Hope Against Hope

When we arrived in Leningrad, we went straight to see Lozinski, who was living in an isolated dacha near Luga. He immediately gave us 500 roubles so we could return to Savelovo and pay the rent for our room there till the end of the summer. There had never been any stability about money and prices. On a free market the rise and fall of prices is governed by natural trends, but we could never make sense of the constant fluctuation of prices in our planned economy, where prices were always being raised or lowered in a seemingly arbitrary fashion. It was therefore difficult to say what the worth of these 500 roubles was, but there was still a certain magic in denomi­nations of hundreds or thousands, and when Lozinski gave us 500 roubles we no longer felt like ordinary beggars, but like very supe­rior ones who collected their alms wholesale instead of stretching out their hands for kopecks.

We had dinner with Lozinski, who played the fool and joked. Both M. and he laughed as in the old days at the Poets' Guild. Then M. read his poems for a long time. Afterward Lozinski saw us back to the station. The road at first went through woodland, but when we came to streets where there were people about, we did not want him to come any further in case somebody saw him with two suspi­cious strangers. The worst would have been to run into someone from the Union of Writers who knew M. by sight. We did not want to compromise Lozinski and left him at the edge of the woods.

Born in the nineties of the last century, Akhmatova, Lozinski and

M. found that in the thirties they already constituted the oldest gen­eration of the intelligentsia—their elders had perished, emigrated or completely faded out of the picture. These three were therefore looked upon as ancients, while some of the Fellow Travelers like Kaverin, Fedin and Tikhonov, who were actually only a few years younger, were regarded as mere striplings. Babel stood apart from the rest, and was not thought of as being either young or old. As though to confirm the public attitude toward them, both Lozinski and M. aged very early. In 1929, when M. was working for the Mos­cow Komsomol newspaper on Tverskaya Street, the doorman there once said to me, as I was looking for him: "The old man has gone to the buffet." He was still not forty at the time, but his heart was already giving him trouble. Ehrenburg, incidentally, is wrong when he says that M. was short in height—he was in fact taller than Ehren­burg, and though I myself am of medium height, I scarcely came up to his ears, even when I wore high heels. Neither was M. as frail as Ehrenburg makes him out to be. He was in fact quite broad-should­ered. Ehrenburg remembered him as he was in the Crimea when he was starving, and he was also aiming at a journalistic effect by de­scribing him as a puny, delicate Jewish type like Ashkenazi*—so weak and helpless, and look what they did to him! But M. was not like Ashkenazi at all—he was much more robust.

M.'s heart succumbed to the impossible demands made on it by our life and his own unruly temperament. Lozinski, on the other hand, was stricken by a mysterious kind of elephantiasis—it was like something Biblical and seemed out of place in Leningrad. His fin­gers, tongue and lips had swollen to twice their normal size. I had first seen him in the middle of the twenties, when he came to see us on Morskaya Street. He seemed to sense the approach of his illness already, and he was saying that after the Revolution everything had become difficult and people tired from the slightest exertion—talk­ing, walking or just meeting someone. Lozinski, like M., had already tasted prison by this time, and he was one of those who always kept a bag packed in case of arrest. He was picked up several times—once because some of his students at a seminar on translation had given each other nicknames. Nicknames made the Cheka unhappy and put thoughts of conspiracy into their heads. The whole seminar was clapped in jail. Fortunately, Lozinski's wife had a good contact in Moscow, and whenever her husband was arrested, she at once rushed to her protector. The same thing was true of Zhirmunski's wife and

• Vladimir Ashkenazi, the Soviet pianist, now resident in the West.

it was only owing to this good fortune—the protecting hand of someone in Moscow—that both got off so lightly in those days. Both Lozinski and Zhirmunski seemed marked men from the beginning, and everybody was pleased to see Lozinski's name in the list of the first writers ever to receive Soviet decorations. He was quite out of place in this company, and it soon turned out that in any case such decorations were no guarantee—you were simply stripped of them on your arrest. But Lozinski was lucky and died of his own terrible and improbable disease.

We all emerged shaken and sick from the first years of the Revo­lution. At the beginning it was the women who were affected most, but in the long run they were the tougher and the more likely to survive. The men seemed stronger and withstood the first shocks, but then their hearts gave out and very few lived to be seventy. Those spared by war and prison were carried away by heart attacks or the sort of fantastic diseases from which Lozinski and Tynianov suffered. Nobody here will ever believe that cancer is not connected with the shocks to which we are constantly exposed. We have seen too many cases in which someone has been publicly hounded and threatened, only to hear shortly afterward that he has cancer. The statistics keep talking about the rise in the average life expectancy, but this must be due to the high proportion of women—we are cer­tainly as tough as the devil!

66 Tania, the Non-Party Bolshevik

's brother, Evgeni Emilievich, lived with his family on Si-

• verskaya Street. After leaving Lozinski, we went there only because M. wanted to see his father. He had no dealings with his brother, who had given up medicine to become a kind of literary agent on the fringe of the writers' organizations—he collected royal­ties for playwrights and did similar profitable jobs for the Literary Fund. Now, in his old age, he has switched to the film industry. He never helped M. and was always demanding that we take their father off his hands. He harped on this theme every time we met, and kept writing to us about it—even when we were in Voronezh and Save­lovo. M. wrote to him several times from Voronezh and, knowing that Evgeni would destroy these letters, made copies of them. In them he denounced Evgeni's attitude toward himself, and asked him never to remind people that he was his brother. Until 1956 Evgeni did not have to be asked to keep quiet about this fact, and he was always very rude to anybody who inquired about me. In recent years, how­ever, he has come to respect M.'s memory, and has even tried to resume contact with me. Once he even came to see me out of the blue, and urged me to go and visit him. He is a man of mercenary instincts who has achieved everything he wanted in life: comfort, money, a car and a movie camera to amuse himself with in his spare time. In our cruel life, such people are not businessmen in the ordi­nary sense, but simply "get by" in a way which is never very pretty.

Another reason M. had for visiting him on this occasion was that he wanted to see his niece Tatka. This was Evgeni's daughter by his first marriage to the sister of Sarra Lebedeva. Later Tatka got ТВ during the blockade of Leningrad and died young. She was a won­derful little girl, completely unlike her father. She had been brought up by her maternal grandmother, the splendid old Maria Nikolay- evna Darmolatova, in whose apartment Evgeni Emilievich still lives. After M.'s arrest, her grandmother arranged for me to meet her se­cretly at her mother's apartment—her father had forbidden her to see me. She complained to me that her father had burned a manu­script copy of M.'s poetry which she had acquired with great diffi­culty from some young literary enthusiasts. At that time there were still very few copies in circulation and they were always confiscated during house searches.

By the time the war began, Tatka was a student at the literature faculty of Leningrad University and was about to marry a young man who wrote poetry and revered the memory of M. He was killed in the first battles of the war, and Tatka trudged around starving Leningrad trying to get news of him. Tatka had a very hard time at home. Her father was always quarreling with her grandmother, ex­posing her as a "reactionary" in the manner of a militant young Komsomol. As for her stepmother, Tatka had nothing at all in com­mon with her. I was constantly amazed that a girl who had grown up in such hard times and in such a difficult family had managed to withstand all the blandishments of the "new era" and preserve the best traditions of the Russian intelligentsia—forgotten, spurned and superseded by the higher reason of the "new" morality as it was.

Tatka's stepmother, Tania Grigoriev, the daughter of a chemis­try teacher in one of the best and most progressive pre-revolution- ary grammar schools, had grown up in an ultra-intellectual family of the kind that remained true to the style of the sixties and worshipped Belinski and Dobroliubov. She was proud of this family tradition and looked down on Tatka's grandmother because of her aristocratic origins. In appearance, too, Tania was the very image of a pre- revolutionary radical woman student—she had the clever face, the smooth nondescript hair done into a bun, and wore the dowdy dress once typical of the most "progressive" schoolmarms. She had a soft voice and a witty tongue. She was very proud of the fact that she knew the names of all the trees, grasses and birds, because her father used to take his daughters on long country hikes so they could study the fauna of their native country. She contrasted this with what she considered to be the thoroughly undemocratic upbringing that Tatka was getting from her grandmother, and she made fun of the girl for not being able to tell one bush or tree from another in winter. Tatka's decision to study literature at the university aroused Tania's scorn: she had no time at all for any profession which was "not useful to the people" or, as she put it in her more up-to-date terminology, "to the collective farms." So that the girl should not get the wrong ideas about religion from her grandmother, Tania took her to see the atheist museum in St. Isaac's Cathedral. During one of these visits there was a scene—Tatka refused to accept the museum's interpretation of a certain passage in the Gospels. Told that she must trust the collective wisdom of all the progressive people who had exposed the humbug of the priests and not be so uppish, she burst into tears. According to the museum, the Gospels called on people to bow down before Mammon, but the girl was too intelligent to believe this. M. and I happened to be staying in Lenin­grad at the time, and Tatka secretly came to see M. to ask him who was right—her grandmother or her father and stepmother. Her at­tachment to M. probably went back to this occasion.

From her father Tania had inherited some excellent contacts with the Party leaders. When he died at the beginning of the Revolution, she and her sister Natasha were taken care of by Yenukidze, whom they always called "Red Abel." This was either an old Party nick­name or the joking way he was referred to in the Grigoriev house­hold. When Yenukidze was arrested in 1937, Tania took it in the spirit of the times, and her comment to me was: "He must have done something—people are so corrupted by power." By this time she had no need of her former protectors and had even outgrown them— after all, as she pointed out, they had not been able to keep abreast of the times and follow Stalin in his efforts to carry through all the essential revolutionary changes of which her father had dreamed! This was Tania's explanation for the arrest of all the old Bolsheviks, and she fervently supported every "mass campaign"—whether it was collectivization, the expulsion of the former aristocrats from Leningrad, or the great purge of 1937.

Tania always had the last word on questions of ideology, and she ruled the household firmly, never raising her soft voice. She was probably just the same at work—though I never had a chance of observing her there, I knew the type only too well from my own experience. The only thing that upset Tania was Tatka's obstinacy. The girl had learned to keep her own counsel and there was no power on earth that could force her to say a single word in approval of Tania's opinions. The first major clash between them had been at the time of the expulsion of the former aristocrats, among whom was a girl next door, a playmate of Tatka's called Olga Chichagov. Tania said there was no place for aristocrats in the City of Lenin and that it was silly to shed tears over the banishment of the Chichagovs. Tatka said nothing, nor did she comment when her stepmother went on to say it was a crime to let aristocrats occupy living-space needed by the workers, and that she furthermore failed to understand what a girl brought up by herself and Evgeni Emilievich could possibly have in common with the young lady next door! Tatka listened to all this in silence—and then went to see Olga off at the station. Tania accused Tatka's grandmother of connivance.

This drama was soon followed by a farce, when Tania and her sisters were summoned before the commission charged with clearing aristocrats out of Leningrad. The commission was guided in its work by an old directory of the city in which their father, Grigoriev, was listed as a "personal nobleman." * The fact that he was not a heredi­tary aristocrat was of no concern to the commission—they were in­terested only in reaching their target figure, and there turned out to be too few real aristocrats, or at least they were hard to find. . . . The sisters were only rescued by "Red Abel," who had not yet lost his influence, or at any rate still had enough power to intervene in a small matter like this.

"Justice has triumphed!" was how Tania put it when we met shortly afterward in Moscow.

"Why did your father allow himself to be listed as a 'personal

* A non-hereditary status automatically awarded for certain types of public service under the Czars.

nobleman'?" I asked. "You only had to give half a rouble as a bribe not to have that entered in documents."

"My father didn't give bribes, on principle," Tania replied coldly.

Maria Nikolayevna and I couldn't help winking at each other: nei­ther of us could suppress the slightly malicious thought that Grigo- riev, inveterate "progressive" though he was, had not been averse to styling himself a "nobleman" and had made use of his right to do so as a university graduate.

We knew beforehand what sort of reception we should get at Siverskaya Street and were relieved to find that Evgeni Emilievich was not at home. He arrived only late at night, and in the morning we had our usual battle with him over M.'s father. He demanded that we take the old man away because he was an intolerable burden for the whole family and was dragging them all down with him. M. didn't argue with his brother. Since he was an early riser, he had already done what he had come here to do—that is, see his father and Tatka. As soon as Evgeni Emilievich started talking about the old man, we said goodbye and started to leave. Only then did Tania ask why we had come to Leningrad. When we explained as best we could, she was astonished and said: "I don't understand why two grown people cannot find a way of earning their living." When I pointed out that all means of livelihood were in the hands of the State and hence unavailable to those considered "unworthy," Tania spoke scathingly of "panic" and "tales invented by the intelligent­sia." Like Marietta Shaginian, she was deaf to all talk of the mass arrests now taking place. When I mentioned the case of Yenukidze to her, she made the comment I have already quoted. There was something quite inflexible about her which made one think of the august forerunners she might have modeled herself on: the women of Sparta, the mother of the Gracchi, or the women terrorists of the "People's Will." As we left, I said, "If your Bolsheviks turned into Fascists overnight, you wouldn't even ntoice." She said this could never happen.

This was M.'s last meeting with his father and with Tatka. As for Tania, he was just amused by her. "What do you expect? She's a non­party Bolshevik," he said. This term was coming into usage at the time and everybody holding a good job was referred to in this way —and behaved accordingly. People like Tania were swiftly promoted in their work right up to the highest levels at which "non-Party Bolsheviks" were allowed to serve. They constituted the so-called "democratic intelligentsia" which Stalin had now said should be given every support in Soviet institutions. They looked remarkably similar to the self-sacrificing radicals of pre-revolutionary times— except that now they were needed by the State and were considered the mainstay of a good family life.

I met Tania again more than twenty years later when she and Evgeni Emilievich came to see me at the Shklovskis'. Needless to say, I asked her how she had reacted to the Twentieth Congress. Before she could say anything, Evgeni Emilievich answered for her. According to him, she had been very upset at first and wanted to know "why all this fuss about past history?" When Khrushchev vis­ited Leningrad, she couldn't bear to look at him—he had passed her car in his on the Nevski Prospekt and, "would you believe it, she turned her head away!" Soon, however, Tania had changed her tune and admitted that there had been "excesses" and then, of course, there was the dialectic. . . .

In 1938, choosing a moment when Tania and Evgeni Emilievich were not at home, I went to see M.'s father just before his death. He was overjoyed to see me. He believed that M. and I might save him from his poverty, loneliness and the terrible disease of which he was dying. I could not bring myself to tell him of M.'s arrest. Shortly after this, Evgeni Emilievich took him to hospital, where he died of cancer. The doctors sent a cable to the second son in Moscow, but he arrived only in time for the funeral. The hospital staff told him that nobody had come to see the old man and he had died alone. I couldn't help remembering Tania's story about how her grand­mother had died when she and her sisters were children—the old woman had gone off to her room as quiet as a mouse and died with­out any fuss, not wanting to upset her granddaughters. Tania was always repeating this story, and Maria Nikolayevna assured me that she did so for the benefit of M.'s father and herself. Both of them in fact died without causing any trouble to Tania and Evgeni Emilie­vich—the old man in the hospital during the summer, while Tania was at the dacha, and Maria Nikolayevna during the blockade. Tatka also died in a hospital—in Vologda, where she came after the block­ade had been broken and a road out of the city was opened up. Her aunt, Sarra Lebedeva, was with her when she died. The day before her death, Tania came and took away her clothes—at that time everybody lived by bartering things for bread, and Tania thought it perfectly all right to exchange Tatka's poor rags for bread for her­self and her son. This seems rational enough, but, as Sarra Lebedeva told me, it meant there was nothing to bury Tatka in.

People can be reduced to such straits that they are stripped of all the protective layers that hypocritical society has devised to hide the essence beneath. But the distinctive thing about us was that we never removed the smiling masks with which we confronted the world. I have often known people to make a good career because of their urbane intellectual appearance and suave speech. I remember, for instance, the director of the Ulianovsk Teachers' Training College, who in 1953 gleefully conducted the purge of Jewish members of the staff.* During a special faculty meeting under his chairmanship which had been called to expel me, I could not take my eyes off his face. He looked extraordinarily like Chekhov, and, as if to heighten the resemblance, he wore not the usual kind of glasses, but a pince- nez in a thin gold frame. The play of his features and the soft modu­lations of his voice were unforgettable—there's no point in trying to describe them, as people would think me guilty of overstatement.

I was the first of a series of people who were going to be expelled. The instructions to start this purge had taken some time to filter down to the provinces, and by the time they reached Ulianovsk it was too late: a few days after the meeting in the college we heard the news of the Leader's death. I went to memorial meetings at which people actually sobbed. As a woman messenger employed by the College said to me, "We managed all right, nobody ever touched us . . . but what's going to happen now?" The director carried on with the purge interrupted by Stalin's death—he hadn't managed to finish it off in good time because each case had to be considered separately. He expelled twenty-six people—not only Jews, but some suspiciously intellectual staff members from other ethnic groups as well—before he was himself dismissed while hounding Professor Lubishchev, a biologist who had once spoken up against Lysenko. He was transferred to another college, where he is highly regarded because of his bland manner and Chekhovian appearance. This man is a real lover of pogroms, and with his deceptive appearance he was made for the times in which we live. Such skill at mimicry was much prized, and no end of gullible people were taken in by sophisticated mannerisms and smooth talk.

* The "exposure" of the "Doctors' Plot" led to a widespread purge of Jews in the last months before Stalin's death. (See note on page 115.)

67 Poetry Lovers

_D

uring out two days in Leningrad we stayed overnight at Akhmatova's place, where everybody did their best to cheer M. up. They even called in Andronikov, then still in the bloom of youth, to show off his party tricks to M. In the evening we sat at the table, drinking toasts and talking. We all knew what we were about to go through, but nobody wanted to cast a shadow on the few moments left to us. Akhmatova seemed at ease and in high spirits, her husband Punin was quite boisterous and laughed a good deal— but I noticed that his left cheek and eyelid twitched more than ever.

The next day we went to see Stenich, the man whom Blok called a "Russian dandy." Among the Soviet writers he had the reputation of a cynic, but that may have been because they were so afraid of his sharp tongue. Like Andronikov, Stenich also liked to put on little acts for his friends, but his were very different. In the mid-twenties his star turn had been to talk about how much he feared and loved his superiors—so much so that he liked nothing more than to help the director of Gosizdat* on with his coat. This was rather coldly received by his fellow writers, who preferred to dismiss Stenich as a cynic reveling in his own servility rather than recognize themselves in the portrait he held up to them.

