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• 1 media/michael-yuan-7Zo4YeXmrEQ-unsplash.jpg 2021-12-13T00:28:41+00:00 Grieving the Living: The Compounding Effect of Incarceration in Memoirs of a Revolutionist and Requiem 22 image_header 2023-10-24T18:46:24+00:00

  Memoirs of a Revolutionist and Requiem share the central theme of parent-child grief resulting from incarceration. Vera Figner’s memoir tells the story of her twenty years as a political prisoner, and the grief she experienced for her mother whom she refers to as her “dearest loved one.” Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem is a poetic cycle about the grief she experienced at her son’s incarceration. These personal tales of grief paint a devastating picture of the violent breaking of communal bonds inherent to incarceration. The texts in tandem demonstrate that the violence of incarceration is not only contained within the walls of the prison, but can infect the incarcerated’s loved ones with grief as well.

  Figner was arrested and sentenced to death (later reduced to life, then twenty years in solitary confinement in the Shlisselburg Fortress) in 1884 for her involvement in the assassination of Emperor Alexander II as a member of People’s Will Party. Figner describes her mother as the person closest to her, and the forced removal from her as the harshest punishment. During her first years at Shlisselburg Fortress, Figner writes, “We had been deprived of everything: of our native land and humanity; of our friends, our comrades and families; we were cut off from every living person and thing” (184). Here Figner begins to articulate the grief of her imprisonment and the psychological consequences of being physically removed from society. Conjugal visits and contact with the outside world were prohibited in Finger’s first years of incarceration, completing her severing from the outside world.

  Requiem centers the theme of grief. Akhmatova’s son was imprisoned in Russia during Stalin's reign of terror. Akhmatova wrote this poetic sequence in response to her son’s incarceration, during which she stood in a line outside of the jail every day for seventeen months trying to figure out what was to happen to him. Because Figner’s book is a memoir, we only see her story from a first-person account defined by the prison border. Requiem adds the layer of the effects of incarceration on the outside community and challenges the idea that the pain of incarceration is confined by walls. Though Akhmatova herself was never imprisoned, her life was controlled and she was confined through her son's incarceration. Akhmatova’s son's incarceration cost her physical and emotional health. She was suicidal, dangerously cold, and hungry. Akhmatova writes, “At dawn they came and took you away/You were my dead: I walked behind” (103). Akhmatova’s son has been taken out of her life, and though he is alive, she is powerless to help or protect him in any way. Out of love for her son, she must follow him in an attempt to make any possible contact. Akhmatova is now driven to stand in line at the whim of the state. She writes,

  Such grief might make the mountains stoop, reverse the waters where they flow,
  but cannot burst these ponderous bolts
  that block us from the prison cells
  crowded with mortal woe. . . .(101)

  From Akhmatova’s standpoint we see the devastation of incarceration from a mother who is willing to do whatever it takes to make contact with her son. Not only is she emotionally confined by grief, but physically bound to the prison institution through her attempt to save him.

  Though on opposite sides of the prison border, Figner and Akhmatova describe feeling immense dehumanization at the hands of the state. Both women have had their autonomy removed causing severe trauma and subsequent grief. While Figner is being held against her will in a cell, Akhmatova is being denied the ability to cross a fabricated border between the outside and inside. A key feature of these authors' grief is that their loved one isn’t physically dead, but the state has separated them, causing the connection to be severed. In describing this feeling Figner writes, “My relatives seemed dead to me. Is not a long, hopeless separation similar to death?” (249). Their separation from their family members isn’t natural but caused by state intervention and violence. Their loved one is alive but inaccessible, causing Figner and Akhmatova to be tortured by their inability to know the conditions of the other. They cling on to the painful hope that they may reunite while having no autonomy to ensure that becomes reality.

