neither for a rainy day nor for a bright future. In our family history the bone
china proved to be more resilient than its owners. Aunt Mirrah was right;
the young generation never learnt how to handle things with care. One day
I broke my old cup with the golden cock that I carried with me in my one
immigrant bag. To tell you the truth, I didn’t throw it in the trash. I planned
to many times, but I didn’t. I may have put the shard with the beheaded red
rooster into some immigrant closet. Don’t get me wrong. Mostly I take out
my trash on schedule and even recycle. But sometimes it’s hard to part with
a beautiful piece, so I keep it in the limbo of my closet, between archive and
garbage. But where is this story going? There is no all-purpose glue that would
put these broken shards together again. Now that my former home country
has broken apart, for better and for worse, and my grandmother and Aunt
Mirrah are no more, who cares about those orphaned things? It was worth
it for me to lose them, right? I’m glad I left and traveled light. With lightness
came liberty. Once you leave home, the other losses matter less. The shock of
finitude hurts at first and then becomes habitual. It’s like a blood test. “Just a
pinch,” says the nurse. “Sorry, have to pinch again … Your veins are so thin.
Make a fist. Deep breathe. Look away. OK. One more pinch, honey. Your
 REPLACE THE IRREPLACEABLE! A TALE OF IMMIGRANT OBJECTS 111

blood’s moving slowly, but we’re getting there …” Bloodletting makes you a
little light-headed. Lying in the middle of domestic ruin I am reminded of my
missed mourning.
Ruin means “collapse,” but it is also about remainders and reminders, about
past dreams of the future and alternative veins of history. The laughing masks
on the cracked façade of my Leningrad house, built by a foreign architect,
smile at me. I remember dandelions on the yellow wallpaper, the torn-up
pages of the Pravda newspaper circa 1974 in our unheated communal toilet,
a mist of Red Moscow Eau de Cologne in the lobby to cover up the smell. We
are dipping Mashenka cookies in weak tea, laughing at the same joke with
a scratchy French record playing in the background. “Tombait la neige. Tu
ne vendrais pas ce soir …” I don’t recall exactly who “we” are but we all feel
at home. Only it’s not what you think. I really don’t want to go back there.
I have no plans to recover the unreal estate. I’d like to hobble forward into
the crutchless future, to move on, to find another country to emigrate to, the
way I have all my life. Instead I trip. I stumble into something I was blind
to. I may not miss lost objects, but I miss telling stories about them. I miss
having someone to tell stories to about lost objects. Do you hear me? Is that
too much to ask?
Meander back to the beginning. To a factory town in Connecticut, not to
Leningrad. I am browsing again through the displaced domestic things in
the warehouse when I realize I’m not alone there. I am with you, of course,
my American ex-husband. You’ve been hiding there in the background of my
story, or rather you haven’t been hiding at all, just waiting for me in the car,
impatient with my erring and wandering, but also giving me time. Of course,
we were together then. We went to visit your relatives in Connecticut, and
this trip to the antique store was my little reward for all the uncomfortable
silences and tensions that we’d been through. We felt safe together, you and
I, maybe not intimate but homey. We didn’t question that, just played our
comforting hide-and-seek with a little jazz in the background. We didn’t
112 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

confront difficult things and spoke with half-words, the way I’d been used
to in my Soviet past. My second home had a few dimly lit corners like my
first one. Your Napoleonic toy soldiers peacefully coexisted with my Russian
dolls. All passions and power struggles were ancient history. You never liked
tea but I could still tell you my stories whether you listened or not. You
looked at my heirloom cup with a mixture of indifference and tenderness
and said something unmemorable like, “It’s nice. Almost new.” Now I am
breaking down. No place to hide in this mess. Too much wear and tear
everywhere. The room hasn’t been aired for ages. Quickly, I have to move
sideways, take another path in my story, a road not taken. Go back to Aunt
Mirrah’s shadowy room, follow her first love, the one-legged lieutenant with
a husky voice and smoky breath. What if he comes back from the war with
a medal, rings the bell twice, as usual, and the wise Aunt Mirrah wearing a
crepe de chine dress with curlers in her hair forgives him his fleeting wartime
infidelities? And the heirloom cups jiggle behind the squeaky-clean glass
happily ever after. The phone rings. I pick up carefully without rushing. It’s
my friend Kati. She knows that something is not right from the slight quiver
in my voice. “Come on.” she says. “Sometimes, a cup is just a cup. It’s not
even yours.”
“No,” I say sobbing. “It’s not just a cup. This one had a story behind it.” “OK,”
says Kati matter-of-factly. “Let’s see. Have you tried www.replacetheirreplacable.
com?” In haste, I google the “Prince Albert Heirloom Cup.” I am redirected
from one homepage to another. I drag the arrow impatiently past the endless
Wedgewood landscapes of the English picturesque, past the Japanese cherry
blossoms and the golden dandelions on the imperial Russian cobalt, circa
2013. Finally, here it is. My cup’s fair sibling with photoshopped highlights. The
bouquet is slightly different, but you know, a rose is a rose. This cup is “like new”
with a few cracks and identity marks. I am in a rush. I part, without hesitation,
with my personal information, leave my credit card number, security code, my
 REPLACE THE IRREPLACEABLE! A TALE OF IMMIGRANT OBJECTS 113

address, phone number, my mother’s maiden name. Who cares about identity
theft when you can replace the irreplaceable? Which cup am I replacing? My
aunt’s, or my own? Don’t distract me. I have no time to care – my online bid is
desperately time-sensitive. I’m gambling on recovery. This cup will be mine,
like new, with pulverized bone ashes, crazings and flowers in bloom.
114
 7
My Significant Others:
Zenita, Susana, Ilanka

On the day of my birth my father was at a football match. The Kirov stadium
was decorated with red banners soaked in Leningrad drizzle: “Forward, to the
Victory of Communism!” and my father’s favorite team, Zenit of Leningrad,
were losing as usual. That did not upset my father in the very least. He was an
honorary member of the Club of Fervent Fans of Zenit (KZBZ in Russian),
whose task it was simply to bet on Zenit’s chances of victory or defeat. What
mattered for the fervent fans was the game itself and the community of friends
that created their own state within a state to share a few permissible laughs.
It was 1959, six years after Stalin’s death; Sputnik had been sent into space,
the exhibit “America” opened up in the Soviet Union and the great spy thriller
North by Northwest by Hitchcock was the rave of the day—in the Western
Hemisphere, at least. Stalin’s winter had been followed by the Khruschev
Thaw, and Leningrad sleet. With a warmer official wind, cultural life in the
country began to change long before any real political changes were possible.
Clubs ranging from knitting to geology, from soccer to cinema sprang up
inside official palaces of culture like mushrooms after rain. They had their
own flags, badges, anthems and election ceremonies that gently mimicked the
Soviet rituals. At the time KZBZ was the friendliest of the people’s republics;
with humor as the official ideology. On the day of my birth my father played
116 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

it safe: betting on Zenit to lose, he won. In his jubilant mood he proposed

that his first (and, as it would turn out, only) child be called Zenita, in
honor of his favorite losing team. Besides, Zenita had a nice cosmic ring to
it, referring to a point on the celestial sphere directly above the observer on
Earth. My grandmothers were in uproar. While they rarely agreed between
themselves, both liked the name Sasha, in which each letter evoked some dead
or remote relative. It was common for Jewish families to give the children
Russified versions of Jewish names; my father was Yuri rather than Uri and
my mother acquired the poetic name Musa (the Muse) rather than be called
Miriam. Like other Jewish families, mine lost many relatives through wars and
Stalin’s purges. To my knowledge, however, none was called Sasha; this name
then became a generic collective commemoration. When my grandmothers
uncovered my father’s plot to call me Zenita, they became so horrified that
they quickly agreed to the name Svetlana, my mother’s favorite. In the Western
imagination the name is linked to Stalin’s daughter, but in the Soviet Union
it has no association so specific. The name was actually popularized by the
nineteenth-century Romantic Vassily Zhukovsky. In his ballad Svetlana
appears as a curious blond girl who tries to read her future in a dim magic
mirror. “I wish you never knew those morbid dreams, oh my Svetlana,” the
author cautioned his heroine. “Svetlana,” means “sweetness and light,” and in
the 1970s the name also figured in a popular Soviet song about a first love
that befalls a teenage boy in the middle of a tedious ninth-grade lesson on
god knows what. You, the male lover, are swimming in a sea of boredom, left
to your own devices in the pre-iPhone era, surfing the stormy seas of your
unplugged adolescent imagination. “ … and there was spring waving at you
from beyond the school window, a spring by the name of Svetlana.”
Svetlana has many derivatives, Svetka, Svetik, Svetochka, all with a different
suffix of endearment. I always felt like a girl of many names. In high school, I
liked to have imaginary friends and identify with fictional characters. While I
did not receive a proper Jewish education, which was strictly prohibited at the
 MY SIGNIFICANT OTHERS: ZENITA, SUSANA, ILANKA 117

time, I was marked as “Jewish” in the ethnicity line of the school journal,
which all school hooligans loved to explore. Eighty percent of the kids were
registered as “Russian” and then there would be some oddballs: one Tatar, one
Georgian, one Ukrainian, three Jews and a few “Russians” with suspicious
foreign roots in their surnames, the crypto-Jews. I embraced my foreignness
with a vengeance and loved to play spy games with my best friend, a Crimean
Tatar by the name of Olya U. I used to love foreign fairy tales—from “The Little
Mermaid,” who emigrated from the beautiful underwater kingdom to the cruel
earth, and “Little Red Riding Hood,” who took a deviant path through the
forest and cheated on the predator wolf with her brave undigested grandma.
At the same time, I was taken with the Russian folk hero Ivan the Fool, who
got an order to go “there, nobody knows where, to find that nobody knows
what”—and he traveled to some fairy tale cosmos or near abroad.
Around age nine I wanted to become a Young Pioneer. I drew my inspiration
from Bella Ilynichna, a half-blind veteran member of the Bolsheviks with
whom my grandma had spent a few years in the camps of the Gulag in 1949–
1954. Becoming a Young Pioneer was a striking experience of touch and smell.
In a half-lit stadium called “The Jubilee” (where Zenit once played) we were
lined up in our ironed white shirts and blue skirts, against the backdrop of
velvety red banners with embroidered golden words. We were poised between
childhood and something new, excited to touch our Pioneer kerchiefs and
join the chorus of the future. Trembling with enthusiasm, I watched our chief
Pioneer leader approach me from the end of the line. I was so eager to tie that
knot of belonging. The next thing I sensed was the blast of the alcoholic breath
of the chief Pioneer leader next to my excited face. His hands were shaking
and he could barely make the kerchief ’s ends meet. And the knot came out
loose. “Pioneers,” screamed the prerecorded voice on the loud speaker. “For
the struggle of the Communist Party, be ready!” “Always Ready!” the voice
of the newly anointed Sveta Goldberg joined the chorus, only slightly off-
key. I never liked the stories of young hero-pioneers, like Pavlik Morozov,
118 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