Stenich had begun by writing verse. In Kiev in 1919 he had run a kind of literary night club (called The Junk Room) in which he recited his rhymed burlesques. Many people still remembered his lines on "The Council of People's Commissars in Session," which had a genuine satirical bite, unlike the usual stuff turned out to order on topical themes. He soon stopped writing poetry himself, but he retained a great love for it. He might have become a brilliant essayist or critic, but the times were not auspicious, and he was now simply a kind of man-about-town who frittered away his time in gossip. He also did a few translations which were regarded as models of the art of prose translation. He was a man with a great feeling for language and literature and an acute sense of the modern age—this he man­aged to convey in his translations of American writers.

He greeted M. with embraces. When M. told him what we had come for, Stenich sighed and said that most of the writers were away just now, though some were out at their dachas. This made it ^# The State Publishing House.

more difficult to raise money for us. But his wife, Liuba, was more encouraging, and said she would go out to Sestroretsk. After lunch she put on a stylish hat and set off. Stenich insisted we stay until her return. Several people looked in on us there, including Akhmatova and Volpe—the same Volpe who had been dismissed as editor of Zvezda for publishing M.'s "Journey to Armenia," including the final part about King Shapukh who was granted "one extra day" by the Assyrian. This ending had been forbidden by the censorship. For us, this short time with Stenich was like King Shapukh's "one extra day."

Liuba returned with her booty: a little money and some clothing. Among the other things were two pairs of trousers, one very large and the other exactly M.'s size. We took the very large pair back to Savelovo and gave them to the criminal we had got to know—the one who had said that in such places as Alexandrov people of his kind were "skimmed off like cream." M. was never able to keep a second pair of trousers—there was always somebody whose need was even greater. At that time Shklovski also belonged to the cate­gory of people who possessed only one pair of trousers, and his son Nikita could expect no better from life. His mother once asked Ni- kita what he would do if a good fairy granted him one wish. With­out a moment's hesitation he replied: "Get trousers for all my friends." In our conditions a man was better judged by his readiness to give a pair of trousers to a less fortunate friend than by his words —let alone by his articles, novels, or stories. From my observations, Soviet writers are a thick-skinned lot, but in the presence of Liuba Stenich it was not easy to refuse to help an exiled fellow writer.

The day we spent with Stenich seemed calm and peaceful, but reality kept breaking in. Stenich was friendly with the wife of Diki, and both she and her husband had been arrested. Stenich was now waiting his turn, and was worried about how Liuba would get on when she was left alone. In the evening the phone rang, but when Liuba picked up the receiver there was no sound at the other end. She burst into tears—we all knew that the police often checked in this way whether you were home before coming for you. However, nothing happened that evening, and Stenich was not arrested until the following winter. As we said goodbye on the landing, he pointed to the doors of the other apartments and told us when and in what circumstances their occupants had been taken away by the police. He was the only person on two floors who was still at liberty—if it could be called liberty. "Now it's my turn," he said. The next time we came to Leningrad, Stenich had been arrested, and when we went to see Lozinski, he was very frightened. "Do you know what happened to your Amphitryon?" he asked. He thought that Stenich had been picked up because of the day we had spent with him, and we had to leave Lozinski at once, before we even had time to ask him for more money.

I think he exaggerated the extent to which our secret police went in for ordinary detective work. They were not in the least bit inter­ested in real facts—all they wanted were lists of people to arrest, and these they got from their network of informers and the volunteers who brought them denunciations. To meet their quotas, all they needed were names of people, not details about their comings and goings. During interrogations they always, as a matter of routine, collected "evidence" against people whom they had no intention of arresting—just in case it was ever needed. I have heard of a woman who heroically went through torture rather than give "evidence" against Molotov! Spasski was asked for evidence against Liuba Ehrenburg, whom he had never even met. He managed to send word about this from the forced-labor camp, and Liuba was warned—ap­parently Akhmatova passed on the message to her. Liuba could not believe it: "What Spasski? I don't know him." She was still naive in those days, but later she understood everything.

In the torture chambers of the Lubianka they were constantly adding to the dossiers of Ehrenburg, Sholokhov, Alexei Tolstoi, and others whom they had no intention of touching. Dozens, if not hundreds of people were sent to camps on a charge of being in­volved in a "conspiracy" headed by Tikhonov and Fadeyev! Among them was Spasski. Wild inventions and monstrous accusations had become an end in themselves, and officials of the secret police ap­plied all their ingenuity to them, as though reveling in the total arbi­trariness of their power. Their basic principle was just what Fur- manov had told us at the end of the twenties: "Give us a man, and we'll make a case." On the day we had spent at Stenich's apartment, his name was almost certainly already on a list of persons due to be arrested—his telephone number would have been found in Diki's ad­dress book, and no further information about him was needed.

The principles and aims of mass terror have nothing in common with ordinary police work or with security. The only purpose of terror is intimidation. To plunge the whole country into a state of chronic fear, the number of victims must be raised to astronomical levels, and on every floor of every building there must always be several apartments from which the tenants have suddenly been taken away. The remaining inhabitants will be model citizens for the rest of their lives—this will be true for every street and every city through which the broom has swept. The only essential thing for those who rule by terror is not to overlook the new generations growing up without faith in their elders, and to keep on repeating the process in systematic fashion. Stalin ruled for a long time and saw to it that the waves of terror recurred from time to time, always on an even greater scale than before. But the champions of terror invariably leave one thing out of account—namely, that they can't kill everyone, and among their cowed, half-demented subjects there are always witnesses who survive to tell the tale.

On the first of our two visits to Leningrad we went out to see Zoshchenko in Sestroretsk (or it may have been Razliv). Zo- shchenko had a weak heart and beautiful eyes. Pravda had commis­sioned a story from him and he had written something about the wife of the poet Kornilov, who was refused work and turned away from every door as though she were the wife of an arrested man. The story wasn't printed, of course, but in those years only Zo­shchenko would have dared to do anything so provocative. It is amazing he got away with it—though it must immediately have gone down on the "account" which he later had to pay.

On that first trip we went to the station from Akhmatova's apart­ment and were seen off by her as well as the Steniches. Since we were catching the last train, we left the house after midnight—"the light-blue midnight" of Akhmatova's poem in which she says that Leningrad seemed to her

not a European city with the first prize for beauty but a terrible exile to Eniseisk, a stopping place on the way to Chita, to Ishim, to waterless Irgiz and famous Atabasar, to the town of Svobodny and the plague-ridden stench of prison bunks,

so it seemed to me on this light-blue night—this city, glorified

by the first of our poets, and by you and me.*

Is there any wonder that this was how the city looked to us then? We all felt the same way—and that's what the city was: a transit station to exile, except that the places Akhmatova mentions were by that time comparatively well settled and they had almost stopped

• These lines have not been previously published.

sending people there.

Liuba Stenich has told me one detail of that night which I had forgotten: at the station M. hung something on a potted palm there and said: "An Arab wandering in the desert . .

The first visit gave us enough to live on for three months. When we came again in the spring just before leaving for Samatikha, we were less successful. In the morning we went to see Akhmatova, and she read to M. the poem quoted above. This was his last meeting with her. We were to have seen her later in the day at Lozinski's, but since we had to leave him almost at once, we were not there when she arrived. We were not able to stay overnight, and all we could do was say goodbye to her on the telephone.

After leaving Lozinski we stood outside on the street for a long time, wondering where to go next. We decided it would have to be Marshak.

Samuil Yakovlevich Marshak greeted us in such a crooning voice that M. couldn't bring himself to ask for money. Instead, they started talking about literature and M. read a few of his Voronezh poems. Marshak sighed—he didn't like the poems: "They give no idea of the people you meet, or what you talk about. Now, when Pushkin was in exile . . ." "What does he expect?" M. whispered to me and we took our leave. The next writer we went to see was out, and we waited on the street until he got back. But he said he had no money—he had spent everything on the dacha he was building. Apart from Selvinski, he was the only one to refuse help when asked, and I do not wish to name him because I believe his refusal was a momentary lapse—he was a decent man, a lover of poetry and one of the last of those who secretly remained true to the spirit of the old intelligentsia. It was only such people we could approach for help, but this man lost his head for a moment and behaved like a member of the Union of Writers.

In the very last days before we left for Samatikha M. said to me: "We ought to go and ask Paustovski for money." Since we didn't even know him, I was surprised, but M. assured me he was bound to help. Recently I told this to Paustovski, and he was very much upset. "Why didn't you come to see me?" he asked. "We didn't have time before M. was arrested," I explained. He was relieved. "If Osip Emilievich had come to me, I would have turned out all my pock­ets," he said and laughed his dry laugh. I do not doubt that he would have done just that: he was also a typical member of the "secret intelligentsia"—and no longer hides it, now there is no need to.

I recently heard that one of our literary officials has been going around asking what sort of fellow this Mandelstam was who was always borrowing money but never returned it. He obviously doesn't like M. It is possible that in his irresponsible youth M. didn't always pay back his debts, but the official wasn't even born then. As regards what happened in the Stalin period, the word "borrow" doesn't apply. It was a case of undisguised begging—which was forced on M. by the State and the life which our press constantly described as 'Ъарру." Beggary was not the worst thing about it, either.

68 Eclipse

_W

ho needs this cursed regime?" Lev Bruni had said as he gave M. the money to pay his fare to Maly Yaroslavets. In the au­tumn it began to seem advisable to move from Savelovo, and we again started studying the map of the Moscow region. Lev recom­mended Maly Yaroslavets, where he had had a small wooden house built for the wife and children of his brother Nikolai. Nikolai was a former priest who had become an aircraft designer and was then sent to a camp. In 1937 he had been given a second sentence for a "crime committed in the camp"—a standard formula in those days. In other words, he had been re-sentenced without being allowed out even for a single moment. His wife, Nadia, after being expelled from Mos­cow, had been living for several years with her children in Maly Yaroslavets. They lived on the produce of a small vegetable garden —Lev had not been able to afford to buy a cow for them. Apart from his brother's children, he had to feed his own large family as well. He probably didn't have too much to eat himself in the days before the war, when the staple food was potatoes, and after the war he died of malnutrition. This was something that happened to "se­cret intellectuals." Everybody was very fond of Lev. Despite all the trials visited upon him by fate, he managed not only to remain a human being, but also to live some kind of life—most of us didn't live in any real sense, but existed from day to day, waiting anxiously for something until the time came to die.

In autumn it gets dark very early, and apart from the railroad sta­tion, there was no lighting at all in Maly Yaroslavets. We walked up the streets, which were slippery from mud, and we saw not a single street lamp or lighted window—nor were there any passers-by. Once or twice we had to knock on windows to ask the way, and each time a fear-contorted face peered out. But when we simply asked the way, the faces were at once transformed and wreathed in smiles, and we were given very detailed instructions with extraordi­nary friendliness. When we at last arrived at Nadia Brum's and we told her what had happened when we knocked on windows, she ex­plained that there had been more and more arrests in recent weeks, not only of exiles, but of local people too. As a result, everybody was just sitting at home, waiting with bated breath. During the Civil War, people did not have lights in their windows for fear of attracting the attention of all the freebooters then roaming the coun­try. In the towns occupied by the Germans, people also sat without lights. In 1937, however, it made no difference, since people were picked up not at random, but on individual warrants. All the same, everybody went to bed early, to avoid putting the lights on. Perhaps it was the most primitive animal instinct—better sit in the darkness of your burrow than in the light. I know the feeling very well my­self—whenever a car stops outside the house, you want to switch off the light.

We were so horrified by the darkened town that after spending the night at Nadia Bruni's we fled back to Moscow the next morn­ing. We didn't follow Lev's advice because we would have needed the strength of mind of the meek and gentle Nadia Bruni to stand the terror that lay like a pall over the town. It was the same through­out the whole country, of course, but in the villages and small towns it was generally less overpowering.

The next person we consulted was Babel. I do not think he ever lived in any of the apartment buildings reserved for writers, but al­ways managed to find peculiar places of his own. With great diffi­culty we tracked him down in a strange house that must formerly have been a private villa. I have a vague recollection that there were foreigners living in this house, and that Babel rented rooms from them on the second floor. But perhaps he just said so to astonish us—he was very fond of startling people like this. At that time foreigners were avoided like the plague—you could lose your head for the slightest contact with them. Who in his right mind would have lived in the same house as foreigners? I still remember my as­tonishment, and still cannot understand it. Whenever we saw Babel

he gave us something to be surprised about.

We told him our troubles, and during the whole of our long con­versation he listened with remarkable intentness. Everything about Babel gave an impression of all-consuming curiosity—the way he held his head, his mouth and chin, and particularly his eyes. It is not often that one sees such undisguised curiosity in the eyes of a grown­up. I had the feeling that Babel's main driving force was the unbri­dled curiosity with which he scrutinized life and people.

With his usual ability to size things up, he was quick to decide on the best course for us. "Go out to Kalinin," he said, "Erdman is there—his old women just love him." This was Babel's cryptic way of saying that all Erdman's female admirers would never have al­lowed him to settle in a bad place. He also thought we might be able to get some help from them—in finding a room there, for instance. But Babel, as it turned out, had exaggerated Erdman's hold over his "old women"—when we went to Kalinin, we found that none of them lived out there with him, and that he had to come into Moscow to see them.

Babel volunteered to get the money for our fare the next day, and we then started talking about other things. He told us he now spent all his time meeting militiamen and drinking with them. The pre­vious evening he had been drinking with one of the chief militiamen of Moscow, who in his drunken state had declared that "he who lives by the sword shall perish by the sword." The chiefs of the militia, he said, were disappearing one after another and "today you're all right, but you don't know where you'll be tomorrow."

The word "militia" was of course a euphemism. We knew that Babel was really talking about Chekists. M. asked him why he was so drawn to "militiamen": was it a desire to see what it was like in the exclusive store where the merchandise was death? Did he just want to touch it with his fingers? "No," Babel replied, "I don't want to touch it with my fingers—I just like to have a sniff and see what it smells like."

It was known that among the "militiamen" Babel visited was Yezhov himself. After the arrest of Babel, Katayev and Shklovski said he had visited Yezhov because he was so frightened, but that it hadn't saved him—Beria had had him arrested precisely on this ac­count. I am convinced that Babel went to see Yezhov not out of cowardice but out of sheer curiosity—just to have a sniff and see what it smelled like.

The question "What will happen to us tomorrow?" was the chief topic of all our conversations. Babel, with his storyteller's gift, put it into the mouth of his "militiamen." M. was generally silent about it—he knew too well what awaited him. Only once did he blurt out something when we happened to run into Shervinski on the street. He was no friend of ours, but M. suddenly told him it couldn't go on like this—"I am right in front of their noses all the time and they must have no idea what to do with me—in other words, they will soon have to pick me up." Shervinski listened to this brief outburst and said nothing at all. After M.'s death I sometimes met him, but he never mentioned it to me. I should not be surprised if he had forgot­ten—there was so much unpleasantness in our lives that this was the only thing to do.

69 A Scene from Life

_B

abel was not the only one who knew Yezhov—we too had once made his acquaintance. This had happened in the 1930's when M. and I were staying in a Government villa in Sukhumi. The Yezhov we met then was remarkably like his later portraits and pho­tographs—especially the one where he appears with a broad smile at the moment when Stalin is shaking his hand to congratulate him on some Government award. The Sukhumi Yezhov also had his famous limp, and I remember Podvoiski, who liked to lecture people about the qualities of a true Bolshevik, scolding me for my laziness and telling me to follow the example of "our Yezhov" who danced the gopak despite his lame leg. But there were many Yezhovs and I still find it difficult to believe that the man we saw in Sukhumi was the legendary People's Commissar at the dawn of his brief but dazzling career. It is hard to credit that we sat at the same table, eating, drink­ing and exchanging small talk with this man who was to be one of the great killers of our time, and who totally exposed—not in theory but in practice—all the assumptions on which our "humanism" rested.

The Sukhumi Yezhov was a modest and rather agreeable person. He was not yet used to being driven about in an automobile and did not therefore regard it as an exclusive privilege to which no ordinary mortal could lay claim. We sometimes asked him to give us a lift into town, and he never refused. At the Government villa, automobiles were a burning issue—cars from the Abkhaz Council of People's Commissars were always sweeping up the hill to the front entrance, and the children of Central Committee officials staying in the villa chased away the grubby brats of the service personnel, proudly tak­ing their places in the driver's seat as though entitled to do so by right of birth. On one occasion M. called this expulsion scene to the attention of Yezhov's wife and another Central Committee lady. The two women told the children of their colleagues to make room for the servants' children and let them sit in the car as well. They were very much upset to see the children departing from the democratic principles of their fathers and told us they were sent to the same school as other children and were dressed no better than the others, so that they wouldn't "lose touch with the people." These children were now preparing themselves to rule the people, but many of them were to meet a different fate.

In the morning Yezhov got up before everybody else to cut roses for the young woman student of literature and friend of Bagritski with whom he was flirting. After him came Podvoiski—to get roses for Yezhov's wife. This was an act of pure chivalry—so the other inhabitants of the villa said—since Podvoiski was a model family man and never flirted with any wives except his own. The rest of the ladies, who had no one to pay court to them, came down to get their own roses, and discussed Podvoiski's gallant behavior as they did so.

Yezhov's wife (her name was Tonia, I think) spent her time lying in a deck chair on the terrace opposite the villa. If she was upset by her husband's conduct, she gave no sign of it—Stalin had not yet begun to insist on the need for a healthy family life. "Where is your comrade?" she asked me whenever she saw me alone. At first I didn't realize that she was referring to M. In these circles they still stuck to the usage of their days in the revolutionary underground, and a hus­band was primarily a comrade. Tonia was reading Das Kapital and softly recapitulated it to herself as she went along. She was angry with the vivacious and intelligent wife of Kossior for going out on horseback with a young and rather brash musician who was collect­ing Abkhaz folk music. "We all know Kossior," said Tonia, "he is a comrade of ours, but who is this fellow? He could be a spy, for all we know!" Everybody denounced Lakoba's irresponsibility in put­ting someone who was "not one of us" in such an important villa. Probably the presence of anybody who was not a member of the Party gave rise to similar protests, and I even heard some talk about the need to centralize the whole process of allotting places in Party rest homes, but Lakoba didn't give a damn for any of them: the villa belonged to the Abkhaz Council of People's Commissars—that is, virtually to him.

Next to us in a small room on the third floor was a Central Com­mittee member of the older generation, a clever Latvian. He kept himself very much apart from the others, and talked only with M. We were taken aback by the note of alarm which we often detected in what he said. M. had already written his "Fourth Prose," and we knew that the outlook for literature was bad, but the Latvian was not concerned with literature—he was simply a high-ranking Party official. He had not been accused of any "deviations" and it was difficult to see why he was so apprehensive and kept harping on the question of what would happen tomorrow. I know nothing of his fate, but he must certainly have taken part in the "Congress of Vic­tors"[22] and it is not difficult to guess what must have become of him —we are all wise after the event.

