Hope Against Hope

How can Pasternak possibly be accused of such a thing—particu­larly since Stalin started off by telling him he had already exercised mercy? According to the present rumors, Stalin asked Pasternak to vouch for M., but Pasternak supposedly refused to do so. Nothing of this kind happened, and the question of it never even arose.

When I gave M. an account of the whole business, he was entirely happy with the way Pasternak had handled things, particularly with his remark about the writers' organizations not having bothered with cases like this since 1927. "He never said a truer word," M. said with a laugh. The only thing that upset him was that the conversation had taken place at all. "Why has Pasternak been dragged into this? I have to get out of it myself—he has nothing to do with it." Another com­ment of M.'s was: "He [Pasternak] was quite right to say that whether I'm a genius or not is beside the point. . . . Why is Stalin so afraid of genius? It's like a superstition with him. He thinks we might put a spell on him, like shamans." * And yet another remark: "That poem of mine really must have made an impression, if he makes such a song and dance about commuting my sentence."

Incidentally, it's by no means certain how things might have ended if Pasternak had started praising M. to the skies as a genius— Stalin might have had M. killed off on the quiet, like Mikhoels, or at least have taken more drastic measures to see that his manuscripts were destroyed. I believe that they have survived only because of the constant attacks on M. as a "former poet" by his contemporaries

* Shaman: Siberian witch doctor.

in LEF and among the Symbolists.* As a result, the authorities felt that M. had been so discredited and was such a has-been that they did not bother to track down his manuscripts and stamp them out completely. All they did was to burn whatever came into their hands —this, they thought, was quite enough. If they had been led to think more highly of M.'s poetry, neither his work nor I would have sur­vived. It would have been a case, as they say, of scattering our ashes to the winds.

The version of the telephone call from Stalin that has been told abroad is completely absurd. According to accounts published there, M. supposedly read his poem at a party in Pasternak's apartment, after which the poor host was "summoned to the Kremlin and given hell." Every word of this shows a total ignorance of our life— though one might well ask how any outsider could be expected to have enough imagination to picture the extent of our bondage! No­body would have dared to breathe a word against Stalin, let alone read a poem like that "at a party." This is the sort of thing that only a provocateur would do, but even a provocateur would scarcely have dared to recite a poem against Stalin at a party. And then, no­body was ever summoned to the Kremlin for questioning. One was invited to the Kremlin for gala receptions and the ceremonial award of decorations. The place for interrogations was the Lubianka, but Pasternak was not asked to go there in connection with M. Indeed, Pasternak came to no harm at all as a consequence of his talk with Stalin, and it is not necessary to feel sorry for him because of this particular episode. One final point: it so happens that we never vis­ited Pasternak at his home, and we saw him only when he came to see us from time to time. This arrangement suited us very well.

3 з The Antipodes

_I

n certain respects M. and Pasternak were antipodes, but since antipodes are by definition located at opposite poles of the same sphere, it is possible to draw a line between them. In other words, they had common features and qualities that united them. Neither of them could ever have been the antipode of, say, Fedin, Oshanin or Blagoi.

* For LEF and Symbolists, see page 419.

There are two poems of M.'s which seem to be in the nature of rejoinders to Pasternak—one occasioned by some lines of Pasternak's, and the other by an unfinished conversation between them. First I will tell about the second poem—the one beginning "The apartment is quiet as paper." It was written in response to an almost casual re­mark by Pasternak. He had looked in to see how we were getting on in our new apartment in Furmanov Street. As he was leaving, he lingered for quite a time in the entrance, saying how wonderful it was: "Now you have an apartment, you'll be able to write poetry," he said as he finally went out.

"Did you hear what he said?" M. asked me. He was furious. He couldn't stand it when people blamed their inability to work on ex­ternal circumstances, such as bad living conditions or lack of money. It was his profound conviction that nothing should prevent an artist from doing what he had to do, and, conversely, that material com­fort was not in itself a stimulus to work—though he wasn't against comfort as such and would not himself have turned up his nose at it. At that time, as we saw all around us, there was furious competition among the writers for the good things of life, among which the greatest prize of all was an apartment. A little later country villas were also handed out "for services rendered." Pasternak's words touched M. to the quick: he cursed the apartment and said it should go to one of those it was intended for: "the worthy traitors, the portrait-painters," and all the other time-servers. This curse he pro­nounced on our apartment does not mean that he thought it better to be homeless—he was simply expressing his horror at the price one was expected to pay. We got nothing—apartments, villas or money —without paying the price.

In Pasternak's novel [Dr. Zhivago] there is also some concern with apartments, or, rather, with the writing table that a creative person supposedly needs for his work. Pasternak could not do with­out his writing table—he could only work with pen in hand. But M. composed his verse in his head, while walking around, and only needed to sit down briefly to copy out the result. Even in their man­ner of working they were antipodes. M. would scarcely have wanted to assert the poet's special claims to a writing table at a time when the whole nation was utterly deprived of basic needs.

The second poem connected with Pasternak is the one beginning "It's night outside. . . ." This is a reply to those lines of Pasternak where he says: "Rhyme is not the echoing of line-ends, but a cloak­room check, the ticket for a seat by the columns." This is a clear allusion to the main auditorium of the Moscow Conservatory, to which people like us were always admitted even if we didn't have tickets, and was thus symbolic of the privileged social position of the poet. In his reply M. renounced his "seat by the columns." In his attitude toward worldly goods and his refusal to come to terms with the age he lived in, M. was much closer to Tsvetayeva than to Pas­ternak. But with Tsvetayeva the rejection was more abstract, whereas for M. it was a head-on collision with something more precisely defined, the shape of which he knew fairly well, just as he knew the nature of his quarrel with it.

As early as 1927 I remember once saying to Pasternak: "Watch out, or they'll adopt you." He often reminded me of these words— for the last time thirty years later, after Dr. Zhivago had appeared. During our conversation in 1927—I was comparing him with M.—I said that he [Pasternak] was a domesticated creature of a familiar Moscow type, very much attached to the comforts of home and his dacha in the country. Thanks to this "Muscovite" quality, I contin­ued, our literary bigwigs understood him very well and they would be glad to come to terms with him, but he was bound nevertheless to break with them—because they were set on a course he could never accept. I then said that M., on the other hand, was a nomad, a wan­derer, whom the walls of Moscow houses could never hold. Later I realized that it was not quite like this, and that M. was deliberately being made into a nomad, whether he liked it or not. As for Paster­nak, I was not trying to be a Cassandra—it was simply that I had come up against the facts of life a little earlier than he, just as the housekeeper in the Cherdyn hospital had seen many things before I had. In any case, I have noticed that sooner or later everybody's eyes are opened, even though many won't admit it. At one of our very last meetings Pasternak reminded me of how I had prophesied his break with his fellow writers.

In the cases of both Pasternak and M., destiny was hatched from character, like a butterfly from its chrysalis. Both were doomed to be rejected by the literary establishment, but whereas Pasternak, for a time at any rate, sought points of contact with it, M. always shied away. Seeking for a stable life, particularly in the material sense, Pasternak knew that the path to it lay through membership in the literary community, and he never shunned it or tried to leave it. Like his creator, Dr. Zhivago is a poet, but he becomes a literary outcast only because Pasternak had seen that his own break with the world of Soviet literature was inevitable.

As a young man Pasternak had given much thought to the ques­tion of what form of literature would assure him of a stable situation in life. In a letter to M. he wrote that he had once considered becom­ing an editor. Of course this was sheer fantasy on the part of the still unfledged Pasternak, but even in their fantasies he and M. were strik­ingly unlike each other. All his life M. refused to have anything to do with the literary profession as such—such things as translating, editing, going to meetings in Herzen House or making the sort of pronouncements expected of writers. None of this was for him. Pas­ternak was drawn to all these things, while M. was repelled by them. The world of literature treated them both accordingly, smiling on Pasternak (at least to begin with) and seeking, right at the start, to destroy M. Fadeyev once said to me, as he glanced through some of M.'s poems, "You know, Pasternak is not one of us either, but all the same he is a little closer to us and we can come to terms with him in some things." At that time Fadeyev was editor of Krasnaya Nov and M. was already under a ban. I had taken the poems to Fadeyev on behalf of M., who was ill. These were the poems which are now gathered in the "First Voronezh Notebook." Fadeyev paid no atten­tion to the "Wolf" poem or any other of that cycle. His eye was caught only by one eight-line poem in which the twinkling stars in the night sky are compared to officials sitting up late writing their reports. Fadeyev noted that the word for "reports" (rapportichki in Russian) was spelled with two "p's." "Why is it with two 'p's'?" he asked, but then suddenly realized that it was a dig at RAPP.* He shook his head and handed the poems back to me with the words: "Things are easier with Pasternak—he only writes about nature." But, of course, it was not just a question of subject matter—the fact was that Pasternak had some points of contact with the traditional world of literature, and consequently with such things as RAPP, whereas M. had none whatsoever. Pasternak wanted to be friendly, while M. turned his back on them. There is no point in debating which of them was right, this is not the issue. But it is noteworthy that at the end of their lives both of them acted in ways quite at variance with the whole of their previous stands. While Pasternak, by writing Dr. Zhivago and publishing it abroad, put himself in open conflict with the Soviet literary world, M. was ready to seek a rapprochement with it—only, as it turned out, he had left it too late. In essence it was an attempt by M. to save himself when the noose

* The Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, of which Fadeyev was a leading member. See page 419.

had already been put around his neck, but the fact remains that it was made. What happened with Akhmatova was a little different— they got what they wanted by keeping her son Lev as a hostage. If it hadn't been for this, her "positive" verse would never have been written.*

In one thing Pasternak was consistent throughout his life: in his feelings about the intelligentsia, or rather those members of it for whom the Revolution meant the end of gracious living and the de­struction of their peaceful mode of life. He virtually ignored the situation of the intelligentsia as a whole—university teachers, for in­stance, with their commonplace notions were not considered worthy of Zhivago's friendship. It was the destruction of the way of life of such intellectuals as Zhivago that concerned him, and he put the blame for it on the revolt of the ordinary people. Pasternak would have liked to see a protective wall between the intelligentsia and the people. Who is Zhivago's mysterious younger brother, Evgraf, the man of aristocratic appearance with the slanting Kirgiz eyes, who always arrives like a good genie with food supplies, money, advice, patronage and help? "The mystery of his power remained unex­plained," says the author, but in fact his connection with the victori­ous revolutionaries and the new State is quite clear from the whole of the novel, and the help which he gives his brother is obviously one of those "miracles" which were wrought only by telephone calls to the right people, "transmission belts" and "commissions for assist­ance to scholars" of the kind set up on the advice of Gorki. Evgraf holds such a high position that he even promises to send his brother abroad, or have his exiled family brought back to Moscow. Paster­nak knew very well how high up you had to be to do this kind of thing at the beginning of the thirties. If Zhivago had not died, his brother would certainly have got him a "ticket for a seat by the columns." It was simply not in M.'s nature to bank like this on the State with its miracles. He understood early what to expect from the new State, and he placed no hopes in its patronage. He also be­lieved that, "like a judge, the people judges," or, as he puts it in another line, "In years of desolation you rise, о sun, people, judge." I share this faith, and I know that, even when reduced to silence, the people still sits in judgment.

In his novel Pasternak describes the killing at the front by his troops of a Provisional Government commissar named Linde (in the novel he is called Gints). In Pasternak's eyes his death was retribu-

^# In 1952 Akhmatova wrote several poems in praise of Stalin.

tion for the fact that he and his like had failed to keep the troops under control, as Cossack officers would have done, and had stirred up the ordinary people. M. knew Linde well—he had probably met him at the Sinanis'. To show what he thought about his death it is enough to quote the following lines: "To bless him, treading lightly, Russia will descend to farthest hell."

In his article on Hamlet, Pasternak wrote that the Prince's tragedy was not his lack of will, but the fact that in carrying out the act incumbent on him as a son, he would lose his birthright—that is, his "ticket for a seat by the columns." Moscow had belonged to Paster­nak from the time of his birth. There was a moment when he might have felt he was ready to give it up, but the moment passed and he remained in possession of his heritage. Marina Tsvetayeva also came to Moscow as a rightful heiress, and was greeted as such, but she had no time for heritages of anv kind, and as soon as she had found her own voice in poetry, she quickly turned her back on it. The recep­tion given to the Acmeists—Akhmatova, Gumilev and M.—was quite different. They brought something with them that provoked blind fury in both literary camps: Viacheslav Ivanov and his entour­age, as well as the Gorki circle, met them with hostility. (With Gumilev this didn't happen all at once, but only after his first book of Acmeist poems, Alien Skies.) For this reason the war against them was one of annihilation, and it was waged much more fiercely than against any other group of poets. M. always said that the Bolsheviks preserved only those who were passed on to them by the Symbolists —a favor certainly not shown to the Acmeists. In Soviet times the LEF group and the remnants of the Symbolists made common cause in their battle against the surviving Acmeists—Akhmatova and M. The campaign sometimes took on comic forms—as, for example, in articles by Briusov in which he extolled the "Neo-Acmeist" school supposedly headed by M. and then proceeded to describe as his dis­ciples the most compromising people he could think of. Even more grotesque were M.'s personal encounters with Briusov. Briusov once called M. into his office and lavished praise on his verse, while con­stantly quoting a Kiev poet called Makaveiski who was notorious for his use of dog Latin. Another time, during a meeting held to decide on food rations for writers and scholars, Briusov insisted that M. be given a ration of the second category, pretending he had con­fused him with a lawyer of the same name. Such tricks were very much in the style of the decade before the Revolution, and it must be said that Briusov never applied political discrimination—this was left to the younger people in LEF.

M. himself was very anxious to be recognized by the Symbolists and by LEF—in particular by Verkhovski and Kirsanov—but noth­ing came of his efforts. Both groups were adamant in their attitude toward him, and all M.'s friends teased him about his complete fail­ure in this respect.

34 Two Voices

_I

n Andrei Bely's definition, the term "sketch" could be applied very broadly to almost any literary composition which did not bear the mark of the social novel which he so detested, or any other kind of fiction. "In this sense," M. said, "my 'Conversation About Dante' is a sketch." Bely agreed.

We had met Bely in Koktebel in 1933. M. got on well enough with him, but Bely's wife evidently remembered some old articles of M.'s and was in no mood to let bygones be bygones. Perhaps she knew about M.'s negative attitude to anthroposophy and theosophy, and felt he must therefore be hostile to her. But the two men never­theless met—albeit surreptitiously—and enjoyed talking with each other. M. was writing his "Conversation About Dante" at the time and read it out to Bely. Their talk was animated, and Bely kept referring to his study of Gogol, which he had not yet finished.

Vasilisa Shklovski has told me that no one else has ever impressed her as much as Bely, and I can well understand this. He seemed to radiate light, and I have never met anyone else who was so literally luminous. Whether this effect was produced by his eyes, or by the constant flow of his ideas, it is hard to say, but he charged every­body who came near him with a sort of intellectual electricity. His presence, the way he looked at you, and his voice stimulated the mind and quickened the pulse. My memory is of something disem­bodied, an electric charge, a thunderstorm incarnate, a miracle of some kind. At this time he was already nearing his end, and he col­lected pebbles and autumn leaves at Koktebel to make complicated patterns with them, as he strolled under his black umbrella along the beach with his small, clever and once beautiful wife, who despised everybody not initiated into her involved, anthroposophic world.

The Symbolists were great proselytizers and fishers of men. Like all of them, Bely too was always casting around with his nets. Once he buttonholed me and gave me a long account of the theory of verse put forward in his book Symbolism. M. told him with a laugh that we had all been brought up on this book, and that I in particular was a great reader of it. This was of course an exaggeration, but I did not protest, because Bely, whom we felt was extremely spoiled by the almost cult-like devotion around him, was suddenly very pleased at having me as one of his readers, and beamed all over his face. In those years he must already have been keenly aware of his loneliness and isolation, feeling rejected and unread. The fate of his readers and friends was very sad: he was always seeing them off into exile, or going to meet them on their return when they had served their sen­tences. He himself was spared, but everyone around him was swept away. Whenever they detained his wife, which happened several times, he stormed and shouted with rage. "Why do they arrest her and not me?" he complained to us that summer—not long before our meeting she had been kept at the Lubianka for several weeks. The very thought of all this enraged him and did much to shorten his life. The last straw, which finally embittered him, was Kamenev's pref­ace to his book on Gogol. This showed that, whatever the twists and turns of inner Party politics, the one thing that would never be per­mitted was normal freedom of thought. Whatever else might hap­pen, the idea of indoctrinating people and watching over their minds would remain the basic line. Here is the high road, they had told us, and we have marked it out for you, so why do you want to wander off on side roads? Why indulge your whims, if the only worthwhile tasks have already been set and their solution given beforehand? In all their different incarnations, our guardians were always sure they were right and never knew what it was to doubt. They always boldly claimed to know just by looking at a seed what its fruit would be, and from this it was but a step to decreeing the destruc­tion of any seedling they thought was useless. And this they do all too thoroughly.

Bely was convinced that his ideas were very hard to understand, and hence his manner of speaking, which was the exact opposite of Pasternak's. He enveloped you as he spoke, gradually overwhelming, convincing and captivating you. His tone of voice was rather embar­rassed and cajoling, as though he was unsure of his listener and dreaded that he might not be understood or properly heard—he felt the need to win your confidence and attention.

Pasternak, on the other hand, spoke and smiled at you as though bestowing a gift. He deafened you with the drone of his organ-like voice, in complete confidence that you were already prepared to take everything in. He neither sought to persuade, like Bely, nor argued like M., but boomed on jubilantly and confidently, allowing all to listen and admire. It was as though he was singing an aria, certain that the Moscow which had been his from childhood had provided an audience worthy of him, endowed with the requisite ear and intelligence and—above all—in love with his voice. He even, in fact, took some account of his audience and was very careful not to offend it. But the main point is that he needed only listeners, not partners in conversation—these he avoided. Bely needed material to stimulate new thought—people who in his presence would begin to grope for new ideas. I once asked M. which manner he himself pre­ferred, and he said: "Bely's, of course." But it was not true. M. only liked to talk with people on a footing of equality. He was just as irritated by an audience as by disciples and admirers. He had an in­satiable craving for the company of equals, but as the years went by, it became harder all the time to satisfy it. By a process of intellectual mimesis all thought, and the voices that gave it expression, were tak­ing on protective coloring in our society.

35 The Path to Destruction

he death of an artist is never a random event, but a last act of

creation that seems to illuminate the whole of his life under a powerful ray of light. M. already understood this when, as a young man, he wrote an article about the death of Scriabin. Why are people surprised that poets are able to foretell their own fate with such insight and know beforehand the manner of their death? It is only natural, after all, that death, the moment of the end, should be a cardinal element—one to which all else is subordinate—in the struc­ture of one's life. There is nothing determinist about this—it is rather to be seen as an expression of free will. M. steered his life with a strong hand toward the doom that awaited him, toward the com­monest form of death, "herded with the herd," that we could all expect. In the winter of 1932-33, at a poetry reading given by M. on the premises of Literary Gazette, Markish suddenly understood this and said: "You are taking yourself by the hand and leading yourself to your execution." This was his interpretation of the poem: "I have led myself by the hand along the streets. . . ."

