CONTENTS
A May Night 5
Confiscation 6
Morning Thoughts 10
The Second Round 16
Shopping Baskets 19
"Integral Moves" 21
Public Opinion 24
Interview 29
Theory and Practice
Leaving for Exile 39
On the Other Side 41
The Irrational 44
The Namesake 51
A Piece of Chocolate 53
The Leap $6
Cherdyn 60
Hallucinations 65
Profession and Sickness 70
"Inside" 7 4
Christophorovich
Who Is to Blame? 8$
The Adjutant 89
On the Nature of the
Miracle 93
Journey to Voronezh 97
Thou Shalt Not Kill 1 о i
The Woman of the
Russian Revolution 108
Transmission Belts 112
Voronezh 118
Doctors and Illnesses 123
The Disappointed
Landlord 128
Money /37
3 2 The Origins of the Miracle 14$
The Antipodes 149
Two Voices 155
The Path to
Destruction 1$ 7
Capitulation 162
The Change of Values 170
Work 180
Moving Lips 184
Book and Notebook 190
Cycle 192
The Last Winter in
Voronezh 19$
The Ode 198
Golden Rules 204
"Hope" 210
"One Extra Day" 214
The "Bessarabian
Carriage" 214
The Illusion 221
The Reader of One
Book 225
Tikhonov 232
The Bookcase 235
Our Literature 244
Italy 246
The Social Structure 253
"NeTreba" 258
The Earth and Its
Concerns 260
Archive and Voice 269
Old and New 277
A "Convicted Person" 282
Chance 28$
The Electrician 290
In the Country 293
Ordeal by Fear 297
Cow or Poetry
Reading? 300
The Old Friend 304
Tania, the Non-Party
Bolshevik 307
Poetry Lovers 314
Eclipse 319
A Scene from Life 322
The Suicide 32$
73
75
77
79
82
71 Rebirth 328
The Last Idyll 334 The Textile Workers The Shklovskis 346 Maryina Roshcha 3 jo The Accomplice 352 The Young Lady of
Samatikha 356 The First of May 360 Gugovna 363 The Trap 367 The Window on the
34'
Sophia Embankment 369 The Date of Death 376 One Final Account 391
419
Appendix a. Notes on Persons Mentioned in the Text 399 в. Note on Literary Movements and Organizations
Index 421
Osip Mandelstam, 1922
Osip Mandelstam, 1936
N M Y
i A May Night
After slapping Alexei Tolstoi in the face, M. immediately re- ii turned to Moscow.* From here he rang Akhmatova every day, begging her to come. She was hesitant and he was angry. When she had packed and bought her ticket, her brilliant, irritable husband Punin asked her, as she stood in thought by a window: "Are you praying that this cup should pass from you?" It was he who had once said to her when they were walking through the Tretiakov Gallery: "Now let's go and see how they'll take you to your execution." This is the origin of her lines:
"And later as the hearse sinks in the snow at dusk . . .
What mad Surikov will describe my last journey?"
But she was not fated to make her last journey like this. Punin used to say, his face twitching in a nervous tic: "They're keeping you for the very end." But in the end they overlooked her and didn't arrest her. Instead, she was always seeing others off on their last journey—including Punin himself.
Akhmatova's son, Lev Gumilev, went to meet her at the station— he was staying with us at that time. It was a mistake to entrust him with this simple task—he of course managed to miss her, and she was very upset. It wasn't what she was used to. That year she had come to see us a great deal and she was always greeted at the station by M.
* See the note on Alexei Nikolayevich Tolstoi in the Appendix, where notes on most other persons mentioned by the author will also be found.
3
himself, who at once started to amuse her with his jokes. She remembered how he had once said angrily, when the train was late: "You travel at the same speed as Anna Karenina." And another time: "Why are you dressed like a deep-sea diver?"—it had been raining in Leningrad and she had put on boots and a rubber mac with a hood, but in Moscow the sun was shining and it was very hot. Whenever they met they were cheerful and carefree like children, as in the old days at the Poets' Guild.* "Stop it," I used to shout, "I can't live with such chatterboxes!" But this time, in May 1934, they had nothing to be cheerful about.
The day dragged on with excruciating slowness. In the evening the translator David Brodski turned up and then just wouldn't leave. There wasn't a bite to eat in the house and M. went around to the neighbors to try and get something for Akhmatova's supper. We hoped that Brodski might now get bored and leave, but no, he shot after M. and was still with him when he returned with the solitary egg he had managed to scrounge. Sitting down again in his chair, Brodski continued to recite the lines he liked best from his favorite poets, Sluchevski and Polonski (there was nothing he didn't know about both Russian and French poetry). He just went on and on, quoting and reminiscing, and it was only after midnight that we realized why he was being such a nuisance.
Whenever she came to see us, Akhmatova stayed in our small kitchen. The gas had not yet been installed and I cooked our semblance of a dinner on a kerosene stove in the corridor. In honor of our guest we covered the gas cooker with oilcloth to disguise it as a table. We called the kitchen "the sanctuary" after Narbut had once looked in there to see Akhmatova and said: "What are you doing here, like a pagan idol in a sanctuary? Why don't you go to some meeting or other where you can sit down properly?" Akhmatova and I had now taken refuge there, leaving M. to the mercy of the poetry-loving Brodski. Suddenly, at about one o'clock in the morning, there was a sharp, unbearably explicit knock on the door. "They've come for Osip," I said, and went to open the door.
Some men in civilian overcoats were standing outside—there seemed to be a lot of them. For a split second I had a tiny flicker of hope that this still wasn't it—my eye had not made out the uniforms under the covert-cloth topcoats. In fact, topcoats of this kind were also a sort of uniform—though they were intended as a disguise, like the old pea-green coats of the Czarist okhrana. But this I did not
* See page 419.
know then. All hope vanished as soon as the uninvited guests stepped inside.
I had expected them to say "How do you do?" or "Is this Mandel- stam's apartment?" or something else of the kind that any visitor says in order to be let in by the person who opens the door. But the night visitors of our times do not stand on such ceremony—like secret-police agents the world over, I suppose.
Without a word or a moment's hesitation, but with consummate skill and speed, they came in past me (not pushing, however) and the apartment was suddenly full of people already checking our identity papers, running their hands over our hips with a precise, well-practiced movement, and feeling our pockets to make sure we had no concealed weapons.
M. came out of the large room. "Have you come for me?" he asked. One of the agents, a short man, looked at him with what could have been a faint smile and said: "Your papers." M. took them out of his pocket, and after checking them, the agent handed him a warrant. M. read it and nodded.