In the evenings Lakoba used to come up to play billiards and gos­sip with the guests in the dining room. This villa with its select visi­tors was the only place he could come to relax and talk. Once he brought us a bear cub that had been presented to him by the moun­tain people. Podvoiski kept it in his room, but then Yezhov took it back to Moscow and put it in the zoo. Lakoba was a good storytel­ler. He told us, for instance, about an ancestor of his who had gone all the way to Petersburg on foot to invite his blood enemy (it was Prince Shervashidze, I think) to come and partake of a feast in Su­khumi. The Prince decided this was the end of their blood feud and accepted the invitation. His imprudence cost him his life. M. was very much impressed by this story of Lakoba's and he thought there was some hidden meaning in it. We were told that by 1937 Lakoba was no longer alive. He had supposedly been buried with full honors in some Abkhaz equivalent of the Kremlin wall, but Stalin, angry with the dead man for some reason, had ordered his remains to be disinterred and destroyed. If this is true, one can only be glad for Lakoba's sake that he died in good time.

It was Lakoba who had put us in this Government villa so that we could rest before setting out on our Armenian journey—we had ar­rived with a note from the Central Committee requesting him to arrange this. Other writers there were Bezymenski and Kazin, bothof whom felt completely at home. The same could not be said for us.

On the day of Mayakovski's death we were working in the gar­den with a proud and elegant Georgian, a specialist in radio. The guests had all gathered in the dining room for their evening's enter­tainment—they generally sang songs and danced Yezhov's favorite dance, the gopak. Our companion said: "Georgian People's Commis­sars would not dance on the day on which a Georgian national poet had died." M. nodded to me and said: "Go and tell that to Yezhov." I went into the dining room and passed on the Georgian's words to Yezhov, who was in very high spirits already. The dancing ceased, but I don't think anybody apart from Yezhov knew the reason. A few years before this, M. had rebuked Vyshinski for laughing and talking loudly while a young poet was reading his verse. This hap­pened in the CEKUBU rest home.

но foresaw the disastrous consequences of abandoning hu­

We could not stand sanatoria and rest homes, but went to them very occasionally if there was nowhere else to go. They always smelled of death, for some reason.

70 The Suicide

manism in the name of some overriding aim? Who knew what calamities we were calling down on our heads by adopting the principle that "everything is permitted"? Only a handful of intellec­tuals—but nobody listened to them. Now they are accused of "ab­stract humanism," but in the twenties everybody mercilessly heaped scorn on them. The standard epithets for them were "puny" and "spineless," and the word "intellectual" itself was always given a pejorative ending (intelligentishka). They were constantly carica­tured in the press, and the thirty-year-old partisans of the "new era" would have nothing to do with them. The prime task was to hold them up to ridicule in literature, and Ilf and Petrov obliged by writ­ing their savage lampoon on "spineless intellectuals" in The Twelve Chairs. The figures in question seem very dated now, and it would not occur to anyone at the present day to see a "typical" intellectual in the pitiful half-wit who pesters the wife who has left him. Read­ing this immortal work today, one has difficulty figuring out the point of the satire and whom exactly they are making fun of. Some­thing similar has happened with a much more profound work, Erd- man's play The Suicide, which Gorki found so impressive and Meyerhold wanted to produce. As originally conceived, the play was to feature a crowd of wretched intellectuals in repulsive masks surrounding a man who is about to commit suicide, and whom they want to exploit for their own purposes—as a way of calling attention to the difficulties of their existence, the hopelessness resulting from their inability to find a place in the new life. But a healthy instinct for life wins out in the end, and the man marked down for suicide— despite the farewell banquet and all the liberal speeches in his honor —decides not to die after all and thumbs his nose at the chorus of masked intellectuals who are egging him on.

Erdman, a real artist, couldn't help introducing genuinely tragic undertones into the polyphonic scenes with the masked intellectuals (who were always then referred to as petit-bourgeois grumblers). Nowadays, when nobody hesitates to say quite openly how unbear­able our life is, the complaints of the masks in Erdman's play sound not like the whining of "spineless intellectuals," but like a tragic chorus of martyred ghosts. The hero's refusal to kill himself also takes on a different meaning now: life is hideous and intolerable, but one must go on living nevertheless, because life is life. . . . Did Erd­man intend this implication, or was his aim much simpler? I do not know, but I believe that, with all its anti-intellectualism, there is an undercurrent of humanity in the play. It is really about why some of us decided to go on living even though everything was pushing us to suicide.

Erdman himself chose to fall silent—anything just to stay alive. In Kalinin he lived in a poky little hole of a room with a bunk to sleep on and a small table. When we came to see him, he was lying on the bunk—the only alternative was to sit on the only chair. He got up, shook himself and took us to the outskirts of the town where there were sometimes rooms to let in privately owned wooden houses. He came to see us quite frequently, but never with his co-author and antipode, Misha Volpin. He evidently visited us only on days when Misha was away in Moscow.

Erdman, as we know, first got into trouble for his fables, which Kachalov was irresponsible enough to recite at an evening in the Kremlin—that is, to the same sort of people as those we had stayed with in the Government villa in Sukhumi, where the companion of

Kossior's wife had immediately been suspected of being a spy. That same evening they were all arrested for their little joke and exiled— Misha Volpin was actually sent to a forced-labor camp, since it ap­peared that the secret police had old scores to settle with him, going back to his youth. They say that Erdman signed the letters he wrote home to his mother "Mamin-Sibiriak";* and that, as a parting shot, he wrote the following fable before being sent into exile:

Once the GPU came by and grabbed old Aesop by the ass. The moral of this tale is clear— No more fables needed here.

This summed up Erdman's recipe for survival, and we heard no more of his fables and jokes—he lapsed into silence. Unlike M., who to the end defended his right to his "moving lips," Erdman sealed his tight. Very occasionally he would put his head close to mine and tell me the plot of a new play he had just thought of but would never write. I have already mentioned one of the unwritten plays: about the way people switch from official jargon to natural speech.

When I came to tell him of M.'s arrest, Erdman mumbled some­thing that sounded like: "If they're picking up such people . . ." and got up to show me out.

During the war, when we lived in evacuation in Tashkent, two people in uniform came to see my brother. One was Erdman, the other was Volpin, who talked incessantly about poetry and kept on saying that it should be "interesting." He found Mayakovski and Yesenin "interesting," but not Akhmatova. Volpin was a product of LEF and knew what he liked. Erdman just sat and drank, without saying a word. Later they went up to see Akhmatova, who lived in the balakhana above my brother.

I still occasionally meet Erdman and Volpin at Akhmatova's. Erd­man says: "Pleased to see you" and then goes on drinking, without another word, leaving all the talking to Volpin. They work together and seem to be perfectly all right nowadays.

One summer while he was living out in Tarusa, Garin was com­plaining about the modern theater and saying how awful everything was. In the evenings there were arguments about which was worse: literature, the theater, painting or music. Everybody present spoke up for his own particular field of interest, insisting that it came first

* A minor novelist of the end of the nineteenth century whose name can be punningly interpreted to mean "Mummy's Siberian." in terms of its degradation. On one of these evenings Garin read Erdman's Suicide, this play that never got on the stage, and it now sounded very different in my ears. "I'll tell you," the author seemed to be saying, "why you didn't jump out of the window and went on living. . . ."

In the meantime, attacks on the intellectuals still go on. This is a legacy from the twenties, and it's time a stop were put to it.

Many people will be offended at what I have said in passing about The Twelve Chairs. I have always found it very funny and am still astonished at the boldness of the authors in the episode where they describe how Ostap Bender and the other crooks from Odessa join a group of Soviet writers in a specially reserved coach on the newly opened Turksib railroad and, mingling with them during the jour­ney, are in no way distinguishable from them. But I find nothing funny about the description of the intellectuals living together in their dilapidated house—no wonder they had gone completely to seed and were being deserted by such of their womenfolk as still had any market value. It is all too easy to poke fun at people who have had the life crushed out of them.

71 Rebirth

_I

must admit to being an incorrigible optimist. Like those who be­lieved at the beginning of this century that life had to be better than in the nineteenth century, I am now convinced that we will soon witness a complete resurgence of humane values. I mean this not only in respect to social justice, but also in cultural life and in everything else. Far from being shaken in my optimism by the bitter experience of the first half of this incredible century, I am encour­aged to believe that all we have been through will have served to turn people against the idea, so tempting at first sight, that the end justifies the means and "everything is permitted." M. taught me to believe that history is a practical testing-ground for the ways of good and evil. We have tested the ways of evil. Will any of us want to revert to them? Isn't it true that the voices among us speaking of conscience and good are growing stronger? I feel that we are at the threshold of new days, and I think I detect signs of a new attitude.

They are few and far between—indeed, almost imperceptible—but they are nevertheless there.

Alas, my faith and optimism are shared by almost nobody: people who know the difference between good and evil are more inclined to expect new misfortunes and new crimes. I realize the possibility of a return to the past, but I still think the general outlook is bright. We have seen the triumph of evil after the values of humanism have been vilified and trampled on. The reason these values succumbed was probably that they were based on nothing except boundless confi­dence in the human intellect. I think we may now find a better foun­dation for them, if only because of the lessons we have drawn from our experience. We can see the mistakes and crimes of the past, and the seductive delusions of former times have lost their glamour. Rus­sia once saved the Christian culture of Europe from the Tatars, and in the past fifty years, by taking the brunt on herself, she has saved Europe again—this time from rationalism and all the will to evil that goes with it. The sacrifice in human life was enormous. How can I believe it was all in vain?

I have a certain acquaintance who, though still quite young, is both wise and gloomy beyond his years. The poet he likes best is Blok, because of his frantic presentiment of the end of Russian cul­ture. This admirer of Blok looks down on me for wearing rose- tinted spectacles at my age. He believes that Blok's prediction came true, that our culture has really perished and we are buried under its ruins. This young pessimist fails to notice the changes that have come about since we first met. He came to see me straight after the Twentieth Congress, when people were asking in bewilderment: "Why have they told us all this?" Some would rather not have heard such disagreeable things; others, about to become members of the ruling class, were upset because their task had suddenly been made somewhat more difficult; then there were those who shook their heads sadly at the thought that the old ways of making a career would not work any more and they would have to think of some­thing new.

This was the period known as the "thaw," when some people re­ally believed that they Would be granted permission to speak their minds. This hope was not fulfilled, but everybody knows that this is not what matters. What matters is the change in each individual and his way of thinking. The very need for permission from above is a hangover from the past, with its belief in authority and fear of pun­ishment. People trembled with terror at every word of command.

This terror could return, but it would mean sending several million people to the camps. If this were to happen now, they would all scream—and so would their families, friends and neighbors. That is something to be reckoned with.

My young friend first came to see me while I was living in the filthy barracks that served as a dormitory for the teachers of the Cheboksary Teachers' Training College. The stench was overpower­ing, and the air was thick with soot from the kerosene lamps. It was as cold in my room as it was outside: a plank in the wall on the second floor had slipped, and threatened to fall on the heads of the children playing down below. The wind that blew freely into my room brought the smell of melting snow. My visitor explained that he was an admirer of M. and had been dying to come and see me. He had come quite out of the blue—without any letters of introduction from mutual friends to give me an idea of what sort of person he was. But his whole bearing, and particularly the look in his eyes, inspired confidence.

I asked him to sit down and told him something I would not nor­mally have said to a casual visitor: "When somebody comes and tells me how much he likes Mandelstam," I said, "I know that he is an informer. He has either been sent, or has come on his own initiative so that he can later submit a nice little report. This has been going on for twenty years now. Nobody else ever talks about Mandelstam with me—literary people who used to read his poetry never mention him in conversation with me. I am telling this to you because you make a good impression on me. I trust you. But even with you I cannot talk about Mandelstam and his poetry. Now you understand why."

He went away, but a couple of years later I heard about him again from some mutual friends and I invited him to come and see me. Bewildered by our first encounter, he was obviously reluctant to visit me a second time, but everything was soon forgotten. I do not know whether he ever realized what profound trust I had shown him at our first meeting by speaking to him as I did.

Several years have gone by since then, and I no longer mind talk­ing with anyone who asks me about M.—they are mostly people of the younger generation, though sometimes even the older ones now bring the subject up. Nowadays we talk about a great many things that used to be so taboo that most people in my circle did not even dare think about them. At present, however, we no longer wonder whether something is "forbidden" or not—we have just stopped

bothering and forgotten that kind of thing. But that is not all.

In the twenties, young people of education willingly gathered in­formation for the authorities and the secret police, and thought they were doing so for "the good of the Revolution," for the sake of the mysterious majority which was supposedly interested in the defense and the consolidation of the regime. From the thirties, and right up to Stalin's death, they continued to do the same, except that their motivation had changed—they now acted to benefit themselves, in the hope of reward, or out of fear. They took copies of M.'s verse to the police, or denounced colleagues in the hope of getting their own writings published, or of being promoted in their work. Others did this kind of thing out of sheer terror—not to be arrested or de­stroyed themselves. They were very easily intimidated, and eagerly seized on any small favors offered to them. At the same time they were always assured that nothing about their activities would ever leak out or become public knowledge. This promise has been kept and the people concerned can calmly live out their days, enjoying the modest privileges their activities have earned them.

But people asked to da such work nowadays no longer have faith in any guarantees. There can be no return to the past for this new generation, which is by no means as terrified and submissive as ear­lier ones. These young people can never be persuaded, moreover, that their fathers were justified in their actions, nor do they believe that "everything is permitted." This does not, of course, mean that there are no longer any informers, but the percentage is much lower. Earlier I could expect the worst of any young man, not to mention corrupt members of my own generation, but it would now be rather a fluke if a scoundrel wormed his way into my circle of acquaint­ances—and even then he might hesitate to do anything really despic­able, because in the new state of affairs it would not be to his advan­tage and everybody would turn their backs on him.

Among the new intelligentsia now growing up in front of our eyes, nobody blithely repeats old sayings like "You can't swim against the tide" or "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs." In other words, the values we thought had been abolished forever are being restored, and they must be taken account of, even by people who could quite well do without them. This has come as a surprise both to those who never gave up these values and to those who tried to bury them once and for all. Somehow or other they lived on underground, taking refuge in all those hushed homes with their dimmed lights. Now they are on the move and gathering force.

The initiative in their destruction belonged to the intelligentsia of the twenties, which, as a result, ceased to be itself and turned into something different. At the present day we are witnessing the re­verse process. It is astonishingly slow, and we are impatient. How can we be patient after all we have gone through?

Nobody can define the intelligentsia or say how it differs from the educated classes. It is a historical term that was first used in Russia and then spread to the West. The intelligentsia has a number of dis­tinctive features, but they don't add up to a neat definition. The history of the intelligentsia is obscured by the fact that the word is often applied to people who do not belong to it by right. How can one use it to refer to technocrats or bureaucrats, even if they have university diplomas, or, for that matter, even if they write novels and epic poems? During the period of capitulation, the real intelli­gentsia was mocked at, and its name was appropriated by those who surrendered.

What, then, is the intelligentsia? If you take any one of its fea­tures, you will find it is shared with some other section of the com­munity: a certain degree of education, the ability to think critically and the sense of concern that goes with it, freedom of thought, con­science, humanism . . . All these are especially important just now, because we have seen how their disappearance means the end of the intelligentsia itself: at the least attempt to change the values it em­bodies, it will itself lose its character and go under—as happened in this country. But it is not only the intelligentsia that preserves values —the ordinary people kept them alive even during the darkest times, when the so-called cultural elite was repudiating them. It may be that the intelligentsia is simply not very stable and that its values are correspondingly volatile. There is also a tendency to self-destruc- tiveness. The people who made the Revolution and were active in the twenties sprang from an intelligentsia which had given up one set of values in favor of others regarded as supreme. The result was a plunge into self-destruction. What does someone like Tikhonov or Fedin have in common with a real Russian intellectual? Nothing— except perhaps their spectacles and false teeth. But the younger people now appearing on the scene—some of them still in their teens —are a very different matter; you can see immediately that they are true intellectuals, though it is very hard to define the qualities in­volved. The Danish linguist Jespersen, tired of hearing arguments about how to define parts of speech, once jokingly remarked that ordinary people can always tell a verb from a noun, just as a dog can tell bread from clay. But the main thing is: these young intellectuals have appeared and the process is now irreversible—it cannot be stopped even by the physical destruction which the representatives of the past would love to visit on them. Nowadays the persecution of one intellectual only creates dozens more. We saw this during the Brodski affair.

The Russian intelligentsia has one feature which is probably not known in the West. Among the teachers of modern languages I en­countered during all my years in provincial colleges, I only once met a true intellectual, a woman called Marta from Chernovitsy. She once asked me in great surprise why all those students who thirst after truth and righteousness are always so keen on poetry. This is so, and it is peculiar to Russia. M. once asked me (or himself, rather) what it was that made someone a member of the intelligentsia. He did not use the word itself—this was at a time when it was still a term of abuse, before it was taken over by bureaucratic elements in the so called liberal professions—but that was what he meant. Was it a university education, he wondered, or attendance in a pre- revolutionary grammar school? No, it was not this. Could it be your attitude toward literature? This he thought was closer, but not quite it. Finally he decided that what really mattered was a person's feel­ings about poetry. Poetry does indeed have a very special place in this country. It arouses people and shapes their minds. No wonder the birth of our new intelligentsia is accompanied by a craving for poetry never seen before—it is the golden treasury in which our values are preserved; it brings people back to life, awakens their con­science and stirs them to thought. Why this should happen I do not know, but it is a fact.

My young friend who loves Blok and nourishes his own pessimism by reading him was for me the first sign of the intelligentsia's re­birth, and I find his pessimism unjustified. The new awakening is accompanied by the copying out and reading of poetry, which thus plays its part in setting things in motion again and reviving thought. The keepers of the flame hid in darkened corners, but the flame did not go out. It is there for all to see.

72 The Last Idyll

_M

oscow drew us like a magnet all the time—we went there for gossip, news, money . . . Each time, remembering where we were, we raced for the last train back to Kalinin, fearful of get­ting stranded for an extra night in the forbidden city. Occasionally people offered their seat in the train and talked with me in an oddly compassionate way. M. happened to mention this to Piast, who laughed in his peculiar way (it was like a horse whinnying) and said: "That's because they think she's the one, not you." At that time I wore a leather jacket, and Piast meant that I got all this sympathy because I was taken for an exile. As so many people in Moscow avoided us like the plague precisely on this account, the kindness of these working people was an unexpected bounty. The leather jacket, incidentally, was of secondary importance, since I got the same sort of consideration without it.

In the train M. and I always argued about whether or not to take a cab in Kalinin. I thought it was better to go home from the station on foot and save money for another day's upkeep in our Kalinin refuge. M. took the opposite view: one more day in Kalinin made no difference and we would still have to go back to Moscow again "to arrange things." This was a variation on the constant theme in the last year of his life that things "can't go on like this." We talked on such lines all the time in Kalinin, but there was nothing we could do by way of "arranging things."