In his verse M. spoke all the time about his death like this, but nobody paid any attention, just as nobody listened to Mayakovski's talk about suicide. But, preparing for death, people nevertheless try at the last moment to put off the inevitable end. They close then- eyes and pretend that all is not lost, perhaps looking for a new apart­ment, or buying themselves a good pair of shoes—anything not to see the pit already dug for them. This was how M. behaved after he had written his poem about Stalin.

The poem was written at the end of collectivization, between "Old Crimea" and "The Apartment." Had he some particular mo­tive for writing it? There were at least several, and perhaps a great many. Each of them had its part in what the interrogator was to call M.'s "provocation," or "act of terrorism," as he styled it at the be­ginning.

The major factor was no doubt a feeling that he could no longer be silent. The phrase "I cannot be silent" was often on the lips of our parents' generation. The same could not be said of ours. But there is always the drop that fills the cup to overflowing. By 1933 we had made great progress in our understanding of what was going on. Stalinism had shown its colors in one large-scale undertaking—the mass deportation of the peasants, and in the lesser one of bringing the writers to heel.

We spent the summer of that year in the Crimea, and it was then that M.'s poetry for the first time showed traces of how much he had been affected by collectivization and the terrible sight of the hungry, wraith-like peasants he had recently seen on the way through the Ukraine and the Kuban. In the first draft of the poem for which he was arrested, Stalin is called a "murderer and peasant- slayer." Everybody at that moment thought and said as much—in whispers, of course—and the poem was thus not in advance of its time, except from the point of view of the ruling circles and their hangers-on.

The second most important factor in the writing of the poem was M.'s awareness that his fate was sealed. It was too late now to hide "like a cap in a sleeve." His other verse of the early thirties was by then being passed from hand to hand. Pravda had already published a lengthy unsigned article in which M.'s "Journey to Armenia" was damned as the "prose of a lackey." This was no longer a mere warn­ing, but an indictment. Before it appeared, the editor-in-chief of the State Publishing House for Literature, Chechanovski, had approached me with the "advice" that it would be as well for M. to repudiate his "Journey to Armenia"—otherwise, as he put it, "you will be sorry." All the warnings, in the form either of threats or of advice, had already been given (by Gronski and Gusev, for example), but M. ignored them. His end was approaching.

I can remember nothing more terrible than the winter of 1933-34, which we spent in our new apartment—the only one I have ever had in my life. Through the wall we could hear Kirsanov playing his Hawaiian guitar, the ventilation system wafted in the smell of cook­ing from other writers' apartments and the stench of the insecticide they used to kill the bedbugs. We had no money and nothing to eat, and every evening there were hordes of visitors—half of them po­lice spies. Death might come to M. either quickly or in the form of a slow process of attrition. M., an impatient man, hoped it would come quickly. He preferred to die not at the hands of the writers' organi­zations who had initiated the process of his destruction, but rather at those of the "punitive organs."

Like Akhmatova, M. did not believe in suicide in the ordinary sense—even though everything was driving us to it: our loneliness, isolation, and the times themselves, which were scarcely on our side. Loneliness is not just the absence of friends and acquaintances— there are always enough of these—it is rather life in a society which heedlessly, with blindfolded eyes, follows its fratricidal path, drag­ging everybody with it. Not for nothing did M. call Akhmatova "Cassandra." Apart from a few poets like her, there were also some other people of an older generation who could see what was coming, but their voices had died away. Even before the victory of the "new spirit" they had spoken out about its ethics, its ideology, its intoler­ance and its perverse notions of law. But these had been voices in the wilderness, and with every day that passed it clearly became more and more difficult to speak. How could you speak when your tongue had been cut out?

In choosing his manner of death, M. was counting on one remark­able feature of our leaders: their boundless, almost superstitious re­spect for poetry. "Why do you complain?" M. used to ask. "Poetry is respected only in this country—people are killed for it. There's no place where more people are killed for it."

Looking at the portraits of our leaders in store fronts, M. once said that he feared only people's hands. The "fingers ... fat as grubs" in the Stalin poem are certainly an echo of Demian Bedny's trouble with Stalin (no wonder he was so frightened and advised Pasternak not to get mixed up in M.'s business). The adjective "thin-necked" was inspired by the sight of Molotov—M. had noticed his thin neck sticking out of his collar and the smallness of the head that crowned it. "Just like a tomcat," said M., pointing at his portrait.

The first people to hear the poem were horrified, and begged M. to forget it. For these particular people, its value was also lessened by the self-evident nature of the truth it contained. In more recent years it has been received with greater sympathy. Some people ask me how it was that M. could understand everything so well already in 1934, and wonder whether there is a mistake in the dating. These are people who accept the official story that everything was all right until the Yezhov terror, and that even that wasn't so bad—it was only after the war, when he was in his dotage, that the old man went out of his mind and made a mess of things. This may no longer hold water, but we continue to idealize the twenties and the beginning of the thirties. This is a stubborn legend. The old generation is dying out without having had its say, and there are now old men—includ­ing even former camp inmates—who go on talking about the glori­ous years of their youth as a golden age cut short only by their arrest. What will our grandchildren make of it if we all leave the scene in silence?

Among those who heard the Stalin poem, I noted three different views. Kuzin thought M. shouldn't have written it because it con­flicted with his general attitude toward the Revolution. He accused M. of inconsistency: if he had accepted the Revolution, then he should put up with its leader and not complain. There is a kind of blockheaded logic about this, though I do not understand how Kuzin, who knew M.'s verse and prose by heart (though in his old age he forgot about this and even claimed in a letter to Morozov that he had never read "Journey to Armenia"), could not see the ambivalence and constant torment in M.'s work. People evidently find it hard to understand anything that is camouflaged, or even just slightly veiled. They need to have everything said straight out, and I think that is why M. wrote this poem in such plain language—he was tired of the deafness of his listeners who were always saying: "What beautiful verse, but there's nothing political about it! Why can't it be pub­lished?"

Ehrenburg does not like the poem, correctly regarding it as un­typical of M.'s work because of this straightforward, uncomplicated quality.

But, whatever one may think of it as poetry, can one really regard it as incidental to the rest of his work, as a kind of freak, if it is the poem which brought him to his terrible end? It was, to my mind, a gesture, an act that flowed logically from the whole of his life and work. It is true, however, that it is peculiar in that he makes conces­sions to his readers he had never made before. He had never met them halfway or striven to be understood, regarding every listener or partner in conversation as his equal and therefore not trying to simplify things for him. But he was concerned to make his Stalin poem comprehensible and accessible to anybody. On the other hand, he did his best to make sure it could not serve as an instrument of crude political propaganda (as he even said to me, "That is none of my business"). But he did write the poem with a view to a much wider circle of readers than usual, though he knew, of course, that nobody would be able to read it at the time. I believe he did not want to die before stating in unambiguous terms what he thought about the things going on around us.

Pasternak was also hostile to the poem. He poured out his re­proaches to me (this was when M. was already in Voronezh). Only one of these reproaches stands out in my memory: "How could he write a poem like that when he's a Jew?" I still do not see the logic of this, and at the time I offered to recite the poem to him again so he could tell me exactly what it was wrong for a Jew to say, but he refused with horror.

The reaction of those who first heard the poem was reminiscent of Herzen's story of his conversation with Shchepkin, who went to London to ask him to stop his activities because all the young people in Russia were being arrested for reading "The Bell." Fortunately, however, nobody suffered because he had heard M.'s poem. M., moreover, was not a political writer, nor was his role in society in any way like Herzen's. Though who is to say where the distinction lies? And to what extent is one obliged to protect one's fellow citi­zens? I am surprised that Shchepkin was so concerned about Her­zen's young compatriots and wanted at all costs to shield and cloister them from the outside world. As for my own contemporaries, I can­not say that I would want to expose them to any hazards—let them live out their lives in peace and do the best they can in these hard times. It will all pass, God willing, and life will come into its own again. Why should I try to waken the sleeping if I believe that they will in any case wake up by themselves one day? I do not know whether I am right, but, like everybody else, I am infected by the spirit of passivity and submissiveness.

All I know for certain is that M.'s poem was ahead of its time, and that at the moment it was written people's minds were not ready for it. The regime was still winning supporters and one still heard the voices of true believers saying in all sincerity that the future be­longed to them, and that their rule would last for a thousand years. The rest, who no doubt outnumbered the true believers, just sighed and whispered among themselves. Their voices went unheard be­cause nobody had any need of them. The line "ten steps away no one hears our speeches" precisely defines the situation in those days. The "speeches" in question were regarded as something old and out­moded, echoes of a past that would never return. The true believers were not only sure of their own triumph, they also thought they were bringing happiness to the rest of mankind as well, and their view of the world had such a sweeping, unitary quality that it was very seductive. In the pre-revolutionary era there had already been this craving for an all-embracing idea which would explain every­thing in the world and bring about universal harmony at one go. That is why people so willingly closed their eyes and followed their leader, not allowing themselves to compare words with deeds, or to weigh the consequences of their actions. This explained the progressive loss of a sense of reality—which had to be regained before there could be any question of discovering what had been wrong with the theory in the first place. It will still be a long time before we are able to add up what this mistaken theory cost us, and hence to determine whether there was any truth in the line "the earth was worth ten heavens to us." But, having paid the price of ten heavens, did we really inherit the earth?

3 6 Capitulation

had a long period of silence—about five years between

• 1926 and 1930—when he wrote no verse (though he did write some prose during this time). The same thing happened for a time with Akhmatova, and with Pasternak it lasted a good ten years. "It must be something about the air," said Akhmatova—and there was indeed something in the air: the beginning, perhaps, of that gen­eral drowsiness which we still find so hard to shake off.

Was it just coincidence that these three active poets were stricken by dumbness for a time? Whatever the differences in their basic attitudes, the fact is that before they could find their voices again, all three had first to determine their places in the new world being cre­ated before their eyes—and this they could only do by learning from experience how it affected everybody else. The first to fall silent was M. This was probably because he was the one most acutely affected by the process of determining what his place was. The question of his relationship to the times was, for him, central to his life and po­etry, and his character was such (to quote his own line: "In spirit he was not as the lilies") that he was incapable of glossing over rough edges—if anything, he tended to the opposite. When he stopped writing verse in the middle of the twenties, what was it in the air that stifled him and made him fall silent?*

Judging by externals, we have lived through not just one but sev­eral epochs. A historian can easily divide the last forty years into periods or stages which may seem not only different but incompat­ible with each other. I am convinced, however, that each one logi­cally followed from its predecessor. True, the top group was always changing, and with it even the physical appearance of Soviet func­tionaries (at one moment, for example, we suddenly noticed that dark ones had given way to fair ones—but these too were soon re­moved from office). After each major change, the whole style of life and leadership were modified, but there was nevertheless an element of sameness throughout these successive stages. These rulers of ours who claim that the prime mover of history is the economic basis have shown by the whole of their own practice that the real stuff of history is ideas. It is ideas that shape the minds of whole generations, winning adherents, imposing themselves on the consciousness, creat­ing new forms of government and society, rising triumphantly—and then slowly dying away and disappearing. Viacheslav Ivanov once

* Author's Note: It was at this time that M. began to suffer from heart trouble and shortness of breath. My brother, Evgeni Yakovlevich, always used to say it was not so much a physical as a "class" disease. This was borne out by the circumstances in which he had his first attack in the middle of the twenties. Marshak had come to see us and was telling M. at great length in his saccharine way what poetry was. He was laying down the official line, and, as usual, spoke with great feeling, carefully modulating his voice. He is a superb fisher of men, whether weak, susceptible ones or men of power. M. did not argue with him—he had nothing in common with Marshak. But suddenly he could stand it no longer and he heard a ringing in his ears that drowned out Marshak's orotund voice. This was his first bout of angina pectoris.

said in my presence—we visited him on our way through Baku in 1921—that he had fled from Moscow and sought seclusion in Baku because he had become convinced that "ideas have ceased to rule the world." What Dionysian cults did he understand by "ideas," this teacher and prophet of the pre-revolutionary decade, if he had failed to see, at the time of our conversation, what enormous territories and vast numbers of people had just been won over by an idea? The idea in question was that there is an irrefutable scientific truth by means of which, once they are possessed of it, people can foresee the future, change the course of history at will and make it rational. This religion—or science, as it was modestly called by its adepts— invests man with a god-like authority and has its own creed and ethic, as we have seen. In the twenties a good many people drew a parallel with the victory of Christianity, and thought this new reli­gion would also last a thousand years. The more scrupulous devel­oped the analogy further and mentioned the historical crimes of the Church, hastening to point out, however, that the essence of Chris­tianity has not been changed by the Inquisition. All were agreed on the superiority of the new creed which promised heaven on earth instead of otherworldly rewards. But the most important thing for them was the end to all doubt and the possibility of absolute faith in the new, scientifically obtained truth.

"And suppose it isn't so? What if people take a different view in the future?" I once asked Averbakh with reference to a literary judgment he had just delivered about M. ("They say he has just returned from Armenia and published some bad verse.") I asked him how he could know this, and he replied that M. did not have the right "class approach." He then explained that there was no such thing as art or culture in the abstract, but only "bourgeois art" and "proletarian art"—nothing was absolute and all values were condi­tioned by class. He was not at all put out by the fact that his own class values were now regarded as absolutes: since the victory of the proletariat was the dawn of a new era which would last forever, the values attributed by Averbakh to the class whose servant he was constituted absolutes. He was genuinely surprised that I could cast doubt on his judgments, which, being based on the only scientific method, were infallible—anything he damned was damned forever- more. I told M. about this conversation, which had taken place in a tramcar. He was fascinated by the monolithic quality of Averbakh's faith in his own truth and the way he reveled in the peculiar ele­gance of his logical constructions. This was in 1930, when M. could afford to be merely fascinated by the workings of Averbakh's mind. By this time M. had recovered his own inner freedom and found his voice again—the twenties with their inhibitions and doubts had ended, so he could now listen with some detachment to "hempen speeches" and not take them too much to heart.

Averbakh was a very typical product of the first decade after the Revolution. This was how all the adepts of the new religion thought and talked—in other spheres as well. There was something very cock­sure about them—they loved to talk down at you and shock you. They had taken it upon themselves to overthrow all the old idols— that is, to destroy the values of the past—and since the tide was flowing in their favor, nobody noticed how primitive their weapons were.

The cry "What did we fight for?" went up at the very beginning of the twenties, but immediately died down again. The nation had not yet been reduced to silence, but it was quiet enough as it looked forward to the life of ease promised by NEP. The intellectuals, meanwhile, set about a leisurely "revaluation of all values." This was the period of mass surrender when they all took the path marked out by the pre-revolutionary extremists and their post-revolutionary successors of the Averbakh type—though, needless to say, they tried to avoid the fanaticism and crudity of the vanguard. The capitula- tionists were led by men of about thirty who had been through the war, and the younger people followed them. In general, the people between thirty and forty were the most active age group in those days. Such members of the older generation as had survived stood silently on the sidelines. The basic premise behind the surrender was that the "old" had given way to the "new," and anybody clinging to the former would go to the wall. This view was rooted in the whole theory of progress and the determinism of the new religion. The proponents of surrender attacked all the old concepts just because they were old and had outlived their usefulness. For most of the neophytes, all values, truths and laws had been done away with—ex­cept for those which were needed at the moment and could conven­iently be given a "class" label. Christian morality—including the an­cient commandment "Thou shalt not kill"—was blithely identified with "bourgeois" morality. Everything was dismissed as a fiction. Freedom? There's no such thing and never was! Since art, and par­ticularly literature, only carried out the orders of the ruling class, it followed that a writer should consciously put himself at the service of his new master. A number of terms such as "honor" and "con­science" went out of use at this time—concepts like these were easily discredited, now the right formula had been found.

It was characteristic of those years that all such concepts were treated as pure abstractions, divorced from the actual social and human framework which alone gave them substance. This made it all the easier to dismiss them out of hand: nothing was simpler, for example, than to show that nowhere in the world is there such a thing as absolute freedom of the press, and then to conclude that instead of making do with the wretched substitutes fobbed off on us by liberals, it was better to face up to the situation like a man and abandon all this hankering after "Freedom." Such arguments seemed plausible enough to minds not yet capable of making finer logical distinctions.

Psychological factors that worked in favor of capitulation were the fear of being left out in the cold, of not moving with the times, and the need for an all-embracing "organic world-view" (as it was called) which could be applied to all aspects of life. There was also the belief that the victory was final, and that the victors were here to stay for all eternity. But the main thing was that those who surren­dered had nothing of their own to offer. This extraordinary empti­ness was perhaps best expressed by Shklovski in his Zoo, that sorry book in which he tearfully implores the victors to take him under their wing. Whether this attitude was self-induced or whether it was a bitter reaction to the war and the trenches, the fact is that the desire to be looked after and protected like a child was enormously strong, and only those who shared it were regarded as being in step with the times.

Once, in the editorial office of Priboi,* M. refused to sign a collec­tive letter from the writers to the Central Committee, on the grounds that "in literary matters they should appeal to us, not we to them." The letter was a petition on behalf of a certain critic who was being hounded by RAPP for allegedly having reviewed a novel by Liashko without reading it to the end. The writers were now asking the Cen­tral Committee to order an end to this persecution, and in support of their appeal they quoted the Central Committee's resolution on liter­ature (1925^ in which the Party had called on the writers to end their squabbles and make common cause in their efforts to fulfill the Party's command.

As usual, there were a lot of people in the Priboi office, and they

* Leningrad publishing house for which Mandelstam did translations.

+ See page 420.

all crowded round M. They were genuinely puzzled by the reason he gave for his refusal to sign. His words seemed to them like a musty old rag pulled from some family chest of the past, a sign of how backward and out-of-touch he was. There can be no doubt of their sincerity. I remember the astonished look on Kaverin's face—it was he who was collecting the signatures. He thought M. was simply an old-fashioned eccentric who didn't understand the times he lived in. When M. and Akhmatova were still not much over thirty, they were quite seriously thought of as old people. As things turned out, however, they gradually came to seem younger in the eyes of others, as the views of those who had espoused the "new age" grew hope­lessly obsolete.

