As one can see from the verse he wrote in the twenties, M. never doubted that a new era had begun with the victory of the Revolution: he says that "the fragile chronology of our era nears its end," and that of the old world only a sound remained, though the "source of the sound has gone." Then there is the image of the age as a wild animal with a broken backbone, looking round at its own footprints.[12] In all this verse he speaks either directly or obliquely about his own position in the new life ("a sick son of the age, with quicklime in his blood."), and in "The Slate Ode" he calls himself a "double-dealer with divided soul." Avowals such as these are scattered throughout this verse—never fully stated, they seem to break from him involuntarily and sometimes appear in the most unexpected context (for example: in a poem of 1922, at the end of an extended image about baking bread, he describes himself as "the drying crust of a loaf long since taken out"). M. never made things easy for his readers. To understand him, you have to know him.t
In the poetry of this period he prophesies the onset of dumbness ("human lips preserve the form of the last word they have uttered" —in "The Finder of a Horseshoe," 1923). It was in fact this line that Brik and Tarasenkov seized on as proof that M. had "written himself out"—they gave little thought to the real sense of the poem before pronouncing this judgment. For them all means were fair in the struggle. Brik had turned his apartment into a place where his colleagues in the Cheka (including Agranov) could meet with writers and sound out public opinion, simultaneously collecting information for their first dossiers. It was here that M. and Akhmatova were first branded as "internal emigres"—a label which was to play an important part in their subsequent fate. Brik was almost the first to employ non-literary weapons in the literary controversies of the twenties, but I should like to point out the difference between him and other hatchet men of the type of Tarasenkov. Tarasenkov (M. once called him a "fallen angel") was a good-looking youth with a passionate interest in poetry who at once fell in with the Party's plans to turn literature into its handmaiden, and carefully collected manuscripts of all the poetry he so busily prevented from appearing in print. In this respect he was different from, say, Lelevich, who hated poetry as such because he considered it "bourgeois."
The position of Brik was completely different. With his usual shrewdness he realized at the outset that the State would grant a monopoly to one or another of the literary movements that existed in those days, and he fought for this monopoly against numerous competitors. It was a fierce struggle and at one moment it looked as though he might win. A large number of supporters gathered around him, and he knew how to win younger people over with his charm. In Party circles he had powerful sponsors, particularly among Chek- ists with artistic and literary inclinations. He maneuvered with great dexterity and at considerable risk to himself, but the prize was won by Averbakh, who, with his RAPP, was a latecomer in the contest. Averbakh owed his victory to a view of literature derived from Pisarev—who had always been dear to the middle ranks of the intelligentsia. With the fall of RAPP there could no longer be any kind of literary struggle, but until then the different factions, each seeking to win the monopoly for itself, relied exclusively on political weapons. In sweeping Akhmatova and M. out of his path, Brik was not, however, concerned with the political effect of his denunciation—all he wanted was to take away their young readers, those ardent devotees of the "new." In this he was successfuclass="underline" for a long time Akhmatova and M. were isolated. The last of the Mohicans from LEF, who are now over sixty, continue to extol the twenties and shake their heads in wonderment at the young readers over whom they have lost all influence.
The twenties were perhaps the worst time in M.'s life. Neither before nor after—even though things became much more frightful —did he speak with such bitterness about his situation in the world. In his early verse, however full of youthful anguish, there is always anticipation of future triumphs and a sense of his own strength ("I feel the span of my wing"), but in the twenties he speaks all the time of his illness, inadequacy and sense of inferiority. By the end of this period he was almost confusing himself with Parnok, or making him out to be his double. One can see from his verse that he thought his illness and inadequacy were caused by his first doubts about the Revolution. In his poem "January i, 1924" he asks: "Whom will you next kill? Whom will you next extol? What lie will you now invent?" He feels he is a "double-dealer" for trying to "join the broken vertebrae of two centuries" and for not being able to change his values.
M. was very cautious about the Revolution's demand for a change of values, though he did pay some lip-service to it. This took the form, in the first instance, of making clear what his relations with the "old world" had been. He wrote about this in The Noise of Time, The Egyptian Stamp and in the poem which begins: "With the world of Empire I was linked only as a child/ fearing oysters and looking askance at the Lifeguards." Although this poem was written in 1931, it expresses more the mood of the early twenties. His most serious concession to the demand for a change of values was in the three or four literary articles he published in Kiev in 1926 (he was by this time completely barred from the Moscow press, but in the provincial press it was still possible to "get away" with things). One senses in these articles that he wanted to be heard at any cost, and that he was therefore making a timid effort to be accepted by admitting or approving certain things and yielding on others. He even, for instance, tried to find excuses for some of the so-called "Fellow Travelers," though he must have known that he could never travel the same road as they. In two articles in Russian Art (Kiev) there were critical remarks about Akhmatova which were also a concession to the times. A year previously, in an article in a Kharkov newspaper, M. had written about her roots in Russian prose, and even earlier, in an unpublished review written for The Almanach of Muses (1916), he had prophesied that "this poorly dressed but majestic woman" would one day be the pride of Russia. In 1937, under questioning by the Voronezh writers—they had forced him to give a lecture about Acmeism and expected him to "unmask" it—he said of Akhmatova and Gumilev: "I do not disown either the living or the dead." He said something similar to the Leningrad writers at a meeting there in the House of the Press. In other words, he always felt linked with these two, particularly with Akhmatova, and his attempted disavowal of them in 1922 was a concession to all the hue- and-cry about Acmeism, the allegations that it was outmoded and "bourgeois," etc. M. was then "alone on every road," and could not stand it. He really was in a state of confusion: it is not so simple to go against everybody and against the times. To some degree, as we stood at the crossroads, we all had the temptation to rush after everyone else, to join the crowd that knew where it was going. The power of the "general will" is enormous—to resist it is much harder than people think—and we are all marked by the times we live in. The logic of the times demanded that M. part company with Akhmatova, his only possible ally. It is no easier for two than for one to swim against the tide, and M. made this one attempt to cut himself off from her. But he very soon came to his senses. In 1927, when he was gathering his articles together as a book, he threw out one of the pieces that had appeared in Russian Art and removed his attack on Akhmatova from the other. He also discarded the articles in the Kiev newspaper and those in Russia, calling them "fortuitous" in his preface to the collection On Poetry, published in 1928. He regarded the period during which he wrote these articles (1922-26) as the worst in his life. It was a period of decline, and in repudiating it altogether, M. took no account of the many good and genuine things he wrote at that time—notably the passages in a number of articles where he attacks the general tendency toward stagnation.