In his verse M. spoke all the time about his death like this, but nobody paid any attention, just as nobody listened to Mayakovski's talk about suicide. But, preparing for death, people nevertheless try at the last moment to put off the inevitable end. They close then- eyes and pretend that all is not lost, perhaps looking for a new apartment, or buying themselves a good pair of shoes—anything not to see the pit already dug for them. This was how M. behaved after he had written his poem about Stalin.
The poem was written at the end of collectivization, between "Old Crimea" and "The Apartment." Had he some particular motive for writing it? There were at least several, and perhaps a great many. Each of them had its part in what the interrogator was to call M.'s "provocation," or "act of terrorism," as he styled it at the beginning.
The major factor was no doubt a feeling that he could no longer be silent. The phrase "I cannot be silent" was often on the lips of our parents' generation. The same could not be said of ours. But there is always the drop that fills the cup to overflowing. By 1933 we had made great progress in our understanding of what was going on. Stalinism had shown its colors in one large-scale undertaking—the mass deportation of the peasants, and in the lesser one of bringing the writers to heel.
We spent the summer of that year in the Crimea, and it was then that M.'s poetry for the first time showed traces of how much he had been affected by collectivization and the terrible sight of the hungry, wraith-like peasants he had recently seen on the way through the Ukraine and the Kuban. In the first draft of the poem for which he was arrested, Stalin is called a "murderer and peasant- slayer." Everybody at that moment thought and said as much—in whispers, of course—and the poem was thus not in advance of its time, except from the point of view of the ruling circles and their hangers-on.
The second most important factor in the writing of the poem was M.'s awareness that his fate was sealed. It was too late now to hide "like a cap in a sleeve." His other verse of the early thirties was by then being passed from hand to hand. Pravda had already published a lengthy unsigned article in which M.'s "Journey to Armenia" was damned as the "prose of a lackey." This was no longer a mere warning, but an indictment. Before it appeared, the editor-in-chief of the State Publishing House for Literature, Chechanovski, had approached me with the "advice" that it would be as well for M. to repudiate his "Journey to Armenia"—otherwise, as he put it, "you will be sorry." All the warnings, in the form either of threats or of advice, had already been given (by Gronski and Gusev, for example), but M. ignored them. His end was approaching.
I can remember nothing more terrible than the winter of 1933-34, which we spent in our new apartment—the only one I have ever had in my life. Through the wall we could hear Kirsanov playing his Hawaiian guitar, the ventilation system wafted in the smell of cooking from other writers' apartments and the stench of the insecticide they used to kill the bedbugs. We had no money and nothing to eat, and every evening there were hordes of visitors—half of them police spies. Death might come to M. either quickly or in the form of a slow process of attrition. M., an impatient man, hoped it would come quickly. He preferred to die not at the hands of the writers' organizations who had initiated the process of his destruction, but rather at those of the "punitive organs."
Like Akhmatova, M. did not believe in suicide in the ordinary sense—even though everything was driving us to it: our loneliness, isolation, and the times themselves, which were scarcely on our side. Loneliness is not just the absence of friends and acquaintances— there are always enough of these—it is rather life in a society which heedlessly, with blindfolded eyes, follows its fratricidal path, dragging everybody with it. Not for nothing did M. call Akhmatova "Cassandra." Apart from a few poets like her, there were also some other people of an older generation who could see what was coming, but their voices had died away. Even before the victory of the "new spirit" they had spoken out about its ethics, its ideology, its intolerance and its perverse notions of law. But these had been voices in the wilderness, and with every day that passed it clearly became more and more difficult to speak. How could you speak when your tongue had been cut out?
In choosing his manner of death, M. was counting on one remarkable feature of our leaders: their boundless, almost superstitious respect for poetry. "Why do you complain?" M. used to ask. "Poetry is respected only in this country—people are killed for it. There's no place where more people are killed for it."
Looking at the portraits of our leaders in store fronts, M. once said that he feared only people's hands. The "fingers ... fat as grubs" in the Stalin poem are certainly an echo of Demian Bedny's trouble with Stalin (no wonder he was so frightened and advised Pasternak not to get mixed up in M.'s business). The adjective "thin-necked" was inspired by the sight of Molotov—M. had noticed his thin neck sticking out of his collar and the smallness of the head that crowned it. "Just like a tomcat," said M., pointing at his portrait.
The first people to hear the poem were horrified, and begged M. to forget it. For these particular people, its value was also lessened by the self-evident nature of the truth it contained. In more recent years it has been received with greater sympathy. Some people ask me how it was that M. could understand everything so well already in 1934, and wonder whether there is a mistake in the dating. These are people who accept the official story that everything was all right until the Yezhov terror, and that even that wasn't so bad—it was only after the war, when he was in his dotage, that the old man went out of his mind and made a mess of things. This may no longer hold water, but we continue to idealize the twenties and the beginning of the thirties. This is a stubborn legend. The old generation is dying out without having had its say, and there are now old men—including even former camp inmates—who go on talking about the glorious years of their youth as a golden age cut short only by their arrest. What will our grandchildren make of it if we all leave the scene in silence?
Among those who heard the Stalin poem, I noted three different views. Kuzin thought M. shouldn't have written it because it conflicted with his general attitude toward the Revolution. He accused M. of inconsistency: if he had accepted the Revolution, then he should put up with its leader and not complain. There is a kind of blockheaded logic about this, though I do not understand how Kuzin, who knew M.'s verse and prose by heart (though in his old age he forgot about this and even claimed in a letter to Morozov that he had never read "Journey to Armenia"), could not see the ambivalence and constant torment in M.'s work. People evidently find it hard to understand anything that is camouflaged, or even just slightly veiled. They need to have everything said straight out, and I think that is why M. wrote this poem in such plain language—he was tired of the deafness of his listeners who were always saying: "What beautiful verse, but there's nothing political about it! Why can't it be published?"
Ehrenburg does not like the poem, correctly regarding it as untypical of M.'s work because of this straightforward, uncomplicated quality.
But, whatever one may think of it as poetry, can one really regard it as incidental to the rest of his work, as a kind of freak, if it is the poem which brought him to his terrible end? It was, to my mind, a gesture, an act that flowed logically from the whole of his life and work. It is true, however, that it is peculiar in that he makes concessions to his readers he had never made before. He had never met them halfway or striven to be understood, regarding every listener or partner in conversation as his equal and therefore not trying to simplify things for him. But he was concerned to make his Stalin poem comprehensible and accessible to anybody. On the other hand, he did his best to make sure it could not serve as an instrument of crude political propaganda (as he even said to me, "That is none of my business"). But he did write the poem with a view to a much wider circle of readers than usual, though he knew, of course, that nobody would be able to read it at the time. I believe he did not want to die before stating in unambiguous terms what he thought about the things going on around us.