The boy in the Hans Andersen story who said the king was naked did so neither too late nor too soon, but just at the right moment. Others had no doubt said it before him, but nobody paid any atten­tion. M. also said many things too early—at a time when normal judgments seemed hopelessly out-of-date and doomed. There was no room for those who wouldn't sing in chorus with the rest—and it was indeed a powerful chorus that drowned out all other voices. There are now many people who would like to bring back the twen­ties and re-create the self-imposed unity of those days. Survivors from those times do their best to persuade the younger generation that this was an age in which everything—science, literature, the theater—flourished as never before, and that if everything had con­tinued to develop on the lines then laid down, we should by now have attained the height of perfection. Survivors of LEF, people who worked with Tairov, Meyerhold and Vakhtangov, former stu­dents and teachers of IFLI * and the Zubov Institute, former mem­bers of the Institute of Red Professors, old Marxists, not to mention the Formalistst—they would all like us to go баск to that time when they were young men of thirty, so that we might once again set out on the road which they then opened up for us—this time without deviating from it. In other words, they deny responsibility for what happened later. But how can they? It was, after all, these people of the twenties who demolished the old values and invented the formulas which even now come in so handy to justify the un­precedented experiment undertaken by our young State: you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. Every new killing was ex­cused on the grounds that we were building a remarkable "new"

* Institute of Philosophy and Literature, t See page 420.

world in which there would be no more violence, and that no sacri­fice was too great for it. Nobody noticed that the end had begun to justify the means, and then, as always, gradually been lost sight of. It was the people of the twenties who first began to make a neat dis­tinction between the sheep and the goats, between "us" and "them," between upholders of the "new" and those still mindful of the basic rules that governed human relations in the past.

The victors might well have been surprised at the ease of their victory, but they were so sure they were right, and so sure they were bringing happiness to mankind, that they only took it as their due and gradually increased their demands on those who had surren­dered to them. This was shown by the speedy disappearance of the term "Fellow Traveler" and its replacement by the term "Non- Party Bolshevik." Eventually we had "the true son of the Mother­land who ardently loves his People and unhesitatingly serves his Party and Government."

People's memories are such that they remember not actual events but only vague stories or legends about them. To establish the facts, one must shatter the myths, but this can only be done if one first points to the circles in which they have been created. This hanker­ing after the idyllic twenties is the result of a legend created by people who were then in their thirties, and by their younger associ­ates. But in reality it was the twenties in which all the foundations were laid for our future: the casuistical dialectic, the dismissal of older values, the longing for unanimity and self-abasement. It is true that those who shouted loudest were then the first to lose their lives —but not before they had prepared the ground for the future. In the twenties our "punitive organs" were still only gathering strength, but they were already in action. The thirty-year-old iconoclasts fervently preached their faith. At first coaxing, and later threaten­ing, they led their hosts of followers into the coming era, during which all individual voices ceased to be heard.

We do not have—nor can we have—an institute for the study of public opinion, though there is no other way of gauging the under­currents in people's mental processes. The part of such an institute was once played to some extent by the "punitive organs." In the twenties they even took soundings among the public to find out what it was thinking—for this purpose they had a special network of informers. Later on it was decided that public opinion must be the same as official opinion, and the role of these informers was reduced to reporting any cases in which there was a divergence—these were then systematically followed up by the appropriate action. After 1937 such "study" of public opinion (by now completely "rational­ized") lost all significance because of the massive nature of the "pre­ventive" terror.

But in the twenties we were still innocently playing with fire. No sooner had M. decided that everything would be all right ("What are you worrying for? They won't touch us, they won't kill us") than we got a foretaste of the future from the rosy-cheeked Vsevo- lod Rozhdestvenski, who came to see us in Tsarskoye after a brief spell of imprisonment. He said he wanted to warn us that his interro­gator had been very interested in M., but he blankly refused to give any details: "I gave my word, and I was brought up as a child always to keep my word." M. threw this model child out, and when he had gone, it occurred to us that he must have been sent simply to give M. a fright and remind him that there was no escaping the all-seeing eye. This kind of thing was to happen frequently. In his "Conversa­tion About Dante" M. mentions the interlocking of prison with the world outside and the fact that any ruler is only too happy if his subjects put the fear of God in each other with stories from jail. Vsevolod Rozhdestvenski carried out his assignment well enough, but he omits all reference to it in his memoirs. On the other hand, he has M. speak about poetry in a conventional Parnassian and Acmeist manner, attributing to him the sort of opinions and pronouncements which Soviet critics always put into the mouth of the "typical aes­thete" of their imagination. Many other absurd utterances of this kind will no doubt be laid at M.'s door, and they should be judged in the light of his essays, which give a real sense of the sort of things he said in conversation and argument. His contemporaries were no match for him, and in their memoirs they will give a garbled version of his ideas, whether they intend to or not. Least of all is he under­stood by those who lived through the twenties as true believers, dur­ing those times when the noose was being pulled tighter and people worked on each other, preaching the new religion, destroying values and preparing the way for the future.

37 The Change of Values

_M

did not believe in the "new" millennium, but he had not • come to the Revolution with empty hands. He was heavily weighed down by his Judaeo-Christian culture on the one hand, and on the other by his faith in social justice, the "fourth estate," Her- zen, and Revolution as a way of deliverance and renewal. He was no longer reading Herzen after I came to know him, but this was un­doubtedly one of the formative influences in his life. It shows in his work—in The Noise of Time, in the story of the lion cub which complains to the indifferent crowd about the splinter in its paw (the splinter later turned into the "'pike's bone stuck in my Under­wood"), in his horror of double talk, in his translations of Barbier, in his understanding of the role of art. "Poetry is power," he once said to Akhmatova in Voronezh, and she bowed her head on its slender neck. Banished, sick, penniless and hounded, they still would not give up their power. M. behaved like a man conscious of his power, and this only egged on those who wanted to destroy him. For them power was expressed in guns, agencies of repression, the distribution of everything—including fame—by coupons, the possibility of com­missioning their portraits from any artist they chose. But M. stub­bornly maintained that if they killed people for poetry, then they must fear and respect it—in other words, that it too was a power in the land.

It is hard to imagine anything worse than the equipment M. brought to the Revolution. It was easy to see in advance that he was doomed and would never find his place in the new world. It would have been a hopeless task to justify what was happening in the name of Herzen—indeed, in the name of Herzen it could only be con­demned. It is true that Herzen reserved the right to retreat into proud isolation ("omnia mea me cum porto"), but such a course was not for M. He could not bring himself to shun his fellow men, and he did not regard himself as someone standing above the crowd, but as part of it. Any self-exclusiveness was anathema to him—this was no doubt connected with his sense of belonging to the Judaeo-Chris­tian tradition. Many of my contemporaries who accepted the Revo­lution went through a severe psychological crisis. They were trapped between a reality which could only be condemned and the need for a principle by which to justify it. Sometimes, in order to be able to vindicate it without qualms, they simply closed their eyes to what was going on, but when they opened them again, it was still there for them to see. Many of them had awaited the Revolution all their lives, but at the sight of what it meant in terms of everyday life, they were horrified and looked away. Then there were others who were frightened of their own fears and were terrified of not seeing the wood for the trees. Among these was M. Not realizing the extent to which he had believed in revolution, people who knew him less well had an oversimplified picture of his life and dismissed as insignificant a major component of his way of thinking. Without this "revolutionary" element he would not have been so concerned to understand the course of events, or to weigh them in the scales of his values. If he had simply turned his back on reality, it would have been easier to live and adjust. This was impossible for M.—he had to live the same life as his contemporaries right through to the logical end.

As one can see from the verse he wrote in the twenties, M. never doubted that a new era had begun with the victory of the Revolu­tion: he says that "the fragile chronology of our era nears its end," and that of the old world only a sound remained, though the "source of the sound has gone." Then there is the image of the age as a wild animal with a broken backbone, looking round at its own foot­prints.[12] In all this verse he speaks either directly or obliquely about his own position in the new life ("a sick son of the age, with quick­lime in his blood."), and in "The Slate Ode" he calls himself a "dou­ble-dealer with divided soul." Avowals such as these are scattered throughout this verse—never fully stated, they seem to break from him involuntarily and sometimes appear in the most unexpected con­text (for example: in a poem of 1922, at the end of an extended image about baking bread, he describes himself as "the drying crust of a loaf long since taken out"). M. never made things easy for his readers. To understand him, you have to know him.t

In the poetry of this period he prophesies the onset of dumbness ("human lips preserve the form of the last word they have uttered" —in "The Finder of a Horseshoe," 1923). It was in fact this line that Brik and Tarasenkov seized on as proof that M. had "written himself out"—they gave little thought to the real sense of the poem before pronouncing this judgment. For them all means were fair in the struggle. Brik had turned his apartment into a place where his col­leagues in the Cheka (including Agranov) could meet with writers and sound out public opinion, simultaneously collecting information for their first dossiers. It was here that M. and Akhmatova were first branded as "internal emigres"—a label which was to play an impor­tant part in their subsequent fate. Brik was almost the first to employ non-literary weapons in the literary controversies of the twenties, but I should like to point out the difference between him and other hatchet men of the type of Tarasenkov. Tarasenkov (M. once called him a "fallen angel") was a good-looking youth with a passionate interest in poetry who at once fell in with the Party's plans to turn literature into its handmaiden, and carefully collected manuscripts of all the poetry he so busily prevented from appearing in print. In this respect he was different from, say, Lelevich, who hated poetry as such because he considered it "bourgeois."

The position of Brik was completely different. With his usual shrewdness he realized at the outset that the State would grant a monopoly to one or another of the literary movements that existed in those days, and he fought for this monopoly against numerous competitors. It was a fierce struggle and at one moment it looked as though he might win. A large number of supporters gathered around him, and he knew how to win younger people over with his charm. In Party circles he had powerful sponsors, particularly among Chek- ists with artistic and literary inclinations. He maneuvered with great dexterity and at considerable risk to himself, but the prize was won by Averbakh, who, with his RAPP, was a latecomer in the contest. Averbakh owed his victory to a view of literature derived from Pisarev—who had always been dear to the middle ranks of the intelli­gentsia. With the fall of RAPP there could no longer be any kind of literary struggle, but until then the different factions, each seeking to win the monopoly for itself, relied exclusively on political weap­ons. In sweeping Akhmatova and M. out of his path, Brik was not, however, concerned with the political effect of his denunciation—all he wanted was to take away their young readers, those ardent devo­tees of the "new." In this he was successful: for a long time Akhma­tova and M. were isolated. The last of the Mohicans from LEF, who are now over sixty, continue to extol the twenties and shake their heads in wonderment at the young readers over whom they have lost all influence.

The twenties were perhaps the worst time in M.'s life. Neither before nor after—even though things became much more frightful —did he speak with such bitterness about his situation in the world. In his early verse, however full of youthful anguish, there is always anticipation of future triumphs and a sense of his own strength ("I feel the span of my wing"), but in the twenties he speaks all the time of his illness, inadequacy and sense of inferiority. By the end of this period he was almost confusing himself with Parnok, or making him out to be his double. One can see from his verse that he thought his illness and inadequacy were caused by his first doubts about the Revolution. In his poem "January i, 1924" he asks: "Whom will you next kill? Whom will you next extol? What lie will you now in­vent?" He feels he is a "double-dealer" for trying to "join the broken vertebrae of two centuries" and for not being able to change his values.

M. was very cautious about the Revolution's demand for a change of values, though he did pay some lip-service to it. This took the form, in the first instance, of making clear what his relations with the "old world" had been. He wrote about this in The Noise of Time, The Egyptian Stamp and in the poem which begins: "With the world of Empire I was linked only as a child/ fearing oysters and looking askance at the Lifeguards." Although this poem was written in 1931, it expresses more the mood of the early twenties. His most serious concession to the demand for a change of values was in the three or four literary articles he published in Kiev in 1926 (he was by this time completely barred from the Moscow press, but in the provincial press it was still possible to "get away" with things). One senses in these articles that he wanted to be heard at any cost, and that he was therefore making a timid effort to be accepted by admit­ting or approving certain things and yielding on others. He even, for instance, tried to find excuses for some of the so-called "Fellow Travelers," though he must have known that he could never travel the same road as they. In two articles in Russian Art (Kiev) there were critical remarks about Akhmatova which were also a conces­sion to the times. A year previously, in an article in a Kharkov news­paper, M. had written about her roots in Russian prose, and even earlier, in an unpublished review written for The Almanach of Muses (1916), he had prophesied that "this poorly dressed but ma­jestic woman" would one day be the pride of Russia. In 1937, under questioning by the Voronezh writers—they had forced him to give a lecture about Acmeism and expected him to "unmask" it—he said of Akhmatova and Gumilev: "I do not disown either the living or the dead." He said something similar to the Leningrad writers at a meet­ing there in the House of the Press. In other words, he always felt linked with these two, particularly with Akhmatova, and his at­tempted disavowal of them in 1922 was a concession to all the hue- and-cry about Acmeism, the allegations that it was outmoded and "bourgeois," etc. M. was then "alone on every road," and could not stand it. He really was in a state of confusion: it is not so simple to go against everybody and against the times. To some degree, as we stood at the crossroads, we all had the temptation to rush after everyone else, to join the crowd that knew where it was going. The power of the "general will" is enormous—to resist it is much harder than people think—and we are all marked by the times we live in. The logic of the times demanded that M. part company with Akhmatova, his only possible ally. It is no easier for two than for one to swim against the tide, and M. made this one attempt to cut him­self off from her. But he very soon came to his senses. In 1927, when he was gathering his articles together as a book, he threw out one of the pieces that had appeared in Russian Art and removed his attack on Akhmatova from the other. He also discarded the articles in the Kiev newspaper and those in Russia, calling them "fortuitous" in his preface to the collection On Poetry, published in 1928. He regarded the period during which he wrote these articles (1922-26) as the worst in his life. It was a period of decline, and in repudiating it altogether, M. took no account of the many good and genuine things he wrote at that time—notably the passages in a number of articles where he attacks the general tendency toward stagnation.

His mood during this period of an attempted "change of values" is best seen from his attitude toward an article he had written on the death of Scriabin (1915) where he outlined his views on Christian art, giving expression to what he really believed (it was here that he spoke about the death of an artist being not the end, but a final crea­tive act). The article was never published. It had originally been a lecture to some Petersburg society (perhaps the Religious and Philo-

The Change of Values $

sophical Society) which held its meetings in a large private house.* M. used to go to the meetings of this society and evidently knew one of its organizers, Kablukov, an old man who was very kind to M. as a budding poet. (I recently bought a copy of M.'s first collection, Stone [1915], which belonged to Kablukov, and in which he had stuck various early poems by M. written in his own hand.) Kablu­kov took the manuscript of M.'s lecture on Scriabin away with him. While we were in the Caucasus in 1921, Kablukov died and all his papers went to the Petrograd Public Library. M. complained to me bitterly about the loss of this manuscript ("It's the most important thing I've written and now it's lost. . . . I'm just unlucky") and he was very pleased when a little later I found some pages of a rough draft in a trunk belonging to M.'s father. But his attitude to the article was by now ambivalent: he asked me to keep it, but in this period of doubt about his own values he was tempted to revise the views expressed in it. In the first drafts of The Egyptian Stamp there is a passage in which he makes fun of Parnok for reading a lecture in the "salon of Madame Perepletnik"—a clear allusion to his own lec­ture about Scriabin. In the text as published, all that remains of this is the threat made to Parnok that one day he will be ejected from the smart salons of St. Petersburg (including Madame Perepletnik's) be­cause as an upstart intellectual he has no business there and "the aris­tocrat's fur coat is not for him." M. was always coming back to this theme of the upstart intellectual in fashionable St. Petersburg—as a young man he probably had several encounters with various snobs who made it quite clear to him that he did not "belong." He was very upset by Makovski's account (which he read not long before his arrest) of how his mother came with him in 1908 (when he was eighteen) to the editorial offices of Apollon. They had come to show M.'s verse to Makovski, who makes out that M.'s mother behaved like the stupid wife of a Jewish tradesman. Evidently Makovski was trying to produce a cheap journalistic effect by contrasting the young genius with his vulgar family background. In fact, however, M.'s mother was a woman of considerable culture, a music teacher who gave her children a good education and brought M. up to love classical music. She could never have said the preposterous things that Makovski attributes to her. This is a good example of the kind

* Author's Note: Once the notorious adventurer Savin came there, set up a table at the foot of the stairs and collected an entrance fee from everybody who came in. Later, at the meeting, he got up and made a long speech about the Russian Devil, who, he said, was distinguished from all others by his cunning, inventiveness and sense of humor.

of aristocratic superciliousness that prompted M. to declare himself a member of the "fourth estate" of intellectuals from the lower classes. In The Egyptian Stamp he made clear his attitude to the "world of Empire" and traced his own and Parnok's lineage back to the raznochintsi.[13] There is also something similar in "Conversation About Dante," where he describes how the urbane Virgil is always preventing the gauche and embarrassed Dante from making a fool of himself. But by the time he wrote this he had to contend with the new "world of Empire" that made the old one look woefully ama­teurish by comparison. This period of confusion about his values helped M. to define his place in the new world, and he once more— this time in verse—proclaimed himself an upstart intellectual ("Did those raznochintsi wear out the dried leather of their boots that I should now betray them?"—Midnight in Moscow, 1932). But what was left to a Soviet raznochinets except his handful of Judaeo- Christian culture? M. preserved it, together with the pages from his article on Scriabin. On the other hand, in the poem written in 1931 where he addresses Parnok's brother, Alexander Gertsovich, he tells him he might as well give up ("There was a Jewish musician by the name of Alexander Gertsovich. . . . May as well give up now, what does it matter any more?").

His efforts to come to terms with the new era thus ended in fail­ure—very much more was demanded of those who surrendered. At the same time he had something to say to the Revolution, as opposed to the new "world of Empire" in which we suddenly found our­selves. There was nobody left in our society who would have under­stood what he wanted to say. The chorus of true believers in the new religion and the new State used the language of revolution in their ritual observances, but they had no time for a new "upstart intellectual" with his doubts and hesitations. For the true believers and "Fellow Travelers" everything was quite clear already: "You have to understand where you're living! What do you expect?" M. heard on all sides. It was with them in mind that he chose to translate Barbier's "Pack of Hounds":

They tear the flesh with claws—each must have his piece . . .

That is the right of the kennel, the law of honor among hounds:

Take home your share to your proud and jealous bitch

who waits to see the steaming bone between her good mate's teeth

and hear him shout as he throws it down:

That is power—this is our part in these great days.

(The theme of the "good mate" was to crop up again in 1933, in the poem about the apartment: "Some worthy traitor ... a good fam­ily man. . . .") He translated the Barbier poem in the summer of 1923, and his "oath of allegiance to the fourth estate" appeared the following winter—no wonder it was so coldly received by those on whom the distribution of worldly goods now depended.

