The new order only began to make itself felt after the Civil War. Engels once pointed out that the industry producing lethal weapons is always the most advanced. This is borne out by its whole history, from the invention of gunpowder to the splitting of the atom in our times. Similarly, the most "advanced" sector of the State apparatus— the one that best expresses its essence—is that concerned with killing people in the name of "society." M.'s first encounter with the new State was his visit to Dzerzhinski to plead for his brother when he was arrested in 1922. This meeting gave him much food for thought about the relative value of the "social structure" and the human personality. The new structure was then only beginning to take shape, but it already promised to be of unprecedented grandeur—something that would dwarf the Egyptian pyramids. And it could not be denied that it had unity of design. M.'s youthful dream of harmony seemed to be coming about, but as an artist M. never lost his sense of reality, and the grand scale of the socialist State structure frightened rather than dazzled him. His apprehensions are reflected in his poem "The Age," where he harks back to the past and asks how he might "join the vertebrae of two centuries"; and in his article "Humanism and the Modern World" he says the measure of the social structure is man, but that there are eras in which this is lost sight of, when people "say they have no time for man, and that he is to be used like bricks or cement as something to be built from, not for." As examples of social structures hostile to man he mentions Assyria and Ancient Egypt: "Assyrian slaves swarmed like chickens at the feet of the gigantic king; warriors embodying the might of a state hostile to man killed shackled pygmies with their long spears; the Egyptian builders treated the mass of human beings as material which had to be provided in the necessary quantity." Though our new age thus reminded M. of Egypt and Assyria, he still hoped that the monumental character of the State system would be mitigated by humanism.
Among the photographs of M. that have been preserved, there is one showing him as a young man in a sweater with an earnest, preoccupied look on his face. This was taken in 1922 when he first understood the Assyrian nature of our new order. Then there is another one that shows him as an old man with a beard. The interval between these two photographs was only ten years, but in 1932 M. already knew the fate of his youthful dreams about a social structure based on authority, free of the faults bequeathed by the nineteenth century. By this time he had already written his lines about the Assyrian king:
He has taken away the air I breathe: The Assyrian holds my heart in his hand.
He was one of the first to look back to the nineteenth century as a "golden age," though he knew that the new ideas had grown from seed nurtured then.
At the very end of his life M. spoke once more of the ill-fated "social structure," and at the same time spoke mockingly of himself:
Adorned by choicest meat of dogs
the Egyptian State of shame
thrusting puny pyramids aloft
richly endowed its dead. . . .
Next to all the Gothic, impishly spitting
on all his spider's rights
a brazen scholar, a thieving angel
he lived, the incomparable Francois Villon.
Perhaps we really are Assyrians. Is this why we can look on with such indifference at mass reprisals against slaves, captives, hostages and heretics? Whenever something like this happens, we say to each other: "It's on such a mass scale, what can one do?" We have a peculiar respect for massive campaigns, for measures or orders carried out on a mass scale. The Assyrian kings could be good or bad, but who was to stay their hand, whether they gave a sign for the slaughter of prisoners or graciously permitted the court architect to build himself a palace?
And what difference is there between those prisoners destroyed on the orders of Assyrian kings and the "masses" which now inspire us with such awe, always appearing whenever an "iron" social order is established? Yet in their everyday working lives, people remain true to their individual selves. I have always been struck by the fact that in the closed world of a hospital, factory or theater, people live in their own completely human lives, not becoming mechanized or turning into "masses."
55 "Ne Treba"
I
t turns out we are part of the superstructure," M. said to me in 1922, after our return from Georgia. Not long before, M. had written about the separation of culture from the State, but the Civil War had ended, and the young builders of the new State had begun —for the time being in theory only—to put everything in its proper place. It was then that culture was assigned to the superstructure, and the consequences were not slow in making themselves felt. Klychkov, an outlandish but most gentle creature, a gypsy with bright dark-blue eyes, told M. with embarrassment about a conversation he had had with Voronski: "He has made up his mind and he wouldn't budge. 'We don't need it,' is what he said." Voronski, like other editors, refused to publish M. The superstructure is supposed to reinforce the basis, but M.'s verse was not suitable for this purpose.
The formula "We don't need it" sounded even more grotesque in Ukrainian. In 1923 M. went to the Arts Department in Kiev to ask for permission to hold a reading of his poetry. An official in an embroidered Ukrainian shirt refused it. When we asked why, he said tonelessly: 'We treba." From then on, M. and I adopted the phrase as a standard saying. As for Ukrainian embroidered shirts, as I have mentioned before, they became fashionable in the middle twenties, replacing the Russian kosovorotka and becoming almost the equivalent of a uniform for officials of the Central Committee and the People's Commissariats.
Complete order was established in the "superstructure" in 1930 when Stalin published his famous letter in Bolshevik, saying nothing should be published that was at variance with the official point of view. This, in effect, robbed censorship of all significance. The much-abused censorship is really a sign of relative freedom of the press: it forbids things that are directed against the existing order, but, however stupid it is, it cannot destroy literature. But the editorial apparatus that served Stalin worked much more purposefully—it rejected everything that did not explicitly meet the State's wishes. In the editorial offices of For a Communist Education, where I was working at the moment Stalin's article appeared, all the manuscripts were rechecked in great panic and we went through huge piles of them, cutting mercilessly. This was called "reorganization in the light of Comrade Stalin's remarks." I brought home a copy of Bolshevik with Stalin's letter and showed it to M., who commented: "Ne treba again, but this time good and proper." He was right. The letter was a crucial turning point in the building up of the "superstructure." Even now it has not been forgotten by the upholders of Stalin's tradition as they try to prevent the publication of such writers as Mandelstam, Zabolotski, Pasternak and Tsvetayeva. The "ne treba" argument still rings in our ears today.