Every time our argument was resolved quite simply. There were only two or three horse cabs at the station. This was one of the few remaining forms of private enterprise, but most cabbies had already been forced out of business by taxes and "liquidated as a class." They were immediately besieged by a large crowd and quickly drove off with the most enterprising clients, so we had no choice but to walk home.

On the bridges across the Volga and the Tmaka there was always a biting wind—the wind of exile and persecution. On the edge of the town where we had rented a room the streets were impassable be­cause of mud in the fall, and in the winter we floundered helplessly in the snow. People lived here only if they didn't have to go out to work. . . . M. got very breathless and kept on saying we should have taken a cab. I trudged along behind him.

When we knocked on our door, it was opened by our landlady, Tatiana Vasilievna, a tall, gaunt woman of about sixty. Looking at us sullenly, she asked whether we were hungry. She looked sullen not because we had wakened her in the middle of the night, but because that was just her manner. We told her we had had a meal in Moscow before leaving and were not hungry. She disappeared into her part of the house and came back in a few minutes with a jug of milk and the remains of her own dinner—some fritters, potato and cabbage. That winter she had slaughtered their pig, and she brought us a little pork as well. "Eat," she said, "it's all our own stuff, we didn't have to buy it." Our women never count the cost of their own work—any­thing that grows in the garden or any livestock they keep is "our own stuff," which they look on as a gift of God.

While we ate, she would stand beside us and ask how we had fared in Moscow, whether we had managed to get work, or permission to return. We talked quietly so as not to waken her other two lodgers,, a married couple from Leningrad—also forced to live beyond the hundredth kilometer—who slept behind a wooden partition which did not quite reach the ceiling. The husband had once been a secre­tary to Shchegolev, and, after serving his sentence in a camp or in exile, was now sitting things out in Kalinin. When we first knocked on Tatiana Vasilievna's door on the advice of passers-by, the man from Leningrad had come out when he heard our voices, and he at once recognized M. Seeing us vouched for in this way, Tatiana Vasi­lievna let us have the room—a great stroke of luck for us. Here it is always as difficult—if not more so—to find a room as I imagine it must have been in Western Europe just after the war when all the towns were in ruins after the bombing.

Tatiana Vasilievna lived with her husband, who was a steelworker. She ruled the household with a firm hand, and her husband, a kind and gentle man, gladly left everything to her. To preserve appear­ances, however, Tatiana Vasilievna always consulted him, and before renting the room to us, she had invited us in for tea and said it would depend on what her husband said. He had no objections and said it was "up to the missus." He and M. soon became good friends and found common ground in their passion for music. On his silver wed­ding anniversary his sons (they had done very well in the Air Force, and one of them had even been presented to Stalin) had given him a phonograph and a pile of records—most of them Komsomol and army songs then in vogue. The old man was not overimpressed by this "caterwauling," as he called it, and preferred the few records

that M. had managed to get hold of—the Brandenburg Concertos, a piece of church music by Dvorak, some early Italian things and Mussorgski. It was very difficult to obtain records then, and this was a quite haphazard selection, but both M. and our host got enormous pleasure out of them. In the evenings, whenever we were in Kalinin, they held "concerts," while Tatiana Vasilievna served us tea from the samovar with homemade jam. M. always wanted to have the tea brewed in his own way, and he told us that the first thing Shev- chenko always bought when he had any money was a pound of tea. At tea M. generally looked through the newspaper—as a regular fac­tory worker, our landlord was able to subscribe to Pravda.

As we now discovered, people talked much more freely and openly in working-class homes than in intellectual ones in those sav­age times. After all the equivocations of Moscow and the frantic attempts to justify the terror, we were quite startled to hear the mercilessly outspoken way in which our hosts talked. We had been conditioned to hold our tongues, and once, when M. made some eva­sive remark, Tatiana Vasilievna looked at him pityingly and said: "What can we do with you? You've all been scared out of your wits."

The parents and grandparents of Tatiana Vasilievna and her hus­band had also been factory workers and, as she told us with some pride: "We are hereditary proletarians." She remembered the political agitators they had hidden from the police in Czarist times and her comment on them was: "To think of the things they said, and look what's come of it all!" Both she and her husband were scathing about the show trials in Moscow: "See what they're doing in our name," said our host once, throwing down the newspaper in disgust. He understood what was going on as "a fight for power among themselves." They were both furious that all this went on in the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat: "They're just making fools of us with that stuff about the working class. They say the power belongs to us, but just try and interfere, and they'd soon show us our place." I told them the theory that classes were "guided" by parties, and parties by leaders. "That's very handy," said the old man. Both of them still clung firmly to their "proletarian conscience."

This family was faced, as always in Russia, by the problem of "fathers and sons." The old couple were not exactly overjoyed by the fact that their children had done so well, and didn't think it would last. As Tatiana Vasilievna put it, "There's lots of us down here at the bottom of the ladder and you're more likely to last, but once you get up top, you can really have a bad fall." The old man went even further—he didn't trust his sons and never said anything in their presence. "They'll go and report you as soon as look at you," he grumbled, "that's what children are like nowadays." But it was only after we'd got to know them really well that we learned what it was that troubled them most about their sons.

Tatiana Vasilievna kept a cow—she told us she could never have brought up her children on her husband's wages, and it was the cow that saved them. The whole family had long since become "proletar­ian," and this cow was their only remaining link with village life. They bought hay from collective farmers and the bargaining was always done around the samovar. Drinking tea with them, Tatiana Vasilievna heard a great deal about collectivization and life in the kolkhozes with its production targets and "labor-days." [23] Once, hav­ing seen her guests out and still flushed from her conversation with them, she came into our room and started telling us how her eldest son had been sent out, as a young Komsomol, to help in the mass deportation of the kulaks. He had been away quite a long time, and when he returned he said nothing to his parents and would not reply to any of their questions. "Who knows what he was doing out there? Goodness knows what I brought him up for." As she talked with the collective farmers, she kept wondering what her eldest son might have been involved in. Her husband tried to calm her by say­ing "They're all the same nowadays, Mother, so why should you get all worked up like that?"

We soon noticed that, for all their common sense about what was going on, our hosts had no patience with any kind of political struggle or activity. "Why did they get mixed up in all this? They were earning good money before, weren't they?" the old man said as he read about the show trials in Pravda: he disapproved of the very fact that the victims of these trials had involved themselves in some kind of political activity. But for us, the horrifying thing was that nobody had lifted a finger to prevent Stalin from seizing power. On the contrary, they had all helped him to pick off the others one by one. The old man remembered how the defendants had been "in the old days" and he suspected that they had been "meddling," as he put it. Both he and Tatiana Vasilievna approved of M. because they re­garded him as a passive victim who had nothing to do with the re­gime and had simply got into trouble for writing things. They would not have been so upset if their sons had kept clear of politics, had nothing to do with the ruling group and "stuck to their own class." Any kind of resistance seemed to them futile and dishonest. They always referred to it as "meddling." In Kalinin we took part for the first time in elections.[24] Taken aback by the way in which they were held, M. did not know what his attitude toward them should be. At first he tried to look on the bright side by saying: "This is only the beginning—when people get used to the idea, everything will be normal." But later he said he could not possibly take part in this farce. Our hosts reasoned with him, saying, "You can't swim against the tide" and "Why should you be different from others? If everybody else votes, so will we." But their final and most telling argument was: "Don't get on the wrong side of them or you'll never hear the end of it." This was all too true, particularly for people in our position. So we all went to vote: they at six o'clock in the morning, as they had been told at the factory, and we a little later, after breakfast.

If Tatiana Vasilievna was law-abiding, it was not because she re­spected the law—on the contrary, she took a very dim view of it— but because of her general philosophy of life. She thought her first duty was to survive as best she could, and to this end it was essential, in her view, to avoid all needless activities. The idea of sacrificing oneself for an idea, or dying for it, would have seemed the height of absurdity to her. Her watchword was that they were "little people" who should not stick their necks out. We even sensed a certain standoffishness in this attitude: while the people "up top" fought and murdered each other, trading on the name of the proletariat (which she was so conscious of belonging to), they, as workers, would have nothing to do with it and kept their hands clean. Their business was to live and work, while the others went to the devil in their own sweet way. But there was nothing religious about her, and she never went to church (though she kept lamps lit before the ikons, as her parents had done before her).

There were times when M. and I even seemed, in Tatiana Vasi- lievna's eyes, to be part, in a very small way, of the harebrained "upper crust." This was whenever she suspected that we were lack­ing in the will to live. Reading some horribly cynical or grotesque item in the newspaper, M. would frequently exclaim: "We are fin­ished!" He first said this when he showed me Stalin's famous com­ment on Gorki's tale "The Girl and Death." It was reported in the press that Stalin had written in his copy of the book: "This thing is more powerful than Goethe's Faust. Love triumphs over Death." M. also said "We are finished!" as he showed me an illustrated magazine with a picture on the front cover of Stalin stretching out his hand to Yezhov. "Where else," M. gasped, "would the head of the State have himself photographed with the chief of his secret police?" But the worst thing about it was the expression on Yezhov's face. As M. said, "Look, you can see there's nothing he wouldn't do for Stalin." Once, at the table, Tatiana Vasilievna read out Stalin's speech at a gradu­ation parade of army cadets when he drank a toast to "the science we need" and denounced "the science we do not need." These words were ominous: if there was a science that was not needed, then it would be uprooted and destroyed. This time, when M. pro­nounced his usual "We are finished," Tatiana Vasilievna and her husband were very cross with us: "You're always talking about be­ing finished. You'll bring it on yourself yet. You ought to think about living, instead. Why don't you learn from us? We manage to live, don't we? Just keep out of things and you'll be all right." As M. summed it up: "Man's first duty is to live."

After M.'s arrest I came back to the sturdy frame house on the outskirts of Kalinin to get the basket full of manuscripts I had left there. When they heard of M.'s arrest, Tatiana Vasilievna and her husband were so upset that I broke down in tears myself. Tatiana Vasilievna, usually so undemonstrative, put her arms around me and said: "Don't cry: you'll be like the saints." And the old man added: "Your husband could never have done harm to anyone. If they're arresting people like him, things must be really bad." They both said they would tell their sons about it so they would know whom they were serving and bowing down to. "Only they won't listen to us," the old man suddenly sighed. His sons were "Stalin's Falcons"—ex­emplary airmen of the type so accurately portrayed by Solzhenitsyn in the person of Zotov. There certainly was no point in telling them anything—they personified the ideas that then ruled the world. Now, in the middle of the sixties, they are the fathers who complain all the time about their sons—the grandchildren of Tatiana Vasi- lievna's generation. They are rejected both by their parents and by their children, who have formed an alliance against them. In this connection I remember a meeting on a train with another relic of "Stalin's empire." This one, unlike the other one I have already de­scribed, was all for the Twentieth Congress. This was because he had been in trouble under Stalin—he hadn't exactly been arrested, but it had been a near thing. Now he was enjoying his retirement on a good pension as a former Party official. Not to spend his time in idleness, he had taken on the job of giving political instruction in a Leningrad technical college. As one teacher to another, he began to tell me his troubles. On one election day he had come to the college early to get all the students out to vote, but none of them wanted to. He said they should take an example from people like himself who had "made the Revolution" and told them he had got up at the crack of dawn to go and vote. To this they replied that nobody had asked him to make a revolution and that people had been better off before. This had left him speechless, and the whole of his "revolutionary" claptrap had been to no avail. "What can you make of these young people nowadays? How do you cope with them?" I told him in all honesty that I got on well with them and they never made trouble for me. These are, in effect, Tatiana Vasilievna's grandchildren— though sometimes I wonder whether they have anything in their heads apart from their negative attitude toward everything. . . .

Not long after I had been to see her, the police came to Tatiana Vasilievna's house with a warrant for my arrest. They searched the house from top to bottom, including the attic and cellar, but luckily I had taken everything away with me. They had a photograph with them, and they looked very carefully at Tatiana Vasilievna and the wife of Shchegolev's secretary. I learned all this a year later when I was about to go back to Kalinin to settle there. It was the wife of Shchegolev's secretary who had brought the story to Leningrad. I would have hesitated to return to Kalinin, but my luggage was al­ready on the train when I heard about this, and I decided to risk it. The terror was now not quite as bad, Yezhov had fallen and the arrests were no longer on a mass scale. I lived in Kalinin nearly two years—right till the evacuation after the war broke out—and I was left alone, even though the warrant for my arrest must still have been lying, unused, in my file. It may seem fantastic, but there were many cases like this—the target figures for the man hunt had by now been "adjusted," and people not picked up under earlier warrants came through untouched. Terror was planned, like the economy, and the quotas for life and death were manipulated at will.

The effect the house search had on Tatiana Vasilievna was deva­stating. Three hefty fellows had turned the place upside down, and she cursed both them and me. When I saw her a year later she ac­cused me of concealing from her that I had meanwhile been in jail. Perhaps she even suspected me of something worse: "Why did they let you out? They never let anybody out nowadays." It was more than I could do to persuade her that I had not been arrested—she just could not believe that "they" would ever fail to arrest anyone they were after, and that I had escaped because I had not been there when they came. And who, indeed, can blame her? But at last she took pity on me and asked whether I had anywhere to live: "If you have nowhere to go, you can stay here. They say God takes care of those who take care of themselves—but how anybody can take care of himself nowadays I don't know." In effect she was offering to betray her principle of non-interference in the troubled affairs of our coun­try, but I decided not to stay in her house again: the thought of those men who had searched it would have robbed me of sleep.

73 The Textile Workers

_D

uring my wanderings I have met all kinds of ordinary folk and I have almost always got on better with them than with those who consider themselves the cream of the Soviet intelligentsia —not that they were so anxious for my company either.

Immediately after M.'s arrest I lived for a time in Strunino, a small cotton-mill town beyond Zagorsk. I had learned about it by chance as I was returning to Moscow from Rostov-the-Great, where I had originally wanted to settle. On the first day there I had met Efros, who went pale when I told him about M.'s arrest—he had just spent many months in the Lubianka himself. He was almost the only per­son during the Yezhov terror to get away with nothing more than expulsion from Moscow. When M. had heard, a few weeks before his own arrest, that Efros was out and had gone to live in Rostov, he was staggered and said: "It should be renamed Efros-the-Great." I readily believed him when he advised me not to settle in Rostov: "There are too many of us here already." In the train on the way back I got talking with an elderly woman and when I told her I was looking for a room she advised me to get out in Strunino and gave me the name and address of some good people there—the man of the house, she said, didn't drink or swear. Then she added: "And the woman's mother has been in jail, so she'll be sorry for you." The people one met in trains like this were always kinder than those in Moscow, and they always guessed what my troubles were—even though it was now spring and I had sold my leather jacket.

Strunino is on the Yaroslavl railroad along which prisoners are taken to Siberia, and I had the mad thought that one day I might catch a glimpse of M. as he went past in the prison transport, so I got out there and went to the address which had been given me. I quickly got on good terms with the people and told them exactly why I needed a place to live in the "hundred-and-five kilometer zone"—though they knew without my having to tell them. They let me have a porch which was not in use, but when it got colder later in the year, they insisted I move inside with them—they screened off a corner of their living room with cupboards and blankets to give me some privacy.

I never hid the fact that I am Jewish, and I must say that among the ordinary people I have yet to encounter any anti-Semitism. In working-class families and among collective farmers I was always treated as one of them, without the least hint of what one found in the universities after the war—and now too, for that matter. It is always among the semi-educated that fascism, chauvinism and hatred for the intelligentsia most easily take root. Anti-intellectual feelings are a greater threat than crude anti-Semitism as such, and they are rampant in all the overstaffed institutions where people are furiously defending their right to their ignorance. We gave them a Stalinist education and they have Stalinist diplomas. They naturally want to hang on to what they feel entitled to—where would they go other­wise?

I made day trips to Moscow from Strunino to hand in parcels for M., and my meager resources—I had to sell off M.'s books—soon gave out. My hosts saw that I had nothing to eat, and they shared their tiuria and murtsovka[25] with me. They referred to radishes as "Stalin's lard." They made me drink fresh milk to keep my strength up—though they had little to spare, because they had to sell a good deal of what their cow gave to buy hay for it. In return I used to bring them wild berries from the woods. I spent most of my day in the woods and I always used to slow down as I came back to the house in the evening: I kept thinking that M. might have been let out of prison and one of these days would come out to meet me. It is hard to believe that someone can be taken away from you and sim­ply be destroyed—the mind can take in the bare fact, but it is still impossible to believe.

That autumn I came completely to the end of my means and I had to think of work. My host worked in the local textile factory, and his wife's family were also textile workers. They were very upset at the thought of my taking on this drudgery, but there was nothing else for it, and when a notice about hiring new hands appeared on the factory gate, I got a job in the spinning shop. I worked on the spin­ning machines—each woman worker had to look after twelve of them. I sometimes volunteered for the unpopular night shift so that I could go to Moscow during the day to hand in a parcel for M. and try to get the information about him which no one would give me. Working on the night shift and running between one machine and another in the enormous shop, I kept myself awake by muttering M.'s verse to myself. I had to commit everything to memory in case all my papers were taken away from me, or the various people I had given copies to took fright and burned them in a moment of panic— that had been done more than once by the best and most devoted friends of literature. My memory was thus an additional safeguard— indeed, it was indispensable to me in my difficult task. I thus spent my eight hours of night work not only spinning yarn but also mem­orizing verse.

To rest from the machines the women took refuge in the wash­room, which was a sort of club for us. They would stop talking and look vacant whenever some Komsomol girl intent on making a ca­reer came running in briskly. "Be careful of her" they would warn me. But when the coast was clear they let themselves go, giving me a picture of how their present life compared with the old days: "It was a long day then, but we kept breaking off for a drink of tea— you know how many machines we each had to work on then?" It was talking with them that I first became aware of how genuinely popular Yesenin is. They were always mentioning his name and he is a real legend among the ordinary people: they felt he was one of them and loved him for it.

In the morning, once they were out of the factory gates, they stood in line at the store to buy bread or cloth. Before the war, material for making dresses was very hard to get, there was never enough bread and living standards in general were extremely low.

People have now forgotten what it was like, and my Stalinist neigh­bors in Pskov were always insisting that before the war they didn't know what poverty was and that they had only learned the taste of it nowadays. It is remarkable how willfully oblivious of the past people can be.

In Strunino I learned that a woman forced to live beyond the hun­dred-kilometer limit was popularly known as a "hundred-and-fiver" (stopiatnitsa). The word reminded them of the martyred St. Para- skeva, and when I later told it to Akhmatova, she used it in a poem. All the workers in the factory referred to me in this way, and they were all very kind to me—particularly the older men. Sometimes they would come into the spinning shop and offer me an apple or a piece of pie ("Eat some of this, my wife baked it yesterday"). In the factory cafeteria during the meal break they always kept a place for me and made me take some soup to "keep my strength up." Every­where I found this warm sympathy which was shown to me as a stopiatnitsa. There was never the slightest hint of anti-intellectual prejudice among these people.