Perhaps the reason he stopped writing verse in the mid-twenties was that in this period of confusion he was no longer certain of being right. His prose writings were an attempt to find his bearings again, to regain the ground under his feet so that he could say, "Here I stand and can do no other." Poetry came back to him when he* once more knew that he was right and had taken the proper stand. In one of his early articles that appeared in Apollon in 1913, he had spoken about "the precious sense of poetic Tightness." Obviously this sense was essential to M. if he was able to define it so confidently at the very beginning of his career as a poet (he was then only eight­een). In so far as he accepted the new reality, M. could not help but condemn his own doubts. Listening to the chorus of its support­ers, he was bound to be sorely troubled by his isolation from it; attacked by the Symbolists, LEF, RAPP and all the other groups which unreservedly supported the new system, he could scarcely help feeling that he was indeed a "drying crust of a loaf long since taken out." Assailed by such doubts, he could not possibly feel cer­tain of his own "tightness." True, there were always readers who stood up for him and swore by him, but M. was somehow, despite himself, repelled by them. I think he grew more and more unhappy with his readers at this time, as he looked on them too as "drying crusts" and believed that somewhere there must be some real "new people." In the early twenties he still failed to see how these "new people," so extrovert in appearance, were going through the classical metamorphosis—a process of turning into wood—that comes over those who lose their sense of values.

M.'s release came through his prose, this time his "Fourth Prose" (1931). This title was our private way of referring to it: it was liter­ally his fourth piece of prose, but there was also an association with the "fourth estate" which so much preoccupied him, as well as with

our "Fourth Rome." [14] It was this work which cleared the way for poetry again, restoring M.'s sense of his place in life and his "right- ness." In it he spoke of our bloodstained land, cursed the official literature, tore off the literary "fur coat" he had momentarily donned and again stretched out his hand to the upstart intellectual, "the first Komsomol, Akaki Akakievich." t At a certain dangerous moment we destroyed the opening chapter, which dealt with our idea of socialism.

The "Fourth Prose" was based on the episode of the Eulenspiegel translation, t which, with all its ramifications, would have died down sooner if M. had not insisted on keeping it alive. It was this that really opened M.'s eyes to what was happening around us. As Bu­kharin had said, the atmosphere in Soviet institutions was indeed like that of a cesspool. During the Eulenspiegel affair we felt as though we were watching a film about literature at the service of the new regime, about the fantastic bureaucratic apparatus that had now grown up (we even had a talk with Shkiriatov), about the Soviet press with its Zaslavskis, about the Komsomol, in whose newspaper M. worked for a year after breaking with the writers' organizations, and so forth. The two years spent on this business were rewarded a hundred times over: the "sick son of the age" now realized that he was in fact healthy. When he started writing poetry again, there was no longer a trace of the "drying crust." M.'s was henceforth the voice of an outsider who knew he was alone and prized his isolation. M. had come of age and assumed the role of a witness. His spirit was no longer troubled. In the first phase of the campaign of destruction against him, right up to May 1934, the methods used had had nothing to do with either literature or politics, but had been quite simply a vendetta on the part of writers' organizations which enjoyed sup­port "up above." "They cannot get at me as a poet," said M., "so they are snapping at my calves as a translator." Perhaps it was this attempt to belittle him that helped him to straighten up his shoulders. Strange to say, even in his case, it needed this personal experience to open his eyes completely. Soviet people prized their own blindness and were prepared to recognize the facts of life only if they were directly affected. Collectivization, the Yezhov terror and the post­war campaigns of mass repression helped very many to see the light. M. was one of the earliest to do so, though he was by no means the first.

M. always knew that his ideas were out of tune with the times and went "against the grain of the world," but after writing the "Fourth Prose" he was no longer worried about it. In his "Conversation About Dante" and in the poem "Canzona" (1931) he spoke of the special kind of sight with which birds of prey and the dead in Dante's Divine Comedy are endowed: they are unable to see things close to them, but they can make out objects at a great distance; blind to the present, they are able to see into the future. Here, as always, M.'s prose supplements and throws light on the poetry.

Poetry came back to him during our return journey from Arme­nia when we were held up in Tiflis. We still felt as though we were watching a film: while we were there, Lominadze met his end. In his last days this man showed real kindness to M. He had received a telegram from Gusev in the Central Committee with instructions to help M. find work in Tiflis, and he very much wanted to oblige, but at that moment he was summoned to Moscow and never returned. The papers were now suddenly full of denunciations of the "hostile faction of Lominadze and Syrtsov." That was our fate: anyone in the leadership whom M. was able to approach always perished. There was no place for a latter-day raznochinets in the new "world of Em­pire." Incidentally, right after the fall of Lominadze, whom M. had visited three or four times at the local Party headquarters, we no­ticed that we were being followed everywhere by someone in plain clothes. The local branch of the secret police had probably decided it would be as well to keep an eye on the mysterious person who had visited the fallen leader. We now realized that Tiflis was no place for us, and we hastily left for Moscow. When we told Gusev (who had sent M. to Lominadze) about how we had been followed, he listened with a stony face. Only Soviet officials could make their faces turn to stone like this. What it meant was: How was I to know that Lominadze was an enemy of the people, or what reasons the Geor­gian comrades had for putting you under surveillance? It was al­ready not unusual for innocent people to be implicated in cases they had nothing to do with, and Gusev was taking no chances. We should have had exactly the same reception from Molotov—it was he who, at Bukharin's request, had instructed Gusev to organize our journey to Sukhumi and Armenia and make sure we were properly looked after. Wherever we went, Gusev sent instructions to the heads of the local Party organizations asking them to make arrange­ments for us. Among them was Lominadze, who was fated to perish at the moment he was instructed to help us. M. might well have been swept away with him, but this time he was spared—the case that could have been made against him in this connection was not made. We were lucky. But at the time we didn't realize it and made fun of Gusev's stony mask. After the Lominadze episode his protecting hand was withdrawn from us, but I cannot say that we were left, as in the fairy tale, with nothing more than a slab of clay—the jour­ney to Armenia restored the gift of poetry to M., and a new period of his life began.

38 Work

_O

nly in 1930 did I first understand how poetry is made. Before this I had always seen it as the working of a miracle, the sud­den appearance of something that had not been there before. In the beginning—from 1919 to 1926—I would not even know that M. was at work, and was always surprised when he became tense and broody, sometimes running outside into the street to escape from small talk. I soon came to know what the reason was, but I didn't really understand it. When his period of silence ended in 1930, I had more than enough opportunity to observe him at work.

In Voronezh I got a particularly clear impression of what it in­volved. Hopelessly uprooted and restricted as it was, our life there in rented rooms (if that is the right name for the squalid hovels we made our home in) meant that we were constantly alone together, and I was able to watch very closely as he went about his "sweet- voiced labor." As soon as M. had reached the stage of actually com­posing a poem, he did not need to hide from people because, as he said, once the work was in progress, nothing could stop it. Vasilisa

Shklovski, with whom he was very friendly, tells how in 1921, when they were neighbors in the House of Arts in Leningrad, M. often wandered into her room to warm himself by the iron stove. Some­times he lay on the divan and covered his head with a cushion so as not to hear the conversation going on in the crowded room. When­ever he got bored with his own company while "composing," he would come to see Vasilisa like this. His poem about the Angel Mary came to him in the Zoological Museum while we were sitting with the curator, Kuzin, and his friends, drinking a bottle of Georgian wine—one of them had smuggled it in, together with some food, in his academic-looking briefcase. Constantly disrupting the ritual of drinking the wine, M. kept getting up from the table and pacing quickly around Kuzin's vast office. As usual, he was composing the poem in his head, but I wrote it down to his dictation while we were still in the Museum. After he married me he became very lazy and always dictated his verse to me, instead of writing it down himself.

In Voronezh he had absolutely no privacy when he was working. In none of the places we rented was there so much as a passage or a kitchen to which he could escape if he wanted to be completely alone. This is not to say that things were much better in Moscow, but at least there was always somewhere I could go for an hour or so, leaving him alone to work. But in Voronezh there was nowhere to go, except out into the freezing streets—and it so happened that the winters were particularly hard during those three years. But all the same, whenever a poem was approaching its final stage of "ripe­ness," I used to take pity on poor M., who was like a caged animal, and did what I could—lying down on the bed, for instance, and pre­tending to sleep. Seeing this, M. sometimes urged me to sleep prop­erly, or at least to turn my back on him.

In the last year in Voronezh, in the seamstress' house, our isolation was really complete. We scarcely left our room except to go to the nearby telephone exchange to phone my brother: he sent us the money—a hundred roubles each—that Vishnevski and Shklovski gave us every month during that winter. They were frightened to do it directly—everything in our life was by now a cause for fear. This money went to pay our rent, which came to exactly 200 rou­bles a month. We were no longer earning anything—neither in Mos­cow nor in Voronezh would anyone give us work now that "vigi­lance" was the order of the day. People turned away from us in the street and pretended not to recognize us. Only the actors departed from the general rule, coming up to us and smiling even in the main street. This is perhaps to be explained by the fact that the theaters were less affected than other Soviet institutions by the big purges now under way. The only people who came to see us at home were Natasha Shtempel and Fedia Marants, but both of them went out to work and could not easily find the time. Natasha told us that her mother had warned her of the possible consequences of coming to see us and she tried to hide where she was going. But then her mother had said to her: "I know where you're going. Why are you trying to keep it from me? I was only warning you, not telling you what to do. Why don't you invite them here?" After that we often went around to see Natasha, and her mother always put out every­thing she had on the table. She had long since separated from her husband, a former nobleman, and had supported her two children by teaching at first in the town's secondary school and then in the ele­mentary school. Modest, intelligent, light-hearted and easy-going, she was the only person in Voronezh who admitted us to her home. All other doors were shut tight in our faces and double-bolted: we were pariahs, untouchables, in this socialist society.

Everything suggested that the end was near, and M. was trying to take full advantage of his remaining days. He was possessed by the feeling that he must hurry or he would be cut short and not allowed to say what he still wanted to say. Sometimes I begged him to rest, to go out for a walk or have a nap, but he dismissed the idea: there was so little time left, and he must hurry. . . .

The poems poured out of him, one after another. He worked on several at once, and he often asked me to take down at one sitting two or three which he had already completed in his head. I could not stop him: "You must understand that I shan't have time otherwise."

Of course, he was just taking a sober view of his approaching end, but I could not yet see it as clearly as he. He never spoke about it to me in so many words, but in letters to people in Moscow (where I went a couple of times during the winter to get money) he once or twice hinted at what was in store for us—but then immediately changed the subject in mid-sentence, as though he had been talking only about our usual difficulties. Perhaps he really was trying to put such thoughts out of his mind, but the greater likelihood is that he wanted to spare my feelings and not darken the last days of our life together.

He drove himself so hard during the whole of that year that he became even more painfully short of breath: his pulse was irregular and his lips were blue. He generally had his attacks of angina on the street, and in our last year in Voronezh he could no longer go out alone. Even at home he was calm only when I was there. We sat op­posite each other and I watched his moving lips as he tried to make up for lost time and hastened to record his last words.

Each time I copied out a new poem, M. would count up the lines and decide how much he had "earned" at the highest current rates of payment. (He would not "settle" for less unless, as occasionally hap­pened, he was very unhappy about a poem, in which case he agreed to a "reduced rate." It was reminiscent of Sologub, who used to sort his verse by quality and price it accordingly!) When we had thus added up his "earnings" for the day, we would go out to borrow money for our supper on the strength of them. We got money like this from some of the actors, the compositors at the local printing works, and sometimes from two professors we knew (one was a friend of Natasha, and the other was a literature specialist). We gen­erally arranged to meet them in some deserted side street, where, like conspirators, we walked slowly past each other while they slipped us an envelope with their offering of money. If we had not managed to arrange to meet someone (it had to be done the day before), we would look in on the compositors. M. had got to know them in the summer of 1935 when we were living in the "agent's" house, which was next to the printing works and the offices of the local newspa­per. M. used to go in to read them poems as he finished them—partic­ularly if this was late at night when nobody else was awake. They were always very pleased to see him, though the younger ones would sometimes stagger him by spouting opinions straight out of Literary Gazette—to the indignation of the older ones. In the bad times that were now upon us, these same older ones listened silently as M. read his new poems and then talked to him for a while about this and that while one of their number went out to buy food for him. They were miserably paid and could hardly make ends meet themselves, but they felt that "you can't let a comrade down in times like these."

On the way to borrow money, we would go to the post office and send off some of M.'s poems to the literary magazines in Moscow. We only once got an answer—when we sent "The Unknown Sol­dier" to 7,namia [The Banner] and got back a letter pointing out that wars may be just or unjust, and that pacifism as such cannot be approved. But to us even this stilted reply was very welcome: at least somebody had bothered to communicate with us!

The poem about the shadow which wanders among men, "warm­ing itself with their wine and their skies," was sent, by way of an exception, not to Moscow but to Leningrad (probably to Zvezda). Among the copies of M.'s poems that now pass from hand to hand I sometimes find missing versions that must go back to these copies we sent to the literary magazines at that time. People working on the magazines in question must have purloined these forbidden poems, with the result that they found their way to readers.

The journalist Kazarnovski, who met M. in a transit camp after his second arrest, has told me that one of the accusations against M. was that he had circulated his verse (which was described by some utterly damning word) among the staffs of the literary magazines. Though what does it matter what he was accused of? When I was summoned to the Prosecutor's office in 1956 to be told that M. had been cleared of the charges brought against him after his second arrest, I actually saw the file on his case and the whole thing seemed to take up only two small sheets of paper. I should like to be able to read what is written there and, even more, to be able to publish it as it is, without commentary.

3 9 Moving Lips

_I

n 1932 I was coming home one day from the offices of the news­paper For a Communist Education on Nikitski Street. At that time we were living on Tverskoi Boulevard. On my way I saw M. sitting on the front steps of a shabby house. His head was twisted around so that his chin almost touched his shoulder; he was twirling his walking stick with one hand and resting the other on one of the stone steps to keep his balance. The moment he saw me, he jumped up and we walked along together.

When he was "composing" he always had a great need of move­ment. He either paced the room (unfortunately we never had very much space for this) or he kept going outside to walk the streets. The day I came across him sitting on the steps, he had just stopped to rest, tired of walking around. He was then working on the second part of his "Verses About Russian Poetry." For M. poetry and walk­ing were closely connected. In his "Conversation About Dante" he asks how many pairs of shoes Alighieri must have worn out while writing the Divine Comedy. The same theme occurs in his poems about Tiffis, of which he says that they "remember the worn splen­dor" of a visiting poet's shoes. This is not just about his poverty—the soles of his shoes were always worn—but about poetry, too.

I only once saw M. composing verse without moving around. This was in Kiev at my parents' home, where we spent Christmas in 1923; he sat motionless by the iron stove for several days, occasionally asking me or my sister, Anna, to write down the lines of his "January 1, 1924." The other time was in Voronezh at a period when he was terribly exhausted by his work and had lain down to rest. But a poem was still buzzing in his head and he could not rid himself of it—it was the one about the singer with the deep voice at the end of the "Second Voronezh Notebook." Not long before this he had heard Marian Anderson on the radio, and the previous day he had visited a singer who had been exiled from Leningrad—the same one for whom he did some free translations of Neapolitan songs, which she sang on the radio, where they both made a little money from time to time. We had rushed around to see her on learning that her husband, recently released after five years in a camp and allowed to come to Voronezh, had again been arrested. This was the first time we had heard of someone being immediately re-arrested like this, and we wondered what it could portend. The singer was lying in bed. People are always literally prostrated by this kind of misfor­tune. My mother, who as a doctor was mobilized after the Revolu­tion to help with famine relief in the Volga region, told me that the peasants just lay quite still in their houses, even in parts where there was already something to eat and people were not totally exhausted by hunger. Emma, a teacher at the Chita Teachers' Training College, once told me how she had gone out to work on a kolkhoz with some of her students, and that all the kolkhozniks were lying down. It is the same with students in their hostels, and with office workers when they get home in the evening. We all do this. I have spent my whole life lying down.

The singer frantically made plans for the future—as often happens when we are overwhelmed by someone's death or arrest, by a sum­mons to the secret police, or a similar calamity. Perhaps this kind of delirious talk about the future helps us to get over such incompre­hensible things as the death of someone close, or his removal to one of our twentieth-century prisons. She kept telling us that her husband could not possibly have been sent back to a camp, since he had only just returned from there. They must be going to exile him, and that didn't really matter. Wherever he was sent, she would go after him. And she would carry on with her singing—she could always sing anywhere: it was just as easy in Ishim or Irgiz as it was in Leningrad or Voronezh. In whatever Siberian village they went to, she would sing and earn enough to buy flour and bake him bread.

Her husband was the victim of a general directive ordering the re­arrest of all those who had already been in prison. There was also an order at that time (or it may have been in the fifties, I don't remem­ber) under which everybody who was sent to the camps must be kept in permanent exile after their release. The singer soon disap­peared herself. She was sent somewhere—we never learned the details—either to sing or to fell timber.

M. told me that in his poem about the singer with the low voice there was a merging of two images: the woman from Leningrad and Marian Anderson. On the day he was composing this poem, I didn't realize he was working, because he was lying as quiet as a mouse. Restlessness was the first sign that he was working on something, and the second was the moving of his lips. In one poem he says that his lips can never be taken away from him, and that they will still move when he is dead and buried. This has indeed happened.

Since he works with his voice, a poet's lips are the tool of his trade, and in his poem about the flute player who "treads with his lips," M. is also speaking about his own whispering lips and the pain­ful process of converting into words the sounds ringing in his ears.

The poem is actually about a flute player we knew. He was a German called Schwab and he was terribly frightened in case any­thing should happen to his only flute, which had been sent to him from Germany by an old comrade from the conservatory. We went to see him occasionally and he would take his flute out of its case and bring great comfort to M. by playing Bach or Schubert for him. He was loved by all the musicians who came to Voronezh on tour. Once, in the days when M. still had his job at the theater and he had finished his work for the day, we went into one of the balconies to listen to a symphony concert. From above we had a perfect view of the orchestra, and I suddenly saw that Schwab's place had been taken by another flutist. I bent over to M. and whispered to him. Despite hisses from the people around us, we went on whispering. "Could he have been arrested?" M. asked, and in the interval he went behind the scenes to find out. The assumption proved correct, as such assumptions always did—to the extent that we superstitiously feared to voice them in case this made them come true. Schwab, as we learned later, had been accused of espionage and sent to a camp for common criminals near Voronezh. He was already an old man and he ended his days there. M. kept wondering whether he had taken his flute with him or whether he had been afraid in case it should be stolen from him by the thieves there. Or if he had taken it, what did he play to his fellow prisoners? M.'s poem was inspired by the sound of Schwab's flute and his wretched fate, as well as by his own anxieties about "the beginning of dreadful deeds."

In the poem M. speaks of the flutist's lips "recalling" something. But is it only a flute player's lips that know beforehand what they have to say? The process of composing verse also involves the recol­lection of something that has never before been said, and the search for lost words is an attempt to remember what is still to be brought into being ("I have forgotten the word I wished to say, like a blind swallow it will return to the abode of shadows."). This requires great concentration, till whatever has been forgotten suddenly flashes into the mind. In the first stage the lips move soundlessly, then they begin to whisper and at last the inner music resolves itself into units of meaning: the recollection is developed like the image on a photographic plate.

