Before we left for Voronezh, Lilia had offered some of her books on Marxism to M. for his edification, but Yakhontov had said: "There's no point: it's utterly useless," and instead gave his Bible to
• See the note on Gapon in the Appendix.
M.—I still have it. Yakhontov was also hard to re-educate.
Akhmatova knows the Old Testament very well and is very fond of discussing fine points of interpretation with Amusin, whom I introduced to her. M., on the other hand, was rather afraid of the Old Testament God and his awesome, totalitarian power. He used to say (and I later found the same idea in Berdiayev) that, with its doctrine of the Trinity, Christianity had overcome the undivided power of the Jewish God. Undivided power was, of course, something of which we were very afraid.
48 The Illusion
he knowledge of what an illusion is first came to us in the au
tumn of 1933, when we were still settling down in the only apartment we ever had, in the street once called Nashchokin but later renamed Furmanov in honor of our neighbor there.
Once a man with a rucksack knocked on our door and asked for M.'s brother Alexander. He had an improbably feudal-sounding name with several components (of which one was Dobropalovy), but he preferred to be known by his nickname, "Bublik." I wanted to send him away to my brother-in-law's apartment—I was already tired of people begging to be put up for the night because they couldn't get into a hotel—but M.'s father, who was staying with us at the time, interceded for him. He said he remembered him as a neat, rosy-cheeked schoolboy from the days when he had attended the same classical grammar school as Alexander. "And now look what he's come to!" said M.'s father, almost crying. M. pushed me aside and asked Bublik to come in. To set our minds at rest, he told us that he had been in prison only on ordinary criminal charges, so we needn't worry: there was no suggestion at all of the dreaded Article 58. In those years M. was impressed by the fact that in the West the police were armed with nightsticks, and when he happened to mention this, Bublik just smiled: "If only you knew what they do to criminals here!" In fact we had heard some rumors about what was done to prisoners—and not only criminals—already in the twenties.
Bublik was an incorrigibly cheerful soul and he kept running off to meet some comrades with whom he was hoping to go to the far north, where, he said, there were "many of our kind"—which meant it would be easier to settle down there. While he lived with us, he helped us with the housekeeping and ran errands for M. M. often sent him with a note to the State Publishing House so that Bublik could collect installments on the money which was then being advanced to M. for a collected edition of his work. This collection never actually appeared, because M. refused to exclude "Journey to Armenia," some of his verse and a great many articles. The edition wouldn't have come off in any case: Bukharin no longer had any influence and at some stage it would have been "killed." Even so, it was good tactics to try to reach a compromise whereby something might be published. The fact that nothing of M.'s was appearing at all made it possible for our officials to spread the story that M. had stopped writing verse in the twenties and now spent his time drinking in the Moscow taverns. Many people believed this—particularly in the West, where the absence of publications is taken to mean that an author is no longer writing. How could we possibly explain that things were different with us? But poetry is a law to itself: it is impossible to bury it alive and even a powerful propaganda machinery such as ours cannot prevent it from living on. "I am easy in my mind now," Akhmatova said to me in the sixties. "We have seen how durable poetry is."
Bublik would bring the money in a briefcase and make me count it: the only reward he would accept for all the waiting in line at the cashier's was to buy himself a sandwich out of the money. M. now looked on him as indispensable, particularly when it turned out that he was a first-rate Latin scholar.
Everybody who came to see M. had his own particular line of talk. Kuzin and the other biologists talked about genetics, the Bergsonian elan vital and Aristotle's entelechy. M. was quite happy to listen to them. With Kuzin he often went to concerts—they both had an excellent knowledge of music and could reproduce (M. by whistling, Kuzin by singing them) the most complicated scores. Margu- lis, whom I have already mentioned, was also a musical companion for M. His wife, Iza Khantsyn, teaches in the Conservatory. She often recalls how M. listened to music and how she played for him on her visits to Moscow—at that time she lived mainly in Leningrad while her husband combed Moscow in search of work. M. used to say that Margulis was his substitute for a printing press: hungry for verse, he always begged to be given the latest new poem, which he would then circulate in manuscript form. This was the beginning of the era of the circulation of literature in this way—though it was not made easier by the fact that whenever a poet's apartment was searched by the police they confiscated both his manuscripts and his books.
Another visitor in those days was Chechanovski, with whom I worked at the beginning of the thirties on the magazine For a Communist Education. Chechanovski was a Marxist, and the main point of our inviting him was to give M. a chance of arguing with him. The concept of "development," he told us, was equivalent to "progress" and could not be "taken away from us by Mandelstam." It was he who was entrusted with the mission of suggesting to M. that he disavow his "Journey to Armenia." Whether he was spying on us, I do not know. Probably not. In any case, it is not very important, since M. never read the poem on Stalin to him—though he said many other things every evening which were quite enough to get him arrested.
We also used to see Nilender, a Greek and Hebrew scholar. A former naval officer, he now worked in the Public Library and generally came around midnight, bringing a packet of tea with him, just in case we had run out by then. He was translating Sophocles and talked all the time about the "golden section." Finally, during that year we saw something of Vygotski, the author of Language and Thought, a very intelligent psychologist (though somewhat hampered by the rationalism of the time), and on the street we sometimes ran into Stolpner, the translator of Hegel, who tried to convince M. that he did not think in words.
Bublik now took his place among these learned men. With his superb classical education, he was a great help to M., and together they delighted in reading Ovid's poems, which for M. were a portent of the future, while for Bublik they evidently spoke of the pleasures of exile already behind him.
Bublik stayed with us for several weeks and was very glad of this unexpected breathing-space. He lost his sallow convict's complexion and began to look like a Latin teacher in a provincial grammar school in the old days. But his comrades were urging that it was time to leave for the north, and his fear of the police also prompted him to get out of Moscow. It so happened that M.'s father had to go to Leningrad, and we asked Bublik to accompany him for that part of his journey. He agreed and helped the old man to pack all his stuff in his comically old-fashioned suitcase. He asked us for a kettle ("so we can get hot water at the stations") and an old blanket ("so we don't have to waste money hiring one on the train"). He carefully tied the kettle to the handle of the suitcase ("so it won't get lost").