  Akhmatova and Figner’s situations mirror each other: Figner being incarcerated and grieving her mother, Akhmatova grieving her incarcerated child. They describe the same process of surviving their grief. In Figner’s thirteenth year at Shlisselburg Fortress she is granted the right to correspond with her relatives twice a year through typed censored letters. Figner does not experience excitement about this new ability, but rather discomfort. To survive her overwhelming grief for her mother and other relatives, Figner had to attempt to forget them and kill the idea that they might someday reunite. Figner writes, “It was the painful agitation of people who had better forget, and whose peace of mind was disturbed by the intrusion of a reminder from the outside world” (250). Figner, having no bridge to the outside world for thirteen years, retreated from it to protect herself from the grief of her removal.

  Akhmatova describes a similar survival tactic, but by the fact that she arrives at the prison every day, she expresses hope to see her son again. Having to hold the dichotomy of grieving her son and taking action every day in hopes to see him again causes her pain. Akhmatova writes,

  So much to do today:
  kill memory, kill pain,
  turn heart into a stone,
  and yet prepare to live again (109)

  To survive the separation from their parent/child, Figner and Akhmatova attempt to numb themselves from the overwhelming trauma of state-sponsored violence. The fact that their relatives are accessible but they are being denied the right to access them causes the need to let hope die to retain their sanity.

  Holding the contradiction between hopeless grief and the need to resist inspires Figner and Akhmatova to attempt to articulate extremity and trauma. Caroline Forché, in writing about Requiem, asserts that language breaks in the face of trauma. State violence strives to rob its victims of communicating their experience, rendering them passive in their inability to articulate. Figner and Akhmatova resisted this state violence and their grief through the act of writing. Figner articulates not only her own grief, but that of those sharing the same experience. Similarly, to heal the rupture of her separation from her son, Akhmatova resists state violence through writing about the community of grieving mothers with whom she waited. Requiem can be understood as Akhmatova trying to describe the experience of losing her son to Stalin’s prisons and living through physically torturous conditions to see him one more time. Akhmatova writes,

  "Can you describe this ?"
  And I said: "I can."
  Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face. (99)

  In this poem an unnamed woman is asking Akhmatova if she has the language to describe such trauma and grief, and Requiem does just that. Akhmatova is therefore articulating a kind of communal grief.
  
  Requiem and Memoirs of a Revolutionist allow us to see the effects of incarceration from within and outside the prison. Figner has been ripped from her community by the state as punishment for crimes. In the Shlisselburg fortress she assimilates into a new society for survival. When Figner is given the opportunity to make contact with her mother and larger community through letters it causes her discomfort because bridging the gap between the interior and exterior world requires her to merge the two societies and remember her relationships with people who have been functionally dead to her for thirteen years. Figner’s incarceration robs her of her relationship with her mother not only through physical removal but an incommunicable transfer of worlds and the removal of language to describe extremity. From the reversed perspective, Akmhatova’s son has disappeared across a physical border into a space that is unimaginable to her. Not only is he inaccessible to her but his world has become unintelligible, and she is physically contained outside the prison border. Requiem and Memoirs of a Revolutionist allow us to see that incarceration opens a wound in all of society. Every incarcerated person leaves behind a grieving community.

  Bibliography
  Akhmatova, Anna. Requiem. In Poems of Akhmatova. Atlantic Monthly Press, 1973.
  Figner, Vera. Memoirs of a Revolutionist. Northern Illinois University Press, 1991.
  Forché, Carolyn, and Duncan Wu. Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001. W.W. Norton & Company, 2014, pp. 159–74.

• 1 2021-12-17T15:32:30+00:00 Historiography and Russian Prison Literature 21 Julia Mohr plain 2021-12-17T17:40:33+00:00             The construction of history, according to Hannah Arendt, is the “playground of crackpots” (Arendt 333). The study of history in academia has long enjoyed the status of ‘objectivity’ much to the chagrin of structuralists like Foucault. History itself is an objective reality, but the study of history is one inseparable from the influences of subjectivity. The number of casualties resulting from a battlefield cannot be empirically contested (although the true number may be debated, the presence of casualties cannot objectively be denied), but the formation of one’s opinions on the war is entirely entrenched in individual circumstances (personal or structural). Because of its innate dependence on the subjective, the construction of history has faced much abuse. Mutilated by propaganda, history (or the propagandized construction of it) becomes a manipulative force, pernicious in its ability to evade criticism and elicit trust almost instantaneously. Consecrated as the realm of objectivity, history is protected from widespread criticism, especially when it accompanies a narrative regarded as morally imperative. What should be given credence, instead, is the understanding that history is as, or perhaps more, subject to subjectivity. Authors of Russian prison literature, and prison literature as a whole, embrace this subjectivity, intending only to write a narrative through which a reader can make sense of the nonsensical and empathize with an experience that is wholly unexplainable.
  