M. hated all the hackneyed talk about form and content which was so much to the liking of the new "client," who wanted official ideas to be clothed in "beautiful" dress. Over this question he imme­diately had a row with the Armenian writers when, not realizing who* had launched it, he attacked the call to make literature "na­tional in form and socialist in content." So even in Armenia we found ourselves isolated. M.'s feeling that form and content are absolutely indivisible evidently came to him from the process of working on his poetry, which was always born from a single impulse—the initial "ringing in the ears," before the formation of words, already embod­ied what is called "content." In "Conversation About Dante" M. lik­ened "form" to a sponge—if a sponge is dry and contains nothing, then nothing can be squeezed out of it. The opposite approach is to think in terms of finding the "right form" for a subject matter conceived independently of it. M. damned this approach (also in "Conversation About Dante") and called its proponents "translators of ready-made meaning."

Ilia Ehrenburg once said to Slutski in my presence that M. spoiled his poems by making "phonetic modifications" in them. I never saw anything of the kind. If Ehrenburg was referring to variants of the

• Stalin.

same poem, he should have known that these are something radically different from "modified" versions. It is translators who introduce modifications, as they try to find the best way to express the ideas in the original. As for "phonetic" modifications, they can only serve decorative purposes. A variant consists either of superfluous material that has been trimmed away, or it is an "offshoot" that may be de­veloped into a separate, self-contained entity. As the poet tries to dig down to the nugget of harmony in the recesses of his mind, he throws away all the spurious or unwanted matter under which it is hidden. Composing verse is hard, wearisome work that demands enormous inner exertion and concentration. When the work is in progress, nothing can stop the inner voice, which probably takes complete possession of the poet. This is why I cannot believe that Mayakovski was speaking the truth when he said that he had "stepped on the throat of his own song." * How was he able to do this? From my own rather unusual experience as an observer of the poet at work, I would say that it is quite impossible for him to curb or silence himself by "stepping on the throat" of his own song.

The work of the poet, as a vehicle of world harmony, has a social character—that is, it is concerned with the doings of the poet's fel­low men, among whom he lives and whose fate he shares. He does not speak "for them," but with them, nor does he set himself apart from them: otherwise he would not be a source of truth.

I was always struck by the absolute character of the urge to serve —with and among one's fellow men—as an instrument by which har­mony reveals itself. In this sense it was impossible either to simulate or induce it artificially, and of course it is nothing but a misfortune for the poet himself. I can understand Shevchenko's lament—which M. appreciated only too well—about the way his poetry would not leave him alone, bringing him nothing but misery and not allowing him to pursue his craft as a painter, the one thing that gave him pleasure. The urge ceases to be felt only when the poet's material begins to run out—that is, when his contact with the world at large is broken and he no longer hears his fellow men or lives with them. There can be no poetry without such contact, which is the source of the poet's sense of "rightness." The urge dies together with the poet, though the movement of his lips is recorded for all time in the verse he leaves behind. Incidentally, how can people be so stupid as to say that poets are no good at reading their own verse? What do such people know about poetry? Poetry only really lives in the poet's

• In the poem written before his suicide.

own voice, which is preserved in his work forever.

In the period when I lived with Akhmatova, I was able to watch her at work as well, but she was much less "open" about it than M., and I was not always even aware that she was "composing." She was, in general, much more withdrawn and reserved than M. and I was always struck by her self-control as a woman—it was almost a kind of asceticism. She did not even allow her lips to move, as M. did so openly, but rather, I think, pressed them tighter as she composed her poems, and her mouth became set in an even sadder way. M. once said to me before I had met Akhmatova—and repeated to me many times afterward—that looking at these lips you could hear her voice, that her poetry was made of it and was inseparable from it. Her contemporaries—he continued—who had heard this voice were richer than future generations who would not be able to hear it. This voice of hers, with all the inflections it had in her youth and later years, and still possessed of the depth which so impressed M., has come out remarkably well on a tape-recording recently made by Nika. If this recording survives, it will confirm the truth of what I have written here.

M. was struck by several of Akhmatova's characteristic gestures and always asked me, after we had been with her, whether I had noticed how she had suddenly stretched her neck, tossed back her head and pursed her lips as though to say "no." He would show me what he meant and was always surprised that I didn't remember it as well as he. In variants of the "Wolf" poem I have found a reference to a mouth that seems to say "no," but here it belongs not to Akhma­tova but to M. himself. The lifelong friendship between these two terribly ill-fated people was perhaps the only consolation for the bitter trials they both endured. In her old age Akhmatova has found a little serenity, and she knows how to make the best of it. But much of her verse remains unpublished, and the past can never be forgot­ten. If it were not for the ability to live in the present seemingly granted to all poets—or at least to these two—she would hardly be able to rejoice in her life as she does now.

40 Book and Notebook

_Y

ou have a book in you," said Charents, listening to M.'s poems about Armenia. (This was in Tiflis—in Erivan he would not have dared to come to see us.) M. was very pleased by these words: "Perhaps he's right—I may really have a book in me." A few years later, at M.'s request, I took a sheaf of his Voronezh poems to Pas­ternak, who, after looking at them, suddenly spoke of the "miracle of a book in the making." With him, he said, it had happened only once in his life, when he wrote My Sister Life. I told M. about this conversation and asked: "So a collection of verse doesn't always make a book?" M. just laughed.

The way in which separate items in a lyrical sequence follow each other may be just as natural as the order of the lines in a single poem, but the outer signs of this are less clear. It is obvious in the case of a work whose unity is not in doubt, such as a narrative or epic poem, but the inner thread running through a series of lyrics is not so easily seen. Yet M.'s words about the poet's "stereometric instinct" (in "Conversation About Dante") are just as applicable to lyric poems gathered together as a "book."

The way in which a "book" comes about probably varies from poet to poet. Some write interlinked poems in their chronological sequence; others rearrange work written at different times (though in the same general period) to make a "book"—this was Pasternak's procedure, and Annenski's (in his Trefoils). M. belonged to the first type of poet: his poems came in groups, or in a single flow, until the initial impulse was spent. In order to put a book together, all he had to do was establish the right chronological order of the items. This does not, however, apply to Tristia, which was not put together by M. himself.

It is no easy matter to reconstruct the chronology of M.'s work— not only because many of his things bear no date, but also because even if they do, the date refers to the moment when the poem was written down, not to the beginning or the end of M.'s work on it. It seems to me, indeed, that one can pinpoint the precise genesis of a poem only if it is a matter of coldly calculated versification rather than true poetry. How could M. know beforehand what exactly would come out of the movement of his lips after he had begun to listen to the voice inside him, or at what moment he would begin to write it down? Another difficulty about dating is whether one should regard the beginning or the end of the actual work of compo­sition as the crucial moment. This is all the more important in that work could be in progress on several poems at one time.

In a number of cases M. was not himself certain in what order to put the poems of a cycle—this was so, for instance, with the poems in the "Wolf" cycle, and those in the middle of the Second Voro­nezh Notebook. He didn't manage to make up his mind about this while he was still able to. I have often been asked about the origin of these "Notebooks." This was the name we used to refer to all the poems composed between 1930 and 1937 which we copied down in Voronezh in ordinary school exercise books (we were never able to get decent paper, and even these exercise books were hard to come by). The first group constituted what is now called the "First Voro­nezh Notebook," and then all the verse composed between 1930 and 1934, which had been confiscated during the search of our apart­ment, was copied down into a second notebook—M. himself looked on these two notebooks as distinct, evidently thinking of them as sections of a "book."

In the fall of 1936, when some more poems had accumulated, M. asked me to get a new exercise book, although there was still room in the old ones. Though there was practically no interval of time be­tween the "Third Notebook" and the "Second," it is clear from the contents of the "Third" that it is a new departure—not a continua­tion of the impulse, by then exhausted, which had given rise to the poems in the "Second Notebook." If there were precise methods for analyzing poetry, one would be able to see exactly where one impulse ends and another begins—though even without this, one can see it clearly enough.

We always associate the word "book" with printing, and think of it in terms of format and typographical convenience, but such me­chanical criteria do not apply to notebooks, whose beginning and end are determined only by the unity of the poetic impulse which gives birth to a given series of poems. In other words, a notebook is the same as a "book" in the sense in which the term was understood by Charents, Pasternak and M. himself. The only difference was that M. did not have to stick to some particular length or structure— often artificial—which is required for a published book. But the word "notebook" itself, as I have said, arose in our usage quite acci­dentally, owing to the fact that we were forced to write in school exercise books. It has the drawback of being too concrete in itsmeaning, as well as reminding one of Schumann's "Notebooks." The only thing in its favor is that it faithfully reflects the way in which we had been thrown back into a pre-Gutenberg era.

he word "phase" refers to stages in the growth of a person's

In his younger days M. had used the word "book" in the sense of "phase." In 1919 he thought he would be the author of one book only, but then he realized that there was a division between Stone and the poems that came to be known under the general title of Tristia. This title, incidentally, was given to the collection by Kuz- min, and the book itself is a miscellany of jumbled-up manuscripts taken to Berlin by the publisher without M.'s knowledge. His Sec­ond Book was garbled by censorship and M. gave it this name be­cause he realized his mistake in thinking that he would write only one book. He was not quite certain where the boundary lay between the pre-revolutionary Stone and this second book with his poems about the war, his presentiment of revolution and the Revolution itself. The poems grouped together under the title "New Verse" (1930-35) reflect his consciousness of being an outcast, and the Voronezh "Notebooks" his exile and approaching doom. Under each of the poems I copied out for him in Voronezh, M. put the date and the letter "V." When I asked him why, he just said: "Just because." It was as though he was somehow branding these pages, but very few of them survived: 1937 was close at hand.

41 Cycle

outlook—his changing view of the world and his own work. Tristia consists of poems which came to M. as he was waiting for the Revolution and as he experienced it in the early days. The "New Verse" is what he wrote after he overcame his silence by writing "Fourth Prose." It is possible for there to be different "books" within the same phase: I believe, for instance, that "New Verse" and the "Voronezh Notebooks," though separate "books," comprise a single phase divided in two by M.'s arrest and exile. In the first there are two and in the second three sections called "notebooks." In other words, for M. a "book" represents a biographical period, while a "notebook" is a poetic division embracing material born of a single

impulse.

A "cycle" is a smaller subdivision. In the first section ("Note­book") of the "New Verse," for instance, one can pick out the "Wolf" (or "convict") cycle and also the Armenian cycle—though the group entitled "Armenia" is actually more in the nature of a selection than a cycle. By this I mean that it resulted—as in many of M.'s earlier cycles—from a ruthless weeding-out process by which the more immature poems were discarded. The remaining ones were arranged not necessarily in the order in which they were written— thus breaking the sequence and obscuring the quality of a lyrical diary which is otherwise so typical of the Voronezh Notebooks.

These cycles are generally built around one particular "theme poem"—it is obvious, for example, that the matrix of the "convict" or "Wolf" cycle is the poem beginning "For the thundering prowess of future times. . . ." This kind of cycle—as opposed to those in which the items simply follow each other like links in a chain—re­sembled a cluster of shoots all sprouting from a main stem, and in these cases the poet's work was rather like a gardener's: training the viable shoots away from the stem and letting them develop inde­pendently. The common origin, however, was always visible in the repetition of certain key words or themes. In the "Wolf" cycle M. dwelt on his fear of succumbing to falsehood ("my mouth is twisted by lies"), the need to preserve his own voice ("Save my speech for­ever"), and there are echoes of the idea that so haunted him in Cher­dyn: that he might be executed with an ax as in Peter's time.

The Russian fur coat (shuba) in the "Wolf" cycle is a recurring theme in M.'s work. It can symbolize a number of things: the Rus­sian winter, a cozy, stable existence, social status (from which the raznochinets is debarred). It occurs in the first book of poems, Stone (where there are doorkeepers in fur coats), in the poem about Alexander Gertsovich and "I drink to officers' epaulettes" (where the fur coat stands for his supposed identification with the old regime). His first piece of prose was even called "Fur Coat," but it was lost by the publishing house run in Kiev by Rakovski's sister. In The Noise of Time there is the aristocratic fur coat which is not for the likes of Parnok and himself, and in "Fourth Prose," to signify his break with his fellow Soviet writers, he strips off his "literary fur coat" and stamps on it.

His ironical toast to the aristocrat's fur coat in "I drink to officers' epaulettes" goes back to a comic episode at the end of the twenties when a certain well-connected lady (who was later to perish) com­plained to Emma Gerstein that she had always thought M. was defi­nitely "not one of us" because she could never forget how at the beginning of NEP he had strutted around Moscow in a magnificent fur coat. We could only gasp at this. We had bought this coat, which had belonged to an impoverished priest, in the market place in Kharkov. It wrs made of reddish, moth-eaten raccoon and was as long and ungainly 5 a cassock. The old priest had sold it to get money for bread, and M had bought it on our way from the Caucasus to Mos­cow so he wouldn't die of cold in the north. This "aristocratic" fur coat was then given to Prishvin to use as a mattress when he was staying at a hostel on the Tverskoi Boulevard. One day his primus stove exploded and he used it to stifle the flames. The last bits of raccoon fur were scorched away, and M. never even had the satis­faction of actually stripping it from his shoulders and trampling on it, as he should have done: to wear a fur coat was above his station.

In the "Wolf" cycle, preparation for exile is also a dominant theme, hence the references to Siberian forests, bunks (of the labor- camp type) and peasant frame houses. By extension, wood becomes the main material of the whole cycle, and objects made of it are frequently referred to: "pine tree," "wooden pail," "pinewood coffin," "skittles," "splinters" (used by peasants for lighting their huts). Some of the words are less domestic and echo his fear of exe­cution: "chopping block," "ax handle" ... A characteristic epithet of this cycle is "rough"—a word appropriate to wooden surfaces.

Premonition of exile began before the "Wolf" poems, and it is expressed, for instance, in the line of another poem where chains for fastening doors were likened to a convict's fetters. Petersburg is compared to a coffin ("To sleep in Petersburg is to sleep in a coffin") from which the only escape is to the railroad station "where no one can seek us out." The theme here is his sense of having been cast out and rejected. In the poem "Preserve my speech . . ." (1931) he speaks of himself as an "unrecognized brother." I have read somewhere in Boudouin de Courtenay that "brother" was orig­inally used not of blood kinship, but of acceptance by one's tribe. M. had not been accepted by the "tribe" of his fellow writers, he had been cast out of Soviet literature, and even the wretched priest's coat on his shoulders was held to bear witness to his bourgeois ideology.

42 The Last Winter in Voronezh

_I

n the summer of 1936, thanks to money given us by Akhmatova, Pasternak and my brother, Evgeni, we were able to get out of Voronezh and spend some time in the country. This was very im­portant because of M.'s heart trouble, which was getting worse and worse. We decided to go to Zadonsk, on the upper reaches of the River Don, once famous for its monastery and the monk Tikhon. For six weeks we rested, thinking about nothing and enjoying life. But then we heard over the radio about the beginning of the terror. The announcer said that Kirov's murderers had been discovered and that trials were in preparation. After listening to this, we walked out silently onto the monastery road. There was nothing to talk about— everything was clear. That same day M. stuck his walking-stick into the imprints left by horses' hoofs on the roadway—it had been rain­ing the day before and they were full of water. "Like memory," he said. These imprints turned up (as "thimbles made by hoofs") in verse written in the following January, when M.'s memory of the celebrated radio announcer's booming voice prompted him to undertake something for his own salvation.*

When we returned to Voronezh, we found that all doors were closed to us. Nobody wanted to talk with us or invite us to their homes or even recognize us—at least, not in public places. But some people still tried to help us on the quiet. The theater manager, for example, arranged for us to rent a room in the house of the seam­stress who worked for the theater. Her house was on a hill above the river—an old, tumbledown wooden place that had sunk into the ground. From the plot of ground near the house one could see the far bank with a fringe of forest, and little boys tobogganed down the slope right to the water's edge. This view was always in front of our eyes, and M. often referred to it in his verse, sometimes cursing it but always nevertheless admiring it.

The little boys would ask him: "Are you a priest or a general, mister?" and to this M. always replied: "A little bit of both." As we soon found out, they thought he might be a general because he held himself so erect and "stuck his nose in the air"—that is, kept his head well back. Through Vadik, the landlady's son, M. took part in a bird

* The reference is to the abortive attempt to write an ode in praise of Stalin, described in the following chapter.

auction[15] at which Vadik bought some birds. As M. said, boys have a particular feeling for birds—"Have you ever seen a girl with pi­geons," he asked me, "or at a bird auction?" There were frequent mentions of wild birds in M.'s verse.

We realized that this winter, calamitous as it was, would be our last breathing-space, and we wanted to make the best of it. We could say with Klychkov, in the lines which M. loved to repeat: "Ahead is only torment, and torment is behind me/ Sit with me a while, for God's sake, sit with me a while." This is why the "notebook" writ­ten in this last period is the most serene and life-affirming of them.

For any intellectual activity, a man has to tune himself up, like an instrument. Some people can no doubt do this as they go along, functioning without interruption, while others always have to tune themselves afresh each time they begin a new work. Like all poets whose work clearly divides into distinct phases, M. belonged to the second category, and at the beginning of each new cycle there is always a "key" poem which, like a tuning fork, strikes the required note for the rest. At the beginning of the "Second Notebook," this function is fulfilled by the poem about the "factory whistle of So­viet cities" which "whistles into the depths of the ages." When I asked him what he meant by "factory whistle" here, he said: "Per­haps I mean myself."

How could this man, living at bay in the isolation, emptiness and darkness to which we were consigned, think of himself as the "fac­tory whistle of Soviet cities"? Virtually excluded from the life of the country, how could he imagine that his voice could sound forth in its cities? It can only be explained by that sense of being right with­out which it is impossible to be a poet. If one were to name the dominant theme in the whole of M.'s life and work, one might say that it was his insistence on the poet's dignity, his position in society and his right to make himself heard.

This is why, after the opening poem about the factory whistle, the "Second Notebook" contains this theme of the poet's self-assertion. In the atmosphere of increasing terror, it would have been impos­sible, if he had been guided by reason alone, for him to strike this note. But the point is that the theme came to him spontaneously, as a poetic subject always did—it was not something arrived at by a ra­tional process. At first it appeared only in a muted form, disguised by references drawn from everyday life, such as the factory whistle.

The theme of the poet's situation also comes out in his poem about the goldfinch, or at least in the variant of it where he addresses the bird as his own likeness and orders it to live. In one of his early ar­ticles M. had told a story about a youthful poet who went from publisher to publisher trying to sell his literary wares which nobody had any use for. This youth is described by a Russian word almost identical in sound with "goldfinch," and since M. never forgot pre­vious associations or images, he must have thought of this, and of the rejection of his own literary wares, as he wrote the poem on the goldfinch. Perhaps this is why he was so insistent in telling it to live.

