Writing from the Ruins of Europe: Representing Kaliningrad in Russian Literature from

Brodsky to Buida
Author(s): Uilleam Blacker
Source: The Slavonic and East European Review , Vol. 93, No. 4 (October 2015), pp. 601-625
Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London,
School of Slavonic and East European Studies
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/slaveasteurorev2.93.4.0601

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 Writing from the Ruins of Europe:
Representing Kaliningrad in
Russian Literature from
Brodsky to Buida
UILLEAM BLACKER

After the Second World War, many cities and towns across Eastern
Europe experienced multiple upheavals: populations were lost through
death, displacement and deportation, while bombing and fighting inflicted
massive material damage. In some cases, cities and towns were transferred
from one state to another, with accompanying population transfers.
German Danzig and Breslau, for example, became Polish Gdańsk and
Wrocław, Polish Wilno and Lwów became Lithuanian Vilnius and
Ukrainian L’viv respectively, and East Prussian Königsberg became
Soviet-Russian Kaliningrad.1 The situation was replicated in cities, towns
and villages across East Central Europe, from the Sudetenland, whose
Germans were deported and replaced by Czechs, through south-eastern
Poland, whose Lemko minority was deported to make way for Poles, to
the Crimea or the North Caucasus, where Tatars, Chechens and others
made way for Russians and other Soviet national groups.2 Another factor

Uilleam Blacker is Lecturer in the Comparative Culture of Russia and Eastern Europe at
the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London.

1
See Norman Naimark, ‘Ethnic Cleansing between War and Peace’, in Amir Wiener
(ed.), Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth Century Population Management in a
Comparative Framework, Stanford, CA, 2003, pp. 167–88; on Wrocław, see Gregor Thum,
Uprooted: How Breslau became Wrocław during the Century of Expulsions, Princeton, NJ,
2011; on L’viv, see Yaroslav Hrytsak ‘Lviv: a Multicultural History through the Centuries’,
in John Czaplicka (ed.), Lviv: A City in the Crosscurrents of Culture, Cambridge, MA,
1999, pp. 47–74; on Kaliningrad, see Per Brodersen, Die Stadt im Westen: Wie Kaliningrad
Königsberg wurde, Göttingen, 2008.
2
See István Deák, ‘How to Construct a Productive, Disciplined, Monoethnic Society:
The Dilemma of East-Central European Governments, 1914–1956’, in Wiener, Landscaping

Slavonic and East European Review, 93, 4, 2015

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602 UILLEAM BLACKER
that left gaping holes in the urban fabric of cities across the region was the
Holocaust: many cities that were not switched from state to state or did
not experience a dramatic shift in the ethnic make-up of their majority
populations nevertheless lost large Jewish communities. In cities like
Warsaw, Jewish districts, sometimes sites of ghettos during the war, lay
derelict and ruined after the war, but were quickly resettled by homeless
locals or incomers.
As a result of this turmoil, millions of people across East Central
Europe and the Soviet Union immediately after the war inhabited places
that were alien to them. These people were surrounded by toponyms,
symbols, inscriptions and architectural languages that seemed obscure
and threatening. Some towns and cities were devastated, others left largely
intact, but even among ruins, the traces of the others who had been forcibly
removed or killed, sometimes others towards whom the new inhabitants
harboured deep feelings of resentment, remained. They could be seen in
the monuments in town squares, read in the street names and the signs of
shops; they could be found inscribed on domestic objects and in the books
and newspapers left behind in abandoned apartments and houses.
This experience of alienation and disorientation could not be admitted
openly in the post-war years. Propaganda in Poland, for example, cast
Wrocław and Gdańsk as eternally Polish cities, ‘regained’ from the
German enemy. The settlers in these cities and the surrounding regions
were represented as pioneers on the frontier of the new socialist Poland,
yet also returnees to a land that was rightfully theirs.3 L’viv and Vilnius
were primarily Polish-Jewish cities before the war, but had significant
Ukrainian and Lithuanian minorities for whom the cities were important
sites of memory; having become the majority, these communities quickly
set about forgetting the Polish-Jewish pasts. The lost Jews of so many cities
and towns in the region went largely uncommemorated, as the Soviet
Union and its satellite states refused to recognize the specifically Jewish
tragedy of the Holocaust, and the physical traces of their existence were
slowly erased through neglect or destruction.4 Official policy across the

the Human Garden, pp. 205–17; on Lemkos, see Diana Howansky Reilly, Scattered: The
Forced Relocation of Poland’s Ukrainians after World War II, Madison, WI, 2013; on the
North Caucasus, see Rebecca Gould, ‘Leaving the House of Memory: Post-Soviet Traces
of Deportation Memory’, Mosaic, 45, 2012, 2, pp. 149–64.
3
Gregor Thum, ‘Wrocław’s Search for a New Historical Narrative: From Polonocentrism
to Postmodernism’, in John Czaplicka, Nida Gelazis, Blair A. Ruble (eds), Cities after the
Fall of Communism: Reshaping Cultural Landscapes and European Identity, Baltimore,
MD and Washington, D.C., 2009, pp. 75–101.
4
Michael Meng, Shattered Spaces: Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Poland and

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 WRITING FROM THE RUINS OF EUROPE 603
new Communist states thus sought to establish the post-war status quo by
effacing the entangled and complex pasts of many cities, and by asserting
exclusive, Soviet-approved national narratives. It was only in the 1960s and
particularly 1970s, with the tentative rise of civil society movements across
the Eastern Bloc, that the other pasts of these cities were re-examined. This
began with the work of local activists and intellectuals, among whom writers
were at the forefront. As the Soviet period drew to a close, this interest grew,
and in some countries, most notably Poland, it became one of the major
themes of late, and then especially post-Communist literature and culture.
Similar trends appeared across the late- and post-Communist states, as
activists began to form local history societies, writers began to explore the
experience of living in cities that were haunted by others and, eventually,
local authorities began to pay attention to their neglected heritage.5
Kaliningrad presents a particularly extreme case of the patterns
outlined above: it was transferred from one state to another, it was entirely
repopulated, and it suffered huge material destruction, which was not
addressed through reconstruction as in the case of nearby Gdańsk, for
example. The city also represents perhaps the most extreme case of the
effacing of the pre-war past of all the cities mentioned above. Unlike in
the German cities transferred to Poland, there was little attempt to rewrite
urban history, and thus adapt the existing cityscape to carve out an ancient
and leading role for its new inhabitants: apart from some references in
official discourse to the lengthy Russian occupation of the city during
the Seven Years’ War, Königsberg was simply, and officially, declared to
have ceased existing, and to have been replaced with an entirely new city.6
Stefan Berger describes this process as ‘a radical attempt to replace one
constitutive narrative of socio-territorial identity, that of Königsberg, with
a counter-narrative, that of Kaliningrad’.7
Germany, Cambridge, MA and London, 2011; Amir Weiner, ‘When Memory Counts: War,
Genocide and Postwar Soviet Jewry’, in Landscaping the Human Garden, pp. 167–88.
5
Denis Kozlov, ‘The Historical Turn in Late Soviet Culture: Retrospectivism,
Factography, Doubt 1953–91’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 2/3,
2001, pp. 577–600; on Kaliningrad in particular see Olga Sezneva, ‘Locating Kaliningrad/
Königsberg on the Map of Europe’, in Cities after the Fall of Communism, pp. 195–215, and
Olga Sezneva ‘Living in the Russian Present with a German Past: The Problems of Identity
in the City of Kaliningrad’, in David Crowley and Susan Reid (eds), Socialist Spaces: Sites of
Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc, Oxford, New York, 2002, pp. 47–64; on L’viv, see Uilleam
Blacker, ‘Urban Commemoration and Literature in Post-Soviet L’viv: A Comparative
Analysis with the Polish Experience’, Nationalities Papers, 42, 2014, 4, pp. 1–18.
6
Edward Saunders, ‘Imagining Königsberg, 1945–2010’, unpublished PhD dissertation,
University of Cambridge, 2012, pp. 26–27.
7
Stefan Berger, ‘How to be Russian with a Difference: Kaliningrad and its German
Past’, Geopolitics, 15, 2010, 2, pp. 345–66 (p. 345).

