The Russian fur coat (shuba) in the "Wolf" cycle is a recurring theme in M.'s work. It can symbolize a number of things: the Russian winter, a cozy, stable existence, social status (from which the raznochinets is debarred). It occurs in the first book of poems, Stone (where there are doorkeepers in fur coats), in the poem about Alexander Gertsovich and "I drink to officers' epaulettes" (where the fur coat stands for his supposed identification with the old regime). His first piece of prose was even called "Fur Coat," but it was lost by the publishing house run in Kiev by Rakovski's sister. In The Noise of Time there is the aristocratic fur coat which is not for the likes of Parnok and himself, and in "Fourth Prose," to signify his break with his fellow Soviet writers, he strips off his "literary fur coat" and stamps on it.
His ironical toast to the aristocrat's fur coat in "I drink to officers' epaulettes" goes back to a comic episode at the end of the twenties when a certain well-connected lady (who was later to perish) complained to Emma Gerstein that she had always thought M. was definitely "not one of us" because she could never forget how at the beginning of NEP he had strutted around Moscow in a magnificent fur coat. We could only gasp at this. We had bought this coat, which had belonged to an impoverished priest, in the market place in Kharkov. It wrs made of reddish, moth-eaten raccoon and was as long and ungainly 5 a cassock. The old priest had sold it to get money for bread, and M had bought it on our way from the Caucasus to Moscow so he wouldn't die of cold in the north. This "aristocratic" fur coat was then given to Prishvin to use as a mattress when he was staying at a hostel on the Tverskoi Boulevard. One day his primus stove exploded and he used it to stifle the flames. The last bits of raccoon fur were scorched away, and M. never even had the satisfaction of actually stripping it from his shoulders and trampling on it, as he should have done: to wear a fur coat was above his station.
In the "Wolf" cycle, preparation for exile is also a dominant theme, hence the references to Siberian forests, bunks (of the labor- camp type) and peasant frame houses. By extension, wood becomes the main material of the whole cycle, and objects made of it are frequently referred to: "pine tree," "wooden pail," "pinewood coffin," "skittles," "splinters" (used by peasants for lighting their huts). Some of the words are less domestic and echo his fear of execution: "chopping block," "ax handle" ... A characteristic epithet of this cycle is "rough"—a word appropriate to wooden surfaces.
Premonition of exile began before the "Wolf" poems, and it is expressed, for instance, in the line of another poem where chains for fastening doors were likened to a convict's fetters. Petersburg is compared to a coffin ("To sleep in Petersburg is to sleep in a coffin") from which the only escape is to the railroad station "where no one can seek us out." The theme here is his sense of having been cast out and rejected. In the poem "Preserve my speech . . ." (1931) he speaks of himself as an "unrecognized brother." I have read somewhere in Boudouin de Courtenay that "brother" was originally used not of blood kinship, but of acceptance by one's tribe. M. had not been accepted by the "tribe" of his fellow writers, he had been cast out of Soviet literature, and even the wretched priest's coat on his shoulders was held to bear witness to his bourgeois ideology.
42 The Last Winter in Voronezh
I
n the summer of 1936, thanks to money given us by Akhmatova, Pasternak and my brother, Evgeni, we were able to get out of Voronezh and spend some time in the country. This was very important because of M.'s heart trouble, which was getting worse and worse. We decided to go to Zadonsk, on the upper reaches of the River Don, once famous for its monastery and the monk Tikhon. For six weeks we rested, thinking about nothing and enjoying life. But then we heard over the radio about the beginning of the terror. The announcer said that Kirov's murderers had been discovered and that trials were in preparation. After listening to this, we walked out silently onto the monastery road. There was nothing to talk about— everything was clear. That same day M. stuck his walking-stick into the imprints left by horses' hoofs on the roadway—it had been raining the day before and they were full of water. "Like memory," he said. These imprints turned up (as "thimbles made by hoofs") in verse written in the following January, when M.'s memory of the celebrated radio announcer's booming voice prompted him to undertake something for his own salvation.*
When we returned to Voronezh, we found that all doors were closed to us. Nobody wanted to talk with us or invite us to their homes or even recognize us—at least, not in public places. But some people still tried to help us on the quiet. The theater manager, for example, arranged for us to rent a room in the house of the seamstress who worked for the theater. Her house was on a hill above the river—an old, tumbledown wooden place that had sunk into the ground. From the plot of ground near the house one could see the far bank with a fringe of forest, and little boys tobogganed down the slope right to the water's edge. This view was always in front of our eyes, and M. often referred to it in his verse, sometimes cursing it but always nevertheless admiring it.
The little boys would ask him: "Are you a priest or a general, mister?" and to this M. always replied: "A little bit of both." As we soon found out, they thought he might be a general because he held himself so erect and "stuck his nose in the air"—that is, kept his head well back. Through Vadik, the landlady's son, M. took part in a bird
* The reference is to the abortive attempt to write an ode in praise of Stalin, described in the following chapter.
auction[15] at which Vadik bought some birds. As M. said, boys have a particular feeling for birds—"Have you ever seen a girl with pigeons," he asked me, "or at a bird auction?" There were frequent mentions of wild birds in M.'s verse.
We realized that this winter, calamitous as it was, would be our last breathing-space, and we wanted to make the best of it. We could say with Klychkov, in the lines which M. loved to repeat: "Ahead is only torment, and torment is behind me/ Sit with me a while, for God's sake, sit with me a while." This is why the "notebook" written in this last period is the most serene and life-affirming of them.
For any intellectual activity, a man has to tune himself up, like an instrument. Some people can no doubt do this as they go along, functioning without interruption, while others always have to tune themselves afresh each time they begin a new work. Like all poets whose work clearly divides into distinct phases, M. belonged to the second category, and at the beginning of each new cycle there is always a "key" poem which, like a tuning fork, strikes the required note for the rest. At the beginning of the "Second Notebook," this function is fulfilled by the poem about the "factory whistle of Soviet cities" which "whistles into the depths of the ages." When I asked him what he meant by "factory whistle" here, he said: "Perhaps I mean myself."
How could this man, living at bay in the isolation, emptiness and darkness to which we were consigned, think of himself as the "factory whistle of Soviet cities"? Virtually excluded from the life of the country, how could he imagine that his voice could sound forth in its cities? It can only be explained by that sense of being right without which it is impossible to be a poet. If one were to name the dominant theme in the whole of M.'s life and work, one might say that it was his insistence on the poet's dignity, his position in society and his right to make himself heard.