Once during a night shift two dapper young men came into the spinning shop, switched off my machines and asked me to follow them into the personnel section. This was located in another build­ing and we had to go through several shops to get to it. Seeing us go by, other workers switched off their machines and began to follow us. As we went down some stairs leading outside, I was afraid to look around because I sensed that this was a way of saying goodbye to me—the workers knew only too well that people were often taken straight from the personnel section to the secret police.

My conversation with the two young men was quite ludicrous. They asked me why I was doing a job for which I was not quali­fied, and I replied that I had no qualification of any kind. And why had I come to live in Strunino? I told them I had no other place to live. "Why does an educated woman like you want to work in a factory?" At that time I still had no college diploma and was only educated in the sense that I had been to a grammar school before the Revolution and belonged to the intelligentsia—as the two men real­ized instinctively. "Why didn't you try to get work in a school?" "Because I don't have a diploma." To which one of them said: "There's something funny about this—tell us the truth." I couldn't make out what they wanted, but that night they decided to let me go—perhaps because of the workers who had gathered outside in the yard. They asked me whether I was working the night shift again the next day and told me to come back to the personnel section before I started work. I even had to sign a paper saying I would.

I didn't go back to the shop that night, but went straight home. My hosts were still awake—somebody had come to tell them that I had been hauled off "to personnel." The man produced a small bottle of vodka and poured out three glasses: "Let's have a drink and think what to do."

When the night shift ended, workers kept coming up to the house and stood talking to us by the window. Some said I should go away at once, and put money on the window sill for me. My landlady packed my things, and her husband and two neighbors took me to the station and put me on one of the early-morning trains. In this way I escaped a new disaster, thanks to these people who had still not learned to be indifferent. Even if the personnel section had not originally intended to hand me over to the police, I am certain they would never have let me go free after seeing how the workers had gathered to say goodbye.

The people of Strunino were sensitive to our misfortunes and knew very well what it was like to be the outlawed wife of a pris­oner, a stopiatnitsa. The prison trains generally passed through at night, and in the mornings the workers from the textile factory would always look carefully as they crossed the tracks to see whether there were any notes written on scraps of paper—some­times prisoners managed to throw them out. Anybody who found such a note put it in an envelope and mailed it. In this way the rela­tives of prisoners sometimes received news. If one of these trains happened to stop in Strunino during the day, everybody tried to throw the prisoners something—food or tobacco—behind the backs of the guards as they paced up and down. This was how my landlady had managed to throw a piece of chocolate to a prisoner.

There had been many arrests in Strunino itself, and this had em­bittered the local people. For the first time I heard Stalin referred to here as "the pockmarked fellow." When I asked why, they said: "Don't you know he had smallpox? They're always getting it down in the Caucasus." They themselves could have got something worse than smallpox for saying such things, but they were extremely care­ful whom they talked to, and they knew very well who all the local informers were. This is the great advantage of living in a village—in the big cities we were never sure whom we could trust.

In Strunino too they were all very law-abiding, but their inborn good nature made it impossible for them not to voice their feelings.

As Yakulov once said to me, "The Russian Revolution is not cruel— the State has sucked out all the cruelty and passed it on to the Cheka."

In Russia everything always happens at the top. The people hold their peace, resisting only in the meekest way. They hate cruelty, but do not believe in fighting it actively. How these qualities can be squared with the great uprisings and revolutions of the past, I do not know. What is one to make of it?

74 The Shklovskis

_I

n Moscow there was only one house to which an outcast could always go. If Victor and Vasilisa Shklovski happened not to be at home when M. and I called during our trips to the city in the months before his arrest, one of the children would run out to greet us: little Varia, who always had a piece of chocolate in her hand, the tall Vasia (the daughter of Vasilisa's sister Natalia), or Nikita, their gangling son, who liked to go out catching birds and was also a great stickler for the truth. Nobody had ever explained anything to them, but they always knew what they had to do: children generally re­flect their parents' standards of behavior. They would take us into the kitchen, which at the Shklovskis' was run like a cafeteria, give us food and drink, and entertain us with their chatter. Vasia, who played the viola, always told us about the latest concert—at that time Shostakovich's symphony was all the rage. Shklovski listened to what Vasia said and commented gleefully: "That puts Shostakovich right at the top!" Those were times in which everybody had to be given his precise place in the hierarchy, with everybody trying to come out on top. The State encouraged people to behave like the boyars in medieval Russia who fought each other over their place at the Czar's table, always reserving to itself the final decision as to who should sit "at the top." It was in those days that Lebedev-Kumach, who was said to be actually a very modest man, found himself ele­vated to the status of "top poet." Shklovski also had his ambitions, but he wanted to see things decided on the basis of his famous "Hamburg reckoning."* M. would have loved to go and hear Shos-

* In the preface to Hamburg Reckoning (Leningrad, 1928), Shklovski notes that Hamburg's prizefighters were ranked once each year in a day of long, hard fighting behind closed doors, rather than by their public fights manipu- pated by promoters. He suggests that the same methods should be applied to writers.

takovich's new symphony, but we were afraid to miss the last train.

With Varia the conversation was different. She showed us her school textbooks where the portraits of Party leaders had thick pieces of paper pasted over them as one by one they fell into dis­grace—this the children had to do on instructions from their teacher. Varia said how much she would like to cover up Semashko —"We'll have to sooner or later, so why not now?" At this time the editors of encyclopedias and reference books were sending subscrib­ers—most such works were bought on subscription—lists of articles that had to be pasted over or cut out. In the Shklovski household this was attended to by Victor himself. With every new arrest, people went through their books and burned the works of disgraced leaders in their stoves. In new apartment buildings, which had central heat­ing instead of stoves, forbidden books, personal diaries, correspond­ence and other "subversive literature" had to be cut up in pieces with scissors and thrown down the toilet. People were kept very busy. . . .

Nikita, the least talkative of the children, sometimes said things that staggered the grownups. Once, for instance, Victor was telling us that he and Paustovski had been to see a famous bird fancier who trained canaries—he only had to give a sign for one of his birds to come out of its cage, sit on a perch and sing. On another signal from its owner, it obediently went back into its cage again. "Just like a member of the Union of Writers," said Nikita and left the room. After saying something like this, he always disappeared into his own room, where he kept the birds he had caught. But he treated his birds nicely, and didn't believe in training them. He told us that songbirds always learned to sing from certain older birds that were particularly good at it. In the Kursk region, once famous for its nightingales, the best songsters had all been caught, and young birds had no way of learning any more. The Kursk "school" of nightin­gales was thus destroyed because of the selfish people who had put the best songsters in cages. . . .

When Vasilisa with her smiling light-blue eyes arrived, she at once went into action. She ran a bath for us, gave us a change of under­wear and then made us lie down for a rest. Victor was always trying to think of ways of helping M., apart from entertaining him with the latest gossip. In the late autumn he gave him an old coat made of dog skin which the previous winter had been worn by Andronikov, the "one-man orchestra." But since then Andronikov had come up in the world and had got himself a brand-new coat of the kind his status as a member of the Writers' Union entitled him to. Shklovski now sol­emnly handed the dog-skin coat over to M. and even made a little speech on the occasion: "Let everybody see that you came here rid­ing inside the train, not hanging on the buffers. . . ." Till then M. had worn a yellow coat made of leather—also a gift from somebody. It was in this yellow coat that he went to the camp later on. . . .

Whenever the doorbell rang, they hid us in the kitchen or the children's room before opening the door. If it was a friend, we were at once released from captivity with shouts of joy, but if it was Pavlenko or Lelia Povolotskaya, the woman police spy from next door—the one who had a stroke when they started rehabilitating people—we stayed in our hiding place until they were gone. None of them ever once caught a glimpse of us, and we were very proud of the fact.

The Shklovskis' house was the only place where we felt like hu­man beings again. This was a family that knew how to help lost souls like us. In their kitchen we discussed our problems—where to stay the night, how to get money, and so forth. We avoided staying the night with them, because of the women who looked after the build­ing—the janitress, the door-woman and the one who worked the elevator. It was a time-honored tradition that these down-trodden but good-natured souls worked for the secret police. They got no extra pay for this—it simply counted as part of their normal duties. I don't remember now how we managed it, but we did go to the Shos­takovich concert and stayed the night somewhere else. . . . When I later came by myself to the Shklovskis' apartment, after M.'s death, the women at the door asked me where he was, and when I told them he was dead, they sighed. "But we thought you'd be the first to go," said one of them. This remark showed me the extent to which our fate had been written on our faces, and it also made me realize that these wretched women had hearts after all, and that one needn't be so afraid of them. The ones who took pity on me soon died—the poor women didn't last long on their meager rations—but afterward I always got on well with their successors, who never informed the militia that I sometimes spent the night at the Shklovskis'. But in 1937 we were terrified of being reported and tried not to stay at the Shklovskis' for fear of getting them into trouble—instead, we kept on the move all the time, chasing breathlessly from place to place.

Occasionally, when there was no choice, we stayed the night there nevertheless, sleeping on their bedroom floor on a mattress covered with a sheepskin rug. They were on the seventh story, so you couldn't hear cars stopping outside, but if ever we heard the elevator coming up at night, we all four of us raced to the door and listened. "Thank God," we would say, "it's downstairs" or "it's gone past." This business of listening for the elevator happened every night, no matter whether we were there or not. Fortunately, it was not used all that often, since many of the writers with apartments in the building spent most of their time in Peredelkino, or in any case didn't come home late—and their children were still very young. In the years of the terror, there was not a home in the country where people did not sit trembling at night, their ears straining to catch the murmur of passing cars or the sound of the elevator. Even now­adays, whenever I spend the night at the Shklovskis' apartment, I tremble as I hear the elevator go past. The sight of half-dressed people huddling by the door, waiting to hear where the elevator stops, is something one can never forget. One night recently, after a car had stopped outside my house, I had a bad dream in which I thought M. was waking me up and saying: "Get dressed—they've come for you this time." But I refused to budge: "I won't get up— to hell with them!" This was a mental revolt against what is also, after all, a kind of collaboration: they come to cart you off to prison and you just meekly get out of bed and put on your clothes with trembling hands. But never again! If they come for me, they'll have to carry me out on a stretcher or kill me on the spot—I'll never go of my own free will.

Once during the winter of 1937 we decided it was wrong to go on taking advantage of the Shklovskis' kindness We were afraid of compromising them—a single denunciation and they could all land in prison. We were horrified at the thought of bringing disaster on Shklovski and his whole family, and though they begged us not to worry, we stopped going to see them for a while. As a result, we felt more homeless and lonely than ever before. Soon M. could stand it no longer and while we were on a visit to Lev Bruni he phoned the Shklovskis. "Come over at once," said Victor, "Vasilisa misses you terribly." A quarter of an hour later we rang at their door and Va­silisa came out crying tears of joy. I then felt she was the only real person in the whole world—and I still think so. I should mention that I have always felt just as close to Akhmatova, but she was living in Leningrad at that time and was thus far away from us.

75 Maryina Roshcha*

_W

e were once sitting at the Shklovskis' when Alexander (Sania) Bernstein called and invited us to stay the night at his apartment. Nobody would have thought that the tall, frail and pampered Sania was a brave man, but he walked along the street with us, whistling as though everything was right with the world and chattering about literature, not the least bit afraid to harbor two such arch-criminals as M. and myself in his apartment. When we got there, his little daughter skipped around us and his placid wife, Niura, gave us tea and gossiped with us. He was just as calm in 1948 when he agreed to take M.'s manuscripts from my brother, Evgeni, and keep them for us. In 1938 his brother Sergei had hidden another "criminal," the linguist Victor Vinogradov, who was then forbidden to live in Moscow because he had been in prison. When Vinogradov eventually got on his feet again, became a member of the Academy of Science and was put in charge of Stalinist linguistics, he forgot this poor family that had once given him refuge and did not even go to the funeral of Sergei's wife, who had been so kind to him.

Usually, however, we went to stay the night with Vasilisa's sister, Natalia, the mother of Vasia. On these occasions Vasia would stay behind with the Shklovskis, and we slept in her mother's room in the apartment in Maryina Roshcha where Victor and Vasilisa had lived before. Another room in this apartment was occupied by Nikolai Ivanovich Khardzhiev_t who was good company for M. in the eve­nings—they always sat up talking till very late. It was with Khardzhiev that I spent the first few days after M's arrest—and then I stayed with him again after hearing of M.'s death. I just lay in a stupor, but Nikolai Ivanovich, desperately poor though he was, went out to buy food and expensive candies for me, and kept making me eat something. He was the other person who stood by Akhmatova and me at the blackest periods of our life.

I once saw in his room a drawing of Khlebnikov by Tatlin. Tatlin had done it many years after Khlebnikov's death, but it looked just like him, exactly as I remembered him when he used to come and eat kasha with us in our room at Herzen House, after which he would sit in silence, continually moving his lips. When I saw this drawing, it suddenly struck me that one day M. might similarly come to life in

* A suburb of Moscow.

a good portrait by somebody, and the thought made me feel a little better. But I didn't reckon with the fact that all the artists who knew him died before it would have been safe for them to draw his por­trait. The drawing by Miklashevski that appeared in the magazine Moskva is a very poor likeness—M. came out astonishingly well in photographs, but no artist was ever able to do justice to him.

M. used to say that Khardzhiev had a perfect ear for poetry, and this is why I insisted that he be put in charge of editing the volume of M.'s verse which was supposed to come out ten years ago in the Poets' Library but still hasn't appeared.

The tumbledown wooden house in Maryina Roshcha seemed like a haven to us, but to get to it was not so simple. When we left the Shklovskis' with Natalia, we first had to run the gauntlet of the vari­ous women looking after the building. Out in the street Natalia walked on ahead, got on tramcars first, and waited for us at the transfer stops. We always kept a little way behind, trying not to lose sight of her broad back. Obliged as we were to behave like conspira­tors, it would not have done for us to walk side by side. If M. had been picked up in the street—we had heard of such cases—Natalia could pretend to be a mere passerby whose papers they wouldn't even bother to check. We would thus avoid calling attention to our connection with the Shklovskis. Our precautions were ridiculous, but we had to take them—this was the penalty of living in our time and place. So we walked behind Natalia, as though hypnotized by her swaying gait. She always seemed quite imperturbable, and if we failed to get on the same tramcar, we knew she would be waiting for us at a transfer stop, or at the terminus.

Although there were other people living in her house, we always managed to slip in without being seen—Natalia went in first and had a look around before beckoning us to follow. But one of her neigh­bors, a certain Vaks, a member of the Union of Writers, must have known that she had people staying overnight in her room. He was evidently a decent person, however, and never denounced us. In the mornings we could hear him ringing the Union of Writers from the telephone in the passage outside, but his purpose was only to demand building materials and money for repairs to the "hovel" which we regarded as such a haven. M. even wrote some comic verse featuring Vaks—he still occasionally managed to turn out this kind of thing, though his life was now such that real poetry had come to an end. Shklovski for some reason hated humorous verse and dismissed it as a symptom of softening of the brain, if not worse—not because he thought the times were unsuitable for it, but as a matter of principle. Humorous verse is a Petersburg tradition and Moscow recognized only the art of parody—Shklovski had forgotten his youth in Peters­burg.

That winter I began shouting in my sleep at night. It was an awful, inhuman cry, as if an animal or a bird were having its neck wrung. Shklovski, who heard it when I slept in their apartment, teased me that while most people shouted "Mama" in their sleep, with me it was "Osia" ["Osip"l. I still frighten people with this terrible cry at night. That same year, much to the alarm of my friends, the palms of my hands started turning bright red at mo­ments of stress—and still do. But M. was as calm and collected as ever, and went on joking to the end.

During our trips to Moscow we sometimes had to stay on a few extra days till we could get money. The number of people able to help us got smaller all the time, and we had to wait until Shklovski was in funds—on such days he would come home with money stuffed in all his pockets. After he had given us some, we set off back to Kalinin, where we spent it on our upkeep in the house of Tatiana Vasilievna.

76 The Accomplice

_I

n the fall of 1937 Katayev and Shklovski decided it would be a good idea to arrange for M. to meet Fadeyev, who, though not yet the boss of the Union of Writers, was already very influential. The meeting took place in Katayev's apartment. M. read some of his verse, and Fadeyev was very moved—he tended to be emotional. Apparently sober, he embraced M. tearfully and said something in a suitable vein. I wasn't present, but waited in the Shklovskis' apartment several stories up. When they came in, Victor and M. seemed pleased. They had left early to give Katayev a chance to talk privately with Fadeyev.

Fadeyev did not forget about M.'s poetry. Shortly after this, when he had to go down to Tiflis with Ehrenburg—probably for the Ru- staveli anniversary—he assured Ehrenburg that he would try to get a selection of it published. But nothing came of this. Perhaps it had been hinted to him that it "wouldn't be advisable." If you ap­proached them for permission to do something, our officials had a nice way of saying with a frown: "Of course, go ahead if you see fit." The frown was equivalent to a refusal, but since the word "no" had not actually passed the official's lips, appearances were saved and the refusal to allow something was made to look like "initiative from below" and thus entirely "democratic." Probably no other regime ever went in for such niceties in the art of bureaucratic control— apart from all its other qualities, it was distinguished by unparalleled hypocrisy. But it is even more likely that Fadeyev, fearing to "get mixed up in something," never raised the matter at all. Nevertheless, at the end of the winter in 1938, running into M. in the Writers' Union, he suddenly offered to put in a word for him "up above" and find out "what they think." He said we should come and see him again at the Union in a few days' time, when he would have the answer, or, rather, some information for us.

To our astonishment, Fadeyev actually kept the appointment on the day and at the hour we had agreed on. We left the premises of the Union with him and he invited us into his car so we could talk on the way to another place we had to go to. Fadeyev sat next to his chauffeur, and we got in the back. Turning around to us, he told us he had talked with Andreyev, but that this had produced no results: Andreyev was quite adamant that no work could be found for M. Fadeyev was embarrassed and upset that he had been turned down "point blank" (to use his own words). M. even tried to cheer him up by saying it didn't matter and everything would work out in the end. We had one good reason not to be too much put out by Fadeyev's failure: just before this M. had suddenly been received by Stavski, who suggested that we should go for a time to a rest home while the question of work for M. was being decided. On Stavski's instructions, the Literary Fund had already issued us vouchers to enable us both to spend two months in a rest home at Samatikha, and this unexpected stroke of luck had made us feel very much better. When we mentioned it to Fadeyev, however, he did not sound pleased: "Vouchers? Where to? Who gave them to you? Where is Samatikha? Why not to the Union rest home?" M. explained that the Union of Writers had no rest homes beyond the hundred- kilometer radius. "What about Maleyevka?" Fadeyev asked. We had never heard of this place, but when we asked about it, Fadeyev sud­denly became evasive. "Oh, it's a pretty run-down building they've just let the Union have. I suppose it's being done over." M. then said he imagined they would not want to let him go to a Union rest home until the general question of his status had been cleared up. Fadeyev readily accepted this explanation. He was clearly upset and worried about something. Now, looking back on it, I can see that he had suddenly realized what was afoot. It is difficult for even the most hardened person to look at such things calmly—and Fadeyev was an emotional man.