The goldfinch was now kept in a cage, and not allowed out into the forest glades. "But," M. said to me once, "they cannot stop me moving about. I have just been on a secret trip to the Crimea." He was referring to the poem "Gaps in Round Bays" (February 1937), which is remarkable for its slow-motion effect ("a slow sail con­tinued by a cloud. . . ."). We were always distressed at the way time flew by, and M. felt that only in the south did you have a tangible sense of present time.

"You've been on a trip to Tiflis as well," I said to him. "I was forced to make that journey," he replied. "I was dragged there by the Evil Spirit." By this he meant that his verses about Tiflis were a by-product of his attempt to write the ode to Stalin.

In another poem, written in January 1937, he writes of his "bright nostalgia" which will not let him leave the "young hills of Voro­nezh" for the "bright ones of Tuscany that belong to all mankind." Italy dwelt with us in the shape of M.'s volumes of Italian poetry and our illustrated books on architecture. M. would invite me to stroll in imagination with him round the Baptistery in Florence, and we got as much pleasure from this as we did from the view in front of the seamstress' house.

Then there was the changing of the seasons. "This is also a jour­ney," M. said, "and they can't take it away from us." With his infi­nite love of life he was able to draw strength from things which other people, including me, only found oppressive: the autumn slush, for instance, or the bitter cold of winter. These were things that could not be "taken away"—the word he used to describe how his enforced residence in Voronezh had deprived him of all that he felt had formerly belonged to him: the south, journeys, trains, steamships . . .

When he started writing poems about stars, M. was upset—this was always a sign that his poetic impulse was coming to an end ("thetailor's material is running out"). He remembered how Gumilev used to say that stars had a different meaning for every poet. For M. they signified abandonment of the earth and hence a feeling that he had lost his bearings.

>oet's understanding of reality comes to him together with his

He was even more upset by the poem he wrote in May 1937 about the woman of Kiev—the second he had written during those months about a woman parted from her husband. Terrified as he was of our parting, he thought this was ominous. He was very often afraid of things that appeared like this in his poetry, and after he had read me a few lines from the first of these poems, he never mentioned them to me again. "Don't talk about them," he said, "or it may all hap­pen." We also had a superstitious belief that anything referred to in his poetry was bound to disappear: after writing "The Patriarch," he lost the white-handled walking-stick mentioned in it. A traveling rug with which I used to cover him began to fall apart as soon as it appeared in the line "you will cover me with it, as with a military flag, when I die." Our apartment, for which I had fought so hard, did not long survive the poem he wrote about it, and our goldfinch was eaten by a cat.

43 The Ode

verse, which always contains some element of anticipation of the future. "They're all the same," Akhmatova once said to me in a matter-of-fact tone when I showed her a poem of M.'s which clearly demonstrated foreknowledge of the future: she knew his work only too well and was not surprised in the least.

In the "Second Voronezh Notebook" there is a cycle whose ma­trix is the "Ode to Stalin" which he forced himself to write in the winter of 1936-37. This "Ode" did not fulfill its purpose—to save his life—but it gave rise to a whole series of other poems which were not only unlike it but also flatly contradicted it. Rather like the un­coiling of a spring, they were a natural response to it.

The "Goldfinch" cycle, which immediately preceded it, had sprung from an intensified craving for life and an affirmation of it, but even here there is a foreboding of death ("I shall take my seat inthe lilac sleigh"), of our parting and the horrors lurking ahead. We were witnessing "the beginning of dreadful deeds," and the future was approaching "grimly," like the dark thunderclouds which occur in his poem about the Voronezh region (December 1936). Finally, in early January 1937 there was the poem about the "deadness of the plains" over which comes slowly crawling "He of whom we shriek in our sleep/ The Judas of peoples to come." At this moment he saw his choice with utmost clarity: either he could passively await his doom or he could make some attempt to save himself. The turning point came in the middle of January, and is expressed in the poem entitled "Yeast of the World" (the one where he refers to the im­prints made by horses' hoofs). This marked the moment at which the "Goldfinch" cycle came to an end and a new one, triggered by the "Ode," began.

The man to whom the "Ode" was written so dominated our minds that one can find veiled references to him in the most unlikely con­texts. These allusions are always betrayed by certain associations from which one can see M.'s train of thought. A poem written in December 1936, for instance, is about an idol living in the middle of a mountain and trying to remember the days when it still had human shape. In Russian there is a clear phonetic trail of association leading from "Kremlin" to "mountain" via the words kremen ("flint") and kamen ("stone"). There is also a dangerously suggestive use of the word "fat" in the line: "The fat of pearls drips from his neck." One immediately thinks of the "fat fingers" in M.'s first poem about Stalin. The line about the idol desperately trying to remember the time when it was human could have been inspired by Yakhontov's wife, Lilia, a Stalinist of the sentimental type, who told us during their visit to Voronezh how wonderful, brave and high-spirited Stalin had been as a young revolutionary. . . . Living as we did in Assyria, it was impossible not to think of the Assyrian.

By the window in the room we rented from the seamstress there was a square dining table which we used for everything under the sun. M. now took possession of it and laid out pencil and paper on it. He had never done anything like this before: paper and pencil were always needed only at the end of his work on a poem, to copy it out when it was already composed in his head. But for the sake of the "Ode" he changed all his habits, and while he was writing it we had to eat on the very edge of the table, or even on the window sill. Every morning he seated himself at the table and picked up the pen­cil, as a writer is supposed to: for all the world like Fedin, or some­one of that kind. I would not even have been surprised if he had pronounced the ritual "Never a day without at least a lihe," but this, thank God, he didn't say. After sitting for half an hour or so in this posture of the real man of letters, he would suddenly jump up and begin to curse himself for his lack of skill: "Now, look at Aseyev— he's a real craftsman, he would just dash it off without a moment's thought." Then, calming down, he would stretch out on the bed and ask for tea. After that, he would get up to feed lumps of sugar to the neighbor's dog through the air vent at the top of the window—to do this he had to climb up on the table with the paper neatly laid out on it. Next he would begin to pace the room and, suddenly brightening, start mumbling to himself. This was a sign that he had not been able to stifle the real poetry inside him, and that it had now broken its bounds, overwhelming the Evil Spirit. His attempt to do violence to himself was meeting stubborn resistance, and the artificially con­ceived poem about Stalin simply became a matrix for the utterly different material seething inside him—real poetry which was antag­onistic to the "Ode" and canceled it out. This cycle, generated by the "Ode," starts with "Yeast of the World" and continues to the end of the "Second Voronezh Notebook."

The main outward sign of the relationship between the "Ode" and the series of poems which burst from M.'s lips in opposition to it is a phonetic one involving the syllable os, which appears in a number of unrelated words such as "wasp" (osa) and "axle" (os). A key poem dated February 8, 1937, for example, begins:

Armed with the sight of narrow wasps [os]

Sucking the axis [oj] of the earth . . .

But much more important than this phonetic link between the "Ode" and the rest of the cycle is the way in which details in the "Ode" are contradicted or given a different interpretation in the "free" poems. In the "Ode," for example, an artist, with tears in his eyes, draws a portrait of the Leader. But the poem of February 8 quoted above has the line "I do not draw and I do not sing." M. himself was astonished at this admission which had burst from him quite spon­taneously, and commented to me: "Look what the trouble with me is: it seems I don't draw. . . ."

A mention of Aeschylus and Prometheus in the "Ode" led on in the "free" poems to the theme of tragedy and martyrdom (in the poem dated January 19-February 14). The theme of martyrdom also comes into the poem on Rembrandt (February 8), which speaks, by implication, of a Calvary devoid of grandeur (the museum in Voro­nezh, which we visited constantly, had a small painting of Golgotha by Rembrandt and some Greek vases—all that remained of the treas­ures of Dorpat University).

The Caucasus, naturally mentioned in the "Ode" as Stalin's birth­place, occurs again in the reference to Tiflis as the place which re­members not the Great Leader but the poor poet with his worn shoes (the poem of February 7-11), and in the mention of Mount Elbrus[16] as a measure of the people's need for bread and poetry.

In the opening poem of the cycle ("Yeast of the World" and its variants) there is even a direct complaint that the "Ode" is at cross- purposes with the rest:

I'm bored: my direct work babbles obliquely

crossed and mocked by another that has dislocated its axle.t

Poetry is the "yeast of the world," a "sweet-voiced labor" which is "blameless." M. declares that he is a poet when his "mind is not deceitful" and his work is "selfless":

a selfless song is its own praise, a comfort to friends, and pitch to enemies.

The enemy who had been installed in our Moscow apartment, the writer with the rank of general, copied out all of M.'s verse on his typewriter. Since very few people had typewriters in those days and he offered to do this as a "favor," it was impossible to refuse—and in any case he would have obtained the poems somehow, even if it had meant stealing them from under my pillow. Just as a little warning to us he underlined the words "selfless song" in red pencil. When the archives are one day thrown open, it will be interesting to see his report on this poem.

In the poems of this cycle M. also exalted man ("Do not compare: the living are incomparable") and gave rein to his love of life for the last time. He lamented his failing eyesight, which had once been "sharper than a whetted scythe" but had not had time to pick out each of the "lonely multitude of stars" (the last poem in the cycle, dated February 8-9). He summed up his life and work in the last three lines of the poem dated February 12:

And I have accompanied the universe's rapture As muted organ pipes Accompany a woman's voice.

Speaking of himself, he used here the "inexorable past tense"—to borrow his own expression from "Conversation About Dante." A few more months were to pass, and he would say to Akhmatova: "I am ready for death." She later used this phrase in her "Poem With­out a Hero," which also has a dedication dated December 27, 1938— the date of M.'s death.

But perhaps the high point of the cycle is contained in the follow­ing lines, which are the proud words of a man condemned to death, yet still clinging to life:

Unhappy is he who, as by his own shadow, is frightened by the barking of dogs and mowed

down by the wind and wretched is he who, half-alive himself, begs a shadow for alms.[17]

The word "shadow" here referred to the man from whom every­body "begged alms"—and a shadow is what he eventually proved to be. Struggling for breath, frightened by everything but afraid of no one, crushed and condemned, the bearded poet thus defied once more, in his last days, the dictator whose power was greater than any the world had ever known.

People who had voices were subjected to the vilest of tortures: their tongues were cut out and with the stump that remained they were forced to glorify the tyrant. The desire to live is insuperable, and people accepted even this, if they could thereby prolong their physical existence. But those who survived at this price were as dead as those who perished. There is no point in mentioning names, but it is safe to say that among all those who continued to play the role of writers in those years, none have come forth as witnesses. They can never overcome their state of confusion, or say anything with the stumps of their tongues. Yet there were many among them who in different circumstances would have found their way in life and said what they had to say.

To be sure, M. also, at the very last moment, did what was re­quired of him and wrote a hymn of praise to Stalin, but the "Ode" did not achieve its purpose of saving his life. It is possible, though, that without it I should not have survived either—their first impulse was to destroy me, too, but it was counted in a widow's favor if her husband had made his submission even though it wasn't accepted. M. knew this. By surviving I was able to save his poetry, which would otherwise have come down only in the garbled copies circulating in ^I937-

The prayer "May this cup pass from me" can only be understood if you know what it is to wait for the slow, inevitable approach of death. It is far harder to wait for a bullet in the back of the neck than to be stricken down unawares. We waited for the end during the whole of our last year in Voronezh, and then yet another year, mov­ing from place to place to place in the Moscow region.

To write an ode to Stalin it was necessary to get in tune, like a musical instrument, by deliberately giving way to the general hyp­nosis and putting oneself under the spell of the liturgy which in those days blotted out all human voices. Without this, a real poet could never compose such a thing: he would never have had that kind of ready facility. M. thus spent the beginning of 1937 conduct- ing a grotesque experiment on himself. Working himself up into the state needed to write the "Ode," he was in effect deliberately upset­ting the balance of his own mind. "I now realize that it was an ill­ness," he said later to Akhmatova.

"Why is it that when I think of him, I see heads, mounds of heads?" M. said to me once. "What is he doing with all those heads?"

When we left Voronezh, M. asked Natasha to destroy the "Ode." Many people now advise me not to speak of it at all, as though it had never existed. But I cannot agree to this, because the truth would then be incomplete: leading a double life was an absolute fact of our age, and nobody was exempt. The only difference was that while others wrote their odes in their apartments and country villas and were rewarded for them, M. wrote his with a rope around his neck. Akhmatova did the same, as they drew the noose tighter around the neck of her son. Who can blame either her or M.?

44 Golden Rules

_A

t the beginning of January 1937, just after M. had written his poem "Smile, angry lamb," he was visited by a youth, a real guttersnipe, who sat down in front of us and announced that "writ­ers must collaborate with their readers." This was a familiar tune: he wanted M. to give him his new verse so he could make copies of it. This is what he had been sent for, but he had been badly briefed and was too confused and tongue-tied to explain what he needed.

We are all very long-suffering people and we have one golden rule: if they start badgering you, never resist—just do what they want, whether it is voting in "elections," signing some public appeal or other, or buying State bonds.* When you are talking with a po­lice spy, always answer all his questions, so that he can duly report to his superiors, otherwise you will "never hear the end of it"—and they'll get what they want anyway. The main thing in these situ­ations is to get rid, as politely as possible, of the person sent to badger you. M. also observed this rule, but on this occasion he was so angry that, to use Akhmatova's expression, he "burst his banks." Against the general background of our isolation from the outside world, visitors of this type were utterly unbearable. M. lost patience with our uninvited guest and told him to leave. Later he laughed at himself for being so fastidious and expecting them to send agents who really knew their stuff! But when the next one appeared and turned out, though a little older, to be just as ill-suited for the job, M. no longer thought it funny and—to use Akhmatova's expression —"had an epileptic fit."

It was not done to expose police spies. The agency which sent them would not put up with any attempt to discredit its operations and sooner or later wreaked vengeance on people who did so. Even now, many people who have been in prisons or camps prefer to keep quiet about their "godfathers" t—they know that to be indiscreet about such things is asking for trouble. In those years people were even more careful. The rare exceptions only proved the rule. Every­body knew, for instance, that Marietta Shaginian never allowed any

* Under Stalin, all Soviet citizens were obliged to buy State bonds, "volun­teering" at factory and office meetings to subscribe a month's salary. It was a kind of recurrent capital levy.

t Officers of the secret police charged with the surveillance of prisoners.

police spy to come near her. If one tried to, she made a terrible fuss, not caring who heard her. In 1934 she created a scene in my pres­ence, and I thought I could see what her game was. We had come out of the State Publishing House together and she started asking me about life in Voronezh—this was in the early days of M.'s exile there, when nobody was yet afraid of being seen with us because the story of Stalin's conversation with Pasternak had spread far and wide. Suddenly the poet B. came running after us—he also wanted to inquire about M. But Marietta rounded on him fiercely. "I have friends in the Central Committee," she shouted, "and I will not put up with police spies." I tried to stop her, saying that I knew B. well. But she wouldn't listen to reason, and I had the suspicion that the whole scene had been deliberately contrived by her: she attacked completely decent people in the hope of frightening off real police spies, whom she would not of course have dared to treat in this way. But, as I say, Marietta was an exception, and for the most part the informers who surrounded us had a completely free hand and be­came more and more brazen.

The Voronezh police spy—the one sent to replace the guttersnipe thrown out by M.—dropped in on us without warning any time he liked. The door in the seamstress' house was never closed because her son Vadik—the young bird-fancier who bought goldfinches and bullfinches at auctions—was always running in and out. The new po­lice spy would appear so unexpectedly in the doorway that we were always caught unawares with manuscripts lying all over the table. Without taking his coat off, he would sit down at the table and start going through everything. He made comments such as "Why are there so many couplets here?" or "I can't make out a thing in this handwriting—hers [that is, mine] is much better." M. would snatch the sheets of paper from him and angrily tear them to pieces. Later we had to reconstruct whatever it was from memory—which only made us even more furious.

"Why do you come in working hours?" M. asked him. The man was posing as a factory worker of some kind—a fitter or a lathe operator. He replied that he had got off work, or that he was on the night shift. "So they let you leave the factory whenever you like?" we asked. But it was all like water off a duck's back, and he just said the first thing that came into his head, not even trying to be plau­sible. Every time M. threw him out, he said: "That's the end, he won't turn up again." He just couldn't believe that the man would have the impudence to come back after being so thoroughly ex­posed. But it was a vain hope: two or three days later we would have to go through the same business all over again. He wasn't such a fool as to tell his superiors that he had failed—an agent who has been exposed is scarcely worth his salt.

M. was working on the poem about begging alms from a shadow when he suddenly decided to ring the GPU and ask for an interview with the Commandant. Most unusually, his request was granted. The normal thing would have been for him to be told to write out his complaint and leave it in the special box at the GPU office—this is how we are used to communicating with our authorities: by drop­ping petitions in boxes. I learned about this move of M.'s only after the interview had been arranged, and I went with him to the GPU building (always known in any Soviet city as "the Big House"). After his bout of heart trouble in the summer of 1936, M. never went out alone. He would not have gone out to phone the GPU without me if the telephone exchange had not been very close to our house. Natasha Shtempel later told me that while they had been out walking together M. had gone to phone the GPU to find out whether the interview was going to be granted. He had asked her not to tell me anything about it—he knew I would be against it and argue that, apart from being futile, it was wrong to draw attention to oneself.

After a brief exchange of words in the GPU guardroom, we were given passes for both of us—they knew that M. was sick and couldn't go out unaccompanied. We were received by the Deputy Commandant, who looked like an ordinary Red Army officer. Men of this type are often found in the higher secret-police posts. M. was convinced that people like this were employed specially for relations with the outside world—so that, seeing their broad, open faces, no­body would guess what went on "inside." The one who received us was shortly afterward transferred to the film industry, where, ac­cording to Shklovski, he was quite easy to get along with. The same was probably true of Furmanov's younger brother, who had a simi­lar career—the film world is swarming with such people. There are also a great many of them in the universities and institutes, where they work in the faculties of literature, philosophy, economics and so forth. They are always gladly given places on the pretext of what is known as "staff consolidation." I have the impression that as a matter of deliberate policy great numbers of young people are given their early training by the secret police before being let out into the world at large—where they never forget their alma mater. Among them there were some perfectly decent kids who in a drunken state would tell you amusing tales about their service with the "organs" (as the secret police is often called). I knew one such splendid fellow when I taught at the Chuvash Teachers' Training College. He was writing a dissertation about the "material base" of the Chuvash kol­khozes and complained that it was a subject of which no one could make head or tail. He told me he had gone to work for the "organs" as soon as he left school. He had done so in search of "adventure," but his first job had been to stand for hours, come fair weather or foul, in front of the house where a certain old man lived, with orders to take note of any visitors. But the devil of it was that nobody ever came to see the old man and he never came out himself—the only sign of life he gave was to pull back the curtain and peep out occa­sionally. My young acquaintance even wondered sometimes whether the old man hadn't been instructed to keep an eye on him—making sure he didn't sneak off to have a beer while on duty. His job was the same as that of the "tails" I have already mentioned whom we saw loitering in front of Akhmatova's house—only they had a more cheerful time, because she at least had fairly frequent visitors! The old man, incidentally, had been described to my young colleague as a former Menshevik.

