The Stalin Epigram Read online

  Also by Robert Littell

  FICTION

  Vicious Circle

  Legends

  The Company

  Walking Back the Cat

  The Visiting Professor

  An Agent in Place

  The Once and Future Spy

  The Revolutionist

  The Amateur

  The Sisters

  The Debriefing

  Mother Russia

  The October Circle

  Sweet Reason

  The Defection of A. J. Lewinter

  NONFICTION

  For the Future of Israel (with Shimon Peres)

  This edition first published in the UK in 2011

  Duckworth Ovrelook

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  Copyright © 2009 by Robert Littella

  First published in the USA by

  Simon & Schuster, New York

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from HOPE AGAINST HOPE: A MEMOIR by Nadezha Mandelstam, translated from the Russian by Max Hayward. Copyright © 1970 by Atheneum Publishers. All rights reserved.

  By Anna Akhmatova from Poems of Akhmatova, selected, translated, and introduced by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward. Originally published by Houghton Mifflin/Mariner and used courtesy of Darhansoff, Verrill, Feldman Literary Agents.

  Excerpt form “Where are the Swans” from The Demesne of the Swans by Marina A. Tsvetaeva. Copyright © 1980 by Ardis Books.

  Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from OSIP MANDELSTAM SELECTED POEMS by Clarence Brown, and W.S. Merwin (translator). Copyright © 1973 by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin. All rights reserved.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  eISBNs:

  Mobipocket 978 0 7156 4270 2

  ePub: 978 0 7156 4269 6

  Library PDF: 978 0 7156 42689

  For my muse Stella

  for whom the stars

  (to borrow an image from Philip Sidney’s

  Astrophel and Stella, 1591)

  “still dance”

  . . . et chacun effectuera avec son âme, telle l’hirondelle avant l’orage, un vol indescriptible.

  Mandelstam

  I am alone; all round me drowns in falsehood:

  Life is not a walk across a field.

  From Boris Pasternak’s banned poem “Hamlet,” which his friends defiantly read aloud at his funeral in 1960

  THE VOICES IN THIS BOOK BELONG TO

  Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam, Nadenka to her husband, the poet Osip Emilievich Mandelstam. She is thirty-four years old when we first hear her voice in 1934.

  Nikolai Sidorovich Vlasik, Stalin’s personal bodyguard and occasional family photographer. He is in his mid-thirties when we meet him in the villa of the writer Maksim Gorky.

  Fikrit Trofimovich Shotman, a popular Soviet weight-lifting champion. He is thirty-two years old when we come across him for the first time. Originally from Azerbaidzhan, Shotman won the silver medal at the All-European games in Vienna in 1932. He subsequently retired from competition because of a botched operation on damaged knee cartilage. After his weight-lifting career was cut short, he worked as a circus strongman.

  Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova, born Anna Gorenko, close friend to both Mandelstam and Pasternak, and a widely admired poet even though the Communist authorities have banned publication of her verse since the mid-twenties. Tall and slender, she was the lover of the then little-known Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani in Paris in 1911 and sat for nude portraits he did of her. Akhmatova, a “decadent poetess” according to her father (who forbid her to use the family name, Gorenko, professionally), “half nun, half harlot” in the eyes of the Bolshevik cultural watchdogs, is forty-five years old when we meet her in these pages.

  Zinaida Zaitseva-Antonova, a very young and very beautiful theater actress who is on intimate terms with the Mandelstams.

  Osip Emilievich Mandelstam, Osya to his wife, Nadezhda. The publication of his first book of poetry in 1913, entitled Stone, established him in the eyes of many as the great Russian poet of the twentieth century, a view that Stalin clearly shared.

  Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, famous lyric poet, forty-four in 1934, son of the painter Leonid Osipovich Pasternak. His first book of poems, published in 1914, was The Twin in the Clouds, which may explain why Stalin, who had a certain admiration for Pasternak, nicknamed him the cloud dweller. It took years for Pasternak to accept that Stalin himself, and not the Chekists operating behind his back, was responsible for the deportations and purges and executions.