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604 UILLEAM BLACKER
The new Soviet authorities had concrete reasons for adopting such an
approach. They considered the Königsberg of the past a direct threat to
the establishment of the new Soviet city, and it was thus thought more
judicious to declare the taking of the city by the Red Army as a fresh start.
This entailed creating a clean slate in the cityscape, and razing most of
the remains of the pre-war centre, since the buildings, and even the city
centre’s layout, were felt to have been inimical to Soviet ideology. At the
same time, investigation of the city’s pre-Soviet past was all but forbidden,
with exception made for archaeological research into the region’s ancient
Slavic cultures.8
Of course, this official narrative did not reflect the complexity of
experience on the ground, especially in the immediate post-war years.
Königsberg remained in scattered fragments, and the first Soviet settlers
lived in the surviving Prussian buildings. While the city centre was
completely transformed, parts of the pre-war suburbs remained intact and
are still inhabited today. The remains of many of the city’s landmarks also
endured for years after the war: the ruins of the city’s oldest church, the
thirteenth-century Standamm Kirche, were cleared in the early 1950s; the
medieval castle was demolished only in 1969, and two of the city’s surviving
bridges were dismantled and replaced in 1972. The cathedral, along with
the adjoining Kant mausoleum, was severely damaged by British bombing
raids in 1944, but its ruins were never cleared, and restoration work finally
began in the 1990s. Alongside these prominent examples, many other, less
conspicuous traces of the Prussian city persisted in everyday domestic and
public spaces of Soviet Kaliningrad.
These remains, crossing the divide between Königsberg and
Kaliningrad, fed and continue to feed the imaginations of local people
and to inform their perceptions of their city and of themselves. As the war
receded into memory and the Soviet system changed in the wake of the
death of Stalin and with de-Stalinization, it eventually became possible
to speak, if carefully, about the German past. Local people took these
opportunities to explore their city’s heritage, sometimes speaking out
against the destruction of German landmarks, and eventually forming
unofficial local history organizations.9 The city also began to interest local
writers and artists.10 As Olga Sezneva has argued, the uncovering of these
traces of a different, non-official past allowed the formation of alternative
8
Sezneva, ‘Living in the Russian Present’, pp. 50–52.
9
Sezneva, ‘Locating Kaliningrad/Königsberg’, p. 196, and ‘Living in the Russian Present’,
p. 61.
10
Berger, ‘How to be Russian with a Difference’, p. 350.

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 WRITING FROM THE RUINS OF EUROPE 605
local identities in Soviet times, and today many Kaliningraders retain
a sense of separateness from Russia proper and of a hybrid European-
Russian identity. Asked about the identity of Kaliningraders, one of
Sezneva’s respondents stated that: ‘We are cosmopolitans here. We live
without homeland, without Russia. We’re different here, non-Russians.
We are the hybrid of Russians and someone else.’ 11 This sentiment among
ordinary Kaliningraders is also reflected among the city’s elites. Politically,
Kaliningrad, like the rest of Russia, generally endorses the patriotic
ideology of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party, but for some among its
local elites its European roots are also important, and local politicians have
repeatedly attempted to capitalize on them.12 Aleksandr Popadin, a local
historian and policy maker, whose work as a writer will be discussed below,
has stated in relation to a project for redeveloping the city centre, which
he directs, that the aim is to ‘project a European city’ — something that is
also, he states, part of a Russian tradition, since European models were the
norm in Russian urban planning in the eighteenth century.13
This sense of the city as connecting Russian and European traditions
is not purely a product of the post-war resettlement or the late and post-
Soviet rediscovery of the Kaliningrad’s Prussian roots. Russian-European
cultural interaction had in fact been taking place for many years in the
city, albeit in very different circumstances. The Lithuanian writer Tomas
Venclova has traced a tradition of Russian-European interaction in the
Prussian city back to the eighteenth century: in 1789, for example, Nikolai
Karamzin visited Königsberg and met Immanuel Kant, an encounter that
he described in his famous account of his travels through Europe, Pis´ma
russkogo puteshestvennika (Letters of a Russian Traveller, 1791–92). Venclova
names a string of Russian writers who have passed through the city,
including Denis Fonvizin, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, Anton Chekhov,
Sergei Esenin and Vladimir Maiakovskii, and describes Königsberg as a
place where Russian intellectuals would first meet with European culture
in Europe proper — a site, as Venclova puts it, of ‘initiation’ into Europe.
By the same token, Königsberg played the role of the last stop on a Russian

11
Sezneva, ‘Locating Kaliningrad/Königsberg’, p. 201.
12
Stefan Berger and Paul Holtom, ‘Locating Kaliningrad and Königsberg in Russian
and German Collective Identity: Discourses and Political Symbolism in the 750th
Anniversary Celebrations of 2005’, Journal of Baltic Studies, 39, 2008, 1, pp. 15–37. See also,
Berger, ‘How to be Russian with a Difference’, and both articles by Sezneva.
13
‘Aleksandr Popadin: gorozhane schitaiut, chto Kaliningrad nuzhno sdelat´ udobnym
dlia prozhivania’, Russkii zapad, 2 December 2013 <http://ruwest.ru/interview/10868/>
[accessed 2 April 2014] (para. 3 of 30).

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606 UILLEAM BLACKER
traveller’s trip back to his or her homeland, a place to bid farewell to Europe
and prepare oneself to re-enter Russia. In both instances, Königsberg
functioned as a borderland city, in many ways similar to Petersburg, a place
on the edge of Russia and Europe, on the border between East and West,
which afforded a unique, semi-outsider perspective on both.14
Kaliningrad, of course, played a different role. Instead of a site of
exchange on a relatively porous border, it became a closed military
outpost, cut off from the rest of Europe. Yet at the same time something
of its previous status continued thanks to the elusive traces of Königsberg.
Venclova describes how intellectuals from Moscow, St Petersburg and
the Baltic states would visit and pay homage to the spirits of Immanuel
Kant or ETA Hoffman, to try and get a whiff of ‘old Europe’ within
the Soviet Union. This may well have been one of the motivations for
Joseph Brodsky’s trip to Kaliningrad in 1963, where he was sent by the
journal Koster, ostensibly to report on the achievements of a local pioneer
swimming team. Kaliningrad’s status as a remarkable site of ruins — in
both a physical, but also a wider, cultural sense — is no doubt what made it
appeal to Brodsky’s imagination. His body of work on Kaliningrad is small,
limited to three poems, but these are among the most interesting of his
early poetry. Only two of the three poems — ‘Einem Alten Architekten in
Rom’ (To an Old Architect in Rome, 1964: the original title is in German),
and ‘Otkrytka iz goroda K.’ (Postcard from the City of K., 1967) — engage
directly and in depth with the city. Another, shorter and untitled poem
(‘V ganzeiskoi gostinitse “Iakor´”’, In the Hanseatic Hotel ‘Anchor’, 1964)
describes Brodsky’s visit to the port of Baltiisk in the Kaliningrad region.15
In ‘Einem Alten Architekten in Rom’ and ‘Otkrytka iz goroda K.’,
Brodsky pays particular attention to Kaliningrad’s architecture and
cityscape, and their ruined state, using these as a springboard to progress
to wider reflections on time, transience and materiality. As Maja Könönen
has noted, this movement from the concrete to the universal is typical
of Brodsky’s use of the city, and especially of his native Leningrad-St
Petersburg.16 As well as Könönen, Tomas Venclova, Czesław Miłosz,
Lev Loseff and Valentina Polukhina have all identified St Petersburg’s

