His mood during this period of an attempted "change of values" is best seen from his attitude toward an article he had written on the death of Scriabin (1915) where he outlined his views on Christian art, giving expression to what he really believed (it was here that he spoke about the death of an artist being not the end, but a final creative act). The article was never published. It had originally been a lecture to some Petersburg society (perhaps the Religious and Philo-
The Change of Values $
sophical Society) which held its meetings in a large private house.* M. used to go to the meetings of this society and evidently knew one of its organizers, Kablukov, an old man who was very kind to M. as a budding poet. (I recently bought a copy of M.'s first collection, Stone [1915], which belonged to Kablukov, and in which he had stuck various early poems by M. written in his own hand.) Kablukov took the manuscript of M.'s lecture on Scriabin away with him. While we were in the Caucasus in 1921, Kablukov died and all his papers went to the Petrograd Public Library. M. complained to me bitterly about the loss of this manuscript ("It's the most important thing I've written and now it's lost. . . . I'm just unlucky") and he was very pleased when a little later I found some pages of a rough draft in a trunk belonging to M.'s father. But his attitude to the article was by now ambivalent: he asked me to keep it, but in this period of doubt about his own values he was tempted to revise the views expressed in it. In the first drafts of The Egyptian Stamp there is a passage in which he makes fun of Parnok for reading a lecture in the "salon of Madame Perepletnik"—a clear allusion to his own lecture about Scriabin. In the text as published, all that remains of this is the threat made to Parnok that one day he will be ejected from the smart salons of St. Petersburg (including Madame Perepletnik's) because as an upstart intellectual he has no business there and "the aristocrat's fur coat is not for him." M. was always coming back to this theme of the upstart intellectual in fashionable St. Petersburg—as a young man he probably had several encounters with various snobs who made it quite clear to him that he did not "belong." He was very upset by Makovski's account (which he read not long before his arrest) of how his mother came with him in 1908 (when he was eighteen) to the editorial offices of Apollon. They had come to show M.'s verse to Makovski, who makes out that M.'s mother behaved like the stupid wife of a Jewish tradesman. Evidently Makovski was trying to produce a cheap journalistic effect by contrasting the young genius with his vulgar family background. In fact, however, M.'s mother was a woman of considerable culture, a music teacher who gave her children a good education and brought M. up to love classical music. She could never have said the preposterous things that Makovski attributes to her. This is a good example of the kind
* Author's Note: Once the notorious adventurer Savin came there, set up a table at the foot of the stairs and collected an entrance fee from everybody who came in. Later, at the meeting, he got up and made a long speech about the Russian Devil, who, he said, was distinguished from all others by his cunning, inventiveness and sense of humor.
of aristocratic superciliousness that prompted M. to declare himself a member of the "fourth estate" of intellectuals from the lower classes. In The Egyptian Stamp he made clear his attitude to the "world of Empire" and traced his own and Parnok's lineage back to the raznochintsi.[13] There is also something similar in "Conversation About Dante," where he describes how the urbane Virgil is always preventing the gauche and embarrassed Dante from making a fool of himself. But by the time he wrote this he had to contend with the new "world of Empire" that made the old one look woefully amateurish by comparison. This period of confusion about his values helped M. to define his place in the new world, and he once more— this time in verse—proclaimed himself an upstart intellectual ("Did those raznochintsi wear out the dried leather of their boots that I should now betray them?"—Midnight in Moscow, 1932). But what was left to a Soviet raznochinets except his handful of Judaeo- Christian culture? M. preserved it, together with the pages from his article on Scriabin. On the other hand, in the poem written in 1931 where he addresses Parnok's brother, Alexander Gertsovich, he tells him he might as well give up ("There was a Jewish musician by the name of Alexander Gertsovich. . . . May as well give up now, what does it matter any more?").
His efforts to come to terms with the new era thus ended in failure—very much more was demanded of those who surrendered. At the same time he had something to say to the Revolution, as opposed to the new "world of Empire" in which we suddenly found ourselves. There was nobody left in our society who would have understood what he wanted to say. The chorus of true believers in the new religion and the new State used the language of revolution in their ritual observances, but they had no time for a new "upstart intellectual" with his doubts and hesitations. For the true believers and "Fellow Travelers" everything was quite clear already: "You have to understand where you're living! What do you expect?" M. heard on all sides. It was with them in mind that he chose to translate Barbier's "Pack of Hounds":
They tear the flesh with claws—each must have his piece . . .
That is the right of the kennel, the law of honor among hounds:
Take home your share to your proud and jealous bitch
who waits to see the steaming bone between her good mate's teeth
and hear him shout as he throws it down:
That is power—this is our part in these great days.