The car stopped in the Kitaigorod district.* Our reason for going there, if I remember rightly, was to call at the Central Rest Homes Bureau to tell them our day of departure so they could arrange for horses to be sent to meet us at Charusti on the Murom railroad. Sa- matikha was twenty-five kilometers farther on from there.

Fadeyev got out of the car and gave M. a warm farewell embrace. M. promised to come and see him when he got back. "Yes, yes—you must," Fadeyev said as we parted. His elaborate farewell and oddly gloomy air made us feel uneasy. What was wrong? Everybody had more than his fair share of troubles in those years, so there was nothing all that surprising about it. Elated by our first windfall in Moscow—fancy the Union of Writers being so kind to us!—we never for a moment thought that Fadeyev's gloom might somehow be con­nected with M.'s fate and Andreyev's refusal to help—a terrible sen­tence in itself. Fadeyev, with all his experience and excellent under­standing of Party affairs, could not have failed to see this.

And why, incidentally, was he not at all worried about talking to us in front of his chauffeur? Nobody ever did this. Under our sys­tem of surveillance, the chauffeurs of prominent officials always re­ported on their employers' every word and gesture. I happen to know that after Stalin's death, when Surkov took over the running of the Union of Writers, the first thing he did on being given Fa­deyev's car was to refuse it on some idiotic pretext—saying it was too old or the wrong make—and get rid of the chauffeur that came with it. Evidently, in the new climate after Stalin's death, he hoped to avoid constant eavesdropping. Surely Fadeyev was not so fanati­cally certain of his immunity that he took no account of the "ears of State" in his car? Or was it, rather, that he had already given his assent to the fate prepared for M. and could therefore look bright- eyed at his chauffeur as he spoke with the untouchable in the back seat? Liuba [Ehrenburg] has told me that Fadeyev was a cold and cruel man—something quite compatible with emotionalism and the ability to shed a tear at the right moment. This became very clear, according to Liuba, at the time of the execution of the Yiddish writ-

* A district in the center of Moscow.

ers.[26] Then also it was a case of tearful farewell embraces after he had signified his formal agreement to their arrest and liquidation—even though the Yiddish writers, unlike Mandelstam, were his friends.

But, unfamiliar as we were with the ways of officialdom in this irrational country of ours, we were just baffled by such duplicity, and certainly didn't understand how on earth a writer could behave like this, even if he held a high post in the writers' organization. We still didn't realize the extent to which people had been corrupted, nor did we know that heads of departments were always required to countersign lists of their subordinates who had been arrested, and were thus deliberately made party to their destruction. In 1938, however, this particular function would have been carried out by Stavski rather than Fadeyev—or so people say. The trouble is that we cannot be certain about anything: the past is still wrapped in mystery, and we still do not really know what they did to us.

Less than a year later, during a party in Lavrushinski Street to celebrate the award of the first Government decorations to be given to writers, Fadeyev learned about the death of M. and drank to his memory with the words "We have done away with a great poet." Translated into Soviet idiom, this meant: "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."

This is not quite the end of Fadeyev's involvement in our story. Shortly before the end of the war I had a chance encounter with him as I was going up to the Shklovskis' in the elevator. I was just about to close the door and press the button when the doorwoman shouted that someone else was coming—I waited a moment, and in walked Fadeyev. He did not greet me, and, being used to this kind of thing, I simply turned away so as not to embarrass a man who didn't want to recognize me. But as soon as the elevator started to move, Fade­yev bent down to my ear and whispered to me that it was Andreyev who had signed M.'s sentence. Or at least that is how I understood the sense of his words, which were roughly: "The business with Osip Emilievich was handled by Andreyev." Then the elevator stopped and Fadeyev got out. I did not yet know about the three- man tribunalst which operated then, and had imagined that sen­tences were passed only by the secret police. I was therefore puzzled by this reference to Andreyev. I also noticed that Fadeyev was a little drunk.

Why did he speak to me like that, and was he telling the truth? It is possible that in his fuddled brain the memory of our last conversa­tion in his car simply sparked off an association with Andreyev, whom he had mentioned to us then. But he may have been speaking the truth. I know from the letter of the secret-police official who killed himself in Tashkent that Andreyev was one of the direct agents of Stalin's terrorist policies and came to Tashkent to brief the secret police on the "simplified interrogation procedures" required at the "new stage." [27]

But it scarcely matters who actually signed the sentence—in those years everybody readily signed whatever was put before them. This was not only because they feared they would otherwise at once be dispatched to the other world. It was also because we were all so well disciplined that we took part in the killing of our own kind and justified ourselves by reference to "historical necessity." The St. Bartholemew massacre lasted only one night—perhaps the cutthroats responsible for it boasted of their heroic deed to the end of their days—yet it has remained in human memory forever. The humanist ideas of the nineteenth century—no matter how ill-founded and spe­cious they may have been—had nevertheless become ingrained in our minds, and though there is never any lack of hired killers, one cannot help wondering what old revolutionaries, dedicated as young men to the service of mankind, must have thought as they sacrificed their humanist principles to "historical necessity." And is it conceiv­able that people will not learn from our example?

Though I can be certain of nothing, I feel that when he gave us a lift in his car Fadeyev already knew what was going to happen to M., and, what is more, that he at once understood the reason for M. being sent to a rest home not belonging to the Union of Writers.

77 The Young Lady of Samatikha

_E

verything went very smoothly. We got out at the station of Charusti, where there was a sleigh waiting for us with sheep­skin rugs to keep us warm. It was so rare in our life for any arrange­ments to work out without a hitch that we were quite staggered. If they hadn't forgotten to send the sleigh down to meet us on time, there must have been very strict instructions to make sure every­thing was done properly. It looked as though we were being treated like guests of honor. It was a very cold March, and we could hear the pine trees cracking from the frost. The snow was so deep on the ground that at first we went everywhere on skis. As an old pupil of the Tenishev school, M. could ski and skate very well, and in Sama­tikha it proved easier to go short distances on skis than on foot. We were given a room in the main building, but it was very noisy there, and as soon as we mentioned this we were at once transferred to a smaller place, a quaint forest hut that usually served as a reading room. The resident doctor told us he had been instructed to create the best possible conditions for M. and he had therefore decided to let us have the reading room, temporarily barring the use of it to others, so that we could have peace and quiet. During our stay in Samatikha the doctor was phoned several times from the Union of Writers and asked how M. was getting on. He told us about these calls with a rather bemused air, and was evidently convinced that M. must be a very big fish indeed. We, for our part, were more and more confirmed in our impression that there had been a change in our fortunes and that "they" were beginning to look after us. What miracles they were, all these phone calls, inquiries about our health, and instructions to "create the best possible conditions," as though we really were people who mattered. This had never happened to us before.

The people in this rest home were quiet enough on the whole— most of them were workers from various factories. As always in such places, they were absorbed in their temporary love affairs, and nobody paid the slightest attention to us. The only person who bothered us was the "master of ceremonies," who kept wanting to arrange an evening of poetry reading by M. We eventually got rid of him by saying that M.'s poetry was banned and could not be read in public without the authorization of the Union of Writers. This he understood at once and after that left us alone. We were of course a little bored. M. had brought Dante, Khlebnikov, the one-volume Pushkin edited by Tomashevski and also Shevchenko—which had been given to him at the last moment by Boris Lapin. Several times M. had the urge to make a trip into town, but the doctor always said there was no room in the sleigh or truck that went to the railroad station. It was impossible to get horses on private hire—there were practically no villages nearby, and in any case the only ones left belonged to the kolkhozes. "You don't think we've fallen into a trap, by any chance?" M. asked me once after the doctor had refused to take us to the station, but it was only a passing thought. We were so well looked after in Samatikha that we couldn't help feeling that the worst was over—hadn't the Union itself paid all expenses (for both of us!) and given instructions to "create the best possible condi­tions"?

At the beginning of April—during the very first days of our stay before we asked to be moved out of the main building—a well- educated young woman of intellectual appearance arrived at the rest home. She came up to M. and started talking with him. It turned out that she knew Kaverin, Tynianov and several other completely de­cent people. Like M., she was—so she said—a "convicted person," and her parents had therefore had to buy her a voucher for a rest home in the hundred-and-five-kilometer zone, which was why she now found herself in such a "democratic" place as Samatikha. We felt sorry for her, and surprised that someone so young had com­pleted a five-year sentence already. But everything was possible in this world. She often looked in on us, particularly when we moved out to the reading room—she thought it was so cozy there! She kept telling us about her mummy and daddy—how, for instance, Daddy himself had carried her into the hospital ward when she had been ill (some Daddy to have had this privilege!), about their wonderful fluffy cats which always sat on Daddy's knee, how nice and refined everything was in their house—judging by her slender arms and legs, she was certainly a well-bred young lady—and so on and so forth. Suddenly, among all this chatter she dropped a remark about her interrogation—how she had flatly refused to name the author of some poems and had fallen into a dead faint when her interrogator insisted. "What poems?" M. asked her. To this our new acquaint­ance babbled on about how during a search of her writing desk they had found some banned poems, but that she had not betrayed their author. On another occasion she pestered M. with questions about who was interested in his poems and who was keeping copies of them. "Alexei Tolstoi," M. replied wickedly. But it had taken him some time to see her game, and at first he had even read her one of his poems ("Gaps in Round Bays," I think it was). The young lady squealed with delight—"How daring of you to write something like that!"—and asked whether she could have a copy. I even rebuked M. for becoming so lax—I said it must be out of boredom. "Nonsense," he said, "she's a friend of Kaverin, isn't she?" He was so relaxed in the rest home that he was even willing to put up with the young lady's tales about her daddy. Later I was to hear similar idyllic tales about Mummy and Daddy from Larisa, the daughter of the police official in Tashkent who killed himself, and from other pupils of mine with the same kind of background. I had the impression that in these circles this kind of talk was thought to be "cultured."

The young lady went away two or three days before the first of May. She had intended to stay a couple of months in Samatikha, but her daddy unexpectedly telephoned from Moscow and told her to return. She was sent to the station in a truck together with the "mas­ter of ceremonies" and somebody else from the rest home who was supposed to buy supplies for the coming holiday. We asked him to get us some cigarettes, because those they sold in the local store were no good at all. M. was very keen to escape to Moscow for the holi­day, away from the drinking, singing and other jollifications which could be expected during the May Day celebrations at the rest home. But the doctor said we couldn't: the truck would be fully loaded and there would be no room. The man we had asked to buy cigarettes for us—he was a worker staying in the rest home—returned from the station at Charusti by begging a lift in a peasant cart. He told us that when they arrived in Charusti, the young lady had gone on a drinking bout with the "master of ceremonies" and the truck driver. They had got blind drunk and behaved so badly that the worker just couldn't wait to get away. He was surprised that the stationmaster didn't seem to mind these goings-on and even, as soon as the young lady asked him, gave them permission to spend the night in the wait­ing room normally reserved for mothers and children. They went on with their drunken orgy the next morning, and the worker de­cided to start back on his own, without waiting for the truck driver. After all she had told us about how nice and cultured her parents were, we found her choice of drinking companions a little strange. "What if she's an agent?" I said to M. "Why should we worry if she is?" M. replied. "They don't want me any more—it's all past his­tory." We were so sure all our troubles were over that nothing could now sow doubts in our minds. Looking back on it all, I am certain that the young lady had been sent to Samatikha on a special mission, and that the doctor was under orders not to let us leave the place. In the meantime our fate was being decided in Moscow.

78 The First of May

_A

s the first of May came nearer, the whole rest home was spring- cleaned and got ready for the holiday. People were already trying to guess what they would be given for dinner on the day itself. There were rumors that ice cream would be on the menu. M. was dying to get away, and I tried to calm him down, pointing out that he could scarcely walk to the station on foot, and that in any case it would all be over in a couple of days.

On one of the last days before the end of April, M. and I went over to the dining room—it was in a separate building not far from the main one. On the way we saw two cars standing outside the doctor's house and trembled at the sight of them—this was the effect cars always had on us. Right by the dining room we ran into the doctor with two strangers. They were large, beefy and well- groomed types—very different from the sort who came to stay in a rest home. One was in military dress and the other in civilian clothes. They were obviously officials, but not local ones by the look of them. I decided they must have come to inspect the place. "I wonder if they've come to check up on me," M. said suddenly. "Did you notice how he looked at me?" Sure enough, the one in civilian clothes had looked around at us and then said something to the doc­tor. But we soon forgot all about them. It was more natural to as­sume that they were a couple of inspectors from local Party head­quarters who had come to see how the rest home was preparing to celebrate May Day. In a life such as ours we were always having fits of panic—everybody was constantly on the watch for signs of immi­nent disaster, and, whether our fears were justified or not, they kept us in a state bordering on dementia. We tried so much not to give way to these fears that bouts of cold terror were always succeeded by moods of recklessness during which we were quite capable of talking with police spies as though they were bosom friends.

On the first of May we didn't go out, except to the dining room for our meals, and the whole day we could hear sounds of revelry— shouting, singing and sometimes fighting. One of the other inmates, a woman textile worker from a factory near Moscow, took refuge with us. M. sat and joked with her, and I was terrified in case he said the wrong thing and she went off to denounce him. They got talking about the arrests, and she mentioned somebody at her factory who had been picked up, saying what a good person he was and how kind he had been to the workers. M. started questioning her about the man. When she had gone I told him at great length how foolish he was to be so indiscreet. He assured me he would mend his ways and never say another word to strangers. I shall never forget how I then said: "You'll have to go all the way to Siberia before you mend your ways. . . ."

That night I dreamed of ikons—this is always regarded as a bad omen. I started out of my sleep in tears and woke M. as well. "What have we got to be afraid of now?" he asked. "The worst is over." And we went back to sleep. I had never before dreamed of ikons, nor have I since—we had never possessed any ikons of our own, and the old ones which we loved had only artistic meaning for us.

In the morning we were wakened by somebody knocking quietly on the door. M. got up to open the door and three people came in: two men in military uniform and the doctor. M. began to dress. I put on a dressing gown and sat on the bed. "Do you know when it was signed?" M. asked me, looking at the warrant. It appeared that it had been signed about a week previously. "It's not our fault," one of the men in uniform explained, "we have too much to do." He com­plained that they had to work while people were on the spree over the holiday—it had been very difficult to get a truck in Charusti because everybody was off duty.

Coming to my senses, I began to get M.'s things together. One of them said to me in their usual way: "Why so much stuff? He won't be in long—they'll just ask a few questions and let him go."

There was no search. They just emptied the contents of our suit­case into a sack they had brought with them, and that was all. Sud­denly I said: "We live in Furmanov Street in Moscow. All our papers are there." In fact there was nothing in our apartment, and I said this simply to distract attention from the room in Kalinin where there really was a basket full of papers. "What do we need your papers for?" one of the men said amiably, and he asked M. to come with them. "Come with me in the truck as far as Charusti," M. said to me. "That's not allowed," one of them said, and they left. All this took twenty minutes, or even less.

The doctor went out with them. I heard the truck start up out­side, but I just remained sitting on the bed, unable to move. I didn't even close the door behind them. When the truck had left, the doc­tor came back into the room. "That's the way things are now," he said. "Don't despair—it may be all right in the end." And he added the usual phrase about how I should keep my strength up for when I needed it. I asked him about the people we had seen with him the day before. He said they were officials from the district center, and that they had asked to see the list of people staying in the rest home. "But it never occurred to me they were looking for you," he said. It was not the first time they had come to check the list the day before someone was arrested, and once they had called by phone to ask whether everybody was present. The great man-hunt also had its techniques: they always wanted to make sure a person was at home before coming to arrest him. The doctor was an old Communist and a very decent person. To get away from everything he had hidden away here in this simple workers' rest home where he was responsi­ble for the administration as well as the medical treatment of the inmates. But the life outside had nevertheless invaded his refuge— there was no escaping it.

In the morning the woman textile worker I had been so afraid of the evening before came to me and wept, cursing the "sons of bitches" for all she was worth. To get back to Moscow I would have to sell off my things. I had given what little money we had to M. The woman now helped me to sell my stuff and to pack for the journey. I had to wait an agonizingly long time for the cart that was to take me to the station. When it eventually came, I had to share it with an engineer who had come to the rest home just for the May Day holiday to visit his father, who was staying there. The doctor said goodbye to me in my room, and only the woman textile worker came outside to see me off. On the way, as we rattled along in the cart, the engineer told me that he and his two brothers all worked in the automobile industry, so that if one of them was arrested, the other two would be picked up as well—they should have been more careful and gone into different things, as it would be a terrible blow for their father if they all three disappeared. I decided he must be a Chekist and would probably take me straight to the Lubianka. But I didn't care any more.

M. and I had first met on May Day in 1919, when he told me that the Bolsheviks had responded to the murder of Uritski with a "hec­atomb of corpses." We parted on May Day 1938, when he was led away, pushed from behind by two soldiers. We had no time to say anything to each other—we were interrupted when we tried to say goodbye.

In Moscow I went straight to my brother and said: "Osia's been picked up." He went at once to tell the Shklovskis, and I went to

Kalinin to get the basket full of manuscripts we had left with Tati­ana Vasilievna. If I had delayed for a few more days, the contents of the basket would have been thrown into a sack (like the stuff from our suitcase in Samatikha) and I myself would have been taken away in a Black Maria—which at that moment I might have preferred to remaining "free." But then what would have happened to M.'s po­etry? When I see books by the Aragons[28] of this world, who are so keen to induce their fellow countrymen to live as we do, I feel I have a duty to tell about my own experience. For the sake of what idea was it necessary to send those countless trainloads of prisoners, including the man who was so dear to me, to forced labor in eastern Siberia? M. always said that they always knew what they were doing: the aim was to destroy not only people, but the intellect it­self.

79 Gugovna

_I

used to have a book on extinct birds and, looking at it, I suddenly had the thought that all my friends and acquaintances were nothing more than the last members of a dying species. I showed M a picture of a couple of extinct parakeets, and he thought they looked very much like us. I later lost the book, but I have never forgotten this instructive analogy. The only thing I did not realize then was how long-lived exotic birds can be, while the more com­monplace specimens die off like crows.

The late Dmitri Sergeyevich Usov once said to me that M. was more of an Assyrian than a Jew. "In what way?" I asked in astonish­ment. In reply he said there was an Assyrian quality about the line "grim heliotrope suns turned full in the face." "That's why he saw through our Assyrian! so easily," he added.

