Mikhail Alexandrovich Zenkevich was one of the first to sink into a hypnotic trance or lethargy. This did not prevent him from going to work, earning money and bringing up his children. Perhaps it even helped him to stay alive and look so utterly normal and healthy. But on a closer look it was clear that he had passed the point of no return: he could not smash the looking-glass. Zenkevich lived in the knowledge that everything he had once lived by was irretrievably lost, gone for good, left on the other side of the glass. It was a feeling that could have been transmuted into poetry, but Zenkevich, the sixth Acmeist,* had firmly decided that there could be no such thing as poetry without the Poets' Guild and all the talk which had so captivated him as a very young man. He now wandered about the ruins of his Rome, trying to persuade himself and others that it was essential to surrender not only one's body, but one's mind as well. "Don't you understand," he said to M., "that it's all finished, that everything's different now?" . . . This argument applied to everything: poetry, honor, ethics, the latest political conjuring trick or act of violence, the show trials, purges, or deportation of the kulaks. ... It was all justified because "everything's different now." . . . Sometimes, however, he excused himself by saying that he had swallowed so much bromide that his memory had gone. . . . But in fact he had forgotten nothing and was touchingly devoted to M., even though he expressed astonishment at M.'s obstinacy and mad persistence in holding to his own. All that Zenkevich wanted to take with him from the past into his new "life after death" were a few original manuscripts. Begging M. to give him one of his rough drafts, he said: "Gumilev has gone, and I haven't a single page of
* See page 419.
anything written by him!" This angered M. and he wouldn't give him anything—"He's already preparing for my death!"
At the beginning of the fifties—a ghastly time!—I met Zenkevich in the courtyard of Herzen House,[5] and though this was the first time I had seen him in fifteen years, he at once started his usual talk about manuscripts: "Where are Osip's papers? I never got anything from him and I haven't a single line in his hand. Maybe you could let me have something?" Remembering that M. could not stand this cadging of his, I gave him nothing, but he managed to get what he wanted all the same. He had kept from the past not books or living verse, but only scraps of paper with a few lines written in their own hand by old comrades who had perished—documentary evidence, as it were, of a literary life that had once been. "And poetry too isn't what it was, you know," he complained.
Zenkevich was one of the first to go to the White Sea Canal and carry out orders by writing a piece of doggerel in praise of the "transformers of Nature." For this M. conferred on him the title Zenkevich-Canalski—just as the great explorer Semionov had once been styled Semionov-Tianshanski, after his discovery of the Tian Shan mountain range. In 1937 Lakhuti arranged for M. to go to the Canal under the auspices of the Union of Soviet Writers. The well-meaning Persian had hoped that M. would write something about it and thus save his life. When he came back M. neatly wrote down a few glib lines and said, showing them to me, "Shall we present them to Zenkevich?" M. went to his death, but these lines have survived, their purpose unfulfilled. Later on, in Tashkent, I once happened to come across them and I asked Akhmatova what I should do with them: "Should I throw them in the fire?" This was in a balakhanat where we were both living as evacuees. "Nadia," Akhmatova replied, "Osip gave you the right to do what you wish with absolutely all his papers." This was totally disingenuous: we were all against falsification, the destruction of manuscripts or any other kind of tampering with anyone's literary remains, and it was not easy for Akhmatova to give her blessing to my suggestion. But now, quite unexpectedly, she had given me in M.'s name a right that M. himself had never given me: to destroy or keep what I saw fit. She did this so that we could get rid of the Canal poem, and without more ado it was at once reduced to a little pile of ash.
If anybody happens to have kept a stray copy of this poem, I beg and pray him, by virtue of the right that Akhmatova and I bestowed upon ourselves, to set aside his love of original manuscripts and throw it in the fire. A poem like this could be of use only to the Union of Soviet Writers as something to be shown to any foreigners who might be curious enough to make inquiries: "Mandelstam's literary remains? Look at this: what's the point of publishing this?" They have no compunction, after all, about falsifying details of a person's life or the date of his death. Who started the rumor that M. was killed by the Germans in Voronezh? Who has postdated the deaths of all who perished in the camps to the beginning of the forties? Who publishes the works of poets, both living and dead, deliberately omitting the best of what they wrote? Who holds up for years and years manuscripts by dead and living writers and poets, long after they have been got ready for publication? One could never even begin to list it all—too much has been hidden away and buried in all kinds of secret depositories, and even more has been destroyed.
Another reason I was so angry about the poem describing the beauties of the Canal was that M. himself would have been sent there to work on it if it hadn't been for the order to "isolate but preserve" him. Forced labor on the Canal had been commuted to exile in Cherdyn, since nobody could be "preserved" once he was sent to the Canal. The young and healthy linguists Dmitri Usov and Yarkho were so broken by their few years at the Canal that they died almost immediately after their release—though they had scarcely been employed on hard physical labor. If M. had gone to the Canal, he would have died in 1934 instead of 1938—the "miracle" gave him a few extra years of life. All the same, miracles send a shiver down my spine. Not that I wish to appear ungrateful, but miracles are an Eastern thing and are ill-suited to the Western mind.
Nowadays I have a different feeling about Misha Zenkevich, the self-appointed Roman who, in the ruins of his Colosseum, preserves a few manuscripts by the poets who have been killed. I now find his life touching and, even though it has been free of great disasters—he has never been in prison or gone hungry—almost tragic. Frail by nature, Zenkevich succumbed earlier than others to the plague that infected all our minds; with him, however, it was not the acute attack I suffered in the railroad car, but a long-drawn-out chronic form from which nobody ever recovered. Can one explain the susceptibility of our intellectuals to this sickness only by reference to conditions after the Revolution? Weren't the first microbes already lurking in the pre-revolutionary malaise with all its frantic search- ings and false prophecies?