Hope Against Hope

Athenc-um 218 College Edition $8.95

Hope Against nope

A MEMOIR

Nadezhda Mandelstam

■ HARRISON E. SALISBURY says of this book:

I NO WORK ON RUSSIA WHICH I HAVE RECENTLY READ | HAS GIVEN ME SO SENSITIVE AND SEARING AN INSIGHT INTO THE HELLHOUSE WHICH RUSSIA BECAME UNDER STALIN AS THIS DEDICATED AND BRILLIANT WORK ON THE POET MANDELSTAM BY HIS DEVOTED WIFE.

10404

Mandelshtam, Nadezhda,

PG

3476 M355 Z813 1983

NEW COLLEGE OF CALIFORNIA (_SF)

Handel'

#6045

Mandel'shtam, Nadezhda, 1899-

Hope against hope : a memoir / Nadezhda Mandelstam# Translated from -the Russian by Max Hayward, with an introd. by Clarence Brown* New York : Atheneuro, 1983*

xvi, 431 p* : ports* ; 21 cjp* Translation of Vosporainaniia (roraanized form)

#6045 Brodart $12*95*

06 dec 84

1* Mandel'shtam, Nadezhda, 1899- 2* Mandelshtam, Osip, 1891-1938* 3* Russia—Politics and government— 1917-1936* 4* Russia—Intellectual life 1917- I* Title

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Nadezhda Mandelstam

Nadezhda Mandelstam

HOPE

AGAINST

HOPE

A MEMOIR

Translated from the Russian by Max Hayward With an Introduction by Clarence Broum

Atheneum New York 1983

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Copyright © 1970 by Atheneum Publishers English translation copyright © 1970 by Atheneum Publishers Introduction copyright © 1970 by Atheneum Publishers All rights reserved q Library of Congress catalog card number 77-124984

ISBN 0-689-70530-1 Published simultaneously in Canada by McClelland and Stewart Ltd. Manufactured in the United States of America by The Murray Printing Company, Forge Village, Massachusetts ' Designed by Harry Ford

First Atheneum Paperback, February 1976 cO Second Printing, March 1978

Third Printing, September 1979 Fourth Printing, November 1980 Fifth Priming, April 1983

INTRODUCTION

by Clarence Brown

_E

xcellent books are slippery things. They slip through the fingers of policemen who want to prevent them being pub­lished, and once they are in print, they slip out of the categories into which tidy-minded critics long to fix them. This book is, for the most part, a memoir; but it is much more. To say of it that it relates the nineteen years, from May i, 1919, to May 1, 1938, that Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam spent with her husband, the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, is to say, under the circumstances, a very great deal. But it is still not enough. For such a statement ignores many things that the curious reader will delight to find here. I shall try to name some of them.

The first is the author herself. "I played the role of 'poet's widow' with him," she once told me of her meeting with a visitor from the West. "It is a thing I can do when required." Indeed she could, but it was precisely that—a "role," something objectively different from herself, a kind of bedraggled plumage that she could, in case of need, snatch from the Victorian chiffonier and don in the nick of time to satisfy, with the addition of a few heart-rending phrases, some pil­grim's need to share the suffering and injustice of her life. When the coast was clear, the sweetly sad figure who had dispensed this and that fact of her husband's biography (even glancing at times, in her hammier moments, over her shoulder) would clear the general air with some spine-shattering Russian oath and revert to her true na­ture: a vinegary, Brechtian, steel-hard woman of great intelligence, limitless courage, no illusions, permanent convictions and a wild sense of the absurdity of life.

And it is the true nature that one meets everywhere in this book. The style, in Russian, is an almost uncanny reproduction of her speaking voice. The toughness of the spirit that animates these pages will be familiar to anyone who has ever known her. The angle of vision is always hers.

But, for all of this, she herself, her person, the externals of her own life, are strangely absent. Her book is very much the book of her husband, to whom as man and poet she was utterly devoted through­out their years together and ever afterward; and where he is con­cerned she never has the slightest desire to make herself conspicuous. Her attitude is always that which she herself memorably expressed one May evening in 1965. The students of the Mechanical Mathe­matics Department of Moscow University had organized on their own initiative the first memorial evening of Mandelstam's poetry to be held in Russia. They invited Ilia Ehrenburg, an old friend of the poet and an even older one of his wife, to preside. Nikolai Chukov- ski, N. L. Stepanov, Varlam Shalamov and Arseni Tarkovski were among the writers and scholars who contributed reminiscences of Mandelstam and recited his poems. At one point Ehrenburg men­tioned rather hesitantly, knowing that she would dislike his doing it, that Nadezhda Yakovlevna was in the auditorium. He continued, "She lived through all the difficult years with Mandelstam, went into exile with him, saved all of his poems. I cannot imagine his life with­out her. I hesitated whether I should say that the poet's widow was at this first evening. I don't ask her to come down here . . But here his words were smothered under thunderous applause that lasted for a long time. Everyone stood. Finally, Nadezhda Yakovlevna her­self stood and a hush fell upon the house. Turning to face the audi­ence, she said, "Mandelstam wrote, 'I'm not accustomed yet to panegyrics. . . .' Forget that I'm here. Thank you." And she sat down. But the applause would not die away for a long time.

In all fairness, the request was and is impossible. For all her diminu­tive size, she was colossally there in the hall (to murmur "Rot!" at the occasional statement with which she disagreed). And she is every­where in this memoir of her husband. Her tone and her spirit, at least, are here.

In this note I shall set down some of the external facts of her life which she omits and which happen to be known to me.

She was born Nadezhda Yakovlevna Khazina—the daughter, that is, of Yakov Khazin—on October 31, 1899, in the town of Saratov. Her mother was a physician. I don't know what her father's occupa­tion was, but I find in one of her letters the information that her parents were "nice, highly educated people." She had a sister, Anna, and a brother, Evgeni Yakovlevich, who became a writer. Though she relishes the slightly outre circumstance of having been born in Saratov—something like Balzac's having been married in Berdichev— the fact is that all her early life was passed in Kiev. There she studied art in the studio of A. A. Ekster, where one of her best friends was Ilia Ehrenburg's future wife, Liuba. Another was A. G. Tyshler, who later became a well-known artist. An acquaintance, but hardly a friend, was the extraordinary Bliumkin, the assassin of the German ambassador Count Mirbach and at times one of the most pestilential banes of Mandelstam's existence.

She learned the principal European languages to such an extent that she can still translate handily from French and German today. Her family traveled widely, nonchalantly, naturally, as used to be done, and she retains today a vivid familiarity with the now for­bidden landscape of Europe. Her knowledge of English also began in childhood, for she has often mentioned her English governesses in letters to me ("they were all parson's daughters"), and she savors the slightly fusty Victorianism of some of her idioms. "Hope against hope" is one of these, which I count so often as I read back through her letters that it has practically become her slogan in my mind. The pun on her own name—Nadezhda means Hope in Russian—makes it eligible for this, and so does its expression of her obstinate courage. It doesn't make a bad title for her book, which has none in Russian.

Her knowledge of languages was very valuable in the twenties and thirties when she and her husband, like many of the old intelligentsia, were driven into a feverish spate of translating in order to live. She translated and edited numerous books—probably, I should think, under a pseudonym. At any rate, it would be impossible to determine what she translated, for those chores were no sooner finished than forgotten. She even collaborated with Mandelstam on many of the works, including those in verse, that carried his name as translator— an added reason, if any were needed, for putting little store by those pages in his canon. It must surely have been Nadezhda Yakovlevna who was mainly responsible for translating things like Upton Sin­clair's Machine or editing the novels of Captain Mayne Reid, for she knew English far better than her husband, but when I asked her this she waved the question away with a gesture of distaste: "Who knows? What didn't we translate?"

As for her knowledge of English, it became her means of liveli­hood after Mandelstam's death, for she seems to have taught it in half the provincial towns of Russia before she was finally allowed to return to Moscow in 1964, when she began writing this book. In 1956, as a student of Mandelstam's old schoolmate, the great scholar Victor Zhirmunski, she earned the degree of "Kandidat nauk"—the equivalent of our doctorate—in English philology. Ten years later she presented me with a copy of the printed abstract of her disserta­tion, a brochure of thirteen pages, and since it is her principal ac­knowledged work before the present book, perhaps it should be noticed. The author is identified as "Head of the Department of English Language of the Chuvash Teachers' Training College," and the title of her work is Functions of the Accusative Case on the Basis of Materials Drawn from Anglo-Saxon Poetic Monuments. There is one tutelary reference to Engels, and one to Lenin. I do not suppose that she looks upon this with quite the contempt re­served for her translations, but the inscription in my copy reads, in part: "this thoroughly pleasant bit of rubbish."

Foreign visitors to the Soviet Union seldom realize how possible it is to meet people there without, in a sense, Meeting them. Very dis­tinguished visitors have made this mistake. In fact, the more distin­guished they are, alas, the more likely they are to be fooled, for the effort expended on them will be much greater. Nor does the effort cost very much. The roles of Poet's Widow, Rebellious Young Poet, Disloyal Journalist, etc., etc., are all too practiced to fail often of their goal. I say all this simply in order to remark that this is a book in which one can Meet the author of it. There are patches of reti­cence, true, but it is for the most part an utterly naked book, from its first page to its last an utterance from beyond the point of no return. Writing of her birthday on October 31, 1969, she said, "Everybody was astonished at my refusing to see anyone that day. ... It was a most pleasant experience to be alone at seventy. I'm glad to be on my vosmoi desiatok [eighth decade]," It gave her, she said, the "free­dom of the city," adding that I, living in England, would grasp what she meant. "Believe me, it is horribly good to be old and unable even to defend myself. Whoever wishes to knock me down will do it in no time." There is little reason, I am sure, to warn the reader of what Dostoyevski found: how dangerous such vulnerability can be, how powerful stark defenselessness.

But it would not be fitting to end this word of introduction on so heavy a note as that, for the fact is that Nadezhda Yakovlevna's book, however melancholy the sum total of its burden, is lightened time and again by an inexplicably buoyant sense of liberation, joy and even . . . humor.

There is an occasional scene that might have derived from Gogol's Inspector General. Consider, for example, the official of the Ministry of Education who came to that Chuvash Teachers' Training College for a meeting. Hapless man! He could not have known that the Head of the English Department would laconically detail, years afterward, his pleas to the faculty to stop writing so many denunciations of each other and his warning that in future unsigned denunciations would not even be read. One tends to forget what a damned nuisance Stalin­ist officials must have found the system of ritual informing. In Voro­nezh an old Jewish grandmother raising her three grandsons was re­ported by some ill-wisher to be a prostitute. The Mandelstams, living nearby, were reported to be entertaining sinister guests at night and . . . firing guns. Right up to 1937, Nadezhda Yakovlevna writes, a certain plausibility was still required.

Some of the humor has no barbs at all. The village of Nikolskoye had been settled by exiled criminals and fugitives in the; days of Peter the Great. The street names had all been changed, of course, but Mandelstam eagerly noted down the names by which the locals still knew them: Strangler's Lane, Embezzler's Street, Counterfeiter's Row. . . .

But the buoyancy of which I speak does not depend upon such passages as these. It depends upon the central figure of Osip Mandel­stam himself. Nadezhda Yakovlevna calls him in one place "endlessly zhizneradostny." The word is usually rendered as "cheerful" or "joyous"—rather feeble counters for an original that means, in its two parts, "life-glad." Those who seek the roots of poetry in a close equivalency with life will find it perfectly astonishing that there are so few sad poems in Mandelstam. But while this or that fact of his tragic existence can explain the brute meaning of many lines, nothing can explain the poetry of them other than the wild joy that he took in the Russian language. It is not astonishing. "Pechal moya svetla," Pushkin wrote, "My sadness is luminous"; and Mandelstam not only could but did use the line. The irrepressible Shakespeare could not restrain his pleasure in the antics of language even for Hamlet's bleak­est soliloquies

it cannot be But I am pigeon-liver'd, and lack gall To make oppression bitter.

To all of which Yeats directly alludes when speaking of the essential gaiety of art in his "Lapis Lazuli":

They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.

All things fall and are built again And those that build them again are gay.

In an early essay on Pushkin and Scriabin, of which only fragments remain, Mandelstam was evidently trying to find the source of this joy within the terms of Christianity. Christian art is joyous because it is free, and it is free because of the fact of Christ's having died to redeem the world. One need not die in art nor save the world in it, those matters having been, so to speak, attended to. What is left? The blissful responsibility to enjoy the world. Such, I take it, was the argument, as one can see it, from what is left. Whether in later years Mandelstam would have sought quite this underpinning for his innate gladness in ttfe, I cannot tell. Perhaps the missing segments of this same essay might have modulated the statement in some way. But that is beside the essential point, which is that Mandelstam habitually converted not only the prose of life but even its truly darker mo­ments into poems from which a sense of pleasure, even beatitude, is seldom absent.

Nadezhda Yakovlevna says in one place that he drew strength from what might drive others, herself included, into despair. But that is unfair. For her ample spirit, no less than the poet's creative gaiety, lends to her book its air of ultimate triumph.

Ill

It is one of the drabber commonplaces of literary history that the reputation of a poet generally suffers some diminution in the years just following his death. That Osip Mandelstam escaped this fate may be attributed in part to the peculiar circumstances of his demise.

For years it was not even known for sure that he was in fact dead; and by the time the facts began to be more widely known—in the late fifties, more or less—the rise in Mandelstam's posthumous celeb­rity had already begun its phenomenal course. At the present mo­ment there can be little doubt that among connoisseurs of Russian poetry he is the supreme verbal artist of this century.

This alone would make Nadezhda Yakovlevna's book absorbing enough, for she discusses the poetry of Mandelstam, especially the work of the exile years, with great sensitivity and with, needless to say, unimpeachable authority as regards the outward conditions of its origin.

His fame as a poet had been firmly established, however, in the decade before he met his future wife in 1919—a decade which, like all of his earlier life, she largely neglects, as she neglects everything of which she has no immediate knowledge. I shall therefore append the bare externals of that earlier life.

Osip Emilievich Mandelstam was born in Warsaw on January 15, 1891. His father was Emil Veniaminovich Mandelstam, a leather merchant, and his mother was born Flora Osipovna Verblovskaya. She was a teacher of piano, a woman of warm heart and cultivated intellect. Mandelstam grew up in St. Petersburg—the fact is by no means commonplace in the biography of Russian Jews of the period and argues his father's eminence in the guild that regulated such matters—and attended the Tenishev School. This was a progressive institution combining the classical disciplines with up-to-date com­mercial, scientific and even manual skills, and the roster of its grad­uates before the Revolution reads like a catalogue of Russian emi­nence for the first half of this century. When he finished in 1907, he went to Paris, took rooms across the street from the Sorbonne and read. The winter of 1909-10 he spent as a student in Heidelberg. He also attended the University of St. Petersburg for a brief time.

His earliest fame as a poet is connected with Apollon, one of the elegant journals of art and literature that adorned the revival of Russian taste around the turn of the century, and above all with a group of young poets who called themselves "Acmeists." They were in varying degrees willingly dominated by Nikolai Gumilev, a man of great fortitude (he died before a firing squad for complicity in a plot against the "new reality"), uncanny discernment in judging the poetry of his day, and himself not meanly gifted in the making of verses. He, with Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam, formed the trio whose work will save Acmeism from the transiency of many another such casual association and make it one of the permanent facts of Russian literary history.

He greeted Mandelstam's first book, Kamen {Stone), published in 1913, in the pages of Apollon. This little green brochure is today a great rarity, and even contemporary readers, as a matter of fact, tend to be more familiar with the second edition, considerably enlarged, of 1916. After the Revolution, a good part of which Mandelstam spent in the relatively humane environment of the Black Sea coast, his second book, Tristia, appeared in 1922 and again, under the title Vtoraya kniga (Second Book), in 1923—this time with a dedication to Nadezhda Yakovlevna. In 1925 he published a collection of auto­biographical prose called Shvm vremeni (The Noise of Time). Man­delstam's collected poems appeared in 1928 under the simple title Stikhotvorenia (Poems) and contained, in addition to the first two books, a section called "1921-1925." If one takes this as his "third book," one has accounted for all the poetry that he published in book form in his life. That same year there was also a book of criticism, О poezii (On Poetry) and a new edition of The Noise of Time, retitled Egipetskaya marka (The Egyptian Stamp) after a novella that had been added to it. The cumulative appearance of his work in verse, criticism and prose makes 1928 the "height" of his career. As Nadezhda Yakovlevna points out, this public summit was reached a few years after his real private position had begun to erode very dangerously.

Since 1955, owing to the truly heroic efforts of two Russian emigre scholars, Professor Gleb Struve and Mr. Boris Filippov, Man­delstam's texts, including not only all of the above but also a great treasure of works never published before, have been appearing in the United States. A collected edition of his poetry has existed in the Soviet Union for over a decade, but the authorities have so constantly postponed its publication that it has become something of a not terribly amusing international literary joke. When it appears, if it ever does, it will entirely vanish from the bookstores within a matter, quite literally, of minutes.

Such is Mandelstam's stature among his countrymen at this mo­ment. To attempt to characterize his art in so brief a note would be a waste of time, but to praise it without characterizing it would seem to me contemptuous of the reader's judgment. Faced with such in­different alternatives, I shall simply postpone the whole matter for another place and ask that you take Mandelstam's status, for the moment, on faith. He is the greatest Russian poet of the modern period. Had the author of this book not lived, or had she been less valorous, intelligent and loving than she is, Mandelstam would no doubt have died several years earlier, and his work, that great con­cealed body of poetry and prose that never emerged in public print, would almost certainly have perished. In addition to everything else that it is, this splendid book is a record of how those things did not happen, and that is sufficient.

London / Easter 1970

Translator's Preface

All notes_y except in the few cases where otherwise indicated, have been supplied by the translator, and the author bears no responsi­bility whatsoever for them. In order to keep footnotes to a minimum, most names of persons have been annotated in an Appendix, arranged in alphabetical order, at the end of the book. There is also a special note (page 419) on the various literary movements and organizations mentioned frequently in the text.

One short chapter of the original has been ormtted in translation be­cause it would make little sense for a reader unable to read Mandel- stam's verse in Russian. The full Russian text of Mrs. Mandelstam'¹ s book has been published under the title Vospominania by the Chek­hov Press (New York, 1910).

Mrs. Mandelstam refers to her husband throughout as O.M. (for Osip Mandelstam). In translation this has been reduced, for sim­plicity's sake, to M. Sometimes he is referred to in quoted conversa­tion by his first name and patronymic: Osip Emilievich.

