Among the books we had in the thirties there were no twentieth- century poets except Annenski, the two Acmeists, Gumilev and
Akhmatova, and a few miscellaneous things. M. had gone through the poetry of the twentieth century in 1922 when two young men who wanted to try their luck as private publishers asked him to compile an anthology of Russian verse from the Symbolists "to the present day." It started with Konevskoi and Dobroliubov and ended with Boris Lapin. As usual, M. looked for the particularly felicitous lines: Dobroliubov's "speaking eagles," Balmont's "Song of an Arab Whose Name is Naught," Komarovski's "On the squares the only word is daki," Borodayevski's "Swifts" and Lozina-Lozinski's "Chessplayers." He very much liked two or three poems by Boris Lapin: one about "stars in the windows of the Cheka," and another beginning: "As though nibbling the fingers of asters, Tril-Tral kissed the flowers." The great stumbling-block was Briusov. M. could fined nothing suitable, but it was impossible to leave him out. He looked much bigger to us in those days than he does now—proportions are always distorted in close-up. Briusov had to be well represented in the volume, and M. was driven frantic as he read him in search of something appropriate. " 'Hot as a flame you must be, and sharp as a sword'—what does that mean?" he asked with exasperation. And when he came to the poem in which Dante's cheeks are singed by the flames of hell, he rushed to the two publishers, saying he would have to give up. To make matters worse, they were always bringing him piles of new things by Briusov. But they both were very well-behaved boys, and after a little argument they would put the stuff back in their pockets and keep it for their own private delectation. M. often remembered them in later years—they seemed like angels to him compared with any Soviet editor. The anthology was eventually forbidden by the censor because M. had not included any of the "proletarian" poets who were already being sponsored by the State. Their names are now totally forgotten, and I do not remember which ones it was proposed to include. The censor also insisted on the removal of a great many poems he condemned as "bourgeois and alien from a class point of view." All that remains from this work are a few page proofs. Of all the things commissioned from M., it was the one he thought made the most sense—it is a good idea for a young poet to put together his own anthology of verse in his native language.
"What does it mean?" was M.'s usual question about verse that irritated him. This was what he once asked about Mayakovski's celebrated line: "Our god is speed, our heart—a drum." I had always liked this jingle until I began to ponder its meaning. But on the whole M. thought well of Mayakovski and told me how they had once made friends in Petersburg, only to be dragged apart because it was "not done" for poets of rival schools to associate with each other. There is a photograph from this period showing M. with Mayakovski, Livshitz and Kornei Chukovski. It was published in some magazine or other with the intention of showing what cretins were now trying to pass themselves off as writers. It should be said, by the way, that the new attitude toward poetry which made itself felt so clearly by the beginning of the First World War, or by the time of the Revolution, and the fact that people began to read it again, was something for which we have to thank the Symbolists and the enormous work they did in re-educating the public taste. I was born at the beginning of the century and hence belong to the generation schooled by them. It was in the circles dominated by them—and they grew all the time—that Tolstoi and particularly Dostoevski were seen in a new light, Pushkin was first properly studied, Bara- tynski, Tiutchev, Fet and many others were revived. The Russian realist tradition, with its emphasis on "social" themes, was losing its following among the public, but it was still firmly entrenched in the literary establishment. It was these people who made war on everything done by the Symbolists and the cultural revival which explained their success—though the persons of the Symbolists themselves were already immune to attack even from this quarter. For a long time it appeared as though the tradition of the "Silver Age," as it is called, had been completely stamped out. But at the moment there are some faint gleams of it again. What will become of them? And where are we headed now, I wonder?
In the thirties M. showed no further interest in the twentieth- century Russian poets, and kept mainly the nineteenth-century ones on his shelves. He liked first editions of a poet's work. This does not contradict what I said about his lack of interest in collecting rare volumes—it was simply that a first edition always betrays the hand of the poet himself and gives the best idea of how he appraised, selected and arranged his own work. We had such first editions of Derzhavin, Yazykov, Zhukovski, Baratynski, Fet, Polonski and others. Reading the nineteenth-century poets, M. was, as usual, on the lookout for things that struck him as particularly successful. He liked Mei's "Woman of Pompei," Sluchevski's "Yaroslavna" and "Execution in Geneva" (where the lines about the old woman sound almost like Annenski) and Polezhayev's poem about the gypsy woman. I have forgotten what he liked in Apollon Grigoriev, whom he also had in a first edition acquired by chance (perhaps it was "Hymns," which appeared in only fifty copies). He liked a large number of Fet's poems, among them "The Snake." In these preferences he was no doubt subconsciously influenced by the tastes of his first teacher, Vladimir Vasilievich Gippius, about whom he talks in The Noise of Time. Akhmatova's favorite line from Fet was: "He who made this rose's whorls/ wished to drive me mad." They were always exchanging the lines they liked best, making a gift of them to each other. With Maikov it was the same as with Briusov—M. could find nothing to his taste. The corner of the bookcase reserved for the Russian poets was being constantly added to, but there would never be a publisher for M.'s anthology of them.
The second-largest section in the bookcase was devoted to the Italians: apart from Dante, M. also had Ariosto, Tasso, Petrarch—both in the original and in German prose translations. At first, before he had made himself at home in Italian, M. sometimes turned to these and other translations. The only Russian translation he had any regard for was one published in the late 1900's (Gorbov's, I think). He could not stand verse translations—it was all too rare that they were successful enough to become part of literature (as Gnedich's have). All these editions of the Italian classics were very modest, with a bare minimum of learned notes (e.g., the Oxford edition of 1904). Of course, we would have bought newer editions, but even now it is impossible to get hold of them. Of the Italian prose writers I remember Vasari, Boccaccio and Vico—but there were probably others as well.
There were also quite a lot of Latin poets: Ovid, Horace, Tibul- lus, Catullus . . . We nearly always bought them with German translations—the Germans are better at this than the French.
M. had taken up the Germans again in Armenia, and in the thirties he bought a great many of them: Goethe, the Romantics, Burger, Lenau, Eichendorff and both Kleists. He also acquired Klopstock (because—as he said—"he sounds like an organ"), Herder and others. Then, he had Morike and Holderlin and also one or two of the poets who wrote in Middle High German. He had far fewer French poets. From earlier days he had kept Chenier, Barbier and the perennial Villon. In the thirties he again bought Verlaine, Baudelaire and Rimbaud. In his youth he had once tried to translate Mal- larme—on the advice of Annenski, who said translating was good practice—but nothing came of it. M. told me that Mallarme was not serious and also that Gumilev and Georgi Ivanov used to make fun of