A poet’s understanding of reality comes to him together with his verse, which always contains some element of anticipation of the future. “They’re all the same,” Akhmatova once said to me in a matter-of-fact tone when I showed her a poem of M.’s which clearly demonstrated foreknowledge of the future: she knew his work only too well and was not surprised in the least.
In the “Second Voronezh Notebook” there is a cycle whose matrix is the “Ode to Stalin” which he forced himself to write in the winter of 1936-37. This “Ode” did not fulfill its purpose–to save his life–but it gave rise to a whole series of other poems which were not only unlike it but also flatly contradicted it. Rather like the un coiling of a spring, they were a natural response to it…
The man to whom the ” Ode” was written so dominated our minds that one can find veiled references to him in the most unlikely con texts. These allusions are always betrayed by certain associations from which one can see M.’s train of thought. A poem written in December 1936, for instance, is about an idol living in the middle of a mountain and trying to remember the days when it still had human shape. In Russian there is a clear phonetic trail of association leading from “Kremlin” to “mountain” via the words kremen (”flint”) and kamen (“stone”). There is also a dangerously suggestive use of the word “fat” in the line: “The fat of pearls drips from his neck.” One immediately thinks of the “fat fingers” in M.’s first poem about Stalin. The line about the idol desperately trying to remember the tune when it was human could have been inspired by Yakhontov’s wife, Lilia, a Stalinist of the sentimental type, who told us during their visit to Voronezh how wonderful, brave and high-spirited Stalin had been as a young revolutionary….Living as we did in Assyria, it was impossible not to think of the Assyrian.
By the window in the room we rented from the seamstress there was a square dining table which we used for everthing under the sun. M. now took possession of it and laid out pencil and paper on it. He had never done anything like this before: paper and pencil were always needed only at the end of his work on a poem, to copy it out when it was already composed in his head. But for the sake of the “Ode” he changed all his habits, and while he was writing we had to eat on the very edge of the table, or even on he window sill. Every morning he seated himself at the table and picked up the pencil as a writer is supposed to do for all the world like Fedin, or someone of that kind. I would not even have been surprised if he pronounced the ritual “Never a day without at least a line,” but that thank God, he didn’t say. After sitting for half an hour or in this posture of the real man of letters, he would suddenly begin to curse himself for his lack of skill: “Now, look at Aseyev–he’s a real craftsman, he would just dash it off without a moment’s thought.” Then, calming down, he would stretch out on the bed and ask for tea. After that, he would get up to feed lumps of sugar to the neighbor’s dog through the air vent at the top of the window–to do this he had to climb up on the table with the paper neatly laid out on it. Next he would begin to pace the room and, suddenly brightening, sta t mumbling to himself. This was a sign that he had not been able to stifle the real poetry inside him, and that it had now broken its bounds, overwhelming the Evil Spirit. His attempt to do violence to himself was meeting stubborn resistance, and the artificially conceived poem about Stalin simply became a matrix for the utterly different material seething inside him–real poetry which was antagonistic to the “Ode” and canceled it out. This cycle, generated by the “Ode,” starts with “Yeast of the World” and continues to the end of the “Second Voronezh Notebook.”
The main outward sign of the relationship between the “Ode” and the series of poems which burst from M.’s lips in opposition to it is a phonetic one involving the syllable os, which appears in a number of unrelated words such as ” wasp” (osa) and “axle” (os). A key poem dated February 8, 1937, for example, begins:
Armed with the sight of narrow wasp [os]
Sucking the axis [os] the earth . . .
But much more important than this phonetic link between the “Ode” and the rest of the cycle is the way in which details in the “Ode” are contradicted or given a different interpretation in the “free” poems. In the ” Ode,” for example, an artist, with tears in his eyes, draws a portrait of the Leader. But the poem of February 8 quoted above has the line “I do not draw and I do not sing.” M. himself was astonished at this admission which had burst from him quite spontaneously, and commented to me: “Look what the trouble with me is: it seems I don’t draw…”
A mention of Aeschylus and Prometheus in the “Ode” led on in the “free” poems to the theme of tragedy and martyrdom (in the poem dated January 19-February 14). The theme of martyrdom also comes into the poem on Rembrandt (February 8), which speaks, by implication, of a Calvary devoid of grandeur (the museum in Voronezh which we visited constantly, had a small painting of Golgotha by Rembrandt and some Greek vases–all that remained of the treasures of Dorpat University).
The Caucasus, naturally mentioned in the “Ode” as Stalin’s birth-place, occurs again in the reference to Tiflis as the place which remembers not the Great Leader but the poor poet with his worn shoes (the poem of February 7-11), and in the mention of Mount Elbrus[1] as a measure of the people’s need for bread and poetry.
