This system of mass surveillance came into being only gradually, but M. was one of the first to be singled out for individual treatment. His status in Soviet literature was defined as early as 1923, when his name was crossed off the list of people allowed to work for the various magazines, and from then on he was always surrounded by swarms of agents. We learned to distinguish several varieties of the breed. The most easily identifiable were the brisk young men of military bearing who, without bothering to feign interest in the author, immediately asked him for his "latest work." M. generally tried to get rid of them by saying he had no spare copy. They would thereupon offer to type it out for him and return it "with a copy for yourself." With one such visitor M. argued for a long time, refusing to let him have "The Wolf"—this was in 1932. The young man insisted, saying that it was in any case widely known. Failing to get it, he came back the next day and recited the poem by heart. After giving this proof of how "well known" it was, he got the author's copy he needed. Agents of this kind completely disappeared from the scene as soon as they had done their job. The good thing about them was that they were always in a hurry and never tried to "make friends." It was evidently not part of their assignment to spy on the other people who came to see us.
The second type of agent was the "admirer"—generally a member of the same profession, a colleague or a neighbor. In apartment buildings housing members of the same institution, one's neighbors are always colleagues too. People like this would appear without calling beforehand, just dropping in out of the blue. They would stay for a long time, talking shop and attempting minor provocations. Whenever we were visited by one of these, M. always asked me to serve tea: "The man is working, he needs a cup of tea." To ingratiate themselves, they tried all kinds of little tricks. S., for instance, first came to us with tales about the East—he said that he was himself originally from Central Asia and had studied in a madrasah there. As proof of his "Eastern" credentials he brought along a small statuette of the Buddha, which could have been bought in any junk store. It was supposed to bear witness to his expert knowledge of the East and his serious interest in art. The connection between the Buddha and an Islamic madrasah never became clear to us. S. soon lost patience with us and, after making a scene, left us to be taken care of by someone else—or so it appeared, to judge from the equally sudden appearance of another neighbor who also tried to cultivate our acquaintance by bringing us a Buddha! This time it was M. who lost his temper: "Another Buddha! That's enough! They must think of something new!" and he threw out the hapless replacement, without even giving him tea.
The third and most dangerous kind of agents we called "adjutants." These were young devotees of literature, sometimes doing graduate work at the university, who were extremely keen on poetry and knew everything there was to know about it. When they first came they often had the purest intentions, but then they were recruited. Some of them openly admitted to M.—as they did to Akhmatova as well—that they were "called in to report." After making this kind of admission they generally disappeared from the scene. Others also suddenly stopped coming to see us, without any explanation. In some cases I found out many years later what had happened—namely, that they had been "summoned" by the police. This was the explanation in the case of L., for example, whom Akhmatova told me about. Not daring to approach her in Leningrad, he had managed to see her during one of her visits to Moscow, and he said to her: "You cannot imagine how closely they watch you." It was always painful when somebody one had become friendly with mysteriously broke off relations, but this, alas, was the only thing that honorable people could do if they refused to play the role of an "adjutant." "Adjutants" had to serve two gods at once. With all their love of poetry, they were mindful of their own careers as writers or poets, of the need to get into print and find their feet. It was this side of them that the police generally played on. To be on close or friendly terms with Mandelstam or Akhmatova, or to have any kind of truck with them, opened no doors in the world of literature, but an "adjutant" only had to submit a candid report on an evening's conversation (of the most innocent kind, needless to say) at our apartment and they would help him to get into the coveted pages of the literary magazines. There was always a crucial point at which the young devotee of literature would break down and agree to embark on a double life.
Finally, there were some real lovers of evil who had a taste for their dual role. Some of them were quite famous: Elsberg, for example, who was undoubtedly an outstanding figure in his field. He was active in different circles than the ones we moved in, and I only know about him from what others have told me, but I was struck by the refinement of the man's methods when I happened to see an article of his entitled "The Moral Experience of the Soviet Era." It appeared at a moment when there was a possibility of his being publicly exposed, and by writing an article under this title he was, as it were, suggesting to his readers that, as an authority on the moral standards of our age, he could scarcely be in any jeopardy. In fact there were some revelations about him, but only some time later, and even so it proved impossible to apply such a mild sanction as expulsion from the Union of Soviet Writers. He lost nothing at all, not even the devotion of his research students. It was typical of Elsberg that, after getting his friend S. sent to a concentration camp, he continued to visit S.'s wife and gave her advice. She knew about his role, but was frightened of betraying her disgust: to expose informers was not done, and you paid a very high price for doing so. When S. returned after the Twentieth Congress, Elsberg met him with flowers, shaking his hand and congratulating him.
We lived among people who vanished into exile, labor camps or the other world, and also among those who sent them there. It was dangerous to have any contact with people who still tried to go on working and thinking in their own way; for this reason Alisa Gu- govna Usov was quite right not to let her husband visit M. "You can't go there," she would say, "they see all kinds of riffraff." She reasoned that it was wiser not to run the risk: who knew what sort of people you might antagonize in the heat of a literary argument? This caution, however, did not save Usov: he went to a labor camp with his fellow linguists as a result of the "dictionary case." All roads led there. The old Russian proverb that prison or the poorhouse waits for every man has never been more true, and the verb "to write" took on an additional meaning in the Russian language. The old scholar Zhirmunski once said to me about a group of his best graduate students: "They all write"—i.e., reports for the secret police—and Shklovski told us we should be careful with his little dog because it had learned to "write" from the bright young "adjutants" who came to see him. . . . When Alisa Usov and I later taught at Tashkent University, there was no point in trying to pick out informers, because we knew that everybody "wrote." And we tried to become adept in Aesopian language. At parties with graduate students we always raised our glasses first "for those who have given us such a happy life," and both the initiated and the students understood us in the required sense.
It was quite natural for the "adjutants" and all the rest of them to"write," but the odd thing was how we were still able to joke and laugh. In 1938 M. even declared he had invented a device for the suppression of jokes as a dangerous thing: he would move his lips silently and point at his throat to indicate the position of the cut-off device. But the "device" didn't help and M. couldn't stop telling jokes.