In Voronezh I got a particularly clear impression of what it involved. Hopelessly uprooted and restricted as it was, our life there in rented rooms (if that is the right name for the squalid hovels we made our home in) meant that we were constantly alone together, and I was able to watch very closely as he went about his "sweet- voiced labor." As soon as M. had reached the stage of actually composing a poem, he did not need to hide from people because, as he said, once the work was in progress, nothing could stop it. Vasilisa
Shklovski, with whom he was very friendly, tells how in 1921, when they were neighbors in the House of Arts in Leningrad, M. often wandered into her room to warm himself by the iron stove. Sometimes he lay on the divan and covered his head with a cushion so as not to hear the conversation going on in the crowded room. Whenever he got bored with his own company while "composing," he would come to see Vasilisa like this. His poem about the Angel Mary came to him in the Zoological Museum while we were sitting with the curator, Kuzin, and his friends, drinking a bottle of Georgian wine—one of them had smuggled it in, together with some food, in his academic-looking briefcase. Constantly disrupting the ritual of drinking the wine, M. kept getting up from the table and pacing quickly around Kuzin's vast office. As usual, he was composing the poem in his head, but I wrote it down to his dictation while we were still in the Museum. After he married me he became very lazy and always dictated his verse to me, instead of writing it down himself.
In Voronezh he had absolutely no privacy when he was working. In none of the places we rented was there so much as a passage or a kitchen to which he could escape if he wanted to be completely alone. This is not to say that things were much better in Moscow, but at least there was always somewhere I could go for an hour or so, leaving him alone to work. But in Voronezh there was nowhere to go, except out into the freezing streets—and it so happened that the winters were particularly hard during those three years. But all the same, whenever a poem was approaching its final stage of "ripeness," I used to take pity on poor M., who was like a caged animal, and did what I could—lying down on the bed, for instance, and pretending to sleep. Seeing this, M. sometimes urged me to sleep properly, or at least to turn my back on him.
In the last year in Voronezh, in the seamstress' house, our isolation was really complete. We scarcely left our room except to go to the nearby telephone exchange to phone my brother: he sent us the money—a hundred roubles each—that Vishnevski and Shklovski gave us every month during that winter. They were frightened to do it directly—everything in our life was by now a cause for fear. This money went to pay our rent, which came to exactly 200 roubles a month. We were no longer earning anything—neither in Moscow nor in Voronezh would anyone give us work now that "vigilance" was the order of the day. People turned away from us in the street and pretended not to recognize us. Only the actors departed from the general rule, coming up to us and smiling even in the main street. This is perhaps to be explained by the fact that the theaters were less affected than other Soviet institutions by the big purges now under way. The only people who came to see us at home were Natasha Shtempel and Fedia Marants, but both of them went out to work and could not easily find the time. Natasha told us that her mother had warned her of the possible consequences of coming to see us and she tried to hide where she was going. But then her mother had said to her: "I know where you're going. Why are you trying to keep it from me? I was only warning you, not telling you what to do. Why don't you invite them here?" After that we often went around to see Natasha, and her mother always put out everything she had on the table. She had long since separated from her husband, a former nobleman, and had supported her two children by teaching at first in the town's secondary school and then in the elementary school. Modest, intelligent, light-hearted and easy-going, she was the only person in Voronezh who admitted us to her home. All other doors were shut tight in our faces and double-bolted: we were pariahs, untouchables, in this socialist society.
Everything suggested that the end was near, and M. was trying to take full advantage of his remaining days. He was possessed by the feeling that he must hurry or he would be cut short and not allowed to say what he still wanted to say. Sometimes I begged him to rest, to go out for a walk or have a nap, but he dismissed the idea: there was so little time left, and he must hurry. . . .
The poems poured out of him, one after another. He worked on several at once, and he often asked me to take down at one sitting two or three which he had already completed in his head. I could not stop him: "You must understand that I shan't have time otherwise."
Of course, he was just taking a sober view of his approaching end, but I could not yet see it as clearly as he. He never spoke about it to me in so many words, but in letters to people in Moscow (where I went a couple of times during the winter to get money) he once or twice hinted at what was in store for us—but then immediately changed the subject in mid-sentence, as though he had been talking only about our usual difficulties. Perhaps he really was trying to put such thoughts out of his mind, but the greater likelihood is that he wanted to spare my feelings and not darken the last days of our life together.
He drove himself so hard during the whole of that year that he became even more painfully short of breath: his pulse was irregular and his lips were blue. He generally had his attacks of angina on the street, and in our last year in Voronezh he could no longer go out alone. Even at home he was calm only when I was there. We sat opposite each other and I watched his moving lips as he tried to make up for lost time and hastened to record his last words.
Each time I copied out a new poem, M. would count up the lines and decide how much he had "earned" at the highest current rates of payment. (He would not "settle" for less unless, as occasionally happened, he was very unhappy about a poem, in which case he agreed to a "reduced rate." It was reminiscent of Sologub, who used to sort his verse by quality and price it accordingly!) When we had thus added up his "earnings" for the day, we would go out to borrow money for our supper on the strength of them. We got money like this from some of the actors, the compositors at the local printing works, and sometimes from two professors we knew (one was a friend of Natasha, and the other was a literature specialist). We generally arranged to meet them in some deserted side street, where, like conspirators, we walked slowly past each other while they slipped us an envelope with their offering of money. If we had not managed to arrange to meet someone (it had to be done the day before), we would look in on the compositors. M. had got to know them in the summer of 1935 when we were living in the "agent's" house, which was next to the printing works and the offices of the local newspaper. M. used to go in to read them poems as he finished them—particularly if this was late at night when nobody else was awake. They were always very pleased to see him, though the younger ones would sometimes stagger him by spouting opinions straight out of Literary Gazette—to the indignation of the older ones. In the bad times that were now upon us, these same older ones listened silently as M. read his new poems and then talked to him for a while about this and that while one of their number went out to buy food for him. They were miserably paid and could hardly make ends meet themselves, but they felt that "you can't let a comrade down in times like these."