Our relatively prosperous life came to an end in the autumn of 1936 after our return from a trip to Zadonsk. The local radio was abolished, as part of a move to centralize all broadcasting, the theater folded, and our newspaper work also dried up. Everything collapsed at once. Going over all the possible private means of making a livelihood, M. now decided we should try keeping a cow. But this dream faded when we realized that a cow wasn't much good without hay.
Hard as it was even during the days of relative comfort, our life in Voronezh was happier than any we had ever known. M. was very fond of the town itself. He liked everything connected with borderlands, and what interested him about Voronezh was that in Peter the Great's time it had been a frontier town—it was here that Peter had built his Azov flotilla. In Voronezh M. could still sense the free spirit of the borderlands, and he listened with fascination to the local speech, which was still Southern Russian, not Ukrainian— the dividing line between the two languages ran a little to the south of Voronezh. In the nearby village of Nikolskoye, M. wrote down the names of the streets—though they had been given new Soviet ones, the inhabitants still remembered the old ones. The people of the village were proud of their descent from outcasts and runaway convicts of Peter's time, and the streets were called after the different kinds of criminaclass="underline" Strangler's Lane, Embezzler's Lane, Counterfeiter's Row, etc. The diary with M.'s notes of this period was confiscated during his second arrest, and I have now forgotten the old Russian terms which came so naturally to the people of Nikolskoye. They were sectarians of the kind known as "jumpers" and composed religious ballads of a traditional type about their unsuccessful attempts to leap up to heaven. Not long before we visited it, the village had been the scene of dramatic events. The sectarians had fixed a day on which they would take off for heaven, and, convinced that by next morning they would no longer be of this world, they gave away all their property to their earthbound neighbors. Coming to their senses when they fell to the ground, they rushed to recover their belongings, and a terrible fight broke out. The most recent ballad which we were able to get from them told about a "jumper" saying goodbye to his beloved beehive before giving it away. M. remembered the lines by heart and often recited them. The "jumper" in the ballad didn't want to fly up to heaven, and was happy enough on earth with his beehives, his house, his wife and children.
In winter Voronezh was like a vast field of ice, and one was always slipping—as Akhmatova says in her poem: "Gingerly I tread on glass. . . ." By this time not even the big cities always had their proper complement of janitors to clear away the snow with shovels and sprinkle sand on the sidewalks. M. was not worried by ice and wind, and at times he was entranced by the town. But as often as not he cursed it and longed to get away. What irked him was the feeling of being confined, as though he had been locked in a room. "By nature, I'm the sort who is always waiting for things," he said once, "and so they have to send me to Voronezh and make me wait for something here." And, true enough, our life there consisted of nothing but waiting—for money, for answers to all our letters and petitions, for a propitious nod from on high, for salvation. But, all the same, I have never known a man who lived so greedily for the passing hours as M. He seemed to have an almost physical sense of time, of the minutes which compose it. In this respect he was the exact opposite of Ber- diayev, who says somewhere that he could never abide time and that all the anguish of waiting is longing for eternity. It seems to me that for any artist eternity is something tangibly present in every fleeting fraction of time, which he would gladly stop and thus make even more tangible. What causes anguish in an artist is not longing for eternity, but a temporary loss of his feeling that every second of time is, in its fullness and density, the equal of eternity itself. Anguish such as this naturally gives rise to concern with the future, and M. willy-nilly became "the sort who is always waiting for things." In Voronezh this side of M. developed just as much as his acute sense of the passing moment, and when anguish came upon him he wanted to rush off into the blue—but he couldn't because he was firmly tied to the spot. He was like a bird that could not stand its cage, and he was always collecting various documents in support of applications to go to Moscow for a few days—to have some glands removed (though he had never had trouble with them before) or to put his "literary affairs" in order (quite forgetting that he had no "literary affairs"). Of course he could not get permission to make the trip. In response to his sighs, Akhmatova and Pasternak even went to see Katanian to ask whether he could be transferred to another town. This request was also turned down. Katanian's office, always open to visitors, existed only for the purpose of receiving requests that were unfailingly turned down. So M. spent the whole of his three years in the Voronezh region, except for one visit beyond the boundary to Tambov, where he stayed very briefly in a rest home. He also made several journeys round the Voronezh area on assignments from the local newspaper, and once we were able to have a little vacation in Zadonsk. This was possible because Akhmatova had got 500 roubles from Pasternak for us, and when she added 500 of her own, we felt so rich that we stayed in Zadonsk for six weeks.
M.'s attempts to break loose ended in the summer of 1936 when we heard over the radio in Zadonsk about the trials then being prepared—an ominous sign that our life had entered a new phase. 1937 was approaching. By this time M. was very ill with something the doctors did not want or were unable to diagnose. He had bouts of what looked like angina pectoris. Although he had difficulty breathing, he went on with his work. Perhaps it was as well that he consumed himself like this—if he had been physically healthy, his later suffering would only have been more protracted.
It was a terrible road that stretched ahead of him, and, as we now know, the only possible deliverance was death. People of M.'s generation—and of mine, for that matter—no longer had anything to live for. He would not have lived to see even the comparatively good times since Stalin's death which Akhmatova and I regard as bliss. I realized this at the end of the forties and the beginning of the fifties, when most people who had returned from the camps after the end of their sentences (including many who had fought in the war) were sent back to them again. "M. did well to die straightaway," said Kazarnovski,* who met M. in a transit camp and then spent ten years in Kolyma. Could we ever have believed such a thing in Voronezh? We probably imagined that the worst was behind us, or, rather, like other doomed people, we tried not to peer into the future. We slowly prepared for death, lingering over every minute and relishing it, to keep the taste on our lips, because Voronezh was a miracle and only a miracle could have brought us there.
# A journalist whose evidence about Mandelstam's last days is discussed in the final chapters.
32 The Origins of the Miracle
I
n his letter to Stalin, Bukharin added a postscript saying he had been visited by Pasternak, who was upset by the arrest of Mandelstam. The purpose of this postscript was clear: it was Bukharin's way of indicating to Stalin what the effect of M.'s arrest had been on public opinion. It was always necessary to personify "public opinion" in this way. You were allowed to talk of one particular individual being upset, but it was unthinkable to mention the existence of dissatisfaction among a whole section of the community—say, the intelligentsia, or "literary circles." No group has the right to its own opinion about some event or other. In matters of this kind there are fine points of etiquette which nobody can appreciate unless he has been in our shoes. Bukharin knew how to present things in the right way, and it was the postscript at the end of his letter that explained why Stalin chose to telephone Pasternak and not someone else.