The Magical Chorus

spiral of events that led to his death on December 27, 1938, at a transit camp in the Far East. Mandelstam was first arrested in Moscow in 1934 for anti-Stalin and anti-kolkhoz poetry, after one of his listeners informed on him. The poems were characterized by the investigators as a “terrorist act against the leader,” but Stalin, in response to a plea for mercy from Bukharin, unexpectedly ordered: “Isolate but preserve.”³³

Mandelstam was then forty-three, but he looks like a very old man in photographs of the period. The arrest and interrogations broke him. In prison he slit both wrists, and in exile, where he was sent, he threw himself out of the second-story window of the local hospital. He was saved each time (Stalin’s orders!), but the inner logic of the situation inexorably pushed Mandelstam to the position of outcast despite his attempts to make peace with Soviet reality and Stalin himself.

It all ended predictably: a repeated arrest (on the denunciations of zealous colleagues) and a martyr’s demise in the camps, where the crazed Mandelstam, dressed in rags and plagued by lice, offered to read his anti-Stalinist poetry to prisoners for a hunk of bread.

Mandelstam did not live long enough to create his own mythos. His posthumous legend in Soviet times was the work of two completely different people—his widow, Nadezhda, an independent and ambitious writer herself, and the influential journalist and novelist of current events, Ilya Ehrenburg. He managed to push through a long essay about the poet, after a twenty-year hiatus, as part of the publication of his memoirs, People, Years, Life, which the journal Novy Mir began serializing in 1960. Ehrenburg was the first to talk about Mandelstam’s tragic death publicly and with an emotional tone that was not typical of the old cynic: “Who could have been bothered by that poet with his puny body and that music of verse that fills the nights?”

Ehrenburg’s memoirs are not a masterpiece, but I remember the powerful impression they made on the Soviet intelligentsia with their massive erudition, unusual European tone, and effort to revive the half-forgotten or still- banned names of persecuted writers and artists. Those qualities made it very difficult for the book to pass the censor’s eyes.

Nadezhda Mandelstam’s monumental memoir about her late husband, written in the 1960s, could not get into print at all. But the manuscript was circulated widely in samizdat. I remember that this upset the envious Akhmatova, who had expended a lot of effort on the creation of her own version of the posthumous mythos of Mandelstam (with her by his side) and who quipped acidly about Nadezhda that “talent is not transmitted by rubbing.”

Brodsky, on the contrary and perhaps to spite Akhmatova, always considered Nadezhda Mandelstam’s prose (which in its stylistic sharpness is comparable with other masterpieces of twentieth-century Russian nonfiction— Benois’s memoirs, Andrei Bely’s autobiographical trilogy, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Other Shores, in its English version called Speak, Memory) on par with the works of Andrei Platonov, whom he admired greatly.

Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs were eventually published in the West, where they unexpectedly became a sensation in the 1970s, for many years being the only source of detailed, albeit not always objective, information and opinion about Mandelstam and also perhaps the most vivid description of the fate of the nonconformist artist in the Stalin era.

Another great urban poet whose fate took a sharp turn after writing about the Stalin collectivization was Nikolai Zabolotsky, a follower of the refined literary experimenter Velimir Khlebnikov and one of the leaders of the Dadaist group OBERIU (Association of Real Art).

The son of an agronomist, Zabolotsky spent his childhood in the country. A solid bespectacled man who did not look like the highly original and eccentric absurdist poet he was (he was frequently taken for an accountant) and whose hobby was pondering philosophical issues, Zabolotsky wrote the utopian poem Triumph of Agriculture, which could have had as its motto, the author said, Khlebnikov’s lines: “I see the horses’ freedom / and the equality of cows.” It was published in 1933, during the famine caused by collectivization, and it was immediately targeted for attack by the official critics.

Pravda and other newspapers derided Zabolotsky’s poem as a “lampoon on collectivization.” “This is not simply abstruse nonsense but politically reactionary priest-loving rubbish which is in solidarity with the kulak and in literature with the Klyuevs and Klychkovs.”³⁴ Zabolotsky was thus included in the doomed circle of New Peasant poets, with whom he had little in common, both in his avant-garde style and his world view.

Zabolotsky’s “crime” from the orthodox point of view was that the poet did not want and did not know how to praise the creation of the kolkhozes: “He presented the greatest struggle in the world as a pointless and mad pastime. He danced, grimaced, stuck out his tongue, and made scabrous jokes when talking about work led by the Leninist Party and by a steel Bolshevik with a name of steel [Stalin].”³⁵

In a situation when, as Stalin had pointed out, the class struggle in the Soviet Union had become more acute, “jesters” were superfluous. On March 19, 1938, Zabolotsky was arrested and then put through the “conveyor,” when investigators took turns interrogating and beating prisoners day and night until they got the confessions they wanted.

Zabolotsky, in his appeal in 1944, described the effect of the conveyor this way: “Without food or sleep, under an endless barrage of threats and humiliation, on the fourth day I lost clarity of thought, forgot my name, stopped understanding what was going on around me, and gradually reached the state of numbness when a man cannot be responsible for his actions. I remember that I gathered my remaining spiritual strength to keep from signing lies about myself and others.”³⁶

But the investigators were not worried that Zabolotsky, despite the beatings, did not admit his guilt in writing “anti-Soviet works used by the Trotskyite organization in their counterrevolutionary agitation.” The poet was sent to a labor camp in the Far East. When Zabolotsky was transported there in a frozen freight car filled with dozens of prisoners, Mandelstam, the other poet also sentenced to five years in the camps, had already died.

At the camp, Zabolotsky was sent to fell trees, where exhausted men (dinner was 30 grams of bread and a ladle of thin gruel) were expected to work until they dropped, and, as the poet recalled, “If you sat down for a moment, they set dogs on you.”³⁷

He learned about the cruel jokes of the Stalin regime. The investigators in Leningrad tried to beat an admission out of him that the leader of the counterrevolutionary organization to which he allegedly belonged was the noted poet Nikolai Tikhonov, who was a member of the Serapion Brothers, an avant-garde literary group. Zabolotsky denied it categorically, but was certain that they would arrest Tikhonov anyway.

In the camps, Zabolotsky heard that Tikhonov was not only not arrested but given the highest Soviet award, the Order of Lenin, in early 1939. That happened, apparently, because in 1937 at a meeting at the Bolshoi Theater dedicated to the centenary of Pushkin’s death, attended by Stalin, Tikhonov (dubbed “little wooden soldier” by some) made a fiery speech that “spoke about Pushkin but praised Stalin,”³⁸ as contemporaries recalled. Stalin liked the speech and that became a good shield for the little soldier, who moved from one official honor to the next.

The irony was that at the very same time, the Leningrad secret police continued concocting the mythical “case of the counterrevolutionary organization headed by Tikhonov.” People arrested in the case were beaten to get compromising material on Tikhonov, and some of them were shot in 1938, including the poets Benedikt Livshits and