Hope Against Hope

The "meeting" with them took place in Armenia—and this was not by accident. M.'s journey to Armenia, which he had looked for­ward to so eagerly (in "Fourth Prose" he tells of an earlier, unsuc­cessful attempt to get there), awoke his latent interest in what I would now loosely describe as "Naturphilosophie"—and would once have referred to even less accurately as "philosophy of cul­ture." It took the form of lively curiosity about a small country, an outpost of Christianity in the East, which for centuries had with­stood the onslaught of Islam. Perhaps in our age of crisis for the Christian consciousness M. was attracted by Armenia's steadfastness. Georgia, which history had treated much more kindly, did not have the same appeal. Our small hotel room in Erivan was soon full of books on Armenia: Strzigovski, the Armenian chronicles, Moses of Chorene, and much more. The general description of the country that impressed M. most of all was the one by Shopen, an official under Alexander I. He couldn't help comparing Shopen's keen inter­est in the country with the indifference of the many embittered and querulous visiting Soviet officials we saw in the hotel.

It was Armenia that took M. back to Goethe, Herder and the other German poets. If his meeting with the young biologist Kuzin —whose enthusiasm for literature and philosophy was somewhat in the Bursche tradition—had taken place in Moscow, it might have made little impact, but in Armenia he and M. hit it off at once. They first got talking in the courtyard of a mosque, where they drank Persian tea served in small glasses, and they were still talking when M. brought him back to the hotel. M. was interested in what he had to say about the application of biology to the things that concerned him, such as the perennial question as to how new forms arise. Even before he met Kuzin, M. had once written that the study of poetry would only become a science when it was approached in the same spirit as biology. This idea may well have been an echo of a theory of linguistics popular in the first decade of the century, which stressed its links with the social sciences and biology.

Kuzin was very fond of Goethe, which was also most relevant to M.'s concerns at the moment. Later on, in Moscow, when M. "met" Dante, his friendship with Kuzin and the other biologists in his circle was reduced to a mere acquaintanceship over an occasional glass of wine. M. immediately decided that nobody was more important than Dante, and regarded him as an inseparable companion ever afterward —even twice taking him to prison with him. Anticipating his arrest —as I have already said, everybody we knew did this as a matter of course—M. obtained an edition of the Divine Comedy in small for­mat and always had it with him in his pocket, just in case he was arrested not at home but in the street. You could be arrested any­where—sometimes they came for you at your place of work, and sometimes you were lured out to another place on a false pretext and no one ever heard of you again. One friend of mine used to complain that he found it difficult to lug around the heavy bag with all the things he would need in a forced-labor camp. In the end, however, he was arrested at home and so much lost his head that he forgot to take his bag with him. When M. went to Samatikha (the place where he was arrested the second time), he left his pocket Dante in Moscow and took another, rather more bulky edition. I do not know whether he managed to keep it until he reached the transit camp at Vtoraya Rechka, near Vladivostok, where he died. I somehow doubt it: in the camps under Yezhov and Stalin, nobody could give any thought to books.

It so happens that by sheer coincidence Akhmatova started read­ing Dante at the same time as M. When he learned this, she recited to him a passage she had learned by heart: "Donna m'apparve ?iello manto vertoand M. was moved almost to tears at hearing these lines read in her voice, which he loved so much.

Both M. and Akhmatova had the astonishing ability of somehow bridging time and space when they read the work of dead poets. By its very nature, such reading is usually anachronistic, but with them it meant entering into personal relations with the poet in question: it was a kind of conversation with someone long since departed. From the way in which he greeted his favorite poets of antiquity in the Inferno, M. suspected that Dante also had this ability. In his article "On the Nature of Words" he mentions Bergson's search for links between things of the same kind that are separated only by time—in the same way, he thought, one can look for friends and allies across the barriers of both time and space. This would probably have been understood by Keats, who wanted to meet all his friends, living and dead, in a tavern.

Akhmatova, in resurrecting figures from the past, was always in­terested in the way they lived and their relations with others. I re­member how she made Shelley come alive for me—this was, as it were, her first experiment of this kind. Next began her period of communion with Pushkin. With the thoroughness of a detective or a jealous woman, she ferreted out everything about the people around him, probing their psychological motives and turning every woman he had ever so much as smiled at inside out like a glove. Akhmatova took no such burning personal interest in any living person. She could not, incidentally, stand the wives of other writers, particularly those of poets. I will never understand why she made an exception of me, but the fact is that she did—though she was unable to explain it herself. In this respect M. was the opposite of Akhmatova and almost never took any interest in the personal life of dead poets, though, despite his apparent absent-mindedness, he was extraordinar­ily observant and knew a great deal more about our living friends than I did. Sometimes I didn't believe him, but he always turned out to be right. But he showed no interest whatsoever in Natalia Gon- charova, Paletika or Anna Grigorievna Dostoevski. Knowing his lack of curiosity about such matters, Akhmatova never raised them with him. As regards living people, he would never be drawn by her and thought people should behave as they wished. His conversation with her was always about the work of their favorite poets ("Do you remember this line?" "Did you notice that wonderful bit?") and they often read them aloud together, pointing out the passages they liked best, sharing their finds with each other. During M.'s last years they were much taken by Dante and other Italians, and—as always—by the Russian poets.

I find it more difficult to say which books influenced M. most in his earlier years. When he came to Kiev in 1919 he had Florenski's Pillar and Affirmation of the Truth with him—he was evidently struck by the pages about doubt, since he sometimes talked on the same lines, without, however, mentioning Florenski as his source. As a schoolboy he certainly read Herzen, and in his adolescence he was interested for a time in Vladimir Soloviev, who meant more to him (as a philosopher, not as a poet) than people imagine. The fact that Soloviev's name is never mentioned in M.'s articles has a very simple explanation: most of them were written for publication in Soviet times, when no editor would have passed a single word about Soloviev unless it was abusive. Nevertheless, there are traces of Solo­viev's influence scattered throughout M.'s writings: one sees it in his Christianity (which was of a Solovievian kind), in his methods of arguing, in many recurring ideas, and even in certain individual words and expressions. For instance, in his poem to Bely, the line about "crowds of people, events, impressions" is a direct echo of Soloviev's phrase about "crowds of ideas" that occurs somewhere in his philosophical writings. M. also mentioned him in conversation and obviously had a high regard for him. When we stayed in the cekubu rest home on the former Trubetskoi estate where Soloviev died, M. was struck by the indifference to his memory with which Soviet scholars sat writing articles, reading newspapers or listening to the radio in the same blue study where Soloviev had once worked. At the time I knew nothing of Soloviev myself, and M. was quite indignant: "You're a barbarian, like them." For M. these professors were nothing but a horde of barbarians invading the holy places of Russian culture.

Whenever we went to these rest homes he scarcely talked with anybody and kept very much to himself. Once, in Bolshevo, he was pestered by some ladies concerned with literary and philosophical studies. They asked him to read his verse to them and assured him that they looked on him as "our poet." He told them that his verse was totally incompatible with the sort of scholarship they went in for and that they had no need to try and appease him by pretending to be so catholic in their tastes! M. let himself go like this very often —in editorial offices, at meetings (closed ones, of course) and in pri­vate conversation—and as a result people were always saying how "impossible" he was. In fact, it was simply that he was uncompro­mising: what a pity this was not a quality that could be doled out to others—he had enough of it for a dozen writers. He was particularly uncompromising in his attitude toward our academic intelligentsia: "They've all sold out." At the end of the twenties and in the thirties our authorities, making no concessions to "egalitarianism," started to raise the living standard of those who had proved their usefulness. The resulting differentiation was very noticeable, and everybody was concerned to keep the material benefits he had worked so hard to earn—particularly now that the wretched poverty of the first post-revolutionary years was a thing of the past. Nobody wanted to go through that again, and a thin layer of privileged people gradually came into being—with "packets," [19] country villas, and cars. They realized only later how precarious it all was: in the period of the great purges they found they could be stripped of everything in a flash, and without any explanation. But in the meantime those who had been granted a share of the cake eagerly did everything de­manded of them. Once, in Voronezh, M. showed me a newspaper with a statement by Academician Bakh concerning the publication of the Short Course.f "Just look what he writes: 'The Short Course is a turning point in my life.' " "He probably only signed it," I sug­gested—people were generally presented with such "statements" and asked to put their signature to them. "That makes it even worse," said M.

But what, objectively speaking, could Academician Bakh have done? Could he have revised the text a little, so that his name would not appear under an obviously official document? I doubt it. Or should he have thrown out the journalist who came to collect his signature? Can one expect people to behave like this, knowing what the consequences will be? I do not think so, and I do not know how to answer these questions. The distinguishing feature of terror is that everybody is completely paralyzed and doesn't dare resist in any way.

But a question one may ask now is: Was there a moment in our life when the intelligentsia could have held out for its independence? There probably was, but, already badly shaken and disunited before the Revolution, it was unable to defend itself during the period when it was made to surrender and change its values. Perhaps we are now witnessing an attempt to regain the values which were then abandoned. It is a slow, groping and arduous process. Whether it will be possible to preserve them during the new ordeals that face us, I shall never know.

50 Tikhonov

_N

ikolai Tikhonov, the poet, always talked in loud, self- confident tones. He had great charm and, with his beguiling ways, was good at winning people over. His literary debut was greeted with joy by all those who spoke of him in such glowing terms as a man of the new generation, a wonderful story-teller—and every inch a soldier to boot. Even now many people are still capti­vated by him, not realizing what he later became. He was first brought to see us by Nikolai Chukovski, and M. took a liking to both of them. "See what a kind person Kornei Chukovski's son is," he said. About Tikhonov he said: "He's all right—though I have the feeling he's the sort who might come into your compartment in a train and say 'Let's see your papers, citizens!'" M. pronounced the phrase in the way it was spoken by the commanders of grain- requisition units during the Civil War when they came through trains looking for black-marketeers. Even so, M. also fell under Tikhonov's spell—but not for long. We saw Tikhonov in his true colors earlier than other people. I particularly remember the passion­ate conviction in his voice as he said to us: "Mandelstam will not live in Leningrad. We will not give him a room." This was after our return from Armenia, when we had nowhere to live and M. had asked the writers' organization to let him have a vacant room in the Leningrad House of Writers. When Tikhonov refused this in such extraordinary terms, I asked him whether M. would have to obtain the permission of the writers' organization to live in Leningrad in a privately rented room. He stubbornly repeated his previous state­ment: "Mandelstam will not live in Leningrad." I tried to find out whether he was saying this on his own initiative or on somebody else's instructions, but I could not get any sense out of him. If it was on instructions, it was difficult to account for the depth of feeling in his voice. Whatever the truth of the matter, it boded no good, and we returned to Moscow. What Tikhonov was trying to convey by his tone of voice was more or less as follows: "We all behave in the way expected of us, and who does Mandelstam think he is to carry on like this, not caring a damn for anybody, and then come and ask us for work and a place to live! He flouts all the rules, and we have to answer for him." From his own point of view, Tikhonov was quite right. In the eyes of someone so totally devoted to the regime M. was an anomaly, a harmful emanation of the past, a person for whom there was no room in a literature where places were allotted by higher authority.

By this time we had already gained some insight into Tikhonov. Not long before our conversation about a room and the right to live in Leningrad, we happened to meet him as he was coming out of the editorial offices of Zvezda with his pockets full of manuscripts that he had been asked to advise on. He patted his pockets and said: "Just like at the front . . ." We knew that Tikhonov was dominated by his memories of the Civil War, but we failed to see what connection there could be between his bulging pockets and the front line. He explained that there was now a "war" going on in literature and it appeared that he was applying himself to his very modest literary activities with all the dash which had once distinguished him as a soldier. All he had to do to feel he was fulfilling his revolutionary duty was to "kill" half a dozen hack novels, of the kind with which any editor's desk is always cluttered, and simultaneously expose their ideological shortcomings. Wasn't that war? Moreover, it was war without the usual risks, and he didn't have to go out marauding to f irnish his apartment with the modest attributes of Soviet comfort. What was wrong with that?

"Just like at the front" was Tikhonov's favorite saying, but we occasionally heard him use other triumphant war-cries. Once I had to go and see him in Moscow—it happened to be April 23, 1932, the day that RAPP fell, as we had learned from the newspapers in the morning. Tikhonov was staying in Herzen House—where we were living at the time—but he was in the "aristocratic" wing, with Pav- lenko. The fall of RAPP had come as a complete surprise to every­one. I found Tikhonov and Pavlenko sitting over a bottle of wine, drinking toasts to "victory." "Down with RAPP and all its works!" Tikhonov was shouting, resourceful as ever. Pavlenko, who was a much cleverer man (and a much more terrifying one), said nothing.

"But," I said to Tikhonov, "I thought you were a friend of Aver- bakh." It was Pavlenko, not Tikhonov, who replied to this: "The war in literature has entered a new phase."

When we were in Voronezh, M. sent Tikhonov his poem about Kashchei [20] and the Tomcat, hoping for some reason that he might be prompted by the lines about gold and precious stones to send some money to a penniless fellow poet in exile. Tikhonov immediately cabled that he would do everything he could. This was the last we were to hear from him. Evidently there was nothing he could do. I reminded him (through Surkov) of this cable at the beginning of the sixties, when the Poets' Libraryt was desperately looking for someone to write a preface to a volume of M.'s poetry which had been sched­uled by the editors. One after another, the people approached had refused to write it—nobody wanted to assume any part of the re­sponsibility for "resurrecting" Mandelstam. If Tikhonov had agreed to write it, the book would probably have come out a long time ago—it was then a propitious moment, just before the publication of Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Tikhonov would have been the ideal person to write the preface—the mere fact of his agreeing to would have protected the volume from at­tacks on it. Such attacks can be fatal right up to the moment of publication. Surkov tried to persuade him to do it, and reminded him of his cable promising to "do everything." But Tikhonov refused outright. "He has turned into a Chinese idol," I said to Surkov, who did not demur.

It is difficult to dismiss entirely the "young Kolia," the youth with the expansive gestures, as we had once known him. "Tikhonov and Lugovskoi," Akhmatova once said to me, "have never done a thing to help anyone, but, all the same, they are a little better than the rest." She also told me how in 1937 she had run into Tikhonov in Leningrad and they had walked along one of the embankments for half an hour or so. Tikhonov kept complaining about how terrible the times were: "He said what we were all saying"—this is the rea­son Akhmatova still has a soft spot for him. But she was also struck by the way he said it. When she came home, she could not remem­ber a single word of what he had actually said about the terror: everything had been so skillfully camouflaged that even in talking with Akhmatova he had managed not to compromise himself. All he did was to complain in general terms, without saying a word out of place: no one could say that he wasn't highly disciplined! I do not think he can be put in the same category as Lugovskoi, who was a completely different type—he had been scared stiff at the front,never involved himself in the "literary war," and when he was drunk he could say all kinds of odd things. Tikhonov, on the other hand, has always been true to himself and the cause he serves. The last of the Mohicans will come to his funeral to pay military honors to this literary warrior who never forgot that the magazine Zvezda was also part of the front line.

ore than a quarter of a century ago, during the May Day cel­

They say that Tikhonov's wife used to make toys out of papier- mache. Tikhonov himself is a papier-mache figure—scarcely a good repository for values of any kind. I doubt whether he had any to change when he first appeared on the scene at the beginning of the twenties as one of the best representatives of the "new era."

51 The Bookcase

ebrations of 1938, I returned to Moscow from Samatikha, a rest home near Murom, where M. had been arrested. In the hope of helping him to survive while his fate was decided, I took a few books from our bookcase, sold them in a secondhand bookstore and spent the proceeds on the first and only food package I was able to buy for him. It was returned "because of the death of the addressee." I had always wanted to preserve some of these books which had once helped us create the illusion of an untroubled existence. Apart from this, they also reflected M.'s interests in the thirties. At the time, in order to keep a record of them, I compiled a rough list of all the books I had sold and gave it to Khardzhiev. It was, of course, incom­plete: given my state of mind, it could hardly be otherwise. The remainder of the books (that is, those the secondhand bookstore wouldn't take) are now with my brother, Evgeni—I still have no place to put them myself.

We began to buy books when I got my job in the editorial office of For a Communist Education, where every month I was given a free "voucher for the acquisition of books"—this was by way of encouraging us to improve our minds. "Get something fundamen­tal," Chechanovski said to me, handing me my first voucher. He particularly recommended the six-volume edition of Lenin and the collected edition of Stalin that was just beginning to come out then.

All my friends already had the "classics of Marxism-Leninism" on their bookshelves—they were by now a standard feature of any in­tellectual's apartment. Our mentors were very insistent about this. Stalin genuinely believed that if the intellectuals read all these works properly, they would at once be convinced by their irresistible logic and give up all their idealistic preconceptions. Marxist literature has never been in such demand as it was then. The pink-cheeked Chekist who treated us to hard candy from a tin box during the search of our apartment in 1934 was quite taken aback by the absence of Marxist literature in our bookcase. "But where do you keep your Marxist classics?" he asked me. M. overheard him and whispered to me: "This is the first time he's arrested anybody who doesn't have Marx."

In general, we had no "standard editions" or sets of collected works—though such things were always being urged on us. Benedikt Livshitz did, indeed, succeed in persuading M. to buy a Larousse in several volumes, saying that it was "quite essential for a translator." This was in the mid-twenties, when M. had no option but to try and make his living by translating. These fat volumes of Larousse lay untouched, still tied together with string, until they were eventually sold back to the secondhand bookstore after M. had failed to become a translator. Apart from his indifference to standard editions of the classics, he had no interest at all in collecting books. He had no need of "rare editions," nor was he ever concerned to have a complete set of anything. All he needed were those books with which he had already established his own intimate relationship. There were other books he may have valued but was easily able to do without. For instance, he let Katayev take away his copy of Pasternak's My Sister Life shortly after it had appeared. "What I need I can remember—he needs it more than I do," M. explained.

M. was rarely enthusiastic about my finds in the bookstores. Once I brought along in triumph a copy of Ivanov's Cor Ardens which I had found in a pile of secondhand rubbish, but M. was quite indifferent to it: "Why the same things again?" (This was at a time when I was trying to restore items lost from my own bookcase.) This was something belonging to a past phase, and M. did not want to return to it. On the other hand, he was very pleased with a vol­ume of Burger—"You always know what I want." (But this was untrue—apart from Burger, he turned down all my offerings!)

