The next day we had an indignant cable from M.'s father: Bublik had abandoned him on the platform in Leningrad and disappeared together with the suitcase. The old man was utterly mortified and demanded that the criminal be tracked down by the police and brought to trial. For this M. would have had to write a full statement and then to go to the police and demand action on the strength of his status as a writer. He did not do this, needless to say. What he couldn't understand was why Bublik had been tempted by his father's suitcase with the kettle tied to the handle, but had shown no interest in the considerable sums of money M. had asked him to bring from the State Publishing House. We were very grateful to Bublik for having behaved with such noble forbearance, and with what was left of the money from the publishing house we bought M.'s father some new clothes. But for a long time he swore and cursed, reproaching himself for having insisted that we let "that vagrant" into the house. He was not even mollified by a package from Bublik in which he returned all the old man's papers, including his memoirs about his travels—he had been writing them in German, in his abominable handwriting, and was always asking M. to read them and get them published.
It was Bublik who explained to us what is meant by the word "illusion." On that first evening, when M. and his father had insisted he stay, I was not feeling very well and went to bed early, doing my best to show what an unwelcome guest he was. Women, as is well known, dislike upsets of this kind and are quick to assume their role as guardians of domestic order—even if there's no longer any such thing. Bublik understood this and decided to make his own bed for the night. He spread several sheets of newspaper in the kitchen and called in M. "Osip Emilievich," he said, "do you know what an illusion is? Here you have one!" and with a broad gesture he pointed at the newspapers. M. could not stand the idea of his sleeping on them, and he pulled the only mattress we had out from under me. I generously added cushions and sheets and the same torn blanket that later disappeared together with the suitcase.
The whole of our apartment with its bookcase—indeed, our life in general—was an illusion of normal existence. Burying our heads in our pillows, we tried to believe that we were peacefully asleep.
49 The Reader of One Book
I
n his youth M. always carefully weighed his words—it was only later that he tended toward levity. In 1919, when he was still very young, he once told me that there was no need at all to have a lot of books, and that it was best to read one book all one's life. "Do you mean the Bible?" I asked. "Why not?" he replied. I thought of the splendid graybeards of the East who read the Koran throughout their lives—perhaps they are the only representatives left of that ancient tribe who read a single book—but I could scarcely picture my light-hearted companion as one of them, "Well, I didn't mean I will, of course," he admitted, "but all the same . . ."
M. did not achieve his own ideal—such single-minded devotion is impossible in the twentieth century—but this remark he made to me in 1919 was not accidental. There are people whose every word flows from a general, integrated view of the world, and perhaps this is always true of poets, even though they vary in the range and depth of their understanding. Perhaps it is this that drives them to express themselves and serves also as the measure of their authenticity. There are, after all, people who write verse as readily as poets, and though there is always something obviously lacking in such verse, it is not easy to define. For this reason it is naive to talk about poets not being recognized by their contemporaries. A real poet is always recognized immediately—by his enemies as well as by his well-wishers. It seems inevitable that a poet should arouse enmity. At the end of his life this happened even to Pasternak, who for so long and with such skill—the same skill with which he charmed all who met him—had avoided provoking the blind fury of the philistines. Perhaps people are angered by the poet's sense of his own rightness, by the categorical nature of his judgments ("The bluntness of our speech is no mere children's bogey," as M. said in one poem), which in turn derives from the "wholeness" of his vision. Every poet is a "disturber of sense"—that is, instead of repeating the ready-made opinions current in his time, he extracts new sense from his own understanding of the world. People who are content with generally received formulas are inevitably outraged by a new idea when it comes to them in its raw state, still unrefined, with all its rough edges. Isn't this what M. had in mind when he spoke of poetry as "raw material," saying that it was incomparably "rougher" than ordinary everyday speech? People shy away from this raw material and ask in what way the poet is better than they, or they accuse him of arrogance and a desire to lay down the law. This was the spirit in which Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Pasternak were hounded—and Mayakovski, too, until he was made into a State poet. For a long time after he was dead, people also talked in this vein of Gumilev. This is how it always is—though the captives of ready-made formulas easily forget what they were saying a week ago if they are ordered to adopt a new set of opinions. Luckily, however, poets also have their friends, and it is they who matter in the long run.
In what he said about reading only one book, M. was condemning something he loathed—namely, the mechanical absorption of incompatible things, the impaired sense of discrimination which he described in his "Fourth Prose" as "omni-tolerance" ("Look what has happened to Mother Philology—once so full-blooded . . . and now so omni-tolerant").
The first time I heard M. denounce the omnivorous approach was in 1919, in Kiev, when he criticized Briusov for his poems about different historical epochs, comparing them to gaudy Chinese lanterns. If such a comparison sprang to mind, M. concluded, it meant that Briusov was really lukewarm about everything, and that he looked at history as an idle spectator. I don't remember his exact words, but this was the sense of what he said. Later on, he and Akhmatova used to dismiss this kind of stuff as "the story of the nations down the ages." M. always knew, or at least tried to know, whether he should say "yes" or "no" to something. All his views gravitated to one pole or the other, and to this extent he was a kind of dualist, believing in the ancient doctrine of good and evil as the twin foundations of existence. Poets can never be indifferent to good and evil, and they can never say that all that exists is rational.
M.'s acutely discriminating mind very much affected the choice of what he read. In his notebooks and in "Journey to Armenia" he has something to say about the "demon of reading" in a culture that "plays havoc" with our minds. When they read, people immerse themselves in a world of make-believe, and, anxious to remember it all, they fall under the spell of the printed word. M. never tried to commit what he read to memory, but rather to check it against his own experience, always testing it in the light of his own basic idea— the one which must underlie any real personality. It is reading of the passive type which has always made it possible to propagate pre- digested ideas, to instill into the popular mind slick, commonplace notions. Reading of this kind does not stimulate thought, but has an effect similar to hypnosis—though it must be said that the modern age has even more powerful means for dominating people's minds.