Until his last days M. remained true to the earth and its concerns, and he hoped for his reward "only here on earth, not in heaven," though he feared he would not live to see it. "If only we live long enough," he used to say to me. In one of his last poems, already preparing for death, he wrote:
under Purgatory's ephemeral sky we often forget that
the happy heaven, above
is but the boundless house in which we live our lives.
Reading Self-Knowledge by Berdiayev—one of our best modern thinkers—I couldn't help being struck by the great difference between him and M. in their attitudes toward life and earthly existence. Perhaps this was because one was an artist, while the other was concerned with abstract thought. Furthermore, Berdiayev was inwardly tied to the Symbolists, and though he had his disagreements with them and was even to a certain extent disillusioned with them, he had never broken with them. For M., on the other hand, the revolt against Symbolism was crucial for the whole of his life and art.
For Berdiayev "life is a daily round of cares," and though he was receptive to "the poetry of life and beauty," he thought life was "dominated by prose and ugliness." Berdiayev's idea of beauty is the direct opposite of what I have always found in the poets and artists who rejected Symbolism: they do not look down on ordinary everyday life—on the contrary, it is a source of beauty for them, whether they are poets or painters. The Symbolists—such as Viache- slav Ivanov and Briusov—assumed the role of high priests standing above everyday life, and for them beauty was something apart from it. By returning to earth, the generation that followed them considerably enlarged its horizon, and for it the world was no longer divided into ugly prose and sublime poetry. In this connection I think of Akhmatova, who knew "from what trash poetry, quite unashamed, can grow," and of Pasternak with his passionate defense of the "daily round" in Dr. Zhivago. For M. there was absolutely no problem here: he did not, like Berdiayev and the Symbolists, seek to escape into some realm of pure spirit from the earthly confines of our everyday here and now. In his essay "The Morning of Acme- ism" he tried to give a poetic justification for remaining attached to earth with its three dimensions: "The earth is not an encumbrance or an unfortunate accident, but a God-given palace." This is followed by a polemical passage about people who, like Berdiayev, cannot wait to get to a better world and regard life on earth as being literally God-forsaken. In the same essay, which was a kind of manifesto, he asked: "What would you think of a guest who, while living at the expense of his host and enjoying his hospitality, actually despises him in his heart of hearts and thinks only of ways to outsmart him?" "Outsmart" here means to escape from time and three- dimensional space. To M., as a self-styled Acmeist, three-dimensional space and life on earth were essential because he wanted to do his duty by his "host"—he felt that he was here to build, which can only be done in three dimensions. This explains his attitude toward the world of things. In his view, this world was not hostile to the poet or—as he put it—the builder, because things are there to be built from. Stone—the title of M.'s first published collection of poems—is a building material which "seems to crave for another mode of being" and longs to find its place in "a vaulted nave" and thus joyfully interact with others of its kind. M. never talked of "creating" things, only of "building" them. As a young man he already thought of himself as a builder: "From a sullen dead weight I shall one day make something of beauty." He was therefore not repelled by matter, but was very conscious of its "dead weight" as something that predisposed it to be used in building. Berdiayev often speaks of man's higher destiny and his creative powers—but he does not define the nature of this creativity. This is probably because he lacked the artist's sense of things and words as inert matter to be used in building. Berdiayev's experience was that of the mystic and it took him to the limit of the world of things. The artist's intuition is similar to the mystic's, but it reveals the Creator through his creation, God through man. It seems to me that this way of perception is justified by Soloviev's (and Berdiayev's) doctrine of "God- manhood." Isn't this also why every true artist has the sense of his own "tightness" about which M. spoke?
However much he tried to overcome it, Berdiayev felt contempt for the "man in the street." In this, too, he had common ground with the Symbolists—perhaps they got it from Nietzsche, who had such an influence on them. Berdiayev complains that "we live in a middle- class age" which is antagonistic to the appearance of "strong personalities." Yet Berdiayev himself wanted to be self-effacing. He hated, he says, to "draw attention to his own significance and intellectual superiority." Reading this, I thought of Pushkin's line: "And among all the lowly of the world, perhaps the lowliest is he"—words which were completely misunderstood by the whole Veresayev crowd. All Pushkin was trying to convey was the simple sense of being at one with his fellow men, of being flesh of their flesh—though perhaps not quite as well made as others. ... It seems to me that this feeling of being the same as everybody else (and even perhaps of envy at not being quite as well formed) is an essential feature of the poet. In his early article "On the Reader" M. has the following to say about the difference between literature and poetry: "The man of letters as opposed to the poet always addresses himself to a specific audience, to his living contemporaries . . . the content of his writing is decanted into them by virtue of the physical law of unequal levels— which means that the man of letters must be 'above' his contemporaries, 'superior' to the society in which he lives. Literature in this sense is essentially didactic. . . . Poetry is quite different: the poet is linked only with readers sent his way by Providence and he does not have to be superior to his age, or to the people he lives among." M. sincerely believed that he was no better than others, or even not as good ("I walk with bearded peasants, a passerby"). The Symbolists thought of themselves as teachers with a cultural mission—hence the way in which they set themselves above the crowd and the attraction they felt for strong personalities. Even Blok was not free of a sense of his own exclusiveness—though it alternated with the other feeling, natural for any poet, of a common bond with the street, with ordinary people. Berdiayev, being a philosopher rather than an artist, naturally felt superior to the crowd, and in his aristocratic inclinations and liking for strong personalities he was only yielding to the spirit of his times.