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  EPILOGUE

  CREDITS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ONE

  Nadezhda Yakovlevna

  Saturday, the 13th of January 1934

  SINCE THAT WHITE NIGHT our lifelines first coiled themselves around each other, fifteen years ago come May Day, in Kiev, in a seedy bohemian cabaret called the Junk Shop, I must have heard Mandelstam give public readings scores of times, still the pure pleasure I take from the poetry of his poems is undiminished. There are moments when I am reduced to tears by the unspeakable beauty of the words, which take on another dimension when they enter one’s consciousness through the ear, as opposed to the eye. How can I explain the miracle of it without sounding like the doting wife swooning in blind admiration? This high-strung, headstrong, life-glad homo poeticus (his description of himself, casually offered up when he mooched that first cigarette from me in the Junk Shop in what now seems like a previous incarnation), this nervous lover (of me and sundry others), is transfigured—becomes someone, something, else. (It goes without saying but humor me if I say it: when he metamorphoses into someone else, so do I.) With one arm sawing the air awkwardly, the arc of his body scores the rhyme and rhythm and layers of multiple meaning buried in the text. His head tossed back, the unmistakably Semitic Adam’s apple working against the almost transparently thin skin of his pale throat, he loses himself in the thing we call poetry; becomes the poem. When he materializes at the lectern at the start of an evening, there are usually several barely suppressed groans of mirth from the audience at the sight of this fussy, stage-frightened figure of a man dressed as if for his own funeral. On the particular evening I’m describing, he was wearing his only suit (a dark and itchy woolen twill purchased at the hard currency shop using coupons bought with a small inheritance I once received), along with a silk cravat (a relic of his trip to Paris before the Revolution) knotted around a starch-stiffened detachable collar. He reads as only the creator of the poem can read: with a slight pause for breath, an inaudible sucking in of air, at the
places where the lines break or bend or double back on themselves. This pause is critical to understanding the impact of a Mandelstam poem. I have compared notes with several of what Osya calls his first readers (with him doing the reading and them doing the listening) and the savvier among them agree that he appears to be inventing the next line as he goes along. And this in turn gives even the listener who is familiar with the poem the eerie feeling that he is hearing these lines for the first time; that they haven’t existed before, haven’t been composed, reworked, polished, memorized, copied out on onion-skin paper by yours truly and stashed away in teapots and shoes and female undergarments in the hope against hope that our Chekists, when they come for him, will be unable to arrest his oeuvre.

  The line, the pause for breath, then the next line spilling freshly minted from his bloodless lips—that, my darlings, is at the heart of the heart of a Mandelstam recitation. For reasons I have not entirely grasped, the effect is even more remarkable when he is reading a love poem—and still more startling when the love poem in question isn’t addressed to me, his best friend and comrade-in-arms and lawful wedded wife, but to the plume of a theater actress perched on the folding chair next to me in the front row of the dingy Literary Gazette editorial office, my fleshy arm linked through her slender arm, the back of my wrist grazing as if by inadvertence the curve of her very beautiful breast.

  At the lectern Mandelstam turned away for a sip of water before starting to recite the last poem of the reading. The actress, who used her stage name, Zinaida Zaitseva-Antonova, even offstage, leaned toward me, crushing her breast into my wrist. “Which poem is next, Nadezhda Yakovlevna?” she breathed, her voice husky with what I identified as sexual anticipation.

  “It is the one he composed for you, my dear. Shamefaced glances.”

  Mandelstam set down the glass of water. “Mistress of shamefaced glances,” he began, the stubby fingers of one hand splayed above his balding scalp, his pupils burning into the eyes of the woman next to me.

  Suzerain of little shoulders!

  Pacified the dangerous headstrong male . . .

  I leaned toward Zinaida. “Tonight you must conduct yourself decently,” I instructed her. “You must stop teasing him.”

  “But it’s you I tease,” she whispered back, flaying playfully at my knuckles with the end of one of the long braids that plunged down her chest. “You excite me as much as he does.”

  Why, like a Janissary, do I prize

  That swiftly reddening, tiny, piteous

  Crescent of your lips?

  Don’t be cross, my Turkish love,

  I’ll be sewn up with you in a sack . . .

  “In Ottoman Turkey,” I told Zinaida, my lips grazing her ear, “adulterous wives were sewn into sacks with their lovers and cast into the sea.”

  Never lifting her gaze from Mandelstam, her reddening, tiny, piteous lips barely moving, she murmured, “Oh, I shouldn’t mind drowning like that.”

  I stand at a hard threshold.

  Go. Go, I say!—Yet, stay a while.

  “Hard threshold,” Zinaida repeated.

  “Hard indeed,” I said with a snicker of suggestiveness.

  The eleven souls apart from us who had braved a January snowstorm to attend the reading broke into fervent applause. Two or three of the younger members of the audience stomped the wooden floorboards with the soles of their galoshes. The Literary Gazette’s chief editor, a brave fellow who had published Mandelstam when Mandelstam was publishable, had been bitterly disappointed by the turnout, which he attributed to the subzero weather. Despite my husband’s low profile in recent years, there were still many poetry lovers who considered him to be an iconic figure, so the editor had reassured us. We liked to think this was true, but we were no longer as sure of it as we had been in the late twenties when a Mandelstam reading could fill a small concert hall.

  Mandelstam, suddenly breathing with difficulty (he suffered from occasional palpitation of the heart), swayed drunkenly, then stepped to the side and, steadying himself with a hand on the lectern, bowed from the waist.

  “Has he been drinking?” Zinaida asked me above the clamor.

  “He drank half a bottle of Georgian wine before the reading to calm his nerves,” I told her. “But he is not intoxicated, if that’s what you mean. I have never seen Mandelstam intoxicated on alcohol, only on words.”

