Blok already spoke about "civilization" overlaying true "culture" and compared our era to that of the fall of Rome. In Blok's view, our individualistic civilization, devoid of "wholeness," had collapsed together with humanism and its ethical values. It would be replaced by barbaric masses, untouched by "civilization," who had preserved the "spirit of music" and would bring a new culture with them. It is interesting that Blok saw these masses as Germanic and Slavic—as though he could already foresee fascism in 1918. Blok's idea was similar to Spengler's. Despite his nominal Christianity and his belief in the 'Spirit of music," Blok remained in essence a positivist: for him personality was a mark not of Christian culture but only of humanism (the same applied to ethical values and humane behavior). M. was not for a moment taken in by Spengler's theories. After reading The Decline of the West, he said to me quite casually that Spengler's analogies are in all probability not applicable to Christian culture. M. never shared the feeling of the approaching end of the world that was one of the main sources of Blok's pessimism. By "culture," M. understood the idea underlying the historical process, and he thought of history as a testing-ground for both good and evil.
His conviction that culture, like grace, is bestowed by a process of continuity led M. to see the Mediterranean as a "holy land." This explains the constant references to Rome and Italy in his verse. Rome is man's place in the universe, and his every footstep there resounds like a deed. M. also included the Crimea and the Caucasus in the Mediteranean world. In his poem about Ariosto he gave expression to his dream of uniting them: "Into one broad and brotherly blue we shall merge your azure and our Black sea."
"The land by which the first people learned" was the only part of the world to which M. felt drawn to go on pilgrimage. With all his love of travel, he flatly turned down chances to make trips to the central Asian or far eastern parts of the country. He was attracted only by the Crimea and the Caucasus. The ancient link between these areas (particularly Armenia) with Greece and Rome seemed to him a token of the unity of world (or, rather, European) culture. Most of the Soviet writers who traveled to the borderlands—something that was very popular—chose the Muslim areas. M. thought this preference for the Muslim world was not accidental—the people of our times were less suited by Christianity with its doctrine of free will and the inherent value of the person than by Islam with its determinism, the submerging of the individual in the army of the faithful, and the formalized design of an architecture which made man feel insignificant.
M., to whom the Muslim world was alien ("and with shame and pain she turned away from the bearded cities of the East"), was more concerned with the outward signs of Hellenic and Christian tradition. He fell in love with Feodosia in the Crimea not only for its nnusual landscape, but also because of its name, the remains of its Genoese fortress, and for its port with the Mediterranean ships. M. once said to Khardzhiev that he regarded himself as the last Christian- Hellenic poet in Russia. The word "last" in that remark was the only time he ever betrayed any fear that culture itself might be coming to an end. ... I think he would have liked to be buried in the Crimea, not in the land of his exile, near Vladivostok.
One can understand very well why poetry returned to him in the Caucasus. Somewhere he says that he could work when he felt the "quivering of Colchis" # in his breast—that is, when he felt he was in communion with the world of culture and history. Only in such conditions could his "selfless song" come to him. He tried very hard and for a long time to get to Armenia, preferring it—probably as a Christian outpost in the East—even to Georgia, though he often spoke of the importance of Georgia in Russian poetry.
Like all the good things in our life, the trip to Armenia was eventually arranged by Bukharin. He had first tried to send us there at the end of the twenties, when the Armenian People's Commissar for Education was Mravian. He had invited M. to Erivan University to give a course of lectures and a seminar. Nothing came of this— partly because of Mravian's sudden death, and partly because M. was
# Colchis: ancient Greek name for the Caucasus.
terrified to death at the thought of giving lectures. He had never imagined himself in the role of a teacher, and he was aware that he had no systematic knowledge. When he was asked in 1931 by Bukhara's secretary Korotkova (the "squirrel" of the "Fourth Prose") where we wanted to go and M. said: "To Armenia," she sighed and, looking earnestly at him, replied: "Still to Armenia? Well, it must be serious, then." M. had good reason to write about Korotkova in "Fourth Prose"—she was kind and attentive in a way not characteristic of our institutions. By way of contrast I remember the "secretary of inhuman beauty" in some dramatic fragments written by Akhmatova but then destroyed in a fit of terror (which was all too well justified). The secretary portrayed by Akhmatova keeps repeating a phrase which we heard all the time wherever we went: "There are many of you and only one of me." This phrase summed up the style of the era as seen at the level of the humblest official.
The editor of the American collection of M.'s work, Filippov, with the usual perspicacity of editors, says that M. went to Armenia to get away from the Five Year Plans. This is cheap political speculation. In the borderlands industrialization was far more hectic than in the central areas, and in any case M. had nothing at all against it. Why should he have been put out by the planned organization of the economy? As if that mattered! What mattered was that, as M. saw them, by virtue of their links between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, the Crimea, Georgia and Armenia were part of world culture. But the measure of all things was Italy. It was not for nothing that he chose Dante as the starting point for a discussion of his own poetics: for M., Dante was the source of all European poetry, and the measure of poetic "rightness." In the notes he made for "Conversation About Dante" there are several references to the "Italian inoculation" received by the Russian poets. These notes did not get into the final text, probably because M. did not like to be too open in revealing the process by which he arrived at his ideas. In the Kremlin cathedrals he was struck by their Italian quality ("the five- headed Moscow cathedrals with their Italian and Russian soul" and "the gentle Assumption—Florence in Moscow"). While looking at Rublev's "Trinity," he remarked that Rublev must have known some Italian artists—which was what distinguished him from the other ikon painters of his day. In the short narrative about Goethe's life which he did for the radio in Voronezh, M. selected episodes he thought were characteristic of the life of any poet, and he ended it by talking about Goethe's Italian journey—this kind of pilgrimage to the holy places of European culture seemed to him an essential and crucial event in the life of any artist.
Why then, dissatisfied as he was by his trips to Italy as a student, did M. let slip a chance to go abroad in the twenties? Bukharin, still all-powerful, had given him a note of recommendation, and so had Voronski. With these he could have had a passport for the asking. But they lay untouched in my trunk right until the house search in 1934, when they were taken away, together with the manuscripts of M.'s poems, and presumably added to his file in the Lubianka.
In my younger days I did not always fully understand the connection between M.'s actions and what he wrote. At the moment much is clearer to me than it was in those days when he was alive and all our time and thoughts were taken up by daily squabbles, mutual banter and argument. I have now found the reason for his renunciation of a second journey to Europe in his article on Chaadayev, where he writes that Chaadayev, having visited the West, "the historical world," nevertheless returned to Russia. The fact that he found his way home again was very much to his credit in M.'s eyes. With the same naive and stubborn consistency because of which he refused to have a watch, he thought of Chaadayev's return to Russia and himself decided to renounce the chance of revisiting Europe. M. always gave literal application to his ideas, but, fearing that I might make fun of him, he did not always reveal his train of thought to me. But I understood well enough that the key to his behavior was to be found in his verse and prose, or, rather, that some things in his writings had the force of vows for him. Such was the vow of poverty in the "Lament of St. Alexis," the promise to continue the struggle, however dangerous and difficult, in "Aliscans," and the renunciation of Europe in the article about Chaadayev. This article was written in his early youth, but his view of the world had already formed, and he was true to the vows he took then until his death.