              The Foucauldian interpretation of history is fundamentally reliant on power structures. Historiography is at the disposal of the powerful to formulate a ‘truth’ that renews their right to rule. Foucault’s Discipline and Punish explores the ways in which power dynamics have installed and continue to cultivate incarceration practices which deny the experience of prisoners: “Can one write such a history against the background of a history of bodies when such systems of punishment claim to have only the secret souls of criminals as their objective?” (Foucault 25). Foucault argues that the history of the prison system is inextricable from the people whom it harms—a history which denies the personhood of the incarcerated, too, creates and perpetuates harm. The existence of the penal system itself is contingent upon the flow of a narrative which dehumanizes the incarcerated: “No doubt it is as if the ‘history-remembering’ of the chronicles, genealogies, exploits, reigns and deeds had long been linked to a modality of power” (Foucault 161). The "modality of power," of course, relies on the creation and perpetuation of manipulated history, history which claims to raise itself to objectivity but is still immersed, invisibly and perniciously, in the subjective. The creation of history (the subjective, physical forms which it occupies, not its place as objective reality) is inseparable from the prolongation of certain modes of power which dictate its “remembering." Historiography becomes a tool through which power is legitimized and the freedom of the oppressed is justifiably revoked. The tradition of prison literature has thus been established to rectify this problem—the survival of narratives returns political autonomy to those who are denied it by remembering their experiences. Foucault writes of the power of the biography, which “establishes the 'criminal' as existing before the crime and even outside it” (Foucault 252). The biography (or autobiography) is a radical concept for Foucault because it constructs a reality which affirms and values the humanity and experiences of the incarcerated.
  