14
Tomas Venclova [Tomas Ventslova], ‘“Kenigsbergskii tekst” russkoi literatury i
kenigsbergskie stikhi Iosifa Brodskogo’, in Tomas Venclova, Stati o Brodskom, Moscow,
2005, pp. 96–120 (pp. 96–100).
15
Iosif Brodskii, ‘V ganzeiskoi gostinitse “Iakor’”’, in Iosif Brodskii, Stikhotvorenia i
poemy, ed. Lev Losev, St Petersburg, 2011, vol. 2, pp. 244–45.
16
Maja Könönen, ‘Four Ways of Writing the City’: St Petersburg-Leningrad as a
Metaphor in the Poetry of Joseph Brodsky, Helsinki, 2003, p. 40.

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 WRITING FROM THE RUINS OF EUROPE 607
architecture as a key reference point for Brodsky’s wider poetics and
ideas.17 Brodsky in turn states in a famous essay that the city taught him
far more than any conventional education could:

I must say that from these facades and porticoes — classical, modern,
eclectic, with their columns, pilasters, and plastered heads of mythic
animals or people — from their ornaments and caryatids holding up the
balconies, from the torsos in the niches of their entrances, I have learned
more about this history of our world than I subsequently have from any
book.18

Alongside St Petersburg and numerous other cities, from Rome and

Venice to London and New York, Kaliningrad represents one point in the
poetic geography of Brodsky’s works, a network of places past and present
that enter into complex relationships of metonymy and metaphor with one
another and, critically, with other texts about the same places.19 A central
element in this geography and its complex of intertextuality is ruins.
According to Lev Loseff, living among Leningrad’s ruined neoclassical
grandeur in the post-war years gave Brodsky the feeling of writing in the
wake of cultural devastation, something that Venclova echoes when he
identifies the poet’s ‘post-catastrophic’ sensibility.20 Andreas Schönle has
called the ruin in Brodsky’s poetry a ‘transitional space between space and
time’, and ‘a graphic emblem of the end of history’, while also identifying
the influence of Leningrad’s architecture as inspiring Brodsky’s fondness
for the elegy form, which affords what Schönle calls ‘an intimate, if
vicarious dialogue with the past’.21 David Rigsbee, similarly, has written
at length on the elegy in Brodsky, also identifying the importance for the
form of ruins as both image and metaphor through which themes of time,
memory, loss and exile are explored.22
17
Lev Loseff, Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life, trans. Ann Miller, New Haven, CT
and London, 2011, pp. 11–14; Czesław Miłosz, ‘A Huge Building of Strange Architecture’
(interview with Valentina Polukhina), in Valentina Polukhina, Brodsky through the Eyes
of his Contemporaries, London, 1992, pp. 325–40 (pp. 326, 337); Valentina Polukhina, Joseph
Brodsky: A Poet for our Time, Cambridge, 1989, p. 1; Venclova, Stati o Brodskom, p. 96.
18
Joseph Brodsky, ‘Less than One’, in Joseph Brodsky, Less than One: Selected Essays,
London, 1987, pp. 3–33 (p. 5).
19
Könönen, ‘Four Ways of Writing the City’, p. 15.
20
Loseff, Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life, p. 13; Venclova, Stati o Brodskom, p. 113.
21
Andreas Schönle, Architecture of Oblivion: Ruins and Historical Consciousness in
Modern Russia, DeKalb, IL, 2011, pp. 193, 183.
22
David Rigsbee, Styles of Ruin: Joseph Brodsky and the Postmodernist Elegy, Westport,
CT and London, 1999, p. 108 and throughout.

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608 UILLEAM BLACKER
‘Otkrytka iz goroda K.’ certainly falls into the elegiac category. Venclova,
citing such poets as Edmund Spenser and Mikołaj Sęp-Szarzyński,
identifies the poem with the baroque genre of the epitaph for Rome,
whereby the material ruins of the supposedly eternal city are contrasted
with the apparently fleeting and impermanent, yet paradoxically more
enduring waters of the river Tiber.23 The juxtaposition serves to facilitate
reflection on the transience of materiality, and of life itself. The poem
describes how the waters of the Pregolya, or Pregel, Kaliningrad’s river,
reflect but also shatter the image of the already ruined castle, which is
described as heeding too late the water’s warnings of the destructive effects
of time:

Вода
дробит в зерцале пасмурном руины
Дворца Курфюрста; и небось, теперь
пророчествам реки он больше внемлет,
чем в те самоуверенные дни,
когда курфюрст его отгрохал.

Water
fractures in the murky mirror the ruins
of the Kuhrfürst Palace; and perhaps now
it heeds the river’s prophecies more carefully
than in those self-confident days,
when Kuhrfürst raised it.24

As Venclova points out, here the Tiber is replaced by the Pregolya,

Kaliningrad’s river, and the ruins of Rome with the ruins of Königsberg’s
castle. Polukhina has noted that the use of water as a metonym for time
is a frequent device in Brodsky’s poetry, and Brodsky himself confirms
this: writing on Leningrad-St Petersburg, the poet describes the city as a
vain Narcissus, covered in its ostentatious classical decorations, gazing at
its reflection in the Neva, whose waters ‘may be regarded as a condensed
form of time’.25
23
Venclova, Stati o Brodskom, p. 107; David MacFadyen has also drawn the connection
between baroque literature and Brodsky’s depictions of the city in Joseph Brodsky and the
Baroque, Montreal and Kingston, ON, 1998.
24
Joseph Brodsky, ‘Otkrytka iz goroda K.’, in Stikhotvorenia i poemy, vol. 1, pp. 262–63
(p. 262); the translation is my own.
25
Brodsky, ‘Guide to a Renamed City’, in Brodsky, Less than One, p. 69–94 (p. 77);
Polukhina, Joseph Brodsky, pp. 83–84.

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 WRITING FROM THE RUINS OF EUROPE 609
Water also plays an important role in the more elaborate poem, ‘Einem
Alten Architekten in Rom’, which also compares the city to Narcissus,
providing one of several echoes of Petersburg in the Kaliningrad poems,
and which contains imagery not just of the city’s river, but also of an ever-
present rain and of the nearby sea. The poem’s title references Wallace
Stevens’, ‘To an Old Philosopher in Rome’, with which Brodsky’s poem
shares a concern with the opposition between the material and the
spiritual that is created by the closeness of death, and which also reinforces
the reference to the Roman epitaph. Venclova speculates that one of the
figures in the poem — which describes the journey of two unidentified
people in a horse-drawn carriage through the ruined city — may be Kant,
in what may be a reference to Karamzin’s earlier visit to the city.26 Schönle,
on the other hand, has suggested that the architect of the poem’s title, and
perhaps the passenger also, may be a reference to Giovanni Piranesi, a
figure who appears elsewhere in Brodsky’s work, the eighteenth-century
Italian artist and architect famous for his etchings of, among other things,
Rome in ruins.27 Indeed, Loseff has suggested that Brodsky’s experience
of ruined post-war Leningrad meant that he felt a particular affinity with
Piranesi’s images.28
The second stanza of the poem refers both to the river and the rain.
Water envelopes the city from all sides, dramatically amplifying the sense
of the ruinous effects of time:

Дождь щиплет камни, листья, край волны.