CONTENTS

A May Night 5

Confiscation 6

Morning Thoughts 10

The Second Round 16

Shopping Baskets 19

"Integral Moves" 21

Public Opinion 24

Interview 29

Theory and Practice

Leaving for Exile 39

On the Other Side 41

The Irrational 44

The Namesake 51

A Piece of Chocolate 53

The Leap $6

Cherdyn 60

Hallucinations 65

Profession and Sickness 70

"Inside" 7 4

Christophorovich

Who Is to Blame? 8$

The Adjutant 89

On the Nature of the

Miracle 93

Journey to Voronezh 97

Thou Shalt Not Kill 1 о i

The Woman of the

Russian Revolution 108

Transmission Belts 112

Voronezh 118

Doctors and Illnesses 123

The Disappointed

Landlord 128

Money /37

3 2 The Origins of the Miracle 14$

The Antipodes 149

Two Voices 155

The Path to

Destruction 1$ 7

Capitulation 162

The Change of Values 170

Work 180

Moving Lips 184

Book and Notebook 190

Cycle 192

The Last Winter in

Voronezh 19$

The Ode 198

Golden Rules 204

"Hope" 210

"One Extra Day" 214

The "Bessarabian

Carriage" 214

The Illusion 221

The Reader of One

Book 225

Tikhonov 232

The Bookcase 235

Our Literature 244

Italy 246

The Social Structure 253

"NeTreba" 258

The Earth and Its

Concerns 260

Archive and Voice 269

Old and New 277

A "Convicted Person" 282

Chance 28$

The Electrician 290

In the Country 293

Ordeal by Fear 297

Cow or Poetry

Reading? 300

The Old Friend 304

Tania, the Non-Party

Bolshevik 307

Poetry Lovers 314

Eclipse 319

A Scene from Life 322

The Suicide 32$

73

75

77

79

82

71 Rebirth 328

The Last Idyll 334 The Textile Workers The Shklovskis 346 Maryina Roshcha 3 jo The Accomplice 352 The Young Lady of

Samatikha 356 The First of May 360 Gugovna 363 The Trap 367 The Window on the

34'

Sophia Embankment 369 The Date of Death 376 One Final Account 391

419

Appendix a. Notes on Persons Mentioned in the Text 399 в. Note on Literary Movements and Organizations

Index 421

Osip Mandelstam, 1922

Osip Mandelstam, 1936

N M Y

i A May Night

After slapping Alexei Tolstoi in the face, M. immediately re- ii turned to Moscow.* From here he rang Akhmatova every day, begging her to come. She was hesitant and he was angry. When she had packed and bought her ticket, her brilliant, irritable husband Punin asked her, as she stood in thought by a window: "Are you praying that this cup should pass from you?" It was he who had once said to her when they were walking through the Tretiakov Gallery: "Now let's go and see how they'll take you to your execu­tion." This is the origin of her lines:

"And later as the hearse sinks in the snow at dusk . . .

What mad Surikov will describe my last journey?"

But she was not fated to make her last journey like this. Punin used to say, his face twitching in a nervous tic: "They're keeping you for the very end." But in the end they overlooked her and didn't arrest her. Instead, she was always seeing others off on their last journey—including Punin himself.

Akhmatova's son, Lev Gumilev, went to meet her at the station— he was staying with us at that time. It was a mistake to entrust him with this simple task—he of course managed to miss her, and she was very upset. It wasn't what she was used to. That year she had come to see us a great deal and she was always greeted at the station by M.

* See the note on Alexei Nikolayevich Tolstoi in the Appendix, where notes on most other persons mentioned by the author will also be found.

3

himself, who at once started to amuse her with his jokes. She remem­bered how he had once said angrily, when the train was late: "You travel at the same speed as Anna Karenina." And another time: "Why are you dressed like a deep-sea diver?"—it had been raining in Leningrad and she had put on boots and a rubber mac with a hood, but in Moscow the sun was shining and it was very hot. Whenever they met they were cheerful and carefree like children, as in the old days at the Poets' Guild.* "Stop it," I used to shout, "I can't live with such chatterboxes!" But this time, in May 1934, they had nothing to be cheerful about.

The day dragged on with excruciating slowness. In the evening the translator David Brodski turned up and then just wouldn't leave. There wasn't a bite to eat in the house and M. went around to the neighbors to try and get something for Akhmatova's supper. We hoped that Brodski might now get bored and leave, but no, he shot after M. and was still with him when he returned with the solitary egg he had managed to scrounge. Sitting down again in his chair, Brodski continued to recite the lines he liked best from his favorite poets, Sluchevski and Polonski (there was nothing he didn't know about both Russian and French poetry). He just went on and on, quoting and reminiscing, and it was only after midnight that we real­ized why he was being such a nuisance.

Whenever she came to see us, Akhmatova stayed in our small kitchen. The gas had not yet been installed and I cooked our sem­blance of a dinner on a kerosene stove in the corridor. In honor of our guest we covered the gas cooker with oilcloth to disguise it as a table. We called the kitchen "the sanctuary" after Narbut had once looked in there to see Akhmatova and said: "What are you doing here, like a pagan idol in a sanctuary? Why don't you go to some meeting or other where you can sit down properly?" Akhmatova and I had now taken refuge there, leaving M. to the mercy of the poetry-loving Brodski. Suddenly, at about one o'clock in the morn­ing, there was a sharp, unbearably explicit knock on the door. "They've come for Osip," I said, and went to open the door.

Some men in civilian overcoats were standing outside—there seemed to be a lot of them. For a split second I had a tiny flicker of hope that this still wasn't it—my eye had not made out the uniforms under the covert-cloth topcoats. In fact, topcoats of this kind were also a sort of uniform—though they were intended as a disguise, like the old pea-green coats of the Czarist okhrana. But this I did not

* See page 419.

know then. All hope vanished as soon as the uninvited guests stepped inside.

I had expected them to say "How do you do?" or "Is this Mandel- stam's apartment?" or something else of the kind that any visitor says in order to be let in by the person who opens the door. But the night visitors of our times do not stand on such ceremony—like se­cret-police agents the world over, I suppose.

Without a word or a moment's hesitation, but with consummate skill and speed, they came in past me (not pushing, however) and the apartment was suddenly full of people already checking our identity papers, running their hands over our hips with a precise, well-practiced movement, and feeling our pockets to make sure we had no concealed weapons.

M. came out of the large room. "Have you come for me?" he asked. One of the agents, a short man, looked at him with what could have been a faint smile and said: "Your papers." M. took them out of his pocket, and after checking them, the agent handed him a warrant. M. read it and nodded.

In the language of the secret police this was what was known as a "night operation." As I learned later, they all firmly believed that they were always liable to meet with opposition on such occasions, and to keep their spirits up they regaled each other with romantic tales about the dangers involved in these night raids. I myself once heard the daughter of an important Chekist,[1] who had come to prominence in 1937, telling a story about how Isaac Babel had "seri­ously wounded one of our men" while resisting arrest. She told such stories as an expression of concern for her kindly, loving father whenever he went out on "night operations." He was fond of chil­dren and animals—at home he always had the cat on his knees—and he told his daughter never to admit that she had done anything wrong, and always to say "no." This homely man with the cat could never forgive the people he interrogated for admitting everything they were accused of. "Why did they do it?" the daughter asked, echoing her father. "Think of the trouble they made for themselves and for us as well!" By "us," she meant all those who had come at night with warrants, interrogated and passed sentence on the ac­cused, and whiled away their spare time telling stories of the risks they ran. Whenever I hear such tales I think of the tiny hole in the skull of Isaac Babel, a cautious, clever man with a high forehead, who probably never once in his life held a pistol in his hands.

And so they burst into our poor, hushed apartments as though raiding bandits' lairs or secret laboratories in which masked car­bonari were making dynamite and preparing armed resistance. They visited us on the night of May 13, 1934. After checking our papers, presenting their warrants and making sure there would be no resist­ance, they began to search the apartment. Brodski slumped into his chair and sat there motionless, like a huge wooden sculpture of some savage tribe. He puffed and wheezed with an angry, hurt ex­pression on his face. When I chanced at one point to speak to him— asking him, I think, to get some books from the shelves for M. to take with him—he answered rudely: "Let M. get them himself," and again began to wheeze. Toward morning, when we were at last per­mitted to walk freely around the apartment and the tired Chekists no longer even looked searchingly at us as we did so, Brodski suddenly roused himself, held up his hand like a schoolboy and asked permis­sion to go to the toilet. The agent directing the search looked at him with contempt. "You can go home," he said. "What?" Brodski said in astonishment. "Home," the man repeated and turned his back. The secret police despised their civilian helpers. Brodski had no doubt been ordered to sit with us that evening in case we tried to destroy any manuscripts when we heard the knock on the door.

2 Confiscation

_M

often repeated Khlebnikov's lines: "What a great thing • is a police station! The place where I have my rendezvous with the State." But Khlebnikov was thinking of something more innocent—just a routine check on the papers of a suspicious vagrant, the almost traditional form of meeting between State and poet. Our rendezvous with the State took place on a different, and much higher, level. Our uninvited guests, in strict accordance with their ritual, had immediately divided their roles between them, without exchanging a word. There were five people altogether—three agents and two witnesses. The two witnesses had flopped down on chairs in the hall and gone to sleep. Three years later, in 1937, they would no doubt have snored from sheer fatigue. Who knows by what charter we are granted the right to be arrested and searched in the presence of members of the public, so that no arrest should take place without due process of law, and it could never be said that anyone had just disappeared at dead of night without benefit of warrant or wit­nesses? This is the tribute we pay to the legal concepts of a bygone age.

To be present as a witness at arrests had almost become a profes­sion. In every large apartment building the same previously desig­nated pair would regularly be roused from their beds, and in the provinces the same two witnesses would be used for a whole street or district. They led a double life, serving by day as repairmen, jani­tors or plumbers (is this why our faucets are always dripping?) and by night as "witnesses," prepared if need be to sit up till morning in somebody's apartment. The money to pay them came out of our rent as part of the expense of maintaining the building. At what rate they were paid for their night work I do not know.

The oldest of the three agents got busy on the trunk in which we kept our papers, while the two younger ones carried on the search elsewhere. The clumsiness with which they went about it was very striking. Following their instructions, they looked in all the places cunning people are traditionally supposed to hide their secret docu­ments: they shook out every book, squinting down the spine and cutting open the binding, inspected desks and tables for hidden drawers, and peered into pockets and under beds. A manuscript stuck into a saucepan would never have been found. Best of all would have been to put it on the dining table.

I particularly remember one of them, a young puffy-cheeked man with a smirk. As he went through the books he admired the old bindings and kept telling us we should not smoke so much. Instead, he offered us hard candy from a box which he produced from the pocket of his uniform trousers. I now have a good acquaintance, a writer and official of the Union of Soviet Writers,* who collects old books, showing off his finds in the secondhand book stores—first editions of Sasha Chorny and Severianin—and offering me hard candy from a tin box he keeps in the pocket of his smart stove­pipe trousers which he has custom-made in a tailor shop exclusive to members of the Union of Writers. In the thirties he had a modest job in the secret police, and then fixed himself up safely as a writer. These two images blur into one: the elderly writer of the end of the

* See page 420.

fifties and the young police agent of the middle thirties. It's as though the young man who was so fond of hard candy had changed his profession and come up in the world: now dressed in civilian clothes, he lays down the law on moral problems, as a writer is sup­posed to, and continues to offer me candy from the same box.

This gesture of offering hard candy was repeated in many other apartments during searches. Was this, too, part of the ritual, like the technique of entering the room, checking identity papers, frisking people for weapons and looking for secret drawers? The procedure was worked out to the last detail and it was all quite different from the hectic manner in which it was done in the first days of the Revo­lution and during the Civil War. Which was worse I find it difficult to say.

The oldest of the agents, a short, lean and silent man with fair hair, was squatting down to look through the papers in the trunk. He worked slowly, deliberately and thoroughly. They had probably sent us well-qualified people from the section in charge of literature —this was supposedly part of the third department, though my ac­quaintance in the stovepipe trousers who offers me hard candy swears that the department responsible for people like us is either the second or the fourth. This is only a minor detail, but the preserva­tion of certain administrative distinctions from Czarist days was very much in the spirit of the Stalin era.*

After carefully examining it, he put every piece of paper either on a chair in the growing pile of those to be confiscated, or threw it on the floor. Since one can generally tell from the selection of papers what the nature of the accusation will be, I offered to help the agent read M.'s difficult writing and date the various items; I also tried to rescue what I could—for example, a long poem by Piast that we were keeping, and the drafts of M.'s translations of Petrarch. We all no­ticed that the agent was interested in the manuscripts of M.'s verse of recent years. He showed M. the draft of "The Wolf" and, frown­ing, read it out in a low voice from beginning to end. Then he picked up a humorous poem about the manager of an apartment house who had smashed a harmonium that one of the tenants was playing against the rules. "What's this about?" asked the agent with a baffled look, throwing the manuscript on the chair. "What in­deed?" said M. "What is it about?"

The whole difference between the periods before and after 1937 could be seen in the nature of the two house searches we went

* Under Nicholas I, the secret police was called "The Third Section." through. In 1938 they wasted no time looking for papers and examin­ing them—indeed, the police agents didn't even seem to know the occupation of the man they had come to arrest. When M. was ar­rested again in 1938, they simply turned over all the mattresses, swept his papers into a sack, poked around for a while and then disappeared, taking M. with them. The whole operation lasted no more than twenty minutes. But in 1934 they stayed all night until the early hours.

On both occasions, seeing me get M.'s things together, they made the same joking remark (also in accordance with instruction?): "Why so much stuff? What's the point? You don't think he's going to stay with us all that long? They'll just have a chat and let him go." This was the only relic from the era of "high humanism" in the twenties and beginning of the thirties. In the winter of 1937, reading a newspaper attack on Yagoda for allegedly turning the forced-labor camps into rest homes, M. said: "I didn't know we were in the paws of such humanists."

The egg brought for Akhmatova lay untouched on the table. Everybody—M.'s brother Evgeni, who had recently arrived from Leningrad, was also there—walked around the rooms talking and trying not to pay attention to the people rummaging in our things. Suddenly Akhmatova said that M. should eat something before he left, and she held out the egg to him. M. took it, sat down at the table, put some salt on it and ate it.

The two piles of papers on the chair and on the floor continued to grow. We tried not to walk on them, but our visitors took no such care. I very much regret that among the other papers stolen by Ru- dakov's widow we have lost some drafts of M.'s early poems—since they were not to be confiscated, they were just thrown on the floor and were marked with excellent impressions of military boots. I valued these pages very much and gave them for safekeeping into hands I thought would be safest of all: those of the young Rudakov, who in his devotion to us spent a year and a half in exile with us in Voronezh, where we shared every scrap of bread with him because he had no way of earning a living there. When he returned to Leningrad he also took with him for safekeeping the papers of Gumilev, which Akhmatova had trustingly delivered to him on a sleigh. Neither she nor I ever saw our papers again. Akhmatova occasionally hears rumors about people buying letters which she knows to have been among them.

"Osip, I envy you," Gumilev used to say to M., "you will die in agarret." Both had written their prophetic lines by this time, but nei­ther wished to believe his own forecast, and they took consolation in the French idea of what happens to ill-starred poets. But a poet, after all, is just a human being like any other, and he is bound to end up in the most ordinary way, in the way most typical for his age and his times, meeting the fate that lies in wait for everyone else. None of the glamour and thrill of a special destiny, but the simple path along which all were "herded in a herd." Death in a garret was not for us.

At the time of the campaign in defense of Sacco and Vanzetti—we were then living in Tsarskoye Selo—M. sent a message to the hierar­chy of the Russian Orthodox Church (through a certain church­man) proposing that the Church should also organize a protest against the execution. The answer came back at once: the Church would be willing to speak out in defense of the two men on condi­tion that M. undertook to organize a similar protest if anything simi­lar should happen to Russian priests. M. was quite taken aback and confessed himself defeated. This was one of the first lessons he learned in those days when he was trying to come to terms with the existing state of affairs.

e never asked, on hearing about the latest arrest, "What was

When the morning of the fourteenth came, all the guests, invited and uninvited, went away and I was left alone with Akhmatova in the empty apartment, which bore all the marks of the night's rav­ages. I think we just sat opposite each other in silence. At any rate we didn't go to bed, and it never occurred to us to make tea. We were waiting for the hour when we could leave the building without attracting attention. Why? Where could we go, or to whom? Life went on. I suppose we looked a little like the "drowned maidens," if I may be forgiven this literary allusion—God knows, at that moment nothing was further from our minds than literature.

3 Morning Thoughts

he arrested for?" but we were exceptional. Most people, crazed by fear, asked this question just to give themselves a little hope: if others were arrested for some reason, then they wouldn't be arrested, because they hadn't done anything wrong. They vied witheach other in thinking up ingenious reasons to justify each arrest: "Well, she really is a smuggler, you know," "He really did go rather far," "I myself heard him say . . ." Or: "It was only to be expected —he's a terrible man," "I always thought there was something fishy about him," "He isn't one of us at all." This was enough for anyone to be arrested and destroyed: "not one of us," "talks too much," "a bad character" . . . These were just variations on a theme we had first heard in 1917. Both public opinion and the police kept inventing new and more graphic ones, adding fuel to the fire without which there is no smoke. This was why we had outlawed the question "What was he arrested for?" "What for?" Akhmatova would cry indignantly whenever, infected by the prevailing climate, anyone of our circle asked this question. "What do you mean, what for? It's time you understood that people are arrested for nothing/"

But even so, when M. was taken away, Akhmatova and I could not help asking the forbidden question "What for?" There were any number of possible reasons—by the standards of our laws, of course. It could have been for his verse in general, for what he had written about literature, or, more specifically, for the poem about Stalin. It could have been for slapping Alexei Tolstoi in the face. When this happened, Tolstoi had shouted at the top of his voice, in front of witnesses, that he would make sure M. was never published again, and that he would have him expelled from Moscow. . . . The same day, so we were told, he went to Moscow to complain to the boss of Soviet literature, Maxim Gorki. Before long we heard that Gorki had said—or at least the phrase was firmly attributed to him—"We'll teach him to strike Russian writers." People now tell me just as firmly that Gorki could not have said any such thing, and that he was really quite different from what we imagined him to be at the time. There is a widespread tendency to make Gorki out as a victim of the Stalinist regime, as a champion of free thought and a protector of the intelligentsia. I cannot judge, though I am sure Gorki had major disagreements with his master and was very hard-pressed by him. But from this it does not follow that he would have refused to support Tolstoi against a writer as deeply uncongenial to him as M. As regards Gorki's attitude to freedom of opinion, one only has to read his articles, speeches and books.

