I only met Gornfeld once, in the dirty editorial office of some unprincipled rag where, as in the buffet at Kvisisan, some spectral figures hovered. There was still no ideology then and nobody to whom to complain if somebody insulted you. When I recall that orphaned state—how did we manage to live then!—huge tears roll down my face . . . Somebody introduced me to this two-legged critic, and I shook his hand.
Dear Uncle Gornfeld, why did you go complain to the Stock Exchange News, I mean to the Evening Red Gazette,17 in the Year of Our Soviet 1929? You would better have gone weeping to Mr. Propper, into his pure literary Jewish waistcoat. You would better have told your woes to your banker, with his sciatica, kugel, and tallith . . .
X.
Nikolai Ivanovich18 has a secretary. And, in truth, to tell you the truth, she is quite a squirrel, a tiny little rodent. She nibbles a nut with every visitor and goes running to the telephone like an inexperienced young mother to her sick baby.
A certain scoundrel told me that truth was mria in Greek.
And so our little squirrel is genuine truth with a capital letter in Greek; and at the same time she is that other truth, that stern card-carrying Virgin—Party Truth . . .
The secretary, frightened and attentive, like a hospital nurse, doesn’t so much work there as live in the office’s anteroom, in the telephone-dressing-room. Poor Mria from the anteroom with her telephone and her classical newspaper!
This secretary differs from others in that she sits like a nightnurse on the threshold of power, defending the wielder of power as if he were gravely ill.
XI.
No, really, bring me to court by all means! Allow me to be submitted as evidence! . . . Permit me, so to speak, to put myself on file. Do not deprive me, I implore you, of my own trial . . . The legal proceedings aren’t over yet and, I make so bold as to assure you, they never will be. What happened before was only the overture. Bosio19 herself will sing at my trial. Bearded students in checked plaids, mingling with policemen in capes, under the baton of their goat of a choir director, ecstatically chanting a syncopated version of the Eternal Memory,20 will carry a police coffin with the remains of my case out of the smoke-dimmed halls of the district court.
Papa, papa, papochka,
Where, oh where is Mamochka?
From the Writers’ Union, down two blocks,
She came home with the black pox.
Mama’s eye has lost its sight
And the case is sewn up tight.
Alexander Ivanovich Herzen! . . . Allow me to introduce myself . . . It seems that in your house . . . As host, you are in some sense responsible . . .
You deigned to go abroad, did you . . . Something disagreeable has happened here in the meantime . . . Alexander Ivanovich! Sir! How can it be! There is absolutely no one to turn to!
XII.
In a certain year of my life, grown men from a tribe I despise with all the strength of my soul, and to which I neither wish to nor ever will belong, conceived the intention of collectively committing against me an ugly and repellent ritual. The name of this ritual is literary pruning, or dishonoring, and it is performed according to the custom and the calendrical needs of the writers’ tribe, and in it a sacrificial victim is designated by vote of the elders.
I insist that writerdom, as it has taken shape in Europe and especially in Russia, is incompatible with the honorable title of Jew, of which I am proud. By blood, burdened with its inheritance from shepherds, patriarchs, and kings, rebels against the shifty gypsydom of the writers’ tribe. A creaking camp of unwashed Romanies kidnapped me when I was still a child and for a certain number of years dawdled along its obscene routes, vainly trying to teach me its only craft, its only art—stealing.
Writerdom is a race with a revolting smell to its hide and the very filthiest means of preparing its food. It is a race that camps and sleeps in its own vomit, expelled from cities and hounded in villages; yet anywhere and everywhere it is close to the authorities, who always grant it special accommodations in red-light districts as they do to prostitutes. For, anywhere and everywhere, literature carries out one assignment: it helps superiors keep their soldiers in line, and it helps judges dispose arbitrarily of the condemned.
A writer is a mixture of parrot and priest. He is a polly in the very loftiest sense of that word. He speaks French if his master is French, but, sold to Persia, he’ll say “Pol’s a fool” or “Polly wants a cracker” in Persian. A parrot has no age and knows not day from night. If he bores his master, he’s covered with a dark cloth, and, for literature, that becomes a surrogate for night.
XIII.
There were two Chénier brothers.21 The despicable junior belongs entirely to literature; the executed senior himself excluded literature.
Jailers love to read novels, and more than anyone else have a need for literature.
In a certain year of my life, bearded adult men in peaked fur caps brandished a flint knife over me, with the aim of deballing me. Judging by the evidence, these were the priests of the tribe: they smelled of onion, novels, and goatmeat.
And it was all as frightening as in a child’s dream. Nel mezzo del’ cammin di nostra vita22—midway on the journey of our life, I was stopped in the dense Soviet forest by bandits who called themselves my judges. They were elders with veins protruding from their necks and little goose-heads unfit to bear the burden of their years.
For the first and only time in my life, literature had need of me, and it crumpled me, pawed me, and pressed me flat, and it was all frightening, as in a child’s dream.
XIV.
I bear moral responsibility for the fact that the ZIF publishing house did not write out a contract with the translators Gornfeld and Kariakin. I—dealer in precious furs, practically suffocating under a load of literary pelts—bear moral responsibility for the fact that I inspired a Petersburg lout with the desire to allude in a libelous anecdote to that warm Gogolian fur coat, torn by night in the open square from the shoulders of that most ancient Komsomol member, Akaky Akakievich.23 I tear off my literary fur coat and trample it underfoot. In nothing but my jacket, and in thirty-degree frost, I will run three times around the concentric boulevard rings of Moscow. I shall flee from the red-light district hospital of the Komsomol arcade into a mortal chill, if only not to see those twelve lit Judas-windows of that obscene house on Tver Boulevard, if only not to hear the clink of silver and the counting of printer’s sheets.
XV.
Honored Romanies of Tver Boulevard, we have written a novel together, you and I, of which you have not even dreamed. I am very fond of coming across my name in official papers, in court-ordered subpoenas and other stern documents. Here the name has a completely objective ring to it: a sound new to the ear and, I must say, quite interesting. From time to time, I, too, am a bit curious to know what it is I am forever doing wrong. What kind of apple is this Mandelstam anyway, who’s supposed to have been doing such-and-such for so long, and who—the scoundrel—keeps on evading the issue? . . . How much longer is he going to keep on evading the issue? That’s why I profit nothing with the passage of the years; others gather dignity and respect with every passing day, while for me, quite the contrary, time flows backward.