'The Passing Tribute of a Sigh'

“The cemetery lives an intense, passion-filled life.” 

Anyone who has walked a cemetery and paid respectful attention -- and I mean as a tourist, when the visit is not obligatory – will understand. Once I tramped the beautifully landscaped Vale Cemetery (1857) in downtown Schenectady, N.Y., with Robert V. Wells, a history professor at Union College and author of Facing the ‘King of Terrors’: Death and Society in an American Community, as my guide. Wells pointed out the Italian, veterans, General Electric Co. and influenza neighborhoods, all segregated and plotted like plats on a surveyor’s map. Even in death we choose order, when permitted.

 

In contrast, I visited a cemetery in Schoharie County, N.Y., that looked like a leaf-covered clearing in the woods. Amateur archeologists had discovered a burial ground for slaves, and it was being excavated. New York had abolished slavery in 1827, becoming the first state in the country to do so. Only one grave was marked – with an upright slab of slate inscribed with a single word – “Smoke,” a generic name given to otherwise nameless slaves.

 

The sentence at the top is from Vasily Grossman’s essay “Eternal Rest,” collected in The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays (trans. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, with Olga Mukovnikova, NYRB, 2010). Written around 1958, the essay describes a visit to Vagankovo Cemetery in Moscow, the final resting place of the lexicographer Vladimir Ivanovich Dahl (much admired by Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn) and the poet Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin. Also of Grossman’s father, Solomon Iosifovich, who changed his name to Semyon Osipovich.

 

Grossman and his wife, Olga Mikhailovna, lived in an apartment across the street from the cemetery. Grossman died of stomach cancer in 1964, and his widow hoped to bury his ashes in Vagankovom, but her request was denied. In the eyes of the Soviet authorities, the great novelist in his final years was a nonperson. Then she sought a plot in Moscow’s best-known cemetery, Novodevichy, where Grossman’s beloved Chekhov is buried. That too was denied. He was finally interred in Troyekurovskoye Cemetery, on the western edge of Moscow.

 

For Grossman, cemeteries are about the relations between the living and the dead. What distinguishes our species from others is the manner in which we treat our dead. We honor or scorn them but we’re seldom indifferent. As in Thomas Gray’s elegy:

 

“Yet ev’n these bones from insult to protect,

         Some frail memorial still erected nigh,

With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck’d,

         Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.”

 

Honoring the dead is almost universally recognized as a mark of civilization. Read Homer. “‘Everything flows, everything changes,’ said the Greek [Heraclitus],” writes Grossman. “But this is not evident from the little mounds with their grey crosses. If everything changes, then it changes in a manner that is barely perceptible. And it is not simply a matter of the tenacity of burial traditions. What we see here is the tenacity of the spirit of life, of the very core of life. What stubbornness!”