Among the books we had in the thirties there were no twentieth- century poets except Annenski, the two Acmeists, Gumilev and

Akhmatova, and a few miscellaneous things. M. had gone through the poetry of the twentieth century in 1922 when two young men who wanted to try their luck as private publishers asked him to com­pile an anthology of Russian verse from the Symbolists "to the pres­ent day." It started with Konevskoi and Dobroliubov and ended with Boris Lapin. As usual, M. looked for the particularly felicitous lines: Dobroliubov's "speaking eagles," Balmont's "Song of an Arab Whose Name is Naught," Komarovski's "On the squares the only word is daki," Borodayevski's "Swifts" and Lozina-Lozinski's "Chess­players." He very much liked two or three poems by Boris Lapin: one about "stars in the windows of the Cheka," and another be­ginning: "As though nibbling the fingers of asters, Tril-Tral kissed the flowers." The great stumbling-block was Briusov. M. could fined nothing suitable, but it was impossible to leave him out. He looked much bigger to us in those days than he does now—pro­portions are always distorted in close-up. Briusov had to be well represented in the volume, and M. was driven frantic as he read him in search of something appropriate. " 'Hot as a flame you must be, and sharp as a sword'—what does that mean?" he asked with exas­peration. And when he came to the poem in which Dante's cheeks are singed by the flames of hell, he rushed to the two publishers, saying he would have to give up. To make matters worse, they were always bringing him piles of new things by Briusov. But they both were very well-behaved boys, and after a little argument they would put the stuff back in their pockets and keep it for their own private delectation. M. often remembered them in later years—they seemed like angels to him compared with any Soviet editor. The anthology was eventually forbidden by the censor because M. had not included any of the "proletarian" poets who were already being sponsored by the State. Their names are now totally forgotten, and I do not re­member which ones it was proposed to include. The censor also in­sisted on the removal of a great many poems he condemned as "bourgeois and alien from a class point of view." All that remains from this work are a few page proofs. Of all the things commis­sioned from M., it was the one he thought made the most sense—it is a good idea for a young poet to put together his own anthology of verse in his native language.

"What does it mean?" was M.'s usual question about verse that irritated him. This was what he once asked about Mayakovski's celebrated line: "Our god is speed, our heart—a drum." I had always liked this jingle until I began to ponder its meaning. But on the whole M. thought well of Mayakovski and told me how they had once made friends in Petersburg, only to be dragged apart because it was "not done" for poets of rival schools to associate with each other. There is a photograph from this period showing M. with Ma­yakovski, Livshitz and Kornei Chukovski. It was published in some magazine or other with the intention of showing what cretins were now trying to pass themselves off as writers. It should be said, by the way, that the new attitude toward poetry which made itself felt so clearly by the beginning of the First World War, or by the time of the Revolution, and the fact that people began to read it again, was something for which we have to thank the Symbolists and the enor­mous work they did in re-educating the public taste. I was born at the beginning of the century and hence belong to the generation schooled by them. It was in the circles dominated by them—and they grew all the time—that Tolstoi and particularly Dostoevski were seen in a new light, Pushkin was first properly studied, Bara- tynski, Tiutchev, Fet and many others were revived. The Russian realist tradition, with its emphasis on "social" themes, was losing its following among the public, but it was still firmly entrenched in the literary establishment. It was these people who made war on every­thing done by the Symbolists and the cultural revival which ex­plained their success—though the persons of the Symbolists them­selves were already immune to attack even from this quarter. For a long time it appeared as though the tradition of the "Silver Age," as it is called, had been completely stamped out. But at the moment there are some faint gleams of it again. What will become of them? And where are we headed now, I wonder?

In the thirties M. showed no further interest in the twentieth- century Russian poets, and kept mainly the nineteenth-century ones on his shelves. He liked first editions of a poet's work. This does not contradict what I said about his lack of interest in collecting rare volumes—it was simply that a first edition always betrays the hand of the poet himself and gives the best idea of how he appraised, se­lected and arranged his own work. We had such first editions of Derzhavin, Yazykov, Zhukovski, Baratynski, Fet, Polonski and others. Reading the nineteenth-century poets, M. was, as usual, on the look­out for things that struck him as particularly successful. He liked Mei's "Woman of Pompei," Sluchevski's "Yaroslavna" and "Execu­tion in Geneva" (where the lines about the old woman sound almost like Annenski) and Polezhayev's poem about the gypsy woman. I have forgotten what he liked in Apollon Grigoriev, whom he also had in a first edition acquired by chance (perhaps it was "Hymns," which appeared in only fifty copies). He liked a large number of Fet's poems, among them "The Snake." In these preferences he was no doubt subconsciously influenced by the tastes of his first teacher, Vladimir Vasilievich Gippius, about whom he talks in The Noise of Time. Akhmatova's favorite line from Fet was: "He who made this rose's whorls/ wished to drive me mad." They were always exchang­ing the lines they liked best, making a gift of them to each other. With Maikov it was the same as with Briusov—M. could find noth­ing to his taste. The corner of the bookcase reserved for the Russian poets was being constantly added to, but there would never be a publisher for M.'s anthology of them.

The second-largest section in the bookcase was devoted to the Ital­ians: apart from Dante, M. also had Ariosto, Tasso, Petrarch—both in the original and in German prose translations. At first, before he had made himself at home in Italian, M. sometimes turned to these and other translations. The only Russian translation he had any regard for was one published in the late 1900's (Gorbov's, I think). He could not stand verse translations—it was all too rare that they were successful enough to become part of literature (as Gnedich's have). All these editions of the Italian classics were very modest, with a bare minimum of learned notes (e.g., the Oxford edition of 1904). Of course, we would have bought newer editions, but even now it is impossible to get hold of them. Of the Italian prose writers I remem­ber Vasari, Boccaccio and Vico—but there were probably others as well.

There were also quite a lot of Latin poets: Ovid, Horace, Tibul- lus, Catullus . . . We nearly always bought them with German translations—the Germans are better at this than the French.

M. had taken up the Germans again in Armenia, and in the thirties he bought a great many of them: Goethe, the Romantics, Burger, Lenau, Eichendorff and both Kleists. He also acquired Klopstock (because—as he said—"he sounds like an organ"), Herder and others. Then, he had Morike and Holderlin and also one or two of the poets who wrote in Middle High German. He had far fewer French poets. From earlier days he had kept Chenier, Barbier and the perennial Villon. In the thirties he again bought Verlaine, Baude­laire and Rimbaud. In his youth he had once tried to translate Mal- larme—on the advice of Annenski, who said translating was good practice—but nothing came of it. M. told me that Mallarme was not serious and also that Gumilev and Georgi Ivanov used to make fun of

one line of his translation which sounded ambiguous in Russian.

M. had brought with him from Leningrad all the books in Old French from his student days—he had needed them in 1922 when some translations of Old French epics were commissioned from him. Sasha Morozov has recently discovered these versions in some ar­chive or other: the eleventh-century "Lament of St. Alexis" and "Aliscans" (of the Guillaume d'Orange cycle). Both are free transla­tions, and M. has brought out something in them that speaks of his own destiny: in the "Lament of St. Alexis" it is the vow of poverty, and in "Aliscans" he appears to be making a solemn oath never to hide in order to save his own life.

M. was always extremely careless with manuscripts and never kept anything ("it will be kept by those who need it") and trusted to archives and editors. He gave his only copy of these translations from the Old French to the magazine Rossia and didn't allow me to make a copy. But, apart from his usual carelessness, there was an­other reason here: he was afraid of these poems, just as he was of those couplets in which he speaks of a woman's coming doom.'He hid from verse like this, never mentioning it or keeping it at home: it was just like a child closing its eyes and thinking it cannot be seen, or a bird hiding its head under its wing. There was nothing all that prophetic about this work—how could our future have worked out otherwise, given the world in which we lived? The only piece of good fortune is that I was somehow able to survive and preserve M.'s work, and that Akhmatova too managed to hold out. Isn't that mir­acle enough?

As regards other Russian books, M. eagerly bought the work of thinkers, such as Chaadayev and the Slavophiles. On the other hand, he clearly had no time for German philosophy. Once he bought a volume of Kant, sniffed at it and said: "Nadia, this isn't for us," and threw it behind the other books, out of harm's way. But he felt very close to the Russians. We often heard stories about how Berdiayev had matured in emigration, and M. was always asking about him and trying to get his books, but this became more and more difficult— and dangerous—all the time. We lived cut off like this from the modern world, with nothing but dry crusts for our sustenance. All we had was the past, and we lived off it as best we could.

In the short period from 1930 to his arrest in 1934, M. did a lot of work on Old Russian literature. He bought the various editions of the Chronicles, the Song of Igor's Campaign (which he had always loved very much and knew by heart), some early prose tales (po- vesti) and also Russian and Slavic songs as gathered by Kireyevski, Rybnikov and others. He eagerly snatched up everything Old Rus­sian—and was as familar with Awakum as with the unfortunate princess who was married off to the brother of the Czar's bride. He also had Kliuchevski on his shelves—including early works, such as Tales of Foreigners—and the historical archives which have been published here on a fairly large scale: documents relating to the Pu- gachev uprising, the records of the interrogation of the Decembrists and of the members of the "People's Will." Akhmatova also had a brief period of interest in the latter kind of material—during the Yezhov terror she read scarcely anything but Exile and Forced Labor * I must say that the Tenishev school t gave an excellent grounding in Old Russian language and literature, and, teaching in Soviet teacher-training colleges, I often thought how catastrophic the destruction of the old secondary-school system had been. I doubt whether M. or I would ever have been able to get through a Soviet school—if we had, we would certainly not have equipped ourselves for life with the straightforward and unforced learning given us by the prerevolutionary Russian grammar school.

Later interests represented in M.'s bookcase were the Armenian chronicles (he managed to buy a secondhand copy of Moses of Cho- rene among other things) and biology: he was lucky enough to be able to buy Linnaeus, Buffon, Pallas and Lamarck, as well as Darwin (The Voyage of the Beagle) and some of the philosophers, such as Driesch, who take biology as their starting point.

Despite his interest in the philosophy of culture and biology, M. could not stomach Hegel (any more than Kant), and his enthusiasm for Marx had not outlasted his school years. Just before his arrest in 1934 he had declined Engels' Dialectic of Nature when it was offered to him as a gift by Lezhnev, the former editor of Rossia, to which M. had once contributed. Lezhnev was astonished by M.'s nerve in refusing it. It was Lezhnev who had asked M. to write The Noise of Time for Rossia, but then turned it down after reading it—he had expected a totally different kind of childhood story, such as he himself was later to write. His was the story of a Jewish boy from the shtetl who discovers Marxism. He was lucky with his book. At first nobody wanted to publish it—though it was probably no worse then others of its kind—but then it was read and approved by

• Ssylka i katorga, a periodical on Czarist political prisoners, closed down m «935-

+ The Tenishev Commercial School, in St. Petersburg, attended by Mandel­stam.

Stalin. Stalin even tried to phone Lezhnev to tell him, but Lezhnev was not at home at the moment Stalin called. When he learned what had happened, Lezhnev sat by his phone for a whole week, hoping that Stalin might ring back. But miracles, as we know, are not re­peated. A week later he was informed that there would be no fur­ther telephone call, but that orders had been given for his book to be published (it was already being printed), that he had been made a member of the Party on Stalin's personal recommendation and ap­pointed editor of Pravda's literary section. In this way Lezhnev, hitherto a nobody who could always be trampled underfoot as a former private publisher, was suddenly raised to the greatest heights and almost went crazy from joy and emotion. Of all the Haroun al Rashid miracles, this, incidentally, turned out to be the most endur­ing: Lezhnev kept his Pravda post, or an equivalent one, right up to his death.

On hearing all this, Lezhnev at last left his telephone and rushed off to the barber—his beard had grown considerably during the week of waiting. Next he called on us to present us with The Dialec­tic of Nature and to tell us about the great change that Marxism had brought into his life. None of this had ever entered his head in the days when he was editor of Rossia. From what he said, it appeared that he had read some newly discovered works by Engels, notably The Dialectic of Nature, and seen the light. He had even gone into a bookshop just now and bought a copy for us, because he hoped it would help M. to see the light as well. Lezhnev was an exceptionally sincere and well-meaning person. I was even a little envious of him at that moment—a genuine conversion to the true faith, which sud­denly puts an end to all your troubles and at the same time starts bringing in a regular income, must be a remarkably agreeable thing.

M. padded around the room in his slippers, whistling to himself and occasionally glancing at Lezhnev as the book was urged on him. He was trying to turn it down as gracefully as possible, but Lezhnev kept insisting, and finally M. said, pointing at me: "No, she has read it and says I shouldn't." Lezhnev just gasped: How could anybody entrust his choice of reading on such crucial ideological questions to his wife? "Why not?" M. said. "She knows better than me, she al­ways knows what I should read." Lezhnev departed in a huff, and when we ran into each other years later in Tashkent—we were both evacuated there during the war—he just cut me dead. He probably regarded me as M.'s evil genius—though, to give him his due, he does not seem to have denounced me to the authorities. I do not know how he behaved on Pravda—probably like the rest of them—but to me he always seemed a decent and honest person. I am even prepared to believe that his eyes really were opened by reading The Dialectic of Nature—it was just about his level.

By hiding behind my back M. had fended off Lezhnev's gift, so we had no Marxist literature on our shelves. Incidentally, long before Lezhnev had offered him The Dialectic of Nature, it had been shown to M. by his biologist friends, who complained about how much it complicated their lives. As regards the fact that Lezhnev didn't shave for a whole week while waiting for Stalin to call back— there is nothing surprising about it: any Soviet citizen would have done the same, even at the risk of losing his job for absenteeism.

But if we had no Marxist literature, we had a few art books, and some illustrated works about architecture, including Rodin on French Gothic. In 1937 someone sent us several books put out by museums in Italy. M. was overjoyed, but his pleasure was spoiled by Kostyrev, who told him to beware of any contact with imperialist countries because they were all spies there: "They must have had a purpose in sending you these things!"

On the bottom shelf M. kept the books from his childhood days: Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, the Iliad—they are described in The Noise of Time and happened to have been saved by M.'s father. Most of them later perished in Kalinin when I was fleeing from the Germans. The way we have scurried to and fro in the twentieth century, trapped between Hitler and Stalin!

There were many more books I cannot remember: Winckelmann, for example, a magnificent Rosary, and a great deal else besides. The secondhand book dealers knew how to tempt us. They once offered M. a very amusing Danse Macabre, but it was too expensive and we couldn't buy it. "Very well," said the old bookseller, "it will go to Leonov—he takes everything over fifty roubles." I have never met Leonov and do not know whether this piece of gossip was true—it must remain on the conscience of those who launched it.

5 2 Our Literature

_I

n the forties the Marxism-Leninism study room of the Tashkent University was looked after by a little old woman with close- cropped hair who walked with a crutch. The story was that she had been knocked down by a berserk cyclist and that the doctors had had to amputate her leg because of gangrene—though Alisa Usov swore that it had been done on purpose because everybody was fed up with her. The old woman once did me a great service, and I can­not believe Alisa's malicious explanation.

After her accident the old woman, who had been a member of the Party since 1905 and until recently a high official, had little choice but to find this niche for herself in the university. Nobody took her very seriously, but they were rather afraid of her all the same. She had as much idea of what was going on around her as a blind puppy, but, faithful to the sacred traditions of the past, she was always pre­pared to make a fuss whenever she thought it was necessary. It was difficult to imagine how she had survived during the Yezhov terror —probably she was simply overlooked because she spent that year in the hospital—though if they had remembered her, they would not have hesitated to come into the ward to arrest her. There were such cases. Once when I was standing in line at the Butyrki jail with other people whose names began with M, a woman who had the same name as I told me that her husband, an old man of seventy (could he have been the lawyer Mandelstam?), had been arrested in the Botkin hospital, where he was being treated for heart trouble. As for our one-legged old woman, she was such an anachronism, with her Party membership going back so far, that she was in all probability simply forgotten during that fateful time.

I was preparing for my doctor's degree in philosophy (for which I had to do an exam) and sitting in the Marxism study room at a table piled with books. They were all required reading for the written examination, and I was quickly going through them. The old lady came into the room and could scarcely believe her eyes: somebody sitting there reading in the original the literature that had played such an enormous part in her life! She no doubt thought back to her youth in the underground and the thrill that went through her when she first opened the hallowed Das Kapital.

"Ah, if only all the graduate students read the way you do!" she

said. "The only thing they ever want from me is the Dictionary." *

I was embarrassed by the undeserved compliment: I was myself not innocent of using the Dictionary in preparing for exams.

"No, no," she continued, "you don't know them. All they use are their lecture notes and the Dictionary, nothing else." She let me take out all the books I had in front of me and went around to see all my examiners, telling them how good I was: "You don't know what the young are like. They want it all cut and dried, in case they trip up and fail the exam. We older people are not used to this. But I told them how you are reading—not like their other graduate students." What she said about the other students was her most effective argu­ment. Afraid of antagonizing the difficult old lady, my examiners hesitated to fail me, though it would have been the easiest thing in the world: I had not mastered the art of bandying question-and- answer, like a tennis ball, with the lecturers, and I was quite capable of mixing up the Party Congresses. Furthermore, there was already whispering in the corridors that I was not to be trusted and should be examined as strictly as possible. Admittedly, this was not in obe­dience to instructions "from above"—it was rather "initiative from below" on the part of the young instructors who didn't want to pass me, thus admitting an outsider into the privileged caste of persons qualified to teach in the universities and entitled to be paid accord­ingly. It has to be said that they had an excellent flair: they could unerringly spot an "outsider," however much he avoided their gaze. In a word, the old woman saved me—and she knew what she was doing. She knew how hard it was for a helpless person to keep afloat among these younger people with all their intrigues and jealousies. Apart from this, she must have felt instinctively that we had some­thing in common—the fact that in those years nobody was reading either my literature or hers. Both had gone out of use, and we both hoped that they would come back again. We both believed that our respective values were indestructible—though mine had now gone "underground," while the underground literature she had read in her youth had been canonized by the new State. Both her litera­ture and mine had lost its readers.

About twenty years have gone by since then. The old woman must be long since dead, but we still have others who think the same way—people of the twenties who stubbornly hope that the young will come to their senses and seek the answer to all questions in the

* I.e., the standard Soviet Philosophical Dictionary, a compendium of potted ideology.

dialectical ABC of those days. They hope that this ABC was aban­doned only because it was replaced by the "Fourth Chapter." * There are also younger people, still under sixty, who dream of a res­toration of the "Fourth Chapter" and of everything that went with it. They are fairly isolated, but they find comfort in the doctrine of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. They hope they may last out till a new "synthesis" which will allow them to come into their own again with a vengeance. Then, finally, there are some young people who remember the glorious days of their now retired fathers. "The aim does not justify the means," a student once said in a class I was teach­ing. "I think it does," he was primly contradicted by a pretty girl student who lived in a good apartment and enjoyed all the amenities that a provincial town can provide for a privileged citizen: clinics, rest homes and exclusive stores. The father of this girl had been re­tired after the Twentieth Congress and had chosen to settle in the town where I was then teaching. She was the only student in my class who knew her own mind. She was the only one, for instance, who had read Solzhenitsyn, and she vigorously denounced the publi­cation of such things. The old woman who looked after the Marxist literature was upset because research students didn't read Das Kapi- tal, but this girl was interested only in the "Fourth Chapter" and the maintenance of "order." Both hoped for a restoration of the past.

