We would like to thank Polina Barskova, Anna Muza, Irina Paperno, Lynn Patyk, and Mark D. Steinberg for their expert suggestions and Oksana Bulgakowa for her inspiring workshops on “visuality and literacy” and “memory and film” in twentieth-century Russian culture, conducted under the auspices of Stanford's Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.

1. Freidin, Gregory, “By the Walls of Church and State: On the Authority of Literature in Russia's Modern Tradition,” Russian Review 52, no. 2 (April 1993): 149-65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. This approach aligns with new trends in art history and film studies that examine the non-narrative, “figural” persistence of the past. See, for example, Haskell, Francis, History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven, 1993)Google Scholar; and Stephanie Sandler's recent reconsideration of the concept “fidelity” in the relation between the document and cinematic image in her Commemorating Pushkin: Russia's Myth of a National Poet (Stanford, 2004), 136-74. An alarming instance of the erasure of image-history is explored in Larisa Maliukova, ed., 90-e: Kino, kotorye my poteriali (Moscow, 2007). Most relevantly for our topic of involuntary mimetic memory, see (literally!) Oksana Bulgakowa's analytical assemblage of culturally imprinted body language disseminated through film in her DVD, produced with Dietmar Hochmuth and Gregor Hochmuth, The Factory of Gestures: Body Language in Film (Berlin, 2008).

3. L. N. Tolstoi, Detstvo, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 90 tomakh (Moscow, 1928-58; hereafter PSS), 1:46.

4. The other relevant texts are Plato's Cratylus, Theatetus, and Sophist, and Aristotle's De Memoria et Reminiscentia and On Interpretation. Plato, Complete Works (Indianapolis,1997), 101-293, 971-1223; Aristotle, Categories, and De Interpretatione, trans. J. L. Ackrill (Oxford, 1963), 113-55; and Aristotle, De Memoria et Reminiscentia, in Richard Sorabji, Aristotle on Memory (London, 1972), 47-60. For a clear and brief discussion of the philosophical distinctions involved, see Ricoeur, Paul, “Passé, mémoire et oubli,” in Verlhac, Martine, ed., Histoire et Mémoire (Grenoble, 1998), 35–40 Google Scholar; and Ricoeur, , “Mimesis and Representation,” in Valdes, Mario J. and Ricoeur, Paul eds., A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination (New York, 1991), 137-55.Google Scholar René Girard has given us many far-reaching theorizations of mimesis: see “Innovation and Repetition,” in René Girard, Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953-2005, ed. Robert Doran (Stanford, 2008), 230-45; and Girard, , “From Mimetic Desire to the Monstrous Double,” in Murray, Timothy, ed., Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought (Ann Arbor, 1997), 87–111.Google Scholar

5. Ong, Walter J., Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London, 1982), 79–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Anthropologist Michael T. Taussig calls the mimetic faculty “an ineffable plasticity in the face of the world's forms and forms of life,” citing Walter Benjamin's still more lapidary definition: “the art of becoming other.” Consequently, the mimetic comprises the power to re-present, but also to falsify and mask, the world. See Taussig's innovative Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York, 1993), 34-40.

7. Carruthers, Mary J., The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, Eng., 1990), 76, 79.Google Scholar

8. In her classic study, Frances Yates shows how the articulations of a visualizable space like a many-roomed house could be used to classify and store memories and retrieve them in an orderly, conscious sequence. See Yates, Frances Amelia, The Art of Memory (London, 1992).Google Scholar

9. Sapir, Itay, “Narrative, Memory, and the Crisis of Mimesis: The Case of Adam Elsheimer and Giordano Bruno,” in Collegium. Studies across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. 1, The Traveling Concept of Narrative, ed. Hyvärinen, Matti, Korhonen, Arm and Mykkänen, Juri (Helsinki, 2006), 84–96.Google Scholar

10. See Schneider, Helmut J., “The Cold Eye: Herder's Critique of Enlightenment Visualism,” in Koepke, Wulf, ed., Johann Gottfried Herder: Academic Disciplines and the Pursuit of Knowledge (Columbia, S.C., 1996), 53–60.Google Scholar

11. In its most famous Freudian version, the memory trace is simply that which has been erected to protect the psyche from reexperiencing the flow of traumatic experience; conscious memory substitutes for the truth of experience, which manifests itself in strange recurrences.

12. This formulation appeared in “From a Small Talk on Proust, Held on My 40th Birthday,” in July 1932—the year Benjamin contemplated suicide. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 2, Pt. 2, 1931-1934, ed. Michael W.Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 613.

13. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1996-2003), 1:613; Benjamin, , “On the Image of Proust” (1929), in Selected Writings, 2:237-47Google Scholar; Benjamin, , “The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in Selected Writings, 3:143-66.Google Scholar

14. Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Trask, Willard R. (1953; reprint, Princeton, 2003).Google Scholar

15. This introduction's ambitious scope and selective coverage necessitate citing only sample primary texts and critical studies from an enormous field.

16. Pushkin, A. S., “Dnevniki, 18go dekabria 1824,“ Polnoe sobranie sochineniiv 10 tomakh (Moscow, 1949; hereafter PSS), 8:57.Google Scholar Indeed, Pushkin's preoccupation with remembrance spans his entire career, from the precocious “Vospominaniia v Tsarskom Sele” (1814) to his late historical work, culminating, for example, in Kapitanskaia dochka (1836).

17. In the poem's famously ambiguous fulfillment of a lady's request to sign her autograph album, Pushkin first dispersed the (as though forbidden) sounds of his name p—oo—sh—kin throughout the poem's first two stanzas. Pushkin's phonetic device is an excellent example of de Saussure's theory of the anagram, which Mikhail Gronas applies in another context. See Gronas, Mikhail, Cognitive Poetics and Cultural Memory: Russian Literary Mnemonics (New York, 2009).Google Scholar This forthcoming book offers several ingenious methods and case studies in what its author has called a “mnemocentric” approach to Russian literature. We thank Mikhail Gronas for sharing his manuscript.

18. A. S. Pushkin, “Chto v imeni tebe moem,” PSS, 3:163.

19. What the state could not control were the exact moments of silence or danger when this paradigm would be invoked. Thus, Evgeniia Ginzburg, in her memoir of the Stalinist labor-camp, Krutoi marshrut (Journey into the whirlwind, 1967-77), would make her internal recitation of memorized classical poetry the core of her humanistic resistance to brutal interrogation, unwitnessed in the “Soviet night.” This is a good example of the “mere” mimetic being elevated to a mnemonic and ethical paradigm. Evgeniia Ginzburg, Krutoi marshrut (Frankfurt am Main, 1967). One finds an even more complex and ambivalent bond with the Russian poetic tradition in Varlam Shalamov's grim gulag tales, such as “Sherry-Brandy,” “Afinskie nochi,” “Vykhodnoi den',” “Pocherk,” and “Sergei Esenin i vorovskoi mir.” Varlam Shalamov, Sobranie sochinenii v 4 tomakh (Moscow, 1998). For a shrewd deconstruction of the device of internalized quotation, see Kolchevska, Natasha, “The Art of Memory: Cultural Reverence as Political Critique in Evgeniia Ginzburg's Writing of the Gulag,” in Holmgren, Beth, ed., The Russian Memoir: History and Literature (Evanston, 2003), 145-66.Google Scholar Among other recent studies that examine the role of memoirs in reconnecting old and new myths and producing cultural commodities for a changing literary market, we would like to acknowledge Irina Paperno's forthcoming Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams (Ithaca, 2009). For reasons of space we can likewise only generally acknowledge the abundant new scholarship on the institutionalized commemoration of national writers through ritual observance of anniversaries, commemorative sculpture, museums, and biographical plays and films. Closest to our concerns with narrative versus figural memory, intertextual citation and parody, “the past as deferral,” and the threatening copy or simulacrum is Renate Lachmann's magisterial study, Memory and Literature: Intertextuality in Russian Modernism, trans. Roy Sellars and Anthony Wall (Minneapolis, 1997), 1-24, 36-49, 194-242, 298-314.

20. Chaadaev, P. Ia., “Filosoficheskie pis'ma. Pis'mo pervoe,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i izbrannye pis'ma (Moscow, 1991), 1:320-39.Google Scholar

21. Crucial aspects of the memoir's ontological ambiguity and labyrinthine eluding of memory are plumbed in Nancy Ruttenburg's new book, Dostoevsky's Democracy (Princeton, 2008).

22. Tolstoi considered Memoirs from the House of the Dead the most truthful work of Russian literature yet written. Upon rereading the work in 1880, Tolstoi called it “the best book in all modern literature, including Pushkin” in a letter to N. N. Strakhov of 26 September 1880. Tolstoi, PSS, 63:24.

23. Tolstoi's Anna Karenina is generally acknowledged as the founding novel of the Russian modernist tradition, but from the specific perspective of experimentation with mimetic forms of memory, War and Peace (and Childhood) are its precursors.

