Hope Against Hope

I noticed that in his work on a poem there were two points at which he would sigh with relief—when the first words in a line or stanza came to him, and when the last of the foreign bodies was driven out by the right word. Only then is there an end to the proc­ess of listening in to oneself—the same process that can prepare the way for a disturbance of the inner hearing and loss of sanity. The poem now seems to fall away from the author and no longer tor­ments him with its resonance. He is released from the thing that obsesses him. Io, the poor cow, escapes from the gadfly.

If the poem won't "go away," M. said, it means that there is some­thing wrong with it, or something "still hidden in it"—a last fruitful bud from which a new shoot might sprout. In other words, the work is not finished. Whenever M.'s "inner voice" ceased, he was always very eager to read the new poem to someone. I wasn't enough for this: I witnessed his throes at such close quarters that M. always thought I must also be able to hear the "hum." He even re­proached me sometimes for not having caught part of it. In his last Voronezh period (when he wrote the verse in his Second and Third Notebooks) we went round to Natasha Shtempel, or invited Fedia Marants, an agronomist of the utmost charm and integrity who in his youth had studied to be a violinist but had had to give it up when he damaged his hand in an accident. Fedia had some of the inner harmony which comes to people who listen to music, and though this was his first encounter with poetry, his musical sense made him a better judge than many a specialist would have been.

The first reading rounds off, as it were, the process of working on a poem, and the first listener is felt to be a contributor to it. From 1930 M.'s "first listeners" were Boris Sergeyevich Kuzin, a biolo­gist, to whom M. dedicated his poem "To the German Language," and Alexander Margulis—it was he who circulated the poems of the first two Notebooks. Memorizing them as he listened, or getting copies of them, he read them to his innumerable friends and acquaint­ances. M. wrote an endless number of "margulets," as he called the couplets about him which had to begin with the words "Old man Margulis . . ." and be submitted for his approval. M. used to say that the poverty-sticken "old man Margulis" (he was no more than thirty at the time) kept an even poorer old man in his apartment and secretly supported him. Margulis was a real "one-man orchestra" who could whistle even the most difficult symphonies. It is a pity- that the best "margulets," those about how the "old man" performed Beethoven in the streets of Moscow, have been lost. Margulis mar­ried the beautiful Iza Khantsyn, famous for her performances of Scriabin. Most of all in life he loved music, poetry and tales of ad­venture. I have been told that when he was dying in a camp in east­ern Siberia he told yarns and adventure stories to the common crimi­nals, who gave him food in return.

M.'s first listener was often Lev Gumilev, who lived with us in the winter of 1933-34. The beginning of the first Voronezh Notebook was read to Rudakov, who was exiled to Voronezh together with other ex-members of the aristocracy from Leningrad, but soon was allowed to return to the city.

It so happens that all of M.'s "first listeners" came to a tragic end. Apart from Natasha, they all went through prison and exile. Fedia Marants, for instance, was in prison for two years during the Yezhov terror, but he stuck it out without signing any confession and was therefore one of the people fortunate enough to be released after Yezhov's fall. Ill and broken after this ordeal, he was again arrested and exiled during the war merely because he happened to have been born in Vienna, from where he had been brought home to Kiev at the age of three weeks.

It might seem logical to conclude that if all M.'s "first listen­ers" suffered persecution, there must have been a link between their cases. But in fact there was no such link. Even before we met him, Kuzin had been "hauled in" for questioning, in connection withsome affair involving biologists. He actually first got in trouble for some humorous verse he always carefully avoided showing us. He was summoned to various private apartments with rooms specially reserved for a secret police official whose job was to recruit inform­ers. He was arrested for the first time in 1932, and then again for a second time together with his fellow biologist Vermel—both of them were regarded as neo-Lamarckists and had already been ex­pelled from the Timiriazev Academy. The biologist Kuzin, the agronomist Fedia Marants, the son of an executed general Rudakov, and the son of an executed poet Gumilev did not even know each other. The only thing they all had in common was their love of poetry. Evidently this went with qualities of the mind which in our country doomed people to death or, at the best, to exile. Only trans­lators were exempt.

The process of doing a translation is the exact opposite of work on original verse. I am not speaking here, of course, of the miraculous meeting of poetic minds that one finds in Zhukovski, whose transla­tions brought a new element into Russian poetry, or of other trans­lated verse that has become a valid part of Russian literature—such as A. K. Tolstoi's rendering of Goethe's "Bride of Corinth," which we liked so much. Only real poets can achieve this kind of thing— and then very rarely. But an ordinary translation is a cold and calcu­lated act of versification in which certain aspects of the writing of poetry are imitated. Strange to say, in translation there is no pre­existing entity waiting to be expressed. The translator sets himself in motion like an engine and then grinds out the required melody by a laborious mechanical process. He is deficient in what Khodasevich so aptly called "secret hearing." A real poet should beware of transla­tion—it may only prevent the birth of original poetry.

In his "Conversation About Dante" M. speaks of "translators of ready-made meaning" to express his attitude toward translation and those who use poetic forms as a medium of ideas. M. always dis­tinguished between this and real poetry. There was a time when people in this country stopped reading poetry altogether. "The thing about poetry," said Akhmatova, "is that once somebody swal­lows a substitute he will feel poisoned forever after." Poetry is now in fashion again and people are reading it as never before—but only because they have learned to tell the difference between it and all the glib products of "translators."

hat happened to M. in the Lubianka during his interroga­

A poem is like a word. A consciously made-up word lacks all vital­ity. This is shown by the failure of all the attempts to create one's own vocabulary—these idiosyncratic games with man's divine gift of speech. When you attach an arbitrary meaning to the phonetic unit known as a word, the result is jargon, or the kind of verbal chaff used for selfish purposes by high priests, soothsayers, heads of state and other charlatans. Both words and poetry are desecrated in this way and made to perform the function of a hypnotist's crystal. Sooner or later the deception will be shown up for what it is, but people are always in danger of falling for every new impostor who turns his crystal in a different direction.

19 "Inside

tion? Later on, in Voronezh, he talked to me a great deal about it, trying to distinguish between his hallucinations and the facts. During the whole time his acute powers of observation never deserted him. This I saw when at our meeting he at once asked me about my coat and drew the right conclusion when I told him it was my mother's: "So you haven't been arrested." But he was ill, and not all his observations and conclusions proved well founded. Together we carefully sifted out the grains of fact, but it was not an easy

task.

We had one fairly good way of judging whether something he remembered was true. During our meeting the interrogator touched on a great number of points. His obvious purpose was to impress on me his view of the case as a whole and various aspects of his inquiry into it. I was, as it were, being given authoritative guidance on how the whole thing should be seen. There were many women, such as Adalis, who gratefully accepted such guidance—most of them out of an instinct of self-preservation, but some quite sincerely. During the interview, then, I served as a kind of phonograph disc on which the interrogator recorded his version of events for me to make known to the world outside. He was deliberately trying to frighten me and, through me, those I would talk to about it. But he miscalculated, like other functionaries of our times, to whom it never occurs that their victims may dare to apply their own, rather than official, criteria to what they are told. Terror and depotism are always short-sighted.

Because of his acute sensitivity M. was no doubt easy game for his jailers and they were not, therefore, particularly subtle in their treatment of him. They kept him in a cell for two persons. The inter­rogator said that solitary confinement was "forbidden for reasons of humanity." I knew this was a lie. If it had ever been forbidden, it was only on paper. At every period we met people who had been kept in cells all alone. But whenever there was a shortage of prison space these tiny cells were filled to bursting point. Generally, how­ever, the second place in a cell for two was used in a way of which in 1934, before M.'s arrest, we had never heard: M.'s cellmate tried to frighten him with the thought of his trial, assuring him that all his family and friends had been arrested and would appear in the dock together with him. He went through all the articles of the criminal code under which M. might be accused, as though giving him "legal advice," but in fact trying to alarm him at the prospect of being charged with terrorism, conspiracy and the like. M. would return from his nighttime interrogation to the clutches of his "fellow pris­oner," who gave him no respite. But the man's approach was very crude, and M. once cut him short by asking: "Why are your nails so clean?" He had stupidly claimed to be a "veteran" of several months' standing, but his nails were neatly manicured. Early one morning he returned to the cell, supposedly from an interrogation, a little later than M., who noticed that he smelled of onion—and told him so.

The interrogator, countering M.'s remark at our interview that he was being held in a cell by himself, mentioned the humane ban on solitary confinement and added that M. had been with another pris­oner whom it had been necessary to transfer because of M.'s "rude­ness" to him. "How considerate!" M. managed to get in by way of the last word in this exchange.

At the very first interrogation M. had admitted to being the au­thor of the poem on Stalin, so the stool pigeon's task could not have been merely to find out something that M. was hiding. Part of the function of these people was to unnerve and wear down prisoners under interrogation, to make their lives a misery. Until 1937 our secret police made much of their psychological methods, but after­ward these gave way to physical torture, with beatings of the most primitive kind. After 1937 I never again heard of anyone being held in solitary-confinement cells, with or without stool pigeons. Perhaps people picked out for such treatment after 1937 did not leave the Lubianka alive.

M. was put through the physical ordeal which had always been applied. It consisted mainly of not being allowed to sleep. He was called out every night and kept for hours on end. Most of the time was spent not in actual questioning, but in waiting under guard out­side the interrogator's door. Once, when there was no interrogation, he was wakened all the same and taken to see a woman who kept him waiting at the door of her office for many hours, only to ask him at the end of it whether he had any complaints. Everybody knew how meaningless it was to make complaints to the prosecutor, and M. did not avail himself of this right. He had probably been called to her office simply as a formality, and also to keep him awake even on a night when the interrogator was catching up on his own sleep. These night birds lived a preposterous life, but all the same they managed to get some sleep, although not at the times when ordinary mortals did. The ordeal by deprivation of sleep and a bright light shining right in the eyes are known to everybody who has gone through such interrogations.

At the interview I had noticed how sore M.'s eyelids looked and asked what the reason was. The interrogator hastened to reply that it was through too much reading, but it later came out that M. was not allowed to have books in his cell. His eyelids never got better and he had trouble with them for the rest of his life. He told me that the inflammation was caused not only by bright lights but also by a stinging liquid which he believed was squirted through the spy-hole in the door whenever he went near it—since any anxiety made him very restless, he naturally paced his cell when he was left alone there. I have been told that the spy-hole is protected on both sides by thick glass so that no liquid could possibly be sprayed through it. This is perhaps one of the things that M. imagined, but one cannot help wondering whether a strong light was enough to bring about such a chronic infection of the eyelids.

M. was given salty food, but nothing to drink—a common prac­tice in the Lubianka. When he went up to the spy-hole and de­manded water from the guard outside, he was dragged off to a pun­ishment cell and put in a strait-jacket. He had never before seen a strait-jacket, and as a check, he wrote down what it was like and we went to the hospital to look at one. His description fitted exactly.

At the interview I saw that M. had bandages on both wrists. When I asked him what was wrong with them, he just waved his hand, but the interrogator delivered himself of an angry speech about how M. had brought forbidden objects into his cell—an offense punishable under such-and-such an article. It turned out that M. had slashed his veins with a razor blade. He had been told by Kuzin, who in 1933, after two months in jail, had been released on the intervention of a Chekist friend with a passion for entomology, that the thing you want most in prison is a knife or at least a razor blade. He had even thought of a way of providing for an emergency by hiding one in the sole of his shoe. Hearing this, M. persuaded a cobbler he knew to secrete a few blades in this way for him. Forethought of this kind was second nature to us. In the mid-twenties Lozinski had shown us the bag which he kept packed in readiness for his arrest. This was something commonly done by engineers and members of other "exposed" professions, and the remarkable thing was not the fact itself, but the way in which everybody thought it was the most natural thing in the world. Such things were just part of our daily life, and with the blade he had so opportunely hidden in his shoe M. was able to slash his wrists. Bleeding to death is not the worst way of getting out of this life of ours. . . .

The work of undermining a person's sanity was carried on quite systematically in the Lubianka, and since our secret police is a bu­reaucratic institution like any other, all the procedures involved were probably governed by precise instructions. Even though the personnel were specifically selected for the job, one cannot ascribe what went on to their wicked nature, since the same people could overnight have become kindness itself—if so instructed. There were rumors among us that Yagoda had set up secret laboratories and staffed them with specialists who were carrying out all kinds of ex­periments with drugs, hypnosis, phonograph records and so forth. It was impossible to check such stories, and they may have been a product of our morbid imaginations, or tales deliberately put about to keep us all on tenterhooks.

In his cell M. sometimes heard a woman's voice coming from a distance and thought it was mine. It sounded as though I was com­plaining, groaning or talking very quickly about something, but it was so indistinct that he could make out no words at all. He con­cluded that the interrogator's hints that I too had been arrested must be true. When we later discussed this, we were not sure whether or not it had been an auditory hallucination. Why hadn't he been able to make out any words? In a state of hallucination the words he heard were all too distinct. Moreover, many other people who went through the Lubianka in those years also thought they heard their wives talking or screaming, only to learn later that they had never been arrested. Could they all have had hallucinations? And if so, how were they caused? There was some talk of the secret police having among their special equipment phonograph records with the voice of a "standard" wife, mother or daughter which were used to break a prisoner's spirit. After these more subtle torments and psychologi­cal methods had been replaced by exceedingly primitive ones, no­body complained any more that he had heard his wife's voice. Among the cruder methods, I know, for instance, that they would arrange for a woman prisoner to catch a glimpse of a man hideously beaten up and covered in blood, and then say that it was her son or husband. But there was no more talk of voices coming from a dis­tance. Were there such recordings? I do not know and have no means of finding out. In view of the hallucinations from which M. suffered on leaving prison, I am inclined to think that this woman's voice was of the same order as the inner voices that plagued him in Cherdyn. There are still rumors about a laboratory for experiments with drugs.

Methods like these are possible only if a prisoner's links with the outside world are broken from the moment of his arrest. Apart from the signatures in the receipt book for packages, he is left completely in the dark about the people he has been torn from—and by no means everybody is allowed to receive packages. The first means of pressure brought to bear on a prisoner is the withdrawal of his right to receive packages—the last thread that binds him to the world out­side. This is why it is better in our sort of life to have no ties. A man feels so much stronger if he doesn't have to watch out all the time during his interrogation for hints and pretended slips of the tongue about the fate of members of his family. It is harder to unhinge a single man, and he is better able to look after his own interests and conduct a systematic defense of himself. Even though the sentence was decided beforehand, a shrewd self-defense could still make some difference. One friend of mine was able to outwit his interrogator— admittedly a provincial one—in an extraordinary way. After a long battle he agreed to go back to his cell and write down all the non­sense required of him. He was given paper and he put down everything the interrogator wanted, but without signing it. The interrogator was so pleased that he didn't notice this. My friend was obviously born under a lucky star, because about this time Yezhov was dis­missed. His case hadn't yet come before the tribunal, no sentence had been passed and he was able to get a reversal on the grounds that his deposition was not valid without a signature. He belongs to those few who were released after Yezhov's fall. But to be born under a lucky star is not enough—it is also advisable not to lose one's head, and this is easiest for people with no family ties.

20 Christophorovich

's interrogator, the celebrated Christophorovich, was not

• without his arrogant side, and he seemed to take pleasure in his work of intimidating a prisoner and reducing him to a nervous wreck. By his whole appearance, the way he looked at you and his tone of voice, he seemed concerned to show up his prisoner as a nonentity, a miserable creature, a disgrace to mankind. "Why is he so stuck up?" we would have asked if we had met him in the ordi­nary way of things, but during his nightly interrogations the pris­oner was supposed to squirm under his gaze, or at least to feel utter impotence. Christophorovich behaved like a person of superior race who despised physical weakness and the pathetic scruples of intellec­tuals. This he made clear during the interview by the whole of his well-practiced manner, and I too, though not frightened by him, could feel myself growing smaller under his gaze. Yet I already had a suspicion that such latter-day Siegfrieds, the heirs to the supermen, cannot themselves stand up to the ordeals they inflict on others. Magnificent before the defenseless, they are only good at savaging victims already caught in a trap.

The interrogator's arrogance was reflected not only in his manner, but also in occasional very superior remarks that smacked of the literary drawing room. The first generation of young Chekists, later to be removed and destroyed in 1937, was distinguished by its so­phisticated tastes and weakness for literature—only the most fashion­able, of course. In my presence Christophorovich said to M. that it was useful for a poet to experience fear ("you yourself told me so") because it can inspire verse, and that he would "experience fear in full measure." Both M. and I noted the use of the future tense. In what Moscow drawing rooms had Christophorovich heard this kind of talk?

Both M. and I had the same general impression that, as M. put it, "this Christophorovich has turned everything upside down and in­side out." The Chekists were the avant-garde of the "new people" and they had indeed basically revised, in the manner of the Super­man, all ordinary human values. They were later replaced by people of a completely different physical type, who had no values at all, revised or otherwise.

It turned out, however, that the technique used by the interroga­tor to frighten M. was an utterly primitive one. Mentioning some­body's name—mine, Akhmatova's or my brother's—he would say that he had obtained certain statements from us. When M. inquired whether whoever it was had been arrested, the interrogator gave no definite answer, but dropped a casual-sounding hint that "we have them here," only to deny a few minutes later that he had said any such thing. Uncertainty about such matters always has a devastating effect on the prisoner, and it is only possible under a prison system like ours. In playing this cat-and-mouse game with M. and only hint­ing that his family and friends had been arrested, Christophorovich was behaving like a top-level interrogator, since it was more usual to inform the prisoner straightaway, without any beating about the bush, that everybody had already been arrested, or questioned and shot. Then you could go back to your cell and wonder whether it was true or not.

Christophorovich, as a "literature specialist," made great play with his "inside knowledge," claiming to know everybody and every­thing that was going on. He tried to create the impression that all our acquaintances came to see him, and that he knew all our little secrets. He referred to many people only by their nicknames or by some telltale feature: one was "the bigamist," another "the ex-Party member" and a woman acquaintance of ours "the actress." These three examples I heard during the interview, but M. told me he had called many other people by nicknames like this. Apart from show­ing how well informed he was, this had another purpose. Since po­lice informers are always referred to only by code names, he was trying to cast a shadow on all these people. The high police official in Tashkent who committed suicide, according to his daughter, also always knew everybody's nickname, and himself invented them for people. Realizing what the intention behind the use of them was, M. paid no attention to his interrogator's innuendoes.

