Most of the people I knew who went to the camps died there almost at once. Intellectuals and professional people did not last long —it was scarcely worth living anyway. What was the point of hanging on to life if the only deliverance was death? What good would a few extra days have been to Margulis, who was protected by the criminals because at night he told them stories from Dumas' novels? He was in a camp together with Sviatopolk-Mirsky, who soon died of total exhaustion. Thank God that people are mortal. The only reason one could have to go on living was to remember it all and later tell the story—perhaps thereby making people think twice before embarking on such lunacies again.
Another person with authentic information about M. was the biologist Merkulov,* whom M. asked, if ever he was released, to go to Ehrenburg and tell him about M.'s last days in the camp—he knew by then that he would not survive himself. I reproduce his account here as it was told to me by Ehrenburg, who by the time I heard
* Mrs. Mandelstam identifies Merkulov only by his initial, but his name is given in full in Ehrenburg's memoirs ("at the beginning of 1952 I was visited by the Briansk agronomist V. Merkulov"), which Mrs. Mandelstam may have seen before publication.
from him on my return from Tashkent had forgotten or confused some details—in particular, he referred to Merkulov as an agronomist, since, wanting to lie low after his release, he had indeed worked as an agronomist. What Merkulov told Ehrenburg substantially bore out what Kazarnovski had told me. He thought that M. had died in the first year, before the opening of navigation to Kolyma in May or June. Merkulov gave a detailed account of his conversation with the camp doctor, who was also, fortunately, a prisoner and had reportedly known M. from previous days. The doctor said that it was impossible to save M. because he was so terribly emaciated. This confirms what Kazarnovski said about his being afraid to eat anything—though camp food was such that people turned into wraiths even if they did eat it. M. was only in the hospital for a few days, and Merkulov met the doctor immediately after his death.
M. did right to ask the biologist to go to Ehrenburg with his story —no other Soviet writer, with the exception of Shklovski, would ever have agreed to see such a person in those years. As for visiting any of those writers who were treated as outcasts—nobody coming from a camp would have dared go near them for fear of being sent back again.
People who had served sentences of five or ten years—which meant they had got off very lightly, by our standards—usually stayed, either voluntarily or because they had no choice, in the remote areas where the camps were located. After the war many of them were put back in the camps, becoming what were known in our incredible terminology as "repeaters." This is why there is only a tiny handful of survivors from among all those who were sent to the camps in 1937-38—you only stood a chance if you were very young at the time—and why I have found so few ex-prisoners who met M. But stories about his fate circulated widely in the camps, and dozens of people have told me all kinds of legends about him. I have several times been taken to see people who had heard—or, rather, as they always put it, "knew for a fact"—that M. was still alive, or had survived until the war, or was still in one of the camps, or had been released. There were also people who claimed to have seen him die, but on meeting me they generally admitted with embarrassment that they knew about it only from other people (described, needless to say, as completely reliable witnesses).
Some people have written stories about M.'s death. The one by Shalamov, for example, is an attempt to convey what M. must have felt while dying—it is intended as a tribute from one writer to another. But among these fictional accounts there are some whicl claim to provide authentic detail. There is one about how M. sup posedly died on the boat going to Kolyma. The story about his mur der by criminals, and about his reading of Petrarch by the light of : campfire likewise belong to the realm of legend. Many people havi fallen for the Petrarch story because it conforms so well to "poetic' convention. Then there are stories of a more "down-to-earth" kind always involving the common criminals. One of the most elaborate of these accounts is told by the poet R. Late one night, says R., some people knocked on the door of the barracks and asked for R. by name. R. was very frightened because they were criminals, but they proved to be friendly and had come with the message that he was to go to another barracks where a poet lay dying. When R. arrived he supposedly found M. lying in his bunk either unconscious or in a delirium, but, seeing R., he immediately revived a little and they spent the whole night talking. In the morning M. died and R. closed his eyes. No date, as usual, is given in this account, but the place— the transit camp of Vtoraya Rechka near Vladivostok—is correctly identified. The story was told to me by Slutski, who gave me R.'s address. But when I wrote, he never replied.
With one exception, however, all my informants have at least been well intentioned. The exception was a certain Tiufiakov, who used to come and see me in Ulianovsk at the beginning of the fifties, before Stalin's death. Tiufiakov behaved monstrously toward me. He was a member of the literature faculty at the Teachers' Training College and deputy director of it. A war veteran, he was covered with medals for his service as a political officer, and he loved to read war novels which described the execution of cowards or deserters in front of their units. He had devoted the whole of his life to the "reconstruction of higher education," and for this reason he had not had time to take any degrees himself. He was a typical Komsomol of the twenties who had then made a career as a "permanent official." He had been relieved of teaching duties so that he could devote all his time to watching over "ideological purity," the slightest deviations from which he duly reported to the right quarters. He was transferred from college to college, mainly to keep an eye on directors suspected of "liberalism." It was for this that he had been sent to Ulianovsk as deputy director—a peculiar post of a nominal kind which did not carry any teaching duties. We had two eternal Komsomols like this. Apart from Tiufiakov, there was also Glukhov, whose name should be recorded for posterity. This man had received a medal for his part in the deportation of the kulaks, and had also been awarded a doctorate for a dissertation on Spinoza. He performed his duties in quite open fashion, summoning students to his office and instructing them whom they should get up and denounce at meetings, and in what terms. Tiufiakov, on the other hand, did his work in secret. Both of them had been involved in purging institutions of higher education ever since the beginning of the twenties.
Tiufiakov's "work" with me was undertaken voluntarily, beyond the call of duty—just for his own recreation. He clearly derived an almost aesthetic pleasure from it. Every day he thought of something new to tell me: M. had been shot; M. had been in Sverdlovsk, where Tiufiakov had visited him as an act of human kindness; M. had been shot while trying to escape; M. was at the moment serving another sentence in a camp for a criminal offense; M. had been beaten to death by criminals for stealing a piece of bread; M. had been released and was living somewhere in the north with a new wife; M. had quite recently hanged himself when he heard of Zhdanov's speech, news of which had only just reached the camps. Each of these stories he relayed to me with a great air of solemnity, saying he had heard it after making inquiries through the Prosecutor's office. I had to sit and listen to him, because it was impossible to throw out a police agent. I also had to listen to his views on literature: "Our best poet is Dolmatovski. . . . What I appreciate most in poetry is clarity. . . . Say what you like, but you can't have poetry without metaphors. . . . Style is not only a matter of form, but a matter of ideology, too—remember what Engels said about this, you have to agree with him. . . . Have you ever received any of the verse Mandelstam wrote in the camp? He wrote a lot there. . . ." Tiufiakov's wiry body was like a coiled spring. There was always a smile lurking on his face under his military mustache, which was very like Stalin's. He said he had got some real zhen- shen* from the Kremlin hospital, and that no artificial product could compare with it.