For my part, knowing that permanent ideas are formed in youth and are rarely revised in later life, I can only watch with hope and bated breath as more and more people read poetry—and the "Fourth Prose." Between people like myself and those who stand on the other side, there is a clear division: we are thesis and antithesis. I do not expect to see a synthesis, but I would love to know whom the future belongs to.

5 3 ^Itah

о the question: "What is Acmeism?" M. once replied: "Nos­

talgia for world culture." This was said in the thirties, either in the Press House in Leningrad or at the lecture he gave to the Voronezh branch of the Union of Writers—on the same occasion when he also declared that he would disown neither the living • The chapter on Dialectical Materialism in Stalin's Short Course.

nor the dead. Shortly after this he wrote: "And bright nostalgia does not let me leave the still young Voronezh hills for those of all man­kind so bright in Tuscany."

Perhaps these lines give a better idea than anything else of his atti­tude toward Italy and the Mediterranean. I happen to have seen a note by Gleb Struve in which he wonders whether M. ever visited Italy and lists all the "Italian themes," as he calls them, in M.'s verse. M. in fact went to Italy twice, in the days when he was a student at Heidelberg and the Sorbonne. But these lone trips, short and superfi­cial (they only lasted a few weeks), left him with a feeling of frus­tration. ("It's as though I'd never been there," he said once.) But this is not important. The main thing is what Italy, the land "for all man­kind," or, rather, the Mediterranean as a whole, meant to M. In a youthful article about Chaadayev he wrote: "One cannot launch a new history—the idea is altogether unthinkable—there would not be the continuity and tradition. Tradition cannot be contrived or learned. In its absence one has, at the best, not history but 'progress' —the mechanical movement of a clock hand, not the sacred succes­sion of interlinked events." These words refer to Chaadayev, but the idea behind them was certainly close to M.'s own way of thinking as well. The Mediterranean was for him a holy land where history had begun, and which by a process of continuity had given Christian culture to the world. I do not quite understand a gibe of M.'s in "Journey to Armenia" which so much upset all the Marxists such as Chechanovski: "A plant is an event, an occurrence, an arrow, not a boring 'development' with a beard." For him, the concept of "devel­opment" was evidently firmly associated with the positivists— Comte, Stuart Mill and others, read and revered by people of his mother's generation, who had prepared the way for Marxism. At any event, M. distinguished between two types of phenomena—one, as it were, positive and the other negative. Positive phenomena in­cluded such things as thunderstorms, events, precipitation of crystals —these were words that M. applied to history, art and even the for­mation of human character. "Negative" were all varieties of me­chanical movement: the motion of a clock's hands, "development," progress. To these one could add the progression of images on a cinema screen which in "Conversation About Dante" he compared to the "metamorphosis of a tapeworm." This was a dig at the specious glitter of the then fashionable Eisenstein with his mechanical splen­dors. Motion of this kind was tantamount, in M.'s view, to immobil­ity, to Buddhism as understood by Vladimir Soloviev, to the "move­ment of Barbarian carts." This is why he described the Moscow of his day as "Buddhist" in the line: "I have returned, or rather been returned against my will to Buddhist Moscow." During the conver­sations that we were always having about the new life and the com­ing millennium of uninterrupted progress, M. always got furious and began to argue. In all such talk he suspected the old "Slav dream of halting history." I do not know to what extent M. retained any faith in the purposefulness of the historical process—it has not been easy in the first half of the twentieth century—but he certainly did not see its purpose in the attainment of universal happiness. His attitude here was the same as toward personal happiness ("Why do you think you should be happy?"). The concept of happiness for all seemed to him the most bourgeois thing in the whole intellectual baggage inherited from the nineteenth century.

Another thing that constantly provoked argument was the ques­tion of continuity, which he sought everywhere—in history, culture and art. Here, too, he found the analogy with a clock's hands useful: a clock is wound up and movement begins from nothing, but an "event" is inconceivable without continuity.

M. was distinguished by a rather comic and childish literal- mindedness: once he had found this analogy between a clock hand and "drab infinity," he took a dislike to clocks and watches, always refusing to have one. "What do I need a watch for?" he used to say. "I can always tell the time without one." As is generally the case with townspeople (and he was one to the marrow of his bones), his sense of time was indeed quite remarkable and he was never wrong by more than a few minutes. The only sort of clock he would toler­ate in the apartment, when I insisted very much, was a Swiss clock— the pendulum, the weight at the end of a chain and the picture on its face made the idea of a mechanical timepiece more bearable. He also thought it was something that went with a kitchen—his favorite room in any apartment, though we never had a proper one of our own. He was also fond of hourglasses and wanted to buy one for our bathroom—but we had a bathroom for such a short time before his arrest that we never got around to doing this. In a poem he wrote for children he refers to the hands of a clock, but they are compared to a pair of mustaches running around a plate—there are faces as flat as plates.

M. had no dislike at all for machines—he was interested in them, liked the way they worked, and was always glad to talk with engi­neers—though he was unhappy that none of them read him. In those years young technologists were attracted to LEF—in so far as they had any interest in literature at all. Some of them read Pasternak, who came to them via LEF. Today the situation is different and, moreover, the technologists are no longer felt to be the spokesmen of their age, or the ones most in touch with modern life. The more intelligent among them are even a little embarrassed at having be­come technocrats. The myth about the greatness of industry and its decisive role in history, about "historical necessity" and the idea of a superstructure totally dependent on the "basis," have now almost faded away. The era of social determinism seems, indeed, to be com­ing to an end, but it has left behind another myth about the supposed incompatibility between "civilization" and "culture." How can any­one say that the sickness of our culture is due only to the fact that we now have more sophisticated tools than a hundred years ago?

Blok already spoke about "civilization" overlaying true "culture" and compared our era to that of the fall of Rome. In Blok's view, our individualistic civilization, devoid of "wholeness," had collapsed to­gether with humanism and its ethical values. It would be replaced by barbaric masses, untouched by "civilization," who had preserved the "spirit of music" and would bring a new culture with them. It is inter­esting that Blok saw these masses as Germanic and Slavic—as though he could already foresee fascism in 1918. Blok's idea was similar to Spengler's. Despite his nominal Christianity and his belief in the 'Spirit of music," Blok remained in essence a positivist: for him per­sonality was a mark not of Christian culture but only of humanism (the same applied to ethical values and humane behavior). M. was not for a moment taken in by Spengler's theories. After reading The Decline of the West, he said to me quite casually that Spengler's analogies are in all probability not applicable to Christian culture. M. never shared the feeling of the approaching end of the world that was one of the main sources of Blok's pessimism. By "culture," M. understood the idea underlying the historical process, and he thought of history as a testing-ground for both good and evil.

His conviction that culture, like grace, is bestowed by a process of continuity led M. to see the Mediterranean as a "holy land." This explains the constant references to Rome and Italy in his verse. Rome is man's place in the universe, and his every footstep there resounds like a deed. M. also included the Crimea and the Caucasus in the Mediteranean world. In his poem about Ariosto he gave ex­pression to his dream of uniting them: "Into one broad and broth­erly blue we shall merge your azure and our Black sea."

"The land by which the first people learned" was the only part of the world to which M. felt drawn to go on pilgrimage. With all his love of travel, he flatly turned down chances to make trips to the central Asian or far eastern parts of the country. He was attracted only by the Crimea and the Caucasus. The ancient link between these areas (particularly Armenia) with Greece and Rome seemed to him a token of the unity of world (or, rather, European) culture. Most of the Soviet writers who traveled to the borderlands—some­thing that was very popular—chose the Muslim areas. M. thought this preference for the Muslim world was not accidental—the people of our times were less suited by Christianity with its doctrine of free will and the inherent value of the person than by Islam with its de­terminism, the submerging of the individual in the army of the faith­ful, and the formalized design of an architecture which made man feel insignificant.

M., to whom the Muslim world was alien ("and with shame and pain she turned away from the bearded cities of the East"), was more concerned with the outward signs of Hellenic and Christian tradition. He fell in love with Feodosia in the Crimea not only for its nnusual landscape, but also because of its name, the remains of its Genoese fortress, and for its port with the Mediterranean ships. M. once said to Khardzhiev that he regarded himself as the last Christian- Hellenic poet in Russia. The word "last" in that remark was the only time he ever betrayed any fear that culture itself might be coming to an end. ... I think he would have liked to be buried in the Crimea, not in the land of his exile, near Vladivostok.

One can understand very well why poetry returned to him in the Caucasus. Somewhere he says that he could work when he felt the "quivering of Colchis" ^# in his breast—that is, when he felt he was in communion with the world of culture and history. Only in such conditions could his "selfless song" come to him. He tried very hard and for a long time to get to Armenia, preferring it—probably as a Christian outpost in the East—even to Georgia, though he often spoke of the importance of Georgia in Russian poetry.

Like all the good things in our life, the trip to Armenia was even­tually arranged by Bukharin. He had first tried to send us there at the end of the twenties, when the Armenian People's Commissar for Education was Mravian. He had invited M. to Erivan University to give a course of lectures and a seminar. Nothing came of this— partly because of Mravian's sudden death, and partly because M. was

^# Colchis: ancient Greek name for the Caucasus.

terrified to death at the thought of giving lectures. He had never imagined himself in the role of a teacher, and he was aware that he had no systematic knowledge. When he was asked in 1931 by Bu­khara's secretary Korotkova (the "squirrel" of the "Fourth Prose") where we wanted to go and M. said: "To Armenia," she sighed and, looking earnestly at him, replied: "Still to Armenia? Well, it must be serious, then." M. had good reason to write about Korotkova in "Fourth Prose"—she was kind and attentive in a way not character­istic of our institutions. By way of contrast I remember the "secre­tary of inhuman beauty" in some dramatic fragments written by Akhmatova but then destroyed in a fit of terror (which was all too well justified). The secretary portrayed by Akhmatova keeps re­peating a phrase which we heard all the time wherever we went: "There are many of you and only one of me." This phrase summed up the style of the era as seen at the level of the humblest official.

The editor of the American collection of M.'s work, Filippov, with the usual perspicacity of editors, says that M. went to Armenia to get away from the Five Year Plans. This is cheap political specula­tion. In the borderlands industrialization was far more hectic than in the central areas, and in any case M. had nothing at all against it. Why should he have been put out by the planned organization of the economy? As if that mattered! What mattered was that, as M. saw them, by virtue of their links between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, the Crimea, Georgia and Armenia were part of world culture. But the measure of all things was Italy. It was not for nothing that he chose Dante as the starting point for a discussion of his own poetics: for M., Dante was the source of all European po­etry, and the measure of poetic "rightness." In the notes he made for "Conversation About Dante" there are several references to the "Italian inoculation" received by the Russian poets. These notes did not get into the final text, probably because M. did not like to be too open in revealing the process by which he arrived at his ideas. In the Kremlin cathedrals he was struck by their Italian quality ("the five- headed Moscow cathedrals with their Italian and Russian soul" and "the gentle Assumption—Florence in Moscow"). While looking at Rublev's "Trinity," he remarked that Rublev must have known some Italian artists—which was what distinguished him from the other ikon painters of his day. In the short narrative about Goethe's life which he did for the radio in Voronezh, M. selected episodes he thought were characteristic of the life of any poet, and he ended it by talking about Goethe's Italian journey—this kind of pilgrimage to the holy places of European culture seemed to him an essential and crucial event in the life of any artist.

Why then, dissatisfied as he was by his trips to Italy as a student, did M. let slip a chance to go abroad in the twenties? Bukharin, still all-powerful, had given him a note of recommendation, and so had Voronski. With these he could have had a passport for the asking. But they lay untouched in my trunk right until the house search in 1934, when they were taken away, together with the manuscripts of M.'s poems, and presumably added to his file in the Lubianka.

In my younger days I did not always fully understand the connec­tion between M.'s actions and what he wrote. At the moment much is clearer to me than it was in those days when he was alive and all our time and thoughts were taken up by daily squabbles, mutual banter and argument. I have now found the reason for his renunci­ation of a second journey to Europe in his article on Chaadayev, where he writes that Chaadayev, having visited the West, "the his­torical world," nevertheless returned to Russia. The fact that he found his way home again was very much to his credit in M.'s eyes. With the same naive and stubborn consistency because of which he refused to have a watch, he thought of Chaadayev's return to Russia and himself decided to renounce the chance of revisiting Europe. M. always gave literal application to his ideas, but, fearing that I might make fun of him, he did not always reveal his train of thought to me. But I understood well enough that the key to his behavior was to be found in his verse and prose, or, rather, that some things in his writ­ings had the force of vows for him. Such was the vow of poverty in the "Lament of St. Alexis," the promise to continue the struggle, however dangerous and difficult, in "Aliscans," and the renunciation of Europe in the article about Chaadayev. This article was written in his early youth, but his view of the world had already formed, and he was true to the vows he took then until his death.

54 The Social Structure

_A

t the beginning of the thirties M. once said to me: "You know, l if ever there was a golden age, it was the nineteenth century. Only we didn't know."

We really didn't know and understand many things—and we paid a heavy price for our ignorance. Why do people always have to pay so dearly for their attempts to build the perfect society? Recently I heard someone say: "It is well known that everybody who has ever tried to make people happy only brought total disaster on them." This was said by a young man who does not want to see any changes now, in case they only bring new misfortune on him and others. There are large numbers of people like him nowadays—among the more or less well-off, needless to say. They are mostly young special­ists and scientists whose services are needed by the State. They live in inherited apartments of two (or even three or four) rooms, or they can expect to get one from the organization in which they work. They are horrified at what their fathers have wrought, but they are even more horrified by the thought of change. Their ideal is to pass their lives quietly working at their computers, not bothering their heads about the purpose or result, and devoting their free time to whatever gives them pleasure: reading, women, music, or vaca­tioning by the Black Sea. Victor Shklovski put it well when he was moving into his new apartment. "Now," he said to the other lucky persons who had been allotted space in the same building, "we must pray God there won't be a revolution." He could not have said a truer word: they had achieved the height of good fortune and wanted nothing more than to make the best of it. All they needed was just a little peace to enjoy it, just a little peace. This is something we have never had.

The young specialist opposed to change couldn't have expressed himself better: it is quite true that the pursuit of happiness can lead to disaster. I was recently struck by an admission from an elderly and very experienced man of a quite different kind who in his day was an active fighter for the "new order" (but not in this country, which is why he still feels responsible for what happened): "Once in our lives we wanted to make people happy, and we shall never for­give ourselves." But I think he too will be able to forgive himself and will not renounce the material rewards due to him for the services he has rendered. In the meantime the "masses," about whom so much nonsense has been written (by Blok, for instance, with his idea that they are untouched by "civilization" and embody the "spirit of music"), are concerned only to try and eke out their wages and get through life as best they can. Some of them spend what little money they have on their homes, or on clothing and footwear; others are more interested in drink. How do they get the money to stupefy themselves with vodka? I remember one of my neighbors in Pskov, a house painter and former partisan who is still a die-hard Stalinist. Every day he came home swearing obscenely and shouting in the corridor of our communal apartment about how good things had been under Stalin. Then his wife would drag him off to the room where they lived with their two children, but we could still hear his drunken praise of Stalin: "He gave me an apartment, he gave me a medal, he gave me my self-respect. . . . You know who I mean. . . . He lowered the prices. . . ." On holidays they were visited by the wife's sisters and their husbands. They sat together staidly reminiscing about collectivization, during which the women had managed to get away from their farm in good time and find work as domestic servants. The house painter's wife had been the most enter­prising of them—during the war with Finland she had worked in an MGB canteen at the front line, and she still talked about "those wicked Finns." They drank to Stalin's memory and kept saying how much better off they had been in his day, whereas now there was nothing but shortages. . . . The house painter's wife helped me with my housework all winter and then in the spring, from force of habit, reported to the police that her neighbor, the woman from whom I rented my room, had an unregistered tenant. Later she wept bitterly and asked my forgiveness, and went to the church to pray for her sins. She is part of the formidable past that we are now grad­ually living down. The only change such people might want is to go back to their younger days—they pine for the time when life was reduced to a few such simple formulas as "Thanks to Comrade Stalin for our happy life." Now they even have the "spirit of music" too— no home is complete without a television set. As to the "happy life" bestowed on us, nobody feels sorry about that.

I suppose it was at the beginning of the twentieth century that people decided the time had come to create a perfect, ideal society which would really ensure universal well-being and happiness. This notion grew out of nineteenth-century humanism and democracy, which, paradoxically, could only hamper the creation of a new order

The Social Structure ^ 5 S

based on social justice. The nineteenth century was therefore de­nounced as an age of rhetoric, compromise and basic instability, and people now looked for salvation in a rigid order and authoritarian discipline. At the end of the last century and the beginning of this, people craved for an "organic" system and a unitary idea to embrace the whole of their thinking and behavior. Free thought—the favorite child of humanism—only undermined authority and had to be sacri­ficed to new ideals. A rationalist program of social change demanded blind faith and obedience to authority. The enthusiasm for the re­sulting dictatorship was quite genuine—a dictator is strong only if he can rely on followers who blindly believe in him. Such followers cannot be bought—that would be too simple—but once they exist, there are always plenty of venal people ready to swell their ranks, especially if they have no choice. But every grand idea eventually goes into a decline. Once this has happened, all that remains is inertia —with young people afraid of change, weary middle-aged ones craving for peace, a handful of old men horrified at what they have done, and countless petty myrmidons repeating by rote the phrases they were taught in their youth.

M. never renounced humanism and its values, but he had come a long way if even he could say that the nineteenth century was a "golden age." Like all his contemporaries, he had taken stock of the last century's legacy and drawn up his own balance sheet. I think that a great part in the formation of M.'s ideas was played by his personal experience as an artist—which, like the mystic's, power­fully affects one's view of the world. M. also sought harmony in social life, and the integration of the parts with the whole. This was consistent with his view of culture as the underlying idea which im­poses order on the historical process and defines its structure. The nineteenth century repelled him by the poverty, not to say wretch­edness, of its social structure—as he says in some of his articles. In the Western democracies, of which Herzen spoke so scornfully, M. did not see the harmony and grandeur he wanted. He wanted a soci­ety with a clearly defined structure, a "Jacob's ladder," as he put it in his article on Chaadayev and in The Noise of Time. He sensed the presence of such a "Jacob's ladder" in the organization of the Catho­lic church and in Marxism—he was simultaneously interested in both as a schoolboy. He wrote about this in The Noise of Time and in a letter from Paris to his teacher, V. V. Gippius, in the days when he was a student there after finishing the Tenishev school. In both Ca­tholicism and Marxism he felt the presence of a unifying idea that bound the whole structure together. I remember him saying to me in 1919 that he suspected the best form of social organization would be something like a theocracy. For this reason he was not frightened by the idea of authority, even when it was translated into dictatorial power. The only thing that worried him in those days, perhaps, was the Party organization. "The Party is an inverted church," he said. What he meant by this was that it had the church's hierarchical sub­ordination to authority, but without God. The comparison with the Jesuits was not yet so obvious in those days.

