M. seemed to foresee the fate of his archive in the passage in "Conversation About Dante" where he writes: "Whether first drafts are preserved or not depends on a struggle of opposing forces—to get them through safely one must take account of winds blowing in the wrong direction."
In this whole Rudakov episode I blame not the poor fool himself, whatever he may have been aiming at, but rather those responsible for creating this "happy life" of ours. If we lived like human beings rather than as hunted animals, Rudakov would have come to our house like any other visitor, and it would probably never have occurred to him to purloin M.'s papers and declare himself M.'s heir— any more than his widow would have carried on her trade in Gumilev's letters to Akhmatova.
Rudakov was one of the most important figures in the story of M.'s archives, but there were others too. Some of the episodes would have been worthy of a film script. For instance, when the Germans were approaching Voronezh, Natasha rescued M.'s letters to me by putting them all in an old tin tea caddy and taking them with her as she left the burning city on foot. Then there was Nina, who destroyed a copy of some verse by M. during the days when her mother-in-law was expecting to be arrested for a second time, and her friend Edik, who boasted about having saved the copies I gave him (though it was not too difficult for him, since he lived in the house of his father-in-law, a high police official who, as I have already mentioned, committed suicide in Tashkent after Stalin's death). All I could do was deposit copies with as many different people as possible and hope that some would survive. My only helper in this was my brother, and our main concern was never to leave the basic collection of M.'s papers too long in any one place. I used to carry around a heap of first drafts of M.'s prose pieces in my suitcase, and I always interleaved them with notes I had made on linguistics for my dissertation—I hoped that this would mislead any semi- literate police agents who might rummage in my belongings. Papers occasionally disappeared—as they do sometimes even now, though probably for a different reason. Not long ago a whole file marked "materials for a biography" disappeared from my room—I still have copies of these notes, but I have no idea where the originals have gone to. Earlier I mentioned an edition of Stone originally owned by
Kablukov. I bought it (for 200 roubles) on account of the variants Kablukov had written in it, and also because of four loose pages written in M.'s own hand—two of these have now vanished. I have also lost a letter to me from Pasternak in which he wrote that the only people in contemporary Soviet literature—this was right after the war—who interested him were Simonov and Tvardovski, because he would like to understand the mechanism by which reputations are created. I imagine that this letter, as well as the two pages written in M.'s hand, were taken by lovers of literature and will not get lost. Be that as it may, I have now stopped keeping anything at home (if where I live can be called a home!) and I again worry constantly about where things have the best chance of surviving.
Despite everything, I have managed to save a good deal of M.'s work, though whether it will ever be published here is another matter—there is still no sign of it. I have had to give up one method of preserving his work—namely, committing it to memory. Until 1956 I could remember everything by heart—both prose and verse. In order not to forget it, I had to repeat a little to myself each day. I did this while I thought I still had a good while to go on living. But time is getting on now.
There are many women like me who for years have spent sleepless nights repeating the words of their dead husbands over and over again. As another example I should like to mention a woman whose name I cannot give because she is still alive. In 1937 there were daily newspaper attacks on her husband, a very high official. He sat at home waiting to be arrested and not daring to go out—the house was surrounded by police agents. At night he wrote a long letter to the Central Committee which his wife memorized. After he was shot, she spent twenty years in prisons and labor camps. When she returned at last, she wrote out the letter and took it to the Central Committee, where I can only hope it has not disappeared forever.
No recordings of M.'s voice have survived. The collection of recordings (including some of M. and Gumilev) made by Sergei Igna- tievich Bernstein was destroyed after he was expelled from the Zubov Institute for "formalism." * This was during a period when the remains of dead people were being scattered to the winds. I have managed to keep such photographs as there were—there were not very many—in the same way as the manuscripts, but I never had any control over the recordings of his voice. I well remember M.'s voice and the way he read, but it was inimitable and lives on only in my
# See page 420.
ears. If people could hear his voice, they would understand what he meant by "interpretative reading"—that is, using the text as a conductor uses a score. This could never be properly conveyed by some form of phonetic notation showing where he paused or raised his voice. His treatment of vowel quantity and the timbre of his voice could not be indicated. And what memory could ever preserve all the inflections of a voice that fell silent a quarter of a century ago? Yet something of his voice is preserved in the very structure of his verse, and now, when the years of silence are coming to an end, thousands of youngsters have caught the intonation of M.'s poetry and, unknown to themselves, reproduce it when they recite him. Nothing can be completely scattered to the winds.
Fortunately, this poetry still has not been seized on by actors, professional reciters and schoolteachers. I once happened to hear the brazen voice of a woman announcer on Radio Liberty.* She was reading M.'s "I drink to officers' epaulettes. . . ." This innocuous humorous poem has always been exploited here by such people as Nikulin to cast cheap political aspersions on M., and now, lo and behold, it was being used in the same way by a foreign radio! The woman was reading it in the same odious tone of voice, full of "meaning," as our radio announcers. She must have learned it from them. Sickened and depressed, I switched off.
58 Old and New
n one of the first few days after our return from Voronezh,
we were given a ride around Moscow by Valentin Katayev in the brand-new car he had just brought back with him from America. He looked at M. fondly and said: "I know what you need: a fixed place of residence." That evening he took us to the new apartment building for writers with the labradorite entry hall which so impressed those who remembered the hardships of the Revolution and the Civil War. In Katayev's new apartment everything was new —including his wife and child and the furniture. "I like modern stuff," he said, screwing up his eyes. But Fedin, who lived on the floor below, went in for mahogany and his apartment was crammed
* An emigre station based in Munich.
with it. The writers had gone wild at having so much money for the first time in their lives. Shklovski had been given a new apartment three floors above Katayev. The floor on which they put you depended on your standing as a writer. Vishnevski had insisted on moving into the apartment allotted to Ehrenburg (who was abroad) because he considered it unbecoming for someone holding his position in the Union of Writers to live right at the top, under the roof. But the official reason he gave was that he was frightened of heights.
Walking around Shklovski's apartment, Katayev asked him: "But where do you keep your suits?" Shklovski still had the same old wife, the same children, and only one pair of trousers—or two at the most. But he had already ordered a suit for himself—the first in his life. It was no longer done to go around in shabby clothes, and you had to look respectable to visit editorial offices or a film studio. The leather jackets and Komsomol blouses of the twenties had completely gone out of style and you were expected to dress in conventional fashion. At the end of the last war, prizes were promised to teachers who could manage to get decent dresses for themselves.