Дразня язык, бормочет речка смутно,
чьи рыбки, навсегда оглушены,
заброшены сюда взрывной волной
(хоть сам прилив не оставлял отметки).
Блестит кольчугой голавель стальной.
Деревья что-то шепчут по-немецки.

Rain nibbles at the leaves, stones, hems of waves.

The river licks its chops and mutters darkly;
its fish look down from the bridge railings, stunned
sheer out of time, into eternity,
as though thrown up by an exploding wave.
(The rising tide itself has left no mark.)
26
Venclova, Stati o Brodskom, p. 111.
27
Schönle, Architecture of Oblivion, p. 187.
28
Loseff, Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life, p. 13.

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610 UILLEAM BLACKER
A carp gleams in its coat of steel chain-mail.
The trees are vaguely whispering in German.29

The poem elsewhere compares the landscape around the city with the
waves of the sea, representing them as mirroring one another, and towards
the end of the poem the carriage and its mysterious passenger seem to
disappear into the sea, and are thus entirely swallowed by water/time. As
the passengers enter the water, the mirroring of sea and land/cityscape
becomes a merging, and water and earth, time and material, become one.
Just as the river in ‘Otkrytka’ shatters the image of the city, time here
triumphs the over material, engulfing both the landscape and those who
inhabit it:

Постромки в ключья... Лошадь где?... Подков

не слышен стук... Петляя там, в руинах,
коляска катит меж пустых холмов...
Съезжает с них куда-то вниз... Две длинных
шлеи за ней... И вот — в песке следы
больших колес... Шуршат кусты в засаде...

И море, гребни чьи несут черты

того пейзажа, что остался сзади,
бежит навстречу и, как будто весть,
благую весть — сюда, к земной границе, —
влечет валы. И это сходство здесь
уничтожает в них, лаская спицы.

The harness traces stand in shreds... Where is

the horse?... The clatter of his hooves has died...
The carriage rolls among the empty hills,
looping through ruins, coasting fast. Two long
breech-straps trail out behind it... There are wheel-tracks
in the sand. The bushes buzz with ambushes...

The sea, whose crests repeat the silhouettes

of landscapes that the wheels have left behind them,
draws in its billows to the land’s frontier,
spreading them like the news — like the Good News —
29
Iosif Brodskii, ‘Einem Alten Architekten in Rom’, in Stikhotvorenia i poemy, vol. 1,
pp. 194–97 (p. 194); Joseph Brodsky, ‘Einem Alten Architekten in Rom’, in Joseph Brodsky:
Selected Poems, trans. George L. Kline, Harmondsworth, 1973, pp. 116–20.

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 WRITING FROM THE RUINS OF EUROPE 611
and thus destroys the likeness of the waves
and hills, caressing the wet carriage-spokes.30

Brodsky’s representation of Kaliningrad is not purely about abstract

reflections on time and materiality, however. It is also a portrait of a
specific, concrete post-war European landscape. The poem refers to
numerous specific landmarks in the city, to the allied bombings, and
to the strange features of the post-war cityscape — such as the bust of
Suvorov placed incongruously on top of a much too large pedestal that had
previously supported a statue of Bismarck, and which stands in the midst
of the post-war waste ground near the cathedral’s ruins, now being used,
the poem informs us, as a workshop (see citation below). There are also
references to the city’s German history, while the German language still
seems to echo among the treetops.
The landscape of Kaliningrad speaks, thus, not just to abstract notions
of transience, but to the specific degeneration and fragmentation of
European culture during and after the Second World War as embodied
in one of its devastated urban landscapes. This concern with culture
is, according to Polukhina, central in Brodsky’s work. This is culture
understood in broad terms, as European or world culture, with which
Russian culture is involved in complex dialogue: it is for this reason that,
according to Polukhina, Brodsky is so prolifically intertextual. Polukhina
also links Brodsky’s concern with culture with his fascination with the city,
particularly with Petersburg’s habit of absorbing and displaying the whole
repertoire of European culture in its buildings, turning the city into a vast
collection of citations.31 In a related observation, Könönen has argued
that for Brodsky poetic reference to the city’s actual topography is closely
intertwined with reference to the canon of texts related to the city.32 Loseff
and others have suggested that the ruination of Petersburg led Brodsky to
reflections on the ruination of culture; the Kaliningrad poems display this
even more dramatically, depicting a journey through the devastated ruins
of a great European city that has been erased by the barbarism of war, and
is slowly being forgotten under the neglect of Soviet rule: just as goats can
be seen grazing in the ruins of Rome after it was sacked by barbarians
in Piranesi’s etchings, in Brodsky’s poem a goat peers through a fence at
Kaliningrad:

30
Brodskii, ‘Einem Alten Architekten in Rom’, p. 197; Brodsky, ‘Einem Alten
Architekten in Rom’, pp. 119–20.
31
Polukhina, Joseph Brodsky, p. 55.
32
Könönen, ‘Four Ways of Writing the City’, p. 17.

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612 UILLEAM BLACKER
Клен выпускает первый клейкий лист.
В соборе слышен пилорамы свист.
И кашляют грачи в пустынном парке.
Скамейки мокнут. И во все глаза
из-за ограды смотрит вдаль коза,
где зелень распустилась на фольварке.

A maple tree flaunts its first sticky leaves.

Power saws are whining in the Gothic church.
Rooks cough in the deserted city playground.
Park benches gleam with rain. A nanny-goat
behind a fence stares at that distant spot
where the first green has spread across the farmyard.33

As Könönen notes, in Brodsky’s Petersburg poetry the city is not only

a kind of text or a route into a certain literary canon: the spaces of the city
that the poet describes also merge with the realm of language in which
the poet makes his home.34 This link between urban space and language
is clearly made in relation to Kaliningrad-Königsberg in the reference to
the whispering trees. The combination of this with the imagery used in
the above citation in reference to a European city that has been ruined
by Soviet violence and neglect reflects Brodsky’s wider view, identified by
Polukhina, of the ruinous effect of Soviet rule not only on Russian culture,
but on the Russian language.35 Yet while impoverishment of language
accompanies cultural material ruin, it is also in language that memory
survives: the trees whisper in German, while the erased name of the city
— Königsberg — is found perched in these whispering trees, embodied as
a bird, suggesting that old names, and the past they embody, persist even
after they have been purged:

Чик, чик, чирик. Чик-чик. — Посмотришь вверх.

И в силу грусти, а верней — привычки,
увидишь в тонких прутьях Кёнигсберг.
А почему б не называться птичке
Кавказом, Римом, Кёнигсбергом, а?
Когда вокруг — лишь кирпичи и щебень,

33
Brodskii, ‘Einem Alten Architekten in Rom’, p. 195; Brodsky, ‘Einem Alten
Architekten in Rom’, pp. 117–18.
34
Könönen, ‘Four Ways of Writing the City’, pp. 177–79.
35
Polukhina, Joseph Brodsky, p. 11.

