(The theme of the "good mate" was to crop up again in 1933, in the poem about the apartment: "Some worthy traitor ... a good family man. . . .") He translated the Barbier poem in the summer of 1923, and his "oath of allegiance to the fourth estate" appeared the following winter—no wonder it was so coldly received by those on whom the distribution of worldly goods now depended.
Perhaps the reason he stopped writing verse in the mid-twenties was that in this period of confusion he was no longer certain of being right. His prose writings were an attempt to find his bearings again, to regain the ground under his feet so that he could say, "Here I stand and can do no other." Poetry came back to him when he* once more knew that he was right and had taken the proper stand. In one of his early articles that appeared in Apollon in 1913, he had spoken about "the precious sense of poetic Tightness." Obviously this sense was essential to M. if he was able to define it so confidently at the very beginning of his career as a poet (he was then only eighteen). In so far as he accepted the new reality, M. could not help but condemn his own doubts. Listening to the chorus of its supporters, he was bound to be sorely troubled by his isolation from it; attacked by the Symbolists, LEF, RAPP and all the other groups which unreservedly supported the new system, he could scarcely help feeling that he was indeed a "drying crust of a loaf long since taken out." Assailed by such doubts, he could not possibly feel certain of his own "tightness." True, there were always readers who stood up for him and swore by him, but M. was somehow, despite himself, repelled by them. I think he grew more and more unhappy with his readers at this time, as he looked on them too as "drying crusts" and believed that somewhere there must be some real "new people." In the early twenties he still failed to see how these "new people," so extrovert in appearance, were going through the classical metamorphosis—a process of turning into wood—that comes over those who lose their sense of values.
M.'s release came through his prose, this time his "Fourth Prose" (1931). This title was our private way of referring to it: it was literally his fourth piece of prose, but there was also an association with the "fourth estate" which so much preoccupied him, as well as with
our "Fourth Rome." [14] It was this work which cleared the way for poetry again, restoring M.'s sense of his place in life and his "right- ness." In it he spoke of our bloodstained land, cursed the official literature, tore off the literary "fur coat" he had momentarily donned and again stretched out his hand to the upstart intellectual, "the first Komsomol, Akaki Akakievich." t At a certain dangerous moment we destroyed the opening chapter, which dealt with our idea of socialism.
The "Fourth Prose" was based on the episode of the Eulenspiegel translation, t which, with all its ramifications, would have died down sooner if M. had not insisted on keeping it alive. It was this that really opened M.'s eyes to what was happening around us. As Bukharin had said, the atmosphere in Soviet institutions was indeed like that of a cesspool. During the Eulenspiegel affair we felt as though we were watching a film about literature at the service of the new regime, about the fantastic bureaucratic apparatus that had now grown up (we even had a talk with Shkiriatov), about the Soviet press with its Zaslavskis, about the Komsomol, in whose newspaper M. worked for a year after breaking with the writers' organizations, and so forth. The two years spent on this business were rewarded a hundred times over: the "sick son of the age" now realized that he was in fact healthy. When he started writing poetry again, there was no longer a trace of the "drying crust." M.'s was henceforth the voice of an outsider who knew he was alone and prized his isolation. M. had come of age and assumed the role of a witness. His spirit was no longer troubled. In the first phase of the campaign of destruction against him, right up to May 1934, the methods used had had nothing to do with either literature or politics, but had been quite simply a vendetta on the part of writers' organizations which enjoyed support "up above." "They cannot get at me as a poet," said M., "so they are snapping at my calves as a translator." Perhaps it was this attempt to belittle him that helped him to straighten up his shoulders. Strange to say, even in his case, it needed this personal experience to open his eyes completely. Soviet people prized their own blindness and were prepared to recognize the facts of life only if they were directly affected. Collectivization, the Yezhov terror and the postwar campaigns of mass repression helped very many to see the light. M. was one of the earliest to do so, though he was by no means the first.
M. always knew that his ideas were out of tune with the times and went "against the grain of the world," but after writing the "Fourth Prose" he was no longer worried about it. In his "Conversation About Dante" and in the poem "Canzona" (1931) he spoke of the special kind of sight with which birds of prey and the dead in Dante's Divine Comedy are endowed: they are unable to see things close to them, but they can make out objects at a great distance; blind to the present, they are able to see into the future. Here, as always, M.'s prose supplements and throws light on the poetry.
Poetry came back to him during our return journey from Armenia when we were held up in Tiflis. We still felt as though we were watching a film: while we were there, Lominadze met his end. In his last days this man showed real kindness to M. He had received a telegram from Gusev in the Central Committee with instructions to help M. find work in Tiflis, and he very much wanted to oblige, but at that moment he was summoned to Moscow and never returned. The papers were now suddenly full of denunciations of the "hostile faction of Lominadze and Syrtsov." That was our fate: anyone in the leadership whom M. was able to approach always perished. There was no place for a latter-day raznochinets in the new "world of Empire." Incidentally, right after the fall of Lominadze, whom M. had visited three or four times at the local Party headquarters, we noticed that we were being followed everywhere by someone in plain clothes. The local branch of the secret police had probably decided it would be as well to keep an eye on the mysterious person who had visited the fallen leader. We now realized that Tiflis was no place for us, and we hastily left for Moscow. When we told Gusev (who had sent M. to Lominadze) about how we had been followed, he listened with a stony face. Only Soviet officials could make their faces turn to stone like this. What it meant was: How was I to know that Lominadze was an enemy of the people, or what reasons the Georgian comrades had for putting you under surveillance? It was already not unusual for innocent people to be implicated in cases they had nothing to do with, and Gusev was taking no chances. We should have had exactly the same reception from Molotov—it was he who, at Bukharin's request, had instructed Gusev to organize our journey to Sukhumi and Armenia and make sure we were properly looked after. Wherever we went, Gusev sent instructions to the heads of the local Party organizations asking them to make arrangements for us. Among them was Lominadze, who was fated to perish at the moment he was instructed to help us. M. might well have been swept away with him, but this time he was spared—the case that could have been made against him in this connection was not made. We were lucky. But at the time we didn't realize it and made fun of Gusev's stony mask. After the Lominadze episode his protecting hand was withdrawn from us, but I cannot say that we were left, as in the fairy tale, with nothing more than a slab of clay—the journey to Armenia restored the gift of poetry to M., and a new period of his life began.
38 Work
O
nly in 1930 did I first understand how poetry is made. Before this I had always seen it as the working of a miracle, the sudden appearance of something that had not been there before. In the beginning—from 1919 to 1926—I would not even know that M. was at work, and was always surprised when he became tense and broody, sometimes running outside into the street to escape from small talk. I soon came to know what the reason was, but I didn't really understand it. When his period of silence ended in 1930, I had more than enough opportunity to observe him at work.