Rudakov did not try to find a proper place to live in Voronezh. He kept hoping that his wife might use her contacts with some top Soviet generals (who later perished in 1937) to get permission for him to return to Leningrad. He had a bunk in a room which he shared with a young worker called Tosha, but he came to us for all his meals. This was a relatively good period for us when we had earnings from translation, the local theater and the radio, and it was no hardship for us to feed the poor fellow. While I was in Moscow he had carefully collected all the drafts of "Black Earth," which M. was composing then, and after my return, when M. and I began trying to remember the poems confiscated during the house search, Rudakov copied them all into a notebook for us. Overnight he re- copied them on drafting paper, in a rather comic copperplate hand with curlicues, and brought them along to us in the morning. He despised my spidery handwriting and complete lack of concern for the appearance of manuscripts. He thought, for instance, that it was scandalous to write with ordinary ink, and insisted on using India ink. (He also drew silhouettes in India ink, and the result was no worse than those done by street artists.) He showed me his beautifully executed copies of M.'s poems and said: "This is what they'll keep in the archives, not the messy things you and Osip Emilievich do." We only smiled, and tried not to hurt his feelings.
We often warned Rudakov that he would do himself no good by coming to see us, but he replied with such a string of noble phrases that we could only gasp. Perhaps for this reason we were so tolerant of certain unpleasant things about him. He was, for example, very arrogant and was always being very rude to our other constant visitor, Kaletski—also a Leningrader and a pupil of all our friends, such as Eikhenbaum and Tynianov. Though he was a modest and shy young man, Kaletski sometimes said things nobody else would have dared to at that time. Once, for instance, he talked to M. about the inefficiency of all the Soviet institutions with which we had any contact, the way they had deteriorated under the dead hand of bureaucracy. And suppose, he continued, the army was just the same? What would happen if there was a war? Rudakov remembered what he had been taught in school and said: "I believe in the Party." Kaletski blushed with embarrassment and replied softly: "I believe in the people." He looked very puny next to the tall, handsome Rudakov, but he had much more inner strength. Rudakov sneeringly called him a "quantum," explaining that this was the smallest unit of energy.
Another disagreeable feature of Rudakov was his constant grumbling. In Russia, he kept complaining, people of talent had always been ground down by life, and he would never be able to write his book. M. could not stand this kind of talk: "Why aren't you writing now?" he asked. "If someone has anything to say, he will always manage to say it." This made Rudakov lose his temper and, asking how he could work without money or a proper place to live, he would storm out, banging the door behind him. But in an hour or so he would come back, as though nothing had happened.
Rudakov had a strong didactic streak in him—he liked to tell me how to copy out M.'s verse, and M. how he should write it. He greeted every new poem with some theory or other from his still unwritten book, as though to ask why he hadn't been consulted beforehand. I could see that he often got on M.'s nerves, and would have liked to throw him out, but M. wouldn't let me ("How will he eat without us?") and everything went on as before. Even so, both he and Kaletski were some comfort to us. While they were in Voronezh we were not totally isolated—as we were after their return to Leningrad at the beginning of 1936. We would have been quite alone if it had not been for Natasha Shtempel, who started coming to see us then. While we were living in the "agent's" apartment, Rudakov had to go to the hospital with scarlet fever and met some girls there, but he was desperately anxious that we shouldn't get to know. One of them was Natasha, and before leaving Voronezh he made her swear she would never visit us, but, fortunately for us, she didn't keep this promise.
Altogether, Rudakov was a very strange type—and we should have known better than to get on such close terms with him. I gave him original copies of all M.'s most important work, and Akhmatova let him have the whole of Gumilev's archive, delivering it to him on a sledge.
During the war, after being wounded, Rudakov was posted to a draft office in Moscow. When one of his relatives came and pleaded to be exempted from military service because he was a Tolstoyan, Rudakov granted his request. For this he was arrested and sent to a penal battalion, where he was soon killed. Our manuscripts were left with his widow, but she did not return them to us. In 1953, meeting Akhmatova at a concert, she said that everything was intact, but six months later she told Emma Gerstein that she had been arrested herself and everything had been confiscated. Soon she was telling yet a third version: that she had been arrested and her mother had burned everything. What the truth of the matter is we just haven't been able to find out. All we know is that she has sold some of Gumilev's manuscripts—not directly, but through middlemen. Akhmatova is furious about it all, but there is nothing she can do. Once we got the widow to come and see Akhmatova on the pretext of trying to publish an essay by her late husband, but it was impossible to get any sense out of her. Khardzhiev had a little more luck—he was able to persuade her to let him copy out everything he needed from Ruda- kov's letters. But Khardzhiev is a man of great charm and good looks who can get anything he likes. However, in Rudakov's letters— which he wrote every day, carefully keeping numbered copies for posterity—there was nothing of special interest for us. The poor boy was obviously a psychopath. The letters were full of ravings about how the whole of poetry had been present in M.'s room—I've forgotten whether he said "world poetry" or Russian poetry, but he was referring to M., himself and a volume of Vaginov which M. had in his room. He also wrote about how he taught M. to write poetry and explained everything to him, and expressed his horror that all the praise would go to M. and he would get no credit. He compared M. to Derzhavin—sometimes like a god and sometimes like a worm. In one of the letters he spoke of himself as M.'s heir, alleging that M. had said to him: "You are my heir, do what you see fit with my verse." I am quoting all this from memory, since I have only seen the copies made by Khardzhiev. Reading them, Akhmatova and I understood that the theft of our archives had been part of a deliberate plan on Rudakov's part, and that his widow was only carrying out his will by refusing to return them to us. The selling of original manuscripts—which is very profitable—was being done not only for mercenary reasons, but also in fulfillment of Rudakov's maniac schemes. One wonders what would have happened if I had died much earlier. It is possible that Rudakov would have claimed all M.'s work as his own—though this would not have been easy, since many of the poems were circulating under the name of their rightful author. A similar attempt at plagiarism on the part of Seva Bagritski only ended in a scandal when his mother published M.'s "Goldfinch" poem as a work of her son's. Things would have been even worse if I had listened to Rudakov when he tried to persuade me (through Emma Gerstein, with whom he had become friendly) to hand over all M.'s papers to him. The reason he gave was that it was important for all the papers to be in one place. But Khardzhiev and I argued that, on the contrary, it was safer to disperse them. As a result of handing them to Rudakov, I have lost several poems altogether— nearly all the Voronezh rough drafts and many copies of Tristia in M.'s own hand.