the goody-goody boy who informed on his father, the supposed Kulak (a
little more entrepreneurial peasant) under pressure from his loving mother
but really for the sake of his Soviet Motherland. The little Soviet Oedipus
wasn’t my kind of hero. I didn’t fall for the positive heroines either, blond and
docile damsels who often got the guy. In my reading I moved a few centuries
backwards and to foreign lands and empathized with the long-suffering and
much misunderstood femme fatales who usually fared badly. My favorites
were Milady de Winter in The Three Musketeers, she with the fleur-de-lis
tattooed on her shoulder, and the dark and passionate Isadora Covarrubio de
los Llanos, who snatched her enemies with a lasso in a forgotten American
classic, The Headless Horseman by Captain Mayne Reid. There was also a red-
haired Jewish adventuress, Rebecca in Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. Shoshana? I
tried hard to salvage her from the status of a minor character. Literature was
providing us a narrow escape from the Soviet everyday life that sometimes
seemed to be an unreadable world of double speak and compromise in which
there was so little correspondence between what was said and what was meant.
Sharing books was an alternative form of belonging that involved not fitting in
but being misfits together.
At thirteen I filled my address book with the improbable French-Russian
name Mitya Brounié. We endured passionate caresses at the entrance to Gorky
subway station and then on the roof of Peter and Paul Fortress. No, you wouldn’t
find “Mitya plus Sveta equals love” in yellow chalk there, we were too cool for
that. Once I deliberately lost my address book and my secret lover became the
subject of school gossip. After that Mitya never called back. None of my lovers
to come, real or virtual, lived up to Mitya Brounié. Around age fifteen I fell
in love with poetry as I smelled with veneration the thin dark blue volume of
Osip Mandelshtam, published for the first time in 1972, after thirty-five years
of silence. I don’t know how my parents managed to afford this book. Its value
on the black market at the time equaled the monthly salary of a Soviet engineer.
My favorite poem “The Golden Stream of Honey,” which I intuited rather than
 MY SIGNIFICANT OTHERS: ZENITA, SUSANA, ILANKA 119

fully understood, unfolded in the Crimean town of Koktebel, where I spent my

summer vacations. We enjoyed misty hills by the sea called “The Breasts of the
Queen of Sheba” and gathered semi-precious stones with bifurcating veins like
the lines of improbable fates. They were our ephemeral talismans that would
connect the past and the future. Mandelshtam’s poem flows slowly through
the terraced landscapes of Koktebel like a golden-hued stream of honey in the
dry Crimean heat. Mandelshtam believed that a poet or his ideal reader is a
“poetic hermaphrodite,” who moves freely between genders, ages and borders
and communicates happily with his non-contemporaries across the world.
Crimea embodied a “nostalgia for world culture,” it was a unique part of Soviet
territory where once upon a time Greeks, Italians, Scythians, Khazars, Jews,
Tatars, Armenians and others intermingled and many cosmopolitan utopian
visions flourished, including a bohemian paradise of artists and poets in the
1910s and a precarious dreamland called “Red Zion,” a short-lived Jewish
socialist dreamland in the 1920s.
In the poem “The Golden Stream of Honey” a beautiful red-haired hostess
looks over her bared shoulder as her friends feast on conversation and flirtation
on the verge of revolution and a bloody civil war, marking a perfect moment.
At the end an uninvited guest appears. It is Odysseus. He comes home carrying
tall tales, only his true home is not his native Ithaca but Crimea/Tauris, the
land of exiles. “Odysseus returned filled with time and space.” “Odysseus
returned,” echoes a poet from another continent and in another tongue. “But
where is that man who said that Nobody was his name?” Jorge Luis Borges’
Ulysses looks over his shoulder to catch his adventurous shadow.
The poetic Spanish of Jorge Luis Borges became my next language of
choice. After high school I wanted to study foreign languages and cultures at
Leningrad State University. However, my father learned through a friend in his
film club, a professor at the university, that there were unofficial Jewish quotas
and a girl with my last name “Goldberg” would never get in, however high her
grades. My father didn’t believe that anti-Semitism had survived Stalinism, but
120 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

he didn’t want to sacrifice my future to his high principles. He learned that the
only place “accepting Jews” in the humanities that year was, for untold reasons
of Soviet internal policies, the Spanish department of the Leningrad State
Pedagogical Institute. The department was a true refuge for eccentrics. Our
professors included a short and stocky linguistic wizard named Dr. Shabbes,
an assistant professor from Baku, tall as Don Quixote, who played guitar and
sang in the Basque language, a phonetics teacher named María-Luisa Muñoz,
who was brought out of Spain as a child of nine during the Spanish Civil War
and always dreamed of returning to her native Asturias, a handful of old Gulag
survivors who had volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War at the age
of eighteen and ended up imprisoned, and a few bland Soviet apparatchiks
with good accents. Their role was to make sure the students didn’t listen to
the Beatles and kept their hair to the normative length. María-Luisa was
responsible for my improbably pure Spanish accent, Castellano castizo, that
continues to mislead people. For all our love for her, she used to torture us with
phonetic exercises as if transmitting to us the physiognomy of her nostalgia.
There was Don Quixote’s monologue on freedom: “La li—ber—ta—d, Sancho,
don’t mumble, every sound loud and clear, let the very tip of your tongue kiss
your front teeth silently … la libertad—it’s not for the weak-hearted.” The other
required memorization was the Spanish poem about Little Red Riding Hood,
caperu—ci—ta—en-carnada. “Caperu—c—ii—ta! Stretch your lips, girls like
a sharp blade, until it hurts … don’t mind the character lines! Ca-pe-ru—
ciiiiii—ta.” I heard that María-Luisa left for Madrid on the first available flight
in the early days of perestroika.
The quixotic Spain that I discovered at Leningrad State Pedagogical Institute,
an imaginary land of Soviet eccentric dreams, quickly became my patria chica.
I became interested in the Iberian dialects and minority languages of Spain,
such as Galician and Catalan or Ladino. Those poetic languages of the Middle
Ages had much more in common among themselves than they did with the
central Castilian that became the national language after the reunification of
 MY SIGNIFICANT OTHERS: ZENITA, SUSANA, ILANKA 121

the country. I imagined my distant relative, the red-haired Spanish-Jewish girl

Shoshana, escaping the moonlit roads of Toledo, crossdressing for the trip and
writing poems to her maiden friends in different romance languages. “Muero
porque no muero”, I am dying because I am not dying. No, not like Santa
Teresa la conversa, the great mystic. Mine would go like that: “Vivo, porque no
vivo.” (I live because I don’t live.) “Porque la vida es sueño y los sueños suenos
son” (“Because life is a dream and dreams are just dreams.”—the last line is not
Shoshana’s). At the age of eighteen I spent my days in the library copying by
hand the works on general and historic linguistics—from Saussure to Amado
Alonso, deriving special pleasure from this narrow escape into scholarship.
My infatuation with Provencal and Catalan culminated with a romance
with the professor-troubadour from Baku. Start small, he used to mentor me.
Begin your research with a small specific thing, for example, the article in
Catalan dialect. Then you can do something original and expand from there.
Sorry, dear M.V., I was never able to follow your advice even though it came
with lovely bouquets of roses, long walks through the Leningrad yards, husky
Spanish love songs with a guitar accompaniment and a glass of Rkatsetelli,
that young Georgian wine. Our romance ended up being mostly platonic,
but it propelled me into emigration and a life of scholarship. I am still not
good at staying with small things and can rarely distinguish the definite from
the indefinite. But those suppressed romance languages lead me on a road of
adventure and self-discovery.
Her life-changing chance encounter happened in 1979 in line for the
sundried vobla in Koktebel, Crimea not far from the wine-dark sea. It
couldn’t have happened anywhere else. In that line she met a dashing Moscow
architect with a golden-hued beard. His name sounded like a perfect artistic
pseudonym, Constantin Boym. After a ten-minute conversation he asked her
if she would like to go to America with him. The rest is history (and the subject
of another story). Eventually she said yes, not there and then, but rather soon.
They married in two months and began the process of relinquishing Soviet
122 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

citizenship and obtaining an exit visa. They both kept their names—Boym and
Goldberg and different artistic identities. The move from internal emigration
into an external one seemed like a continuity, but actually this was more of
a leap of faith. Internal émigré is someone who distances, estranges herself
as far as politically possible from the engagements and compromises of her
society and carves a state within a state for herself, sometimes as small as a
“kitchen salon.” There she shares her immigrant identity at her own risk with
likeminded people. The borders of these states within states are unguarded and
porous, but still the internal émigré follows (and deviates) from the mother-
tongue and the home country. When you emigrate abroad, especially from a
closed and closely-knit society, you experience a shock from the very idea that
there is an “abroad” there. In our case, it was hard to believe that the “West”
was not merely an ideological or countercultural fiction; it operates according
to the rules of a different language altogether. We knew well our point of
departure but not our destination. The “West” existed for us as the other and
as a movie land. Our actual experiences didn’t always follow the movie scripts.
It was daring Svetka, repulsed by injustice and enamored of other lives, who
decided to emigrate from the Soviet Union promptly and decisively.
The process was humiliating and unpleasant. The crypto-Jewish professor
in the Spanish department (Professor Shabbes? Is this possible that such was
his name?) asked me to voluntarily withdraw from the Pedagogical Institute
risking never to finish my education in the Soviet Union. Alternatively, the
administration would have to conduct a long public meeting shaming me as
a traitor of the motherland, which would be unpleasant for everyone. I chose
to drop out “for family reasons.” Two years after my emigration, my father was
made the target of a mini show trial at his factory; he was accused of rearing
a traitor of the motherland. He was fired from his job and removed from his
post as president of his film club “Kino and You.” The only job he could find
was as a night guard in a parking lot, where he read a lot of foreign detective
stories and began to learn English. After being thrown out of the Pedagogical
 MY SIGNIFICANT OTHERS: ZENITA, SUSANA, ILANKA 123

