Sergei Klychkov was our neighbor for many years in Herzen House and then in Furmanov Street, and we were always very friendly with him. The third part of M.'s "Verses About Russian Poetry" is dedicated to him—this after Klychkov had commented on the line about freaks playing cards for no stakes: "That's about you and me," he said to M. Neither of them in fact played cards, and the stakes they were playing for were higher than in any gambling game.
Klychkov was dismissed from his work as an editor very early. He was too much of a peasant to make a good official and worry about the purity of the "superstructure." He made his living by translating some infinitely long epic poem. In the evenings he put on his spectacles (one of the arms was broken off and he used a piece of string instead) and read an encyclopedia, just as a self-taught cobbler reads his Bible. He once paid me the nicest compliment that a woman could hear: "Nadia," he said, "you are a very clever woman, and a very silly little girl." This was because I had read Luppol M.'s epigram about him.
M. very much admired Klychkov's cycle of poems on the theme of being an outcast, and he often read passages from them, imitating Klychkov's northern accent. All these poems were taken away by the police when Klychkov's apartment was searched—he did not have time to hide them—and they have disappeared, like everything else that was taken to the Lubianka. Klychkov himself disappeared with them. His wife was told he had been given ten years "without the right of correspondence." It was some time before we learned that this meant he had been shot. It is said that he stood up to hisinterrogator with great courage and independence. With those eyes of his he must have infuriated his inquisitors. In those days the secret police did not bother much about formal trials for people they had decided were guilty, and they sometimes simply shot them out of hand during the interrogation. It is said that this is what happened to Klychkov.
After Klychkov's death Moscow seemed a much poorer place. He was a great friend of Pavel Vasiliev, whom he called his "evil genius" because Pavel used to take him on womanizing and drinking expeditions. The girls working in the Krasnaya Nov office once inadvertently published some verse of Klychkov's under M.'s name. Both of them had to go and tell the girls off and get the fee transferred to Klychkov. It never occurred to them that there might one day be a problem about the authorship of this poem, and they didn't insist on a correction being published because the girls thought they might be fired if their superiors found out. As a result, this verse of Klychkov's has now appeared as the last item in the American edition of M.'s poetry. I would like to tell the editors about this mistake, but how can one reach them?
woman who has come back after many years in the forced-labor
In the days when Klychkov's and Vasiliev's fate was being decided, M. and I were waiting for a train at the Savelovo station and happened to buy a newspaper in which it was announced that the death penalty was being abolished, but that the maximum length of prison sentences was being increased to twenty years. M.'s first reaction was one of joy—he had always been horrified by executions— but then it struck him how little it meant. "The number of people they must be killing, if they have to abolish the death penalty!" he said. In 1937 we clearly understood that whether a prisoner was marked down for physical destruction or not depended only on the principle treba or ne treba. . . .
56 The Earth and Its Concerns
camps tells me that she and her companions in misfortune always found comfort in the poetry which, luckily, she knew by heart and was able to recite to them. They were particularly moved by some lines M. wrote as a young man: "But I love this poor earth, because I have not seen another. . . ."
Our way of life kept us firmly rooted to the ground, and was not conducive to the search for transcendental truths. Whenever I talked of suicide, M. used to say: "Why hurry? The end is the same everywhere, and here they even hasten it for you." Death was so much more real, and so much simpler than life, that we all involuntarily tried to prolong our earthly existence, even if only for a brief moment—just in case the next day brought some relief! In war, in the camps and during periods of terror, people think much less about death (let alone about suicide) than when they are living normal lives. Whenever at some point on earth mortal terror and the pressure of utterly insoluble problems are present in a particularly intense form, general questions about the nature of being recede into the background. How could we stand in awe before the forces of nature and the eternal laws of existence if terror of a mundane kind was felt so tangibly in everyday life? In a strange way, despite the horror of it, this also gave a certain richness to our lives. Who knows what happiness is? Perhaps it is better to talk in more concrete terms of the fullness or intensity of existence, and in this sense there may have been something more deeply satisfying in our desperate clinging to life than in what people generally strive for. I always remember my conversation about happiness with Vishnevski's widow, Sonia. We were trying to draw the balance sheet of everything that had happened to us. How different our lives had been! Sonia summed up: "Mine has been so happy, and yours has been so unhappy." Poor, stupid Sonia! Her husband had an illusion of power: other writers tried to keep in with him because he controlled certain funds and he was able to make the Government's wishes known to his cronies. He had access to the Central Committee and was several times received by Stalin. He drank no less than Fadeyev, greedily breathed in the heady air of State, and permitted himself no more than token expression of fronde—suggesting, for instance, that James Joyce be published, and sending money to exiles (first to a naval officer banished to Tashkent, and then—through my brother —to us in Voronezh). He had a car and a villa in the country which was rather meanly taken away from Sonia after his death. Until her own death, she remained faithful to him, and was angry with Khrushchev for cutting royalty payments to a writer's heirs by half. Many stories were told about Sonia, but she was not a bad sort, and nobody could really hold it against her when she went around shouting that her husband had been killed by saboteurs in the Kremlin hospital. In fact she was very lucky that he died in good time, without managing to transfer his assets to one of Sonia's rivals—that none of them succeeded in snatching it all from her hands was certainly fortunate for her, and in this sense she was entitled to describe her life as "happy."
I also would have been glad, if not of "happiness," at least of a little well-being (as M. put it in one of his poems, "Oh, how much dearer to her the creak of rowlocks, a boat's deck broad as a bosom, a flock of sheep")—a peaceful life with its ordinary despairs, its thoughts about the certainty of death and the vanity of earthly things. None of this was granted to us, and perhaps this is what M. meant when he told his interrogator that with the Revolution he had lost his sense of awe.
For M., Acmeism was not only "nostalgia for world culture," but also an affirmation of life on earth and social concern. With his integral view of the world, one could see how every one of his judgments was part of his understanding of things in general. This was not, of course, an elaborate philosophical system, but what he called in one of his articles "the world-view of the artist." Т., a wonderful artist, once said to me: "A man sits and carves a piece of wood, and out of it comes God." And about Pasternak he asked: "Why did he have to change his religion? What does he need intermediaries for when he has his art?" Just as mystical experience gives rise to a religious view of the world, so the working experience of an artist defines his view of the material and spiritual world around him. It is probably this experience as an artist that explains why M.'s view about poetry, the role of the poet in society and the "merging of the intellectual and the moral" in an integrated culture (as well as in each of its individual representatives) never underwent any substantial changes, so that throughout his life he was able to stand by what he wrote in his early articles for Apollon. Despite its division into distinct periods, his poetry also reflects the unity of his views and "world-sense" throughout his life, and in this it often echoes his prose, even that of the earliest days. His prose thus serves as a commentary on his poetry.