  Standing at the back of the room, the woman editorial director of a state publishing house, who was known as the Pigeon (it was widely believed she kept our Chekists informed of who said what at gatherings such as this one), called out, “Questions, answers.”

  I waved a warning finger at my husband, hoping to get him to end the evening then and there; I feared the Pigeon would try to provoke him into saying something that could land him in hot water with our minders. When his instinct for survival (mine as well as his) had dominated his fine sense of right and wrong, he used to beat about the bush. No longer. In the months since we’d returned from the Crimea, where we’d seen hoards of rake-thin and bone-weary peasants, victims of Stalin’s collectivization rampage, begging for crusts of bread at train stations along the way, Mandelstam had become dangerously outspoken. In recent weeks he had taken to quoting lines from an old 1931 poem of his whenever one of his acquaintances passed through our kitchen: How I’d love to speak my mind, To play the fool, to spit out truth. I lived in dread he would do precisely that—I was terrified he would repeat in public things he’d confided to intimate friends in private: about the individual he called the Kremlin mountaineer, about the utter failure of the Bolshevik Revolution to improve the lot of common people, about the transformation of Russia into a police state far worse than existed under the miserable tsars, about how the Communist apparatchiki who kept an eye on artists had deprived poets of the right to write boring poems.

  With a courteous wave of his hand, Mandelstam gave the woman leave to pose a question.

  “Tell us, Osip Emilievich, where in your experience does poetry come from?”

  “If I could be sure, I’d write more verse than I do.” Mandelstam savored the laughter his comment elicited. “To respond to your question,” he went on when it had subsided, “Pasternak claims the artist doesn’t think up images, rather he gathers them from the street.”

  “Are you telling us that the poet is something like a garbage collector?” the Pigeon asked.

  “Garbage represents the dregs of capitalist societies,” Mandelstam observed, smiling blandly at the stool pigeon over the heads of his listeners. “Our Soviet Socialist Republics don’t produce garbage, which explains the absence of garbage collectors.”

  This, too, drew a laugh; a functionary in the Moscow City Cooperative had recently been arrested on charges of sabotaging the capital’s sanitation department by failing to hire a sufficient number of garbage collectors.

  “No garbage, no garbage collectors,” Zinaida agreed under her breath. She uttered it in a way that dispatched a pang of jealousy through my soul; for the instant it takes an eyelid to rinse the eye, she actually sounded like Mandelstam.

  “What about Akhmatova?” an intense young poet demanded from the row behind me.

  “As for Akhmatova,” Mandelstam said, “it is inaccurate to say she writes poetry. In point of fact, she writes it down—she opens a notebook and copies out lines that, during what she calls prelyrical anxiety, have already formed in her head. I have known her to substitute dots for a line that has not yet come to her, filling in the missing words later.” Closing his eyes, angling his head, exposing his throat, Mandelstam recited a verse of Akhmatova’s that, like much of her recent poetry, remained unpublished:

  If only you knew from what rubbish

  Poetry grows . . .

  An angry cry, fresh smell of tar,

  Mysterious mold on the wall,

  And suddenly lines ring out . . .

  “Enough of Pasternak and Akhmatova,” Zinaida cried. “Where does Mandelstam poetry come from, Osip Emilievich?”
>
  Mandelstam favored her with a conspiratorial half-smile, as if they had covered this very ground during one of their so-called literary evenings together. “A poem begins with a barely audible voice ringing in the ear well before words are formed,” he replied. “This signals that the search for lost words has been initiated. My lips move soundlessly, so I’m told, until eventually they begin to mouth disjointed words or phrases. Gradually this inner voice becomes more distinct, resolving itself into units of meaning, at which point the poem begins to knock like a fist on a window. For me, the writing of poetry has two phases: when the first words make themselves known, and when the last of the foreign words lodged like splinters in the body of the poem are driven out by the right words.”

  “God, he makes it sound easy,” Zinaida was saying as we waited in the lobby downstairs for Mandelstam to finish signing slim volumes of his early poetry or scraps cut from newspapers with more recent poems printed on them (a rarity since our minders decided that Mandelstam wasn’t contributing to the construction of socialism). “I could listen for the inner music from now until the Arctic melts,” Zinaida continued with what I took to be a practiced theatrical sigh, “and still never come up with a poem.”

  “What Mandelstam has,” I informed the young actress whom we were both lusting after, “is a gift from the Gods. Either you have it or you don’t. If you have it, the music and the words are delivered to you on a silver tray.”

  “Is it true, Nadezhda, what they say about your knowing every poem he has ever written?”

  “I am of course extremely familiar with his several volumes of published poetry. But our literary minders pretty much stopped publishing Mandelstam’s verse, with the occasional exception, six years ago. In the late twenties, he went through what he calls his deaf-mute phase, when he abandoned the writing of poetry entirely. Every poem he has composed since I have had to memorize—I repeat them to myself day in and day out. This way if anything happens to him, the poems could survive.”