M. told me that the interrogator's methods constantly betrayed the influence of stereotyped official procedure. Our authorities as­sumed that for each class and even sub-group of the population there were certain standard remarks that were often made in conversa­tion. It is said that the research section of the Lubianka had compiled reams of such "typical" remarks. Christophorovich tried some of them out on M., for example: "You said to So-and-so that you would rather live in Paris than in Moscow." The theory was that M., as a bourgeois writer and ideologist of a dying class, must surely be eager to return to its bosom. The name of the person to whom he was supposed to have made such remarks was always a common one, such as Ivanov or Petrov (or, if need be, Ginzburg or Rabinovich). The guinea pig on whom this type of approach was tried out was supposed to quake in his shoes and begin frantically going over in his mind all the Ivanovs or Rabinoviches to whom he might have con­fided his dream of going abroad. In the eyes of Soviet law, such a dream was, if not an outright crime, at least an aggravating circum­stance for which you could even be charged under some convenient article of the criminal code. In any case, an accused person's class nature was fully revealed by his ambition to go to Paris, and in our classless society, account must always be taken of one's class alle­giance. . . . Another example of this kind of questioning was: "You complained to So-and-so that before the Revolution you earned much more by your writings than now." M. was obviously not to be caught out by such things. The whole approach was indeed crude, but they had no need of subtlety. Why bother? "Give us a man, and we'll make a case."

Christophorovich had been conducting the interrogation in prepa­ration for a trial, as was implicit in his words "We have decided not to proceed with the case" and similar remarks. By our standards he had more than enough to go on, and a trial would have been a more natural outcome than what actually happened. The interrogator's approach was to seek an explanation for every single word in the poem on Stahn. He was particularly concerned to find out what had prompted the writing of it. He was flabbergasted when M. suddenly told him in reply to this question that more than anything else he hated fascism. M. had not intended to speak so frankly to the inter­rogator, and he blurted this out despite himself—he was by then in such a state that he just didn't care. As he was in duty bound to, the interrogator stormed and shouted, demanding to know what M. thought was fascist about our system. This question he repeated in my presence during the interview, but, astonishingly enough, he didn't pursue the matter when M. replied evasively. M. later assured me that there was something ambiguous about the interrogator's whole behavior, and that behind his blustering manner one could constantly sense his hatred for Stalin. I didn't believe M., but in 1938, when Christophorovich was also shot, I began to wonder. Per­haps M. had spotted something that a more balanced and worldly- wise person would not have seen—such people are always too con­ventional in their reasoning. It is difficult to believe that the mighty Yagoda and his awesome organization surrendered to Stalin without a struggle. In 1934, when M.'s poem was being investigated, it was widely known that Vyshinski was intriguing against Yagoda. In our incredible blindness—what better example of conventional reason­ing?—we had eagerly followed the rumors of a struggle between the Prosecutor General and the head of the secret police, thinking that Vyshinski, a lawyer by training, would put an end to the excesses and terror of secret tribunals. To think that we believed this—we who knew what to expect from the Vyshinski of the trials in the twenties! For Yagoda's followers, however, and in particular for Christophorovich, it was clear that a victory for Vyshinski would do them no good at all, and, of course, they knew better than anyone else what tortures and humiliations to expect in their final days. When there are two groups fighting for the right to unlimited con­trol over the fate of their fellow citizens, the losers are doomed to die, and perhaps M. really was able to read the secret thoughts of his iron-willed interrogator. But the extraordinary thing about those times was that all these "new people," as they killed and were de­stroyed themselves, thought that only they had a right to their views and judgments. Any one of them would have laughed out loud at the idea that a man who could be brought before them under guard at any time of the day or night, who had to hold up his trousers with his hands and spoke without the slightest attempt at theatrical effects —that such a man might have no doubt, despite everything, of his right to express himself freely in poetry. As we were to discover, Yagoda liked M.'s poem so much that he even learned it by heart— he recited it to Bukharin while we were still in Cherdyn—but he would not have hesitated to destroy the whole of literature, past, present and future, if he had thought it to his advantage. For people of this extraordinary type, human blood is like water and all individ­uals, except for the victorious ruler, are replaceable. The worth of any man is measured by his usefulness to the ruler and his henchmen. The skilled propagandists who help to rouse the people to expres­sions of enthusiasm for the leader deserve to be better paid than the rest. Our rulers may sometimes have bestowed favors on their cro­nies—they all liked to play the Haroun al Rashid—but they never allowed anyone to interfere in their business, or to have an opinion of his own. From this point of view, M.'s poem was a real crime—a usurpation of the right to words and thoughts that the ruling powers reserved exclusively for themselves, whether they were enemies or friends of Stalin. This astonishing presumption has become second nature to our rulers. Your right to an opinion is always determined by your rank and status in the hierarchy. Not long ago Surkov ex­plained to me that Pasternak's novel is no good because its hero, Dr. Zhivago, has no right to make any judgments about our way of life —"we" had not given him this right. Christophorovich was no more able to grant such a right to M.

Christophorovich referred to the poem as a "document" and to the writing of it as a terrorist "act." At our interview he said he had never before set eyes on such a monstrous "document." M. did not deny that he had read it to a number of people—eleven all told, including me, our brothers and Akhmatova. The interrogator had extracted their names one after another by going through all the people who came to see us, and it was evident that he really was very well informed about all those closest to us. At the interview M. told me all the names that had cropped up during the interrogation so that I could warn everybody concerned. None of them suffered, but they all got a terrible fright. I do not wish to give all the names here, otherwise someone may be tempted to speculate as to the identity of the traitor. Christophorovich was anxious to know how each of his listeners had reacted to the poem. M. insisted that they had all begged him to forget it and not bring ruin on himself and others. Apart from the eleven named during the interrogation, seven or eight other people, including Shklovski and Pasternak, had heard the poem, but the interrogator did not mention them, and they did not therefore figure in the case.

M. signed the record of his interrogation without even reading it over—something for which I gave him no rest during the next few years. Even the interrogator rebuked him for this in my presence. "I suppose he trusted you," I said angrily. In fact, I believe that in this respect there was no reason not to trust him: by our standards it was a perfectly real case, there was enough material for ten trials and therefore it would have made no sense to invent anything.

At the beginning of the interrogation, M. noticed, the interrogator had behaved much more aggressively than toward the end. He even stopped describing the poem as a "terrorist act" and threatening that M. would be shot. At first he threatened not only M. with the firing squad but all his "accomplices" as well—that is, everybody who had heard the poem. When we later discussed this softening in the inter­rogator's attitude, we decided it had been brought about by the in­struction to "preserve" M. I did not see Christophorovich in the early stage, when he had used threats against M., but I must say that at the interview his manner still seemed to me monstrously aggres­sive. But this is in the nature of the job—probably not only in our country.

The interrogator probed into M.'s feelings about the Soviet sys­tem and M. told him that he was willing to co-operate with any Soviet institution except the Cheka.

He said this not out of daring or bravado, but because of his total inability to be devious. I believe this quality of M.'s was a puzzle to the interrogator, one he could not fathom. His only explanation for such a statement, particularly when it was made to his face, would have been stupidity, but stupidity of this kind he had never encoun­tered before, and he had a baffled look when he quoted M.'s words at our interview. M. and I recalled this detail at the height of the Yezhov terror, when Shaginian wrote a half-page article in Pravda saying how gladly persons under investigation unburdened them­selves to their interrogators and "co-operated" with them at their interrogations. This she explained by the great sense of responsibility common to all Soviet citizens. Whether Shaginian wrote this article of her own free will or on instructions from above, it is something that should not be forgotten.

In their depravity and the depths to which they sank, some writers exceeded all bounds. In 1934 already Akhmatova and I heard that Pavlenko was telling people how, out of curiosity, he had accepted an invitation from Christophorovich, who was a good friend of his, to hide in a cupboard, or between double doors, and listen to one of the nighttime interrogations. In the interrogator's room I noticed several identical doors—far too many for one room. We were later told that some of these doors opened into cubby-holes, and others into emergency exists. Premises like these are scientifically designed in the most up-to-date fashion with the aim of protecting the inter­rogator against prisoners who might try to attack him.

According to Pavlenko, M. cut a sorry figure during his interroga­tion: his trousers kept slipping down and he had to hold them up with his hands; his replies were confused, incoherent and beside the point, he talked nonsense and was very nervous, squirming "like a fish in a frying pan." Public opinion here has always been condi­tioned to take the side of the strong against the weak, but what Pav- lenko did surpassed everything. No Bulgarin would ever have dared to do this. Moreover, in the official literary circles to which Pav- lenko belonged, it had been completely forgotten that the only thing with which someone in M.'s position could be reproached was giving false evidence to save his own skin; certainly he could not be blamed for being bewildered and frightened. Why are we supposed to be brave enough to stand up to all the horrors of twentieth- century prisons and camps? Are we supposed to sing as we fall into the mass graves? Face death in the gas chambers with courage? Travel cheerfully to prison in a cattle car? Engage our interrogators in polite conversation about the role of fear in poetry, or discuss the impulses that lead to the writing of verse in a state of fury and indig­nation?

The fear that goes with the writing of verse has nothing in common with the fear one experiences in the presence of the secret police. Our mysterious awe in the face of existence itself is always overridden by the more primitive fear of violence and destruction. M. often spoke of how the first kind of fear had disappeared with the Revolution that had shed so much blood before our eyes.

21 Who Is to Blame?

he interrogator's first question was "Why do you think you

were arrested?" Receiving an evasive answer, he suggested M. try to think which of his poems might have led to his arrest. M. recited, one after another, "The Wolf," "Old Crimea" and "The Apartment." He hoped he could fob Christophorovich off with these, though any one of them would have been enough to send him to a labor camp. The interrogator knew neither "Old Crimea" nor "The Apartment," and copied both of them down. M. suppressed eight lines from "The Apartment," and it was in this truncated form that the poem later turned up among Tarasenkov's copies. Next the interrogator took a sheet of paper from a file, read out a description of the poem about Stalin and several lines of the text. M. admitted he was the author. The interrogator then asked him to recite the whole poem. When M. had finished he remarked that the first stanza in his copy was different, and he read out what he had:

We live, deaf to the land beneath us, Ten steps away no one hears our speeches. All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer, The murderer and peasant-slayer.

M. explained that this was the first version. M. then had to copy the poem out in his own hand, and the interrogator put it in his file.

M. saw the copy produced by the interrogator, but could not re­member whether he was actually allowed to hold it in his hand and read it. At that moment he was so flustered that he didn't know what he was doing. We cannot therefore be certain of the form in which the poem had been passed on to the police—whether in full or only partially, whether in an accurate copy or not.

Among the people who had heard it there were a number who could have memorized these sixteen lines even after hearing them only once. People who are themselves writers are particularly good at this, but they nearly always garble the text slightly, substituting one word for another or leaving something out. If M. had seen such minor changes, he would have known that the poem had been given to the police by someone who had only heard it recited, and he would thus have been able to clear the one person he had allowed to make a copy (in the first version, moreover). But M. did not have enough presence of mind to make this check. It was all very well for us to discuss later on in Voronezh what he should have done and how he should have behaved. I am always hearing accounts of how some bold spirit or other foxed his interrogator or gave him hell, but aren't these perhaps the product of reflections after the event?

There was another reason, too, for M.'s lack of initiative in this matter: he was by no means anxious to discover who the traitor was, even if he had the opportunity. We lived in a world where people were always being "hauled in" and asked for informa­tion about our thoughts and feelings. They summoned people who were compromised by their background or by psychological defi­ciencies, threatening one because he was the son of a banker or Czarist official, and promising favors or protection to another. They sum­moned people who were afraid of losing their jobs or wanted to make a career, those who wanted nothing and feared nothing, and those who were ready for anything. The object of all this was not just to gather information. Nothing binds people together more than complicity in the same crime: the more people could be implicated and compromised, the more traitors, informants and police spies there were, the greater would be the number of people supporting the regime and longing for it to last thousands of years. And when it is common knowledge that everybody is "summoned" like this, people lose their social instincts, the ties between them weaken, everybody retires to his corner and keeps his mouth shut—which is an invaluable boon to the authorities.

Once they played on Kuzin's feelings as a son by telling him: "Your mother won't stand it if we arrest you." To this he replied that he wished his mother would die, and the official was quite shaken by such heartlessness. (This was the same man who had threatened to start rumors that "we have recruited you, and you'll never be able to look people in the face again.")

The artist В., a man of absolute purity whom we all loved, always used to arrive late for these interviews—nobody dared cut them altogether, even though they were unofficial and generally arranged on the telephone, as in a Kafka novel. When they rebuked him for being late, B. would say: "I always fall asleep when I have trouble." A woman friend of mine, in the twenties when she was still a pretty young girl, used to be stopped on the street and hauled off by police agents—as though they were staging a new abduction of Europa. There was nothing they wouldn't do.

They generally invited people for these interviews not to the Lu- bianka, but to apartments specially allotted for the purpose. The uncooperative were kept for hours on end and urged to "think again." No secret was made of all this—it was an important element in the general system of intimidation, as well as being a good way of testing a person's "loyalty." The stubborn became marked men and were "dealt with" as opportunity arose. The cooperative, on the other hand, were helped in their careers, and whenever there were dismissals or purges, they could count on the good will of the per­sonnel department.

The way in which people reacted to proposals to cooperate de­pended on their generation. The older people suffered if they were merely panicked into signing an undertaking not to divulge anything about the interview. Of all my friends only Zoshchenko ever refused to sign such a statement. Younger people did not even understand what was wrong about this. They preferred to stall by saying: "If I were to learn anything, I'd come and tell you, but I never hear any­thing—I never go anywhere except to work." This is the sort of boast made by people who refused to "cooperate"—a word with a very wide meaning in this country. But what percentage refused?

There's no way of knowing. Presumably their number increased in periods when the terror slackened off. Apart from people who were forced into cooperating, there were hosts of volunteers. Denuncia­tions poured into every institution on a quite unmanageable scale. Before the Twentieth Congress I heard an inspector of the Ministry of Education address a meeting at the Chuvash Teachers' Training College, where I was then working, and ask the staff to stop writing denunciations, warning them that anonymous ones would no longer be read at all. Can it be true that they no longer read anonymous denunciations? I find it hard to believe.

Because of this system of "interviews," people developed two kinds of phobia—some suspected that everybody they met was an informer, others that they might be taken for one. Quite recently a certain poet was moaning to me that he had no copies of M.'s poems. When I offered him a copy of one of them, he was horrified in case I might get the idea that he was asking for it on behalf of the Lu- bianka! S., when I offered him the same poem, thought it his duty to inform me that for decades the secret police had been calling him in and harassing him. In 1934, when M. and I were in Voronezh, I was visited by X., who was gloomy and upset. "Tell me," he said, "that it wasn't me." He had come to find out whether we regarded him as the person responsible for M.'s arrest. He had not even heard the poem about Stalin, and was a good friend. When I told him what we thought of him, he was enormously relieved.

We often stopped people who talked too freely by saying: "Good God! What are you doing? What will people take you for if you talk like that?" And we were always being advised not to meet people at all. Misha Zenkevich, for example, told me I should not allow anyone into the house unless I had known him all my life, to which I always replied that even such friends might have changed into something different. This is how we lived, and this is why we are not the same as other people.

An existence like this leaves its mark. We all became slightly un­balanced mentally—not exactly ill, but not normal either: suspicious, mendacious, confused and inhibited in our speech, at the same time putting on a show of adolescent optimism. What value can such people have as witnesses? The elimination of witnesses was, indeed, part of the whole program.

22 The Adjutant

_W

e got to know Dligach in the middle twenties in Kiev when a group of young journalists there managed to talk the dim- witted editor of a local newspaper into publishing a few articles by M. This would have been quite out of the question in Moscow. Dli- gach's wife, a limpid blonde of a type M. always found touching, had gone to the same school as I. They lived not far from my par­ents, and we often met them on our visits to Kiev. A few years later Dligach turned up in Moscow to work, like M., on the newspaper Moscow Komsomol. He didn't get on very well and, as a provincial, was given a hard time by his Moscow colleagues. One day he came to us, beaming all over his face, to say he had at last had a piece of good luck: he had found on the floor a letter written by one of his enemies, an editor of the newspaper. It was a typical letter from a village youth who had come to the town to earn his living. He sent greetings to his friends and neighbors, and told his mother that, thank God, he was on good terms with his superiors, would soon settle in a more permanent way, get some kind of award and a room to himself, after which he would invite one of his younger brothers to join him and help him get on his feet as well.

The letter was a perfectly human one in which the young man talked about his personal interests in a way unbecoming to someone occupying an official position on a Komsomol newspaper. What was worse, he mentioned God—something no Komsomol official could afford to do. Even such hackneyed expressions as "thank God" were regarded as a concession to religion. It was clear that the youth was leading a double life, and talked two different languages. At what point do people switch from bureaucratic and ideological jargon to ordinary everyday speech? Our leading playwright was always long­ing to write a play about this linguistic dualism and the critical mo­ment at which people pass from one idiom to the other. "When does it happen, out on the street or only at home?" he would ask, itching to start work. But, being a man of the older generation, he never went ahead with it. Many years later another writer,* much younger, dealt with this question in a story about a meeting of a village Soviet, when the kolkhozniks started speaking in official jar­gon the moment the chairman rang his bell.

* See the note on Alexander Yashin in the Appendix.

Dligach intended to make full use of his find to expose his enemy to the higher authorities. He had come to us to brag about his good luck, and he showed the letter to M. M. snatched it from him and threw it into the stove.

Dligach's behavior was typical of that period—the end of the twenties and the beginning of the thirties. In their struggle for ideo­logical purity, the authorities did everything to encourage "fearless unmaskers" who, "without respect for persons," showed up "surviv­als of the old psychology" in their colleagues. Reputations were pricked like soap bubbles, and the "unmaskers" quickly climbed the ladder of promotion. Every official who moved up the scale in those years was bound to use this method at least once—that is, "unmask" his immediate superior, as the only way of taking his place. Dligach might have found his letter very useful in this way, but, to our sur­prise, he agreed with M.'s comment on his behavior and left us more in sorrow than in anger after his hopes for a better future had gone up in smoke in our stove. But perhaps he really was angry, because we didn't see him again for several years.

He reappeared at our apartment in Furmanov Street in the winter of 1933-34. He was brought to us by Dinochka, a tiny actress, scat­terbrained but very nice, whom we had inherited from Yakhontov. We remembered the letter and Dligach thanked M. for having saved him from doing such a despicable thing. He now quickly gained our confidence; the old business of the letter was forgiven and forgotten as something that any youngster might have done in those years: how could one hold such a thing against him for the rest of his life?

In 1933 Dligach also saw a lot of Bezymenski, trying to fix up some of his newspaper business through him. He was always telling M. he should consult Bezymenski about various matters (such as the affair with Amir Sagidzhan and Alexei Tolstoi over which M. was still fuming). Almost on the very eve of his arrest M. was being urged by Dligach to go and see a woman prosecutor, a friend of Bezymenski's, to tell her what had made him slap Tolstoi in the face. I do not know what the purpose of all this fuss was, but I do know that M. had read his poem on Stalin to Dligach.