The new order only began to make itself felt after the Civil War. Engels once pointed out that the industry producing lethal weapons is always the most advanced. This is borne out by its whole history, from the invention of gunpowder to the splitting of the atom in our times. Similarly, the most "advanced" sector of the State apparatus— the one that best expresses its essence—is that concerned with killing people in the name of "society." M.'s first encounter with the new State was his visit to Dzerzhinski to plead for his brother when he was arrested in 1922. This meeting gave him much food for thought about the relative value of the "social structure" and the human per­sonality. The new structure was then only beginning to take shape, but it already promised to be of unprecedented grandeur—some­thing that would dwarf the Egyptian pyramids. And it could not be denied that it had unity of design. M.'s youthful dream of harmony seemed to be coming about, but as an artist M. never lost his sense of reality, and the grand scale of the socialist State structure frightened rather than dazzled him. His apprehensions are reflected in his poem "The Age," where he harks back to the past and asks how he might "join the vertebrae of two centuries"; and in his article "Humanism and the Modern World" he says the measure of the social structure is man, but that there are eras in which this is lost sight of, when people "say they have no time for man, and that he is to be used like bricks or cement as something to be built from, not for." As ex­amples of social structures hostile to man he mentions Assyria and Ancient Egypt: "Assyrian slaves swarmed like chickens at the feet of the gigantic king; warriors embodying the might of a state hostile to man killed shackled pygmies with their long spears; the Egyptian builders treated the mass of human beings as material which had to be provided in the necessary quantity." Though our new age thus reminded M. of Egypt and Assyria, he still hoped that the monu­mental character of the State system would be mitigated by human­ism.

Among the photographs of M. that have been preserved, there is one showing him as a young man in a sweater with an earnest, preoc­cupied look on his face. This was taken in 1922 when he first under­stood the Assyrian nature of our new order. Then there is another one that shows him as an old man with a beard. The interval between these two photographs was only ten years, but in 1932 M. already knew the fate of his youthful dreams about a social structure based on authority, free of the faults bequeathed by the nineteenth cen­tury. By this time he had already written his lines about the Assyrian king:

He has taken away the air I breathe: The Assyrian holds my heart in his hand.

He was one of the first to look back to the nineteenth century as a "golden age," though he knew that the new ideas had grown from seed nurtured then.

At the very end of his life M. spoke once more of the ill-fated "social structure," and at the same time spoke mockingly of himself:

Adorned by choicest meat of dogs

the Egyptian State of shame

thrusting puny pyramids aloft

richly endowed its dead. . . .

Next to all the Gothic, impishly spitting

on all his spider's rights

a brazen scholar, a thieving angel

he lived, the incomparable Francois Villon.

Perhaps we really are Assyrians. Is this why we can look on with such indifference at mass reprisals against slaves, captives, hostages and heretics? Whenever something like this happens, we say to each other: "It's on such a mass scale, what can one do?" We have a peculiar respect for massive campaigns, for measures or orders car­ried out on a mass scale. The Assyrian kings could be good or bad, but who was to stay their hand, whether they gave a sign for the slaughter of prisoners or graciously permitted the court architect to build himself a palace?

And what difference is there between those prisoners destroyed on the orders of Assyrian kings and the "masses" which now inspire us with such awe, always appearing whenever an "iron" social order is established? Yet in their everyday working lives, people remain true to their individual selves. I have always been struck by the fact that in the closed world of a hospital, factory or theater, people live in their own completely human lives, not becoming mechanized or turning into "masses."

55 "Ne Treba"

_I

t turns out we are part of the superstructure," M. said to me in 1922, after our return from Georgia. Not long before, M. had written about the separation of culture from the State, but the Civil War had ended, and the young builders of the new State had begun —for the time being in theory only—to put everything in its proper place. It was then that culture was assigned to the superstructure, and the consequences were not slow in making themselves felt. Klychkov, an outlandish but most gentle creature, a gypsy with bright dark-blue eyes, told M. with embarrassment about a conversa­tion he had had with Voronski: "He has made up his mind and he wouldn't budge. 'We don't need it,' is what he said." Voronski, like other editors, refused to publish M. The superstructure is supposed to reinforce the basis, but M.'s verse was not suitable for this pur­pose.

The formula "We don't need it" sounded even more grotesque in Ukrainian. In 1923 M. went to the Arts Department in Kiev to ask for permission to hold a reading of his poetry. An official in an em­broidered Ukrainian shirt refused it. When we asked why, he said tonelessly: 'We treba." From then on, M. and I adopted the phrase as a standard saying. As for Ukrainian embroidered shirts, as I have mentioned before, they became fashionable in the middle twenties, replacing the Russian kosovorotka and becoming almost the equiva­lent of a uniform for officials of the Central Committee and the People's Commissariats.

Complete order was established in the "superstructure" in 1930 when Stalin published his famous letter in Bolshevik, saying nothing should be published that was at variance with the official point of view. This, in effect, robbed censorship of all significance. The much-abused censorship is really a sign of relative freedom of the press: it forbids things that are directed against the existing order, but, however stupid it is, it cannot destroy literature. But the edito­rial apparatus that served Stalin worked much more purposefully—it rejected everything that did not explicitly meet the State's wishes. In the editorial offices of For a Communist Education, where I was working at the moment Stalin's article appeared, all the manuscripts were rechecked in great panic and we went through huge piles of them, cutting mercilessly. This was called "reorganization in the light of Comrade Stalin's remarks." I brought home a copy of Bol­shevik with Stalin's letter and showed it to M., who commented: "Ne treba again, but this time good and proper." He was right. The letter was a crucial turning point in the building up of the "super­structure." Even now it has not been forgotten by the upholders of Stalin's tradition as they try to prevent the publication of such writ­ers as Mandelstam, Zabolotski, Pasternak and Tsvetayeva. The "ne treba" argument still rings in our ears today.

Sergei Klychkov was our neighbor for many years in Herzen House and then in Furmanov Street, and we were always very friendly with him. The third part of M.'s "Verses About Russian Poetry" is dedicated to him—this after Klychkov had commented on the line about freaks playing cards for no stakes: "That's about you and me," he said to M. Neither of them in fact played cards, and the stakes they were playing for were higher than in any gambling game.

Klychkov was dismissed from his work as an editor very early. He was too much of a peasant to make a good official and worry about the purity of the "superstructure." He made his living by translating some infinitely long epic poem. In the evenings he put on his spec­tacles (one of the arms was broken off and he used a piece of string instead) and read an encyclopedia, just as a self-taught cobbler reads his Bible. He once paid me the nicest compliment that a woman could hear: "Nadia," he said, "you are a very clever woman, and a very silly little girl." This was because I had read Luppol M.'s epi­gram about him.

M. very much admired Klychkov's cycle of poems on the theme of being an outcast, and he often read passages from them, imitating Klychkov's northern accent. All these poems were taken away by the police when Klychkov's apartment was searched—he did not have time to hide them—and they have disappeared, like everything else that was taken to the Lubianka. Klychkov himself disappeared with them. His wife was told he had been given ten years "without the right of correspondence." It was some time before we learned that this meant he had been shot. It is said that he stood up to hisinterrogator with great courage and independence. With those eyes of his he must have infuriated his inquisitors. In those days the secret police did not bother much about formal trials for people they had decided were guilty, and they sometimes simply shot them out of hand during the interrogation. It is said that this is what happened to Klychkov.

After Klychkov's death Moscow seemed a much poorer place. He was a great friend of Pavel Vasiliev, whom he called his "evil genius" because Pavel used to take him on womanizing and drinking expedi­tions. The girls working in the Krasnaya Nov office once inadver­tently published some verse of Klychkov's under M.'s name. Both of them had to go and tell the girls off and get the fee transferred to Klychkov. It never occurred to them that there might one day be a problem about the authorship of this poem, and they didn't insist on a correction being published because the girls thought they might be fired if their superiors found out. As a result, this verse of Klych­kov's has now appeared as the last item in the American edition of M.'s poetry. I would like to tell the editors about this mistake, but how can one reach them?

woman who has come back after many years in the forced-labor

In the days when Klychkov's and Vasiliev's fate was being de­cided, M. and I were waiting for a train at the Savelovo station and happened to buy a newspaper in which it was announced that the death penalty was being abolished, but that the maximum length of prison sentences was being increased to twenty years. M.'s first re­action was one of joy—he had always been horrified by executions— but then it struck him how little it meant. "The number of people they must be killing, if they have to abolish the death penalty!" he said. In 1937 we clearly understood that whether a prisoner was marked down for physical destruction or not depended only on the principle treba or ne treba. . . .

56 The Earth and Its Concerns

camps tells me that she and her companions in misfortune al­ways found comfort in the poetry which, luckily, she knew by heart and was able to recite to them. They were particularly moved by some lines M. wrote as a young man: "But I love this poor earth, because I have not seen another. . . ."

Our way of life kept us firmly rooted to the ground, and was not conducive to the search for transcendental truths. Whenever I talked of suicide, M. used to say: "Why hurry? The end is the same everywhere, and here they even hasten it for you." Death was so much more real, and so much simpler than life, that we all involun­tarily tried to prolong our earthly existence, even if only for a brief moment—just in case the next day brought some relief! In war, in the camps and during periods of terror, people think much less about death (let alone about suicide) than when they are living normal lives. Whenever at some point on earth mortal terror and the pres­sure of utterly insoluble problems are present in a particularly in­tense form, general questions about the nature of being recede into the background. How could we stand in awe before the forces of nature and the eternal laws of existence if terror of a mundane kind was felt so tangibly in everyday life? In a strange way, despite the horror of it, this also gave a certain richness to our lives. Who knows what happiness is? Perhaps it is better to talk in more concrete terms of the fullness or intensity of existence, and in this sense there may have been something more deeply satisfying in our desperate clinging to life than in what people generally strive for. I always remember my conversation about happiness with Vishnevski's widow, Sonia. We were trying to draw the balance sheet of every­thing that had happened to us. How different our lives had been! Sonia summed up: "Mine has been so happy, and yours has been so unhappy." Poor, stupid Sonia! Her husband had an illusion of power: other writers tried to keep in with him because he controlled certain funds and he was able to make the Government's wishes known to his cronies. He had access to the Central Committee and was several times received by Stalin. He drank no less than Fadeyev, greedily breathed in the heady air of State, and permitted himself no more than token expression of fronde—suggesting, for instance, that James Joyce be published, and sending money to exiles (first to a naval officer banished to Tashkent, and then—through my brother —to us in Voronezh). He had a car and a villa in the country which was rather meanly taken away from Sonia after his death. Until her own death, she remained faithful to him, and was angry with Khru­shchev for cutting royalty payments to a writer's heirs by half. Many stories were told about Sonia, but she was not a bad sort, and nobody could really hold it against her when she went around shout­ing that her husband had been killed by saboteurs in the Kremlin hospital. In fact she was very lucky that he died in good time, with­out managing to transfer his assets to one of Sonia's rivals—that none of them succeeded in snatching it all from her hands was certainly fortunate for her, and in this sense she was entitled to describe her life as "happy."

I also would have been glad, if not of "happiness," at least of a little well-being (as M. put it in one of his poems, "Oh, how much dearer to her the creak of rowlocks, a boat's deck broad as a bosom, a flock of sheep")—a peaceful life with its ordinary despairs, its thoughts about the certainty of death and the vanity of earthly things. None of this was granted to us, and perhaps this is what M. meant when he told his interrogator that with the Revolution he had lost his sense of awe.

For M., Acmeism was not only "nostalgia for world culture," but also an affirmation of life on earth and social concern. With his inte­gral view of the world, one could see how every one of his judg­ments was part of his understanding of things in general. This was not, of course, an elaborate philosophical system, but what he called in one of his articles "the world-view of the artist." Т., a wonderful artist, once said to me: "A man sits and carves a piece of wood, and out of it comes God." And about Pasternak he asked: "Why did he have to change his religion? What does he need intermediaries for when he has his art?" Just as mystical experience gives rise to a reli­gious view of the world, so the working experience of an artist de­fines his view of the material and spiritual world around him. It is probably this experience as an artist that explains why M.'s view about poetry, the role of the poet in society and the "merging of the intellectual and the moral" in an integrated culture (as well as in each of its individual representatives) never underwent any substan­tial changes, so that throughout his life he was able to stand by what he wrote in his early articles for Apollon. Despite its division into distinct periods, his poetry also reflects the unity of his views and "world-sense" throughout his life, and in this it often echoes his prose, even that of the earliest days. His prose thus serves as a com­mentary on his poetry.

Until his last days M. remained true to the earth and its concerns, and he hoped for his reward "only here on earth, not in heaven," though he feared he would not live to see it. "If only we live long enough," he used to say to me. In one of his last poems, already preparing for death, he wrote:

under Purgatory's ephemeral sky we often forget that

the happy heaven, above

is but the boundless house in which we live our lives.

Reading Self-Knowledge by Berdiayev—one of our best modern thinkers—I couldn't help being struck by the great difference be­tween him and M. in their attitudes toward life and earthly exist­ence. Perhaps this was because one was an artist, while the other was concerned with abstract thought. Furthermore, Berdiayev was in­wardly tied to the Symbolists, and though he had his disagreements with them and was even to a certain extent disillusioned with them, he had never broken with them. For M., on the other hand, the revolt against Symbolism was crucial for the whole of his life and art.

For Berdiayev "life is a daily round of cares," and though he was receptive to "the poetry of life and beauty," he thought life was "dominated by prose and ugliness." Berdiayev's idea of beauty is the direct opposite of what I have always found in the poets and artists who rejected Symbolism: they do not look down on ordinary everyday life—on the contrary, it is a source of beauty for them, whether they are poets or painters. The Symbolists—such as Viache- slav Ivanov and Briusov—assumed the role of high priests standing above everyday life, and for them beauty was something apart from it. By returning to earth, the generation that followed them consid­erably enlarged its horizon, and for it the world was no longer di­vided into ugly prose and sublime poetry. In this connection I think of Akhmatova, who knew "from what trash poetry, quite un­ashamed, can grow," and of Pasternak with his passionate defense of the "daily round" in Dr. Zhivago. For M. there was absolutely no problem here: he did not, like Berdiayev and the Symbolists, seek to escape into some realm of pure spirit from the earthly confines of our everyday here and now. In his essay "The Morning of Acme- ism" he tried to give a poetic justification for remaining attached to earth with its three dimensions: "The earth is not an encumbrance or an unfortunate accident, but a God-given palace." This is fol­lowed by a polemical passage about people who, like Berdiayev, can­not wait to get to a better world and regard life on earth as being literally God-forsaken. In the same essay, which was a kind of mani­festo, he asked: "What would you think of a guest who, while living at the expense of his host and enjoying his hospitality, actually de­spises him in his heart of hearts and thinks only of ways to outsmart him?" "Outsmart" here means to escape from time and three- dimensional space. To M., as a self-styled Acmeist, three-dimensional space and life on earth were essential because he wanted to do his duty by his "host"—he felt that he was here to build, which can only be done in three dimensions. This explains his attitude toward the world of things. In his view, this world was not hostile to the poet or—as he put it—the builder, because things are there to be built from. Stone—the title of M.'s first published collection of poems—is a building material which "seems to crave for another mode of being" and longs to find its place in "a vaulted nave" and thus joyfully interact with others of its kind. M. never talked of "creating" things, only of "building" them. As a young man he al­ready thought of himself as a builder: "From a sullen dead weight I shall one day make something of beauty." He was therefore not re­pelled by matter, but was very conscious of its "dead weight" as something that predisposed it to be used in building. Berdiayev often speaks of man's higher destiny and his creative powers—but he does not define the nature of this creativity. This is probably because he lacked the artist's sense of things and words as inert matter to be used in building. Berdiayev's experience was that of the mystic and it took him to the limit of the world of things. The artist's intuition is similar to the mystic's, but it reveals the Creator through his crea­tion, God through man. It seems to me that this way of perception is justified by Soloviev's (and Berdiayev's) doctrine of "God- manhood." Isn't this also why every true artist has the sense of his own "tightness" about which M. spoke?

However much he tried to overcome it, Berdiayev felt contempt for the "man in the street." In this, too, he had common ground with the Symbolists—perhaps they got it from Nietzsche, who had such an influence on them. Berdiayev complains that "we live in a middle- class age" which is antagonistic to the appearance of "strong person­alities." Yet Berdiayev himself wanted to be self-effacing. He hated, he says, to "draw attention to his own significance and intellectual superiority." Reading this, I thought of Pushkin's line: "And among all the lowly of the world, perhaps the lowliest is he"—words which were completely misunderstood by the whole Veresayev crowd. All Pushkin was trying to convey was the simple sense of being at one with his fellow men, of being flesh of their flesh—though perhaps not quite as well made as others. ... It seems to me that this feeling of being the same as everybody else (and even perhaps of envy at not being quite as well formed) is an essential feature of the poet. In his early article "On the Reader" M. has the following to say about the difference between literature and poetry: "The man of letters as opposed to the poet always addresses himself to a specific audience, to his living contemporaries . . . the content of his writing is de­canted into them by virtue of the physical law of unequal levels— which means that the man of letters must be 'above' his contempo­raries, 'superior' to the society in which he lives. Literature in this sense is essentially didactic. . . . Poetry is quite different: the poet is linked only with readers sent his way by Providence and he does not have to be superior to his age, or to the people he lives among." M. sincerely believed that he was no better than others, or even not as good ("I walk with bearded peasants, a passerby"). The Symbol­ists thought of themselves as teachers with a cultural mission—hence the way in which they set themselves above the crowd and the at­traction they felt for strong personalities. Even Blok was not free of a sense of his own exclusiveness—though it alternated with the other feeling, natural for any poet, of a common bond with the street, with ordinary people. Berdiayev, being a philosopher rather than an artist, naturally felt superior to the crowd, and in his aristocratic inclinations and liking for strong personalities he was only yielding to the spirit of his times.

M. did not approve of attacks on the "middle class" and its values. If anything, he respected the middle classes—which is why he once described Herzen, who was always attacking them, as an "aristo­crat." He was particularly dismayed by the constant attacks on the middle class and bourgeois values in this country. "What don't they like about the middle class?" he said once. "They are the most stable section of the community and everything rests on them." (The only members of the middle class he could not stand were literary ladies who kept salons—and their successors in Soviet times. He could not tolerate their pretentiousness, and the dislike was mutual.) In "Jour­ney to Armenia" there is a passage which at first sight looks like an attack on the middle class, but M. was referring here to our neighbors in the old merchant quarter of Moscow—these were not people who had once enjoyed a stable, bourgeois existence, but a sullen, backward mob who were only too happy to accept a new form of slavery.

