* Institute of Philosophy and Literature, t See page 420.
world in which there would be no more violence, and that no sacrifice was too great for it. Nobody noticed that the end had begun to justify the means, and then, as always, gradually been lost sight of. It was the people of the twenties who first began to make a neat distinction between the sheep and the goats, between "us" and "them," between upholders of the "new" and those still mindful of the basic rules that governed human relations in the past.
The victors might well have been surprised at the ease of their victory, but they were so sure they were right, and so sure they were bringing happiness to mankind, that they only took it as their due and gradually increased their demands on those who had surrendered to them. This was shown by the speedy disappearance of the term "Fellow Traveler" and its replacement by the term "Non- Party Bolshevik." Eventually we had "the true son of the Motherland who ardently loves his People and unhesitatingly serves his Party and Government."
People's memories are such that they remember not actual events but only vague stories or legends about them. To establish the facts, one must shatter the myths, but this can only be done if one first points to the circles in which they have been created. This hankering after the idyllic twenties is the result of a legend created by people who were then in their thirties, and by their younger associates. But in reality it was the twenties in which all the foundations were laid for our future: the casuistical dialectic, the dismissal of older values, the longing for unanimity and self-abasement. It is true that those who shouted loudest were then the first to lose their lives —but not before they had prepared the ground for the future. In the twenties our "punitive organs" were still only gathering strength, but they were already in action. The thirty-year-old iconoclasts fervently preached their faith. At first coaxing, and later threatening, they led their hosts of followers into the coming era, during which all individual voices ceased to be heard.
We do not have—nor can we have—an institute for the study of public opinion, though there is no other way of gauging the undercurrents in people's mental processes. The part of such an institute was once played to some extent by the "punitive organs." In the twenties they even took soundings among the public to find out what it was thinking—for this purpose they had a special network of informers. Later on it was decided that public opinion must be the same as official opinion, and the role of these informers was reduced to reporting any cases in which there was a divergence—these were then systematically followed up by the appropriate action. After 1937 such "study" of public opinion (by now completely "rationalized") lost all significance because of the massive nature of the "preventive" terror.
But in the twenties we were still innocently playing with fire. No sooner had M. decided that everything would be all right ("What are you worrying for? They won't touch us, they won't kill us") than we got a foretaste of the future from the rosy-cheeked Vsevo- lod Rozhdestvenski, who came to see us in Tsarskoye after a brief spell of imprisonment. He said he wanted to warn us that his interrogator had been very interested in M., but he blankly refused to give any details: "I gave my word, and I was brought up as a child always to keep my word." M. threw this model child out, and when he had gone, it occurred to us that he must have been sent simply to give M. a fright and remind him that there was no escaping the all-seeing eye. This kind of thing was to happen frequently. In his "Conversation About Dante" M. mentions the interlocking of prison with the world outside and the fact that any ruler is only too happy if his subjects put the fear of God in each other with stories from jail. Vsevolod Rozhdestvenski carried out his assignment well enough, but he omits all reference to it in his memoirs. On the other hand, he has M. speak about poetry in a conventional Parnassian and Acmeist manner, attributing to him the sort of opinions and pronouncements which Soviet critics always put into the mouth of the "typical aesthete" of their imagination. Many other absurd utterances of this kind will no doubt be laid at M.'s door, and they should be judged in the light of his essays, which give a real sense of the sort of things he said in conversation and argument. His contemporaries were no match for him, and in their memoirs they will give a garbled version of his ideas, whether they intend to or not. Least of all is he understood by those who lived through the twenties as true believers, during those times when the noose was being pulled tighter and people worked on each other, preaching the new religion, destroying values and preparing the way for the future.
37 The Change of Values
M
did not believe in the "new" millennium, but he had not • come to the Revolution with empty hands. He was heavily weighed down by his Judaeo-Christian culture on the one hand, and on the other by his faith in social justice, the "fourth estate," Her- zen, and Revolution as a way of deliverance and renewal. He was no longer reading Herzen after I came to know him, but this was undoubtedly one of the formative influences in his life. It shows in his work—in The Noise of Time, in the story of the lion cub which complains to the indifferent crowd about the splinter in its paw (the splinter later turned into the "'pike's bone stuck in my Underwood"), in his horror of double talk, in his translations of Barbier, in his understanding of the role of art. "Poetry is power," he once said to Akhmatova in Voronezh, and she bowed her head on its slender neck. Banished, sick, penniless and hounded, they still would not give up their power. M. behaved like a man conscious of his power, and this only egged on those who wanted to destroy him. For them power was expressed in guns, agencies of repression, the distribution of everything—including fame—by coupons, the possibility of commissioning their portraits from any artist they chose. But M. stubbornly maintained that if they killed people for poetry, then they must fear and respect it—in other words, that it too was a power in the land.
It is hard to imagine anything worse than the equipment M. brought to the Revolution. It was easy to see in advance that he was doomed and would never find his place in the new world. It would have been a hopeless task to justify what was happening in the name of Herzen—indeed, in the name of Herzen it could only be condemned. It is true that Herzen reserved the right to retreat into proud isolation ("omnia mea me cum porto"), but such a course was not for M. He could not bring himself to shun his fellow men, and he did not regard himself as someone standing above the crowd, but as part of it. Any self-exclusiveness was anathema to him—this was no doubt connected with his sense of belonging to the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Many of my contemporaries who accepted the Revolution went through a severe psychological crisis. They were trapped between a reality which could only be condemned and the need for a principle by which to justify it. Sometimes, in order to be able to vindicate it without qualms, they simply closed their eyes to what was going on, but when they opened them again, it was still there for them to see. Many of them had awaited the Revolution all their lives, but at the sight of what it meant in terms of everyday life, they were horrified and looked away. Then there were others who were frightened of their own fears and were terrified of not seeing the wood for the trees. Among these was M. Not realizing the extent to which he had believed in revolution, people who knew him less well had an oversimplified picture of his life and dismissed as insignificant a major component of his way of thinking. Without this "revolutionary" element he would not have been so concerned to understand the course of events, or to weigh them in the scales of his values. If he had simply turned his back on reality, it would have been easier to live and adjust. This was impossible for M.—he had to live the same life as his contemporaries right through to the logical end.