Posted by Claudia Durastanti on March 9th, 2022

Sometimes writers we read a long time ago meet in a strange zone, especially if current events are leading our thinking and daytime hallucinations towards a specific country in the world. In the past few days I found myself seeing Nina Berberova, Nicola Chiaromonte and Viktor Shklovsky sitting on a bench somewhere, not really talking, just switching seats, passing by, briefly staring at each other. Nina Berberova is the closest: I’ve just finished reading Aleksandr Blok i ego vremia, Aleksandr Blok: A Life, George Brazille, 1996, her account of one of Russia’s greatest poets. The writing is quiet and vivid, full of greens and purples, and it starts with the beautiful image of a city – St. Petersburg – that might disappear entirely once the fog is dissolved. Was there a third way, for a poet? Could something be dirty, real, romantic and symbolic at the same time, could the poet hold it all together? Alexander Blok tried and Berberova’s account of his life is strikingly beautiful in conjuring him back. Nicola Chiaromonte’s whole life was about finding a new way, a different space. Close friends would say he was a genius, the outside world barely had a clue he existed. Born in the same region as me in Southern Italy, Basilicata, Chiaromonte was an anti-fascist intellectual who lived through the war and ended up having the life of a spy, between Paris and New York, hanging with Albert Camus and Mary McCarthy and people at the Partisan Review. He was always the emigrant, il dispatriato, the one who left and stayed, and one day would stay and leave: coming back to Italy after life abroad was an act of vanishing of sorts, and he never fully belonged to the political and cultural climate of Italy after World War II. He believed in freedom as a personal choice and an act that would inspire people around it, acting perhaps more like a contagion than a revolution. But he didn’t believe in egomania, or boundless freedom, and he had a hard time with counter-culture in the late Sixties: he could see how that would quickly turn into a fascination for power, or dissolve into plain middle-class liberalism. One could find his writings in English in The Worm of Consciousness and other essays (1977), or catch up with his readings of the Russian masters of the novel. His writing is gentle, tamed, but often arresting for his independent thinking, when the world was split between the American and Russian churches. He’s quite obscure in Italy, a country that somehow still believes it never really had colonies and therefore there is no need for decolonial thinking, but I wonder what would have happened if he wrote about it, this man who was a reluctant prophet. Reluctance: that’s what I felt when I first read Zoo, or Letters Not About Love by Viktor Shklovsky, written in 1923 but translated into English only in the Seventies. Reluctance about feeling at home, sustaining love, thinking about the motherland or not thinking about it. This epistolary novel is all about arrested feelings. The writer was given an order by Elsa Triolet, another Russian living in Berlin who would later marry a famous surrealist. His love letters should speak about everything but not about love. In a few cases, censorship in plain sight can become very intimate, and create a new code: every time life is constrained, and power takes over, the artist turns into a spy, and language fights for its own survival. When the fight is incandescent, the literature that ensues is forever.