24. Several recent studies devoted to the mnemonic functions of the arts and literature have shown how accurately, for example, Marcel Proust's investigation of the “madeleine” flashback anticipated neuroscience's much later understanding of the biochemistry and biophysics of “physical memory.” Russian realist descriptions also demonstrated prescient accuracy. See Lehrer, Jonah, Proust Was a Neuroscientist (Boston, 2007), 75–95 Google Scholar; Nalbandan, Suzanne, Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience (New York, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Koch, Christine, The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach (Denver, 2004), 187–204.Google Scholar

25. Tolstoi, PSS, 10:275-77; Dostoevskii, F. M., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 30 tomakh (Leningrad, 1976), 15:106-7.Google Scholar

26. Murav, Harriet, Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky's Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique (Stanford, 1992), 34–39, 144-48.Google Scholar

27. The illuminating distinction between lieux and milieux de mémoire was proposed by Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations, no. 26, Special issue on Memory and Counter-Memory (Spring 1989): 7-25; see also Nora, Pierre, ed., Les Lieux de Mémoire (Paris, 1984-1992).Google Scholar Nora associates modernity with the disappearance of remembering communities (milieux de mémoire) and the emergence of places (lieux) of memory to compensate for this absence.

28. Interest in the poetics and sociology of installment publication amid the surrounding context of the thick journals has grown in recent years. See Morson, Gary Saul, “Introductory Study: Dostoevsky's Great Experiment,” in Dostoevsky, Fyodor, A Writer's Diary, Vol. 1, trans, and annotated by Lantz, Kenneth A. (Evanston, 1994), 1–117.Google Scholar See also Todd, William M. III, “Anna on the Installment Plan: Teaching Anna Karenina through the History of Its Serial Publication,” in Knapp, Liza and Mandelker, Amy, eds., Approaches to Teaching Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (New York, 2003).Google Scholar This article is itself an installment from Todd's forthcoming book on serial publication in Russia 1860-1880. See also Martinsen, Deborah A., ed., Literary Journals in Imperial Russia (Cambridge, Eng., 1997)Google Scholar; and Kate Holland, “The Novel in the Age of Disintegration: Dostoevsky and the Problem of Genre after the Great Reforms” (forthcoming).

29. See Hilary L. Fink's original insight and detailed argument for Russian preexisting affinities with Bergsonism in Bergson and Russian Modernism, 1900-1930 (Evanston, 1999), 3-41; as well as a thorough elaboration of the influence of these affinities in the successive stages of literary modernism, ending with an elucidation of Daniil Kharms's absurd as a tactic against Immanuel Kant and temporal causality.

30. Bergson, Henri, Matter and Memory, trans. Paul, Nancy Margaret and Palmer, William Scott (New York, 1988).Google Scholar

31. Although the avant-garde famously urged its members to toss Pushkin off the ship of modernity, Eugene Onegin became the exemplar of modernist world creation, fusion of “matter and memory,” and even, to borrow James Joyce's expression, protean “entelechy“: “But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I memory because under everchanging form?“James Joyce, Ulysses, ed, Hans Walter Gabler (New York, 1986), 156. Iurii Tynianov's article “Mnimyi Pushkin” developed the idea that twentieth-century readers were obliged to scrape away the false memory of Pushkin purveyed by the “greybeards” of the nineteenth century with their ethical agendas. Tynianov, Iurii, Poetika. Istoriia literatury. Kino. (Moscow, 1977), 78–92.Google Scholar This was a patently Bergsonian injunction. See Alexandra Smith's new examination of such modernist practice in Montaging Pushkin: Pushkin and Visions of Modernity in Russian Txuentieth-Century Poetry (Amsterdam, 2006).

32. Zhiznetvorchestvo can be defined as the artistic organization of texts and acts in a fused poesis/pragmatics. See also Paperno, Irina and Grossman, Joan Delaney, eds., Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism (Stanford, 1994).Google Scholar Ivanov, V. I., “O sushchestve tragedii,” Lik i lichiny Rossii: Estetika i literaturnaia teoriia (Moscow, 1995), 90–103.Google Scholar

33. Leach, Robert, “Revolutionary Theatre 1917-1930,” in Leach, Robert and Borovsky, Victor, eds., A History of Russian Theater (Cambridge, Eng., 1999), 304-5.Google Scholar

34. For a brief discussion of the incorporation of Frederick W. Taylor's time-andmotion studies, invented for the purpose of increasing efficiency in the workplace by attending to bodily rhythm, into Meierkhol'd's biomechanics, see Leach, Robert, Vsevolod Meyerhold (1989; reprint, Cambridge, Eng., 1993), 52–54.Google Scholar

35. Later, however, when he rematerialized as a postwar American author, Nabokov would make a concerted effort to graft his reading of the Russian literary legacy, as well as his heroic performance of Russian creative memory, onto the imbricated institutional systems of replication that American publishing and academia afforded.

