FEBRUARY 10, 1942
My dear Mother!
Hooray! Today I received your registered letter from February 1 and was very, very glad. It’s the second letter (registered) that I’ve received from you. Soon it will be four months since I left Moscow, but it seems like yesterday. Time flies, and it’s impossible to make up for every hour lost. That’s something I realized only recently. I’m working here at full tilt, and work is one of my few sources of comfort.
Your letter disturbed me. I can so clearly imagine your life, and I wanted so much to be there with you, to lighten your burden at least a little bit. I can see that it is not easy and that it is grounded in your clearly defined character and your enthusiasm. Mama, I want to be there with you! It’s so wonderful how you describe going to the theater and remember things that happened ten, twenty, thirty years ago. But for me, memories hold no interest whatsoever. Everything is in the future. I want to achieve something big and useful, and, to be honest, something that will bring fame and respect, and all that sort of thing. For the country, and for you. It won’t be easy, with my family legacy, but I’ll make it, you’ll see!
Write me and tell me whether you received my birthday telegram on January 23, and the money transfer of a hundred rubles that I sent you on the 20th. Right now I’m snowed under with work from my classes, and I haven’t managed to earn any more money—and, added to that, I have many expenses (paying for the studies, war tax, and repairing my felt winter boots). But I have provided for myself in advance for the next one and a half months. I will help you if I can. My dream is to be able to help you regularly. In a month, I’ll graduate from the theoretical courses of the Institute. Then only the applied part of the course and my thesis will remain to be completed. I’m almost an engineer.
I recently saw Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man at the Red Army Theater. I went there because of the buffet (here they call even the local opera and ballet theater “The Theater of Opera and Buffet”). My hunting expedition was successful. I bought eighteen sandwiches and five buns (the first time since leaving Moscow that I’ve had white bread). I wasn’t accepted into the Military Academy program, for reasons that had nothing to do with me. But I still stand a chance, since there will be a new round of admissions in May. I’m afraid that the academy is not for me. All my life, aviation, the dream of my childhood and youth, has eluded me. The admissions committee didn’t accept Kolya F., either. They refused Egor Gavrilin, and he had to get into the academy, since his studies at the Institute are in an abysmal state. He took only two exams, and he hasn’t even begun his project. The fellow got lazy. But they agreed at least to consider him in the next round of admissions.
It is now one in the morning. I just returned from the post office. All the other fellows have gone to bed, and they certainly foul up the air while they’re sleeping—that’s a result of the diet. I changed my schedule a bit. Now I study until three or four in the morning, get up at eleven or twelve, and eat my midday meal immediately. In that way, I allay my hunger and save time simultaneously. Mother, tell me more about what your day is like. What’s it like at home in the apartment: Is it cold? Is there gas for cooking?
Where is A. Kostromin? What do you hear from Uncle Mikhail? Does he write at all? Whom do you meet with, who are your friends? Write me about what my beloved Moscow looks like. And tell me how things stand with your food supply—I’m very worried about it.
The stipend will be disbursed pending the results of sixteen exams. I passed six of them already, and got four A’s and two B’s. I still need to get good marks on at least three more. It will be hard. I don’t attend lectures, but work only with my books. With few exceptions, the lecturers aren’t well qualified. I’m putting all my efforts into passing the exams early. Write me if you’ve heard any news about Osip Shapir and Sergey Prasolov. Sasha Volkov and Boris Kokin were killed near Leningrad. I was very upset by the news. And one of our students, Zhenya Pochando, received the decoration of Hero of the Soviet Union. Good for him! I bitterly regret that I’m not at the front.
Mother, write me more often. I desperately need your letters.
Send my greetings and a big kiss to Uncle Mikhail and the family. Thank you for the envelopes, by the way.
If you have the chance, send me socks, a darning needle and thread, some underwear, my skating boots and canvas shoes, a few shirts, a suitcase if at all possible, because I have nothing but a gunnysack. And please send me a suit as well. But the most important things are a slide rule, a pencil box, and pencils (drafting pencils—they’re in the desk drawer).
I send you many kisses (8,888 of them), Genrikh
P.S. I didn’t want to write you about it, but I can’t help myself. At the end of December, just by chance, I met my former classmate Amalia Kotenko in town. Do you remember her? You must—she got married to our classmate Tisha Golovanov as soon as she finished the tenth grade. You certainly remember him. He came to our house in the seventh grade and we played chess. He died in the first month of the war. I feel terribly sorry for her. We’ve started to meet each other occasionally. She was such a bright, happy girl, and now her light seems to have gone out. Cursed war. I’m trying to cheer her up a bit; she is “thawing” out bit by bit. SVERDLOVSK–MOSCOW EGOR GAVRILIN TO MARUSYA
FEBRUARY 15, 1942
Hello, Mrs. Ossetsky!
Genrikh let me read your last letter, and it touched me so deeply I wanted to write you a few warm and friendly lines, not by way of comfort—you are not one of those people who need that—and there’s probably nothing to comfort you for, but simply out of an excess of feeling, as they say. When I read your casual remarks about Moscow, about daily life there, about the working conditions of ordinary people, I get a sense of the reality of war and the front line. Here you don’t feel it at all. People know about it, and talk about it, but nothing more. At first, this seemed strange to me, but, gradually, even we who smelled the gunpowder, on earth and in the sky, out of the corner of our noses, so to speak, got used to it; so it’s not surprising that the people in Sverdlovsk have that reaction.
For this reason, it’s not surprising that the news of missing relatives or abandoned apartments, and many other things that are so natural for us in Moscow, and inevitable in wartime (especially this war), inspire indignation here. And you are absolutely right when you say that we live in a kind of paradise here—only we don’t appreciate it, and, I’m certain, if you were in our place you wouldn’t appreciate it, either. And that’s why you, more than anyone else, can understand why Genrikh is so eager to get to Moscow. We are sitting on pins and needles here, and we are very nervous, and we can’t feel at home. That very Sverdlovskian complacency irritates us, as does the fact that, on the very day when Lozovaya was recaptured by our troops, some students—yes, students!—got into a fight in the buffet over a salami sandwich. What does the man in the street here think about on such a day? How to snatch another person’s portion, whoever he might be. But the people who have experienced the war firsthand (and there are many such people here), refugees from Ukraine, Belorussia, Leningrad, Moscow, and the western regions, turn on the morning news as soon as they get up, and after that stand over the Soviet map arguing for the next few hours.
You describe a passage from Peer Gynt—the death of Åse. You are right, Mrs. Ossetsky, that it is perhaps the most powerful part of Ibsen’s play, and Grieg’s music.
Much has been said about a mother’s love, about its power and endurance, by all the great masters of the word—Romain Rolland, Gorky, Chekhov, Maupassant, Nekrasov, Heine, and many others. But this short scene of a mother’s quiet death in the arms of her estranged son, who has come to shut her eyes and to comfort her in her hour of death, surpasses almost everything in its laconicism, its emotional restraint, its power.