The morning after M.'s arrest, at a very early hour, we had a phone call from Bezymenski. I told him, of course in the guarded language that everybody understood, what had happened during the night. He whistled through his teeth and hung up. This was the one and only phone call we ever had from Bezymenski. Had Dligach told him about M.? Perhaps he had heard something about the arrest and had just phoned to check? But who could have told him? How could he have known? The warrant had been signed by Yagoda him­self, and too little time had gone by—it was only a few hours since M. had been taken away—for any rumors to spread. Why did he call?

The last time I saw Dligach was in the hall of our apartment in Furmanov Street when I returned from the meeting with the inter­rogator. Dligach went away to get the money I asked him for and never came back. When Dinochka wanted to come and see us in Voronezh, Dligach made a violent scene, forbidding her to do any such thing. Dinochka was indignant and left him. Still in a state of shock, she told us in Voronezh about her boy friend's sudden fit of hysteria and the breaking-off of their relationship, which had appar­ently lasted several years. After the war I heard that Dligach had hanged himself. He did this out of sheer panic during the campaign against "cosmopolitans." He was not known for his courage.

As I have said, M. was not concerned to try and find who had betrayed him. He said that he had only himself to blame: it was wrong, in our times, to lead people into temptation. Not for nothing had Brodski—the one who sat in the room during M.'s arrest—once asked M. not to read him any dangerous poems, since he would only have to go and report them. When I nagged M. about Dligach, he just said with amazing indifference: "If it wasn't him, it was an­other." I was very anxious to put all the blame on this insignificant person because the very thought of all the other possibilities was intolerable. It was easier to put it all on the wretched Dligach than to suspect somebody we thought of as a real friend. Yet I am not sure it was Dligach who denounced M. During the interrogation Dligach's name never came up. This may have been to protect him, but it is also possible that the informers who had given the names of our visitors never met Dligach because he generally came in the daytime with Dinochka—she was busy at the theater in the evenings and in any case avoided our friends, preferring to catch us alone. Informers always told the police about the whole circle of one's friends, not just picking out one isolated individual. Christophorovich knew of practically everybody who came to see us regularly.

Was Dligach capable of memorizing sixteen lines after one hear­ing? I never heard him repeat verse he had heard in these conditions. M. read the poem on Stalin only once in his presence and broke his usual rule by doing so in front of a second person—the artist Т., whose name was not mentioned by the interrogator either. And— most important of all—we could not recollect whether Dligach had heard the poem in the "peasant-slayer" version or not. Probably not. T. was a rare visitor who came to see us not long before M.'s arrest, by which time the first version had been completely discarded. The only person M. had allowed to write the poem down had done so in the first version, but, judging by his whole life, this man is above suspicion. Perhaps someone stole it from him? The suggestion has a certain appeal, but I believe that things always passed from private hands to the secret police in a much more direct fashion.

Dligach's behavior after M.'s arrest could be explained by coward­ice, or by the well-known phobia about being taken for a police spy. By his past he was fitted more than anyone else for this role, but the horror was that the same part could be played by people from whom one least expected it. So many informers were eminently respectable ladies, or young men from good families—the very picture of hon­esty!—or highly intellectual people utterly devoted to scholarship and art who were able to win you over by their refined, elegant, clever conversation. One of these would have fitted the part very much better than the humdrum Dligach. But he scarcely matters. He was just a poor wretch who happened to live in terrible times. Can a man really be held accountable for his own actions? His behavior, even his character, is always in the merciless grip of the age, which squeezes out of him the drop of good or evil that it needs from him.

Another puzzle is: when did the poem about Stalin become known to the police? It was written in the autumn of 1933, and the arrest took place in May 1934. Perhaps after he had slapped Tolstoi in the face, the authorities had stepped up their surveillance of M. and learned about the poem only in the course of making inquiries among their agents? Or had they kept it for six months without taking any action? This seems inconceivable. As for Dligach, he ap­peared on the scene fairly late—in the middle of the winter—and wormed his way into our confidence in the spring.

One final question: was it my fault for not getting rid of all our friends and acquaintances, as did most good wives and mothers at that time? My guilt is lessened only by the fact that M. would in any case have given me the slip and found a way of reading his outra­geous poem—and in this country all real poetry is outrageous—to the first person he met. He was not one to put a gag on himself and lead a life of voluntary seclusion.

2 3 On the Nature of the Miracle

_V

inaver, who often had to go to the Lubianka, was the first to learn that something odd was going on in connection with M.'s case: "There's a kind of special atmosphere about it, with people fussing and whispering to each other." As we soon learned, the case had been suddenly revised and M.'s sentence commuted to "minus twelve." * All this happened in record time—in no more than a day, or only a few hours. The very pace of events was testimony to their miraculous nature: when the right button was pressed above, the bureaucratic machine functioned with astonishing speed.

The greater the degree of centralization, the more impressive the miracle. We were overjoyed by miracles and accepted them with the innocent credulity of an Oriental mob. They had become part of our life. Which one of us had never written letters to the supreme powers, addressed to the most metallic of names? t And what is such a letter but a plea for a miracle? If they are preserved, these moun­tains of letters will be a veritable treasure trove for historians: the life of our times is recorded in them far more faithfully than in any other form of writing, since they speak of all the hurts, humiliations, blows, pitfalls and traps of our existence. But to go through them and sift out the tiny grains of real fact will be a Herculean labor. The trouble is that even in these letters we observed the special style of Soviet polite parlance, speaking of our misfortunes in the lan­guage of newspaper editorials. But even a cursory look at these let­ters to the "powers-that-be" would show at once how much we needed miracles—to live without them was impossible. Only one must remember that even if they got their miracles, the writers of such letters were doomed to bitter disappointment. This they were never prepared for, despite the warning of popular wisdom that mir­acles are never more than a flash in the pan, with no lasting effect. What are people left with in the fairy tales after their three wishes have come true? What becomes, in the morning, of the gold ob­tained in the night from the lame man? It turns into a slab of clay, or a handful of dust. The only good life is one in which there is no need for miracles.

The affair of M.'s arrest gave birth to a whole cycle of stories, spread by word of mouth, about miracles which had suddenly come from on high, bursting on us like benevolent thunderclaps—if this is not a contradiction in terms. And it is indeed true that we were saved by a miracle that gave us the three years' lease of life in Voro­nezh.

It was my brother, Evgeni Khazin, who first told us by telegram about the commuting of M.'s sentence to "minus twelve." When we showed it to the Cherdyn Commandant, he shrugged his shoulders and said: "We'll see about that. By the time I hear, it'll be winter." And he thereupon reminded us that it was time we cleared out of the hospital and found winter quarters for ourselves: "Find something without cracks in the walls—it gets cold in these parts."

The official telegram came the next day. The Commandant might not have told us straightaway if, before he came to work, we hadn't got to know about it from the girl clerk in the telegraph office with whom M. gossiped and joked during his morning walk. We went to the Commandant's office, but had to wait a long time for him to appear. He read the telegram in our presence and could not at first believe his eyes. "Perhaps this was sent by your relatives," he said. "How am I to know?" For two or three days he kept us waiting in great anxiety until at last he got confirmation from Moscow that the cable was an official one and had not been fabricated by the cunning relatives of the exiled man who had been given into his charge. He now summoned us and told us to choose the town we would like to go to. The Commandant insisted that we decide at once—there was nothing in the telegram about giving us time to think it over. "Right now!" he said, and we chose our town under his gaze. We did not know the provinces and we had no friends anywhere outside the twelve forbidden towns. Suddenly M. remembered that Leonov, a biologist at Tashkent University, had said good things about Voro­nezh, where he was born. Leonov's father worked there as a prison doctor. "Who knows, perhaps we shall need a prison doctor," said M., and we decided on Voronezh. The Commandant then duly made out a travel warrant for us. He was so shaken by the turn of events— that is, by the speed with which our case had been reviewed—that he did us the unheard-of favor of letting us use an "official" horse and cart to take our belongings to the pier. (We should never have been able to hire a horse privately—all private horses had been wiped out by the recent collectivization.) At the last minute the Commandant wished us luck—as one of the first witnesses of the miracle that has so suddenly happened to us, he must even have felt in some ways a kind of intimate of ours.

With the housekeeper at the hospital, on the other hand, it was the opposite—she lost all faith in us. What sort of people could we be if the authorities treated us like this? was the unspoken reproach I read in her eyes. Needless to say, she now had no doubt that M. had earned this favor in some unspeakable way—they never otherwise allowed anyone to escape their clutches. The housekeeper had greater experience than we, and, like all our fellow countrymen, she was peculiarly (though quite understandably) egocentric in trusting only to her own experience. As an exile M. had been automatically "one of us" for her (though three years later she was to learn that not all exiles could be so regarded and you had to hold your tongue in their presence, too), but now he had been pardoned—for to an inhabitant of Cherdyn, Voronezh sounded like paradise—he was alien and suspect in her eyes. I imagine that after we had left, all the exiles in Cherdyn spent a long time trying to remember what indis­creet things they had said to us, and wondering whether we hadn't been sent there specially to ferret out their inner thoughts and se­crets. It would have been pointless to feel any resentment toward the housekeeper—I should have felt exactly the same in her place. The loss of mutual trust is the first sign of the atomization of society in dictatorships of our type, and this was just what our leaders wanted.

The housekeeper was as much an outsider to me as we were to her, and a lot of the things she said made no sense to me. In that memorable year I had already come to understand one or two things, but it was still not enough. The housekeeper was always saying that she and the others had been exiled quite illegally. For example, by the time of her arrest she had stopped working for her party, and when they picked her up, she was already a private person—"and they knew it too!" But in my barbarism or, rather, barbarized by what had been dinned into my ears, I couldn't follow her reasoning. If she herself admitted having belonged to one of the parties that had been liquidated, how could she complain about being kept in exile? It was only what could be expected under our system. . . . This was how it struck me then. Our system, I felt, was harsh and brutal, but that was life, and a strong regime could not tolerate avowed opponents who, even though out of action, might make a comeback. I was not easily taken in by official propaganda, but I had swallowed some of their barbaric ideas of justice. Others were even more re­ceptive to the "new law"—Narbut, for example, thought there had been no choice but to exile M. "The state has to protect itself, doesn't it? What would happen otherwise, I ask you?" I did not argue with him. What was the point of trying to explain that unpub­lished verses have the same status as thoughts, and that nobody should be banished for his thoughts? It always needed a personal misfortune to open our eyes and make us a little more human—and even then the lesson took a little time to sink in.

There had been a time when, terrified of chaos, we had all prayed for a strong system, for a powerful hand that would stem the angry human river overflowing its banks. This fear of chaos is perhaps the most permanent of our feelings—we have still not recovered from it, and it is passed on from one generation to another. There is not one of us—either among the old who saw the Revolution or the young and innocent—who does not believe that he would be the first victim if ever the mob got out of hand. "We should be the first to be hanged from a lamppost"—whenever I hear this constantly repeated phrase, I remember Herzen's words about the intelligentsia which so much fears its own people that it prefers to go in chains itself, provided the people, too, remain fettered.

What we wanted was for the course of history to be made smooth, all the ruts and potholes to be removed, so there should never again be any unforeseen events and everything should flow along evenly and according to plan. This longing prepared us, psy­chologically, for the appearance of the Wise Leaders who would tell us where we were going. And once they were there, we no longer ventured to act without their guidance and looked to them for di­rect instructions and foolproof prescriptions. Since we could offer no better prescriptions of our own, it was logical to accept the ones proposed from on high. The most we dared do was offer advice in some minor matter: would it be possible, for example, to allow different styles in carrying out the Party's orders in art? We would like it so much. ... In our blindness we ourselves struggled to im­pose unanimity—because in every disagreement, in every difference of opinion, we saw the beginnings of new anarchy and chaos. And either by silence or consent we ourselves helped the system to gain in strength and protect itself against its detractors—such as the housekeeper in Cherdyn, or various poets and chatterboxes.

So we went on, nursing a sense of our own inadequacy, until the moment came for each of us to discover from bitter experience how precarious was his own state of grace. This could only come from bitter personal experience, because we did not believe in other people's. We really are inadequate and cannot be held responsible for our behavior. And we are saved only by miracles.

24 Journey to Voronezh

_O

ur documents were made out and stamped by the most influ­ential institution in the Soviet Union, and we were authorized to buy tickets for reserved seats in the military booking office. This was an unheard-of privilege in those days, when all the railroad sta­tions and piers in the country were besieged by sullen, grimy mobs who had to wait for weeks on end to buy a ticket. It looked as though a whole people were on the move or being evacuated. At the pier in Perm, exhausted and ragged people with blackened faces had encamped in whole families, or perhaps tribes, sitting on bundles and piles of rags next to their wooden trunks with crude lacquer patterns on them. All over the riverbank, charcoal fires were glowing in pits dug in the sand where they were making a stew for their children. The grown-ups chewed crusts of bread which they carried with them in bags—bread was still rationed at that time and they had stored up these iron reserves for the journey. Collectivization had uprooted vast hordes of people and they were roaming the country, desperately searching for somewhere to live and still sighing for their boarded-up huts.

Strictly speaking, these were not dispossessed kulaks—those had long ago been deported to new places—but marginal groups who had fled in panic and were now wandering aimlessly—anything to get away from their native villages. We have seen many forced mass migrations and several voluntary ones: during the Civil War, during the famines in the Volga region and the Ukraine, during collectiviza­tion, wartime evacuation. Right up to the last war, the railroad sta­tions were still crowded with uprooted peasants. After the war, people again began to wander in search of food and work, but on a smaller scale. Every family in which an able-bodied man had sur­vived was desperate to find a place where there was bread and a demand for labor. Sometimes they traveled in organized fashion— that is, going to jobs for which they had been hired beforehand. But, finding that things were no better elsewhere, they tried to get back home again or move on to some new place. Every mass deportation —whether of whole classes or ethnic groups—was accompanied by waves of voluntary migration. Children and old people died like flies.

Mass deportation is something quite new, for which we have the twentieth century to thank. Or perhaps the conquering despots of ancient Egypt or Assyria? I have seen the trains taking bearded peas­ants from the Ukraine and the Kuban, and the closed cattle cars transporting prisoners to the forced-labor camps of eastern Siberia. Then there were the trainloads of Volga Germans, Tartars, Poles, Estonians . . . And again cattle cars with prisoners for the camps— sometimes more of them and sometimes less, but never ceasing. The departure of the former aristocracy from Leningrad was a little different. Coming after collectivization, this was the second of the mass deportations. In 1935 Akhmatova and I went to the Paveletski station to see off a frail woman with three small boys who was being exiled to Saratov. They were not, of course, going to be given a permit to live in the town itself—people as helpless as this were ex­pected to make out as best they could in the country somewhere. The station presented the usual sight—it was impossible to move in the milling throng, but this time the people were sitting not on bundles, but on quite respectable-looking trunks and suitcases still covered with old foreign travel labels. As we pushed our way through to the platform, we were constantly greeted by old women we knew: granddaughters of the Decembrists,* former "ladies" and just ordinary women. "I never knew I had so many friends among the aristocracy," said Akhmatova. "Why all the fuss about them? Why should Leningrad be cluttered up with them?" said the non­party Bolshevik Tania Grigoriev, the wife of M.'s younger brother, Evgeni.

I have read somewhere that in the history of all nations there is a time when people "wander in body and spirit." This is the youth of a nation, the creative period of its history that affects it for many centuries and sets its cultural development in motion. We also ap­pear to be wanderers, but will our migration bring the fruits prom­ised by the philosopher? Our ordeal has been too great for us to keep our faith in these fruits, yet I cannot say that the answer to the question is "no." We have all, from top to bottom of society, learned something, even though we have destroyed our culture in the proc­ess and reverted to savagery. Still, what we have learned is very im­portant.

* Noblemen who attempted to overthrow the Czar in December 1825.

We traveled from Cherdyn to Kazan by river steamer, but had to change in Perm. This meant a wait of twenty-four hours. We could not get into a hotel because M. had no identity papers—they had been taken from him at the time of his arrest. Identity papers are the privilege of the city dweller. Peasants do not have papers and are hence barred from the hotels, as are townspeople in our sort of plight. In any case there is never any room in the hotels, even for ordinary citizens with papers.

It was impossible to sit down anywhere on the pier because of the vast number of migrants. We wandered around the town all day until we were totally exhausted. We sat on benches in the town park with its sparse shrubs and were surprised to see how pale the children were, even though they were from the better-off families of the city. We remembered how struck we had sometimes been by the sallow skin of the children in Moscow—this was always so during each of the successive famines. The last time had been in 1930 when we returned from Armenia to Moscow just after they had put up prices and not long before rationing and special stores were intro­duced. This was the price Moscow was paying for collectivization. By the time we left Moscow, things had greatly improved, but Perm still looked in frightful shape. We got a meal in a restaurant, but had to hurry over it because there was a line at each table—there was no food in the stores, and it was possible to get some kind of a meal only at the restaurants.

As he grew more tired, M. also became more and more worked up, and I was sure his illness would come back. These two journeys —the one under guard to Cherdyn, and now this one to Voronezh— only made his morbid condition worse. That night, as we continued to wander the streets, he kept wanting to go to the inquiry window at the MGB * building "to talk about my case." When he finally did so, the officer on duty would not listen. "Go away . . . people like you are coming here all the time." At this M. suddenly came to his senses. "That damned window is like a magnet," he said, and we went back to the pier. In Akhmatova's phrase, these were still com­paratively "vegetarian" times, but the "magnet" already had a great hold on everybody's mind. Was there nobody who was not both­ered by thoughts of interrogations, trials and shootings? There may have been a few such blissful people among the very young.

The steamer arrived in the middle of the night. With the tickets we had bought in the military booking office, feeling not like exiles

* MGB: Ministry of State Security—i.e., secret police.

but more like pampered proteges of the country's most feared insti­tution, we made our way through the murmuring crowds and were almost the first to board. The crowd followed us with envious and hostile glances: the ordinary people take a poor view of privilege, and this crowd on the pier at Perm could not know why we had been able to buy our tickets without waiting in line. In our times, when it has often been possible to obtain one's daily bread only by special favor, hatred for the privileged has grown particularly in­tense. For at least ten out of the first forty revolutionary years we had rationing, and even in the supply of bread there was no egalitar- ianism—some got next to nothing and others more than enough. As my brother Evgeni explained to us in 1930 when we returned from Armenia, "We have a famine, but things are done quite differently nowadays. They've divided everybody into categories, and we all starve, or eat, according to rank. Everybody gets just as much as he deserves." Then I remember a young physicist—this was after the war—saying to his startled mother-in-law as he ate a steak which had been bought in the special closed store to which his father-in-law had access: "It's very good, and what makes it particularly nice is that other people can't get it." People were proud of their ration cate­gory and of their other rights and privileges, and carefully concealed the amount of their earnings from their inferiors. By an irony of fate, we were traveling on tickets bought in the booking offices for the most privileged, and this aroused universal envy. Yet at the same time we did not look at all like members of the elite, and this only increased people's resentment of us.

