Waiting in line

What happens when the flâneur has to stand still?

This is an excerpt from a longer essay about Kazimir Malevich in Vitebsk that appeared in the LA Review of Books. Malevich’s letters to a Moscow friend while he was in Vitebsk gave me a chance to think about the differences between the provinces and the city, a subject dear to my heart. I started kindergarten at P.S. 187 in Manhattan and graduated high school from Ames Senior High School in Ames, Iowa. I’m posting this excerpt because I have not finished thinking about the provinces and the city and this section on waiting in line still revolves in my mind.

     In the fall of 1919, the artist Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935), a leader of the Russian avant-garde, reluctantly left Moscow for the provincial city of Vitebsk. Malevich was part of an exodus from Russia’s great cities. Two years into Bolshevik rule, Russia’s great cities were emptying out as people searched for food, fuel and safety. In Moscow and St. Petersburg if there was wood, there were not enough people to chop and haul it. If there was flour for bread, there was not enough wood for the ovens to bake it. Trams and trains did not run for lack of parts to repair them. This was the time of the worst typhus epidemic in the history of the world. The year that Malevich left Moscow so reluctantly, there were 100,00 reported cases of typhus and 72,000 reported cases of tuberculosis. Petrograd lost two-thirds of its population; Moscow, more than half. Not everyone could escape. Malevich belonged to a fortunate group of the cultural elite who were allowed to find refuge in Vitebsk, creating what is often called Vitebsk’s “cultural renaissance.” Malevich joined the faculty of an art college headed by Marc Chagall, the city’s most famous native son.

     Malevich did not forget his Moscow friends while he was in Vitebsk. He wrote regularly to the Russian-Jewish intellectual, Mikhail Osipovich Gershenzon. In these letters he described life in the provincial city. In one of the letters Malevich describes his efforts to send bread to Gershenzon.

In order to send the bread, Malevich has to wait in line at the post office. He was not the only one to squeeze grocery lists into the postscripts of long letters or apologetic messages onto the blank spaces of other letters. The state restricted who could send how much bread to whom. In his letter, Malevich explained: only union members could send bread, only family members could receive it (The Ukrainian-Catholic Malevich and his wife agreed to pretend that the Russian-Jewish Gershenzon was a relative.), only ten pounds could be sent, speculators were punished and anyone’s bread could be replaced by bricks. And he has to wait in line: from 5 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon on what was nearly the darkest day of the year without advancing to the head of the line. Just as he returns again and again to watch the Jewish refugees, he returns to the post office and waits in line again.

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     Waiting in line was not invented in the twentieth century; but that seems to be when it becomes a literary trope. Nobody waits in line in Dickens, Flaubert, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Poe and the only people who line up in Tolstoy are those who have joined the army. Only in the last volumes of the Forsythe Saga, does Galsworthy have his characters stand in a queue and, even in those last volumes, they queue only twice. Anna Karenina must have waited in line at the ticket booth at the railway station, but Tolstoy does not tell us about it. All of those characters who conveniently, fortuitously and accidentally meet on the train in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot never wait in line at a ticket booth. In nineteenth-century novels, soldiers line up and so do trains and trams. Presciently, one person does wait in line in Dickens, the homeless Oliver Twist. In the twentieth century, in Theodore Dreiser’s 1900 novel, Sister Carrie, about the girl from provincial Wisconsin in the great city of Chicago, young women line up at work, men line up like street lights. 

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Flâneurs wander; they do not wait. Monsieur G never waits in line. The flâneur has to move fast to catch a glimpse of the ephemeral and the fugitive. The great size of the great city makes speed necessary. How else to traverse those 40 versts? Greater speed makes a greater city possible. The histories of speed and the city are intertwined. Modernity hurries through the novels of Bely, Dostoevsky and Joyce. Speed has made modernity ephemeral and fugitive. It fragments the self. We don’t just walk away, we run, drive and ride away as fast as possible. Our infatuation with speed is as old as tales of magic carpets and seven league boots. Speed is something to boast about, to record. Speed makes history. We are human; therefore, we race.