              The importance of this canon (specifically the auto/biographical element) has been recognized from its genesis. The Life of Avvakum recounts Avvakum’s persecution and imprisonment by the powerful Orthodox church, as well as his determination to defend his beliefs. He sanctifies these struggles, believing them to bring him closer to God and the actualization of God’s will. We can find value simply in the presence (or the truth) of his narrative alone, its celebration of determination and agency in the face of oppression, “for the falling away of Truth is repudiation of self, for Truth is connatural; for if Truth is connatural, the falling away of truth is repudiation of the connatural” (Avvakum 37). It is clear from Avvakum’s narrative that ‘Truth’ is, contextually, better defined as the belief in God. However, Avvakum’s experience itself is a celebration of personal volition (in his narrative, an extension of God’s volition) and the triumph of truth’s survival through the dissemination of the narrative. “The falling away of Truth," or the destruction of personal narratives through which the truth survives, is a rejection of the individual self and the national self—to tell only the partial story is to permit falsehoods through which disunity arises.
              The preservation of the truth, of the ‘whole’ is similarly confirmed by Dostoevsky in Notes from a Dead House. The narrative is powerful in its commitment to returning the humanity to inmates of a labor camp by telling their stories—not only the stories of their crimes, but of their convictions, personalities, and quirks. The experience of prison is constructed not by the physical barriers it has, but by the construction of a new world with unique social customs and dynamics—the creation of a community of sorts.
              The formation of community in prison is explored by Vera Figner’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist, which recounts her unending loyalty to her comrades and their role in her mental survival. Life still continues inside of the cage, as is so eloquently paralleled by Figner with the flourishing of the prison garden, which her peers have kept with the utmost care. Ginzburg’s narrative Journey into the Whirlwind remembers the writing of Vera Figner, which provides her with immense comfort in a terrifying situation. Similarly, she is motivated by an intense desire to survive and write, to “remember all these things in the hope of recounting them to honest people and true Communists, such as I was sure would listen to me one day” (417), to sustain the tradition of Russian prison narratives as a vessel through which determination can inspire change in the face of oppressive forces. In all of these cases, Russian prison literature rebels against the forces which constrict its authors to create a channel of narratives that pass down values of strength and determination to future activists.
              While these narratives provide this very thing for activists, they are shunned by the history of the powerful for the same reason. Arendt’s discussion of historiography primarily affirms Foucault’s conception of its role as the force which constricts; manipulated by the powerful, history becomes a medium of propaganda dissemination by totalitarian regimes. The sanctity of history and the madness of the mass dissolve “the difference between truth and falsehood…[which] become a mere matter of power and cleverness, of pressure and infinite repetition” (Arendt 333). Historiography is beholden to its creator, who often holds the power to distort it. The audience for this distortion is the mass. The role of the mass is critical in the acceptance of historical revisionism for the sake of totalitarian movements—once the mob begins to police itself, totalitarianism is able to flourish, born from the dissemination of a mangled history that engrains itself in the mass. The construction of history must be understood to be two sided: the construction of the past and the construction of the present in the future. The movement, aided by the dissemination of propaganda and the fury of the mass, desired itself “access to history even at the price of destruction” (Arendt 332). Historiography only allows memorialization for those events which demand it.
              The right to memorialization, the value placed of marginalized narratives—these issues cannot be relegated to the past because of their role in the formation of history, the discourse of the past. They are still inherently connected to the present day, the foundation of a pernicious historiography which seeks only to uplift the powerful. Never Remember by Masha Gessen expresses the power inherent in the construction of history by telling of the difficulty undertaken in the construction of physical history—a memorial. Russia’s conception of the atrocities committed by the USSR is confused because the Terror did not draw distinctions—‘perpetrators’ and ‘victims’ are unidentifiable when a perpetrator, a day later, may himself become the victim. When the line between oppressor and oppressed blurs, memory is obfuscated, and the event is rendered ahistorical—outside of time. No one is to blame because there were no oppressors and no victims. Gessen writes, “terror connotes an active perpetrator: the criminal state itself. Repressions seem to have happened of their own accord, like a force of nature that swept through, leaving a ravaged country in its wake” (Gessen 52). Gessen describes the structural obfuscation of history as ‘cacophony’: “The cacophony creates a sense of moral neutrality. There is no story-of an occupation, an Other, a mistake-because there can be no such story. But what is history without a story?” (Gessen 107). Because history is a human invention, history itself is utterly human: it is the story. The construction of actual history necessitates the subjectivity narratives provide.
              The antidote to this societal problem is already in existence—one need not look further than the narratives which have already been, and which continue to be written, detailing the history of marginalized experience. These narratives post a threat to “the more general, more fluid, but also more determinant history… a whole domain of knowledge, a whole type of power” (Foucault 185). General history, objective history—this is the history we revere. That acclaim forms the basis of the determinism of which Foucault writes. The creation and propagation of history beyond the most basic empirical claims that does not identify itself as subjective is the element responsible for societal divides. Reading prison literature reminds us of the fullness of history that we lack when room is not made for the ‘Other’ which tells itself not through statistics and treaties, but through personhood and subjectivity.
  
  Bibliography 
  Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harcourt Brace, 1985.
  Avvakum, Archpriest. Archpriest Avvakum: The Life Written by Himself. Michigan Slavic Publications, University of Michigan, 1979.
  Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from a Dead House. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Vintage Classics, 2015.
  Dovlatov, Sergei. The Zone. Alma Classics, 2013.
  Figner, Vera. Memoirs of a Revolutionist. Northern Illinois University Press, 1991.
  Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, a Division of Random House, 1979.
  Gessen, Masha, and Misha Friedman. Never Remember: Searching for Stalin's Gulags in Putin's Russia. Columbia Global Reports, 2018.
  Ginzburg, Evgenia Semenovna. Journey into the Whirlwind. Harcourt, Brace, 1967.