Institute and subsequently applying to emigrate, I spent a year and a half in

Soviet limbo, not quite an émigré, not quite a refusenik. Times were tense.
The Moscow Olympic Games brought smiley Olympic bears and less smiley
beefy policemen all over the place. I finally received an exit visa to leave for
“permanent residence” in the state of Israel. Several months of transit camps in
Austria and Italy followed, and at the end, I chose to come to the United States,
ending up in Boston, which I thought was Leningrad’s American sister city. At
the interview with the immigration agency, an officer kept my husband’s name
Constantin Boym intact, but suggested I change mine: “Nobody in America
would be able to pronounce your first name Svetlana. How about Susan?” The
woman asked cheerfully. “It’s easy enough to pronounce.” I opted for Suzanne
because I used to love the song “Suzanne, believe me, I am sorry, Suzanne
forever …” (There must have been a good reason for him to be making excuses,
and I hope Suzanne didn’t believe him.) The immigration officer smiled at me
and scribbled something on my non-resident alien application form. “Sveta
Goldberg” walked out “Susan Boym.” I wasn’t upset about the name change.
I didn’t feel robbed of my identity. I felt liberated and hoped to reinvent
myself. There was a small glitch with Susan. A new acquaintance would call
on the phone and ask: “Can I speak to Sue?” “You’ve got the wrong number,” I
would answer politely. I liked my new American name, but I never learned to
respond to it. Susan was one of my most assimilated American selves. During
the first year in America, Susan had a brief career as a part-time secretary
at a place called Matching Roommates. She went to Filene’s Basement and
purchased a pink-and-white checkered shirt with a white collar to look like
a secretary in a commercial for something like yogurt. Not too long ago, I
found myself at Downtown Crossing in Boston, where I did my first American
shopping. Where Filene’s Basement used to be, there was a gaping hole in the
ground in the heart of Boston, on the border between the historic center and
the business district, an unfinished communal grave of the immigrant bargain
hunting experience. The Matching Roommates office was located in a leaking
124 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

basement in Brighton and while I passed for a diligent new American at the job
interview, I was promptly fired after failing to buy my boss the right smoked
turkey and Dijon mustard sandwich. All I remember from that experience
was the boss’s thick moustache, like in a Mayakovsky poem I learned in high
school, “Hey, you, mistah, you’ve got cabbage in your moustache,” and a rotten
bench in the high grass in Fenway Park. Whenever he would send me out of the
basement into some special reconnaissance mission, I would take my break on
that bench and read my yard-sale copy of The Love Story, blissfully forgetting
what kind of dressing my boss was after. As a former communal apartment
dweller, I was suspicious of matching roommates and of Dijon mustard. My
next American job was a real labor of love. I became a part-time aide to the
social worker in the Jewish Family and Children Service (JFS), assigned to
work with Cuban refugees. I had to accompany them from their shelter in
Dorchester to the JFS and to the welfare office to help them with their asylum
seeking, benefits and employment. My group consisted of three Cuban men,
two tall brothers who were still in a state of shock or stupefaction from their
departure and smoked quite a lot of dope, which made it challenging to wake
them up and persuade them to come to their appointments—all of that using
my nineteenth-century Soviet Castilian. The third man was short and soulful.
He told me in confidence that he was a skilled mechanic and was determined
“to make it in America.” I can still hear the faltering steps of the three men
behind my back as if I were their Pioneer leader. They called me Susana and
also respectfully Nue-tra Mae-tra. We often had to understand each other with
half-words. Of course, I never told on them even when the kind social worker
asked me point blank if they were clean. One thing I learned in the Soviet
Union, never to be a snitch. I just wanted them to wake up and not jeopardize
their support. Once in the Welfare Office in the city, a famous monument of
Brutalist Architecture, I would have to accompany them and do a trickster
translation, inventing and embellishing their stories of years of work experience
back in Cuba. Gringa as I was, we were still compañeros de la lucha. Then they
 MY SIGNIFICANT OTHERS: ZENITA, SUSANA, ILANKA 125

were transferred somewhere else. On our last meeting they gave me three glass
heart pins—green, red and blue. Por Nue-tra Mae-tra. The safety pins broke
but the glass hearts are still with me, somewhere in my unsorted archive. Years
passed and I became a resident alien and a proud green-card carrier (exposing
my left ear in the identity photograph) and finally, a citizen. In my heart I
remain a resident alien, even though now I co-own an attached single house
and no longer own up to my former immigrant resilience. I know, I know. A
resident alien is better as a poetic metaphor than a living condition. Going to
graduate school in literature was like coming home. It offered me an alternative
to conventional immigrant assimilation and a true home—a portable one—in
world literature. When I was asked at the Jewish Vocational Services, which
was helping to resettle Soviet refugees, what job preparation I was looking for,
I said that I wanted to go back to university. After all, that’s one of the reasons
I left and I only finished three years of education. What field? the officer asked.
Philosophy, I said, or philology.
That sounded like a joke to the immigration office. A practical vocation,
indeed. He said that the best he could do was a three-month intensive typing
course, possibly with programming thrown in. I slammed the door in response.
Then I took the subway to the Boston Public Library and spent an afternoon
researching universities in Boston. I inquired about “minority grants” for
Jewish women and it was politely explained to me that Jews in America no
longer needed support in getting a university education. I also learned that
there was such a thing as a “deadline” and it passed. Not too alarmed by
the information that I had obtained officially, I decided to simply go to the
departments and knock on some doors. Boston University was the closest.
Trembling a little, I walked to the office of the chair of the Modern Languages
Department. Through the half-cracked door, I was surprised to see a youngish
man sitting with his feet up on the desk reading a book about Bertolucci.
Even though he was quite puzzled by my refugee traveling documents and my
transcripts from the Pedagogical Institute that listed many courses in “military
126 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

services” and “civil defense nursing practice,” he proved to be open-minded.

We hit it off speaking about the one topic I knew something about—Italian
communist cinema. In 1981, Spanish-speaking Soviet refugees were still an
exotic commodity and without my knowing it I dressed the part, in my beige
coat and long straight hair. He suggested that I speak with the Spanish professor
next door, Alicia B. I couldn’t believe the openness and access that I was able to
gain without any letter, connection, favor, barter, or what in Russian was called
“blat”—a combination of all of the above.
Alicia proved to be even more fascinating, a beautiful and mysterious writer
and scholar, and herself a Polish Jewish refugee from Argentina. I was a little
surprised that she spoke to me in some version of sixteenth-century Spanish
“vos sabes” but I didn’t show it and tried my best. She was equally surprised
by my “overall good” grades in military nursing but chose to overlook it. She
asked me if I could just come the next day and teach a class in elementary
Spanish. I had enough chutzpa to say yes. The class went fine, language
teaching skills proved to be transferrable. The only thing I didn’t understand
was when the students made conversation about some mysterious “General
Hospital,” since the words “soap opera” were not yet in my vocabulary. I also
didn’t know that there are letter grades and not the usual 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Later at
the orientation meeting at Boston University, an Italian professor, a one-year
veteran of the American education system, taught me an important life lesson:
“In an American university, you’re better off not asking questions. Otherwise
you can reveal how much you don’t know.”
Alicia’s husband, a major scholar of French literature named Jeffrey
Mehlman, happened to be the head of the Master’s Program. They came up
with a low-risk Solomonian solution. I will teach elementary Spanish, which
my education in pedagogy qualified me to do, with a good Asturian accent,
and I would be able to take classes in the MA program part-time for free. This
was when I thought that I had really made it. I found my true homeland—
the Fourth International of American Immigrants. Today the story seems
 MY SIGNIFICANT OTHERS: ZENITA, SUSANA, ILANKA 127

unbelievable to me; it would probably not happen today, in the highly

bureaucratic university environment. In other words, as I sit on the admission
committees with my distinguished colleagues, I realize over and over again
that today I probably wouldn’t make it into the graduate school of a major
university. Now that I serve on many committees, I try to be a “fifth column,”
so to speak, to sneak in an unusual and eccentric person, an immigrant or not,
flawed but original. (shsh … )
So, once I started to build a second home in America as a part-time teacher
of Spanish, I decided to travel abroad—to Spain, of course, to study Catalan at
a special program in the monastery in Palma de Mallorca. Susana, the student
of oppressed Iberian dialects, was getting back on the road. The program
included a roundtrip fare on Spantax and I proudly showed my new “Refugee
Travel Document” on the US border. At that time, I was still a “non-resident
alien.” However, upon my landing in Spain, I was immediately arrested at
Barajas Airport and was threatened with deportation. My “Refugee Travel
Document” (with the line in capital letters on the first page “This Is Not a
Passport of the United States of America” seemed suspicious. The concept of a
Soviet Jew immigrating to America to study Catalan didn’t seem too plausible.
Deportation and loss of scholarship didn’t sound appealing, so I went for the
arrest. One glitch was that the airline had allowed me to board the plane, so
they were supposed to guarantee my entry into the country. For the night
I was placed in an extraterritorial glass room, sleeping on uncomfortable
chairs, but during the day I was allowed into the lobby, where vendors kindly
offered me churros con chocolate for free as a sweet neighborly gesture. Once
again, my Castilian accent helped a lot, as did a slim volume of Jorge Luis
Borges’ Fictions, which was traveling with me. I lay on three loosely assembled
chairs in my Barajas revolutionary cell, leaving greasy chocolate stains on the
fictional pages of the encyclopedia of Tlon. Ulysses in a skirt came home to her
patria chica, but she was mistaken for that woman whose name was Nobody.
There was no Cyclope, only the buff airport police officer. For four or five
128 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

days, literature helped me survive and I was imagining what this airport limbo
would look like from the perspective of Tlon. Finally, I came up with a more
practical solution and found my Spanish professor from Boston University,
who happened to be teaching summer school in Madrid. He kindly agreed to
appear on my behalf at the police station and offer something called “A moral
evaluation of S’s character and behavior.” This sounded very Soviet. I still don’t
know what else he did for me, but finally I was lectured briefly on how to
be a “law abiding” and moral citizen and traveler, and my “Refugee Travel
Document” was properly stamped and I was allowed to step on Spanish soil.
Madrid in 1982 had nothing of the colorful spirit of Almodovar that we
have come to associate with the urban boom of the 1990s. Only six years
after Franco’s death, the Spanish capital struck me as a beautiful but grim
Eastern European place with shady stocky men whispering obscenities in a
good Castilian accent as I walked around Plaza del Sol. I inhabited the narrow
space of a Madrileño balcony, which keeps you on your toes and forever on the
threshold, stuck in the window frame in front of the cast iron Saturn. On the
whole my Spanish homecoming was not a success. In the school for the study
of Catalan, I stood out as an odd bird, a Russian-American who could barely
afford a meal out. While my Spanish professors back in Leningrad dreamed of
returning to Spain, the locals wanted to go back to the USSR of the Spanish
Republican imagination of their parents, quite an understandable nostalgia
after Franco’s repression of memory, but strange for me at the time. America,
on the other hand, was considered Reagan’s evil empire and nobody could
figure out why I would have left the USSR for the USA. But when curiosity
subsided, the students who came from different Catalan-speaking provinces
of the country mostly argued among themselves about true and impostor
Catalan. Which was the most primordial and authentic? Which would unite
the Catalan lands: Barcelones? Valencia? Menorqui? Mallorchi? I was also
embarrassed about my financial restrictions that kept me out of many outdoor
cafes. Mostly, I spent my time in the monastery garden reading the great
 MY SIGNIFICANT OTHERS: ZENITA, SUSANA, ILANKA 129