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 WRITING FROM THE RUINS OF EUROPE 613
предеметов нет, а только есть слова.
Но нету уст. И раздается щебет.

Cheep, cheep-chireep. Cheep-cheep. You look above

and out of sorrow or, it may be, habit
you glimpse a Königsberg among the twigs.
And why shouldn’t a bird be called a Königs-
berg, a Caucasus, a Rome? — When all
around us there are only bricks and broken
stones; no objects, only words. And yet —
no lips. The only sound we hear is twittering.36

This persistence of the name is key: as Könönen suggests, proper names

are one of the strongest linking points in the dialogue between cities of
the past and present and across textual canons.37 Through the name, then,
culture and memory can survive material destruction as language. In
Kaliningrad, however, there are no lips to pronounce these words, to speak
the vanished city: memory and the words that bear it seem rather to lie
dormant among the ruins, independent of individual or collective subjects,
waiting to be rediscovered and articulated.
Brodsky was rare among Soviet writers of the post-war decades in
broaching the subject of the fragmented memories and landscapes of
Kaliningrad. As outlined above, the topic was taboo in the Soviet Union,
and the work of writers, local or otherwise, steered clear of the German
past. While some minor local writers may have referred to the German
past here and there, no significant literary statements on Kaliningrad’s
difficult past were made until after 1991. Zinovy Zinik is one of a small
number of Russian writers that have explored the city in their writing in
recent years. Like Brodsky, Zinik is an outsider to the city: he is a native
of Moscow who has lived in emigration in the UK since 1976, and visited
Kaliningrad only once. Also like Brodsky, Zinik has not made Kaliningrad
a major preoccupation, treating it only in one novella, Noga moego otsa
(My Father’s Leg, 2004), and has also used it as a route into more universal
problems. Part of the essayistic, autobiographical novella describes the
author’s visit to Kaliningrad in the early 2000s, explaining that the city
has fascinated him since childhood, as it was here that his father lost a leg
during the war.
36
Brodskii, ‘Einem Alten Architekten in Rom’, p. 196–97; Brodsky, ‘Einem Alten
Architekten in Rom’, p. 119.
37
Könönen, ‘Four Ways of Writing the City’, pp. 57–58.

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614 UILLEAM BLACKER
Zinik uses Kaliningrad primarily to explore a preoccupation that he
shares with Brodsky: exile. The city, for Zinik, is a part of Russia separated
by distance and borders from itself, a space that is both Russia and not
Russia at the same time, Russia and its opposite:

This city enchanted me, perhaps because I recognized myself in it. Divided
off in our time from the Russian metropolis by the lands of Lithuania
and Belarus, Kaliningrad is a kind of island in a foreign sea, something
like Great Britain. A Muscovite who has lived for a quarter of a century
in London, I live in a foreign present, and the fears of my Soviet past
sometimes appear in my dreams of a British future. And is there not a
similarity here with Königsberg, which changed its name to Kaliningrad,
but where, as Brodsky wrote, ‘the trees whisper in German’ […]? 38

Zinik is also interested in Kaliningrad’s status as a city with a ‘lost past’,

which for the author is suggestive of wider historical experiences in Russia
or the former Soviet Union, whereby it is not infrequent for generations to
grow up feeling that they are cut off from the lands of their pasts, of their
childhoods, which are their true homes. This is certainly the case for the
narrator’s father, who lost not only a leg with the caesura of the war, but
also his own past, since the country he returned to, and the life he had
made in it, were irreversibly altered.39
Towards the end of the novella, Zinik brings the images of the
fragmented city and his father’s prosthetic leg together to reflect on the
Russian or Soviet experience of twentieth-century history: according to
Zinik, the people who came to inhabit this city, like their counterparts
across the USSR, were turned by the catastrophes of the twentieth century
and by Soviet rule into creatures that he compares to golems, centaurs
and Frankenstein’s monster: grotesque hybrids with stitched-together
memories, who nevertheless managed to survive the century’s traumas.
Kaliningrad epitomizes this as a city with an amputated past, a place that
is mutilated by the twentieth century and roughly pieced back together:

38
Zinovy Zinik, Noga moego otsa, Ural, 7, 2005 <http://magazines.russ.ru/ural/2005/7/
z4.html> [accessed 2 April 2014] (section 3, para. 8 of 37).
39
Iurii Buida identifies a similar problem in the Soviet context in relation to
repressions: the main character in his novel, Don Domino (translated as The Zero Train,
1994) is told that because his parents were convicted as enemies of the people he himself
‘has no past’. See Iurii Buida, Tret´e sertse/Don Domino, Moscow, 2010, p. 131; Yuri Buida,
The Zero Train, trans. Oliver Ready, Sawtry, 2001, p. 20.

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 WRITING FROM THE RUINS OF EUROPE 615
This centaur […] has survived the catastrophes of the twentieth century
(from the gas-genocide to the correctional labour camps and the atom
bomb), with a physiological nature that is a tri-partite unity of human
flesh, electronic chips and mechanisms, that is, prosthetics. This is a magic
human robot with computer brains, a new golem, the prosthesis of the
human soul. In the same way that Kaliningrad is the reinforced concrete
sheath, the prosthesis of the amputated spirit of Königsberg.40

Zinik here gives literary expression to a metaphor that has gained

some currency in the field of memory studies, that of prosthetic memory,
as developed by Alison Landsberg and Celia Lury.41 These are memories
that are attached, as it were, to one’s own memory artificially, principally
through popular visual media. Memory that is articulated publicly
and powerfully through a medium like cinema can, according to these
theorists, become as deeply felt as that of actual lived experience. Prosthetic
memory has also been cited by Marianne Hirsch in relation to her theory
of postmemory, which describes the vivid memories of the Holocaust that
are passed down to and internalized by the children and grandchildren of
survivors.42 For Landsberg, while prosthetic memory is ‘neither inherently
progressive nor inherently reactionary’, it has the ‘ability to generate
empathy’ with others.43 For Zinik, as for Hirsch, this kind of memory
has another dimension: while the potential for building empathy is cited
also by Hirsch, and is implicit in Zinik, both also identify a disturbing
dimension to prosthetic memory. Hirsch describes the difficulties of
coping with the overwhelming, haunting memories of the Holocaust, while
Zinik underlines the uncanny, frightening nature of prosthetic memory
in the grotesque image of his father’s disembodied leg wandering through
Kaliningrad kicking the contemporary citizens. Prosthetic memory can
be voluntarily embraced, yet it can also manifest itself violently and
unpredictably.
In Zinik, and indeed in the work of the other authors discussed here,
the bodily-prosthetic metaphor is expanded to include disfigured memory
that is manifest in the ugly scars and physical mutilation of both body and
city. Zinik mentions Prussian monuments that had their heads knocked off
40
Zinik (section 4, para. 18 of 18).
41
Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance
in the Age of Mass Culture, New York, 2004; Celia Lury, Prosthetic Culture: Photography,
Memory, Identity, London, 1998.
42
Marianne Hirsch, ‘The Generation of Postmemory’, Poetics Today, 29, 2008, 1, pp.
103–28 (p. 105).
43
Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, pp. 3, 24.

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616 UILLEAM BLACKER
by Soviet soldiers, echoing the striking image from Brodsky’s ‘Einem Alten
Architekten’ of the mutilated figures of stone lions and cupids, shamefully
hiding their ‘stumps’ from observers:

Аканты, нимбы, голубки, голубки,

атланты, нимфы, купидоны, львы
смущенно прячут за спиной обрубки.

