Apartment 61 was recently sold by Molotov’s heirs to the TV producer who already owned apartment 62 – Trotsky’s last Moscow home – on the other side of the landing. For weeks the sounds of renovation came from above. This is my last torture by Moscow remont, I told myself as the drill sounded above my desk. One night water began to pour through the ceiling into my daughter’s bedroom, and I went upstairs again. The producer’s wife had come back from Tuscany. The fine lines of her beauty had coarsened. She had grown larger in the years since I used to see her regularly, unsmiling and perfect in her black mink, on the staircase. Now she wore flip-flops and a shapeless grey silk smock, her blonde hair a mess, her pouting face newly bruised with beauty injections. She took me to the bathroom, much less interested in the flood in our apartment than in what I thought of her taste in sanitary ware and marble tiling. She showed me through the rooms. The wood panelling was still in place, but the synthetic wall coverings in the bedrooms were gone, and so were the bookcases in the corridor. In the corner where the magic lantern once stood was a lavish purple velvet divan with an asymmetrically curving gold-painted frame. There were rows of photographs mounted in polished wood and silver on the window ledge in what was once the study where Molotov ‘dug into everything from dawn to dusk’, seeing bad tendencies take shape, which, he said, ‘began, unfortunately, back in Stalin’s time and mine’. My neighbour caught me looking at a picture of her, captured in a shining moment of absolute glamour, arm in arm at a party with the Italian designer Miuccia Prada. ‘Shoes!’ she said, breaking into English with a lovely smile.
Note
I have referred in the text to many of the books I read and drew on as I was working on Molotov’s Magic Lantern. These brief bibliographical notes are for English-speaking readers who may wish to explore further.
In 1991, Osip Mandelstam’s centenary year, his first collection Stone was published in an elegant edition by Collins Harvill, with facing-page English translations (and an introduction and notes) by Robert Tracy. New York Review Books recently republished the thirty-year-old Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, co-translated by the Mandelstam scholar Clarence Brown and the American poet W. S. Merwin (New York, 2004). Translations of Mandelstam’s prose, including Fourth Prose and Journey to Armenia, may be found in The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, translated with critical essays by Clarence Brown (North Point Press, San Francisco, 1986) and The Collected Critical Prose and Letters, edited by Jane Gary Harris (Collins Harvill, London, 1991). Collins Harvill published Nadezhda Mandelstam’s two volumes of memoirs, translated by Max Hayward, in 1971 and 1974, with the titles Hope against Hope and Hope Abandoned. She herself requested these English titles, punning on her name, Nadezhda, which in Russian means ‘hope’. The second volume ends with a love letter she wrote, and could not send, to her husband in October 1938, when she did not know where he was or whether he was alive or dead. ‘Only now is it possible to illuminate that dark section of Mandelstam Street’, Vitaly Shentalinsky remarks (referring to a poem by Mandelstam about his own name) in The KGB’s Literary Archive, which came out in an abridged English translation by John Crowfoot in 1995 (The Harvill Press), introduced by Robert Conquest. Shentalinsky had been demoted as a journalist in the Soviet period for repeatedly referring to Pasternak and Tsvetaeva in his writing. When Shentalinsky took advantage of ‘glasnost’ and went into the Lubyanka (quietly supported from the Kremlin by Mikhail Gorbachev’s adviser Alexander Yakovlev) to petition the KGB for the hidden files on Russia’s suppressed writers, he was told that he was the first writer to come into the building of his own free will. His researches raised many atrocities to the light, including details of Mandelstam’s death and burial in a mass grave, the protocols of Isaac Babel’s interrogations, and a letter to Molotov (as head of the Soviet government) from the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold (who was arrested at the same time as Babel), in which Meyerhold described the beatings that produced the ‘confessions’ so prized by Andrei Vyshinsky: ‘the intolerable physical and emotional pain caused my eyes to weep unending streams of tears … “Death, oh most certainly, death is easier than this!” the interrogated person says to himself’. Alexander Yakovlev’s A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia was published by Yale University Press in 2002, translated by Anthony Austin. (Under Gorbachev, Yakovlev had been head of a commission on the rehabilitation of victims of political repression.) ‘Papers are not destroyed; people are’, Yakovlev writes, ‘More and more of the bloodstained documents pile up on my desk … If only the files would burn and the men and women return to life!’ I read Yakovlev’s remarkable book in the Molotov apartment, where the banker had left it out one day on the desk in the study.