In this respect M. agreed with Berdiayev's remark that the First World War had given birth to a new generation that hated freedom and had a taste for authority and force. But Berdiayev was wrong in thinking that this was a consequence of "an age of democracy"—the last few decades of our history have been anti-democratic in the ex­treme, and it is particularly in this country that the results have been felt most acutely. The love of dictators, which has been the curse of the first half of the twentieth century, is a complete denial of de­mocracy, and Berdiayev, as an emigre, failed to see how ordinary people were ground underfoot, and he was blind to the growth of the secret police's contempt for human rights. Furthermore, it wasn't a question of just one dictator—anybody who had the slight­est power, down to the humblest police official or doorkeeper, was also a dictator. We had not previously understood what a temptation power can be. Not everybody wants to be a Napoleon, but people cling desperately to what little power they have and will do their best to get all they can out of it. There has never been such a prolif­eration of petty tyrants, and our country is still swarming with them. It is only now that they seem to be on the way out at last— people have had their fill of this game.

Like the Symbolists, Berdiayev does not recognize communal mo­rality or the "hereditary principle" because it is not compatible with freedom. Here his idea of freedom comes close to the license that undermined the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia. Culture, after all, is not something generated by the upper layer of society at any given time, but an element passed down from generation to generation—a product of the continuity without which life would break up in chaos. What is thus handed down in the community often seems unbearably set in a conventional form, but it cannot be all that ter­rible if it has enabled the human race to survive. The threat to the human race comes not from its communal morality, but from the extravagant innovations of its more volatile elements. M. defined the poet as one who "disturbs meaning." What he had in mind, how­ever, was not rebellion against inherited order, but rejection of the commonplace image and the hackneyed phrase by which meaning is obscured. This was another way of appealing for an art that faith­fully recorded life and living events, as opposed to all that was death­like. It was perhaps in the same sense that he spoke of "culture-as- convention"—in art this evidently referred to the repetition of things already spent and played out, but nevertheless eagerly ac­cepted by people who want no truck with "disturbers of meaning."

Berdiayev's main preoccupation was with freedom, and it was a problem he wrestled with all his life. But for M. there was no prob­lem here, since it probably did not occur to him that there can be people devoid of inner freedom. He evidently thought that freedom was inherent in man as such. In the social sphere Berdiayev was con­cerned to establish the primacy of personality over society, but for M. it was rather a question of assuring the place of personality in society—just as he fought for the poet's place in society. In other words, he accepted the idea of society, taking it for granted as the highest form of human organization.

Comic as it may seem, even in their attitudes toward women the difference between Berdiayev and M. was that between Symbolist and Acmeist. For the Symbolists, women were "Beautiful Ladies" (as in Blok's poems), high priestesses or, as Akhmatova and I called them, "bearers of myrrh." When I was young there were very many of them, and they were unbelievably pretentious with their grand views about their role as female acolytes. They perpetrated the most fearful nonsense—as witness E.R.'s notes to the Autobiography * where snakes suddenly grow claws, the women have the faces of snakes and the men are fancied to have cloaks and swords. All these women—and relations with them—were quite out of the ordinary. With us things were much simpler.

Berdiayev had no time for the pleasures of life. Although M. did not seek happiness, he described everything he valued in terms of pleasure and play: "Thanks to the wonderful bounty of Christianity, the whole of our two-thousand-year-old culture is the setting of the world free for play, for spiritual pleasure, for the free imitation of Christ." And elsewhere: "Words are sheer pleasure, a cure for an­guish."

I would have liked to describe M.'s attitude toward words, but it is beyond my power. All I can say is that he was aware that words have an "inner form," and that he did not confuse words, as units of meaning, with symbols. He was cool toward Gumilev's famous poem about words, but never told me why. Probably he did not share Gumilev's view of numbers either. Incidentally, he was always concerned about the number of lines and verses in a poem, or the number of chapters in a piece of prose. He was angry when I said I was surprised he thought this important. My lack of understanding struck him as nihilism and ignorance. It was not for nothing, he said, that some numbers—three and seven, for example—had magic sig­nificance for people: numbers were also part of our culture, a gift which had been handed down to us.

In Voronezh M. began to compose poems of seven, nine, ten and eleven lines. Seven- and nine-line stanzas also began to appear as

^# Eugenie Rapp, Berdiayev's sister-in-law, supplied footnotes to Berdiayev's autobiography.

parts of longer poems. He had a feeling that some new form was coming to him: "Just think what they mean, these fourteen-line groups. And there must be some significance in these seven- and nine- line stanzas. They keep cropping up all the time." There was no mysticism about this, it was seen simply as an index of harmony.

Everything I have said about the contrast between Berdiayev and M. applies only to those features of Berdiayev which he shared with the Symbolists. He was by no means identified with them as a philos­opher, but some of his views on matters of taste bore the marks of his time. All of us are subject to the influences of our day, and al­though Berdiayev, like M., used to say he had never been anybody's contemporary, he nevertheless lived in his time. Yet it was Berdiayev who pointed out the main thing about the Symbolists: namely, that they ignored social and ethical questions. It was because of this that M. revolted against the "omnivorousness" of Briusov, against the haphazard way in which they arrived at their values. In everything except matters of taste Berdiayev had overcome the influence of the Symbolists, but he could not quite escape the seductive charm of these great fishers of men.

ч artist's feeling for the world is a tool, like a mason's mallet,

It is a shame that, though he tried very hard, M. was never able to get hold of Berdiayev's books, so I do not know what he would have made of him. Unfortunately, we were completely cut off from what the world outside was thinking. This is one of the worst misfortunes that can befall a man.

57 Archive and Voice

and his only tangible product is the work itself," M. wrote in "The Morning of Acmeism."

Some of M.'s poetry and prose is lost, but most of it has been preserved. How this happened is the story of my battle with the forces of destruction, with everything that conspired to sweep me away, together with the poor scraps of paper I managed to keep.

When they are young, people do not bother to keep their papers. How can a young man imagine that his scribblings may one day be thought of value? Though perhaps it's not a bad thing that earlyverse gets lost—this can be a kind of weeding out which an artist should undertake in any case.

M. arrived in Kiev with a wicker basket that his mother had used to keep her sewing in—it was all he had left of his mother's things. It had a large lock on it, and M. told me it contained his mother's let­ters and some of his own writings—he couldn't remember exactly what. From Kiev M. went to the Crimea with his brother Alexander. Here Alexander got into a card game with some soldiers and gam­bled away his brother's shirts. While M. was gone for a moment, the soldiers broke the lock on the wicker basket and used all the paper inside to make cigarettes. M. very much valued his mother's letters and was angry with his brother. About his own papers he was less concerned—he remembered everything in them.

During the first few years that M. and I lived together, nothing was ever written down. He put together his Second Book from memory, dictating to me the poems he wanted to include, or jotting them down himself. He then looked them over, kept some and threw others away. Before that he had given a pile of rough drafts to Pe- tropolis.* They were taken abroad and published there as the Tristia collection. In those days we never stopped to think that a man might die and his memory with him. Furthermore, M. always thought that anything he gave to editors was bound to be preserved. He had no idea of the slapdash way in which our editorial offices work.

My mother had given me some very nice suitcases and a trunk plastered with foreign hotel labels. We gave the suitcases to a shoe­maker to make shoes for us out of the stout yellow leather. In those days they were a luxury. The only use I could find for the trunk was to put papers in it—not realizing that I was in effect using it as an archive.

When M.'s father fell ill, we had to go to Leningrad. The old man could not go back to his wretched lodgings after leaving the hospital, so we took him to M.'s younger brother, Evgeni. While I was pack­ing his things I came across another trunk, just like mine, only a little larger, and also covered with labels. It appeared that M. had once bought it in Munich so as to look like a proper tourist—trunks of this kind were very popular before the First World War. M.'s father had put all his ledgers in it, together with piles of worthless paper money from the times of Nicholas II and Kerenski. At the bottom I found a pile of manuscripts: fragments of early verse and some pages of the lecture on Scriabin. We took these manuscripts and the trunk

* Russian publishing house in Berlin.

back to Moscow with us.

This was the beginning of M.'s archive. Everything was thrown into it: rough drafts of poems, letters and essays. M. didn't seem to mind this system, and the pile grew and grew. The only things that did not find their way into the trunk were minor pieces of work such as translations, newspaper articles and notes on manuscripts and books—mostly foreign—sent to him by publishing houses for his opinion. All these notes have been lost by Lengiz,* apart from one or two that got into the trunk by accident. He needed his newspaper articles when he was putting together a book of his essays, and my brother Evgeni and I went to the library to copy them out as pub­lished—no doubt with censorship cuts. For some reason the manu­scripts of The Noise of Time didn't get into the trunk—perhaps because we only began our "archive" after it was written.

The turning point in M.'s attitude toward his papers came with our experience over the "Fourth Prose"—this was a kind of warning signal that it was time to take greater care of them. The second warning was M.'s arrest in 1934.

When we left for Armenia, I did not want to take the only copy of "Fourth Prose." Although the climate was very good at the mo­ment, M. could still have got into hot water because of it. We had to find a trustworthy person to leave it with. This was the first time we had left a manuscript with somebody else. Or, rather, the second—in 1919, in the Crimea, M. had written two poems which he did not want to keep on his person, so he gave them to a friend, a certain Lenia L. In 1922 I saw this man in Moscow and he said he still had the poems. But then he disappeared, and I doubt whether they will ever be found. It was this that first made me appreciate the need to keep things in several copies and in different places. We gave "Fourth Prose" to a number of people for safekeeping, and I copied it out so many times that I remember it word for word.

When M. returned from Armenia and began to write verse in great quantity, he was immediately made to feel what an outcast he was. I remember particularly one conversation in the Leningrad offices of Izvestia. A member of the staff, who appeared to be friendly, read through M.'s poem "I have returned to my native city" and said: "Do you know what happens after you write a poem like this? Three men come for you ... in uniform." We knew this, of course, but at that moment the authorities were in no hurry to act. This particular poem was quickly passed around from hand to

* Leningrad State Publishing House.

hand, though in a fairly narrow circle of people. M. thought this was a good way of preserving his work: "People will keep it for me." But I felt it was not enough, and time has proved me right. I began to make copies and hide them in various places. Generally I put them in hiding-places at home, but some copies I handed to other people. During the search of our apartment in 1934 the police agents failed to find poems I had sewn into cushions or stuck inside saucepans and shoes. When we arrived in Voronezh, I removed the poem about Ariosto from a cushion in which it had been hidden.

Voronezh marked a new stage in our handling of manuscripts. The idyllic era of cushions was at an end—and I remembered all too vividly how the feathers had flown from Jewish cushions during Denikin's pogroms in Kiev. M.'s memory was not as good as it had been, and with human life getting cheaper all the time, it was in any case no longer a safe repository for his work. It was also becoming harder to find people willing to keep things for us. During the whole of our three years in Voronezh, I made copies of everything and distributed them to such people as I could find, but apart from my brother Evgeni (who in any case kept nothing at his own home) I had nobody I could rely on to take them. Not, that is, until Sergei Borisovich Rudakov turned up.

Rudakov, the son of a Czarist general, had been expelled from Leningrad together with other people of aristocratic origin. His fa­ther and elder brothers had been shot at the beginning of the Revo­lution. He had been brought up by his sisters and had a normal So­viet childhood—he became a member of the Pioneers, distinguished himself in school and even got through the university. He was look­ing forward to a decent career when suddenly he was struck by the disaster of expulsion from Leningrad. Like many people who had lost their parents, he was anxious to get into step with the times, and he even had a theory that one should only write books that stood a chance of being published. He himself wrote elegant verse (a little under the influence of Tsvetayeva) which was popular at the time. He had chosen Voronezh as his place of exile in order to be near M. He first came there while I was in Moscow looking for translation work, and he spent about a month with M. all alone before I re­turned. When M. came to meet me at the station he told me that Rudakov had appeared, that he was going to write a book about poetry, and what a splendid fellow he was. After his illness M. had probably lost confidence in himself and needed a friendly listener for his new verse.

Rudakov did not try to find a proper place to live in Voronezh. He kept hoping that his wife might use her contacts with some top Soviet generals (who later perished in 1937) to get permission for him to return to Leningrad. He had a bunk in a room which he shared with a young worker called Tosha, but he came to us for all his meals. This was a relatively good period for us when we had earnings from translation, the local theater and the radio, and it was no hardship for us to feed the poor fellow. While I was in Moscow he had carefully collected all the drafts of "Black Earth," which M. was composing then, and after my return, when M. and I began trying to remember the poems confiscated during the house search, Rudakov copied them all into a notebook for us. Overnight he re- copied them on drafting paper, in a rather comic copperplate hand with curlicues, and brought them along to us in the morning. He despised my spidery handwriting and complete lack of concern for the appearance of manuscripts. He thought, for instance, that it was scandalous to write with ordinary ink, and insisted on using India ink. (He also drew silhouettes in India ink, and the result was no worse than those done by street artists.) He showed me his beauti­fully executed copies of M.'s poems and said: "This is what they'll keep in the archives, not the messy things you and Osip Emilievich do." We only smiled, and tried not to hurt his feelings.

We often warned Rudakov that he would do himself no good by coming to see us, but he replied with such a string of noble phrases that we could only gasp. Perhaps for this reason we were so tolerant of certain unpleasant things about him. He was, for example, very arrogant and was always being very rude to our other constant visi­tor, Kaletski—also a Leningrader and a pupil of all our friends, such as Eikhenbaum and Tynianov. Though he was a modest and shy young man, Kaletski sometimes said things nobody else would have dared to at that time. Once, for instance, he talked to M. about the inefficiency of all the Soviet institutions with which we had any con­tact, the way they had deteriorated under the dead hand of bureauc­racy. And suppose, he continued, the army was just the same? What would happen if there was a war? Rudakov remembered what he had been taught in school and said: "I believe in the Party." Kalet­ski blushed with embarrassment and replied softly: "I believe in the people." He looked very puny next to the tall, handsome Rudakov, but he had much more inner strength. Rudakov sneeringly called him a "quantum," explaining that this was the smallest unit of energy.

Another disagreeable feature of Rudakov was his constant grum­bling. In Russia, he kept complaining, people of talent had always been ground down by life, and he would never be able to write his book. M. could not stand this kind of talk: "Why aren't you writing now?" he asked. "If someone has anything to say, he will always manage to say it." This made Rudakov lose his temper and, asking how he could work without money or a proper place to live, he would storm out, banging the door behind him. But in an hour or so he would come back, as though nothing had happened.

Rudakov had a strong didactic streak in him—he liked to tell me how to copy out M.'s verse, and M. how he should write it. He greeted every new poem with some theory or other from his still unwritten book, as though to ask why he hadn't been consulted be­forehand. I could see that he often got on M.'s nerves, and would have liked to throw him out, but M. wouldn't let me ("How will he eat without us?") and everything went on as before. Even so, both he and Kaletski were some comfort to us. While they were in Voro­nezh we were not totally isolated—as we were after their return to Leningrad at the beginning of 1936. We would have been quite alone if it had not been for Natasha Shtempel, who started coming to see us then. While we were living in the "agent's" apartment, Ruda­kov had to go to the hospital with scarlet fever and met some girls there, but he was desperately anxious that we shouldn't get to know. One of them was Natasha, and before leaving Voronezh he made her swear she would never visit us, but, fortunately for us, she didn't keep this promise.

Altogether, Rudakov was a very strange type—and we should have known better than to get on such close terms with him. I gave him original copies of all M.'s most important work, and Akhmatova let him have the whole of Gumilev's archive, delivering it to him on a sledge.

During the war, after being wounded, Rudakov was posted to a draft office in Moscow. When one of his relatives came and pleaded to be exempted from military service because he was a Tolstoyan, Rudakov granted his request. For this he was arrested and sent to a penal battalion, where he was soon killed. Our manuscripts were left with his widow, but she did not return them to us. In 1953, meeting Akhmatova at a concert, she said that everything was intact, but six months later she told Emma Gerstein that she had been arrested her­self and everything had been confiscated. Soon she was telling yet a third version: that she had been arrested and her mother had burned everything. What the truth of the matter is we just haven't been able to find out. All we know is that she has sold some of Gumilev's manuscripts—not directly, but through middlemen. Akhmatova is furious about it all, but there is nothing she can do. Once we got the widow to come and see Akhmatova on the pretext of trying to pub­lish an essay by her late husband, but it was impossible to get any sense out of her. Khardzhiev had a little more luck—he was able to persuade her to let him copy out everything he needed from Ruda- kov's letters. But Khardzhiev is a man of great charm and good looks who can get anything he likes. However, in Rudakov's letters— which he wrote every day, carefully keeping numbered copies for posterity—there was nothing of special interest for us. The poor boy was obviously a psychopath. The letters were full of ravings about how the whole of poetry had been present in M.'s room—I've forgotten whether he said "world poetry" or Russian poetry, but he was referring to M., himself and a volume of Vaginov which M. had in his room. He also wrote about how he taught M. to write poetry and explained everything to him, and expressed his horror that all the praise would go to M. and he would get no credit. He compared M. to Derzhavin—sometimes like a god and sometimes like a worm. In one of the letters he spoke of himself as M.'s heir, alleging that M. had said to him: "You are my heir, do what you see fit with my verse." I am quoting all this from memory, since I have only seen the copies made by Khardzhiev. Reading them, Akhmatova and I understood that the theft of our archives had been part of a deliber­ate plan on Rudakov's part, and that his widow was only carrying out his will by refusing to return them to us. The selling of original manuscripts—which is very profitable—was being done not only for mercenary reasons, but also in fulfillment of Rudakov's maniac schemes. One wonders what would have happened if I had died much earlier. It is possible that Rudakov would have claimed all M.'s work as his own—though this would not have been easy, since many of the poems were circulating under the name of their rightful au­thor. A similar attempt at plagiarism on the part of Seva Bagritski only ended in a scandal when his mother published M.'s "Goldfinch" poem as a work of her son's. Things would have been even worse if I had listened to Rudakov when he tried to persuade me (through Emma Gerstein, with whom he had become friendly) to hand over all M.'s papers to him. The reason he gave was that it was important for all the papers to be in one place. But Khardzhiev and I argued that, on the contrary, it was safer to disperse them. As a result of handing them to Rudakov, I have lost several poems altogether— nearly all the Voronezh rough drafts and many copies of Tristia in M.'s own hand.

M. seemed to foresee the fate of his archive in the passage in "Conversation About Dante" where he writes: "Whether first drafts are preserved or not depends on a struggle of opposing forces—to get them through safely one must take account of winds blowing in the wrong direction."

In this whole Rudakov episode I blame not the poor fool himself, whatever he may have been aiming at, but rather those responsible for creating this "happy life" of ours. If we lived like human beings rather than as hunted animals, Rudakov would have come to our house like any other visitor, and it would probably never have oc­curred to him to purloin M.'s papers and declare himself M.'s heir— any more than his widow would have carried on her trade in Gumilev's letters to Akhmatova.