All things considered, our main hope was that M.'s arrest was in­deed an act of vengeance for the slap in the face given to Alexei Tolstoi. However the charge was formulated, it could lead to noth­ing worse than banishment—and of this we were not afraid. Expul­sion and exile had become a standard feature of our everyday life. In the years of the "breathing-space," before the terror began in ear­nest, there were always fairly widespread arrests, particularly among the intelligentsia, in the spring (mostly in May) and in the fall. They were meant to distract attention from our perennial economic fail­ures. At that time there were scarcely any cases of people disappear­ing into thin air: they always wrote from exile, and returned at the end of their sentences—to be deported again. Andrei Bely, when we met him at Koktebel* in the summer of 1933, said he could scarcely keep up with the business of sending telegrams and writing letters to all his friends who had just "returned"—there had evidently been a clean sweep of theosophists, who were then released all at the same time in 1933. Similarly, in the spring before M.'s arrest, Piast had re­turned. After three or five years' absence all such exiles came back and were allowed to settle in small towns beyond a hundred kilometers from Moscow. If it happened to everybody else, why shouldn't it happen to us? Not long before his arrest, hearing M. talk rather carelessly with some people we did not know, I said to him: "You'd better watch out—it's almost May!" M. just waved his hand: "So what? Let them send us away. Others may be frightened, but what do we care?" And it was true: for some reason we really weren't worried about exile.

But it would be quite another matter if they had found the poem about Stalin. This was what had been in M.'s mind as he kissed Akhmatova goodbye before they took him away. We none of us doubted that for verse like this he would pay with his life. That was why we had watched the Chekists so closely, trying to see what they were after. The "Wolf" poems were not so bad—they would mean being sent to a camp, at the worst.

How might these potential charges be formulated? It was really all one! It is absurd to apply the standards of Roman law, the Napole­onic Code or any other legal system, to our times. The secret police always knew exactly what they were doing and they went about it systematically. Among their many aims were the destruction of wit­nesses who might remember certain things, and the creation of the unanimity needed to prepare the way for the millennium. People were picked up wholesale according to category (and sometimes age group)—churchmen, mystics, idealist philosophers, humorists, people who talked too much, people who talked too little, people with their own ideas about law, government and economics; and—

• A resort in the Crimea, popular with writers.

Mandelstam's poem on Stalin (November 19 3 3)¹

We live, deaf to the land beneath us_y Ten steps away no one hears our speeches_y

But where there's so much as half a conversation The Kremlin's mountaineer will get his mention?

His fingers are fat as grubs

And the words_y final as lead weights, fall from his lips_y

His cockroach whiskers leer And his boot tops gleam.

Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders— fawning half-men for him to play with.

They whinny, purr or whine As he prates and points a finger_y

One by one forging his laws_y to be flung Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin.

And every killing is a treat For the broad-chested Ossete?

This poem, which Mrs. Mandelstam mentions on page 12 and at many other points, is nowhere quoted in full in the text of her book.

In the first version, which came into the hands of the secret police, these two lines read:

All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer, The murderer and peasant-slayer.

"Ossete." There were persistent stories that Stalin had Ossetian blood. Os- setia is to the north of Georgia in the Caucasus. The people, of Iranian stock, are quite different from the Georgians.

once the concept of "sabotage" had been introduced to explain all failures or blunders—engineers, technicians and agricultural special­ists. "Don't wear that hat," M. once said to Boris Kuzin, "you mustn't attract attention—or you'll have trouble." And he did have trouble. But fortunately the attitude toward hats changed when it was decreed that Soviet scholars must dress even better than their foppish Western counterparts, and after serving his sentence Boris was appointed to a very good academic post. M.'s remark about the hat may have been a joke, but the nature of the head under it cer­tainly determined its owner's fate.

The members of the exterminating profession had a little saying: "Give us a man, and we'll make a case." We had first heard it in Yalta in 1928 from Furmanov, the brother of the writer. A former official of the Cheka who had switched to film-making, he was still connected with the secret police through his wife, and knew what he was talking about. In the small boardinghouse where we were staying most of the people were ТВ patients, but Furmanov had come to restore his shattered nerves in the sea air. There was also a good-natured Nepman with a sense of humor who quickly got on friendly terms with Furmanov. Together they invented a game of "interrogation" which was so realistic that it gave them both quite a thrill. Furmanov, to illustrate the saying about it being possible to find a case against any man, "interrogated" the trembling Nepman, who always became entangled in the web of ingenious constructions that could be put on his every single word. At that time relatively few people had experienced at first hand the peculiarities of our legal system. The only ones who had so far really been through the mill were those belonging to the categories mentioned above, as well as people who had had their valuables confiscated, and Nepmen—that is, entrepreneurs who took the New Economic Policy* at its face value. That was why nobody, except for M., paid any attention to the cat-and-mouse game being enacted for their own amusement by the former Cheka interrogator and the Nepman. I wouldn't have noticed it either if M. hadn't told me to listen. I believe that M. was always intent on showing me things he wanted me to remember. Furmanov's game gave us a first glimpse of the legal process as it was while the new system was still only taking shape. The new justice was based on the dialectic and the great unchanging principle that "he who is not with us is against us."

Akhmatova, who had carefully watched events from the first, was wiser than I. Sitting together in the ransacked apartment, we went over all the possibilities in our minds and speculated about the fu­ture, but we put very little of it into words. "You must keep your strength up," Akhmatova said. By this she meant that I must prepare for a long wait: people were often held for many weeks or months, or even for more than a year, before they were banished or done away with. This was because of the length of time needed to "proc-

^# The New Economic Policy (NEP) was launched by Lenin in 1921 to al­low the country to recover after the Civil War. Limited private enterprise (in­cluding private publishing) was allowed. NEP ended in 1929.

ess" a case. Procedure meant a great deal to our rulers, and the whole farrago of nonsense was always meticulously committed to paper. Did they really think that posterity, going through these records, would believe them just as blindly as their crazed contemporaries? Or perhaps it was just the bureaucratic mind at work, the demon from the ink pot, feeding on legal formalities and consuming tons of paper in the process? If the formalities in question could be called "legal" . . .

For the family of an arrested man the period of waiting was taken up by routine steps (what M. in his "Fourth Prose" calls "imponder­able, integral moves") such as obtaining money and standing in line with packages. (From the length of the lines we could see how things stood in our world: in 1934 they were still quite short.) I had to find the strength to tread the path already trodden by other wives. But on that May night I became aware of yet another task, the one for which I have lived ever since. There was nothing I could do to alter M.'s fate, but some of his manuscripts had survived and much more was preserved in my memory. Only I could save it all, and this was why I had to keep up my strength.

We were roused from our thoughts by the arrival of Lev. Because his mother was staying with us and we hadn't enough room for both, he had been put up for the night by the Ardovs. Knowing that M. was an early riser, he came almost at the crack of dawn to have early- morning tea with us, and we told him the news as he came in through the door.

He was still a boy, but so alive with ideas that wherever he ap­peared in those years he always caused a stir. People sensed the dy­namic strength fermenting in him and knew that he was doomed. Now our house had been stricken by the plague and become a death trap for anyone prone to infection. For this reason I was overcome by horror at the sight of Lev. "Go away," I said, "go away at once. Osip was arrested last night." And he obediently went away. That was the rule among us.

4 The Second Round

_M

y brother Evgeni was still asleep when we rang to tell him the news. On the phone, of course, we used none of the ta­boo words like "arrested," "picked up" or "taken away." We had worked out a code of our own and we understood each other per­fectly without having to spell anything out. Both he and Emma Ger- stein quickly came over to the apartment. All four of us then left, one after the other at short intervals, each with a shopping basket in his hand or a wad of manuscripts in his pocket. In this way we man­aged to save part of M.'s papers. But on the prompting of some sixth sense, we did not remove everything. We even left the pile of stuff on the floor lying where it was. "Don't touch it," Akhmatova had said to me when I had opened the trunk to put back this eloquent heap of papers. I obeyed, not knowing why. It was simply that I trusted her instinct.

That same day, after Akhmatova and I had returned from running errands around the city, there was another knock at the door, but this time a rather delicate one. Once more I admitted an uninvited guest—it was the senior of the three police agents who had come the night before. He glanced with satisfaction at the pile of papers lying on the floor. "Ah, you still haven't tidied up," he said, and started on a second search. This time he worked by himself, and he was inter­ested only in the trunk which contained the manuscripts of M.'s verse. He didn't even bother to look at the manuscripts of prose works.

Hearing about this second search, Evgeni, who was the most re­served and tight-lipped person in the world, frowned and said: "If they come once more, they'll take both of you with them."

What was the explanation of this second search and the removal of further papers? Akhmatova and I exchanged glances—always enough for Soviet citizens to understand each other. Clearly, the official in charge of the case had examined the manuscripts confis­cated the night before (none of the poems was very long, and not much time had been needed to read them), but had not found what he was looking for. They had therefore sent this agent to have an­other look, fearing that some essential document might have been missed in the haste of the search. We could see from this that they wanted some one particular thing and would not rest content with verses such as the "Wolf' poem. But the thing they were looking for wasn't in the trunk—neither M. nor I had ever written it down on paper. This time I didn't offer to help, and Akhmatova and I just sat drinking tea, with an occasional sidelong glance at our visitor.

The agent had appeared exactly fifteen minutes after our arrival. In other words, he must have been informed about it. But who had tipped him off? It could have been a police spy living in the building, one of our neighbors who had been instructed to keep an eye on us, or a "tail" keeping watch in the street. We had not yet learned to identify these people—that was to come with later experience when we saw them all the time in front of Akhmatova's house: they stood there without the least pretense at disguise. Why were they so open about it? Was it just plain clumsiness, or was it their crude way of intimidating us? Perhaps there was an element of both. By their whole behavior they seemed to be saying: You have nowhere to hide, you are always under surveillance, we are always with yom . . . On more than one occasion, good acquaintances whom we had never suspected dropped a casual phrase to let us know who they were and why they had honored us with their friendship. Pre­sumably this kind of openness was calculated to play its part in the whole system of conditioning: such innuendos, with all the vistas they opened up, had the effect of making us quite tongue-tied, and we retreated into our shells even more. Later on, in Tashkent, I was often advised, for example, not to go on carrying around with me the remnants of M.'s manuscripts, to forget the past, and not to try to get back to Moscow—"They approve of your living in Tash­kent." There was never any point in asking who approved of it. The question would be met with a smile. Such hints and cryptic phrases spoken with a smile aways produced a furious reaction in me: sup­pose it was all the idle talk of a despicable wretch who in fact knew nothing, but was just putting on the mannerisms of one close to the rulers of our destiny? There was no end of such people. But this was not all. In Tashkent, again, when I was living there with Akhmatova, we often returned home to find our ashtrays filled with someone's cigarette ends, a book, magazine or newspaper that had not been there before, and once I discovered a lipstick (of a revoltingly loud shade) on the dining table, together with a hand mirror that had been brought in from the next room. In the desk drawers and suit­cases there were often traces of a search too conspicuous not to be noticed. Was this in accordance with the instructions given to those who rummaged in our things, or was it simply their idea of amusing themselves? Did they laugh out loud and say: "Let them have a good look"? Both explanations are possible. Why not give them a fright, they must have reasoned, so they don't get too complacent? How­ever, they used this technique against Akhmatova more than against me.

As regards the "tails," I particularly remember one from the pe­riod after the war. The weather was very cold and he was trying to keep warm by stamping his feet and swinging his arms very energet­ically, as the cabbies used to. Several days running, Akhmatova and I went past this dancing "tail" every time we left the house. Then he was replaced by another one who was not quite so lively. Another time we were walking through the courtyard back to the apartment when a flashbulb suddenly went off behind us: they had evidently decided to take a photograph to find out who was visiting Akhma­tova. To get into this courtyard one had to go through a lobby in the main building, and the door into it was guarded by a doorman. On this occasion we were held up at the entrance for rather a long time. The excuse was an idiotic one: the doorman had lost the key or something like that. Had the "photo-spy" begun to load his camera only when he was told we had returned? All this happened not long before the Decree on Akhmatova and Zoshchenko,* and these signs of a special interest in her made my flesh creep.

I did not myself receive this kind of attention and was almost never honored with my own individual "tail." I was generally surrounded not by regular agents, but only by common informers. Once, how­ever, in Tashkent I was warned by Larisa Glazunov, whose father was a high official of the secret police, against one of the private pupils sent to me by a woman student in the Physics faculty. This one, the woman student had insisted, didn't want lessons from anyone except me. One day Larisa happened to run into her on my doorstep and told me that the girl worked for her father. I assured Larisa that this had been plain to me for some time already: the girl never came for her lesson at the agreed hour, but always at some odd time, evidently in the hope of catching me unawares, but ostensibly to ask whether she could postpone her lesson because she was so busy. Apart from this, she had the characteristic mannerisms of a minor agent: she could never refrain from watching me out of the corner of her eye as I moved about the room. It was not hard to guess why she wanted these lessons that she was always skipping. She soon stopped coming, and the student who had pressed her on me, a decent girl who had

* The Party decree of 1946—see the note on Zhdanov in the Appendix.

obviously got caught in the web, was clearly very upset and anxious to explain things to me. I managed to avoid this confrontation, but I will never forget how the girl sent to spy on me kept sighing and repeating: "I adore Akhmatova and your hubby"—the vulgar tone was typical of her milieu. All this relates to a much later stage; in 1934 we hadn't even heard the word "tail," and therefore we did not suspect who had informed the police agent about our return to the apartment.

5 Shopping Baskets

manuscripts for the second time, the agent did not even no­tice that Piast's poems were missing—it was this that might have alerted him to the fact that we, too, had removed a few things. Akh­matova's shrewdness in advising me not to tidy the room had paid off—if I had put all the papers back in the trunk, the agent might have got suspicious.

Piast's poems were very long, and it was these we had had to take away in shopping baskets. They were divided into chapters called "Fragments." M. liked them—perhaps because of the way in which Piast denounced the concept of the lawful wedded life. He referred to his own wife as his "wedded" one, and refused to live with her. When we settled for the first time in a normal apartment, tiny as it was, M. too was minded to rebel against the trammels of married life and began to praise Piast inordinately. Noting his enthusiasm, I asked: "And who is your 'wedded' one? Not I, surely?"

To think that we could have had an ordinary family life with its bickering, broken hearts and divorce suits! There are people in the world so crazy as not to realize that this is normal human existence of the kind everybody should aim at. What wouldn't we have given for such ordinary heartbreaks!

hile rummaging in our trunk and going through all the

Piast had given me two of his poems to keep, after writing them out in long hand: typewriters were expensive and neither of us could afford one. He had given me the only fair copies and refused to believe me when I tried to convince him that he could hardly have chosen a worse place to keep them in. After his exile our apartment seemed to him the epitome of stability, security and calm, almost likea fortress. When he saw our night visitor pick up the "Fragments," M. sighed sadly, fearful of what might happen to Piast. It was at this point that "the strength came over me," as Akhmatova put it, to retrieve from the agent and thus virtually preserve for posterity Piast's curses on "wedded wives" and his paeans to the illicit beauties of the kind he preferred—for some reason, they were all as tall as guardsmen. He had brought the most recent of these female giants to our apartment to hear him recite his "Fragments." Is it possible that she kept a copy of the manuscript? Actually, I believe she was less interested in Piast than in the fees he was then extorting from the State Publishing House for a translation of Rabelais. I also re­member Piast complaining at that time about his wayward step­daughter; I am told that she is still living, though somewhere far away, and has fond memories of her rather eccentric stepfather. Per­haps she still has the poems that I rescued?

Just before M.'s arrest we had constant visits from the ordinary police because of Piast: he had given our address when he registered with them and got permission to spend a few days in Moscow to straighten out his literary affairs. His permit had expired and the police were now looking for him to make sure he left the city for the place he was allowed to live in. Luckily for him, he was not with us during the searches—as he would have been if he hadn't been frightened off by the visits from the ordinary police. If he had fallen into the hands of our agents, they would have hauled him off to­gether with our manuscripts. He was lucky. Just as he was also lucky not to survive till the next wave of arrests and die in his bed or a hospital ward in Chukhloma or some other such place he was al­lowed to live in. Like the dramas of family life, this was normal and hence could be regarded as happiness. To understand this one had to go through a certain schooling.

As to M.'s manuscripts, we rescued a small number of drafts from various years. After this we never kept them in the apartment again. I took some of them out to Voronezh in small batches in order to establish the texts in final form and to compile lists of the unpub­lished items. I gradually got this done together with M. himself, who had now changed his attitude toward manuscripts and drafts. Previ­ously he had no time at all for them and was always angry when, instead of destroying them, I threw them into the old yellow trunk that had belonged to my mother. But after the search of our apart­ment and his arrest, he understood that it was easier to save a manu­script than a man, and he no longer relied on his memory, which, as

he knew, would perish with him. Some of these manuscripts have survived to the present day, but the bulk of them disappeared at the time of his two arrests. What do they do in the bowels of our Halls of Justice with all the papers which in the early days they took away in briefcases and then, later on, in sacks? But why speculate about- the fate of papers when we don't know what happened to their own­ers? It is a miracle that a few witnesses and a handful of manuscripts have survived from those times.

6 "Integral Moves'

here was no third search and we were not arrested. We there­

fore started the same routine as everybody when their relatives have been picked up. After running around the city all day, we came back exhausted and, instead of making a proper dinner, opened a can of corn. This went on for three days. On the fourth day my mother arrived from Kiev. She had vacated her apartment there, sold off the unwieldy family furniture, and come to spend the rest of her days with her daughter and son-in-law now that they had at last settled in a nice apartment of their own. Nobody met her at the station, and she was very angry and hurt. But when she learned what had hap­pened, all her resentment vanished and she was once again the stu­dent radical of pre-revolutionary days who knew exactly what to think about the Government and its police activities. Throwing up her hands, she gave us a piece of her mind on the theory and practice of Bolshevism, made a rapid survey of our household resources, and, declaring that even in her day the doctors attributed the high inci­dence of pellagra in Bessarabia to the excessive consumption of corn, took some money out of her purse and ran off to buy provisions. Now that we had someone to look after us, we pursued our routine with even greater energy.

I had gone to see Bukharin right at the outset. When he heard what had happened, he changed color and bombarded me with questions. I had not realized that he was capable of getting so upset. He paced rapidly up and down his huge office, occasionally stopping in front of me to ask another question. "Have you been to see him?" I had to explain to him that visits to relatives in prison were no longer allowed. Bukharin did not know this. Like all theorists, he

was not good at drawing practical conclusions from his theory.

"He hasn't written anything rash, has he?" I said no—just a few poems in his usual manner, nothing worse than what Bukharin knew of already. It was a lie, and I still feel ashamed of it. But if I had told the truth, we should not have had our Voronezh "breathing-space." Should one lie? May one lie? Is it all right to lie in order to save someone? It is good to live in conditions where one doesn't have to lie. Do such conditions exist anywhere? We were brought up from childhood to believe that lies and hypocrisy are universal. I would certainly not have survived in our terrible times without lying. I have lied all my life: to my students, colleagues and even the good friends I didn't quite trust (this was true of most of them). In the same way, nobody trusted me. This was the normal lying of the times, something in the nature of a polite convention. I am not ashamed of this kind of lying and I misled Bukharin quite deliber­ately, out of a calculated desire not to frighten off my only ally. How could I have done otherwise?

