Wall carpets, pencils, and other “relics”

(Károly TÓTH, 2YMA Comparative History, 2nd year)

Back in 2015 I had the chance to visit the memorial museum of Andrejs Upīts (Andreja Upīša memoriālais muzejs) in Riga, the capital of Latvia. Upīts’ life spanned almost an entire century (1877–1970): he wrote novels, short stories, plays, poetry, essays, and criticism, not to mention his numerous translations of the works of Gustave Flaubert, Aleksey Tolstoy and others. He is one of the greatest figures of Latvian literature, and probably the most controversial among them, since he was a staunch supporter of the Soviet regime, in which he believed until the end of his life. His works were translated into more than thirty languages.

Upīts and his family moved to this apartment in 1951 and lived here until his death. In the writer’s preserved study and bedroom one can observe an interesting object.

Focus on the wall carpet!
(own work)

Detail of the wall carpet and the strange something
(Andreja Upīša memoriālais muzejs)

German literary critic Friedrich Kittler remarked somewhere that the very act of writing (in physical sense) should be considered an important aspect of analyzing literary works. In my interpretation of this strange something on the wall carpet, Upīts used it to keep there pencils, what he could use for writing, underlining, drawing etc. while he was lying on the couch. If I am not mistaken almost all elements of this scene are considered “relics” of the past now: maybe not the use of pencils, but the practice of handwriting in general reduced significantly in the last half century, and even if couches are evergreen pieces of furniture, who has one combined with a wall carpet? (That was a poetic question, of course I do, what is more fashionable than a carpet protecting you from the cold wall, while writing masterpieces with a pencil?)

Joking aside, this combination of objects pose an important question: is it just the (more or less) preserved intimate space of a 20th-century intellectual (looking into which you can be a bit of a voyeur with the valid excuse that “Oh, I’m really into literature!”) or the allegedly untouched arrangement of objects can preserve something else than just a certain state in which they were left? I the latter works, then is it a part of cultural heritage or just an “extra”? Is this a really substantial question or just another manifestation of the quirkiness of analytic philosophy? Anyway, I think that this “cans” can be an indeed important question for those, who are dealing with cultural heritage issues.

PS: But it may easily happen that I just overthink it. Also, I do not have a definite answer. (I am not even from your department. 😀) What is your opinion?