When I came to tell him of M.'s arrest, Erdman mumbled something that sounded like: "If they're picking up such people . . ." and got up to show me out.
During the war, when we lived in evacuation in Tashkent, two people in uniform came to see my brother. One was Erdman, the other was Volpin, who talked incessantly about poetry and kept on saying that it should be "interesting." He found Mayakovski and Yesenin "interesting," but not Akhmatova. Volpin was a product of LEF and knew what he liked. Erdman just sat and drank, without saying a word. Later they went up to see Akhmatova, who lived in the balakhana above my brother.
I still occasionally meet Erdman and Volpin at Akhmatova's. Erdman says: "Pleased to see you" and then goes on drinking, without another word, leaving all the talking to Volpin. They work together and seem to be perfectly all right nowadays.
One summer while he was living out in Tarusa, Garin was complaining about the modern theater and saying how awful everything was. In the evenings there were arguments about which was worse: literature, the theater, painting or music. Everybody present spoke up for his own particular field of interest, insisting that it came first
* A minor novelist of the end of the nineteenth century whose name can be punningly interpreted to mean "Mummy's Siberian." in terms of its degradation. On one of these evenings Garin read Erdman's Suicide, this play that never got on the stage, and it now sounded very different in my ears. "I'll tell you," the author seemed to be saying, "why you didn't jump out of the window and went on living. . . ."
In the meantime, attacks on the intellectuals still go on. This is a legacy from the twenties, and it's time a stop were put to it.
Many people will be offended at what I have said in passing about The Twelve Chairs. I have always found it very funny and am still astonished at the boldness of the authors in the episode where they describe how Ostap Bender and the other crooks from Odessa join a group of Soviet writers in a specially reserved coach on the newly opened Turksib railroad and, mingling with them during the journey, are in no way distinguishable from them. But I find nothing funny about the description of the intellectuals living together in their dilapidated house—no wonder they had gone completely to seed and were being deserted by such of their womenfolk as still had any market value. It is all too easy to poke fun at people who have had the life crushed out of them.
71 Rebirth
I
must admit to being an incorrigible optimist. Like those who believed at the beginning of this century that life had to be better than in the nineteenth century, I am now convinced that we will soon witness a complete resurgence of humane values. I mean this not only in respect to social justice, but also in cultural life and in everything else. Far from being shaken in my optimism by the bitter experience of the first half of this incredible century, I am encouraged to believe that all we have been through will have served to turn people against the idea, so tempting at first sight, that the end justifies the means and "everything is permitted." M. taught me to believe that history is a practical testing-ground for the ways of good and evil. We have tested the ways of evil. Will any of us want to revert to them? Isn't it true that the voices among us speaking of conscience and good are growing stronger? I feel that we are at the threshold of new days, and I think I detect signs of a new attitude.
They are few and far between—indeed, almost imperceptible—but they are nevertheless there.
Alas, my faith and optimism are shared by almost nobody: people who know the difference between good and evil are more inclined to expect new misfortunes and new crimes. I realize the possibility of a return to the past, but I still think the general outlook is bright. We have seen the triumph of evil after the values of humanism have been vilified and trampled on. The reason these values succumbed was probably that they were based on nothing except boundless confidence in the human intellect. I think we may now find a better foundation for them, if only because of the lessons we have drawn from our experience. We can see the mistakes and crimes of the past, and the seductive delusions of former times have lost their glamour. Russia once saved the Christian culture of Europe from the Tatars, and in the past fifty years, by taking the brunt on herself, she has saved Europe again—this time from rationalism and all the will to evil that goes with it. The sacrifice in human life was enormous. How can I believe it was all in vain?
I have a certain acquaintance who, though still quite young, is both wise and gloomy beyond his years. The poet he likes best is Blok, because of his frantic presentiment of the end of Russian culture. This admirer of Blok looks down on me for wearing rose- tinted spectacles at my age. He believes that Blok's prediction came true, that our culture has really perished and we are buried under its ruins. This young pessimist fails to notice the changes that have come about since we first met. He came to see me straight after the Twentieth Congress, when people were asking in bewilderment: "Why have they told us all this?" Some would rather not have heard such disagreeable things; others, about to become members of the ruling class, were upset because their task had suddenly been made somewhat more difficult; then there were those who shook their heads sadly at the thought that the old ways of making a career would not work any more and they would have to think of something new.
This was the period known as the "thaw," when some people really believed that they Would be granted permission to speak their minds. This hope was not fulfilled, but everybody knows that this is not what matters. What matters is the change in each individual and his way of thinking. The very need for permission from above is a hangover from the past, with its belief in authority and fear of punishment. People trembled with terror at every word of command.
This terror could return, but it would mean sending several million people to the camps. If this were to happen now, they would all scream—and so would their families, friends and neighbors. That is something to be reckoned with.
My young friend first came to see me while I was living in the filthy barracks that served as a dormitory for the teachers of the Cheboksary Teachers' Training College. The stench was overpowering, and the air was thick with soot from the kerosene lamps. It was as cold in my room as it was outside: a plank in the wall on the second floor had slipped, and threatened to fall on the heads of the children playing down below. The wind that blew freely into my room brought the smell of melting snow. My visitor explained that he was an admirer of M. and had been dying to come and see me. He had come quite out of the blue—without any letters of introduction from mutual friends to give me an idea of what sort of person he was. But his whole bearing, and particularly the look in his eyes, inspired confidence.
I asked him to sit down and told him something I would not normally have said to a casual visitor: "When somebody comes and tells me how much he likes Mandelstam," I said, "I know that he is an informer. He has either been sent, or has come on his own initiative so that he can later submit a nice little report. This has been going on for twenty years now. Nobody else ever talks about Mandelstam with me—literary people who used to read his poetry never mention him in conversation with me. I am telling this to you because you make a good impression on me. I trust you. But even with you I cannot talk about Mandelstam and his poetry. Now you understand why."