Bukharin said that M. could not have been arrested for slapping Tolstoi in the face. I replied that people could be arrested for any­thing. What could be more convenient than Article 58 of the Crimi­nal Code,[2] which was always applied to everything?

My account of Tolstoi's threats and the phrase "We'll teach him to strike Russian writers" had their effect. He almost groaned. Prob­ably this man who had known the Czarist jails and believed in revo­lutionary terror as a matter of principle had at this moment a particularly keen premonition of what lay in store for himself.

I went to see Bukharin frequently during those days. His secre­tary, Korotkova, described by M. in his "Fourth Prose" as a "squir­rel who chews a nut with every visitor," greeted me every time with an affectionate and frightened look and immediately went in to an­nounce me. The door of the office was at once flung open and Bu­kharin ran out from behind his desk to meet me: "Anything new? Nor have I. Nobody knows anything."

These were our last meetings ever. On the way from Cherdyn to Voronezh I went to Izvestia to try and see him again. "What terrible telegrams you've been sending from Cherdyn," Korotkova said and disappeared into his office. When she came out again, she was almost in tears. "Nikolai Ivanovich doesn't want to see you—because of some poem or other." I never saw him again. Later on he told Ehren- burg that Yagoda had recited the poem on Stalin by heart to him, and this so frightened him that he gave up his efforts. By then he had done everything in his power, and we had him to thank for getting a revision of M.'s sentence.

A visit to Bukharin took no more than an hour, but the general process of "going the rounds," trying to get people to intervene, meant running around the city the whole day long. The wives of arrested men (even after 1937 men far outnumbered women in the jails) all trod a well-beaten path to Peshkova in the "Political Red Cross." The only real point in going there was to talk and unburden oneself, thus creating an illusion of activity that was quite essential in these periods of anxious waiting. The "Red Cross" had no influence whatsoever. Very rarely it would forward a package to a prisoner in a labor camp or notify relatives of the result of a trial or a death sentence carried out. In 1939 this strange institution was abolished and the last link between the prisons and the outside world was thus cut. The very concept of assistance for political prisoners is, of course, quite incompatible with our system: one only has to think of the number of people who have been sent to forced labor and soli­tary confinement just because they were acquainted with others ar­rested before them. The closing down of the "Political Red Cross" was hence perfectly logical, but it meant that the relatives of prison­ers now lived only on rumors, some of them deliberately put about to frighten us.

The "Red Cross" had been headed by Peshkova from the very beginning. However, I went not to her, but to her deputy, a brilliant man called Vinaver. His first question was: What was the rank of the senior police agent who had gone through the papers in our trunk? I now learned that the higher the rank of the senior agent during such searches, the more serious the case and the worse the

d '

fate in store for the victim. Since I had not known at the time about this form of divination, it had not occurred to me to note the stripes on the man's uniform. Vinaver further told me that material condi­tions "inside" were not at all bad—the cells were clean and the pris­oners well fed: "The food is probably better than what we eat at home." I didn't have to explain to Vinaver that one would rather starve and be free, and that there was something unbearably ominous about this "civilized treatment" in prison. He knew and understood this just as well as I did. A little later he told me what to expect in the future, and he turned out to be right. He had enormous experi­ence and knew how to draw the proper conclusions from it. I wentto see him regularly and always kept him informed of developments. I didn't do this only to have the benefit of his advice, but rather from the need to maintain contact with one of the last people in those confused times to keep a sense of law and to fight stubbornly, if vainly, against the use of brute force.

hmatova also played her part in all these moves. She managed

Though he did, in fact, have some good advice for me as well. It was he who told me to persuade M. to take things as easily as pos­sible, not asking for a transfer to another place, for example, or drawing attention to himself in any way—in other words, to keep mum and show no signs of life at all. "Don't sign any more pieces of paper. The best thing is to let them forget all about you." In his view, this was the only way to save oneself, or at least to keep alive a little longer. Vinaver could not follow his own advice because he was already far too exposed. He disappeared during the terror of 1937. There are rumors that he lived a double life and wasn't what he seemed to be. I do not believe this and never will. I hope his name will be cleared by posterity. I know that stories of this kind are put around by the secret police themselves to compromise people who have fallen foul of them. Even if there are documents in the archives that show him in a bad light, this would still not be proof that he betrayed his visitors to the police. Even if Peshkova was led to be­lieve Vinaver had been attached to her as a police spy, that is no reason for us to believe it. It is easy enough to fabricate documents; people signed the most incredible statements under torture, and nothing would have been easier than to put alarming ideas about police spies and provocateurs into the head of an old woman like Peshkova. But how will the historians ever get at the truth if every minute grain of it is buried under huge layers of monstrous false­hoods? By this I mean not just the prejudices and misconceptions of any age, but deliberate and premeditated lies.

7 Public Opinion

to get an interview with Yenukidze, who listened to her care­fully but said not a word. Next she went to Seifullina, who at once rushed to the phone and rang a friend of hers in the secret police. His only comment was: "Let's hope they don't drive him out of hismind—our fellows are very good at it." The next day this "friend in the secret police" told Seifullina that he had made inquiries, and that it was better not to get involved in the case. When she asked why, he didn't reply. Seifullina was discouraged—as we always were, beating a hasty retreat when advised not to "get involved" in some case or other.

This is an extraordinary feature of our life: none of us ever sub­mitted petitions and pleas, expressed our opinion about something or took any other action before finding out what people thought "at the top." Everybody was too conscious of his helplessness to try and assert himself. "I can never get anywhere with these things," Ehrenburg used to say in explanation of his refusal to help people over such matters as pensions, housing or residence permits. The trouble was that though he could ask for favors, he could never in­sist. Nothing could make things easier for the powers-that-be. Any initiative from below can be halted by the mere hint that it will meet with disapproval "at the top." Both the middle and the higher reaches of the bureaucracy turned this attitude to their advantage and declared certain questions "untouchable." From the second half of the twenties the "whisper of public opinion" became fainter and fainter until it ceased to be the prelude to action of any kind. All cases involving somebody's arrest were, needless to say, "off limits," and only relatives were supposed to try and do anything about them —that is, visit Peshkova and the office of the public prosecutor. It was quite exceptional for an outsider to involve himself in activity on behalf of a prisoner, and anybody who did deserves all due credit. Since M.'s poem had given cause for offense to the most awesome person in the land, there was very good reason to keep right out of the whole business. I was grateful to Pasternak, therefore, when he volunteered to help. He came to see me with Akhmatova and asked me whom he should approach. I suggested he see Bukharin, whose attitude to M.'s arrest I already knew, and Demian Bedny.

I had good reasons for suggesting Demian Bedny. Through Pas­ternak I was now able to remind him of a promise he had made in 1928. In that year M. had learned from a chance conversation in the street with his namesake Isaiah Mandelstam that five bank officials, specialists left over from the old regime, had been sentenced to death by shooting for embezzlement or negligence. Much to his friends' and his own surprise, and despite the rule against intervening in such matters, M. raised such a hue and cry all over Moscow that the five old men were spared. He mentions this episode in his "Fourth

Prose." Among his "integral moves" was an approach to Demian Bedny. Their meeting took place somewhere in the backyard of the "International Bookstore," which, as a passionate book-lover, Demian was always visiting. He probably also used it to meet his friends— people living in the Kremlin no longer dared invite anybody there. Demian refused point blank to intervene on behalf of the old men. "Why should you worry about them?" he asked when he realized that they were neither relatives nor friends of M. But at the same time he promised that if anything ever happened to M. himself, he would come to his help without fail. For some reason M. was very gratified by this promise, though at that time we were firmly per­suaded that "they'll neither touch nor kill us." When M. came down to join me at Yalta shortly afterward, he told me about this conver­sation with Demian. "It's really very good to know. He won't keep his word, you think? I think he will." This was why in 1934 I ad­vised Pasternak to speak with Demian Bedny. Pasternak called him on the day after M.'s arrest, the day on which our trunk was exam­ined for a second time, but Demian seemed to have got wind of the case already. "Neither you nor I can get involved in this," he said. Was it that he knew of the poem about Stalin, with whom he was already in trouble himself, or was he simply responding with the usual Soviet formula on the need to avoid those stricken by the plague? Whichever it was, Demian was in any case in disgrace him­self. It was his passion for books that had got him into trouble: he had been unwise enough to note in his diary that he didn't like to lend books to Stalin because of the dirty marks left on the white pages by his greasy fingers. Demian's secretary had decided to curry favor by copying out this entry in Demian's diary and sending it to Stalin. Though the secretary apparently gained nothing by his treachery, Demian was reduced to dire straits for a long time and even had to sell off his library. By the time his works began to appear in print again, the fifteen years required under law before anyone can inherit had gone by, and I myself have seen his heir, a puny youth from his last marriage, going to Surkov and trying to beg a little money in his father's name. I also heard Surkov refuse outright —as though visiting a final insult on Demian through his offspring. What had he done to deserve this? Nobody ever worked so whole­heartedly for the Soviet regime. With me it was a different matter: I could scarcely be surprised if I was trampled on from time to time. What else could I expect?

In the middle of May 1934, Demian and Pasternak met at some

gathering (probably in connection with the Union of Writers that was then being set up) and Demian offered to take Pasternak home in his car. If I remember rightly, he got rid of his driver and for a long time they drove around Moscow alone. At that time many of our big shots were not yet afraid of talking in automobiles, though later on there were rumors that they also had microphones planted in them. Demian told Pasternak that Russian poetry was being "shot dead" and mentioned Mayakovski as a case in point. In Demian's view, Mayakovski had died because he had trespassed on territory to which he was a stranger—the same political territory in which he (Demian) was so much at home.

When he had unburdened himself, Demian drove Pasternak not to his home, but to our apartment in Furmanov Street, where Akhma­tova and I were sitting, distraught after the two searches.

At a congress of journalists taking place in Moscow just at that time, Baltrushaitis frantically made the rounds of the delegates and, invoking the memory of Gumilev, begged them to save M. from a similar fate. I can imagine how this combination of names sounded to the ears of our hard-bitten journalists of those years, but Baltrushai­tis was a citizen of a foreign country and they could scarcely expect him to be impressed by the suggestion that it was better not to "get involved."

Baltrushaitis had long before had a presentiment of what M.'s end would be. At the very beginning of the twenties (in 192 r, before the execution of Gumilev) he had urged M. to take out Lithuanian citi­zenship. This would have been quite feasible, since M.'s father had once lived in Lithuania and M. himself had been born in Warsaw. M. even went so far as to hunt out some papers and take them round to Baltrushaitis, but then he thought better of it: you can't escape your fate and better not to try.

The slight stir created by M.'s arrest evidently had some effect, since the whole affair did not develop according to the usual pattern. At least, that's what Akhmatova thought. And, indeed, even this muted reaction, this faint murmur, was in itself something quite out of the ordinary and a matter for astonishment. But if one had tried to interpret this whispering, it is not clear what one would have found. In my naivete I had thought that public opinion always sided with the weak against the strong, with the oppressed against the op­pressor, with the quarry against the hunter. My eyes were later opened by the more up-to-date Lida Bagritski. In 1938, when her friend Postupalski was arrested, she complained bitterly to me: "Things were different before. When Osip was arrested, for in­stance, some were against it, and others thought it was all right. And now look what's happening: they're arresting their own people!"

One must admire the way Lida put it. With Spartan bluntness she was simply defining the basic moral law of those who were supposed to constitute our intelligentsia and were, hence, presumably the foundation of public opinion. The distinction between "one of us" and "not one of us" (or "alien elements," to use the phrase then current) went back to the Civil War with its iron law of "Who whom?"[3] After victory and the surrender of the other side, the win­ners always claim rewards, decorations and privileges, while the de­feated are subject to extermination. But it soon becomes evident that the right to count as "one of us" is neither hereditary nor even granted for life. The right to style oneself thus is a matter for con­stant struggle, and has been from the beginning. A person who was yesterday "one of us" can be degraded with lightning speed to the opposite status. What is more, by the very logic of this division, you become "not one of us" from the moment you lose your footing and start to slip downward. 1937 and all that followed were possible only in a society where this division has been taken to its logical conclu­sion.

The usual reaction to each new arrest was that some retreated even further into their shells (which, incidentally, never saved them) while others responded with a chorus of jeers for the victim. In the late forties my friend Sonia Vishnevski, hearing every day of new arrests among her friends, shouted in horror: "Treach­ery and counterrevolution everywhere!" This was how you were supposed to react if you lived in relative comfort and had something to lose. Perhaps there was also an element of primitive magic in such words: what else could we do but try to ward off the evil spirits by uttering charms?

8 Interview

_T

wo weeks later a miracle happened, the first of several: the of­ficial interrogating M. rang me and suggested a meeting. A pass was issued to me with unprecedented speed. I went up the broad staircase of the Lubianka,* then along a corridor and stopped at the interrogator's door, as I had been instructed. Just as I got there something quite extraordinary happened: I saw a prisoner being led along the corridor. The guards had evidently not expected to run into an outsider in this inner sanctum. I saw that the man was a tall Chinese with wildly bulging eyes. I had no time to observe any more than his fear-crazed eyes and the fact that he had to hold up his trous- sers with his hands. Seeing me, the guards made a quick movement and they hustled the prisoner into a room. I just had time to get a glimpse of the faces of these members of the "inner" guard who were a very different type from those on the outside. It was a fleet­ing impression, but it left me with a feeling of horror and a strange chill running down my spine. Ever since I have always felt the same chill and a trembling sensation at the mere approach of such people, even before seeing the look on their faces: they follow you with their eyes, never moving their heads. Children can get this look from their parents—I have seen it in schoolboys and students. I know, of course, that it is a purely professional mannerism, but with us, like everything else, it has been taken to horrible extremes, as though everybody with this sleuth's look were a model pupil eagerly trying to show teacher how well he has learned his lesson.

I had only a momentary glimpse of the Chinese, but whenever I hear of people being shot, I see his eyes again. How was this meeting possible? According to all accounts, the most elaborate precautions are taken to prevent such mishaps. The corridors are supposedly di­vided into separate sections, and guards are alerted by a special sys­tem of signals if the way ahead is not "clear." But do we really know what goes on in these places? We lived on rumors and trembled. Trembling is a physiological response which has nothing in common with ordinary fear as such. But Akhmatova was angry when I once said this to her. "What do you mean, it isn't fear? What is it, then?" She said it was not just a physical reflex, but a result of holy terror of the most ordinary and agonizing kind—she had suffered from it

* Political prison and headquarters of the secret police in Moscow.

through all the years right up to Stalin's death.

Stories about various kinds of special technical equipment in the prisons—apart from the signaling system in the corridors—stopped only at the end of the thirties when methods of interrogation were simplified and became so comprehensible in their old-fashioned way that there was no more call for myths. "Everything is straightfor­ward now," to quote Akhmatova again. "They stick a fur cap on your head and send you straight to the taiga."* Hence the line in "Poem Without a Hero":

There, behind the barbed wire, In the very heart of the dense taiga They take my shadow for questioning.

I just don't know what section it was—the third or the fourth—to which I was summoned for this meeting, but if it was the one that dealt with literature, the interrogator certainly had a name hallowed in Russian literary tradition: Christophorovich.t Why didn't he change it, if he worked in the literary section? Perhaps the coinci­dence appealed to his fancy. M. was always very angered if one even pointed such things out: he was very much against the frivolous mention of anything connected with Pushkin. Once, when I was ill, we had to spend two years in Tsarskoye Selo and we actually took one of the apartments in the old Lvcee,Ј which were quite good and comparatively cheap. But M. was terribly upset by what for him was almost sacrilege, and at the first pretext he insisted we clear out and revert to our usual homeless existence. So I was never able to sum­mon up the courage to discuss the name of his interrogator.

Our meeting took place in the presence of Christophorovich—I have to refer to him by this taboo patronymic because I have forgot­ten his last name. He was a large man with the staccato, over- emphatic diction of an actor of the Maly Theater school, and he kept butting into our conversation, not to tell us things in a normal way, but to read us pompous little lectures. To all his sententiousness there was an ominous and threatening undertone. The effect on me as a person from the outside was to arouse disgust rather than fear.

• Taiga: virgin forest.

t Christophorovich was the patronymic (middle name) of the notorious Chief of Police and head of the Third Section under Nicholas I, Count Alex­ander Christophorovich Benkendorff (1783-1844). BenkendorfF was responsible for the official persecution of Pushkin and Lermontov.

X Famous school for the sons of the aristocracy created by Alexander I at Tsarskoye Selo ("Czar's Village"), the Imperial summer residence near St. Petersburg.

But two weeks without sleep in a cell and under interrogation would have radically changed my attitude.

When M. was brought in I at once saw that he was as wild-eyed as the Chinese, and that his trousers were slipping down in the same way. This is a precaution against suicide—belts and suspenders are taken away and all fasteners are removed.

Despite his distraught appearance, M. immediately noticed I was wearing someone else's raincoat. He asked whose it was, and I told him: Mother's. When had she arrived? I told him the day. "So you've been at home all the time?" At first I didn't understand why he was so interested in this wretched raincoat, but now I saw the reason: he had been told that I was under arrest too. This is a stand­ard device used to break the prisoner's spirit. When prisons and in­terrogations are as shrouded in mystery as in this country and there is no possibility of public control over them, such techniques work without fail.

I demanded an explanation from the interrogator, but the futility of demanding anything in such a place is self-evident. One could only do it out of naivete or extreme anger. In my case it was both. But of course I got no answer.

Thinking we should not meet again for a long time, if ever, M. hastened to tell me the things he wanted me to convey to the outside world. We are all exceedingly well "prison-trained"—whether or not we have actually been in jail—and we know how to seize "the last chance of being heard"—a need which in his "Conversation About Dante" M. attributed to Ugolino. To us it comes naturally, and you are bound to bring it to a fine art if you have to live our sort of life. I have several times had this "last chance of being heard" and tried to take advantage of it, but it so happened that the people I was talking to didn't catch the implication of my words and failed to register what I was trying to convey. They evidently thought that our acquaintance, only just begun, would go on forever and that there would be plenty of time to learn, gradually and at leisure, everything they wanted to know. This was a fateful mistake from their point of view, and my efforts to communicate went for noth­ing. During our meeting M. was in a better position—I was very well prepared to take in his meaning. Nothing had to be elaborated and not a word was wasted.

