In the poem M. speaks of the flutist's lips "recalling" something. But is it only a flute player's lips that know beforehand what they have to say? The process of composing verse also involves the recollection of something that has never before been said, and the search for lost words is an attempt to remember what is still to be brought into being ("I have forgotten the word I wished to say, like a blind swallow it will return to the abode of shadows."). This requires great concentration, till whatever has been forgotten suddenly flashes into the mind. In the first stage the lips move soundlessly, then they begin to whisper and at last the inner music resolves itself into units of meaning: the recollection is developed like the image on a photographic plate.
M. hated all the hackneyed talk about form and content which was so much to the liking of the new "client," who wanted official ideas to be clothed in "beautiful" dress. Over this question he immediately had a row with the Armenian writers when, not realizing who* had launched it, he attacked the call to make literature "national in form and socialist in content." So even in Armenia we found ourselves isolated. M.'s feeling that form and content are absolutely indivisible evidently came to him from the process of working on his poetry, which was always born from a single impulse—the initial "ringing in the ears," before the formation of words, already embodied what is called "content." In "Conversation About Dante" M. likened "form" to a sponge—if a sponge is dry and contains nothing, then nothing can be squeezed out of it. The opposite approach is to think in terms of finding the "right form" for a subject matter conceived independently of it. M. damned this approach (also in "Conversation About Dante") and called its proponents "translators of ready-made meaning."
Ilia Ehrenburg once said to Slutski in my presence that M. spoiled his poems by making "phonetic modifications" in them. I never saw anything of the kind. If Ehrenburg was referring to variants of the
• Stalin.
same poem, he should have known that these are something radically different from "modified" versions. It is translators who introduce modifications, as they try to find the best way to express the ideas in the original. As for "phonetic" modifications, they can only serve decorative purposes. A variant consists either of superfluous material that has been trimmed away, or it is an "offshoot" that may be developed into a separate, self-contained entity. As the poet tries to dig down to the nugget of harmony in the recesses of his mind, he throws away all the spurious or unwanted matter under which it is hidden. Composing verse is hard, wearisome work that demands enormous inner exertion and concentration. When the work is in progress, nothing can stop the inner voice, which probably takes complete possession of the poet. This is why I cannot believe that Mayakovski was speaking the truth when he said that he had "stepped on the throat of his own song." * How was he able to do this? From my own rather unusual experience as an observer of the poet at work, I would say that it is quite impossible for him to curb or silence himself by "stepping on the throat" of his own song.
The work of the poet, as a vehicle of world harmony, has a social character—that is, it is concerned with the doings of the poet's fellow men, among whom he lives and whose fate he shares. He does not speak "for them," but with them, nor does he set himself apart from them: otherwise he would not be a source of truth.
I was always struck by the absolute character of the urge to serve —with and among one's fellow men—as an instrument by which harmony reveals itself. In this sense it was impossible either to simulate or induce it artificially, and of course it is nothing but a misfortune for the poet himself. I can understand Shevchenko's lament—which M. appreciated only too well—about the way his poetry would not leave him alone, bringing him nothing but misery and not allowing him to pursue his craft as a painter, the one thing that gave him pleasure. The urge ceases to be felt only when the poet's material begins to run out—that is, when his contact with the world at large is broken and he no longer hears his fellow men or lives with them. There can be no poetry without such contact, which is the source of the poet's sense of "rightness." The urge dies together with the poet, though the movement of his lips is recorded for all time in the verse he leaves behind. Incidentally, how can people be so stupid as to say that poets are no good at reading their own verse? What do such people know about poetry? Poetry only really lives in the poet's
• In the poem written before his suicide.
own voice, which is preserved in his work forever.
In the period when I lived with Akhmatova, I was able to watch her at work as well, but she was much less "open" about it than M., and I was not always even aware that she was "composing." She was, in general, much more withdrawn and reserved than M. and I was always struck by her self-control as a woman—it was almost a kind of asceticism. She did not even allow her lips to move, as M. did so openly, but rather, I think, pressed them tighter as she composed her poems, and her mouth became set in an even sadder way. M. once said to me before I had met Akhmatova—and repeated to me many times afterward—that looking at these lips you could hear her voice, that her poetry was made of it and was inseparable from it. Her contemporaries—he continued—who had heard this voice were richer than future generations who would not be able to hear it. This voice of hers, with all the inflections it had in her youth and later years, and still possessed of the depth which so impressed M., has come out remarkably well on a tape-recording recently made by Nika. If this recording survives, it will confirm the truth of what I have written here.
M. was struck by several of Akhmatova's characteristic gestures and always asked me, after we had been with her, whether I had noticed how she had suddenly stretched her neck, tossed back her head and pursed her lips as though to say "no." He would show me what he meant and was always surprised that I didn't remember it as well as he. In variants of the "Wolf" poem I have found a reference to a mouth that seems to say "no," but here it belongs not to Akhmatova but to M. himself. The lifelong friendship between these two terribly ill-fated people was perhaps the only consolation for the bitter trials they both endured. In her old age Akhmatova has found a little serenity, and she knows how to make the best of it. But much of her verse remains unpublished, and the past can never be forgotten. If it were not for the ability to live in the present seemingly granted to all poets—or at least to these two—she would hardly be able to rejoice in her life as she does now.
40 Book and Notebook
Y
ou have a book in you," said Charents, listening to M.'s poems about Armenia. (This was in Tiflis—in Erivan he would not have dared to come to see us.) M. was very pleased by these words: "Perhaps he's right—I may really have a book in me." A few years later, at M.'s request, I took a sheaf of his Voronezh poems to Pasternak, who, after looking at them, suddenly spoke of the "miracle of a book in the making." With him, he said, it had happened only once in his life, when he wrote My Sister Life. I told M. about this conversation and asked: "So a collection of verse doesn't always make a book?" M. just laughed.