Biography and Locations: Brief Notes Prompted by Books by Paolo Pagani and Patrick Wright

       

 Given the rather haphazard emergence of this project and the idea that I want to use it as a kind of notebook or diary of what I am currently thinking about, I thought I would add some more words relative to the genealogy of the idea and how it has come to be formed in my mind. It is very much a project that has taken on aspects of other projects as I have tried to explain previously. So finding myself in Liguria (the village where my father was born) I have reimagined a project I was planning to work on in the Moscow Region (and maybe more widely on the peripheries of Moscow and other larger cities). Yet there are always links back to previous concerns and these links I discovered will provide or provoke a number of posts. I also want somehow to explain how these links arose along with some stories concerning them. For example, during my to-ing and fro-ing from Russia back to the UK and Italy in the past two decades I recall visiting the local (La Spezia) public library and finding a book on Russians in Liguria and Ligurians in Russia. What do I recall of this volume read more than 12 years ago (I think I read it around 2010)? Well, there was a chapter on Tchaikovsky in Bordighera, I think (all I remember was how the composer hated the mild Ligurian winters) and another piece on a family also from Bordighera who lived in Russia in the 1920s and 1930s. What stayed with me is that this family actually lived in the very same town in the Moscow Region in which I lived with my family in the decade and a half between 2008 and 2022. Though the town was then known as Obiralovka (and we lived in one of its peripheral locations - Olgino) that then made up Zheleznodorozhny (and which was a few years ago swallowed up to become part of a larger Balashikha). I loved retelling their story and a single detail about how they found the place impossible to live in and so decided then to immigrate, of all places, to Yakutia (which has some of the harshest winters anywhere in Russia). At some point in the 1930s they would return to their native Bordighera. This story of a connection between Liguria and my then home town in Russia (Zheleznodorozhny), a town that  took me years to become accustomed to, provoked in me a strange wonder. In a way it is through these 'strange wonders' that I want to build up my 'Ligurian project' and these strange connections that were at the heart of my Moskva-Petushki Elektrichka project. 

        Trying to discover connections between, in and among micro-cosmic and seemingly peripheral worlds without quite knowing how this is going to develop is at the core of all this. One of the things that help me in all this is my fascination with a miscellaneous collection of travel writings and what is (was?) known as pyschogeographical works (as an aside, psychogeography was if not born in Liguria at least was given a clearer definition and elaboration during the foundational Situationist conference at Cosio di Arroscia in 1956). Back in the Moscow Region, I was keen on seeing how a genealogy to situationism could be traced back to, say,  Vasily Slevtsov, who aimed to walk the Vladimirka [the way that exiles would start off on their way to exile in Siberia]. Slevtsov would have been an important ur-text for my Moscow-Petushki project but who knows what useful tips he will have if transposed to this Ligurian project.

In a way I would like to map many interests onto this project as well as to overturn many barriers to conventional hierarchical historical, geographical borders and limits. I’m not sure of this is a good place to mention that I have just read a couple of books by the Italian author/scholar Paolo Pagani. He has written a book on (a kind of biography of) Walter Benjamin which I have just finished. Prior to that he wrote a book concentrating on the locations that a variety of thinkers lived and worked in. He has also written on Nietzsche in a similar vein (it seems). This was going to be peripheral reading unconnected to my 'Liguria project' but then I discovered that as well as the Versilian resort of Poveromo, Benjamin had also spent long periods of time in parts of Liguria mainly San Remo where he stayed at his ex-wife's hotel travelling to and from Paris at irregular intervals during the 1930s (there is little on Portofino, Rapallo or Genova where he also passed through). A new exciting prospect emerged about adding Benjamin to Italo Calvino and others to the chapter on San Remo. 

Yet the book (and Pagani's other writings) also provides an interesting perspective on biographical writing as such. He foregrounds Benjamin's (and other thinker's) travels. Sometimes forced and sometimes for 'frivolity' for want of a better term. One could say that as far as Benjamin is concerned what began as a kind of travel provoked by a curiosity to discover or curiositas inveniendi (in the 1920s) then became the desparate wanderings of a refugee after the early 1930s (especially after 1933). Pagani's book reminds us of Brecht's statement that refugees make for the sharpest dialecticians in this regard. But this concentration on the movements/wanderings of a thinker is of great interest to this project. This desire to write on the wanderings (I wanted to use the Russian term странствие) of a thinker/cultural figure had occurred to me occasionally in Russia. I'd thought about it in terms of the philosopher Evald Ilyenkov (who wasn't a particularly itinerant philosopher but still there was his teaching at Obninsk which fascinated me, and the time he spent his military training in the Urals near where my wife is originally from. Would he have traveled to Obninsk by elektrichka? I think I recall a photograph. And there was an elektrichka to the place in the Urals he had been to.  The other figure I wished to do an itinerant biography of was Boris Barnet. From being known as a Moscow filmmaker, he widely traveled throughout Russia and the other Soviet Republics to shoot many of his films. In any case, putting this geographical story at the heart of biography is a fascinating prompt to reread both biography and location. Another book which I loved immensely was Patrick Wright's masterful book on Uwe Johnson in Sheerness The Sea View Has Me Again which has been one of the most enjoyable reads for me in recent years.  

Patrick Wright's book, read two or three years ago, concentrates on why a successful and highly regarded East German writer would transfer himself to an extremely peripheral backwater location like Sheerness when presumably easily having the possibility of living in a cultural capital. Uwe Johnson celebrates his decision and convinces himself and others (or at least tries to) that there is something wholly unique about this location. It all made sense to me in the Moscow Region and I found Patrick Wright's book on Johnson almost like a vindication of my living so long in my own Pod-Moscovian backwater. But now, another sea view has me again, though not (alas?) that of Sheerness.