We took a berth for two, walked around the deck and had a bath —just like real tourists. These few days were a turning point for M. I was quite astonished at how little he needed to get over his illness— only three days of peace and quiet. He calmed down, read Pushkin and began to talk in a completely normal way. His auditory halluci­nations and paroxysms of fear, agitation and egocentric view of what was going on around him—all this had almost ceased, or at least he had learned to cope with any slight relapse. But it was not over alto­gether—until the late autumn he still had a tendency to be oversensi­tive, and he tired easily (this had always been so because his heart was abnormally small and during that summer it became much weaker). I also noticed that, unusually for him, he was very easily hurt and—something unheard of before—he was intellectually list­less. He had begun to read again almost at once, but he avoided any­thing strenuous, scarcely looking even at his Dante.

iong all the ways in which the state could destroy people, M.

It is possible that his recovery was slowed down by a new misfor­tune: in Voronezh I fell ill, at first with spotted typhus that I must have picked up on some railroad station or pier. National calamities in Russia are always accompanied by spotted typhus, and until very recently it has been endemic. In the hospitals its incidence was con­cealed by giving it a number instead of calling it by its name—it was either 5 or 6, I don't remember exactly. Even this was made into a state secret, so that the "enemies of socialism" should not know what illnesses afflicted us. After recovering from spotted typhus I made a trip to Moscow and came down afterward with dysentery (which was also disguised under some number or other). I was sent back to the isolation hospital, where the use of germicides was unknown, except for patients belonging to the highest categories. Vishnevski happened to be in the hospital at the same time, and it was from him that I learned of the existence of new drugs which would have helped me recover much more quickly. But even the medicine you get depends on your status. I once complained about this in the pres­ence of a Soviet official who had held high rank before his retire­ment. I said medicine was something everybody needed. "What do you mean, everybody?" he asked. "Do you expect me to get the same treatment as a cleaning woman?" He was a kind and perfectly decent person, but nobody was unaffected by the "fight against egal- itarianism."

25 Thou Shalt Not Kill

most of all hated the death penalty, or the "highest measure," as we delicately called it. The fact that it was death by shooting which he so much feared in his delirium was not accidental. While he was quite calm about exile, deportation and forced-labor camps ("This we are not afraid of," he would say), he shuddered at the very thought of death by execution. We had often read announce­ments about the shooting of people, and sometimes notices were posted up in the cities about such things. We read about the execu­tion of Bliumkin (or Konrad) in Armenia—the news was plastered on every wall and post. M. and Boris Sergeyevich [Kuzin] returnedto the hotel shaken, depressed and sick. Neither of them could stom­ach it. It was probably not only that the death penalty symbolized violence of every kind for them, but that they could also imagine it far too vividly. The rationalist feminine mind is less affected, and for me the idea of instant death seemed less abhorrent than that of mass deportation, prison, forced-labor camps and other such outrages against human dignity. But for M. it was different, and his first clash with the new regime (when it was still very young indeed) arose out of his feelings about capital punishment. The story of his encounter with Bliumkin is known from Georgi Ivanov's inaccurate second­hand account. There is also a mention of the episode in Ehrenburg's memoirs. Ehrenburg was present once when Bliumkin threatened M. with a revolver. Bliumkin was always brandishing his revolver in public places, as I once had occasion to see myself.

This was in Kiev in 1919. M. and I were standing on a balcony on the second floor of the Hotel Continental when we suddenly saw a cavalcade sweeping down the broad Nikolayev Street. It consisted of a horseman in a black cloak surrounded by a mounted escort. As it approached, the horseman in the black cloak looked up and, seeing us, he turned around sharply in the saddle, and the next thing we saw was a hand pointing a revolver at us. M. was about to duck, but instead he bent over the edge of the balcony and waved in greeting to the horseman. When the group drew level with us, the hand which had pointed the revolver was already hidden in the folds of the cloak. All this lasted only a second. It reminded me of a killing I once witnessed in the Caucasus: the driver of a tram leaned out while it was moving down the main street, and shot a bootblack. This was by way of blood revenge. The scene with Bliumkin was just the same, except that he did not actually shoot and bring his vendetta to a conclusion. The cavalcade swept past and turned off toward Lipki, where the Cheka had its headquarters.

The horseman in the cloak was Bliumkin, the man who shot the German Ambassador, Count Mirbach. He was probably on his way to Lipki. We had heard that he had been given very important secret work connected with counter-espionage. The cloak and the caval­cade were simply self-indulgence on the part of this mysterious man. What I fail to understand is how such ostentation could be recon­ciled with the secrecy demanded by his work.

I had occasion to meet Bliumkin even before I got to know M. I had once lived with his wife in a tiny Ukrainian village where sev­eral people wanted by Petliura were hiding among a group of young

artists and journalists. When the Reds took over, Bliumkin's wife suddenly came to see me and gave me a certificate made out in my name, guaranteeing the safety of our house and property. "What's this for?" I asked in astonishment. "We have to protect the intelli­gentsia," she replied. In the same way, on October 18, 1905, women from the "workers' patrols" had gone disguised as nuns to distribute ikons to Jewish homes. They hoped that the pogrom mob would be misled by this. During the many searches of our house my father never once produced this obviously fake certificate made out to me (I was then only eighteen). It was from this woman, who tried to save the intelligentsia with such methods, that I first heard of Mir- bach's assassin. I also met him several times in person during one of his brief visits—he was always coming and going in mysterious fash­ion.

The similarity of the balcony incident in Kiev to an act of blood vengeance was not accidental. Bliumkin had sworn to take ven-« geance on M. and had already brandished a revolver at him several times before, but he had never actually fired. M. thought it was all an empty threat and put it down to Bliumkin's love of melodramatic effects: "What's to stop him from shooting me? He could have done it long ago if he wanted." But even so, M. couldn't help ducking every time Bliumkin drew his revolver. The final episode in this Caucasian game was in 1926 when M. was leaving the Crimea and happened to get into the same train compartment as Bliumkin. See­ing his "enemy," Bliumkin demonstratively unhitched his holster, put his revolver in his suitcase and held out his hand. They then talked amicably for the rest of the journey. Not long after this we learned of Bliumkin's execution by shooting. Georgi Ivanov, pander­ing to the tastes of his least discriminating readers, has given such a highly colored account of the whole story that it becomes meaning­less—yet respectable people continue to quote his version, ignoring its logical flaws. This is only possible because we are so cut off from each other.

Not long before their clash, Bliumkin had proposed to M. that he work in a new organization which was then being set up, and which he said would have a great future. In Bliumkin's view, this organiza­tion was bound to give shape to the new era and become the focus of power. M. took fright and refused to work for it—this at a moment when nobody yet knew exactly what the nature of the new institu­tion would be. M. only had to learn that it was powerful to keep right away from it. He had always, in an almost childish way,

shunned any contact with power. When he arrived in Moscow in 1918, for instance—he had traveled by Government trains—he had to stay with Gorbunov in the Kremlin for a few days. One morning when he came to breakfast in the common dining room, the waiter, a former court flunkey who now waited on members of the Revolu­tionary Government in the same obsequious fashion, said that Trot- ski himself would shortly be coming in to take coffee. M. seized his raincoat and fled, thus losing a unique opportunity to have a proper meal in the hungry city. He found it impossible to explain what prompted him to flee like this: "I just didn't want to breakfast with him." A similar thing happened when he was summoned to the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs to discuss the possibility of a job there. Chicherin came out to see him and asked him, as a test, to draft an official telegram in French. He left him alone to do it, and M., seeing his chance to escape, just made off without even trying to draft the telegram. "Why did you run away?" I asked him. He dis­missed the question in the same way—if it had been some minor official he might have stayed and taken a job in the Commissariat, but it was better to keep away from people invested with power. It was perhaps this instinctive, almost unconscious abhorrence of power that saved M. from many false and disastrous paths which opened up before him at a time when even the most experienced people had no idea what was going on. What would have happened to him if he had joined the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, let alone the "new organization" which Bliumkin was so keen he should work for?

M. first understood the functions of this "new organization" dur­ing his clash with Bliumkin. The scene was the Poets' Cafe in Mos­cow—the only detail correctly reported by Georgi Ivanov. But it is not true that Bliumkin used to go there as a bloodthirsty Chekist looking for new victims—as has been written in the West. Rather he was a welcome visitor; he was close to the center of power, and such persons are always sought after in literary circles. M.'s quarrel with Bliumkin took place a few days before the assassination of Mirbach. At that early date the term "Chekist" still meant very little. The Cheka had only just been organized, and up till then terror and shootings had been carried out by other organizations—by military tribunals, I believe. In his conversation with Bliumkin, M. perhaps clearly understood for the first time the precise functions of this "new organization" which Bliumkin had asked him to join a few days previously.

Bliumkin, in M.'s words, began to boast that he had powers of life and death in his hands, and that he was about to shoot some "wretched intellectual" who was being held under arrest by the "new organization." It was fashionable in those years to speak with contempt of the "spineless intelligentsia" and to talk blithely about shooting people. Bliumkin was not just following the fashion, he was one of those who created it. He was referring to an art historian, a Hungarian or Polish count, whom M. had never heard of before. When he later told me the whole story in Kiev, M. could not re­member either the name or the nationality of this man he had stood up for. In just the same way he was unable to remember the names of the five old men he saved from execution in 1928. It is now easy to find out the count's name from published materials about the Cheka, which include a report on the murder of Mirbach, where Dzerzhinski mentions that he had already heard of Bliumkin.

Bliumkin's boast that he was going to put this "wretched intellec­tual" up against the wall and shoot him enraged M., who said that he would not stand for it. To this Bliumkin said he would not tolerate any interference in his business and that he would shoot M. too if he dared to "meddle." It appears that Bliumkin threatened M. with his revolver during this first argument between them. This was some­thing Bliumkin did at the slightest provocation—even, I was told, at home with his family.

According to the story as it has been told abroad, M. next man­aged to seize Bliumkin's warrant and tear it up. What kind of a war­rant could it have been? The art historian was already in the Lubi- anka, so the warrant for his arrest must already have been filed away and could not have been in Bliumkin's possession. Nor would it have made sense for M. to do this—a piece of paper can always be re­placed. Knowing M.'s temperament, I can well believe he would have been capable of snatching something and tearing it up, but he would not have left it at that. That would not have been like him—it would have meant that, frightened by Bliumkin's threats, he washed his hands of the business after making a fuss merely as a sop to his conscience. If that had been the case, the story would only be worth recalling as an illustration of how badly standards of behavior had declined. But in fact the story had a sequel.

M. went straight from the Poets' Cafe to Larisa Reisner and made such a row that Raskolnikov phoned Dzerzhinski and arranged for him to see Larisa and M. In the published account it says that Ras­kolnikov also went with Л1. to the meeting, but this is not true—only his wife, Larisa, went. I doubt whether anything in the world would have induced Raskolnikov to go to the Cheka on such an errand, particularly together with M., whom he did not like. He was always irritated by his wife's literary infatuations.

Everything else in the published account is more or less true: Dzerzhinski listened to M., asked for the file on the case, accepted M.'s assurances about the art historian and ordered his release. Whether his order was actually carried out I do not know. M. thought it was, but a few years later he learned that in a similar case an order for someone's release given by Dzerzhinski in his presence was not followed up. In 1918 it never occurred to M. to check whether this promise given by such a high official had actually been kept. He did, however, hear from someone that the Count had been released and allowed to return to his own country. This also seemed to be borne out by Bliumkin's subsequent behavior.

Dzerzhinski showed interest in Bliumkin himself and began to question Larisa about him. She didn't know very much, though M. later complained about how garrulous and indiscreet she was—quali­ties for which she was celebrated. At all events, her loose talk did Bliumkin no harm, and M.'s complaint about his threats to kill pris­oners remained, as could be expected, the voice of one crying out in the wilderness. If closer attention had been paid to Bliumkin, the murder of the German Ambassador might have been prevented. But, instead, Bliumkin was allowed to carry out his plans without the slightest hindrance. Dzerzhinski remembered M.'s visit only after Mirbach's assassination and evidently mentions it in his report only to show how well informed he was. He couldn't even remember who was with M. After the assassination Bliumkin was suspended from work for a time, but he was soon allowed to return to it and remained with the Cheka until his downfall and execution.

One may ask: Why didn't Bliumkin carry out his threat to take vengeance on M. for interfering in his "business" and even getting the better of him? In M.'s opinion, Bliumkin, terrible as he was, was by no means an utter savage. M. always said that Bliumkin never had any intention of killing him—on all the occasions when he threat­ened him, he allowed himself to be disarmed by other people pres­ent, and in Kiev he himself put away his revolver. Brandishing a revolver, shouting and raving like one possessed, Bliumkin was simply indulging his temperament and his love of external effects— he was by nature a terrorist of the flamboyant type which had ex­isted in Russia before the Revolution.

Another question is: How could Bliumkin's revolting braggadocio about killing people and the contemptuous words about a "wretched intellectual" marked down for destruction be reconciled with the activity of his wife, who, however absurdly, had tried to save the in­telligentsia? It may be, of course, that the woman I knew in the Ukrainian village was only one of Bliumkin's mistresses and did not share his views. But with people of Bliumkin's type one can never be sure of appearances, and there are people who think that he may have been playing a double game, and that all his talk about the shooting of "spineless intellectuals" was intended to cast doubt on the "new organization" which he had joined as a representative of the Left Social Revolutionaries.[9] If this was so, M.'s reaction was precisely the kind of effect he hoped to achieve—which could be why he never took vengeance on him. But only the historians may be able to make sense of this when they come to study this strange time and this outlandish man.

For my own part, I think that he was not playing a double game, but that the people who were making history in those days had all the cruelty and inconsistency of the children they were. Why is it so easy to turn young people into killers? Why do they look on human life with such criminal frivolity? This is particularly true in those fateful periods when blood flows and murder becomes an ordi­nary everyday thing. We were set on our fellow men like dogs, and the whole pack of us licked the hunter's hand, squealing incompre­hensibly. The head-hunting mentality spread like a plague. I even had a slight bout of it myself, but was cured in time by a wise doctor. This happened in Ekster's studio in Kiev when some visitor or another (it was either Roshal or Cherniak) read out some couplets by Mayakovski about how officers were thrown into the Moika Canal in Petrograd to drown. This brash verse had its effect and I burst out laughing. Ehrenburg, who was also there, at once fiercely attacked me. He gave me such a talking-to that I still respect him for it, and I am proud that, silly as I was at the time, I had the sense to listen to him and remember his words forever afterward. This hap­pened before my meeting with M., so that he did not have to cure me of the head-hunting mentality and explain to me why he stood up for the art historian.

This is something that hardly anyone here understands, and I am still always being asked why M. did it—that is, why he intervenedfor a stranger at a time when people were being shot on every side. They understand if it is for a relative or a friend, a chauffeur, or a secretary—even in the Stalin era this sometimes happened. But where there is no personal interest, one is not supposed to interfere. People living under a dictatorship are soon filled with a sense of their helplessness, in which they find an excuse for their own passivity. "How can I stop executions by speaking up? It's beyond my control. Who will listen to me?" Such things were said by the best of us, and the habit of not trying to pit oneself against superior force meant that any David who attacked Goliath with his bare hands met with puzzlement and shrugs of the shoulders. This was the case when Pas­ternak, at a most dangerous time, refused to sign a collective letter by the Soviet writers approving the latest shooting of "enemies of the people." No wonder it was so easy for the Goliaths to destroy the last of the Davids.

e must create a type of Russian revolutionary woman," said

Larisa Reisner on the one occasion when we visited her at

her home (this was after her return from Afghanistan). "The French Revolution created its own type. We must do the same." This did not mean that Larisa wanted to write a novel on the subject, but that she hoped to establish herself in this role. This was the pur­pose of her journeys back and forth across the battle fronts, and her visits to Afghanistan and Germany. She had found her vocation in life in 1917 and it was made easier for her by family tradition. Her father, Professor Reisner, had formed close links with the Bolsheviks in his Tomsk days, and Larisa thus found herself in the camp of the

victors.

During our meeting Larisa overwhelmed M. with stories and they all had about them something of the same light-headedness with which Bliumkin reached for his revolver or otherwise strove to cre-

We all took the easy way out by keeping silent in the hope that not we but our neighbors would be killed. It is even difficult to tell which among us were accomplices to murder, and which were just saving their skins by silence.

2 6 The Woman of the Russian Revolution

ate a sensation. Larisa also built up her image of the "Russian revolu­tionary woman" in a way reminiscent of Bliumkin. She had no time for those who sat at home moaning about their helplessness—she be­longed to circles in which the cult of power reigned supreme. The right to use power has always been justified by reference to the good of the people: the people must be reassured, the people must be fed, the people must be protected. Larisa despised such arguments and had even cut the word "people" out of her vocabulary—it too seemed to smack of the prejudices of the old intelligentsia, against which the whole of her anger and the fire of her eloquence were directed. Berdiayev is mistaken when he says that the intelligentsia was destroyed by the people for which it once made such sacrifices. The intelligentsia destroyed itself, burning out of itself, as Larisa did, everything that conflicted with the cult of power.

At this meeting with M., Larisa at once remembered how she had betrayed her principles by going to see Dzerzhinski with him: "Why did you want to save that count? They're all spies." To me she complained rather coyly that she had "got into this business" because M. had rushed her into it against her better judgment. One may indeed ask why she went against her own beliefs by going to plead for a "wretched intellectual" whom she did not even know. M. thought it was out of a desire to show how influential she was, and how close to the new regime. But in my opinion she did it simply to humor M., whose verse she liked so much that she was ready to do anything for him. The one thing Larisa could not overcome was her love of poetry—though this too she was bent on doing, since it scarcely suited her image of the "Russian revolutionary woman." In the first few years after the Revolution there were many such po­etry-lovers among the victors. How did they manage to reconcile it with their Hottentot ethic: "If I kill, it's good; if I'm killed, it's bad"?

