During the period of M.'s exile there could be no question at all of his publishing any original work, and neither was he given translations any more. Even his name was no longer mentionable—during all those years it cropped up only once or twice in denunciatory articles. Now his name is no longer banned, but, from force of habit, people don't mention it, and in Kochetov's circles people are moved to fury by it. Not for nothing was Ehrenburg attacked mainly for the passages about M. and Akhmatova in his memoirs.
In the winter of 1937-38 there was no work of any kind to be had, and I was unable to get a job again until 1939, when it was announced that the wives of prisoners still had the right to work. But in periods of "vigilance" I was always thrown out. Since all work is in the hands of the State, the only thing one can do is "scream under the Kremlin walls." * Private means of subsistence scarcely existed. If you had your own house and plot of land, you could grow vegetables and keep a cow (but for hay you depended on the authorities); you could do dressmaking at home—until the tax inspector caught up with you; or you could take in typing, but before the war typewriters were very expensive. Finally, you could beg, but this was not easy because only the faithful servants of the regime had money to spare, and they were not the sort to compromise themselves by contact with outcasts.
Of all these means the one we chose was to "scream"—as long as it
* Quoted from Akhmatova's "Requiem." was possible. M. badgered the local branch of the Writers' Union in Voronezh, and I went to Moscow to talk with Union officials there —while they would still see me—such as Marchenko, Shcherbakov and other grandees. They wore inscrutable expressions and never answered any of my questions, but they nevertheless made some kind of inquiries "higher up." In the first winter after his exile, M.'s pension was stopped. I tried to get it restored, pleading with Shcherbakov on the grounds that M.'s "services to Russian literature" could not be denied, and that it was therefore wrong to take the pension away. My eloquence was wasted on Shcherbakov, who replied: "What sort of services to Russian literature can there be if Mandelstam has been exiled for his works?" Like everybody else, I had lost all sense of normal legal standards, and I am still curious to know whether it is in order to deprive someone of his pension if he has been sentenced to exile without loss of civil rights.
I deliberately referred to Shcherbakov and his like as "grandees." Our officials were now even of a different physical type. Until the middle of the twenties we had been dealing with former members of the old revolutionary underground and their younger assistants of a similar type. They were brusque, utterly self-righteous, and often ill- mannered, but they loved to hold forth and argue. There was about them something of the seminarists and Pisarev. Gradually they were replaced by round-headed, fair-haired types in embroidered Ukrainian shirts who affected a cheerful familiarity, cracked jokes and liked to be taken for bluff, straightforward fellows. It was all completely put on. These were superseded in their turn by diplomats who weighed every word, never gave anything away or made any promises, but at the same time tried to create the impression that they were men of power and influence. One of the first functionaries of this kind was Shcherbakov. When I first came to see him, we were both silent for a few minutes. I wanted him to speak first, but it didn't work: he was very much the dignitary waiting for the humble petitioner to make her request. I raised the question of publishing M.'s work, though I knew this was quite hopeless. He replied that the only criterion for publication was the quality of an author's work, and since Л1. was not being printed, it could only mean that his work did not pass the test. The same thing, only with a less practiced inflection of the voice, was said to me by Marchenko. Only once did Shcherbakov betray any feeling. This was when he asked me what M. was writing about now, and I replied: "About the Kama River." He misheard this and half smiled: "About the guerrillas?" But the smile disappeared when I explained that it was not about the Civil War partisans. "What is he writing about the Kama for?" he asked. The idea seemed grotesque to him. The way his face had lit up for a moment suggested that they probably expected M. to compose hymns of praise and were surprised he was not doing so. On this step he decided only in 1937, but by then it was too late to help him.
In the end, M. and I did manage to break through the blank wall— thanks to our joint efforts, he was given work in the local theater as its "literary director." He had little idea of what he was supposed to do, and in practice it just meant gossiping with the actors, with whom he got on very well. We were also able to make a little money out of the local broadcasting station—anonymous work of this kind was permitted even to exiles, though only in relatively quiet periods, when the word "vigilance" was not constantly appearing in the newspapers. We worked on several broadcasts together: "Goethe as a Young Man," "Gulliver for Children." M. often wrote the program notes for concerts, notably for a performance of Gluck's Orpheus and Eur у dice. He was very pleased when he walked along the street and heard his story of Eurydice coming over all the loudspeakers. It was at this time that he did his free versions of some Neapolitan songs for a contralto also living as an exile in Voronezh.
But even in this comparatively prosperous Voronezh period it was still difficult for us to get by. The theater paid 300 roubles a month, which just covered our rent (we paid between 200 and 300 for the various miserable rooms we lived in) and perhaps cigarettes as well. The radio also brought in between 200 and 300, and I sometimes made a little extra by advising the local newspaper on literary works submitted to them for publication. Altogether it was enough to keep us going in food. We lived mainly on cabbage soup and eggs. We could afford tea and butter, but canned fish was a rare luxury. Sometimes we let ourselves go and bought a bottle of Georgian wine. On top of everything, we also managed to feed Sergei Borisovich Ruda- kov—his wife sent him 50 roubles a month, but this was exactly what it cost him to rent the bunk in which he slept. This was during the year spent in the "agent's" house, when we had visitors nearly all the time—actors from the local theater were always coming to see us, or musicians on tour. Voronezh was one of the few provincial cities with their own symphony orchestras, and anyone on tour always passed through it. M. used to go not only to the concerts, but also to the rehearsals: he was fascinated by the fact that each conductor had a different way of working with the orchestra, and he wanted to write a piece about conductors, but nothing came of it— he never got around to it. When Leo Ginzburg and his namesake Grigori came to Voronezh on a concert tour, they spent a lot of time with us, and added variety to our meals by bringing with them cans of the fruit preserves they liked so much. Maria Veniaminovna Yudina went out of her way to give concerts in Voronezh so she could see M. and play for him. Once, when we happened to be away in the country, the singer Migai came to see us, and we were very sorry to miss him. Visits like these were great events in our life, and M., with his sociable nature, couldn't have lived without them.