Waiting in line stops human racing. Someone should roll out a thousand-page book on this odd phenomenon. Why does it become a trope in the twentieth century? This is the line that turns people into parts of a machine, the line of regulation and surveillance. The flâneur who waits in line puts himself into the modernity of surveillance, the modernity of Foucault’s prisons and mental institutions. Lines discipline and punish. The line also takes the menace out of the mob. To see a crowd outside the door is to see the risk of getting trampled. A line tames the crowd, rationalizes it. The English are justifiably proud of their willingness to queue. The line is civilized. It is just.

Waiting in line is the clay feet of the everyday, it’s what clay feet do best. Waiting in line is boredom. Waiting in line is everything the great city despises about the provincial city; it is an outpost of the provincial city in every city. Unhappily for the great city, the very things that make it great – crowds and commerce – make it wait in line. Waiting in line turns the urbane into provincials.

     Did Malevich believe that the people who waited in line with him were his “involuntary friends”? Did he feel that waiting in line was “like coming home”? He did not say. Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) wrote these words to describe what it felt like to wait in line outside Leningrad’s Kresty prison. Her son, Lev Gumlyov, was arrested and rearrested throughout the years of Stalin’s terror. She began writing Requium at the end of October 1935, the first time he was arrested. She continued working on the poem through his subsequent arrests and imprisonment in 1938 and 1939.

     The poem shows how waiting in line could become an act of resistance because of the bonds, the solidarity, among the women, Akhmatova numbers them at 300, waiting together to learn whether their men lived or died, whether they had been sentenced, where and for how long. These are the women who are her “involuntary friends.” One of these women says, “When I come here, it’s like coming home.” One more way that a line can be a microcosm of the provincial city is that these women are forced to be in close quarters with people who are so different from themselves; the line is the Vitebsk street where Malevich heard and saw the incomprehensible. In the line outside the Leningrad prison, different social classes met.  

     Waiting in line, Akhmatova met women who knew nothing about her fame as a poet, of her life at the center of Russian intellectual life. Such was the community Anna Akhmatova set aside to find her home and friendships among the humble and unnamed women who waited in line with her. She chose to unite with them in shared grief and anxiety.

     Malevich never said that the people waiting in line with him from dawn to dusk day after day felt like family or friends; yet he chose waiting in line with them on the cold street over writing by himself in his room.  

     Soon it would be his turn to go hungry. The Trans-Volga famine that devastated the whole country, beginning in 1921, affected Vitebsk. His beloved wife, Sofia Mihailovna, contracted tuberculosis, he believed, in Vitebsk because of the very cold and hunger that had threatened him in Moscow. In a letter to Lissitzky sent around the time that he left Vitebsk for good, July 4, 1922, Malevich wrote “We have had a horrible famine. I hang by a thread.” He hopes to get a package from the ARA, Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration, which had been allowed to enter Soviet Russia at the end of the summer of 1921 because of the famine. Malevich shared his crowd’s vulnerability and their fate. In the same letter, he reported Khlebnikov’s death (“He died 28 June tormented by hunger.”) and then, he acknowledged that he and his arch-rival, Tatlin face the same danger. In one of the few times that he recognized their shared fate. He used the metaphor of the line. “Tatlin and I are next in line.”

Waiting in line is also seeing eye-to-eye. The people in “Author and Hero” who look behind each other’s backs also look into each other’s eyes. “As we gaze at each other, two different worlds are reflected in the pupils of our eyes.” Bakhtin describes a gaze between equals. In order to see eye-to-eye, neither person can look down upon the other or walk away. The line is the problem of mass society as solved by Archimedes; his observation about the shortest distance between two points applies to people also. People get lost in crowds. The crowd is the shape that fragments; the line connects.

Flâneurs connect by walking. Walking draws a line, like the one people wait in, that links the provincial crowd, even the people whom nobody needs. Provincial city streets are too small and too slow for one person to walk away from another. Malevich lingered. He mingled. He felt answerable.