57 Archive and Voice
and his only tangible product is the work itself," M. wrote in "The Morning of Acmeism."
Some of M.'s poetry and prose is lost, but most of it has been preserved. How this happened is the story of my battle with the forces of destruction, with everything that conspired to sweep me away, together with the poor scraps of paper I managed to keep.
When they are young, people do not bother to keep their papers. How can a young man imagine that his scribblings may one day be thought of value? Though perhaps it's not a bad thing that earlyverse gets lost—this can be a kind of weeding out which an artist should undertake in any case.
M. arrived in Kiev with a wicker basket that his mother had used to keep her sewing in—it was all he had left of his mother's things. It had a large lock on it, and M. told me it contained his mother's letters and some of his own writings—he couldn't remember exactly what. From Kiev M. went to the Crimea with his brother Alexander. Here Alexander got into a card game with some soldiers and gambled away his brother's shirts. While M. was gone for a moment, the soldiers broke the lock on the wicker basket and used all the paper inside to make cigarettes. M. very much valued his mother's letters and was angry with his brother. About his own papers he was less concerned—he remembered everything in them.
During the first few years that M. and I lived together, nothing was ever written down. He put together his Second Book from memory, dictating to me the poems he wanted to include, or jotting them down himself. He then looked them over, kept some and threw others away. Before that he had given a pile of rough drafts to Pe- tropolis.* They were taken abroad and published there as the Tristia collection. In those days we never stopped to think that a man might die and his memory with him. Furthermore, M. always thought that anything he gave to editors was bound to be preserved. He had no idea of the slapdash way in which our editorial offices work.
My mother had given me some very nice suitcases and a trunk plastered with foreign hotel labels. We gave the suitcases to a shoemaker to make shoes for us out of the stout yellow leather. In those days they were a luxury. The only use I could find for the trunk was to put papers in it—not realizing that I was in effect using it as an archive.
When M.'s father fell ill, we had to go to Leningrad. The old man could not go back to his wretched lodgings after leaving the hospital, so we took him to M.'s younger brother, Evgeni. While I was packing his things I came across another trunk, just like mine, only a little larger, and also covered with labels. It appeared that M. had once bought it in Munich so as to look like a proper tourist—trunks of this kind were very popular before the First World War. M.'s father had put all his ledgers in it, together with piles of worthless paper money from the times of Nicholas II and Kerenski. At the bottom I found a pile of manuscripts: fragments of early verse and some pages of the lecture on Scriabin. We took these manuscripts and the trunk
* Russian publishing house in Berlin.
back to Moscow with us.
This was the beginning of M.'s archive. Everything was thrown into it: rough drafts of poems, letters and essays. M. didn't seem to mind this system, and the pile grew and grew. The only things that did not find their way into the trunk were minor pieces of work such as translations, newspaper articles and notes on manuscripts and books—mostly foreign—sent to him by publishing houses for his opinion. All these notes have been lost by Lengiz,* apart from one or two that got into the trunk by accident. He needed his newspaper articles when he was putting together a book of his essays, and my brother Evgeni and I went to the library to copy them out as published—no doubt with censorship cuts. For some reason the manuscripts of The Noise of Time didn't get into the trunk—perhaps because we only began our "archive" after it was written.
The turning point in M.'s attitude toward his papers came with our experience over the "Fourth Prose"—this was a kind of warning signal that it was time to take greater care of them. The second warning was M.'s arrest in 1934.
When we left for Armenia, I did not want to take the only copy of "Fourth Prose." Although the climate was very good at the moment, M. could still have got into hot water because of it. We had to find a trustworthy person to leave it with. This was the first time we had left a manuscript with somebody else. Or, rather, the second—in 1919, in the Crimea, M. had written two poems which he did not want to keep on his person, so he gave them to a friend, a certain Lenia L. In 1922 I saw this man in Moscow and he said he still had the poems. But then he disappeared, and I doubt whether they will ever be found. It was this that first made me appreciate the need to keep things in several copies and in different places. We gave "Fourth Prose" to a number of people for safekeeping, and I copied it out so many times that I remember it word for word.
When M. returned from Armenia and began to write verse in great quantity, he was immediately made to feel what an outcast he was. I remember particularly one conversation in the Leningrad offices of Izvestia. A member of the staff, who appeared to be friendly, read through M.'s poem "I have returned to my native city" and said: "Do you know what happens after you write a poem like this? Three men come for you ... in uniform." We knew this, of course, but at that moment the authorities were in no hurry to act. This particular poem was quickly passed around from hand to
* Leningrad State Publishing House.
hand, though in a fairly narrow circle of people. M. thought this was a good way of preserving his work: "People will keep it for me." But I felt it was not enough, and time has proved me right. I began to make copies and hide them in various places. Generally I put them in hiding-places at home, but some copies I handed to other people. During the search of our apartment in 1934 the police agents failed to find poems I had sewn into cushions or stuck inside saucepans and shoes. When we arrived in Voronezh, I removed the poem about Ariosto from a cushion in which it had been hidden.
Voronezh marked a new stage in our handling of manuscripts. The idyllic era of cushions was at an end—and I remembered all too vividly how the feathers had flown from Jewish cushions during Denikin's pogroms in Kiev. M.'s memory was not as good as it had been, and with human life getting cheaper all the time, it was in any case no longer a safe repository for his work. It was also becoming harder to find people willing to keep things for us. During the whole of our three years in Voronezh, I made copies of everything and distributed them to such people as I could find, but apart from my brother Evgeni (who in any case kept nothing at his own home) I had nobody I could rely on to take them. Not, that is, until Sergei Borisovich Rudakov turned up.
Rudakov, the son of a Czarist general, had been expelled from Leningrad together with other people of aristocratic origin. His father and elder brothers had been shot at the beginning of the Revolution. He had been brought up by his sisters and had a normal Soviet childhood—he became a member of the Pioneers, distinguished himself in school and even got through the university. He was looking forward to a decent career when suddenly he was struck by the disaster of expulsion from Leningrad. Like many people who had lost their parents, he was anxious to get into step with the times, and he even had a theory that one should only write books that stood a chance of being published. He himself wrote elegant verse (a little under the influence of Tsvetayeva) which was popular at the time. He had chosen Voronezh as his place of exile in order to be near M. He first came there while I was in Moscow looking for translation work, and he spent about a month with M. all alone before I returned. When M. came to meet me at the station he told me that Rudakov had appeared, that he was going to write a book about poetry, and what a splendid fellow he was. After his illness M. had probably lost confidence in himself and needed a friendly listener for his new verse.