Larisa not only loved poetry, but she also secretly believed in its importance, and for her the only blot on the Revolution's record was the shooting of Gumilev. She was living in Afghanistan at the time this happened, and she believed that if she had been in Moscow she would have been able to put in a good word and prevent it. During her meeting with us she kept coming back to this subject, and we were thus witnesses to the birth of the legend about Lenin's supposed telegram ordering a stay of execution. That evening Larisa gave us the legend in the following version: her mother, hearing what was about to happen in Petrograd, went to the Kremlin and persuaded Lenin to send a telegram. Nowadays it is Gorki who is credited with having informed Lenin about the impending execu­tion. But there is no truth in either version. While Larisa was abroad we several times went to see her mother, who bitterly lamented that she had not taken Gumilev's arrest seriously and tried to reach Lenin —which might have made all the difference. As regards Gorki, it is true that people asked him to intervene—Otsup, for one, went to see him. Gorki had a strong dislike of Gumilev, but he nevertheless promised to do something. He could not keep his promise because the sentence of death was announced and carried out with unex­pected haste, before Gorki had got round to doing anything.

When we began to hear touching stories about a telegram from Lenin, M. often remembered how we had heard the legend take shape in Larisa's apartment. Until her return from abroad there had been no such stories in circulation and everybody knew that Lenin had shown no concern for a poet of whom he had never even heard. But when one thinks of all the blood shed in this country, why is it that this legend has proved so persistent? I am always meeting people who assure me that the telegram has been printed in such-and-such a volume of Lenin's works, or that it is still preserved in the archives. The story has even reached the ears of the writer in stovepipe trou­sers—the one who always carries a box of hard candy in his pocket. He has even promised to bring me the volume in which he has read it with his own eyes, but he has never kept his promise. The myth invented by Larisa to cover up her own weakness will still have a long life in our country.

She had less luck with her image of the "Russian revolutionary woman" than with her myth about Lenin's telegram. This was probably due to the fact that, though she belonged to the victorious side, she was not really much of a fighter. M. told me how she and her husband Raskolnikov lived a life of luxury in hungry Moscow— keeping a town house, with servants and magnificently served meals. In this they were different from the Bolsheviks of an older genera­tion, who stuck to their modest way of life much longer. Larisa and her husband justified themselves by saying that, as people engaged in building a new order, it would have been sheer hypocrisy for them to deny themselves their due as incumbents of power. Larisa was ahead of her time in fighting "egalitarianism" even before it was de­nounced.

I remember one story that M. told me about Larisa. At the very beginning of the Revolution there was need to arrest some high- ranking officers—admirals, or other "military specialists," as they were called. Raskolnikov and Larisa offered to help. They invited the admirals to come and stay with them, and the admirals duly ac­cepted. They were royally entertained by their beautiful hostess, and then arrested at breakfast by the Chekists, without a shot being fired. This really was a dangerous operation, and it passed off smoothly, thanks to the trap cunningly laid by Larisa.

Larisa was capable of anything, but I am somehow convinced that if she had been in Moscow when Gumilev was arrested, she would have got him out of jail, and that if she had been alive and still in favor with the regime during the time when M. was being de­stroyed, she would have moved heaven and earth to try and save him. But in fact one cannot be certain of anything, people can be so changed by life.

M. was on friendly terms with her, and she wanted to take him to Afghanistan with her, but Raskolnikov wouldn't hear of it. At the time we went to see her she had already left Raskolnikov, and after that we lost touch with her completely: M. had clearly decided to have nothing more to do with this "woman of the Revolution." When we heard about her death, he sighed, and in 1937 he said how lucky Larisa had been to die in time: all the people in her circle were now being destroyed wholesale.

With Raskolnikov we had nothing in common at all. He once showered M. with telegrams—this was when he took Voronski's place as editor of Krasnaya Nov [Red Virgin Soil]. Extraordinary as it may seem, the so-called "Fellow-Traveling" writers who had been published by Voronski boycotted the journal under its new editor when he took over after the sudden dismissal of its creator. Raskol­nikov so badly needed material that he even approached M., whose comment on his telegrams was: "I don't care who the editor is: I won't be published either by Voronski or Raskolnikov." The "Fel­low Travelers" soon forgot their former protector and never again worried about changes in editorship. As for M., he would never have had his Noise of Time published if it had not been for Georgi Blok, who worked in the private publishing house Vremya [Time] before it was closed down.

All the people Larisa had known when she was still a professor's daughter (when she edited an absurd little magazine and visited poets to show them her poems) perished before their time—as did everybody she got to know later when she was trying to become the "woman of the Russian Revolution." She was beautiful in a heavyand striking Germanic way. Her mother watched over her as she lay dying in the Kremlin hospital, and committed suicide immediately after her death. We were so unused to people dying a natural death from illness that I still find it hard to believe that this beautiful woman could have been carried away by something as ordinary as typhus. Contradictory and unrestrained, she paid for all her sins with an early death. I sometimes feel that she may well have invented the story about the admirals in order to enhance her status as the "woman of the Russian Revolution" by taking credit for a killing. All these people building a "new world" were so vehement in de­nouncing as hypocrisy all the commandments, including "Thou shalt not kill." But then this same Larisa, when she visited Akhmatova at the height of the famine, was horrified to find what poverty she was living in, and a few days later reappeared with a bundle of clothing and a food parcel which she had managed to buy with special vouch­ers. In those days it was just as hard to get such vouchers as to free someone from jail.

2 7 Transmission Belts

petition to the totally inaccessible person it is addressed to—if it is sent by ordinary official channels, there is no hope at all that the miracle will come to pass. Millions of letters have been sent, but the number of miracles can be counted on one's fingers. Here there is certainly no question of "egalitarianism."

My telegrams to the powers-that-be would have been as futile as the housekeeper in Cherdyn said, if I had not sent copies to Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin. If it had not been for this detail, my Cherdyn friend would have been quite right. Nikolai Ivanovich was as impul­sive as M. He was not the sort to ask himself what business it was of his, or to start calculating his chances of success. Instead he sat down and wrote a letter to Stalin. This was an act completely at variance with our normal code of behavior, and by that time there were very few people left in the country who were capable of such impulsive­ness: they had long ago been destroyed or "re-educated."

miracle is a two-stage affair. The first stage is to get a letter or

In 1930 in a small rest home in Sukhumi for high officials, whichwe had got into owing to a blunder on the part of Lakoba, I had a conversation with the wife of Yezhov. "Pilniak comes to see us," she said. "Whom do you go to see?" When I indignantly passed this on to M., he tried to calm me: "Everybody goes to see someone. There's no other way. We go to see Nikolai Ivanovich."

We had first started "going to see" Bukharin in 1922 when M. had asked him to intercede for his brother, Evgeni, who had been ar­rested. M. owed him all the pleasant things in his hfe. His 1928 vol­ume of poetry would never have come out without the active inter­vention of Bukharin, who also managed to enlist the support of Kirov. The journey to Armenia, our apartment and ration cards, contracts for future volumes (which were never actually published but were paid for—a very important factor, since M. was not al­lowed to work anywhere)—all this was arranged by Bukharin. His last favor was to get us transferred from Cherdyn to Voronezh.

In the thirties Bukharin was already complaining that he had no "transmission belts." He was losing his influence, and was in fact very isolated. But he never hesitated to help M., worrying only about whom it would be best to approach. At the height of his glory at the end of the twenties—he was hardly yet forty—he was at the very center of the world Communist movement and used to drive up to his gray headquarters, where he received representatives of all races and nations, in a black automobile escorted by three or four others carrying his guards. Already he was saying things which gave some hint of the future. When, from a chance conversation in the street, M. learned about the impending execution of the five old men and went around the city in a fury, demanding that they be re­prieved, everybody just shrugged their shoulders, and he pleaded with Bukharin for all he was worth, as the only man who listened to his arguments without asking "What business is it of yours?" As a final argument against the execution he sent Bukharin a copy of his recently published volume of Poems with an inscription saying: Every line here is against what you are going to do. I have not put these words in quotation marks, because I do not remember the exact phrasing, only the general sense. The sentence was repealed and Bukharin informed M. by sending him a telegram in Yalta, where he had come to join me after he had done everything he could in Moscow. At first Bukharin had tried to fend M. off with words like "We Bolsheviks have a simple approach to these things: we each know that it could happen to him as well. There's no point in swear­ing that it can't." And as an illustration he mentioned the recent shooting of a group of Komsomols in Sochi for debauchery. M. re­membered these words during Bukharin's trial.

From what quarter did Bukharin think the danger came? Did he fear the return of his defeated enemies, or did he sense the threat from his own side? We could only guess; to a direct question this slight man with the red beard would have replied with a joke.

In 1928, sitting in an office which was at the pivot of some of the most grandiose developments of the twentieth century, these two doomed men talked about capital punishment. Both were going to their own death, but in different ways. M. still believed that his "oath to the fourth estate" obliged him to come to accept the Soviet regime—everything, that is, except the death penalty. He was recon­ciled to the new state of affairs by Herzen's doctrine of prioritas dignitatis, which had powerfully undermined all his notions of popu­lar rule. "What is a mechanical majority!" M. would say, trying to justify the abandonment of the democratic forms of government. Unfortunately, the idea of indoctrinating the people also went back to Herzen, though he added the proviso that it must be done "through the laws and institutions." Isn't this the basic error of our times, and of each one of us? What do the people need to be indoc­trinated for? What satanic arrogance you need to impose your own views like this! It was only in Russia that the idea of popular educa­tion was replaced by the political concept of indoctrination. When M. himself became a target for it, he was one of the first to revolt.

Bukharin's path was quite different. He clearly saw that the new world he was so actively helping to build was horrifyingly unlike the original concept. Life was deviating from the blueprints, but the blueprints had been declared sacrosanct and it was forbidden to com­pare them with what was actually coming into being. Determinist theory had naturally given birth to unheard-of practitioners who boldly outlawed any study of real life: Why undermine the system and sow unnecessary doubt if history was in any case speeding us to the appointed destination? When the high priests are bound together by such a bond, renegades can expect no mercy. Bukharin was not a renegade, but he already felt how inevitable it was that he would be cast into the pit because of his doubts and the bitter need which one day would drive him to speak out and call things by their real name.

M. once complained to him that in the Land and Factory Publish­ing House* one felt the lack of a "healthy Soviet atmosphere." "And what," asked Bukharin, "is the atmosphere like in other organizations?

• See the note on Narbut in the Appendix.

The same as in a cesspool—it stinks!" And another time, when M. told him: "You have no idea how people can be persecuted here," Bukharin just gasped: "We have no idea?" and together with Т., his secretary and friend, he burst out laughing.

The fundamental rule of the times was to ignore the facts of life. Holders of high office were supposed to see only the positive side of things and, once ensconced in their ivory towers (it was they, not we, who were shut off like this!), to look down indulgently at the writhing human masses below. A man who knew that you cannot build the present out of the bricks of the future was bound to resign himself beforehand to his inevitable doom and the prospect of the firing squad. What else could he do? We were all prepared for the same end. When M. said goodbye to Akhmatova in the winter of 1937, he said, "I am ready for death." I have heard the same phrase, in slightly different words, from dozens of people. "I am ready for anything," Ehrenburg said to me once as I was leaving his apartment —this was at the time of the "Doctors' Plot" * and the campaign against "cosmopolitans," and his turn was coming. As one era fol­lowed another, we were always "ready for anything."

Thanks to Bukharin, M. got a vivid impression of the first fruits of the "new world" as it was created in front of our very eyes, and was hence one of the first to learn where the threat lay. In 1922 when he was trying to help his arrested brother, M. approached Bukharin for the first time. We went to see him in the Metropole Hotel. Bukha­rin at once phoned Dzerzhinski and asked him to see M. A meeting was fixed for the next morning, and M. now made his second visit to the organization for which Bliumkin had foretold such a great fu­ture—he was thus able to compare the period of revolutionary terror with the age in which a new concept of government was be­ing born. Dzerzhinski had not yet given up the old ways. He re­ceived M. in simple fashion and suggested he stand surety for his brother—a solution actually proposed by Bukharin. Dzerzhinski picked up the phone and gave the necessary instructions on the spot. The next morning M. went to see the interrogator in charge of his brother's case and returned full of impressions. The interrogator wore a uniform and was flanked by two bodyguards. "I got the in­struction," he said, "but we cannot let you stand surety for your brother." The reason he gave was: "It will be awkward to arrest you

* In 1952 a large group of Kremlin doctors, mostly Jewish, were accused of trying to poison the Soviet leaders. They were all released shordy after Stalin's death. "Cosmopolitans" was a frequent euphemism for "Jews" in the anti-Semitic campaigns of the last years of Stalin's life.

if your brother commits a new crime." The implication of this was that some crime had already been committed. "A new crime?" M. said when he got back home. "What can they have cooked up now?" We had no illusions, and we were afraid that they were going to try and frame Evgeni Emilievich. It also occurred to us that Dzer- zhinski might have given his instruction over the phone in a manner suggesting that the interrogator did not have to take it seriously.

It is true that the refusal to comply was made to sound like a favor ("We don't want to arrest you, too"), but the general tone, the armed guards, the air of mystery and hint of intimidation ("He'll commit a new crime") all struck a new note. The forces conjured up by the older generation were getting out of hand, and a future was brewing that had little resemblance to the terror of the early revolutionary days. There was even a new language coming into be­ing—a language of state. Fearful as it was, the terror of the early days could not be compared with the systematic mass extermination which the all-powerful "state of a new type" practiced on its subjects in accordance with laws, instructions, orders and directives issued by all kinds of committees, secretariats, special tribunals—if they were not simply handed down "from above."

When M. told him how he had been received by the interrogator, Bukharin flew into a rage. We were quite taken aback by the vio­lence of his reaction. A few days later he came to tell us that no crime had been committed—either an old or a new one—by M.'s brother, and that he would be released in two days' time. These two days were needed for the formal winding up of a case involving an uncommitted crime.

Why did Bukharin react like this? He was, after all, a proponent of terror, so why should he have got so worked up? A youth had been picked up as a warning to his fellow students, and he wasn't even in danger of being shot—a very ordinary case. So why was Bukharin so upset? Did he too have a foreboding of the "new" spirit that was beginning to threaten us all? Did he remember the magic broom of the sorcerer's apprentice in Goethe's poem? Did it occur to him that neither he nor his colleagues would now be able to con­tain the forces awakened by them, any more than the poor appren­tice could halt the magic broom? No, the most likely thing is that Bukharin was indignant because a wretched interrogator had got out of line and failed to obey an order passed down by his seniors in the hierarchy. The machine, he must have thought, was not yet prop­erly tuned, and did not always work as it should.

He had always been a man of passionate temperament, quick to anger, but his way of venting his indignation changed with the times. Until 1928 he would shout "Idiots!" and pick up the phone, but after 1930 he just frowned and said: "We must think whom to approach." He arranged our trip to Armenia through Molotov, and also our pension. The pension was given "for services to Russian literature and in view of the impossibility of finding employment for the writer in Soviet literature." This formula was close to the reali­ties of the situation, and we suspected that Bukharin was responsible for it. In the case of Akhmatova they could think of nothing better than to give her a pension on the grounds of old age, though she was only thirty-five. As an "old-age pensioner" she received seventy roubles a month—enough to keep her in cigarettes and matches.

At the beginning of the thirties Bukharin, in his search for "trans­mission belts," was always talking of going to see Gorki to tell him about M.'s plight—the way nobody would publish him or give him work. M. vainly argued with Bukharin that no good would come of such an approach to Gorki. We even told him the old story about the trousers. When M. returned to Petrograd from Wrangel's Cri­mea by way of Georgia, he was half dead and had no warm clothing by the time he arrived in the city. In those days clothing could not be bought, but was supplied only against vouchers. The issue of such vouchers for writers had to be authorized by Gorki. When he was asked to let M. have a pair of trousers and a sweater, he crossed out the word "trousers" on the voucher and said, "He'll manage with­out." The many writers who later became "Fellow Travelers" still recall Gorki's fatherly concern for them, but this was the only time he ever denied someone a pair of trousers. The trousers were a small matter in themselves, but they spoke eloquently of Gorki's hostility to a literary trend that was foreign to him: here too it was a question of "spineless intellectuals" who were worth preserving only if they were well equipped with solid learning. Like many people of similar background, Gorki prized learning but had a quantitative view of it: the more, the better. Bukharin did not believe M., and decided to take soundings. Soon, however, he was telling us: "There's no point in going to Gorki." However much I pestered him, he wouldn't tell me why.

When our apartment was searched in 1934, they took away all Bukharin's notes to us. They were a little flowery, with a sprinkling of Latin tags. He begged our pardon for not being able to see us at once, but nolens volens he could only see us at the times arranged by his secretary: "Please don't think me bureaucratic, but otherwise I could never get anything done. Would tomorrow at nine be conven­ient? The pass will be ready. If it's inconvenient, perhaps you can suggest another time."

I would give a great deal to be able once more to ask Korotkova, the squirrel-like secretary mentioned in "Fourth Prose," for an interview, and then to come and talk with Nikolai Ivanovich about all the things we didn't manage to say at the time. Perhaps he would again ring up Kirov and ask him what was going on in Leningrad and why they were not publishing Mandelstam there—"the book has been scheduled ages ago, but you keep putting it off year after year." And now it's twenty-five years since M. died. . . .

Fate is not a mysterious external force, but the sum of a man's natural make-up and the basic trend of the times he lives in—though in our age a great many tortured lives have been cut to the same hideously standard patterns. But these two men, with their particular endowments, themselves defined their relations with their times.

2 8 Voronezh

's identity papers were taken from him at the time of his

• arrest. When we arrived in Voronezh, his only document was the travel warrant issued to him by the Cherdyn GPU Com­mandant which enabled him to buy tickets in the military booking offices. M. now handed it over at a special window in the shabby premises of the Voronezh GPU and was given a new document which only entitled him to a temporary residence permit. He had to make do with this while it was being established whether he would be kept in Voronezh itself or sent off into the countryside some­where. Moreover, our new overlords had not decided which cate­gory of exile we belonged to. There are several types, of which the two main ones known to me are "with reporting" and "without re­porting." In the first case, one had to make regular visits to the GPU offices. In Cherdyn M. had to go and report every three days. If one does not have to report, one may be either permitted or forbidden to travel in the region to which one has been exiled. In the autumn M. was called to the police and given identity papers with a permit to reside in Voronezh. The type of exile was thus the easiest—with identity papers! It was now that we learned what a privilege it is to have identity papers, a privilege not granted to everybody.

The granting of identity papers is an enormous event in the life of an exile, since it gives the illusion of having some rights as a citizen. The first few months of our life in Voronezh were marked by con­stant visits to the police to get a piece of paper known as a "tempo­rary permit." Seven or eight months running we had to renew this permit, which was valid for only one month at a time. A week before it expired, M. had to begin collecting the necessary docu­ments needed for its renewal: a note from the local housing de­partment to certify that he had been properly registered to live in such-and-such a house, references from the GPU and his place of work. There was no problem about the note from the GPU, since his standing with them was clear enough, but what was he to do about the second reference? At first he had to ask the local branch of the Union of Soviet Writers. This was never a straightforward proce­dure. The officials of the Union would gladly have made out any kind of certificate, but they were frightened, and some of them trembled at the thought of exercising their right to put the Union's stamp on a scrap of paper, in case they found themselves issuing a certificate to a bad writer. Every time the heads of the local branch applied to some higher authority for permission to issue a paper stat­ing that M. really was engaged in literary work. At first there was whispering, dark looks and much scurrying about, but once they received clearance from higher up, the Voronezh writers were all smiles: they, too, were glad when all ended well. Those were still comparatively innocent days.

