The main outward sign of the relationship between the "Ode" and the series of poems which burst from M.'s lips in opposition to it is a phonetic one involving the syllable os, which appears in a number of unrelated words such as "wasp" (osa) and "axle" (os). A key poem dated February 8, 1937, for example, begins:
Armed with the sight of narrow wasps [os]
Sucking the axis [oj] of the earth . . .
But much more important than this phonetic link between the "Ode" and the rest of the cycle is the way in which details in the "Ode" are contradicted or given a different interpretation in the "free" poems. In the "Ode," for example, an artist, with tears in his eyes, draws a portrait of the Leader. But the poem of February 8 quoted above has the line "I do not draw and I do not sing." M. himself was astonished at this admission which had burst from him quite spontaneously, and commented to me: "Look what the trouble with me is: it seems I don't draw. . . ."
A mention of Aeschylus and Prometheus in the "Ode" led on in the "free" poems to the theme of tragedy and martyrdom (in the poem dated January 19-February 14). The theme of martyrdom also comes into the poem on Rembrandt (February 8), which speaks, by implication, of a Calvary devoid of grandeur (the museum in Voronezh, which we visited constantly, had a small painting of Golgotha by Rembrandt and some Greek vases—all that remained of the treasures of Dorpat University).
The Caucasus, naturally mentioned in the "Ode" as Stalin's birthplace, occurs again in the reference to Tiflis as the place which remembers not the Great Leader but the poor poet with his worn shoes (the poem of February 7-11), and in the mention of Mount Elbrus[16] as a measure of the people's need for bread and poetry.
In the opening poem of the cycle ("Yeast of the World" and its variants) there is even a direct complaint that the "Ode" is at cross- purposes with the rest:
I'm bored: my direct work babbles obliquely
crossed and mocked by another that has dislocated its axle.t
Poetry is the "yeast of the world," a "sweet-voiced labor" which is "blameless." M. declares that he is a poet when his "mind is not deceitful" and his work is "selfless":
a selfless song is its own praise, a comfort to friends, and pitch to enemies.
The enemy who had been installed in our Moscow apartment, the writer with the rank of general, copied out all of M.'s verse on his typewriter. Since very few people had typewriters in those days and he offered to do this as a "favor," it was impossible to refuse—and in any case he would have obtained the poems somehow, even if it had meant stealing them from under my pillow. Just as a little warning to us he underlined the words "selfless song" in red pencil. When the archives are one day thrown open, it will be interesting to see his report on this poem.
In the poems of this cycle M. also exalted man ("Do not compare: the living are incomparable") and gave rein to his love of life for the last time. He lamented his failing eyesight, which had once been "sharper than a whetted scythe" but had not had time to pick out each of the "lonely multitude of stars" (the last poem in the cycle, dated February 8-9). He summed up his life and work in the last three lines of the poem dated February 12:
And I have accompanied the universe's rapture As muted organ pipes Accompany a woman's voice.
Speaking of himself, he used here the "inexorable past tense"—to borrow his own expression from "Conversation About Dante." A few more months were to pass, and he would say to Akhmatova: "I am ready for death." She later used this phrase in her "Poem Without a Hero," which also has a dedication dated December 27, 1938— the date of M.'s death.
But perhaps the high point of the cycle is contained in the following lines, which are the proud words of a man condemned to death, yet still clinging to life:
Unhappy is he who, as by his own shadow, is frightened by the barking of dogs and mowed
down by the wind and wretched is he who, half-alive himself, begs a shadow for alms.[17]
The word "shadow" here referred to the man from whom everybody "begged alms"—and a shadow is what he eventually proved to be. Struggling for breath, frightened by everything but afraid of no one, crushed and condemned, the bearded poet thus defied once more, in his last days, the dictator whose power was greater than any the world had ever known.
People who had voices were subjected to the vilest of tortures: their tongues were cut out and with the stump that remained they were forced to glorify the tyrant. The desire to live is insuperable, and people accepted even this, if they could thereby prolong their physical existence. But those who survived at this price were as dead as those who perished. There is no point in mentioning names, but it is safe to say that among all those who continued to play the role of writers in those years, none have come forth as witnesses. They can never overcome their state of confusion, or say anything with the stumps of their tongues. Yet there were many among them who in different circumstances would have found their way in life and said what they had to say.
To be sure, M. also, at the very last moment, did what was required of him and wrote a hymn of praise to Stalin, but the "Ode" did not achieve its purpose of saving his life. It is possible, though, that without it I should not have survived either—their first impulse was to destroy me, too, but it was counted in a widow's favor if her husband had made his submission even though it wasn't accepted. M. knew this. By surviving I was able to save his poetry, which would otherwise have come down only in the garbled copies circulating in I937-
The prayer "May this cup pass from me" can only be understood if you know what it is to wait for the slow, inevitable approach of death. It is far harder to wait for a bullet in the back of the neck than to be stricken down unawares. We waited for the end during the whole of our last year in Voronezh, and then yet another year, moving from place to place to place in the Moscow region.
To write an ode to Stalin it was necessary to get in tune, like a musical instrument, by deliberately giving way to the general hypnosis and putting oneself under the spell of the liturgy which in those days blotted out all human voices. Without this, a real poet could never compose such a thing: he would never have had that kind of ready facility. M. thus spent the beginning of 1937 conduct- ing a grotesque experiment on himself. Working himself up into the state needed to write the "Ode," he was in effect deliberately upsetting the balance of his own mind. "I now realize that it was an illness," he said later to Akhmatova.
"Why is it that when I think of him, I see heads, mounds of heads?" M. said to me once. "What is he doing with all those heads?"