When we began to hear touching stories about a telegram from Lenin, M. often remembered how we had heard the legend take shape in Larisa's apartment. Until her return from abroad there had been no such stories in circulation and everybody knew that Lenin had shown no concern for a poet of whom he had never even heard. But when one thinks of all the blood shed in this country, why is it that this legend has proved so persistent? I am always meeting people who assure me that the telegram has been printed in such-and-such a volume of Lenin's works, or that it is still preserved in the archives. The story has even reached the ears of the writer in stovepipe trousers—the one who always carries a box of hard candy in his pocket. He has even promised to bring me the volume in which he has read it with his own eyes, but he has never kept his promise. The myth invented by Larisa to cover up her own weakness will still have a long life in our country.
She had less luck with her image of the "Russian revolutionary woman" than with her myth about Lenin's telegram. This was probably due to the fact that, though she belonged to the victorious side, she was not really much of a fighter. M. told me how she and her husband Raskolnikov lived a life of luxury in hungry Moscow— keeping a town house, with servants and magnificently served meals. In this they were different from the Bolsheviks of an older generation, who stuck to their modest way of life much longer. Larisa and her husband justified themselves by saying that, as people engaged in building a new order, it would have been sheer hypocrisy for them to deny themselves their due as incumbents of power. Larisa was ahead of her time in fighting "egalitarianism" even before it was denounced.
I remember one story that M. told me about Larisa. At the very beginning of the Revolution there was need to arrest some high- ranking officers—admirals, or other "military specialists," as they were called. Raskolnikov and Larisa offered to help. They invited the admirals to come and stay with them, and the admirals duly accepted. They were royally entertained by their beautiful hostess, and then arrested at breakfast by the Chekists, without a shot being fired. This really was a dangerous operation, and it passed off smoothly, thanks to the trap cunningly laid by Larisa.
Larisa was capable of anything, but I am somehow convinced that if she had been in Moscow when Gumilev was arrested, she would have got him out of jail, and that if she had been alive and still in favor with the regime during the time when M. was being destroyed, she would have moved heaven and earth to try and save him. But in fact one cannot be certain of anything, people can be so changed by life.
M. was on friendly terms with her, and she wanted to take him to Afghanistan with her, but Raskolnikov wouldn't hear of it. At the time we went to see her she had already left Raskolnikov, and after that we lost touch with her completely: M. had clearly decided to have nothing more to do with this "woman of the Revolution." When we heard about her death, he sighed, and in 1937 he said how lucky Larisa had been to die in time: all the people in her circle were now being destroyed wholesale.
With Raskolnikov we had nothing in common at all. He once showered M. with telegrams—this was when he took Voronski's place as editor of Krasnaya Nov [Red Virgin Soil]. Extraordinary as it may seem, the so-called "Fellow-Traveling" writers who had been published by Voronski boycotted the journal under its new editor when he took over after the sudden dismissal of its creator. Raskolnikov so badly needed material that he even approached M., whose comment on his telegrams was: "I don't care who the editor is: I won't be published either by Voronski or Raskolnikov." The "Fellow Travelers" soon forgot their former protector and never again worried about changes in editorship. As for M., he would never have had his Noise of Time published if it had not been for Georgi Blok, who worked in the private publishing house Vremya [Time] before it was closed down.
All the people Larisa had known when she was still a professor's daughter (when she edited an absurd little magazine and visited poets to show them her poems) perished before their time—as did everybody she got to know later when she was trying to become the "woman of the Russian Revolution." She was beautiful in a heavyand striking Germanic way. Her mother watched over her as she lay dying in the Kremlin hospital, and committed suicide immediately after her death. We were so unused to people dying a natural death from illness that I still find it hard to believe that this beautiful woman could have been carried away by something as ordinary as typhus. Contradictory and unrestrained, she paid for all her sins with an early death. I sometimes feel that she may well have invented the story about the admirals in order to enhance her status as the "woman of the Russian Revolution" by taking credit for a killing. All these people building a "new world" were so vehement in denouncing as hypocrisy all the commandments, including "Thou shalt not kill." But then this same Larisa, when she visited Akhmatova at the height of the famine, was horrified to find what poverty she was living in, and a few days later reappeared with a bundle of clothing and a food parcel which she had managed to buy with special vouchers. In those days it was just as hard to get such vouchers as to free someone from jail.
2 7 Transmission Belts
petition to the totally inaccessible person it is addressed to—if it is sent by ordinary official channels, there is no hope at all that the miracle will come to pass. Millions of letters have been sent, but the number of miracles can be counted on one's fingers. Here there is certainly no question of "egalitarianism."
My telegrams to the powers-that-be would have been as futile as the housekeeper in Cherdyn said, if I had not sent copies to Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin. If it had not been for this detail, my Cherdyn friend would have been quite right. Nikolai Ivanovich was as impulsive as M. He was not the sort to ask himself what business it was of his, or to start calculating his chances of success. Instead he sat down and wrote a letter to Stalin. This was an act completely at variance with our normal code of behavior, and by that time there were very few people left in the country who were capable of such impulsiveness: they had long ago been destroyed or "re-educated."
miracle is a two-stage affair. The first stage is to get a letter or
In 1930 in a small rest home in Sukhumi for high officials, whichwe had got into owing to a blunder on the part of Lakoba, I had a conversation with the wife of Yezhov. "Pilniak comes to see us," she said. "Whom do you go to see?" When I indignantly passed this on to M., he tried to calm me: "Everybody goes to see someone. There's no other way. We go to see Nikolai Ivanovich."