The whole difference between the periods before and after 1937 could be seen in the nature of the two house searches we went
* Under Nicholas I, the secret police was called "The Third Section." through. In 1938 they wasted no time looking for papers and examining them—indeed, the police agents didn't even seem to know the occupation of the man they had come to arrest. When M. was arrested again in 1938, they simply turned over all the mattresses, swept his papers into a sack, poked around for a while and then disappeared, taking M. with them. The whole operation lasted no more than twenty minutes. But in 1934 they stayed all night until the early hours.
On both occasions, seeing me get M.'s things together, they made the same joking remark (also in accordance with instruction?): "Why so much stuff? What's the point? You don't think he's going to stay with us all that long? They'll just have a chat and let him go." This was the only relic from the era of "high humanism" in the twenties and beginning of the thirties. In the winter of 1937, reading a newspaper attack on Yagoda for allegedly turning the forced-labor camps into rest homes, M. said: "I didn't know we were in the paws of such humanists."
The egg brought for Akhmatova lay untouched on the table. Everybody—M.'s brother Evgeni, who had recently arrived from Leningrad, was also there—walked around the rooms talking and trying not to pay attention to the people rummaging in our things. Suddenly Akhmatova said that M. should eat something before he left, and she held out the egg to him. M. took it, sat down at the table, put some salt on it and ate it.
The two piles of papers on the chair and on the floor continued to grow. We tried not to walk on them, but our visitors took no such care. I very much regret that among the other papers stolen by Ru- dakov's widow we have lost some drafts of M.'s early poems—since they were not to be confiscated, they were just thrown on the floor and were marked with excellent impressions of military boots. I valued these pages very much and gave them for safekeeping into hands I thought would be safest of alclass="underline" those of the young Rudakov, who in his devotion to us spent a year and a half in exile with us in Voronezh, where we shared every scrap of bread with him because he had no way of earning a living there. When he returned to Leningrad he also took with him for safekeeping the papers of Gumilev, which Akhmatova had trustingly delivered to him on a sleigh. Neither she nor I ever saw our papers again. Akhmatova occasionally hears rumors about people buying letters which she knows to have been among them.
"Osip, I envy you," Gumilev used to say to M., "you will die in agarret." Both had written their prophetic lines by this time, but neither wished to believe his own forecast, and they took consolation in the French idea of what happens to ill-starred poets. But a poet, after all, is just a human being like any other, and he is bound to end up in the most ordinary way, in the way most typical for his age and his times, meeting the fate that lies in wait for everyone else. None of the glamour and thrill of a special destiny, but the simple path along which all were "herded in a herd." Death in a garret was not for us.
At the time of the campaign in defense of Sacco and Vanzetti—we were then living in Tsarskoye Selo—M. sent a message to the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church (through a certain churchman) proposing that the Church should also organize a protest against the execution. The answer came back at once: the Church would be willing to speak out in defense of the two men on condition that M. undertook to organize a similar protest if anything similar should happen to Russian priests. M. was quite taken aback and confessed himself defeated. This was one of the first lessons he learned in those days when he was trying to come to terms with the existing state of affairs.
e never asked, on hearing about the latest arrest, "What was
When the morning of the fourteenth came, all the guests, invited and uninvited, went away and I was left alone with Akhmatova in the empty apartment, which bore all the marks of the night's ravages. I think we just sat opposite each other in silence. At any rate we didn't go to bed, and it never occurred to us to make tea. We were waiting for the hour when we could leave the building without attracting attention. Why? Where could we go, or to whom? Life went on. I suppose we looked a little like the "drowned maidens," if I may be forgiven this literary allusion—God knows, at that moment nothing was further from our minds than literature.
3 Morning Thoughts
he arrested for?" but we were exceptional. Most people, crazed by fear, asked this question just to give themselves a little hope: if others were arrested for some reason, then they wouldn't be arrested, because they hadn't done anything wrong. They vied witheach other in thinking up ingenious reasons to justify each arrest: "Well, she really is a smuggler, you know," "He really did go rather far," "I myself heard him say . . ." Or: "It was only to be expected —he's a terrible man," "I always thought there was something fishy about him," "He isn't one of us at all." This was enough for anyone to be arrested and destroyed: "not one of us," "talks too much," "a bad character" . . . These were just variations on a theme we had first heard in 1917. Both public opinion and the police kept inventing new and more graphic ones, adding fuel to the fire without which there is no smoke. This was why we had outlawed the question "What was he arrested for?" "What for?" Akhmatova would cry indignantly whenever, infected by the prevailing climate, anyone of our circle asked this question. "What do you mean, what for? It's time you understood that people are arrested for nothing/"
But even so, when M. was taken away, Akhmatova and I could not help asking the forbidden question "What for?" There were any number of possible reasons—by the standards of our laws, of course. It could have been for his verse in general, for what he had written about literature, or, more specifically, for the poem about Stalin. It could have been for slapping Alexei Tolstoi in the face. When this happened, Tolstoi had shouted at the top of his voice, in front of witnesses, that he would make sure M. was never published again, and that he would have him expelled from Moscow. . . . The same day, so we were told, he went to Moscow to complain to the boss of Soviet literature, Maxim Gorki. Before long we heard that Gorki had said—or at least the phrase was firmly attributed to him—"We'll teach him to strike Russian writers." People now tell me just as firmly that Gorki could not have said any such thing, and that he was really quite different from what we imagined him to be at the time. There is a widespread tendency to make Gorki out as a victim of the Stalinist regime, as a champion of free thought and a protector of the intelligentsia. I cannot judge, though I am sure Gorki had major disagreements with his master and was very hard-pressed by him. But from this it does not follow that he would have refused to support Tolstoi against a writer as deeply uncongenial to him as M. As regards Gorki's attitude to freedom of opinion, one only has to read his articles, speeches and books.
All things considered, our main hope was that M.'s arrest was indeed an act of vengeance for the slap in the face given to Alexei Tolstoi. However the charge was formulated, it could lead to nothing worse than banishment—and of this we were not afraid. Expulsion and exile had become a standard feature of our everyday life. In the years of the "breathing-space," before the terror began in earnest, there were always fairly widespread arrests, particularly among the intelligentsia, in the spring (mostly in May) and in the fall. They were meant to distract attention from our perennial economic failures. At that time there were scarcely any cases of people disappearing into thin air: they always wrote from exile, and returned at the end of their sentences—to be deported again. Andrei Bely, when we met him at Koktebel* in the summer of 1933, said he could scarcely keep up with the business of sending telegrams and writing letters to all his friends who had just "returned"—there had evidently been a clean sweep of theosophists, who were then released all at the same time in 1933. Similarly, in the spring before M.'s arrest, Piast had returned. After three or five years' absence all such exiles came back and were allowed to settle in small towns beyond a hundred kilometers from Moscow. If it happened to everybody else, why shouldn't it happen to us? Not long before his arrest, hearing M. talk rather carelessly with some people we did not know, I said to him: "You'd better watch out—it's almost May!" M. just waved his hand: "So what? Let them send us away. Others may be frightened, but what do we care?" And it was true: for some reason we really weren't worried about exile.