Rudakov was one of the most important figures in the story of M.'s archives, but there were others too. Some of the episodes would have been worthy of a film script. For instance, when the Germans were approaching Voronezh, Natasha rescued M.'s letters to me by putting them all in an old tin tea caddy and taking them with her as she left the burning city on foot. Then there was Nina, who de­stroyed a copy of some verse by M. during the days when her mother-in-law was expecting to be arrested for a second time, and her friend Edik, who boasted about having saved the copies I gave him (though it was not too difficult for him, since he lived in the house of his father-in-law, a high police official who, as I have al­ready mentioned, committed suicide in Tashkent after Stalin's death). All I could do was deposit copies with as many different people as possible and hope that some would survive. My only helper in this was my brother, and our main concern was never to leave the basic collection of M.'s papers too long in any one place. I used to carry around a heap of first drafts of M.'s prose pieces in my suit­case, and I always interleaved them with notes I had made on linguis­tics for my dissertation—I hoped that this would mislead any semi- literate police agents who might rummage in my belongings. Papers occasionally disappeared—as they do sometimes even now, though probably for a different reason. Not long ago a whole file marked "materials for a biography" disappeared from my room—I still have copies of these notes, but I have no idea where the originals have gone to. Earlier I mentioned an edition of Stone originally owned by

Kablukov. I bought it (for 200 roubles) on account of the variants Kablukov had written in it, and also because of four loose pages written in M.'s own hand—two of these have now vanished. I have also lost a letter to me from Pasternak in which he wrote that the only people in contemporary Soviet literature—this was right after the war—who interested him were Simonov and Tvardovski, be­cause he would like to understand the mechanism by which reputa­tions are created. I imagine that this letter, as well as the two pages written in M.'s hand, were taken by lovers of literature and will not get lost. Be that as it may, I have now stopped keeping anything at home (if where I live can be called a home!) and I again worry constantly about where things have the best chance of surviving.

Despite everything, I have managed to save a good deal of M.'s work, though whether it will ever be published here is another mat­ter—there is still no sign of it. I have had to give up one method of preserving his work—namely, committing it to memory. Until 1956 I could remember everything by heart—both prose and verse. In order not to forget it, I had to repeat a little to myself each day. I did this while I thought I still had a good while to go on living. But time is getting on now.

There are many women like me who for years have spent sleepless nights repeating the words of their dead husbands over and over again. As another example I should like to mention a woman whose name I cannot give because she is still alive. In 1937 there were daily newspaper attacks on her husband, a very high official. He sat at home waiting to be arrested and not daring to go out—the house was surrounded by police agents. At night he wrote a long letter to the Central Committee which his wife memorized. After he was shot, she spent twenty years in prisons and labor camps. When she re­turned at last, she wrote out the letter and took it to the Central Committee, where I can only hope it has not disappeared forever.

No recordings of M.'s voice have survived. The collection of re­cordings (including some of M. and Gumilev) made by Sergei Igna- tievich Bernstein was destroyed after he was expelled from the Zubov Institute for "formalism." * This was during a period when the remains of dead people were being scattered to the winds. I have managed to keep such photographs as there were—there were not very many—in the same way as the manuscripts, but I never had any control over the recordings of his voice. I well remember M.'s voice and the way he read, but it was inimitable and lives on only in my

^# See page 420.

ears. If people could hear his voice, they would understand what he meant by "interpretative reading"—that is, using the text as a con­ductor uses a score. This could never be properly conveyed by some form of phonetic notation showing where he paused or raised his voice. His treatment of vowel quantity and the timbre of his voice could not be indicated. And what memory could ever preserve all the inflections of a voice that fell silent a quarter of a century ago? Yet something of his voice is preserved in the very structure of his verse, and now, when the years of silence are coming to an end, thousands of youngsters have caught the intonation of M.'s poetry and, unknown to themselves, reproduce it when they recite him. Nothing can be completely scattered to the winds.

Fortunately, this poetry still has not been seized on by actors, pro­fessional reciters and schoolteachers. I once happened to hear the brazen voice of a woman announcer on Radio Liberty.* She was reading M.'s "I drink to officers' epaulettes. . . ." This innocuous humorous poem has always been exploited here by such people as Nikulin to cast cheap political aspersions on M., and now, lo and behold, it was being used in the same way by a foreign radio! The woman was reading it in the same odious tone of voice, full of "meaning," as our radio announcers. She must have learned it from them. Sickened and depressed, I switched off.

58 Old and New

n one of the first few days after our return from Voronezh,

we were given a ride around Moscow by Valentin Katayev in the brand-new car he had just brought back with him from Amer­ica. He looked at M. fondly and said: "I know what you need: a fixed place of residence." That evening he took us to the new apart­ment building for writers with the labradorite entry hall which so impressed those who remembered the hardships of the Revolution and the Civil War. In Katayev's new apartment everything was new —including his wife and child and the furniture. "I like modern stuff," he said, screwing up his eyes. But Fedin, who lived on the floor below, went in for mahogany and his apartment was crammed

* An emigre station based in Munich.

with it. The writers had gone wild at having so much money for the first time in their lives. Shklovski had been given a new apartment three floors above Katayev. The floor on which they put you de­pended on your standing as a writer. Vishnevski had insisted on moving into the apartment allotted to Ehrenburg (who was abroad) because he considered it unbecoming for someone holding his posi­tion in the Union of Writers to live right at the top, under the roof. But the official reason he gave was that he was frightened of heights.

Walking around Shklovski's apartment, Katayev asked him: "But where do you keep your suits?" Shklovski still had the same old wife, the same children, and only one pair of trousers—or two at the most. But he had already ordered a suit for himself—the first in his life. It was no longer done to go around in shabby clothes, and you had to look respectable to visit editorial offices or a film studio. The leather jackets and Komsomol blouses of the twenties had com­pletely gone out of style and you were expected to dress in conven­tional fashion. At the end of the last war, prizes were promised to teachers who could manage to get decent dresses for themselves.

Katayev treated us to Spanish wine and fresh oranges—which were now on sale again for the first time since the Revolution. Everything was just like old times! Except that in the old days there were no refrigerators, such as the electric one Katayev had brought with him from America: the little chunks of ice floating in our wine were the last word of modern luxury. Nikulin came in with his new wife, who had just borne him twins. Katayev was quite astonished that such a promiscuous pair could have children. I remembered something that Nikulin had said a long time before, but it no longer seemed so funny: "None of us is a Dostoyevski—all we need is money." He drank Spanish wine and held forth about the Spanish dialects—he had just been to Spain to take a look at the Civil War.

At the time we left Moscow for exile, the writers had not yet become a privileged caste, but now they were putting down roots and figuring out ways of keeping their privileges. Katayev revealed his own plan when he told us: "Nowadays one must write like Wal­ter Scott." This was not the easiest way—it required hard work and talent.

The inhabitants of this building with the labradorite entrance understood the meaning of 1937 better than we did, because they saw both sides of what it entailed. It was like Doomsday, with some being trampled underfoot by demons, and others having their praises sung. Those who had tasted the delights of heaven had no wish to be cast down into the pit. Who can blame them? The decision taken at family councils and in discussion with friends was, therefore, that the only way of dealing with the situation which arose in 1937 ^was to adapt to it. "Valentin is devoted to Stalin," said Katayev's new wife, Esther, who knew from life in her parents' home what it was to be an outcast. And Katayev himself, chastened by earlier experi­ences, had long since gone around saying: "I don't want any trouble. The main thing is not to upset the powers-that-be."

"Who remembers Mandelstam nowadays?" Katayev asked us rue­fully. "My brother and I always mention him when we talk to the younger people, but that's about all." M. was not offended to be told this, since it was quite true that he had been forgotten—though it was certainly not true that Katayev and his brother would ever dare mention him in conversation with strangers.

The new Moscow was now being built up and adopting the ways of the world—people were opening their first bank accounts, buying furniture and writing novels. Everybody could hope for speedy ad­vancement because every day somebody was plucked from their midst and had to be replaced. Of course, everybody was also a candi­date for prison and death, but during the day they did not think about it, giving full rein to their fears only at night. The people who fell by the wayside were immediately forgotten, and their wives—if they had been lucky enough to hang on to part of the accommoda­tion shared with their arrested husbands—found that the doors of all "decent" apartments were now firmly slammed in their faces. Actu­ally, by now few wives survived the arrest of their husbands—in 1937 whole families were being wiped out.

M. thought rather well of Katayev and said that he had a "real bandit's charm." We had first got to know him in Kharkov in 1922. In those days he was a ragamuffin with intelligent, lively eyes and had already been in serious trouble (which he managed to get out of). He was on his way to Moscow, which he intended to take by storm. He later used to come and see us there and tell us jokes he had heard in Mylnikov Street, the old Bohemian quarter of Odessa. Many of these stories we were later to read in The Twelve Chairs— Valentin had made a present of them to his brother, who came to Moscow from Odessa to get a job as a detective, but on his elder brother's advice became a writer instead.

Toward the end of the twenties, after their early successes, all the prose writers I knew in my youth—with the exception of Tynianov and Zoshchenko—began to churn out fiction in a rather sordid way. In the case of Katayev, thanks to his special blend of talent and cynicism, it was particularly blatant. Right at the end of the twenties

I remember going somewhere in a taxi with him. We hadn't seen him for a very long time, because we had been living in Leningrad and the Crimea. The meeting was very friendly, and, sitting on the jump seat in the taxi, he talked incessantly. I had never before heard the like of some of the things he said. He reproached M. for not producing enough or getting his stuff published in large editions: "Suppose you die, what will your collected works be like? How many pages will they make? It won't be enough to send to the bind­ers! Every writer should have twelve volumes with gilt edges." All this had a very familiar ring, not of the "new" era, but of something much older. Everything Katayev wrote could have come out in the fiction supplement to the pre-Revolutionary magazine Niva. His wife played the part of the bourgeois housewife and he was the per­fect family despot who stamped his foot at the cook for burning the roast. As a boy he had been through too many terrors and suffered too much hunger, and now he wanted peace and stability, money and women—and the trust of his superiors. For a long time I could not tell when he was just joking and when he was revealing the ugly side of himself under the mask. "They're all the same," M. said to me, "but this one is clever."

I once met Katayev during the war, when I was living as an evacuee in Tashkent. He was very happy because somewhere near Aralsk he had seen a camel and it reminded him of M.: "He held his head back, just like Osip Emilievich." The sight had reminded Kata­yev of his youth and inspired him to write a poem. This was the whole difference between Katayev and the others—they would not have risked such unwise associations. Fedin, for example, would scarcely have been moved to write verse on seeing a camel that re­minded him of Mandelstam. Of all the writers who were allowed to survive and live in comfort, only Katayev did not lose his love of poetry and feeling for literature. Otherwise M. could not have borne to drink Spanish wine with him in Moscow in June 1937. As he showed us out, Katayev said to M.: "Osip Emilievich, perhaps they'll let you settle down and become a good citizen at last. It's high time."

In the period when people were being "rehabilitated" after the Twentieth Congress, Katayev kept wanting to publish some of M.'s verse in Yunost [Youth], but he was too worried about angering the authorities. Unlike others, however, he did at least entertain the thought.

What would have become of Katayev if he hadn't been obliged to "write like Walter Scott"? He is a very talented man, with a lively intelligence and a quick wit, who belongs to the most enlightened wing of the present-day best-selling Soviet writers.

That summer we really wanted nothing more than to settle down and become "good citizens." We made all kinds of plans for the future—thinking how nice it would be, for instance, to get another apartment in a building with an elevator, so we wouldn't have to walk up to the fifth floor. But we figured there was no hurry about this—let Stavski first keep his promise to move Kostyrev out of our present apartment.

M. had a violent argument with my brother Evgeni on a question which seemed most important to us just then: should he take trans­lating work or not? Evgeni said it was absolutely essential for him to do this kind of work for the time being, "and if you can't stand it, then Nadia must take it on." M. replied that he couldn't bear it him­self and hated to see me doing it. The argument was decided for us. by Luppol, the editor-in-chief of Goslit,* who said that, as long as it depended on him, Mandelstam would never be given a single line of translation or any other kind of work to do. Luppol was soon ar­rested and disappeared for good, but nothing changed when his job was taken over by somebody else. People come and go, but "deci­sions of principle" remain. The one affecting M. is still in force, and there seems to be no power on earth that can change it.

At the time Luppol's decision did not bring us to our senses—we still hoped that everything would somehow come out all right. Narbut had gone, so had Margulis, Klychkov and many others. M. kept muttering Gumilev's line: "Woe, woe, fear, the snare and the pit," but then he would again look on the bright side and tell me that everything would be all right. "Why are you moaning?" he would ask. "Live while you can, and then we'll see. It just can't go on like this!" For many years this phrase had been the only source of opti­mism: "It can't go on like this. . . ."

Reading the Bible, Akhmatova discovered that the words of Gu­milev's poem are taken almost literally from the prophet Isaiah: "Fear, and the pit, and the snare, are upon thee, О inhabitant of the earth."

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59 А "Convicted Person"

_D

o firemen die?" M. had once been asked by his young niece Tatka. He had later echoed her by asking: "Do the rich die?" —in Voronezh it occurred to him that money and comfort increase one's chances of living longer. "Do people have to register in Mos­cow as well?" he asked, when I reminded him that it was time we got our residence permits. It so happened that Kostyrev came back at that moment for a couple of days, and this made M. realize that there was no time to waste. He went down to the house committee office, but came back almost at once and asked for my papers. It turned out that after I had returned to Voronezh after a visit to Moscow earlier in the year, Kostyrev had got them to cancel my permit to live in the city: this was his way of preparing for our homecoming. Until then I had counted officially as a Moscow resi­dent, while in Voronezh I had the status of a "visitor." The house committee did not know I had last renewed my papers in Voronezh, but I had managed to get away with this. Kostyrev had obtained a residence permit as occupant of a room in our apartment, and his temporary permit had now been made permanent even though he had not been here the required length of time—as they told us in the house committee office, the rule had been waived in his case. The building was a co-operative, and we had paid a large sum of money for our apartment. In law we were the owners of it, and theoreti­cally nobody could be registered for residence in it without our permission. The authorities were now having trouble with co­operatives, because the families of arrested people referred to their legal rights in an attempt to stay put and prevent new tenants being moved in with them. A new law was in preparation to abolish these "rights." So far there had only been talk about it in high quarters and it was not actually passed until the end of 1938, but in this coun­try they don't wait until laws are passed before putting them into effect! The fact that Kostyrev had been registered for residence in our apartment showed that he was being encouraged to take over the whole place, and this was a bad sign. But for some reason M. was not at all upset. He had become a fatalist of the Soviet type: "Every­thing will be all right if they want it that way. If they don't, there's nothing we can do about it." This fatalism began to affect me as well. Not long before, he had said to me: "You will return to Mos­cow if they let me back. They won't let you back alone." Now, a quarter of a century later, they have indeed allowed me to reside in Moscow again—although M. himself is still not "allowed back," if one doesn't count the publication of a few of his poems in the maga­zine Moskva.

Kostyrev was only a cog in a complex mechanism. He was a face­less person—the sort you would never notice on the street or in a bus, but he looked like many others of the same kind. In an earlier historical period he would have worn a pea-green overcoat,* but in our day such people rise to greater heights, and he became both a writer and a general. Having settled in our apartment, he spent all his time at the typewriter, writing his stories about the Soviet Far East —and copying out M.'s verse. Once, as he was typing one of M.'s Crimean poems, he said to me: "Osip Emilievich only likes the Cri­mea because he's never been to the Far East." In his view, it was important for every writer to visit the Far East. This was said at a time when endless prison trains were going east to Vladivostok, and Kolyma was being converted into a vast penal colony—as we all knew perfectly well. Anybody to whom the secret police had at­tached someone of Kostyrev's rank had every prospect of seeing the Far East. But at the moment we were worried more about getting a residence permit than about Kolyma.

The district militia refused us the permit with unusual speed. They said we could try the Central militia station on Petrovka. "If they refuse," M. said, "we'll go back to Voronezh." We even phoned our old landlady there to ask her to keep our room for us, just in case. At the Petrovka station they also refused to give us the permit and explained why: M. could not be allowed back in Moscow because he had been a "convicted person." Nowadays, I am told, a past conviction no longer counts against someone if his sentence did not exceed five years and he has not been specifically deprived of his civic rights by the court, but in those days, and until recently, not only ex-prisoners but their families as well were marked for life by the fact of having been convicted. I have often had to fill in forms with a question about whether I or any close relative has ever been convicted of an offense. To cover up such unpleasant facts, people were always inventing new life stories for themselves. Whether chil­dren should mention that their father had died in prison or in a camp was a constant theme of family discussions. For several years I have been free of the stigma of M.'s conviction, but the literary stigma is still there.

At the Petrovka station we first learned all the implications of M.'s

* Such coats were worn by police spies in Czarist times.

status as a "convicted person." "Where are you going now?" asked the militia official as he handed M. a slip of paper rejecting his appli­cation for a permit: he was supposed to enter our next place of resi­dence in our file. "Back to Voronezh," M. replied. "Very well," said the official, "but you won't get registered there either." We now discovered that while as an exile M. had been barred from only twelve towns, as a "convicted person" he was banned from over seventy, and for life at that!

"And what would have happened if I had stayed in Voronezh?" M. asked. The official explained that because "we still have deficien­cies in our work" M. might have been overlooked for a while, but he would sooner or later have been expelled. This sort of thing no longer surprises us: we are now familiar enough with the residence permit as a high barrier which only the most agile can clear. Nobody can just go and settle in the town of his choice (unless he has been sent there to work), and there is no question of a residence permit at all without identity papers—which means that vast categories of people—such as collective farmers—cannot move at all. Not every­body realizes, even now, what a great privilege it is to have identity papers. But in 1937 we were learning for the first time about this "progress," as M, called it.

When we came home, M. said to me: "Why don't you try to register without me? You are not a convicted person."

This was the first and only occasion on which he ever suggested we act as separate persons. And—in the hope of saving our apart­ment—I agreed to try my luck, just this once.

But I, too, was refused a permit. I went up to one of the high- ranking militia officials sitting at desks in the main hall of the Pe- trovka station and demanded an explanation. "Convicted person," said the official. "I have no conviction," I said indignantly. "What do you mean," the man said, and started looking through my papers. "Here we are: "Osip Mandelstam, convicted person—'" "That's a man," I interrupted, "but I am a woman—Nadezhda." He conceded this point, but then flew into a fury: "He's your husband, though, isn't he?" He got up and banged his fist on the table: "Have you ever heard of Article 58?" He shouted something else as well, but I fled in terror, even though I knew perfectly well that his anger was feigned, that he was just following his instructions in refusing me a permit and simply had no answers to my tiresome questions. We all unfailingly carried out our instructions, and if anybody ar­gued with us, all we could do was shout at them. We were fortunate if the nature of our instructions was relatively innocent—such as refusing medical certificates to people who needed them, cutting off grants to students, or assigning them, on graduation, to work in un­congenial places. Others had instructions that required them to ar­rest and deport people, beat them with their fists, and so forth. It was simply a question of your profession. I should not have been fright­ened if it had been simply a case of a bad-tempered militiaman shout­ing at me, but I knew that the State was speaking out of his mouth. Ever since then I have not been able to enter a militia station without trembling—particularly since my troubles with them are not over and my right to live where I do remains precarious.