Acanthi, nimbi, doves (both male and female),

atlantes, cupids, lions, nymphs, all hide
their stumps behind their backs, plainly embarrassed.44

This connection between architectural ruins and ruined bodies is one

that recurs in Brodsky, as Rigsbee points out, expressing the common,
time-ravaged materiality of humans and their environments.45 Similar
motifs also occur in Iurii Buida’s stories on the Kaliningrad region in
relation both to characters, many of whom display physical and mental
scarring and disabilities that have been inflicted on them by the violence
and unpredictability of historical events, and elements of the Prussian
cityscape, such as the figure of Justice on top of the ruined prison building,
which lacks an arm.46 Indeed, this kind of imagery is not only confined to
literature: Leonid Brezhnev, keen to see the city leave the past behind and
inscribe itself into the Soviet narrative of modernity, is reported to have
called the ruins of Königsberg cathedral a ‘rotten tooth’ during a visit to
the city in 1980, and recommended their removal.47
The use of images of amputated, dead or rotten body parts by these three
writers and the former General Secretary demonstrates how the German
past becomes abject, to use Julia Kristeva’s term for that which is outside of
the symbolic order, and thus revolts us and traumatizes us when we face it.
Kristeva identifies the human reaction to corpses as an exemplification of
the abject, but also extends it to our response to traumatic experience that
we do not wish to face, and which we reject, attempting to purge it from
memory.48 For Zinik, and for the other writers examined here, the foreign
44
Brodskii, ‘Einem Alten Architekten in Rom’, p. 195; Brodsky, ‘Einem Alten Architekten
in Rom’, p. 117.
45
Rigsbee, Styles of Ruin, pp. 125–26.
46
Iurii Buida, Prusskaia nevesta, Moscow, 1998, p. 161; Yuri Buida, The Prussian Bride,
trans. Oliver Ready, Sawtry, 2002, p. 210.
47
James Charles Roy, The Vanished Kingdom: Travels through the History of Prussia,
Boulder, CO and Oxford, 1999, p. 15.
48
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New

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 WRITING FROM THE RUINS OF EUROPE 617
past appears both as a disembodied limb, inspiring revulsion and rejection,
but also as the degraded, troubling fragments of the devastated German
city. The city itself, in other words, contains abject spaces. This is something
that Michael Meng has specifically identified in the attitudes of Poles
and Germans to the devastated post-Holocaust Jewish spaces left in their
cities.49 It is precisely the desire to purge the abject that inspired the post-
war authorities to wish to remove Kaliningrad’s ‘rotten teeth’, to declare
Königsberg a ‘dead’ city, whose remains should be expelled — physically,
discursively, mnemonically — from the Soviet symbolic order.
The other past is not always seen in these terms, of course: as mentioned
above, many in Kaliningrad have tried to come to terms with and even
internalize the ‘abject’ German past. The author and activist Aleksandr
Popadin is a prominent contemporary example of this. He is the least well
known of the writers discussed here, but he is the only one who comes from
and still lives in the city of Kaliningrad itself. Popadin is not only a writer, but
has also been an active campaigner for various initiatives to commemorate
the city’s Prussian past, including for the reconstruction of the city’s castle.
In 2012, Popadin became director of the project ‘Heart of the City’, which is
sponsored by the municipal government and charged with developing the
city’s historic centre. In addition to his policy work, Popadin has published
collections of local legends and historical anecdotes — Mestnoe vremia:
progulki po Kalningradu (Local Time: Walks around Kaliningrad, 1998) and
Mestnoe vremia: 20.10 (Local Time: 20.10, 2010) — and written a novella,
Ivanov i ego okresnosti (Ivanov and His Surroundings, 2003).
The protagonists of Popadin’s novella, three childhood friends seemingly
in their thirties or forties, engage in a childish quest to find Kaliningrad/
Königsberg’s fabled ‘amber room’, which they believe to be hidden beneath
one of their houses, one of the remaining Prussian tenements on the
outskirts of the city. The choice of the amber room as the object of the
search reflects the complex history of German-Russian relations. This
spectacular room, richly decorated in Baltic amber, was created in Prussia
in the early eighteenth century by craftsmen from the Baltic and given by
Friedrich Wilhelm I to Peter the Great as a gift. The room was looted by
the Nazis from Tsarskoe Selo during the Second World War and taken to
Königsberg, where all trace of it vanished. Tales of the possible location
or reported discoveries of the room are a common feature of Kaliningrad

York, 1982.
49
Michael Meng, Shattered Spaces: Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Poland and
Germany, Cambridge, MA and London, 2011, pp. 109–10 and passim.

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618 UILLEAM BLACKER
urban folklore, and feature prominently in Popadin’s books on local
legend.50
In Popadin’s novella, the vanished and inaccessible amber room serves
as a metaphor for the fascinating but unknowable German past. Yet while
the room cannot be found, other, more modest traces can. During their
search of the building, the protagonists encounter objects that have been
left behind by the pre-war Germans in a dusty attic. Recalling Brodsky’s
whispering trees, these objects begin to speak to one another in the
protagonists’ presence, discussing the barbarity of the city’s present-day
inhabitants. Here, an old German typewriter addresses a sewing machine:

‘Oh no, Herr Singer! I’ve told you a thousand times, and I’ll tell you a
thousand more: the fact that we do not observe any conscious actions
on the part of the new inhabitants of the city does not mean that we are
bad observers, but rather that nothing conscious is happening in the city.
Everything that happens is barbarically stupid and uncivilized.’ 51

The protagonists do come close to finding the amber room, but due to
their own incompetence ultimately fail to gain access to the basement that
hides a secret entrance to it: had they done so, we are told, they would have
encountered two mysterious old Germans who have been guarding the
doorway since the war, but the encounter never takes place. Popadin’s story
of the Prussian building on the outskirts of Kaliningrad presents an image
of present-day inhabitants who are enthralled by the hidden secrets of their
city, but never entirely able to access or comprehend them. Indeed, Popadin
has stated that the German past has been ‘pushed into an inarticulate
function of the subconscious’ of Kaliningraders, and while in his activist
and policy-making activities he clearly wishes to reverse this situation, his
work expresses the ambiguities and difficulties involved in this process.52
The complex attitudes of the Russian residents of the Kaliningrad
region to the Prussian past are most thoroughly explored by Iurii Buida
in his volume of interlinked short stories, Prusskaia nevesta (The Prussian
Bride, 1998), and to a lesser extent (despite its title) in his novella, Kenigsberg
(Königsberg, 2003). Prusskaia nevesta is set not in Kaliningrad itself,
but the small town of Znamensk (formerly Wehlau) in the Kaliningrad
region. The collection is full of imagery of the past suddenly, and often
50
Aleksandr Popadin, Mestnoe vremia: progulki po Kaliningradu, Kaliningrad, 2010, p. 22.
51
Aleksandr Popadin, Ivanov i ego okrestnosti, 2003 <www.proza.ru/2003/04/29-20>
[accessed 2 April 2014] (Chapter 2, section titled ‘Obitateli’ [Inhabitants], para. 8 of 25).
52
Sezneva, ‘Locating Kaliningrad/Königsberg’, p. 204.