Each piece of paper meant at least two visits to the relevant office: first to apply for it, and then to collect it. Often one had to come again because it wasn't yet ready. When they were ready, all these references had to be handed to the head of the identity-papers sec­tion of the local police, where there was always a long line. Two or three days later M. again had to stand in line there to collect his temporary identity paper, which then had to be taken next day and stamped with the residence permit. This meant standing in line once more at the appropriate window in the police station. Fortunately, the girl clerk who entered residence permits was very kind to M. Ignoring the murmurs of concierges fretting in the line with their enormous registers under their arms (all arrivals and departures had to be entered in them), she always called M. to the window straight­away and took his identity paper so that she could return it to him next morning, duly stamped, without his having to wait in line.

In the summer of 1935 M. was granted the favor of receiving an identity paper valid for three months, accompanied by a residence permit for the same period. This made our lives much easier, particu­larly since the lines for papers had lengthened considerably after the purge in Leningrad: the lucky ones, who had been sent no farther than Voronezh, now had to go through the lengthy ordeal of getting permits and papers to live there.

People who live in countries without identity papers will never know what joys can be extracted from these magic little documents. In the days when M.'s were still a precious novelty, the gift of a benevolent fate, Yakhontov came to Voronezh on tour. In Moscow M. and he had amused themselves by reading from the ration books which were used in the excellent store open only to writers. M. re­fers to this in his poem "The Apartment": "I read ration books and listen to hempen speeches." Now Yakhontov and M. did the same thing with their identity papers, and it must be said that the effect was even more depressing. In the ration book they read off the cou­pons solo and in chorus: "Milk, milk, milk . . . cheese, meat . . When Yakhontov read from the identity papers, he managed to put ominous and menacing inflections in his voice: "Basis on which is­sued . . . issued ... by whom issued . . . special entries . . . permit to reside, permit to reside, permit to reside . . ." Ration books reminded one of the literary fare that was doled out to us in the magazines and by the State publishing houses, and every time he opened Novy Mir [New World] or Krasnaya Nov, M. would say, "Today they're dishing out Gladkov" (or Zenkevich or Fadeyev). The line quoted above was intended in this double sense. Allusions to his identity papers are also to be found in M.'s verse: "Clutching in my fist a worn year of birth, herded with the herd, I whisper with my bloodless lips: I was born on the night between the second and third of January in the unreliable year of eighteen ninety something or other, and the centuries surround me with their fire."

Another amusement of this type (it was rather like a schoolboy thumbing his nose behind the teacher's back) took the form of a public stage performance by Yakhontov. In a turn entitled "Travel­ing Poets" he read passages from Pushkin's "Journey to Erzrum" and from Mayakovski in such a way as to suggest that poets could travel abroad only under the Soviet regime. The audience reacted with total indifference: nobody then imagined that anybody could travel abroad and as they left at the end of this baffling evening, the only comment they could manage was: "That's what comes of living too well." To keep his spirits up in the face of such an impassive audience, Yakhontov had to keep playing little tricks. At one point he would recite from Mayakovski's poem about the "Soviet Pass­port" and, taking his own identity papers from his pocket, brandish them in front of the audience, looking all the time straight at M. M. took his brand-new papers out of his pocket, and they exchanged knowing glances. The authorities would have taken a poor view of such antics, but they are very literal-minded, and there were no in­structions to cover cases of this kind.

Another thing about identity papers was that they gave rise to guessing games. Since every general renewal of people's papers was also the occasion for a quiet purge, I decided not to go to Moscow to renew mine, but to do it in Voronezh. The result of this was that I lost my right to live in the capital and did not recover it until twenty- eight years later. But in any case I had no hope of getting my Mos­cow papers renewed—where would I have got a reference about my employment, how would I have explained the whereabouts of my husband, in whose name the title to our Moscow apartment was made out? When we both got our brand-new Voronezh papers, we noticed that they had the same serial letters before the numbers. It was thought that these letters were a secret-police code indicating the category to which one belonged—i.e., that one was an exile or had been convicted of some offense. "Now you are really trapped," M. said, examining the numbers and serial letters. Our more optimistic friends consoled us by saying that it wasn't so, but rather that the police had forgotten that M. was an exile and failed to mark his papers accordingly. We were so convinced that all citizens were numbered and registered according to categories that it never oc­curred to any of us to doubt the significance of these letters and numbers. Not until a few years after M.'s death did it turn out that these serial numbers had no special significance—apart from showing that my frightened fellow citizens had imaginations more lively than even the GPU and the police.

We were not too upset by the loss of my Moscow residence per­mit. "If I return," M. said, "they'll register you as well. But until then they won't let you live there in any case." Sure enough, I was thrown out of the capital in 1938 and after that was allowed to come back only for brief periods of a month or so on academic business. At last Surkov proposed that I return ("you've been in exile long enough"). Throwing up my work, I returned to Moscow to move into the room offered me by the Union of Writers. I was kept hang­ing around for six months, and then Surkov informed me that there would be neither a room for me nor a permit to reside in the city. "They say that you left it of your own free will," he explained to me, adding that'he had no time to "talk with the comrades about you." And it is only now at last, in 1964, that I have suddenly been granted the right to live here. No end of people have written letters and pleaded on my behalf, but perhaps it has only happened now because a certain magazine[10] is about to print some of M.'s poems. This means that he has at last returned to Moscow. During thirty- two years not a line of his work has appeared in print. It is twenty- five years since his death, and thirty since his first arrest.

It really was a great relief when M. was given proper papers in Voronezh. The business of renewing the temporary ones not only took up a great deal of time, but was accompanied by constant anx­iety and speculation as to whether it would be issued or not. In the GPU office and the police station one heard the same conversations all the time: some complained to the man behind the window that they had been refused a permit to reside, others begged for it to be granted. But the official never argued—he just stretched out his hand for your application and told you when it had been turned down. Those who were refused permits to live in Voronezh had to move into the countryside, where it was impossible to earn one's living and conditions were unbearable. And every time we joined all the other people making the rounds of offices to get our bits of paper, we trembled in case we should be unlucky and be forced to move on in some unknown direction for reasons not revealed to us. "And clutch­ing in my fist a worn year of birth, herded with the herd . . ." When M. read these lines to Mikhoels, he took out his papers and held them in his clenched hand.

29 Doctors and Illnesses

_W

hen we first got to Voronezh, we stayed in the hotel. Those in charge of us evidently permitted this to exiles arriving at their destination, even when they had no papers. We were not actu­ally given rooms, only beds in rooms (separate for men and women) shared by a number of people. We were put on different floors, and I had to keep running up the stairs because I was worried about M.'s condition. But every day it got harder to climb the stairs. After sev­eral days my temperature shot up, and I realized I must be falling ill with spotted typhus, which I had no doubt picked up on the jour­ney. The first symptoms of spotted typhus are unmistakable and cannot be confused with anything else, certainly not with flu. But this meant many weeks in the hospital, in the isolation wing, and I kept picturing the scene of M. throwing himself out of the window. Hiding my temperature from him—it was still going up—I begged him to see a psychiatrist. "If that's what you want," he said, and we went together. M. described the whole course of his illness himself, and there was nothing for me to add. He was completely objective and lucid. He told the doctor that at moments of tiredness or distrac­tion he still had hallucinations. Most of all this happened when he was falling asleep. He said he now understood the nature of the voices and had learned to stop them with an effort of the will, but that in the hotel there were many irritants that made it difficult for him to fight his illness—it was very noisy, and he couldn't rest dur­ing the day. But the most unpleasant thing was the constant closing of doors, even though he knew they closed from the inside, not the outside.

Prison was ever-present to our minds. Vasilisa Shklovski cannot stand closed doors—because of all the time she spent in prison as a young woman, when she learned at first hand what it means to be closed in. And even people who had no experience of prison cells were not always free of this kind of association. When Yakhontov stayed in the same hotel during his visit to Voronezh a year and a half later, he immediately noticed how the keys ground in the locks. "Oho," he said, as we closed the door on leaving his room. "It's a different sound," said M., reassuringly. They understood each other perfectly. This is why M. is so insistent in his verse on the right to "breathe and open doors"—it was a right he was terrified of losing.

The psychiatrist was careful about what he said to us. We all sus­pected each other of being police spies, and there were many among people who had suffered like M.—a man who had undergone a psy­chological trauma was often incapable of resistance. But without waiting for M. to finish, the psychiatrist said that such "complexes" were very often observed in "psychostenic types" who spent any length of time in prison.

I then told the doctor about my own illness (at this moment M. understood my purpose in bringing him here and became terribly alarmed) and asked whether it wouldn't be best for M. to go into a clinic while I was in the hospital. The doctor replied that it would be perfectly all right to leave M. where he was since there were scarcely any traces left of his traumatic psychosis. He added that he had often observed the same condition among people exiled to Voronezh. It was caused by a few weeks, or even days, of imprison­ment, and always cleared up, leaving no trace. M. then asked him why it was that people got into this state after a few days in prison, whereas in the old days prisoners spent years in dungeons without being affected Eke this. The doctor only shrugged his shoulders.

But is it true that they were unaffected? Perhaps prison always causes mental trouble, if not psychological damage. Is this really a specific feature of our prisons? Or is it perhaps that before we go to prison our mental health is undermined by anxieties and brooding on "prison themes"? Nobody here is able to go into this question—and abroad the facts are not known, because we are only too good at keeping our secrets from the outside world.

I have heard that somebody abroad recently published his mem­oirs about life in a Soviet camp, and that the author was struck by the large number of mentally sick people he encountered among the prisoners. As a foreigner, he had lived in the Soviet Union in some­what special conditions, and his knowledge of our life was very su­perficial. The conclusion he reaches is that certain psychotic condi­tions are just not treated in this country, and that people suffering from them get sent to camps for infringement of discipline and other offenses caused by their illness. The percentage of mentally unbalanced people in the country is indeed enormous, and among those sentenced for hooliganism and petty theft there are, I believe, many psychotics, not to mention psychopaths. They are given sev­eral years for breaking into a store and stealing a few bottles of vodka, and when they come out they immediately do the same thing again and are sent back to prison and the labor camps for a good ten years. Under Stalin much less attention was paid to them, and far fewer of them went to the camps than nowadays. But the question remains as to why so many intellectuals and nervous or sensitive people in general are so strongly affected by their arrest and often fall prey to this mysterious trauma which quickly passes after their release. The foreign author of the book about the camps does not say where the prisoners he saw had become mentally sick, in prison or "outside." Nor does he say who they were—youths who had stolen to buy drink, or peaceful citizens. And were they psychopaths or were they suffering from the prison trauma I have described? All these questions will remain open, both for foreigners and for our­selves, until we are able to speak up about our past, present and fu­ture.

After I came out of the hospital, M. again went to see a psychia­trist, an eminent specialist who had come from Moscow to inspect the local lunatic asylum. M. went on his own initiative to tell him the story of his illness and to ask whether it might not be the conse­quence of some organic trouble. He mentioned that he had earlier noted in himself a tendency toward obsessive ideas—for instance, at times when he was in conflict with the writers' organization he could think of nothing else. Moreover, he actually was very sensitive to external shocks. I had noticed the same thing, incidentally, in M.'s two brothers. Though they were both of a very different make-up, they also tended to become obsessional about any difficult event in their lives.

The Moscow psychiatrist did an unexpected thing: he asked M. and me to walk around the wards with him. Afterward he asked whether M. thought he had anything in common with the patients he had seen in the clinic, and if so, how he would describe it: senility? schizophrenia? hysteria? They parted friends.

Nevertheless, without telling M., I went back to see the doctor myself next morning. I was worried in case the fearful things he had shown us the day before might produce a new shock in M. The doctor reassured me, saying that he had deliberately shown his pa­tients to M. because better knowledge of these things would help him to get over the painful memories of his own illness. As for M.'s nervous sensitivity and inability to withstand traumas, the psychia­trist saw nothing pathological about this: the traumas had been pretty severe, and one could only wish that there were fewer of them in our life.

I was now struck by the light-heartedness with which M. made fun of his illness and how quickly he managed to forget the days he had spent in a state of delirium. "Nadia," he said a month and a half after our arrival in Voronezh, complaining about a bad meal I had made for him, "I just can't eat stuff like this—I'm not out of my mind now, you know."

The only thing that seemed to me an aftereffect of his illness was an occasional desire he now had to come to terms with reality and make excuses for it. This happened in sudden fits and was always accompanied by a nervous state, as though he were under hypnosis. At such moments he would say that he wanted to be with every­body else, and that he feared the Revolution might pass him by if, in his short-sightedness, he failed to notice all the great things happen­ing before our eyes. It must be said that the same feeling was experi­enced by many of our contemporaries, including the most worthy of them, such as Pasternak. My brother Evgeni Yakovlevich used to say that the decisive part in the subjugation of the intelligentsia was played not by terror and bribery (though, God knows, there was enough of both), but by the word "Revolution," which none of them could bear to give up. It is a word to which whole nations have succumbed, and its force was such that one wonders why our rulers still needed prisons and capital punishment.

Fortunately, M. was only seldom overcome by these bouts of what is now called "patriotism," and once he had come to his senses he himself dismissed them as madness. It is interesting to note that in the case of people concerned with art or literature, total rejection of the existing state of affairs led to silence, while complete accept­ance had a disastrous effect on their work, reducing it to medioc­rity. Unfortunately, only their doubts were productive, but these brought down the wrath of the authorities on their heads.

Another factor which made for reconciliation with reality was simple love of life. M. had no taste for martyrdom, but the price one had to pay to live was much too high. By the time M. had decided to pay a first installment, it was in any case too late.

To come back to my own illness, I was put in the wing for spotted- typhus cases. I overheard the head doctor saying to some superin­tendent or other that I was very sick, and that I was "in the charge of" the secret police. At first I thought I must have imagined this in my delirium, but the doctor, who was to prove a good friend, later confirmed to me after my recovery that he really had said these words. Subsequently, during my wanderings around the country, I was often told by people connected (whether openly or secretly) with the secret police—officials of personnel departments and in­formers—that I was "in the charge of Moscow." What this meant I do not know. To understand it, one would have to learn more about the structure of the agency in whose charge I was. Personally, I think it is better not to be in anybody's charge, but I just cannot imagine how to achieve this. It would be interesting to know whether we were all accounted for in the same way, or only a select few of us.

The kindly woman doctor who looked after our ward told me that her husband, an agronomist, was at that time coming to the end of his sentence in a camp, to which he had been sent, together with many others of his profession, for allegedly poisoning the wells in his village. This is not the invention of a lively mind, but a fact. Later on, when I was better, and began making trips to Moscow, she gave me packages to mail to him in his camp. In those years such food parcels could be mailed only from Moscow, whereas nowadays they can be sent only from small provincial towns. For a number of years Emma Gerstein used to go out to all kinds of outlandish places, lug­ging heavy parcels which Akhmatova wanted mailed to her son Lev.

When the "poisoner of the wells" returned at the end of his sen­tence, we were invited to a party in his honor and toasted him in sweet wine while he sang songs in his soft baritone and rejoiced in his freedom. In 1937 he was arrested once more.

I got a lot of attention in the hospital from a nurse called Niura. Her husband worked at a flour mill. Once he had brought home a handful of grain for his hungry family and been sentenced to five years. The nurses greedily ate anything the typhus and dysentery patients left on their plates, and they were always talking about their misfortunes and poverty.

I came out of the hospital with a shaved head, and M. said that I looked like a real convict.

ЗО The Disappointed Landlord

_I

came back not to the hotel, but to a "room" which M. had man­aged to find to serve us as a temporary accommodation. It con­sisted of a glassed-over veranda in a large tumbledown house that belonged to the best cook in town. He had managed to hang on to it as a private owner because he was the chef in a "closed" restaurant in the exclusive category. In this connection, M. said to me that we might at last be able to find out who actually used these mysterious "closed" restaurants. In the spring of 1933, during a trip to the Cri­mea, we had been refused admittance to restaurants in Sebastopol and Feodosia, on the grounds that they were "of the closed type." But from the cook we learned nothing about it—for him it was no joking matter. He was a tired, sick old man who no longer had any appetite for food, and lived in one room of his house—all the others were occupied by tenants who for a long time had been paying him the nominal rent fixed by law. As the owner, he had to do all repairs at his own expense, and in summer he let the veranda just to make ends meet. His one hope was that the place might be pulled down or taken over by the housing department of the local Soviet, but no local Soviet in its right mind would want to saddle itself with a ruin like this. So the last private owner of a large house in Voronezh was miserably going to the dogs, and his only dream was to become an ordinary tenant in his own house, which would in any case soon be pulled down.

The Voronezh of 1934 was a grim place, badly off for food. Dis­possessed kulaks and peasants who had fled the collective farms begged in the streets. They stood by the bread stores and stretched out their hands. They had long since eaten their supplies of dry crusts brought with them in bags from their native villages. In the cook's house there was an old man called Mitrofan who was frantic with hunger. He wanted to get a job as a night watchman, but no­body would take him. He put this down to his name: "With a name like this they think I must have something to do with the church." In the middle of the city there was a half-ruined cathedral of St. Mitrofanius, and he was probably right. When we moved out of the house that winter, the old man hanged himself. With our departure his last means of earning a little money had gone: he had helped us to find our new room by bringing along old women who acted as go-betweens for owners of rooms, or corners of rooms (or simply beds), and potential customers.

One had to search for such accommodation in houses that were still privately owned or owned by the housing department of the local soviet. This was illegal and counted as speculation. Owners and tenants always hated each other even before they met. The tenants wanted to pick a quarrel as soon as possible so they would have an excuse to refuse to continue paying rent at a rate twenty times higher than what the housing department would have charged, and the owners, once they had made a few urgent repairs out of the rent money, suddenly began to feel they had sold their birthright for a mess of pottage and took fright in case their tenants might stay on for good. This, in fact, is what generally happened. Once he had his residence permit and had reached the end of the few months origi­nally agreed on, the tenant would make his own agreement with the housing committee (this often involved a little greasing of palms) and was given permanent title to the accommodation in question. This was in the case of housing run by the local soviet. In a privately owned place, the tenant just refused to move out, and since it was never possible to get a court order against him, he simply stopped paying rent. This was how most people eventually got a permanent place to live, and it was, so to speak, a natural process of re-distribu­tion of living space. As such, it was a much more passionate affair than the earlier phase of outright confiscation had been. It was at­tended by constant rows and scenes and the writing of mountains of denunciations, by means of which both tenants and owners sought to get rid of each other. Nowadays such things cannot happen be­cause living-space is rented out privately like this only to people who have no residence permit—a tenant in such a situation, living like a bird in a tree, cannot easily make any claims. The only scope left for trouble-making is for a neighbor to denounce a tenant who lives without a permit, but the authorities have begun to take a lenient view of such cases. Times have changed.