People of this type, sent to work in colleges and institutes by the "organs," were regarded with tolerance by their colleagues. It is said that they were never used as informers—which makes good sense, since they were less suited for the part than certain ladies or young gentlemen with an intellectual or upper-class background who could more easily gain one's confidence. Moreover, these people appointed on the grounds of "staff consolidation" were not frightened of losing their jobs and were therefore less likely to take part in departmental intrigues aimed at getting rid of rivals.

The Voronezh Commandant saw us in a vast office with lots of doors—just like the office of M.'s interrogator in Moscow. He asked what M. had come to see him about, and he looked at us with uncon­cealed curiosity—perhaps the reason he had broken with custom and decided to receive us was a desire to have a look at this odd bird sitting in his cage. Even men like him had their human weaknesses. But I do not think that M. could have made much of an impression on this Soviet general—he must have had a very different image of what a writer was. Haggard, with sunken cheeks and bloodless lips, M. indeed looked "half alive" (as he said of himself in the poem about the shadow) next to the burly, clean-shaven and pink-cheeked

Commandant, who, though a trifle portly, was still in very good trim.

M. said that he had come on two matters. The first was: How was he to earn enough money to keep himself alive? Exiles were not given work anywhere—anybody who was rash enough to offer a job to someone like M. would be dismissed himself for "lack of vigi­lance." There was no such thing as a labor exchange, so how could he exercise his constitutional right to work? At the moment all doors were closed to him, but while he had still at least been able to gain access to people, he had managed to talk with someone in the Re­gional Party Committee about the question of finding work. Here they had said to him: "You will have to start all over again: get a job as a watchman or as a cloakroom attendant and show what you're capable of." But this was hypocrisy—nobody would even give him a job as an attendant for the same reason: fear that they might be accused of "lack of vigilance." In any case, if an intellectual took a menial job like that, it would be regarded as a political demonstra­tion. No organization, beginning with the Union of Writers, would take any responsibility for him, and there was no question of any of them finding work for him. Evidently, as M. told the Commandant, the only organization which had any responsibility for him was the GPU. Since people sent to the camps were given work, M. asked whether the same did not apply to exiles.

The Commandant replied that the "organs" could not concern themselves with finding work for people: not only would that be "too much of a burden," but it was also unnecessary, since exiles were free to take any job they liked and, "as is well known, there is no unemployment in our country." "And what are you doing at the moment?" he asked. M. replied that, not having any regular paid work, he was studying the Spanish language and literature, in partic­ular the work of a poet, Jewish by origin, who spent many years in the cellars of the Inquisition and every day composed a sonnet in his head. When he was released, he wrote down all his sonnets, but he was soon imprisoned again and this time put on a chain. It was not known whether he continued to compose poetry or not. Perhaps, M. suggested, it might be possible to organize a Spanish study group in the local GPU club and put him in charge of it? I can't be sure, but I think that by this time we had heard rumors of the arrest of the Leningrad Spanish scholars, and this was probably why M. men­tioned his Spanish studies to the Commandant rather than anything else. The Commandant was quite taken aback by M.'s proposal for a

Spanish study group and replied that "our fellows" would scarcely be interested in learning Spanish. I doubt whether he got the point about the Inquisition, and imagine that he was simply puzzled by the eccentric character sitting in front of him.

"And why don't your relatives or friends help you?" he asked suddenly. M. replied that he had no relatives, and that his friends now pretended not to know him and did not answer his letters—"for reasons you understand," he added.

"We don't prevent anybody meeting exiles," said the Comman­dant with a genial laugh, and asked M. what the other thing was he wanted to discuss.

The second question concerned M.'s verse. M. suggested that in future it might be better for him to mail the Commandant all his new verse—"so you don't have to waste your men's time," he ex­plained. As he told me later, it had been on the tip of his tongue to use the Commandant's own word for his colleagues and say: "Why should your fellows have to waste their time coming to get my verse?" But luckily he refrained from this extremely patronizing turn of phrase.

The Commandant became more and more genial. He assured M. that his organization was not at all interested in his verse, only in counter-revolutionary activity. "Write just what you like," he said, but he at once went on to ask: "Why did you write that poem that got you into trouble? Upset by collectivization, were you?" In Party circles it was now customary to speak of the mass deportation of the kulaks as past history and to say that it had been carried out so vigorously because it was essential, but that some unstable citizens had been upset by the excesses which had admittedly taken place. M. mumbled an evasive reply to this question.

During our conversation the Commandant's phone rang and we heard him say to the person at the other end: "Yes, yes . . . That's slander. . . . Send it along, we'll attend to it." We realized that somebody's fate was being decided, that a warrant was being issued as the result of a denunciation: So-and-so said such and such. This was quite enough for someone to disappear for good. Whatever we said—things that anywhere else but this country might seem quite ordinary—could be produced in evidence against us. After talking with friends, we often joked as we left: "Today we've said enough to get ten years."

We parted from the Commandant in a perfectly amicable way. I asked M.: "Why all this tomfoolery?" "So that he knows what's what," M. replied. "But they know in any case," I wailed with my usual female logic. But I was not able to spoil M.'s mood, and for several days he went around cheerfully, remembering the details of the conversation. In one thing he had certainly been successful: the police spies vanished into thin air, and for the rest of our stay in Voronezh we were never troubled by any of them again. And what in fact had been the point of them? AH M.'s verse came into the hands of the "organs" anyway—admittedly not in Voronezh, but in Moscow, through the vigilant Kostyrev and the editorial offices of the literary magazines.

The only question is: Why did the Commandant remove his po­lice spies instead of accusing M. of "slander" and issuing a warrant for his arrest? Is it possible that the original order to "isolate but preserve" M. was still in force? Or it may be that since M. was "in the charge of Moscow," the Voronezh branch of the secret police attached their agents to us simply out of excess of zeal—just to show their mettle. A third possibility is that the Commandant was actually displaying a certain liberalism. This did sometimes happen—even se­cret-police officials were human, and some of them were tired of killing. The only really strange thing is that all this was done by people, the most ordinary sort of people: "people like you and me, with eyes hollowed out in skulls,/ with as much right to judge as you." How can we understand or explain it? And what is the point of it all?

45 "Hope"

's three-year term of exile was supposed to end in the mid-

• die of May 1937, but we did not attach too much signifi­cance to this. We knew only too well that the length of your sen­tence was a matter of chance rather than of law—they could always add to it or shorten it, depending on how your luck ran. Experi­enced exiles, such as the ones we had met in Cherdyn, were always pleased if they were given a few more years without any formal proceedings. Otherwise it meant going through the ordeal of a new arrest and interrogation, after which you would be exiled to a new, unfamiliar place. Nobody knows better than an exile or a camp in­mate how important it is to stay as long as possible in one place. This is the basic condition of survival, because it means you make friends with people who will help you to come through, and you acquire a few pitiful belongings—in other words, you strike some kind of roots and spend less of your strength on the struggle to stay alive. But this is true not only of exiles: moving to a new place is an intolerable ordeal for anybody in our conditions. No wonder people hang on so grimly to their "living-space." Only an incorrigible vaga­bond like M., who hated the very idea of being tied to one place, could dream of moving. A change could only bring trouble. But M. was tired of Voronezh.

In April I went to Moscow, but found myself confronted by a blank wall which it was quite impossible to breach. However, to keep M.'s spirits up I wrote to him in Voronezh to say that we should soon be moving, now that his sentence was almost over. M. did not react to my words of encouragement, but my mother took them seriously and went to look after M. in Voronezh for a while so that I could again visit Moscow in search of new hope.

Why, at the dawn of the new era, at the very beginning of the fratricidal twentieth century, was I given the name Nadezhda ["Hope"]? All I now heard from our friends and acquaintances was: "Not a hope!"—not a hope that anybody would help us, or give us work, or read letters from us, or shake us by the hand. By now everybody was too used to thinking of us as doomed. But one cannot live without hope and, however often our hopes were disap­pointed, we could only go on trying. The head of the local branch of the MGB had generously explained to us that we would not be able to stay in Voronezh unless we got some kind of private help. Since there was no hope of that, we had nothing to look forward to but the prospect of moving to some other place.

On May 16, 1937, we went up to the same window in the MGB office through which three years previously M. had handed over his travel warrant from Cherdyn and had ever since conducted all his business with the State. This was where all exiles had to come to "report"—some once a month, others every three days. There were so many of us, small fry caught in the toils of the State, that there had always been a long line at this window. We did not realize that these crowds of waiting people had been the outward sign that the good times described by Akhmatova as "vegetarian" were still with us. Everything is relative—we were soon to read in the newspapers that under Yagoda the forced-labor camps had been run like "health resorts." The press unleashed a flood of abuse against Yagoda, accus­ing him of being soft on all the scum in the camps and in exile. "Who would have thought that we have been in the hands of hu­manists! " we said to each other.

By the middle of May 1937 the line at the MGB window had dwindled to a dozen or so gloomy and shabbily dressed intellectuals. "Everybody's left Voronezh," M. whispered to me. Despite our iso­lation, we at once understood the reason: nearly all the old exiles had been re-arrested and no new ones were being sent. The "vegetarian" phase was over. People were no longer being banished, as we had been. From prison one now went either to a forced-labor camp or to the other world. A privileged few were kept in prison. The wives and children of prisoners were no longer sent into enforced resi­dence away from the big cities, but were now also interned in special camps. There were even special institutions for small children, who were seen as potential avengers for their fathers. In 1956 Surkov said to me: "There must have been some case against Gumilev*—if you had a father like that and he was shot! He must have wanted to get revenge for him." It was curious that Surkov should have said this to me, of all people: he was so steeped in Stalin's Caucasian mentality that he thought only men might want to take vengeance.

Until 1937 all such potential avengers had merely been banished and one saw them standing in line in provincial MGB offices, waiting to "report." When we first arrived in Voronezh we saw there the son of Stoletov, who wandered the streets, alone and half but of his mind, complaining that his father had turned out to be a "wrecker." In 1937 the son of a man who had been shot would not have been sent to Voronezh, but would have been put straight behind barbed wire, and no complaints about his father would have been of any avail. Incidentally, neither M. nor I nor anybody else thought Stole- tov's son really meant it—but there were sons who sincerely cursed their executed fathers. After M.'s death, when I lived for a time on the outskirts of Kalinin, I met there a few wives who for some rea­son had been banished rather than sent to camps. They had also sent here a boy of fourteen who was distantly related to Stalin. He was being looked after by an aunt who lived nearby—also in exile—and his former governess. For days the boy went on raving against his father and mother as renegades, traitors to the working class and enemies of the people. He used a formula which had been instilled in him during his very careful upbringing: "Stalin is my father and I do

• Lev Gumilev, the son of Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev.

not need another one," and he kept referring to the hero of all the Soviet schoolbooks, Pavlik Morozov, who had managed to denounce his parents in time. He was tormented by the thought that he had lost the chance of becoming a second Pavlik by likewise exposing the criminal activity of his parents. His aunt and governess were forced to listen in silence—they knew what the boy would do if they dared breathe a word. The fact that he was allowed to live in Kalinin as an exile was only an exception that proved the rule. By 1937 no more exiles were being sent to Voronezh.

Without any hope or expectations, we stood for half an hour in the much diminished line. "What surprise will they have for us now?" M. whispered as we came up to the window. He gave his name and asked whether they had anything for him now that his term of exile had just come to an end. He was handed a piece of paper. For a moment he couldn't make out what was written on it, then he gasped and said to the clerk behind the window: "Does that mean I can go where I please?" The clerk snapped something back at him—they always snapped at us, they had no other way of talking— from which we gathered that M. was free again. A kind of electric shock went through the people glumly waiting behind us. They be­gan to shuffle and whisper. They suddenly saw a faint gleam of hope: if one had been released, perhaps the same could happen to others as well?

It took us a few days to wind up our affairs in Voronezh. Despite the poverty of our existence, we had accumulated some possessions: buckets, a frying pan, a flatiron (M. wrote to Benedikt Livshitz about how well I ironed his shirts), a cooker, a lamp, a kerosene stove, a mattress, jars, plates and a few saucepans. We had bought all this in the market and it had cost us a lot of money: every purchase was an event. But it would have cost us even more to take it all with us—cab drivers and porters would have ruined us, if that word meant anything in our situation. Some of the things we sold, and others we gave away. What use would we have for buckets in Mos­cow, where we would get water simply by turning a faucet? We had no doubt that we should be going back to Moscow: if M. had not been given an additional sentence at such a difficult time, it could only mean he was being allowed back to the capital. It suddenly appeared significant to us that for some reason we had been able to keep possession of our Moscow apartment during these three years. Other writers in the building, tired of living only in one room, had often asked to be given more space at our expense and had tried toget my mother to show them what was available in the apartment. She would never let them inside and gave them a lecture on the doorstep about how writers should behave toward an exiled col­league under the traditional code of the old intelligentsia. We did not worry about Kostyrev, who had been given one of our rooms right at the beginning: he had been vouched for by Stavski himself, and, still believing in his elementary good faith as a representative of the Writers' Union, we assumed that the room would be vacated the moment we needed it back. We also recalled Stalin's remark in his telephone conversation with Pasternak: "Mandelstam will be all right." But we completely forgot the warning Vinaver had given us. We had also forgotten where we were living.

e opened the door of our apartment with our own key and

A few days later we were sitting on a pile of our belongings at the Voronezh railroad station. My mother and I had brought just enough money from Moscow to buy tickets for all three of us. There was nobody to see us off. Fedia was at work, and Natasha, who was a teacher, was giving lessons at that time of day. M. was always composing comic doggerel about her ("If God knew that Natasha was a pedagogue, he would say: Take this pedagogue away, for the sake of God"). The evening before, we had drunk a bottle of wine with her and M. would just not let her go home, though she complained that her mother would be worried. About this, too, he made up some lines:

"Where've you been?" asks Mother dear, "Eating and drinking, I do declare," And black as night she sniffs the smell of Wine and onion in the air.

We left in good spirits, full of the rosiest hopes, quite forgetting how insidious and delusive is the one whose name I bear. . . .

46 "One Extra Day

were pleasantly surprised to find it empty. On the table there was a brief note from Kostyrev saying he had moved out to a dacha with his wife and child. He had left nothing at all to remind us he had ever lived here and sat copying out M.'s verse, listening in as Italked with my mother, brother, or the few friends who had still dared to come and see me on my trips from Voronezh. We had no idea why Kostyrev had decided to clear out. It was certainly not from tact. We could only regard it as a good sign—it must mean that all restrictions on M. had really been lifted.

The absence of Kostyrev and the reality of the familiar walls and belongings—beds, curtains, shelves with a handful of books on them —suddenly blotted out the whole memory of Cherdyn and Voro­nezh. We had the illusion that this was a real home to which we had returned after a time of incomprehensible and needless wandering. The process of rejoining past and present took no more than a sec­ond—the intervening period that had been forced on us from out­side and not freely chosen, suddenly faded away. Thanks to his abil­ity to live for the moment, M. easily passed, without looking back, from one part of his life to another—as one can see from his poetry with its clear division into different phases. Hence, when he entered our apartment, his three-year exile at once ceased to have any reality for him, and the business of fitting together the two parts of his life was achieved straightaway, on the spot, without any preliminaries.

Sometimes the two parts of one's life come together again like this, but sometimes the opposite happens—as when we were setting off for Cherdyn. Now, back in Moscow, we felt as though we had never been away. It is a common enough experience, known, for instance, to prisoners returning from the camps—as long as they have a home to return to. But enormous numbers of them have been away so many years that when they come back they find nothing: their wives have been sent away, their parents are dead, and their children have disappeared or grown up as strangers. Such people have to begin life all over again, piecing it together from whatever may be left to them. Sometimes, after many years of forced labor, they can reconstruct their lives, even if they have no home or fam­ily, by returning to their former profession. Although I escaped the camps myself, I know what it is to go through this process of remak­ing one's life. It means that you can become yourself again and throw off the mask which you have been forced to wear for so long. Many of us were only able to survive on condition that we con­cealed our true nature and pretended to be like those around us. It was essential not to betray one's past. A deported kulak, for instance, could save himself only by taking up manual labor and forgetting about the land. Twenty years went by between the time of M.'s death and the moment when I was able to take from their hiding place all the poems I had managed to save and put them openly on the table (or, rather, the suitcase which served me as a table). Dur­ing all those years I had to pretend to be someone else, wearing, as it were, an iron mask. I could not tell a soul that I was only waiting secretly for the moment when I could again become myself and say openly what I had been waiting for, and what I had been keeping all these years.

If the severed parts of my life were to come together in 1956, there could be no question of it in 1937: the trend of the times was not toward mending broken lives, and on that day when we came back to Moscow we were the victims of an optical illusion, a pure hallucination. But, thanks to this hallucination, M. was granted his "one extra day." *

In our sort of life everybody gladly falls for illusions or seeks some belief that gives a sense of reality. If the life around you is illusory, you take refuge in illusory activity, entering illusory rela­tions with others, embarking on illusory love affairs—you must have something to hang on to. Once, long before his first arrest, M. had said to me as we waited at a tram stop: "We think that everything is going along as it should, and that life continues—but that is only because the trams are running." Our empty apartment with its book­shelves was an even greater invitation to delude ourselves than the sight of our overcrowded tramcars. We also cheered each other with reminders of what Stalin, or Stavski, had said—as though we didn't know that such promises were the most terrible illusions of all. But we tried to close our eyes to this—anything to maintain our sense of false security. Instead of sitting down to consider our posi­tion soberly, which would only have meant upsetting ourselves with gloomy thoughts, we deposited all our things in the middle of the room and went off to the small gallery in Kropotkin Street to see "the French."

In Voronezh M. had often said to me: "If I ever get back, the first thing I shall do is go and see the French." Maria Veniaminovna Yu- dina had noted how much he missed the French painters. Whenever she came to Voronezh, he would ask her about them, even while she was playing to him. She once sent him an album put out by the gallery, but the reproductions were very bad, and they only whetted his appetite. Now, without changing after the journey, pausing only to drink some tea, he went straight to the gallery. He also talked of going to see Tyshler: "I must have a good look at everything while

• Quoted from the end of Mandelstam's "Journey to Armenia." there is still time." He had appreciated Tyshler very early, when he had seen the series of drawings at the first OSZ [18] exhibition. Later, after he had joined me in Yalta, he said: "You still don't know what this Tyshler of yours is capable of." The last time he went to see him and look at his paintings was just before the end, in March 1938.

