Bunks in the camp barracks were in tiers of three, and L. had managed to get one in the middle. The lower ones were bad because of people milling about all the time, and in the upper ones it was intolerably hot and stuffy. After a few days L. began to shiver, and in order to get warmer he changed places with someone in an upper bunk. But he still went on shivering and he realized it was typhus. He was desperately anxious to avoid being taken off to the infirmary, and for a few days he managed to fool the orderlies by not letting them measure his temperature properly. But it kept going up and they soon took him away to quarantine. He was told that M. had been there a little while before. It appeared that he had not had typhus. The doctors, who were also prisoners, had treated him well and even given him a fur coat—they had a large stock of spare clothing because people were dying like flies. By this time M. was badly in need of it, since he had exchanged his leather coat for half a kilo of sugar—which had immediately been stolen from him. L. asked where M. had gone to, but nobody knew.
L. spent several days in quarantine before the doctors diagnosed typhus. He was then transferred to the infirmary. The transit camp turned out to have a perfectly decent and clean two-story hospital, to which all the typhus cases were sent. Here, for the first time in many months, L. slept in a proper bed. His illness brought him rest and a sweet feeling of comfort.
When he left the infirmary L. heard that M. had died. This must have been between December 1938 and April 1939—in April L. was transferred to a work camp. He met no witnesses of M.'s death and knew about it only from hearsay. L.'s story seems to bear out what Kazarnovski had told me—namely, that M. died early. I also conclude from L.'s account that, since all typhus cases were taken to the infirmary, then M., who was found not to have it, must have died in quarantine. This means that he did not even die in his own bunk, covered by his own miserable convict's blanket.
There is nowhere I can make inquiries and nobody who will tell me anything. Who is likely to search through those grisly archives just for the sake of Mandelstam, when they won't even publish a volume of his work? Those who perished are lucky if they have been posthumously rehabilitated, or if, at any rate, their cases have been "discontinued for lack of evidence." Even here there is no "egalitarianism," and there are two types of rehabilitation—M. was given the second-class one. . . .
All I can do, therefore, is to gather what meager evidence there is and speculate about the date of his death. As I constantly tell myself: the sooner he died, the better. There is nothing worse than a slow death. I hate to think that at the moment when my mind was set at rest on being told in the post office that he was dead, he may actually have been still alive and on his way to Kolyma. The date of death has not been established. And it is beyond my power to do anything more to establish it.
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APPENDIX
A. Notes on Persons Mentioned in the Text
Adalis (Efron), Adelina Yefimovna (1900- ): Poet and prose-writer.
Agranov, Yakov Savlovich (?—1939): Cheka investigator in the Kronstadt mutiny, the Tagantsev conspiracy, the Tambov uprising, the Kirov assassination, etc. Creator and chief of Litkontrol, a GPU department for the surveillance of writers. As deputy head of the NKVD under Yagoda and Yezhov, he was active in the preparation of the Moscow show trials of 1937-38. He was arrested and shot in 1939.
Akhmatova (Gorenko), Anna Andreyevna (1889-1966): Major Russian poet. Born in Odessa, she lived most of her life in St. Petersburg (Leningrad). Her verse was first published in 1911 and won immediate acclaim. Together with Nikolai Gumilev (whom she married in 1910), she became a leading figure in the Acmeist movement, with which Mandelstam was also associated. Her marriage to Gumilev ended in divorce, as did her second marriage to V. K. Shileiko, an Assyriologist. Her third husband, N. N. Punin, and her son, Lev Gumilev, were both arrested during the 1930's. She herself was never arrested, but for many years (1926-1940) she published scarcely anything and, like Mandelstam, was virtually proscribed. In 1946 she was scurrilously attacked (as a "half-nun, half-whore") by Stalin's chief lieutenant in cultural affairs, Andrei Zhdanov, and expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers. Subjected to intolerable pressures and threats of reprisals against her son, she wrote several poems in praise of Stalin in 1952. After the partial exposure of Stalin's crimes by Khrushchev in 1956 (when her son, like millions of others, was released from a forced-labor camp) she began to publish again, and swiftly won recognition from the younger generation. But her long poem "Requiem," a dirge for her husband and son and all of Stalin's victims, has still not been published in the Soviet Union. Her "Poem Without a Hero," a remarkable attempt to illuminate Russia's destiny in the last half century, was published with some cuts in the Soviet collection of her poetry, Beg Vremeni (Moscow, 1965). The most complete collection of her work has appeared only abroad in the two-volume edition edited by Gleb Struve and Boris Filippov (Washington, D.C., 1968). In the last years of her life Akhmatova was allowed to travel abroad for the first time since the Revolution. In 1964, at the age of seventy-five, she went to Sicily, where she received the Taormina literary prize. In 1965 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Oxford. On her way home she visited France and Italy. As she makes clear in her short memoir on Mandelstam (published in New York in 1965 in the literary almanac Voz- dushnye Puti [Aerial Ways'], edited by Roman Grynberg), her close friendship with him was based on the natural affinity of two great poets.
Altman, Natan Isayevich (1889- ): Painter of Akhmatova's portrait.
Amusin, Joseph Davidovich: Biblical and classical Hebrew scholar. He has published articles in Soviet scholarly journals and a book on the Dead Sea Scrolls (Moscow, i960).
Anderson, Marian (1902- ): American contralto. The sound of her voice inspired Mandelstam to write a poem in 1936.
Andreyev, Andrei Andreyevich (1895- ): Member of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, 1920-61. Deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers, 1946-53.
Andronikov (Andronikashvili), lrakli Luarsabovich (1908- ): Literary historian and critic, well known at present for his newspaper and television causeries on literary topics.
Annenski, Innokenti Fedorovich (1856-1909): Classical scholar and lyric poet.
Ardov, Victor Yefimovich (1900- ): Writer of humorous stories, film scenarios and satirical sketches for the variety stage.