's brother, Evgeni Emilievich, lived with his family on Si-
• verskaya Street. After leaving Lozinski, we went there only because M. wanted to see his father. He had no dealings with his brother, who had given up medicine to become a kind of literary agent on the fringe of the writers' organizations—he collected royalties for playwrights and did similar profitable jobs for the Literary Fund. Now, in his old age, he has switched to the film industry. He never helped M. and was always demanding that we take their father off his hands. He harped on this theme every time we met, and kept writing to us about it—even when we were in Voronezh and Savelovo. M. wrote to him several times from Voronezh and, knowing that Evgeni would destroy these letters, made copies of them. In them he denounced Evgeni's attitude toward himself, and asked him never to remind people that he was his brother. Until 1956 Evgeni did not have to be asked to keep quiet about this fact, and he was always very rude to anybody who inquired about me. In recent years, however, he has come to respect M.'s memory, and has even tried to resume contact with me. Once he even came to see me out of the blue, and urged me to go and visit him. He is a man of mercenary instincts who has achieved everything he wanted in life: comfort, money, a car and a movie camera to amuse himself with in his spare time. In our cruel life, such people are not businessmen in the ordinary sense, but simply "get by" in a way which is never very pretty.
Another reason M. had for visiting him on this occasion was that he wanted to see his niece Tatka. This was Evgeni's daughter by his first marriage to the sister of Sarra Lebedeva. Later Tatka got ТВ during the blockade of Leningrad and died young. She was a wonderful little girl, completely unlike her father. She had been brought up by her maternal grandmother, the splendid old Maria Nikolay- evna Darmolatova, in whose apartment Evgeni Emilievich still lives. After M.'s arrest, her grandmother arranged for me to meet her secretly at her mother's apartment—her father had forbidden her to see me. She complained to me that her father had burned a manuscript copy of M.'s poetry which she had acquired with great difficulty from some young literary enthusiasts. At that time there were still very few copies in circulation and they were always confiscated during house searches.
By the time the war began, Tatka was a student at the literature faculty of Leningrad University and was about to marry a young man who wrote poetry and revered the memory of M. He was killed in the first battles of the war, and Tatka trudged around starving Leningrad trying to get news of him. Tatka had a very hard time at home. Her father was always quarreling with her grandmother, exposing her as a "reactionary" in the manner of a militant young Komsomol. As for her stepmother, Tatka had nothing at all in common with her. I was constantly amazed that a girl who had grown up in such hard times and in such a difficult family had managed to withstand all the blandishments of the "new era" and preserve the best traditions of the Russian intelligentsia—forgotten, spurned and superseded by the higher reason of the "new" morality as it was.
Tatka's stepmother, Tania Grigoriev, the daughter of a chemistry teacher in one of the best and most progressive pre-revolution- ary grammar schools, had grown up in an ultra-intellectual family of the kind that remained true to the style of the sixties and worshipped Belinski and Dobroliubov. She was proud of this family tradition and looked down on Tatka's grandmother because of her aristocratic origins. In appearance, too, Tania was the very image of a pre- revolutionary radical woman student—she had the clever face, the smooth nondescript hair done into a bun, and wore the dowdy dress once typical of the most "progressive" schoolmarms. She had a soft voice and a witty tongue. She was very proud of the fact that she knew the names of all the trees, grasses and birds, because her father used to take his daughters on long country hikes so they could study the fauna of their native country. She contrasted this with what she considered to be the thoroughly undemocratic upbringing that Tatka was getting from her grandmother, and she made fun of the girl for not being able to tell one bush or tree from another in winter. Tatka's decision to study literature at the university aroused Tania's scorn: she had no time at all for any profession which was "not useful to the people" or, as she put it in her more up-to-date terminology, "to the collective farms." So that the girl should not get the wrong ideas about religion from her grandmother, Tania took her to see the atheist museum in St. Isaac's Cathedral. During one of these visits there was a scene—Tatka refused to accept the museum's interpretation of a certain passage in the Gospels. Told that she must trust the collective wisdom of all the progressive people who had exposed the humbug of the priests and not be so uppish, she burst into tears. According to the museum, the Gospels called on people to bow down before Mammon, but the girl was too intelligent to believe this. M. and I happened to be staying in Leningrad at the time, and Tatka secretly came to see M. to ask him who was right—her grandmother or her father and stepmother. Her attachment to M. probably went back to this occasion.
From her father Tania had inherited some excellent contacts with the Party leaders. When he died at the beginning of the Revolution, she and her sister Natasha were taken care of by Yenukidze, whom they always called "Red Abel." This was either an old Party nickname or the joking way he was referred to in the Grigoriev household. When Yenukidze was arrested in 1937, Tania took it in the spirit of the times, and her comment to me was: "He must have done something—people are so corrupted by power." By this time she had no need of her former protectors and had even outgrown them— after all, as she pointed out, they had not been able to keep abreast of the times and follow Stalin in his efforts to carry through all the essential revolutionary changes of which her father had dreamed! This was Tania's explanation for the arrest of all the old Bolsheviks, and she fervently supported every "mass campaign"—whether it was collectivization, the expulsion of the former aristocrats from Leningrad, or the great purge of 1937.
Tania always had the last word on questions of ideology, and she ruled the household firmly, never raising her soft voice. She was probably just the same at work—though I never had a chance of observing her there, I knew the type only too well from my own experience. The only thing that upset Tania was Tatka's obstinacy. The girl had learned to keep her own counsel and there was no power on earth that could force her to say a single word in approval of Tania's opinions. The first major clash between them had been at the time of the expulsion of the former aristocrats, among whom was a girl next door, a playmate of Tatka's called Olga Chichagov. Tania said there was no place for aristocrats in the City of Lenin and that it was silly to shed tears over the banishment of the Chichagovs. Tatka said nothing, nor did she comment when her stepmother went on to say it was a crime to let aristocrats occupy living-space needed by the workers, and that she furthermore failed to understand what a girl brought up by herself and Evgeni Emilievich could possibly have in common with the young lady next door! Tatka listened to all this in silence—and then went to see Olga off at the station. Tania accused Tatka's grandmother of connivance.
This drama was soon followed by a farce, when Tania and her sisters were summoned before the commission charged with clearing aristocrats out of Leningrad. The commission was guided in its work by an old directory of the city in which their father, Grigoriev, was listed as a "personal nobleman." * The fact that he was not a hereditary aristocrat was of no concern to the commission—they were interested only in reaching their target figure, and there turned out to be too few real aristocrats, or at least they were hard to find. . . . The sisters were only rescued by "Red Abel," who had not yet lost his influence, or at any rate still had enough power to intervene in a small matter like this.