one line of his translation which sounded ambiguous in Russian.
M. had brought with him from Leningrad all the books in Old French from his student days—he had needed them in 1922 when some translations of Old French epics were commissioned from him. Sasha Morozov has recently discovered these versions in some archive or other: the eleventh-century "Lament of St. Alexis" and "Aliscans" (of the Guillaume d'Orange cycle). Both are free translations, and M. has brought out something in them that speaks of his own destiny: in the "Lament of St. Alexis" it is the vow of poverty, and in "Aliscans" he appears to be making a solemn oath never to hide in order to save his own life.
M. was always extremely careless with manuscripts and never kept anything ("it will be kept by those who need it") and trusted to archives and editors. He gave his only copy of these translations from the Old French to the magazine Rossia and didn't allow me to make a copy. But, apart from his usual carelessness, there was another reason here: he was afraid of these poems, just as he was of those couplets in which he speaks of a woman's coming doom.'He hid from verse like this, never mentioning it or keeping it at home: it was just like a child closing its eyes and thinking it cannot be seen, or a bird hiding its head under its wing. There was nothing all that prophetic about this work—how could our future have worked out otherwise, given the world in which we lived? The only piece of good fortune is that I was somehow able to survive and preserve M.'s work, and that Akhmatova too managed to hold out. Isn't that miracle enough?
As regards other Russian books, M. eagerly bought the work of thinkers, such as Chaadayev and the Slavophiles. On the other hand, he clearly had no time for German philosophy. Once he bought a volume of Kant, sniffed at it and said: "Nadia, this isn't for us," and threw it behind the other books, out of harm's way. But he felt very close to the Russians. We often heard stories about how Berdiayev had matured in emigration, and M. was always asking about him and trying to get his books, but this became more and more difficult— and dangerous—all the time. We lived cut off like this from the modern world, with nothing but dry crusts for our sustenance. All we had was the past, and we lived off it as best we could.
In the short period from 1930 to his arrest in 1934, M. did a lot of work on Old Russian literature. He bought the various editions of the Chronicles, the Song of Igor's Campaign (which he had always loved very much and knew by heart), some early prose tales (po- vesti) and also Russian and Slavic songs as gathered by Kireyevski, Rybnikov and others. He eagerly snatched up everything Old Russian—and was as familar with Awakum as with the unfortunate princess who was married off to the brother of the Czar's bride. He also had Kliuchevski on his shelves—including early works, such as Tales of Foreigners—and the historical archives which have been published here on a fairly large scale: documents relating to the Pu- gachev uprising, the records of the interrogation of the Decembrists and of the members of the "People's Will." Akhmatova also had a brief period of interest in the latter kind of material—during the Yezhov terror she read scarcely anything but Exile and Forced Labor * I must say that the Tenishev school t gave an excellent grounding in Old Russian language and literature, and, teaching in Soviet teacher-training colleges, I often thought how catastrophic the destruction of the old secondary-school system had been. I doubt whether M. or I would ever have been able to get through a Soviet school—if we had, we would certainly not have equipped ourselves for life with the straightforward and unforced learning given us by the prerevolutionary Russian grammar school.
Later interests represented in M.'s bookcase were the Armenian chronicles (he managed to buy a secondhand copy of Moses of Cho- rene among other things) and biology: he was lucky enough to be able to buy Linnaeus, Buffon, Pallas and Lamarck, as well as Darwin (The Voyage of the Beagle) and some of the philosophers, such as Driesch, who take biology as their starting point.
Despite his interest in the philosophy of culture and biology, M. could not stomach Hegel (any more than Kant), and his enthusiasm for Marx had not outlasted his school years. Just before his arrest in 1934 he had declined Engels' Dialectic of Nature when it was offered to him as a gift by Lezhnev, the former editor of Rossia, to which M. had once contributed. Lezhnev was astonished by M.'s nerve in refusing it. It was Lezhnev who had asked M. to write The Noise of Time for Rossia, but then turned it down after reading it—he had expected a totally different kind of childhood story, such as he himself was later to write. His was the story of a Jewish boy from the shtetl who discovers Marxism. He was lucky with his book. At first nobody wanted to publish it—though it was probably no worse then others of its kind—but then it was read and approved by
• Ssylka i katorga, a periodical on Czarist political prisoners, closed down m «935-
+ The Tenishev Commercial School, in St. Petersburg, attended by Mandelstam.
Stalin. Stalin even tried to phone Lezhnev to tell him, but Lezhnev was not at home at the moment Stalin called. When he learned what had happened, Lezhnev sat by his phone for a whole week, hoping that Stalin might ring back. But miracles, as we know, are not repeated. A week later he was informed that there would be no further telephone call, but that orders had been given for his book to be published (it was already being printed), that he had been made a member of the Party on Stalin's personal recommendation and appointed editor of Pravda's literary section. In this way Lezhnev, hitherto a nobody who could always be trampled underfoot as a former private publisher, was suddenly raised to the greatest heights and almost went crazy from joy and emotion. Of all the Haroun al Rashid miracles, this, incidentally, turned out to be the most enduring: Lezhnev kept his Pravda post, or an equivalent one, right up to his death.
On hearing all this, Lezhnev at last left his telephone and rushed off to the barber—his beard had grown considerably during the week of waiting. Next he called on us to present us with The Dialectic of Nature and to tell us about the great change that Marxism had brought into his life. None of this had ever entered his head in the days when he was editor of Rossia. From what he said, it appeared that he had read some newly discovered works by Engels, notably The Dialectic of Nature, and seen the light. He had even gone into a bookshop just now and bought a copy for us, because he hoped it would help M. to see the light as well. Lezhnev was an exceptionally sincere and well-meaning person. I was even a little envious of him at that moment—a genuine conversion to the true faith, which suddenly puts an end to all your troubles and at the same time starts bringing in a regular income, must be a remarkably agreeable thing.
M. padded around the room in his slippers, whistling to himself and occasionally glancing at Lezhnev as the book was urged on him. He was trying to turn it down as gracefully as possible, but Lezhnev kept insisting, and finally M. said, pointing at me: "No, she has read it and says I shouldn't." Lezhnev just gasped: How could anybody entrust his choice of reading on such crucial ideological questions to his wife? "Why not?" M. said. "She knows better than me, she always knows what I should read." Lezhnev departed in a huff, and when we ran into each other years later in Tashkent—we were both evacuated there during the war—he just cut me dead. He probably regarded me as M.'s evil genius—though, to give him his due, he does not seem to have denounced me to the authorities. I do not know how he behaved on Pravda—probably like the rest of them—but to me he always seemed a decent and honest person. I am even prepared to believe that his eyes really were opened by reading The Dialectic of Nature—it was just about his level.