I often heard reports about poems written by M. in the camp, but they always turned out to be false—whether deliberately or unwittingly so. Recently, however, I was shown a curious collection of items which had been taken from poetry "albums" compiled in the camp. Most of the poems were rather garbled versions of unpublished poems, excluding all those with the slightest political undertones (such as the poem about our apartment). The bulk of them
* A Chinese root which supposedly has rejuvenating properties.
must have been made from manuscript copies which circulated in the thirties, but these were often written down from memory, which explains the large number of mistakes. Some of them appeared in old versions that M. had discarded ("To the German Language," for instance). A few can only have been written down from his dictation, since they had never existed in written copies. Among them was a poem he had written as a child about the crucifixion. Is it possible that he had remembered it and recited it to someone? These camp albums also contained a few humorous poems which I did not have before ("Dante and the Cab Driver," for example), but they are unfortunately in a badly garbled form. Such things could only have been brought to the camps by people from Leningrad, of whom there were very many.
This collection was shown to me by Dombrovski, the author of a book about our life which was written, as they used to say in the old days, "with his heart's blood." Though it has a lot about archaeological excavations, snakes, architecture and young ladies working in offices, it is also a book which gets to the very core of our wretched existence. Anybody who reads it cannot fail to understand why the camps were bound to become the main instrument by which "stability" was maintained in our country.
Dombrovski says that he met M. in the period of the "phony war" —that is, more than a year after December 27, 1938, which I had accepted as the date of his death. The sea route to Kolyma was already open for navigation, and the man whom Dombrovski took to be M.—or really was M.—was among a batch of prisoners about to be transported there from the Vtoraya Rechka transit camp. Dombrovski, who was then still very young, full of life and eager for friendship, had heard that there was someone among them nicknamed "The Poet" and wanted to see him. When Dombrovski went over to the group and shouted for "The Poet," someone came forward and introduced himself as Osip Mandelstam. Dombrovski had the impression that he was mentally ill, but still not completely out of touch with reality. It was the briefest of meetings—they talked about whether the crossing to Kolyma would be made, in view of the military situation, but then "The Poet," who looked about seventy, was called away to eat his kasha.
The fact that this prisoner looked so old—whether or not it really was M.—proves nothing one way or the other. In those conditions people aged amazingly quickly, and M., moreover, had always looked much older than his years. But how can Dombrovski's account be squared with what I had heard previously? It may be that M. left the hospital alive after all those who knew him had been sent to other camps, and that he lingered on for a few more months or even years. Or it may have been some other old man with the same name who was taken for Osip in the camps—there were lots of Man- delstams with similar first names and faces. Are there any grounds for believing that the man seen by Dombrovski really was M.?
When I told him what I had already heard, Dombrovski's confidence in his own story was slightly shaken, but I found it perplexing, and I'm no longer sure of anything now. Can one ever know anything for certain in our life? I have carefully pondered the arguments both for and against his story.
Dombrovski had not known M. previously, and though he had seen him several times in Moscow, it was always at periods when M. had grown a beard—whereas the person he met in the camp was clean-shaven. All the same, Dombrovski thought he looked like M. in some ways. This does not mean very much, of course, since there is nothing easier than to be wrong about faces. But Dombrovski learned one significant detail at the time—not, admittedly, from "The Poet" himself, but from other people in the camp: namely, that M.'s fate had been decided by some letter of Bukharin. This could mean that the letter written to Stalin by Bukharin in 1934 had played some part in the investigation after M.'s second arrest in 1938 —together, no doubt, with the notes from Bukharin confiscated during the search of our apartment. It is more than likely that this was so, and the only person who could have known about it was M. himself. The only question is: Had the old man nicknamed "The Poet" himself said this to the prisoners who passed it on to Dombrovski, or was it only attributed to him as something told by a dead man for whom he was later taken? There is just no way of checking this. But the fact that there was this story about Bukharin's letter is of great interest to me: this is the only echo that has reached me about the case brought against M. after his second arrest. In his "Fourth Prose" M. wrote: "My case has not been closed and never will be closed." How right he was! Because of Bukharin's letter, M.'s case was reviewed in 1934 and then again in 1938. It was then reexamined once more in 1955, but it still remains completely obscure, and I can only hope that it may one day be properly investigated.
What of the evidence in favor of the version of M.'s death that I had previously accepted—namely, that it took place in December 1938? The first news I got came in the shape of the parcel returned "because of the addressee's death." But this is not conclusive: we know of thousands of cases in which parcels were returned for this reason, though in fact, as became known later, they had not been delivered because the addressee had been transferred to another camp. The return of a parcel was firmly associated in people's minds with the death of the addressee, and for the majority it was the only indication that a relative in a camp might have died. In fact, however, in all the confusion of the overcrowded camps, the officials in military uniform were so brazen that they wrote whatever came into their heads—who cared? People sent to the camps were in any case thought of as dead, and there was no point in standing on ceremony with them. The same thing happened at the front during the war: officers and soldiers were reported dead when they were only wounded or had been taken prisoner. But at the front it was a case of honest errors being made—nobody did it out of callousness, as in the camps, where the inmates were treated like cattle by brutes specially trained to trample on all human rights. The return of a parcel cannot, therefore, be regarded as proof of death.