47 The "Bessarabian Carriage

he first person to come and see us was Akhmatova. This was

on the morning of the day we arrived. She had timed her own arrival in Moscow to coincide with ours. I lay on a mattress in the kitchen with a fearful headache while M. paced rapidly round the tiny "sanctuary," as we called it, and recited to Akhmatova. He was giving her an account of what he had written in Voronezh (the Second and Third Notebooks)—from the early days of their friend­ship, they had always told each other of every line they wrote. In return Akhmatova read him the poem she had written about him in Voronezh. It ends with the lines:

But in the room of the banished poet Fear and the Muse stand watch by turn and the night falls without the hope of dawn.

It was quite true that while Akhmatova had been visiting us, we had all been overcome by a sudden paroxysm of wild and senseless ter­ror. It had happened in the evening as we were sitting in the room we rented from the "agent" (the one who threatened to roast mice on our grill). As often happened in the provinces, the electricity had been cut off, and we had lit an oil lamp. Suddenly the door opened and in came Leonov, the biologist from Tashkent, together with an­other man. Though this happened without any warning at all, there was no reason for us to be frightened—we knew Leonov had a fa­ther in Voronezh and that he often came to see him. He was a kind of Russian dervish who was always a little drunk, but we trusted him absolutely. He had first been brought to us by Kuzin, and often

Poem by Anna Akhmatova written after her visit to Mandelstam in Voronezh (1936)

Voronezh

And the town stands locked in ice:

A paperweight of trees, walls, snow.

Gingerly I tread on glass;

the painted sleighs skid in their tracks.

Peter's statue in the square points to

crows and poplars, and a verdigris dome

washed clean, seeded with the sun's dust.

Here the earth still shakes from the old battle

where the Tartars were beaten to their knees.

Let the poplars raise their chalices

for a sky-shattering toast,

like thousands of wedding-guests drinking

in jubilation at a feast.

But in the room of the banished poet

Fear and the Muse stand watch by turn,

and the night falls,

without the hope of dawn.¹

Translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward

¹ The last four lines have been omitted in the Soviet edition of Akhmatova's verse.

our life was at last secure.

My memory of those days in Moscow is strangely fragmented—I can recall very vividly several moments, like stills from a film, but in between there are gaps which I can no longer reconstruct. One such "still," which also features Akhmatova, was the time when we waited endlessly for Khardzhiev to arrive at the apartment. He had promised to come and bring some wine with him, but he was intoler­ably late, as only Muscovites can be—particularly in those days when nobody had watches and the trams and buses ran very errati­cally. Akhmatova decided not to wait for him any longer, and set off back to where she was staying—with Tolstaya on the Prechistenka. She had to go back all the way on foot—it was the rush hour and she could not get on a tram, but the moment she arrived she was called to the telephone. It was M. ordering her to return to our apartment again: Khardzhiev had come after all. She immediately started out, like Phoebus Apollo in the anthology of mock-classical verse that M. had made up together with Gumilev, Georgi Ivanov and Lozinski in their carefree younger days: "Phoebus in his golden carriage rolls across the sky./ Tomorrow he'll come back again in the same old way."

We had been sitting in our large room (which we had now dubbed the "Kostyrev room"), but when Akhmatova came back, we moved to the narrow passage which we preferred. We had parti­tioned it with a cupboard and put in a small table and a mattress on a wooden frame with castors—in our cramped conditions we had soon learned to do without proper beds. The mattress was usually placed lengthwise, but for fear of bedbugs we had put it crosswise, with the head against the wall. There was only a narrow gap at the other end through which one could get to the large window, always kept wide open. While I busied myself in the kitchen, the three of them sat talking on the mattress.

"Look at our Bessarabian carriage," M. said as I came in, "and the impoverished lady of the manor with her steward. ... I am just the Jew."

When he was with Akhmatova, one could always see that their relations went back to the madcap days of their youth. Whenever they met, they both became young again and made each other laugh with words from their private vocabulary. Some of these went back to certain episodes. For instance, when Akhmatova was posing for Altman's portrait of her, M. occasionally looked in, and one day they told him how Altman's neighbor, also an artist and an Italian by origin, had come in, heard them laughing, and used a macaronic form of the Russian word for "laughter" which they found very funny. This was the word by which Akhmatova and M. described the fits of giggling that came over them whenever they met.

The scene on the "Bessarabian carriage" was the last with Akhma­tova. She probably went back to Leningrad to have things out with Punin—she had been on bad terms with him for a long time and I can't remember when it was she first told me how difficult she found life with him. In Moscow she had also been to have a talk with Gar- shin, and this had brought on her final break with Punin. After she left, her place on the mattress was taken by Yakhontov, who brought his girl friend Lilia along with him. Lilia could easily have been taken for a Bessarabian "lady of the manor," but she would not have been amused by the comparison. She earnestly tried to re-educate M. in a spirit of sentimental Stalinism (there was such a thing!). In her opin­ion, a writer who did not devote himself to Stalin's service was fin­ished. Who would read such a writer? He would be barred from literature and forever consigned to oblivion. Lilia had no doubt whatsoever that Stalin was the savior of mankind. She also wanted, incidentally, to write a letter to Stalin saying he ought to help M. to mend his ways, and that the best way to achieve this would be to let him publish his verse. This kind of thing later came to be known as "Gaponism." * Lilia was very well read in Party literature because she had to write sketches for Yakhontov. Every day she turned out some new story about the miracles performed by the Leader. Ya­khontov didn't share her views, but said nothing, preferring to joke and act funny little scenes for us. One of his best turns was an imita­tion of his own father, a large, fat, perspiring man—in Czarist times he had been an official and was always terrified of his superiors (Lilia's commentary on this was: "All officials were cowards in Czar­ist times"). Sometimes Yakhontov recited Lermontov's "Prophet," manipulating his walking-stick like a puppet—an imaginary crowd would timidly part before it and it went up to Lilia and bowed, while Yakhontov recited the line: "He is poor and naked," pointing at M. as he did so. Yakhontov was himself by no means rich, but if we had no money difficulties during those days, it was because of him.

Before we left for Voronezh, Lilia had offered some of her books on Marxism to M. for his edification, but Yakhontov had said: "There's no point: it's utterly useless," and instead gave his Bible to

• See the note on Gapon in the Appendix.

M.—I still have it. Yakhontov was also hard to re-educate.

Akhmatova knows the Old Testament very well and is very fond of discussing fine points of interpretation with Amusin, whom I in­troduced to her. M., on the other hand, was rather afraid of the Old Testament God and his awesome, totalitarian power. He used to say (and I later found the same idea in Berdiayev) that, with its doctrine of the Trinity, Christianity had overcome the undivided power of the Jewish God. Undivided power was, of course, something of which we were very afraid.

48 The Illusion

he knowledge of what an illusion is first came to us in the au­

tumn of 1933, when we were still settling down in the only apartment we ever had, in the street once called Nashchokin but later renamed Furmanov in honor of our neighbor there.

Once a man with a rucksack knocked on our door and asked for M.'s brother Alexander. He had an improbably feudal-sounding name with several components (of which one was Dobropalovy), but he preferred to be known by his nickname, "Bublik." I wanted to send him away to my brother-in-law's apartment—I was already tired of people begging to be put up for the night because they couldn't get into a hotel—but M.'s father, who was staying with us at the time, interceded for him. He said he remembered him as a neat, rosy-cheeked schoolboy from the days when he had attended the same classical grammar school as Alexander. "And now look what he's come to!" said M.'s father, almost crying. M. pushed me aside and asked Bublik to come in. To set our minds at rest, he told us that he had been in prison only on ordinary criminal charges, so we needn't worry: there was no suggestion at all of the dreaded Article 58. In those years M. was impressed by the fact that in the West the police were armed with nightsticks, and when he happened to mention this, Bublik just smiled: "If only you knew what they do to criminals here!" In fact we had heard some rumors about what was done to prisoners—and not only criminals—already in the twen­ties.

Bublik was an incorrigibly cheerful soul and he kept running off to meet some comrades with whom he was hoping to go to the far north, where, he said, there were "many of our kind"—which meant it would be easier to settle down there. While he lived with us, he helped us with the housekeeping and ran errands for M. M. often sent him with a note to the State Publishing House so that Bublik could collect installments on the money which was then being ad­vanced to M. for a collected edition of his work. This collection never actually appeared, because M. refused to exclude "Journey to Armenia," some of his verse and a great many articles. The edition wouldn't have come off in any case: Bukharin no longer had any influence and at some stage it would have been "killed." Even so, it was good tactics to try to reach a compromise whereby something might be published. The fact that nothing of M.'s was appearing at all made it possible for our officials to spread the story that M. had stopped writing verse in the twenties and now spent his time drink­ing in the Moscow taverns. Many people believed this—particularly in the West, where the absence of publications is taken to mean that an author is no longer writing. How could we possibly explain that things were different with us? But poetry is a law to itself: it is impossible to bury it alive and even a powerful propaganda machin­ery such as ours cannot prevent it from living on. "I am easy in my mind now," Akhmatova said to me in the sixties. "We have seen how durable poetry is."

Bublik would bring the money in a briefcase and make me count it: the only reward he would accept for all the waiting in line at the cashier's was to buy himself a sandwich out of the money. M. now looked on him as indispensable, particularly when it turned out that he was a first-rate Latin scholar.

Everybody who came to see M. had his own particular line of talk. Kuzin and the other biologists talked about genetics, the Bergsonian elan vital and Aristotle's entelechy. M. was quite happy to listen to them. With Kuzin he often went to concerts—they both had an excellent knowledge of music and could reproduce (M. by whis­tling, Kuzin by singing them) the most complicated scores. Margu- lis, whom I have already mentioned, was also a musical companion for M. His wife, Iza Khantsyn, teaches in the Conservatory. She often recalls how M. listened to music and how she played for him on her visits to Moscow—at that time she lived mainly in Leningrad while her husband combed Moscow in search of work. M. used to say that Margulis was his substitute for a printing press: hungry for verse, he always begged to be given the latest new poem, which he would then circulate in manuscript form. This was the beginning of the era of the circulation of literature in this way—though it was not made easier by the fact that whenever a poet's apartment was searched by the police they confiscated both his manuscripts and his books.

Another visitor in those days was Chechanovski, with whom I worked at the beginning of the thirties on the magazine For a Com­munist Education. Chechanovski was a Marxist, and the main point of our inviting him was to give M. a chance of arguing with him. The concept of "development," he told us, was equivalent to "prog­ress" and could not be "taken away from us by Mandelstam." It was he who was entrusted with the mission of suggesting to M. that he disavow his "Journey to Armenia." Whether he was spying on us, I do not know. Probably not. In any case, it is not very important, since M. never read the poem on Stalin to him—though he said many other things every evening which were quite enough to get him ar­rested.

We also used to see Nilender, a Greek and Hebrew scholar. A former naval officer, he now worked in the Public Library and gen­erally came around midnight, bringing a packet of tea with him, just in case we had run out by then. He was translating Sophocles and talked all the time about the "golden section." Finally, during that year we saw something of Vygotski, the author of Language and Thought, a very intelligent psychologist (though somewhat ham­pered by the rationalism of the time), and on the street we some­times ran into Stolpner, the translator of Hegel, who tried to con­vince M. that he did not think in words.

Bublik now took his place among these learned men. With his superb classical education, he was a great help to M., and together they delighted in reading Ovid's poems, which for M. were a por­tent of the future, while for Bublik they evidently spoke of the pleasures of exile already behind him.

Bublik stayed with us for several weeks and was very glad of this unexpected breathing-space. He lost his sallow convict's complexion and began to look like a Latin teacher in a provincial grammar school in the old days. But his comrades were urging that it was time to leave for the north, and his fear of the police also prompted him to get out of Moscow. It so happened that M.'s father had to go to Leningrad, and we asked Bublik to accompany him for that part of his journey. He agreed and helped the old man to pack all his stuff in his comically old-fashioned suitcase. He asked us for a kettle ("so we can get hot water at the stations") and an old blanket ("so we don't have to waste money hiring one on the train"). He carefully tied the kettle to the handle of the suitcase ("so it won't get lost").

The next day we had an indignant cable from M.'s father: Bublik had abandoned him on the platform in Leningrad and disappeared together with the suitcase. The old man was utterly mortified and demanded that the criminal be tracked down by the police and brought to trial. For this M. would have had to write a full statement and then to go to the police and demand action on the strength of his status as a writer. He did not do this, needless to say. What he couldn't understand was why Bublik had been tempted by his fa­ther's suitcase with the kettle tied to the handle, but had shown no interest in the considerable sums of money M. had asked him to bring from the State Publishing House. We were very grateful to Bublik for having behaved with such noble forbearance, and with what was left of the money from the publishing house we bought M.'s father some new clothes. But for a long time he swore and cursed, reproaching himself for having insisted that we let "that va­grant" into the house. He was not even mollified by a package from Bublik in which he returned all the old man's papers, including his memoirs about his travels—he had been writing them in German, in his abominable handwriting, and was always asking M. to read them and get them published.

It was Bublik who explained to us what is meant by the word "illusion." On that first evening, when M. and his father had insisted he stay, I was not feeling very well and went to bed early, doing my best to show what an unwelcome guest he was. Women, as is well known, dislike upsets of this kind and are quick to assume their role as guardians of domestic order—even if there's no longer any such thing. Bublik understood this and decided to make his own bed for the night. He spread several sheets of newspaper in the kitchen and called in M. "Osip Emilievich," he said, "do you know what an illu­sion is? Here you have one!" and with a broad gesture he pointed at the newspapers. M. could not stand the idea of his sleeping on them, and he pulled the only mattress we had out from under me. I gener­ously added cushions and sheets and the same torn blanket that later disappeared together with the suitcase.

The whole of our apartment with its bookcase—indeed, our life in general—was an illusion of normal existence. Burying our heads in our pillows, we tried to believe that we were peacefully asleep.

49 The Reader of One Book

_I

n his youth M. always carefully weighed his words—it was only later that he tended toward levity. In 1919, when he was still very young, he once told me that there was no need at all to have a lot of books, and that it was best to read one book all one's life. "Do you mean the Bible?" I asked. "Why not?" he replied. I thought of the splendid graybeards of the East who read the Koran throughout their lives—perhaps they are the only representatives left of that an­cient tribe who read a single book—but I could scarcely picture my light-hearted companion as one of them, "Well, I didn't mean I will, of course," he admitted, "but all the same . . ."

M. did not achieve his own ideal—such single-minded devotion is impossible in the twentieth century—but this remark he made to me in 1919 was not accidental. There are people whose every word flows from a general, integrated view of the world, and perhaps this is always true of poets, even though they vary in the range and depth of their understanding. Perhaps it is this that drives them to express themselves and serves also as the measure of their authentic­ity. There are, after all, people who write verse as readily as poets, and though there is always something obviously lacking in such verse, it is not easy to define. For this reason it is naive to talk about poets not being recognized by their contemporaries. A real poet is always recognized immediately—by his enemies as well as by his well-wishers. It seems inevitable that a poet should arouse enmity. At the end of his life this happened even to Pasternak, who for so long and with such skill—the same skill with which he charmed all who met him—had avoided provoking the blind fury of the philistines. Perhaps people are angered by the poet's sense of his own rightness, by the categorical nature of his judgments ("The bluntness of our speech is no mere children's bogey," as M. said in one poem), which in turn derives from the "wholeness" of his vision. Every poet is a "disturber of sense"—that is, instead of repeating the ready-made opinions current in his time, he extracts new sense from his own understanding of the world. People who are content with generally received formulas are inevitably outraged by a new idea when it comes to them in its raw state, still unrefined, with all its rough edges. Isn't this what M. had in mind when he spoke of poetry as "raw material," saying that it was incomparably "rougher" than or­dinary everyday speech? People shy away from this raw material and ask in what way the poet is better than they, or they accuse him of arrogance and a desire to lay down the law. This was the spirit in which Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Pasternak were hounded—and Mayakovski, too, until he was made into a State poet. For a long time after he was dead, people also talked in this vein of Gumilev. This is how it always is—though the captives of ready-made formu­las easily forget what they were saying a week ago if they are or­dered to adopt a new set of opinions. Luckily, however, poets also have their friends, and it is they who matter in the long run.

In what he said about reading only one book, M. was condemning something he loathed—namely, the mechanical absorption of incom­patible things, the impaired sense of discrimination which he de­scribed in his "Fourth Prose" as "omni-tolerance" ("Look what has happened to Mother Philology—once so full-blooded . . . and now so omni-tolerant").

The first time I heard M. denounce the omnivorous approach was in 1919, in Kiev, when he criticized Briusov for his poems about different historical epochs, comparing them to gaudy Chinese lan­terns. If such a comparison sprang to mind, M. concluded, it meant that Briusov was really lukewarm about everything, and that he looked at history as an idle spectator. I don't remember his exact words, but this was the sense of what he said. Later on, he and Akh­matova used to dismiss this kind of stuff as "the story of the nations down the ages." M. always knew, or at least tried to know, whether he should say "yes" or "no" to something. All his views gravitated to one pole or the other, and to this extent he was a kind of dualist, believing in the ancient doctrine of good and evil as the twin founda­tions of existence. Poets can never be indifferent to good and evil, and they can never say that all that exists is rational.

M.'s acutely discriminating mind very much affected the choice of what he read. In his notebooks and in "Journey to Armenia" he has something to say about the "demon of reading" in a culture that "plays havoc" with our minds. When they read, people immerse themselves in a world of make-believe, and, anxious to remember it all, they fall under the spell of the printed word. M. never tried to commit what he read to memory, but rather to check it against his own experience, always testing it in the light of his own basic idea— the one which must underlie any real personality. It is reading of the passive type which has always made it possible to propagate pre- digested ideas, to instill into the popular mind slick, commonplace notions. Reading of this kind does not stimulate thought, but has an effect similar to hypnosis—though it must be said that the modern age has even more powerful means for dominating people's minds.

M. always referred to reading as an "activity"—and for him it was indeed mainly the active exercise of his powers of discrimination. Some books he just glanced through, others he read with real inter­est (for instance, Joyce and Hemingway), but on a quite different level from all this there was his reading of really formative books with which he entered, as it were, into lasting contact and which left their mark on some part of his life, or the whole of it. The coming of a new book into his life was like a first encounter with someone destined to be a friend. His line: "I was awakened by friendship, as by a shot" refers not only to his meeting with Kuzin, but also—to a far greater degree—to his "meeting" at the same time with the Ger­man poets, of whom he wrote: "Tell me, friends, in what Valhalla did we crack nuts together, what freedom did we share, what mile­stones did you leave for me?" M. had known these poets before: Goethe, Holderlin, Morike, and the Romantics—but he had only read them, which wasn't the same as a real "meeting."