Whenever we went to these rest homes he scarcely talked with anybody and kept very much to himself. Once, in Bolshevo, he was pestered by some ladies concerned with literary and philosophical studies. They asked him to read his verse to them and assured him that they looked on him as "our poet." He told them that his verse was totally incompatible with the sort of scholarship they went in for and that they had no need to try and appease him by pretending to be so catholic in their tastes! M. let himself go like this very often —in editorial offices, at meetings (closed ones, of course) and in private conversation—and as a result people were always saying how "impossible" he was. In fact, it was simply that he was uncompromising: what a pity this was not a quality that could be doled out to others—he had enough of it for a dozen writers. He was particularly uncompromising in his attitude toward our academic intelligentsia: "They've all sold out." At the end of the twenties and in the thirties our authorities, making no concessions to "egalitarianism," started to raise the living standard of those who had proved their usefulness. The resulting differentiation was very noticeable, and everybody was concerned to keep the material benefits he had worked so hard to earn—particularly now that the wretched poverty of the first post-revolutionary years was a thing of the past. Nobody wanted to go through that again, and a thin layer of privileged people gradually came into being—with "packets," [19] country villas, and cars. They realized only later how precarious it all was: in the period of the great purges they found they could be stripped of everything in a flash, and without any explanation. But in the meantime those who had been granted a share of the cake eagerly did everything demanded of them. Once, in Voronezh, M. showed me a newspaper with a statement by Academician Bakh concerning the publication of the Short Course.f "Just look what he writes: 'The Short Course is a turning point in my life.' " "He probably only signed it," I suggested—people were generally presented with such "statements" and asked to put their signature to them. "That makes it even worse," said M.
But what, objectively speaking, could Academician Bakh have done? Could he have revised the text a little, so that his name would not appear under an obviously official document? I doubt it. Or should he have thrown out the journalist who came to collect his signature? Can one expect people to behave like this, knowing what the consequences will be? I do not think so, and I do not know how to answer these questions. The distinguishing feature of terror is that everybody is completely paralyzed and doesn't dare resist in any way.
But a question one may ask now is: Was there a moment in our life when the intelligentsia could have held out for its independence? There probably was, but, already badly shaken and disunited before the Revolution, it was unable to defend itself during the period when it was made to surrender and change its values. Perhaps we are now witnessing an attempt to regain the values which were then abandoned. It is a slow, groping and arduous process. Whether it will be possible to preserve them during the new ordeals that face us, I shall never know.
50 Tikhonov
N
ikolai Tikhonov, the poet, always talked in loud, self- confident tones. He had great charm and, with his beguiling ways, was good at winning people over. His literary debut was greeted with joy by all those who spoke of him in such glowing terms as a man of the new generation, a wonderful story-teller—and every inch a soldier to boot. Even now many people are still captivated by him, not realizing what he later became. He was first brought to see us by Nikolai Chukovski, and M. took a liking to both of them. "See what a kind person Kornei Chukovski's son is," he said. About Tikhonov he said: "He's all right—though I have the feeling he's the sort who might come into your compartment in a train and say 'Let's see your papers, citizens!'" M. pronounced the phrase in the way it was spoken by the commanders of grain- requisition units during the Civil War when they came through trains looking for black-marketeers. Even so, M. also fell under Tikhonov's spell—but not for long. We saw Tikhonov in his true colors earlier than other people. I particularly remember the passionate conviction in his voice as he said to us: "Mandelstam will not live in Leningrad. We will not give him a room." This was after our return from Armenia, when we had nowhere to live and M. had asked the writers' organization to let him have a vacant room in the Leningrad House of Writers. When Tikhonov refused this in such extraordinary terms, I asked him whether M. would have to obtain the permission of the writers' organization to live in Leningrad in a privately rented room. He stubbornly repeated his previous statement: "Mandelstam will not live in Leningrad." I tried to find out whether he was saying this on his own initiative or on somebody else's instructions, but I could not get any sense out of him. If it was on instructions, it was difficult to account for the depth of feeling in his voice. Whatever the truth of the matter, it boded no good, and we returned to Moscow. What Tikhonov was trying to convey by his tone of voice was more or less as follows: "We all behave in the way expected of us, and who does Mandelstam think he is to carry on like this, not caring a damn for anybody, and then come and ask us for work and a place to live! He flouts all the rules, and we have to answer for him." From his own point of view, Tikhonov was quite right. In the eyes of someone so totally devoted to the regime M. was an anomaly, a harmful emanation of the past, a person for whom there was no room in a literature where places were allotted by higher authority.
By this time we had already gained some insight into Tikhonov. Not long before our conversation about a room and the right to live in Leningrad, we happened to meet him as he was coming out of the editorial offices of Zvezda with his pockets full of manuscripts that he had been asked to advise on. He patted his pockets and said: "Just like at the front . . ." We knew that Tikhonov was dominated by his memories of the Civil War, but we failed to see what connection there could be between his bulging pockets and the front line. He explained that there was now a "war" going on in literature and it appeared that he was applying himself to his very modest literary activities with all the dash which had once distinguished him as a soldier. All he had to do to feel he was fulfilling his revolutionary duty was to "kill" half a dozen hack novels, of the kind with which any editor's desk is always cluttered, and simultaneously expose their ideological shortcomings. Wasn't that war? Moreover, it was war without the usual risks, and he didn't have to go out marauding to f irnish his apartment with the modest attributes of Soviet comfort. What was wrong with that?