The Voice Over

Sebald simply removes the “boring/not-boring” gauge from the dashboard and honestly recollects everyone he is capable of reaching—in the mode of a common cause. His grief and his passion reside in the fact that all the component parts of the created world deserve recollection and re-understanding—and he works himself off his feet, attempting to utter a word (a picture, a quote, a hint) for each one of those who have lived. In its inner essence the problem he has taken on, and even the means he has chosen for resolving it, is very much like the commemoration of the departed at the Proskomedia—and here I’ll permit myself just once to cite a text that has no connection with literature: “In practice it turns out that a tremendous number of names is usually collected, and the priest appeals for help in reading from other clergy and assistants. […] Given this kind of overload the reading of names, unfortunately, is often carried out mechanically. It is especially difficult for a priest who is serving alone, without a deacon or a second priest, when notes are brought up with names during the liturgy itself (up to the Cherubic Hymn), and the priest has to read them out between the litany and the secret prayers. How can one concentrate under such conditions?”

Sebald’s prose is occupied with the same thing, but in a world utterly deprived of any hope of resurrection. The chosen method of standing up against non-being lends his books a particular status, like nothing else—it locates them in a no-man’s-land, between great literature (one can hardly describe it differently) and, if one can express it this way, metaphysical activism. I myself don’t know which they’re closer to. But these texts, which from the moment they were written have been hovering between literature and fact, invention and document, are already accustomed to this situation. All that we can rely on here—and even lean on, like the arm of a friend, in the pitch-dark night of a decline and fall—is our unaccountable confidence in the author. In the voice that continues to speak, as if respect, compassion, goodness have not lost their meaning, while all that has been written is written—to cite Sebald—“so to speak, from the other side.”²³ From that side: more populous than this one.

2013

Translated by Sibelan Forrester

Over Venerable Graves

Here’s what happened: I was looking at pictures someone sent me from Germany, and one of them was particularly striking. Winter, a dark forest or maybe a park, and a narrow path winding its way right to a church, and a giant Christmas tree all decked out in glorious lights, and the sky above looks not like Germany but more like Gzhel porcelain or Vyatka toys, dark blue with enormous cold stars. On my tiny screen, the tree was lit like a bonfire, and it looked like a perfect postcard if you wanted to, say, wish someone a happy new year; all it needed was a couple of words appropriate to the occasion.

I sent the card (“good tidings in the new year”) to several people, some of them even responded, and a month later I opened the picture file again. But then—well, yes, the dark forest or park with its snowy hills, the shrubs, the church, the spruce—of course this was a cemetery. I have no idea how I failed to notice it the first time around.

But it’s quite easy not to see the cemetery, it is always in your head anyway; any thought brought to its endpoint will brush up against it: unmarked graves, half-covered in snow, and at the end of the road a spruce (“All the apples, all the golden ornaments”¹), and not much further—the church, we-all-fall-down. As the Orthodox hymn for the repose of the deceased says, “The whole world is a common, sacred grave, for in every place is the dust of our brethren and fathers.”

For some reason it matters to us how much space will be set aside for each and every person. The old jokes about six feet of English soil (“and since he’s taller, we’ll add one more”) can be easily put into the language of the Vagankovo cemetery. As if the size of our last earthly allotment meant something—and the more space surrounds you, the greater, freer, sweeter the rest. The obscure meaning of posthumous landownership (“Though senseless flesh will hardly care / Precisely where it goes to rot”²) alludes to a merger with the landscape—or an acquisition that doesn’t require expert witnesses. Meanwhile, the earthly lot of the dead is shrinking before our eyes, which is hardly just the result of overpopulation and lack of space.