M. himself was very anxious to be recognized by the Symbolists and by LEF—in particular by Verkhovski and Kirsanov—but nothing came of his efforts. Both groups were adamant in their attitude toward him, and all M.'s friends teased him about his complete failure in this respect.
34 Two Voices
I
n Andrei Bely's definition, the term "sketch" could be applied very broadly to almost any literary composition which did not bear the mark of the social novel which he so detested, or any other kind of fiction. "In this sense," M. said, "my 'Conversation About Dante' is a sketch." Bely agreed.
We had met Bely in Koktebel in 1933. M. got on well enough with him, but Bely's wife evidently remembered some old articles of M.'s and was in no mood to let bygones be bygones. Perhaps she knew about M.'s negative attitude to anthroposophy and theosophy, and felt he must therefore be hostile to her. But the two men nevertheless met—albeit surreptitiously—and enjoyed talking with each other. M. was writing his "Conversation About Dante" at the time and read it out to Bely. Their talk was animated, and Bely kept referring to his study of Gogol, which he had not yet finished.
Vasilisa Shklovski has told me that no one else has ever impressed her as much as Bely, and I can well understand this. He seemed to radiate light, and I have never met anyone else who was so literally luminous. Whether this effect was produced by his eyes, or by the constant flow of his ideas, it is hard to say, but he charged everybody who came near him with a sort of intellectual electricity. His presence, the way he looked at you, and his voice stimulated the mind and quickened the pulse. My memory is of something disembodied, an electric charge, a thunderstorm incarnate, a miracle of some kind. At this time he was already nearing his end, and he collected pebbles and autumn leaves at Koktebel to make complicated patterns with them, as he strolled under his black umbrella along the beach with his small, clever and once beautiful wife, who despised everybody not initiated into her involved, anthroposophic world.
The Symbolists were great proselytizers and fishers of men. Like all of them, Bely too was always casting around with his nets. Once he buttonholed me and gave me a long account of the theory of verse put forward in his book Symbolism. M. told him with a laugh that we had all been brought up on this book, and that I in particular was a great reader of it. This was of course an exaggeration, but I did not protest, because Bely, whom we felt was extremely spoiled by the almost cult-like devotion around him, was suddenly very pleased at having me as one of his readers, and beamed all over his face. In those years he must already have been keenly aware of his loneliness and isolation, feeling rejected and unread. The fate of his readers and friends was very sad: he was always seeing them off into exile, or going to meet them on their return when they had served their sentences. He himself was spared, but everyone around him was swept away. Whenever they detained his wife, which happened several times, he stormed and shouted with rage. "Why do they arrest her and not me?" he complained to us that summer—not long before our meeting she had been kept at the Lubianka for several weeks. The very thought of all this enraged him and did much to shorten his life. The last straw, which finally embittered him, was Kamenev's preface to his book on Gogol. This showed that, whatever the twists and turns of inner Party politics, the one thing that would never be permitted was normal freedom of thought. Whatever else might happen, the idea of indoctrinating people and watching over their minds would remain the basic line. Here is the high road, they had told us, and we have marked it out for you, so why do you want to wander off on side roads? Why indulge your whims, if the only worthwhile tasks have already been set and their solution given beforehand? In all their different incarnations, our guardians were always sure they were right and never knew what it was to doubt. They always boldly claimed to know just by looking at a seed what its fruit would be, and from this it was but a step to decreeing the destruction of any seedling they thought was useless. And this they do all too thoroughly.
Bely was convinced that his ideas were very hard to understand, and hence his manner of speaking, which was the exact opposite of Pasternak's. He enveloped you as he spoke, gradually overwhelming, convincing and captivating you. His tone of voice was rather embarrassed and cajoling, as though he was unsure of his listener and dreaded that he might not be understood or properly heard—he felt the need to win your confidence and attention.
Pasternak, on the other hand, spoke and smiled at you as though bestowing a gift. He deafened you with the drone of his organ-like voice, in complete confidence that you were already prepared to take everything in. He neither sought to persuade, like Bely, nor argued like M., but boomed on jubilantly and confidently, allowing all to listen and admire. It was as though he was singing an aria, certain that the Moscow which had been his from childhood had provided an audience worthy of him, endowed with the requisite ear and intelligence and—above all—in love with his voice. He even, in fact, took some account of his audience and was very careful not to offend it. But the main point is that he needed only listeners, not partners in conversation—these he avoided. Bely needed material to stimulate new thought—people who in his presence would begin to grope for new ideas. I once asked M. which manner he himself preferred, and he said: "Bely's, of course." But it was not true. M. only liked to talk with people on a footing of equality. He was just as irritated by an audience as by disciples and admirers. He had an insatiable craving for the company of equals, but as the years went by, it became harder all the time to satisfy it. By a process of intellectual mimesis all thought, and the voices that gave it expression, were taking on protective coloring in our society.
35 The Path to Destruction
he death of an artist is never a random event, but a last act of
creation that seems to illuminate the whole of his life under a powerful ray of light. M. already understood this when, as a young man, he wrote an article about the death of Scriabin. Why are people surprised that poets are able to foretell their own fate with such insight and know beforehand the manner of their death? It is only natural, after all, that death, the moment of the end, should be a cardinal element—one to which all else is subordinate—in the structure of one's life. There is nothing determinist about this—it is rather to be seen as an expression of free will. M. steered his life with a strong hand toward the doom that awaited him, toward the commonest form of death, "herded with the herd," that we could all expect. In the winter of 1932-33, at a poetry reading given by M. on the premises of Literary Gazette, Markish suddenly understood this and said: "You are taking yourself by the hand and leading yourself to your execution." This was his interpretation of the poem: "I have led myself by the hand along the streets. . . ."