By hiding behind my back M. had fended off Lezhnev's gift, so we had no Marxist literature on our shelves. Incidentally, long before Lezhnev had offered him The Dialectic of Nature, it had been shown to M. by his biologist friends, who complained about how much it complicated their lives. As regards the fact that Lezhnev didn't shave for a whole week while waiting for Stalin to call back— there is nothing surprising about it: any Soviet citizen would have done the same, even at the risk of losing his job for absenteeism.
But if we had no Marxist literature, we had a few art books, and some illustrated works about architecture, including Rodin on French Gothic. In 1937 someone sent us several books put out by museums in Italy. M. was overjoyed, but his pleasure was spoiled by Kostyrev, who told him to beware of any contact with imperialist countries because they were all spies there: "They must have had a purpose in sending you these things!"
On the bottom shelf M. kept the books from his childhood days: Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, the Iliad—they are described in The Noise of Time and happened to have been saved by M.'s father. Most of them later perished in Kalinin when I was fleeing from the Germans. The way we have scurried to and fro in the twentieth century, trapped between Hitler and Stalin!
There were many more books I cannot remember: Winckelmann, for example, a magnificent Rosary, and a great deal else besides. The secondhand book dealers knew how to tempt us. They once offered M. a very amusing Danse Macabre, but it was too expensive and we couldn't buy it. "Very well," said the old bookseller, "it will go to Leonov—he takes everything over fifty roubles." I have never met Leonov and do not know whether this piece of gossip was true—it must remain on the conscience of those who launched it.
5 2 Our Literature
I
n the forties the Marxism-Leninism study room of the Tashkent University was looked after by a little old woman with close- cropped hair who walked with a crutch. The story was that she had been knocked down by a berserk cyclist and that the doctors had had to amputate her leg because of gangrene—though Alisa Usov swore that it had been done on purpose because everybody was fed up with her. The old woman once did me a great service, and I cannot believe Alisa's malicious explanation.
After her accident the old woman, who had been a member of the Party since 1905 and until recently a high official, had little choice but to find this niche for herself in the university. Nobody took her very seriously, but they were rather afraid of her all the same. She had as much idea of what was going on around her as a blind puppy, but, faithful to the sacred traditions of the past, she was always prepared to make a fuss whenever she thought it was necessary. It was difficult to imagine how she had survived during the Yezhov terror —probably she was simply overlooked because she spent that year in the hospital—though if they had remembered her, they would not have hesitated to come into the ward to arrest her. There were such cases. Once when I was standing in line at the Butyrki jail with other people whose names began with M, a woman who had the same name as I told me that her husband, an old man of seventy (could he have been the lawyer Mandelstam?), had been arrested in the Botkin hospital, where he was being treated for heart trouble. As for our one-legged old woman, she was such an anachronism, with her Party membership going back so far, that she was in all probability simply forgotten during that fateful time.
I was preparing for my doctor's degree in philosophy (for which I had to do an exam) and sitting in the Marxism study room at a table piled with books. They were all required reading for the written examination, and I was quickly going through them. The old lady came into the room and could scarcely believe her eyes: somebody sitting there reading in the original the literature that had played such an enormous part in her life! She no doubt thought back to her youth in the underground and the thrill that went through her when she first opened the hallowed Das Kapital.
"Ah, if only all the graduate students read the way you do!" she
said. "The only thing they ever want from me is the Dictionary." *
I was embarrassed by the undeserved compliment: I was myself not innocent of using the Dictionary in preparing for exams.
"No, no," she continued, "you don't know them. All they use are their lecture notes and the Dictionary, nothing else." She let me take out all the books I had in front of me and went around to see all my examiners, telling them how good I was: "You don't know what the young are like. They want it all cut and dried, in case they trip up and fail the exam. We older people are not used to this. But I told them how you are reading—not like their other graduate students." What she said about the other students was her most effective argument. Afraid of antagonizing the difficult old lady, my examiners hesitated to fail me, though it would have been the easiest thing in the world: I had not mastered the art of bandying question-and- answer, like a tennis ball, with the lecturers, and I was quite capable of mixing up the Party Congresses. Furthermore, there was already whispering in the corridors that I was not to be trusted and should be examined as strictly as possible. Admittedly, this was not in obedience to instructions "from above"—it was rather "initiative from below" on the part of the young instructors who didn't want to pass me, thus admitting an outsider into the privileged caste of persons qualified to teach in the universities and entitled to be paid accordingly. It has to be said that they had an excellent flair: they could unerringly spot an "outsider," however much he avoided their gaze. In a word, the old woman saved me—and she knew what she was doing. She knew how hard it was for a helpless person to keep afloat among these younger people with all their intrigues and jealousies. Apart from this, she must have felt instinctively that we had something in common—the fact that in those years nobody was reading either my literature or hers. Both had gone out of use, and we both hoped that they would come back again. We both believed that our respective values were indestructible—though mine had now gone "underground," while the underground literature she had read in her youth had been canonized by the new State. Both her literature and mine had lost its readers.
About twenty years have gone by since then. The old woman must be long since dead, but we still have others who think the same way—people of the twenties who stubbornly hope that the young will come to their senses and seek the answer to all questions in the
* I.e., the standard Soviet Philosophical Dictionary, a compendium of potted ideology.
dialectical ABC of those days. They hope that this ABC was abandoned only because it was replaced by the "Fourth Chapter." * There are also younger people, still under sixty, who dream of a restoration of the "Fourth Chapter" and of everything that went with it. They are fairly isolated, but they find comfort in the doctrine of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. They hope they may last out till a new "synthesis" which will allow them to come into their own again with a vengeance. Then, finally, there are some young people who remember the glorious days of their now retired fathers. "The aim does not justify the means," a student once said in a class I was teaching. "I think it does," he was primly contradicted by a pretty girl student who lived in a good apartment and enjoyed all the amenities that a provincial town can provide for a privileged citizen: clinics, rest homes and exclusive stores. The father of this girl had been retired after the Twentieth Congress and had chosen to settle in the town where I was then teaching. She was the only student in my class who knew her own mind. She was the only one, for instance, who had read Solzhenitsyn, and she vigorously denounced the publication of such things. The old woman who looked after the Marxist literature was upset because research students didn't read Das Kapi- tal, but this girl was interested only in the "Fourth Chapter" and the maintenance of "order." Both hoped for a restoration of the past.