In Voronezh the most favored tenants were exiles. Since they were always under threat of being forced to move to some remoter place, the owner of the room they rented could always, in case of conflict, help this to come about. For this reason we got plenty of offers and M. was run off his feet looking at rooms in all kinds of hovels. But in fact it was a long time before we actually moved, because everybody wanted a year's rent in advance. The water was already freezing in our veranda when I went to Moscow to get some translating work to do. I obtained it with astonishing ease. Luppol had heard about our "miracle" and, certain he could give M. work without running any great risk, he was very glad to do so. We gave the advance on the translation to the owner of a small house on the outskirts of the city who had agreed to be paid for only six months ahead. Every journey into the city center was a nightmare—and we had to go in frequently to obtain references for the renewal of M.'s papers, to find jobs for him, and so forth. There were endless waits at the tram stops, and people hung from the cars like clusters of grapes. Before the war, city transport was in a terrible state, even in Moscow. That winter we also got to know the winds blowing from the steppes in all their fury. People in our sort of plight are particu­larly sensitive to cold, as we realized during all the recurrent periods of famine, war or exile.

It soon appeared that the owner of the house, an agronomist who wore high leather boots, had only taken us in because he thought he might make interesting contacts through us. "I thought you'd have writers like Kretova and Zadonski * coming to see you, and we'd all be dancing the rumba together," he complained in a hurt tone. To give expression to his disappointment in us, he burst into our room when we were visited by friends, such as Kaletski and Rudakov, and demanded to see their papers: "You're holding meetings here, and as the owner of the house I'm responsible." We threw him out and he went away sighing sadly. Once he cornered me and bemoaned his fate: "If only more decent people would come to see you." He could not return the money we had paid him in advance, and we just had to stay on for the whole six months. M. took it all with good humor: exiles had traditionally suffered at the hands of their land­lords. In the old days they denounced you to the police, and now it was to the GPU. But it seemed that our agronomist only threatened, and never actually went to report us. We had to be thankful for small mercies.

Our next room, which we occupied from April 1935 to February 1936, was in the city center, in a former lodging house where all kinds of shady types had settled. The police raided the place several times, looking for illegal vodka stills. Our young neighbor, a prosti­tute, adored M. because he always bowed to her on the street, and she often came with a pail of water to wash our floor. But she wouldn't take any money: "I'm doing it because I like you." An old Jewish woman who was bringing up three young grandchildren

^# Voronezh writers.

used to come in and complain about life in general. The owner of the place was trying to get rid of her and kept writing denunciations in which he accused her of prostitution. The old woman denied it, pointing to her age ("Who would need me?") and the small size of her room, where the three grandchildren slept all huddled together.

It was lucky that people who wrote denunciations were so uncon­cerned about plausibility and reported whatever came into their heads—until 1937 there had to be some element of truth. Denunci­ations were in fact a reflection of their writers' level, illustrating what flights of fantasy they were capable of. Our second Voronezh landlord was on the very lowest level. Once we were summoned to the GPU office, confronted with one of his denunciations, and asked to write an explanation. He had reported that we had been visited during the night by a suspicious type, and that the sound of shots had come from our room. The first part might just have got by, but the second part was hopeless. The visitor in question was Yakhontov, whose name was plastered up all over town on the billboards, and when he simply confirmed that he had sat up with us all night, that was the end of the matter.

The mere fact of being summoned in connection with a denunci­ation meant that it was not going to be used against you. This was shown by something that happened to me later—admittedly, after the fall of Yezhov when the terror had subsided. I was called out to the GPU section of the police station in Moscow, where after M.'s death I had managed to get a temporary permit to live in our old apartment. I was asked to explain a denunciation to the effect that I held meetings in my apartment during which there was counter­revolutionary talk. The only person who had visited me was Paster­nak—he came to see me immediately on hearing of M.'s death. Apart from him, nobody had dared to come and see me, as I explained to the secret-police official. In the upshot nothing much happened, ex­cept that I was asked to leave Moscow before my temporary permit had run out. This time I was being eased out by my temporary lodger, who had been moved in with us by the Union of Writers on the recommendation of Stavski. The man, whose name was Kos- tyrev, called himself a writer and sometimes hinted that he had rank equivalent to that of a general.

When after the Twentieth Congress they were going to give me a place to live in Moscow again, I was called to the Union of Writers and asked how I had come to lose my original apartment. I told them about Kostyrev. Ilyin, the official of the Union dealing with me, spent a long time going through lists of writers, but he could find no one of this name. Whether Kostyrev was a writer or a general, the fact is that he had used the standard technique of getting an apart­ment for himself. I believe that Kostyrev was trying to get out of the secret police into literature, but he probably didn't make it. The time when he moved into our apartment was a transition period for people with double careers and double missions.

Our landlord in Voronezh who thought he heard shooting in our room at night saw nothing shameful in his activities as an informer. He probably regarded himself as a useful member of society, a keeper of the peace. What his work was we could never make out. He never talked about it and we preferred not to inquire. He de­scribed himself as an "agent" and was always going out into the countryside on matters "concerning collectivization." At any event, he was very small fry—though even people like him were carefully chosen.

His wife, who was very young, almost a girl, and whom he had married to save her from the hard life of her dispossessed kulak fam­ily, had let the room to us during one of his prolonged absences in the countryside. She herself moved to the kitchen and sent the money received from us to her parents. Her huband thus had two ten­ants around his neck, but got no benefit from it. Though she had been "saved" by him, she kept him pretty firmly in hand. Judging by some of the talk that passed between them, she knew something about him that even in those brutal times would not have been taken lightly. Both to his face and behind his back she referred to him in the traditional way as a "Herod," and when she cursed him in choice language, he cringed in front of her. But, all the same, he could not put up with us, his tenants, and he played all the nasty tricks he could think of. For instance, he once came into our room holding a live mouse by the tail—the house swarmed with all kinds of vermin —and, greeting us from the doorway in brisk military fashion, he said: "Allow me to roast this." Then he started to walk over to our electric toaster, which had an open grill. He thought this kind of toaster was despicable—a bourgeois plaything which should be done away with, like the kulaks, and opposed by any honest Soviet citi­zen. Rudakov and Kaletski, who were always sitting around in our room, sprang to the mouse's defense, and the landlord, who was a fearful coward, retreated. From the neighboring room we could then hear his jibes about the intellectuals and their weak nerves—"I'll give them a real scare—I'll grill a cat on that toaster of theirs." The ex­traordinary thing was that he wasn't a drunkard and did all these things in a completely sober state. The mouse was his star turn.

When M. went to the rest home in Tambov, the "agent" threw all our things out of the room. They were gathered together and kept by the prostitute. When he returned, M. couldn't get into his room and had to go out and wait in the offices of the newspaper next door. Somebody rang up the nameless institution in which our landlord worked. In the evening he came to the newspaper office and said to M.: "You can go back—I've been told not to make trouble." This brought home to us the advantage of renting a room from a member of an institution which imposed military discipline on its employees. From that time on, the "agent" behaved like a lamb. When we moved out, he himself loaded our belongings into the cab. He was so delighted that he even crossed himself: he had never thought he would get rid of his unwelcome tenants so easily.

It was said that in 1937 he got rid of another tenant, but he didn't enjoy his triumph for long, because he was transferred to guard duty in a forced-labor camp.

During our three years in Voronezh we changed rooms five times. After leaving the "agent," we moved to an apartment belonging to a widow in a luxurious new building for engineers and technicians. She let two rooms simultaneously—one to us and the other to Duna- yevski, a young journalist. It was he who had arranged this splendid new place for us, but the widow had only agreed to it because she calculated that he would marry her. When it appeared that he had no intention of doing so, we had to move out to make room for another prospective husband.

The last of our rooms was in the tiny house of a seamstress who worked for the local theater. It seemed like heaven to us, a dream from a vanished past, a reward for all our tribulations. M. had taken them all quite calmly, but living at the seamstress' house, he came back to life.

The seamstress was a most ordinary sort of woman, friendly and good-humored. She lived with her mother, whom she called "Grandma," and her son Vadik, who was like all boys of his age. Her husband, a cobbler, had died a few years previously and some actors who had their shoes repaired by him had got his widow a job in the theater so she could feed her family. Since the cobbler had been a Party member, she managed also to get an allowance for her son. They lived, like everybody, on potatoes and "Grandma" kept a few hens in the outhouse. For them ten roubles was an enormous income. They had generally had actors living there, and she was fa­mous among them for her good nature. That is why they had sent us to her. Living in her house, we breathed freely again.

There were once many kind people, and even unkind ones pre­tended to be good because that was the thing to do. Such pretense was the source of the hypocrisy and dishonesty so much exposed in the realist literature at the end of the last century. The unexpected result of this kind of critical writing was that kind people disap­peared. Kindness is not, after all, an inborn quality—it has to be cultivated, and this only happens when it is in demand. For our gen­eration, kindness was an old-fashioned, vanished quality, and its ex­ponents were as extinct as the mammoth. Everything we have seen in our times—the dispossession of the kulaks, class warfare, the constant "unmasking" of people, the search for an ulterior motive behind every action—all this has taught us to be anything you like except kind.

Kindness and good nature had to be sought in remote places that were deaf to the call of the age. Only the inert had kept these quali­ties as they had come down from their ancestors. Everybody else had been affected by the inverted "humanism" of the times.

In the seamstress' house we lived quietly, like ordinary human be­ings, and we quite forgot that we had no place of our own. Later on, traveling in a car or a tram through the streets of some huge city or other, I often counted the windows as they flashed by, wondering why I could call none of them mine. I had grotesque dreams in which I saw enormous corridors, like covered streets, with doors leading off on either side. Now, I thought, the doors would open and I would be able to pick a room for myself. Sometimes I found dead relatives of mine inside, and this made me angry: Why are you living here, while I have to wander without a home? What Freud would dare to explain such dreams in terms of sexual repression, the Oedi­pus complex or similar monstrosities?

It has been said that Soviet citizens do not need to build houses for themselves because they have the right to demand a free apartment from the State. But whom does one demand it from? Even in my dreams I wondered about this, and always woke up before the bliss­ful moment of receiving the piece of paper entitling you to move into an apartment and get your residence permit. In Voronezh I lived on the illusion that I still had my own hard-won place in Mos­cow, something quite unique in its way. But I no longer have such illusions and am familiar with the laws under which I have no right to anything. And how many of us are there like me? Please don't think that I'm an exception. Our name is legion.

Future generations will never understand what "living-space" means to us. Innumerable crimes have been committed for its sake, and people are so tied to it that to leave it would never occur to them. Who could ever leave his wonderful, precious twelve and a half square meters of living-space? No one would be so mad, and it is passed on to one's descendants like a family castle, a villa or an estate. Husbands and wives who loathe the sight of each other, mothers-in- law and sons-in-law, grown sons and daughters, former domestic servants who have managed to hang on to a cubby-hole next to the kitchen—all are wedded forever to their living-space and would never part with it. In marriage and in divorce the first thing that arises is the question of living-space. I have heard men described as perfect gentlemen for throwing over their wives but leaving them the living-space. I have also heard of eligible girls with apartments, and of bachelors who want nothing more. Some clever women have been known to put on old clothes and hire themselves out to clean student dormitories, in exchange for a corner to live in. Here they would stay, putting up for years with curses and threats of eviction. Even faculty members brave insults to live in such places. I too could at one time have done this, and sat cooped up until late at night, listening to the women students singing and dancing. Often there were not enough places for them, and they had to sleep two to a bunk.

Your permit to reside went with your accommodation and if you lost it you could never return to the city you had lived in. For many people their apartments turned out to be real traps. The clouds were already gathering, their friends and colleagues were being picked up one after another, or, as we used to say, the shells were falling nearer and nearer, but the possessors of permanent titles to apartments stayed put for the police to come and get them. As they waited, they deluded themselves with the hope that this cup might for some rea­son pass from them. In this way they clung to the wretched dumps they called "apartments," and if they were self-contained ones in new buildings, the only way out—to complete the resemblance to a trap—was the window, since there were no back stairs. I knew only one woman who, during the expulsion of former aristocrats from Leningrad, was sensible enough to pack her things and flee to the provinces, thus keeping her record clean and avoiding a great many misfortunes.

I too was saved from arrest by not having a home. The only time I had living-space of my own was in 1933, when, under pressure from Bukharin, we were given our perch on the fifth floor of a building put up specially for writers. When M. was arrested a year later, we kept our right to the apartment, but, egged on by other writers liv­ing in the building, Mate Zalke (who was in charge of it) went per­sonally to the MGB to ask permission to make room for a "real" Soviet writer by throwing out M.'s old relative—that is, my mother. But the "miracle" was still in operation and his request was turned down with a comment to the effect that the writers should not be more royalist than the king. The fact that we had been left in posses­sion of the apartment gave me some hope that they might allow M. to go back to Moscow, but when it was needed, it was taken away and I was thrown out too, even though I did not count as an exile. If I had stayed there together with the literary general, my bones would long ago have moldered away in some common grave in a prison camp. After M.'s second arrest I kept on the move, and when they came to look for me in the room where we had last lived in Kalinin, they could not find me. That room I could not in any case have kept—it was in a private house and cost too much for me. So I was not caught in a trap, and because I was homeless they over­looked me. That is why I was able to survive and preserve M.'s poems.

And what would have happened if in the summer of 1937, after we left her house, some other tenant had moved in with the good seamstress and stopped paying her rent on getting a title to the room from the local soviet? Would she have done the same as the rest of them and gone to denounce him to the secret police ("My tenant holds illegal meetings and carries on counter-revolutionary talk . . . as a householder I regard it as my duty . . .")? Or would she have meekly given up the little extra she got to feed her mother and son? All I know is that her little house was destroyed during the war, and that something very different has been put up in its place.

31 Money

_A

t first we were materially better off in Voronezh than we had l ever been before. Impressed by the "miracle," the State Pub­lishing House gave us translation work. As my brother Evgeni put it, Moscow looked better after it burned down. I hastily translated some ghastly novel or other, and was immediately given a second contract. But in the winter of 1934-35 the persons responsible were evidently reprimanded for their kindness. I was summoned to Mos­cow for a talk about my "method of translation." The editor-in- chief was then Startsev. He spoke well of my methods, but after that the head of the translation section asked me to let him have the book back on the pretext that he had to see whether or not the novel should be abridged. I never saw the book (Nest of Simple Folk) again, and it soon came out in somebody else's translation. We were paid a little that was due to us under an old contract for a translation of Maupassant, and after that the flow of money from Moscow dried

^UP-

In search of work M. wrote innumerable applications, and also kept going to the local branch of the Union of Writers. The ques­tion of giving him work had been "posed in principle," as they used to say in those days. This meant that the Union of Writers, as the organization to which M. belonged, had asked for instructions "from above" and was still waiting for them. Neither M. nor I could ever get work without a great deal of preliminary fuss and delay. Even as late as 1955 I was able to take up a job in Cheboksary only after Surkov had been somewhere to get authorization and then, in my presence, phoned the result to the Minister of Education. But in 1934 no organization would give work to an exile without instructions "from above." This was because heads of departments wanted to guard against being held responsible for having a dubious person on their staff—though in times of increased "vigilance" it was no good referring to permission or authorization "from above," since such instructions were never given in writing. It was always done by a nod of the head, or by a mumbled remark over the phone: "Well, all right" or, at best, "You decide, we don't mind." There was never any trace of this in the records, and officials often paid dearly for cluttering up their staff with "alien elements." We had been "alien elements" for so many years that we knew only too well how this mechanism worked. We saw how it evolved with the passage of time as the State's power over the individual became more and more elab­orate. In the eight years since the Twentieth Congress things have changed radically—we are now living in a new era—but I am talking about the Stalin period and the various phases of the subjugation of literature as M. experienced them—it was essentially the same in other fields too, with only minor differences.

In 1922, when we returned from Georgia, all the literary month­lies still had M.'s name on their lists of potential contributors, but it became more and more difficult for him actually to publish any­thing. Typical in this respect was Voronski, who rejected every­thing. "What can I do?" complained the secretary, Sergei Antono- vich Klychkov. "He says it's not topical." In 1923 M.'s name was re­moved from all the lists of contributors to the literary magazines. Since it happened in all of them simultaneously, this can scarcely have been a coincidence. That summer there must have been some kind of ideological conference at which the process of dividing writers into friend and foe had begun. In the winter of 1923-24 Bukharin, who was then editing the magazine Prozhektor [Search­light] said to M.: "I cannot publish your verse—let me have some translations." It seems likely that the restriction applied at first only to magazines, since a book of verse (the Second Book) acquired by a publisher in 1922 actually appeared the following year, but two years later Narbut, who managed the Land and Factory Publishing House, said the same thing as Bukharin: "I can't publish you, but I can give you all the translating you like." By this time everybody was saying that M. had given up poetry for translation. M. was very upset when the emigre paper Nakanune [On the Eve][11] echoed our press in putting this story about. Things were in general very diffi­cult just then: "They will only let me translate," M. complained.

But even this was not plain sailing. Apart from the fact that there was a lot of competition, M. was not among those who were being "looked after" on special instructions, and from the second half of the twenties it became much harder to obtain translating work, so that his right to a livelihood was always being contested. Nothing came of his books for children either. Marshak made a terrible mess of Balloons and The Tramcar, and only the poverty-stricken private publishers, while they still existed, offered some kind of outlet. M. was able to print a few articles in the provinces (in Kiev) and in theatrical magazines. There was evidently not yet a total ban—it was rather a question of restrictions and "recommendations" to be more in step with the times. A new stage in the struggle for the "purity of the line" was opened in 1930 by Stalin's article in Bolshevik in which he called for a complete prohibition of unsuitable works. I was working at that time on the magazine For a Communist Education, and from snatches of conversation in the editor's office I realized that the sniping phase was over and we were now in for a general offen­sive. M. still managed to get a few poems printed, but for publishing his "Journey to Armenia" in Zvezda [Star] one of the editors, Cae­sar Volpe, lost his job—he knew, incidentally, the risk he was taking. The screws were gradually being tightened. M. and Akhmatova were the first to feel the effects of Stalin's rule, but everybody else soon learned as well. Many found all the new restrictions to their advantage—these are the ones who even now would like to see a return to the past, and are still fighting to maintain their own previ­ous positions and keep the old prohibitions in force.

