I too was saved from arrest by not having a home. The only time I had living-space of my own was in 1933, when, under pressure from Bukharin, we were given our perch on the fifth floor of a building put up specially for writers. When M. was arrested a year later, we kept our right to the apartment, but, egged on by other writers living in the building, Mate Zalke (who was in charge of it) went personally to the MGB to ask permission to make room for a "real" Soviet writer by throwing out M.'s old relative—that is, my mother. But the "miracle" was still in operation and his request was turned down with a comment to the effect that the writers should not be more royalist than the king. The fact that we had been left in possession of the apartment gave me some hope that they might allow M. to go back to Moscow, but when it was needed, it was taken away and I was thrown out too, even though I did not count as an exile. If I had stayed there together with the literary general, my bones would long ago have moldered away in some common grave in a prison camp. After M.'s second arrest I kept on the move, and when they came to look for me in the room where we had last lived in Kalinin, they could not find me. That room I could not in any case have kept—it was in a private house and cost too much for me. So I was not caught in a trap, and because I was homeless they overlooked me. That is why I was able to survive and preserve M.'s poems.
And what would have happened if in the summer of 1937, after we left her house, some other tenant had moved in with the good seamstress and stopped paying her rent on getting a title to the room from the local soviet? Would she have done the same as the rest of them and gone to denounce him to the secret police ("My tenant holds illegal meetings and carries on counter-revolutionary talk . . . as a householder I regard it as my duty . . .")? Or would she have meekly given up the little extra she got to feed her mother and son? All I know is that her little house was destroyed during the war, and that something very different has been put up in its place.
31 Money
A
t first we were materially better off in Voronezh than we had l ever been before. Impressed by the "miracle," the State Publishing House gave us translation work. As my brother Evgeni put it, Moscow looked better after it burned down. I hastily translated some ghastly novel or other, and was immediately given a second contract. But in the winter of 1934-35 the persons responsible were evidently reprimanded for their kindness. I was summoned to Moscow for a talk about my "method of translation." The editor-in- chief was then Startsev. He spoke well of my methods, but after that the head of the translation section asked me to let him have the book back on the pretext that he had to see whether or not the novel should be abridged. I never saw the book (Nest of Simple Folk) again, and it soon came out in somebody else's translation. We were paid a little that was due to us under an old contract for a translation of Maupassant, and after that the flow of money from Moscow dried
UP-
In search of work M. wrote innumerable applications, and also kept going to the local branch of the Union of Writers. The question of giving him work had been "posed in principle," as they used to say in those days. This meant that the Union of Writers, as the organization to which M. belonged, had asked for instructions "from above" and was still waiting for them. Neither M. nor I could ever get work without a great deal of preliminary fuss and delay. Even as late as 1955 I was able to take up a job in Cheboksary only after Surkov had been somewhere to get authorization and then, in my presence, phoned the result to the Minister of Education. But in 1934 no organization would give work to an exile without instructions "from above." This was because heads of departments wanted to guard against being held responsible for having a dubious person on their staff—though in times of increased "vigilance" it was no good referring to permission or authorization "from above," since such instructions were never given in writing. It was always done by a nod of the head, or by a mumbled remark over the phone: "Well, all right" or, at best, "You decide, we don't mind." There was never any trace of this in the records, and officials often paid dearly for cluttering up their staff with "alien elements." We had been "alien elements" for so many years that we knew only too well how this mechanism worked. We saw how it evolved with the passage of time as the State's power over the individual became more and more elaborate. In the eight years since the Twentieth Congress things have changed radically—we are now living in a new era—but I am talking about the Stalin period and the various phases of the subjugation of literature as M. experienced them—it was essentially the same in other fields too, with only minor differences.
In 1922, when we returned from Georgia, all the literary monthlies still had M.'s name on their lists of potential contributors, but it became more and more difficult for him actually to publish anything. Typical in this respect was Voronski, who rejected everything. "What can I do?" complained the secretary, Sergei Antono- vich Klychkov. "He says it's not topical." In 1923 M.'s name was removed from all the lists of contributors to the literary magazines. Since it happened in all of them simultaneously, this can scarcely have been a coincidence. That summer there must have been some kind of ideological conference at which the process of dividing writers into friend and foe had begun. In the winter of 1923-24 Bukharin, who was then editing the magazine Prozhektor [Searchlight] said to M.: "I cannot publish your verse—let me have some translations." It seems likely that the restriction applied at first only to magazines, since a book of verse (the Second Book) acquired by a publisher in 1922 actually appeared the following year, but two years later Narbut, who managed the Land and Factory Publishing House, said the same thing as Bukharin: "I can't publish you, but I can give you all the translating you like." By this time everybody was saying that M. had given up poetry for translation. M. was very upset when the emigre paper Nakanune [On the Eve][11] echoed our press in putting this story about. Things were in general very difficult just then: "They will only let me translate," M. complained.
But even this was not plain sailing. Apart from the fact that there was a lot of competition, M. was not among those who were being "looked after" on special instructions, and from the second half of the twenties it became much harder to obtain translating work, so that his right to a livelihood was always being contested. Nothing came of his books for children either. Marshak made a terrible mess of Balloons and The Tramcar, and only the poverty-stricken private publishers, while they still existed, offered some kind of outlet. M. was able to print a few articles in the provinces (in Kiev) and in theatrical magazines. There was evidently not yet a total ban—it was rather a question of restrictions and "recommendations" to be more in step with the times. A new stage in the struggle for the "purity of the line" was opened in 1930 by Stalin's article in Bolshevik in which he called for a complete prohibition of unsuitable works. I was working at that time on the magazine For a Communist Education, and from snatches of conversation in the editor's office I realized that the sniping phase was over and we were now in for a general offensive. M. still managed to get a few poems printed, but for publishing his "Journey to Armenia" in Zvezda [Star] one of the editors, Caesar Volpe, lost his job—he knew, incidentally, the risk he was taking. The screws were gradually being tightened. M. and Akhmatova were the first to feel the effects of Stalin's rule, but everybody else soon learned as well. Many found all the new restrictions to their advantage—these are the ones who even now would like to see a return to the past, and are still fighting to maintain their own previous positions and keep the old prohibitions in force.