I had good reasons for suggesting Demian Bedny. Through Pasternak I was now able to remind him of a promise he had made in 1928. In that year M. had learned from a chance conversation in the street with his namesake Isaiah Mandelstam that five bank officials, specialists left over from the old regime, had been sentenced to death by shooting for embezzlement or negligence. Much to his friends' and his own surprise, and despite the rule against intervening in such matters, M. raised such a hue and cry all over Moscow that the five old men were spared. He mentions this episode in his "Fourth
Prose." Among his "integral moves" was an approach to Demian Bedny. Their meeting took place somewhere in the backyard of the "International Bookstore," which, as a passionate book-lover, Demian was always visiting. He probably also used it to meet his friends— people living in the Kremlin no longer dared invite anybody there. Demian refused point blank to intervene on behalf of the old men. "Why should you worry about them?" he asked when he realized that they were neither relatives nor friends of M. But at the same time he promised that if anything ever happened to M. himself, he would come to his help without fail. For some reason M. was very gratified by this promise, though at that time we were firmly persuaded that "they'll neither touch nor kill us." When M. came down to join me at Yalta shortly afterward, he told me about this conversation with Demian. "It's really very good to know. He won't keep his word, you think? I think he will." This was why in 1934 I advised Pasternak to speak with Demian Bedny. Pasternak called him on the day after M.'s arrest, the day on which our trunk was examined for a second time, but Demian seemed to have got wind of the case already. "Neither you nor I can get involved in this," he said. Was it that he knew of the poem about Stalin, with whom he was already in trouble himself, or was he simply responding with the usual Soviet formula on the need to avoid those stricken by the plague? Whichever it was, Demian was in any case in disgrace himself. It was his passion for books that had got him into trouble: he had been unwise enough to note in his diary that he didn't like to lend books to Stalin because of the dirty marks left on the white pages by his greasy fingers. Demian's secretary had decided to curry favor by copying out this entry in Demian's diary and sending it to Stalin. Though the secretary apparently gained nothing by his treachery, Demian was reduced to dire straits for a long time and even had to sell off his library. By the time his works began to appear in print again, the fifteen years required under law before anyone can inherit had gone by, and I myself have seen his heir, a puny youth from his last marriage, going to Surkov and trying to beg a little money in his father's name. I also heard Surkov refuse outright —as though visiting a final insult on Demian through his offspring. What had he done to deserve this? Nobody ever worked so wholeheartedly for the Soviet regime. With me it was a different matter: I could scarcely be surprised if I was trampled on from time to time. What else could I expect?
In the middle of May 1934, Demian and Pasternak met at some
gathering (probably in connection with the Union of Writers that was then being set up) and Demian offered to take Pasternak home in his car. If I remember rightly, he got rid of his driver and for a long time they drove around Moscow alone. At that time many of our big shots were not yet afraid of talking in automobiles, though later on there were rumors that they also had microphones planted in them. Demian told Pasternak that Russian poetry was being "shot dead" and mentioned Mayakovski as a case in point. In Demian's view, Mayakovski had died because he had trespassed on territory to which he was a stranger—the same political territory in which he (Demian) was so much at home.
When he had unburdened himself, Demian drove Pasternak not to his home, but to our apartment in Furmanov Street, where Akhmatova and I were sitting, distraught after the two searches.
At a congress of journalists taking place in Moscow just at that time, Baltrushaitis frantically made the rounds of the delegates and, invoking the memory of Gumilev, begged them to save M. from a similar fate. I can imagine how this combination of names sounded to the ears of our hard-bitten journalists of those years, but Baltrushaitis was a citizen of a foreign country and they could scarcely expect him to be impressed by the suggestion that it was better not to "get involved."
Baltrushaitis had long before had a presentiment of what M.'s end would be. At the very beginning of the twenties (in 192 r, before the execution of Gumilev) he had urged M. to take out Lithuanian citizenship. This would have been quite feasible, since M.'s father had once lived in Lithuania and M. himself had been born in Warsaw. M. even went so far as to hunt out some papers and take them round to Baltrushaitis, but then he thought better of it: you can't escape your fate and better not to try.
The slight stir created by M.'s arrest evidently had some effect, since the whole affair did not develop according to the usual pattern. At least, that's what Akhmatova thought. And, indeed, even this muted reaction, this faint murmur, was in itself something quite out of the ordinary and a matter for astonishment. But if one had tried to interpret this whispering, it is not clear what one would have found. In my naivete I had thought that public opinion always sided with the weak against the strong, with the oppressed against the oppressor, with the quarry against the hunter. My eyes were later opened by the more up-to-date Lida Bagritski. In 1938, when her friend Postupalski was arrested, she complained bitterly to me: "Things were different before. When Osip was arrested, for instance, some were against it, and others thought it was all right. And now look what's happening: they're arresting their own people!"
One must admire the way Lida put it. With Spartan bluntness she was simply defining the basic moral law of those who were supposed to constitute our intelligentsia and were, hence, presumably the foundation of public opinion. The distinction between "one of us" and "not one of us" (or "alien elements," to use the phrase then current) went back to the Civil War with its iron law of "Who whom?"[3] After victory and the surrender of the other side, the winners always claim rewards, decorations and privileges, while the defeated are subject to extermination. But it soon becomes evident that the right to count as "one of us" is neither hereditary nor even granted for life. The right to style oneself thus is a matter for constant struggle, and has been from the beginning. A person who was yesterday "one of us" can be degraded with lightning speed to the opposite status. What is more, by the very logic of this division, you become "not one of us" from the moment you lose your footing and start to slip downward. 1937 and all that followed were possible only in a society where this division has been taken to its logical conclusion.