When I left the militia station, M. was waiting for me on the street. We went back to the apartment that was no longer our home.

60 Chance

he fact that I was not able to register as a Moscow resident

and thus keep the apartment in Furmanov Street meant that my fate was not subsequently bound up with M.'s. Wandering from place to place, and never having a home of my own, my connection with him was less conspicuous than it would have been if I had con­tinued to live in Moscow. Everywhere I went, I was of course fol­lowed by my police file, but since I remained "in charge of Mos­cow," I could not be seriously harmed by denunciations of me in the various small towns where I lived. In some ways I owe my survival to Kostyrev for getting us out of the Moscow apartment. If I had stayed there, other writers in the building—either because they wanted the space, or for higher "reasons of State"—would certainly have brought me to the attention of the authorities.

I was saved by chance. Our lives were ruled by chance, but it more commonly led to death than to survival. After M.'s second arrest I often heard about such cases as I stood in line, waiting for hours on end to hand over money for him, or trying to get informa­tion in the Prosecutor's Office. I shall never forget the woman whose son had been arrested by chance, instead of a person of the same name who lived next door and happened to be out when the secret police came to pick him up. Though it meant moving mountains, the woman had managed to get through to some official and prove that her son had been arrested by mistake. An order had gone out for his release, but she was now told that her son was dead, having been killed in some quite improbable accident.

On hearing this in the Prosecutor's Office, the woman screamed and sobbed. The Prosecutor himself came out of his cubby-hole and shouted at her in the same mock-angry way in which the militia official had shouted at me. His purpose was to make her understand that he could not be expected to do his work properly unless he had peace and quiet. The duty of the Prosecutor was to give information about the length and nature of a person's sentence, not to notify relatives of his death. This woman must have had ex­traordinary persistence if she had managed to get them to tell her of her son's fate; such things were learned either by chance or not at all.

Other people from the line gathered around the Prosecutor and the howling woman, but she got no sympathy from them. "What's the use of crying?" asked one long-suffering woman who was also trying to find out about her son. "That won't bring him back to life, and she's only holding us up." The disturber of the peace was re­moved and order was restored.

Soviet citizens have a peculiar respect for Government offices. If the woman had loudly lamented her son's death at home, nobody would have thought anything of it, but to do so in a Government office was offensive to people's sense of order. We all have amazing powers of self-control—we were quite capable of coming to work with a smile on our face after a night in which our home had been searched or a member of the family arrested. We were always ex­pected to smile. This was dictated by the instinct of self-preserva­tion, concern for our family and friends, and our peculiarly Soviet code of behavior. During the second arrest of her son, Akhmatova infringed this code by screaming out loud in the presence of those who came to take him away. Apart from this one "lapse," however, she kept herself so well in hand that she even earned Surkov's ap­proval: "Anna Andreyevna has stuck it out so well all these years. . . ." What choice had she, with a hostage in jail? Was it just coincidence that practically none of us broke the rules of Soviet etiquette? M., for example, didn't observe them at all. He had no self- control—he joked, shouted, hammered on closed doors, raged and fumed, and never ceased to express astonishment at what was going on around us.

My self-control and discipline have now weakened to the point that I am writing these pages—although we have been told to be discriminating in the way we talk about the past. The only approved way is to show that, however bad things may have been for you, you nevertheless remain faithful to the idea of Communism, always able to distinguish the truly important—our ultimate objective—from minor factors—such as your own ruined life. Nobody worries about the inherent absurdity of this approach—it even seems to have been suggested by people who have spent half their lives in the camps, to approving nods from those who sent them there in the first place. I have only once had a personal encounter with someone who shared this point of view. This was a chance companion in a train on which I was traveling from Pskov to Moscow—otherwise I should never have met the man, given the insuperable social barriers that stand between me and people of his type. I had been seen off at the station by a group of friends who were all pleased and excited about news we had heard the day before—namely, that Tvardovski had at last got permission to publish Solzhenitsyn's story* in Novy Mir.

"Who is this Solzhenitsyn?" asked the man sitting next to me in the compartment. One look at his frowning face was enough to tell me that the only possible link between us would be like that of con­necting retorts in which the liquid can never reach the same level in both halves.

I told him about Solzhenitsyn and he gave his judgment: he should not be published. "Did you read the story 'The Rough Diamond'?" he asked me. "We could have done without that, too, but at least it had educational values."

In reply I said something about the need to tell the truth about the past.

To this he said: "You should realize that it was all a historical necessity."

"Why a necessity?" I objected, "We're now being told it was all a historical accident due to Stalin's bad character."

"You look like an educated person, yet you don't seem to have read your Marx properly," he said. "You must have forgotten what he says about accidents—they also happen by necessity, but people aren't aware of it." What he meant was that if it hadn't been Stalin, somebody else would have sent all those people to the camps.

My companion wore a military tunic without epaulettes, and he had the puffy, sallow face of someone who had spent all his life be-

* "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," published in November 1962.

hind a desk and suffered from insomnia.

Listening to me talking with my friends at the station, he had also caught the name of Pasternak. He now gave me his view of the Dr. Zhivago affair with professional forthrightness: it had been a case of gross negligence on somebody's part. "How could they have allowed him to send it abroad like that? What a blunder!" He had not him­self read Pasternak and had no intention of doing so. "Who reads him? I keep up with literature—I have to—but I'd never heard of him."

I said I bet he'd never heard of Tiutchev or Baratynski either.

He took out a notebook. "Who did you say? I must find out about them."

At first he told me he was a retired doctor (though he looked a little young to be on a pension) and was now helping the militia with juvenile delinquents. "Why have you given up medicine?" I asked. "I just had to," he replied. It appeared that he had practiced medi­cine only in the distant past. For most of his career he had done work that brought him into contact with both supporters and enemies of the Stalin regime—he claimed to know the opinions of both. "Where did you meet people who talked against it?" I asked, but he gave no reply. After his retirement he had settled in Tallin, where he had to live "in connection with my work." He had been given a three-room apartment there for himself, his wife and his younger son. "I have never heard of doctors getting a three-room apartment for a family of that size," I said. "It can happen," he replied curtly.

At this point he began to tell me, as a teacher, about his family problems. His two eldest children were all right and he was in fact just on his way to visit them. His daughter had married a regional Party secretary, and his son was also a Party official. But the younger son, who was born after the war, was no good at all. He was an idler who wanted to give up school and go to work in a factory. "How can he be an idler if he wants to work?" I asked. It appeared that he simply didn't want to live at home with his father because of things his friends had told him. Moreover, he was having a bad influence on his mother, who was also beginning to play up. "It's all because he's had too easy a time—the older ones grew up during the war and know what it means to suffer hardship. The young one's had every­thing that money can buy—all the oranges and chocolate he wanted. And now look at him. I should never have had him." He was unable to tell me what it would be like after the achievement of "full Com­munism" when all children will supposedly have everything they need. Did that mean they would all get out of control? Evidently his son's friends knew something of his father's past activities.

It was quite clear to me that I was talking to a "relic of Stalin's empire." Was it accidental that his son had revolted against him and that he was so much opposed to anyone probing into the past and scrutinizing the "historical necessity" which he had served with such zeal? Solzhenitsyn's story is like a touchstone: you can judge what a man's past (or his family's) has been like by the way he reacts to it. The past weighs heavily on us and we still have to make sense of it. It is difficult for us to confront it because so many people were im­plicated, either directly or indirectly, in what happened—or at least silently acquiesced in it. It is perfectly clear what people such as my chance traveling companion would like: they are simply waiting for the moment when they can give their blessing to a new generation of like-minded but more sophisticated heirs to Stalin's empire.

People who were silent or closed their eyes to what was happening also try to make excuses for the past. They generally accuse me of subjectivism, saying that I see only one side of the picture and ignore all the other things: the building up of industry, Meyerhold's stage productions, the Cheliuskin expedition and so forth. None of this, to my mind, absolves us from our duty to make sense of what hap­pened. We have lived through a severe crisis of nineteenth-century humanism during which all its ethical values collapsed because they were founded only on man's needs and desires, his longing for per­sonal happiness. The twentieth century has also shown us that evil has an enormous urge to self-destruction. It inevitably ends in total folly and suicide. Unfortunately, as we now understand, in destroy­ing itself, evil may destroy all life on earth as well. However much we shout about these elementary truths, they will only be heeded by people who themselves want no more of evil. None of this, after all, is new: everything is always repeated, though on an ever greater scale. Luckily, I shall not see what the future holds in store.

61 The Electrician

_W

e shouldn't give up yet," M. said the next morning and went to the Union of Writers to see Stavski. But Stavski wouldn't see him, letting it be known through his secretary that he couldn't receive him for at least a week because he was frantically busy. From the Union of Writers M. went to the Literary Fund,[21] but on the stairway there he had a slight heart attack. He was brought home in an ambulance and told he must rest for the time being. This suited him very well—if he could manage to stay here until he got an interview with Stavski, he thought there was a good chance of obtaining a residence permit. What he didn't realize was that people like Stavski, and all the other intermediaries between us and the authorities, always say they are too busy and cannot spare a moment. It was exactly the same in 1959 when I was again thrown out of Moscow (for the last time) and Surkov told me that he just couldn't find a second to speak with his colleagues about me. Admit­tedly, on this occasion I was faced only with the prospect of having nowhere to live—it was not a matter of life and death, as it would have been in Stalin's time.

M. was in a fairly good mood as he lay resting on the "Bessarabian carriage." Every day he was visited by a doctor from the Literary Fund, and after ten days they arranged for him to be seen by a spe­cialist, Professor Razumova, a woman with an intelligent face who had sketches by Nesterov on the walls of her office. We were sur­prised how readily she wrote out a certificate saying M. needed fur­ther rest in bed and a general check-up. Of course she had no reason to know what our legal situation was, but after all our tribulations in Cherdyn and Voronezh we were much struck by the way in which she and the other Literary Fund doctors treated us—it was just like the attitude of intellectuals to exiles in pre-revolutionary Russia.

At this point M. became obsessed with the idea of cheating fate and staying on in Moscow at any price—as the only city where we had a roof over our heads and could lead some sort of life. He was encour­aged by the way the Literary Fund had helped him, sent doctors to him and inquired after his health. What was the explanation? It could have been that one of the officials there was sympathetic to M., or they may simply have taken fright when he had his attack and didn't want to be accused of failing to give him help in time. Both things were quite possible. Whatever it was, there was no doubt of the Literary Fund's desire to help, and in our conditions this was quite astounding.

Kostyrev suddenly arrived in the apartment, nosed around a little, banged all the doors, and then went out, telling my mother he would be staying in Moscow for a few days. He soon came back and left the door into our room open—we were sitting with Rudakov (who was passing through Moscow on his way to the Crimea) in the pas­sage, blocked off by a cupboard, where we had put the "Bessara­bian" bed. We thought Kostyrev just wanted to eavesdrop, but it turned out that he was waiting for a visitor. When the visitor ar­rived he brought him into our room, where we were sitting behind the cupboard. The man appeared to be an electrician and we heard him tell Kostyrev that the wiring needed fixing. It struck me as odd that Kostyrev should bother about such household matters. M. was quite alarmed and I thought for a moment that his hallucinations had returned—before I could stop him he went straight up to the electrician and said: "Stop pretending and tell us what you want! Have you come for me?" "What's he saying!" I whispered to Ruda­kov, convinced that M. was delirious again. But, to my astonishment, the "electrician" seemed to think it was all quite normal. After a further exchange of words, he and M. showed each other their pa­pers, and then the "electrician" asked M. to go with him to the mili­tia station. I felt both horror and relief—horror at the thought of his being arrested and sent to a camp, and relief that he was not suffer­ing from delusions again.

The man took M. off to the militia station and Rudakov ran after them. But they did not get as far as the station—on the way M. had another attack. He was again brought home in an ambulance and carried upstairs in a chair borrowed from Kolychev's apartment on the ground floor. While a doctor attended to M., the "electrician" waited in the room. When M. was a little rested, he showed all his medical certificates to our strange visitor, who asked to be given the one with a triangular stamp which had been signed by Razumova. Taking it with him, he went to Kostyrev's room to make a telephone call. Having got his instructions, he came back and said to M.: "Stay where you are for now." Then he left us.

M. stayed in bed for several days. Every day, in the morning and evening, the "electrician" or one of his colleagues—always in civilian clothing—looked in on us. During the day M. was able to joke about it ("All the trouble they're having with me!") and consoled himself with the thought that if he hadn't exposed the "electrician" they would have come to pick him up at night. He was not so cheerful at night. Once I woke up and saw him standing at the foot of the bed with his head thrown back and his hands spread wide. "What is it?" I asked. He pointed at the wide-open window. "Isn't it time? Let's do it, while we're still together." "Not yet," I said, and he didn't argue. I am not sure I was right. We should both have been spared so much torment.

The next morning we endured the visit of the "electrician," who was now promising to send his "own doctor," but before he came again in the evening we slipped out of the house and went to Ya- khontov's apartment, where we stayed the night. In the morning I came back to our place to get our things ready to leave, but Kosty­rev insisted on taking me around to the militia station. "Where is Mandelstam?" they asked me. "He's gone away." "Where?" "I don't know." They then said we must clear out of Moscow within twenty- four hours.

For his pains Kostyrev was rewarded with our apartment. His widow and daughter still live there. I would like his daughter to read this, but the children of such parents do not read books—unless they also work in the literary section of the Lubianka and have to by way of duty. In that case it is probably better that she doesn't see this manuscript.

We stayed with Yakhontov for three days and spent the whole time consulting maps of the Moscow region. At last we settled on Kimry. It was easy to get to from the Savelovo railroad station near the Moscow suburb of Maryina Roshcha, where the Yakhontovs lived. Another attractive feature was that it was on the Volga—if one must live in a small provincial town, then better it should be on a river. We did not go back to our apartment on Furmanov Street— M.'s brother Alexander and my brother Evgeni volunteered to bring our things to the station. To say goodbye to my mother, who was still in the apartment, we called her down into the street. She was quite startled when M. went up to her with outstretched hand and said: "Hello, my illegal mother-in-law."

It was the beginning of June when we left Moscow.

It must be said that the militia had shown unusual humanity and tender-heartedness by allowing a sick man to stay on illegally in Moscow until he was well enough to travel. They are not generally so considerate, and they would have been quite within their rights to insist that we leave immediately.

6 2 In the Country

_R

ather early for us to come out to the country this year," said - M. after we had taken refuge from the Moscow militia in the small village of Savelovo on the high bank of the Volga opposite Kimry. It was set in sparse woodland, and in the market there the peasants sold berries, as well as milk and buckwheat for making kasha. There was a tearoom where we could go and read the local newspaper, which had the comic name The Invalid's Echo. The tea­room was lit by a smoky kerosene lamp, whereas at home we had only candles. It was very difficult for M. to read by this kind of light because of the bad state of his eyes. We have all ruined our eyesight through having to sit by kerosene lamps all our lives. In fact, how­ever, we had brought very few books with us, since we did not expect to settle here. This was only a temporary halt which we needed to have a rest and take stock of our situation.

Savelovo is a village with two or three streets. All the houses looked well-built and were made of wood with old-fashioned fret­work window frames and gates. Not far away was the village of Kalyazin, which would shortly be submerged in the waters of the artificial lake then being made. It would have been possible to get one of the excellent frame houses from Kalyazin and set up house in Savelovo if only we had had the money to buy one.

The inhabitants of Savelovo worked mainly at the nearby factory, but they got a livelihood from the river by catching fish and selling it on the black market. It also provided them with fuel for the win­ter—on summer nights they used boathooks to pull in logs as they were floated down from the lumber camps on the upper reaches of the river. In those days the Volga still fed those who lived on its banks, but now a stop has been put to this as well, and the rivers are no longer a source of livelihood.

We preferred to remain in Savelovo—which was the last station on the railroad—rather than cross over to Kimry, a shabby little town on the other side of the river. This would have made it more difficult for us to make day trips into Moscow. The railroad was a kind of lifeline for us. As our friend G.M. told us—she had been through the prisons and camps and knew what it was to be a "con­victed person"—it didn't matter what god-forsaken place you settled in as long as you could hear the whistles of passing trains.

The forbidden city of Moscow was like a magnet. People of our status were allowed to reside only at points just over a hundred kilo­meters away, and all the places within reach of the railroads in this belt around the city were crammed with former prisoners and exiles.

Particularly popular was the small town of Alexandrov, because it was possible to get to Moscow and back in one day by changing to the electric train at Zagorsk. This meant a journey of three hours instead of four or four and a half on other lines into Moscow. After a day in Moscow, where one would go to get some money to live on, or to make the rounds of officials in connection with one's case, it was advisable to return by the last train to the place where you were registered.

In 1937, when people who had been in trouble were re-arrested on a mass scale, the secret police found it very convenient to have their victims all gathered together at these focal points just beyond the hundred-kilometer perimeter around Moscow. It was much easier than tracking them down individually. Whole towns could be cleared out at one fell swoop. Since these operations were carried out according to plans for which "production quotas" were set, the police agents involved were no doubt well rewarded for their self- sacrificing efforts in reaching their targets. Every time these small towns were emptied in this way, they would at once begin to fill up again with new ex-prisoners who in due course were all picked up in their turn.

People found it hard to believe that small places like Alexandrov could serve as traps. It never occurred to them that whole categories were being systematically wiped out. Everybody believed that he was the object of individual proceedings, and the stories about "be­witched places" (i.e., where you were more likely to be arrested) were dismissed as old wives' tales. We had already been warned in Moscow about a great round-up going on in Alexandrov, but we hadn't believed it. The only reason we didn't go there was that M. feared this "crazed borough," as he called it in one of his poems. "We couldn't find a worse place," he said. Furthermore, we heard that it was monstrously expensive to rent rooms there.

In Savelovo there were no former prisoners or exiles apart from us and a few common criminals who had come here to weather the storm of the current mass arrests. They were not a target of the great round-up, but they could always be thrown in for good meas­ure if there was any danger of the "production quota" not being met. We got talking with one of these criminals in the tearoom and he gave us a very clear explanation of why Savelovo was preferable to Alexandrov or Kolomna: "If the mob all gathers in one place, they can be skimmed off like cream." He was wiser than all those gullible people sentenced under Article 58—many of them had been to a university in the old days and were firmly persuaded that no­body could be called to account twice for the same crime. And since they were not aware of having done anything wrong, they kept hop­ing they would be cleared ("It can't go on like this") but instead found themselves being taken away in the "Black Maria."