During the period of M.'s exile there could be no question at all of his publishing any original work, and neither was he given transla­tions any more. Even his name was no longer mentionable—during all those years it cropped up only once or twice in denunciatory articles. Now his name is no longer banned, but, from force of habit, people don't mention it, and in Kochetov's circles people are moved to fury by it. Not for nothing was Ehrenburg attacked mainly for the passages about M. and Akhmatova in his memoirs.

In the winter of 1937-38 there was no work of any kind to be had, and I was unable to get a job again until 1939, when it was an­nounced that the wives of prisoners still had the right to work. But in periods of "vigilance" I was always thrown out. Since all work is in the hands of the State, the only thing one can do is "scream under the Kremlin walls." * Private means of subsistence scarcely existed. If you had your own house and plot of land, you could grow vegeta­bles and keep a cow (but for hay you depended on the authorities); you could do dressmaking at home—until the tax inspector caught up with you; or you could take in typing, but before the war type­writers were very expensive. Finally, you could beg, but this was not easy because only the faithful servants of the regime had money to spare, and they were not the sort to compromise themselves by con­tact with outcasts.

Of all these means the one we chose was to "scream"—as long as it

* Quoted from Akhmatova's "Requiem." was possible. M. badgered the local branch of the Writers' Union in Voronezh, and I went to Moscow to talk with Union officials there —while they would still see me—such as Marchenko, Shcherbakov and other grandees. They wore inscrutable expressions and never answered any of my questions, but they nevertheless made some kind of inquiries "higher up." In the first winter after his exile, M.'s pension was stopped. I tried to get it restored, pleading with Shcher­bakov on the grounds that M.'s "services to Russian literature" could not be denied, and that it was therefore wrong to take the pension away. My eloquence was wasted on Shcherbakov, who replied: "What sort of services to Russian literature can there be if Mandel­stam has been exiled for his works?" Like everybody else, I had lost all sense of normal legal standards, and I am still curious to know whether it is in order to deprive someone of his pension if he has been sentenced to exile without loss of civil rights.

I deliberately referred to Shcherbakov and his like as "grandees." Our officials were now even of a different physical type. Until the middle of the twenties we had been dealing with former members of the old revolutionary underground and their younger assistants of a similar type. They were brusque, utterly self-righteous, and often ill- mannered, but they loved to hold forth and argue. There was about them something of the seminarists and Pisarev. Gradually they were replaced by round-headed, fair-haired types in embroidered Ukrainian shirts who affected a cheerful familiarity, cracked jokes and liked to be taken for bluff, straightforward fellows. It was all completely put on. These were superseded in their turn by diplo­mats who weighed every word, never gave anything away or made any promises, but at the same time tried to create the impression that they were men of power and influence. One of the first func­tionaries of this kind was Shcherbakov. When I first came to see him, we were both silent for a few minutes. I wanted him to speak first, but it didn't work: he was very much the dignitary waiting for the humble petitioner to make her request. I raised the question of publishing M.'s work, though I knew this was quite hopeless. He replied that the only criterion for publication was the quality of an author's work, and since Л1. was not being printed, it could only mean that his work did not pass the test. The same thing, only with a less practiced inflection of the voice, was said to me by Marchenko. Only once did Shcherbakov betray any feeling. This was when he asked me what M. was writing about now, and I replied: "About the Kama River." He misheard this and half smiled: "About the guerril­las?" But the smile disappeared when I explained that it was not about the Civil War partisans. "What is he writing about the Kama for?" he asked. The idea seemed grotesque to him. The way his face had lit up for a moment suggested that they probably expected M. to com­pose hymns of praise and were surprised he was not doing so. On this step he decided only in 1937, but by then it was too late to help him.

In the end, M. and I did manage to break through the blank wall— thanks to our joint efforts, he was given work in the local theater as its "literary director." He had little idea of what he was supposed to do, and in practice it just meant gossiping with the actors, with whom he got on very well. We were also able to make a little money out of the local broadcasting station—anonymous work of this kind was permitted even to exiles, though only in relatively quiet periods, when the word "vigilance" was not constantly appearing in the newspapers. We worked on several broadcasts together: "Goethe as a Young Man," "Gulliver for Children." M. often wrote the pro­gram notes for concerts, notably for a performance of Gluck's Or­pheus and Eur у dice. He was very pleased when he walked along the street and heard his story of Eurydice coming over all the loud­speakers. It was at this time that he did his free versions of some Neapolitan songs for a contralto also living as an exile in Voronezh.

But even in this comparatively prosperous Voronezh period it was still difficult for us to get by. The theater paid 300 roubles a month, which just covered our rent (we paid between 200 and 300 for the various miserable rooms we lived in) and perhaps cigarettes as well. The radio also brought in between 200 and 300, and I sometimes made a little extra by advising the local newspaper on literary works submitted to them for publication. Altogether it was enough to keep us going in food. We lived mainly on cabbage soup and eggs. We could afford tea and butter, but canned fish was a rare luxury. Some­times we let ourselves go and bought a bottle of Georgian wine. On top of everything, we also managed to feed Sergei Borisovich Ruda- kov—his wife sent him 50 roubles a month, but this was exactly what it cost him to rent the bunk in which he slept. This was during the year spent in the "agent's" house, when we had visitors nearly all the time—actors from the local theater were always coming to see us, or musicians on tour. Voronezh was one of the few provincial cities with their own symphony orchestras, and anyone on tour al­ways passed through it. M. used to go not only to the concerts, but also to the rehearsals: he was fascinated by the fact that each con­ductor had a different way of working with the orchestra, and he wanted to write a piece about conductors, but nothing came of it— he never got around to it. When Leo Ginzburg and his namesake Grigori came to Voronezh on a concert tour, they spent a lot of time with us, and added variety to our meals by bringing with them cans of the fruit preserves they liked so much. Maria Veniaminovna Yudina went out of her way to give concerts in Voronezh so she could see M. and play for him. Once, when we happened to be away in the country, the singer Migai came to see us, and we were very sorry to miss him. Visits like these were great events in our life, and M., with his sociable nature, couldn't have lived without them.

Our relatively prosperous life came to an end in the autumn of 1936 after our return from a trip to Zadonsk. The local radio was abolished, as part of a move to centralize all broadcasting, the theater folded, and our newspaper work also dried up. Everything collapsed at once. Going over all the possible private means of making a liveli­hood, M. now decided we should try keeping a cow. But this dream faded when we realized that a cow wasn't much good without hay.

Hard as it was even during the days of relative comfort, our life in Voronezh was happier than any we had ever known. M. was very fond of the town itself. He liked everything connected with borderlands, and what interested him about Voronezh was that in Peter the Great's time it had been a frontier town—it was here that Peter had built his Azov flotilla. In Voronezh M. could still sense the free spirit of the borderlands, and he listened with fascination to the local speech, which was still Southern Russian, not Ukrainian— the dividing line between the two languages ran a little to the south of Voronezh. In the nearby village of Nikolskoye, M. wrote down the names of the streets—though they had been given new Soviet ones, the inhabitants still remembered the old ones. The people of the vil­lage were proud of their descent from outcasts and runaway con­victs of Peter's time, and the streets were called after the different kinds of criminal: Strangler's Lane, Embezzler's Lane, Counterfeit­er's Row, etc. The diary with M.'s notes of this period was confis­cated during his second arrest, and I have now forgotten the old Russian terms which came so naturally to the people of Nikolskoye. They were sectarians of the kind known as "jumpers" and composed religious ballads of a traditional type about their unsuccessful at­tempts to leap up to heaven. Not long before we visited it, the vil­lage had been the scene of dramatic events. The sectarians had fixed a day on which they would take off for heaven, and, convinced that by next morning they would no longer be of this world, they gave away all their property to their earthbound neighbors. Coming to their senses when they fell to the ground, they rushed to recover their belongings, and a terrible fight broke out. The most recent ballad which we were able to get from them told about a "jumper" saying goodbye to his beloved beehive before giving it away. M. remembered the lines by heart and often recited them. The "jumper" in the ballad didn't want to fly up to heaven, and was happy enough on earth with his beehives, his house, his wife and children.

In winter Voronezh was like a vast field of ice, and one was always slipping—as Akhmatova says in her poem: "Gingerly I tread on glass. . . ." By this time not even the big cities always had their proper complement of janitors to clear away the snow with shovels and sprinkle sand on the sidewalks. M. was not worried by ice and wind, and at times he was entranced by the town. But as often as not he cursed it and longed to get away. What irked him was the feeling of being confined, as though he had been locked in a room. "By na­ture, I'm the sort who is always waiting for things," he said once, "and so they have to send me to Voronezh and make me wait for some­thing here." And, true enough, our life there consisted of nothing but waiting—for money, for answers to all our letters and petitions, for a propitious nod from on high, for salvation. But, all the same, I have never known a man who lived so greedily for the passing hours as M. He seemed to have an almost physical sense of time, of the minutes which compose it. In this respect he was the exact opposite of Ber- diayev, who says somewhere that he could never abide time and that all the anguish of waiting is longing for eternity. It seems to me that for any artist eternity is something tangibly present in every fleeting fraction of time, which he would gladly stop and thus make even more tangible. What causes anguish in an artist is not longing for eternity, but a temporary loss of his feeling that every second of time is, in its fullness and density, the equal of eternity itself. An­guish such as this naturally gives rise to concern with the future, and M. willy-nilly became "the sort who is always waiting for things." In Voronezh this side of M. developed just as much as his acute sense of the passing moment, and when anguish came upon him he wanted to rush off into the blue—but he couldn't because he was firmly tied to the spot. He was like a bird that could not stand its cage, and he was always collecting various documents in support of applications to go to Moscow for a few days—to have some glands removed (though he had never had trouble with them before) or to put his "literary affairs" in order (quite forgetting that he had no "literary affairs"). Of course he could not get permission to make the trip. In response to his sighs, Akhmatova and Pasternak even went to see Katanian to ask whether he could be transferred to another town. This request was also turned down. Katanian's office, always open to visitors, existed only for the purpose of receiving requests that were unfailingly turned down. So M. spent the whole of his three years in the Voronezh region, except for one visit beyond the boundary to Tambov, where he stayed very briefly in a rest home. He also made several journeys round the Voronezh area on assign­ments from the local newspaper, and once we were able to have a little vacation in Zadonsk. This was possible because Akhmatova had got 500 roubles from Pasternak for us, and when she added 500 of her own, we felt so rich that we stayed in Zadonsk for six weeks.

M.'s attempts to break loose ended in the summer of 1936 when we heard over the radio in Zadonsk about the trials then being pre­pared—an ominous sign that our life had entered a new phase. 1937 was approaching. By this time M. was very ill with something the doctors did not want or were unable to diagnose. He had bouts of what looked like angina pectoris. Although he had difficulty breath­ing, he went on with his work. Perhaps it was as well that he con­sumed himself like this—if he had been physically healthy, his later suffering would only have been more protracted.

It was a terrible road that stretched ahead of him, and, as we now know, the only possible deliverance was death. People of M.'s gener­ation—and of mine, for that matter—no longer had anything to live for. He would not have lived to see even the comparatively good times since Stalin's death which Akhmatova and I regard as bliss. I realized this at the end of the forties and the beginning of the fifties, when most people who had returned from the camps after the end of their sentences (including many who had fought in the war) were sent back to them again. "M. did well to die straightaway," said Kazarnovski,* who met M. in a transit camp and then spent ten years in Kolyma. Could we ever have believed such a thing in Voro­nezh? We probably imagined that the worst was behind us, or, rather, like other doomed people, we tried not to peer into the fu­ture. We slowly prepared for death, lingering over every minute and relishing it, to keep the taste on our lips, because Voronezh was a miracle and only a miracle could have brought us there.

^# A journalist whose evidence about Mandelstam's last days is discussed in the final chapters.

32 The Origins of the Miracle

_I

n his letter to Stalin, Bukharin added a postscript saying he had been visited by Pasternak, who was upset by the arrest of Man­delstam. The purpose of this postscript was clear: it was Bukharin's way of indicating to Stalin what the effect of M.'s arrest had been on public opinion. It was always necessary to personify "public opin­ion" in this way. You were allowed to talk of one particular individ­ual being upset, but it was unthinkable to mention the existence of dissatisfaction among a whole section of the community—say, the intelligentsia, or "literary circles." No group has the right to its own opinion about some event or other. In matters of this kind there are fine points of etiquette which nobody can appreciate unless he has been in our shoes. Bukharin knew how to present things in the right way, and it was the postscript at the end of his letter that explained why Stalin chose to telephone Pasternak and not someone else.

Their conversation took place at the end of July, when M.'s sen­tence had already been commuted, and Pasternak told a lot of people about it—Ehrenburg, for instance, who was in Moscow at the time and whom he went to see the same day. But for some reason he said not a word about it to anyone directly involved—that is, to me, my brother Evgeni, or Akhmatova. True, on the same day he did ring Evgeni, who already knew about the revision of the sentence, but only to assure him that everything would be all right. He said no more than this, and Evgeni, thinking his words were simply an ex­pression of his optimism, attached no particular importance to them. I myself only learned about Stalin's call to Pasternak several months later when I came to Moscow from Voronezh a second time after being ill with typhus and dysentery. In casual conversation Shengeli asked me whether I had heard the story about Stalin's telephone call to Pasternak, and whether there was anything in it. Shengeli was convinced that it was just a figment of somebody's imagination if Pasternak himself had not told me anything about it. I decided, how­ever, to go to the Volkhonka* and see Pasternak, since there is never smoke (and what smoke!) without fire. Shengeli's story was con­firmed down to the last detail. As he told me about the conversation, Pasternak reproduced everything said by Stalin and himself in direct speech. It was just the same as what Shengeli had told me—evidently Pasternak had told it to everybody in identical terms and the version

* A street in Moscow.

going around Moscow was entirely accurate. This is how Pasternak told me the story:

Pasternak was called to the phone, having been told beforehand who wished to speak with him. He began by complaining that he couldn't hear at all well because he was speaking from a communal apartment and there were children making a noise in the corridor. The time had not yet come when such a complaint would have been taken as a request—to be granted by way of a miracle—for an imme­diate improvement in one's living conditions. It was simply that Pasternak began any telephone conversation with this complaint. Whenever he was talking on the phone to one of us, Akhmatova and I would quietly ask the other—whichever of us happened to be on the phone with him: "Has he stopped carrying on about the apart­ment yet?" He talked with Stalin just as he would have talked with any of us.

Stalin began by telling Pasternak that Mandelstam's case had been reviewed, and that everything would be all right. This was followed by a strange reproach: why hadn't Pasternak approached the writ­ers' organizations, or him (Stalin), and why hadn't he tried to do something for Mandelstam: "If I were a poet and a poet friend of mine were in trouble, I would do anything to help him."

Pasternak's reply to this was: "The writers' organizations haven't bothered with cases like this since 1927, and if I hadn't tried to do something, you probably would never have heard about it." Paster­nak went on to say something about the word "friend," trying to define more precisely the nature of his relations with M., which were not, of course, covered by the term "friendship." This digres­sion was very much in Pasternak's style and had no relevance to the matter in hand. Stalin interrupted him: "But he's a genius, he's a genius, isn't he?" To this Pasternak replied: "But that's not the point." "What is it, then?" Stalin asked. Pasternak then said that he would like to meet him and have a talk. "About what?" "About life and death," Pasternak replied. Stalin hung up. Pasternak tried to get him back, but could only reach a secretary. Stalin did not come to the phone again. Pasternak asked the secretary whether he could talk about this conversation or whether he should keep quiet about it. To his surprise, he was told he could talk about it as much as he liked— there was no need at all to make a secret of it. Stalin clearly wanted it to have the widest possible repercussions. A miracle is only a mira­cle, after all, if people stand in wonder before it.

Just as I have not named the one person who copied down M.'s poem about Stalin, because I believe he had nothing to do with the denunciation and arrest of M., so there is one remark made by Pas­ternak in this conversation which I do not wish to quote since it could be held against him by people who do not know him. The remark in question was entirely innocent, but it had a slight touch of Pasternak's self-absorption and egocentrism. For those of us who knew him well, it just sounded faintly comic.

Everybody could now clearly see what miracles Stalin was capable of, and it was to Pasternak that the honor had fallen not only of spreading the good tidings all over Moscow, but also of hearing a sermon in connection with it. The aim of the miracle was thus achieved: attention was diverted from the victim to the miracle- worker. It was extraordinarily symptomatic of the period that, in discussing the miracle, nobody thought to ask why Stalin should have rebuked Pasternak for not trying to save a friend and fellow poet while at the same time he was calmly sending his own friends and comrades to their death. Even Pasternak had not thought about this aspect, and he winced slightly when I raised it with him. My contemporaries took Stalin's sermon on friendship between poets completely at its face value and were ecstatic about a ruler who had shown such warmth of spirit. But M. and I couldn't help thinking of Lominadze, who was recalled to Moscow for his execution while we were in Tiflis talking with him about the possibility of M. staying there to work in the archives. And apart from Lominadze, there were all the others whose heads had rolled by this time. There were already very many, but even now people still stubbornly continue to reckon only from 1937, when Stalin supposedly went to the bad all of a sudden and began to destroy everybody.

Pasternak himself was very unhappy about his talk with Stalin, and to many people, including me, he lamented his failure to follow it up with a meeting. He was no longer worried about M., since he had complete faith in Stalin's word that he would be all right. This made him feel his own failure all the more keenly. Like many other people in our country, Pasternak was morbidly curious about the recluse in the Kremlin. Personally, I think it was lucky for him that he did not meet Stalin, but at the time all this happened there was a good deal we did not yet understand—we still had much to learn. This was another extraordinary feature of the times: why were people so dazzled by absolute rulers who promised to organize heaven on earth, whatever it might cost? Nowadays it would never occur to anyone to doubt that in their confrontation with Stalin it was M. and Pasternak who came out on the side of right, displaying both moral authority and a proper sense of history. But at the time Pasternak was very upset by his "failure" and himself told me that for a long time afterward he could not even write poetry. It would have been quite understandable if Pasternak had wanted, as it were, to touch the sores of the era with his own hands, and, as we know, he subsequently did so. But for this he had no need of any meetings with our rulers. At that time, however, I believe that Pasternak still regarded Stalin as the embodiment of the age, of history and of the future, and that he simply longed to see this living wonder at close quarters.

Rumors are now being spread that Pasternak lost his nerve during the talk with Stalin and disowned M. Not long before his final illness I ran into him on the street and he told me about this story. I sug­gested we both make a written record of his conversation, but he didn't want to. Perhaps things had now taken such a turn for him that he no longer had any time for the past.