Catalan philosopher Raimon Llull and Jorge Luis Borges, in the politically
incorrect language of power—Castilian Spanish.
Before my departure for the US, I had an uncanny encounter in a Madrid
park where I was having my beloved churros con chocolate that smudged the
pages of Borges’ Fictions. A young man with an unruly beard approached me
and then started talking in a strangely accented Spanish. “Why don’t you speak
to me in your native language? He whispered.” Pause. “Are you afraid? Why are
you hiding something?” He made me nervous. “Yo soy Gallego, tu eres Gallega
… let’s talk to each other right.” (I am Galician, you’re Galician.) Unbelievable.
This man mistook me for a native! He was no KGB agent with a fake beard
following Svetlana Goldberg on a trip abroad. No. I, Susana, with my heavy
Russian-Asturian “ese-s” was taken to be a Spaniard from the next province to
the West. How many times I dreamed of being Spanish during my language
classes in Leningrad and Boston? I had finally passed successfully. But at that
moment I chose not to prolong this imaginary communion. “I am American,
not Galician.” I said, surprising myself. This was the first time I dared to say
it: I am American. I already knew it would have been much better to say “I
am Russian.” A pause of incomprehension. “I am American,” I repeated. “Soy
Americana.” Pause. Another pause. Hiss. “Hueles a Yanqui!” (You smell like
a Yankee.) (I hasten to add that I fell in love with Spain, belatedly, in 2009.
I traveled all over Catalunya with great pleasure. I took part in an exhibit
“Historiar-Imaginar” devoted to Spanish recovery of memory of Franco,
suppressed during the roaring 90s and thought that somehow this country’s
forgetting mirrored mine. My new affection is a lasting and mature affection
that almost wiped out the failures of this gritty romance.)
Not the specific country, Spain, but literature itself proved to be the
best immigrant homeland, the new immigrant international. Maybe I
never learned how to drive a car but I had plenty in my imagination and a
poetic driving license. In the 1980s the American university turned out to
be a reliable refuge for immigrants; it gave us scholarships and a sense of
130 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

adventurous belonging. During my first, most bookish years in America I felt

that I was really living. “Life and death I’ve long put in quotes like fabulations
known to be empty,” wrote the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva. In my research
that would become my first book, I explored different personae, masks and
deep selves, and the myths of the poet in life and death. “Life and Death
in Quotation Marks,” was to be my first book title. The editor at Harvard
University Press thought that it was too long and suggested cutting either life
or death. At the age of twenty-eight Death in Quotation Marks seemed to me
a sexier title, although what drove me really was life—expanding life in and
out of literature into the world.
While believing in the power of ideas, I was always cautious about translating
texts back into life or making any kind of ready-made models of transcendence.
The poet’s stories were exemplary experiments and transformation of the self
that moved in and out of the dangerous border zone of life and death. In my
twenties, I was traveling the world recklessly like Dona Quixote trying to
live out the lessons of literature. I followed the surrealist guide to Paris and
read Georges Bataille’s Interior Experience and André Breton’s Nadja over a
single short cup of coffee in the café Bonaparte—one per day was as much as I
could afford. I was waiting for the mind-blowing existential chance encounter
while the local Parisians were just minding their own everyday business over
overflowing café au lait and decadent deserts. The only “chance encounter”
I had was with a Hungarian immigrant who read the same books but was
even poorer than I. Our romance culminated with him asking me to buy him
a sandwich. Yet I wasn’t too disappointed. Life was a romance—not in the
sense of a love affair but in the sense of a quest. My first youth in the Soviet
Union was cut short by the difficult process of emigration. I was hoping to
catch up during my second American youth. At the age of twenty I married
the adventurous architect I met in the line for beer and vobla, but rather than
a conventional marriage, Constantin and me created a unique partnership for
exploring the world and ourselves. We were bent on discovering something
 MY SIGNIFICANT OTHERS: ZENITA, SUSANA, ILANKA 131

new every year. We didn’t want to assimilate into American middle-class life.
The “American dream” of a little suburban house was foreign to us.
I remember reading Marx in my high school, my girlfriend Kycha and I
found two “classes” that were considered particularly hideous and despised
in Marxist–Leninist edifice; the “social strata intelligentsia” (to which the
leaders themselves belonged) and the “lumpen-proletariat” that anarchically
challenged the heroic working class. I was clearly low-class “intelligentsia”
according to the Soviet class system but aspired to be a lumpen-aristocrat,
a Leningrad girl-dandy. In America I wanted to be a hard-working and not
heavily drinking bohemian who can avoid suffering from hunger, tuberculosis
or epilepsy like the characters of nineteenth-century novels. I learned later
that many of the surviving American bohemians that I met in the mid-1980s
were trust fund kids. I loved Nabokov’s confession about the pleasure of exile:
“The break in my own destiny allowed me a syncopal kick that I wouldn’t
have changed for worlds.” Syncope means at once a missed beat in a musical
composition, a shortage of breath and a swoon; it brought together the loss
of bodily control and the intricate composition. Syncopal composition was
about a piercing experience of sensual details without synthesis, a vertiginous
suspension in the air. I seemed to have sailed into immigration gingerly, like
Ivan the Fool on a magic carpet; fairy tales were almost coming true if only I
could keep memories and gaps in my story at bay. Unlike Lot’s wife I didn’t care
to look back. There was still so much I had to look forward to. In other words,
it was all going as planned, until one day, some six years into my American life,
I started to have dreams of Russia.
They came slowly but steadily, at a time when I barely spoke Russian
with anyone. I rushed through the same transit space, a long corridor of
an anonymous communal apartment turning into a half-lit railway station;
always a passage from one nowhere to another, crowded third-class train
cars with people’s legs hanging from the upper bunks, loose locks on the
doors of strangely shaped rooms in communal apartments filled with friends
132 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

and relatives whose faces I barely recognized. They always waited for me,
yet I caught them unawares. I would try to escape and there would always
be another room there and then another. I still follow these passages in my
dreams and no number of trips to Russia has cured me of them. Then came a
very stark and simple dream. I found myself in the middle of St. Isaac Square
(the dark statue in the center, purple pomposity of the huge cathedral, drizzle
in the air, sleet on the uneven boardwalks). I need to go to Senate Square to the
monument of the Bronze Horseman (grey waves frozen in stones, mad hooves
and the undulating serpent underneath, the Tsar’s unseeing eyes). Somehow, I
cannot get there. I walk in circles and there is no way to get there. Well, every
Leningradian knows that the squares are adjacent; one behind the other on a
straight line. In the dream the straight line turned into an endless spiral. When
I woke up, I would start drawing maps of Leningrad public transportation,
trolleys and buses going from my house to different parts of the city. Here was
Trolley No 1 moving along the wide avenues to the imperial glory of palaces
and bridges over the rippling river. Tram No 6 crawled through the click and
clacker of the dark outskirts, the dirty Karpovka River and Spanish-language
high school near the Botanic garden where I practiced my “pedagogy.” And
there was the crowded Bus No 49 going to St. Isaac Square; the driver on this
bus deeply hated his passengers and loved leaving them behind, cutting short
their hopes to make it on time.
I started writing my memoir of public transportation in a pre-computer
age and it might still be somewhere in my papers or lost during one of my
American relocations. And then the eighties came to a dramatic end; the
Berlin Wall was suddenly cracking and falling—with its bright pop art on
one side and grim concrete on the other. I wanted to touch the burning
stones of history on the streets of Berlin and Leningrad, which seemed
much more relevant than all my academic quotation marks. The fracture
in my personal destiny corresponded to the breaks in collective history,
where forgetting was also a central feature, much less discussed than the
 MY SIGNIFICANT OTHERS: ZENITA, SUSANA, ILANKA 133

restoration of collective memory. In 1989 the iron curtain was dismantled

and many rejoiced in their personal colorful pieces of the Berlin Wall. The
Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991 and the whole country felt like the
country of immigrants, even though many didn’t move very far. I remember
the Moscow Summer of August 1991 was a euphoric time in Russian
history when thousands of people came to express support for perestroika
and glasnost against the attempted Putsch. Moreover, similar to the Velvet
revolution in Prague, this was a voluntary civic protest (without Twitter and
Facebook aid) that hadn’t happened in Russia since the February revolution.
While this major historical event—much maligned and deliberately
misinterpreted later—was taking place, no TV channel was willing to show
it. Instead all TV channels were showing Swan Lake, the great Tchaikovsky’s
ballet, morning, day and night. That was how everyone knew that something
was terribly wrong and couldn’t be reported. I had just returned to the US
a couple of weeks before and was in constant contact with my friends from
the Leningrad TV program The Fifth Wheel who were reporting from the
Palace Square where they were facing old Soviet tanks. “Call CNN,” the
anchorman was insisting. I couldn’t disappoint him by saying that I had no
direct line to the recently created CNN. On CNN, the advance of tanks on
Red Square in Moscow and the Palace Square in Leningrad as well as the
euphoric and brave reactions of the protesters were constantly interrupted
by the advance of the mysterious “Hurricane Bob” on Boston and the
warnings about candles, pipes and floods. Since my Soviet years, I believed
that whenever people speak excessively about the weather, there might be
something else going on that they are covering up. “Small talk” must be
concealing something big that cannot be talked about. All those babbling
brooks and forest lakes usually appeared on Soviet TV channels as lovely
nature intermissions to avoid controversial reporting. Of course, when it
came to the revolution, like August 1991, it was time for something more
unnatural, like Swan Lake as a little less natural.
134 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

Following CNN on August 20, my friend from the St. Petersburg TV

station was screaming into my phone receiver. “Sveta, what the hell is going
on? What disaster? Who is Bob? CIA?” At that historic moment I lost power
and remained in absolute darkness in my house in Boston with no candles
and no saved water. I realized that not all weather reports are ideological, and
that I am doomed to miss history. After this August putsch of 1991, the media
opened up and till the Putin era it was multifaceted, experimental and diverse.
But that Swan Lake moment will come back with a vengeance in the 2000s.
Many people welcomed the change after the wall came down in 1989 and the
Soviet Union ended in 1991. Like true émigrés who knew what they left behind
but not where they were going. Yet a large number of former Soviet citizens
didn’t feel that such emigration was their choice; in Russian culture we often
had quicker access to blame than to reflection and responsibility. Eventually
the difficulties and perceived economic injustices of the transition, as well as
enforced forgetting of life experiences during the Soviet era, opened the road
of restorative nostalgia for the world that might have existed in their dreams,
and in their dreams only.
I took my first trip back to Russia in 1990 after nine years abroad. For at
least six of those years I hadn’t imagined such a return trip was possible. I
was told on the Soviet border in 1981 that I would never be allowed back to
see my parents, and I was stripped of my Soviet citizenship. In 1990 as the
British aircraft started to circle down to earth and I could see the shabby
building of the Leningrad airport, I became paralyzed and didn’t wish to leave
the international territory. But I was accompanying a sixteen-year-old distant
cousin who was going for the first time to see her father in Russia, so I had
to get up and dare, for her. For ten years I went back several times a year and
every time I dreaded the arrival and mourned the departure from Russia and
all the deep friendships I built there. But once on the plane out, I would always
be possessed by the vertiginous happiness of an immigrant—wow, I managed
to leave again! I began my book The Future of Nostalgia with an anti-nostalgic
 MY SIGNIFICANT OTHERS: ZENITA, SUSANA, ILANKA 135

premise. Immigrants of the first generation often had a taboo on nostalgia.