Jonathan Brent’s Inside the Stalin Archives (Atlas & Co., New York, 2008) gives a very readable account of the challenges and excitements of bringing to light archival materials from the Soviet period, as well as on how ‘perplexing and often sad’ such work can be. For the past seventeen years, Brent has collaborated with the Russian scholars Oleg Naumov and Oleg V. Khlevniuk, among others, on the Annals of Communism series for Yale University Press. Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, 1925–1936 (1995) was one of the first books published in this invaluable ongoing series. The caricatures of Party leaders that I mention in Molotov’s Magic Lantern can all be found in Piggy Foxy and The Sword of Revolution: Bolshevik Self-Portraits (Yale University Press, 2006), edited by Alexander Vatlin and Larisa Malashenko, with a foreward by Simon Sebag Montefiore.
Lydia Chukovskaya’s The Akhmatova Journals, translated by Milena Michalski and Sylva Rubashova (Harvill, 1994), relates how Chukovskaya preserved Akhmatova’s Requiem in her memory. A less hagiographical picture of great poets comes through in the literary critic Emma Gerstein’s fascinating and controversial memoirs of her troubled friendships with the Mandelstams, Akhmatova, and Lev Gumilev, which appeared in English in 2004, translated and edited by John Crowfoot (The Harvill Press). (For some Russian readers, Gerstein shed far too much light on ‘Mandelstam Street’.) Nancy K. Anderson’s The Word that Causes Death’s Defeat: Poems of Memory (published by Yale in the Annals of Communis m series in 2004), which includes verse translations of Akhmatova’s Requiem and Poem without a Hero, as well as a biography of the poet and critical essays on her poetry, is a most valuable resource for English-speaking readers.
Carol J. Avins’s long introduction to her annotated edition of Isaac Babel’s 1920 Diary, translated by H. T. Willetts (Yale University Press, 1995), gives a vivid portrait of the writer and his life. There are several editions of his short stories in English translation, including David McDuff’s for Penguin Books (revised edition, 1998). Some of Marina Tsvetaeva’s prose appeared in English in A Captive Spirit: Selected Prose, edited and translated by J. Marin King, published by Ardis (Ann Arbor, 1980) and by Virago Press (1983). Earthly Signs, Jamey Gambrell’s translations of Tsvetaeva’s Moscow notebooks of 1917–1922 (Yale University Press, 2002), gives a fine sense of Tsvetaeva as a prose writer and includes a valuable biographical and critical essay by the translator. A new English edition of the extraordinary three-way correspondence between Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, and Rainer Maria Rilke of 1926, was published by New York Review Books in 2001, translated by Margaret Wettlin, Walter Arndt, and Jamey Gambrell. Selected Poems by Tsvetaeva, translated by Elaine Feinstein from literal versions by Angela Livingstone, has been published in several editions by Oxford University Press, and most recently by Carcanet in 2004. The terrible end of Tsvetaeva’s life is recounted in Irma Kudrova’s Death of a Poet: The Last Days of Marina Tsvetaeva, translated by Mary Ann Szporluk, with an introduction by Ellendea Proffer (Gerald Duckworth and Co., London, 2004). Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales, translated by John Glad, were published by W. W. Norton in 1980, and by Penguin Books in 1994. Looking further back in Russian literary history, English versions of Chekhov’s short stories ‘Fortune’, ‘On the Road’ and ‘The Lady with a Little Dog’ appear in About Love and Other Stories (Oxford University Press, 2004), a collection of fine new translations by Rosamund Bartlett. Dostoevsky’s story ‘Bobok’ can be found in Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida, edited and translated by Robert Chandler (Penguin, 2005).