M. managed to tell me that his interrogator had the text of his poem about Stalin and that it was the first draft with the word "peasant-slayer" in the fourth line: "All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer, the murderer and peasant-slayer." This was a very im­portant clue to the identity of the person who had denounced M. to the police. Next, M. was eager to tell me how the interrogation was being conducted, but Christophorovich constantly interrupted him and tried to take advantage of the occasion to intimidate me as well. By listening carefully to the heated words passing between the two, I tried to glean every scrap of information that would be of interest to people outside.

The interrogator described M.'s poem as a "counter-revolutionary document without precedent," and referred to me as an accessory after the fact. "How should a real Soviet citizen have acted in your place?" he asked. It appeared that in my place any real Soviet person would immediately have informed the police, for otherwise he made himself liable to be charged with a criminal offense. Almost every third word uttered by the interrogator was "crime" or "punish­ment." I discovered that I had not in fact been charged only because they had decided "not to proceed with the case." Then, for the first time, I heard the phrase "isolate but preserve": such was the order that had come down to him, the interrogator implied, as a supreme act of clemency from the very highest level. The sentence originally suggested—that M. should be sent to a forced-labor camp on the White Sea Canal *—had been commuted, by this same supreme au­thority, to exile in the town of Cherdyn. Christophorovich added that I could accompany M. if I wished. This was a further unprece­dented act of clemency, and I naturally agreed at once. But I am still curious about what might have happened if I had refused.

What a rush there would have been if—say, in 1937—all who wanted had been told they could go into voluntary exile with their families, children, belongings and books! All would have flocked to wait in line—wives side by side with their husbands' lovers, daugh­ters with their stepmothers.

But maybe not. People only keep going because they don't know their future and hope to avoid the fate of others. As their neighbors perish one after the other, the survivors take hope from the famous question "What were they arrested for?" and discuss all their indis­cretions and mistakes. It is the women, as the real mainstays of the household, who are always the most frantic in their efforts to keep the small flame of hope from going out. In 1937 Lilia Yakhontov, for instance, said after a visit to the Lubianka: "I shall always feel safe as long as that building stands." Her pious expression of devo-

* A showpiece built by forced labor in the i93o's.

tion may even have delayed her husband's end for a few years—he later threw himself out of a window in a fit of wild fear that he was about to be arrested. And in 1953 a Jewish woman biologist, a true believer, tried to convince another Jewish woman (who had come from the West and was therefore completely shaken by what was going on) that nothing would happen to her "if you have committed no crime and your conscience is clear." Then there was the woman I met in a train in 1957 who explained to me that one must be very careful about rehabilitated persons, since they were being released on humanitarian grounds, not because they were innocent: "Say what you Бке, there's no smoke without fire." Causality and expedi­ency are the basic articles of faith in our ready-made philosophy.

9 Theory and Practice

he gist of what I had learned by the time I went home from

the meeting was that the interrogator had charged M. with the authorship of the poem on Stalin, and that M. had admitted it, to­gether with the fact that about ten people in his immediate circle had heard him recite the poem. I was angry that he had not denied everything, as a good conspirator might have done. But it was im­possible to think of M. in such a role: he was too straightforward to be capable of any kind of guile. He was utterly without deviousness. Besides, I am told by people of experience that in our conditions it is essential to admit to some basic minimum, otherwise such "persua­sion" is applied that the prisoner, at the end of his tether, will incrim­inate himself in the most fantastic way.

In any case, how on earth could we be expected to behave like good conspirators? A political activist, a revolutionary or a member of an underground organization is always a person of a special out­look. But although that kind of activity was just not for us, we were constantly forced by the circumstances of our life to behave Hke members of a secret society. When we met we spoke in whispers, glancing at the walls for fear of eavesdropping neighbors or hidden microphones. When I returned to Moscow after the war, I found that everybody covered their telephones with cushions, because it was rumored that they were equipped with recording devices, and the most ordinary householders trembled with terror in the presence of the black metal object listening in on their innermost thoughts. Nobody trusted anyone else, and every acquaintance was a sus­pected police informer. It sometimes seemed as though the whole country was suffering from persecution mania, and we still haven't recovered from it.

I must say that we had every reason to be afflicted in this way: we all felt as if we were constantly exposed to X-rays, and the principal means of control over us was mutual surveillance. "There is nothing to fear," Stalin had said, "one must get on with the job." So the employees of all Soviet institutions duly took their offerings to their superior, to the secretary of the Party cell or to the personnel de­partment. In the schools a system of "self-government" in the class­room, with monitors and Komsomol representatives, made it very easy for the teachers to get everything they needed out of their pu­pils. Students were instructed to spy on their professors. The pene­tration of the world at large by the secret police was organized on a grand scale. In any institution, particularly in the universities and colleges, there is always a large number of people whose careers have begun in the security service. They are so superbly trained that they have no difficulty getting promotion in any field of activity. When they are given "study leave," they receive all kinds of incen­tives and are often allowed to stay on and do graduate work. An­other link with the secret police is maintained through informers who are even more dangerous because, merging with the rest, they are indistinguishable from their colleagues. To advance themselves, they are quite capable of framing people—something the profession­als rarely do. This was part of our everyday life, a dreary routine relieved only by a neighbor telling you at dead of night how "they" had summoned him to bully him into working for them, or by friends warning you which other friends to beware of. All this hap­pened on a vast scale and affected everybody indiscriminately. Every family was always going over its circle of acquaintances, try­ing to pick out the provocateurs, the informers and the traitors. After 1937 people stopped meeting each other altogether, and the secret police were thus well on the way to achieving their ultimate objective. Apart from assuring a constant flow of information, they had isolated people from each other and had drawn large numbers of them into their web, calling them in from time to time, harassing them and swearing them to secrecy by means of signed statements. All such people lived in eternal fear of being found out and were consequently just as interested as regular members of the police in the stability of the existing order and the inviolability of the archives where their names were on file.

This system of mass surveillance came into being only gradually, but M. was one of the first to be singled out for individual treatment. His status in Soviet literature was defined as early as 1923, when his name was crossed off the list of people allowed to work for the vari­ous magazines, and from then on he was always surrounded by swarms of agents. We learned to distinguish several varieties of the breed. The most easily identifiable were the brisk young men of military bearing who, without bothering to feign interest in the au­thor, immediately asked him for his "latest work." M. generally tried to get rid of them by saying he had no spare copy. They would thereupon offer to type it out for him and return it "with a copy for yourself." With one such visitor M. argued for a long time, refusing to let him have "The Wolf"—this was in 1932. The young man in­sisted, saying that it was in any case widely known. Failing to get it, he came back the next day and recited the poem by heart. After giving this proof of how "well known" it was, he got the author's copy he needed. Agents of this kind completely disappeared from the scene as soon as they had done their job. The good thing about them was that they were always in a hurry and never tried to "make friends." It was evidently not part of their assignment to spy on the other people who came to see us.

The second type of agent was the "admirer"—generally a member of the same profession, a colleague or a neighbor. In apartment build­ings housing members of the same institution, one's neighbors are always colleagues too. People like this would appear without calling beforehand, just dropping in out of the blue. They would stay for a long time, talking shop and attempting minor provocations. When­ever we were visited by one of these, M. always asked me to serve tea: "The man is working, he needs a cup of tea." To ingratiate themselves, they tried all kinds of little tricks. S., for instance, first came to us with tales about the East—he said that he was himself originally from Central Asia and had studied in a madrasah there. As proof of his "Eastern" credentials he brought along a small statuette of the Buddha, which could have been bought in any junk store. It was supposed to bear witness to his expert knowledge of the East and his serious interest in art. The connection between the Buddha and an Islamic madrasah never became clear to us. S. soon lost pa­tience with us and, after making a scene, left us to be taken care of by someone else—or so it appeared, to judge from the equally sud­den appearance of another neighbor who also tried to cultivate our acquaintance by bringing us a Buddha! This time it was M. who lost his temper: "Another Buddha! That's enough! They must think of something new!" and he threw out the hapless replacement, with­out even giving him tea.

The third and most dangerous kind of agents we called "adju­tants." These were young devotees of literature, sometimes doing graduate work at the university, who were extremely keen on po­etry and knew everything there was to know about it. When they first came they often had the purest intentions, but then they were recruited. Some of them openly admitted to M.—as they did to Akhmatova as well—that they were "called in to report." After making this kind of admission they generally disappeared from the scene. Others also suddenly stopped coming to see us, without any explanation. In some cases I found out many years later what had happened—namely, that they had been "summoned" by the police. This was the explanation in the case of L., for example, whom Akh­matova told me about. Not daring to approach her in Leningrad, he had managed to see her during one of her visits to Moscow, and he said to her: "You cannot imagine how closely they watch you." It was always painful when somebody one had become friendly with mysteriously broke off relations, but this, alas, was the only thing that honorable people could do if they refused to play the role of an "adjutant." "Adjutants" had to serve two gods at once. With all their love of poetry, they were mindful of their own careers as writ­ers or poets, of the need to get into print and find their feet. It was this side of them that the police generally played on. To be on close or friendly terms with Mandelstam or Akhmatova, or to have any kind of truck with them, opened no doors in the world of literature, but an "adjutant" only had to submit a candid report on an evening's conversation (of the most innocent kind, needless to say) at our apartment and they would help him to get into the coveted pages of the literary magazines. There was always a crucial point at which the young devotee of literature would break down and agree to em­bark on a double life.

Finally, there were some real lovers of evil who had a taste for their dual role. Some of them were quite famous: Elsberg, for ex­ample, who was undoubtedly an outstanding figure in his field. He was active in different circles than the ones we moved in, and I only know about him from what others have told me, but I was struck by the refinement of the man's methods when I happened to see an ar­ticle of his entitled "The Moral Experience of the Soviet Era." It appeared at a moment when there was a possibility of his being pub­licly exposed, and by writing an article under this title he was, as it were, suggesting to his readers that, as an authority on the moral standards of our age, he could scarcely be in any jeopardy. In fact there were some revelations about him, but only some time later, and even so it proved impossible to apply such a mild sanction as expul­sion from the Union of Soviet Writers. He lost nothing at all, not even the devotion of his research students. It was typical of Elsberg that, after getting his friend S. sent to a concentration camp, he con­tinued to visit S.'s wife and gave her advice. She knew about his role, but was frightened of betraying her disgust: to expose informers was not done, and you paid a very high price for doing so. When S. returned after the Twentieth Congress, Elsberg met him with flow­ers, shaking his hand and congratulating him.

We lived among people who vanished into exile, labor camps or the other world, and also among those who sent them there. It was dangerous to have any contact with people who still tried to go on working and thinking in their own way; for this reason Alisa Gu- govna Usov was quite right not to let her husband visit M. "You can't go there," she would say, "they see all kinds of riffraff." She reasoned that it was wiser not to run the risk: who knew what sort of people you might antagonize in the heat of a literary argument? This caution, however, did not save Usov: he went to a labor camp with his fellow linguists as a result of the "dictionary case." All roads led there. The old Russian proverb that prison or the poorhouse waits for every man has never been more true, and the verb "to write" took on an additional meaning in the Russian language. The old scholar Zhirmunski once said to me about a group of his best graduate students: "They all write"—i.e., reports for the secret po­lice—and Shklovski told us we should be careful with his little dog because it had learned to "write" from the bright young "adjutants" who came to see him. . . . When Alisa Usov and I later taught at Tashkent University, there was no point in trying to pick out in­formers, because we knew that everybody "wrote." And we tried to become adept in Aesopian language. At parties with graduate stu­dents we always raised our glasses first "for those who have given us such a happy life," and both the initiated and the students understood us in the required sense.

It was quite natural for the "adjutants" and all the rest of them to"write," but the odd thing was how we were still able to joke and laugh. In 1938 M. even declared he had invented a device for the suppression of jokes as a dangerous thing: he would move his lips silently and point at his throat to indicate the position of the cut-off device. But the "device" didn't help and M. couldn't stop telling jokes.

10 Leaving for Exile

Men would not come near our plague-stricken house, but sent their wives instead—women were less exposed. Even in 1937 most women were arrested because of their husbands, not on their own account. No wonder, then, that men were more cautious than women. On the other hand, even the most prudent men were sur­passed by their wives when it came to "patriotism." I quite under­stood why no husbands had come, but I was astonished to see so many wives: persons sentenced to exile were usually shunned by all. Akhmatova gasped: "What a lot of them!"

s soon as I came home, the apartment began to fill with people.

I packed our baskets—the same ones which had so irritated the staff at CEKUBU,[4] as M. tells in his "Fourth Prose"—or, rather, threw everything into them at random: saucepans, linen, books. M. had taken his Dante to prison with him, but didn't insist on keeping it when they told him that once a book had been taken to the cells, it could not be allowed out again and had to be left in the prison li­brary. Not yet knowing the conditions in which a book becomes an eternal hostage, I threw in another edition of Dante. I had to think of everything—going into exile was not like setting off on an ordi­nary journey with a couple of suitcases. This I had every reason to know, having spent all my life moving from place to place with my wretched belongings.

My mother gave me all the money realized from the sale of her furniture in Kiev. But it was very little, a wad of worthless paper. Our women visitors went off in all directions to raise money for us. This was in the seventeenth year after the creation of our system.

Seventeen years of persistent indoctrination had been to no avail. These people who collected money for us, as well as those who gave it, were breaking the rule that governed relations with victims of the regime. In periods of violence and terror people retreat into them­selves and hide their feelings, but their feelings are ineradicable and cannot be destroyed by any amount of indoctrination. Even if they are wiped out in one generation, as happened here to a considerable extent, they will burst forth again in the next one. We have seen this several times. The idea of good seems really to be inborn, and those who sin against the laws of humanity always see their error in the end—or their children do.

Akhmatova went to the Bulgakovs and returned very touched by the reaction of Elena Sergeyevna, Bulgakov's wife, who burst into tears when she heard about our exile and gave us everything she had. Sima Narbut ran around to see Babel, but did not come back. But all the others kept arriving with contributions and there was soon a sum so large that it lasted us for the journey to Cherdyn and the first two months of our life in Voronezh. Admittedly, we didn't have to pay for our tickets (except for a small supplement on the return jour­ney)—this is the one convenience of being an exile. In the train M. noticed what a lot of money I had, and asked where I had got it. When I explained, he laughed: what a roundabout way of getting the means to travel. All his life he had been eager to travel, but never could because of lack of money. The sum we had now was enor­mous for those days. People like us had never at any time been rich, but before the war nobody in our circle could even say that he was comparatively well-off. Everybody lived from hand to mouth. Some of the "Fellow Travelers" * started doing quite well as early as 1937, but this was only by comparison with the rest of the population, which could barely make ends meet.

At the end of the day Dligach came with Dina, and I asked him whether he could lend me some money. He went off to get some and left Dina with us. I never saw him again—he vanished for good. I didn't expect him to lend me money, I just wanted to see whether he would disappear like this. We had always suspected that he was an "adjutant," and, as such, it would have been natural for him to clear off when he heard I had been to see M.—for fear that I might have learned about his role. This is indeed what it looked like, but it is still not final proof. He might simply have taken fright—this cannot be ruled out.

• See page 420.

I was seen off to the station by Akhmatova, M.'s brother Alexan­der and my own brother, Evgeni Khazin. On the way there I stopped at the Lubianka, as had been agreed with the interrogator, by the same entrance I had used that morning to come to the meet­ing with M. The officer on duty let me in and a moment later the interrogator came down the staircase with M.'s suitcase in his hands. "You're off?" he said. "Yes," I replied and forgetting who he was, automatically held out my hand as I said goodbye. We were not, I repeat, revolutionaries, underground plotters or politically minded people at all. But we suddenly found ourselves having to act as though we were, and I had now nearly sinned against time-honored tradition by shaking hands with a member of the secret police. But the interrogator saved me from disgrace by not responding—he did not shake hands with people like me—that is, with his potential vic­tims. It was a good lesson for me—my first political lesson in the spirit of the old revolutionaries: never shake hands with a policeman. I was very ashamed that I had to learn it from a police interrogator. Since then I have never forgotten it.

We went into the station building, and I was about to go to the ticket office when I was intercepted by a short, fair-haired man in a baggy civilian suit—it was the agent who had searched our trunk and thrown the papers in a pile on the floor. He handed me a ticket, but didn't take my money. Some porters—not the ones we had hired, but some new ones—picked up my baggage. They told me I needn't worry and that everything would be taken right through to the train. I noticed that the first ones didn't come up to beg for tips, but just vanished.

We had to wait for a long time, and Akhmatova was forced to leave me, because her train to Leningrad was already due to depart. At last the fair-haired man reappeared, and, relieved of all the usual burdens and worries of getting on a train, we went through to the platform. The train drew in and I caught a glimpse of M.'s face through the window. I showed my ticket to a conductress, who asked me to go right to the end of the train. My brother and brother- in-law were not admitted.

M. was already in his compartment and there were three soldiers with him. With our guards we occupied all six berths, including the two on the side. The stage manager of our departure, the fair-haired agent, had arranged everything so perfectly that he seemed to be showing off the marvels of a Soviet Thousand and One Nights.

M. pressed up against the window. "It's a miracle!" he said, gluedto the pane. Our two brothers were standing on the platform. M. tried to open the window, but a guard stopped him: "It's against the rules." The fair-haired man came back once more to check that everything was all right and gave final instructions to the conduc­tress: the door into this compartment from the rest of the coach was to be kept locked during the whole journey, and only the toilet at our end could be used. At stopping points only one of the guards was allowed to leave the coach; the other two were to stay with us all the time. Wishing us a good journey, the fair-haired man left us, but I saw him standing on the platform until the train started to leave. He was obeying his instructions to the letter, no doubt.

? the moment when I entered the coach and saw our brothers

The coach gradually filled with other passengers. The door to our compartment was guarded by a soldier who turned back passengers eager to find places—the rest of the coach was crammed. M. stayed by the window, desperate for contact with the two men on the other side, but no sound could penetrate the glass. Our ears were powerless to hear, and the meaning of their gestures hard to in­terpret. A barrier had been raised between us and the world out­side. It was still a transparent one, made of glass, but it was already impenetrable. The train started for Sverdlovsk.

ii On the Other Side

through the glass, my world split into two halves. Everything that had previously existed now vanished to become a dim memory, something beyond the looking-glass, and the future opening up be­fore me no longer meshed with the past. I am not trying to be liter­ary—this is just a modest attempt to put into words the mental dislo­cation that is probably felt by all the many people who cross this fateful line. Its first result was utter indifference to what we had left behind—an indifference due to our knowledge that we had all set out on a path of inescapable doom. One of us might be granted a week's grace or even a year, but the end would be the same. It would be the end of everything—friends, relatives, my mother, Europe. . . . I say "Europe" advisedly, because in the "new" state I had entered there was nothing of the European complex of thought, feel­ings and ideas by which I had lived hitherto. We were now in a world of different concepts, different ways of measuring and reck­oning. . . .