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 WRITING FROM THE RUINS OF EUROPE 619
disturbingly coming to the surface from underneath the very feet of the
inhabitants of the small ex-Prussian town, as in the striking scene that
opens the collection, and which gives the book its title, in which young
boys in search of treasure in a ruined Prussian graveyard come across a
beautiful young woman who is seemingly miraculously preserved in her
grave:

The girl sighed, and at that same instant her airy dress and the smooth
skin were turned into a cloud of dust, which settled slowly along her
knotted spine. We gazed entranced at the yellow skeleton, at the white
shoes sticking out absurdly with their gold heels, at the heart-shaped
watch, still ticking, at the thick hair in which the dark-yellow egg of her
skull was nesting.53

When the magical and macabre spectre from the past has vanished before
it can be grasped, all that is left are objects — here, the watch and the
shoes. Such objects are a constant and uncanny presence in the everyday
lives of Znamensk’s inhabitants: their homes are full of German furniture
and other domestic objects, while German crockery or silverware buried
for safekeeping during the war are constantly being found in the ground.
Buida describes these objects as ‘scarily ours’.54 These traces are attractive
and fascinating, but also frightening, and aggravate a deep ambivalence
and uneasiness towards the abject Prussian past:

Close by, a stone’s throw away, lay an enchanted world. But if a Russian in
Pskov or Ryazan could enter an enchanted world which he had inherited
by right, what was I here, a man without a key, of a different race, blood,
language and faith? At best a treasure-seeker, at worst a grave-digger.55

It is noticeable that Buida and Popadin, who write, unlike Brodsky and
Zinik, from a local point of view, are more concerned with exploring what
it means for the individual to be confronted on an everyday level with the
traces of lost others in the space that he or she calls home. Brodsky and
Zinik both use Kaliningrad primarily to stand for something else, to point
at wider experiences and universal ideas. Nevertheless, the particular and
the local do intersect with the universal on a number of levels in both
Popadin and Buida. For example, both point to the feeling of cultural
53
Buida, Prusskaia nevesta, p. 6; Buida, The Prussian Bride, pp. 13–14.
54
Buida, Prusskaia nevesta, p. 122; Buida, The Prussian Bride, p. 152.
55
Buida, Prusskaia nevesta, p. 7; Buida, The Prussian Bride, pp. 15–16.

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620 UILLEAM BLACKER
inferiority or barbarity felt by post-war Soviet citizens when faced with
the remains of a seemingly superior European urban culture that has been
destroyed by the society to which one belongs. This is something that
Brodsky in turn identifies as a more general trait of Russia’s self-perception
when confronted with European culture. According to Polukhina, it is this
inferiority complex that lies at the root of Brodsky’s own preoccupation
with incorporating the best of world literature into his poetry through
intertextuality.56
Brodsky and Buida also share a concern with the general effect on
memory of living among ruins; in Brodsky, this is a concern that is manifest
in a metonymic use of Kaliningrad to reflect on a wider phenomenon,
while in Buida it is manifest in the detailed, private micro-mapping of
Znamensk. In his poem, ‘Sovremennaia pesnia’ (Contemporary Song,
1961), not set in any specific city, Brodsky describes how the experience of
being a ‘person of the ruins’ leads to an undermining of memory, including
of the traditional mnemonic practice of photography. He cites the ‘person
of ruins’ as warning that ‘В наши дни, — так они говорят, — не стоит
заводить фотографий’ (‘In our time’, so they say, ‘it’s not worth keeping
photographs’).57 Photographs here, instead of being media through which
the past can be accessed and preserved, are simply a useless, undifferentiated
part of the landscapes of ruins. The mnemonic ambiguity of photography
can be observed in Prusskaia nevesta: in the story ‘Sinie guby’ (Blue Lips), a
man walks through the town photographing empty spaces where he could
remember spending time with his young family, which he had managed to
form with a local German woman when he was a prisoner of war billeted
to work on the land of a German farmer, but which he has since tragically
lost. By taking photographs of these places, the man, who represents a rare
bridge between the pre-war and post-war communities, attempts to recover
his past life — piling negative on negative, he produces images that contain
strange, shadowy shapes that he believes to be a kind of manifestation of
the past. The man is not, incidentally, a teacher of German language, and
as he walks through the city, photographing empty spaces, he narrates the
town’s German past to the narrator of the story, a young boy.58
As in Brodsky’s ‘Contemporary Song’, in Buida’s story the archetypal
medium of memory, the photograph points towards absence, oblivion and
ruination. The teacher’s images, and his narratives about the German past
56
Polukhina, Joseph Brodsky, p. 55.
57
Iosif Brodsky, ‘Sovremennaia pesnia’, in Sochinenia Iosifa Brodskogo, ed. G. F. Komarov,
St Petersburg, 1997, vol. 1, pp. 74–75 (p. 75).
58
Buida, Prusskaia nevesta, pp. 191–93; Buida, The Prussian Bride, pp. 258–59.

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 WRITING FROM THE RUINS OF EUROPE 621
tell not of what is or was present, but point to the absence of those who
once inhabited these spaces. This is precisely how Brodsky’s ‘Postcard
from the city of K.’ functions: the postcard here is a very unusual one,
in that it does not show flattering views of the city’s famous buildings or
landmarks, but instead explores the broken spaces where the city used to
be. This impression is intensified by the repeated references to the broken
reflections of the city in water or glass in the poem: not only is the city
devastated, but its image, or after-image, is fragmented and ultimately lost,
causing memory to be obscured or fade.
The ambiguous use of photographic images by Brodsky and Buida
calls to mind Roland Barthes’ analysis of the semiotics of the photograph.
Barthes asserts that the photograph provides a kind of direct access to its
referent that is unique among forms of representation: without the real
existence of the object at the moment the photograph was taken, the image
cannot exist, and the image is thus connected, as though by an umbilical
cord, physically to its referent. At the same time, however, photography
dramatically underlines the caesura with the past, the impossibility of
its return: as Barthes states, in each photograph we are reminded that
the object can no longer be as it is represented — it has always already
deteriorated, or is dead or gone.59
In many ways, Barthes’ description of the experience of viewing a
photograph can also be applied to the experience of inhabiting a ruined
city filled with traces of lost others. There are strong similarities between
the mechanism of signification of the photograph, as described by Barthes,
and that of the city: just as the photograph cannot exist without the actual
physical presence in the past of the object before the camera, so the city
cannot exist without the physical presence and actions in the past of the
previous residents: by living in its buildings, walking its streets, using
the objects left behind in it, we experience a close physical connection to
those who came before. In a city that has enjoyed continuity between past
and present in terms of its inhabitants, this is taken for granted, yet in
cities like Kaliningrad, marked by dramatic discontinuity in population,
this connection becomes uneasy, and the fragmented traces of previous
inhabitants become constant reminders of irreversible loss and potential
sources of alienation.
How, then, does one address this sense of alienation? Understanding
the semiotic dynamics of the city in the way outlined above may pave
the way for a possible solution: if cities have lost their referents when they
59
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, London 1982, pp. 69 & 76.