Between the years 1948 and 1953 I was again to witness one of these round-ups of former prisoners and exiles. It was in a sense a minor drama, without the mass graves and tortures so typical of our age. I was living at that time in Ulianovsk (Lenin's birthplace) and saw how it was swept clean of everybody who had previous convic­tions. Some of them were picked up straightaway, but others first had their residence permits canceled and were thus forced to move out somewhere beyond the hundred-kilometer radius. The most popular small town to which they went was Melikez. Among them was a violinist I knew who had once been a member of the Party and of the Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAMP), where he had dabbled in musical politics together with Briusov's sister. In 1937 he was sent to a camp and, after serving a sentence of eight or ten years, went to live in Ulianovsk at the end of the forties. Almost out of his mind with joy, and thinking the worst was now over—how many of us fell for this illusion!—he decided to start a new life. His previous wife and children having "disowned" him, he married a nice colleague of mine in Ulianovsk and got a job in the music school there. They had a son who was soon reaching for his father's violin, and his happy father was dreaming of making a violinist of him. He was always telling me that there was no greater happiness than to live for art, and he quoted the Marxist classics to this effect. Suddenly, when his little son was three years old, he was summoned to the militia station and told that his permit to reside in Ulianovsk had been re­scinded, and that he must leave the city within twenty-four hours. I happened to visit him and his wife that same day, and I could see at once from their faces what had been done to them. From then on I was the only person they could confide in—such things had to be kept secret, otherwise the whole family was liable to suffer.

That same night the violinist left for Melikez, where he managed to rent a corner of a room and start making a little money by giving violin and piano lessons. But very soon they began arresting former camp inmates there, too. In small towns such news spread very quickly, since landladies could never resist telling their neighbors about the arrest of a lodger. These arrests meant that the local au­thorities had been ordered to clear the town of all "suspicious ele­ments" that had gathered there. Everybody now rushed to leave the town, and the station was crowded with "refugees." My violinist friend managed to get out in time, and for the next two and a half years, right up to the death of Stalin, he kept permanently on the move, going up and down the Volga from one small town to an­other. In some places, already packed with refugees, he was not able to find a corner to live in, or the police refused to register him. Sometimes he managed to get a job teaching music in a local school, but wherever he went he always had to leave in a hurry the moment he heard they had started picking people up. In the course of these wanderings he sometimes passed through Ulianovsk and went to see his wife. But he could only do this at dead of night—if he had shown his face on the street in the daytime, the neighbors would have reported him immediately. He got very thin, developed a bad cough and constantly trembled with fear. After these visits he would set off once more with his violin to begin all over again in some new town. He once even went up to Moscow to complain to the Arts Committee, where he was still remembered, that the music schools were hiring people without any education while he, with all his qual­ifications, was unable to get work. They promised to help, but there were soon arrests in the small town where he was hoping to get a permanent job, and he had to flee as usual, without learning whether or not the Moscow officials had kept their promise.

After Stalin's death he was allowed, as an invalid, to return to his wife in Ulianovsk. He died at home, but he was never able to teach his son to play the violin—he didn't dare go near the boy for fear of infecting him with the ТВ he had caught while roaming the country to save his life.

Yet this violinist was comparatively lucky. His wife had been able to stay where she was and had not been dismissed from her work (this was because she had concealed their marriage, which had in any case not been officially registered); he managed to escape arrestthanks to his experience in recognizing the danger signals in time, and he was not Jewish—Jews were the most exposed at that period. His violin gave him the means of earning his daily bread—no more than this, but it kept him alive. He also had the advantage that musi­cians suffered less than members of other professions. Even so, it was only his tremendous stamina that saved him. Almost anybody else in his place would have waited to be picked up in Melikez on the prin­ciple that "you can't hide from them." His only reason for making such an effort to save himself was to be able to come home to die— even this is a great luxury in our conditions.

Looking at the fortunate violinist, I always wondered what would have happened to M.—who was about the same age—if he had sur­vived and returned from the camps. If we had been able to foresee all the alternatives, we would not have missed that last chance of a "normal" death offered by the open window of our apartment in Furmanov Street.

hen I used to read about the French Revolution as a child, I

Voronezh was a miracle, and it was a miracle that brought us there. But such things happened only once.

63 Ordeal by Fear

often wondered whether it was possible to survive during a reign of terror. I now know beyond doubt that it is impossible. Any­body who breathes the air of terror is doomed, even if nominally he manages to save his life. Everybody is a victim—not only those who die, but also all the killers, ideologists, accomplices and sycophants who close their eyes or wash their hands—even if they are secretly consumed with remorse at night. Every section of the population has been through the terrible sickness caused by terror, and none has so far recovered, or become fit again for normal civic life. It is an illness that is passed on to the next generation, so that the sons pay for the sins of the fathers and perhaps only the grandchildren begin to get over it—or at least it takes on a different form with them.

Who was it who dared say that we have no "lost generation" here? The fact that he could utter such a monstrous untruth is also a consequence of terror. One generation after another was "lost" here,but it was a completely different process from what may have hap­pened in the West. Here people just tried to go on working, strug­gling to maintain themselves, hoping for salvation, and thinking only about their immediate concerns. In such times your daily round is like a drug. The more you have to do, the better. If you can immerse yourself in your work, the years fly by more quickly, leaving only a gray blur in the memory. Among the people of my generation, only a very few have kept clear minds and memories. In M.'s generation, everybody was stricken by a kind of sclerosis at an early stage.

True as this is, however, I never cease to marvel at our hardiness. After Stalin's death my brother Evgeni said to me: "We still do not realize what we have been through." Not long ago, as I was traveling in an overcrowded bus, an old woman pushed up against me and I found my arm was bearing the whole weight of her body. "That must be killing you," she said suddenly. "No," I replied, "we're as tough as the devil." "As tough as the devil?" she said, and laughed. Somebody nearby also laughingly repeated the phrase, and soon the whole bus was saying it after us. But then the bus stopped and everybody started to push toward the exit, jostling each other in the usual way. The little moment of good humor was over.

In the period of the Yezhov terror—the mass arrests came in waves of varying intensity—there must sometimes have been no more room in the jails, and to those of us still free it looked as though the highest wave had passed and the terror was abating. After each show trial, people sighed, "Well, it's all over at last." What they meant was: Thank God, it looks as though I've escaped. But then there would be a new wave, and the same people would rush to heap abuse on the "enemies of the people." There was noth­ing people wouldn't say about the victims in order to save them­selves. "Stalin doesn't have to cut heads off," said M., "they fly off by themselves like dandelions." I think he said this after reading an article by Kossior and then learning that he had been arrested never­theless.

In the summer of 1937 we lived in the country like vacationers— as M. said, "It's always easier in the summer." We went into Mos­cow fairly often, and we even visited friends at their dachas in other parts of the country around about. We went, for instance, to see Pasternak at Peredelkino.* He told us he thought his wife was baking a cake down in the kitchen. He went to tell her of our arrival, but came back looking glum: she clearly wanted to have nothing to do

* A writers' colony in the country near Moscow.

with us. A few years later, when I had returned from Tashkent and tried to telephone Pasternak, she answered the phone and said: "Please don't come out here to Peredelkino." After that I never tried to call him again, but whenever he ran into me on Lavrushinski Street, near the house where I lived for a long time with Vasilisa Shklovski, he would come up to see me in the apartment. He was also the only person to come and see me on hearing of M.'s death.

On that last visit that M. and I made to Pasternak in Peredelkino, he came to see us off at the station and we spent a long time talking on the platform, missing train after train. Pasternak was still obsessed by Stalin and complained that he could not write poetry any more be­cause he had not been able to get a personal meeting with him as a result of their famous telephone conversation. M. smiled sympatheti­cally, but I felt nothing but dismay. After the war it appears that Pasternak rid himself of this obsession—at least he never mentioned it again in conversation with me. As regards his novel, Dr. Zhivago, the idea must have come to him well before the war—every time we met him he told us he was writing a prose work "about us all." As one can see from the novel itself, the basic idea may have changed in the course of the years, but it was a time in which people were always frantically changing their minds, never sure who was right.

During the years of the terror Shklovski had no illusions, but he always hoped that the arrests reflected mainly a "settling of ac­counts" within the ruling group. For instance, when Koltsov was arrested, he said it did not affect us, but he was terribly upset when­ever real intellectuals were picked up. He was anxious to survive so that one day he could be a "witness." But by the time the Stalin era was over, we had all grown old and lost the keenness of vision one needs to be a witness. This is what happened to Shklovski.

Lev Bruni, when we went to see him at this time, shoved some money into M.'s pocket and said: "Who needs this cursed regime?" Marietta Shaginian pretended that she hadn't heard anything about arrests: "Who are they arresting? What for? Why are the wretched intellectuals making such a fuss because half a dozen people have been arrested for conspiracy?" Her own daughter shouted into her ear about the Tretiakov family, but, taking refuge in her deafness, she affected not to hear.

Adalis was scared to let us stay the night, which was natural enough, but then she put on a silly act of trying to persuade us to go and spend the night at our old apartment in Furmanov Street: "I'll come along with you, and if the militia trouble you, I'll explaineverything to them—I promise I will." People were quite beside themselves and said the first thing that came into their heads, in sheer self-defense. The ordeal by fear is the most terrible there is, and people never recover from it.

We had nothing to live on and we had to go and beg from our friends. We spent part of the summer on money given us by Kata­yev, his brother (Evgeni Petrov) and Mikhoels. Mikhoels embraced M. and vied with Markish in trying to console him. Yakhontov gave us money all the time, until he went away.

Every time we came into Moscow for the day, M. went to the Union of Writers, trying to get an interview with Stavski, but Stav- ski wouldn't see him and sent him instead to his deputy, Lakhuti.

e everybody else, we tried to devise ways of saving ourselves.

Lakhuti did his best to arrange something for M. He even sent him on commission from the Union of Writers to the White Sea Canal, begging him to write a poem about it. This is the poem that Akhma­tova empowered me to burn. It would not, incidentally, have satis­fied those who commissioned it: M. was only able to turn out some­thing on the landscape.

64 Cow or Poetry Reading?

It is only in the East that people voluntarily throw themselves into the flames, but we still thought of ourselves as Europeans. Both M. and I had different plans—all they had in common was their abso­lute unfeasibility.

My plan was summed up by the word "cow." In our country, where all means of earning a livelihood are in the hands of the State, there are only two ways of maintaining a private existence: begging, or keeping a cow. We had tried begging, but found it unbearable. Everybody shies away from beggars and nobody wants to give alms, particularly as all they have comes to them by courtesy of the State. There had been a time when the ordinary people in Russia always took pity on prisoners and convicts, and the intelligentsia regarded it as a duty to support anyone persecuted for political reasons. All this disappeared together with "abstract humanism." Apart from this, people were frightened of us—we were not only beggars, we were also lepers. Everybody was afraid of everybody else: not even the"safest" person was immune—they could even come at night for someone who had just published an article in Pravda denouncing the "enemies of the people." Every arrest was followed by a chain reac­tion of others—the relatives and friends of the arrested man, as well as those whose telephone numbers were scribbled in his notebook, or in whose company he had celebrated the New Year. . . . People were frightened of every meeting and of every conversation, but they gave a particularly wide berth to people like us who had al­ready been touched by the plague. And we ourselves felt that we were spreading the infection and wanted nothing more than to hide away and not see anybody.

This was why I dreamed of a cow. Thanks to the vagaries of our economic system, a family could support itself for many years by keeping a cow. Millions lived in wretched huts, feeding themselves from the products of their tiny plots of land (on which they grew potatoes, cabbage, cucumbers, beets, turnips and onions) and their cow. Some of the milk had to be sold to buy hay, but there was always enough left over to add a little richness to the cabbage soup. A cow gives people some independence and, without over-exerting themselves, they can earn a little extra to buy bread. The State is still in a quandary about this relic of the old world: if people are allowed to buy hay to feed their cow, then they do only the very minimum of work on the kolkhoz; if, on the other hand, you take their cows away, they will die of hunger. The result is that the cow is alter­nately forbidden and then permitted again. But the number of cows is gradually decreasing, because the peasant women no longer have the strength to fight for them.

A cow would have saved us, and I was sure I would be able to learn how to milk it. We would have merged with the background somewhere, living very obscurely and never leaving our house. But to buy a house and cow you needed money—even now I wouldn't be able to afford them. Peasant women came to us in Savelovo, offer­ing us their frame houses for a song, and nothing could have been more tempting. But to settle in the countryside you need to have been born there and inherit a hut with a leaking roof and a broken fence from some old peasant woman. Perhaps in capitalist coun­tries there might be people eccentric enough to give an exiled poet the money to buy himself a peasant hut and a cow, but there could be no question of it here. To do so would have been regarded as a crime, and the benefactors themselves would speedily have ended up in a labor camp.

M. was not keen on my plan. Apart from the fact that we had no money to bring it about, the idea itself did not appeal to him. "Noth­ing ever comes of such schemes," he said. His plan was the reverse of mine—instead of merging with the background, he wanted to attract attention to himself. He believed that if only he could induce the Union of Writers to arrange a public reading of his poetry, then it would be impossible to refuse him work. He still harbored the illu­sion that you could win people over with poetry. This was something he had felt in his youth, when he once said to me that nobody could deny him anything if he wrote verse. It was probably quite true— things had been good for him in those days, his friends valued and protected him. But it was of course meaningless to apply those standards to the Moscow of 1937. Moscow no longer had faith in anything, and the order of the day was: every man for himself. Mos­cow now had no time for any civilized values, let alone for poetry. We knew this well enough, but M. was restless by nature and could not just sit waiting on events. Morever, an outcast could live only if he kept on the move—M. was not to be given a moment's respite until his death.

Lakhuti seized on the idea of a poetry reading, which he too thought might save M. I know nothing at all of Lakhuti, except that he was friendly and kind to us. In the brutal atmosphere of those days, his friendliness seemed like a miracle. Neither he nor Stavski could decide the question of a reading without consulting higher authority. While this matter of State was being considered "up above," we waited in Savelovo, occasionally coming in to Moscow and going to the Union to see whether there was any progress. On one of these visits M. had a conversation with Surkov in the corri­dor, and when he came out, he found 300 roubles in his pocket. Surkov must have put them there without M. noticing. Not every­body would have risked such a thing—the consequences could have been very unpleasant. In any final estimate of Surkov, one should not forget this gift of money to M. It was rather like the onion which, in Russian tradition, the sinner must hang on to if he wants the Virgin to pull him into heaven at the last moment.

For a long time there was no word about the poetry reading, but then suddenly M.'s brother Evgeni had a phone call from the Union and was asked to inform M. urgently that it had been fixed for the next evening. Cables were very unreliable and, rather than take chances, Evgeni rushed to the station and caught the last train out to Savelovo. At that moment he too no doubt thought that M. might be

saved by a poetry reading.

The next day we traveled to Moscow and went to the Union of Writers at the stated time. The secretaries were still there, but no­body knew anything about a poetry reading—they had only heard some vague rumor, but couldn't remember exactly what. All the rooms it could have been held in were locked, and there were no posters announcing it.

It only remained to find out whether anybody had received a cir­cular about it. Shklovski told us that nothing had been sent to him, but he advised us to ring one of the poets—invitations were gener­ally sent around only to members of the relevant section. We hap­pened to have Aseyev's telephone number and M. phoned him to ask whether he had received a notice. After a moment or two M. turned pale and hung up: Aseyev said that he had heard something vaguely, but that he couldn't talk just now because he was about to leave for the Bolshoi Theater to see The Snow Maiden. . . . M. didn't have the heart to try anybody else.

We were never able to unravel the mystery of the poetry reading. Somebody had certainly rung Evgeni from the Union of Writers, but we never discovered who. It might have been the personnel de­partment (always closely connected with the secret police) which had not bothered to inform the secretaries and given them no in­structions—it was they who usually attended to the practical ar­rangements for such things. But why would the personnel depart­ment have been involved? The thought crossed our minds that it had all been a trap designed to lure M. from Savelovo for the purpose of arresting him in Moscow, but that nothing had come of it because somebody had forgotten to get top-level clearance—perhaps from Stalin himself. Since Stalin had been personally interested in M.'s case, this may well have been so. Otherwise M. might have been picked up in a way which had now become common practice for the overworked secret pohce—instead of going to arrest people in their homes, they lured them on some pretext to a convenient place from which they could be sent straight to the Lubianka. There were many stories about such cases. But there was no point in speculating about it, so we returned to Savelovo and pretended to be vacationers again.

Both our plans for salvation thus collapsed—M.'s suddenly, and mine more gradually. Such dreams offered no way out.

It was quite natural that Aseyev should have mentioned The Snow Maiden, rather than some other opera, as his excuse for not being able to talk: the poetic faction to which he belonged had once shown a weakness for pre-Christian Russia. But we omitted to in­quire what was being performed that evening at the Bolshoi Theater and whether, indeed, it had not already been closed for the summer. I am told that in his old age Aseyev was lonely and isolated. He explained his isolation by saying that he had lost his standing because of his fight against the "cult of personality." Friends of Kochetov write articles to say that even he (Kochetov) fought against the "cult of personality." It now seems there were no Stalinists at all, only brave fighters against the "cult of personality." I can testify that nobody I knew fought—all they did was to lie low. This was the most that people with a conscience could do—and even that re­quired real courage.

65 The Old Friend

he fiasco over the poetry reading did not break M.'s will.

"We'll have to wait until the fall now," he said. It was al­ready July and Moscow was empty, so we no longer hatched plans of salvation but thought only of how we could hold out till the fall. "We must change our profession—we are beggars now," M. de­clared, and he proposed we make a trip to Leningrad

It was noteworthy that in this last year M. and I no longer con­versed as we had always done earlier, when I had often remembered things he said and the exact words he used. Now we exchanged inar­ticulate phrases or short interjections ("I'm tired . . . must lie down . . . can't go on . . . must do something . . . Lord, who will they arrest next? . . ."

When life becomes absolutely intolerable, you begin to think the horror will never end. In Kiev during the bombardment I under­stood that even the unbearable can come to an end, but I was not yet fully aware that it often does so only at death. As regards the Stalin­ist terror, we always knew that it might wax or wane, but that it might end—this we could never imagine. What reason was there for it to end? Everybody seemed intent on his daily round and went smilingly about the business of carrying out his instructions. It was essential to smile—if you didn't, it meant you were afraid or discon­tented. This nobody could afford to admit—if you were afraid, then you must have a bad conscience. Everybody who worked for the State—and in this country even the humblest stall-keeper is a bureau­crat—had to strut around wearing a cheerful expression, as though to say: "What's going on is no concern of mine, I have very impor­tant work to do, and I'm terribly busy. I am trying to do my best for the State, so do not get in my way. My conscience is clear—if what's- his-name has been arrested, there must be good reason." The mask was taken off only at home, and then not always—even from your children you had to conceal how horror-struck you were; other­wise, God save you, they might let something slip in school. . . . Some people had adapted to the terror so well that they knew how to profit from it—there was nothing out of the ordinary about de­nouncing a neighbor to get his apartment or his job. But while wear­ing your smiling mask, it was important not to laugh—this could look suspicious to the neighbors and make them think you were indulging in sacrilegious mockery. We have lost the capacity to be spontane­ously cheerful, and it will never come back to us.