This is why, after the opening poem about the factory whistle, the "Second Notebook" contains this theme of the poet's self-assertion. In the atmosphere of increasing terror, it would have been impossible, if he had been guided by reason alone, for him to strike this note. But the point is that the theme came to him spontaneously, as a poetic subject always did—it was not something arrived at by a rational process. At first it appeared only in a muted form, disguised by references drawn from everyday life, such as the factory whistle.
The theme of the poet's situation also comes out in his poem about the goldfinch, or at least in the variant of it where he addresses the bird as his own likeness and orders it to live. In one of his early articles M. had told a story about a youthful poet who went from publisher to publisher trying to sell his literary wares which nobody had any use for. This youth is described by a Russian word almost identical in sound with "goldfinch," and since M. never forgot previous associations or images, he must have thought of this, and of the rejection of his own literary wares, as he wrote the poem on the goldfinch. Perhaps this is why he was so insistent in telling it to live.
The goldfinch was now kept in a cage, and not allowed out into the forest glades. "But," M. said to me once, "they cannot stop me moving about. I have just been on a secret trip to the Crimea." He was referring to the poem "Gaps in Round Bays" (February 1937), which is remarkable for its slow-motion effect ("a slow sail continued by a cloud. . . ."). We were always distressed at the way time flew by, and M. felt that only in the south did you have a tangible sense of present time.
"You've been on a trip to Tiflis as well," I said to him. "I was forced to make that journey," he replied. "I was dragged there by the Evil Spirit." By this he meant that his verses about Tiflis were a by-product of his attempt to write the ode to Stalin.
In another poem, written in January 1937, he writes of his "bright nostalgia" which will not let him leave the "young hills of Voronezh" for the "bright ones of Tuscany that belong to all mankind." Italy dwelt with us in the shape of M.'s volumes of Italian poetry and our illustrated books on architecture. M. would invite me to stroll in imagination with him round the Baptistery in Florence, and we got as much pleasure from this as we did from the view in front of the seamstress' house.
Then there was the changing of the seasons. "This is also a journey," M. said, "and they can't take it away from us." With his infinite love of life he was able to draw strength from things which other people, including me, only found oppressive: the autumn slush, for instance, or the bitter cold of winter. These were things that could not be "taken away"—the word he used to describe how his enforced residence in Voronezh had deprived him of all that he felt had formerly belonged to him: the south, journeys, trains, steamships . . .
When he started writing poems about stars, M. was upset—this was always a sign that his poetic impulse was coming to an end ("thetailor's material is running out"). He remembered how Gumilev used to say that stars had a different meaning for every poet. For M. they signified abandonment of the earth and hence a feeling that he had lost his bearings.
>oet's understanding of reality comes to him together with his
He was even more upset by the poem he wrote in May 1937 about the woman of Kiev—the second he had written during those months about a woman parted from her husband. Terrified as he was of our parting, he thought this was ominous. He was very often afraid of things that appeared like this in his poetry, and after he had read me a few lines from the first of these poems, he never mentioned them to me again. "Don't talk about them," he said, "or it may all happen." We also had a superstitious belief that anything referred to in his poetry was bound to disappear: after writing "The Patriarch," he lost the white-handled walking-stick mentioned in it. A traveling rug with which I used to cover him began to fall apart as soon as it appeared in the line "you will cover me with it, as with a military flag, when I die." Our apartment, for which I had fought so hard, did not long survive the poem he wrote about it, and our goldfinch was eaten by a cat.
43 The Ode
verse, which always contains some element of anticipation of the future. "They're all the same," Akhmatova once said to me in a matter-of-fact tone when I showed her a poem of M.'s which clearly demonstrated foreknowledge of the future: she knew his work only too well and was not surprised in the least.
In the "Second Voronezh Notebook" there is a cycle whose matrix is the "Ode to Stalin" which he forced himself to write in the winter of 1936-37. This "Ode" did not fulfill its purpose—to save his life—but it gave rise to a whole series of other poems which were not only unlike it but also flatly contradicted it. Rather like the uncoiling of a spring, they were a natural response to it.
The "Goldfinch" cycle, which immediately preceded it, had sprung from an intensified craving for life and an affirmation of it, but even here there is a foreboding of death ("I shall take my seat inthe lilac sleigh"), of our parting and the horrors lurking ahead. We were witnessing "the beginning of dreadful deeds," and the future was approaching "grimly," like the dark thunderclouds which occur in his poem about the Voronezh region (December 1936). Finally, in early January 1937 there was the poem about the "deadness of the plains" over which comes slowly crawling "He of whom we shriek in our sleep/ The Judas of peoples to come." At this moment he saw his choice with utmost clarity: either he could passively await his doom or he could make some attempt to save himself. The turning point came in the middle of January, and is expressed in the poem entitled "Yeast of the World" (the one where he refers to the imprints made by horses' hoofs). This marked the moment at which the "Goldfinch" cycle came to an end and a new one, triggered by the "Ode," began.
The man to whom the "Ode" was written so dominated our minds that one can find veiled references to him in the most unlikely contexts. These allusions are always betrayed by certain associations from which one can see M.'s train of thought. A poem written in December 1936, for instance, is about an idol living in the middle of a mountain and trying to remember the days when it still had human shape. In Russian there is a clear phonetic trail of association leading from "Kremlin" to "mountain" via the words kremen ("flint") and kamen ("stone"). There is also a dangerously suggestive use of the word "fat" in the line: "The fat of pearls drips from his neck." One immediately thinks of the "fat fingers" in M.'s first poem about Stalin. The line about the idol desperately trying to remember the time when it was human could have been inspired by Yakhontov's wife, Lilia, a Stalinist of the sentimental type, who told us during their visit to Voronezh how wonderful, brave and high-spirited Stalin had been as a young revolutionary. . . . Living as we did in Assyria, it was impossible not to think of the Assyrian.
By the window in the room we rented from the seamstress there was a square dining table which we used for everything under the sun. M. now took possession of it and laid out pencil and paper on it. He had never done anything like this before: paper and pencil were always needed only at the end of his work on a poem, to copy it out when it was already composed in his head. But for the sake of the "Ode" he changed all his habits, and while he was writing it we had to eat on the very edge of the table, or even on the window sill. Every morning he seated himself at the table and picked up the pencil, as a writer is supposed to: for all the world like Fedin, or someone of that kind. I would not even have been surprised if he had pronounced the ritual "Never a day without at least a lihe," but this, thank God, he didn't say. After sitting for half an hour or so in this posture of the real man of letters, he would suddenly jump up and begin to curse himself for his lack of skilclass="underline" "Now, look at Aseyev— he's a real craftsman, he would just dash it off without a moment's thought." Then, calming down, he would stretch out on the bed and ask for tea. After that, he would get up to feed lumps of sugar to the neighbor's dog through the air vent at the top of the window—to do this he had to climb up on the table with the paper neatly laid out on it. Next he would begin to pace the room and, suddenly brightening, start mumbling to himself. This was a sign that he had not been able to stifle the real poetry inside him, and that it had now broken its bounds, overwhelming the Evil Spirit. His attempt to do violence to himself was meeting stubborn resistance, and the artificially conceived poem about Stalin simply became a matrix for the utterly different material seething inside him—real poetry which was antagonistic to the "Ode" and canceled it out. This cycle, generated by the "Ode," starts with "Yeast of the World" and continues to the end of the "Second Voronezh Notebook."