"And suppose it isn't so? What if people take a different view in the future?" I once asked Averbakh with reference to a literary judgment he had just delivered about M. ("They say he has just returned from Armenia and published some bad verse.") I asked him how he could know this, and he replied that M. did not have the right "class approach." He then explained that there was no such thing as art or culture in the abstract, but only "bourgeois art" and "proletarian art"—nothing was absolute and all values were conditioned by class. He was not at all put out by the fact that his own class values were now regarded as absolutes: since the victory of the proletariat was the dawn of a new era which would last forever, the values attributed by Averbakh to the class whose servant he was constituted absolutes. He was genuinely surprised that I could cast doubt on his judgments, which, being based on the only scientific method, were infallible—anything he damned was damned forever- more. I told M. about this conversation, which had taken place in a tramcar. He was fascinated by the monolithic quality of Averbakh's faith in his own truth and the way he reveled in the peculiar elegance of his logical constructions. This was in 1930, when M. could afford to be merely fascinated by the workings of Averbakh's mind. By this time M. had recovered his own inner freedom and found his voice again—the twenties with their inhibitions and doubts had ended, so he could now listen with some detachment to "hempen speeches" and not take them too much to heart.
Averbakh was a very typical product of the first decade after the Revolution. This was how all the adepts of the new religion thought and talked—in other spheres as well. There was something very cocksure about them—they loved to talk down at you and shock you. They had taken it upon themselves to overthrow all the old idols— that is, to destroy the values of the past—and since the tide was flowing in their favor, nobody noticed how primitive their weapons were.
The cry "What did we fight for?" went up at the very beginning of the twenties, but immediately died down again. The nation had not yet been reduced to silence, but it was quiet enough as it looked forward to the life of ease promised by NEP. The intellectuals, meanwhile, set about a leisurely "revaluation of all values." This was the period of mass surrender when they all took the path marked out by the pre-revolutionary extremists and their post-revolutionary successors of the Averbakh type—though, needless to say, they tried to avoid the fanaticism and crudity of the vanguard. The capitula- tionists were led by men of about thirty who had been through the war, and the younger people followed them. In general, the people between thirty and forty were the most active age group in those days. Such members of the older generation as had survived stood silently on the sidelines. The basic premise behind the surrender was that the "old" had given way to the "new," and anybody clinging to the former would go to the wall. This view was rooted in the whole theory of progress and the determinism of the new religion. The proponents of surrender attacked all the old concepts just because they were old and had outlived their usefulness. For most of the neophytes, all values, truths and laws had been done away with—except for those which were needed at the moment and could conveniently be given a "class" label. Christian morality—including the ancient commandment "Thou shalt not kill"—was blithely identified with "bourgeois" morality. Everything was dismissed as a fiction. Freedom? There's no such thing and never was! Since art, and particularly literature, only carried out the orders of the ruling class, it followed that a writer should consciously put himself at the service of his new master. A number of terms such as "honor" and "conscience" went out of use at this time—concepts like these were easily discredited, now the right formula had been found.
It was characteristic of those years that all such concepts were treated as pure abstractions, divorced from the actual social and human framework which alone gave them substance. This made it all the easier to dismiss them out of hand: nothing was simpler, for example, than to show that nowhere in the world is there such a thing as absolute freedom of the press, and then to conclude that instead of making do with the wretched substitutes fobbed off on us by liberals, it was better to face up to the situation like a man and abandon all this hankering after "Freedom." Such arguments seemed plausible enough to minds not yet capable of making finer logical distinctions.
Psychological factors that worked in favor of capitulation were the fear of being left out in the cold, of not moving with the times, and the need for an all-embracing "organic world-view" (as it was called) which could be applied to all aspects of life. There was also the belief that the victory was final, and that the victors were here to stay for all eternity. But the main thing was that those who surrendered had nothing of their own to offer. This extraordinary emptiness was perhaps best expressed by Shklovski in his Zoo, that sorry book in which he tearfully implores the victors to take him under their wing. Whether this attitude was self-induced or whether it was a bitter reaction to the war and the trenches, the fact is that the desire to be looked after and protected like a child was enormously strong, and only those who shared it were regarded as being in step with the times.
Once, in the editorial office of Priboi,* M. refused to sign a collective letter from the writers to the Central Committee, on the grounds that "in literary matters they should appeal to us, not we to them." The letter was a petition on behalf of a certain critic who was being hounded by RAPP for allegedly having reviewed a novel by Liashko without reading it to the end. The writers were now asking the Central Committee to order an end to this persecution, and in support of their appeal they quoted the Central Committee's resolution on literature (1925^ in which the Party had called on the writers to end their squabbles and make common cause in their efforts to fulfill the Party's command.
As usual, there were a lot of people in the Priboi office, and they
* Leningrad publishing house for which Mandelstam did translations.
+ See page 420.
all crowded round M. They were genuinely puzzled by the reason he gave for his refusal to sign. His words seemed to them like a musty old rag pulled from some family chest of the past, a sign of how backward and out-of-touch he was. There can be no doubt of their sincerity. I remember the astonished look on Kaverin's face—it was he who was collecting the signatures. He thought M. was simply an old-fashioned eccentric who didn't understand the times he lived in. When M. and Akhmatova were still not much over thirty, they were quite seriously thought of as old people. As things turned out, however, they gradually came to seem younger in the eyes of others, as the views of those who had espoused the "new age" grew hopelessly obsolete.
The boy in the Hans Andersen story who said the king was naked did so neither too late nor too soon, but just at the right moment. Others had no doubt said it before him, but nobody paid any attention. M. also said many things too early—at a time when normal judgments seemed hopelessly out-of-date and doomed. There was no room for those who wouldn't sing in chorus with the rest—and it was indeed a powerful chorus that drowned out all other voices. There are now many people who would like to bring back the twenties and re-create the self-imposed unity of those days. Survivors from those times do their best to persuade the younger generation that this was an age in which everything—science, literature, the theater—flourished as never before, and that if everything had continued to develop on the lines then laid down, we should by now have attained the height of perfection. Survivors of LEF, people who worked with Tairov, Meyerhold and Vakhtangov, former students and teachers of IFLI * and the Zubov Institute, former members of the Institute of Red Professors, old Marxists, not to mention the Formalistst—they would all like us to go баск to that time when they were young men of thirty, so that we might once again set out on the road which they then opened up for us—this time without deviating from it. In other words, they deny responsibility for what happened later. But how can they? It was, after all, these people of the twenties who demolished the old values and invented the formulas which even now come in so handy to justify the unprecedented experiment undertaken by our young State: you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. Every new killing was excused on the grounds that we were building a remarkable "new"