Moreover, this particular longing for home was most used and abused by
nationalist politicians and religious extremists—a longing for a grander patria
that existed in some historic moment that is now turned into an eternal present.
I defined nostalgia as a longing for home that no longer exists or perhaps had
never existed. Most importantly, nostalgia seems to be a longing for a place
but in fact it’s a yearning for another time; it can be also a rebellion against
the irreversibility of modern time, a desire for slower rhythms of existence.
Nostalgia has a utopian element to it, only the utopia is not directed toward
the future but towards the past or towards “another time” more broadly. The
more I worked on nostalgia, the more I realized that it might be incurable
and its object is forever elusive. It is better to face up to one’s nostalgias for
all that matters is that we don’t fall into a collective manipulation of our
affects and make our own serpentine road of longing. I distinguished between
“restorative nostalgia” that is anti-historical and tries to restore the space of the
great homeland often engaging conspiracy theories and myths and “reflective
nostalgia” that knows that is has no single object and explores affectionately the
human experience of time. Nostalgia is not always retrospective; it can also be
prospective, it can move sideways and open the roads not taken, a past future
that never came to be. I became very attuned to the seductions and discontents
of this strange modern emotion that is best practiced in art and not in politics.
And of course, nostalgia is not what it used to be. “Do you miss Russia?” I
would be asked. “Yes, but it’s not what you mean.” Or I would say “No, but it’s
not what you think.” What it was that I thought and felt remained off-limits to
me. I felt a certain incongruity, like the closer I was to my home the stranger
it looked. Homesickness would be followed by a sickness of home. It was not
really a homecoming that was important for me but a desire to be a public
intellectual who lives in history, shares cross-cultural experiences and can
become an acute observer and possibly, an adviser who brings back knowledge
to one’s first motherland. Sometime in 1994, fifteen years since my study at the
136 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

Pedagogical Institute, I decided to visit my alma mater. I went spontaneously

and anonymously, with my American boyfriend, not notifying anyone. The
entrance with the shabby cracked paint looked exactly the same. In the buffet
in the dark lobby the same lady “bufetchitsa” was selling cabbage pirozhki
(I am tempted to say the same pirozhki for they looked pretty antique). In
the girls’ toilet which was our unofficial salon, there was a familiar smell of
young sweat from a pre-deodorant era and there were a few freshmen with
excited blushing faces and smudged blue shades who were discussing exams.
It was very familiar but I never felt more out of place. I was almost afraid to
speak English to my boyfriend, not to be arrested for illegitimate contact with
foreigners. We went up to the third floor where the Spanish department used to
be located. Since we spoke English, a few secretaries looked at us suspiciously
through the cracks of the doors. The corridors were dark and empty; it must
have been an intersession and a reading period for the exam. My boyfriend
found the situation amusing; he started to explore the “Wall Papers” (nastenny
gazety?) which portrayed students’ achievement and progress—mostly in black
and white, as if color photography hadn’t reached the Pedagogical Institute yet.
“Here you are, he said suddenly. “What do you mean?” “That’s you,” he
repeated. I looked at one of the photographs of the students’ research and
saw a girl with long straight hair with a familiar white pin, dark Polish jeans,
a serious look. Behind her on the board were Spanish and Catalan verbs of
motion, circa 1978. What happened to that girl, one might wonder? Maybe she
became a researcher in this Institute? Unfortunately, her name was Goldberg
so she went to teach in the English school on the outskirts somewhere. How
was it possible that the persona non-grata and “traitor of the motherland” who
was asked to quit the Institute in 1979 and asked never to come back was still
hanging on the board of scientific research? My professor could have paid with
a strict reprimand or demotion by the security department of the university.
Did M.Z. the professor of Spanish and Basque keep it there nostalgically till
the rainy day? Was it simply an act of Soviet negligence? Did they try to avoid
 MY SIGNIFICANT OTHERS: ZENITA, SUSANA, ILANKA 137

the “brain drain” and keep Svetlana Goldberg in her alma mater? Was there
no new research on Spanish verbs on motion since 1978? Somehow Svetlana
Goldberg was detained on the board of scientific research in 1978 and lived
on in this badly lit corridor in Leningrad–Petersburg for the last fifteen years,
while Svetlana Boym went to another university, became a professor and
escaped. Or at least, she thought she did. In the 1990s I hoped to be Russian-
American and serve both cultures. Of course, I couldn’t quite pass for a native
in either of the two countries, in spite of my flawless Russian. It was the body
language and the inappropriate smile that betrayed me on the streets of St.
Petersburg and Moscow. And one more thing: whenever I tripped walking on
the streets of my hometown, I would say ‘shit, or “ouch”—always in English,
betraying myself. After 1996 I could sense the change in the Russian zeitgeist
looking at cultural projects, new architecture and urban transformations such
as the building of the uncanny replica of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour
and of the largest shopping mall in Russia with Crimean motives in the center
of Moscow. Crimea is Ours! Crimea is Russian! was an agenda of the Mayor of
Moscow, Luzhkov, but it wasn’t taken so seriously then and nobody objected
to a few buildings that were not far from Red Square that were prefiguring
what was to come nor the books that were sold en masse. In the summer of
1999 so many possibilities appeared still open, we had conversations about
freedom in smokey cafes, meeting with potential liberal candidates to the post
of prime minister. It all came to an end in early 2000. I abandoned the idea
of being a dual citizen, de facto, if not de jure. In 2003 a policeman stopped
me in central Moscow. “What is your nationality?” He asked. “What?” I was
perplexed. “Nationality,” he said rudely, “your documents.” “I am a Jew,” I
said, “American by passport.” “Oh, ok,” he answered. “Don’t worry. I thought
you were a Caucasian” (in the Russian context someone from the Caucasus.
In slang they are also called “darkies”). That was the time when one type of
ethnic discrimination was temporarily superseded by another; I was still non-
white in his eyes, only a less dangerous non-white. That’s when the realization
138 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

came that Sveta, who speaks Russian without an accent, is just as a much an
imaginary creature as Susana, la Gallega, or Susan, the American
Russia does not tolerate hyphenated identities; you can never be Russian/
and/and. Russian and Jewish and American and Catalan, for example. It’s
always either/or, more than in many other places in the world. Working with
Russian culture you are frequently placed into a category of patriot or traitor,
and rarely a translator. September 2001 reoriented many peoples’ lives and
turned them inward. For me with Vladimir Putin in Russia and George W.
Bush in the United States, the decade of 2000 was the time of forgetting—
and writing a book about alternative conceptions of public freedom that were
vanishing all over the world. Freedom is a “new beginning and a miracle of
infinite improbability,” these words of Hannah Arendt opened up the world of
inspiration. In the book I asked the question of how to live with uncertainty,
how to co-create in the public space and make a new beginning possible without
abandoning historical and personal memory. In the Russian conception there
was always an opposition between inner freedom or “freer freedom” of will
in which Russians excel and lack of political freedoms—from the time of the
absolute monarchy to Stalinism. In Russian culture it’s often more important
to feel free at the moment than to learn how to live in freedom. Radical and
mostly short-lived liberation is valued higher than a deliberate struggle for
freedoms and laws. In fact, the positive concept of freedom (rather than
liberation or independence) originated in the Athenian republic; it referred
to public, not personal freedom and was particularly cherished by the former
slaves and immigrants who had a chance to become citizens of Athens. In
some ways, it was up to outsiders to appreciate and admire the possibility to
live free that the natives might have taken for granted. As for the conceptions
of inner freedom, these date back to the later Imperial time and internalized
the public architecture. Stoics speak about the “acropolis of the soul” when
the other Acropolis is in ruins. The public space of freedom was a space of
co-creation, a performance with social conventions, laws and institutions
 MY SIGNIFICANT OTHERS: ZENITA, SUSANA, ILANKA 139

but not limited to a technocratic practice and opening space for individual
spontaneity and dissent. On the whole I tried to reinvent the humanistic and
political conception of public freedom, something East European dissidents
and other post-totalitarian thinkers dreamed about and valued higher than
capitalist economy.
Working on a book on freedom was more of a solitary exercise than
working on nostalgia. I found that my readers were more interested in the
utopian attachment to the past than in uncertainty in the present and the
future. After my own confrontation with uncertainty, I married my long-
time American boyfriend. My nom de plume—Svetlana Boym, however,
was left intact. During that time of Putin’s power, I stopped traveling to
Russia. In my Boston I found myself caught in an unintentional art project.
I was cutting the photographs from my journeys to Russia and Eastern
Europe in the 1990s, sometimes unique snapshots, with no backup. Then I
began to arrange them into collages disfiguring images of home and leaving
errors, overexposures and blurs. I preferred the fun of cutting and moving
fragments over the old wallpaper to the fixity of pasting. But at the end the
all-purpose glue and conventional framing made those ephemeral projects
into “art.” Then I began to work with minimal units of movement. My media
projects “Phantasmagorias of History” and “Multitasking with Clouds”
exposed historic images to chance and human error and revealed their
cracks and the patina of time. I used the syncopated movement to assemble
the images together, winking to Nabokov and his celebration of the missed
beats. It was the “zero” decade of the twenty-first century and for better
or for worse, “the end of history” was nowhere in sight. My disorganized
archive was dispersed all over the house and I shrugged at the suggestion to
write an immigrant memoir. In fact, I dreaded what seemed to be my own
nostalgic turn. I sought forgetting for the sake of the new beginning. So, I
found the website Improbable Reality, and it seemed to be a perfect new
platform for intellectual experiments. The idea of posting your real name
140 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

(or real face!) was alien to the free spirit of those early days. Improbable
Reality required an interesting alias and a high-level of conversation. It
focused on the philosophical quest and held forums on the nature of the
real, on freedom and memory. I thought of using Zenita as my alias, Zenita,
a wild digital pioneer without a red tie, but settled for Svoboda—freedom
in Russian. Nobody got it; they assumed I was a man, called me informally,
“Svobo” (and I hope nobody confused me with Slobodan). The Improbable
Reality soon took over the probable one and I found myself writing to other
philosophically minded aliases instead of answering my own emails. We
had broad discussions about law and freedom; pleasure and memory. One
feature was a continuous debate between a law professor with a pompous
alias and two female academics. One presented an analytic feminist position
while the other was a bit long-winded and idealistic. The professor usually
got to do the punchline and the last word and somehow the others accepted
this kindly. And then one day Improbable Reality suffered an identity crisis.
As the homepage was migrating to another server, the organizers needed to
verify information about the participants. At that time, they discovered that
the “law professor” who argued with two feminist academics was pulling
everybody’s virtual leg. Actually, he impersonated all three characters, making
two presumably female scholars a little less intelligent than himself. The
founder of the Improbable Reality, a philosophy student from Amsterdam,
had a Code of Honor. Each participant could select a fictional avatar—but
then they had to enter into a real meaningful dialogue with OTHERS, not
just with themselves. It was a good old-fashioned virtual salon where we
abandoned our everyday identity for an intense international conversation
on important subjects. You can go outside your everyday self but you still
have to listen to others. I briefly exchanged emails with the founder and I
think Zenita-Svoboda was the only woman on the site. Then the homepage
migrated to a new platform that involved a more secure password which I
eventually forgot.
 MY SIGNIFICANT OTHERS: ZENITA, SUSANA, ILANKA 141

