M. always referred to reading as an "activity"—and for him it was indeed mainly the active exercise of his powers of discrimination. Some books he just glanced through, others he read with real interest (for instance, Joyce and Hemingway), but on a quite different level from all this there was his reading of really formative books with which he entered, as it were, into lasting contact and which left their mark on some part of his life, or the whole of it. The coming of a new book into his life was like a first encounter with someone destined to be a friend. His line: "I was awakened by friendship, as by a shot" refers not only to his meeting with Kuzin, but also—to a far greater degree—to his "meeting" at the same time with the German poets, of whom he wrote: "Tell me, friends, in what Valhalla did we crack nuts together, what freedom did we share, what milestones did you leave for me?" M. had known these poets before: Goethe, Holderlin, Morike, and the Romantics—but he had only read them, which wasn't the same as a real "meeting."
The "meeting" with them took place in Armenia—and this was not by accident. M.'s journey to Armenia, which he had looked forward to so eagerly (in "Fourth Prose" he tells of an earlier, unsuccessful attempt to get there), awoke his latent interest in what I would now loosely describe as "Naturphilosophie"—and would once have referred to even less accurately as "philosophy of culture." It took the form of lively curiosity about a small country, an outpost of Christianity in the East, which for centuries had withstood the onslaught of Islam. Perhaps in our age of crisis for the Christian consciousness M. was attracted by Armenia's steadfastness. Georgia, which history had treated much more kindly, did not have the same appeal. Our small hotel room in Erivan was soon full of books on Armenia: Strzigovski, the Armenian chronicles, Moses of Chorene, and much more. The general description of the country that impressed M. most of all was the one by Shopen, an official under Alexander I. He couldn't help comparing Shopen's keen interest in the country with the indifference of the many embittered and querulous visiting Soviet officials we saw in the hotel.
It was Armenia that took M. back to Goethe, Herder and the other German poets. If his meeting with the young biologist Kuzin —whose enthusiasm for literature and philosophy was somewhat in the Bursche tradition—had taken place in Moscow, it might have made little impact, but in Armenia he and M. hit it off at once. They first got talking in the courtyard of a mosque, where they drank Persian tea served in small glasses, and they were still talking when M. brought him back to the hotel. M. was interested in what he had to say about the application of biology to the things that concerned him, such as the perennial question as to how new forms arise. Even before he met Kuzin, M. had once written that the study of poetry would only become a science when it was approached in the same spirit as biology. This idea may well have been an echo of a theory of linguistics popular in the first decade of the century, which stressed its links with the social sciences and biology.
Kuzin was very fond of Goethe, which was also most relevant to M.'s concerns at the moment. Later on, in Moscow, when M. "met" Dante, his friendship with Kuzin and the other biologists in his circle was reduced to a mere acquaintanceship over an occasional glass of wine. M. immediately decided that nobody was more important than Dante, and regarded him as an inseparable companion ever afterward —even twice taking him to prison with him. Anticipating his arrest —as I have already said, everybody we knew did this as a matter of course—M. obtained an edition of the Divine Comedy in small format and always had it with him in his pocket, just in case he was arrested not at home but in the street. You could be arrested anywhere—sometimes they came for you at your place of work, and sometimes you were lured out to another place on a false pretext and no one ever heard of you again. One friend of mine used to complain that he found it difficult to lug around the heavy bag with all the things he would need in a forced-labor camp. In the end, however, he was arrested at home and so much lost his head that he forgot to take his bag with him. When M. went to Samatikha (the place where he was arrested the second time), he left his pocket Dante in Moscow and took another, rather more bulky edition. I do not know whether he managed to keep it until he reached the transit camp at Vtoraya Rechka, near Vladivostok, where he died. I somehow doubt it: in the camps under Yezhov and Stalin, nobody could give any thought to books.
It so happens that by sheer coincidence Akhmatova started reading Dante at the same time as M. When he learned this, she recited to him a passage she had learned by heart: "Donna m'apparve ?iello manto vertoand M. was moved almost to tears at hearing these lines read in her voice, which he loved so much.
Both M. and Akhmatova had the astonishing ability of somehow bridging time and space when they read the work of dead poets. By its very nature, such reading is usually anachronistic, but with them it meant entering into personal relations with the poet in question: it was a kind of conversation with someone long since departed. From the way in which he greeted his favorite poets of antiquity in the Inferno, M. suspected that Dante also had this ability. In his article "On the Nature of Words" he mentions Bergson's search for links between things of the same kind that are separated only by time—in the same way, he thought, one can look for friends and allies across the barriers of both time and space. This would probably have been understood by Keats, who wanted to meet all his friends, living and dead, in a tavern.
Akhmatova, in resurrecting figures from the past, was always interested in the way they lived and their relations with others. I remember how she made Shelley come alive for me—this was, as it were, her first experiment of this kind. Next began her period of communion with Pushkin. With the thoroughness of a detective or a jealous woman, she ferreted out everything about the people around him, probing their psychological motives and turning every woman he had ever so much as smiled at inside out like a glove. Akhmatova took no such burning personal interest in any living person. She could not, incidentally, stand the wives of other writers, particularly those of poets. I will never understand why she made an exception of me, but the fact is that she did—though she was unable to explain it herself. In this respect M. was the opposite of Akhmatova and almost never took any interest in the personal life of dead poets, though, despite his apparent absent-mindedness, he was extraordinarily observant and knew a great deal more about our living friends than I did. Sometimes I didn't believe him, but he always turned out to be right. But he showed no interest whatsoever in Natalia Gon- charova, Paletika or Anna Grigorievna Dostoevski. Knowing his lack of curiosity about such matters, Akhmatova never raised them with him. As regards living people, he would never be drawn by her and thought people should behave as they wished. His conversation with her was always about the work of their favorite poets ("Do you remember this line?" "Did you notice that wonderful bit?") and they often read them aloud together, pointing out the passages they liked best, sharing their finds with each other. During M.'s last years they were much taken by Dante and other Italians, and—as always—by the Russian poets.
I find it more difficult to say which books influenced M. most in his earlier years. When he came to Kiev in 1919 he had Florenski's Pillar and Affirmation of the Truth with him—he was evidently struck by the pages about doubt, since he sometimes talked on the same lines, without, however, mentioning Florenski as his source. As a schoolboy he certainly read Herzen, and in his adolescence he was interested for a time in Vladimir Soloviev, who meant more to him (as a philosopher, not as a poet) than people imagine. The fact that Soloviev's name is never mentioned in M.'s articles has a very simple explanation: most of them were written for publication in Soviet times, when no editor would have passed a single word about Soloviev unless it was abusive. Nevertheless, there are traces of Soloviev's influence scattered throughout M.'s writings: one sees it in his Christianity (which was of a Solovievian kind), in his methods of arguing, in many recurring ideas, and even in certain individual words and expressions. For instance, in his poem to Bely, the line about "crowds of people, events, impressions" is a direct echo of Soloviev's phrase about "crowds of ideas" that occurs somewhere in his philosophical writings. M. also mentioned him in conversation and obviously had a high regard for him. When we stayed in the cekubu rest home on the former Trubetskoi estate where Soloviev died, M. was struck by the indifference to his memory with which Soviet scholars sat writing articles, reading newspapers or listening to the radio in the same blue study where Soloviev had once worked. At the time I knew nothing of Soloviev myself, and M. was quite indignant: "You're a barbarian, like them." For M. these professors were nothing but a horde of barbarians invading the holy places of Russian culture.