Until a short time before, I had been full of concern for all my friends and relatives, for my work, for everything I set store by. Now this concern was gone—and fear, too. Instead there was an acute sense of being doomed—it was this that gave rise to an in­difference so overwhelming as to be almost physical, like a heavy weight pressing down on the shoulders. I also felt that time, as such, had come to an end—there was only an interlude before the inescap­able swallowed us with our "Europe" and our handful of last thoughts and feelings.

How would it come, the inescapable? Where, and in what form? It really didn't matter. Resistance was useless. Having entered a realm of non-being, I had lost the sense of death. In the face of doom, even fear disappears. Fear is a gleam of hope, the will to live, self-assertion. It is a deeply European feeling, nurtured on self- respect, the sense of one's own worth, rights, needs and desires. A man clings to what is his, and fears to lose it. Fear and hope are bound up with each other. Losing hope, we lose fear as well—there is nothing to be afraid for.

When a bull is being led to the slaughter, it still hopes to break loose and trample its butchers. Other bulls have not been able to pass on the knowledge that this never happens and that from the slaugh­terhouse there is no way back to the herd. But in human society there is a continuous exchange of experience. I have never heard of a man who broke away and fled while being led to his execution. It is even thought to be a special form of courage if a man about to be executed refuses to be blindfolded and dies with his eyes open. But I would rather have the bull with his blind rage, the stubborn beast who doesn't weigh his chances of survival with the prudent dull- wittedness of man, and doesn't know the despicable feeling of de­spair.

Later I often wondered whether it is right to scream when you are being beaten and trampled underfoot. Isn't it better to face one's tormentors in a stance of satanic pride, answering them with con­temptuous silence? I decided that it is better to scream. This pitiful sound, which sometimes, goodness knows how, reaches into the re­motest prison cell, is a concentrated expression of the last vestige of human dignity. It is a man's way of leaving a trace, of telling people how he lived and died. By his screams he asserts his right to live, sends a message to the outside world demanding help and calling for resistance. If nothing else is left, one must scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity.

That evening, guarded by three soldiers in the coach to which I had been taken in such comfort, I had lost everything, even despair. There is a moment of truth when you are overcome by sheer aston­ishment: "So that's where I'm living, and the sort of people I'm liv­ing with! So this is what they're capable of! So this is the world I live in!" We are so stupefied that we even lose the power to scream. It was this sort of stupefaction, with the consequent loss of all crite­ria, standards and values, that came over people when they first landed in prison and suddenly realized the nature of the world they lived in and what the "new era" really meant. Physical torture and fear are not enough to explain the way people broke down and con­fessed, destroying others in the process. All this was only possible at the "moment of truth," during the madness which afflicted people when it looked as though time had stopped, the world had come to an end and everything was lost for ever. The collapse of all familiar notions is, after all, the end of the world.

But what was so terrible about moving to a small town on the Kama, where, it seemed, we should have to live for three years? Was Cherdyn any worse than Maly Yaroslavets, Strunino, Kalinin, Mui- nak, Dzhambul, Tashkent, Ulianovsk, Chita, Cheboksary, Vereya, Tarusa or Pskov, in all of which I was cast up in the homeless years after M.'s death? Was this a reason for going out of one's mind and expecting the end of the world?

Yes, I think so. Now that I have regained my sense of despair and am capable once more of screaming, I can say this quite emphati­cally. And I think that the superb way in which our departure was organized, with the stop at the Lubianka for M.'s suitcase, the porters who didn't have to be paid, and the polite fair-haired escort in civilian clothes who saluted as he wished us a happy jour­ney—nobody had ever gone into exile like this before—was more terrible and sickening, and spoke more eloquently of the end of the world, than the plank beds in the forced-labor camps, the prisons and shackles, and the brutal cursing of policemen, torturers and kill­ers. It was all done with the greatest style and efficiency, without a single harsh word. And there we were, the two of us, guarded by three well-briefed peasant youths, sent off by an unseen and irresist­ible force to some place in the east, and forced to live in exile, where, as they had seen fit to tell me, M. was to be "preserved." This I had been told in that large, clean office where, at that very moment per­haps, they were now interrogating the Chinese.

12 The Irrational

_O

ur encounter with the irrational forces that so inescapably and horrifyingly ruled over us radically affected our minds. Many of us had accepted the inevitability—and some the expediency—of what was going on around us. All of us were seized by the feeling that there was no turning back—a feeling dictated by our experience of the past, our forebodings about the future and our hypnotic trance in the present. I maintain that all of us—particularly if we lived in the cities—were in a state close to a hypnotic trance. We had really been persuaded that we had entered a new era, and that we had no choice but to submit to historical inevitability, which in any case was only another name for the dreams of all those who had ever fought for human happiness. Propaganda for historical deter­minism had deprived us of our will and the power to make our own judgments. We laughed in the faces of the doubters, and ourselves furthered the work of the daily press by repeating its sacramental phrases, by spreading rumors about each new round of arrests ("that's what passive resistance leads to!") and finding excuses for the existing state of affairs. The usual line was to denounce history as such: it had always been the same, mankind had never known any­thing but violence and tyranny. "People are shot everywhere," the young physicist L. once said to me. "More so here, you think? Well, that's progress." "But look, Nadia," L.E. used to argue with me, "things are just as bad abroad."

In the middle of the twenties, when the atmospheric pressure be­gan to weigh more heavily on us—at critical periods it was heavier than lead—people all at once started to avoid each other. This could not be explained only by fear of informers and denunciation—we had not yet had tiilie to get really scared of these. It was rather the onset of a kind of numbness, the first symptoms of lethargy. What was there to talk about when everything had already been said, ex­plained, signed and sealed? Only children continued to babble their completely human nonsense, and the grown-ups—everybody from bookkeepers to writers—preferred their company to that of their peers. But mothers prepared their children for life by teaching them the sacred language of their seniors. "My children love Stalin most of all, and me only second," Pasternak's wife, Zinaida Nikolayevna, used to say. Others did not go so far, but nobody confided their doubts to their children: why condemn them to death? And then suppose the child talked in school and brought disaster to the whole family? And why tell it things it didn't need to know? Better it should live like everybody else. ... So the children grew, swelling the ranks of the hypnotized. "The Russian people is sick," Polia X. once said to me, "it needs to be treated." The sickness has become particularly obvious now that the crisis has passed and we can see the first signs of recovery. It used to be people with doubts who were considered ill.

Mikhail Alexandrovich Zenkevich was one of the first to sink into a hypnotic trance or lethargy. This did not prevent him from going to work, earning money and bringing up his children. Perhaps it even helped him to stay alive and look so utterly normal and healthy. But on a closer look it was clear that he had passed the point of no return: he could not smash the looking-glass. Zenkevich lived in the knowledge that everything he had once lived by was irretriev­ably lost, gone for good, left on the other side of the glass. It was a feeling that could have been transmuted into poetry, but Zenkevich, the sixth Acmeist,* had firmly decided that there could be no such thing as poetry without the Poets' Guild and all the talk which had so captivated him as a very young man. He now wandered about the ruins of his Rome, trying to persuade himself and others that it was essential to surrender not only one's body, but one's mind as well. "Don't you understand," he said to M., "that it's all finished, that everything's different now?" . . . This argument applied to every­thing: poetry, honor, ethics, the latest political conjuring trick or act of violence, the show trials, purges, or deportation of the kulaks. ... It was all justified because "everything's different now." . . . Sometimes, however, he excused himself by saying that he had swallowed so much bromide that his memory had gone. . . . But in fact he had forgotten nothing and was touchingly devoted to M., even though he expressed astonishment at M.'s obstinacy and mad persistence in holding to his own. All that Zenkevich wanted to take with him from the past into his new "life after death" were a few original manuscripts. Begging M. to give him one of his rough drafts, he said: "Gumilev has gone, and I haven't a single page of

* See page 419.

anything written by him!" This angered M. and he wouldn't give him anything—"He's already preparing for my death!"

At the beginning of the fifties—a ghastly time!—I met Zenkevich in the courtyard of Herzen House,[5] and though this was the first time I had seen him in fifteen years, he at once started his usual talk about manuscripts: "Where are Osip's papers? I never got anything from him and I haven't a single line in his hand. Maybe you could let me have something?" Remembering that M. could not stand this cadging of his, I gave him nothing, but he managed to get what he wanted all the same. He had kept from the past not books or living verse, but only scraps of paper with a few lines written in their own hand by old comrades who had perished—documentary evidence, as it were, of a literary life that had once been. "And poetry too isn't what it was, you know," he complained.

Zenkevich was one of the first to go to the White Sea Canal and carry out orders by writing a piece of doggerel in praise of the "transformers of Nature." For this M. conferred on him the title Zenkevich-Canalski—just as the great explorer Semionov had once been styled Semionov-Tianshanski, after his discovery of the Tian Shan mountain range. In 1937 Lakhuti arranged for M. to go to the Canal under the auspices of the Union of Soviet Writers. The well-meaning Persian had hoped that M. would write something about it and thus save his life. When he came back M. neatly wrote down a few glib lines and said, showing them to me, "Shall we pre­sent them to Zenkevich?" M. went to his death, but these lines have survived, their purpose unfulfilled. Later on, in Tashkent, I once happened to come across them and I asked Akhmatova what I should do with them: "Should I throw them in the fire?" This was in a balakhanat where we were both living as evacuees. "Nadia," Akhma­tova replied, "Osip gave you the right to do what you wish with ab­solutely all his papers." This was totally disingenuous: we were all against falsification, the destruction of manuscripts or any other kind of tampering with anyone's literary remains, and it was not easy for Akhmatova to give her blessing to my suggestion. But now, quite unexpectedly, she had given me in M.'s name a right that M. himself had never given me: to destroy or keep what I saw fit. She did this so that we could get rid of the Canal poem, and without more ado it was at once reduced to a little pile of ash.

If anybody happens to have kept a stray copy of this poem, I beg and pray him, by virtue of the right that Akhmatova and I bestowed upon ourselves, to set aside his love of original manuscripts and throw it in the fire. A poem like this could be of use only to the Union of Soviet Writers as something to be shown to any foreigners who might be curious enough to make inquiries: "Mandelstam's lit­erary remains? Look at this: what's the point of publishing this?" They have no compunction, after all, about falsifying details of a person's life or the date of his death. Who started the rumor that M. was killed by the Germans in Voronezh? Who has postdated the deaths of all who perished in the camps to the beginning of the for­ties? Who publishes the works of poets, both living and dead, delib­erately omitting the best of what they wrote? Who holds up for years and years manuscripts by dead and living writers and poets, long after they have been got ready for publication? One could never even begin to list it all—too much has been hidden away and buried in all kinds of secret depositories, and even more has been destroyed.

Another reason I was so angry about the poem describing the beauties of the Canal was that M. himself would have been sent there to work on it if it hadn't been for the order to "isolate but preserve" him. Forced labor on the Canal had been commuted to exile in Cherdyn, since nobody could be "preserved" once he was sent to the Canal. The young and healthy linguists Dmitri Usov and Yarkho were so broken by their few years at the Canal that they died almost immediately after their release—though they had scarcely been em­ployed on hard physical labor. If M. had gone to the Canal, he would have died in 1934 instead of 1938—the "miracle" gave him a few extra years of life. All the same, miracles send a shiver down my spine. Not that I wish to appear ungrateful, but miracles are an Eastern thing and are ill-suited to the Western mind.

Nowadays I have a different feeling about Misha Zenkevich, the self-appointed Roman who, in the ruins of his Colosseum, preserves a few manuscripts by the poets who have been killed. I now find his life touching and, even though it has been free of great disasters—he has never been in prison or gone hungry—almost tragic. Frail by nature, Zenkevich succumbed earlier than others to the plague that infected all our minds; with him, however, it was not the acute at­tack I suffered in the railroad car, but a long-drawn-out chronic form from which nobody ever recovered. Can one explain the sus­ceptibility of our intellectuals to this sickness only by reference to conditions after the Revolution? Weren't the first microbes already lurking in the pre-revolutionary malaise with all its frantic search- ings and false prophecies?

There was a special form of the sickness—lethargy, plague, hyp­notic trance or whatever one calk it—that affected all those who committed terrible deeds in the name of the "New Era." All the murderers, provocateurs and informers had one feature in common: it never occurred to them that their victims might one day rise up again and speak. They also imagined that time had stopped—this, indeed, was the chief symptom of the sickness. We had, you see, been led to believe that in our country nothing would ever change again, and that it was now up to the rest of the world to follow our example and enter the "New Era," after which all change would cease everywhere. And the people who accepted this doctrine worked sincerely for the greater glory of the new morality which followed from a historical determinism taken to its extreme conclu­sion. They thought that everybody sent to the next world or to the camps had been eliminated once and for all. It never entered their heads that these ghosts might rise up and call their grave-diggers to account. During the period of rehabilitations,[6] therefore, they were utterly panic-stricken. They thought that time had gone into reverse and that those they had dubbed "camp dust" had suddenly once more taken on flesh and reassumed their names. They were seized by terror. It so happens that during that time I was able to observe one wretched woman informer who lived next door to Vasilisa Shklov- ski. She was constantly being summoned to the Prosecutor's office, where she retracted testimony given many years before, thus clear­ing the names of persons both living and dead. On returning home, she came running to Vasilisa—whose apartment it had once been her iob to watch—and stammered that, as God was her witness, she had lever said anything bad about Malkin or anybody else, and that her only reason for going to the Prosecutor's office now was to say good things about all the dead people so they would be cleared as soon as possible. The woman had never had anything remotely resembling a conscience, but this was more than she could stand, and she had a stroke that left her paralyzed. She must at some moment have got so scared that she really believed these rehabilitations were serious and that all the slanderers and other minions might be brought to trial. This, of course, didn't happen, but, all the same, she's better off as she is now—paralyzed and senile. For her, time has stopped once more.

And in Tashkent one of the most senior secret-police officials, who was pensioned off after the changes but was occasionally sum­moned to interviews with former victims who had by some miracle survived and returned from the camps, could not stand it and hanged himself. I was able to read a draft of his suicide letter addressed to the Central Committee. His reasoning was quite simple: As a com­pletely dedicated young Komsomol,* he had been assigned to the secret police and had constantly been decorated and promoted for his work. During all his years of service he had never seen anybody but his colleagues and the prisoners he interrogated; he had worked day and night without pause and it was only after he was retired that he had the time to stop and think about what had been going on. Only then did the thought cross his mind that he might have been serving not the people, but "some kind of Bonapartism." He tried to put the blame on others: on the people he had interrogated for sign­ing all kinds of bogus confessions, thereby misleading the officials in charge of their cases; on the officials sent from Moscow with in­structions concerning "simplified interrogation procedure" and demands that the quotas be fulfilled; and, last but not least, on the informers who volunteered the denunciations which forced the se­cret police to act against so many people—a secret policeman was prevented by his class consciousness from disregarding information of this kind. . . . He had finally made up his mind to commit sui­cide after reading Victor Hugo's "Last Day of a Condemned Man."

He was buried and the case was hushed up—it couldn't be other­wise, since he had named all the officials who had come from Mos­cow to brief him, and the informers who had brought him denuncia­tions. The daughter of the dead man—she was called Larisa, after Larisa Reisner—stormed and raged for a long time, thinking only of getting even with those who had caused her father's death. Her anger was directed against the ones who had stirred up this nightmar­ish business. "They should have shown some consideration for the people in official positions at that time! They didn't start all this, they were just carrying orders." To this Larisa kept adding that she would not "let the matter rest here," and she even said she was going to get the whole story out of the country so that people abroad would know how her father had been treated. I asked her what exactly she proposed to complain about. For Larisa it was all quite clear: one could not make such sudden changes because it was so "traumatic." One could not inflict traumas on people such as her fa­ther and his colleagues. "Who is going to sympathize with you?" I

• Member of the Young Communist League.

asked, but she didn't understand the question. People had been prom­ised that all change was at an end, ^nd further changes were inad­missible. "All right, let them no longer arrest people, but things should stay as they were." Let time stand still. The stopping of time means peace and stability. They need it so much, the leaders of our age.

Larisa wanted time to be halted again, and to a considerable extent her plea has been heeded. The sons of her father's deposed colleagues have gone to Moscow to learn new methods, and before they went they put flowers on his grave. They will fill the same jobs and move into the same offices, always ready to act in accordance with instruct­ions from above. The only question now is: What will these instruc­tions be?

Larisa and I had nothing in common, but, looking at her, I always wondered why all lives in this country are equally ill-fated. What do you have to be to escape? In what burrow can one hide? Larisa and her friends had made a burrow of sorts for themselves, stocking it with all the things which for them symbolized the good life: side­boards, wineglasses, standard lamps, Bohemian cut glass and old Rus­sian china, embroidered dressing gowns and Japanese fans. But all the furnishings they traveled to Moscow to buy only served, like tombstones, to bury them. Their burrow had not been deep enough either: some were destroyed at a wave of Stalin's hand, others de­stroyed themselves.

i з The Namesake

_I

n the train I did not at first realize that anything was wrong with M. He greeted me with joy and took my appearance for a miracle. Indeed, it was a miracle. He said that he had been expecting all the time to be shot: "It happens to people for much less, you know." This was true enough. We had never doubted that he would be shot if they found out about the poem. Vinaver, a very well- informed man of enormous experience who was privy to many se­crets, told me several months later when I came from Voronezh to see him and read him the poem about Stalin at his request: "What do you expect? He got off very lightly: people are shot for much less than that." At the same time he warned me not to place too much hope in mercy from on high: "It might be withdrawn as soon as the fuss has died down," he said. "Does that happen?" I asked. He was staggered by my naivete. "I'll say it does!" And he added: "Just try not to attract attention. Perhaps they'll forget about you then." But we didn't follow this advice. M. was not one to keep quiet and he went on making a fuss to the very end.

In the train M. said that this merciful sentence to three years in exile meant only that his execution had been put off to a more con­venient time—just what Vinaver told me later. I wasn't in the least surprised by this reading of the situation: by 1934 we were already a little wiser about what was going on. When M. said that there was no escape anyway, he was absolutely right—a sober view of the situ­ation could lead to no other conclusion. And when he whispered to me: "Don't trust them," I could only nod in agreement. Who indeed could trust them?

Yet this talk was actually a result of the severe psychotic state to which M. had been reduced in prison. At first, however, it was not M. who appeared unbalanced to me, but the senior guard (called Osip, like both M. and the target of his poem) * when he took me aside and said, his kindly, sheepish eyes popping out of his head, "Tell him to calm down! Tell him we don't shoot people for making up poetry." He had heard us mention the poem in our conversation, and he wanted us to know that people were shot only for spying and sabotage. In the bourgeois countries, he went on, it was quite a dif­ferent matter: there you could be strung up in no time for writing some stuff they didn't like.