Thus, the Improbable Reality collapsed as had my other ephemeral

homelands. My first secret digital romance was, of course, in Spanish, in its
unfamiliar poetic dialect of Spanish with many a hiatus and crafted silences.
It crossed many borders and pushed the boundaries of the text and the body.
It began with explicit courtship. My anonymous correspondent X had an
intimate knowledge of The Future of Nostalgia as if he was the book’s true
addressee. X claimed that we never met outside the text and proceeded with
an old-fashioned courtship mixing the quotes from Don Quixote and the
Argentinian poet of Slavic descent Alejandra Pizarnik. We spoke about our
exiles, young pioneers—in cold and hot climates, poems and syncopes. Who
wouldn’t fall for that? This was an old-fashioned epistolary romance, not
virtual dating. We invented our own singular platform and a private language;
only my correspondent didn’t want to bring it into the non-virtual space. X
was sometimes omnipresent and other times endlessly elusive. As we went
deeper and deeper into language, writing more often, barely touching the
tender buttons of the keyboard, just reading each other’s immigrant minds,
I began to realize that my Spanish did not have enough nuance of affect and
irony. My Leningrad phonetic training was useless but I didn’t admit to my
linguistic limitations. In one particularly intricate letter I was caught in a
web of allusions and suddenly faced a line that made no sense from the point
of view of Spanish grammar: “Y que vas a decir si fuera una ella?” I chose
to ignore this agrammatical line. (Try google translation, dear reader.) My
correspondent was startled by my silence. Please answer. Is this so horrible?
What if I were a she? So my caballero andante was also la belle dame sans
merci, polymorphous and versatile. Somebody to whom the eros of language
came naturally. I was Ezbed-lana for her, this was my name that was fully hers;
it was saved for this singular romance between two immigrants from different
continents. No, I wasn’t writing to myself; for once I had a real addressee.
These days, as I board a crowded subway car, I hear my name called: Sveta,
Susana, Svetka, Svetlana. I turn around as if in a time machine and recognize
142 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

nobody. I came to know too many people in different disjointed universes, so

I don’t connect names and faces any more, they float weightlessly in space like
folded paper snowflakes from Soviet New Year parties. These names lived with
me like the characters of unfinished novels, barely sketched and abandoned
before reaching their full potential. I tried to pass for a native in too many
countries—Russia, USA, Spain, Russia again, USA again. Now it is time to
embrace my embarrassing accented self. But when will emigration finally end?
It dawned on me only recently that it wasn’t a one-time border crossing, but a
life-long journey beyond my control. It is as if there is a strange engine inside
me that makes me go in zigzags, like the knight in the game of chess. Victor
Shklovsky wrote in the 1920s that he and his friends were still playing a game
with certain rules, a chess game, but the world around them was engaged in a
more cruel theater of trial, error and arbitrariness. The immigrant is a creature
of contradictions: tough and vulnerable, excessively earnest and a compulsive
masquerader, skeptical on the outside, trusting on the inside. Never uttering a
casual “I love you” but always dreaming of being able to say it and mean it, at
times a clairvoyant and at other times, willfully blind, caught up in aspirations
for the future and fears of the unburied past in a country that no longer exists.
After some improbable things come true in your life, as they did in mine,
you start to rely on the exceptional and trust your luck. Not a good idea.
The immigrant is a trickster who can easily be tricked at her own game.
She is susceptible to pyramid schemes of happiness and gets swindled over
and over again, whether the scheme be the perfect middle-class nest that
she occasionally envies, with cuddly spooning in bed, with less writing
and more living, or a perfect intellectual community somewhere in a good
climate, a non-Platonic Symposium for women. The immigrant is easy prey
both for improbable adventure and for the promise of security and comfort.
She is an unstoppable gambler who suddenly realizes that she no longer
knows the rules of the game. It’s tempting to turn exile into a metaphor;
exile from paradise, exile into humanity, exile into art. If you came to
 MY SIGNIFICANT OTHERS: ZENITA, SUSANA, ILANKA 143

America as a child of immigrants and went to an American school and later

to a creative writing program, you know the exact genre for speaking about
immigrant experience in the American language; your writing is a well-
packaged product because the foreignness you’re selling is domesticated
and pitched to an exact niche market. The immigrant who came to the US
as an adult remains forever tongue-tied and can never get rid of foreign
syntax. You are caught in your mixed feelings—excessive gratitude towards
your new homeland and recognition of your own non-belonging to it, your
embarrassment and your trickster’s joy. The packaging of metaphors and
experiences is harder for you; you are forever caught up in a web of mixed
feelings, like old slapstick comedians. On the one hand, you are sometimes
too enthusiastic for your second homeland, against all odds, on the second
hand, you are too embarrassed of your failure to belong, on the third hand,
too long-winded and grateful for little things, on the fourth hand, easily
offended by the minutia of foreign life, on the fifth hand, clumsy and frazzled,
not cool and collected, on the sixth hand, “those (immigrant) mental states
sprout additional forelimbs all the time,” writes Nabokov’s immigrant super
achiever about his less successful fellow-émigré, Timofei Pnin. Immigrant is
a centipede (sorokonozhka) with many aching limbs.
When we, the Soviet refugees, arrived in the US we received short and
simple lessons in good American English: avoid Russian long sentences, don’t
use “perhaps” and impersonal constructions, don’t beat around the bush, show
your agency. You are responsible for your actions, so just say “I did this and
that and that.” But in Russian we had a proverb: “I (ia) is the last letter of the
alphabet.” “No but. And avoid the proverbs. Nobody gets them. But maybe …
One more thing: don’t ever try to make jokes. You’re already funny.” Writing
in characters helps me to reconcile my Russian and American style, at least
provisionally. Zenita, Susana, Svetlana—they caught me unawares. They cross
paths throughout this book, occasionally bumping into one another. Together
they tell a collective story of the move from inner immigration to actual
144 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

emigration; a story of double lives and multiple perspectives. Immigrant

resilience is built on forgetting and working towards a new start. What will the
backward glance accomplish?
I miss Zenita, the child of the 1960s, as I miss my mother’s youthful
laughter, artful hair updo, crowded beaches and my father’s comical badges
of the KZBZ and KINO. Zenita, named after the cosmic football team, is the
one who wouldn’t need to emigrate. She embraced being a young pioneer
precisely because of that disturbing alcoholic breath of the ungainly pioneer
leader whose shaky finger made an improbably loose knot on her neck during
the wonderful rite of passage. Little Zenita tried to show that it hadn’t marred
the day for her, it was all worth it. And since that moment on she would
always like to improve the system from within, try to make it better, not leave
it. At the age of nine Zenita would try without much success to be a great
figure skater, at least on the parquet floor of her parents’ room. She would
dream of flying into space making a second home on the Red Planet, like
Aelita, the queen of Mars. At eleven, while gaining some interest in the foreign
D’Artagnan, she would still follow young Vladimir Ulyanov-Lenin into his
underground and write many secret messages calling for a new revolution
in milk from an inkwell made of bread. We all liked that story. In one of
his underground hideouts or maybe even in a tsarist prison, Lenin was left
without pens. All he was given to eat was porridge, milk and bread. He would
eat the porridge, for strength, and then he would make a little inkpot out of
softened bread and pour milk inside. He would dip his finger into milk and
write important revolutionary directives invisible to his prison guards. His
addressee would get the precious paper and bring it close to fire in order to
read it. Please try this at home. Zenita and I loved that revolutionary writing
white-on-white; yesterday’s milk on yellowish paper. Now when you bring the
paper close to a gas stove (or camp fire), you will see shaky letters with burnt
shadows emerge gradually in the middle of the page. Zenita would do well in
literature and in math and even won an honorable mention in the Children’s
 MY SIGNIFICANT OTHERS: ZENITA, SUSANA, ILANKA 145

Math Olympics. By age fourteen, high-school Leninism started to bother

Zenita and she decided to look for the “true Marx” beyond a few memorized
and predigested quotes in the school manual. As she began to dream of a
Marxist revolution, she would unwittingly replicate the polemics between
Trotskyists and left Socialist Revolutionaries circa 1919. And then came that
“class meeting of extreme importance and urgency” in the seventh grade
chaired by the director of the school herself and with the whole school board
presiding. It was a public renunciation of the “traitors of the motherland” and
their allies. The reason for this obligatory official meeting was the departure
from the Soviet Union of one of our pupils, Mark, whose family decided to
emigrate from the Soviet Union to Israel.
This type of meeting was highly recommended in such cases, but our local
officials showed an unusual zeal and initiative. The class master asked all
students whose “nationality” in the school ledger was Jewish to stand up and
renounce international Zionism and cosmopolitism. There were four or five
Jews in our class and a few crypto ones, who didn’t count on this occasion. The
first student with the last name “Joffe” (I remember this like it was yesterday)
volunteered enthusiastically; stood up before his alphabetical turn had come
and denounced Zionist cosmopolitan Western propaganda. Zenita and Svetka
Goldberg, listed as “Jewish,” were next. They just stood up. And said absolutely
nothing. She stood with her lips sealed like a partisan. A long uncomfortable
silence ensured. A little fidgeting and whisper but mostly silence. The director
and the head class mistress were silent too. They tried to say “So?” “Nu?”
but then stopped. Everyone was locked in five or ten minutes of silence. It
was like a Chekhov play except there was no violin playing in the destroyed
garden. The silence continued until one privileged kid, the tall and handsome
Misha, son of a university rector and not Jewish at all, stood up and said, “I
think we shouldn’t be judging Mark so quickly; he is just obeying his parents
who are emigrating.” Neither Zenita nor Svetlana remembers what happened
next. Only this statement saved everyone and somehow allowed the school
146 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

apparatchiks a face-saving way of cutting the meeting short. At the end Svetka/
Zenita shook Mark’s hand and this stopped him from bitter tears.
Mark, incidentally, got back in touch ten years later: he was in Canada,
studying to be a rabbi. He still remembers that story. Svetka might have started
to think emigration at that moment while Zenita took her firm stand for justice
inside the country. (Did Svetka neglect to share that story with you? She is
always forgetting important things.) Zenita stays focused. The beautiful words
about just society, peace, internationalism and love between people have been
profaned! Time for more writing in milk, white-on-white, of a different kind.
She went to the secret meetings of a tiny grass root group of local dissidents
who read smuggled chapters of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago
and an even more troubling book, Lolita, by an unknown émigré writer named
Vladimir Nabokov. (Svetka wasn’t told about these. The meetings took place
not far from the building where they lived, you could get there from their
courtyard. Svetka’s friend from the literary club, the poet Alexandra Nefetova,
went there too but swore to keep a secret from everyone, including Svetka.)
Zenita found Nabokov’s style too flowery and overwritten for her taste, and
the subject matter was disturbing, but some passages were beautiful. Ze-ni-ta
wasn’t able to finish Lo-li-ta in the one night she was allowed to keep the book.
She fell asleep, her one-night stand with Nabokov ended on an early chapter.
She did get into Solzhenitsyn and tried to learn more about her grandmother
Sonya’s experiences in the Gulag too. Zenita loved the Baltic resorts like
Zelenogorsk, conquered by the Soviets during the Russian–Finnish war,
which still kept large and ornate country houses built by the Finns, that were
expropriated by the Soviets, that gave the place a foreign aura. There was also a
long sandy beach with dunes and a labyrinthine part there with endless flower
beds that housed encouraging slogans made of forget-me-nots, dandelions,
bellflowers, chrysanthemums. Unlike Svetka, she resisted falling for Sasha B.,
whose father was a colonel and who studied French and cut deals with Finnish
tourists on the black market.
 MY SIGNIFICANT OTHERS: ZENITA, SUSANA, ILANKA 147