36. Evgeny A. Dobrenko demonstrates the necessary correlation of the two in his important pair of studies: The Making of the State Writer: Social and Aesthetic Origins of Soviet Literary Culture (Stanford, 2001) and The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature (Stanford, 1997), both translated by Jesse M. Savage.

37. An influential text was Iurii Tynianov, “Dostoevskii i Gogol: K teorii parodii,” Literaturnaia evoliutsiia: Izbrannye trudy (Moscow, 2002), 300-339.

38. Boyd, Brian, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton, 1991), 134.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39. For a sensitive reading of the tension between sensory memory and narrative time that cannot be recuperated as a chronological development, see Witt, Susanna, Creating Creation: Readings of Pasternak's Dohtor Živago (Stockholm, 2000).Google Scholar

40. Smeliansky, Anatoly, The Russian Theater after Stalin, trans. Miles, Patrick (Cambridge, Eng., 1999), 30–45, 90-110.Google Scholar See also Bushnell, John, “A Popular Reading of Bulgakov: Explication des Graffiti,” Slavic Review 47, no. 2 (Fall 1988): 502-11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41. Anatolii M. Khazanov, “Whom to Mourn and Whom to Forget? (Re) constructing Collective Memory in Contemporary Russia,” Reckoning with the Past: Perpetrators, Accomplices and Victims in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Narratives and Politics, special issue of Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 9 nos. 2-3 (2008): 293-310.

42. Patrick H. Hutton identified this conundrum of finding an ontological basis for history under the conditions of modern indifference in History as an Art of Memory (Burlington, Vt., 1993), xxv, 12. This deeply coherent study has shaped our thinking from the outset, while Kerwin Lee Klein's intensely skeptical article has alerted us to the multiple pitfalls of engaging in what he terms “the memory industry.” See Kerwin Lee Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” Representations, no. 69, Special Issue on Grounds for Remembering (Winter 2000): 127-50.

43. Some of the most fruitful investigations of Russian collective memory have come from historians and have focused on the multiple legacies of the Soviet regime, the gulag, World War II, and the siege of Leningrad. For some striking examples, see Garros, Veronique, Korenevskaya, Natasha, and Lahusen, Thomas, eds., Intimacy and Terror (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; Sherbakova, Irina, “The Gulag in Memory,” in Perks, Robert and Thomson, Alistair, eds., The Oral History Reader (New York, 1998), 235-45Google Scholar; Hellbeck, Jochen, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, Mass., 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and a catalogue of a Boston University exhibit: Territories of Terror: Mythologies and Memories of the Gulag in Contemporary Russian-American Art, exhibition and essay by Svetlana Boym (Boston, 2006). We found the greatest resonance with our theoretical nexus of memory and mimesis in Thomas Lahusen's poignant biographical deconstruction, How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin's Russia (Ithaca, 1997). Lahusen shows how the writing of the only allowable socialist realist autobiography had created an exemplary Soviet man, Vasilii Azhaev, by methodically erasing every trace of the life he had lived, or even a conceptual language in which his life could be thought. Lahusen's book thus questions the dichotomy of the heroic and the nonheroic, memory as consciousness and memory as repetitive habit, suggesting that totalitarianism is a mnemonic system that breaks the bond between the body and its “own” experience, much the way a virus commandeers a cell's genetic material to replicate only itself. On the siege of Leningrad, see Perlina, Nina and Simmons, Cynthia, eds., Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women's Diaries, Memoirs, and Documentary Prose (Pittsburgh, 2002)Google Scholar; Kirschenbaum, Lisa A., The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad: Myth, Memories, and Monuments (Cambridge, Eng., 2006).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Polina Barskova has recently presented some fascinating findings on the artists who stayed behind in Leningrad and provided the aesthetic modeling of the blockade, the terrible and sublime mnemonic images necessary for numbed sameness to locate itself temporally and spatially.

My gratitude to Monika Greenleaf and Luba Golburt for their stimulating collaboration and indispensible comments on earlier drafts. I am also thankful for the sophisticated reading and detailed comments offered by the anonymous reviewers, for Stuart Finkel's keen eyesight, and for Mark D. Steinberg's gentle prodding toward the few final revisions that helped complete my thoughts.