To some degree or another we all, of course, believed what was dinned into us. The young people—whether students, soldiers, writ­ers or guards—were particularly credulous. "No elections could be fairer," a demobilized soldier said to me in 1937. "They put up can­didates, and we elect them." M. also fell for it and proved gullible on this occasion: "This is the way they're doing it now, but they'll gradually learn better, and then we shall have proper elections," he said as he left the polling booth, awed by the novelty of the first and last elections in which he was ever to vote. Even we, with all our experience, were not able to form a proper judgment of all the changes, so what could we expect of younger people? ... I re­member how in Kalinin the woman next door who used to bring me milk just before the war once said with a sigh: "At least we get a

* Osip is a form of Joseph.

little salted herring, or sugar, or kerosene now and again. But what must it be like in the capitalist countries? I suppose you can just starve to death there." Even today the students believe that educa­tion for all is possible only under socialism, and that "over there" people are sunk in ignorance. Once, while we were having a meal with Larisa, the daughter of the Tashkent official who had killed himself, there was a fierce argument about whether in large foreign towns like London or Paris they would refuse to give a residence permit to an airman who had been invalided out of the service. There had just been such a case in Tashkent (this was in 1959) and Larisa was saying that an airman must be given a permit, particularly if he was a test pilot. I tried to explain that "over there" you didn't need a permit to reside in a city, but nobody would believe me: since everything was so much worse "over there," the difficulties with residence permits were bound to be tremendous. How could any­body live in a city without a permit? You'd be caught straight away! If we all believed what our mentors told us, how could we wonder that our guard Osip believed them?

I had brought a small volume of Pushkin with me. Osip was so taken by the story of the old gypsy that he read it out loud to his bored comrades. "Look at what those Roman Czars did to old men," Osip said to the others. "It was for his poems they sent him away." The description of Ovid's northern exile* affected him greatly: he thought it was a terrible thing, and he decided to reassure me that we were not in for anything as bad as this. Accompanying me, as per instructions, to the toilet, Osip managed to whisper to me that we were going to Cherdyn—where the climate was good—and that our first change of train would be in Sverdlovsk. When I told him that the interrogator had already told us this, Osip was crestfallen: he had been instructed to keep our destination and route a secret, and only the guards were supposed to know such things. In his fondness for us, Osip had broken the rules and told us where we were going, only to learn that I knew already. But I made him feel better by saying that if it hadn't been for his confirmation of the interrogator's words, I should have had all kinds of wild ideas.

This was not the only exception Osip made for us. Every time we had to change trains—and it happened often—he got the other guards to carry our things for us, and when we transferred to a river steamer at Solikamsk, he whispered to me to take a cabin at our own expense ("So your man can have a rest"). He kept the other guards

• In Pushkin's poem "The Gypsies." away from us and they stayed up on deck. I asked why he was dis­obeying orders like this, but he just waved his hand: up to now he had always traveled in charge of common criminals and "saboteurs" who had to be watched very carefully—"but your man's different, he doesn't need watching!" But none of the guards would touch any of our food, try as I would to offer them a bite: it was forbidden. Only when they had handed M. over to the commandant in Cher- dyn did they say at last: "Now we are free, you can treat us!"

In the whole of my life I was to meet only two more people of Osip's profession. One of them just ground his teeth all the time and kept on saying that we could have no idea of what it was like. He dreamed of the day when he would be demobilized, and I was glad when I heard that he had regained his freedom. "Even a state farm is like paradise now," he told me when we met. The other man was a brutish creature with a low forehead who had once let a prisoner escape and hence lost a job which had seemed full of promising pos­sibilities and had obviously suited him very much. For years, drunk or sober, he cursed the "counter-revolutionary German fascist sabo­teur" who had ruined his career. His one dream was to catch the swine and kill him. He also harbored a grudge against the Soviet regime: why was it soft on these criminals, sending them to camps instead of shooting them like that— He snapped his fingers expres­sively. We should have had a very poor time if this man, rather than Osip, had been given the task of taking us to Cherdyn.

14 A Piece of Chocolate

_D

uring the first change of trains at Sverdlovsk we had to wait for many hours at the station, and the guards kept a very close watch not only on M. but on me as well. I wasn't allowed to send a telegram, buy bread or go near the newsstand. Neither had I been permitted to get out at intermediate stops ("It's against the rules"). M. noticed this at once: "So they're treating you the same as me." I tried to explain to the guards that I hadn't been exiled, that I was traveling of my own free will. "Not allowed. Those are the orders."

In Sverdlovsk we had to sit for many hours, from morning till late at night, on a wooden bench flanked by two armed guards. At our least move—we weren't allowed to get up and stretch our legs or change our position in the slightest—the guards at once sprang to the alert and reached for their pistols. For some reason they had put us on a seat right opposite the station entrance, so we faced the endless stream of people coming in. The first thing they saw was us, but they looked away immediately. Even little boys decided not to no­tice us. We weren't allowed to eat, either, because our food was in our suitcase and we were not supposed to touch our things—it was against the rules. There was no water within reach. Osip didn't dare disobey his orders here: Sverdlovsk was a station not to be taken lightly.

In the evening we were transferred to the narrow-gauge line from Sverdlovsk to Solikamsk. We were taken to some sidings and put aboard a car with ordinary seats, a few rows of which were left empty to separate us from the other passengers. Two soldiers stood next to us all night while a third one guarded the empty seats to keep away passengers who stubbornly tried to sit in them. In Sverdlovsk we had sat side by side, but now we were facing each other by a window of the unlighted car. The white nights had already started, and we could glimpse the wooded hills of the Ural as they flashed by. The railroad went through thick forest, and M. stared out of the window all night long. This was his third or fourth sleepless night.

We traveled in crowded cars and on river steamers, we sat in busy stations swarming with people, but nowhere did anybody pay any attention to the outlandish spectacle of two people, a man and a woman, guarded by three armed soldiers. Nobody gave us so much as a backward glance. Were they just used to sights like this in the Ural, or were they afraid of getting infected? Who knows? Most probably it was a case of the peculiar Soviet etiquette that has been carefully observed for several decades now: if the authorities are sending someone into exile, all well and good, it's none of our busi­ness. The indifference of the people around us hurt and upset M. "They used to give alms to convicts and now they don't even look at them." With horror he whispered in my ear that in front of a crowd like this they could do anything to a prisoner—shoot him down, kill him, torture him—and nobody would interfere. Bystanders would just turn their backs, not to be upset by the sight. During the whole journey I tried to catch somebody's eye, but never once succeeded.

Perhaps only the Ural was so stony-faced? In 1938 I lived in Stru- nino, in the permitted zone a hundred kilometers from Moscow. This was a small textile town on the Yaroslavl railroad and in those years trainloads of prisoners passed through it every night. People coming in to see my landlady spoke of nothing else. They were outraged at being forbidden to give the prisoners bread. Once my landlady man­aged to throw a piece of chocolate through the bars of a broken window in one of the prison cars—in a poor working-class family, chocolate was a rare treat and she had been taking it home for her little daughter. A soldier had sworn at her and swung the butt of his rifle at her, but she was happy for the rest of the day because she had managed to do at least this much. True, some of her neighbors sighed and said: "Better not get mixed up with them. They'll plague the life out of you. They'll have you up in front of the factory committee." But my landlady didn't go out to work, so she wasn't afraid of any factory committee.

Will anybody in a future generation ever understand what that piece of chocolate with a child's picture on the wrapper must have meant in a stifling prison train in 1938? People for whom time had stopped and space had become a prison ward, or a punishment cell where you could only stand, or a cattle truck filled to bursting with its freight of half-dead human beings, forgotten outcasts who had been struck from the rolls of the living, stripped of their names, numbered and registered before being shipped to the black limbo of the prison camps—it was such as these who now suddenly received for the first time in many months their first message from the for­bidden world outside: a little piece of chocolate to tell them that they were not yet forgotten, and that people were still alive beyond their prison bars.

On the way to Cherdyn I consoled myself with the thought that the dour people of the Ural were simply afraid to look at us, but that every one of them, on returning home, would tell his family about the two people, a man and a woman, being taken somewhere to the north by three soldiers.

15 The Leap

_I

had realized that M. was ill the first night, when I noticed that he was not sleeping, but sitting with his legs crossed and listen­ing very intently to something. "Do you hear?" he asked me when­ever our eyes met. I listened—but there was only the hammering of wheels and the snoring of passengers. "You have bad hearing. You never hear anything." He really had extremely fine hearing, and he could catch the slightest sounds that I never heard. But this time it was not a question of hearing.

He spent the whole journey listening like this, and from time to time he would shudder and tell me that disaster might strike any moment, and that we must be ready, not be caught unawares. I real­ized that not only was he expecting to be put to death, but that he thought it would happen any moment—right now, during the jour­ney. "On the way?" I asked. "You must be thinking of the twenty- six commissars." [7] "And why not?" he answered. "You think our own people couldn't do the same thing?" We both knew perfectly well that our own people were capable of anything. But in his mad­ness M. hoped to cheat his executioners, to run for it, to break away or be killed in the attempt—anything rather than die at their hands. It is strange that all of us, whether mad or not, never give up this one hope: suicide is the last resort, which we keep in reserve, believing that it is never too late to use it. Yet so many people who were determined never to fall alive into the hands of the secret police were taken by surprise at the last moment.

The thought of this last resort had consoled and soothed me all my life, and often, at times when things were quite unbearable, I had proposed to M. that we commit suicide together. M. had always sharply rejected the idea.t

His main argument was: "How do you know what will come afterward? Life is a gift that nobody should renounce." And there was the final and most telling argument: "Why do you think you ought to be happy?" Nobody was so full of the joy of life as M., but though he never sought unhappiness, neither did he count on being what is called "happy."

Generally, however, he dismissed the idea of suicide with a joke: "Kill ourselves? Impossible! What will Averbakh say?" Or: "How can I live with a professional suicide like you?" The thought of sui­cide first came to him during his illness on the way to Cherdyn as a means of escaping the death by shooting that he believed was inevi­table. It was then that I said to him: "Very well, if they shoot us, we shan't have to commit suicide." At this, already ill and obsessed as he was, he suddenly burst out laughing: "There you go again." From then on our life was such that the suicide theme recurred frequently, but M. always said: "Wait . . . not now. . . . We'll see. . . ." In 1937 he even consulted Akhmatova, but she said: "Do you know what they'll do? They'll start taking even better care of writers and even give some Leonov or other a dacha. Why do you want that to happen?" If he had made up his mind to do it then, he would have been spared his second arrest and the endless journey in a cattle car to Vladivostok, to horror and death in a camp, and* I should not have had to live on after him. I am always struck that people find it so difficult to cross this fateful threshold. There is something in the Christian injunction against suicide which is pro­foundly in keeping with human nature—this is why people don't do it, even though life can be far more terrible than death, as we have seen in our times. When M. had gone and I was left alone, I was sustained by the memory of his words "Why do you think you ought to be happy?" and by the passage in the "Life" of the Arch- priest Awakum when his exhausted wife asks him: "How much fur­ther must we go?" and he replies: "Until the very grave, woman." Whereupon she gets to her feet and walks on.

If these notes of mine survive, people reading them may think they were written by a sick person, by a hypochondriac. ... By then all will have been forgotten and nobody will believe the testi­mony of a witness. One only has to think of all the people abroad who still do not believe us. Yet they are contemporaries, separated from us only by space, not by time. I recently read the following reasonable-sounding words by a foreign author: "They say that everybody was afraid there. It cannot be that everybody was afraid. Some were and some weren't. . . ."It sounds so reasonable and logi­cal, but in fact our life was far from logical. And it wasn't just that I was a "professional suicide," as M. had called me teasingly. Many other people thought about it, too. Not for nothing was the best play in the Soviet repertory entitled The Suicide*

So it was in the train to Cherdyn, traveling under the eye of three

• By Nikolai Erdman.

guards, that M. first thought of killing himself, but this was the result of illness. He was a man who always noted everything in the minutest detail and his powers of observation were extraordinarily acute. "Attention to detail," he noted in one of his rough drafts, "is the virtue of the lyric poet. Carelessness and sloppiness are the de­vices of lyrical sloth." But now, on the journey to Cherdyn, this feral perceptiveness and acute sense of hearing had turned against him, exacerbating his illness. In the hectic throng of crowded sta­tions, and in railroad cars, he constantly registered each little detail, and, thinking it all referred to him personally—isn't egocentrism the first symptom of mental illness?—he decided it all added up to one thing: the fateful moment was at hand.

In Solikamsk we were put in a truck to be taken from the station to the pier. On the way we drove through a forest clearing. The truck was full of workers and M. was frightened by the appearance of one of them, a bearded man in a dark-red shirt with an ax in his hand. "They're going to behead me, as in Peter's time," he whis­pered to me. But on the river steamer, in the cabin we had got thanks to Osip, M. started making fun of his own fears and clearly saw that he was frightened of people who were no threat to him—such as the workers in Solikamsk. And he added bitterly that they would lull his suspicions and then "grab" him when he was least expecting it. This is indeed just what happened four years later.

In his dementia M. understood perfectly well what was coming, but when he recovered he lost this sense of reality and began to believe he was safe. In our sort of life people of sound mind had to shut their eyes to their surroundings—otherwise they would have thought they were having hallucinations. To shut your eyes like this is not easy and requires a great effort. Not to see what is going on around you is not just a passive activity. Soviet citizens have achieved a high degree of mental blindness, with devastating conse­quences for their whole psychological make-up. This generation of people who chose to be blind is now disappearing for the most prim­itive of reasons—they are dying off—but what have they passed on to their children?

We were glad to see Cherdyn with its pleasant scenery: it re­minded one of what the country was like before the time of Peter the Great. We were taken to the local Cheka and handed over to the Commandant together with our papers. Osip explained that he had brought "a very special bird" whom they were ordered to "pre­serve" without fail. He was evidently very anxious to impress this on the Commandant, a man with the typical appearance of one who had served on the "inside"—that is, who had shot and tortured prisoners and had then been posted to this remote place because of his brutal­ity: in other words, because he had seen too many unmentionable things. I sensed that Osip must have made a certain effort on our behalf—to judge from the mixture of curiosity and venom with which the Commandant looked at us, and from the ease with which I was able to enlist his help to get us a place in the local hospital. As other exiles in Cherdyn told me later, he did not usually "pamper" people who had been brought there under guard. In the hospital we were given a large empty ward with two creaking beds set up at right angles to the wall.

As it says in M.'s poem, I really hadn't slept for five nights as I watched over him on the journey. But in the hospital, tired by the endless white night, I fell into a troubled, wakeful kind of sleep through which I could see M., legs crossed and jacket unbuttoned, sitting on the shaky bed and listening to the silence.

Suddenly—I sensed this through my sleep—everything changed place: M. was all at once on the window sill and I was there beside him. He put his legs outside, and I just had time to see him begin to lower his whole body. The window sill was a high one. I reached out desperately with both hands and managed to grab the shoulders of his jacket. He wriggled out of the sleeves and dropped. I could hear the sound of his falling—a dull thud and a cry. His jacket was left hanging in my hands. I ran screaming along the hospital corridor, down the stairs and outside. Some nurses raced after me. We found M. on a pile of earth that had been plowed up to make a flower bed. He was lying there all huddled up. Shouting and cursing, they car­ried him upstairs. They swore mostly at me for not having kept an eye on him.

A woman doctor, very disheveled and very angry, came running and quickly examined him. She said he had dislocated his right shoul­der, but there was no other damage apart from this. He was lucky: he had thrown himself from a second-floor window of an old district hospital which would equal at least a third-floor window of any modern one.

From somewhere a crowd of hospital orderlies appeared. M. lay on the floor of a completely empty ward, which they called the operating room, and struggled with the men holding him while the woman doctor set his shoulder to the accompaniment of loud curses: a substitute for the anesthetic lacking in this hospital. The X-rayequipment was not working because the generator was switched off to save fuel during the white nights, and the mechanic had gone on vacation. This was why the doctor did not notice the fracture in M.'s shoulder bone. It was not discovered till much later, in Voro­nezh, where we had to consult a surgeon because M. had lost the use of his right arm. He was under treatment for a long time and par­tially recovered the use of his arm, but he could not raise it—to hang up his coat, for instance. This he had to do with his left hand.

nshaven, with the beard of a Biblical patriarch, M. lay for two

After his leap that night he calmed down. As he says in his poem: "A leap—and my mind is whole."

16 Cherdyn

weeks in Cherdyn, looking closely at everything around him with a studious and, for some reason, very serene gaze. I thought that he had never looked so alert and so calm as during this illness. He was not upset by the peasants, as bearded as he was himself, who wandered along the corridors. As he now told me, the experience in Solikamsk had done him good: peasants are peasants, and there's no reason to fear them—you could tell them straightaway from "those others" (that is, policemen). The peasants in the hospital had fester­ing sores and they were treated in the same rough-and-ready fashion as M. had been. They talked slowly among themselves and were al­ways smirking for no apparent reason. A lot of things about human behavior are hard to understand, but this smirk made no sense at all. It was easier to explain their sores: the hideous conditions in which they had been transported here, lifting loads too heavy for them, injuries ... A thin woman with the face of a radical intellectual from the 1860's—an exile like us, who worked as housekeeper in the hospital and considered herself remarkably lucky to have the job— said she would gladly sacrifice her life for the sake of these peasants. From this remark M. realized at once what kind of a person she

was.

I cannot now remember how these bearded peasants were referred to at the time. The word may have been "resettled"; all I remember is that it was forbidden to describe them for what they were: peas­ants deported as kulaks.[8] We do not like to call a spade a spade. Those bearded men with their festering sores have long been dead and buried. There is never any mention of them anywhere. Are we afraid to touch those sores?

At that time the tradition of comradeship and mutual help still lingered on both in the forced-labor camps and in remote places of exile such as ours. In the world beyond, all this was a thing of the past, but Cherdyn was faithful to the old ways, and the house­keeper showed warm concern for us. She insisted that I buy some fur boots for winter—they would be unobtainable later on—and start growing vegetables if we wanted to eat properly. Exiles were given plots of land to grow food on, but they had to find their own accom­modation. In Cherdyn, as everywhere else, there was a desperate shortage of housing, and the exiles rented corners of rooms where they could. The housekeeper took us to see a little man with short legs who had managed to do quite well for himself. He had curtained off a corner in someone's house with plush curtains and made some bookshelves which were filled from top to bottom with the works of Marx and Engels. Behind these curtains he lived with his wife, and both of them went every three days to report to the Commandant. M. was expected to do the same, even though he was in hospital. They had given him a document that did not qualify as a residence permit, and every three days the Commandant put a stamp on it. The other exiles were worried in case the Commandant decided to send M. away to some place in the surrounding district. He tried to keep as few people as possible in the town because "there are too many as it is." "Does he have the right?" I asked, saying that M.'s document mentioned only Cherdyn itself, not the district. "You are in his hands. He'll send you wherever he wants. He's always making people leave the town." At the beginning of that spring there had been many more political exiles, but they had all had to leave for the countryside, where there was nothing for them to do except manual labor. "And some of the comrades were quite ill," the housekeeper added. In the camps and places of exile the word "comrade" had a special ring all its own that had long been forgotten in the world outside.