Zenita couldn’t fall for anyone who hasn’t read Pasternak and knew even
less about Marx and surplus value. It was Svetka who was driven by that
adventure of freedom or sometimes just an adventure while Zenita was
looking for true love. She was prepared to wait for it. Koktebel charmed her
with its purple mists and Sapphic hills. She bought herself a Zenit camera and
took nicely framed pictures of Koktebel fences and shadows falling on her
and her friends in the wavy sand. She snacked on sundried vobla and listened
to many conversations about “leaving,” where “leaving” meant leaving for
ever. She listened carefully but she had already met Yura, her fellow student
in mathematical linguistics at the Pedagogical Institute. He was shy at first
and she wasn’t sure if he took her seriously. She worried that he might have
been seduced by Irka Sidorova, the daughter of a law professor and very well-
connected. But then Yura came to Koktebel—she saw him right as she was
about to join a line for beer and vobla and asked: “Excuse me, who is next?” “I
am next,” he said quietly. “Next to you.” Yura had many dreams and ambitions
of his own, he wanted to study mathematical linguistics to understand cosmic
communication or at least to study alternative models of the universe through
semiotics, the way it was pioneered at the Tartu School in Estonia. He was
tallish with a sparkling dimple on his cheek and seriousness in his grey eyes.
It was totally unfashionable in those days to say anything explicit but I would
imagine (for I didn’t do it and wouldn’t have any idea what it would feel like),
I could only imagine that they really did whisper “I love you” quietly to each
other with the shimmer of the wave. Or maybe they didn’t need the shimmer
and the words at all. But they did whatever they did putting all ironic distance
aside. Of course, Zenita married Yurochka in an understated ceremony in
the Palace of Weddings and then suffered from endless reproaches from his
relentless Jewish mother. She could do nothing right by her mother-in-law at
first, but then they got their own studio apartment, god knows through what
connections. In a year or so they made their honeymoon journey through the
Crimea from Koktebel to Bakhchisarai, to Chufut Kale, the secret towns of
148 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

the Karaites. The Karaites were mysterious and mystifying; sometimes they
claimed to be the original and most authentic Jews and at other times, when
it was inconvenient to be Jews, they claimed not to be. Thus, they didn’t pay
“Jewish” taxes to the Russian tsar and were not rounded up by the Nazis during
the Second World War. They left striking tomb stones with ruined Hebrew
letters and a patina of forgotten history. (All of that is another story.) Image 1:
Zenitochka in her risqué Polish bikini and Yura stooping shyly and pressing
her tightly to his hairy chest. Image 2: Karaites rocks, bifurcating cracks around
the letter Hey.
In the stagnating 1980s, talk of emigration became background noise in
many Jewish households. But Yura’s mother had a security clearance and
couldn’t get an exit visa, and they wouldn’t leave without her. Really? Shall we
talk about this? No, out of the question. Somehow Zenita never had a visceral
urge to leave. She didn’t love her job as a school math teacher but she continued
with her short writing experiments, short documentary stories from the life
of Leningrad yards, prose poems about bleeding autumnal leaves dancing on
electric wires and the burned fingers of the Aurora Borealis. (Not so good in
English translation.) She stopped with the poems when little Boria was born.
And then came glasnost followed by perestroika and life has become merrier,
to quote Mayakovsky. Zenita saw the books she read in samizdat in semi-open
circulation and she was ready to become an active participant in the time of
transition. It was as if her earlier inner immigration now prepared her for open
public life. She marched to the Palace Square to face the tanks in August 1991.
In the nineties she went for many public discussions and even published her
journalism and photographs. Teaching kids was becoming more interesting
even though it paid less and less. But as the 1990s went downhill after 1996–
1998, Zenita started to experience something of a midlife crisis. Borechka was
doing some start-up business in high school, Yura appeared distanced and
tired, and she was drawing blanks on her own writing. True, they took lovely
vacations abroad, to Europe and even to Turkey, but they were only tourists
 MY SIGNIFICANT OTHERS: ZENITA, SUSANA, ILANKA 149

there, learning more about themselves with interesting backdrops for the
family pictures. It’s during that time, in 1998 or so, that Zenita met a visiting
professor from America, glamorous Susana-Svetlana, who looked a bit like
her only her gait was very different. She walked like a person who needed to
leave free space around her, to lean on nobody, to take her own direction. Yet
there was something ungrounded about her too. She traveled light and cringed
when called Svetka by strangers and refused to add any suffix of endearment to
her name. But Zenita felt that Svetlana lived in an enchanted expanding world.
Her old-fashioned Leningradian Russian tinged with a foreign intonation
turned every sentence into a dangling inquiry. It didn’t occur to her to ask
Svetlana if she was happy in love. It was clear that she found life with a capital
“L.” That night, Zenita argued as usual with her son Bor-ka who brought some
new “brands” home, she left Yura watching disturbing news on TV, put on her
Yugoslav robe, and then lay facing the old yellow wallpaper of her ex-Soviet
bedroom and thinking what it would be like to be Svetlana and dream in a
foreign room painted “Toscana red.” She cried a little for her possible lives but
then counted sheep like her mother told her “count the sheep and visualize it,
one, two, three, white, grey, black” and fell asleep touching Yura’s beloved body
ever so slightly.
In the morning Zenita put some eye cream to cover her blues. For the blues
are just a part of life. Zenita remained grounded and strong. Sometimes, she
looks over my shoulder with reproach and disbelief as I stare at the ceiling,
letting angry short circuits of thought overwhelm my best ideas and sparks
of wonder amidst scattered books and chocolate foils. “You are the one who
got all our chances …” I know, in my heart of hearts, that Zenita is right and
without her this book would never be written. Svetlana Boym, the scholar and
writer, seems to be the most accomplished of us all, but the traces of the other
girls with unfinished fates occasionally bleed into her organized prose. For a
while Svetlana managed to conduct an experimental symphony with all of us.
She embraced this syncopic experience of exilic sensual details, of life without
150 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

a synthesis; resisting blinding ideologies and ready-made administrative

thinking and never ceasing to explore new destinations for emigration. But
then the fickle Fortuna played a trick. First Svetlana broke her leg walking
casually by the Charles River. She took many pictures of teasing shadows on
the rippled surface of the river and wondered what was really broken inside
her and what phantom limb was let loose. She decided as always to play it light,
to co-create with the accident and not make a bigger deal out of her midlife
fall than need be. And then her long-term American marriage broke just as
accidentally as the limb and somehow that affected her whole foundation. She
learned the paradox that for the adventure of mobility you needed a strong
and stable skeleton. Mobility and security are provided by the same joints. She
grappled with uncertainty most of her life but always with the sense of personal
security and companionship existing somewhere in the background, whether
real or imaginary. Confronting insecurity and uncertainty in midlife without
that energy of immigrant resilience seemed an insurmountable task. At that
moment the last of our imaginary creatures sprung into being, a desperate
adventuress named Lana-Ilanka, a woman of indefinite foreign origins,
a Jewish cosmopolitan, a globe trotter and coy virtual dater, also known as
Ilanka66 (“hi gorgeous. LOL.”) She described herself as a “beautiful, somewhat
intelligent, college teacher and artist.” Ilanka, open-minded, glamorously
melancholic, easy to ichat with and sometimes to “meet for coffee,” was the
least happy of my bunch. Ilanka suddenly realized that after thirty years in
America, she remains a stranger here and not only to herself.
This latest delayed shock of immigration was the hardest one to take. She
deserved to belong already, never mind the “cute” identifiable accent. Do you
always have to answer the question “Where are you from” that a complete
stranger imposes on you? She kept trying to pass for a hyphenated-native, or
something like that; just a person with a slightly unusual biography, but for
most people she remained an “exotic” woman, fun for dating but perhaps too
unusual for life. It’s easy to be attracted to foreigners and then drop them as
 MY SIGNIFICANT OTHERS: ZENITA, SUSANA, ILANKA 151

quickly as you pick them up; they are not a part of your family and never would
be. Ilanka began to feel like a resident alien in her near-native Boston with
her best friends dispersed all over Europe and New York. Ilanka was a distant
cousin of the adventurous Suzanne-Susana. Only Susana was young, enjoyed
her creative defamiliarization and solitude with a sense of security. Instead of
this creative solitude when you’re in dialogue with yourself and others, Ilanka
felt isolated and unspeakably lonely. Solitude is when you are in conversation
with your best daimons; loneliness is when no such dialogue seems possible.
Our slender Ilanka66 with the great haircut and cool glasses looked so good
on paper but proved to be the weakest link in life. Zenita, Susana, Ilanka—they
took me by surprise. I didn’t plan for them to come forth. Until the moment
of crisis, Susana and Zenita didn’t talk back to me and Ilanka seemed just
my virtual dating avatar. Each name is a limb with its own phantom pleasure
and pain. They have their own bifurcating lives that often elude me. We are
independent but a little co-dependent too. We change roles and play musical
chairs and sometimes there is a mishap, a gap, a fall. And there is that nameless
girl who liked to play hide-and-seek because she trusted that whenever she hid
there would be for sure someone seeking her.
Maybe together, the collective of imaginary siblings can help the single
child? I read that the best cure for phantom pain is the mirror method, which
allows you to confront the wandering limbs that haunt us. This book is an
attempt at the mirror method. I never wished to assimilate completely and
fit into the proverbial American melting pot. Nor did I want to affirm my
immigrant identity and the warmth of the displaced community. I hoped for
a third way, the knight’s move. Not to have to try to assimilate but to have
dissimilar others around me to engage in the adventure of living. Persona was
a mask in Greek tragedy but wearing that mask wasn’t a mere disguise but a
revelation of a deeper self. For me personal integrity was always more important
than a coherent personal identity. Neither of the two words “integrity” and
“identity” translate well into Russian. (There is plenty of “soul” and “truth”, of
152 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

course.) Perhaps that kind of integrity without full integration can be found in
a passionate dialogue with others through teaching and research and our last
imaginary homeland—nostalgia for world culture? In my graduate school days
as I walked through immigrant districts of the city and then took the crowded
subway to the university, it never occurred to me that it was an ivory tower or
some kind of free autonomous zone. They were interconnected spaces, one
leading into another like the corridors of the communal apartment and the
railway station in my dreams. The questions of human suffering, displacement,
world wonder, human communication didn’t seem to me merely academic.
My study helped me make sense of my immigrant experience and to share it
with others. If anything, the relationship between life and research seemed too
continuous. Ivory Tower hasn’t always been a pejorative term; it comes from
the lover’s discourse in the Song of Songs: Your throat is like an ivory tower. It’s
about the beauty of the beloved body, an amorous architecture of the cosmos.
It’s the prudish nineteenth century and the anti-intellectualism that made the
term pejorative. Yet it is true that there are scholars who devote themselves to
the narrow confines of disciplinary knowledge, but in both of my homelands,
the USSR and USA, the term was too frequently abused in order to attack
intellectuals and critical thinkers. So, I will stick to the lover’s tower, shaped in
an avant-garde spiral like the tower of Tatlin. In the face of enormous inequality
in the United States (and less acknowledged, in the Soviet Union and Russia as
well), the ivory tower is not the most dangerous place. I know how unpopular
it is to observe this, but in fact it is the popular culture in the United States that
is far from democratic and has been created by the entertainment industry
that is way more economically and politically powerful than a bunch of artists,
scientists and academics.
Jargons of exclusion are not the sole property of academia nor its only
characteristic. Today there is more danger that a university would become
yet another corporate tower losing its relative independence and focus on
research and teaching. Once, while finishing Another Freedom about five years
 MY SIGNIFICANT OTHERS: ZENITA, SUSANA, ILANKA 153

