“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!”
Thanks for mentioning the Grossman volume by NYRB. I just ordered four books from them: the two volumes of essays by Elizabeth Hardwick, the first volume of novelist Thomas Flanagan's Irish trilogy (the other two are out of print), and Norman Podhoretz's memoir (with an introduction by Terry Teachout).
ReplyDeleteI got interested in Flanagan (1923-2002) through a piece published in The New Criterion some years ago which I got in the weekly email they send out featuring articles from the past.
My brothers came up from Texas to Cleveland last month. We went to Lakeview Cemetery to visit our parents' resting place. Kicking aside some leaves, we found our great grandparents, and aunts and uncles. My brothers complained that Texas was an oven this summer, and they reveled in Cleveland's crisp air and lowering grey clouds. We are all quite old now, and we walked our separate ways between monuments and gravestones, calling out funny or peculiar names.
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