Next to us in a small room on the third floor was a Central Committee member of the older generation, a clever Latvian. He kept himself very much apart from the others, and talked only with M. We were taken aback by the note of alarm which we often detected in what he said. M. had already written his "Fourth Prose," and we knew that the outlook for literature was bad, but the Latvian was not concerned with literature—he was simply a high-ranking Party official. He had not been accused of any "deviations" and it was difficult to see why he was so apprehensive and kept harping on the question of what would happen tomorrow. I know nothing of his fate, but he must certainly have taken part in the "Congress of Victors"[22] and it is not difficult to guess what must have become of him —we are all wise after the event.
In the evenings Lakoba used to come up to play billiards and gossip with the guests in the dining room. This villa with its select visitors was the only place he could come to relax and talk. Once he brought us a bear cub that had been presented to him by the mountain people. Podvoiski kept it in his room, but then Yezhov took it back to Moscow and put it in the zoo. Lakoba was a good storyteller. He told us, for instance, about an ancestor of his who had gone all the way to Petersburg on foot to invite his blood enemy (it was Prince Shervashidze, I think) to come and partake of a feast in Sukhumi. The Prince decided this was the end of their blood feud and accepted the invitation. His imprudence cost him his life. M. was very much impressed by this story of Lakoba's and he thought there was some hidden meaning in it. We were told that by 1937 Lakoba was no longer alive. He had supposedly been buried with full honors in some Abkhaz equivalent of the Kremlin wall, but Stalin, angry with the dead man for some reason, had ordered his remains to be disinterred and destroyed. If this is true, one can only be glad for Lakoba's sake that he died in good time.
It was Lakoba who had put us in this Government villa so that we could rest before setting out on our Armenian journey—we had arrived with a note from the Central Committee requesting him to arrange this. Other writers there were Bezymenski and Kazin, bothof whom felt completely at home. The same could not be said for us.
On the day of Mayakovski's death we were working in the garden with a proud and elegant Georgian, a specialist in radio. The guests had all gathered in the dining room for their evening's entertainment—they generally sang songs and danced Yezhov's favorite dance, the gopak. Our companion said: "Georgian People's Commissars would not dance on the day on which a Georgian national poet had died." M. nodded to me and said: "Go and tell that to Yezhov." I went into the dining room and passed on the Georgian's words to Yezhov, who was in very high spirits already. The dancing ceased, but I don't think anybody apart from Yezhov knew the reason. A few years before this, M. had rebuked Vyshinski for laughing and talking loudly while a young poet was reading his verse. This happened in the CEKUBU rest home.
но foresaw the disastrous consequences of abandoning hu
We could not stand sanatoria and rest homes, but went to them very occasionally if there was nowhere else to go. They always smelled of death, for some reason.
70 The Suicide
manism in the name of some overriding aim? Who knew what calamities we were calling down on our heads by adopting the principle that "everything is permitted"? Only a handful of intellectuals—but nobody listened to them. Now they are accused of "abstract humanism," but in the twenties everybody mercilessly heaped scorn on them. The standard epithets for them were "puny" and "spineless," and the word "intellectual" itself was always given a pejorative ending (intelligentishka). They were constantly caricatured in the press, and the thirty-year-old partisans of the "new era" would have nothing to do with them. The prime task was to hold them up to ridicule in literature, and Ilf and Petrov obliged by writing their savage lampoon on "spineless intellectuals" in The Twelve Chairs. The figures in question seem very dated now, and it would not occur to anyone at the present day to see a "typical" intellectual in the pitiful half-wit who pesters the wife who has left him. Reading this immortal work today, one has difficulty figuring out the point of the satire and whom exactly they are making fun of. Something similar has happened with a much more profound work, Erd- man's play The Suicide, which Gorki found so impressive and Meyerhold wanted to produce. As originally conceived, the play was to feature a crowd of wretched intellectuals in repulsive masks surrounding a man who is about to commit suicide, and whom they want to exploit for their own purposes—as a way of calling attention to the difficulties of their existence, the hopelessness resulting from their inability to find a place in the new life. But a healthy instinct for life wins out in the end, and the man marked down for suicide— despite the farewell banquet and all the liberal speeches in his honor —decides not to die after all and thumbs his nose at the chorus of masked intellectuals who are egging him on.
Erdman, a real artist, couldn't help introducing genuinely tragic undertones into the polyphonic scenes with the masked intellectuals (who were always then referred to as petit-bourgeois grumblers). Nowadays, when nobody hesitates to say quite openly how unbearable our life is, the complaints of the masks in Erdman's play sound not like the whining of "spineless intellectuals," but like a tragic chorus of martyred ghosts. The hero's refusal to kill himself also takes on a different meaning now: life is hideous and intolerable, but one must go on living nevertheless, because life is life. . . . Did Erdman intend this implication, or was his aim much simpler? I do not know, but I believe that, with all its anti-intellectualism, there is an undercurrent of humanity in the play. It is really about why some of us decided to go on living even though everything was pushing us to suicide.
Erdman himself chose to fall silent—anything just to stay alive. In Kalinin he lived in a poky little hole of a room with a bunk to sleep on and a small table. When we came to see him, he was lying on the bunk—the only alternative was to sit on the only chair. He got up, shook himself and took us to the outskirts of the town where there were sometimes rooms to let in privately owned wooden houses. He came to see us quite frequently, but never with his co-author and antipode, Misha Volpin. He evidently visited us only on days when Misha was away in Moscow.
Erdman, as we know, first got into trouble for his fables, which Kachalov was irresponsible enough to recite at an evening in the Kremlin—that is, to the same sort of people as those we had stayed with in the Government villa in Sukhumi, where the companion of
Kossior's wife had immediately been suspected of being a spy. That same evening they were all arrested for their little joke and exiled— Misha Volpin was actually sent to a forced-labor camp, since it appeared that the secret police had old scores to settle with him, going back to his youth. They say that Erdman signed the letters he wrote home to his mother "Mamin-Sibiriak";* and that, as a parting shot, he wrote the following fable before being sent into exile:
Once the GPU came by and grabbed old Aesop by the ass. The moral of this tale is clear— No more fables needed here.
This summed up Erdman's recipe for survival, and we heard no more of his fables and jokes—he lapsed into silence. Unlike M., who to the end defended his right to his "moving lips," Erdman sealed his tight. Very occasionally he would put his head close to mine and tell me the plot of a new play he had just thought of but would never write. I have already mentioned one of the unwritten plays: about the way people switch from official jargon to natural speech.