ago, and being particularly annoyed at the bureaucratic agendas, I decided to

put a quote from Tocqueville’s Democracy in America on my office door at the
Barker Center at Harvard. A great admirer of American political institutions
and a critic of American mentality, Tocqueville observed the paradoxes of
striving individualism and conformity:
“I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and
real freedom of discussion as in America.”
I couldn’t anticipate the reaction to my quote. Next day I was told by
the building supervisor to remove the quote. “Why?” I asked suspecting
censorship. “It violates the building design,” explained the supervisor. “We like
office doors to look uniform.”
Yet whenever I fall into nostalgic non-conformism, I remember the wise
words of my former mentor, writer and critic Barbara Johnson, who gave me a
life lesson after I got a job at Harvard. “Stop speaking about anti-establishment,
Svetlana. Now, you’re the establishment.” She had a good sense of irony, and
I see her lips crack in a wistful smile. One just has to learn to live with some
fractures, co-create with what’s given and not flee from one’s ideals at the first
misfortune. Not all roads not taken are better than the roads taken. Emigrate
when needed. Regret nothing. I happened to live through many declarations
of the “ends of ”: the end of history, the end of art, the end of the Soviet Union,
etc., some more real than others. That’s probably why I have such difficulty with
closures. The end of the Soviet Union and its satellite states didn’t bring with
it the “end of history”; in fact, history gushed out as if from an open wound.
And capitalism didn’t simply win the game, democracy is not exactly on the
rise in the world, either, and we are not sure who (if anyone) won the Cold
War. As for the end of the “snail world” (i.e. the non-digital retro-existence of
senses and face-to-face encounters), it hasn’t occurred yet either. There was
a way in which the inner emigration in my childhood and the escape into a
virtual universe of literature prepared me for the digital existence and virtual
dating. However, I remained a “digital immigrant”; not a digital native, but
154 THE ORIGINS OF NOSTALGIA

after my experiences of border crossing, I embraced my digital non-resident

alien status with pleasure. One can still remain a trickster and move sideways,
making an alternative path in the virtual world without sacrificing the sentient
world. As I am about to put an end to this tale of “the end of immigrations,”
PBS is airing a program about another “end of …” as if mocking me with my
desire for closure. This time it’s not about “the end of history” or “the end
of art,” but something more ambitious—the end of homo sapiens—that can
be translated as an “inquiring human.” Yuval Noah Harari, the author of the
new book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, predicts that in the not so
remote future “sapiens,” knowing won’t be any longer attached to a human
but to a wise machine or to a new caste of super-reach cyborgs of inhuman
longevity. Unlike in the era of my childhood, most futuristic thinking today
leans towards the dystopian, rather than the utopian, although they often
overlap. The nice part of the title is that “the history of humankind is “brief,”
and we will soon be a retro specie of humorous reflection. Human immigrants.
Of course, this might be another foreboding scientific fairy tale. One thing
the Soviet experience taught me—to be a good reader of fairy tales; not to
merely run behind hunky Komsomol leader Ivan the Fool in the search for his
explosive Fire Bird, but to map the migrating plots and porous textures of fear
and wishful thinking itself. The fairy tales of this book are now about to begin.
Svetka, age four and a half, wanted to be a Little Red Riding Hood. She got
dressed like a fairy tale girl and went for the New Year celebration for kids
at her mother’s workplace. And there she saw an old doctor on stage with a
needle, human size. She didn’t want the kids to suffer pain. “Children, we’ve
been deceived! screamed Svetka, disrupting the party. “This is not a show, this
is a hospital!” Zenita, age ten, dreamed of a true Kosmos. She drew pictures of
rockets, looked at photographs of animals and people who traveled into space
and wanted to see a real sputnik—which in Russian means both a satellite and a
life companion. And then she learned that the little dog Laika sent by comrade
Khrushchev into outer space never came back to earth. And what’s worse,
 MY SIGNIFICANT OTHERS: ZENITA, SUSANA, ILANKA 155

it was arranged as a one-way trip all along. Children, we’ve been deceived!
Kosmos as we knew it no longer exists, or perhaps it has never existed. And
there is ageing Susana, gathering stones with bifurcating veins in the Crimean
mist in the ruins of the twentieth-century dreams and military debris. Let’s
remember what we’ve tried to forget, kids. Let’s multitask with clouds. Let’s
play with a different fire.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my deep thanks to Musa and Yuri Goldberg for the
honor of editing these works of Svetlana’s and to Svetlana for writing them and
for her friendship. I would particularly like to thank Natal’ya Strugach and
Maria Vassileva for their respective contributions to one of the stories here
(“Tearing Away”) and for their permission to publish it in this volume. I wish
also to extend my thanks to Tamar Abramov. Finally, thanks to my friend Irina
for boundless encouragement.
 INDEX

Adamo, Salvatore 62, 89, 90 Death in Quotation Marks 130

Aibolit, Doctor 17, 18, 20, 29, 36, 37 Degas, Edgar 73, 74
Aksyonov, Vasily 73, 75 Dissidents 45, 139, 146
Almodovar, Pedro 128 Don Quixote 120, 130, 141
Angry Young Men 35 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 32, 60
Arendt, Hannah 138 Dubrovnik 89

Baba Yaga 36 Einstein, Albert 11

Bagristsky, Vsevolod 52
Beatles 7, 74, 120 Femida, Goddess of Justice 33, 49, 85
Berkeley, George 10, 11, 13 Fenway Park 124
blockade, Leningrad 26, 46, 64 flea markets, American 103
Bolshoy Prospekt (Avenue) 55, 56, 58, 59, Free Philosophical Association 79
62, 86
Bonoparte, Napoleon 85, 93, 100 Gagarin, Yuri 6, 7, 9
Borges, Jorge Luis 119, 127, 129 Galeano, Eduardo 2, 3
Borodino 83 Genrikovna, Gertruda 46
Boston 14, 55, 66, 86, 103, 104, 123, 125, Great Patriotic War 22
126, 128, 129, 133, 134, 139, 151 Griboedov, Alexander 51
Boym, Konstantin 66, 121, 123 Gulag 24, 26, 27, 45, 48, 109, 117, 120, 146
Brezhnev, Leonid 8, 11, 22, 78, 92, 95 Gulag Archipelago 146
Brodsky, Joseph 44, 58
Bronze Horseman 132 Harari, Yuval Noah 154
Brothers Grimm 18, 20, 28, 48, 49 Harvard University 130
Brothers Karamazoff 60 Helsinki Accords 70
Brown, Clarence 67 Hermitage (Museum) 42
Hitchcock, Alfred 115
Chaliapin, Feodor 79 House of Culture 17, 18, 22, 26, 34, 36, 37
Chukovsky, Kornei 20
Communal Apartment 97, 107, 109, 124, Ivan the Fool 6, 14, 18, 19,117, 131, 154
131, 152
Communism 6, 7, 10, 22, 74, 92, 107, 115 Jesus Christ Superstar 74
Communist Party 6, 34, 81, 82, 95, 117 Jewish Family and Children Service (JFS)
Connecticut 103, 106, 111 124
Crimea 10, 63, 74, 119, 121, 137, 147
Karaklajić, Radmila 89
Day of the Soviet Army 8 Karpovka River 56, 58, 132
Day of the Soviet Aviation 8 Kazakhstan 46
158 INDEX

Kharms, Daniil 64 Nabokov, Vladimir 139, 146

Kirov Avenue, Kirovsky Avenue 85 Nazis 148
Kirovsky Prospekt Nefetova, Alexandra 146
Kirov Park of Culture and Leisure 91 Neva embankment 59, 89, 94
KGB 45, 46, 72, 129 Nevsky Prospekt 99, 100
Kodak 105 New York City 86, 87, 94, 98, 151
Koktebel 66, 119, 121, 147 Nietzsche, Friedrich 55, 89, 90, 95, 98
Komsomol (Communist Youth Party) 66, Nostalgia 1, 58, 64, 67, 106, 119, 120, 128,
81, 154 134, 135, 139, 141, 152
Korolev, Sergei 14
Kosmos 6, 10, 13, 154, 155 October Revolution 44, 72, 79
Khrushchev, Nikita 21, 44, 73, 109, 154 Odysseus 119
Kulak 118 Okudzhava, Bulat 57, 72, 73, 75
KZBZ 26, 115, 144 Olympic Games 95, 96, 123
Order of the Red Banner of Labor 50
Lenin, Vladimir 11, 33, 44, 59, 71, 93, 97, OVIR (Office of Visas and Registration)
131, 144, 145 76, 77
Lermontov, Mikhail
Leningrad (St Petersburg/Petrograd) 2, 9, Palace of Culture 27, 47
11,12, 13, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 29, 30, Perrault, Charles 20
34, 42, 44, 45, 46, 50, 59, 60, 64, 65, Peter and Paul Fortress 89
66, 85, 86, 89, 95, 96, 103, 107, 111, Petrograd (Leningrad/St Petersburg) 26, 59
115, 121, 123, 128, 129, 131, 132, Petropavlovsky Street 56
133, 134, 137, 141, 148, 149 Phantasmagorias of History 139
Leningrad State Pedagogical Institute 120 Pioneer 21, 34, 35, 36, 59, 117, 124, 140,
Leningrad University 10, 119 141, 144
Llull, Raimon 129 Pizarnik, Alejandra 141
Lolita 20, 146 Prague (Spring) 22, 133, 139
Lot’s wife 131 Pravda 7, 45, 61, 111
Proust, Marcel 1, 3
Madrid 78, 120, 128, 129 Pushkin, Alexander 32
Magomaev, Muslim 91, 92
Mandelshtam, Osip 20, 31, 118, 119 Radio Mayak 82
March of the Aviators 8, 23 Red Riding Hood 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 25, 28,
Marx, Karl 61, 131, 145, 147 29, 36, 47, 117, 120, 154
Marxist-Leninist 10, 131 Red Square 71
Mayakovsky, Vladimir 60, 124, 148 Refusenik 63, 76, 123
Mayoro, Nikolai 52 Reid, Thomas Mayne 118
Merwin, W.S. 67 Rodari, Gianni 28, 48
Military Naval Academy 94 Russia 31, 46, 64, 66, 67, 83,131, 132, 133,
Morozov, Pavlik 29, 117 134, 135, 137, 138, 139, 142, 152
Moscow 66, 67, 71, 79, 82, 83, 96, 111,
121, 123, 133, 137 Shklovsky, Victor 1, 11, 142
Multitasking with Clouds 139 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr 146
 INDEX 159

Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs 76 Trubachev, Vasek 29

Soviet Union 2, 6, 14, 20, 24, 27, 50, 64, 70, Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin 14
71, 78, 82, 86, 115, 116, 122, 124, Tsar Nikolai II 46
130, 133, 134, 145, 152, 153 Tsvetaeva, Marina 130
Spain 120, 127, 128, 129, 142
Spanish Civil War 120 USA 128, 142, 152
Sputnik 5, 48, 59, 115, 154 USSR 5, 22, 62, 66, 78, 128, 152
Stalin, Joseph 21, 22, 23, 24, 44, 46, 74, 79
St. Isaac Square 132 Velvet revolution 133
St Petersburg (Leningrad/Petrograd) 2, 45, Voice of America 74, 78
58, 59, 65, 79, 134, 137 Vysotsky, Vladimir 39, 40, 73, 75
Subjective idealism 10
Winter Palace 46, 78
Tatlin, Vladimir 152
Temple of our Savior in Blood 98 Young Pioneers 59, 141
Tereshkova, Valentina 13
The Future of Nostalgia 67, 134, 141 Zelenogorsk 51, 53, 146
The Three Musketeers 33, 118 Zenit (Leningrad/St Petersburg) 115,
Tocqueville, Alex de 153 117
Tolstoy, Leo 26, 47 Zhukovsky, Vassily 116
160