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622 UILLEAM BLACKER
have lost their original inhabitants (in the sense of the community of
mnemonic continuity, rather than the actual individuals, who obviously
change over time), then there must be an empty space left in the semiotic
equation where the referent should be. Physically, if not discursively,
this is a space that is occupied by the new inhabitants. This may be an
uncomfortable space for these people, yet the very fact of their being there
opens the possibility that a meaningful connection to place and to the
memories therein contained could be formed by overcoming revulsion at
the abject, embracing this position of secondary or substitute referent, and
repositioning or altering the self to becoming the community to which the
city, in all its dimensions, refers. This possibility is raised by Celia Lury
in her description of prosthetic memory as a kind of ‘self-extension’ that
allows a re-negotiation of the ‘relations between consciousness, memory
and the body’ and also a process by which the subject can ‘lay claim to
features of the context or environment as if they were the outcome of the
testing of his or her personal capacities’.60 Buida identifies something
similar in the introduction to his collection:

Shadows and secrets belonged to an alien world that had plunged into non-
being. But, in a strange way these shadows and secrets — or perhaps the
shadow of a shadow, the hint of a secret — became part of the chemistry
of my soul.61

What Buida describes here is the formation of a hybrid identity based

on a creative harnessing of the experiences of dislocation and physical
ruination so typical of Europe, and especially Eastern Europe and the
(former) Soviet Union, in the mid-to-late twentieth century. In his work
on the Kaliningrad region, Buida does not describe a straightforward
confrontation between Russians and an alien, ex-German city, but provides
a wider picture of the true complexity of Soviet displacement — his stories
contain the narratives of Jews, Belarusians, Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians
and others whose routes to Kaliningrad are convoluted and traumatic.
This sense of a Soviet and post-Soviet community that is the product of
traumatic entanglements and discontinuities can also be seen in several
of Buida’s other works, for example, in his first novel, Don Domino (1994),
set in a small, unnamed provincial Soviet town, or his collection, Zhungli
(Jungle, 2010), which takes an approach similar to that of Prusskaia nevesta

60
Lury, Prosthetic Culture, p. 3.
61
Buida, Prusskaia nevesta, p. 16; Buida, The Prussian Bride, p. 8.

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 WRITING FROM THE RUINS OF EUROPE 623
in producing a panoramic portrait of a small town on the edge of Moscow
that is slowly being absorbed into the capital.
The writer and critic Olga Slavnikova has argued that Buida’s Znamensk
shows the complete absorption and neutralization of cultural richness and
diversity in an amorphous sea of Russianness:

Their [the characters’] nationality is erased. They all become Russian,

that is, nobody: this is the water, the neutral solvent in which the Jewish
or German elements miraculously surviving on this graveyard-island
dissolve.62

The population of the small town is indeed primarily Russian — or perhaps

more accurately Russian Soviet — but this Russian Sovietness in Buida’s
projection consists not in the clear-cut erasure of old identities and the
imposition of a new one, but rather in the locals’ continued status as ragged,
mongrel, traumatized and dislocated subjects, as Zinik’s post-traumatic
‘golems’, or Brodsky’s ‘people of the ruins’ who have been produced by
what Rigsbee describes as Brodksy’s central preoccupation: ‘the drama
of the twentieth century displaced person, homeless, contingent, but not
without resources’.63
The previous identities, origins and memories of these people are not
erased, damaged as they may be, just as the Prussian past can never be
finally washed out of the degraded urban fabric of Kaliningrad: in this
sense, the setting suits its inhabitants well. A key figure in this regard, for
example, is the eccentric Veselaya Gertruda (Jolly Gertrude), one of only
two Germans left in the town, who is known for spontaneously singing
Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ in the street. This is, on the one hand, a grotesque
yet elated expression of suppressed identity, released under the mask of
madness. Yet on the other, the choice of song, the German words of which
are reproduced phonetically in Russian in the text, is telling: the German-
language anthem of Europe, symbol of its rich culture and ability to unite
despite a broken past, is both a piece of bathetic irony, given the context, yet
also a sign that memories remain in dormant, hidden language, as in the
whispers in Brodsky’s trees, always retaining the potential to burst forth.
The identity of the central character in the tellingly titled story, ‘Rita
Shmidt kto ugodno’ (Rita Schmidt Whoever), which is arguably the central

62
Olga Slavnikova, ‘Obitaemyi ostrov’, Novyi mir, 9, 1999 <http://magazines.russ.ru/
novyi_mi/1999/9/slavn.html> [accessed 2 April 204] (para. 9 of 11).
63
Rigsbee, Styles of Ruin, p. 3.

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624 UILLEAM BLACKER
story of the collection, is another case in point. The story is told by an
elderly Znamensk man to his nephew several decades after the war, and
relates how he, an orphaned Jew, and his adopted sister Rita, a German
baby left behind by her fleeing mother, are brought up by two Russian
women. They are treated harshly by their ‘parents’ and never allowed to
forget the identities that are theirs by birth, but which are entirely alien to
them: Rita is renamed from Schmidt to Kuznetsova (the two names having
the same meaning), but is spitefully given the patronymic Adolfovna. She
is a misfit in her family and in the community, and her life is marked by
cruelty and abuse.
Despite the chaos that has shattered his sense of identity and turned
him into etakii kto ugodno (‘a sort of whoever’), and despite the traumas he
witnessed as a child, growing up with the hardships of post-war Kaliningrad
region, Rita’s brother feels a powerful connection to Znamensk. In fact, it
is precisely because of this experience of rootlessness and uncertainty that
the man clings to the one constant in his life, the place he calls home. He
addresses his nephew thus:

‘All I can do is remember. My life is half-life, half-memory. And it’s more

and more memory than life, until memory will be all that’s left. That’s
what I am. But only here. Nowhere else. And never again, and that’s the
hardest thing. […] An aging, no, an aged Jew who doesn’t know a word of
his own language, a real Whoever, and the girl, a German who can’t speak
a word of German — here, in this shitty promised land, without which
there’s no life or memory… Where would I go? Understand? No?’ 64

The very German, very European cobbled streets, brick houses and red
tiles that constantly appear in Buida’s narrative are at once an incongruous
and yet entirely appropriate setting for such ‘whoevers’: in the post-
catastrophic landscape of post-war Eastern Europe and the post-Stalin
Soviet Union, only such a site could give them the space that they require
to gather the shattered pieces of their memories and their identities and
to form new communities. It is in such liminal, undefined spaces that,
in Rigsbee’s words, poets like Brodsky might ‘suggest how a life might be
lived in view of fragmentations both interior (conscious and memory) and
exterior (ruins)’.65
In this regard, Jan Assmann points to the particularly apt semantics of
‘the English-language words re-membering and re-collecting, which evoke
64
Buida, Prusskaia nevesta, p. 148; Buida, The Prussian Bride, p. 188.
65
Rigsbee, Styles of Ruin, p. 108.

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 WRITING FROM THE RUINS OF EUROPE 625
the idea of putting “members” back together […] and “re-collecting” things
that have been dispersed. Thus they interpret memory as the restoration
of lost unity’.66 When they confront Kaliningrad, the characters and
narrators of Buida, Brodsky, Zinik and Popadin do not necessarily only
express loss of identity and memory, and they may not, to the contrary,
recover the wholeness that Assmann describes, but they certainly manage
to make use of spatial, mnemonic fragmentation and the experience of
dislocation and violence to create new, at times startling, connections,
and to express complex, sometimes grotesque and traumatized, but also
vibrant Soviet and post-Soviet identities, both individual and collective.
These identities, and the attitude to memory that informs them — at once
tortured and highly creative, shattered and reconstructed — are rooted in
the specifics of Königsberg-Kaliningrad; yet they also, as the metonymic
uses of Kaliningrad by Brodsky and Zinik underline, speak to some of the
most acute problems of Russian, European and wider historical experience
of the late twentieth century, and at the same time powerfully highlight
the mediated, constructed and prosthetic dimensions of contemporary
cultural memory.

66
Jan Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies, trans. Roderick Livingstone,
Stanford, CA, 2006, p. 11.

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