Bearded, short of breath and gone to seed, like M., Usov was also afraid of no one, yet frightened by everything. As he lay dying in a hospital in Tashkent, he called for me, but I did not get there in time. I hope I may be forgiven for this. But I was able to make his last days a little easier by reading M.'s poetry to him—he was de­voted to M. When Zenkevich went to the White Sea Canal on behalf of the Union of Writers, Usov was already doing the forced labor there that brought on his heart trouble. He had been arrested in connection with the "dictionary affair" and would have been shot, together with a number of others, if it hadn't been for the interven­tion of Romain Rolland. Some of them were released during the war, after serving five years in the camps, and came to central Asia to join their wives, who had been exiled there. Now all in their mid- forties, they died off,, one after another, from the heart diseases con­tracted in the camps—among them my friend Usov. Every case of this kind—like the others involving the historians and the staff at the Ermitage*—was part of the systematic destruction of the country's intellectual and spiritual resources.

Usov's wife, Alisa Gugovna (or just Gugovna for short), buried her giant of a husband in the Tashkent cemetery, marked out a spot for her own grave at his side, and settled down to live out the rest of her days in central Asia, where the climate was deadly for someone in her state of health. She also managed to rescue a former official with a large family from his remote place of exile in Kazakhstan— this she did because he had helped her during her own years of exile in the same place, chopping firewood and drawing water for her. She got a residence permit for this family in her room in a building belonging to the Teachers' Training College—so that after her death this "living-space" obtained by Usov should not go to waste. Having arranged all this, she felt she had done her duty by the world and quietly went to her grave, first giving a little money to the beggars in the cemetery, with instructions to plant a tree over her grave—like the one over her husband's—and water the flowers as long as peo­ple remembered to bring any. She was not certain she could rely for this on the people she had put in her room.

As she gradually wasted away, Alisa Gugovna continued to react keenly to all the oddities of the life around us, and to pour scorn in the choicest language on bureaucrats, imbeciles and bogus scholars. She was completely at home in the academic world and knew exactly who was a real scholar and who a police spy, and in whose com­pany it was all right to drink a bottle of the vinegary local wine. It was she who invented the toast which we always drank whenever any of our graduate students—whom we never, of course, dared trust—appeared at one of our modest parties. It was difficult to de­nounce us if we were the first to rise and propose a toast in honor of

* Museum in Leningrad, formerly a part of the Winter Palace.

those we had to thank for this "happy life" of ours! The police spies among our graduates were quite flummoxed by this.

Despite her lame leg, Alisa Gugovna was always busily moving around her room, rearranging the piles of Usov's books and creating an effect of home comfort, quite extraordinary for us, by improvis­ing things from broken pieces of china and tattered old blankets that must have gone back to the days of serfdom. Usov and she had a favorite drinking mug nicknamed "The Goldfinch" which nobody was allowed to use unless they could recite M.'s poem by heart. Alisa liked to massage her face with her slender fingers, remarking that Akhmatova didn't look after herself at all. She took very good care of her hands—which was important if you had spent years lighting stoves and scrubbing floors with them—and of her long, almost gray braids. She was secretly very worried that if she didn't "keep her looks" Usov might not recognize her in the next world. She had been just as concerned about her looks when she lived in exile in Kazakhstan, waiting for Usov to finish serving his sentence in the forced-labor camp: she wanted to look as beautiful to him as the night they had parted. After his death she was angry with him for a long time because he had been so thoughtless as to abandon her like this—he had, she felt, deserted her, leaving her to cope all alone with the linguistics she had to teach in order to earn her widow's daily bread.

She was one of the last few people to speak with the accent of the old Moscow aristocracy, and Usov always used to say that she could always, in any circumstances, count on being taken for an honorary Jewess rather than a born one. At the same time, account would no doubt be taken of the work she did before she was exiled: the Lenin Library employed her as a consultant to identify people in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century portraits. She knew all the gossip there was to know about the ladies of that period, and there was no greater expert on the genealogy of the families from which the poets of the time came.

This, then, was how the beauties of my generation ended their lives—as the widows of martyrs, consoled in prison or exile only by a secret hoard of verse stored in their memory.

In those days people who read poetry belonged to a breed apart, like members of a dying species of bird. They were invariably the kindest and most honest people in the world—not to speak of their courage. Will the generation of new readers who are appearing now, in the sixties, be able to match their courage, or, rather, strength of mind? Will they face whatever ordeals life has in store for them as Alisa Gugovna did?—though she always maintained that she was just a spoiled and crotchety old woman with a bad temper. Alisa was so spoiled by fate that even in exile she managed to keep her long braids, her wonderful memory for poetry and her savage intolerance for any kind of time-serving or dishonesty.

Once at Tashkent University she was stopped by a young scholar who started asking questions about me and wanted to know whether I was keeping Mandelstam's papers. Alisa answered evasively and im­mediately afterward came to report to me that the young man had suggested it would be wisest to burn the lot. He was very insistent that she convey this advice to me, and referred to some mysterious source which he did not dare name. "Nonsense," I said, "I would never dream of it. If they come and take it from me, that's one thing—but I shall never destroy it myself." "That's right," said Gugovna, "but there's no point in letting it fall into their hands ei­ther. We'll make some copies for them and hide the originals." We sat up the whole of that night preparing a pile of copies. Gugovna took the originals away with her and deposited them in a safe place. We had a rule that I should never know whom the papers were with—this meant that if I was arrested, I should not in any circum­stances be able to name the person who was keeping them.

We were always preparing for the worst, and that is perhaps the reason we survived. When we ran into each other at the university, where we both taught, Gugovna would tell me that the "gold­finches" were all right and singing as well as ever. The use of this code even earned her a reputation as a bird-fancier. All this hap­pened at the time when I was being visited by the "private pupil" about whom Larisa had warned me as an employee of her father. It is possible that she was working on her own initiative rather than on direct orders—or so I judge from the fact that when the girl went to Larisa's father and complained about Larisa coming to see me and hence making it difficult for her to "work," he ordered the girl to leave me alone, explaining that M. had been a criminal, not a political offender. As he put it, M. had been "caught in Moscow after disgracing himself in some way, and he had no right to be in the city." He added that I was "in the charge of Moscow." Presumably my file, which followed me from city to city, had a note to this effect. I heard about this from Larisa. After the "private pupil" had disappeared, Gugovna brought my papers back. She did not live till Stalin's death, but, like me, she was an incorrigible optimist and knew that one day he would have to die.

8 о The Trap

_H

efore I learned of M.'s death I kept having a dream: I was out with him buying something for our supper and he was standing behind me; we were about to go home, but when I turned around he was no longer there and I caught a glimpse of him somewhere ahead of me. I ran after him, but never managed to catch up and ask what they were doing with him "there." ... At this time there were already rumors about the torture of prisoners.

In my waking hours I was tormented by remorse: when we saw the two visiting officials with the doctor, why hadn't we read the writing on the wall and left at once for the railroad station? Why did we have to be so Spartan and refrain from giving way to fear— even if it had meant going on foot, leaving all our stuff behind, and perhaps dying of heart failure on the twenty-five-kilometer walk?

Why had we let ourselves be lured into a trap just because we didn't want to think about food and lodging for a few weeks, be­cause we didn't want to go on pestering our friends for money? I have no doubt whatsoever that Stavski deliberately sent us into this trap. Evidently the police had to wait for a decision from Stalin or someone close to him—without such authorization it was impossible to arrest M. on account of Stalin's personal order in 1934 to "isolate but preserve" him. Stavski must have been told to arrange for M. to stay for the time being in some definite place so they wouldn't have to look for him when the moment came. In other words, to save the "organs" any tiresome detective work, Stavski had obligingly sent us to a rest home. The "organs" were desperately overworked and a good Communist like Stavski was always glad to help them. He had even been careful in his choice of a rest home: it was not a place you could easily get out of in a hurry—twenty-five kilometers to the nearest station was no joke for a man with a weak heart.

Before sending us to Samatika, Stavski had received M. for the first time. This also we had taken as a good sign. But in fact Stavski probably wanted to see M. only to make it easier for him to write his report—the sort of report always written on a man about to be ar­rested.

Such reports were sometimes written after the event, when the person in question had already been arrested, and sometimes before­hand. This was one of the formalities which had to be observed in the process of destroying people. In ordinary cases, these reports were made by the head of whatever organization the arrested man worked for, but when writers were involved, the "organs" often required additional reports and were liable to call on any member of the Union of Writers to supply one. In the moral code of the sixties we distinguish between straight denunciations and "reports" made under pressure. Who in those days could have been expected to re­fuse to give a report on an arrested colleague if asked to do so by the "organs"? Anybody who refused would have been arrested on the spot, and he also had to consider the consequences to his family.

People who wrote reports of this kind excuse themselves now by saying that they never went beyond what had been alleged about the victim in the press. Stavski was no doubt quite familiar with what had been written about M.—the neatly filed clippings would have been produced for him by his secretaries—and all he had to do was add a little by way of personal impressions. M. provided the ma­terial he needed during their interview by giving his views on capital punishment. He noticed that Stavski listened very intently when he talked about this—nothing, as we know, unites members of a ruling class more than complicity in crime, of which there was certainly more than enough.

In 1956, when for the first time in twenty years I went into the Union of Writers and saw Surkov, he greeted me with great expres­sions of joy. At that moment many people thought the revision of the past would be much more thoroughgoing than it actually was; the optimists did not foresee the recoil of the spring carefully pro­vided for by the Stalinist system—that is, the reaction of all the myr­iads of people implicated in past crimes. As Larisa, the daughter of the Tashkent police official, said: "One can't make such sudden changes—it's so traumatic for people who were in official positions." It was probably about this that she wanted to make her threatened protest abroad. . . .

Surkov at once began asking me about M.'s literary remains: where were they? He kept on telling me that he had once had some of M.'s verse written out in M.'s own hand, but that Stavski had taken it away from him—he couldn't think why, since Stavski didn't read poetry. To put a stop to this senseless conversation, I inter­rupted Surkov and told him what I thought of Stavski. He did not argue with me.

I later spoke in the same vein to Simonov, whom I went to see in the absence of Surkov. Simonov, great diplomat that he is, suggested I submit a formal application requesting that M. be posthumouslymade a member of the Union of Writers; he said I should refer to the fact that before M.'s second arrest Stavski had been proposing to have him formally elected. I rejected the idea and told Simonov what I thought of Stavski's role. He didn't argue either—he knew from his own experience how people in official posts had behaved in those fateful years. Both he and Surkov were lucky not to have been top officials then—so they didn't have to countersign lists of people to be arrested; nor were they forced to write reports on candidates for liquidation. I hope to God they didn't, anyway.

he only link with a person in prison was the window through

But it is pointless to mention names. Any other official would have done the same as Stavski, unless he wanted to be spirited away by car at dead of night. We were all the same: either sheep who went will­ingly to the slaughter, or respectful assistants to the executioners. Whichever role we played, we were uncannily submissive, stifling all our human instincts. Why did we never try to jump out of win­dows or give way to unreasoning fear and just run for it—to the forests, the provinces, or simply into a hail of bullets? Why did we stand by meekly as they went through our belongings? Why did M. obediently follow the two soldiers, and why didn't I throw myself on them like a wild animal? What had we to lose? Surely we were not afraid of being charged with resisting arrest? The end was the same anyway, so that was nothing to be afraid of. It was not, indeed, a question of fear. It was something quite different: a paralyzing sense of one's own helplessness to which we were all prey, not only those who were killed, but the killers themselves as well. Crushed by the system each one of us had in some way or other helped to build, we were not even capable of passive resistance. Our submissiveness only spurred on those who actively served the system. How can we escape the vicious circle?

81 The Window on the Sophia Embankment

which one handed parcels and money to be forwarded to him by the authorities. Once a month, after waiting three or four hours in line (the number of arrests was by now falling off, so this was not very long), I went up to the window and gave my name. The clerkbehind the window thumbed through his list—I went on days when he dealt with the letter "M"—and asked me for my first name and initial. As soon as I replied, a hand stretched out of the window and I put my identity papers and some money into it. The hand then re­turned my papers with a receipt and I went away. Everybody en­vied me because I at least knew that my husband was alive and where he was. It happened only too often that the man behind the window barked: "No record. . . . Next!" All questions were useless—the official would simply shut his window in your face and one of the uniformed guards would come up to you. Order was immediately restored and the next in line moved up to the window. If anybody ever tried to linger, the guard found ready allies among the other people waiting.

There was generally no conversation in the line. This was the chief prison in the Soviet Union, and the people who came here were a select, respectable and well-disciplined crowd. There were never any untoward events, unless it was a minor case of someone asking a question—but persons guilty of such misconduct would speedily retreat in embarrassment. The only incident I saw was when two little girls in neatly starched dresses once came in. Their mother had been arrested the previous night. They were let through out of turn and nobody asked what letter their name began with. All the women waiting there were no doubt moved by pity at the thought that their own children might soon be coming here in the same way. Somebody lifted up the elder of the two, because she was too small to reach the window, and she shouted through it: "Where's my mummy?" and "We won't go to the orphanage. We won't go home." They just managed to say that their father was in the army before the window was slammed shut. This could have been the actual case, or it could have meant that he had been in the secret police. The children of Chekists were always taught to say that their father was "in the army"—this was to protect them from the curiosity of their schoolmates, who, the parents explained, might be less friendly otherwise. Before going abroad on duty, Chekists also made their children learn the new name under which they would be living there. . . . The little girls in the starched dresses probably lived in a government building—they told the people wait­ing in line that other children had been taken away to orphanages, but that they wanted to go to their grandmother in the Ukraine. Before they could say any more, a soldier came out of a side door and led them away. The window opened again and everything re­turned to normal. As they were being led away, one woman called them "silly little girls," and another said: "We must send ours away before it's too late."

These little girls were exceptional. Children who came and stood in line were usually as restrained and silent as grown-ups. It was generally their fathers who were arrested first—particularly if they were military people—and they would then be carefully instructed by their mothers on how to behave when they were left completely alone. Many of them managed to keep out of the orphanages, but that depended mainly on their parents' status—the higher it had been, the less chance the children had of being looked after by rela­tives. It was astonishing that life continued at all, and that people still brought children into the world and had families. How could they do this, knowing what went on in front of the window in the build­ing on Sophia Embankment?

The women who stood in line with me tried not to get drawn into conversation. They all, without exception, said that their husbands had been arrested by mistake and would soon be released. Their eyes were red from tears and lack of sleep, but I don't recall anyone ever crying while we stood in line. When they left their homes, they composed their features by some effort of the will and tried to look their best. Most of them came to hand in their parcels during work­ing hours—they got off on some pretext or other—and on returning to their offices they had to be very careful not to show their feelings. Their faces had become masks.

In Ulianovsk, at the end of the forties, I had working for me a woman who lived in a college dormitory with her two children. She had come to the college as a technical assistant and soon made herself indispensable. She was even promoted and allowed to take courses on an extramural basis. She had practically nothing to live on, and her children were literally starving—she said her husband had left her and wouldn't give her anything for their upkeep. People advised her to sue for alimony, but she just cried and said that would go against her pride. She and her children were visibly getting thinner all the time. She was summoned by the director, who told her she should swallow her pride for the children's sake, but she would not budge: her husband had betrayed her, deserted her for another woman in a most despicable fashion, and she would not take money from him or allow him to come anywhere near her children. People tried to influence her through her oldest son, but he was just as stub­born as she. A few years later her husband suddenly appeared on the scene, and we all saw her fling herself into his arms. She then re­signed from her job and began to pack her bags. Our omniscient janitresses soon learned that the husband had been refused permis­sion to live in Ulianovsk because he had just been released from a forced-labor camp. All these years his wife had been putting it on about her pride and broken heart in order not to lose her job. If it hadn't been the most insignificant of positions, the "organs" would certainly have informed the personnel section that she was the wife of a prisoner—though it is also possible that he had been arrested not under the notorious Article 58, but on some criminal or other non- political charge. He was released just before Stalin's death, so that he was not in danger of being re-arrested, and I hope that he and his family are now thriving. I can just imagine how the mother must have sat at night with her two undernourished children, telling them how careful they must be if they wanted their father to return. Their father had once been a student of political science and had shone in the realm of ideology. This was one of many cases in which the regime struck down its own supporters.

After several months of standing in line at the window on the Sophia Embankment I was told one day that M. had been transferred to Butyrki. This was the prison in which people were held before being sent off in prison trains to the forced-labor camps. I rushed there to find out on what days they dealt with inquiries about people whose names began with the letter "M." In Butyrki I was only once able to hand over something for M.; the second time I tried, I was told that he had been sent to a camp for five years by decision of the Special Tribunal.[29]

This was confirmed to me in the Prosecutor's Office after I had stood in line there endlessly. There were special windows through which requests for information were handed, and I did the same as everybody else. Exactly a month after putting in a request, one was always informed that it had been turned down. This was the usual routine for a prisoner's wife—if she was lucky enough not to have been sent to a camp herself. In the smooth, impregnable wall against which we beat our heads they had cut these little windows through which we handed in parcels or requests for information. I was considered particularly lucky because I got a letter—the only one—from M. and thus learned where he was. I immediately sent a package to him there, but it was returned to me and I was told that

Letter from Osip Mandelstam sent to his brother Alexander [Shura], and to his wife, from the "transit camp" near Vladivostok

Dear Shura,

/ am in Vladivostok—USVITL,¹ barracks no. 11. I was given five years for c.r.a.² by the Special Tribunal. The transport left Butyrki on September p, and we got here Octo­ber 12. My health is very bad, Vm extremely exhausted and thin, almost unrecognizable, but I dorit know whether there's any sense in sending clothes, food and money. You can try, all the same. Vm very cold without proper clothes.

My darling Nadia—are you alive, my dear? Shura, write to me at once about Nadia. This is a transit point. Vve not been picked for Kolyma and may have to spend the winter here.

I kiss you, my dear ones. Osia. Shura: one more thing. The last few days we've been going out to work. This has raised my spirits. This camp is a transit one and they send us on from here to regular ones. It looks as though Vve been rejected, so I must prepare to spend the winter here. So please send me a telegram and cable me some money.

USVITL: "Directorate for North-Eastern Corrective Labor Camps."

"Counter-revolutionary activity."

to go to the Union of Writers and sound out the ground. We al­ready knew that the widows of both Babel and Meyerhold had ap­plied for the rehabilitation of their husbands, and Ehrenburg had long been advising me to follow suit, but I had been in no hurry. Now, however, I decided to go to the Union.

Surkov came out to see me, and by the way he treated me I could see that times had indeed changed: nobody had ever spoken to me like this before. My first conversation with him took place in an anteroom in the presence of secretaries. He promised to see me again in a few days' time and begged me not to leave Moscow until we had spoken. For two or three weeks following this I kept phoning the personnel section of the Union, and every time they asked me in dulcet tones to wait a little longer. This meant that Surkov still had not received instructions about what he was to say to me. So I just continued to wait, marveling at the way that strange institution known as the "personnel section" had suddenly changed its tune.

