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– DACHA – me? Whose are the war dreams that I see sometimes? Why am I on trains a lot in my sleep? Why do cemeteries give me a feeling of comfort? Does my neck pain, as I write this, carry the memory of the silence which must have been suffocating and which now I am trying to break? To fill? The freewheeling feeling of powerlessness, of confusion, of inability to comprehend. Now I can imagine. The lives lived in fear, invisible, since even being seen was dangerous. The bodies effacing themselves, tension, eyes careful when meeting eyes, living as if absent from life. Members of my family stayed silent. Some died before I was born. They left no diaries. In his essay about Varlam Shalamov’s The Kolyma Tales, Andrei Siniavsky, a Russian novelist who spent five years in the camps, writes that ‘a human being does not endure; he turns into material – wood, stone – from which the builders build what they want . . . in such conditions a human being doesn’t think about anything, doesn’t remember anything, loses his mind, his feeling, his will.’ Rachel Rosenblum, a French psychoanalyst, remarks that ‘survivors who remain silent are often condemned to a desiccated existence, a dried-out life, a death in life [. . .] But when they speak out, and in particular when they do so in public, they are running an even greater risk. Telling the “ghastly tale” may, in some cases, trigger not only serious somatic trouble, psychotic episodes, but suicide.’ There seems to be no way back to life. 154
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– Dasha Shkurpela – In the film Architecture and Power, Ioan Augustin, Romanian scholar and practicing architect, describes totalitarian architecture as built ideology. Probably, dachas will never be thought of as architecture. Yet in a way these everyday spaces constitute a built ideology more than the glorious construction projects for which the ideology wanted to be remembered. We are so habituated to each of these (and myriad of other) more-or-less standardized features of environmental design that, in the course of using and moving through the built environment, any apperception of physical details remains largely unconscious. Indeed, standardized units and configurations of space are fundamentally integral to our corporeal schemata. We depend on them in our daily navigations of the human world. – Maria McVarish, ‘Mourning in the Hollows of Architecture and Psychoanalysis’ When we step out of our private spaces, what kind of world do we find? The maps of Gulag show the dense lay of the prison and camp land. Yet most of the camp sites have disappeared, unidentified, or have been demolished by the state once the Soviet Union collapsed. What has been memorialized was done by private groups and individuals. There’s only one museum in the whole of Russia that was built on the site of a former camp – Perm 36, run by the private historical memory and human rights society until 2014, when the state took over the property and the collections. The 155

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– DACHA –

me? Whose are the war dreams that I see sometimes? Why am I on trains a lot in my sleep? Why do cemeteries give me a feeling of comfort? Does my neck pain, as I write this, carry the memory of the silence which must have been suffocating and which now I am trying to break? To fill? The freewheeling feeling of powerlessness, of confusion, of inability to comprehend. Now I can imagine. The lives lived in fear, invisible, since even being seen was dangerous. The bodies effacing themselves, tension, eyes careful when meeting eyes, living as if absent from life. Members of my family stayed silent. Some died before I was born. They left no diaries. In his essay about Varlam Shalamov’s The Kolyma Tales, Andrei Siniavsky, a Russian novelist who spent five years in the camps, writes that ‘a human being does not endure; he turns into material – wood, stone – from which the builders build what they want . . . in such conditions a human being doesn’t think about anything, doesn’t remember anything, loses his mind, his feeling, his will.’

Rachel Rosenblum, a French psychoanalyst, remarks that ‘survivors who remain silent are often condemned to a desiccated existence, a dried-out life, a death in life [. . .] But when they speak out, and in particular when they do so in public, they are running an even greater risk. Telling the “ghastly tale” may, in some cases, trigger not only serious somatic trouble, psychotic episodes, but suicide.’ There seems to be no way back to life.

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