The housekeeper's husband was always arguing with the short- legged Marxist who lived behind the plush curtain. They were former members—marginal ones at that—of parties now destroyed, and their arguments had begun way back in the revolutionary under­ground of Czarist times. Their wives were more concerned with their jobs than with this kind of talk, and they obviously missed their children, which both couples had left with relatives. "How are they getting on, I wonder?" they kept sighing, but they couldn't bring themselves to send for them. "We are done for, but we must give them a chance to live." Their own future was perfectly clear to them: on the first pretext they would be finished off here on the spot, or sent to rot in the camps. "Perhaps things will ease off," we once said to the Marxist. "Not a hope!" he replied. "They're only just beginning to warm up." But I didn't believe him. It's only natural, I thought, that they take such a gloomy view of the future: there's not much room for optimism in their situation. And things really can't go on forever like this. ... In my long life I have often imagined that we had reached the limit and that things would "ease off," as I put it. Nobody likes to part with his illusions.

The other exiles tried to set my mind at rest as to M.'s health. "They all come out of there in his state, but it will be all right later on—they get over it." "Why are they in such a state?" I asked. They didn't know how to explain it to me. "Was it like that in the old days?" They had all been in Czarist jails, and should have been able to enlighten me. But all they could tell me was that in the old days people's mental state was not affected so much by prison. At the same time I was not to be alarmed: "it" always cleared up com­pletely. The illness lasted from two to three months. The main thing was a certain self-control: it was important not to think about the future—which boded no good anyway. We should make the best of Cherdyn as a last breathing-space. Expect nothing and be ready for anything—that was the key to sanity.

They urged us to resign ourselves to fate and not throw away our little remaining money on telegrams. Once they are out of prison, all exiles, dazed by the fantastic nature of their treatment there, al­ways started bombarding the Government with protest telegrams. Nobody ever received an answer. My new friends were people of enormous experience. They had spent more than ten years already in various places of exile and in labor camps (where at first the men were separated from their wives, but were later reunited with them). I thought of G., an old country doctor whom I had met at the very beginning of the twenties in Moscow. He had come to plead on behalf of his family, but achieved nothing. "I have nobody left," he told me, "they have sent all of them away, even the young­sters," and he gave me the names of all his sons and grown grand­children. "This never used to happen." The old man knew that in the old days, if someone's eldest son was exiled, the grandchildren were always handed over to the care of their grandparents. The ar­rest of a son never affected the other members of a family—they remained free, and lived where they liked. The old man was now trying to get back one of his grandsons who was still under age, but nothing came of it.

I told the other exiles in Cherdyn about the formula that had been applied in M.'s case: "isolate but preserve." What did they think it meant? Perhaps the Commandant wouldn't dare to make M. leave the town and live in even worse conditions? Perhaps it would enable us to get some improvement in his lot and proper medical treatment for him? They doubted it. There were many people in their circles who had been personally acquainted with those who later rose to power, Stalin among them. They had had dealings with them in the underground and in exile in Czarist times. Now, going into exile again, they had often heard assurances that they were only being "isolated" and that they would be given "all the conditions" needed for life and work. However, these promises were never kept, and the petitions and letters with which they bombarded the Government just vanished into a bottomless pit. Isolation, they said, promised not "preservation" but the most ordinary kind of destruction, quietly, without witnesses, "at the right moment." The only things one could trust in were one's own patience and discipline. The only thing to do was to expect the worst and cling to one's human dig­nity. It was difficult to do this, and you needed all your strength. Such was the conclusion they had drawn from their experience and a sober analysis of their situation. But we couldn't help feeling that they were not quite objective in their pessimism: life had treated them so badly that they were bound to see everything in the darkest light. Was three years' exile in Cherdyn really the end? Everything would come out all right, things would ease off, and life would go on. . . .

People always clutch at straws, nobody wants to part with his illusions, and it is very difficult to look life in the face. To see things as they are demands a superhuman effort. There are those who want to be blind, but even among those who think they are not, how many are left who can really see? Or, rather, who do not shghtly distort what they see to keep their illusions and hopes alive?

Our Cherdyn friends had only one aim in life—to preserve their human dignity. For this they had given up any kind of activity, con­demning themselves to total isolation and the prospect of an early death. This was undoubtedly passive resistance of a kind, but the movement known by this term in India is by comparison a very active form of political struggle. In a certain sense they had now adopted the idea of self-perfection once proposed by the Vekhi (Landmarks)* group and indignantly rejected by them at that time. It must be said, however, that they had little choice. The only other thing they could have done was to scream, but no one would have heard anyway.

I later heard quite by chance what happened subsequently to the housekeeper at the Cherdyn hospital. She was sent to Kolymat and there told the story of M.'s illness to a fellow prisoner, a woman writer from Leningrad called E. M. Tager. After jumping out of the window, M. went on believing he would be shot, but he no longer tried to run away from it. He had decided that his executioners would come at some particular time, and at the appointed hour he waited for them in fear and agitation. In the hospital ward where we were living, there was a large clock on the wall. One day M. said he expected to be put to death at six o'clock that evening, and the house­keeper advised me to move the hands on the clock without his no­ticing. She and I managed to do this, and this time M. was not over­come with fear as the fateful hour approached. "Look," I told him, "you said six, but it's already quarter past seven." Oddly enough, this trick worked and he no longer had bouts of terror associated with certain hours of the day.

The housekeeper had remembered this episode in exact detail and told it to E. M. Tager, who was her neighbor in the camp barrack. After twenty years in the labor camps Tager was rehabilitated after the Twentieth Congress t in 1956 and returned to her native city. She was given an apartment in the same building as Akhmatova, and it was there that I met her. And I, who also owe it to chance that I have survived with my memories, recognized the woman who told her the story of the clock as the housekeeper from Cherdyn. It is thus only through a chain of pure chance that I am able to write down (will it ever find its way to other readers?) the story of how the worst expectations of one of our fellow exiles in Cherdyn proved only too true. My nameless Cherdyn sister died in Kolyma from

^# See note on Berdiayev in the Appendix.

t A forced-labor camp area in the Soviet Far East.

I The Party Congress at which Khrushchev made his "secret speech" de­nouncing Stalin.

total exhaustion. I have been able to discover nothing about the fate of her children whom she had left behind "to give them at least a chance. . . ." Did they escape the fate that usually befell the chil­dren of exiles and prisoners? Did they have to pay the price of prison and camp on account of the parents who had wanted only to preserve their human dignity? And have they themselves kept the human dignity for which their parents paid so dearly?

e walked around Cherdyn, talked with people and spent

This I do not know, and shall never learn.

17 Hallucinations

our nights in the hospital. I was no longer afraid of keep­ing the window open. There was only the sling on M.'s arm to re­mind me of that first night when I had been left holding an empty jacket. When the secret police came to take M. away for the second time in 1938, I was again left with an empty jacket in my hands: in all the hurry M. forgot to take it.

During the few days in Cherdyn M. became very much calmer. The crisis had passed, but his illness was not over. As before, he was waiting for the death sentence to be carried out, but his mental state had improved to the point where he had regained a certain sense of reality. After the business with the clock he said that there was obvi­ously no escaping the end in store for him, but that there was noth­ing to be done about it—even committing suicide wasn't so simple, "otherwise nobody would come into their clutches alive. . . ."

His agitation had passed, but he still had auditory hallucinations. They took the form not of inner voices, but of violent and utterly strange ones which seemed to come from without. M. spoke about them almost objectively, trying to understand what they meant. He explained that these voices he was hearing could not come from in­side because they used a vocabulary that wasn't his. "I couldn't say such things even to myself"—this was his argument in favor of the real existence of these voices. In a way his ability to analyze them made it harder for him to fight his hallucinations. He couldn't be­lieve in their internal origin because he thought that a hallucination was necessarily some kind of reflection of one's own inner world.

"Perhaps it's something you've repressed?" I asked him. He in­sisted that things he'd repressed would be quite different, and that what the voices said was foreign to him. "Even their worries are quite different from mine." M. revealed himself so fully in his verse that for me at least there were very few "dark corners" in him. If I mention "dark corners" at all, it was because he was a reserved man and there were subjects that he scarcely ever talked about. For in­stance, he never said how he arrived at the associations in his poetry —which, indeed, he never commented on in any way—and always had very little to say about things and people dear to him—his mother, for instance, or Pushkin. In other words, there was an area which he thought it was almost sacriligeous to touch on—this is what I mean by saying he was a reserved man. But it would be wrong to put this reticence down to "inhibitions." He was not inhib­ited in his thoughts and feelings—rather the contrary. And in any case, how could inhibitions have been involved when his illness was caused by an over-reaction to external factors?

"Whose vocabulary is it? Whose words can you hear?" I asked. This he could not say. It could have been the words of the guards who had led him along the corridors of the Lubianka when he was called out for interrogation at night. They sometimes winked at each other, snapped their fingers in a symbolic gesture meaning death by shooting, and also exchanged occasional remarks calculated to terrify the prisoner. All this was deliberately intended to help the in­terrogator in his task, as everybody who has ever been in the Lubi­anka knows. M. also kept remembering the voice of the man who had let him out of the "iron gates of the GPU." M. referred to him as the prison commandant, but perhaps he was simply the duty guard. M. couldn't actually see him because he was sitting in the "Black Maria," but he could hear someone checking his papers be­fore allowing it to go through the gates. This voice, together with the whole ritual, had produced a strong impression. But most of all he had been affected by the interrogator's solemn monologues with their stress on "crime and punishment."

"The voices," M. said to me once, "are like a composite quotation of everything I heard." ("Composite quotation" is an expression coined by Andrei Bely, who said that for him every writer was rep­resented not by a series of separate, word-for-word quotations, but by a kind of "composite quotation" that summed up the essentials of his thoughts and words.)

To test M.'s sense of reality, I asked him whether he also heard the voices of the guards who had brought us to Cherdyn, such as Osip, or those of the bearded men who had come to the hospital for treat­ment. M. was indignant: those guards had been simple village youths doing this horrible job by way of duty—"babes in the wood," he called them. As for the bearded men, he saw them as just what they were: peasants who had been deported as kulaks—"ordinary people could never say or think this kind of thing." There was in his mind a total contrast between "ordinary people" and the sort he had en­countered in the Lubianka. More than once, in Cherdyn and later on, he told me: "You can't imagine what a special type they are there." In saying this, he made a distinction between the guards "on the outside" (as well as some of the officials we had dealings with in Voronezh) and the very specific personnel who did their work at night. The first were run-of-the-mill Red Army types, but the sec­ond—those "on the inside"—were quite out of the ordinary: "To do that job," M. said, "you have to have a particular vocation—no ordi­nary person could ever stand it." In Cherdyn the only person who struck him as belonging to this "inner" category was the Comman­dant. This was what the other exiles thought, too. They warned us to watch our step with him and to keep out of his way as much as possible: "You never know what ideas he might get into his head." He was one of those who had been in the Civil War: "He always follows his class instinct," the short-legged Marxist told me with horror, "and no good ever comes of that—you can never tell where it will lead a man." The poor fellow was completely at the Com­mandant's mercy and M.'s instinctive fear of him was well-founded.

What M. heard were the coarse voices of men trying to frighten him by describing his "crime" and enumerating all kinds of possible punishments in the language of our newspapers during Stalin's cam­paigns against "enemies of the people." They cursed him in the foul­est language and blamed him for the ruin he had brought on all those to whom he had read his poem. The names of these people were reeled off as those of defendants at a forthcoming trial, and appeals were made to his conscience as the one who had brought them to this pass. Strange to say, the word "conscience," which had gone out of ordinary use—it was not current in newspapers, books or in the schools, since its function had been taken over first by "class feeling" and later by "the good of the state"—was still doing service in prison, where people under interrogation were constantly warned of the "pangs of conscience" they would suffer. Boris Sergeyevich Kuzin had told us that when they tried to recruit him as an informer he was threatened not only with arrest, difficulties in his work, the spreading of rumors among his friends and colleagues that he was already a police spy, but also with the "pangs of conscience" he was bound to suffer for all the misery he would bring on his family if he refused to cooperate. This word, occurring in such a specific context in M.'s hallucinations, was a direct indication that they originated in those nighttime interrogations. Neither had M. imagined or dredged up from some obscure recesses of his own mind the idea of a trial with a list of defendants accused of conspiracy against Stalin. During my interview with M. in prison I had myself heard the interrogator allude to this possibility when he told me he was not "proceeding with the case" only on orders from above. But how, he had then asked by way of a rhetorical question, could one explain M.'s whole case except as a conspiracy?

Where is the borderline, in times such as ours, between the normal and the sick? M. and I thought about the same things, but with him they assumed a tangible quality: he not only thought about them, but saw in his mind's eye what they could lead to. He would wake me during the night to say that Akhmatova had been arrested and was at that moment being taken for questioning. "Why do you think so?" I asked. "I just do." Walking round Cherdyn, he would look for her corpse in the ravines. Of course it was madness, but once I had recovered from the torpor that had come over me in the train, I too couldn't sleep at night for wondering which of our friends had already been arrested and what they would be accused of—they would be lucky if the charge was only failure to denounce us, but there was nothing that couldn't be pinned on them. The real madness would have been to believe that the interrogator had meant it when he said he was not going to "proceed with the case." To be so trusting could even be despicable: I remembered, for instance, how I had recoiled from Adalis when she told me how she had been summoned for questioning about one of her husbands and, believing everything the interrogator said, at once disowned him, even though he was totally innocent.

Was I sick when I lay awake during those nights, imagining the way in which all my friends were being questioned and tortured, even if such tortures were as yet only psychological, or at least left no traces on the body? No, there was nothing sick about this—any normal person in my place would have tormented himself with simi­lar thoughts. Who of us has never pictured himself in the office of the interrogator? Who of us has never thought up answers to the questions he might be asked? Not for nothing did Akhmatova write these lines:

There, behind the barbed wire,

In the very heart of the dense taiga

They take my shadow for questioning. . . .

M. was, of course, a person of unusual sensitivity who was more vulnerable to psychological damage than others, and always reacted very strongly to external stimuli. But does one need to be all that hypersensitive to be broken by this life of ours?

When I asked that M. be examined by a specialist, the woman doctor refused point blank to arrange it. Her reply reminded me of Osip's "it's against the rules." When I persisted, she avoided talking with me and used bad language. At last she broke down and said: "What do you expect me to do? They're always in this state when they come 'from there.' "

With my old-fashioned view of things I thought it was wrong— indeed criminal—to exile a person suffering from hallucinations, and I denounced the doctor as a murderess because of her indifference. But I soon noticed that the bearded peasants did not think so badly of her. "There's no sense in badgering her," one of them said. "What can she do? Nothing at all." When I asked them what she was like, they said she was "no worse than anybody else." There are indeed circumstances in which it is not possible to display high moral quali­ties. When I'd seen more of her, I realized that she was just an ordi­nary country doctor. Unluckily for her, she had come to a place where they sent people "from there," and she was thus forced to have constant dealings with the secret police and act "on instruc­tions." She had learned to hold her tongue and not to disobey orders. Day after day she changed the pus-covered bandages of the peasants, shouting and cursing at them, but at least doing her best for them. And she gave me a good piece of advice: not to try and have M. sent to Perm for a medical examination, or to put him in a clinic. "People get over this, but in one of those places he'd be done for—you know what they're like." I took her advice and it was as well I did so: people really do get over "it." But I would like to know what its med­ical name is, why it affects so many people held for interrogation, and what conditions "inside" make it so widespread. I repeat that M. was unusually sensitive and may have been prone to mental illness, but I was struck not so much by it having happened to him as by every­body telling me how commonplace this sickness was. People who had known the Czarist jails, which were scarcely distinguished by their humaneness, confirmed my suspicion that prisoners held out much better and kept their sanity a great deal more easily in those days.

Many years later, in a train traveling east, I happened to share a compartment with a young woman doctor who had the same kind of bad luck as the one in Cherdyn: she had been assigned to a hospital in a labor camp. Times were not now so terrible—this was in 1954— and the girl started to tell me her troubles: How could she get out of it? It was more than flesh and blood could stand. "The worst is that you're helpless. What sort of doctors are we? We say and do what we're told." By this time I knew only too well that no doctor dares to show independence and is all too often forced to go against his conscience, though some are not even aware of breaking the Hippo- cratic oath when they refuse to give certificates of illness or disabil­ity. But what's the point of picking on the doctors? We all do only what we are told. We all act "on instructions," and there is no sense in closing our eyes to the fact.

18 Professional Sickness

_I

imagine that for a poet auditory hallucinations are something in the nature of an occupational disease.

As many poets have said—Akhmatova (in "Poem Without a Hero") and M. among them—a poem begins with a musical phrase ringing insistently in the ears; at first inchoate, it later takes on a precise form, though still without words. I sometimes saw M. trying to get rid of this kind of "hum," to brush it off and escape from it. He would toss his head as though it could be shaken out like a drop of water that gets into your ear while bathing. But it was always louder than any noise, radio or conversation in the same room.

Akhmatova told me that when "Poem Without a Hero" came to her, she was ready to try anything just to get rid of it, even rushing to do her washing. But nothing helped. At some point words formed behind the musical phrase and then the lips began to move. The work of a poet has probably something in common with that of a composer, and the appearance of words is the crucial factor that distinguishes it from musical composition. The "hum" sometimes came to M. in his sleep, but he could never remember it on waking. I have a feeling that verse exists before it is composed (M. never talked of "writing" verse, only of "composing" it and then copying it out). The whole process of composition is one of straining to catch and record something compounded of harmony and sense as it is re­layed from an unknown source and gradually forms itself into words. The last stage of the work consists in ridding the poem of all the words foreign to the harmonious whole which existed before the poem arose. Such words slip in by chance, being used to fill gaps during the emergence of the whole. They become lodged in the body of the poem, and removing them is hard work. This final stage is a painful process of listening in to oneself in a search for the objec­tive and absolutely precise unity called a "poem." In his poem "Save My Speech," the last adjective to come was "painstaking" (in "the painstaking tar of hard work"). M. complained that he needed some­thing more precise and spare here, in the manner of Akhmatova: "She knows how to do it." He seemed to be waiting for her help.