A meeting was at last arranged, and I saw how pleased Surkov was at being able to talk like a human being. He promised to help Lev Gumilev and did everything for me that I asked him. Thanks to Surkov, I was given a pension—at the moment of our interview I was again out of work, and Surkov got in touch with the Ministry of Education and told them how outrageously I was being treated. He took a rosy view of the future and promised to arrange for me to live in Moscow, getting me a residence permit and a room, and he also broached the subject of publishing M.'s work. He said that, to begin with, I should formally apply for M.'s rehabilitation. I asked him how it would have been if M. had no widow to do this for him, but I didn't pursue the matter.

I soon received an official notice clearing M. of the charges brought against him in 1938, and the woman Prosecutor dealing with the case helped me draft an application to have M. cleared of the charges brought against him in 1934 ("the accused wrote the poem, but did not circulate it"). This second application was considered during the Hungarian events* and it was turned down. Surkov, however, decided to ignore this and appointed a committee to go into the question of M.'s literary remains. I was given 5,000 roubles by way of compensation. I divided the money among all the people who had helped us in 1937.

The second stage in the ritual of restoring the names of writers

• The Hungarian uprising of November 1956, which was followed by a political reaction in Moscow.

who perished in the camps is the publication of their work. Here the obstacles have been manifold. I know nothing about the competi­tion they frighten us with,[30] but I do know how ruthlessly people fight to keep their entrenched positions. When the first rumors were heard about the rehabilitation commissions established by Mikoyan, many people were very upset—and not only people who had helped to dispose of their competitors. I heard whispered questions about where room could possibly be found for all the ex-prisoners return­ing from the camps—suppose they all wanted their old jobs back? How many new posts would have to be created in Soviet institutions to accommodate these hordes of "returnees" (as they were known)! But there was no problem: the majority of the returnees were in such poor shape that they had no thought of taking up any kind of active career again. Everything passed off very quietly, and those who had worried about having to make room heaved sighs of relief. But literature is a different matter. The carefully contrived "order of precedence" has to be protected at all cost, if many established reputations are not to collapse. This is why there is so much opposi­tion to the publication of work by those who perished. It must be said that some of the living do not fare any better either.

A volume of M.'s poetry was scheduled by the Poets' Library in 1956. All the members of the editorial board pronounced themselves in favor. I was very pleased by Prokofiev's attitude—he said that M. was simply not a poet and that the best way to demonstrate the fact would be to publish him. Unhappily, he later abandoned this high- minded position and has since fought the proposal tooth and nail. Orlov, the editor-in-chief of the series, didn't at first anticipate any opposition, and started writing me friendly letters, but when he saw what trouble there might be with the volume, he hastily beat a re­treat and broke off our correspondence. One could, however, scarcely expect anything else of Orlov, who is a high official and quite indifferent to M.'s poetry into the bargain.

Much more serious is the attitude shown by several people of real authority and independence who are anything but bureaucrats and have a real love of M.'s work. Two of them—both outstanding rep­resentatives of the generation that was destroyed—have explained to me that Orlov is right not to publish M., which technically would be quite possible for him: "It might be exploited by his enemies—thereare lots of people who would like to take his place. If he goes, it will be the end of a distinguished series." By sacrificing the Mandelstam volume, they argued, Orlov would keep his position and thus be able to carry out his project to publish the poets of the twenties, thirties and forties of the last century—a project with which both of these people were concerned. It is difficult for me to make any sense of all this, with the overlapping personal and group interests involved— not to mention the struggle to keep one's job and get a share of the cake handed out by the State. Since it is impossible, in our condi­tions, for me to publish M.'s work myself at my own expense, I realize that I shall not live to see his poetry come out in this country —I am now getting on in years. I am consoled only by the words of Akhmatova, who says that M. does not need Gutenberg's invention. In a sense, we really do live in a pre-Gutenberg era: more and more people read poetry in the manuscript copies that circulate all over the country. All the same, I am sorry I shall never see a book.

82 The Date of Death

some journalists from Pravda, who mentioned it to Shklovski, someone in the Central Committee said in their hearing that it now appeared that there had been no case against Mandelstam at all. This was shortly after the dismissal of Yezhov and was meant to serve as an illustration of his misdeeds. . . . The conclusion I drew was that M. must be dead.

Not long afterward I was sent a notice asking me to go to the post office at Nikita Gate. Here I was handed back the parcel I had sent to M. in the camp. "The addressee is dead," the young lady behind the counter informed me. It would be easy enough to establish the date on which the parcel was returned to me—it was the same day on which the newspapers published the long list of Government awards—the first ever—to Soviet writers.

г the end of December 1938 or in January 1939, according to

My brother Evgeni went that same day to tell the Shklovskis in the writers' apartment building on Lavrushinski Street. They went to call Victor from the apartment downstairs—Katayev's, I think it was—where Fadeyev and other "Fellow Travelers" were drinking onthe occasion of the honor done them by the State. It was now that Fadeyev shed a drunken tear for M.: "We have done away with a great poet!" The celebration of the awards took on something of the flavor of a surreptitious wake for the dead. I am not clear, however, as to who there (apart from Shklovski) really understood what M.'s destruction meant. Most of them, after all, belonged to the genera­tion which had changed its values in favor of the "new." It was they who had prepared the way for the strong man, the dictator who was empowered to kill or spare people at his own discretion, to establish goals and choose whatever means he saw fit for their fulfillment.

In June 1940, M.'s brother Alexander was summoned to the Regis­try Office of the Bauman district* and handed M.'s death certificate with instructions to pass it on to me. M.'s age was given as forty- seven, and the date of his death as December 27, 1938. The cause was given as "heart failure." This is as much as to say that he died be­cause he died: what is death but heart failure? There was also some­thing about arteriosclerosis.

The issue of a death certificate was not the rule but the exception. To all intents and purposes, as far as his civil status was concerned, a person could be considered dead from the moment he was sent to a camp, or, indeed, from the moment of his arrest, which was auto­matically followed by his conviction and sentence to imprisonment in a camp. This meant he vanished so completely that it was re­garded as tantamount to physical death. Nobody bothered to tell a man's relatives when he died in camp or prison: you regarded your­self as a widow or orphan from the moment of his arrest. When a woman was told in the Prosecutor's office that her husband had been given ten years, the official sometimes added: "You can remarry." Nobody ever raised the awkward question as to how this gracious "permission" to remarry could be squared with the official sentence, which was technically by no means a death sentence. As I have said already, I do not know why they showed such exceptional consider­ation to me by issuing a death certificate. I wonder what was behind it.

In the circumstances, death was the only possible deliverance. When I heard that M. had died, I stopped having my nightmares about him. Later on, Kazarnovski said to me: "Osip Emilievich did well to die: otherwise he would have gone to Kolyma." Kazarnovski had himself served his sentence in Kolyma, and when he was released in 1944 he turned up in Tashkent. He lived there without a permit

• A district in central Moscow.

or ration cards, hiding from the police, terrified of everybody and drinking very heavily. He had no proper shoes, and I gave him some tiny galoshes that had belonged to my mother. They fitted him very well because he had no toes on his feet—they had become frozen in the camp and he had chopped them off with an ax to prevent gan­grene. Whenever they were all taken to the baths, their clothes froze in the damp air of the changing room and rattled like sheets of tin.

Recently I heard an argument as to who was more likely to sur­vive the camps: the people who worked, or those who managed not to. Those who worked died of exhaustion, and those who didn't starved to death. This much was clear to me, though I had neither arguments nor personal observations of my own to support either side in the discussion. The few people who survived were exceptions who proved the rule. In fact, the whole argument reminded me of the Russian folk ballad about the hero at the crossroads: whichever way he goes, he will perish. The main feature of Russian history, something that never changes, is that every road always brings disas­ter—and not only to heroes. Survival is a matter of pure chance. It is not this that surprises me so much as the fact that a few people, for all their frailty, came through the whole ordeal like heroes, not only living to tell the tale, but preserving the keenness of mind and mem­ory that enables them to do so. I know people like this, but the time has not yet come to name them—apart from the one whom we all know: Solzhenitsyn.

Kazarnovski had come through only with his life and a few dis­jointed recollections. He had arrived at the camp in Kolyma in the winter and remembered that it was an utter wilderness which was only just being opened up to receive the enormous influx of people being sent to do forced labor. Not a single building or barracks ex­isted yet. They lived in tents and had to put up the prison buildings themselves.

I have heard that prisoners were sent from Vladivostok to Kolyma only by sea, which freezes over in winter—though quite late in the year. I am puzzled, therefore, as to how Kazarnovski could have arrived at Kolyma in winter, after the sea route was no longer navi­gable. Could it be that he was first sent to another camp, somewhere in the neighborhood of Vladivostok, because of overcrowding in the "transit" camp? At this period the Vladivostok transit camp, where prisoners were held temporarily before being sent on to Kolyma, can hardly have coped with the prison trains arriving all the time. Everything was too confused in Kazarnovski's disordered brain,

The Date of Death Z79

and I could not clear this point up, though in trying to establish the date of M.'s death it was very important to know at exactly what moment Kazarnovski left the transit camp.

Kazarnovski was the first more or less authentic emissary I had met from the "other world." Before he actually turned up, I had already heard about him from other people and knew that he had really been with M. in the transit camp and had apparently even helped him in some way. They had occupied bunks in the same bar­racks, almost next to each other. This was the reason I hid Kazarnov­ski from the police for three months while I slowly extracted from him all the information he had brought to Tashkent. His memory was like a huge, rancid pancake in which fact and fancy from his prison days had been mixed up together and baked into an insepa­rable mass.

I already knew that this kind of affliction of the memory was not peculiar to the wretched Kazarnovski or a result of drinking too much vodka. It was a feature of almost all the former camp inmates I have met immediately after their release—they had no memory for dates or the passage of time and it was difficult for them to distin­guish between things they had actually experienced themselves and stories they had heard from others. Places, names, events and their sequence were all jumbled up in the minds of these broken people, and it was never possible to disentangle them. Most accounts of life in the camps appeared on first hearing to be a disconnected series of stories about the critical moments when the narrator nearly died but then miraculously managed to save himself. The whole of camp life was reduced to these highlights, which were intended to show that although it was almost impossible to survive, man's will to live was such that he came through nevertheless. Listening to these accounts, I was horrified at the thought that there might be nobody who could ever properly bear witness to the past. Whether inside or outside the camps, we had all lost our memories. But it later turned out that there were people who had made it their aim from the beginning not only to save themselves, but to survive as witnesses. These relentless keepers of the truth, merging with all the other prisoners, had bided their time—there were probably more such people in the camps than outside, where it was all too common to succumb to the temptation to make terms with reality and live out one's life in peace. Of course those witnesses who have kept a clear memory of the past are few in number, but their very survival is the best proof that good, not evil, will prevail in the end.

Kazarnovski was not of the heroic type, and from his endless tales I gleaned only a few tiny grains of truth about M.'s life in the camp. The population of transit camps is, of course, a constantly shifting one, but the barracks in which they had been together had at first been occupied entirely by intellectuals from Moscow and Leningrad sentenced under Article 58. This had made life very much easier. As always in those years, the prisoners appointed to be "elders" in the barracks were chosen from among common criminals—generally the type who had been connected with the "organs" before they went to prison. They were extremely vicious, and prisoners sentenced under Article 58 suffered just as much at their hands as they did from the ordinary guards, with whom they had, if anything, less contact. M. had always been afflicted by a nervous restlessness and paced rapidly up and down if he was upset. In the transit camp, this tendency to run up and down in a state of nervous excitement con­stantly got him into trouble with the guards. Outside, in the zone around the barracks, he often ran up to the perimeter and was chased away by the sentries, who shouted obscene curses at him. But none of the dozen or so witnesses I have spoken to confirms the story that he was beaten up by criminals—that is probably a legend.

Prisoners were not issued with clothing in the transit camps, and M. froze in his leather coat, which by now was in tatters. According to Kazarnovski, however, the most terrible frosts set in only after his death and he didn't have to go through them. This detail, too, is important for the date of his death.

M. scarcely ate anything, and was afraid to—as Zoshchenko was later. He always lost his bread ration and never knew which was his own mess can. According to Kazarnovski, the transit camp had a shop where they apparently sold tobacco and sugar. But where could M. have got the money? In any case, his fear of food applied to anything he could have bought there, and to sugar as well—which he would take only if it was handed to him by Kazarnovski. One can just picture it: a dirty palm offering this last gift of a piece of sugar, and M. wondering whether to take it . . . But was Kazarnovski speaking the truth? Had he perhaps invented this detail?

Apart from his fear of food and constant nervous restlessness, Ka­zarnovski noted that M. had a fixed idea that his life would be made easier when Romain Rolland wrote to Stalin about him. This little detail could not have been invented, and proves to me beyond doubt that Kazarnovski really did have contact with M. While we were still in Voronezh, we read about the arrival in Moscow of Romain

Rolland and his wife, and about their meeting with Stalin. M. knew Maya Kudasheva* and he kept saying wistfully: "Maya will see everybody in Moscow and they must have told her about me: what would it cost him [Rollandl to ask Stalin to let me off?" M. could not believe that professional humanists are not interested in the fate of individuals, and all his hopes were centered on the name of Ro- main Rolland. To be fair, however, I should add that while he was in Moscow, Romain Rolland did apparently obtain some improvement cf the lot of the linguists implicated in the "dictionary affair." At least, that's what people said. But this does nothing to change my view of professional "humanists." Real humanism knows no limits and is concerned with the fate of every individual.

Another point that made Kazarnovski's account sound genuine was that M. assured him that I must be in a camp, too, and he begged Kazarnovski, if he ever returned, to find out where I was and ask the Literary Fund to help me. All his life M. had been tied to the writ­ers' organizations like a slave laborer to his wheelbarrow, and had always depended on them for his livelihood, such as it was. However much he tried, he could never free himself of this dependence— which was so much to the advantage of those who ruled over us. Even for me, therefore, his only hope was that the Literary Fund might do something. But things turned out quite differently: during the war, when the writers' organizations had forgotten about M. and me, I managed to change over to another field of activity, and if I was able to save my life and keep my memories, it was only be­cause of this.

Sometimes, in his calmer moments, M. recited poetry to his fellow prisoners, and some of them may even have made copies. I have seen "albums" with his verse which circulated in the camps. Once he was told by somebody that in one of the death cells in Lefortovo a line from one of his poems had been scratched on the wall: "Am I real and will death really come?" When he heard this, M. cheered up and was much calmer for a few days.

He was not made to do any work—not even such things as clean­ing up inside the camp. However bad the others looked, M. looked even worse. For days on end he just wandered about, which brought down on his head threats, curses and obscenities from all the people in charge of them. He was very much upset when he was almost immediately eliminated from the transports of prisoners being sent on to the regular work camps. He thought things would be easier for

* Rolland's Russian wife.

him there—though people with experience of them tried to disabuse him.

Once M. heard that there was somebody in the camp by the name of Khazin and he asked Kazarnovski to go with him to find out whether this might be a relative of mine. It turned out to be simply a namesake. Many years later this Khazin wrote to Ehrenburg after reading his memoirs, and I was able to meet him. The existence of Khazin is yet another proof that Kazarnovski really was in the camp with M. Khazin himself saw M. a couple of times—when M. came to see him with Kazarnovski, and a second time when he took M. to see another prisoner who was looking for him. Khazin says that this meeting was very touching—the name of the other man, as Khazin remembers it, was Khint, and he was a Latvian, an engineer by pro­fession. Khint was being sent back to Moscow for a review of his case (such "reviews" generally ended tragically in those years). I don't know who this Khint was. Khazin had the impression that he had been to the same school as M. and came from Leningrad. He spent only a few days in the transit camp. Kazarnovski also remem­bered that M. had found an old schoolmate through Khazin.

According to Khazin, M. died during a typhus epidemic, but this was something Kazarnovski never mentioned. I have heard, how­ever, that there actually was a typhus epidemic then—several other people have told me about it. I should take steps to try and trace this man Khint, but in our conditions this is impossible: I can scarcely put an advertisement in the newspapers to say I am looking for someone who saw my husband in a camp. . . . Khazin is a primitive type. He got in touch with Ehrenburg because he wanted to tell him his memories of the beginning of the Revolution in which he had taken part with his brothers—all of them Chekists, it seems. This was the period he remembered best, and while talking with me he kept trying to bring the conversation back to his own heroic deeds at that time.

But to return to Kazarnovski's account: One day, despite the swearing and cursing of the guards, M. would not come down from his bunk. This was during the days when the cold was getting much worse—Kazarnovski could give no more precise indication of the date. Everybody was sent out to clear away snow, and M. was left by himself. A few days later he was removed from his bunk and taken to the camp hospital. Soon afterward Kazarnovski heard that he had died and had been buried, or, rather, thrown into a pit. Need­less to say, prisoners were buried without coffins, and stripped of their clothing—so that it wouldn't go to waste. There was no lack of corpses, and several were always buried in the same pit, after a tag with a number had been attached to each man's leg.

This would have been by no means the worst way to die, and I like to think that Kazarnovski's version is the true one. Narbut's death was incomparably worse. They say that he was employed in the transit camp to clean out the cesspits and that together with other invalids he was taken out to sea in a barge, which was blown up. This was done to clear the camp of people unable to work. I believe that such things did happen. When I later lived in Tarusa, there was an old ex-convict called Pavel who used to get water and firewood for me. Without any prompting from me, he once told me how he had witnessed the blowing up of a barge—first they had heard the explosion and then they had seen the barge sinking. From what he heard at the time, all the prisoners on board were "politi­cals" sentenced under Article 58 and no longer fit for work. There are still people—including many former camp prisoners—who even now try to find excuses for everything. Such people assure me that there was only one case like that, and that the camp commandant responsible for this atrocity was later shot. This would indeed have been a touching sequel to the story, but for some reason I am not moved by it.

Most of the people I knew who went to the camps died there almost at once. Intellectuals and professional people did not last long —it was scarcely worth living anyway. What was the point of hang­ing on to life if the only deliverance was death? What good would a few extra days have been to Margulis, who was protected by the criminals because at night he told them stories from Dumas' novels? He was in a camp together with Sviatopolk-Mirsky, who soon died of total exhaustion. Thank God that people are mortal. The only reason one could have to go on living was to remember it all and later tell the story—perhaps thereby making people think twice be­fore embarking on such lunacies again.

Another person with authentic information about M. was the biol­ogist Merkulov,* whom M. asked, if ever he was released, to go to Ehrenburg and tell him about M.'s last days in the camp—he knew by then that he would not survive himself. I reproduce his account here as it was told to me by Ehrenburg, who by the time I heard