In the opening poem of the cycle (“Yeast of the World” and its variants) there is even a direct complaint that the “Ode” is at cross-purposes with the rest:
I’m bored: my direct work
babbles obliquely
crossed and mocked by another that has dislocated its axle.[2]
Poetry is the “yeast of the world,” a “sweet-voiced labor” which is “blameless.” M. declares that he is a poet when his “mind is not deceitful” and his work is “selfless”:
a selfless song is its own praise,
a comfort to friends, and pitch to enemies.
The enemy who had been installed in our Moscow apartment, the writer with the rank of general, copied out all of M.’s verse on his typewriter. Since very few people had typewriters in those days and he offered to do this as a “favor,” it was impossible to refuse–and in any case he would have obtained the poems somehow, even if it had meant stealing them from under my pillow. Just as a little warning to us he underlined the words “selfless song” in red pencil. When the archives are one day thrown open, it will be interesting to see his report on this poem.
In the poems of this cycle M. also exalted man (“Do not compare: the living are incomparable”) and gave rein to his love of life for the last time. He lamented his failing eyesight, which had once been “sharper than a whetted scythe” but had not had time to pick out each of the “lonely multitude of stars” (the last poem in the cycle dated February 8-9). He summed up his life and work in the last three lines of the poem dated February 12:
And I have accompanied the universe’s rapture
As muted organ pipes
Accompany a woman’s voice.
Speaking of himself, he used here the “inexorable past tense”–to borrow his own expression from “Conversation About Dante.” A few· more months were to pass, and he would say to Akhmatova: “I am ready for death.” She later used this phrase in her “Poem Without a Hero,” which also has a dedication dated December 27, 1938–the date of M.’s death.
But perhaps the high point of the cycle is contained in the following lines, which are the proud words of a man condemned to death, yet still clinging to life:
Unhappy is he who, as by his own shadow,
is frightened by the barking of dogs and mowed
down by the wind
and wretched is he who, half-alive himself,
begs a shadow for alms.[3]
The word “shadow” here referred to the man from whom everybody “begged alms”–and a shadow is what he eventually proved to be. Struggling for breath, frightened by everything but afraid of no one, crushed and condemned, the bearded poet thus defied once more, in his last days, the dictator whose power was greater than any the world had ever known.
People who had voices were subjected to the vilest of tortures: their tongues were cut out and with the stump that remained they were forced to glorify the tyrant. The desire to live is insuperable, and people accepted even this, if they could thereby prolong their physical existence. But those who survived at this price were as dead as those who perished. There is no point in mentioning names, but it is safe to say that among all those who continued to play the role of writers in those years, none have come forth as witnesses. They can never overcome their state of confusion, or say anything with the stumps of their tongues. Yet there were many among them who in different circumstances would have found their way in life and said what they had to say.
To be sure, M. also, at the very last moment, did what was required of him and wrote a hymn of praise to Stalin, but the “Ode” did not achieve its purpose of saving his life. It is possible, though, that without it I should not have survived either–their first impulse was to destroy me, too, but it was counted in a widow’s favor if her husband had made his submission even though it wasn’t accepted. M. knew this. By surviving I was able to save his poetry, which would otherwise have come down only in the garbled copies circulating in 1937.
The prayer “May this cup pass from me” can only be understood if you know what it is to wait for the slow, inevitable approach of death. It is far harder to wait for a bullet in the back of the neck than to be stricken down unawares. We waited for the end during the whole of our last year in Voronezh, and then yet another year, moving from place to place to place in the Moscow region.
To write an ode to Stalin it was necessary to get in tune, like a musical instrument, by deliberately giving way to the general hypnosis and putting oneself under the spell of the liturgy which in those days blotted out all human voices. Without this, a real poet could never compose such a thing: he would never have had that kind of ready facility. M. thus spent the beginning of 1937 conducting a grotesque experiment on himself. Working himself up into the state needed to write the “Ode,” he was in effect deliberately upsetting the balance of his own mind. “I now realize that it was an illness,” he said later to Akhmatova.
“Why is it that when I think of him, I see heads, mounds of heads?” M. said to me once. “What is he doing with all those heads?”
When we left Voronezh, M. asked Natasha to destroy the “Ode.” Many people now advise me not to speak of it at all, as though it had never existed. But I cannot agree to this, because the truth would then be incomplete: leading a double life was an absolute fact of our age, and nobody was exempt. The only difference was that while others wrote their odes in their apartments and country villas and were rewarded for them. M. wrote his with a rope around his neck. Akhmatova did the same, as they drew the noose tighter around the neck of her son. Who can blame either her or M.?
Notes
1 The highest mountain in the Caucasus
2 The syllable os occurs four times here.
3 From the poem beginning “I am not yet dead, I am not yet alone (January 1937).